The Rabbit
Tenerife. A thirteen-year-old from Cable Street E1 orders something he can't pronounce, eats it with his hands, and accidentally becomes a cook.
When you know you have never tried something before but it hits like you always knew it would.
The room smelled of wood smoke and summer humidity — that particular heaviness that sits in the air near the ocean and makes you almost giddy before you've touched a plate. Salt from the Atlantic. Smoke from a fire you couldn't see but knew was there. Tenerife, high season, a restaurant full of tourists in linen shirts. And me: thirteen years old, from Cable Street E1, reading a menu like I knew what I was doing.
I didn't, of course. Know what I was doing. But I saw the words wood-roasted rabbit and something in my gut said: that's the one. No deliberation. No asking anyone. Just the certainty of a kid who hadn't yet learned to second-guess himself in restaurants.
My older sister Donna ordered something sensible. I ordered the rabbit. The waiter nodded without comment. I felt like I'd done something.
When it arrived, it was whole. Not fillets. Not a tidy portion. The whole animal, wood-roasted, slightly charred at the bits that had faced the fire closest — that almost-burnt darkness at the edges that only a real flame produces. Juicy underneath. Succulent in the way that things cooked slowly over wood always are. The smoke had gone all the way through it.
The cutlery lasted about ninety seconds.
I picked up the legs first. Ripped them clean from the carcass and stripped them with my teeth. More flavour in those legs than anything on the main body — the muscle that worked hardest tasted the most. That's not something anyone told me. That's something the eating told me.
The saddle was leaner — I remember the slight disappointment of how little meat a wild rabbit actually carries. My thirteen-year-old belly had expected more. But I picked the ribs clean anyway, worked every possible gram off the carcass, seasoned so well that the effort felt like the point rather than the necessity.
What I couldn't see — and what I would only understand years later, when Donna told me — was the reverse angle. From her side of the table she had the full bird's-eye view of the rib cage opening up, and a few of the offal bits still tucked in that I hadn't quite reached. She watched me eat with my hands in a restaurant in Tenerife, methodically dismantling a small animal, completely unbothered.
She is still a vegetarian. I cannot prove causality. I also cannot rule it out.
The flavour, if you've never had rabbit: imagine chicken's more interesting older sibling. Slightly gamey — not aggressively, just enough to remind you that this animal lived a real life outdoors. Leaner. More complex. The wood smoke had done something to the surface that no oven ever could — a faint bitterness at the charred edges that cut through the richness of the meat underneath. It was not like anything I'd eaten before. It was also, somehow, exactly like something I'd always been about to eat.
That night we danced at the apartment complex disco to the Birdy Song. I had rabbit juice on my chin and absolutely no self-consciousness about either of those facts.
This is food. And what it can do. A thirteen-year-old from Cable Street E1, chin full of rabbit, smile of such utter contentment — set on a path to cheffingdom by a wood fire in Tenerife and the simple act of ordering the thing that sounded right.
Every piece on this blog begins here. In a moment where the food arrived and the person it found was changed by eating it. That's the whole project.
Køk Wok & Roll is about food, travel, and the music underneath both — the rhythm of a kitchen, the beat of a new city, the particular frequency of a meal that lands at exactly the right moment. It is not a review site. It is not a recipe index. It is a record of what happens when a curious person eats the thing that sounds right and pays attention to what it does to them.
Posts will move between the technical and the personal, between Copenhagen and Tenerife, between dry-aged salmon and a whole roasted rabbit eaten with bare hands on holiday at thirteen. The thread connecting all of it is the same one that ran through that first meal: genuine curiosity, no apology, and the understanding that the best food experiences are the ones you were never quite prepared for.
Donna, if you're reading this — I'm still sorry. Sort of.