Tom Yum, paralytic, Tom Yum, anxiety

EATING NOTES

Tip Top Thai and Dim T, Heath Street, Hampstead

Here are a few things I haven't written down because I feel I should be working on my dissertation. I should be. I can't think to write. I'm anxious. I'm thinking about food because it's manageable and outside my head. Unlike, I suppose it's inevitable I add, my dissertation.

New Years Eve. Hampstead. A restaurant called Tip Top Thai on Heath Street we only go to because other restaurants are fully booked. The proprietor sits on a chair by the bar, grimly overseeing four metres square of restaurant. She gets brought tea through the time we're eating, but doesn't say anything. She just sits. The maître d' has a face barren of joy or, yet, expression and reluctantly gives us a table.

Those of us who don't order a starter receive (cue expression) a scowl for not ordering a starter, and I get a further one when all I order is a bowl of Tom Yum and some steamed rice. I am not hungry, so this is all I want. I am scared into ordering a glass of house white ("You want drinks" - not so much a question as a command) which turns out okay. The soup is a bare thimbleful, but it's hot and aromatic, lemongrass predominant. There are a few not-overcooked prawns floating around in there and the rice is, well, cooked and tastes like rice.

Okay so it's not really fair to judge a place on the food, having tried one dish of Tom Yum - what Thai can't knock up an acceptable Tom Yum? My Thai aunt uses stock cubes she gets from Yum Yum in Brighton and works a miracle with them - but the sweet and sour creation served to James is fluorescent enough to make me suspicious. Besides, the waiting staff are so awful it barely matters. I won't be back for it - the food.

Jess and I ask for filter coffee, which causes some consternation although the menu reads: "Filter Coffee". "What coffee? Fil-? Oh. No. We only have normal coffee." Which means instant coffee. You can see the undissolved flakes winking at the brim. Oddly, it's very good instant coffee. Almost I'm tempted to ask what brand it is, because I could drink this, at dire moments. (Unromantic thoughts.)

Resisting, we pay, and we're not going to pay service, except that bitchface assumes a harder expression and worse English than she can actually speak. I ask if it's discretionary. "Yes." So we don't have to pay it. "You pay this," she barks, jabbing her finger at the 110% total.

It's only a few pounds so we pay and get out. It's very irritating, and I leave with the kind of fury that you imagine compels people to write in to a newspaper, or ring Watchdog. Pathetic, in other words. But still, you resent giving money to people who don't even have the grace to bother seeming they care.

Next, New Year's Day. After a night of hard drinking to escape the worry of talking to people, which saw me alternately asleep and throwing up by half past ten, being taken into a fried chicken place on the Finchley Road at half past four in the morning, buying fish and chips and eating them to fill the gap which the vomit, leaving me, left in me, I wake up on New Year's morning in serious need of restoration.

(I regret that my first fish and chips in two or three years is from Montana Fried Chicken, Finchley Road - however satsfying, in a wrong, guilty way, they were. A retributive pilgrimage in order? Whitby? Padstow? Whatever. I think I'll go to Loch Fyne when I get back to Cambridge next weekend and have good fish and chips sans sick starter. I'd forgotten the joy of fish in batter - and chips for that matter. I don't have chips often enough, proper fried ones or even just wedges of potato left to care for themselves in a hot oven with herbs and oil. Potato made crisp, soggy, fluffy by mere application of heat and fat - be it of a goose, a cow, a sunflower, an olive - is without doubt one of the good things in life.)

Johan suggests a walk and we end up going for lunch at Dim T, again on Heath Street, but the Fitzjohn Av end.

Dim T is good - out and out, no bones, no cliches, good. Service is easy-going but professional and the food is - has been each time I've come - really excellent. It's pan-Asian so you could get sneery, but then you remember that places like Tip Top Thai exist, and you think how awful restaurants can be, and then, here, how good they can be, and authenticity is piffling jingoism.

I have Tom Yum again. I need something cleansing, restorative. It's repetitive, I know, but that doesn't matter. The basin - I mean mixing-bowl - of soup which comes is triumphant, a steaming bath of aromatic broth, with large, beautiful coral-striped prawns, noodles, pak choi, good thick bits of chilli with the seeds in, bits of ginger and lemon grass. This is nothing like yesterday's ramekin of liquid with bobbing prawns. The prawns are fresh, with the crunch they have when freshly cooked and on the point. The balance of flavours in the broth, which is all-important, really, is as it should be, hot, sweet, sour, salt. It could do with a bit more heat, maybe, but there's chilli sauce on the table.

We share dim sum. Pork buns. How do you get dough to be like that? It's light, but satisfyingly stodgy, skin-soft and clinging. The pork filling is gutsy, long-cooked, sweet, salt and delicious. Pork and prawn dumplings have a good mouth-coating oitment of porky fattiness, and the taste, which somehow goes so well with it, of sweet seashell prawn. Spicey beef ones have a little slice of red-chilli on top, the meat itself is minced, warmly spiced, rich, and again delicious. You get three of these dim sum in a basket, but you want more, and that surely is a good sign. I leave some noodles and soup in my bowl. It's not that I don't want more but I'm bursting with broth. It's at moments like this I envisage Christian Jessen, all square-jawed and healthy and wearing a lab-coat, saying your stomach is the size of a clenched fist. Groan.

Dim T seems, looking at the menu, to be generous with its pricing, but it turns out it's the food that's generous. Alright, dim sum are a little over a pound a mouthful - but they're so delicious! - and the bowl of soup is around eight quid - but it's fabulous, and massive! Tip Top should trip down the street a few yards to see how service should be done. I'm feeling poor - my bank account is scary before Student Loans give me my new year's pocket money - so I don't pay a tip here. I feel I should, but I don't; the waiter doesn't show a flicker of disapproval.