"Cooking is like being in love with someone as a teenager who doesn't even see you"

Greedy DMs - Ed Mcilroy

I first met Ed at a friend’s birthday - this gangly bloke in a yellow t-shirt, drinking yellow natty wine, eating a big plate of curry, friendly and grinning, his arms long as an orangutan’s. This was just before he opened the Plimsoll in Finsbury Park, and way before Tollingtons, his chippy turned Spanish restaurant. His cooking at the Plimsoll is messy and excitable, bucking the turn toward calm neatness favoured in many London eateries, and sensitively embracing global nature; while Tollingtons is a love-letter to Barcelona (to El Xampanyet especially) that does not copy but emulates. He lives in London, above Tollingtons.

Tollington’s pre-refurb. I visited a few times before it opened, and Ed showed me around like a boy who’d askd for a toy kitchen, and, through some marvellous quirk of fate, had been given a restaurant all of his own

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Jago: Where are you right now?

Ed McLroy: in the office, story of my life.

I’m picturing crisp packets and ash trays with half smoked cigarettes.

a year ago it would have been, now i'm sat in between empty water bottles and my eaten packed lunch my sister makes me - yogurt and chia seeds and fruit… it's lost the rock and roll edge

So she makes you and her kids their packed lunches at the same time?

man they've outgrown the packed lunches, my sister is only 6 years older than me but the girls are 20 and 18, small women. And she raised me as a teen for a while

What’d she cook?

my favourite was loaded potato skins, cheesy carby bacony, maybe the perfect trio? she had to feed 2 children and a rapidly growing young adult male on a teacher's assistant's wage, it wasn't easy

Why were you living with her?

[If you upgrade to paid, it will make me so happy!]