The little brown restaurant review

Yes, AA Gill has been to India and done the usual squatting over a bowl – and a restaurant back in London:

“Somehow, I picked something up. I’d had enough pebble-dashing amoeba and slurry with the fringe on top to insist on drugs, so I took it straight round to my doctor. “I’ll need a specimen,” he said, without any discernible note of excited inquiry. The thing with specimens is, well, everything. And they never find anything in them. I mean, would you? How hard are you going to look? Can I suggest you give me the most powerful antibiotics known to botty world, and let God pick through the corpses? He handed me a plastic container the size of a film canister, with a little spatula attached.”

Back eating out again it doesn’t get much better:

“The walls are brick, the tables zinc and the room full of locals talking and eating. Suggs from Madness lurched back and forth to the street for fags. Inside, the menu is short and replete with those dishes that have become young England classics, or clichés, depending on how your digestion’s feeling. I started with mushroom soup, which was a thick, grey custard of underseasoned field mushrooms and not much else.”