Hello and welcome to the second edition of FREELOADER, a food-based newsletter we’re already starting to regret.

Not really - though we will say that the response to the first mailout has been stunningly positive, accruing us a throbbing one-thousand subscribers after only a week, thus piling on the pressure. We welcome all newcomers to the fold, and to our day ones: don’t worry, you’re still our favourite children.

We have a real whopper for you today, appropriately Gaelic in time for your Guinness hangover. Kieran battles his alcoholism at Corrigan’s for St. Patrick’s Day, why MasterChef: The Professionals needs more Seoul, the lowdown on Victor Garvey’s new venture, plus a new brand new feature we’re calling One Line Reviews, where we - you guessed it - review restaurants in one line.

First though, we went to Old Billingsgate to watch a load of chefs punch each other in the face for charity.

On the face of it, chefs boxing each other doesn’t make much sense. To many, the chef is a genial figure they see on Saturday Kitchen, laughing it up, preparing a fritter for Romesh, keeping a respectful distance from Lola Young. In reality, though, chefs and boxers share many of the same traits; short-tempered ultra-geezers who lock in to their brain-mashing day jobs, then indulge in the sort of extracurriculars that would make Ronnie Wood blush.

We were at Food Fight, an event hosted by the food education charity Prept, which saw eighteen hospitality professionals coached over months on end for a white-collar boxing card. A gaggle of kitchen lags and general managers were to step onto the mat and spill raspberry coulis for the good cause. Four-star general Jason Atherton would headline against Behind’s Andy Beynon, once a protégé and now a starred chef in his own right.

When asked if he was feeling confident, Beynon replied: “Do I look confident?” – and to his credit, he did. “End of the fight,” he said, “once I win, it’s time for a beer.” Atherton, on the other hand, confessed to feeling nervous for his “first and last fight”, especially when he pondered the final round. “I’ve never been in this position before,” he told us. “I don’t know how I’m going to react. Who knows?”

Many of the fights did not end up as shining examples of the sweet science. There was one match-up approximating a technical classic, as Dan Page of 67 Pall Mall went the full three rounds with Humble Chicken’s Jonpaul Sato, while his pink-suited brother Angelo howled from the sidelines. The vigour of this fight arrived at the right time, just before the charity auction saw a still-pumped-up Angelo drop £12,000 on a private dinner for ten with Da Terra’s Rafael Cagali. That’ll be one hungover Monzo notification.

Skulking around the ringside area, we nabbed some pre-fight predictions from Claude Bosi (Team Jason) and Sally Abé (Team Andy). Desserts had been served, bottle-buckets replenished, and, with the charity money long since raised, everyone was in the mood for some proper violence. 

Beynon walked out to Hail by Kano – the kind of tune you’d hope would ring through your ears as you try and fail to ward off a teenage mugger. But Atherton, doing the Ali shuffle to a maniacal happy house remix of Like A Prayer, was all aura, his silver vest emblazoned along the shoulder-blades with ‘MICHELIN MAN’, and Isaiah 60:1 stitched across his heart. The power of Christ was compelling him to win. Could he do the baby Jesus proud by battering Beynon?

It was a spirited fight, but one where the initiative was captured early then deployed with mercy. Beynon gassed himself out in round one; in round two, Atherton busted his nose and the jus started dripping. Round three was a foregone conclusion, with Atherton pulling punches as Beynon swung wildly through the red mist. The sort of compassion that could get your legs broken in a traveller fight with money on it.

It’s quite good watching an amateur fight in an actual ring, as if they’ve overly formalised the sort of scrap you’d see in a Leeds McDonald’s at 1AM. The fight went to points to save blushes, but it was never really in doubt: come at the king, you best not get your nose bashed half-way through. 

As boxing goes, so too does hospitality. Now, then, forever – Jason Atherton is inevitable. 

Food Fight raised over £150,000 for Prept – read more about the charity here. 

Heard Burger x Akoko: Mind if a white boy speaks a little Hausa?

Hogs for food content as we are, we’ve been locked into the latest series of MasterChef: The Professionals. Why? No idea. It’s on, isn’t it? Time to go for one more trip around the sun with Marcus, Monica and the critics - the annual check-up on how William Sitwell is getting on. It’s all the same, only the names have changed this year as ‘historical misconduct’ forced the show’s first line-up change in a decade. 

We have now entered a new phase in MasterChef’s otherwise by-the-numbers existence: the post-Wallace era. For the last few years he had something of a spayed spaniel vibe to him – markedly more deferential to the main two judges, trying to generate warm moments with one eye on his industrial tribunal. Now he’s been studiously edited out of old footage like Chris Benoit, and benign stickman Matt ‘what’s-his-name-again’ Tebbutt has been called up to fill the Gregg-shaped void. It’s been an interesting experiment, in that someone has clearly nudged him to play bad cop, but he’s also such a rung below Marcus and Monica that you needn’t take his thoughts into consideration. It’s like when someone gives you unsolicited feedback at a barbecue.

They really tried to give things a new lick of paint this year: a new kitchen, new skills tests, even a ghastly new marble-and-gold ident that has a very unpleasant Dubai feel to it. There have been some fun crash-outs, early standouts, and a pleasing amount of cocky junior sous chefs getting ethered as soon as their ideas meet with reality - there’s a reason Chef won’t put your venison dish on the menu, and it’s not because he’s jealous of you. As the pack thins out on the way to finals week, the favourites are already becoming clear – but if you’ve seen it before, well, you’ve seen it before. If they really want to freshen things up, they should follow what teenagers did a decade ago and start ripping off Koreans. 

Continuing the South Korean trend of ‘inventing a concept as dystopian fiction and then bringing it to life’, Netflix’s Culinary Class Wars owes as much a debt to Squid Game as it does to any other cooking competition. The urgency is real, the stakes are high, the scale and calibre kind of extraordinary – like if the Bocuse d’Or was run like Battle Royale.

The rules are simple. Well they’re not, but you soon pick them up. In a nutshell: it’s eighty Black Spoons v. twenty White Spoons. The Black Spoons are the great Korean chefs of the present day; the White Spoons are the great Korean chefs of all time. The White Spoons are referred to by their birth name; the Black Spoons lose theirs, and are assigned nicknames all competition long, from ‘Rebellious Genius’ to ‘Culinary Monster’. They compete within their groups, then against each other, in increasingly elaborate games of ingenuity, until someone wins 300 million Korean won (just over £150,000). 

We don’t want to give the game away, but one truly refreshing thing about it is the genuine sense of danger. Sob stories and soft-focus footage count for absolutely fuck-all. Chefs you’re invested in – even the ones you think are being cynically teed up for a run at the finals – are eliminated with a grunt from Mr Paik and a dressing down by Chef Anh, bodied in front of their peers like it’s their first day at catering college. And it just makes you admire the ones who survive even more. 

Once they’re free of Tebbutt next year, Marcus and Monica ought to pick up the mantle of set misbehaviour, and act a bit more like Chef Anh and Mr. Paik. Be withering, be menacing – you’re the professionals, you know they long for a lashing from mummy and daddy. 

Burro: Tiocfaidh ár lárdo!

We love pies but we’re getting a bit fucking sick of the conditions for which pies are ideal. The cold, the wet, the dark, the scenarios in which you need to feel ‘cosy’, ‘curled up’ by the ‘fire’ with ‘a good book’. Disgusting. Who reads books? 

But it was British Pie Week (?) and, luckily for the pies, spring still wasn’t quite springing, all pallid afternoons and drizzly nights like David Fincher’s Se7en. The Camberwell Arms invited us to a special ‘Pie Night’, kindly timed so we could load up on suet and lard just before light jacket season. 

There were four pies to be communally smashed through; dayboat fish, beef, chicken and mushroom, and rabbit and guanciale. It was quite fun to just load the plate with different pies and eat a bit of all of them at once, the pastry equivalent of drinking mineswept pints on a Newquay stag-do.

Best of all, not a single person (to our knowledge) raised the insipid question of whether a pie is just a ‘stew with a lid’ if it doesn’t have sides or a base, the sort of chat you overhear being deployed by a guy wearing Yard Sale merch on an ill-fated Hinge date before the girl ‘Asks For Angela’.

Afterwards, we decamped to the nearby Old Dispensary, which was teeming with geriatric Gen Alphas watching a lad called Joshua Zero chant ‘See it/ smoke it/ snort it’. The bassist was wearing a plastic bag over his face. We asked one of the children if they remembered the horrors of 7/7, and they said they did not. We left under a cloud of unc-coded embarrassment; washed, chopped, Ohio. Curled up with a pie by the fire is where we belong, sadly. 

As I tell myself while tipping a nitrosurge can into my Starbucks travel mug every morning: God, there’s nothing like a 9AM Guinness. Last Friday marked one of the great traditions in Britain’s food media calendar, the St. Patrick’s Day Breakfast at Corrigan’s in Mayfair. And FREELOADER, already becoming one of the great traditions in Britain’s food media, managed to sneak into the emerald sanctum. 

There were Guinnesses, fizzes, old fashioneds and Irish coffees – all of which we had sunk at least one of before the end of Woman’s Hour. There were cheese toasties and ham sandwiches, black pudding sausage rolls, battered prawns, Matthew Fort, real shamrock lapels, the taller one from Fallow, a thumping bodhrán and the actor Adrian Dunbar. This is what being a Mason should feel like, instead of all the wanking in coffins and reporting business rivals to HMRC. 

The gilded room heaved, then by elevenses, emptied, as the industry’s ever-shifting cliques targeted second, third and fourth venues for the day’s crawl. Tables were extended, tagalongs tagged along – it was like a Home Counties wedding party haphazardly smeared across central London.

We made it through six venues, by the bitter, bleary 7PM end, suppressing hiccups for 45 minutes in the aisles of New Loon Moon, having not really bothered to eat over the prior nine hours. It was the orgiastic consumption of alcohol, the kind you pay a spiritual toll for. We guess from our understanding of St. Patrick (inventor of lager?) that he would be proud it ended like this. As they say in Ireland, santé! 

Khao Bird: Honky Thai - but like, actually quite good.

There’s an American with a dream. He’s got bags of talent, but tends to rub people the wrong way. He has a short stay in a London hotel, where a large bill gets racked up, and people get very angry about it. But he doesn’t really care, you see, because Japan is calling, and Japan is how he gets to show the world he’s the don-dada. Not Marty Supreme, but his non-union Spanish-American equivalent, Victor Garvey, a man whose very presence in London’s restaurant scene is as controversial as his food is extremely good. 

His one-Michelin-starred Soho restaurant, Sola, has quietly been putting out dishes way above their station for years, and his now-ignominious stint at the Midland Grand had great promise cut short, like Ledley King. Materia, which has opened in Westbourne Grove, is his newest venture, and it’s the purest distillation of his approach to gastronomy – ingredient-focused to a financially insensible degree.

One thing that’s clear about Garvey is that he is a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying weeaboo. (For the uninitiated, a weeaboo is someone who loves Japan in the way that a teenage boy might love a certain special sock). Half the staff are Japanese, as is a lot of the produce, which is wheeled in front of us and explained with self-deprecating caveats about air miles. A cooling madai fish, brought from Toyosu market that morning, stared helplessly back at us from the trolley.

The meal began on very familiar Garvey rhythms: a bright amuse-bouche of agar noodles in a Sicilian tomato broth; a march of five fish canapés, ranging from saline to savoury; and a pink flank of akami tuna from Mr. Tanaka, the ikejime-spiking fisherman who shows up on quite a few of London’s omakase menus. This final plate was pooled in the chef’s trademark tosazu dressing – something we might describe as ‘Liquid Garvey’ if that wasn’t extremely off-putting for a food review. 

Oden - a street food dish where various items are boiled in perpetual dashi - comes in the shape of a ‘surf and turf’; Segovian pork belly and a langoustine with a broth that is partially brewed tableside. It comes with a little egg timer whose sands represent the three minutes needed for the flavours to blend. After a certain point, egg timers cease to be the merciful stopper on your ill-fated round of Christmas charades, and start becoming a terrifying emblem of life’s ebbing decay. That being said, the dish was fabulous, and there was a spout on the bowl that allowed you to drink the sauce like a hungry lamb being bottle-fed by a ruddy-faced farmhand. 

Then there’s the chawanmushi. You don’t always get a headbanger in these kinds of restaurants. A lot of the time, the food is great – exceptional even – but you’re always looking for that one dish that makes you go Requiem for a Dream-mode: pupils dilate, blood pumps, veins throb in illicit ecstasy. The chawanmushi, with Joselito ham, Cévennes onions and a truffle sukiyaki sauce, will have you doing a gourmandise fent lean. Dealers should add it to their Telegram menus.

The pairing lurched decadently between Europe and Japan like a Belgian Sony executive. A skunky white burgundy, a fizzy sake that had a scallop-like sweetness, a naughty Côte-Rôtie. The measures aren’t shy, either.

We closed the menu with a dessert of kyo no shizuku strawberries, presented both as an elaborate dessert where they’d taken many forms (a sorbet, a coulis, a bavarois), and just on their own, halved and skewered, resting on a bed of ice chips. We were told that, spend-per-head, this was probably the most costly dish they serve, but you’d pay that for these strawberries. They were the ur-strawberry, the Eden strawberry; all strawberries should made in their image.

Chefs often court the headlines by stabbing their interns with forks and throwing pans of demi-glace at them. Rarely is it because they’re allegedly ferrying plates and goods in black cabs from one restaurant to another, like a gastronomic Derek Hatton. There’s something charmingly Looney Tunes about it; Garvey painting a tunnel onto a wall to escape across town with an ACME bag bursting with top-drawer sea urchins.

Garvey is a strange and mercurial character in the capital’s dining scene, but an alchemist in the kitchen. He could defraud every wagyu beef supplier from here to Timbuktu for all we care, as long as he keeps cooking in London, where you can be anybody.

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Bloody hell, we’re knackered. That’s a lot of eating and drinking isn’t it? Jesus. Well, if you enjoyed this edition of FREELOADER, please do make sure to sign up if you haven’t already, and if you have anything you’d like us to come to, or if you just want to say hello, email us at [email protected]. Only nice things though because we are VERY sensitive and do NOT take criticism well at ALL.

Feel free to follow FREELOADER’s co-editors Joe Bishop and Kieran Morris on Instagram if you like as well, no pressure. Until next time!