Debbie does Dining

Best booze food - from the Great British Beer Festival

Beer is really nice. No amount of anti-drink-driving campaigns, revolting street vomiting incidents and never-again mornings can change my mind on this. It's really, really great.

But afternoons in the pub turn swiftly into evenings, and after a couple of hours on the sauce, thoughts turn to food. "Ohmygod I really fancy a …" But what? What is that je ne sais quoi that defines the great beer snack? Well I sais quoi and I'm going to tell you. 

Bulking agents: The Bedroom Bar, Islington

You know what bulking agents are? I don't either, but they crop up on ingredients lists as one of those 'I'd rather not know and now I'm sorry I looked' items. I picture them as something like cement, or chalk - just some non-reactive substance whose only role is to make whatever-it-is bigger than it was.

Last night I was introduced to a new bulking agent: pitta bread. Piles and piles of toasted pitta bread. How delightful, I hear you think, if there were piles and piles of hummus and taramasalata and tzatziki with it. But were there? I think you know the answer.

Ok so to be fair (if I absolutely have to be, though generally I don't approve of the practice), we weren't there for the food. The Bedroom Bar is a live music venue down a shady back street in Shoreditch, an area which specialises in said live venues and shady back streets, as well as doing a nice sideline in anorexic-looking girls with goth makeup and a Victorian wardrobe lounging artistically outside faux-authentic East End pubs which also serve rillettes. You get me? The Peruvian band we saw (Los Chinches) were great. The mezze was ok. But wherefore all the pitta? Bulk, my friends. Bulk.

Details: the carnivorous platter came with massive chicken legs/wings, a criminally small number of lamb koftes and a big pile of fatty sausages slices. All well and good and generically Mediterranean enough not to upset the children, though I could swear buffalo wings aren't a classic Greek dish.

The vegetarian platter - tortillas, stuffed with some vegetables, so few that I was uncertain until I actually bit into it that it was stuffed, not just awkwardly folded; just the two halloumi kebabs - fortunately I was near that end of the table so could scarf more than my fair share; olives; one small bowl of what was definitely hummus but seemed to have been mixed with cottage cheese (and let's be clear here: it was PINEAPPLE cottage cheese. Good suffering Christ); and mounds and mounds and mounds of pitta. What looked sumptuous ended up, as half a good meal accompanied by a big pile of dough.

All those dry, curly pitta triangles, unredeemed by sauce of any kind? Yes of course I ate them.