The man who ate Lincoln Rd has a lot of time for farm animals, mostly at lunch time and dinner time. I like meat. It's good. In fact even the thought of it causes me to interrupt writing this latest installment in the series everyone is talking about to go into the kitchen and cook a sausage.
Ten minutes later: delicious! Thank you, Hellers, for your New Yorker Porker! But the experience reminded me that one of the virtues of a sausage is that it doesn't look like meat. The point of it is that it operates in disguise; it's processed, given shape and purpose by machines, backstage, out of sight. It's the meat that cheats. It saunters into the room all cheerful and innocent. You'd never know it was pulled out of a screaming animal.
You know all about it at BBQ Hut Nood Les on Lincoln Rd. Once you recover from the incredible decision to spell noodles as two words on the outside sign, you're confronted with the indoor window display of killed whole meat hanging from a hook. There were five ducks. There were five chickens. There were pork spare ribs, too, and the display told you in explicit terms that they'd been pulled out of a screaming animal.
All the meat was coated in some sort of deep dark soy. The sauce dripped off their carcasses in long, sticky lines of ooze. The ducks in particular caught my eye; they were pierced, with little metal piercings, and it took me a while to realise that the leathery thing draped over the hook was their necks. I attempted a sketch.
