Slow Food and London sushi
Moshi Moshi celebrates 30 years
Hello Lemonistas,
Welcome to your latest edition of The Lemon Grove, in which we take a look at a celebration dinner with London-based sushi restaurant Moshi Moshi and Slow Food UK. There’s also a podcast of my conversation with Moshi Moshi founder Caroline Bennett.
Slow Food UK and 30 years of Moshi Moshi
Working with six guest chefs for a series of celebratory dinners is how Caroline Bennett chose to celebrate 30 years of serving sushi to time-pressed travellers, and stressed-out workers in London's financial centre. For the second dinner in the series, Caroline teamed up with chef and podcaster Lewis Bassett and Slow Food UK to cook a six-course menu featuring Slow Food supporters Bermondsey Street Bees and Sole of Discretion, a Plymouth, Devon-based collective of fishers. Bermondsey supplied two varieties of honey – one from hives settled on the roof of London's Custom House and from Exmoor in the west of England.
Founded after Caroline returned to London after a prolonged stay in Japan
, Moshi Moshi was the first conveyor-belt sushi restaurant in the UK. Head chef Hong Sui Li has been at the kitchen's helm since its beginning. Quite an achievement.
As a keen supporter of Slow Food and eater of Japanese food and flavours, I was eager to hear Caroline's story. Click the link below to listen to our conversation. It’s recorded in a bus lane close to Moshi Moshi, but it was the best spot we could find at the time!
PODCAST: Caroline Bennett shares her life in food
Lewis is a chef and host of the Guild of Food Writers 2023 podcast of the year, 'The Full English'. The podcast is a great listen for those with an ear for food history, food riots, the price of food, and conversations about what exactly English food is.
Over six courses, we got an insight into Lewis' culinary inspiration as he cooked with fresh fish from Cornwall and Slow Food ingredients including Bread with seaweed butter; Pollack collars with honey and nori; Raw hand-dived scallops, melon, pepper dulse and finely chopped radish; Cuttlefish sausage, smoked scallop roe, wilted leaves and ink sauce; Roast beef tataki, ponzu, horseradish and rocket; with a dessert of Rice pudding, whipped cream, apricots and honey.
Caroline is at the forefront of campaigns to protect vulnerable fish stocks and has won a number of awards, including the prestigious Green Apple Award for the Environment and the RSPCA Award for Animal Welfare.
Moshi Moshi (which roughly translates as hello when Japanese speakers answer the phone) was one of the first restaurants in the UK to achieve Marine Stewardship Council accreditation and was awarded Restaurant of the Year by Slow Food UK in its latest national awards. Caroline's relationship with Slow Food also sees her active in the vital and inspiring Slow Fish events held in Genoa, northern Italy, every couple of years. She quotes Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement, saying, ‘The food lover who doesn't take account of the environment is naïve, whereas the environmentalist who doesn't enjoy the pleasures of food certainly has a sadder life.’
The long-awaited return of Bluefin tuna
Moshi Moshi took Bluefin tuna off the menu back in 1997 after Caroline heard from her Cornish seafood suppliers that the fish had become an endangered species due to overfishing. Since then, conservation efforts around Europe to preserve the Bluefin have paid off, and in 2023, the Bluefin fishery was cautiously opened in the UK. The UK government has now deemed the replenished bluefin stocks healthy enough to fish again, allowing new limited quotas.
Exciting news: to celebrate the growing numbers of Bluefin tuna in the waters off southwest England, British-Japanese Chef Koj will create a seven-course dinner for Moshi Moshi around the magnificent Bluefin, which will be caught off the coast at Dartmouth if all goes to plan.
When: Tuesday 24th September
Where: Moshi Moshi, 24, Liverpool Street Station, Liverpool St, London EC2M 7PY.
Get tickets and further information here.
Grow a Loaf
The little group sitting at my stretch of Moshi Moshi's benches included Chris Young of the Real Bread Campaign and a former editor of Jellied Eel, an influential magazine published by Sustain's London Food Link to promote good food across the capital.
Chris is part of the leadership team at Real Bread, and after a few glasses of wine at the Moshi Moshi/ Slow Food dinner we got talking about how to grow a loaf. I'd recently read an article in the New York Times' book review of 'Frostbite' by Nicola Twilley. The book looks at how the cool chain of fridges, freezers and international shipping has changed how we eat. The book argues that refrigeration is necessary for a fast food burger as many seasonal ingredients and harvests wouldn't coincide.
So, my conversation with Chris turned to how to grow enough wheat to bake a loaf. Unknown to me, Chris and the Campaign published 'Bake Your Lawn', a book that mirrored our conversation and is leading me on a journey to plant up some of my garden with wheat from planting to harvest, milling and baking. It'll take many months to get to my finished loaf, but it will be a fun journey, which I'll share here in The Lemon Grove's newsletter.
Get inspired and start your own wheat-growing journey with 'Bake Your Lawn', by Colin Young and published by Sustain. Buy the book here.
La Panza Piena and Pompìa from Sardinia
Pompìa is a rare citrus fruit found growing between the Mediterranean Sea and the hot, dusty hills of eastern Sardinia. It's a cultural icon for the islanders and makes a delicious marmalade. Thanks to Carlotta (a fellow alumni from the University of Gastronomic Sciences) and La Panza Piena for publishing my thoughts on the fruit.
Read 'The Curious World of Citrus' here, and subscribe to 'The Cabinet of Curiosities' through the link below to get regular and fascinating insights into Italian food, life and culture.
Etsy
We've just opened our Etsy shop, and it's the place to buy my book, 'Cook Wrap Sell: A guide to starting and running a successful food business from your kitchen'. More culinary items and citrusy goods will be added regularly.
Best wishes
Bruce
The Lemon Grove's Substack newsletter
Give the gift of a 'The Lemon Grove' Substack newsletter to a friend, family member or yourself! Organise your gift through this link below … Thank you.
BRUCE & THE LEMON GROVE'S EVENTS DIARY
Travel planning for 2024 is in the works for Seville, Turin (Slow Food’s Terra Madre), Liguria, and Barcelona, to name just a few! But first, I am having new replacement surgery in early July, so I will be a little quiet for a few weeks.
If you enjoyed this post, please click on the little ❤️ below ⬇️.
Bruce McMichael
Writer, Podcaster, Event Host & Cook, Lemonista
Website: www.thelemongrove.net
Facebook: LemonGroveSocial
Instagram: LemonGrovePics