Being a chef is perhaps one of those careers through which one’s work is never really done, simply because preparing food is just part of everyday life beyond the kitchen doors of some restaurant or other dining establishment. It’s a bit like how comics are always the centre of entertainment beyond their stand-up sets for which they get paid and yet even if you’ve spent time in their presence and enjoyed some of their humour which you didn’t need to pay for, you would still pay to see them perform their set in some comedy club.
Now to bring things back to my mere life and career as a chef, on one particular occasion I was standing in the queue of a local food truck I always get my food from and things weren’t going too well for the owner and cook on the day. For some reason the owner was short-staffed at the worst of times since it was around the busiest time of the day – lunch hour, while the usually long but flowing line on this occasion was moving very slowly with the increasingly agitated queuing gang’s irritation compounded by an unusually long queue which had been added to by some foreigners who were let into the country to pass some of the time they now found themselves with due to a mega flight delay at Heathrow.
The owner of the food truck knows me all too well and he knows that I’m a chef, so he welcomed my gesture to throw on an apron and help him prepare some of the food so that we could speed things up a little, much to the delight of the queuing crowd which initially thought I was doing nothing more than trying to cut in.
This is how these overlaid travellers got a unique and authentic taste of London’s ever changing face, with what I can confidently say was a street dining experience they’ll probably never experience ever in their lives again. The “limited edition” gourmet style street food which was enjoyed all around will have definitely gone a long way to get the delayed travellers’ minds off of things for a little while, plus I’m pretty sure they’ll be getting compensated rather handsomely as a result of what is likely to be a torrent of London Heathrow flight compensation claims to follow.
Some of these travellers which we had the pleasure of chatting with told us about how they hadn’t really planned to come to the capital of England and so they were given special clearance by immigration as a result of the magnitude of the delay they were faced with. Needless to say, many of them had such a great time sampling the real London and so they’ve promised to come back officially next time to enjoy the city and all which it has to offer tourists.
The food truck owner has since mentioned to me how he would love for me to share some of my gourmet street food recipes with him and I guess that just about epitomises the evolution of London.
