Turkish Pide House

In one of Pulp's less well known songs, Jarvis Cocker sings with lament of someone who is "like a friend" to him. At the beginning of the song Jarvis implores the said person to "Don't bother saying you're sorry/why don't you come in/come on in now/wipe your feet on my dreams". As the song develops Cocker runs through a string of critical analogies to this friendship: "the last drink I never should have drunk", "the car I never should have bought", "the party that makes me feel my age", and so on. Clearly, while he is accutely aware of the unreliability of this "like a friend", Cocker is also apparently compelled to forgive them for almost any transgression.

We too perhaps have similar relationships with a couple of restaurants and cafes around Canberra. We continue to go to Izumi freely despite one of us' gripes with the frequently shrinking portions and missing ingredients, and the other's frequently feeling sick afterwards due to the food's greasiness.

Our relationship with the Turkish Pide House can probably be seen in a broadly like vein. In this case the flaw we cannot help but to ignore is the variability of quality of the food we've both eaten in and taken away. At their best, the House's pides are wholey delicious and possibly the cheapest way to feed two people well in Civic for less than $15. At their worst, as we experienced recently, the pides are one or all of undercooked, understuffed, dry, or just plain dull. The "banquet" we once had there was also very mediocre in both food quality and pricing.

To clarify using other pop song staple themes, this is not a tainted love, a hopeless devotion, or an addiction. Rather, despite itself and its perpetual half-emptiness, the Pide House is a friendship of ours that we can't turn our back on, for reasons we can't fully explain. We'll probably take our chances there again.