Media/Diet (May '26)
Five busy days in London
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MEDIA/DIET (MAY ‘26)
My trip to London is off to a good start when I am assigned an aisle seat and the seat to my left proves empty, but it takes a sharp turn for the worse when I’m served the first meal of the flight. I requested a vegan meal, which gets a small cup of coconut yogurt, a few cubes of fruit and a whole wheat roll that is fully empty, save for a few crumpled slices of grilled zucchini and a single slice of a small tomato. I unravel the zucchini to salvage the situation and take a deep breath. Five hours left to go.
I am traveling for work, it’s a Sunday, and the list of upcoming meetings and tasks is an endless scroll in the back of my mind. It will be a five day stay, crammed with one full day of workshops and team-wide discussions, several editorial meetings and, as the magazine I work for has to be relentlessly fed stories at all times, lots of my usual work as a journalist. To distract myself from the anxiety of it all, I read The Edge of Space-Time by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, which is shaping up to be the most relevant and interesting physics book that I’ve read in ages. Prescod-Weinstein interrogates the use of metaphor in science, makes broad connections between physics, society and popular culture and seamlessly jumps from quantum field theory to queer studies to black history then back to theories of gravity, all done with style and verve. I only manage to read for a few hours before a mix of sleep and nerves gets to me, but even chapters outlining physics that I had learned a decade feel new, revelatory and full of generative connections in Prescod-Weinstein’s telling.
I awake to the airline redeeming itself with a dinner of fairly solid ravioli in tomato and mushroom sauce with a few more zucchini slices and some broccolini. This is less upsetting, but by the time I land and clear customs I am hungry again so I grab a ‘no duck’ hoisin wrap from a Marks & Spencer in the arrivals area and hope that the rest of my trip will be kinder to my diet, nutritionally and spiritually. Below is a short recap of how that went.
My hotel, a Holiday Inn in Kensington, offers breakfast and the time difference between New York and London really helps me be at the hotel gym the moment it opens at 6:15 am so all my London mornings include a 5 mile treadmill run followed by some combination of greens, hash browns or toast, roasted tomatoes, sauteed mushrooms, veggie breakfast sausages and a fruit salad or cereal with soy milk1. The tomatoes are a discovery, the mushrooms are mostly watery and bland, and I immediately realize that the undressed spring mix I’m trying to cajole into a salad is actually there for sandwiches. On day two I work out where the hot sauce is and this makes the rest of the week’s breakfasts more enjoyable.
The first workday in the London office is a blur of adjustments and jet lag. I miss my desk, my multitude of monitors and the Eastern time zone, but still manage to file a story. Inevitably, I end up staying in the office overtime which makes it feel just like the New York newsroom that’s been my home base for the past four years. For lunch, part of my team heads to a Dishoom across the street, which I surmise is meant to be a treat. As I was similarly treated to this fast casual Indian chain on a previous visit to London I know that the okra fries are fantastic and that I ought to ask for a vegan menu. Bread and potato options abound, but I settle on a chole chawal, a chickpea curry served with rice, and a chai with oat milk. I am mostly not a fan of oat milk so the chai surprises me by being a real treat and our server is adamant that I can have bottomless refills. The rest is good but not necessarily exciting. Feeling petty, I think of the tofu jalfrezi and potato parathas at my go-to Indian spot back in Queens and feel a wave of cowardly homesickness.
“I don’t know how this happened to me, but places that look like they could be New York but aren’t sort of incense me,” I record myself speaking into my phone’s front lens on the walk to the hotel after work but don’t post the video on social media. I can recognize when my pettiness is just for me, a treat of sorts in itself. To prevent the feeling from fully consuming me I settle on a 40 minute walk to an all you can eat vegan Chinese buffet for dinner. The route takes me through a beautifully green and blooming park at golden hour, which feels like being on the edge of a fairy tale and does in fact fix my heart.
Instead of the sensory overwhelm I am steeling myself for, I find Su Vegan Buffet to be rather manageable, small even, and very inviting. It feels like entering someone’s family kitchen the morning before a huge holiday. From what I can tell, only three people have cooked everything that’s on display. There is no shortage of options, however, and a lot of them include very old-school seitan, soy and ‘wheat meat’ products that feel refreshing and comforting. Among all the suspiciously wellness-forward and tech-forward vegan options, sometimes you just need some seitan or yuba and veggies in a nondescript brown sauce. The host, who is also making dumplings, immediately clocks me as both anxious and American and reassures me that I can have as much food as I want and don’t have to pay upfront. It’s the best 16$ I’ve spent in a long time and I happily have two plates.
Tuesday is set aside for workshops, team building and visioning so my gym-and-hotel-breakfast routine is followed by a few stray pieces of conference room fruit then another team lunch, now catered in a private room of a pub. There are many vegan options but they are all beige carbs. Piling a faux meat slider, a slice of focaccia, and a quinoa salad on my plate feels a touch silly in its homogeneity and that is before several big bowls of fries are also placed on the table. Both the focaccia and the fries are very good, but I crave something green and crunchy, and feel like a stereotype for doing so. (As an aside, catering services still defaulting to gloopy under seasoned quinoa salads as a vegan option is something that ought to be studied.)
Luckily, dinner is completely different and the absolute highlight of my day. I meet the writer, editor and artist Apoorva Sripathi at a vegan pub called the Spread Eagle for great conversation and great food alike. We split some hummus and flatbread, fries, an incredible fried cauliflower served with black rice vinegar and hot pineapple honey, all on top of little dollops of miso mayo, tempeh croquetas that are delightful soft and savory underneath their properly crunchy exterior, and a big and satisfying salad heavy on greens and asparagus, and studded with creamy Jersey Royale potatoes. For dessert, I have a sticky toffee pudding because I am in England after all. Its texture is more grainy than I expect, but it also floats in a pool of delectable toffee sauce. The pudding is paired with an aggressively coconutty scoop of ice cream, something that I would usually bristle at, but find it complementing the toffee’s combination of sweet and salty rather well.
It’s a privilege to meet Apoorva after admiring her work from afar and we find a lot of common ground in griping about the life of a working writer and unpacking current media messaging about home cooking. When I complain about the scarcity of good coffee in the area that I am staying in, she advises that I ditch Americanos in favor of flat whites and that turns out to be a fantastic tip. Flat whites with soy milk2 really help get me through the next few days of work. On the train back to the hotel, which is experiencing delays due to signaling issues just like subway trains constantly do in New York, I feel grateful to my writing for helping me cross paths with someone as cool as Apoorva.
The next day is regular in the sense of my workout, my breakfast, my work and the general need to get things done after all that talking that had consumed the previous day. During a very short lunch break, I grab a box of veggie sushi from Wasabi, a chain store near the office, and a chocolate tahini bite from an adjacent coffee shop and bakery called Gail’s, purposefully avoiding the busy office cafeteria in favor of feeling a little sun on my face. The main event of the day, however, is that my mom is flying in from Croatia. I rush to meet her in the hotel lobby after working late again and soon we’re off to dinner at Akub, a truly fantastic Palestinian restaurant close to Notting Hill.3 We order olives, pickles, two small za’atar breads, some stewed fava beans, perfectly jammy eggplant halves finished with tahini and pomegranate seeds, and a very fragrant plate of mujadara generously topped with caramelized onions. Mom asks for the least sweet cocktail on the menu and I have a nonalcoholic tamarind fizz. We eat enough to forego dessert and spend the next two hours walking around to take in some more of London and catch up. “I have so much to say that your ears will hurt,” my mom says, and she’s not joking.
Thursday is mostly a mess. There’s too much work, I’m too sleepy, and the feeling of being rushed permeates everything. I put in my miles, have my hotel breakfast, and catch a small break when a colleague suggests eating lunch in nearby Hyde Park. We duck into a Marks & Spencer first, I confidently grab another ‘no duck’ wrap and a small salad full of crunchy nuts and then we’re off to sit in the grass and chat. Having solidarity with coworkers is crucial for surviving any workplace, and forging it in the surprisingly warm late April sun is especially good. Back in the office, a smattering of store bought desserts has been laid out for the team so I grab a vegan chocolate cupcake and a hilariously grotesque mini version of an off-brand Colin the Caterpillar. I have long been fascinated with this type of chocolate cake and for the millionth time resolve to figure out how to make my own sometimes soon.
After work, mom, who is back from a full day of adventuring, and I both make an appearance at a crowded pub that’s been chosen for company happy hour, but we soon have to run off to make it to a ballet performance in a different part of town. There’s no time for a sit down meal so we’re back in that Wasabi, grabbing two prepackaged rice bowls that we inhale in the hotel, in-between changing clothes and bags. It’s a bad day for consuming food, but an incredible one for consuming culture. The ballet, a production in three parts called Alchemies, is fantastic and proves absolutely worth the hassle and the rush.
Alchemies was choreographed by Wayne McGregor, the resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet for the last 20 years, and performed by Royal Ballet’s incredibly impressive dancers. McGregor is a celebrated artist known for more abstract style. I know next to nothing about dance but my colleagues had all been reacting to his name with excitement throughout the day, so I am very curious. The show opens with “Untitled,” the curtain lifting to reveal a striking white backdrop interrupted by a sharp green triangle, a promise that something beautifully minimal and geometric is about to happen. The dancers are costumed in green and white too and they move to a haunting, droning soundtrack nearly devoid of melody but very rich in texture. Their movements alternate between being fluid and sharp with an absolutely rigorous execution of every straight line, every curved arc, and myriad other geometrical shapes that the human body can sustain. Set design and inspiration for the piece come from the minimalist Cuban artist Carmen Herrera, but the whole thing, which does run a little longer than feels ideal, reminds me in equal parts of Italian futurists and, as Teresa Guerreiro wrote in Ballet Position, an abstract painting come to life. Lights shift colours throughout, changing the emotional charge of the movement by turning the white flats of the stage and the costumes into warm yellows, oranges and pinks. I am blown away.
After an intermission, we are thrust into a different world as dancers appear in sparsely illuminated glass cubes, now in flowy ruby red jumpsuits. Set to Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, this is a more traditional piece and there is more softness and romance to it. It flows by fairly quickly, feeling less punchy but also less abstract. Dancers’ bodies move with emotion and rigor in equal parts now, lending themselves to a sense of narrative, a sort of communal search for beauty and meaning. This act is called ‘Yugen”, which is a Japanese concept of subtle mystery and beauty that is felt and inferred within an object more than it is directly observed. Historically, this concept is also historically connected to a sense of cosmic truths that transcend human comprehension so it bridges the religiosity of Bernstein’s music with the beauty of the dancer’s movements nicely. This is not my favourite part of the night, but it lives up to its name, briefly, gorgeously fluttering into existence before giving way to the show’s final act “Quantum Souls.”
The transition between the two brings a big tonal shift because this part of the show is much more in conversation with its opening, if not a more extreme version of its style. Minimalist stage design is back as are dancers in tight costumes covered in geometrical shapes, but there are now two musicians and a formidable array of percussion instruments on stage too. The orchestra in the pit and the dancers follow a script but the percussionist, Beibei Wang, gets to improvise and respond to movements around her more spontaneously. As a result, there is an undertone of chaos or frenzy which works well with the physically challenging choreography that is nevertheless not without an element of play. I am mesmerized by the shadows that the dancers’ often coupled-up bodies cast on the colorfully lit stage, an array of symbols in motion, like a calligraphy exercise or a mathematical equation become possessed. When Wang starts moving among the dancers towards the end of the show, an electricity spreads through the audience. We all watch intently, witnessing something very much like alchemy happen on stage. The show ends to a resounding applause and both mom and I are instant fans.
By the time we exit the Royal Ballet and Opera, it’s past 10pm and nearly every shop and restaurant nearby is closed but we’re both in a snacky mood so end up at Amorino Gelato, mostly because I have a memory of once eating a decent sorbet there. Mom opts for a waffle generously covered in chocolate sauce and my memory proves right when a cup of mango, basil lime and chocolate sorbet really hits the spot.
Friday is the only morning when I skip the gym and the only morning when mom joins me for breakfast in the hotel. It’s my last day in London and our brief time together is wrapping up very quickly. I have to duck into the office one more time, to field some emails and say my goodbyes. I grab one last soy flat white in the office cafeteria and really disappoint the very friendly barista by disclosing that I’m not a new hire but actually about to disappear. There’s more rushing, there’s matcha lattes with mom at the train station Sakurado, and then I’m back at the airport, mostly thirsty and disappointed in myself when I realize that I’d not made any progress on The Edge of Space-Time during the week. I have a passable sweet potato and avocado wrap from Pret A Manger at my unexpectedly barren airport terminal, its only truly good seasoning being the fact that an employee called me ‘sir’ while charging me an obscene amount of money for it. Finding a water fountain also feels victorious though I do have to wait in a sizeable line just to fill my water bottle.
And just like that, I’m back where I started, feeling lucky yet again because my seat on the airplane turns out to be in a fully empty row. The vegan dinner option is a decent lentil and potato curry with rice, a side salad, a cup of chocolate pudding and a roll of bread with a stick of surprisingly decent vegan cheese. I eat, I doze off, I read, I doze off some more, and suddenly we’re at JFK almost an hour ahead of schedule. While I wait to clear customs my partner texts asking what I’d like for dinner and I am immediately so excited to be home.
The week has been as exhausting as it has been nourishing and I know better than to be ungrateful. All of my busy days were still studded with something truly good, from friendship to an always necessary family reunion. But I hope that the next time I am in London, I will be a blissfully relaxed tourist, with no task more pressing than finding another sticky pudding.
Best,
Karmela
After many years of being loyal to almond milk, I have come around to soy being the richer choice for both eating and baking
The first time I try to order one of these, I learn that I have to say “soya flat white” when the barista corrects my attempt to say “soy” without that final “a”
An Instagram mutual from Bushwick’s Boyfriend Co-op recommended this restaurant. Thank you!
London without Apoorva is like a kiss without a squeeze!
Love your New Scientist articles and this post's smorgasbord or vegan delights.