Hello and welcome to FREELOADER, a newsletter about stupid blokes living ever more stupid lives.

This edition sees us freeload harder than ever before. Kieran takes an all-expenses-paid trip to Guernsey, Joe climbs aboard the LoLuca Express, and we both spend a night in pisstaker’s paradise, the National Restaurant Awards. Plus: the most expensive One Line Review in the country, and to close, we visit Vesper, and the chef who inadvertently set this newsletter in motion, Jackson Boxer. 

Before we get there, let’s lead with something a little different. 

At FREELOADER, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do if it wasn’t for the hordes of tireless PRs and the vaunted agencies they work for. Day by day, they suffer in silence to fuel our pleasure, comping our meals and fake-laughing at our jokes, like hostesses at an Osaka pachinko parlour. Truly, they are braver, and tougher, than the Marines. 

Committed as we are to doing things differently around here, we wanted to give a voice to the voiceless. So we’re letting an anonymous PR frend-uv-ours break their silence on the daily trial that is their life: 

Get into office late and discover via TimeOut review that last night’s press dinner gave all guests dysentery. Make a quick note to call Giles Coren’s PA and offer to pay for his dry cleaning. 

Call my doctor to again explain that “Claude is telling me I have bowel cancer and/or chronic IBS”, though it could also just be the unhappy combination of Whispering Angel and vada pav from Chaska Maska’s Mayfair launch. He’s sending a stool sample kit to the office on express delivery, but promises it will be discreet. 

Find a desk coupon and venture out for an iced americano at Bar Italia, and a pack of Marlboro Reds from a money laundering shop. Process the chronic hangxiety of telling the Uber Eats Head of Ops that my cousin shagged their delivery driver over the kung pao chicken from Royal China. 

Press trip planning: taking group of Tier C journalists to Madeira for unveiling of 6ft bronze Parmesan wheel installation by Emanuel Santos tomorrow. Estimating how many of the party have gout and might require golf buggies. Make the executive decision not to tell them about the bunk-bed arrangements until the plane has firmly left the airport. Send group itinerary without mention. 

Host journalists at new opening. Two bottles of wine and a black olive tapenade crostini. Room is spinning but the FT is calling about getting a table tonight, and if they don’t get one, they’re going to kill my dog. Back at the lunch table to swat off wandering hands before quickly dipping out through the fire escape. 

Woozy call with irate Michelin star chef. Politely explain that if the producer at Sky News wishes to finger his concubine at the chef’s counter, there’s very little I can do to stop it without actually being there myself. 

Call Giles’ PA for an onslaught of verbal terrorism; coerced into picking up three weeks’ worth of washing, including a pair of cream Savile Row trousers with steak Diane sauce down the front. 

Prompt arrival for QV martini hour. Check the guest book and send Ben Lippett a selfie letting him know ‘we’re on our way upstairs!’. Turns out he left four hours ago – message deleted. Pay our respects to Gigi and order five extra-filthy vodka martinis immediately to avoid wait time at the bar. 

Roll over to a book launch at LRB Bookshop for ‘Bake Well, Tarts: Cake Making as Radical Feminism’. Buy three copies and leave immediate five-star Google review. 

Locate a Lime bike and fill basket with leftover NOAM stock and ice from nearest offy. Chill lagers on cycle home. 

Defrost a doggy bag of kedgeree from Simpson’s-in-the-Strand and make 20 mins headway with a press list for the launch of Adam Handling’s anti-clingfilm campaign. Make a mental note that the guy from Food & Travel can’t be in a room with the Diary Editor at the Guardian because he gave crabs to the Bloomberg woman’s half-sister in 2014. Add FREELOADER to the top of the invite list (no comp limit) and shut my laptop for the day. 

Dylans at The Kings Arms – Is there a Mrs Txuleta?

The National Restaurant Awards returned to Magazine London last week, a venue that, from the outside, looks like an alien abattoir where humans are harvested for their delicious appendixes. Hundreds of chefs, journalists, sponsors, PRs and other assorted liggers (like us) roam around in packs like a culinary rendition of The Warriors. All the stars were there; Byatt, Rogan (Simon not Joe), the nice one from Fallow, crowd fave Nieves Barragán, and Ynynyshshshir head chef Gareth Ward, who was rather inexplicably decked out in full Rick Owens, like a Gen Z nepo tearaway. 

The FREELOADERs were actually deeply mentally and physically unwell at this year’s ceremony, which is incredibly unfortunate given that it’s basically a pisstaker’s paradise; free caviar from Kaviari, martinis from SevenRooms, Charles Heidsieck champers and all the Chick’n’Sours you can eat. An industry-wide summer party where half of the people in attendance are blottoed before they even get there. 

In keeping with the party spirit, the ceremony and list itself is rattled through very quickly, with only one or two perfunctory awards punctuating the flow of things. There weren’t many surprises: ‘Burna Boy’ Tom Kitchin’s place, The Kitchin in Edinburgh, placed 49th to a couple of raised eyebrows and zero fanfare. Worse was the reaction to The Devonshire, whose announcement at 18th, as well as the award for Gastropub of the Year, was met with actual boos. Even host and Restaurant Magazine editor Stefan Chomka got a friendly elbow in, calling it “the Schooner Scorer effect”, which prompted a sulky riposte of “such a shit joke” under the breath of nearby David Ellis.

Our tip for the number one spot, Osip, placed joint-second with The Ritz (which surely means it’s a top 101), and the big gong went to Bouchon Racine, which we’re sure will have people heralding a return to ‘proper cooking and food’ and ‘none of that fiddly stuff’, because we go through this inane cycle every couple of years. 

We tried to stay for a bit longer but both of us were so ill and bummed out we basically left immediately, complimentary bottles of Acqua Panna secreted in our jacket pockets. Whilst waiting for an Uber, a half-cut reveller farted on us. See you again next year!

Luca, the Michy-clad modern Italian in Clerkenwell, is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. Naturally, as a nod to the culture and cuisine of Italiano that has made them so popular, they chose to mark the occasion on board a British Pullman train. I suppose Mussolini did make them run on time…

The day began at 10:00am in a reception room beside the platform, with bubbles and bits of stomach lining breakfast being served. Luca was sharing the train today with its operator, Belmond, who were hosting a gaggle of influencers on behalf of Dyson, presumably hoping they’d be blown away by the experience, while hoovering up the delicious food. They were mostly parked in the relatively new Wes Anderson-designed carriage up top, and were of course not-drinking and looking at their phones the entire time, while the rest of us normal people got shitfaced before the starters came out. 

I’d never been on a high-end train before and was always gently skeptical of its status as a luxury experience. The genetic memory of the commuter cuck chair is a hard one to shake, and jammed-up Southern Rail journeys still haunt me in my sleep. But of course the Pullman, with its refurbished ‘20s interiors and unique mosaic floors, was categorically The Good Shit. 

And that’s before you even get into the food, which head chef Rob Chambers and his team were somehow preparing in a kitchen the size of a Japanese hotel bathroom. They served the Luca classic ‘nduja-topped Orkney scallop, a vibrant plate of salt-baked gnocchi and sweet Mazara prawns, and an excellent cannon of lamb with a summery caponata and rosemary polenta. How they produced this in what is effectively a medieval prison cell, I’ll never know. 

After a quick stop at Dover Priory to have an illegal platform cigarette, it was back to London Victoria, back to the drudgery of real life, back to the sick-making experience of craning your neck up to witness the digital timetable ruin your journey back to Caterham. Still, Luca allowed me, just for a moment, to live like the toadying Minister of Armaments of a mid-century European dictator, and for that I am grateful. Buon compleanno, i duchi!

Decimo – Totopo the world.

Some personal news: I’ve decided to give up drinking…

…in airports first thing in the morning. Psyke! But genuinely, as I get older, pints hit a little harder, stomachs rumble a little longer, and I’m trying out this new thing called ‘pacing’, which is basically where you don’t have a drink in your hand throughout every second of a press trip. 

I say ‘press trip’ – thankfully, this one had so many last-minute cancellations that only one other writer joined our PR at Gatwick on a Friday morning, the three of us hopping on a teeny-tiny airplane to Guernsey like a gaggle of low-tens millionaires. You don’t get to do stuff like this at our age unless you bet big on Ethereum in 2019, or you sell fake peptides through Facebook Marketplace.

We were here for Vraic, Nathan Davies’ latest, and the only Mich on the island. ‘Vraic’ means seaweed in the regional dialect of Dgèrnésiais - a language named to make you sound like you’re gurning. As you might expect there was seaweed everywhere and in everything, though this point was never laboured on, and aside from the seven-seaweed broth course (where you’d want it to), it never dominated. 

The restaurant is amazing, obviously, and Guernsey is too – though once we left the restaurant, we could afford to break with the tourist board route and go chasing a taste of la vraie Guernesey. On the way in, we spotted a sus-looking pub by the airport called Happy Landings; now with time to kill, I insisted we go, the beast truly unleashed by ten glasses of Stellenbosch.  

Frosty atmosphere of a Midtown dive bar, décor of an old folks’ home, pool room of an inner-city youth centre, Happy Landings was the boozer of my drunken dreams, though I can see why it’s not in the guidebooks. Croaky barflies kept watchful eye on our interloping as we played a risible, avowedly non-competitive game of pool together before we split for the departure lounge, bleary-eyed from a day on the jib. If I’d started at Gatwick, I’d never have made it back to the mainland, I’d still be in Happy Landings, I’d be speaking Dgèrnésiais and eating seaweed from the shore. Pacing: never again. 

Hilariously, FREELOADER now runs ads, after Kieran accepted a ‘free’ box of Japanese sweets from Ichigo Inc., parent company of Sakuraco and TokyoTreat. We’re calling this the advert, though they did reject our request to become our first formal partners, and they still haven’t sent Joe anything. If someone would like to restore harmony among the FREELOADER top-team by mailing us more free stuff – or better still, pay us both money – email [email protected] for our ‘rate card’ (can you imagine?).  

Sushi Kanesaka (served by Shinji Kanesaka) – The fish was a little under!!

A few weeks ago, a woman called Emily Segal, the founder of a trend forecasting strategy firm, appeared to coin the term ‘tasteslop’. The idea was that there is a kind of pervasive algorithmic version of ‘good taste’; a generalised cosmopolitan ‘chicness’ that is, in reality, just as anonymous as your Deano-borne crushed grey cul-de-sac nightmare. 

Vesper, the new restaurant by comely imp Jackson Boxer, could well have fallen into this trap. Its interiors, carefully curated by Jermaine Gallacher, certainly are Tasteful. But it’s the fun of the food at Vesper steering it happily away from tasteslop, towards something you can enjoy because it’s actually good: we’d call it ‘qualityslop’, but that’s what Nick Bramham calls his fasolakia. 

We found ourselves on the best table in the house, the furthest western edge of the main dining room, full view of entrances and exits so we couldn’t get domed like Tony Soprano as we tore through our crisps and trout roe. The Gallacher design formula works, though as with Below Stone Nest: the big metal doors look like set fixtures from Robot Wars. 

The very first bite was excellent: a wedge of scallion congyoubing, a sliver of tuna loin, a Cantabrian anchovy and a guindilla-fied olive slice which took the whole thing into the gilda realm – it was several things at once, while also very much its own thing.

The pizzette gave us both palpitations and flashbacks to Mò Mortadella Lab in Bologna: a sandwich shop where they serve you half a kilo of mortadella at a time. The dough was a little too sweet, and the promised pineapple mostarda needed to make more of an appearance (also – what’s the deal with mostarda on all the menus right now?) A mackerel, pea, raspberry and wood sorrel dish was straight out of a trendy izakaya: conceptually confounding until you eat it, where it clicks.

The star of the whole production was the chicken liver agnolotti, straight up there in London’s pantheon of pasta dishes. They’re a nightmare to make according to the kitchen, and who knows how long they’ll be on the menu when El Niño boils the capital all summer, so move quick.

And where do we start with the off-menu Vesper burger? A conversation starter and killer, this butter and beef behemoth stopped us both in our tracks for about five minutes, so rich and thick it could work for Tatler. It had a menace to it, like the jacked-up éclair that the evil French chef uses to try and assassinate Homer Simpson. How could you eat this and do anything else with your day? 

Vesper is going to fit in spectacularly around Exmouth Market, joining Qualities Wines and Chop House to form a sort-of Las Vegas Strip for London Library members. It is already a place to see and be seen, to write and pretend to write, to show your good taste by revelling in Jackson’s. Being tasteful can be a blessing and a curse, but having it is the main thing. 

*

One month of freeloading, one day of writing, one hell of a newsletter you’ve just finished reading. Jog that off or it’ll stick to your ribs, we’re speaking from experience. 

Follow Joe and Kieran on their respective Instas if you don’t already – we were incredibly reluctant to set up a FREELOADER page, finally agreed to do so, then forgot to set it up before this went out, but keep an eye out for it.

If you enjoyed this, tell your mates, send it on, clip it up and post about it. Feedback, invites, free gifts and ‘advertising’ ‘enquiries’ to [email protected]. 

Arrivederci!