Editor’s Letter

In a soho basement kitchen, a chef called Sofia is buttering two slender slices of Poilâne bread, on both sides. “We don’t hold back on the butter,” she says. “We don’t hold back on much here.”

From a plastic tub she takes a short length of smoked eel, perhaps two inches, and cuts it into four pieces, which she turns on their sides. The eel is from the Dutch Eel Company, of Lincolnshire. “It’s not Dutch eel,” she says, before I get the wrong idea. “The people are Dutch, but the eel’s English.” She happens to have a promotional Biro on her. “Highest Quality SMOKED EELS,” it says on it.

While I’m admiring this, she places the buttered bread on a plancha — one of those big, hot, flat metal surfaces — where it begins to sizzle. “You want it nice and crisp, brown but not charred,” she says, as if I would try this at home, which I wouldn’t, because I don’t have to: I can come here and have it done for me, by someone who can cook.

Once the bread is toasted on one side, Sofia takes it off the heat and, on the browned slice, pours a generous dollop of mustard cream (mustard, sugar, vinegar, cream). On the other, a large spoonful of horseradish (more sugar and vinegar, fresh horseradish grated not too fine) and the eel. Then she sticks it all together and places it back on the plancha.

On a small white plate she arranges shreds of pickled red onion. (Sugar? Check. Vinegar? Check.) Then she plates the sandwich — in case you hadn’t guessed until now, I have been describing the making of a sandwich — and that’s it.

I take a bite, and another bite, warm butter dripping through my fingers, and a third bite, and a fourth, and it’s gone. It being the smoked eel sandwich at Quo Vadis, the landmark Dean Street restaurant. It being among the most intense, and intensely pleasurable sensory overloads I know of. An almost overpowering assault of rich, tangy sweetness cut through with the sharp stab of the pickled onion. (You can see a photo of it, in all its glory, if you turn to the last page of this issue.)

I eat the Quo Vadis smoked eel sandwich as often as I can. Lucky old me, that is fairly often; the restaurant is five minutes’ walk from the Esquire office. The sandwich is the creation of Sofia’s boss, Jeremy Lee, a man who, unusually, justifies the use of the word “inimitable.” A true bon viveur, this gifted, gregarious Scot has been running the kitchen at Quo Vadis since 2012, but he’s been a star of British cooking for a lot longer than that. It’s the experience that he and Quo Vadis supply — nourishing, innovative cooking in elegant surroundings, with an atmosphere of restrained, and sometimes unrestrained hedonism (they don’t hold back on much there) — that Esquire seeks to celebrate with this, our annual food issue.

I was introduced to the Quo Vadis eel sandwich a few years ago, by this magazine’s food editor, Tom Parker Bowles. Tom has, as he should if he’s going to swank around the place calling himself Esquire’s food editor, among the most worldly and educated palates of anyone I’ve met. I rely on him to supply recommendations for the best places to eat in whichever city I visit. This month, rather than keeping his tips to myself, I asked him to write about 10 of his favourite places to eat, so that you, like me, can luxuriate in his insider knowledge. Tom PB doesn’t only supply introductions to sandwiches. He does people, too. Among them, in my case, Matthew Fort, who makes the case for that least fashionable pursuit: fine dining. For too long, argues Matthew, inverted food snobs have turned up their noses at the old values of oleaginous maître d’s and fancy French sauces and Homeric wine lists. Sometimes, a person in search of sustenance wants more than to queue in the cold for a bum-numbing bench seat in a cacophonous Asian bun joint where the waiter asks if you’re still working on that before you’ve taken your first bite. I’m with Matthew on this. (Can you tell?) Just now and then I like a bit of starched linen on my table.

There’s food to cook at home here, too, courtesy of Russell Norman, Esquire’s Accidental Cook. The recipes this month come from Russell’s handsome new book, Venice: Four Seasons of Home Cooking, about the city that inspired his Polpo restaurants. Elsewhere, we have three essays on food by three exceptional writers — Joe Dunthorne, Blake Morrison, Jeet Thayil — and two stories by Max Olesker, another Esquire trencherman. As well as serving up a deliciously droll encyclopedia of current food trends, Max spent the best part of a month eating egg and chips for his succulent piece on the East End’s most storied café, E Pellicci. Tough gig.

Finally, Tim Lewis’s profile of Jackson Boxer, in which Jeremy Lee, of eel sandwich fame, pops up again, making merry with his fellow chef and helping to inspire Boxer’s next project. It’s a cheery scene that Tim describes, of drinking and eating and mischief making. But that’s what these foodie types do. These sandwich-makers. They spread good cheer. They cheer us up.

Nourishing, innovative cooking in elegant surroundings, with an atmosphere of restrained, and sometimes unrestrained hedonism — that’s what we seek to celebrate with our annual food issue