Consider the shopping list: 1100 chickens, 900 lambs, 2600 sheep, almost 8000kg of honey and 18,000 eggs.
What a swell party that must have been. And the occasion? To celebrate the circumcision of a prince sometime during the era of the Ottoman Empire. The catering details, recorded by a mid-16th-century writer, are revived by William Sitwell in his latest literary effort, which also does a wonderful PR job for the historically disparaged civilisation by looking at its food rather than its political ideology.
The latter may have a way of gripping the psyche, he writes, but “food is different. If things taste good, if drinks do more than just quench thirst, then they find a way of reaching the surface, coming up for air, seeing the light.” And we have plenty in the way of modern-day feasting – falafel, hummus, shared plates and more – to thank “this beast of an ancient culture” for shining a light upon our own dining tables.
Sitwell – author, travel writer, food writer, restaurant critic, MasterChef UK judge and broadcaster – is bringing his prodigious wisdom to the Auckland Writers Festival next month. It is impossible to ignore what he also brings: his genealogy.
He is the great-nephew of British poet, critic (and exotically provocative socialite) Dame Edith Sitwell and of author Sir Osbert Sitwell; grandson of the writer Sir Sacheverell Sitwell; great-grandfather Sir George is another Sitwell literary luminary.
High society indeed. No wonder he attests to being very proud of his ancestors. By his own description, they are “extraordinary, unique, English rebellious aristocrats, each of whom had a fierce talent”.
He is sitting in his home in Somerset, southwest England, in a library he built, surrounded by books – lots of them – that his predecessors wrote. He acknowledges there’s something in the genes that enables him to “enjoy constructing sentences”, but says the Sitwell surname has never opened doors for him. “My great-grandfather, down through his children, there was a fierce vein of writing, and if some of that has touched me, that’s great – [but] I can’t blow my own trumpet.”
His first writing hire was more to do with gut instinct than the family tree. Sometime after studying politics at the University of Kent, the Eton-educated Sitwell ended up landing a job as deputy editor on Waitrose Food Illustrated – a magazine he’d never heard of. “I had this curious interview with the editor. She came to my flat and said, ‘Well, what do you know about food?’ And I said, ‘Well, I eat.’ She cut me off, talked for two hours, and then she gave me the job. So I got the job mainly on the strength that I ate.”
He later became editor, a post he held for almost 20 years. “It struck me that food was an extraordinary subject, because it’s about everything: culture, history, politics, economics, love and hate, richness and poverty.”
During his tenure, he made it his business to transform the magazine into one that always had a story of note that would be followed up in the newspapers. And that was certainly the case when an email exchange between him and a freelancer, in which he mocked vegans and joked that they should be force-fed meat, made it into mainstream publications in 2018. His apology was immediate, as was the announcement he was stepping down.
Supper in the shed
No hard feelings. The man who saw him out the door is still a good friend, he says. And it hardly impeded his path. There are the books on food: The Restaurant: A History of Eating Out, where he references the Ottoman feast, is his latest. A detailed and scholarly work, threaded throughout with the sheer joy of food and wine, too, it traverses everything from the Romans to the future of dining out. “For as we all know, eating out is at the heart of things: be it fuelling happiness, appeasing grief, aiding and abetting both business and pleasure, or encouraging our best and our worst natures,” he writes.
There are the broadcasts, the podcasts, the monthly newsletter. There’s the supper club he runs from what he calls “the shed” at his home. “I don’t have anything flash there. I don’t have any sous vide stuff.” So let us look at what the shed does contain. “I have a tandoor oven in there. I’ve got this wonderful pantry. I’ve got a big grill – charcoal. I’ve got a lot of the accoutrements of a traditional kitchen … I can use quite fun stuff.” Oh, and he’s built a kitchen and dining room.
It must be quite a big shed. “It’s a cow shed,” he deadpans. The Sitwell Supper Club sessions, as they’re known, seat 70. Shortly before he leaves for New Zealand, a Mauritian feast, hosted by TV chef, author and 2012 MasterChef Shelina Permalloo will be held. Sitwell is choosing the wines. Tickets are £75 ($150) with a strict no-refund policy.
All features great and small. Sitwell also runs what he calls the world’s smallest wine store, an online site that restricts itself to just eight wines at one time. He was prompted to set it up by necessity, after finding himself overwhelmed by the “complicated morass of choice” for wines online. He couldn’t find anyone who kept things simple, he says, “so I decided to do it myself. I got in touch with a supplier, built a website, launched a thing called William’s House Wines.
“My schtick is: if you trust me on food, you trust me on wine, and I lead people down a gentle path of discovery while teaching myself about wine as I go. I love talking about wine. Again, it’s one of those things that leads you into really interesting avenues [where you meet] fascinating people.”
Spitting it out
You can certainly trust him not to hold back in his restaurant reviews. (Another post he holds now is restaurant critic for the Telegraph.) A recent visit to The Bailiwick Free House, in Egham, Surrey, does not leave the reader in any doubt. The piece opens with Sitwell spitting out food served to his companion, Jasper – just as Jasper himself had done – but Sitwell was checking his mate’s claim of it being inedible. “And sure enough, even my well-exercised molars couldn’t masticate the meat enough to avert the risk of fatal choking if swallowed. So back it went to the kitchen,” he writes.
A replacement dish duly arrived: “a roe deer kebab; a lonely turd of a thing sitting on a fat shock of globby flatbread showered in vulgar squirts of mayo and chilli sauce”. Jasper, Sitwell shares, “pushed it round the plate and almost yelped in disappointment”.
I ask him what his rules and boundaries are when writing reviews. “My official brief is to entertain – to draw you in and keep you to the end. But unofficially, it’s very important to be both honest as well as colourful in your writing. And I think if you considered the reviews in their entirety, I would say that I am more positive than negative, which I’m glad about.” He does not, he says, regard criticism as a sport, like some of his colleagues do. “I suppose I just try to do good journalism, which is about creative honesty, if you like.”
He will no doubt be applying those rules when he gets here. In addition to his five festival appearances in Auckland, he’s embarking on a big research and writing mission for the Telegraph, which will see him travelling about and immersing himself in many aspects of our own food culture during his 10-day stay. (Note to chefs/owners: there are restaurants to be visited. You have been warned.)
This is his first trip to Aotearoa, and he knows very little about us, he says. He hasn’t even looked at his schedule in detail. “I’ll probably get there and think, ‘My god, what have I let myself in for?’ I’ll be turning night into day, so I’ll probably be gaga.” Still, “When you’ve come this far, you want to make the most of every opportunity.” And he says he can’t wait to talk here about his own version of a rebellious English family.
Slow-cooked words
To the business of writing, then. “Writing books is very, very hard work. You’re at the coalface.” He says he does his own research. His decision to pursue food and drink rather than, say poetry, as one of his predecessors did, was prompted by advice he received in his early 20s.
He was introduced to a senior Murdoch executive who said he should set out to be the “go-to man” on a specialised subject. At that stage, he says, he thought he didn’t know “anything about anything”. But he had always been interested in the media. And, well, he ate, didn’t he?
In a way, he adds, he envies his grandfather (who goes by the full name of Sir Sacheverell Reresby Sitwell, 6th Baronet). “He wrote about 130 books. Books on travel, architecture and design, books on poetry. He didn’t have the hideous distractions of phones and social media.”
There are additional, non-hideous, modern-day distractions, the most welcome of which are sons Walter, 4, and Barnaby, 2, born to second wife Emily Lopes, whom Sitwell married in 2017. “It’s very easy to prevaricate: to notice the desk needs tidying – and then the hardest thing is to actually start writing. I need long periods of concentration and it’s very easy to get distracted. I find it very frustrating.”
Clearly, his disciplined efforts in the face of distraction have paid off. Marco Pierre White, in a cover blurb on The Restaurant, says Sitwell “has the palate of a great chef, the honesty of a high court judge and he holds the pen of PG Wodehouse”.
The book was originally due to be launched in early 2020, which happened to coincide with Britain’s first lockdown. In some ways, he is now enjoying its relaunch. It is similar in design and tone to his first book – A History of Food in 100 Recipes – published in 2012, “but this one is more specifically about the concept of eating out. So I tried to go back in time … and weave my way around the world, writing about things engaged with hospitality.”
Allergic to froths
Food. It’s not all glorious. It becomes evident in his latest work that, for all the exquisite delights, for all the rare temptations and access to the great gustatory elite, he doesn’t necessarily embrace it. The final chapter of The Restaurant introduces us to Ovnew – a restaurant in Barcelona that turns the whole notion of eating out on its ear.
Situated in a flying-saucer-like capsule perched on top of a skyscraper, Ovnew didn’t want its diners to arrive with massive appetites, he writes. “The restaurant declared on its website, ‘To enjoy Ovnew, it is important that your body, mind and soul are in total harmony.’ Thirst and hunger are distracting emotions.
“And if you did arrive parched or famished, the usual rules around perusing the menu and getting your taste buds excited went out of the window. A typical dish in one of the multi-tasting courses reads, ‘Sinestesia. Experimentation two-way operating mingling among them.’ To which the response ‘I’d like that medium-rare’ would get one nowhere.”
Reflecting from Somerset on that passage, he says: “There’s always going to be nut jobs attracted to extreme theatre and gastronomics … but there’s [also] always going to be a place for neighbourhood restaurants.”
William Ronald Sacheverell Sitwell abhors tasting menus. “Too many restaurants are opening now where you sit there, and every five minutes another dish comes and there’s a lecture by a smartly dressed man, and you sit there and nod. And that’s not what it’s about.” Other no-nos: he is “allergic” to froths, smears and overcomplicated food, too.
Is he on the hunt for honesty and simplicity, then? “That’s what life’s about. There’s plenty of cuisines around the world where they give the treats of Mother Nature without too much hassle. I think in these days of complication at every level, the simplest dishes are the loveliest: a lovely simple glass of wine with air-cured beef; a lovely bit of focaccia with just olive oil …”
For the man who has read and eaten his way around the world, food is not the most important part of a restaurant. “It’s the people and their conversations; everything else is an adjunct. We need to encourage that in-depth communing of people. And I think chefs need to remember they are not the most important human beings. The most important part is the people and [the fact] they’re having a good time.”
William Sitwell appears at the Auckland Writers Festival, at five events from May 18-20.
