Ghost Kitchens

‘The food trucks, kiosks, kitchens and restaurants may no longer stand, but the traces of you do.’ Words by Nikesh Shukla. Illustration by Liam Cobb.

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today, we have an essay by Nikesh Shukla about shared meals as a map of life, and grief. Last Friday, we published a special edition of Six of One, with recommendations for places to eat on a day-trip from London. You can read it, and the last five years of restaurant recommendations with a subscription to Vittles, which costs £7/month or £59 for the whole year.

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Ghost Kitchens

‘The food trucks, kiosks, kitchens and restaurants may no longer stand, but the traces of you do.’

Most of the food spots you took me to years ago don’t even exist anymore. Like you, they’re long gone, consigned to memory. The thought hits me one summer morning, a few years after your death, when, walking to work down High Holborn, I realise I’m about to walk past the last place I saw you. I cross the road immediately, almost stepping out into traffic, not ready to confront your ghost, which is trapped forever at a bench in the window, urging me to try your bánh mi.

You exist in emails about rappers and comedy, in cousin get-togethers at aunties’ houses and snarky side-groups to the main family WhatsApp. You also exist in links you have text me, Google Maps locations of the food spots you wanted to try. You are in the stream of one-tick messages I’ve sent you since I learned of your passing, trying to make sense of it all. You exist in meals, too, moments I cherish the most. Moments that slip away from me with each passing day. This is probably what James and Kay Salter were referring to when they called their book Life as Meals. Those meals are secret histories, the trajectory of our relationship. The buildings - the food trucks and kiosks, the kitchens and the restaurants - may no longer stand, but the traces of you do.

Kebab in Camden

The first food spot you found for us was a kebab place in Camden. You’d moved from Calgary the week before and were living with our uncle, working in Euston, while I was in Holloway Road. When I invited you for lunch, expecting a cheeky pint, you replied with the location of a restaurant. I arrived to find a kebab spot, a few doors down from Underworld.

It had the pallor of a place that comes to life once the pubs kick out. When we entered, the men sprang into surprised action to accommodate us, firing up the fryers, reloading the charcoal grills – indicating they weren’t used to customers at this time. I had walked past so many times, on my way home, drunk, and decided not to go in. ‘Why this place?’ I asked you that day, and you showed me a picture of a rapper we both love eating here after a show.

Over lunch, freshly cooked, we rapped our favourite lyrics and we shared our favourite horror stories of that rapper’s notorious behaviour and we laughed and we laughed, standing up at the counter, encased in a booth, spattered with traces of ketchup, grease and garlic sauce. I was late back from lunch and I could smell onions on my clothes, but I sat at my desk, for the rest of the afternoon, glowing warmly. It was like you were the only person in the world.

That kebab shop in Camden is now a chicken shop. Same, but still different. The decor is the same. The menu is, surprisingly, the same. Just the sign above the door is chicken centric. The scaffolding of our spirits, the embers of our ghosts, still there, still together.

Korean Fried Chicken in Wick

Then there was that food market among the warehouses in Wick where we got Korean fried chicken, our backs to a party of lads at a communal picnic table in a courtyard. It took an hour or so of me talking at you, knowing something was wrong, before you let me know you were going through it. As drum ‘n’ bass shuddered and rattled the shutters of the various warehouses surrounding us, you told me it was over. She was leaving you. I was devastated. It took a drop of gochujang sauce on your alabaster-white Air Force 1s and the panicked rubbing in of the sauce, your frustration at not having any Crep Protect in your backpack, for the tears to come.

What do these moments tell me? Are they my montage of our best bits? If our relationship was confined like the first fifteen minutes of Up, these are the moments I’d show. I walk through that food market now and the stalls are all different. No fried chicken stall. No benches. Just a space that’s been reinvented.

Mint Tea in Preston Road

I used to love meeting you by yourself because we could split a ten-pack of fags guilt-free, back in those days when you could buy them for under a fiver. However, the shisha spot you took me to, in the courtyard of a car wash behind Preston Road station, served – you thought – the best mint tea in the city. It was coming up on way too late to be out, and I wanted to keep drinking. The mint tea came with a pistachio pastry, and you chose a watermelon shisha for us. We lounged on sofas, just beyond the canopy, gazing up at the sky. I wanted to take my phone out and trace the constellations.

However, I also wanted to live inside the timbre of your soft voice, so I stilled my desire to pick up my phone and listened as you told me the story of how you lost hearing in one ear. The story was so simple and stupid, a tale of immaturity and an inability to take care of oneself. I don’t know how often you told this story, but it felt like a special one. I’m glad I sobered up enough to receive it.

Chinese at Peckham or Camberwell

You were funny, too. There was that time we were on the borders of Peckham and Camberwell, in a Chinese spot that had the same tiles as my parents’ bathroom, and you were listing your top meats. I was surprised that pork came out on top. You launched into a monologue – which felt pre-prepared, or like a long-held bugbear, or not your first pig rodeo – about the various ways it topped all the other meats. My relationship with meat at the time was tenuous. I was a recently lapsed vegetarian and found that it was only really the processed stuff that I liked. You were about to head to Japan, and you’d already started researching the spots you wanted to visit. You insisted on ordering liver to celebrate my return to the flesh. I wasn’t into it. And so you pushed rice with small chunks of pork onto my plate.

To be the satellite around your orb of excitement was to feel boundless. You asked for our leftovers to be wrapped up to go, which surprised our waiter. You also topped us up from the pitcher of lager. As I chewed on the pork, you held your hands out as if to say, am I right or am I right? I nodded. In this moment, you were. The waiter later confessed that he wished more people asked to take their leftovers, that the food wastage in the place bothered him. You told him it is standard practice in Canada. He asked where you were from, and I watched as he fell into orbit around your enthusiasm as you told him about Calgary in the winter.

Ten Pints on Hackney Road

You were there for me, too, a steady hand in my chaotic moments. Like that time outside a pub on Hackney Road; we’d gone because you were convinced their Scotch eggs beat everyone’s Scotch eggs. I had drunk on an empty stomach, and it didn’t take long before I was leaning on a steel bollard outside the pub. I didn’t want to tell you that I didn’t want to say goodbye to you. I was crying. You were kind and alarmed. But still kind. You conjured a series of meals-as-adventures to occupy me. You told me you were hungry. I said there was food at home. You could stay at mine. We decided to get a taxi the whole way. We didn’t talk. Your hands were close to mine on the seat. Close enough to remind me, as I drifted in and out of sleep, that you were there.

Bánh Mi in High Holborn

This morning, High Holborn is filled with workers holding coffee cups and pastries, rushing to their offices. The day hasn’t ruined them yet. I’m heading to where I teach. I try to cut my eyes across the road to the bánh mi spot. We went to this particular spot because I was doing a talk at LSE, had a few hours before my train and hadn’t seen you in a while. You went into your research lab, checking your favourite food blogs, maps, group chats, till finally you knew that the bánh mi at this place was our best bet in an office-heavy part of town filled with quick food chains. I remember you sitting at that bench in the window, urging me to take a bite of your bánh mi. I’m declining, as politely as I can, mostly because all I can think about is the trace of your saliva on the bitten edge.

I wish I had taken that bite now. It was the last time I would see you. And maybe the trace of you on my lips would have contained enough DNA to Jurassic Park you back to life. I don’t know. I always appreciated the work you put into finding the perfect spot, to the point where I ceded that role to you. All those years, all those spots, all that work: your life’s work, in fact.

It's been a few months of crossing the street every time I get to that restaurant on High Holborn. It’s preserved, unlike these other places. The kebab shop now a chicken shop, the food stall now another food stall, the pub shut down and reopened multiple times, the Chinese restaurant now a betting shop, and the ghosts of us feel trapped in those buildings, eating those meals, downing those drinks, in purgatory. Here, though, on High Holborn, you are intact.

I want to see you again. This time, I don’t cross the street. I have avoided this restaurant for months now. I’ve placed so much importance on keeping you trapped on that bench in the window in a loop, so I can revisit you whenever I want. I’m ready now. I approach the restaurant. It’s an early summer’s morning, the air is fresh: it is the coolest part of the city right now.

I stand in front of the window, confused. The benches have been removed, there are packing boxes everywhere, the stools we sat on have been stacked in the window. The restaurant has closed down. You always said to me, about the places you chose for us, that we should appreciate the moment while we had it, because who was to know what would happen with these restaurants. If we were to take anything, it was the meal, the experience, the anatomy of time spent together, not the bricks-and-mortar of it all. I press my eyes up to the glass, shield them with my fingers and search for you inside.

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Credits

Nikesh Shukla is a novelist and screenwriter, currently working on a Spider-Man India comic book miniseries for Marvel as well as numerous television projects. Most recently, he released his first children’s book, called The Council Of Good Friends. Nikesh wrote the award-winning short film, Two Dosas, a Channel 4 Comedy Lab called Kabadasses and the award-winning short film, The Great Identity Swindle, and has worked in numerous writer’s rooms both in the UK and US for HBO, Prime, BBC, Sky, and Apple. Nikesh is a fellow of the Sundance Institute and the Royal Society of Literature. He is also columnist for the Bristol Cable, the co-founder of The Good Literary Agency. His memoir, Brown Baby: A Memoir Of Race, Family And Home was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize. You can find him on Instagram or his website here.

Liam Cobb is a freelance illustrator and comic artist based in Reykjavik, Iceland and London, UK. You can find more of his work here.

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