Tony down at Supa Fry, my local chip shop, is a big fan of Pukka pies. “The guy who started the company,” he says, “he started in his garden! This was 40, 50 years ago. And now look at it. They’re sending pies around the world now. And good luck to him.”

Tony is, as ever, right. Pukka pies are everywhere, and it’s for the best. While some traditionalists lament the demise of the regional pie, and I certainly miss being able to score a good Scotch pie here in London, the rise of the Pukka superpie has removed the occasionally intestinally devastating variation in quality that has, historically, been a significant hazard for the enthusiast.

The Pukka Pie founder of whom Tony speaks is Trevor Scott, who kicked things off in 1963 and made himself one of Britain’s richest men on the back of his pie empire. 180,000 pies and pastries are produced every day at Pukka’s high-tech factory at Syston, Leicestershire. You can get them all over the place – as well as at Tony’s Supa Fry, I think I’m right in saying they are now the principle pie in English football, and it is in this context I have come to know them well.

Like all the best football rituals, there’s a knack to eating a Pukka pie. When served in a crinkly plastic bag, the top may appear cool, while the foil tray in which they rest is quite warm. Nothing, however, indicates the extraordinary heat in the centre of the pie. N00b pie eaters will dive straight in, and risk serious burns to tongue, lips and even face as the pie contents spill out. Seasoned supporters view this as something of a test; the “serious” fan would not make such a schoolboy error.

The pragmatic pie eater, therefore, may choose to wait 15-20 minutes before consuming the product, knowing that it is piping hot throughout despite its cool exterior. This waiting time is known, at least round seat M108 of the Don Rogers Stand, Swindon, as the “half life” of the Pukka pie. The pie should then be debagged and, by means of gripping the edges of the foil tray while using the index finger to push the bottom of said tray, the pie raised out its container. This allows a safer approach to the snack, all the while ensuring no gravy spills down your front.

Could this ritual spread from the English lower leagues to Serie A or La Liga, or even Major League Soccer in the US? The company’s advertising makes no secret of Pukka’s global ambitions, as you can see from these snaps from SupaFry.

That’s no moon. It’s a pie.

A terrifying vision: a fleet of giant pies swoop down towards the Houses of Parliament, sent through some kind of tractor beam from a giant Photoshopped orb.

Pie for President

Pukka make their global ambitions clear, as a giant pie – aroma clearly leaking from under its pastry lid, prepares to land on the White House.

Pies fly through the bridge

History meets the future in his pastry-packed vision, where the foil-wrapped snacks make their weaving way down from the stars, and squeeze through the historic landmark. Note: the bridge stays down, to avoid any punctures and/or spillage of gravy.

Pies help you pull

In a surprising turn, Pukka point out the noted aphrodisiac qualities of their products. The snack being advertised here is known in the trade as – and I $hit you not – a Stand Up Cornish Pasty.

You’ll find plenty more brilliant Pukka posters at their website (and they’re available to buy) although I think Tony’s selection is pretty damn fine.

And then, in what’s possibly an alarming insight into the workings of my mind, my thoughts drifted to the second most memorable thing from that World Cup – a TV ad for McEwans Lager, which ran during the Scotland matches on ITV.

It stuck in my memory for a few reasons – not that I drank the stuff at the time (being 12). It had a thumping soundtrack, stunning production values for an ad of the time (even now), and it ran to what was staggering length – two whole minutes.

I loved it, hummed the tune for the best part of two decades, could never find the music or reference to the ad… and now the internet ponies up the full thing, on YouTube. Turns out it was produced by storied ad agency Collett Dickenson Pearce (think other iconic ads for Heineken – “refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach” – Harvey’s Bristol Cream and Hamlet – “Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet”). This was one of their finest hours, too, if less well-known.

The details around it on YouTube are, I think, a little wrong – it obviously ran on TV, not just in cinema, and it was 1986, not 1988, because it was certainly shown during the World Cup. But the comments are great – one explains:

“Fantastic, my fav advert of all time. It is based on ‘The myth of Sisiphus’ by Albert Camus. It is meant to show ceaseless and pointless toil as a metaphor for modern lives spent working at futile jobs in factories and offices.”

Indeed so. Great way to advertise fizzy lager. Enjoy.

So it was a good night. I’m fortunate enough to live in a city with some great restaurants, even luckier to have been able to eat in a few of them thanks to an indulgent Mrs Tosh, and the joys of (other people’s) meedja business expenses. And the meal in Ramsay’s in New York ranked as the best I’ve enjoyed in a restaurant; not because of its scale, but because of the mixing and balancing of flavours, perfect again and again.

It was food that simply tasted like very little I’ve ever experienced before. I’ll spare you any attempt to replicate it in words; I lack the vocabulary. Let’s just say it was damn fine. And I’m probably sold as a result (plus, of course, the clear Scots Mafia connection).

I’ll accept I didn’t necessarily have a typical experience. The menu was special, it was a special night, stops were pulled out. But I was not surprised to see m’colleague Gareth MacLean’s warm review of the place on our travel site in January, or the Indie’s four out of five review around the same time.

And, thus, I was surprised to see this very lukewarm review in the New York Times, which I’ll guess will be a Huge Deal because it’s the New York Times and Their Word Goes in NYC restaurants.

Now, of course, I disagree with what it’s saying, although I accept that maybe the day-to-day menu is less impressive than the one I experienced on December 31. What bothers more is the style of the review, and how that style appears to interfere with the substance. My suspicion is the theme for the review is founded less on food, more on Ramsay’s TV persona, and thus the riff the reviewer can derive from that. That’s a very Bad Thing, for reasons I’ll explain at the end.

But this is a trick I know, because I’ve done it too; you look for an angle into a story from the moment you start work on it. Here, you sit down, you note the surroundings are very muted (they are) and tasteful (they are), you note that’s is in stark contrast to the man you see on TV, who’s brash and rude. So you immediately think your intro’s going to be something like this:

“THE chef Gordon Ramsay has a British television show called “The F Word,” an American television show called “Hell’s Kitchen” and, by all accounts and appearances, the kind of foul mouth and foul temper those titles suggest.

You might expect his debut New York restaurant to be brash and any of its shortcomings to be attributable to audacity, not timidity.

You’d be wrong.”

Sound enough intro. Little wonder: the reviewer’s a time-served former political and general reporter with years of experience of doing this stuff. But already you’re moving down the road of swapping a convincing analysis of the food, one that’s of use to your reader, for a snappy way into your piece.

Still, the review soon moves into a much more interesting comparison…

And for all his brimstone and bravado, his strategy for taking Manhattan turns out to be a conventional one, built on familiar French ideas and techniques that have been executed with more flair, more consistency and better judgment in restaurants with less vaunted pedigrees.

… but doesn’t expand on it. Which restaurants? One example? One chef? A hint? Nope, instead we’re going into a description of the food that sounds pretty good, but ends with an absurdly obvious conclusion:

“An appetizer of caramelized sweetbreads with creamed artichoke had a textbook luxuriousness, but it didn’t venture into any new or particularly gripping chapters. An entree of roasted chicken for two was adorned with a sufficiently flavorful fricassee of bacon, onions and prunes, but it was still just a roasted chicken for two.”

I’ve never known a roasted chicken to be anything other than… roasted chicken, except when subjected to my remarkable kitchen skillz, in which case it becomes burnt roasted chicken. Unique, gripping taste, let me tell you, with the added edge of is-the-the-oven-on-fire drama.

Weirdly, the review then goes on to be pretty nice about the place (although it gets only two out of four stars), but the reviewer can’t resist a return to the old riff with…

But the restaurant fails to deliver the most important thing of all: excitement. And it’s impossible, given Mr. Ramsay’s reputation, not to be primed for it, and not to be rankled by the low-key loveliness that you get in its place.

The “most important thing of all” is “excitement”? Are you quite sure? For all my good fortune in getting to eat in these places from time to time, I can only hope I never lose my taste for “low-key loveliness” and – naive as I might be – the taste of the food itself. In my madder moments I think that’s the most important thing of all – other than not being poisoned by the damned chicken for two.

But it would be silly to take this kind of thing too seriously. Really, they should teach this in media classes at school: there’s an age-old trap lots of people in the media business encounters early on. Some fall for it, some dodge it.

It’s this: working as a commentator it’s inevitable that one day, someone will invite you to say something outrageous or otherwise noteworthy. That, or you’ll feel the temptation to pep up the ordinary with something a little more exciting. Nothing wrong with that, except they – or the temptation – will be asking you to say something you won’t quite believe, or which is an exaggeration of what you actually think (or even the opposite of what you think). But you know you’ll get points – audience, another commission, brownie points, a column – if you say it. So some do. You see it every week on Newsnight review, or from guests on rolling news stations or talk radio (I’ve been there) or in the papers.

The best, I think, don’t fall for it; if they’ve nothing to say, they say so. Their art is in picking their moments to go off on one, and to say nothing much, but artfully, the rest of the time.

Everyone else, seduced by the lights, the airwaves and the attention, ends up on clip shows reading their views off a junior researcher’s script. It’s a choice you make. Paint mostly in greys, or entirely in dramatic black and white.

This review is not that lost. But it shows enough to suggest the reviewer felt that obligation weighing heavily as he typed away. And it’s a real old media failing, because getting to the position of writing big reviews in a big paper is hard work. The holder will know the pressure to make it interesting to read, whatever happens.

But the usurpers aren’t necessarily forming an orderly queue at the editor’s office door. I’m not much into Adrian Holovaty’s data driven vision for journalism – it sounds like a dull old world. But some areas cry out for more data, less posing.

When you see the demand for vast, wisdom of the crowd-style reviewing on the web, for the collective voice of hundreds of people offering their opinion no strings, or paychecks, attached, this is why. No conceits, no witty turning of paragraphs, just what really (really) matters.

* The sharp-eyed will note this is a year-old viral meme thing that I’m only blogging about now. You may find faster viral meme thing suppliers elsewhere.

It’s the quote in the ABC news story that seals the deal. Says mother, of son getting the prezzie: “He went from joy, really happy joyful,” she said, “then to discover this, just angry and hurt.”

Indeed so.

It doesn’t appear they fried it up to see what, exactly, it was, which is a shame.

In other food news, don’t forget to check out the deep fried pizza porn I left on Flickr for you all, just to prove such delicacies exist in my homeland. The example pictured was scoffed literally moments later by yours truly, and I’ve had absolutely no chest pains yet.

That is all.

"Irish and Scottish
migrants to England and Wales are more likely to die early from a host
of causes than those from other ethnic minority groups, public health
watchdogs say today.

Mortality
rates are worse than those in communities more recognised for poor
health such as Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, according to a report
likely to prompt new questions about ‘hidden’ public health problems."

Suicide rates are also 53-75% higher among our jolly little community. Also – a curious theory proposed and dismissed in one paragraph:

"Laurence Gruer, director
of public health science at NHS Scotland, said: "We are constantly
asking ourselves why Scotland’s health particularly is so bad … one
idea put forward is that Scots who emigrate may be the healthy ones,
leaving behind a residue of the weak and infirm. This finding may
contradict that."

No reasons are offered for the findings – but I’m sure it’ll make a great topic of conversation tonight when the boys and I meet up over a fried pizza supper and a few jars.

My regular reader will have deduced I like pictures of bright lights, and especially ones taken at night. So here’s another night view of the city; looking south across the Thames, from the bar of Rhodes 24, the rather fantastic restaurant in Tower 42. Mrs Tosh took me there for my birthday last week. Fans of British cuisine take note: they serve amazing kidney sausage with their steaks, and the mutton Irish stew suet pudding is to – almost quite literally – die for. We wanted to try the steamed jam roly poly but, frankly, the cardiac team was already on standby.

More snaps from up there in the Flickr photostream, along with some pix of Guardian Unlimited’s new quarters, atop the Guardian HQ in Farringdon Road (Simon Waldman has some nice images from the old place). We move in tomorrow, first thing. The views aren’t quite as good as Tower 42, but all I’m hoping for by 9am tomorrow is a few more tables, chairs and computers than there are in the pictures…