Dinner with American food writer, Nik Sharma
Oh what a night, late November twenty twenty three, with acknowledgements to Frankie Valli, it was a very special time for us.
We are sharing a table at Honey & Co, Bloombury with a group of people, most of whom we had never met and it feels like a group of old friends catching up over dinner.
Seated with us are Inez, Sharon and Emily from publishers, Abrams and Chronicle; Jess and Kim who manage Queens Park and West End Lane Books, fiercely independent bookshops; the delightful Bee Wilson author of the brilliant The Secret of Cooking and the only person we had met before and finally, the guest of honour, polymath Nik Sharma. Nik is originally a molecular biologist, who worked for a pharmaceutical company whilst studying public policy. And tonight he is wearing a woolly hat – November in London is significantly colder than California - but his metaphorical hat is that of food writer and photographer, the career he has pursued with considerably more enthusiasm than his earlier one.
Nik and Bee He is in the UK to promote his latest book, Veg-Table, the dinner is in celebration of the book and we are privileged to meet him and thank him in person for using his Netherton Foundry prospector pan and photographing it to such advantage in the book. We can attest that the aubergine/eggplant in tomato curry is phenomenal.
The book has won praise from Nigella Lawson and Diana Henry among many others and is a revelation, bringing fresh and exciting ideas to the cooking of vegetables and equally about the format of recipes and the presentation of information between a book’s covers.
Conversation sparkled and flowed covering topics ranging from pans, pets, Nik’s love of bags, but mostly food; cooking it, sourcing it (Bee’s comment about the ready availability of kadaif pastry raised a wry smile from us), eating it and writing about it. Whilst we talked about food we ate the most amazing meal, created by the truly talented team gathered and guided by Sarit and Itamar at Honey and Co.
It was all exceptional and for those of us who have only ever read about it, there was only ever going to be one choice of dessert. Bee more or less ordered us to choose the famous cheesecake and we duly went along with hr recommendation. How right she was! So often the hype outweighs the reality, but in this case despite the scale of expectations, there were to be no disappointments, just contented sighs, scraped plates and happy grins.
This was Nik’s night and we were so pleased to be a part of it; he is a beguilingly and talented individual and we hope that we will meet him again and again. But until we do , we will content ourselves with working out way through Veg-Table; there is no point in page markers, we want to cook and eat every recipe.
