The Labour MP talks about belonging, Brexit and Caribbean comfort food
“I make sure I know where all the new Caribbean restaurants and takeaways are,” says David Lammy, “because there are times I need a certain type of comfort food. Somewhere like this is almost umbilical for me. It’s the food my mum used to cook.”
We are in One Love Kitchen, in Finsbury Park, north London, which began life in a city street-food market and opened here just in time for lockdown. While Uber Eats riders come and go clutching bagged orders, and locals queue for something from the invitingly smoky grill, Her Majesty’s shadow minister for justice is deliberating between the jerk chicken and brown stew. Actually, “umbilical” is almost literally right, he suggests with a laugh as he opts for the former, because he was conceived a couple of streets away from here, where his parents had a bedsit.
In France or Spain when a festival is going on in a town, you can’t quite believe the sense of civic belonging
Continue reading...