63 Dean Street, London W1 (020 7437 0071). Meal for two, including wine and service: £50
Greed does a terrible marketing job on itself. It's all "I want" and "gimme" and "hurry up". Greed and delayed gratification are, like energy companies and a fair deal or Nadine Dorries and common sense, deemed to be mutually exclusive. No truly greedy person could ever have the self-control, the simple moral rectitude necessary for holding back. To be fair, if I were to argue too strenuously against this the rhetoric would fall into the column marked "protesting too much". I am not a big fan of later. I do not regard patience as a virtue but a vice. If a thing's worth doing it's worth doing now.But greed, like a mid-career Madonna, presents itself in myriad ways. One of the best lurks on the stove in any proper kitchen. It is stock. A properly made stock is never quick or easy, whatever the crappy cookbooks with those words in the title tell you.It takes time and effort and patience and an instinct to parsimony. For a great stock is also the product of things lazy people would throw away. It is the final resting place for the cow's moo, the chicken's cluck, the pig's oink. It is the last hurrah for a life reared solely to be eaten. It deserves to be good.The stock at Tonkotsu is very good. It is a deep, rich, intensely life-affirming thing (albeit not for the pigs that must die in its making). Theword means "pork bone" which describes the ingredients, along with piggy collagen and fat, simmered long and slow in water. Think 18 hours. The result is a cloudy liquor with a milky texture which would set into jelly if it dropped very far below room temperature. It may well be the best hangover cure known to humankind; a soothing balm which makes the lips sticky and reaches deep unto the very deepest part of even the most godless chap's soul.
Read more at http://www.guardian.co.uk
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