3 hour queue? I'd rather eat a tongue (and I did)

We're back, kettle's on 🫖

But quick word before we get going. Issue 01 went out last week and, frankly, you turned up in numbers I wasn't braced for. 

I love that we’ve collectively gathered a list of people who, when asked one (1) question about TikTok food recs, will respond with paragraph-length essays.

It’s exactly the right energy for this thing.

Some of your replies are going to be featured in this issue (look out for them at the end). 

Here we go 👇

spoiler: this week I ate the tongue of an ox, refused to queue for banana pudding, and outed Angus Steak House as the TGI Fridays of London. Big week, all things considered.

I Tested Tourist Trap Restaurants 

This video isn't out yet, consider this your sneak peek and a perk of being subbed to this newsletter. 

The idea of the video was/is: we pick out a bunch of restaurants that fit our tourist trap criteria, and then put them to the usual test (food, atmosphere, price, etc). 

How did we pick the spots? we followed the crowds (literally).

We pulled rough data on foot traffic, found the most aggressively touristy postcodes in London (Leicester Square, Piccadilly, obviously) and ate our way through them. Somebody had to! Consider it a public service.

The biggest offender? Angus Steak House.

I went in knowing it'd be a tourist trap, but I came out surprisingly impressed at how committed to the bit they are.

The whole place is what would happen if you took TGI Fridays, gave it some red leather banquettes, and let it loose in Leicester Square. The price-to-plate ratio is, frankly, criminal. I suppose the fact it sits in WC2 (a postcode where rent must run roughly the cost of a small island) means they probably have to pull this stuff to keep the lights on.

I won't fully out Angus here, that's what the video's for 😉

But you've been warned. 

(if you're a real one, drop a 🥒 in the comments when the video is live. I want to know my newsletter lot are there)

The Magnolia banana pudding people did a pop-up in Trafalgar Square over the bank holiday and the queues were, by all accounts, mental.

Three hours (four, in some reports), in thirty-degree heat 🥵… for banana pudding?

Don’t get me wrong, I love banana pudding.

But mate.

Three hours? Two hours? I am not doing it. Thirty minutes is the ceiling. Absolute maximum.

That's the official No Pickles policy and I will not be taking questions. 

If the queue is longer than half an hour, the universe is telling you to go literally anywhere else. 

Three hours of your finite life, on a pavement, in the heat, surrounded by other people doing the exact same thing - for one portion of dessert. And then what? You eat it in eight minutes? You snap a pic of it, you walk to a bin, and the entire afternoon is over.

Fair play to Magnolia though. The pop-up sold out, rave reviews, pudding apparently top tier. Glad they had a great day, I just wasn't going to be the one stood in Trafalgar Square at half-eleven on a Saturday in May with the back of my neck on fire.

1) Osteria Angelina, London.

Italian-Japanese fusion.

I know, I rolled my eyes too. 

I went in deeply prepared to roast it, totally pre-judging it. 

Ladies and gents… I’ve never been more wrong in my life. 

This place was sick and the food was OUTSTANDING (the menu doesn't read like it should work, but you have to trust it). 

I went with my mum and two of her mates. Sat down, opened the menu and mentally wrote off half of it immediately. I was sat there going “hmm, there’s probably only a couple of bits here I’m gonna like”. Terrible approach as it turns out. The right move is to full send it, order a mix, and just trust the process.  

So I did what any reasonable person would do, I ordered the ox tongue. 

Pre-Osteria Angelina me could not imagine the idea of eating ox tongue. Absolutely vile 😂

But like I said, I forced myself to have an open mind and tried it…

It fell apart in my mouth. Like, no weird texture, no unpleasant anything. Simply outrageous.

(We will return to the matter of the ox tongue. Strong feelings ahead.)

Now that I'm thinking about it as I write, was I just lipsing off an ox? 

Alright. Nah, let me not actually think too much about this.

The wine list was solid, with a great date-night vibe. 

Heads up though - book ahead. 

A week minimum, probably more (I had to book over a month in advance). 

Osteria Angelina is hot at the moment and they don't have many tables. 

It's spenny, it’s a little bougie… but it's worth it.

With that said (drumroll please 🥁)

Stamp number two!!

which - yh, alright, fine, I clocked it as I was writing this. Last week I said these wouldn't be handed out lightly, and here I am, stamp in hand, two for two, like a bouncer at a soft-launch nightclub waving everyone through.

In my defence, Osteria Angelina really earned it. 

But for the avoidance of doubt - there will be stampless issues, probably soon, possibly next week. 

The integrity of the stamp matters!!!

2) Vnlla, on Deliveroo.

A small follow-up to the banana pudding rant ⬆️

If you're sat there going "Cal, all this Magnolia talk has given me a real craving for some posh pudding" - I've got you covered.

Vnlla - that's V-N-L-L-A, first ‘A’ and ‘I’ nowhere to be found - serves the kind of dessert Magnolia built its name on. Except you don't need to stand in Trafalgar Square for three hours because it’s on Deliveroo.🎉

The joy-per-pound ratio is unfair.

Is ordering posh dessert on Deliveroo at 10pm a bit tragic?

Probably.

Did I do it last week?

Yes.

Will I do it again?

You already know

About that TikTok poll from last week…

The orders are in! Hundreds of you turned up, in fact, with paragraph-length replies. 

(I want to say a huge thank you for taking the time to do that 🤝)

If you missed it, I asked: 

What do you think of TikTok for food recommendations? 

A: TikTok’s recs are goated 

B: Every viral spot is lowkey a let down

The result: 63% of you said every viral spot is lowkey a let down. 37% said the recs are goated.

The room leans cynical (probably justified tbh) 

I asked you to add a comment after your vote for a chance to feature this week and a ton of you legends did, so I picked out a few responses that caught my eye (sorry if you didn’t make the feature, there’s no way I could add them all in one email):

"Discovered the fellas on TikTok, lowkey a let down 😉" (bro wtf… 😤)

"I feel once a place has that 'viral' tag attached to it, inevitably a f*ck-ton of people turn up, and the food is rushed to increase output, so the quality is lost."

"TikTok recommendations are the best when they have low likes / comments - the more comments and likes, the worse and over-hyped the place. I've found hidden gems from videos with only a couple hundred likes."

"At the end of the day, TikTok is a social media platform - everyone curates their videos to show the highlights of their life, and food is no exception. Will there be gems? Absolutely. But most of the time they're dunking food in a pot of sauce and cranking the saturation all the way up. The goal is to make you eat through your screen, and even the most reliable food reviewers end up exaggerating because views are the priority."

"Crumbl Cookie is either a mass conspiracy or mass stupidity."

Reading all of that back, it’s pretty clear the room thinks TikTok is useful for finding places, and almost useless for trusting the reviews of them. 

I’d say if we use TikTok as a map of sorts, and not a guidebook, we’ll be alright. 

So we appear to be of one mind on this, which is either a sign of healthy community alignment or the first warning sign of a cult - we'll find out together.

New week, new debate.

I mentioned it above - I ordered the ox tongue at Osteria Angelina. 

Something I’d never usually go for.

But I tried it, and it was the best thing on the menu.

So:

When you vote, you’ll also be able to add a comment. 

Best answers, like last week, go in next week's issue.

And that's number two in the bag.

Was it better than the first?

Worse?

About the same?

Reply to this email, vote in the poll, let me know either way.

Compliments are very much welcome.

Criticism even more so.

Same time next Thursday.

Cal

P.S. 

No Pickles · Issue 02 · by the numbers

Stamps awarded to date: 2

Tourist traps endured this month: too many to count

Hours I'm willing to queue for food: 0.5

Hours other people queued for banana pudding: 3

Italian-Japanese fusion concepts I was wrong about: 1

Animals' tongues lipsed: 1

Apologies owed to Angus Steak House: 0