Cheese and Biscuits

Cha Cha Moon, Soho

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:37:00 +0000

There are few restaurateurs that have had as dramatic an impact on the way this country eats than Alan Yau. The man who created an impressive number of famous restaurants such as Michelin-starred Chineses Hakkasan and Yauatcha, and plush Japanese Sake No Hana in St James (though not still involved day-to-day with very many of them), he is perhaps best known for being the founder of the extraordinarily popular Wagamama chain, which has so many branches now up and down the country - and around the globe - that they're almost as almost as ubiquitous on the high street as Boots or Marks & Spencer. To be honest, I'm not a fan of Wagamama - it's timid food served as quickly as possible, and the bench seating is infuriating for a number of reasons - but then I'm a snobby Londoner with access to places like Koya and Chilli Cool; I can easily see why they've been so popular elsewhere.

So the guy has a decent track record. And he has been very successful, perhaps thanks to the very clear set of expectations crafted by his restaurants. So far, each has filled a certain specific role; Hakkasan is posh Cantonese, Yauatcha is posh dim sum, Saka No Hana is posh Japanese. Similarly, Wagamama is budget Japanese and Busaba Eathai is budget Thai. So presumably Cha Cha Moon is budget Chinese except - what's this on the menu - Dolly mee goreng is Malaysian isn't it? And Fujian style udon is most definitely Japan. There's Thai chicken curry, Sichuan chicken, Singapore fried noodles, Indonesian satay, baby back ribs!? - geographically, it's all over the place. And if you think that pan-Asian restaurants are doomed to mediocrity because no one kitchen can master such a wide range of styles of cooking, Cha Cha Moon is unlikely to change your mind.

First thing to arrive - dishes are just brought out as and when they are ready - was a warm crispy duck salad. I suppose the duck was technically crispy in that it had been deep fried to near-oblivion, but thanks to the shredded flesh soaking up the fryer oil like a sponge, it was unbelievably greasy. The salad itself was dressed in what I can only assume was simple syrup as I didn't detect anything other than sugar, and while ordinarily I'd compliment their generosity on such a large portion for your £7.90, in this case it just meant there was more sickly, greasy gunk to wade through. Hideous.

Singapore fried noodles were better, but then so is driving a ten-inch cook's knife through your thigh. It was a bit sweet, a bit bland and despite being marked on the menu as "spicy" we couldn't detect even the slightest hit of chilli, but at least it was fresh and just about edible. Still, this was the kind of thing you could get from any High Street Chinese takeaway in the country, absolute bog-standard fare, and was £6.90.

These spring rolls tasted exactly like the ones you can get in the plastic cartons from Tescos. That's not to say they were in any way inedible, I just have this old fashioned notion that people visit restaurants to eat food they can't reheat themselves in the oven for a quarter of the price. They came with some kind of tamarind-based dipping sauce that made them taste of tamarind-based dipping sauce instead of spring rolls. We used up all of the sauce.

I can't begin to tell you how awful the baby back ribs were. The cloyingly sweet sauce (described coyly as "tangy" on the menu) they came soaked in wasn't enough to cover the appalling smell of commodity pig and the meat was so overcooked and formless it was like eating rancid pork-flavoured blancmange. Unspeakably bad, and although perhaps nothing can quite beat the ribs at Hard Rock Cafe for sheer catastrophic terror, these weren't far off. Pitt Cue in Soho is still the only place in town I've eaten ribs of any kind worth paying for.

We drank sickly lychee-flavoured cocktails and cheap white wine, as you tend to do in these places, and after gamely working at the more edible elements of the food, scurried off wondering what on earth just happened. Alan Yau has dropped so many balls with Cha Cha Moon the streets of Soho could be used to film a Sony Bravia commercial. With its directionless, geographically vague menu, timid and incompetently prepared food, and piercingly loud room fitted with those dreaded communal bench seats, it's hard to find anything even remotely positive to say about the place. Oh - the staff were very pleasant and there were lots of them so you never had to try to hard to get their attention. But for God's sake, even the toilets were shoddy - Alan Yau's places are famous for always having nice toilets, even the budget ones. It's baffling, and my meal was miserable, but all said and done, this is Soho and alternatives are hardly in short supply. Eat somewhere else. Eat anywhere else.

2/10

I was invited to review Cha Cha Moon

Hedone, Chiswick

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:15:00 +0000

I went to see new movie The Artist on Saturday evening. Even if you've not seen it yourself, you will most likely have heard of it - the slavering reviews, the cavalcade of awards, the Oscar buzz. The friend I went with told me that her colleague declared it "the most perfect movie he'd ever seen", and to compliment this most nostalgic of shows we'd selected the best seats at the wonderful old Ritzy cinema in Brixton. So I think it's fair to say our expectations were high.

It was a good film. I liked it. I think my friend liked it too. A nice, light-hearted period piece set in the early days of cinema, a good few chuckles, some dancing, a straightforward love story and a Bit With A Dog. A very pleasant way to spend the evening. But I would hardly put it in my top 5 films I've seen this week, never mind of all time, and left completely baffled about the attention it's been receiving. Is The Artist really the best film of 2011 and I'm just a joyless misery guts that can't appreciate a good thing when he sees one? Or, was I simply expecting too much and nothing could have lived up to it, no matter how good? Which brings us to Hedone.

Executive Chef Mikael Jonsson is that rarest of things - a food blogger and obsessive foodie who gave up his previous (presumably more generously paid) job, and, by the looks of things, his blog, to open a restaurant that would serve the kind of food he wanted to eat. And, being an obsessive foodie, what he wants to eat is nothing less than the finest ingredients he can get his hands on, cooked in a way that makes the most of them. I remember reading his blog in the days before I'd started my own - it would contain vast, 10,000-word reports on multi-Michelin starred meals in Paris and Berlin, with the kind of detail and expertise more usually applied to open-heart surgery than dinner, and I found it all completely fascinating. So, above all else, congratulations to Mikael for having the guts to offer up his own cooking for critique, as he must know what he has coming from other bloggers too lazy and talentless to ever cross the Great Divide themselves (ie. me).

The amuse was literally that - a culinary joke which looked for all the world like a sweet Jammy Dodger but actually consisted of savoury cheese biscuits sandwiching a thin layer of sharp ewe's milk cheese, topped with a sharp red berry coulis of some kind. I realise I'm doing a huge disservice to the amount of fanatical care that has gone into sourcing all the food at Hedone, but quite frankly if you ever came to this blog looking for informed food journalism you were on a hiding to nothing.

Next, a teeny cup of ferociously dark seaweed sauce which topped a thick savoury custard which I think involved some kind of cheese (more of that top-notch food journalism for you there). The idea behind this was to provide a heavy umami hit to get your taste buds going before the main courses started arriving, and though I can't vouch for the science of it, I thought it was great fun.

Devon scallops sashimi was a pretty little dish, containing carefully balanced textures and delicate splashes of colour, but I'm afraid I wasn't hugely impressed by the flavours. Raw scallops aren't my favourite thing in the world - I just think they're always better cooked - and while I'm sure these were the finest examples money can procure, I found them dense and bland.

Rocks on watercress jelly was better, though. Raw (or at least very lightly poached) oysters had an absolutely fantastic fresh flavour, and combined with the ever-so-slightly-peppery watercress and a few dabs of what I think is the same red berry coulis that came with the Jammy Dodgers, it all added up to an interesting and rewarding dish.

Cévennes onions, pear shavings (with the £15 Périgord truffle option naturally) I knew would be the dish that made up my mind about Hedone. You have to have supreme confidence not only in your own ability to showcase world-class ingredients but also confidence in the customers who will be paying a lot of money for a plate of onion and pear to recognise the quality in those ingredients, and appreciate them. I'm sure there will be enough people out there who do, as well, I'm just not one of them. To me, it tasted like warm onion and shaved pear with some nice black truffle on top - not unpleasant, just unremarkable. What am I missing here?

This mother-of-pearl effect on the turbot flesh is, we were told, an indication that this most precious of beasties has been cooked to perfection. It certainly had a great flavour, and a remarkable texture - dense without being dry, and flaking apart beautifully. The seaweed (I presume... don't nominate me for the Pulitzer all at once, now) underneath seasoned the fish very nicely, and a slightly grizzly-looking clam topped it all off.

Sika deer "Royale" was, for me, the highlight of the meal. A delicate "raviolo" burst under the slightest pressure in the mouth to reveal a rich game soup filling. Beautifully cooked venison, bright pink loin and a different slow-cooked cut, had the most intense flavour of any I've ever eaten, and was all soaked in one of those classically French reduced sauces that packed an incredible punch. As if all that wasn't enough, there was some gorgeous shaved foie gras on top to add extra meaty butteryness. Beautiful.

Squab pigeon was, again, technically faultless - flavourful and attractive and presented as two cuts of breast and a roast leg. I ate it all quite happily, I just think it suffered slightly in comparison to the pigeon I'd had at the Ledbury a few months ago where they debone the leg and turn it into a meat lollipop. Chewing around the sinew in this one was harder work, but perhaps I'm nit-picking.

What is it with fancy restaurants and beetroot desserts recently? Rose floating island, rhubarb and beetroot was, fortunately, a lot nicer than the dish at Tom Aikens, though I definitely preferred the gorgeous sweet rhubarb sorbet and the soft meringue-y base to the disconcertingly earthy beetroot sauce. Also, I couldn't detect any rose flavour but can't say I missed it.

This second dessert was, with the flecks of gold leaf on top, reminiscent of Alain Ducasse's famous Louis XV creation from his restaurant in Monte Carlo, but just like the version I had at Gauthier Soho I couldn't quite see what the fuss was about. It was a perfectly decent chocolate dessert and I finished it off quite happily, it just wasn't particularly memorable.

We didn't have a huge amount of wine, just two bottles (one of each) between four and I think a couple of people had coffees, but the bill still somehow managed to come to £120+ a head. In fairness, in the context of the obvious commitment to world-class ingredients (I'm reliably informed Jonsson is charging far less for some of these super-premium items than his accountants would like), the superb service and the very attractive room, this is understandable but I can think of a few other spots in London I've had more satisfying meals and on a far less eye-watering total. This ingredients-led, precise, formal, even reverential style of cooking will, indeed does, have its fans but I couldn't help spending most of the afternoon wondering if I was suffering from some kind of palate-blindness. It was like being in the audience of an experimental modern Jazz quartet, standing baffled and uncomprehending whilst all those around me enjoyed a life-changing experience.

After we'd emerged, baffled and uncomprehending from a sell-out screening of The Artist in Brixton, we nipped around the corner and joined the back of the queue for Franco Manca. After 15 minutes or so wait, we sat down and ordered a pizza each for £7 ish, a glass of £1.80 Pinot Grigio and a glass of their homemade lemonade for the same. I still maintain that the pizzas from Franco Manca Brixton (have heard mixed reports from the other branches) are the best it's possible to pay for in the capital, the sourdough bases sweet and crispy and smoky, the toppings fresh and bright, the atmosphere convivial and rustic. And call me an inverted snob (you won't be the first), but I enjoyed that pizza much more than I'd enjoyed lunch in Chiswick, and not only because it cost fully twelve times less. I am convinced, objectively, that Hedone is a very good restaurant, possibly world-class. But I think I'd rather have a pizza. Sorry.

6/10

Tom Aikens, Chelsea

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:44:00 +0000

I never visited the "old", pre-refurbished/relaunched Tom Aikens. I believe he once held two Michelin stars at Pied a Terre, which whatever your thoughts on Michelin (and I have many) is impressive, and I can only suppose you have to possess a certain amount of nouse to run three (as far as I know) successful restaurants. Other than this I had few preconceptions about his ability as a chef; what I do have preconceptions about is this. In 2008, finding himself owing a large sum of money to a number of small producers (the true amount is still unknown but thought to be a good deal over £100,000), Aikens exploited a legal but morally questionable loophole in the way restaurants interact with their suppliers, declared himself bankrupt and carried on trading under a different company name. Many of those suppliers suffered greatly, some even went under, and the damage done to his reputation was incalculable.

His PR team must wince every time the bankruptcy gets brought up but however much I'd prefer not to open old wounds, the fact is that the actions of Aikens the man have a nasty habit of overshadowing anything coming out of his restaurants' kitchens. If you put your name in lights above the door, you surely must expect that extra scrutiny, but it's surprising just how strong the feelings he excites still are - the briefest of mentions on Twitter that I was headed to Aikens' eponymous restaurant in Chelsea provoked a flurry of angry links to the Telegraph article above; clearly this is a man who continues to divide opinion.

So that's the backstory. The latest chapter, or so they'd like you to believe, is that Tom Aikens has humbled-up and gone "more informal". In terms of the decor this means goodbye to the old starched white linen and soft furnishings and hello to bare wooden tables and stencilled quotes about food on the walls, but more interesting is what's happened to the food. Perhaps mindful (or jealous!) of the attention lavished on the new wave of London restaurants like Roganic and the Young Turks, the new menu leans away from classical French and towards foraging, British ingredients and arty, Noma-style presentation. Lovely fresh house bread was presented with three types of butter (our favourite had bacon bits in it, rather Viajante-like) and a tray of canapés, once they arrived (we were sat 35 minutes before any solid food arrived, but service settled down a bit after that) were universally admired, particularly a stunning teeny bowl of duck and truffle soup.

Raw turnip salad with chestnuts was light and fresh, although I could have done with more of the buttery chestnut paste smeared around the side of the plate and less of the fairly bland vegetable consommé poured on top. There was plenty of texture here, even some chunks of savoury jelly floating around, but this was in the end one of those "filler" vegetarian courses and not really strong enough to stand up in its own right.

Roast foie gras with thyme sabayon and smoked onions was much more successful, in fact I can barely remember a better cooked piece of cruelly-force-fed goose liver. The ethereally-light foie, which dissolved in the mouth like hot butter, was served with crunchy charcoal-blackened onions, a pairing which brought out the absolute best in everything on the plate. I loved this; if nothing else, the guy certainly knows what to do with foie gras.

Roast langoustine was a tad dry perhaps but a green slick of powerful herb mayonnaise made up for it; there was also a dusting of Can Roca-style prawn powder for a bit of extra interest.

I was looking forward to seeing if turbot with chicken skin would work - it certainly sounded interesting - but I'm afraid I'm still in the dark as this course was disastrously overcooked and dry. There could be a number of reasons for this but prime culprit is the appearance of AA Gill at a table for four in the corner; staff were struck with such abject terror we actually noticed them shaking. Anyway perhaps turbot and chicken skin is a brilliant and brave combination, or perhaps it isn't. Who knows.

Next, a lovely pink cube of Romney Lamb was served with a blob of tangy ewe's cheese and a battered anchovy. This was a clever take on the famous lamb and anchovy combo, and I rather enjoyed it despite the lamb being slightly on the tough side.

Having spotted it lurking on the menu I admit to fretting about the beetroot dessert - yes that's "beetroot" and "dessert" - for most of the meal, and it turns out my fears were quite well founded. I'm all for experimentation and pushing the boundaries of modern British cuisine, but trying to make a meringue out of beetroot is, I'm afraid, not the future. It was very odd, in fact I'd go so far as to say deeply unpleasant, and all the more psychologically distressing because due to the colour of it you kept hoping it was raspberry or blackberry you were eating, and not root vegetables. Full marks for seasonality I guess, but where will it end? Turnip sorbet? Brussel sprout pavlova? Cabbage pannacotta?

Petits fours were decent - a generous selection of chocolate covered things in a cute vintage OXO cube box, and incredibly citrusy jelly pieces in a separate little metal tin - but not really anything to set the pulse racing. More beetroot meringues were lurking amongst the bits and pieces but we studiously avoided them.

What's clear is that Tom Aikens (or at least someone at Tom Aikens) can cook; there were enough highlights - although only just - in this very variable meal to prove that. And it's entirely possible that, having had a life-changing meal at Roganic (they generally are) or Noma he had some kind of Damascene conversion and decided from now on it's all about foraging, unusual vegetables and savoury desserts. But I can't shake the niggling feeling that this most wiley of restaurateurs' attempts to reinvent himself as a trailblazing champion of Nordic cuisine is less about where his talents really lie and more about good PR. It was the more recognisably French and Haute Cuisine moments in the meal (the stunning foie gras, the lamb and anchovy) that worked, and the more obviously outside-influenced ones (the turnip salad, the beetroot dessert) that didn't. But the staff were lovely, the newly rustic interiors are impressive and despite everything that wasn't perfect, we did enjoy ourselves. And perhaps you will, too. Just avoid the beetroot dessert.

6/10

I was invited to review Tom Aikens

Burger & Lobster, Mayfair

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:04:00 +0000

As a child, starved of entertainment on long car journeys through France on family holidays, I would often find myself flicking through the Michelin Guide. And much like the way I occasionally now browse the Foxtons website for the most expensive properties on their books, just for the sheer masochistic delight of discovering what £32 million can buy you in SW6 (come on, I can't be the only one), I would find myself drawn to the flashiest places in the Red Guide; the 3 star restaurants and the 5-red-tower hotels, strange make-believe places like the Crillon (Paris) and the Carlton (Cannes) that existed in a glittering parallel universe I could only dream about being a part of.

Our own evening meals on the road, needless to say, generally consisted of a 70F set menu in the nearest cafe to whichever prefabricated chain hotel we found ourselves in, but the details I soaked up from the short descriptions underneath whichever gastronomic temple was top of the list that year led me to a lifelong obsession with lobster. They seemed to be everywhere in that book, and always at the most expensive places - lobster, along with a couple of other ingredients (caviar, truffle), was shorthand for glamour and decadence, and as I was (still am) desperately superficial, I was hooked.

As for burgers, that's a little easier to explain. My parents, with only the best and very sensible intentions I'm sure, refused to take me to McDonalds, and the only times I ever managed to breach this embargo was when children of slightly less neurotic families would invite me to sit in the plastic boat upstairs at Southport branch, wear a little cardboard hat and eat cheeseburgers and fries until I was sick. There's something about McDonalds that hits every single pleasure spot in a child's brain - it's crack for the under 12s - and these rare occasions burned so bright in my formative mind that even to this day there are few more sinful pleasures I indulge in than the occasional Quarter Pounder. I don't care who knows it - it's salty, greasy, packed with evil chemicals and everything that's wrong with the way people eat in the 21st century but I bloody love it. Also, anyone who thinks McDonald fries aren't the best are snobs. So there.

So, there's a new restaurant in Mayfair called Burger & Lobster and it's as if my whole life has been leading up to this moment. It serves, at £20 per item, a whole lobster, a lobster roll, and a burger. Each come with salad and fries. The burger is rich and bloody, the umami hit of the aged beef strengthened with (so it's rumoured) a splash of Thai fish sauce, though not enough to be distracting. The lobster steamed or grilled (your choice) to perfection, presented in neat halves so you have all the joy of extracting the sweet claws and meaty tail section for yourselves. And the roll, with its sweet toasted brioche bun and carefully balanced lobster meat and mayonnaise filling, is a thing of wonder too, packed with silky fresh seafood and perfect dipped in the lemon herb butter. Even the fries are fantastic - golden and crunchy, aggressively seasoned and generously numerous.

The question is, of course, and it's one that might have occurred to you already, is why on earth would anyone pay £20 for the burger, no matter how good it is, when an entire fresh lobster is the same price. It is a fair question, but whether or not you think burger addicts should subsidise the crustacean fans there is a certain pleasing aesthetic to a menu where everything's the same price and at least you know (barring anyone going too crazy at the bar) approximately how much the bill's going to be before you sit down. It's an incredibly attractive way of doing things - I'm a huge fan - and I hope they don't cave in to any accountant's suggestions of adding a few quid onto the lobster and shaving a few off the burger. Lobster, or burger. £20. Simple. Perfect.

Oh, there's the no-reservations thing I suppose but that's just the way things are going at the moment so you may as well just get used to it. Here's a tip from me - if there's a queue, put your name down and hop over the road to the upstairs bar at Tempo. You can enjoy some of the best drinks in this part of town while you wait for your table to be ready. They'll even call you on your mobile when it is - surely that's no real hardship?

Either to blame or thank them for the way I've turned out, I brought along my parents to Burger & Lobster on Saturday. They loved it - how could you not - and we talked about old holidays and great meals the way you do when you're enjoying yourself. Mum said that she remembers a conversation with an old friend when I was quite small, and how she told her that I wasn't allowed to start on dessert until I'd finished off every bit of my main course. "Aren't you worried that might make him a bit greedy?" was the friend's response. I suppose it had never occurred to her. And thank God for that.

10/10

Manson, Parsons Green

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:24:00 +0000

There are few experiences more surreal than being the only customer in an empty restaurant and being comprehensively ignored by every member of staff. Certainly, there are times in life where the ability to make yourself invisible would come in handy - to avoid having to contribute in work meetings perhaps, or if you find yourself on the front row of a particularly confrontational stand-up comedy gig - but in a restaurant, it's not ideal. After a period staring thirstily towards Manson's handsome bar, while groups of waiting staff prodded importantly at cash registers and generally got on with the kinds of things waiting staff do when there isn't a customer at the other side of the room waiting to be served, I was beginning to wonder if the District Line had finally done what it has been threatening to do all these years and I'd died somewhere en route to Parson's Green. Not having been a particularly good Christian (I could never get over that whole "believing in God" stumbling block sadly) I began to worry I was trapped in Food Blogger Hell, condemned to pitifully flap for attention for all eternity, hungry, thirsty and forlorn.

In the midst of this existential panic, my friend arrived, helpfully reassuring both that I was not dead (at least not yet) and, by the fact that she'd managed to get from the front door to the table without being greeted or even noticed, that if I was in Food Blogger Hell, at least I wasn't alone. And then, finally, we managed to get served, and for the few precious minutes it took us to drink our aperitifs (sparkling wine and rhubarb, very good indeed but you'd hope so at £10.50 a glass) all was well with the world.

It wasn't that the food at Manson was bad, exactly - most of it was fine, some of it was good, and it did all look the part - but it was occasionally quite... odd. Take my starter of turbot with pigs trotter sauce; the sauce very well executed in that classically-trained way, being perfectly reduced and rich in flavour and colour, it just didn't sit very well with the fish - it felt like a sauce meant for a bloody hunk of rare venison or aged beef steak. And the fish itself was the strangest texture, not dry exactly but dense and congealed - fresh fish should break into moist flakes, but this split apart like meat jelly and I really missed a nice crispy skin. Caraway-cured sea trout though, paired with lightly pickled vegetables, was a more successful experiment and the pretty coils of Romanesco broccoli made for a very attractive plate of food.

Catastrophically underseasoned Mallard (as in, it was completely unseasoned) spoiled what could possibly have been a better dish, although even without sodium's helping hand I didn't detect much flavour in the meat. It was presented in a deep bowl which at first I thought was strange until I realised the duck and the salad vegetables were sitting on top of a wonderfully rich game soup of some kind - I could have easily just swallowed a pint of this on its own as nothing else was worth the effort. More ill-advised experimentation also affected my friend's roast gurnard - let's just say there's a reason you don't often see parsnips and fennel seed yoghurt on the same plate, although even that aside, the fish was overcooked and dry.

In the manner of a line manager tasked with motivating his staff, I will follow up bad feedback with good by saying the cheese course at Manson was very nice. Consisting entirely of British and Irish cheeses, a number of which were unpasteurised and unfamiliar to me, we particularly enjoyed a nutty semi-hard Doddington and lovely fluffy unpasteurised goat's. Some of them had sweated slightly under the heat of the bar where they were kept but nothing too disastrous and they were generous both with the portions of cheese and the basket of crackers. I suppose it's not rocket science, serving cheese, but credit where credit's due.

I'm prepared to believe that I didn't get as much out of an evening at Manson as others might. It is, after all, a lovely room in a nice part of town and although staff got off to a bit of a shaky start, once it was all underway dishes arrived at a good pace and usually with a smile. But I'm afraid there were enough mistakes with the food, and enough weird textures and odd flavours, to make me uncomfortable and I can't honestly say that I'm confident enough in their ability to pull off a good - even normal - meal to warrant a return visit.

6/10

I was invited to review Manson

The White Lion, Great Longstone

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:25:00 +0000

It took a trip up North over Christmas to remind me that while London remains the principal battleground for competing restaurant concepts (for better or for worse), there are some places removed from the relentless fads and trends of the capital that have decided the key to success is nothing more ground-breaking than serving huge portions of nice, simple food and not charging the earth for it. Places, for example, like the White Lion in Great Longstone.

In the middle of this picture book Peak District village, the kind of place that could very easily be used as a set for a Jane Austen adaptation - and in fact probably has - the White Lion is a pub serving food. There's no sharing plates, no wacky soundtrack, no Asian-Jewish fusion, no exhaustive list of the heritage and birthplace and star sign of every last carrot or potato, just a menu of British pub classics plus a few international bits and pieces, a decent and inexpensive wine list, and a couple of guest ales. There are no surprises here, no clever twists, no foams, swirls or frills. And it's no surprise, breathing a metaphorical sigh of relief to have however briefly escaped the exhaustingly experimental London restaurant bubble, I enjoyed every bit of it.

I'm afraid I forgot to take very many pictures but actually, you can probably imagine what the food looked like anyway - as I said, this was straightforward, unpretentious stuff and all the better for it. Rustic hummus (£4.50) with warm pitta was buttery and well seasoned and just about the only homemade hummus outside of a Middle Eastern restaurant I've ever enjoyed - better for example than the stuff at Hummus Bros and they do very little else. My main course of gammon egg and chips was just that, a great thick piece of pork with some choice roast veg and skin-on chips, and a vast portion for £11.50.

I have never been able to resist a Sticky Toffee Pudding once I see it on a dessert menu, and this example was up there with the best of them - moist and rich and as addictive as Sticky Toffee Crack. It's also worth noting that the White Lion serve a £4 glass of Moscato dessert wine in a 125ml glass rather than the miserly 75ml measures more usual Down South.

Back in London now, faced with the usual bewildering array of new restaurants ready to test my wallet and my waistline (in 2012 more than ever restaurateurs just seem to be throwing everything they have at us and seeing which ones stick), Great Longstone seems like a world and a half away. But however impressive the pace and imagination of the capital, it's worth remembering that sometimes all that's needed for a good time is honesty, comfort, familiarity and great big bloody portions.

8/10

The Delaunay, Aldwych

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:48:00 +0000

However much fun it's been having so many days off work over the festive period (due apologies and commiserations to those who haven't, of course) it is frighteningly easy, after two weeks of late nights and lie-ins and general dossing about, to lose track of time completely. I strolled into Soho yesterday afternoon with the intention of toasting the New Year at Bob Bob Ricard, only to find it disconcertingly dark and empty and, well, closed. As indeed was Polpo. And Wright Bros. And Dehesa. Turns out yesterday was a bank holiday, a fact I probably should have been aware of, but - to cut a long story short - wasn't. Increasingly frantic, not to mention hungry, I vaguely recalled some Twitter activity centred around newly opened Delaunay in Aldwych, and a grovelly phonecall and 5 minute cab ride later, I and a couple of friends found ourselves in seemingly the only restaurant open on 2nd January in the centre of London.

A lunch of convenience, perhaps, but that's not to say I wasn't looking forward to it. Sister restaurant The Wolseley was never really my cup of tea - sure they do a very nice Eggs Benedict but £13.50? We are still talking about ham and eggs aren't we, not Beluga Caviar? - but the buzz surrounding this latest place was deafening. Fay Maschler swooned, TimeOut gushed, and the word from various first-week visitors was universally, uniformly positive. And after some solid, straightforward dishes sold at a healthy premium, in an admittedly gorgeous room staffed with pleasant and obliging people, I could just about see how it could have gathered some fans. That was, until the bill arrived... but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

After some excellent house bread with Echire butter, the first dish I'd agreed to pay for as opposed to had forced on me (more on that later) was a Veal Holstein. At £21.50 it was a generous portion of nicely cooked meat but the unidentifiable brown smear underneath was less a sauce and more like something that had failed to be removed by the previous dishwasher cycle. The staff did suggest I ordered a side to go with it - unseasoned, damp but fresh tasting spinach - but this was crying out for the volcano of rich veal stock and truffled mash that Bob Bob Ricard's version comes with. Bloody Bank Holidays.

Other main courses were, admittedly, better. A chargrilled slab of Pollock was a beautiful bit of fish, simply presented with a soft boiled egg and buttered new potatoes - comfort food at its most comforting. And omelette Arnold Bennett, when it finally appeared (a mix up with the orders but one charmingly apologised for and fixed) had a good cheesy flavour even if it was a bit runny. House fries needed more salt but were crunchy even to the bottom of the bowl.

Desserts continued in the same not-bad-but-not-quite-value vein. The dangerous sounding Scheiterhaufen was the best of them, a sort of boozy bread & butter pudding, soft and creamy. And an individual black forest gateaux was very pretty although it didn't quite get our pulses racing in the same way other versions elsewhere have. But my own "Mozart" was a very ordinary mixture of tart orange sorbet, chocolate meringue fingers and hot chocolate sauce - in fact it seems strange now, reciting those ingredients back, that it didn't taste a lot better than it did; you'd think you couldn't go far wrong with orange sorbet and chocolate sauce, but I'm afraid it was just a bit dull and not really worth the £5.25.

So that was it, and yes, I can easily moan about the high prices and somewhat unsatisfying food but it's a formula that has made the Wolseley as bafflingly popular as it is today so you can hardly blame them for sticking to it. But it was only when we were presented with the bill that another reason why I had avoided the Wolseley for so many years was brought to light - the dreaded Cover Charge.

The Delaunay - like the Wolseley - is not a cheap place to eat. We had deliberately asked for tap water, like we always do, and had naively assumed that the nice fresh bread and fancy butter was a complimentary way of getting our expensive lunch off to a nice start rather than an obligatory extra course. But no - the Delaunay would rather treat every customer as a potential freeloader, and charge each of us £2 for the privilege of walking through the door and using up their carpet, than trading in this miniscule premium for a payback of good will. Do other restaurants with no cover charge have tables of 12 snacking on free bread and olives then buggering off home? No, they do not. Cover charges are a mean-spirited, cynical and completely counterproductive way of clawing a couple of extra quid off unsuspecting punters and I hate them.

Ahem. I would, of course, in the interests of fairness, welcome a response from any person or particularly any restaurant that would like to defend the "mug's tax" of a cover charge. There was a bit of backwards and forwards on Twitter yesterday between a couple of people in the "well it's only a couple of quid" camp (though doesn't that argument work both ways? If they think we can cough up £2/head without making a fuss, surely they can take that miniscule hit on their profit margins), but largely it seems people are as infuriated by the practice as I am. One individual brilliantly compared them to the Ryanair-style credit card booking fees - not technically unavoidable perhaps if you read the small print or plan ahead, but in practice usually so.

Anyway, as ever with these things the only way of getting our message across is to vote with our feet. I would never advocate anything as deliberately disruptive (and potentially excruciatingly embarrassing) as asking for the cover charge to be taken off a bill - and in fact, that's exactly what most restaurants that charge one are banking on - but we can at the very least avoid such places altogether. Fortunately there aren't many, and even more fortunately, one of them is the Delaunay, and you really aren't missing anything much by avoiding there.

5/10

Cheese and Biscuits Restaurant of the Year 2011 - Roganic

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:08:00 +0000

Having been asked by Toptable a couple of weeks ago to come up with a Top 5 restaurants of 2011 (and somehow managing to pick not a single one bookable on Toptable...oops), I thought the job of picking an overall winner for the blog would be easier. In fact, it's been a bloody nightmare. For some reason, my favourite restaurants of previous years have, in their own ways, been shoo-ins - obviously Tayyabs had to win at least once, Rules another, and there will always be a special place in my heart for the astonishing Ledbury. But this year it sometimes felt like all my food wishes had been granted at once - each month brought yet another exciting new opening or dangerously obsession-forming discovery and keeping up with it all was as exhausting as it was thrilling.

It's a strange phenomenon that in an economic climate that you'd expect to limit the scale and ambition of London's restaurants, the opposite seems to have been the case. Russell Norman's restaurants (including my personal favourite Spuntino, above) are often spoken about as "recession-busting", thanks to their focus on informality and tasty comfort food served at reasonable prices, but actually the top end - "fine dining" for want of a better phrase, and believe me I do want - has seen just as much activity. People don't mind splashing out occasionally if - and only if - they feel they are getting their money's worth; this is why it's near impossible to get a table at Goodman of an evening but fusty old temples of silver service like the Rib Room are suddenly feeling rather anachronistic. Customers are fussier when times are hard, but the best places realise that and not only meet their expectations but regularly exceed them.

So, yes, settling on an overall winner has been nearly impossible. The temptation to cop-out and declare a joint or shared 'best' is huge, but in the end that would be a cop-out, so I've had to be brutal and pick just one. It would have been satisfyingly topical to choose a restaurant formed in the fires of London's street food scene but MeatLiquor, dive bar, burger joint and den of iniquity, only missed out by a whisker. Deservedly rammed from the moment it opened, this is the kind of restaurant I'd open if I ever could - fast food as recreated by people who understand everything that's good about it and are obsessive about every detail. Despite some fierce new competition, there still is no greater burger in London than MeatLiquor's (I'd go for the bacon cheese pictured below if it's your first, but they're all great), and the buffalo wings and chilli cheese fries are as addictive as they are messy - which is very. Special mention too should go to the guys at Soulshakers who match the food with inventive and very reasonably priced drinks. Once inside - and at busy times, that takes a while - you simply will enjoy yourself. It is always worth the wait.

It tells you everything you need to know about the drive, ambition and sheer talent of Roganic head chef Ben Spalding that I have been to his restaurant three times in the space of six months and the menu has changed completely on every visit - not a single course of a 12+ stage tasting menu has been repeated, not even once. In addition, everything I have eaten has been not only remarkably well executed, presented immaculately and using unusual and exciting ingredients, but served with the kind of practiced ease that hardly any restaurants anywhere have, never mind one opened so recently. The food at Roganic may be amongst the best in London - it probably is the best in London - but it's the pacing and charm of the front of house that makes it sing, and it's a credit to everyone there that it all comes together so beautifully. I love a dirty burger as much as anyone, but the fact that in 2011 of all years some people are prepared to put their necks on the line and make unapologetically high-end cuisine that is somehow still fresh and relevant and recognisably British makes me very happy indeed. Now if they could only sort out that décor...

I've rambled on long enough even without mentioning gems like José (below), Zucca, Silk Road, Bob Bob Ricard, Dinner, Soif, The Heron, Amici Miei, Magdalen and God knows how many other fantastic restaurants in this extraordinarily diverse city so I had better stop while I still hopefully have your attention. Thanks, as ever, for reading yet another year's worth of rants, misinformed opinion and hyperbole; I'm sure there'll be plenty more where that came from in 2012. Meantime, have a very happy Christmas and New Year, and I only hope you're looking forward to the next twelve months as much as I am. And if you're not yet, then how about this - Pitt Cue are opening in Soho in the first week of January. You're welcome.

Thanks to Lizzie for the Goodman and José pics

Lucky Chip, Hackney

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:17:00 +0000

It is a common complaint levelled at overeager food saddos like me that we will often review restaurants in their opening days and weeks before they've had a chance to "bed in". By and large, this accusation is easy to deflect - if anywhere is open and unapologetically charging full price, they deserve a proper critique. If they're not - a soft opening or press launch - then that's different of course, and I very rarely write those up in full (though on this subject, do go to Burger & Lobster, it's brilliant). However, nobody can accuse this blog of being too early to the party regarding Lucky Chip - they've been operating in one form or another since March and given the reams of positive feedback from others, I have no idea what's taken me so long. If they've not "bedded-in" by now, they never will.

So, on a freezing cold Saturday afternoon, in a spot well away from the overpriced olive oil vendors and irritatingly kooky buskers of Broadway Market itself (no, wailing Babooshka by Kate Bush along to a backing track doesn't make you part of an exciting counter-culture, it makes you a moron) we queued up to place orders at the Lucky Chip van. I wish I could report on more of the menu than the bacon cheeseburger and fries but as this was all either of us wanted, that's all we ordered, although the idea of scoffing down one of their oak-smoked hot dogs did fleetingly cross my mind. Maybe next time. For I'm sure there will be a next time.

A couple of niggles aside, this is a top burger. Inside a firm, glossy brioche bun (don't let anyone tell you that brioche buns have to fall apart like sponge cake - Lucky Chip have nailed it) was a good amount of medium-rare aged beef (the menu said Ginger Pig but I'm reliably informed they have recently switched suppliers to Walter Rose) soaked in bright yellow American cheese (hooray!). Adding much-needed crunch (the beef itself tasted great but was missing that MeatLiquor char) and all-important sour tang were some excellent sliced pickles and a subtle application, on the bottom bun, of Heinz ketchup and French's mustard. Shredded lettuce added a bit of volume. So far, then, so very very good.

But why back bacon? That's my only issue with the Lucky Chip bacon burger, and it's quite a fundamental one. A great big wobbly slice of soggy gammon doesn't add anything to a cheeseburger. Back bacon belongs inside white bread soaked in brown sauce, and you use crispy streaky bacon for burgers - everyone knows that. I'm sure their applewood smoked pig is very good quality, but finding it inside an otherwise very authentic American burger is a bit like serving a roast dinner with curly fries. It just doesn't work.

That said, the quality of the other ingredients from Lucky Chip, including their excellent fries which despite having that slightly soily taste of skin-on had a very good potatoey flavour and addictive crunch, meant this was still food that was very easy to enjoy. It is not, in the end, a MeatLiquor beater - that extra inch of sordid heaving decadence, power and black magic is somehow still missing (maybe it's the bacon, but it's not just the bacon) - but in this price range and in late 2011, there is very little else that can touch it.

But maybe even that is changing. I began this post high-mindedly declaring I hardly ever write up press events or launch nights, but based on a very hastily arranged sample of Masterchef winner Tim Anderson's burgers at brand-spanking-new Brewdog Bar in Camden last week, London looks like suddenly being something approaching spoiled in this arena. He had made one containing an interesting mix of Bangladeshi spices, which wasn't anywhere near as weird as it sounds, but of course my favourite was the standard cheeseburger, juicy loose beef, sliced pickles, American cheese, nice soft brioche bun. Oh, and the bar serves almost the complete range of the best craft beers in the world, including my beloved Tokyo on draft. Things are looking up.

8/10

Bukowski, Shoreditch

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:38:00 +0000

Had I done a bit more research, taken a bit more advice, even gone to the effort of checking their website, I would have known to avoid Bukowski like the plague. Everything about the place seems designed to irritate, from the wilfully quirky way they describe themselves ("We are a new-school fast slow-food American diner", sod off) to the exhausting list of worthy suppliers and liberal use of hipster foodie buzzwords like "single estate organic heritage" (tomatoes) and "artisinal[sic] wood oven" (bread). It seems obvious now, looking back, that this is an outlet that values how they look on paper (and specifically the calculatedly rustic paper they print their overblown menus on) above anything that comes out of their kitchens, but on Sunday afternoon I was in the mood for a burger (shocking but true) and thought I could do worse than mooch around the new Boxpark shopping centre in Shoreditch.

Boxpark is a restaurant and retail space based inside converted shipping containers. If you're thinking that sounds a bit odd, then you're not wrong - the only units that seemed like a comfortable size were those where two had been knocked through into one; most single-container shops had barely enough room to shuffle through single-file, and perhaps understandably the food side of things tended to lean heavily towards a lunchy takeaway theme - Pieminister were there, as were dull rabbit food-peddlers Chop'd. Bukowski itself only has seats inside for a maximum of 16 people; presumably all the retailers are looking forward to spring where the large outdoor seating areas will be of slightly more use, although I do wonder how the already massively inadequate toilet facilities (just some portaloos behind a code-locked door) will cope. I guess Pizza East is only over the road if you want to use theirs, you certainly wouldn't want to visit for any other reason.

Everything you need to know about the food at Bukowski is summed up in the fact that they shun Heinz tomato ketchup for their own homemade lumpy, watery "organic heritage tomato ketchup made from single estate organic San Marzano tomatoes". Heinz tastes better, is cheaper and is good enough for every other restaurant in town but no, why settle for that when you have a golden opportunity to bugger something up? I glumly worked my way through the rest of the wordy menu whilst sipping on a watery Bloody Mary in a plastic cup containing bitter chunks of raw horseradish. I guess it was only a fiver but it didn't taste like it had more than a single shot of vodka in it and still wasn't worth the effort.

I'm not going to dwell too long on everything that was wrong with the Bukowski bacon cheese burger - there aren't enough hours in the day - but briefly, the David Tomlin Rare Breed Survival Trust Hereford Steer beef was overcooked to grey (we'd ordered medium-rare) and tasted of nothing, the Greens of Glastonbury Organic Aged Double Gloucester cheese was completely inappropriate for a burger (I know it's not to everyone's taste apart from geeky burger purists like me but at least give me the option of American Yellow), the Topolski of Kruszewo naturally fermented gherkins would have been better served sliced inside the burger than slowly drying out on the side, and all the ingredients were fighting a losing battle against the overwhelmingly powerful smoked Gloucester Old Spot streaky bacon, which was the only thing that really had any flavour. Oh, and the Bridget Hugo's "Bread Bread" artisinal[sic] wood oven bakery buns had quite a nice soft sweet taste but weren't strong enough and fell apart after a few bites.

Bukowksi are equally adept at royally cocking up other American classics too, though. A pulled pork sandwich contained bland, dry meat and was no better than the version I'd had from Barbecoa, and that was bad enough. House fries - sorry, "Hand cut Heritage Organic chips" were greasy, a strange orange colour (strangely, my iPhone seems to have made them look more normal than they actually were) and absolutely covered in salt although actually when you found one that wasn't too soggy it tasted OK. We briefly tried dipping them into the Scotch Bonnet relish ("Very HOT - Use with caution!") which wasn't that hot and didn't taste of anything much more than blitzed pepper, but very soon lost interest.

You may be thinking that a mediocre lunch for around £15 is not something worth spending too much time fretting about. Ordinarily I'd agree with you, too - this is still not the worst burger in London and at least it's not another branch of some tepid high street chain. But what worries me about Bukowski is the sheer amount of energy and (presumably) expense that has been lavished on finding oh-so-impressive sounding "local" and "artisan" producers without any trace of that effort being reflected in the actual finished product. So keen are they to tout their earnestly foodie credentials that the menu is almost a parody of itself; reams of text describe every item on the menu in such mind-numbing detail you wonder whether you should be ordering off it or submitting it for peer review. And yet despite - or even perhaps because of - all that self-important bluster and showmanship, the food was terribly ordinary.

I think it all goes back to the issue with the 'home made' ketchup. It takes a very specific kind of mind-set to conclude that Heinz not only can be improved upon, but that the way to do that is to blitz up some "heritage" (whatever the hell that even means) tomatoes with a fancy name and put it in a swing stopper bottle. Anyone, literally anyone, and I'm including whoever's in charge of the food at Bukowski here, would prefer Heinz to this bland alternative and yet there it is anyway, an expensive and pretentious waste of time and energy. That Bukowski have gone down this route at all suggests they care far more about having correctly on-trend words on their menu than making good food - even the name 'Bukowski' looks like an attempt to curry favour with local hipster intellectuals - and that saddens me. Save yourself the disappointment and the irritation, and spend your money elsewhere.

3/10

Morgan M, Barbican

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:37:00 +0000

As much as I flatter myself that there is such a thing as an objectively good restaurant, I've had enough people going for a meal out on the back of one of my more slavering posts, only to hate it, to demonstrate that nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, some good places can have occasional off-days while some bad ones have very occasional "ons", but I'm not just talking about the perils of recommending an inconsistent kitchen. The single most important factor that governs whether you will enjoy a meal out has always been, and always will be, personal preference. Don't like queuing and table-turning? You won't like Tayyabs. Don't like eating in the dark? Avoid MeatLiquor. Can't bear the idea of spending £100 on lunch? The Ledbury's not for you. And it doesn't matter how much I try and convince you that all these places are amongst the best ways of spending your money in London, if somewhere aggravates your intolerances or your own particular penchants and eccentricities aren't catered for, you will not have a good time, and there's nothing I or anyone else can do about it.

Objectivity aside, then, Morgan M will be many, many people's idea of a good restaurant. It is smart and comfortable, serviced by effortlessly charming staff with outrageous Gallic accents and the menu boasts a comprehensive list of all the dishes you could reasonably expect to find in such a place - foie gras terrine, lobster cannelloni, tarte tatin. And it probably says far more about me than anything Morgan M are doing that I'm afraid I just found it all a bit, well, dull. Nothing was bad, some things were good, but for the best part of £60 a head with a couple of house wines, I couldn't help thinking how much further this kind of money would go elsewhere. Call me fussy (and you may be right), but perhaps competent French haute cuisine doesn't rock my boat as it so clearly does for so many others.

An amuse of beetroot soup, containing a sharp sorbet and a little blob of horseradish cream, was good, doing its palate-freshening job very well and with top seasonal awareness. I imagine you're all getting sick of hearing me say this, but apologies once again for the photos - it all looked a lot better than my iPhone would have you believe.

The best thing you can say about my snail ravioli starter was that you could really taste the snails - they were either better quality than most I've had in the past or Morgan M's treatment of them was spot-on. The pasta was delicate and silky, containing dainty chunks of vegetables in amongst the snail meat, and the Chablis they were poached in gave a pleasant alcoholic tang. In fact, thinking back now I have no idea why I didn't like it more - perhaps the "garlic froth" was too insubstantial to lend any depth (ironic accusing a froth of being insubstantial) or perhaps it was just missing that something extra to quite justify the £12.50 price tag. A friend's foie gras terrine was similarly competent, the foie slightly fridge-fresh and the brioche a bit dry, but nothing too disastrous. £14, mind.

As with the starters, there was much to admire about the mains, yet little to love. Best of the two was a partridge, carefully butchered and presented with a roast breast underneath a boned leg & thigh. At least when you pay your £21.50 for game in a French restaurant you do get your money's worth in the often painstaking preparation. This came with a pleasant liver and bread sauce arrangement in tribute to a traditional game dinner, and a rather less traditional but no less tasty caramelised chicory. My mallard though, despite on paper having everything going for it, was let down by strangely tasteless meat. The breast wasn't overcooked, I'd have liked a bit more crispiness in the skin and the confit leg was a little dry, but even if prepared absolutely perfectly I doubt this would have been worth the effort. I also could have done without the three dense, chalky nuggets of old chestnut (yes, that old chestnut).

Events nearly came full swing with the appearance of a brilliant cheeseboard, and in particular a wonderful (and stinky) Livarot. That's it there, second on the left, looking innocent enough through the gloom of my photography but believe me, if there was such a thing as food blog smell-o-vision you'd have environmental health officers knocking on your door.

Pre-dessert of rice pudding with winter berries was good, and a refreshing change to just have a mouthful of rice pudding without having to wade your way through an entire bowl. I feel the same way about rice pudding as I do about risotto - less is more.

Finally, a decent pineapple soufflé which while slightly on the eggy and greasy side still had plenty of flavour and came with a blob of pineapple coconut ice cream which was a bit like eating a piña colada. Which isn't a bad thing, by any means.

To reiterate my earlier point, that eating out is a deeply subjective experience is perfectly illustrated in the fact that Morgan M already is a success - this Barbican branch is an offshoot of the original site in Islington, which presumably has been doing such a roaring trade they've found themselves in the position where they are able to expand. And good luck to them, too - God knows I'd rather see a proliferation of solid French restaurants, even Michelin-chasing ones, than yet another bloody Cafe Rouge. It's staid and stuffy and anachronistic but these are my particular bugbears and not necessarily anyone else's, and I'm sure they will find just as many fans in EC1 as in N7. I'm not one of them, of course, but then what good would it be if we were all the same?

6/10

I was invited to review Morgan M

Soif, Battersea

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:24:00 +0000

One of the few criticisms of José Pizarro's tapas bar in Bermondsey - in fact really the only criticism - is that it's always far too busy. In Madrid, a place like José would be one of a number of options to pop in and enjoy a glass of sherry and some carved ham in any given area of town, and whilst some would be better than others, the idea is that you spend a happy evening going from bar to bar, never lingering too long in one spot and with the sheer number of alternatives helping to thin out the crowds. No such luck in SE1 - the nearest decent tapas bar once you've done with José is a cab ride to Soho away, and so the only option is to queue, cheek to jowl with other hungry patrons, hoping at some point you'll be lucky and find a seat. It's worth it, because the food and drink is always so brilliant, but you can see why it's not for everyone. What José needs, and what the people of London need, is competition - and unless you manage to get a walk-in at Zucca (good luck with that), there ain't none.

I am worried a very similar fate will befall Soif, the new restaurant from the guys behind the Terroirs and Brawn. There are lots and lots of restaurants in Battersea but with the odd exception they are all absolutely crap, so anywhere that is any good (Mien Tay, the Draft House) is permanently hugely oversubscribed. And Soif is just so much better than anywhere else in this part of town that I can very soon see it turning into the Zucca of SW11 - booked up six months in advance and with a waiting list like a kidney transplant. For now, though, let's enjoy it before the word gets around and you still stand a snowball's chance in hell of eating there.

Lardo di Colonnata, buttery and rich and presented on a marble tray in thin ribbons, was very tasty although when I've had lardo before it's been simply dressed with olive oil and seasoning and I think that helps lighten it slightly. Having said that though, it still all disappeared very quickly and if you don't enjoy the experience of melting bright write strips of pig fat in your mouth and washing them down with the house red there's something seriously wrong with you.

All the food from here on was, without exception, superb. A bowl of clams in butter and garlic was superficially simple but one of those things that's far too easy to get wrong. Bursting with freshness and seasoned perfectly, the only thing better than sucking back the sweet, juicy bivalves themselves was dipping the house sourdough in the garlicky butter sauce left behind - just brilliant.

This cute little pile of surf and turf is a paprika (I think) studded squid balanced on a disc of thick black pudding. The squid had a great flavour and a nice soft texture but the real star here was the black pudding, so thick and powerfully flavoured it was like a solid slow-cooked stew studded with chunks of pork fat.

And the third of the starters, chanterelles and pancetta, very like something I'd had once at Brawn, was a posh - and perfect - mushrooms on toast, with all kinds of strange shapes combining into an addictive mix of crunchy and soft, sweet and salty.

Based on the number of times I've had a dry partridge with flabby skin, it can't be easy to cook these birds properly. But this example was great - roasted golden brown with a fantastic aroma, the flesh beneath the crust was soft and juicy and full of gamey flavour. The sauerkraut (sorry, "choucroute"), despite my initial reservations, actually made a good sharp counterpoint to the meat, and the combination was all the more impressive once the juices from the bird had begun to mix together. But I still remain to be convinced whether it really did need that huge piece of Montbéliard sausage - it tasted perfectly nice but after stripping the partridge to the bone and knocking back a couple of mouthfuls of sauerkraut I barely had space to really appreciate it. Perhaps those with a bigger appetite would disagree.

There was one other main I forgot to take a picture of - a bowl of pig cheeks in cider and winter veg, but it was of a similar standard to the rest of the food - as soft as Christmas cake, rich as foie gras, comforting as a thick porky blanket. And given how much of my main course I had to leave, I'm not sure how I found room for any chestnut cake, but one slice between three people was just enough to send us wobbling on our way - it was lovely though, soft and buttery and lifted by the accompanying crème fraiche.

The bill, with a 500ml carafe of Cuvee Briand (much of the inspiration for the wine list and the food at Soif apparently comes from the Ardeche in SE France) came to £40 a head, which I suppose isn't super cheap but thanks to the generous attitude to portion sizes we were absolutely stuffed and you can hardly claim for food of this standard that it wasn't good value. Anywhere in London, Soif would be a great restaurant but given the standards of the area it's little short of miraculous. And it's for this reason that my hearty recommendation on 2nd December 2011 comes with a potentially ruinous caveat - this is a great value restaurant serving top food and wines in pleasant surroundings, but it's in Battersea, so be warned: I can guarantee that whenever you decide to try your luck, you won't be the only Nando's or Pizza Express exile on the hunt for a some decent grub.

9/10

The Oxo Tower, Southbank

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 09:57:00 +0000

Nothing was quite right about our meal at the Oxo Tower restaurant. But before you settle down for a long and satisfying dose of schadenfreude, I should also say that nothing was that bad about it either. Everything, from the decor to the service to drinks and (most importantly) the food weaved a fine line between disappointing and just about acceptable, never dropping below the former and rarely rising above the latter, and so I can neither wholeheartedly recommend it or condemn it. It's a frustrating place, wowing you with superficial glamour while never quite satisfying on any other level.

Take that view, for example. The Oxo Tower is on the 8th floor of a building right on the south bank of the river Thames and is blessed with one of the most fantastic vistas in the city, a grand, sweeping panorama encompassing St Paul's cathedral all the way round to the Savoy hotel. Quite understandably the staff are keen to show it off, and we were offered a seat on the terrace accompanied by cocktails and nibbles. But while I should have been enjoying the view I couldn't help being distracted by the scruffy old uncomfortable chairs, the weird Astroturf on the floor which made me feel like I was sitting in a B&Q garden furniture display, and the regular misuse of apostrophes in the cocktail menu. Also, am I wrong to expect a lychee and rose petal martini to be pink or at least be garnished with rose petals? It tasted OK (and was "only" £10, actually a pretty good price for a cocktail these days) but again, there was just that overwhelming sense of "not quite". The nibbles were pretty interesting though, a fancy black box with drawers containing olives, home made (and very good) pork scratchings and some delicate potato crisps.

Once reseated inside, the general sense of discomfort only continued. So keen are Oxo Tower to show off their fantastic view that there is absolutely no guard against the early summer sun, and anyone unlucky enough to be seated facing west had to squint at their date and the table in front of them until sundown. And yet, eating with one hand and using the other as a visor, an amuse of gaspacho was genuinely lovely, well seasoned and with nice fresh vegetable flavour. Perhaps the food would be worth it after all.

A quail starter was nearly right. Clearly a lot of work had gone into boning the teeny leg and breast portions, and the selection of summer vegetables was cooked perfectly and very pretty. But the bird itself was soggy, smelling rather more of the oil it was cooked in than of nice fresh poultry; it seemed they had sacrificed a nice browned skin and crispy texture for tender moist flesh with slower cooking. Which is a bit of a shame. In a similar vein, a crab starter was fairly underwhelming, just a blob of fresh crab meat and salad, although an accompanying mini rye loaf was very good indeed, as was the selection of house breads. Whoever's in charge of baking at Oxo Tower knows what they're doing.

Mains were more disappointing still. Despite being told the lamb came medium rare, it was overcooked and chewy, didn't have a great deal of flavour and was rather a chore to eat, although the accompanying cheese "crumble" (kind of a mini cottage pie) was - bizarrely - gorgeous. And I don't know what they'd done to my lemon sole, but this usually robust and flavoursome fish was bland and mushy, in dire need of seasoning - or something - to lift it, and the collection of insipid vegetables and froth beneath tasted like pond water. Even the "caviar" on top was muted, with hardly any flavour at all.

Although we skipped dessert, they were nice enough to bring what would otherwise have been the complimentary pre-dessert of raspberry panacotta. It was nice enough, but certainly nothing interesting enough to make us wish we'd gone for a full extra course. Same goes for the petits fours.

The bill for two came to £141. We had ordered a £36 bottle of Beaujolais and a £4.50 side of French beans, but that total doesn't include the cocktails (which they strangely didn't charge us for); as I say, none of it was technically inedible but I think I am entitled to expect a little more dazzle from a meal that sits alongside places like the ever-reliable Galvin @ Windows in this price category and style of cuisine. And Galvin can even beat them on the view. For somewhere that asks so much of your wallet, the Oxo Tower never gives enough back to represent value for money, and value for money is really what it's all about. The restaurant was at capacity last night - clearly there are enough people who think "never mind the food, what about the view", but I'm afraid I'm not one of them. And I can't see myself returning.

5/10

This post was originally written in May 2011

Boisdale, Canary Wharf

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:47:00 +0000

It used to be so easy. The rule was, unless you could help it, you avoided Canary Wharf completely, and left those windswept concrete canyons to the suits and skirts who worked there. Even today, hardly anyone is traipsing around its soulless "streets" out of choice - you're there because you have to be. Recently though, if you have found yourself unlucky enough to be in Canary Wharf and out of the office long enough to enjoy a lunch or dinner, the choice is no longer simply between the nearest Pret or Eat, Cafe Rouge or All Bar One. The place still has as much style and charm as a multi-storey car park (and plenty of truly awful restaurants still do a depressingly good trade), but there is a slowly growing number of fairly decent places to dine, even if they do all somewhat conform to the city-boy stereotype. The latest branch of Goodman, which opened here last week, should find a very appreciative audience for its premium steaks and wine list, and despite not enjoying everything I ate at Camino, it's big and noisy and flash enough to fit right in. And now there is Boisdale, a place so unimaginably huge and lavish the only place in the capital it could conceivably exist, and at least conceivably break even, is here in the docklands.

It really is hard to fully convey the scale of the place. Split over two floors, each holding a good few hundred people, downstairs boasts a central bar with enormous seafood presentation, with lobsters and oysters and huge legs of Alaskan crab interspersed with the odd bucket of Beluga caviar. Upstairs, an even bigger space has, stretching down one side, a bar the size of an articulated lorry with a good 600 or so different bottles of Whisky. At one end of this room is a substantial stage featuring live music every night, and behind a number of wood-panelled doors are various extra private dining rooms and conference rooms, a huge outdoor terrace, a sealed smoking (sorry, "cigar tasting") room and a climate-controlled walk-in cigar humidor. It is absolutely vast, and quite overwhelming, and yet despite all the very obvious expensive showpieces like the whisky bar and cigar room there is still that rather corporate Canary Wharf vibe that hangs heavy over the tartan carpets and spotlighting. It's partly the size and shape of the place - it's nowhere near small or cosy enough for the member's club atmosphere they're presumably trying for - but it's also the clientele, all of a very specific middle aged demographic and awkward 'office night out' groupings. This may be sheer prejudice talking, but if I notice it there's a good chance you will, too.

The menu is, in keeping with everything else about the place, vast and expensive and rather overwhelming. It's also slightly confusing - there are no 'starters', just something called 'Small Plates' which included recognisably starter-y things like whitebait and foie gras terrine next to snacks like dry-fried broad beans. There were 'Salads', though only two, and a section for 'Sandwiches' although burgers appeared under a different heading 'The Grill'. Roast haggis was listed under 'Large Plates' while sausage and mash was under 'The Grill' next to the selection of dry-aged steaks. Finally there's a showy 'Shellfish' section where snacks, starters, small plates and large all gathered together as long as they have a shell and live in the sea. In fairness, all the individual items looked tempting, it just took us half an hour to work out where it all was.

Native oysters, in this case "Duchy of Cornwall No.3", were absolutely superb - fresh and crunchy and literally impossible to fault. Which is just as well, as at £18.50 for 6 they were also bleeding expensive. They weren't even the top of the range either - that honour went to some Maldon No.2 which came in at an astonishing £25 a half dozen. Maybe they all came with pearls.

Crab tian was lovely, too - perfectly dressed fresh crab with a smooth avocado puree, daintily presented, and so nice that at £12 it seemed like a relative bargain. It was a relief to discover that attention to detail in the kitchen hadn't been lost amidst the gazillions spent elsewhere on stocking a cigar list and sourcing caviar.

A 12oz fillet on the bone was £38 - silly money, but actually it was almost worth it, cooked perfectly with a great beefy taste and aroma. I hardly ever order fillet but this was at the recommendation of our waiter and as you don't often see bone-in fillet on menus curiosity got the better of me. The texture is the best thing about this cut; slicing through it is like carving butter, but so often the extraordinary texture makes up for a lack of flavour - not in this case. Even the béarnaise was good, although I wasn't quite as keen on the skin on chips - if I'm paying the best part of £4 for a bowl of fried potato, the least you can do is be bothered to peel them first.

After the food, we shifted upstairs for an awestruck audience with the world's biggest whisky bar (probably) and a fascinating Whisky "flight" - 6 quarter measures of some really interesting rare blends and thick, peaty single malts. I don't smoke, so I can't offer my opinion on the cigars (though I can say the room they came from smelled fantastic), but anyone with even a passing interest in whisky could easily spend a happy evening here, not to mention quite easily burn through their life savings if they accidentally picked out a bottle of 1946 Glenmorangie from the line-up.

The bottom line is, Boisdale is a good restaurant. The food is good, the service is good, there are enough nooks and crannies to cover every event from a quick bite to a multi-course slap-up seafood feast to a long evening in chugging cigars and sampling vintage whisky and everything in between. It's huge, but somehow the sheer size of the place allows a variety of ways of spending your time, and doesn't just feel like a cynical method of covering all bases for the maximum possible profit. What it isn't, though, is cheap - God only knows what our bill would have come to had we not been invited, but I'm guessing somewhere in the £100/head mark - certainly serious Event Meal territory. And it's simply this question of value that means Boisdale may not quite be a reason to visit Canary Wharf by itself. It may, however, be a good enough reason not to avoid it. And that, at least, is progress.

7/10

I was invited to review Boisdale

Degò, Fitzrovia (revisited)

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:51:00 +0000

I'll save you the effort of getting up to speed with this blog's tortured relationship with Degò, and attempt a quick summary. I visited a relatively new Venetian wine bar around the back of Oxford Circus with a friend in October 2010. After suffering an evening of stale bread, bland cheese and dishes that tasted like cat food soaked in olive oil, we were presented with a substantial bill that included service and still left a space for an extra tip. In short, absolutely nothing was right about the place, particularly the strange strip-joint decor, and we hated it. And I said so. And there the sorry little episode would have ended were it not for certain mysteriously partisan comments that appeared not just on my post but on various other London restaurant review sites, all in a suspiciously overly defensive vein and, despite being under different names, often containing the same turns of phrase and same little anecdotes.

Then, as if that all wasn't surreal enough, a comment appeared from their own PR, self-proclaimed "restaurant guru" Luisa Welch (other client: the Spaghetti House chain... I'm saying nothing), who decided the best way of negating bad press was to leave an entertainingly prissy rant about my spelling of "focaccia" and attacking my knowledge of Italian food and cheese in particular. In fact, Ms Welch may have had very good points, I just question the logic of saying so, under her own real name, on a negative review of her client. But hey - I'm not the expert here. Either way, the belligerence of their PR only helped to vindicate my initial opinion and very soon my experience at Degò faded like a bad dream, never to be spoken of again.

Fast forward twelve months, and Degò, very understandably, has new PR. And not just any old PR either - Lotus PR, who also handle Heston Blumenthal, and presumably know a bit about creating good press, and who responded to my cheeky "well you can't do any worse than the last lot" by bravely inviting me back to see how things had improved. I don't know what it says about me that I didn't take too long to decide to accept - I suppose either dear old Luisa Welch was right all along and I really don't know anything about food, or the meal will be just as bad, in which case it's a fairly miserable evening but at least I get to say I was right in the first place. Who can resist the temptation of a lose-lose situation like that?

My opinion's unchanged on one thing at least from the first time - the decor at Degò is utterly hideous. Back in 2010 we had spent the evening upstairs in the wine bar area, a room decked out in black Formica with scarlet red detail that brought to mind a cross between an MFI kitchen showroom and Spearmint Rhino's. But downstairs, incredibly, is even worse - more of the same trashy black and red but with two huge flat screen TVs bolted above the bar showing pointless silent looping videos of vineyards, and darkened low booths whose uncomfortably deep leather seats meant that you had to either sit bolt upright and unsupported to eat or slump right back with your legs in the air. I'm told they're losing the TVs soon but I have a feeling they'll have to do a lot more than that to make this a comfortable place to eat your dinner.

But, some things have changed at Degò. The house bread, so stale and tasteless the first time, was now very nice; even the focaccia (note spelling) which crumbled like old cake before was now bouncy and moist and perfectly seasoned. The selection of house meats, bland and badly butchered then were now attractively presented and full of flavour, and I only tried one cheese this time but it was a very interesting mix of three milk types (cow's, sheep's and goat's) and the contrast with the tray of boring lumps of cheddar-a-likes from 2010 couldn't have been more sharp.

"Ah", you're thinking, "but before you visited anonymously and paid for yourself. Of course you're going to be presented with fresh bread and with greater care taken over sliced meats and cheese when you're sat having dinner with their PR guy". And if my meal had ended here, I'd agree with you - it's not difficult to make a bit of extra effort with the charcuterie when you know you have to, and it shouldn't be above any restaurant to improve from the horribly low standards of the house bread from my last visit. But things were about to get a lot more strange.

Steak Tartare, using Jack O'Shea's fillet steak freshly minced tableside (a nice, if admittedly quite pointless bit of theatre) was quite lovely - powerfully flavoured cow mixed with a good balance of sweet and sour and crunchy elements. Sadly in London there are still more bland, disappointing tartares than there are any worth paying for, but this was one of the best I've had. And a goat's cheese soufflé was fresh and fluffy, and presented with some leaves of the most brilliant braised fennel, a perfect match to the sharp cheese. Does it sound like I'm picking tricky dishes to try and trip them up? I was. And it wasn't working.

Surely a traditional Venician pasta dish would expose Degò for the shallow tourist trap I knew it was? Bigoli is a type of hand made buckwheat pasta, like thick spaghetti. I'd not tried it, or even seen it, anywhere before, but it was quite brilliant - a rich, earthy taste of bucolic Northern Italian tradition, with just enough bite to roll around the mouth without being cloying. But the duck ragu it was soaked in - wow. Rich doesn't even begin to describe just how complex and rewarding the flavour was from this superficially simple looking meat sauce - quite brilliant.

Expectations shattered, confidence in my critical abilities shot, reeling from the blows of all my certainties coming crashing down around me in the space of an evening, I had one last chance to try and derail Degò. For my main course I insisted on ordering the T-bone steak - at £54 for 900g this was in line with the prices charged at Hawksmoor or Goodman but surely to God couldn't be as good as either of those? It arrived, it smelled fantastic, I tasted it, it was superb. Expertly cooked (though perhaps without that extra crust of a really hot grill), correctly seasoned, sliced into huge melty, buttery chunks of medium rare and with the same powerful flavour of top quality beef that had made the tartare so special, it was - honestly - a close to perfect steak. It wasn't technically a T-bone, actually - the fillet side seemed to be missing - but I still loved it.

So, what the hell is going on here? As far as I know, and I'm told, the same chef and pretty much the entire same team works at Degò today as did in October last year. But I just can't see how the same people who happily signed off that smelly octopus surrounded by pink goo or that balloon of rubbery mozzarella jokingly described as 'burrata' back then could have, in the space of a year, turned things around quite so dramatically. Towards the end of the evening Massimo, the Degò head chef, turned up for a chat and, rather than attempting to cleave me in twain with a 20" cook's knife, which I could understand, explained that in the first few weeks he was mainly out of the kitchen dealing with the various billion-and-one crises that every new restaurant has to cope with and probably wasn't keeping too much of an eye on the food. Which kind of makes sense but then, this wasn't just a disappointing meal we're talking about - my dinner in 2010 was a complete unmitigated disaster, every bit of everything we ate was in some way wrong. Degò hasn't just turned itself around, it's done the equivalent of raising itself from the dead. I still don't know whether to be happy for them or be terrified it may turn again and start actually killing people like some kind of undead restaurant zombie.

Who knows what kind of lessons can be learned here - that good PR works, perhaps, although Degò really did most of the opinion changing work for themselves by being suddenly inexplicably brilliant at cooking. That one meal isn't enough to write off a restaurant? Maybe, although I still absolutely stand by my first review, and there's surely an argument that if they are capable of being quite that bad, for however long, they deserve all they get. But here's me giving Degò a second chance anyway, and despite the risk of looking like a biddable PR shill I'm very glad I did - Degò still isn't perfect, but it is at least somewhere near Oxford Circus that deserves your money. And at no point in the last twelve months did I ever think I'd be saying that.

8/10

Apologies for lack of pictures - the dark, gloomy winters are lean times for food photography, and the dining room at Dego is gloomier than most

MEATLiquor, Marylebone

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:06:00 +0000

There's a very real chance that every single person reading this post already knows everything there is to know about MEATLiquor. If you think #MEATEASY (the short-lived but bright-burning dive bar above a pub in New Cross) was overexposed then the storm of anticipation unleashed by the announcement of the latest venture will have you pondering emigration. But before you do, please consider this: hype, in this case, is not a cleverly constructed PR campaign, nor is it a Snakes on a Plane froth of zeitgeist whipped up by delighted and undeserving protagonists. Londoners are going crazy for MEATliquor because it really is as much dirty, greasy fun as you can have with your clothes on and because the food and the drink are astonishingly good, and astonishingly cheap.

So you've braved the queues, you've found yourself a table and you're sipping on a Lagerita (yes, that's the forced marriage of lager and a margerita; it's surprisingly successful) wondering what to order. The short answer, and without a hint of irony, is everything. I've worked my way through most of it in the last week and anything I've not ordered from Wellbeck St I've had either at #MEATEASY or from the Meatwagon itself and it's all, without exception, without question, excellent. The deep-fried pickles, new to MEATLiquor, are crunchy on the outside and sweet and sharp within, served with a blue cheese dip that contains nice big chunks of strong salty cheese in tangy sour cream. And it would be silly not to also get a portion of Buffalo Wings, also expertly fried to crunchy/moist perfection and coated in an addictively tangy hot sauce (though not, as it turns out, the usual Frank's - this is a custom order from somewhere in deepest Peckham, details of which are, in the traditional Meatwagon style, kept well under wraps).

And let's not forget the burgers. The Dead Hippie is the MEATLiquor's take on a Big Mac, but that glib description does it no justice at all. A heaving, juicy pile of two beef patties soaked in luminous yellow cheese and encased in a glistening soft golden bun, it is doused with their own version of the special sauce (mayonnaise and ketchup, perhaps, with chunks of white onion) and is absolutely glorious. No less glorious is the chilli cheeseburger (if the phrase "butter-fried chillies" doesn't get your pulse racing, not to mention your arteries hardening, nothing will), the bacon cheeseburger (the bacon is boiled, pressed then fried on the hot plates, making it crumbly and crunchy and intensely porky) and the Double Bubble double cheeseburger, so fresh and sealed with such intense heat that you could make a soup out of the juice that pours out of it on every bite.

The draw of MEATLiquor doesn't end at the food, of course. Cocktails, provided as in New Cross by the enormously talented SoulShakers, are, just like everything else, inventive, delicious and surprisingly good value. I can particularly recommend the English Breakfast martini which comes with a pickled quails egg on a stick coated in some kind of bacon-flavoured breadcrumbs, and spare some room too for the Lagerita's cousin the Ciderita, the ingredients of which I'm sure you can take an educated stab at.

But you know all this, everyone does. You've heard it all before. The fact they can still come up with the goods on a much larger scale with such a high level of consistency is delightful, perhaps, but it's not news. But let me just tell you about one more thing - the Buffalo Chicken Burger. Deep-fried chicken breast coated in some kind of crunchy batter, soaked in the Buffalo sauce, smothered in mayo and encased in those same glossy, firm rolls, it is unbelievably good. The chicken itself is juicy and, for want of a better word, very "chicken-y" - these are no KFC broiler animals - but it's the coating that makes it, crunchy and caramelised like bubbly tempura, but fiercely flavoured with vinegary hot pepper. The mayo mellows out the hot sauce without being sickly, and the only salad is some shredded iceberg to add colour. It's a work of art, a true masterpiece, my latest all-consuming obsession. It is also a tantalising glimpse of a larger menu that will be rolled out in the coming weeks (there are fevered rumours of something called "Dirty Fried Chicken").

Just as there are those who claim they don't like the Beatles, who have never seen Star Wars and who think Shakespeare is overrated, you will hear people boring on about how they can't see what all the fuss is about MEATLiquor. These people will, most likely, be the ones rolling their eyes dramatically at every mention of the place on Twitter, huffing and puffing about herd mentalities and - yes - "hype", and stubbornly avoiding heading to that strange, dark place under the car park round the back of Debenhams in mortal fear they might actually enjoy it and their entire world will collapse around their shoulders. But you know what? That's fine. MEATLiquor isn't for everyone - it's noisy, brash, calculatedly seedy and, just like #MEATEASY, there's a good chance you'll have to queue. It's also completely and utterly brilliant. I'd say that was worth a bit of a wait, wouldn't you?

9/10

The Rib Room, Knightsbridge

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:06:00 +0000

Going to a smart restaurant in one of London's most expensive hotels and then complaining about the prices could be considered one of the more futile crusades a food blogger might engage in. I am certainly not, at least traditionally, the Rib Room's target audience - it's not just that I don't like spending £150 on dinner without a cast-iron guarantee everything will be excellent, it's not even that I feel slightly out of place in this most glitzy of surroundings. It's simply that in a more general sense, the Rib Room isn't "me". I would never have gone had I not been invited, and despite having enjoyed a perfectly decent evening I am almost certain never to go back. There was nothing drastically wrong with anything (well, there was one thing, but more on that later), but I just know there are better ways of spending that kind of money - call it a blessing or a curse.

To be fair to the guys behind the Rib Room, they have clocked on that basing their business model on a group of ageing Belgravia locals isn't a recipe for long-term security and have used a recent refurb as an opportunity to lower their prices to a slightly more egalitarian level. The problem is, whereas before the prices were "offensively high" (a £60 British fillet steak for one sticks in the mind), now they're just "high", and while most of the food we tried was very good, it's still hard to see past the numbers attached to them.

Half a dozen rock oysters were a little too bloated and creamy for my liking - I don't know what it is that occasionally causes rock oysters swell up like this (spawning season?), but I find the sensation of bursting a bag of white bivalve innards in my mouth ever so slightly disturbing. They came with a very nice Virgin Mary shot though, which helped cut through it.

A pear and Stilton salad was really good, and one of the relative bargains on the menu at only £9.50. Beautifully presented (this is a press shot but it did honestly look just like this when we had it), studded with crunchy toasted walnuts and hunks of oozing honeycomb, it was a dish that satisfied on every level - the sweet honey combining with the salty cheese, the crunchy melba toasts with the soft slices of chargrilled pear. I can hardly remember a better or more attractive dish calling itself a salad.

But then, the steaks. For a restaurant called the Rib Room you'd hope that these would at least be interesting enough to carry the flag, and superficially they looked decent enough, nice and thick and with something approaching a dark char. But looks were sadly all they had going for them - they each tasted watery and bland, like any bog standard £10 pub offering, and while my ribeye was just tender enough, a friend's sirloin was incredibly dry and chewy, really rather unpleasant. And there's the little matter of cost, too - the 250g ribeye was £26 and 250g sirloin was £29, a huge markup for what was very obviously commodity Smithfield market standard meat. I've never heard of Aubrey Allen before (the beef supplier) but I made a mental note to avoid them in the future.

Thankfully, a very enjoyable dessert of macerated oranges and vanilla ice cream went some way to obliterating the memory of the mediocre steaks. With bold flavours and more clever use of honeycomb for texture, this was thankfully more on the level of the starters than the mains, and - you'll have to take my word on this one - presented very well. And a cheese course consisting of five cheeses all from the same Sussex farm and all pasteurised would not normally have set my pulse racing but these were surprisingly good and although I'd like a bit more variety I'd say the Rib Room's bold decision to put all their eggs in one metaphorical basket just about paid off. Unpasteurised would have been better of course, but you can't have everything.

I have just finished reading Mark Kermode's book The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex. In it (bear with me, this is going somewhere), he describes how it is almost impossible for a blockbuster movie to lose money - throw enough special effects, explosions, internationally famous movie stars and McDonalds Happy Meal tie-ins at more or less anything and people will flock to see it, just to be part of the "event". If people were that fussy, any number of straightforward summer movies trotted out by the big studios over the years (Godzilla, Green Lantern, Tron: Legacy, you name it) would have been catastrophic flops - in fact, all of these were, financially at least, successful. The Rib Room is a Blockbuster Restaurant - millions have been spent on the revamp, it's in the poshest part of town, the menu is crowdpleasing in that "all bases covered" kind of way and the service is slick and professional. And on Friday night every table was taken, not with trend-chasing food geeks like me but with comfortably moneyed Belgravia locals who were enjoying a perfectly nice evening surrounded by all the crystal and silverware they could want. The Rib Room, as I said, isn't me. And for that reason, I'm sure it will do very well.

6/10

I was invited to review the Rib Room. Also, it was very dark in there so pics kindly supplied by Rochelle of Roche Communications (their PR people)

Cassis, South Kensington

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 11:13:00 +0000

Before I get down to the dirty business of explaining just why my meal last night was so mediocre, I'll try and start on a positive note. Because, trotting through Knightsbridge on a bright summer's evening on my way to a restaurant that much better men than me had raved about, I certainly was feeling positive, at least initially. Cassis opened in November last year, and ten months seems like a very decent bedding in period - not short enough to catch early day technical or service issues, but not too long for the staff to lose any of their opening months drive and ambition. It's a pleasant room, too - bright and comfortable with a healthy chatter even with only two or three tables occupied at 7pm. Staff were professional, if a bit... tetchy (more on that later) and I liked my foie gras starter. And the toilets were quite nice. And... yes, that's the sum total of everything I liked about the place.

The very first thing we ordered was a Margarita - a £13.50 Margarita too, from the "premium cocktails" list, which I think contained a fancy tequila and Mandarine Napoléon instead of the more usual triple sec. "That's a lot of salt" my friend said as the drinks, after a good ten minute wait, eventually arrived. Each glass was coated a good half inch inside and out of the rim - enough to make your throat go dry just at the sight of it. But it was only when I attempted to clear a path through the "salt" to the drink with my finger that I realised that it wasn't in fact salt but sugar - lots and lots of sugar. Understandably, we assumed the barman had made a mistake and mixed up his condiments, but just as we tried to send them back we were told that the sugar was, in fact, intentional - they actually meant to serve us a Margarita with sugar. It was, of course, revolting - way too sweet, and with large chunks of broken ice floating around because they'd used the wrong filter while pouring. I wouldn't come to Cassis for the cocktails.

But on to the food. House focaccia was cold and oily, although the brown bread was better so we just stuck to that. Some little snail vol-au-vent things ("Pastis flambéed snails, puff pastry and garlic butter", £5.50) were greasy and tasteless, the snails doing nothing much more than providing texture, and texture isn't exactly a snail's strongest suit. I've had some very tasty snail dishes over the last year or two - I'm thinking particularly of a snails and meatballs dish at Bistrot Bruno Loubet which was magnificent, and although it's not quite in the same price scale a snail starter at Gordon Ramsay - but this was a real waste of the poor little blighters. We did mention our issue with them (as politely as we possibly could) to our waitress, who looked more annoyed than apologetic, and didn't take anything off the bill. And I could just be paranoid but I got the distinct impression from that moment onwards our service got decidedly cool - we noticed on a couple of occasions waiting staff having discussions just out of earshot and casting significant glances towards us, the difficult couple who didn't like the snails. It was uncomfortable and rather odd.

In the context of everything else, "Pan-fried Landes foie gras, caramelised kumquat, sesame tuille" (£17) was surprisingly good. A huge slab of perfectly cooked and wonderfully smooth foie sat on top of a sharp kumquat chutney to balance out the fat, and was hugely enjoyable. I've had stringy, mealy foie at the fanciest places (such as Alaine Ducasse at the Dorchester) but this was pretty much perfect, even if you would hope so for £17 for a starter portion. My friend's octopus carpaccio (£9) was less good though - the octopus itself was alright (though no more than that) but the plate was dressed weirdly with cold, oily croutons (why?), plain rocket and cherry tomatoes. And there's not much more boring than rocket and cherry tomatoes.

"Roast suckling pig leg, girolles" (£22) sounded exciting on paper (or rather, the daily specials chalkboard), and indeed the pig flesh was beautifully cooked to moist perfection, even if the skin was thin and crackle-free. But the sauce it sat in was over-reduced and bitter, and not particularly pleasant. Worse still was a scallop carpaccio (another chalkboard special, £22) containing bland scallops that would have been bad enough even if they weren't dressed exactly in the same way as the octopus, with oily croutons, rocket and cherry tomatoes. Snore.

Desserts were ordered more out of hunger than optimism. My strawberry tart (£8) was OK though, light soft pastry containing a tasty fruit mousse. But Creme Caramel (£7), served in an Irish Coffee glass for some reason, was runny and wrong, the bottom half of the glass seemingly consisting of nothing other than tooth-rottingly sweet liquid caramel.

If it sounds like I'm picking fault wherever I possibly can, then perhaps that's only because a combination of the service, the prices and the fact that almost everything we ate was somehow at fault made that possible. In all fairness, the service did improve towards the end as a more senior (and friendlier) waiter took over, and I am prepared to believe you could go to Cassis and, if you steer clear of the cocktails and the carpaccios, construct a fairly decent dinner for yourself. But I am also a firm believer that it should not, at these kinds of prices (our meal came to £100 a head with 2 glasses of the cheaper wines and a digestive each, which could have got us a tasting menu at the Ledbury for God's sake) be possible to order this badly. And it is not, in the end, our fault that we didn't enjoy it - it was theirs.

4/10

This post was originally written in August

The Heron, Paddington

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 12:04:00 +0000

Somewhat foolishly, and prematurely, I decided back in January that 101 Thai Kitchen in Hammersmith was as good as Thai food gets in this country. I don't know what posessed me really - I knew in my heart of hearts that this still wasn't the meal I was looking for, still wasn't anywhere near approaching the fire and flavour of any dish I'd ordered roadside during a month-long trip around Thailand a decade ago. But at the time, 101 was as good as I'd tried and it suited my dwindling prospects of ever finding anything better to use it as an excuse to stop looking. 101 is very good, of course, it's just not quite actual Thai - it's London-friendly Thai, toned-down, lukewarm, safe.

The Heron is not any of these things. In fact, the Heron is so unlike any other Thai meal I've ever had in the UK I'm still not entirely convinced the building doesn't conceal some kind of wormhole to Bangkok - I'm distinctly heard the whine of a Tuk Tuk and the swish of a riverboat every time our waitress disappeared into the kitchens. The phrase "a little slice of Thailand in London" is massively overused when it comes to describing any old mediocre pad-Thai-and-spring-roll peddler in the capital but this really is the real deal, from the tables of happy Thai ex-pats to the functional plastic furniture, to - yes - the food. Oh glory be, the food.

As a "snack" while waiting for others to arrive, we ordered a dish of chilli cashews. Mixed in with spring onions, shallots, blazingly hot red chillies (which we swiftly learned to circumvent) the real stroke of genius were tiny studs of lime which judging by their diminutive size and soft texture could well have been fresh Kaffir limes, although I'm happy to be corrected on this. If you managed to get all the different elements together in one spoonful, it was a marvellous balance of crunchy and soft, citrus and sweet, freshness and fire.

Embarrassingly, given the events that were to follow, we had to double check with our waiter that he was indeed giving us the "authentic Thai" levels of chilli heat when a bowl of orange curry (containing prawns and chunks of a kind of vegetable omelette) turned out to not quite be as fiery as we were expecting. It was very nice - sweet and sour with the emphasis on sour, and the broth was rich with chunks of prawn and a sharp green herb of some kind, it just wasn't particularly challenging. And then the laab ped arrived.

On taking your first mouthful of the Heron's laab ped (minced duck salad, for want of a better translation, though that hardly does it justice), the initial response is delight at this supremely masterful combination of Thai flavours and textures. There's the sweetness and citrus hit of lemongrass, the rich crunch of spring onions and shallots, the herby hit of fresh Thai basil, the dense meaty goodness of minced duck, and - oh yes - I think there's a bit of chilli there. Hang on, that's quite a lot of chilli. Wow, this is - holy God I can't feel my face. Hidden in amongst the mince like silent assassins are teeny red devils which, if you don't locate and isolate them with surgical precision, create absolute hellfire. The five of us, each hardly a stranger to a bit of heat, were reduced to frothing wrecks, desperately knocking back mouthfuls of Singha in an attempt to keep a lid on the pain. It only partially worked.

From here on, and once we realised we had survived the laab ped with only minor internal damage, the meal was a panting, sweaty joy. An unusual dry catfish salad (Yum pla duk fuu) was like a big fluffy fish biscuit, and soaked up the sour dressing most satisfyingly. Som tam Thai + poo was papaya salad containing chunks of extraordinary powerful chunks of fermented pickled crab - I can't think of a better way of describing them than saying they smell a bit like standing on a beach on the South China Sea next to a raw sewage outlet, but in a good way - they season the vegetables in the same way as nam pla (Thai fish sauce) but in a dirtier, earthier manner. This was certainly uncompromisingly authentic food, unique and vibrant and exciting.

Yum nhaam, a sausage salad from North-Eastern Thailand, was very interesting, the meat being cold and sour instead of hot and fatty. A daily special tom yum soup had that familiar sweet and sour feel but was studded with chunks of slow-cooked hock which added an increasingly intense porky flavour as the broth reduced over the flame. And a fantastic plate of stir-fried clams was as good a seafood dish I've had in any SE Asian restaurant, the sweet bivalves coated in a thick, dark sauce that I can't even begin to guess what went into.

Almost my favourite thing overall (possibly tied with the Devil's Laab Ped) was a plate of minced pork and century egg (Kai yiew mar kra pow krob) which, ironically, was one of the milder dishes in terms of chilli heat but had an unbelievably rich combination of pig fat and silky, jellified egg. It seems that where the dishes weren't catastrophically, explosively chillified the flavour was bumped up in other ways - stronger or more unusual earthy notes (the pickled crab, or the preserved eggs) or using citrus & sour to stunning effect (the cashew snack). Every dish was balanced and considered and cooked to perfection - there was no menu padding, no lazy substitutions of meat in the same sauce, nothing that wasn't a complete and wholly successful combination of flavours and textures.

For sheer, exhilarating Thai authenticity, then, I am convinced you can't do any better in the UK. But on that same note, food this challenging isn't for everyone. As we moaned and groaned (equally in pain and pleasure) our way through the last morsel of laab it dawned on us that other than a few other obsessively foolhardy foodies there probably weren't many people that could cope with quite this amount of catastrophic heat or uncompromising flavour (or, for that matter, the price - at £36 a head with admittedly a lot of food but only a couple of beers each it's not that cheap). But herein lies the Heron's greatest achievement - to bring Thai food, real, actual Thai food to London without bending even slightly to local tastes. It is the reason it probably won't expand out of a strange, strip-lit basement room in an estate pub in Paddington, but it is also the reason it's one of the best meals I've had anywhere this year. If you've got the stomach for it (and believe me, based on the last 12 hours I've just had, I'm not completely sure I do) then here, finally, is what you've been waiting for. If not, I'm sure it's only a short trot to your nearest Thai Square. The choice, and the challenge, is yours.

9/10

Many thanks to Hollow Legs for reminding me what we ate last night; her report of the meal is here. We are also massively indebted to London-based Thai blogger The Skinny Bib and this astonishing post, in which he helpefully translates into English the entire menu! Take a printout if you're planning a trip yourself.

Amici Miei, Shoreditch

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 11:35:00 +0000

A good, reliable delivery pizza place is a rare and precious thing. Everyone has their own particular favourite, although it seems certain areas of London are better served than others. Where I am in Battersea, for example, I get to choose between Basilico (I only ever order the one thing - the funghi au truffle, pricey at £15 for 13" perhaps but worth every penny) and Firezza, who do these huge metre-long affairs which are great for drunken parties. Over in Shoreditch though, aside from the usual nationwide crap (anyone who's favourite delivery pizza is Dominos needs to take a long, hard look at themselves) there were slim pickings for pizza fans, and so when Due Sardi opened a few months back I started getting excited texts from a friend who lives over there, raving not just about the pizzas but also their selection of takeaway pasta dishes. Due Sardi has obviously been welcomed with open arms by greedy Shoreditchites, as they seem to have scraped together the cash to buy the shop next door and convert it into Amici Miei, an utterly brilliant local Italian restaurant.

In an early effort to keep this post from getting embarrassingly gushy, I will start with the pizzas, which ironically given the way these guys made their name, aren't the best things they do. They're very good of course, just not perfect, let down mainly by the base which isn't quite as rich and bubbly as those from class-leaders Franco Manca. But base issues aside, my Speck pizza (£10.75) was still hugely enjoyable, topped with a good thick layer of gooey mozzarella, a generous coating of salty speck and some powerfully flavoured cherry tomatoes. I read somewhere about Due Sardi getting a lot of their ingredients shipped over from Sardinia, and whether true or not the flavours all certainly feel very authentic.

The Amici Miei burrata is a huge gorgeous fluffy thing, the inside creamy enough to still retain some shape when cut. It's presented on a bed of cold sliced aubergine studded with powerful (presumably home made) basil pesto, and it's all seasoned just so the fresh cheese is still the most important element. At £6 this was one of the more pricey starters, I'm assuming due largely to the stunning burrata itself, but even so £6 is very good value for ingredients of this quality.

And then, joy of joys, the greatest pork chop I've ever tasted in my life. Firstly, it was perfectly cooked, with crunchy charred fat on the outside and just pink around the bone within. It was also clearly an incredibly good bit of pig, the porkiness and thick ribbons of fat reminding me of the version at Dinner, although here it was a frankly ludicrous £10 instead of the £28 they charge at Heston's place. And if this huge chunk of heavenly meat wasn't enough, it came served with the most silky, buttery potatoes you can imagine, a generous handful of sage infusing both the vegetables and the meat with the wonderful aromas of a Mediterranean afternoon. It was a dish so astonishing it was almost as if it transported us to another place and time; it was only after I got home I realised I had sage butter all over my jeans.

See, I told you I would get gushy. And yes, I've only been once so maybe I should offer the possibility we accidentally struck absolute solid gold on our first visit and return trips will fail to recreate that initial dizzying high. But I know for a fact there is some serious talent at work in the kitchens of Amici Miei, nurtured by owners who know London just as well as they know Italy - if we have Zucca and Trullo to thank for this new wave of world class Italian restaurants at bargain basement prices then we also have to thank people like Amici Miei for taking that torch and running with it. It was relatively quiet there last night; perhaps the awful weather kept customers away, or word of this astonishing new restaurant is yet to leave the environs of Kingsland Road. But it will, and soon. So go now, and go often.

9/10

The Admiral Codrington, Chelsea

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:53:00 +0000

The Admiral Codrington, or "Ad Cod" if you're feeling particularly insufferable, is a pub so smart the only way it can still, with a straight face, be called a pub is because it's in Chelsea. Locals probably come here to slum it, but to your average Londoner gazing upon the substantial dark wood bar, expensive lotions and hand towels in the gleaming conveniences, not to mention the "dining area" with its white tablecloths and Reidel wine glasses, this is a restaurant, albeit a restaurant that has Kronenburg on tap. But who cares about fixtures and fittings; I was here for one reason only, tipped off by a number of fellow burger fanatics on Twitter and eager to see what all the fuss was about.

Ironically given my rant last week about dual menus, the Admiral Codrington's is an odd split of standard gastropub fare on the left (crab linguini, burrata and heritage tomatoes, fish and chips) and an exciting list of Jack O'Sheas steaks and gourmet burgers on the right. I wouldn't have ordinarily felt compelled to deviate from my incurable red meat addiction but a small bowl of comped chilli salt squid (yes, full disclosure time - we'd had a bit of a chat on Twitter beforehand and they did know I was coming) showed at least that they know how to deal with seafood too - these were fried crunchy golden brown and really rather good. Pork scratchings were only slightly less than perfect because the scratchings themselves were cold and the apple sauce was warm - I'd have preferred it the other way round.

At £15 the 8oz house cheeseburger is confidently pitched alongside London's other market-leading offerings from Hawksmoor and Goodman, and as such has a lot to live up to. Fortunately, and surprisingly for something coming out of the kitchens of a Sloaney gastropub and not a dedicated steakhouse, it is absolutely brilliant. A glossy brioche bun, lightly toasted, holds a generous thick beef patty (aged, though they don't say for how long) topped with cheddar and resting on a layer of sliced tomato and mayo-loosened salad. Sliced pickles add that all important tang and extra texture, but the real star here is the meat itself which while cooked perfectly medium still managed to have a wonderful crunchy crust - a feat none of the other £10+ burgers in London have managed. I do have issues with the use of cheddar - the chef told me he'd like to try an American cheese version but is worried how the regulars would react (sod 'em, I say), but it was at least all melted properly and not, like the version at Honest Burgers, cold and claggy.

The special on the menu on Saturday was a chilli cheeseburger topped with chipotle-braised ox cheek, Monterey Jack and chilli slaw. If you think that sounds like there's a lot going on, you're not wrong - I would really liked to have tried some of those elements, particularly the braised ox cheek, outside of the burger as a dish in their own right, as I wasn't completely sold on the idea of combining them all inside a sesame bun. Having said that though, it was all undeniably very tasty, and in fact my friend said she preferred it to the house cheeseburger, so this is probably just a case of me being an unreconstructed burger snob rather than the idea as a whole not working. Also, and impressively, this burger was ordered medium rare and arrived just so, the centre of the beef that extra bit more purple.

The Admiral Codrington burgers are a real find, and even in this "gourmet" price category represent pretty good value for money when you consider the quality of the meat and the fact they come with lovely crispy chips. I'm not going to get carried away and herald London's new wave of world class burgers because let's face it, three in the city over £10 worth eating is hardly Mission Accomplished - we're not yet New York. But that a talented chef with a love of proper American food has been given a bit of room to age his own beef (I'd love to go back to the Admiral for a steak) and make burgers how he thinks they should be made is perhaps just yet another sign things are moving in the right direction. And for that, we can all be thankful.

8/10

Kaosarn, Brixton

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:29:00 +0000

On my way home from a pleasant, cheap but ultimately disappointing meal at Kaosarn I texted a friend, sympathising with her similar experience a few weeks back. "Did you ask for authentic spicing?" she replied, and immediately a conversation we'd had around that time came flooding back - namely that Kaosarn will up the heat to face-burningly authentic levels if - and crucially only if - you ask. Naturally, I was annoyed I'd forgotten this bit of advice but annoyed not just with myself - why is getting more authentic (and by all accounts better) spicing incumbent upon the customer to happen to know to ask for it? Why didn't our waitress, when we'd made our selections, pro-actively offer at least the option of the hot stuff?

Having to go through hoops to get better food from restaurants reluctant to serve the "authentic" dishes to anyone who looks Western (or otherwise) enough not to appreciate it is a depressing feature of dining out in London, and yet it doesn't need to be like this. Many decent Chinese restaurants for example, if they're really so sure that a good chunk of their customers wouldn't be able to cope with Sichuan peppercorns or crispy pig's intestines, have a section of the menu for timid gweilos and a section with all the good stuff. It shouldn't be a battle, or segregation based on insider knowledge, all we need is all our options presented to us so we can make an informed decision.

Anyway, we forgot to ask for authentic spicing, and so everything we ate at Kaosarn is in the context of being more Western-friendly than we would have otherwise liked. But even so, a small bowl of larb was so stunningly flavoured with kaffir lime leaves, fish sauce (I think) and rich minced pork that you hardly noticed the tame levels of chilli at all. This dish encapsulates everything I love about Thai food - fresh and colourful, with great texture contrasts and a complex mix of powerful flavours that still somehow managed to stay clean and refined. A triumph, it's just a shame that nothing else we tried lived up to it.

Moo ping (grill pork skewers) had a decent sweet marinade and I liked the mix of lean meat and fat, but they needed more crisping up on the outside, perhaps over hotter coals; these were rather uniformly flabby. And a Som Tum Thai papaya salad was overwhelmingly sugary - what both dishes really cried out for was a lot more chilli to balance the sweetness out, but of course, it wasn't to be.

And if not asking how spicy we'd like our food was a service issue, then the same is definitely true of how they allowed us to order two plates of exactly the same dish. Perhaps we should have guessed that Peek Gai Tod and Gai Tod were, in fact, the same thing in two different sizes, but I still don't think we would have minded too much if either of them tasted of much. The chicken itself was moist and well cooked, with a golden, greaseless crunchy skin, but it was desperately bland, with no sign at all of the garlic and pepper that supposedly went into it, and the accompanying sweet chilli dip was - you guessed it - rather heavy on the former and rather lacking on the latter. All dishes also came with a chilli/soy dip which suffered from a similar lack of punch.

There will be people out there, lucky people, who knew about the secret way of ordering the better food and may have had much more enjoyable evening than the one we had last night. But in the end, I can't recommend anything I wasn't offered and didn't eat, and I can't imagine that the majority of punters that turn up at Kaosarn will know about this covert system either. So, despite it being very reasonably priced (our substantial meal came to under £15 a head and we were able to Bring Our Own beers) and perfectly nice in an everyday Thai kind of way, I've still had better elsewhere.

6/10

The Shellfish Journey, West Sweden

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:47:00 +0000

Is it technically still a press trip when it doesn't actually involve any press? There were six of us, amateur bloggers all, invited along to what was billed as a Shellfish Journey (with matching Twitter hashtag #shellfishjourney, 'natch) along Sweden's dramatically beautiful west coast. I remember a few years ago now when I first started getting invited for free meals and blogger events that my extreme gratitude at being asked was always matched with a kind of bafflement that they even considered it worth their while. At least if you invite a paid journalist they have a job to do, a duty to report, almost always a much larger readership. Where's the guarantee a blogger will even bother writing it up at all? These things must be a huge gamble for the organisers; after all you can never be completely certain how things will pan out, and if you think PR companies are taking a risk sending out invites to review a new restaurant, imagine how much is on the line on an all-expenses 3-day jolly to Sweden.

Fortunately, for us and more importantly the kind people of VisitSweden.com, the trip was an absolute blast. The weather, first of all, was incredibly good, and despite various PR-savvy Swedes informing us, tongue-in-cheek under bright sunshine, that it was "always like this" in mid-October, something about the rather more "broody" shots from previous trips tells me that isn't quite the case. But from a freakishly smooth SAS early morning flight from Heathrow (plus complimentary use of the Heathrow Star Alliance lounge, thankyouverymuch) to a boat trip on the last day which would have been a lot more... challenging if the conditions had been less than perfect, we could thank our lucky stars for benign Nordic weather gods. Well, that or global warming.

First stop on day one was a beautifully restored early 20th century mansion house, now a hotel, on a hill overlooking a lake in the town of Ljungskile. Oddly for the first meal on a "shellfish journey" our lunch was a dish of chicken and girolles mushrooms in an apple sauce (with some kind of alcohol too, perhaps cider) and a lovely sweet root vegetable cake thing. As an introduction to Nordic cuisine it all seemed a bit French, but the accompanying fresh bread rolls and crispbreads were fantastic, as was the butter, and apparently all the ingredients were very local/foraged.

For our first taste of West Sweden's seafood bounty we boarded a small boat in Lysekil (pronounced something like "Lisse-shil" I think) harbour and headed out to where the mussels grow, attached to cross-hatched ropes under large floating tubes. This being quite early in the season, all there was to see on the ropes themselves were the odd tiny juvenile mussel amongst an alarming carpet of strange writhing tiny sea creatures of some kind, but it was all still fascinating stuff. At a wooden hut knocked up on a remote island near the mussel beds we were treated to a moules marinere cooked on a portable gas ring ("here's some we prepared earlier"), along with our first taste of an extraordinary delicacy, the powerfully metallic native oysters. Sat in our hilariously oversized survival suits, eating fresh oysters and sweet mussels and watching the sunset on a remote island miles away from civilisation, it was a magical introduction to the country.

That evening, dinner was a seafood buffet at an atmospheric little restaurant in Lysekil old town called Ferdinand's. We were told it can generally only be booked by groups tied into a Sweden tour package, and mindful of the kind of "restaurants" you're lumbered with in the UK if you go for a hotel tie-in (50% off at next door's Harvester, or perhaps if you're very lucky a Groupon voucher for Pizza Express) it's fair to say my expectations weren't high. But the quality of the food and generosity of spirit was stunning. Huge trays of dill-softened gravadlax and fresh salads, hot rolls and more of that lovely salty crispbread, and - most importantly - as many fat langoustine and sweet crab claws as my freebie-loving face could fit. Bed that night was the eclectic Strandfickomo Hotel, clean and comfortable and good Wi-Fi coverage (gold dust to a Twitter-obsessed loser like me) but with an interesting approach to interior design. Some of our group shared their rooms with creepy dead sailors belongings and a disembodied Victorian nightgown; I think I got off lightly just having this staring at me as I tried to nod off:

Wasting no time the next day we were bussed off to Stromstad and from there a short ferry ride to the Koster islands, home to (be still my beating heart) the Lobster Safari. No cars are allowed on Koster; instead, residents (of which there are a few hundred permanent) and tourists (hundreds of thousands in the summer months) get around either on pushbikes or these strange machines that look like the flat trolleys at Homebase welded to the back end of a scooter. They looked fun, and are just the right size for hauling around big boxes of lobster and crab - handy that. Before the lobster, though, a tour of the island by bike, and lunch at a rustic farm/cafe in the centre of the island called the Koster Gardens. The food here was obsessively local - every ingredient in our lunch was either grown on the farm itself or, in the case of a handful of edible flowers, an hours boat ride away. It was very interesting to see how fierce localism (horrible word but I can't think of a better one) isn't particular to middle-class Tom and Barbara types in the UK - indeed, the locavore (ugh) has their own temple in Scandinavia, just further south in Copenhagen in the form of Noma. Personally, I don't think you're betraying any very important foodie ideals by having a bit of Irish beef or Spanish anchovy every now and again but hey, each to their own.

Due to a two-metre swell out in the open ocean where the lobster pots were, our hosts quite rightly concluded our weak city-dwelling stomachs couldn't deal with quite that much reality of a Saturday afternoon and after a pleasant pootle around calmer waters in a fishing boat came back to Koster to gawp at a few boxes of lobster braver people had caught earlier in the day. They were lively beasts, flicking and wriggling in a way you hardly ever see even from the freshest examples to reach London, and included a huge 50-year-old mammoth beast of about two kilos - not great for eating perhaps but fascinating to see.

So what did they taste like? Back at the hotel, later that evening, we were treated to a lobster menu, beginning with a gorgeous silky lobster bisque and generously followed up with a whole beast each. They were, if perhaps not any better than examples from Scotland or Canada, at least as good, although I'm not entirely sure their method of cooking them in 800g of salt per 20 litres of water was entirely necessary - they turned out quite on the salty side. The Swedes have a habit of serving their seafood with cheese, which took a bit of getting used to but actually is no more strange than lobster thermidor when you think about it. I wasn't that keen on the cumin flavoured cheese though, which brought back terrifying memories of Cheddar Tikka Masala.

The next day, early but not so bright thanks to spending until midnight in the hotel bar the night before drinking £7 beers and watching a middle-aged 3-piece work their way through a repertoire of Bryan Adams and Wham!, we set off for Grebbestad. This is where the Oyster Experience was to take place, which sounded very intriguing, but getting there involved an hour long boat ride over waters that, if they had been any choppier, may have meant a premature end to the gastronomic experience for a few of our party. For whatever reason, and I'm not trying to sound smug here, just stating the facts - I've never had too much of a problem with sea travel, and so I think I probably enjoyed bouncing around in the back of a small boat a bit more than some of my friends. Before long, though, we had arrived at an achingly picturesque seaside shack and were watching our host dredging up fresh oysters from the beds right underneath the building. Following a short demonstration we were even let loose with a shucking knife ourselves, to discover first-hand how opening oysters really isn't as easy as it looks. Having opened a few rocks in Spain a few years back I had nearly convinced myself I might repeat my success, only to "expertly" slice one of the precious, delicious natives almost entirely in half in an effort to get it open. Still tasted nice though, as did the 2nd massive seafood buffet of the trip served in the same shack, consisting of more huge langoustine and fresh brown crab.

A fantastic experience then, from start to end, and one I'm equally flattered and delighted to have been invited on. But let me try for a moment to be objective. There are some things that are irrefutable - West Sweden is a breathtakingly beautiful part of the world, clean and fresh and easy, populated by friendly, helpful (and helpfully English-speaking) people and where, at least from our PR-cossetted experience, the food is fantastic. And I would have no problem recommending anyone go there if - and it's a big if - it wasn't all quite so expensive.

Firstly, the biggest problem for a boozehound like me (and if I know anything about my readership, most of the rest of you too) is that alcohol is astonishingly wallet draining. A beer in the hotel bar - ONE BEER, and not even quite a pint (500ml), was 70 Kroner - about £7 at current exchange rates. Wine was worse, even the cheapest on the list in the lobster restaurant on Sunday being a Jacob's Creek Semillon Chardonnay for £36 - yes, the same as the ones you see in Tescos. And lastly, spirits - a double of something even quite ordinary like Jack Daniels or Beefeater gin will set you back at least £10, and in fact in many places is even more. Alcohol tax rates are set by the Swedish government of course, and are nobody's fault that we met over the weekend, but having to worry quite so much about how much you're spending on everyday holiday activities like eating and drinking really does become an issue. At least, I imagine it would.

Also, the hotel we stayed at in Lysekil, pleasant and clean if ever so slightly Haunted House is currently available on Expedia "from" £181 a night in October. I think there are better deals if you book in advance, but still, not cheap. Better value perhaps is a 3-day lobster experience (a more extended version of the mini preview we had) on South Koster which is £359 per person based on two sharing a room, which includes all meals including the final day's lobster feast. And for £24 the oyster class and tasting at Grebbestad is well worth the money - watching your live lunch being dredged out of the sea and then opening them up yourself with a glass of local porter is unforgettable.

So, blame the Swedish tax system, blame our pathetic currency or simply blame sheer cosmic injustice that this idyllic place is just slightly out of the average-earning Brit's reach. But for die-hard seafood fanatics I can't imagine there are many better places in the world to indulge yourself - the whole trip was almost worth it for a taste of those stunning native oysters, and after all this was always going to be a shellfish journey, not a steak-and-wine journey. It's worth repeating, too, just how utterly, heart-stoppingly attractive it all is, the rugged pristine fjords cut through by sparkling clear waters, the picturebox seaside huts hugging the lichen-covered rocks, and not to mention the abundance of non-edible wildlife - we saw seals, rockpools and jellyfish along with any number of different finches and sea birds. It may come at a price, but West Sweden is a rare and precious part of the world, and I feel utterly privileged to have been.

Photos, apart from Bjorn the Evil Pheasant, courtesy of Food Stories.

More West Sweden Tourist Info:
Website: www.westsweden.com
For more information about the Shellfish Journey: www.westsweden.com/shellfishjourney
Facebook page: www.facebook.com/westsweden
Twitter: www.twitter.com/westswedentb
Blog: www.explorewestsweden.com

Roti Chai, Marble Arch

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:28:00 +0000

London will never be the kind of city where you can simply wander into the nearest restaurant and be reasonably assured of a good meal; it is not Tokyo, it is not Madrid, and New York too probably has us beat on the Tourist Trap Test. But only the most stubborn nostalgist would argue that things haven't massively improved here recently. Think about it - how many restaurants that have closed over the last few years do you still mourn? Perhaps Eastside Inn, maybe Kastoori. And over the same period, how many new ones could you now not live without? It's impossible to imagine Soho without Spuntino, Hackney without Brawn, Bermondsey without José. While the flashy big-name openings get the international headlines (and yes, the odd blog post), it's too easy to overlook the change happening across the board. Witness, in particular, the revolution that street food vans have brought to budget dining - a few years ago the notion that a world-class West Coast style burger could be purchased from a pub in Peckham for £6 would have been laughable. Now, we're so spoiled that the news of the Meatwagon's first permanent bricks-and-mortar outlet was greeted with something approaching nonchalance.

It's almost as if we've happened upon a culinary identity by completely abandoning any attempts to find one. There isn't, probably never will be, any such thing as a Typical London Restaurant. London doesn't have an equivalent of New York's delis, Madrid's tapas bars, Tokyo's ramen joints. But what it does have is all of those things (or at least will soon have), and more - such an astonishing variety of culinary styles, covering every inch of the globe, enough for you to never tire of eating, or taking, out. Without wanting to sound too trite, London's great strength is in its diversity - you could make a strong case for Madrid being the culinary capital of the world but can you honestly say, hand on heart, that after a few months of trawling the Mercado San Miguel you wouldn't be craving some cumin-spiced lamb chops from Silk Road? Didn't think so.

Roti Chai, a brand-spanking-new Indian restaurant round the back of Marble Arch, is a perfect example of the growing confidence of London's restaurateurs, and by extension its diners. Apparently inspired by the food sold by India's street cart vendors, it offers a variety of interesting snack-size plates at around the £5-£6 mark, many of which will be unfamiliar to anyone used to the traditional line-up of high street curry house clichés. Chicken Lollipops are my favourite - crispy, spicy chicken wings, deep fried with the meat drawn up to one end of the bone (all the better for dipping in the spicy yoghurt sauce), they are one of those dishes that it's just impossible to dislike, ticking every spicy/salty/crunchy/sweet box.

Bun Kebab, too, was a masterful combination of powerful flavours and textures, soft spiced minced lamb inside a glossy white bun, seasoned with pomegranate seeds and spring onions. Best described as a sort of an Indian take on a burger, it's unlike anything I've had before, and if there's one thing guaranteed to raise my spirits its a new way to eat meat in a bun.

Bhel Puri was nicely textured and powerfully tamarind-y, but as a standalone dish it was just a bit too tart to be enjoyable. I would have liked some yoghurt in there to balance out the tamarind, or perhaps it would have worked well with a creamy curry. Even so, for £3.90 it's hard to complain too much.

Chicken Keema Kaleji is an bowl of earthy, thick chunks of chicken livers and seemingly little else. I enjoyed it, the marinade was subtly sweet and the fresh veg on top provided some crunch, but I wasn't quite sure whether the accompanying white bread (same as used in the Bun Kebab) really matched it very well. As a sandwich, a layer of pasty chicken livers inside a burger bun was a bit too dry and cloying - what it really needed was probably some flatbread and a small selection of chutneys. It's possible to order both of those things separately, but I either needed to be told to do so, or it should have been included in the order. Sometimes, I just need telling.

These were more niggles though. In fact, my only major niggle is that for a restaurant specialising in street food, why the formality of starched white napkins and expensive cutlery? I would have much preferred the street food concept to have carried further than the food itself; there isn't even a takeaway option for heaven's sake. How can it pretend to be street food if you can't eat it in the street? Maybe, though, these changes will come - I'm sure Roti Chai could make a killing from al-desko lunchers if they invested in some cardboard boxes and plastic forks.

But what it lacks in certain dishes, Roti Chai makes up for with huge wins in others, married with a clean, bright dining room and good selection of craft beers and cocktails. To say there isn't anything better in the immediate area sounds like damning with faint praise, so I will instead say that for food this interesting, punchy and very reasonably priced you can't do much better outside of Zone 1.

Perhaps it's naive of me to try and extrapolate a grand theory on the state of everything from the fact that some nice interesting restaurants have opened up recently, but even if you do think that London dining in 2011 is beyond help, and certainly a short stroll around Piccadilly Circus or Victoria would certainly do little to convince anyone otherwise (there are still, sadly, areas where the best option is a Pizza Express), you have to at least concede that somewhere like Roti Chai, while not perfect, is at least a symbol of growing ambition and self-assurance. It would have been so easy to open another branch of Zizzi or Pret a Manger in this most visitor-trodden areas of town, but instead we have a bright, buzzy little space where you can pick up some crunchy chicken wings and a bowl of fresh curry and still have change from a tenner. Sometimes, London is a very easy city to love.

7/10

The Collection, Knightsbridge

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:41:00 +0000

There was a time a decade or two back, hard as it is to believe now, when The Collection was one of the hottest tables in town. Ideally located on the ever-desirable Brompton Road, it regularly played host to A-listers and assorted international glamour-pusses, the rest of the clientele carefully hand-picked out of the star struck hordes that would queue up every night. But yet, like the Met Bar before it or Mo*vida since, stars waned, times changed, and the Collection found itself out of favour. The George Michaels and Paris Hiltons began to book their parties elsewhere, the original owners lost interest and moved on, and by the time I first visited for a friend's birthday in 2006, the huge dining hall was half empty, and without the celebrity factor to support it the menu exposed as directionless and overpriced. I guess that's the problem with running a business aimed at fickle, fame-hungry poseurs - without anything substantial in terms of food or value to fall back on, it's all built on sand.

But now, in 2011, the Collection has been refurbished and relaunched, with a new menu, a new Italian head chef and apparently (though my memory isn't good enough to recall exactly what it was like pre-refurb) a new design inside and out. On the subject of that redesign though, I'm not sure how successful it's been. Whether or not you thought it was a good restaurant overall, one of the standout features of the old Collection was a long, underlit entrance hall which arced gently towards the glittering bar in the far distance. Last night, the underlighting had gone and the same journey felt rather less like a glamorous catwalk and a bit more like one of the pedestrianised subways under Elephant and Castle. The vast bar is still there, though, and I started the evening with something from the Chelsea-themed cocktail list, Granny Takes A Trip. It tasted a bit like mouthwash but I suppose mouthwash is refreshing.

You'll have to excuse the hideous photos which go nowhere near doing the food justice - it was so dark in there I would have nothing to show you if I didn't use the flash, but fortunately as one of only two tables taken last night (understandable I guess on a windy Monday night) I didn't think I'd be bothering anyone too much. Fresh house bread (I always like it when restaurants make their own bread) consisted of focaccia, a crunchy baguette and some kind of strange greasy parcel thing completely covered in salt but which I rather enjoyed in a heart-attackey sort of way. There were three different flavoured oils to dip them in, too, one of which was truffle. I like truffle.

At first I was pleasantly surprised that the "starters" all came in under £10 (this is Knightsbridge after all) but it turns out one of the concessions the New Collection has made to 2011 dining was the ubiquitous Small Plates concept, and we were advised to order at least three between two. Buffalo tartar was my favourite, cleverly hiding a quails egg within, although the accompanying crispbread was way too salty to eat - I scraped off a layer of the stuff so thick I could have seasoned an entire porterhouse with it. Burrata was very good (and very salty too) with more of that (very salty) crispbread, and a scallop carpaccio used good fresh ingredients and looked very pretty on the plate. Quite salty though.

Mains were, for various reasons that I think you may have picked up on by now, nearly right. A 250g sirloin steak, of good beef and cooked medium-rare, was so hugely oversalted I had to eat it between desperate gulps of tap water, and the weirdly bland tomato purée it was served with (not to mention the deathly unimaginative - ugh - rocket and tomato salad) didn't do anything for it. But, it was charred nicely, smelled of lovely barbeque smoke and the chips were very good if a bit-, oh, you get the picture. Barbequed grouper, coated in a thick, treacly marinade although cooked to flaky perfection, was served on top of a mound of crunchy samphire. And the thing about samphire is, it's quite salty.

One of the desserts, a pineapple carpaccio with chilli jelly, was lovely. A good mixture of flavours and very well presented, the chilli wasn't too strong and just got the tastebuds tingling alongside blobs of sharp lemon sorbet. The other, a warm pistachio tartlet, wasn't so enjoyable - the tart itself was fine, but it was served under a huge, thick ring of solid chocolate which rather put the whole thing off-balance. We still finished it off though, probably because it was one of only a couple of dishes all evening that hadn't been caked in sodium.

There will be plenty of people out there, I'm sure, who will thoroughly enjoy an evening at Collection. Just as I would never have been found in the queue out on Brompton Road hoping to catch a glimpse of Prince Harry tucking into his veal chop in the early noughties, I am certainly not now, with my shallow pockets and natural aversion to superficial Sloaney glamour, anything approaching Collection's target audience. All I can really safely comment on is whether the food and drink is worth the money, and I'm afraid it's not, at least not quite. A meal in Knightsbridge is always going to cost more than one in Whitechapel but with the unhinged approach to seasoning and the fact that most of the dishes on the overlong, geographically vague menu were if not exactly wrong then at the very least unadventurous, there's still better to be had elsewhere, even round these parts. The Collection has its place perhaps, but it's not for me.

5/10

I was invited to review The Collection