As I was booking my trip to India for February, I found an itinerary that involved just two flights, but with a stop in London — for 17 hours. Wow, that would suck, I thought, and went on looking for the shortest flight itinerary.

Then I realized that the stopover would give me one night and half a day in London, which I hadn’t visited since 2000. I’d been reading about all the new things in the city: the Tate Modern, Norman Foster’s Great Court at the British Museum and Millennium Bridge, and of course, the nose-to-tail eating at Fergus Henderson’s St John. Maybe I could fit in the tea with scones and proper clotted cream that I’d been craving. I even knew of the perfect place to stay: the new Yotel right at Heathrow Airport.

No, the stopover plan didn’t suck. It was totally awesome.

Unfortunately, arriving in London on a Sunday afternoon means you really have to rush to get things done. I zipped through the Tate Mod, where I loved a sculpture by Anish Kapoor (whose work I discovered in Chicago) and the works of Juan Muñoz (pictured, detail from “Two Seated on the Wall”). The pieces I saw felt a world away from the pop-culture-referencing works in the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum in L.A. (though I didn’t make it to the last gallery, where I glimpsed a Lichtensteinian “Ka-pow!”).

Then it was off to the main course. St John restaurant is closed on Sundays, but St John Bread & Wine, a more casual place that offers breakfast, elevenses, and more through dinnertime, was open and sounded just my style.

On a map, its Commercial Street location looked like a long walk from the Aldgate East Tube stop, but it wasn’t; in fact, I overshot and ended up one street over, on Brick Lane and briefly considered having Indian food instead. But since I was going to India the next morning, that wouldn’t have made much sense, would it?

A single open room divided from the kitchen by a half wall, St John B&W is simple and clean-lined, with dark-wood chairs and tables, and bright lighting. Early on a Sunday evening, there were a couple tables of quietly conversing friends; as my meal progressed, there were a few more. As the name suggests, they sell both bread and wine to go; in a ballsy acknowledgement of restaurant markups, the wine list on the wall shows that it’ll cost you twice as much to drink that bottle in-house.

The menu was simple yet intriguing. I could’ve used a glossary to decode it — ramson? Arbroath smokies? I had no idea a British menu could hold such mysteries. I was too early for the dinner main courses, so I decided to make a meal of small plates: squirrel with bacon and ramson, potato soup and crispy pig’s tail. I was tempted by the snails with bacon and chickpeas, but you can’t do it all.

I’m not squeamish about eating small rodents (I’ve enjoyed rabbit and guinea pig), but I’d never had squirrel before. My father startled me recently when he mentioned that my aunt in Kansas City always had a few squirrels in the freezer — the very freezer just a few feet away from the table where I’d happily feasted on fried chicken, brisket, baked chicken and other delicious-but-ordinary meals as a kid.

Actually, my aunt could’ve sneaked in some squirrel and I probably would have never known. The meat was slightly tacky on the teeth, like dark-meat chicken, with a very mild flavor perked up by the bacon and ramson, a leafy green known as wild garlic. It turned out to be my favorite dish of the evening.

The innocuous-sounding potato soup had a distinctive muskiness that nagged at a corner of my brain. What was it? Then I remembered that the week before I had been experimenting with beef broth using soup bones, and that I had then eaten some of the marrow on toast. I hadn’t liked it. When I asked the waitress, it turned out the croutons had been fried in drippings, where they picked up that funky-beef flavor.

Then came the real adventure: the pig’s tail.

Eating this gave me a flashback to 10th grade biology, when I dissected a fetal pig without ever touching it (key: Use a pair of scalpels like chopsticks). Ever wonder what gives a pig’s tail its structure? I hadn’t, but I suspect that if I had been asked I would have said cartilage. Wrong — there are little vertebrae encased in a little meat couched in a lot of snowy, tender fat. Unfortunately, neither the meat nor the fat was as flavorful as pork belly, where the generous layers of fat are infused with porkiness. I ended up deconstructing the tail and making little bundles of the perfectly fried skin and tender meat. Incidentally, the salad of lettuce and caramelized shallots in a mustardy sauce spiked with capers is just what you’d want with a fatty dish like this.

Dinner ended on a high note. I hadn’t been able to indulge in afternoon tea, so I got Jersey cream with blood orange jelly, a monkishly simple dish that turned out to be a luxurious experience. The scoop of cream, perched on a shortbread wafer, was as firm and dense as ice cream even though it was only slightly chilled. Plain but intensely rich, it was set off by the austerity of the barely-sweet blood orange jelly, which tasted just like the fruit — orange tinged with raspberry.

Even though not every dish was to my taste, I really liked this place. The vibe is casual, but the commitment to high-quality, straightforward food is serious. Unfortunately, when it comes to pig-tail fat and beef marrow, I’m forced to realize that I’m one of the people who are the reason that nose-to-tail* eating went out of favor in the first place. Still, I’m likely to keep trying just out of curiosity, and the possibility of happy surprises like the squirrel. Plus, there are plenty of tamer choices.

As I walked back to the Tube, a cool-looking pub at the end of the block, overflowing with what seemed to be a hip local crowd, caught my eye. If I hadn’t been a) a single female; b) completely without cash and unsure whether one could charge half a pint of beer; and c) starting to stagger under the weight of travel fatigue, I definitely would have checked it out. In fact, when I looked it up later, The Ten Bells figures in Jack the Ripper lore, and the gorgeous tilework I spotted from the street is a restored portrayal of “Spitalfields in the Olden Time.”

St John Bread and Wine
94-96 Commercial Street
London (Spitalfields)
Reservations: 020 7251 0848

The Ten Bells
84 Commercial St
London (Spitalfields)
+44 20 73661721