For all the menus and receipts I’ve collected over a lifetime of gluttony, I’ve never framed one, never made a corkboard collage for the corridor. Instead, I have a cluster of “memory boxes”, each full of things – business cards and degustation menus – that I cling onto but rarely actually think about. They live instead in a kind of material purgatory in a spare room which heaves with all my tat.
Food merch, however, isn’t tat. Okay, some of it is. The ubiquitous Trader Joe’s bag is an instant eye-roller (Trader Joe’s is just Aldi dressed up like a Laurel Canyon farmers market). That St John sweatshirt is a contradiction in terms, as nobody who eats there regularly can, or should, fit into one. And you, a Londoner, do not need to see the words “Yard Sale Pizza” any more than you already do on retina-burning signs across our city, never mind emblazoned in orange across someone’s sweaty back, an anthropomorphic slice squeezed between their shoulder blades. It’s all a bit post-pandemic (derogatory).
But what you wear communicates a version of yourself: who you are, what you like, what you’ve been up to. And if you’ve picked up a few nice pieces from the places you’ve visited, you get to think about that place with each peek inside the wardrobe.
My wife’s baseball cap from New York’s S&P Lunch, mustard-yellow with ketchup cursive, puts me back at that Fifth Avenue counter every time I see it, picking at waffle fries with a can of Dr Brown’s. I have a T-shirt from a Japanese soy sauce factory that breaks down the entire brewing process on the back; last week, a Dutch guy spotted it in a pub and told me the Netherlands is one of the biggest soy sauce producers anywhere in the world, thanks to Kikkoman’s factory in the town of Sappemeer. Without the shirt, I’d never have known. There’s another from Tres Monos in Buenos Aires – won during a 5am lock-in that turned my teeth amber with Fernet.
I like these places and the people behind them, and I like telling people about somewhere I’ve loved, because I want them to love it too. And if they visit, I say: leave the menu and bring me a T-shirt.
This article originally appeared in issue 5 of Broadsheet London's print magazine. Find out where you can pick up a copy here.
