Five things London needs

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Three months and change into living in London and I couldn’t be happier. The city’s exciting neighborhoods and unbridled internationalism are thrilling. The retail scene is varied and strong, the restaurant inventory is deep, 2014 fashion trends can be previewed at London Fields every weekend, and there are scores of cafes serving very good coffee. Leaving aside some infrastructural issues (delay-prone Tube lines and some weak city-to-airport links, in particular), London is a great city.

Yet London, for all of its many strengths, doesn’t have everything you could possibly want in a top-tier city. Here are five things that London doesn’t have and needs: a Korean bath house; an Uruguayan chivitos restaurant; a sabich stand; a taquería selling real burritos; 100 percent cotton swabs.

1. A Korean bath house. There is no proper Korean bath house in London. Shocking. Korean bath houses are gender-segregated temples of bliss with hot tubs of varying temperatures, saunas, swimming pools, napping rooms. They offer spa treatments, including the justifiably famous Korean full-body scrub. A London version of New York Spa Castle in Queens would be enormously popular.

2. A chivitos restaurant. The chivito (see above right) is a delicious heart attack of a steak sandwich. There are variations, but typically a chivito will contain steak, bacon, ham, egg, cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, and mayonnaise. A simple Uruguayan restaurant selling chivitos and South American beer and wine would be terribly popular.

3. A sabich stand. Freshly back from Tel Aviv several weeks ago, I walked over to Spitalfields to try the sabich at Pilpel and was terribly disappointed. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the Pipel sabich, mind you, but it tastes like a grab-bag of Middle Eastern flavors and textures and as such is a million miles from the eggplant-focused immediacy of the sabich I’d just eaten on the street in Israel. One of London’s weekend markets needs a sabich stand, plain and simple.

4. A decent burrito. Londoners, against their old reputation, are quite sophisticated about food. Just don’t ask them to suggest a place to grab a burrito. They’ll likely recommend a specimen that would make the average Californian groan. Entrepreneurs, focus! Studies show that once people have been exposed to truly good burritos, they are longer attracted to subpar variations.* There is a fortune to be made here.

5. Cotton swabs. They’re called “buds” in the UK, which is already disarming. The standard version here has plastic wands, which are flimsy and decidedly not biodegradable. I’ve seen pricey organic cotton buds, but as of yet no mainstream all-cotton swabs. Some hard cotton wands at a reasonable price point would be well received.

*This is a lie. There are no studies on this matter, as far as I know. But you get my point.

[Image: Flickr | mattrubens]

Sabich: Israeli fast food

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Sabich, an Israeli fast food with origins among Iraqi immigrants to Israel, is the most insanely delicious street food you probably haven’t discovered yet. A great introduction to the emergence of sabich as a popular fast food item in Israel, several years old now, can be found on Yael Zisling’s Gems in Israel site. According to Zisling, there was originally no name for this fast food among Iraqi Jews in Israel. It was simply the typical food eaten on Shabbat morning.

Residents of Tel Aviv are quite passionate about their sabich. I enlisted Israeli journalist and travel writer Yuval Ben-Ami for navigational assistance. A friend of Yuval’s had recently talked up the stand at 2 Tchernichovsky Street sufficiently to prompt him to switch his allegiance. The Tchernichovsky Street sabich takeout joint, called rather literally Sabich, was packed at lunchtime. Common to a number of other sabich stalls, its owner has a sense of humor. Yuval translated a sign on the wall clarifying that orders of sabich without eggplant would not be entertained.

Firmly in the high-quality budget eats camp at around 15 shekels (about $4.35) apiece, a sabich lunch is a real meal. The main ingredient is fried eggplant. There are variations, of course, but other components include tahini, hummus, crumbled hard-boiled egg, salad, pickled mango, hot sauce, and pickled cucumbers.

Sabich is vegetarian. With the subtraction of the egg, it becomes fully vegan. Some enjoy sabich without the egg, while others love the egg for how it transforms in combination with the other flavors and gives the meal a real solidity.

It is easy to imagine sabich joining falafel and the burrito as a globally popular fast food. It’s just as easy to imagine the lack of quality and ingredient control that would come with a mass adoption. For now at least, this fast food sandwich, quite difficult to find outside of Israel, has not yet achieved globalized status. This is a situation ripe for entrepreneurial action.