By our culinary correspondent Harry Speed
It is not often that one attends a tasting and leaves questioning the very possibility of frying an egg, yet such was my fate after an evening at The Existential Chop, Fitzrovia’s most self-important butcher.
The event was billed as a “Dialectical Tasting,” and promised a pairing of artisanal charcuterie with penetrating ontological reflection. Guests gathered in a cold, candlelit shop, seated on stools fashioned from what Penhaligon, our host, assured us were “repurposed chopping blocks, softened by the hands of history.”
We began with “Existential Salami.” Before slicing, Penhaligon delivered a ten-minute discourse on the inevitability of decay, suggesting that the very mould on the casing was a metaphor for time’s relentless intrusion. The salami itself was serviceable, though rather chewy—possibly to make the metaphor linger.
Next came “Absurdist Bacon.” Each rasher was curled into the shape of a question mark, a witty touch somewhat undermined by the overzealous frying that left it limp and despondent. Guests were encouraged to discuss whether eating it amounted to collusion with the void.
The evening’s centrepiece was the “Sartrean Sausage Quartet.” Each sausage was stuffed with a different spice blend, meant to represent freedom, anguish, nausea, and bad faith. They tasted, respectively, of paprika, Coco Pops, too much cumin, and something alarmingly close to what I imagine despair tastes like.
Penhaligon prowled the room in his butcher’s apron like a lecturer in exile, quoting Nietzsche while wielding a cleaver for emphasis. “Every cut is a question,” he thundered, before dropping a slice of chorizo onto my plate with the solemnity of a sacrament.
Audience reactions were mixed. A young woman wearing a bobble hat declared the experience “transformative, like Hegel with gravy.” A more sceptical diner muttered that she’d “prefer Waitrose, where there’s less metaphysics.” For myself, I found the evening both illuminating and indigestible, like reading Kant on an empty stomach.
The tasting concluded with a “Phenomenological Pudding,” which turned out to be black pudding accompanied by a footnote on Husserl. By then, half the audience had slipped away to the pub, leaving only the true philosophers still nodding earnestly into their beef wine.
Verdict: three stars for ambition, one for seasoning. Recommended only for those with strong stomachs and an even stronger tolerance for epistemological puns.
