I'd been to see A Streetcar Named Desire at the cinema, and walked out with mixed feelings. Poor Blanche DuBois, sure; but that Stanley Kowalski, what a brute. A lady sitting next to me snoozed her way through the film, but I was startled by the young Marlon Brando's mesmeric on-screen adonis. A veritable hero.
Crossing the Thames from the BFI, we went straight to the pub. Two Irish coffees weren't enough to take the edge off the cold snap of wintertime
Soho air, though. It was time to have a samosa.
After peering into a few indistinctive touristy places that looked either empty and sad or inauthentic and overpriced, we settled on
Tiger Spice, which somehow managed to roll all of those qualities into one colourful room of muddled intrigue. As two smiling waitresses greeted us, a late 90s cheesy pop compilation played on the stereo and chintzy Christmas trinkets adorned shelves and wallspace. Kowalski/Brando would have hated it.
Three Indian beers later, though, and things began to regain a semblance of normality. With S Club 7 on the speakers, we reminisced about our favourite teachers at school (Miss Patterson - thanks for everything). Meanwhile, two tall blonde German tourists walked in, panicked, and u-turned out.
The sweetest part of the Tiger Spice experience was placing our order. Asking for curry and beer was easy, but my request for a samosa was met with baffled eyes and sideways glances from our eager-to-please waitress. I didn't panic, though. I just had to make the
internationally recognised hand gesture for samosa (two hands making a triangle using thumbs and index fingers) and we were all back on the same page. She knew what I meant. There were grins all round. Samosas build fried pastry bridges over cultural divides.
When the food arrived, it was actually a lot like the 90s girl- and boyband pop we were being treated to. Vaguely pleasing on the eye, but missing depth and character, and not something you'd ever deliberately go back to. Even the little samosas were a slight disappointment. The pastry was brittle like a Chinese fortune cookie, and the maroon-coloured mashed potato filling contained little carrot, pea or much else. Spices had obviously been used, but they'd been misdeployed, and rather than being an adventure, each samosa bite became a tepid task. As Robbie Williams' 'Let Me Entertain You' blurted out of the speakers, I took a big yawn.
We settled the bill and stepped back into the cold roads of Soho night. Walking to the bus, we passed two drag queens singing disco hits to a heaving pubload of punters on the corner of Tottenham Court Road. As voyeuristic old men gawped through windows, the cross-dressed singers marched out of the pub and into the middle of the road. The euphoric pub scene spilt out into the pavement as the singers stood swaying on a traffic island belting out 'I Will Survive'. Meanwhile, a pair of dawdling community support officers rolled their eyes at the frolicking scenes of a drunk Sunday. We kept walking.
With the stars high in the darkening sky, the evening was turning colder and stranger. I thought to myself, 'what would the young Brando do now?' - so decided to head back north for the inaugural Skittle-ites (bowling team) training session.
Tiger Spice, Old Compton Street.
