What the queue on Lodge Lane is actually for

The kitchen is the size of a hallway. There is one pot that matters and a second one that is mostly for show, and by half four on a Thursday there are eleven people outside who have arranged their afternoon around it.

I had come to film the food. That is what I told her on the phone and it is what I believed for the first two days. Then on the Wednesday a woman near the front turned round and asked the man behind her about his mother, by name, and he answered in the detail you only give someone who already knows the story.

Nobody in that queue is only waiting for food, and once you notice it you cannot unnotice it.

Comfort has been open since 1994. She has never advertised. When I asked how people find her she looked at me as though I had asked how people find the sea, and then she said that somebody always brings somebody, and that is the whole system.

What the pot is for

The food is real and it is very good, and it is also the reason the pavement fills up with people who would otherwise have no particular reason to stand together for twenty minutes. Lodge Lane has plenty of places to eat. It has fewer places to be known.

I filmed the queue for three more afternoons. The final cut opens on the pavement and stays there for two minutes before you see the kitchen at all, and nobody who has watched it has asked me why.