"I HAD A LIGHT LUNCH."

REBECCA THIMMESCH ON CALF BRAIN, HOSPITALITY DATES, AND THINGS NOT SITTING WELL

I’m en route to lunch, walking through an industrial estate in East London, further east than I normally go. I’ve peeled my jacket and cardigan off damp spring skin, and my shoulder has seized up. It’s a chronic thing. This isn’t how I want to arrive for my glamorous wine bar lunch date, sweaty and clutching my left arm in pain. I’m exploring a romance with a local sommelier.

On our first date, we huddled over a plate of char-grilled livers and kidneys in Chinatown. On the second, I cooked us a whole fish. I love cooking a whole fish for a gentleman caller. I do a decent job plating up these second date fish; I don’t have quite the flair of the Mediterranean waiters with their two spoons but I do okay. At the end of the night—ravaged by the wine and each other in equal measure—we stood over my stove, digging out the cheeks and eyeballs from what remained of the frame.

What culinary delights await me today?

I knocked back two pain pills on my walk here. The ones you can drink with, I think. I need a glass of wine. We meet on the road and I explain my shoulder. “I’m fine,” I say, “I just need a drink.” He ushers me inside.

Would we like a glass of something to start?

Of course we would. They talk wine. I know enough about wine, enough to choose a bottle for the group and certainly enough to choose to date sommeliers and let them order for me. I take a bigger sip of ice cold pet nat than is perhaps ladylike, my clamminess abates and my shoulder loosens. We’re being talked through the menu, a series of beautiful, seasonal Italian small plates. “If you’re brave enough,” he says to me, “we’re doing a calf’s brain with salsa verde.” Why is he saying that to me? Do I not look like a bitch who can handle a bit of brain?

“Oh, I’m brave,” I say.

Why did I say that?

I eat plenty of offal when I eat meat. I’m adventurous, but I’ve eaten enough brain to know that I don’t love it.

But my date and I have egged each other on, each nervous for our own reasons. We have plenty of plates coming to warm up our palates and we’ve ordered a bottle, we’ll be fine.

It’s not long before we’ve eaten our piquant bites, our delicate salads, and drunk most of the wine. The pain in my shoulder is long-gone, replaced by the pain in my lower back from attempting to sit elegantly on a bar stool. I’m pleasantly drunk and having a really good time, as ready as I could be for the brain to arrive.

The brain comes tenderly poached alongside what looks like the absolute first zucchini of spring, topped with an ultra-verdant salsa verde. Usually, my forays into brain have been French and heavily sauced. Here, there is no artifice. It’s brain, on a plate. You said you were a bitch who could handle it, remember?

My date and I look at each other, thinking the same thoughts. “We need to focus,” he tells me. “I don’t think we want this to get cold.”

I would say I do more grappling than most with the corporeal forms of the meat that I eat, if but rarely. Lately, I look at a pack of 24 factory-farmed chicken wings in the horrid meat aisle of the Hoxton Street Lidl and I can’t stop picturing a dozen chickens in a pile, exsanguinated on the line of a commercial slaughterhouse. I know that the animals I eat, the pigs for my prosciutto and the lamb for my first-day-of-my-period lahmacun, they all have brains. Brains I can’t obscure like when I feast greedily on the head of a shrimp. These are brains that look like my own. Think thoughts like my own. Brains that look like this. Snap out of it, Rebecca. He’s right, I don’t want this to get cold.

I cleave off a piece of brain, scooping salsa verde with my knife. It’s exquisitely cooked--the whole meal has been exquisitely cooked—I’m surrounded by handsome men of various Mediterranean origins and expensive bottles of wine and delicious, teeny plates of food. I’m feeling very Continental with this brain.

We’re huddled together, engaged in a hushed conspiracy not to embarrass ourselves by failing to put away this chic slice of brain. It’s coming to room temperature, texture shifting from panna cotta to, well, brain, by the second. It’s getting really brain-y. What a bonding experience.

Our legs form a herringbone as we alternate the last few pieces of brain with that perfect zucchini. We are completely exposed by this experience. No artifice for the brain, no artifice for us.

My date very graciously takes the last piece of brain. “Well,” he says to me, “should we have some desert wine?”

We leave the restaurant and head to a pub where his friends are. I try to be sensible and order a soda water. His friends leave and we have a pint, then another.

“Should we head back towards central?” we ask each other, the tacit admission that we are far from either of our flats. My friends are at a pub near his restaurant, let’s go.

It’s that point of spring in London where the sun sets a bit later and everyone forgets how to act. A few weeks ago, it would have been dark as we were leaving the restaurant, but the last streaks of sunlight are only just fading away as we exit the station. I have two or three more pints. Now those friends are leaving and we’re walking up the road for a nightcap. It’s almost eleven, a long time since the brain. And let me tell you, that brain is not putting up a fight against all the wine and the beers. I’m shitfaced, another glass won’t hurt. This is a real hospitality date.

We’ve collected his FOH friends, we’re all at another pub with a late license. I have three pints of water. The brain is not sitting well. I’m cut off.

Everyone is gone and we’re at a table, he’s clearly a favorite of the pub landlady but even we have overstayed. We’re out on the street. Proverbially, we’re back eating the brain. “I’m sorry, I’m so drunk,” I tell him. “I have to go home.” Thankfully, my bus is a night bus. I need to go home and make my private drunken pasta, splattering oil on my stove and my arms in my stupor which I’ll clean up, shamefully, the next morning. More pasta than anyone should eat in one sitting, frozen peas poured haphazardly from the bag as my freezer door swings open, two lemons and a heaping spoon of sambal.

The brain is not sitting well.

I’m apologizing. “I’m sorry I’m so drunk, although I think you’re drunker than I am. It’s just been so long since we had that brain.”

He’s laughing, I’m laughing, God it’s been so long since we’ve had that brain.

My bus arrives, signalling an end to five very indecent minutes under the lone overhead light of the stop. I don’t really want the night to end like this, but I’ve got to get home. I pass on the upper deck, focusing on the road ahead. It’s only twenty minutes on the bus and a short walk from there. And then I can make my pasta and replenish my stomach, where the dregs of brain and tender zucchini are facing a Gettysburg-level defeat against a horde of beers with the high ground.

It’s after two now, and my high street is full of 22-year olds leaving the chain nightclubs which serve to blight this otherwise lovely stretch of road. I step off the bus--it’s cold now, I’m shivering in the cardigan and the coat I couldn’t bear hours ago--I just need to cross and then I’m home free.

I take another step then keel over. After twelve hours of agonizing about my lunch, I finally lose it.

Rebecca Thimmesch is a writer and cook based in East London. Her newsletter Chic! is published on Substack.

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Very excited to have this story from Rebecca Thimmesch online this week as well as in the upcoming print edition, which is definitely still happening, I promise. Most of the stories are done, I am just petrified to complete layout and actually put it out there. But it’s happening!

Pre-orders will be announced soon.