Restaurant: Krantas
Location: Walthamstow
By Boeing: 1519 miles
By Boris Bike: 8.4 miles
Eating pigs ears wasn’t on the shortlist for the bucket list I hadn’t yet written. But I felt a moral obligation to order them. Afterall, a Lithuanian dinner without pigs ears is like a Greek wedding with intact crockery. How would they come? Blistered and bristled? Or deep fried and oily like sensory pork scratchings? These are not questions faced by those whose Tuesday dinner is provided pre-packed by Budgens. My stomach baulked at the momentary lunacy of the mind.
It was a lunacy that had already crept up on me as I disembarked the tube at Walthamstow. It was a hot, balmy night and yet I shuddered with shivers. For Walthamstow is not a district you visit unless you have an extremely good reason to. Walking along what must be the most depressing and soulless pedestrianised kilometre in the northern hemisphere my shoulders slumped with foreboding. The stench of a drumstick drenched in saturated batter drifted across the road and mayonnaise curdled on discarded kebab wrappings on the floor.
So it was with a sense of palpable relief when I arrived at Krantas, by far the most pleasant establishment in the area. I pushed open the door draped in doilies and entered foreign soil. I had wanted to be transported far, far away, in a sense I had been. The contrast with my last destination was marked. From bustling Edgware Road, brimming with life in the neon dizziness of the small hours, to bleak, deserted Walthamstow.
The waitress served the ears apologetically, sensing that I had ordered them for the experience rather than the enjoyment. They came sliced, which was a relief, and made this trial seem less cannibalistic somehow. The taste was acceptable but the crunch through the cartilage was anything but. It was like chomping on a pensioner’s wrist.
The first thing I noticed were the high backed benches. They were a cross between a Shakespearian throne and a church pew and were quite regal in a pagan way. The beige was matched by the walls except for deliberately exposed brick-work. This gave the room almost the feel of a cloister. A large plasma screen shimmered in the corner and burbled excitedly in a foreign tongue.
The medieval feel was perhaps no accident, afterall the former Soviet Baltic state’s heyday was in the 14th century when it was one of the most powerful potentates in Europe. Now a political backwater,It only raises diplomatic eyebrows in its suspiciously generous scores for the atonal Eurovision pop tunes of its Baltic neighbours. It once incorporated Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and a large swathe of Russia. Its national hero, Vytautas the Great, would have sat tall and proud in his throne-cum-pew surveying his vast empire.
As I sipped a very cheap, very strong beer the tables around me began to fill. With the Daily Mail reporting that 97% of Londoners are Polish and that a boiler hasn’t been fixed in the capital by anyone other than a pole since 1981 it is perhaps not surprising that the UK has also attracted a community of neighbouring Lithuanians.
I noticed that the ceiling was pine-planked, lending the room the soft intimacy of a sauna. Were it not for the pigs’ ears I would have relaxed into the evening. The menu was a delight of culinary intrigue and linguistic eccentricity. Some of the dishes were familiar, with potato and pork prevailing. It promised the same huntsman heartiness as the Czech Republic but with a distinctly more Russian flavour.
I was tempted by Crepes in a mushroom sauce, a national staple, but couldn’t deny myself the wonderfully named ‘Man’s glory’. But to begin I chomped on some potato fritters and attempted to follow the storyline of a Lithuanian soup which appeared to feature an aggrieved housewife seeking revenge on a slap-dash handyman. It caused great mirth among two locals on an adjoining table, who thought my mere presence almost as amusing as my pathetic attempts to nibble pigs’ ears.
Watching me struggle the waitress kindly withdrew the offending platter, deprived only of several grams of pinched skin I had nervously picked at. She smiled knowingly, as if to say ‘My race is more manly than yours, soft, callow Englishman.’ I was more than happy to nod in wordless agreement.
Then came a huge steaming plate through the swing door to the kitchen. It was the ‘Man’s Glory’, the culinary savour of the evening. It comprised of a flat, tenderised pork steak smothered in cheese, mushrooms and onions. This wasn’t female food, I could see that now, and there was indeed glory in every delicious mouthful. There was nothing delicate about it, no deftness in its creation, just honest, filling and tasty. I tucked in with the relish of a man deprived an edible starter.
It was all ridiculously cheap, like a three bedroom semi-detached in a northern mill town. This meant I could wash it all down with another Soviet beer. I left sated and satisfied, and in truth a little surprised that I had enjoyed Lithuania so much. But as the door opened Walthamstow reappeared like a terrible nightmare psychologists spend decades attempting to suppress with expensive machines and hallucinatory drugs.
