Two worlds, one city: largesse, duress and under stress – a weekend of fine food, fitness and family feuds

Bittersweet is the only way I can describe the mood, the food, the expense, endurance and the endeavour of the past weekend. Hanging it all together was a celebration of my father’s sixtieth birthday, and the success he’s had over the past few years. Good on him. He’s worked hard for it, and he deserves the spoils of his lifetime’s work, for all it’s been sometimes been hard for the rest of us to live with meanwhile. It has benefited and damaged us all equally enough.

I can say with a degree of misplaced pride that Dad is now a rich man, jetting around the globe with a multinational business that keeps him away from his family for months at a time. But by family, I don’t mean me of course, or my sister Katie, but the daughter, wife and two step-children who have been his family for the past fifteen years.

But I no longer begrudge them the trappings of his wealth. They offer me something else completely, although it was a hard won appreciation – the privilege of understanding the nuances of another culture, a half-sibling who plays with and bickers with my children like they are her own sister and brother; and for all she may be materially better off than I was, I know now my own upbringing was in some ways the richer for that; and from the older two step siblings, there’s a lesson in stoic acceptance of a situation beyond their control that is of value to us all.

They too know what it’s like to be uprooted, but coming from a culture where the self is placed beneath the family, and that beneath the good of societal harmony itself, they seem to have taken it all better, though whether the myriad advantages and disadvantages they have experienced at the hands of their parents will play out for better or worse, perhaps remains to be seen.

It was apt that we celebrated the occasion with two meals that fused the best of both cultures and perhaps the worst, as well as the sometimes harmonious mismatch where both worlds collide. The first, at Jinjuu, a Korean restaurant in Kingly Street, near Carnaby Street, chosen by Tom for its location near the Palladium where later they would all see Cats, although my father and his wife would sit in the bar for the duration of the performance, which he baldly described as abysmal.

But then he’s never been one to take pleasure in frivolity for its own sake, for all he enjoys splashing out on the good things in life: he rarely seems to enjoy them much more than  in having the remarkable capacity to pay for them, given his own materially sparse childhood that was so rich in love.

But never mind, the meal was pleasant enough, though Tom, with little comprehension of the Korean style of eating was egged on by the waitress on into massively over-ordering a gamut of European style fusion foods – Korean Fried Chicken Sliders, Jinjuu Carnitas Fries, topped with  an unnecessary combination of chillies, cheese and kimchi, Bulgogi Beef Tacos, and crab cake lollipops that were fun and kitch, but heavy going and seemingly more Mexican than Asian influenced in all their deep fried glory. It rather spoiled our appetites for the main event:  fresh and tasty sharing platers of Korean-style barbecued meats and fish beautifully spiced, delicately sauced, served with pickles and large lettuce leafs, to be eaten rolled round rice like de-constructed sushi. The food was delicious. There was way too much of it, but even so, it was a much better bargain than if we’d ordered the tasting menu at £45 a head. Considering we were paying – and it’s the first meal I’ve ever bought my father, which seems a pretty crappy return on his investment in me as a daughter, until you consider the handful of times we’ve seen each other over the last 15 years, in which there have been moments when I didn’t know where my next meal was coming from – it was a shame so much food was wasted; (a travesty, really, so uncomfortable I am with waste, I hissed a reprimand to Tom about ordering so much food, having contrarily refused to get into the confusing business of ordering). Nonetheless we were relieved it came in at sub £400 for a party of nine. But then, it’s pretty much the first time I’ve personally splashed £400 quid on anything that isn’t my house, and I don’t think, in this day and age, my generation can be blamed for struggling to pay their parents back.

It was, in any case, a snip compared to what Dad paid the next day, which, without wanting to blow his trumpet – perish the Freudian thought – was an epic bill which aptly came in its own suitcase for those (and I’m sure there are some) wishing to pay the bill at Hutong, representing for the Chinese at the Shard’s myriad international restaurant portfolio, in cash.

We arrived somewhat flustered, ten minutes late after a haphazard Uber ride, to our private dining room in a relatively dark corner of the glass-lined restaurant, to find my my father looking somewhat drained from the previous evening’s entertainment, as well as the morning’s a trip to Harrods where he had purchased some luggage and another handbag for his lady wife, with the prospect of a flight to LA in the morning. For a 60 year old, it isn’t half bad going – I’m not sure I could keep up. Although, my own morning’s activity had been a 5k with Ava piggy backing for half of it in the Where’s Wally Fun Run in Victoria Park,  which, in aid of the Literacy Trust, is as appropriate a charity as I can fathom supporting, and which was genuinely fun, despite a chilly start and my mild limp today.

But this might also have more to do with the vertiginous heels I donned swiftly afterwards, which Jonah told me looked weird (a no-nonsense style of flattery he’s clearly inherited from my father) along with a powder blue Reiss dress from two seasons ago that thankfully still just about fits. With the whole family spruced up and energised from our morning’s  wholesome endeavour, we enjoyed our afternoon as temporary 1 per centers, enjoying the view from the 32nd floor, which for me, with a touch of the vertigos added to already ill-advised heels, was just about bearable, and which gave us a stunning perspective of the city below: river and train lines snaking to towns and cities beyond, towering above the jostling tower blocks, hazed in sunlit smog above the grey sea below. The view from the top, however, was reserved for those further up the pyramid even then us.

Here, amid the delicately carved fretwork and obsequious attentions of a not quite personal waiter, we enjoyed yet another feast whose leftovers could have regretfully fed a family for a week. I had hoped that family would be mine. With Tom away this week, and given my eternal dislike of cooking, the long line of delicately spiced ribs, mountains of fluffy rice, spiced and sweet prawns, crusted lamb and delicious piles of roasted garlic beans would have made up meals for several days – and my mouth is watering at the thought of eating them again while actually hungry.But the waiter curled his lip at my uncouth but thrifty suggestion of a doggy bag – “we don’t do takeaways, madam”. No shit, I thought, from that distance up, but certainly something to consider when the age of the drones finally take over.

Yet, for all his overt attention to refilling my glass, the waiter forgot to bring out the cake Dad had ordered for himself, forcing us to sing a slightly awkward, belated “Happy Birthday” after we’d all got up to leave, and then force down an unnecessary slice of raspberry topped chocolate mouse and cream and biscuit, delicious though it was, just after golloping ginger ice cream on top of seven courses from soup and duck to delicious sweet and sour chicken we ordered for the kids but ended up polishing off ourselves. Semi-sloshed, I all but insisted on taking home the remnants, and so managed to score a free plate into the bargain, which for just shy of 800 feels like a reasonably freebie..

In itself, the meal was a feat of human endeavour, from its location in the sky to the variety of its ingredients and of course, its grotesque size and cost; It’s easy in today’s blasé acceptance of the way things are to forget that its not the way things were or indeed should be. Indeed the very fact that we could be sitting there at all is testament to the fact that we were perched on the shoulders of the many, we few in a state, albeit temporary, of obscene privilege. Even to have us there together, coming as we do from opposite corners of the globe with our opposing outlooks and sometimes loggerhead ethos was itself a triumph of magnanimity, tolerance and integration, forcing, as I gazed on the interconnected city below, the realisation that we are all better off when we are kind to one another. But while my kids were slightly awed by the experience, and managed to leave their devices at the door for much of the meal, my father’s other daughter, who at nine, wore the perpetual ennui and fussy façade of a seasoned restauranteuse; and the shadow created by absence of the one who wasn’t there tainted the meal for us all.

And so it remains a stark reminder that great wealth and the divisions it causes brings little real joy, for all its many corporeal pleasures.There’s nothing like money and its distribution thereof to divide a family, for all it can bring us together. I just hope the next time we all gather as a family – all off us-might not mark a very different occasion, in which our interests, already shaken by so much change and resentment over the years, could have less inclusive agenda at its heart. Wounds so recently closed can easily be reopen. As I left with my father’s cake in a bag, having all of us eaten our fill, it felt like a metaphor for our whole relationship over the years. So much wasted, each of us wanting a piece, to have our cakes and eat them, but only one of us ending up with the lion’s share.

So today, I’ve returned to my workaday lunch of homous and avocado, and the kids will eat home made pesto for tea, and we will share my father’s cake, brought out too late for him to enjoy. All that will be leftover will be the heartbreaking look on his face that it had not been brought out sooner, and the fact that my older sister wasn’t there to have her slice.

It remains to say that what gave me greatest pleasure this weekend was not the fine food, or even the shared experience, my father’s awkward hug or the children’s joy of cake, but it was hobbling over a finishing line in a ridiculous getup with Ava on my back, having given more than I perhaps I felt able to give to help a stranger learn to read.