Morrow to thee, readers, and welcome to FREELOADER, where we just drink and drink and eat a bit and drink and drink and drink and die.

This month sees Kieran Frid-loading at the Tate Modern’s Kahlo exhibit with food by KOL’s Santiago Lastra, meanwhile Joe ponders the smooth edges of the wage-slave slop bowl, and we dine at Lordship Lane’s newest bistropub, The Victory. We also set up an Instragram owing to threats from various PR agencies and their mewling clients, which you can and should follow here. We’ll be posting all kinds of shit.

But first, a summer treat: honorary FREELOADER Séamas O’Reilly steps into our guest spot to share the illustrious history of the freebie – from Porsches to sex toys – and how we pisstake on the shoulders of giants.

In 1986, Walt Disney World invited some journalists to celebrate the 15th anniversary of its storied Florida resort. “Some journalists” is admittedly an understatement, since the mouse-fondling Death Star chartered twenty three planes to take 12,000 “publishing or broadcast personnel from 25 countries and their spouses or companions of the moment” for four nights’ free accommodation and entertainment. There, they dined, clapped – and, one presumes, got first dibs on all the big rides – in the company of special guests like Buddy Rich, Dolly Parton and US Chief Justice William Burger. It was an orgy of glad-handing so spectacular that the Chicago Tribune’s Mike Royko was moved to call it “the greatest freebie in the history of journalism”. He meant this in the principled, derogatory sense, but for a certain type of wistful freeloader, it serves as a time-stamped lodestar for what might be termed “the good old days”.

Today’s freebie-hunters can rub up some small plate launches, a festival trip or two, and as many tie-in tchotchkes as you can shake a Hamnet mousepad at. But, sadly, the going gets a little less good with each passing year.

Compared to my elders, I feel quite hard done by. My current job means I do get all books and many meals for free, and the thrill of this has never left me. Five or six times a year I get to travel somewhere, usually quite nice, so I can write about it. For a brief, glorious stint in 2019 I was paid to review spas, culminating in a four-day stay in Alicante which involved living in Europe’s fanciest wellness resort, and receiving all 21 of its standard treatments while I was there. This being its off-season, the place was near-deserted, and the only other punters in attendance were one Saudi couple, a single Russian man, and Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. It was thrilling to enter and exit saunas while brushing tummies with the world’s only famous Spaniards, but then COVID hit, and my time in that gilded circle ended.

Surveying peers, it seems like the shrinking of the freebie economy is similarly ubiquitous in other areas. Even a decade ago, all-inclusive trips to Las Vegas, Bogota or Tokyo for premieres of streaming series, or three-day jaunts to LA to accrete 450 words from Fred Durst for the music press, were reportedly common.

Now, film journalists are expected to make do with screeners rather than festival trips, while music hacks must navigate janky, in-house media players on record company websites. 45-minute Zoom calls – often with two or three PRs listening in like ghosts at the digital banquet – may even be considered sufficient for a celeb profile.

In other areas of hackdom, however, the perks remained “eye-poppingly extreme” just recently. A motoring journalist tells me said gig was exactly as bountiful as you might expect. “For 15 years I could get behind the wheel of pretty much any car I wanted” he says. “Usually, I was loaned them for a week. They'd be delivered to my home full of petrol, freshly polished and fully insured. At the end of the loan, the car would be picked up filthy and empty, and by that evening a different vehicle would be waiting for me on the driveway. I didn't even own my own car in that period. In the end I worked out that I drove at least 1,500 different cars”.

“Beauty writers used to get insane, sometimes wonderful stuff” a lifestyle editor tells me. “Not the best, but the most memorable, was a locked aluminium suitcase, lined with velvet, containing a collection of high-grade, serious dominatrix tools. I believe it was related to the promotion of a face serum. I left it under my desk and it was gone by morning”.

This too, however, was small beer compared to the bounties of yesteryear. “In the old days” she claims, “they would think nothing of offering, say, a washing machine and dryer to everyone who turned up at a drinks launch”. I tell her the last freebie I got from a drinks launch was a pair of Botivo-branded socks, which I like so much they've gone straight into my rotation. She seems happy for me.

Free stuff is less of a thing with those on the sports beat, although they do get to attend some of the world’s most prestigious events. “The Qatar World Cup was my fave” one reporter tells me, “out of a rich collection of the ‘24 Euros, ‘24 Olympics, and the Golf Masters, Open and Ryder Cup. It’s 90 percent work but then I get a huge buzz from that work. There are a lot of horrible shuttle buses and queues though”. Do sports hacks get treated like VIP or cattle, I ask? “Mostly cattle” he says, “and the travel really is a grind. I’d say the lads coming home from America this week are truly fucked”.

Not that they’re denied any fashion freebies at all. “I still have a T-shirt with a printed signature from the Emir of Qatar from the opening game of the World Cup” he tells me.

“I think he died last week, so it might be worth a few quid”.

Séamas O’Reilly is a journalist and author. His debut novel, Prestige Drama, is out now.

The Fat Duck: They gave me a spoon with my name on it and I started crying.

Scouse Not English is for life, not just for Christmas or as a means of seizing power. So when the opportunity came to performatively turn my back on the World Cup semi-final, I snatched it up. Doubly so as it was a ritzy little do, the kind you see in the Standard’s Diary pages, or finals week of MasterChef: a private evening showing of the Tate Modern’s nigh-on unbookable Frida Kahlo exhibition, followed by cocktails on the sixth floor and a five-course dinner from KOL, served by Santiago Lastra himself. 

I arrived in the vast, cold Turbine Hall with a gentle buzz on, thankful for the cool stone atmosphere, and surprised at the scrum of guests who were also in attendance; the England-agnostic and football-avoidant, the silent and soon-to-be-sidelined majority in Burnham’s Britain. This was the optimal mental state to get absorbed in the work of Frida Kahlo – patron saint of ‘girls who tell you off in smoking areas’. 

I’ve seen Kahlo’s stuff before, though more of her ephemera – as a gringo who has visited Mexico City while in a heterosexual relationship, a visit to Kahlo’s Casa Azul was near the top of the cultural agenda. I saw the bed she painted in, her trinkets, all her backbraces and whatnot, but precious few of her actual pieces before this exhibit. For this, I say: I’m no critic of the arts, but this broad can brush! 

Having forgotten how to mix or mingle upon arrival at the members’ bar – two margaritas, little play on my phone – I sat at one of the great default table setups: two people I knew, one I’d heard of but hadn’t met, and no-one else. Spread across the dining room, which was genuinely packed to the rafters, I counted a couple of veterans from free meals’ past, blessedly far from our bit of real estate, not to mention a pronouncedly Mexican contingente. Go figure, sure, likely place for them to be; but if they’d won in the quarters, the room would be half as full. 

The food was recognisably KOL, some dishes were even an upgrade. One signature, the langoustine taco, was covered with so much caviar that I felt like a 00s Bond villain, casting my eyes over an anxious London with a mouthful of Oscietra, high off schaudenfreude. Just as the mains came out – a chamoy-rubbed duck breast, served with mole and a couple of tortillas – news broke of Anthony Gordon’s goal. The whole room forced or feigned a “could it be?”, tables were lightly drummed, and for a second, a few people believed. Not me. I don’t trust Bluenoses, never will, and as God is my witness, I will be vindicated in that over the years to come. I built a second duck taco, folded it into my mouth and sent my friends some mean jokes. 

The enduring silence of the dining room told me what I didn’t need to check: football wasn’t coming home, but with a pre-bottled margarita in my event-branded tote bag, I sure was. On the way back, I followed the tip of the Shard – emblazoned in red and white – toward London Bridge while listening to George Clinton’s ‘Atomic Dog’. Bridgeside brewpubs spilled out with sobbing men in ill-fitting BELLINGHAM 10s. M&S was open later than usual; two tinnies and a pretzel bar. I had a great night. How was yours?

Dove: Notting Hill Set Menu.

A couple of months ago, I was working in an office, something I try very hard not to do these days, but on occasion, when personal finances demand it, I will indulge. There it was again – the bright lights (negative), the open plan, the feeling that you’ve found yourself in a particularly nice Scandinavian prison. It was only three days, to be fair, though each felt like its own little long haul flight, and I left with my skin nice and dry, my eyes nice and stung, and my spirit well and truly manured. Oh, and my stomach filled to the bastard brim with anonymous, fattening ‘salads’ and Diet Coke.

Much has been said about what the office lunch has morphed into, with both ‘wage slop’ and ‘slop bowl’ entering the lexicon of nine-to-fivers trying to make sense of their lives. Generally speaking, a slop bowl is a recyclable cardboard basin that is populated with several ingredients that, if you were preparing it at home, you would never combine. Harissa chicken, crushed Doritos, broccoli, pearled spelt, wasabi mayo, a handful of rocket, roasted peppers. It’ll have your stomach contents looking like you’ve done a mukbang in the Terminal 3 branch of Giraffe. You stand in a snaking line with other atomised nodes and bark your fixings at the conveyor of salad artists until it reaches the till and you tap your blue BA Amex on the reader and take a few too many tissues as a way to stick it to them.

There was a time in my life where my lunch slop was the highlight of my day. In fact, I blame my astonishing weight gain from the years 2018 to 2023 on my need to break up the psychedelic monotony of my life with overpriced office worker chow. I became something of a slop savant, able to sniff out deals, new openings, local office discounts. A hierarchy emerged in my mind; Bond Street Station Hop Vietnamese and Juicy Jerk Selfridges Food Hall at the top, The Salad Project and M&S hot food counter somewhere in the middle. Then there’s the people – quite literally – at the bottom of the food chain.

The al desko McDonald’s eaters are surely some of office culture’s bravest and most disgusting soldiers, people for whom politesse and social graces mean nothing. You know a guy has a fucked-up life if he’s stinking up a corner of the office with a Big Tasty and mozzarella dippers. Some people eschew the slop bowl life entirely, though these people are almost as scary as the Big Mac-ers. They have optimised their lives and finances and do not need the sweet escapism of a gross expensive lunch. In fact, they will not even leave the office space all day, even for a little stroll, rather eating cold pasta salad from a rationing tin like an Italian Alpini soldier. These people, and their clear lack of lust for life, must be avoided at all times.

It’s easy to demean the wage slop bowl and its bizarre contents, its inflated price, its sickeningly frictionless delivery, the stomach ache it provides. But what it does give you is some variety, an opportunity to go outside and smell the exhaust fumes, maybe stop by the corner shop on the way back for a peanut butter KitKat Chunky. And if you’re lucky enough, and if you pick the correct alchemical components, it will provide you with a thirty-minute-long shit break to take you from the evil and disheartening 4:00PM to the hopeful and shining 4:30PM. Farmer J – we thank you for your service.

Miokuru: 手巻き寿司の名を汚す.

The Victory, a new gastropub sat in the middle of the ancient thoroughfare of Lordship Lane, already feels like part of the furniture, though that’s probably because it sort of is. It’s in the space where beloved local restaurant Franklin’s stood for 26 years, and reverted to a pub, even restoring its original name. Jamie Younger of the Begging Bowl and his wife Rema Waterhouse have moved former Noble Rot chef Seán Breen into the kitchen and the result is a strong but slightly uncanny addition to London’s Anglo-Franco bistro bonanza. 

As if to underscore that this is, indeed, a pub, the first part of the menu is all bar snacks and picky bits, and on this it excels. The opening salvo, a smoked eel gilda soaked in someone’s special bottle of EVOO, kicked things off great. The egg mayo and anchovy soldiers, the peri peri chicken hearts: good, nice. Standing out beyond them all, however, was the speck and celeriac remoulade, which put us both back in the breezy-AC Carrefours of our dreams – wispy-thin ham and a grainy, punchy remoulade. In the glass, a natural wine from the Alsace which we’d last seen poured in Paris, and a couple of icy martinis. What’s not to like?

Fasolakia followed – green beans braised to insensibility in passata, served lukewarm with a block of feta. This was comparable to the famous one at Quality Wines, and in this tribute act, it succeeded. The scallops with saffron ajo blanco were less convincing; cooked well enough but the sauce added nothing, which for a dish that was mostly sauce, isn’t where you want to be.

The big selling point at The Victory is the whole-roast poulet jaune, served with ceremony in two parts: breast with tarragon and summer truffle sauce, and crisp leg with citrusy lamb’s lettuce after. The initial stage is a clear riff on the early-onset legendary dish of ‘chicken and morels with vin jaune’ found at Breen’s alma mater, Noble Rot Soho; an incredible plate of food that is easily one of the best on any menu in town right now. 

It’s a tremendous risk to put your own thing, physically and spiritually, up against such a behemoth, never mind one from your previous employer. Ballsy, even. But unfortunately, misguided; the risk does not pay off. The sauce is not as buttery, the truffle doesn’t work as well as the morels – the last thing you want your diners to be thinking is ‘I wish I was eating that other, better thing somewhere else’. 

The crispy leg is better, though a wheelbarrow full of tangy shallots somewhat diminished the enjoyment, as they had to be nudged toward the outer edges of the plate. Their two-serving gimmick is novel, but when we finished our plates, our heads were more in Greek Street than Lordship Lane. 

There’s something we keep coming across in our travels, something we may even have mentioned before: London’s mains are getting left behind. There’s such a concentration of effort in making the small bites and plates pop that the larger dishes are suffering. This is everywhere, from the amuse-bouches of fine dining to the snackettes of bistros. We should be careful before we quite literally start to lose recipes. 

Desserts were a semi-return to form: an underpowered custard tart drastically superseded by a Basque cheesecake with peaches and mint that delivered with the best of them, and tasted like their version. A lot of these dishes are – perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not, but undeniably – throwbacks to the last ten years in dining. A bit of Brat here, Maison François there, Quality Chop House, Quality Wines, even a little nod to Nando’s, like NOW! 70 for modern classics. It’s good for the area, for sure, and good for a pub, but it’d be better for The Victory to find its own star dish. 

*

That’s it for this month, and for Part One of Summer 2026, which, lest ye forget, is almost over. They go by quicker these days, don’t they? Wonder how many we have left. Anyway, we have an Instagram now – please follow it, make the number go higher. Email all invites, legal writs, and warm-hearted words of praise to [email protected]. We do it for you – well, we do it for ourselves first, but you are in our thinking, we promise.

Arrivederci!