Dutch Class

I like to stop off at the embedded Starbucks franchise in Borders bookshop on Magdalen street to have coffee and a muffin and to browse a few magazines. It is often a nice little break from whatever else is going on in the day.

Some things I see there have always caused me to waggle my eyebrows. For instance a significant fraction of the people who borrow books or magazines from the bookstore to read in Starbucks seem to treat these with no respect whatsoever. Cracking spines on paperback books and peppering books and magazines with food remains will in most cases render these unsaleable. I am not sure what the direct equivalent in Holland would be but having seen a few embedded cafes in Borders and Barnes & Noble stores in New York I am pretty confident that similar behaviour over there would net a conversation with the store manager if the perpetrator didn’t get pulled up short by fellow visitors first. In Oxford this doesn’t seem to happen. One just looks.

A more recent observation is that some people seem to use Starbucks in Borders as an office or in fact a place of business and hogging an inordinate amount of space for a long time. Now I have to admit that I am not entirely innocent myself here as I do occasionally do some work with laptop or exercise book myself there but it never takes longer than an hour and thirty to forty minutes would be more typical. Given the cost of £5 for coffee and a cake I don’t feel too guilty about it.

Some people take it a little further and they set up with a laptop, lever arch files, piles of books and general amounts of contents appropriate for a small office. I have never actually timed any one’s stay but some of these ‘professionals’ do seem to sit there for large fractions of the day as I sometimes see them in the same spot as I pass at various times during the day. Sometimes they spread out over more than one table and as their ‘offices’ grow bigger they seem to take up more space in general perhaps adding an additional chair to rest their feet on or in fact an extra table to make a larger workstation.

Even this breed is now being superseded by a new generation of super-pros. A good example being people that provide remedial education for various levels of school children and students. They set up school and their students take up several adjacent tables. When one set of students is done, the next set moves in. In this way they will use a significant fraction of the cafe for up to half a day, often for the price of a single bottle of water.

Unlike the book and magazine destruction I am not sure whether this use of the cafe is explicitly in violation of any rules. What I am sure of is that it causes many other customers inconvenience as these little schools tend to take up the nicest places to sit for a long time, thus making them unavailable to others.

In conversation with friends I sometimes reflect that I will write to the UK Manager of Borders bookstores suggesting that they allocate some kind of hybrid open office space in their stores and make it available for limited periods of time for a small fee.  Personally I would happily pay it a handful of times during the month and I think it would be fair if the educational entrepreneurs did the same. They will be making hundreds of pounds per session. It would seem reasonable for them to pay for the resources they are using.

I will write that letter.

After leaving the embedded Starbucks Coffee shop in the Borders Bookstore on Magdalen Street today I was accosted by the author of “I’m Not Drunk, Honest!: A Victim Who Refused to Be a Victim”, Mr Hal Lever, who was sitting there with the intention of selling copies of his book.

The book apparently tells his recovery from a grave accident and the trials he endured along the way. Though  I was not particularly keen to buy his book I was perfectly happy to chat for a few minutes especially as he wanted to tell of his experiences with the Dutch. When I expressed the thought that Mr Lever looked quite well considering the grave experiences he was telling of he apparently inferred that I thought he was making a “mountain out of a mole hill” of his troubles.

While I was taking a few seconds to think of how to reply to that he clearly got impatient and suggested that I might as well go away if I didn’t buy his book and so I did.

Now I expect I will never meet Mr Lever again unless he happens to be selling books somewhere on my path again. I do however expect that Mr Lever is just as persistent and energetic as he would have us know therefore there is a good chance he will find this account on Google and if so he will read what he didn’t give me the time to say which is that I have respect for his achievements under difficult circumstances and I am quite sure that his slurred speech is not caused by inebriation.

He might also want to consider that insulting people who do not appear to agree with him in a matter of seconds is not going to help him sell more books. I never thought he was drunk. I do think he was rude. I know he wasn’t making a good job of selling his book.

Wij lopen vaak in Oxford. Wij genieten van het lopen in de tuin van Christchurch en ook in de Universiteitsparken. Het is nu herfst. Wij houden er van om de verschillende seizoenen te fotograferen.

Ik houd heel veel van eekhoorns. Ik kijk graag naar eekhoorns. Het zijn mijn favoriete dieren in het park. Zij lopen langs het gras en door de bomen. Eekhoorns eten noten en eikels. Zij verzamelen noten. Eekhoorns verbergen noten, eikels en andere dingen om te eten.

Mijn vriend neemt foto’s van eekhoorns. Hij heeft een heel goed fototoestel.

Hier is een foto van een eekhoorn in Oxford. Hij woon in Christchurch Tuinen. Hij verzamelt noten in de tuin.

Woordenlijst

In case you would like to print this posting we have made it available to download easily. Just click here: Print the page “Eekhoorns in Oxford”

Jamie’s Italian restaurant on George street is a relative newcomer on the Oxford scene having opened only a few weeks ago in the location where the Cock & Camel pub used to be. We’ve been keen to have a look for a while but today was the first time that there wasn’t actually a discouragingly long queue outside when we walked by. Clearly there are more people who would like to try it.

We are quite partial to Italian restaurants and Italian food in general and I in particular am a fan of Jamie Oliver’s because in some ways he always seems to capture the spirit of Italian cuisine even better than some Italian practitioners themselves. Fresh food, simple tastes, etc. You’ve seen it all on TV and it works. So we were quite excited at finally getting to try Jamie’s Italian on George street.

Despite the fact there wasn’t a queue we still had to wait for 20 minutes at a very crowded bar and when we eventually got a table we also found ourselves at rather intimate range from the people at the tables beside us. They have crammed too many tables into too little space. The waiting staff would probably agree because it those who served us had to perform acts of medium to advanced contortionism to do it. As a consequence of the high density of customers and staff per square foot the restaurant is also very loud to the point where it starts to intrude on conversation. 

The menu looks very ‘Jamie’ like. It contains many Oliverisms, usually delivered in the first person. Most of the dishes are Italianate. Where he has stuck to traditional Italian dishes the name has  been jazzed up here and there, e.g. The Penne al Arrabiata are called ‘Turbo Penne’. Many other dishes are not strictly traditional Italian restaurant fare but on paper they look true to the Jamie ethos as covered in his books and TV programmes.

In actual fact the food was vaguely disappointing. We I started with a Genovese pesto dish that looked very promising on paper and that looked just as promising when delivered to the table, containing some extra vegetables and potatoes to make it more interesting than the usual plate of tagliatelle covered with pesto and some parmesan. Shame then that the pesto itself was not very convincing. With the best will in the world I could hardly taste the basil in it and finding any trace of pecorino cheese was just as difficult. Ultimately this pesto has little or no energy. Somehow not what I would have expected as a Jamie Oliver fan or of a restaurant that advertises ‘lush’ pesto.

Similarly the main course of Salmon on a bed of roasted vegetables couldn’t quite impress. The Salmon was nicely cooked but the roast vegetables were just nowhere near as good as roast vegetables can be. Desert of a banana chocolate brownie again nice enough but not very memorable and not a match for similar deserts at Chez Gerard’s or Carluccio’s.

Just below the deserts the menu also lists Jamie Oliver T-shirts and signed books.

The bill (including a 10% tip but not counting money spent at the bar while waiting for a table) came to about £35 a head which is a bit high for Oxford casual dining standards and a better dinner and general experience can certainly be had elsewhere and not infinitely far away in Oxford. There is something of the emperor’s new Parka about Jamie’s.

I looked up the Independent’s Restaurant review of Jamies Italian in Oxford and it appears somewhat more positive than mine. Have a look. The Independent’s reviewer took along Oxford locals who apparently ‘were down on their knees in gratitude’ for Jamie bringing this miracle of good food to Oxford. Given the quality of the food traditionally served on George Street I can kind of see the point however I really must suggest that they give Chez Gerard’s on the opposite side of the street a go. It is a more pleasant and comfortable place to sit and they serve better food for less money. Or take a short walk down to the Castle complex and try Carluccio’s. Both of those are Pukkah.

As Dutch students in Oxford we often eat Italian. We do this because we don’t know of any Dutch restaurants in Oxford and also because we just love Italian food. There are a number of Italian retaurants in close to the centre of Oxford. The one we’d like to talk about in this article is Carluccio’s restaurant at Oxford Castle.

There are many cynically bad restaurants in Oxford, presumably trading to the tourist trade – people who are supposed to only dine once and never return.  Carluccio’s Caffe Restaurant is not one of these.

Carluccio’s aims to be traditionally Italian. The blue in the facade suggests it and a peek at the menu soon confirms it.  Many of the traditional Italian favourites are on the menu and most of the ones we have had were more than good enough to be Dutch Class approved.

Fortunately Carluccio’s does not take tradition so far that they’ve gone for the traditional Anglo Italian Restaurant cramped interior with sponge washed walls, checked table cloths and old wine bottles with candles in them. Instead the interior of Carluccio’s is modern, airy, light and pleasant.

Prices are pretty much in line with the Dutch Class Oxford rule of casual dining: a three course meal with a glass of wine or beer and an espresso to close costs just under £20 a head. The quality of the dining experience is better than most in Oxford though so we are happy to call this good value for money and we will eat there again soon.

To be honest we sometimes spend a little more because Carluccio’s also sells various Italian delicatessen to take home, temptingly arrayed to be seen on the way out. We like these too.