In the Beginning
What's all this about?
A year ago I walked through the front door of London’s busiest pub. I hated it almost immediately. The rowdy crowds, the damp and boozy air, its proximity to the twists and turns of unknowable Soho. A week prior I had returned to London and the finance start-up I had bet the house on had failed to raise any money. I was out of a job, recently heartbroken, and most of all broke. There was no way I could ring home for any more support having cocked up so much already. The world I now find myself in was anything but a deliberate choice in its early stages…
My interview was briefer than expected. I turned up for a trial shift a few days later and was sent up a foreboding set of stairs to the restaurant. I spent an evening polishing glassware and listening to the clattering of pots from the curtained off kitchen. I had lied about my experience, but got the job, although I am still unsure as to what I was hired as.
My time at The Devonshire began slowly. I wasn’t very good at anything; I was almost always late, and I spent most days seeking out quiet spaces and menial jobs that afforded a view and allowed my mind to wander. Mostly I would daydream about how to get back into a collar and an open plan office. It was a time so desperate that I was keeping up a ruse with my now girlfriend that I was still hard at work in ‘finance’. My evening absences and lazy mornings must have been rather bizarre to her at the time. Weeks went by, applications elsewhere slowed and days at the restaurant became ever more engrossing as I got better at the job. Sense prevailed through a tough conversation with my mother - the answer to my grand question of what I ought to do with my life was right in front of me; and had been all along.
I have always loved food and entertaining. As a little boy I would fall asleep with a brick sized paperback titled ‘1001 Foods to Try Before You Die’ that I was ticking off. It is particularly amusing to read it back and wonder how on earth an untraveled eight-year-old from Johannesburg would have tried rattlesnake or mangosteen. My first introduction to cooking was aside my mother, precariously joining in to mixed success. A large scar remains on my thumb from an incident with a paring knife age five.
I have many wonderful memories of food, mixed in with all the angst from toddler-dom to the turbulent teenage years. It is very boring trying to unpack the full extent of one’s context to others but to put it briefly I grew up in South Africa, mostly in a big city and partly on a cattle farm in the middle of nowhere. I was a precocious, probably quite painful kid. At fourteen I was sent off to boarding school and aside from making wonderful friends they are years that have already become hazy. I was always walkabout at school, kept a notably exotic tuck-box courtesy of my mother’s pantry and pretended to be Kosher in order to avoid the dreaded pork chop.
University afforded me a newfound freedom to feed myself, albeit not particularly creatively. Initially I was mostly frying off garlic and onions hoping that some girl would put her head through my tiny res-room door and ask what I was up to. Thankfully I did eventually grow into myself and my interest in food. I spent a lot of time on YouTube and cooking for always enthusiastic digs-mates. There are some very special anecdotes from that time which will no doubt appear as this page develops.
Three years at UCT in Cape Town passed by quickly and at the conclusion of my undergrad I was packing up my things to move back to Johannesburg and into a proper job. In the penultimate week of university I took ill with Covid, knocking out my sense of taste and smell for the subsequent nine months. In a world without the olfactory I nosedived emotionally and after six weeks I resigned. I wanted to leave South Africa for the first time and towards the end of 2021 I got my wish and journeyed to Italy, sneaking through the fastidious Covid travel rules armed with a dubiously acquired student visa. This glorious time that changed my life will be accounted for in the coming weeks and months.
In 2022 I fetched up in England, without much real understanding of why I was there beyond the very banal task of waiting around for a British passport for the next seven years. Initially I had grandiose ideas of becoming a war correspondent, then I naively tried to join the army. Finally somebody pointed out that I’d need to figure out how to pay my rent and the delusions would have to go on the back burner. I took a job through a cousin in a small unsexy recruitment consultancy, followed by another in a sort-of-swanky Mayfair brokerage. I became obsessed with the idea of suits and ties and bankers’ bonuses; failing to consider that I am nearly innumerate and would never make it to the big leagues and would eventually be found out in the little ones. The only thing that was ever constant in all of this was the food. I would spend money I didn’t have on groceries and cookbooks and travel back onto the continent.
After the very interesting, albeit tumultuous summer of 2023 I thought my train had finally come in. I was offered a role in a start-up under the leadership of three established, City sorts. As we now know however, I instead ended up underneath the looming green of London’s new favourite pub. The story however did not end there as this is no fairytale. I now prowl the floor and occasionally chop and peel at another restaurant – Dorian in Notting Hill. My ambitions are grand and bolstered by something verging on the obsessive. I dream about service, good and bad. I come home in the small hours after a double and start watching cooking videos. I have long drifted into the territory of a bore. This energy needs to go somewhere and ‘PanconTommy’ will hopefully be that. The name is an homage to my breakfast of the last 3 years and is also all that was available on instagram…
Writing will be part of the process of holding myself accountable to aspirations and interests. Combing recipe books, grand bouts of cooking and late-night pondering on past adventures, current perspectives and future ambitions are what I hope to distil onto these pages.
I will do my best to be ruthless in editorial oversight. I am a writer out of practice and ask the reader to bear with me as I bring up my fitness. I hope to publish a couple of recipes each week – sort of tied in with the adjacent Instagram. Alongside these will be bi-weekly accounts of a previous adventure, near or far and finally some of my own perspective on the epicurean or otherwise.
I look forward to sharing much with you in 2025. If you fancy, please engage in commentary and criticism. It will be, as it always seems, an interesting ride.
Tom