The Canteen That Stopped Cooking

I went back for eleven years, and somewhere along the way I stopped buying dinner and started buying a memory.

25 September 2026

For eleven years I ordered the same thing at the same corner table: rigatoni with sausage and fennel, a carafe of something rough and red, the owner's nephew forgetting the bread. I called it my canteen. What I meant was that I had stopped tasting it.

The sausage got finer, greyer, more industrial. The fennel vanished one winter and I told myself it was seasonal. Fennel is not seasonal; fennel is a decision. I was paying nineteen quid for a photograph of a night in 2013, when I was broke and in love and the pasta was better than I deserved.

Loyalty to a restaurant is real: it feeds cooks, keeps the lights on in February. But it's owed to people still doing the work. Nostalgia is the surcharge you pay for refusing to admit they stopped. Order something new. If it's bad, you're free.