Cheese and Biscuits

Jamie Oliver's Diner, Piccadilly

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:35:00 +0000

Taking "inspiration" from an existing successful business is not, in itself, evil. Noting the success of Bubbledogs and the Big Apple Hot Dogs and then opening your own hot dog stall is not evil. Spotting the crowds in MeatLiquor and opening your own burger and cocktail joint is not evil. Being envious of the queues trailing down Beak Street from FlatIron then serving your own version of the dish is not evil. Wanting to get in on the market for slow-cooked BBQ ribs pioneered by Pitt Cue is not evil.

But doing all this at once?

It's not just that Jamie's Diner is cynical. It's not merely that it's an incoherent, paper-thin mess of a place that shouldn't have left the drawing board. It's way more than that. It's a multi-million pound cliché warehouse, a jumble of every single one of London's food fads all piled up on top of each other, each more disastrously "reimagined" than the last.

The menu is bone-jarring, multi-car pile up, so much so that pointing out all its failings would take a short novella never mind a blog post. There's a collection of "starters" of no obvious geographical origin, "cajun" prawns and "sweet potato quesadilla" jostling somewhat uncomfortably next to a Marie Rose prawn cocktail. There's a box of four "Classic Dishes" including a Reuben sandwich, a £15 chicken in a basket (one would hope you get the whole chicken for that; I bet you don't) and the worryingly singular "Giant Spaghetti Meatball".

There's another section for "salads" which has so many eye-twitchingly irritating phrases I got as far as "Super Duper Quinoa Salad" then gave up and moved on. The "Steaks" section has just two choices - a £16.50 "Flat-Iron" (for all its failings, at least Flat Iron Soho's is only £10 with a salad) and a completely bonkers "Rib-eye for two" for £60. There's a section for "waffles" which has only two choices; one with pulled pork and one - I swear I'm not making this up - with smoked salmon and horseradish cottage cheese which must rank with one of the most terrifying ideas anyone in charge of writing a menu has ever had. There's also a box for "burgers" where if you really want to push the boundaries you can specify extra sweetcorn salsa, gruyere cheese and piccalilli for £1 an item.

But if the menu is a car crash, just wait till you get a load of the food. "Guacamole tortilla chips" were notable insofar as they contained no tortilla chips, and very little guacamole, just some salty water biscuits of some kind, slowly dissolving under a pile of tasteless chopped tomatoes. They were served in a sort of bucket thing with a handle which I'm sure someone thought was a good idea.

"Dirty Barbecue Ribs" were burned, so it's hard to objectively rate their "dirty"ness, although if "dirty" means "sickeningly sweet and overcooked" then we're probably halfway there. A pile of chopped carrots and cabbage and who knows what else was entirely unseasoned and served no purpose, although bizarrely shoestring fries were crisp, perfectly seasoned and actually rather nice.

Worse was yet to come, though. "Giant spaghetti meatball" was, in fact, three or four totally normal-sized meatballs of flavourless mystery meat, nestled amongst slimy commodity pasta. They were garnished with sour cream, cheap parmesan and chopped parsley, the latter being all you could taste. "It smells like vomit," my friend pointed out thoughtfully, as she gamely prodded her way through it.

Dear God though, the pulled pork waffles. At first I couldn't remember if I'd ever tasted pulled pork quite this bad, and then it dawned on me - I had. At Jamie Oliver's other restaurant, Barbecoa. A winning combination of dry, sickly sweet and sloppy, their sugared-vinegar runoff had turned the waffles below from what were once presumably very bland but inoffensive carbohydrate into soggy, tooth-softening mush. Awful, and yet some deep-fried chillis, although slightly chewy, were genuinely tasty, with a gentle citrus tang and moderate heat. Which didn't go anywhere near redeeming the dish, just made the whole thing that much more psychologically bewildering.

Staff were enthusiastic - and numerous - but had a slightly eccentric habit of asking how everything was every five minutes, and given the amount of trauma involved in explaining the difference between beer and ginger beer to my eastern European waitress (a lot), I didn't feel like doing anything other than grunt "fine thank you" on each occasion. But what could they have done, anyway? Re-done the 12-hour pulled pork? Re-trained the chefs? Burned ribs aside, none of the food was cooked wrong, it just was wrong.

For all the grumbling about trend-chasing, and there has been a fair amount of grumbling (most of it from me), it's worth pointing out that however unimaginative a concept, when the food is decent, much can be forgiven. Clockjack Oven may have been rushed into field on the back of the success of Chicken Shop, but given that it's also serving lovely moist chicken and crunchy double-cooked chips for less than a tenner, who cares. And although it's tempting to blame MeatLiquor for BRGR, Burger and Shake and who knows how many other bland ripoffs, we can also thank them for Patty & Bun, Honest Burgers and Lucky Chip, all of whom London would be much poorer without.

The food here is terrible, but Jamie's Diner is enraging - apocalyptically, biblically enraging - because it has no ambition greater than to make some easy money off the back of the hard work of others, by scraping every barrel of London's current American comfort food fashions, and to exploit passing tourists and Jamie fans and get them out of the door before they realise they've been scammed. And if anyone else had put their name to this giant con trick, it would be criminal enough. But for Jamie Oliver, who has made a living for years out of telling poor people not to eat burgers, hot dogs and chips only to then charge way over the odds for the same food as soon as he realises there's money to be made, the nerve is astounding.

We are led to believe that Jamie's Diner is a "pop-up". We know this because it says 'POP-UP' on every menu, and it's plastered all over the walls and windows. In fact, the lease on the building is 3 years, which as anyone in the industry will tell you, is a perfectly acceptable period for a restaurant to last. The only way anyone would call their 3-year restaurant a "pop-up" would be if, not content with having ticked off nearly every other London food cliché, they wanted to jump on that bandwagon as well. And the cynicism, the lack of originality, the shallowness, that is all irritating enough. But to perform a volte-face on your own multi-million-pound-earning healthy-eating campaign to make yet more millions? That's shameful.

1/10

Newman Street Tavern, Fitzrovia

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:56:00 +0000

Such is the relentless pace of change - and not just change, progress - of London's restaurants that even that once-great totem of British cuisine, the gastropub, was in danger of looking a bit tired. Many of the old stalwarts (and I won't single any out but if you ever took an interest in eating out in London from around 1995 onwards you'll know which I'm talking about) haven't changed much about the way they're doing things since they first opened, and in the same way as you wouldn't these days consider a Rover Metro a cutting-edge example of automotive design, that non-specifically Mediterranean cous-cous-and-sun-dried-tomatoes gastropub fayre is no longer the advance guard. Once you could pick up a "gastropub" ready meal from Waitrose, the writing was on the chalkboard.

Well, fear not. The times they are a-changing, and like any successful industry, progress is driven by innovation and reinvention. The Newman Street Tavern is, at first glance, just another revamped boozer in Central London serving modern British cuisine, and could have made a very tidy profit just trotting out the usual crowd-pleasers and marking up South African wine. Instead, it quite unexpectedly served me and a couple of friends one of the most interesting and exciting and - crucially - technically impressive meals I can remember eating in W1.

The food NST are cooking isn't, on the face of it, anything completely groundbreaking. It is still Modern British from the St John school, hunks of meat or fish with salad, cottage pie, soups, etc. and so forth. On the one hand it's all quite familiar. But look a bit closer and you'll notice that they aren't playing anything safe - the starters require proper cooking and contain the kinds of words ("wild garlic, "saffron aioli", "cured wild trout") that make you want to bed in and try them all one by one. The mains, too, (token veggie offering aside) use genuinely exciting ingredients like suckling kid and pouting but there are no obvious fillers, no burgers or Caesar salad or anything bulked out with polenta. Yes, there's a steak, and I suppose cottage pie isn't too easy to mess up, but by and large it's a menu that would get anyone - even a shallow, jaded, trend-chasing food blogger like me - salivating.

And it tastes as good as it reads. Crab bisque was packed full of the main ingredient, but still delicate enough to make finishing a bowl of it as easy and pleasurable as drinking a glass of barrel-aged Jura. Devon crab salad (not pictured; I didn't forget but it came out so badly I didn't want to do the chef the disservice of publishing it) again had plenty of crab, but wouldn't have been half as good without a dollop of earthy brown crab mixture by the side. And some "Manilla" (no idea) clams had a good sweet flavour and there were loads of them, although the advertised saffron aioli was subtle bordering on stealthy.

Out of sheer food-bore curiosity I ordered a single gull's egg, having never tried them before and keen to see what all the fuss was about. I hesitate to dismiss them completely as a fad after just the one, but aside from the shocking deep orange colour of the yolk there was nothing out of the ordinary about this at all. Perhaps there are good and bad gull's egg, or perhaps this was the Emperor's New Egg. At £7.50 for a single one, too, I'm not sure I'll bother again.

Mains were all of an equally high quality as the starters. Pork belly came arranged in so much stock it could have been sold as a soup, but fortunately was so intensely, richly flavoured any presentational failings were forgiven. A single large ray wing, as beautifully sculptured as the Sydney Opera House, stood proudly unadorned and the flesh lifted from the cartilage in gleaming white chunks. But best of all (and I would say that as I ordered it) was a combination platter of langoustine and plaice, the plaice in particular tasting better than any fish in recent memory. Yes, the langoustine was a tad under, and the compulsion to dress everything with plain watercress needs a bit of a rethink, but this was still by and large incredibly good stuff.

Desserts - sticky toffee pudding and a rhubarb sorbet - were the only dishes on the menu that leaned slightly towards unimaginative. They weren't bad, but you could tell their energies weren't as focussed on this part of the menu as the savouries. Still, it all got eaten, even if the rather sour sorbet was a bit more of a struggle than the pudding.

Even if Newman Street Tavern represents nothing more than a gradual evolution of the gastropub theme without radically redrawing the map, it's still a fantastic place to have a meal and for not really that much money. But I got the distinct impression that there was more than just a lick of paint and a liberal use of a few seasonal buzzwords on the menu on top of the traditional template. The unapologetically British ingredients, minimalist presentation and unpretentious service are all vaguely familiar to anyone who's eaten at St John Bread & Wine or, say, 32 Great Queen Street but here it was all just that little bit more refined, skilful and - for want of a better word - "modern". And if this is the way things are headed, we've got a whole lot to look forward to.

8/10

One Leicester Street, Covent Garden

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:40:00 +0000

It's always sad when a good restaurant dies, but when said restaurant bears the hallowed St John name, the soul-searching is that much more intense. Back in late 2012, when it was revealed that their 3rd outpost would be just off Leicester Square, the news was met with widespread approval; anywhere even half-decent to eat in that part of town is welcome, and what better people to wow the tourists with British cuisine than those who kicked the whole thing off? And when the operation stuttered, stalled and finally collapsed, it's a testament to the goodwill heaped upon the St John brand that people pointed the finger of blame at the area, the building, the clientèle, anything but the business itself.

The unfortunate truth is, though, that the St John thing was never going to work in a poky Georgian townhouse in W1. The cathedral-like atmosphere and whitewashed walls of the ex-smokehouse in Smithfield was - is - a unique and precious gift and eating there is as much about the building as the food. The team did their best to impose that famously minimalist décor on a building that was singularly ill-equipped to cope with it, but it never worked. The restaurant was echoey and impersonal, the hotel rooms boxy and noisy, and the upstairs bar had all the personality of a dentist's waiting room.

And yet, thanks to the priceless pedigree of the Henderson/Gulliver partnership, the food at St John Chinatown was always worth any other discomforts. In the dying days of the previous administration I went in one lunchtime for a plate of snails, duck hearts and lovage, which was lovely enough to distract me from the fact I could hear every word of the conversation on the table next to mine. The good news is that same chef - Tom Harris - is still manning the stoves, only now his food gets served in a room you actually want to be in.

Cockles and Jersey Royals in a saffron/tomato broth was a bowl of joy for £8, and was as good an advertisment for the St John school of cooking as you could wish for. Congratulations are in order, too, for managing to source the most freakishly massive cockles I've ever seen - each was the size of an oyster and packed loads of flavour.

Razor clams would have perhaps been nicer warm, but they were otherwise very good, a minimalist salad of tomatoes and dill highlighting the main ingredient without overwhelming it. Nice to not have a big sack of clam guts to eat around as well, which happens far too often for my liking (hang your head, 10 Greek Street).

Lamb sweetbreads are the kind of things that make me go all wobbly with delight even when only modestly prepared, but here, resting on a bed of artichokes and celery and glazed with a rich, sticky sauce that only the very best chefs can pull off without making treacle, they were nothing short of perfect. If you ever make the trip to 1 Leicester Street yourself, and I strongly suggest you do, you should order the sweetbreads. And thence if you ever go back, you should order them again.

Monkfish and anchovy may have approached the levels of the sweetbreads, too, had they not been unfortunately overcooked and dry. The spice coating on the fish was good, though, and there was an interesting interplay of textures with the breadcrumbs and the crunchy (and slightly scary sounding) "rape greens".

So while not perfect - and how many places are? - 1 Leicester Street has, with the use of skilful remodelling and with the retention of its highly skilled chef, morphed from a Formica'd, clinical space serving nice food to somewhere you could happily spend all day in, munching on oysters and white wine and generally just enjoying life. Oh, and that awful upstairs bar, forever to be filed under "what were they thinking?" in the Big Book of Restaurant Design Car Crashes, is now cozy and stylish, with a kind of 60s James Bond vibe and a counter you can actually sit at. It is a proper, grown-up restaurant, comfortable and confident and gimmick-free. This one's going to stick around.

8/10

Salon, Brixton Market

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Fri, 10 May 2013 10:26:00 +0000

Objectively, Salon - ostensibly a showcase restaurant for the products sold at the Cannon & Cannon deli - are a very solid little operation serving decent British (or largely British) food in an airy room above Brixton Market and are charging very little money for it. It's possibly unfortunate for them that I made my second trip to Broadway Market and to Sabel this Sunday just gone, who are doing this thing that much better (in fact probably better than anyone else), but if you find yourself near Electric Avenue with £15 burning a hole in your pocket you can certainly do much worse.

N'duja croquettes were an attractive golden brown, had a nice crunch and came perched on blobs of ketchup and surrounded by leaves of chicory. I'd have liked a bit more of a kick from the n'duja, and there was something about the ketchup that felt a bit... low-rent, but I was happy enough to eat them. Which I guess is the point.

Welsh Rarebit was a bit wrong, though - a thick, disconcertingly brown gunk laid on brown bread, grilled too timidly to have any of that nice golden crust you get on a good bit of rarebit (see: St John, Farringdon). Pickled walnuts were a nice touch, but there's only so much bitterly beer-y, salty mixture the consistency of snot you can eat before feeling a bit queasy. We didn't finish it.

Dexter beef - they didn't specify the cut but I'm guessing onglet - had plenty of flavour and was cooked well if you ignore the fact it didn't have a char. It's probably a bit mean criticising a restaurant like this for not having a charcoal grill, as often it's a licensing/extraction issue and out of their hands, but there has never been a bit of beef in the history of the world that isn't better cooked over coals. Still, not bad.

Suffolk chorizo with Jersey Royals was nice too, and oddly enough suffered from the opposite problem as the beef as there was way too much of it all - mainly potato. The chorizo had plenty of punch and bite, and the potatoes were little bouncy balls of flavour, but my friend pointed out that leaving those furry leaves on the radishes has way more benefit to visual aesthetics than taste, and there was quite a bit of salty butter swimming about underneath it all.

Still, all said and done, it was a hearty old lunch for £15 a head and we'd had a nice time. It's great fun, too, looking out over the market while you eat, where, as anyone who's ever been to Brixton Market will know, entertainment in various forms is never in short supply. A marvellously gooey rye, baked fresh that morning, was way better than you usually get as a house bread and, slathered in salty butter, made a fantastic appetiser. So Salon are doing enough right that the odd misstep doesn't matter so much. On the days I don't fancy trekking over to Broadway Market, I will be back.

7/10

Rosita, Northcote Road

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Tue, 07 May 2013 12:08:00 +0000

"You should write it up," my flatmate said, after I'd spent the whole evening moaning about how much better José would have been for the same price, "because it's a nice, normal restaurant that nice, normal people go to. Not everyone spends every waking hour scouring geeky food websites or travelling to Hendon to spend two hours queuing for a cheeseburger. Normal people eat at places like this."

There is always room for a middle ground, and of course not every Spanish restaurant has to be - or can be - as good as José. But is it my "job" (such as it is) to make excuses for somewhere I know is charging too much for food that might have been impressive ten years ago, or brutally point out a short list of alternatives in town where you'll have a better time? However much of a smug, spoiled, elitist twerp it makes me sound.

Anyway, if I was worried about coming across as a smug, spoiled, elitist twerp I would have given up on this food blog a long time ago, so here goes. Rosita is the sister restaurant to Lola Rojo, also on Northcote Road and where I'd had a very passable but - again - slightly overpriced and uninspiring meal a few years back and never really felt compelled to go back. The USP of Rosita is that is it is nothing so humdrum as a tapas bar - it is a "sherry bar", which as we all know is far more trendy these days and has the added benefit of not actually requiring you to do anything differently other than put the words "sherry bar" above the door.

Dressed crab was decent, and although padded out with egg and bread it was almost worth the £7.50. Didn't feel massively Spanish, though, just like the filling from a crab, egg and cress sandwich put in a shell. "Rositas" were more interesting, little bitesize rolls of toasted bread filled with, in this case, a well-seasoned tuna tartar and one with duck egg and sprouts; they were fun to eat, but still felt like wedding buffet canapés masquerading as tapas.

Grilled King Prawns did at least look authentically Spanish, but suffered from having been slightly undercooked and were a bit gloopy inside - this despite the legs on the poor things being so fiercely cremated they had mostly fallen off. I wonder if this is because of the use of a Josper grill, which may get a nice darkened crust on your medium-rare beef steak but is perhaps too difficult to control on tiny delicate bits of seafood.

The biggest knowing sigh of the evening was reserved for this plate of Iberico Jamon de Belotta, which bore about as much resemblance to the silky slivers of acorn-fed loveliness available at José as a packet of Frazzles. Tough and curly as dry wood shavings, they were an £11.50 waste of time. And "cod churros with green olives" were just bizarre - the chewy sticks of "churros" tasted of nothing more than batter, and the green olives came in the form of an inedibly salty foam that the churros were planted into. It didn't work. They were £6.50.

With a bottle of the cheapest Manzanilla, the bill came to around £73, so let's return to my original point. For a bill for two of that size in José, or Pizarro, or Tramontana, or Barrafina, or Fino, you would have left having eaten some of the best Spanish food outside of Madrid. The sherry would have been ice cold (Rosita's wasn't), the seafood of the highest quality and grilled to perfection, the Iberico ham expertly carved to translucently thin. If I didn't know any better, I may have not grumbled quite so much about how better I could have spent my money. But I'm afraid I do know better, and I'm not about to make excuses for a restaurant that while not a disaster, in 2013 is simply outshone. And if that makes me a snob, and I'm pretty sure it does, I'll live with that.

5/10

Balthazar, Covent Garden

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:25:00 +0000

I just wish Balthazar had been cheaper, or better. Or both, of course - that would have been nice too - but I still could have lived with either cheaper or better. Because if it was cheaper I could have enjoyed its straightforward French food in the same way as I enjoyed Brasserie Zedel, where you're never likely to have the meal of your life but can generally get away with spending less than £15 for a very passable steak haché, frites and a salad, or if it was better I could have rated it alongside the Wolseley or Delaunay, where you can see where you money goes.

"But it's not about the food" you'll hear people say. "People go to Balthazar for the room and the service and the atmosphere. It's about the experience". Well, I'm all for a nice experience but I'm afraid no matter how great the surroundings and atmosphere, once I've paid £9 for a very ordinary goat's cheese tart I start to enjoy such marginal factors as lighting and nice mosaic floors that much less.

We didn't, thank the heavens, have quite as disastrous an evening as some. Nothing was inedible, we didn't have to send anything back, and we didn't see any cling film. We liked the house bread (particularly the sourdough), the butter was soft, the red leather banquette very comfortable. But even so, Balthazar did not do anywhere near enough to justify the £50 a head bill, or the frankly baffling difficulty of getting a table.

The aformentioned goat's cheese tart suffered from a slightly runny mixture (undercooked perhaps) but was seasoned well and was still just about edible. It came with an underdressed - in fact practically naked - salad and instead of a chutney or something that would have offset the creaminess of the tart, a pile of salty tapenade. None of it was awful, but it was an unsatisfying, worryingly amateurish plate of food for £8.25+service.

Chicken liver & foie gras mousse was better; again basic to the point of homely but with a good rich amount of foie and a lovely smooth texture. This may even have been worth the money we paid for it.

Linguini wasn't a disaster either, although I'd had a much better seafood pasta dish at Osteria Antica on Northcote Road the weekend before, and it cost a fiver less.

You can do a lot worse for £17 elsewhere - in fact you can do a lot worse at Balthazar by the looks of things - than this "bar steak", which had a great charred flavour and was cooked exactly as requested. Chips were a bit strange - oily and orange and so tiny it looked like they had been chipped both horizontally and vertically, and I wasn't too keen on the vinegary bearnaise, but the steak was the main event and it was good. Not very good, not brilliant, but good.

Service veered between over-attentive and bizarrely inept. A request for lemon with our water was met with an astonished look from our first waiter, who scurried off for someone more senior to confirm that actually yes, we did want lemon with our tapwater. A few minutes later, two glasses arrived each with a quarter of fresh lime in. I ordered a Negroni Finis and was brought something that looked suspiciously like a standard Negroni. When I questioned whether this drink really did contain the advertised passionfruit and Byrrh I was told that yes, it did. Fairly sure it didn't. Something called a Big Easy was lovely, thankfully worth every bit of the £12.50.

That the cocktails are worth the investment though is not a surprise - God amongst barmen Brian Silva is responsible for the output of the bar, and even with him not there in person that evening the drinks were great. But you can't just go in for a drink, you need to order food too. And being forced to order, say, a ersatz burger or a £10 plate of uninteresting cheeses just for the license to sit at the bar with a negroni (as I did on two previous occasions) seems terribly unfair, like being forced to order the complete Sky Sports package when all you ever want to watch is the cricket.

So no, I can't recommend Balthazar. There is better food elsewhere, there is cheaper food elsewhere, and there are ways of spending your time and money that will give you a much happier return. We didn't suffer an unmitigated disaster that others did; it just felt anachronistic and awkward, like a 90s-themed restaurant for tourists to go alongside the other novelty cash cow joints of Covent Garden. And I wonder, once the buzz has died down and the tourists and bloggers have each tried it once then got on with their lives, how long it will last.

5/10

A Wong, Victoria

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:46:00 +0000

Under ordinary circumstances, I would applaud anywhere trying to do something different. God knows London already has enough places whose ambition runs no greater than to do what MeatLiquor/Hawksmoor/Polpo are doing, only with bigger profit margins, and genuine innovation is generally to be welcomed. A Wong are, for better or worse, genuinely innovating, and the meal I had last night was, in all kinds of ways, unlike any I've had before.

But innovation comes with associated risks. It's all very well convincing yourself that what the world is missing is a Surströmming Hot Dog stall or a Polish-Mexican Bistro, but overestimate your customer base's capacity for experimentation and you could be staring down the barrel of humiliating failure.

A Wong is not - quite - a failure. But where it is experimental, those experiments are more likely to shock than delight, and where it is more mainstream, it can't compete on price. Take a dish of "Yunan fried cheese", for example. I use the quotation marks deliberately, as had I not been assured by the menu that this was a regional Chinese delicacy, I would have quite naturally assumed it was a block of halloumi cheese. Because that's literally what it tasted like.

But let's assume for the sake of argument that it was, in fact, a regional Chinese delicacy and not a small slice of the kind of thing you can pick up in Asda, because this may explain why they saw fit to serve it accompanied by a small bowl of salt. Now, I don't know about you, but the first thing that comes to mind when eating some halloumi - sorry, "Yunan fried cheese" - is not "if only I had a small bowl of salt to dip this in". It's "blimey this halloumi is salty". This may be how they do it in the Yunan, but I'm not convinced. Not convinced at all.

At the other end of the experimentation scale is something titled 'Seaweed'. Given the price point - £3 - and the unpredictable nature of offerings elsewhere on the menu, you may be forgiven for expecting a little more than a small pile of the kind of sugary deep-fried cabbage available in every Chinese restaurant in the country. But that's exactly what arrived. Don't get me wrong, I love the stuff, but it's hardly cutting-edge.

Everything else fell somewhere between those two extremes. Chengdu "street soft" (sounds painful) tofu was unremarkable other than the fact it was served in an irritating tiny glass bowl and contained too much soy sauce. Century egg had a really lovely flavour but for some bizarre reason was chopped up into tiny wibbly cubes which made it totally impossible to eat with chopsticks. And "pickled" cucumber were less "pickled" than "covered in sugary soy" but were reasonably pleasant.

Far less edible was Gong Bao chicken which was so utterly drowned in Sichuan peppercorns it was like eating a bowl of liquid mercury. Too often Sichuan dishes are toned down in London but the other extreme is just as unpleasant - this was completely unbalanced and pretty careless. And a small "dim sum" taster showed some skill, I just wish they hadn't seen fit to coat one of the dumplings in a layer of frothy spittle; if they thought it was an improvement, they were wrong.

But there were a couple of dishes that - annoyingly for a food blogger trying to make his mind up one way or other about the place - showed flashes of genius. Steamed-to-perfection seabass spiked with ham was, if you ignored the hideous grease-soaked deep-fried pieces of skin on top, proof that someone in the kitchen knew how to properly treat a piece of premium fish. And razor clams, sweet and fresh and studded with dainty discs of salami, were similarly impressive, and with two large specimens for £5, something approaching value.

So I can't, and I won't, totally write off the place. For one thing, plenty of people whose opinions on restaurants are pretty reliable have nothing but good things to say about it so there's always that chance that I somehow chose the ten worst items on the menu or that the kitchen was having a disastrous off-day. There is that chance. But £40 with a couple of beers each in a soulless, beige room plagued with airflow issues (it was like having dinner in a wind tunnel; I found a terrified child trapped in the corridor to the toilets because they couldn't prize the door open) is not an experience I'm in a hurry to repeat. As fearless experiments go, A Wong had me longing for the mainstream.

4/10

Photos by Hollow Legs. This post was sponsored by match.com, although I would not recommend A Wong for a date unless you were trying to let someone down gently.

Sagar, Covent Garden

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:26:00 +0000

I've been obsessing too much about the cynical, overpriced or just downright evil recently, and it's not good for me. The more you think about these kinds of things the more they prey on you, and I was worried I had spent so long looking for the very worst that London had to offer I was in danger of losing sight of the best.

So what I needed was a fresh perspective; someone to show me that, after all, there are far more wonderful, generous, hospitable places in London than a brief glance down Kingsway from the office (All Bar One, Café Rouge, Café Nero, Belgo, Pret, Costa, Subway, Eat, another Subway... it's like restaurant death row) would indicate. And so thanks to a humanitarian intervention from a friend we found ourselves first in Notes café and wine bar on Wellington Street (reasonably priced wine, lovely staff) and then Sagar restaurant on Catherine Street.

First, the Asian Elephant in the room - Sagar is a vegetarian restaurant. And my history with vegetarian restaurants, and vegetarian food, and occasionally even vegetarians, hasn't always been happy. But this wasn't just some half-assed quiche and cous-cous peddler, this was a proper South Indian restaurant, a cuisine which has had hundreds of years to learn how to make brilliant food without the use of animal protein, and is responsible for the late and much, much lamented Kastoori in Tooting.

Sagar isn't quite at the level of Kastoori, but then it is cheaper, and it's in Covent Garden, so perhaps their achievement is just as impressive. These Pani Puri could never hope to compete with the extraordinary flavour bombs of Kastoori's Dahi Puri but it was still fun punching a hole through the little pastry casings, filling it with chickpeas and tamarind then downing the whole thing before they collapsed. House pickles were a little on the tame side but I liked their version of lime pickle which was presumably home made, and had a nice bite.

Onion and chilli uttapam (sort of a savoury pancake) didn't skimp on the hot stuff at all, and along with the golden brown onions and refreshing coconut dip and pot of warm chutney, it made for an exciting mix of temperatures, flavours and textures. Without a brave attitude to spicing these things can sometimes taste a bit bland, but there was none of that here.

It's the dosas, such as this Mysore Masala Dosa, that really draw the crowds here though. Inside the golden brown, gently vinegary casing was a generous amount of spicy potato filling that was satisfying - and filling - without being claggy. Having one of these vast sculptures brought to your table is worth every bit of the £7 odd they cost, and as with the uttapam the mixture of textures and flavours was incredibly addictive.

Bakalabath was interesting alright - sort of a cool rice & cucumber thing ordered to offset the chilli heat elsewhere - but there was something about the texture of cold rice and cucumber I couldn't get comfortable with. But Pav Bhaji was much better - a rich vegetable curry, homely and comforting and packing bags of flavour. Adding chicken, or lamb, or prawns would have been a complete waste of time - it is a simple, self-contained, satisfying dish that's good not despite the fact it's had animal products removed, but because it was good to begin with. Sorry to keep banging on about the vegetarian thing, but it's worth comparing the food from Sagar to the pappy, worthy dross from any number of vegetarian cafés around.

And all that, plus a large bottle of Kingfisher each, was bill was £20 a head. I realise it's easy to keep the costs down when you're not serving meat, but there was still enough skill on display here for this to seem like an absolute bargain, and as I say, considering the location it's nothing short of stunning. Buzzing and happy from a lovely time at Sagar, we bounded across the road to Balthazar for a cocktail and ice cream, and were told in no uncertain terms that we couldn't stay unless we were each having a "full meal" - despite having been in twice before for nothing more than a plate of cheese and a bottle of sherry. So I guess the Curse of Covent Garden can strike at any time. But whenever it does, remember there will always be places like Sagar more than happy to restore your faith in humanity.

8/10

34, Mayfair

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:33:00 +0000

If you were to make a list of the most glamorous and oversubscribed dining spots in London, what would you include? The Ivy, Covent Garden stalwart and default shorthand for an exclusive celebrity hangout, is a shoo-in. Ditto Scott's in Mayfair, where if you manage to get a booking between the hours of 7 and 9 you are surely something above a mere mortal. There's Sheekey's, favoured of West End stars and a very lucky minority of their audiences, and perhaps also Le Caprice, somewhere that generally hides a good number of influential and famous notables behind its lace curtains.

And all of the above, astonishingly, are run by the same people - Caprice Holdings.

If we are to measure a restaurant's success on its popularity - and I can't think of a better way of doing it - then surely they are doing something right. It's all very well having the best food in Britain but if you can't sell yourself, if you can't make the whole package of visiting a restaurant an "event", something desirable over and above the mere act of eating dinner, then you aren't making the most of what you have. Caprice know this, which is why eating in one of their restaurants means taking part in a theatre of soft carpets, white linen and stylish front of house who dance between the tables like they were born to do nothing else.

You could dismiss the whole enterprise as deeply superficial - and plenty have done just that - were it not for the fact that, by and large, the food from a Caprice Holdings restaurant is worth the effort of snagging a table. I still dream about the Dover sole from Scott's I had almost a decade ago; there are few better places to knock back oysters and champagne than Sheekey's, and now there is 34, which... I was really hoping would be good as well.

House bread involved a sort of cheese/chilli affair with the colour of cornbread, and some lovely salty Sardinian flatbread which I will never not utterly demolish within the first five minutes of being presented with it.

The cocktail list included a good variety of Bloody Marys (a clamato version with oyster leaf was particularly nice), but our favourite was actually a shocking green Apple Bellini, light and perfumed and tasting of very good apples. It may have tasted even better had my stomach not been turned by some dreadful apostrophe abuse on the menu, annoying enough anywhere never mind a smart restaurant in the heart of Mayfair charging £10 per drink. But a self-righteous twitpic made me feel slightly better, and I somehow managed to put the whole sorry incident behind me for the rest of lunch.

A shared starter of artichokes, anchovy and punterella salad was bursting with flavour and didn't last long. The great big chunks of artichokes were doused in a light citrus mayonnaise of some kind, "punterella" (I think they meant puntarella) added crunch and bitterness, and the little smoked anchovies - as long as you got a forkful of everything at once - balanced it out with umami and seasoning. Pretty as a picture, too.

Lobster Thermidor omelette was huge, rich, and not particularly attractive (why not fold it in half on the plate? It may look a little less like a cowpat) but had enough chunks of lobster in to justify the £20 and would be the ideal hangover food if you were the kind of person that has £20 to spend on hangover food.

The burger though, was all kinds of wrong. Perhaps I shouldn't have assumed that by not specifying either Barkham Blue or Mayfield cheeses that it would arrive with no cheese at all, but honestly, who serves a beef burger dry? The truffle fried egg, ordered out of sheer curiosity, was topped with a few rubbery sheets of preserved truffle (horrid), the relish on the side was very... familiar (I doubt if you'd opened a jar of similar from Sainsbury's you'd have been able to tell them apart) and the bun was chalky and dry and completely unsuitable. The beef was good, with a lovely note of charcoal, but short of separating it from the rest of the car crash and pretending it was a steak haché (which I ended up doing), it was wasted.

So 34 can't do burgers. OK, fine. But fries were decent, and I did like the look of the steaks being prepared on the grill, and the man dutifully shovelling coal onto it like a steam train driver, so I'm not about to dismiss the whole operation because my particular area of obsession was a bit of a letdown. I'm sure I could have ordered better. But then again, perhaps in a restaurant charging £20 and up for a main course, it shouldn't be possible to order badly?

A raspberry pistachio sundae went some way to putting things right; the chunks of freeze-dried raspberries were an interesting addition but it was otherwise a fairly standard affair. And so, overall, I'm not sure 34 is quite worth the eyebrow-raising amount of money they charge, when all they really are doing is serving solid food in a nice room. Of course, that's all any Caprice Holdings restaurants are doing most of the time, and look how popular they all are - we had a nice time, the staff are incredibly well-drilled and the surroundings (and the toilets) are of the highest standards. All this glamour, and fuss, and money, for me, just needs to have more to recommend from the food to justify it all. But then, what do I know. The place was packed.

6/10

I was invited to review 34

The Worst Restaurants in London

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 16:42:00 +0000

I know what you're thinking. What's the point of going to the effort of sending me to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet in Piccadilly when the resulting post isn't the unqualified calamity you were hoping for? That's just the way the prawn cracker crumbled I'm afraid - Mr Wu's really wasn't all that bad, and in fact given the location, the clientèle and the price point, it acquitted itself rather well. 4/10 isn't a marvellous score by any stretch of the imagination but there is a world of difference between the merely mediocre and the downright awful; between the noble failures and the determinedly dire; between the disappointing and the diabolical. And so by way of an apology for the Chinese Burn that never was, here are my top (or should that be bottom?) five Worst Restaurants in London.

But first, some runners up, and a confession. The only reason Planet Hollywood, Chiquito, Bella Pasta, Garfunkel's, and a number of other lowest-common-denominator chains, ripoffs and ripoff chains aren't on this list is because (thank the stars) I haven't yet been to them. I'm fairly sure they're awful, but unless you're trapped in Gatwick waiting for a delayed long-haul flight, they're very easy to avoid.

Also, although I have never really enjoyed anything I've eaten at Yo! Sushi, Pizza Express, Ask, Zizzi's, TGI Friday's or Gourmet Burger Kitchen, and their ubiquitous presence on our high streets is a source of constant irritation, they each have their fans and deserve at least grudging respect for doing what they do with consistency. The fact that the cardboardy, beige Pizza Express pizzas have spread like a nasty rash all over the country is depressing, but depressing isn't enough to win a spot in the bottom five.

These five restaurants are not merely depressing, or overpriced, or cynical, or unpleasant. The food isn't just disappointing, the décor not merely drab, the service nothing so straightforward as incompetent. They are a special kind of awful, the kind that requires a particular set of variables to work in miserable harmony. Most bad restaurants, remember, soon go out of business; people vote with their feet. For somewhere bad to survive (and even to expand, God help us) needs very specific factors, ranging from a captive or clueless audience (airports, or tourist honeypots) to a glitzy brand or celebrity endorsement. They may also survive by virtue of using the cheapest possible ingredients (Brakes Bros is the go-to supplier for bad restaurants), marked up so ruthlessly that even a half-empty restaurants turns a profit. Ironically, running a bad restaurant takes energy, and thought, and skill. And these are the worst of the worst.

5. Frankie & Benny's

So there was plenty of competition for the fifth place in the list, and in fact I have a horrible suspicion that Frankie & Benny's may not even be the worst nationwide fake Italian-American-themed diner chain. But it earns a spot here because of the time my flight from Gatwick South Terminal was delayed and I slunk reluctantly in hoping the vast, laminated menu held at least one edible item. Well, if it did, I didn't find it. After a 45-minute wait (maybe they had to change the fuse on the microwave), flabby chicken wings came doused in a sickly sweet BBQ sauce that must have come right from the bottom of the Brakes Bros Bargain Bin, and a burger so bland it could have been mistaken for a lump of soft furnishing. I think it cost about £2,000. Something like that anyway.

Yes, there are other chains, maybe no worse and maybe no better than this. But Frankie & Benny's makes this list for what it represents - a vast, utterly charmless, relentlessly expanding chain serving food at investor-friendly markups, who have learned that by inventing a faux-nostalgic backstory and papering the walls with black and white pictures of New Yorkers from the 1930s (who would have laughed out loud had they been presented with anything from the F&B menu even then) they can somehow convince their victims - sorry, customers - that what they are eating somehow constitutes "authentic". Don't be fooled. They are the devil.

Location: All over the bloody place

4. Fire and Stone

It's easy to laugh at Fire & Stone, perhaps too easy. Anywhere that thinks duck hoi sin cheese pizza (I shit you not) is a menu item worth laminating, and that around Christmas time will sell you something involving turkey, brie, cranberry and gravy, is clearly setting itself up as the Frank Spencer of dining experiences. But to dismiss them as an elaborate joke is to ignore the real problem here; namely that with the brazen use of sheer, excruciating, pointless novelty for the sake of novelty they are convincing hapless diners that, against their better judgement, they really do want to eat a pizza topped with guacamole and roast potato and what's more, said guacamole and roast potato pizza is somehow an improvement on the status quo.

Proper pizza is a wonderful thing, as anyone who's ever eaten one from Donna Margherita in Battersea, Santa Maria in Ealing, Franco Manca in Brixton or the Pizza Pilgrims truck in Soho will tell you. It doesn't need messing about with, it doesn't need improving. It's almost as perfect a foodstuff as has ever existed, which is why they've been making it in Naples with a recipe pretty much unchanged for hundreds of years. The arrogance of anywhere that looks at an honest, beautiful margherita pizza and thinks "you know what? I wonder if we dump whatever we have in the fridge on this we can convince some witless tourists it's the way things are headed? Also, swap the base for semolina flour - I know it tastes of Lego but it's way more difficult for the chefs to cock up". I really do not like Fire & Stone.

Location: Covent Garden, Spitalfields, Oxford, Portsmouth and Westfield

3. Rainforest Café

Many "family-friendly" restaurants fall into the same trap. They spend so long worrying about themes and distractions and ball pools and paper hats and free crayon sets to keep the kiddies from getting bored and tearing the place up, that by the time it comes to the food, all their energies have already been spent. Rainforest Café has that problem, too, but because their budget is so many times bigger than other places, the Grand Canyon-sized gulf between the ludicrous animatronic animals and water displays and the - for want of a better word - crap that comes out of the kitchen is even more jarring.

Actually, you can probably find equally bad food elsewhere - the sad, greasy cowpat of a quesadilla was upsetting bordering on tragic, but I bet there's no better at Chiquito, and I'm sure the burger at Garfunkels is very much of the same ilk as the dry, rubbery discs of mystery meat inside sweet sesame seed buns at the RC - but dear lord the prices. That quesadilla - just cheese and vegetables in a thin case that had all the personality of a sheet of greaseproof paper - was £15.60; a toffee and banana crepe £6.95; a plain Caesar salad an astonishing £14.40. The markups, for these are clearly very cheap ingredients, must be some of the highest in London, and only a trickle of harassed parents and their offspring must be enough to keep the place afloat. Which is just as well, as on my visit half the restaurant was roped off and dark. Perhaps it's a sign it's not much longer for this world. We can but hope.

Location: Piccadilly

2. The Hard Rock Café

The only thing more wretched than the experience of eating at Hard Rock Café is the fact that it's always so popular. Every time I pass this place on the bus it's had a queue out of the door, which even if you assume that nobody ever goes back (and I think it's a fairly safe assumption), that's still pretty staggering.

If there was something - anything - about the place that would justify even the most cursory interest then I might begin to be able to get my head around it, but no - I do not have a single nice word to say about the place. It's hateful. We were served gloopy overcooked ribs in cheap sauce, a burger so inedibly cremated it actually made me laugh out loud, and then were presented with a bill that wouldn't have looked unreasonable for lunch at the Ledbury. Given its international brand and stratospheric prices, you'd be justified in thinking that maybe the décor was worth a visit, but all the cases of memorabilia looked like they had seen better days, and were of pretty marginal interest to even the most rabid rock and roll fan (a guitar Adam Clayton played. A couple of times. Woopie-do), and the bathrooms looked like a bomb had hit them. Where does the money go? It doesn't bear thinking about.

Location: Piccadilly

1. Aberdeen Steak House / Angus Steak House / Scotch Steak House

Nobody quite knows the distinction between these three near-identical but for some reason differently named restaurants. As far as I can gather, Aberdeen Steak House and Angus Steak House are owned by the same company, while Scotch Steak House split a little while ago from the main group and decided to forge its own path selling, er, exactly the same food as the others. So who knows. And who cares, because all you need to know is that, for more reasons than I have time to list here, they are a collection of the very worst restaurants in London, and most likely Britain, and very possibly the world.

Oh go on then, just a small list. The décor is battered and aged, either very nearly falling apart or very actually fallen apart. Staff are so uninterested and chippy they may as well be working in a Post Office, and manage the very impressive feat of doing a whole evening's service without looking anyone - least of all each other - in the eye. The food is terrifying - mealy, bruised steaks that taste of blood and liver, frozen chips, tinned mushrooms and a list of unfortunate 70s classics like prawn cocktail and ("our famous") melted Camembert made by people who neither know nor care what they're doing.

And for this bitterly miserable experience, with absolutely nothing to recommend it whatsoever, you'll pay a small fortune. And you'll leave feeling broken and dejected, bankrupt in every sense of the word, and not a little queasy. I have never known anywhere to suck the joy out of eating to quite such a degree - it's like having dinner in a gulag; completely and utterly devoid of hospitality and warmth and everything a restaurant should be. So while Hard Rock and Rainforest Café and all the others listed above are bad - very bad indeed - there still is nowhere to rival the sheer catastrophic, diabolical awfulness of Aberdeen Angus. A most worthy "winner".

Location: Not telling. It's for your own good.

Thanks to Abandon Spoon for the Christmas Pizza picture, and Shit London for the brilliant Aberdeen Angus lighting failure picture.

Mr Wu's, Piccadilly

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 12:48:00 +0000

I'm afraid this post is going to disappoint a whole lot of you. Mr Wu's is an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet near the Trocadero, populated mainly by bewildered tourists, and as such you'd think would tick every box in the "crappy restaurant" checklist. There are very few all-you-can-anything operations in the world that strive to the very highest standards of service and quality, and the likelihood of my evening at Mr Wu's being a catalogue of hilarious disasters was presumably why it was voted the winner of the Where Next poll.

I know, too, that plenty of people have had bad meals at Mr Wu's - the user review sites are full of stories of grim service and grimmer food, and if we'd left the place clutching our stomachs and screaming blue murder it wouldn't have been a wholly unexpected turn of events.

But instead - instead - what if I told you that the welcome and the service at Mr Wu's was friendly and efficient? That I was allowed to save a space for a couple of friends who were slightly delayed and brought bottles of ice-cold Tsingtao while I waited? And that - brace yourselves - the food itself, whilst occasionally very very odd, was usually edible and in one memorable case actually quite nice? Believe me, I'm as surprised as anyone.

First job, once everyone had arrived, was to troop up from our basement table and load our plates. And I'll say this for Mr Wu's - there's no shortage of options. With a commendably liberal attitude to what constitutes a "Chinese" buffet, we were presented with onion rings, chips, paella, Thai fish cakes, mayonnaise, taramasalata (I think... well, it was pink. Could have been Marie Rose) and God knows what else, vast amounts of each, all waiting patiently under heat lamps.

Though tempted for a second to go for some kind of spring roll and taramasalata paella, I eventually decided that this would be beyond what would be reasonably expected, and ended up with a (still somewhat leftfield) arrangement of sweet & sour fishcakes of some kind, some crispy seaweed (I can't help it, I love that stuff), a bit of lemon chicken so lurid yellow it looked like it would have glowed in the dark, and (for balance you understand) a bit of stir-fried cabbage. Oh, and a chicken wonton.

And some noodles. And a bit of roast pork.

And a couple of prawn crackers.

OK so it's not exactly the kind of thing you'd get at Hakkasan, but people never eat normal food combinations at buffets. In the same way that while staying at a hotel you'll happily stack up digestive biscuits, Dairylea segments, melon balls and a raspberry Pop Tart and call it breakfast, surely the most obvious option at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet is to throw together some of the most bizarre ingredients you can find and see how it all pans out. At the time, believe it or not, I thought the plate of food I'd come up with was a fairly conservative affair - I saw someone with nothing but a vast pile of sweet and sour pork balls on their plate, and another that had just taken one spoonful of every different type of carbohydrate - rice, noodles, pasta AND chips. Together.

So, the taste test. I'll start with the bad - and lemon chicken was very bad indeed. I've already mentioned the colour of the thing, but the flavour was even more startling, like they'd covered the poor bird in the coating from a melted Solero ice-cream. But if Solero Chicken wins the Worst Item award, a wonton that tasted like a pellet of fish food wrapped in deep-fried newspaper wasn't far behind; the "Thai" fishcakes were an engineering project of sugar and red food colouring; and there's a special place in hell for whoever came up with "Tofu soup", utterly devoid of flavour but thickened with just enough cornflour to successfully evoke a bowl of fresh spit.

Of course, there were always going to be some unpleasantness in an all-you-can-eat buffet near Piccadilly. The surprise was the stuff we found which was edible. Crispy seaweed is literally identical everywhere you get it and that's not a bad thing, ditto prawn crackers. But the fried noodles weren't too greasy and had a nice bite, the spring rolls likewise weren't completely revolting and were at least not drenched in grease like they often are, and most unexpectedly of all, some pork char siu was actually quite nice, tender and well-seasoned and with a presumably wholly unnatural but nevertheless attractive scarlet smoke ring.

And it was thanks to the presence of just enough that was edible, combined with the just-good-enough service, combined with the just-cheap-enough prices, that we left Mr Wu's feeling not completely ripped off. Mass-produced, hormone-pumped gunk it may for the most part be, but if you go to any all-you-can-eat buffet near the Trocadero and expect anything BUT mass-produced, hormone-pumped gunk then you're only going to end up disappointed. And for just over £10 per person, with one beer each, it's certainly got a jump on Aberdeen Angus, Hard Rock, Rainforest Café and who knows how many other truly cynical tourist traps in those parts. Mr Wu's is not a good restaurant. It's not an ethical, or healthy, or attractive restaurant. But it is at least an honest restaurant. And that'll do.

4/10

Sabel popup, Broadway Market

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Many years ago I made it an unwritten policy never to write up one-off events, or supperclubs (and therefore also, by extension, one-off supperclubs). One-off special events are very rarely of interest to anyone outside the most geeky set of food obsessives, and though I certainly count myself amongst that group, I'm not sure how many of the people who read this blog do. It also seemed a bit like bragging - "look at this great meal I went to! What's that, you want to go as well? Well you can't! Haha!" - and I'd rather the blog was mainly a useful database of places you might want to go for your dinner, rather than an exhaustive record of everything I personally ate over the course of a year. Which would be pretty bloody terrifying, for one thing.

Supperclubs are a tricky one, too. I've been to lots of very good ones and a few pretty terrible ones, and if I only wrote up the good it would very soon become clear the glaring omissions were the bad. And although there's no good reason why I couldn't explain in exhaustive detail on these pages everything that was wrong with a meal served by a young couple in their own home in good faith, at cost price and with no other desire than for a random group of strangers to enjoy themselves, you can hopefully understand why I'm not. I may be a bastard, but I'm not evil.

There has been the odd exception, though. Ben Greeno's multi-course spectacular at his old flat in Hackney was worth shouting about for a number of reasons - it was one of the best meals I've ever been served in someone's house, for starters - but now also stands in historical interest as one of the jumping-off points for the Young Turks. Along with James Lowe and Isaac McHale, Greeno had a huge impact on the way restaurant food was heading in London, and now is doing the same for Sydney under the supervision of David Chang.

And now I'm going to break my own rule again because Sabel are also worth shouting about. They are one chef (him), one front of house (her) who most of the time are involved with outside catering and events management, but who every other weekend host a popup in the unlikely location of F Cooke pie'n'mash shop on Broadway Market in Hackney. And yes on the one hand they are just another trendy popup in East London serving Modern British food, but there is something more to these guys.

"Oxtail and smoked bone marrow pie, pickled red cabbage". I challenge you to see that on a menu and not want to order it immediately. It's a wee little thing, but thanks to a delicate golden pastry and a gentle smokey filling, easily satisfied. The sweet clovey pickled red cabbage was top-notch too.

Lamb scrumpets (what a brilliant word) were breaded, deep-fried fingers of lamb, accompanied with a tart redcurrant jelly. Commendably greaseless and using powerfully flavoured meat, they would give pork scratchings a run for their money in a top bar snack competition.

A grilled lettuce and anchovy salad was pretty as a picture. It also sparked off a conversation about how rarely you see grilled lettuce on a menu these days, and how nice it is when done properly. The eggs had precisely soft yolks, the lettuce full of flavour and not too mushy, and some croutons added a good crunch. One of those dishes that is deceptively simple and could easily have been a disaster had not each element been handled perfectly.

Cured sea trout was just as impressive. As with the salad, it superficially seems straightforward - just trout, on a plate, covered in dill-mustard dressing. But the trout was packed with flavour and wonderfully moist, the dressing balancing out the cured fish, and the side of pickled cucumbers was faultless. It also came with a slab of E5 bakehouse sourdough, a product that has never been known to lessen the qualities of a dish.

Then, beef cheek and mash. If you're already fan of beef cheek and mash, then you won't need me to go into too much detail - you'll just need me to tell you that it was a very, very good beef cheek and mash. And if you've not yet had the chance to try beef cheek and mash, then you should book yourself in at Sabel and order theirs immediately. Finally, if you're not the kind of person who can enjoy a chunk of rich, salty slow-cooked beef oozing its dark juices into a dollop of silky, cheese-spiked mashed potato then there is no hope for you, and you may as well just go and live on a commune somewhere and eat lentils.

With everything up to this point being so good, we weren't in the mood to stop there. So Eccles cake and Lancashire cheese provided a neat conjoint between the savoury and sweet courses, room-temperature cheese matched with a golden pastry case so full of gooey sultana mixture it practically exploded when I prodded it with a fork.

But the best, incredibly, was yet to come. An egg custard tart, with an impossibly light-yet-firm pastry base and a filling so expertly judged so as to somehow hold its shape on the plate yet melt away to a liquid in the mouth, was worth the 1 1/2 hour journey to Hackney and then some. It came with a rhubarb and ginger compote thing which, to be honest, it didn't need at all but was nonetheless also a very impressive bit of work.

So there we have it, and hopefully you can see why I think it's been worth a few words. Toby and Lianna are doing their thing on Broadway Market for a couple more weekends (dates here), and then - ah well after that, then things are likely to get quite interesting. They are looking for a permanent site, and anyone with the ability to provide one should be tripping over themselves to help out, because cooking and service of this standard deserves better than a draughty pie shop on Broadway Market. This may be the first, but all being well it almost certainly won't be the last you've heard of Sabel.

9/10

I was invited to review Sabel

Circus, Covent Garden

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 14:14:00 +0000

Is there really ever any need to have a bouncer at the door of a restaurant? What kind of trouble are Circus expecting from the Covent Garden post-theatre crowd? Are they worried gangs of day-trippers, passions roused by the matinee performance of Top Hat, will suddenly turn up en-masse and demand the opportunity to spend £20 on a crab curry?

Or maybe the burly security, the ostentatiously discreet entrance and the ranks of coolly-glamorous staff are all part of the performance of eating at Circus, and without them they'd be just another faintly disappointing pan-Asian joint in the heart of Tourist London.

There's the "cabaret" too, I suppose. They've probably allowed themselves a bit of a markup for that, although I can't help feeling if you wanted to see a good cabaret you could find better in Soho for less, and certainly if you were in the mood for a bit of sashimi and a cocktail then there are better places for that, too. In the end, what we have is somewhere that does both of these things, to a degree of competence certainly, but not really to the level the prices demand.

Take the beef & foie gras gyoza for example. £8 gets you four soggy bags of sickly sweet, vaguely beefy mixture with no discernible foie gras flavour, and with only a hint of the crust that should exist on properly prepared gyoza. They werent inedible, just inelegant and overpriced, and not something you'd rush to eat again. Happily, yellow tail sashimi was a lot more pleasant; £15 is clearly far too much for 8 small slices of fish, but the pickled beetroot and jalapeno dressing, while not about to win any prizes for authenticity, worked surprisingly well.

Next, encased in a pale, damp batter were half a dozen scampi - sorry, langoustine - so utterly devoid of flavour they may as well have deep-fried as many balls of cotton wool. Any high-street chip shop in the country could have done better, and you'd have had enough money left over to treat your friends too for the £15 this sad little pile cost.

Fortunately (not to mention bizarrely), a £30 Canadian lobster was cooked incredibly well, the tail meat succulent and the claws sweet and moist. Again, and at the risk of labouring the point, it's a lot of money for not a great deal of food but I've had enough dry, plasticky lobsters in my time to appreciate a good example when it shows up.

Dessert, called "Doughnuts & Magnums" was a mixed bag. The little cubes of white chocolate-covered ice cream on sticks were pleasant, as was a little pot of what I can only describe as the filling from a Mr Kipling apple pie (this is not a bad thing). But mini doughnuts were cardboardy and chewy, and "jasmine ice cream" was completely flavourless and quite unpleasant.

I know, I know, it's not about the food. It was a full house in Circus on Friday night, all very happily spending a small fortune on dinner with odd little five minute periods where the lights go down and someone wearing not very many clothes spins on a hoop from the ceiling. It's undeniably popular, so perhaps I'm just not their target audience. Maybe I just need to lighten up and stop moaning about soggy scampi. It's not the end of the world.

But as eyes adjusted to the light as the evening wore on, and the stage smoke cleared after yet another oddly underwhelming bit of hoop-spinning, the wobbly furnishings and stains on the white walls spoke of a place whose heyday, such as it ever was, was behind it. Circus is, all said and done, a theme restaurant for tourists and office parties, and though the food on the whole may be better than the dross served at Hard Rock or the Rainforest Café, its inspiration comes from a similar place - huge markups, with enough distractions going on elsewhere to make you not care too much. If superficiality rocks your boat, you may find something to enjoy. If you like fairly-priced food and a warm welcome, try elsewhere.

5/10

I was invited to review Circus. Apologies, as ever, for the terrible photos. It started off quite dark, and got darker.

Quality Chop House, Farringdon

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:55:00 +0000

The Quality Chop House on Farringdon Road is not, technically, new. There has been a restaurant in that same building with the same name for the majority of time since 1869, serving - as the moniker suggests - no-nonsense grilled meats and the like. There was, in the more recent past, an attempt to sell self-consciously trendy meatball sliders (God help us) which fortunately quickly moved to Westfield where it belonged, but the current owners have restored sanity as well as the attractive interior, and written a menu that harks back to its roots.

Like any such restaurant in London in 2013, though, what constitutes "British" food is up for somewhat liberal interpretation. The menu has plenty of St John-alike buzzwords like Middlewhite pork and the Longhorn beef that Hawksmoor and the Ginger Pig have made famous, but also sells fancy foreign snacks like charcuterie and lardo, and the Denham lamb comes with "confit shallots". Well la-di-da.

It's all good though. Pig scratchings would have been even better with an apple sauce dip, but it was after all just something to soak up a bottle of cava (an Easter treat, but we also needed something to deaden the pain of the unbelievably uncomfortable seats) and each had a nice balance between crunchy and chewy.

A crabcake was perhaps a bit light on the good stuff for £7.50 but was nicely seasoned and had a good crunchy crust. Look how nice the tableware is too.

Lamb ribs had been coated in mint sauce rather than as a separate dip, but once you got over the mess (finger bowls were provided) you realised the lamb had a great flavour and were perfectly cooked to just pink. And plenty of them.

Longhorn mince on dripping toast was everything it promised to be; a straightforward but deeply satisfying plate of loose meat on a thick slab of sourdough made soggy with cooking juices. A bit more toast and a slightly less mountainous helping of beef may have made a more balanced dish overall but I'd certainly rather have too much beef than too little, and £12.50 is a good price for a main course.

There was no room to pick fault with these lamb sweetbreads though. Tender little nuggets of golden brown, nestled in a tasteful arrangement of crunchy raddish and crispy bacon, they were dressed in one of those mind-bendingly rich demi-glace sauces that you wish you could just go away and drown in. Sauces like this are the reason I eat out; to make them yourself would take days, cost a fortune due to the lack of economies of scale, and you'd probably mess it up anyway. Well, I would.

By this time another bottle of Bordeaux had bumped the bill up past the average spend here for two people for lunch, but even so, alongside the utterly charming service (Josie, ex- of Heston Blumenthal's Dinner so there's a pedigree for you) it still seemed like a very reasonable total. And once we'd wobbled off into a taxi we both agreed we'd definitely be back, which in the end tells you all you need to know. I wasn't completely floored by Quality Chop House, it is after all just a solid British eatery serving familiar dishes for not very much money, but it slots so happily into the London dining scene it's like it's been here for the best part of 150 years. Which of course, in many ways, it has.

7/10

Etsu, Liverpool

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 14:42:00 +0000

Perhaps it was the contrast between the Arctic weather sweeping around Beetham Plaza that Saturday night and the cozy glow of the dining room, or the cheery welcome from the front desk, but I have rarely had my expectations of a meal turned around so dramatically by just walking through a restaurant's front door. It's not that I wasn't expecting much of Etsu; it had been recommended and I wouldn't have been there at all had I not been mildly optimistic, but this was, after all, a Japanese restaurant in Liverpool. And while competition for Spanish and Chinese (not to mention British) joints has created the likes of Lunya, Yuet Ben and 60 Hope Street (all worth visiting), if your closest rival is a Yo! Sushi then you really don't have to try too hard to be the best.

But Etsu are trying, and trying bloody hard, and, more importantly, passing with flying colours. The service was the first indication this was an operation with heart and soul - front of house in Liverpool are known for their friendliness and enthusiasm, less so (it has to be said) for their knowledge of whatever it is they're serving. Here though, every item of every dish was explained in detail on request, and the traditional Scouse charm was matched with an efficiency I've not seen anywhere else in the city.

Which would have all meant nothing, of course, had the food not been up to scratch. But even the most humble of dishes we ordered, such as these house pickles, showed an attention to detail that punched far above the very reasonable amount they were charging for it. It was all good, but some cabbage was my favourite, perfectly balanced between sweet and sour with just a hint of kimchi-like fermentation.

Sashimi, whilst having the most potential for disaster, acquitted itself perfectly well. It's probably not their fault I had a slightly better selection at Roka a couple of days previously, but it's also worth pointing out that the selection at Roka was a very similar volume of food and cost £28. This cost £9.50.

Some scallop nigiri though were lovely, as were a couple of pieces of gunkan masago, involving capelin roe. I'm afraid there's no picture of those as they disappeared almost as soon as they were placed on the table, they were that good.

With the trend in London towards extreme specialisation, especially with Japanese restaurants (Koya for udon, Tonkotsu for ramen, Shiori for Kaiseki etc) it was a surprise at first - not to mention a slight worry - to see sashimi, katsu curry, udon and tempura all on the same menu. But the breadcrumbed chicken in curry sauce was at least as good as that you can get from Wasabi, and I happen to think the Wasabi katsu curry is pretty good. At least, it was before they saw fit to change the recipe and serve it in a weird TV dinner tray and douse the fried chicken with tamarind. Can I have my little hot cardboard pot of rice and fried chicken with curry sauce on the side back please?

Sorry, I digress. Yasai tempura udon was very well done, the noodles thick and meaty, the broth rich and comforting, and the bits of fried veg light enough to enjoy without a hint of grease-induced queasiness. In fact this was probably the most impressive dish of all, showcasing a number of different techniques on one plate and getting all of it as close to correct as makes no odds. Sashimi may "just" be fresh fish on a plate, but good bubbly tempura requires quite a bit of skill.

The fact we decided to squeeze in a final course of matcha doriyaki despite being quite full shows how much we didn't want the evening to end. It was worth every bit of the £5.45, moist and not too sweet, and like everything else was served with a smile.

And it's the service, I think, that I will remember most about Etsu. That seems harsh on the food, but I don't mean it to - everything we ordered ranged from good to excellent and was priced so low I wondered at first whether our bill was a mistake - but in a town where the most you can usually expect from your waiter or waitress is that they bring you what you order and don't accidentally break any of your limbs in the process, to interact with such enthusiastic, happy people over the course of a couple of hours was an absolute joy. And it's also the reason why, at this moment in time, Etsu may just be the best restaurant in Liverpool.

9/10

Master & Servant, Shoreditch

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 13:02:00 +0000

Damn you Quality Chop House. Not because you're not a good restaurant - I'm fairly confident you are - but because, thanks to a power cut last night you were closed, and having got myself in the mind for a nice meal out I decided to stay on the 243 bus and try a new place in Hoxton Square instead of just going home and having some reheated pizza. Which would have been a far less painful option, as it turns out.

But there's no point wondering what could have been. What's done is done. And instead of adding my voice to the tidal wave of praise for Quality Chop House, which I fully intend to do as soon as soon their lights are back on, I'll have to tell you about Master & Servant. It's in Hoxton Square, it serves (eventually) a menu of modern British dishes, and I wish I'd gone straight home and reheated some pizza instead.

The first sign something was wrong was the fact that for most of the long, long time we spent sat in that draughty dining room, we were the only customers. Master & Servant is still a relatively new place - it replaces a mediocre Thai restaurant which never seemed to have anyone in it either - but even so you'd expect a bit more interest from the new restaurant capital of London (Shoreditch) than that, especially given the menu reads rather well. Oysters, devilled duck hearts, half crab & mayonnaise, ox cheek and celeriac - these are crowd-pleasing dishes that when made well could lift any jaded diner's heart. So it was with great optimism we ordered a few of them and waited for the show to begin.

And waited. And waited. One glass of wine turned into three, house bread was nibbled at then picked off then replaced. Six o'clock turned into seven, and still no sign of any food. Then just as we were wondering if we shouldn't just cut and run (oh how I wish we had), a commotion on the other side of the room. The good news was that our starters had arrived; the bad news was that the waitress had accidentally tipped the whole lot of them down the stairs and so we had to wait - again - for them to be replaced.

Mystifyingly, although it had taken a full hour for Master & Servant to make some food to throw down the stairs, it took only another 5 minutes to replace those same dishes and bring them to the table. Even so, we soon wished they hadn't bothered. Grilled duck hearts, to pick the first thing we tried, were a winning combination of greasy and over-vinegared, like they'd been soaked in cold oil then doused in Sarson's. Very bizarre.

House sausages tasted OK at first but had a distressing farty aftertaste which lingered well into the late evening. They came presented on two whole baked onions which tasted like whole baked onions. And a grilled quail was completely unseasoned and desperately dull, despite having been crisped up on the grill to a good texture. Kudos to Master & Servant at least for finding a way of making quail boring; I never would have thought it possible until last night.

After those three abominations, we awaited the arrival of the one main course - lemon sole - with a combination of morbid curiosity and terror. It didn't disappoint. Overcooked and mushy, with a skin of grey leather that peeled off like soggy kitchen towel, it was covered in a mound of pickled salsify which cleverly managed to highlight the lack of seasoning in the fish, as well as being inedibly sweet itself. And even a day later the memory of a side of "courgettes, cumin & yoghurt" is making me gag - that's cold, slimy courgettes, shredded into thick noodles for who knows what reason, and topped with a blob of cumin-thickened yoghurt. "It tastes", said my friend, "like armpit sweat and deodorant".

To give Master & Servant a grain of credit where due, they did take a couple of glasses of wine off the bill to apologise for the wait, which I suppose is something. But even with a discount the total came to £70, which is still approximately £70 more than what it was worth.

It was in shock as much as sadness, though, that we paid up and queasily slunk out. More than anything, it just didn't seem fair. We did nothing wrong - we ordered in good faith, carefully and in a promising area of town, in an attractively designed restaurant with a very appealing menu. And yet somehow events had conspired to produce a truly terrible meal. What had we done to deserve it?

Anyway, lesson learned. Next time I have it in my mind to visit a new restaurant that everyone's talking about, and it's closed for whatever reason, I won't try and find a short notice backup on the same bus route. I'll turn around and go home and reheat some pizza. Sometimes it's best to know when you're beaten.

3/10

You Decide 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 11:19:00 +0000

Given what happened last time I put a blogpost subject up for public vote (you utter bastards), you may be wondering why I'd put myself through the same ordeal again. It's a fair question.

But I'd be a fool to think most of you aren't only reading these pages for the occasional sadistic pleasure of seeing me spend my hard earned on a diabolical meal, and there's always the chance you might send me to Le Gavroche or Pollen Street Social instead of the Clapham Junction branch of Wimpy. So instead of pre-populating the poll with nice places I actually want to go to like last year, I'm going to call your bluff and start you off with a list of real shockers. Then hopefully, thanks to a clever bit of reverse psychology you'll add your own nice options and I'll end up somewhere good.

Oh, who am I kidding. Do your worst.

VOTE HERE

EDIT 15/03/13: It appears I'll be going to Mr Wu's all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. I hope you're all very pleased with yourselves.

Cheese and Biscuits on tour: San Francisco

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 14:50:00 +0000

Parts of San Francisco, this will not be news to many of you, are quite spectacularly beautiful. You'll have seen the impossibly severe roads lined with picturebox Victorian rowhouses, the Golden Gate Bridge, the cable cars and the glittering waterfront from countless travelogues and movie locations, but up close it's all even more impressive.

The Pacific Heights and Telegraph Hill areas of town, in particular, have a unique kind of dramatic impact; standing at a street junction with one road plunging down towards Alcatraz Island and the other soaring infeasibly skyward is equally jaw-dropping and unnerving, like that scene from Inception when the buildings start folding up and over themselves. It's almost enough to put your off your lunch.

I said almost. Given my priorities when visiting a new city position eating and drinking significantly higher than sleeping or breathing, I had a list of places to cram into a whistle-stop 3-day stay, and all a strenuous traipse up and down Lombard St was going to do was work up an appetite. So breakfast at the excellent Thorough Bread bakery near our Air B&B in Castro gave way to a an obligatory terrifying cable car ride up to Russian Hill (surprising how paranoid Americans are about health and safety in most cases, and yet are quite happy to make you hang on white-knuckled to the back of a covered wheelbarrow as it hurtles up a mountain) and lunch at Leopold's.

A boisterous Austrian gastaus isn't the first thing that might come to mind when thinking of San Francisco, but a beer and a poached egg salad was just the ticket after barely having time to work off a pound of pastries from Thorough Bread. A white bean soup, too, was typically hearty Austrian fayre, even if we weren't as badly as need of its warmth as presumably most are in Austria this time of year, and one of our party even managed to stretch to a pile of grilled sausage and sauerkraut, all very well received.

Maverick, a restaurant in Castro serving regional (largely southern) cuisine had the kind of menu an American food obsessive like me dreams about. The buttermilk fried chicken was predictably brilliant, as were some miniature lemon tarts for dessert, but the star of the evening was devilled eggs with caviar, the kind of dish that can make an entire trip. We still talk about it.

The next evening was Oscar Night, and I'm afraid the first real disappointment. No, not just Brave winning Best Animated Feature (I mean come on, ahead of Frankenweenie, ParaNorman, Pirates! and Wreck-It Ralph? Are they insane?) - a takeaway from Mission Chinese. I am painfully aware that judging a venue on its takeaway offering is a bit like having a beer in the street outside Harry's Bar then moaning about the lack of complimentary peanuts, but we really found it hard to see what all the fuss was about. For a not insignificant chunk of cash, lamb ribs were 99% fat, Mapo Tofu was notable for little other than its eye-watering dry heat, and all dishes, including the famous Chongqing chicken wings and Kung Pao pastrami, were disastrously salty. I've since learned that the head chef has left to do something in New York, which may explain something, if not excuse it.

The next morning though, a stunning selection of pastries at Tartine got us back on track. One of the most acclaimed bakeries in the US, if not the world, Tartine is always busy and always churns out incredible product. The gigantic ham and cheese croissant, for example, was so astonishingly good with its dark crust, soft filling and perfect balance of dairy and protein that I can hardly believe a better version is made anywhere in France. The only downside, in fact, is that given Tartine's immense popularity, much like anywhere else that has them queuing round the block no matter what, the serving staff aren't often all sweetness and light. I realise it must stressful dealing with such huge numbers all day every day with no end in sight, but as we were unceremoniously chucked our carefully-selected purchases and told to bugger off (I paraphrase) a quote from Absolutely Fabulous came to mind from when Edina found herself in a Kensington art gallery - "You only work in a shop you know. You can drop the attitude."

And talking of bad attitudes, this might be a good time to bring up the biggest problem I had with this city, something which really took a shine off most of the many wonderful things it has to offer - San Francisco is Crazy Central. In no other place in the world have I ever seen so many drug casualties, hoboes, lunatics and destitutes. We were shouted at on the bus, screamed at in the street, sung to, propositioned and abused more or less wherever we went. Sure the smart areas of town had fewer issues, but it seemed every tiny area of public space was a cardboard city or had people pushing their belongings round in a old shopping trolley, and it made getting around - particularly on public transport though by no means exclusively - a bit, well, unpredictable. I'm not going to pretend I have any idea why the problems should be so bad here and why elsewhere in California seems to have more of a handle on it, but it's certainly something to be aware of.

I swear I will end this post on a lighter note, but we have one more disappointment to get out of the way first. I don't know what's happened to Chez Panisse since it was one of the most well-regarded and famous restaurants in the US, but I can only tell you time has not been kind on this Berkeley stalwart and these days the pioneer of California cuisine now appears happy to charge credulous guests (that would be me then) a vast amount for dreadfully boring food. Perhaps in 1971 it was acceptable to charge $150 a head for a spinach & ricotta pie, some greasy pieces of duck and a (actually this was OK) crème caramel, but we left feeling completely ripped off. Thoroughly not recommended, although I promise it wasn't me that set fire to it a couple of days ago.

But happier times awaited elsewhere. Back in Mission the next day we jumped in the queue for Dynamo Donuts, surely the next imported American fad to hit London if these are anything to go by (Electric Donuts have already made a start). Lovely friendly staff and great fresh donuts with a variety of very interesting toppings such as "Meyer lemon and huckleberry" or "passionfruit milk chocolate". And just round the corner, another first - lunch at an El Salvadorian restaurant for pupusa, a kind of thick corn tortilla filled with cheese and pork. The pupusa were very nice - incredibly filling for something so deceptively small and pretty cheap, but a huge bowl of shrimp soup was the unexpected star of the meal, powerfully flavoured with a generous number of plump, juicy shrimp. At the very least, I'm glad they turned out better than the "Mushy Disturbances of Corn" promised by my specially-purchased augmented-reality translation app (above).

Ah, I almost forgot. Straight from the airport early in the morning on the first day we hired a car and drove to Napa. A brief tasting at the Alpha Omega vineyard opened the door to lunch, and we found ourselves in the Oxbow market just down the road, sat at the bar at the Hog Island Oyster co. It is difficult, in fact I might argue impossible, not to enjoy yourself eating fresh oysters, drinking Sauvignon Blanc and pulling apart whole Dungeness crabs of an afternoon, and it is this place I think reflects the side of San Francisco cuisine the world is more familiar with - fresh seafood, served with charm and with a nice cold glass of local wine.

A strong start, and end, to the trip then, and plenty to love in-between, but like the city itself geographically and otherwise, the food was (groan) a bit up and down. Tartine aside, we seemed to do better by avoiding the big names and just wandering into whichever little place was nearest, which also had the advantage of not requiring risking life and limb by travelling on public transport. Getting there was a cinch, though, thanks to Virgin America, our little house in Castro was a joy, and though it will never replace dear old San Diego in my affections, it's clear there's a lot more to know of this enigmatic, topsy-turvy town.

Leopold's 7/10

Maverick 7/10

Mission Chinese 4/10

Tartine 8/10

Chez Panisse 3/10

Dynamo Donut 7/10

El Salvador 6/10

Hog Island Oyster Co 9/10

The Clove Club, Shoreditch

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 12:11:00 +0000

In the beginning, three chefs, Ben Greeno, James Lowe and Isaac McHale, having trained at some of the most influential restaurants in the world (Noma, the Ledbury, etc.), began running special evenings under the collective name the Young Turks. Invariably wildly popular, and winning lavish praise from anyone lucky enough to attend, it was inevitable that they would attract the attention of the movers and shakers and before long Greeno was cherry-picked by David Chang to launch his Sydney outpost of Momofuku. By all accounts, he's doing very well.

So then there were two. Lowe and McHale, after gracing the rooftops of Peckham with a popup at Frank's Campari bar in the summer of 2011, began a residency in the newly refurbished upstairs dining room of the Ten Bells pub in Spitalfields, where the reviews were similarly salivating. I ate at Upstairs a couple of times and it really was very good indeed; don't ask me why I never wrote it up, I definitely should have done, sometimes these things happen.

And now there is one. McHale, now Lowe-less but accompanied by the two giants of front of house (in both senses of the word) Daniel and Johnny, has moved into an annex of the Shoreditch Town Hall once occupied by the disastrously ill-conceived Monsieur M (you know what an area of town blessed with lots of amazing Vietnamese restaurants didn't need? A mediocre Vietnamese restaurant). It's called the Clove Club, it opened on Monday and you should go as soon as you can.

OK, so I've long been a fan of the Young Turks' output and this was never likely to be a negative post. And I hesitate after the drubbing David Sexton got on Twitter for his not wholly upbeat writeup of the opening night in the Standard, because I was there the same evening albeit in the more informal a la carte bar area. But given the quality of the dishes we were served, the slick service and the generally positive vibes that chime through every element of this operation, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess there were other factors at play in that piece than a desire to be objective. Put it this way - if you ever read a restaurant review that grumps just as much about "hipsters and food bloggers" and a "yearningly aspirational diaspora" as the food, then take the star rating with a pinch of salt.

Anyway, it's about time I told you what you get for your £35 a head. A short list of house cocktails were all refreshingly unsweet and reasonably priced. "Clove Club Sprits[sic]" was a Polpo-a-like aperitif served in a wineglass, while an "Orange Gin Ricky" was an straightforwardly quaffable highball of fresh juice and gin.

Dishes, while vaguely distinguishable by price point, are only divided on the menu into 'cold' and 'hot' rather than 'starters' and 'mains', and arrive as and when unless instructed otherwise. This is, of course, how it should be on a bar menu designed for sharing, and at least prevents anything hanging around for ages under a heat lamp slowly baking. First thing we tried were some pretty fingers of sliced chicory, I think gently cooked somehow as they had none of that usual extreme bitterness of raw chicory, dressed in a light cream dressing and topped with toasted hazelnuts. Like Upstairs and his previous ventures, much of McHale's food has a masterful control of texture, used to often stunning effect.

If you were lucky enough to try the grouse sausages served at the Young Turks Frank's dinner, then you will love the pigeon variety served at the Clove Club. Whoever they've found to create these unctuous, gamey little beggars deserves a big pat on the back, and matching them with a powerful fermented chilli "ketchup" is inspired. The "ketchup", in fact (really a hot sauce in the Sriracha vein but actually far nicer) should really be available to buy - I imagine it would go with just about anything.

"Lemon Sole and Indian Spices" was the kind of thing that could either be a complete disaster or the highlight of an evening. Fortunately, this was the latter. A soft, light piece of fresh fish was coated in the most incredible complex, buttery coating and topped with toasted almonds, creating a dish that satisfied in every department. The raita-style crunchy dressing added a cooling touch, and lifting the flesh off the bone was a rare treat.

Having ordered savoury courses quite conservatively and buoyed by what we'd eaten so far, desserts were requested without a second thought. The single official dessert on the bar menu is an éclair, and bloody lovely it is too - all light and freshness and way more attractive than my murky photo suggests.

But we were also treated to a refugee from the tasting menu next door, a bowl of warm blood orange, sheep's milk and wild fennel which, like everything else, was a deceptively complex arrangement of flavours and textures, temperatures and techniques. It was great, and only reinforced my desire to go back for the Full Monty.

With three glasses of wine plus a very pleasant side of smacked cucumber I completely forgot to take a photo of, I think £71.80 is a very reasonable total for food of this standard. Service isn't added on, which is a lovely touch, but unfortunately water is - we had asked for tap, was told that the water from the bar was all tap even if we wanted sparkling anyway, but then were charged £1 for something called "Vivreau". So they lose a point for that. Oh and some of the window tables are a bit draughty. But these are niggles.

As I've been at pains to point out, these are very early days - the earliest day in fact - and only the bar menu not the full multi-course multi-sensory experience offered in the main dining hall next door. But you don't always need an exhaustive sampling of every corner of a restaurant's offering to know when you're onto a good thing. In fact, you very rarely do. Based on the all of the above, the pedigree of a chef like McHale and my burning desire to revisit as soon as possible, the Clove Club is a smash.

9/10

Mision 19, Tijuana, Mexico

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:42:00 +0000

The trajectory of a high-end restaurant is very often the same. Open in a blaze of publicity with unrealistically low prices, parachute in all the best front of house staff you can get hold of just as long as it takes for all the eager early-doors critics and bloggers to write positive reviews, then once the hype dies down, jack up the prices and lose all your most expensive employees (and head chef). Then bring out a book.

As a blogger I'm often criticised for only visiting restaurants once in the first few weeks than never again, but if the alternative is having a slightly mediocre overpriced meal somewhere that used to be better, can you blame me? A representative experience is all well and good, but this is my money I'm spending (usually) and as I've repeated plenty of times before on these pages, going anywhere hoping for a bad meal (note: "hoping" is not the same as "expecting") is a recipe for disaster.

The good news, though, is that at least one fancy-pants haute cuisine joint, instead of sitting back on its healthy collection of glowing reviews and bringing a book out, has actually considerably improved over the last twelve months to become one of the most exciting and memorable meals I've enjoyed in a very long time. The bad news - for Londoners at least - is that the restaurant in question is in Mexico. But I thought it was worth a proper report here because Mision 19 really is good enough to bother crossing continents for, and because as many people as possible need to know that Mexican is one of the truly great world cuisines of the 21st century.

We started with a mini burger. Which was weird. Fortunately, this was the only thing that was less than spectacular, so it's easily ignored, but you still have to wonder what it's doing opening a tasting menu that was so accomplished in every other regard. A slightly stale bun, a bit of beef, some guacamole and I think some cheese. Pointless but hardly offensive. Just weird.

Normality was restored with this dainty bit of pickled tomatillo and radish. Attractive presentation on a little marble rock, and some powerful and recognisably Mexican flavours.

Beetroot and oyster doesn't seem like the most obvious match but this was actually a very clever frothy sweet beetroot salsa of some kind, on top of a raw oyster. The natural soiliness of beetroot was toned down by whatever they'd done with the dressing, and the oyster still managed to be the main flavour. Sorry about the photo - attempted a couple with flash on (we were in a sort of private bit near the kitchens so weren't annoying too many people) with even more disastrous results than normal.

A dish that had impressed us so much last year was even better in 2013 - a sort of scallop guacamole concoction served in a tall clear glass, with all kinds of different textures, colours and complimentary flavours. We particularly enjoyed an incredibly powerful blob of concentrated mushroom jelly lurking somewhere in the mix.

In fact, mushrooms of many kinds featured heavily in the menu that evening. It must be the time of year - Chef Javier Plascencia, credited with being a key player in the current resurgence of Tijuana cuisine and a fierce proponent of that international foodie buzzword "localism", and will use as many ingredients from nearby producers as possible. This next dish contained a good variety of fungi alongside some abalone, something I'd never tried before due to its prohibitive cost in most European restaurants. It was very good - firm but not too chewy, with a pronounced sweet flavour.

This risotto, too, came dusted with a layer of dried mushrooms which gave it a rather odd appearance. The flavour, though was incredible - one of the best risottos I've had the pleasure of eating anywhere in the world, ethereally light and perfectly seasoned and 3000 miles away from the stodgy savoury rice puddings that your local high street Italian would serve, both literally and figuratively.

Served in a very attractive glass bowl was a kind of deconstructed pork tamale, with pickles, herbs and ground corn. Pulled pork (sorry, "carnitas" as we're in Mexico) was moist and packed with flavour and it all made absolute sense as a portion of high end comfort food.

If you think this beef course looks good, if you think that looks like the most perfectly charcoal-grilled chunk of medium-rare sirloin, accompanied by some crispy confit shoulder and two gently blackened pieces of romesco broccoli, then you'd be right. It was good. But it was also way better than good - the kind of quality of beef I've had perhaps only once of twice in my life and always from Goodman steak restaurants in London or certain high-end joints in New York. Where other dishes at Mision 19 had been a balancing act of sourcing and technique, this pared-down presentation (just, after all, meat and two veg if we're being completely reductive) displayed a huge confidence in the product, and it's a confidence that was completely justified. A stunning dish, a highlight amongst highlights.

There were eight on our table that night, and so for dessert, rather than anything so prosaic as a soufflé and a couple of macaroon each we were treated to a full-size version of every dessert on the a la carte menu that day. I won't bother going into detail on them all - I can't, for one thing - but a strawberry and dark chocolate tart went down particularly well, as did a selection of Baja California cheeses.

I'd like to end it there, with eight very happy people rolling back across the border to Southern California stuffed and under $100 a head lighter after plenty of wine and some very good house cocktails. For that is indeed what happened. But I'd be doing you all a disservice if I didn't mention the one only real drawback of dinner at Mision 19, enough to lose them a couple of C&B points - the often shoddy service. For a place aiming at the heights of international gastronomy - and for the most part hitting a bullseye as far as the food on the plate is concerned - I would have liked wine glasses topped up (or at least letting us do it ourselves instead of keeping the bottles annoyingly out of reach), more effort made explaining the dishes (in English or in Spanish; we had a couple of fluent Spanish speakers but even they struggled with the rushed and mumbled descriptions) and more attention paid by the staff generally, who seemed to much prefer being huddled around the reception area chatting than clearing used cutlery, bringing water and so on.

But this is something for them to work on, and is by no means a situation that is cursed to continue. I distinctly remember a first visit to Can Roca back in 2007 which suffered from very much the same service issues even while the food was earning international attention, and even today it still has the odd Catalan moment. It's annoying, but somehow inevitable in the grand order of things, that the brilliance and individual talent of a chef like Javier Plascencia can be let down in formative years by the apathy of front of house staff, but give it a little longer and I'm sure they'll catch up. And when they do, there'll be no stopping them.

8/10

Shoryu, Piccadilly

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:31:00 +0000

There are two possible reasons I can think of for the disastrous bowl of food I was served on my first visit to Shoryu. The first, and this is me in "benefit-of-the-doubt" mode, is that someone in the kitchen misread the reading on an unfamiliar pair of scales, and erroneously dumped twenty times the correct amount of wasabi into the recipe for Wasabi Tonkotsu. The second, more worrying possibility is that there really are people out there who would voluntarily eat what I can only describe as Pepper Spray Noodles and it was actually supposed to be like that.

I have literally never been in so much agony in a restaurant in my life. With the first mouthful of wasabi-soaked nori my throat closed up, my eyes started streaming and the most excruciating pain shot around my sinuses. This wasn't anywhere near a normal level of heat, this was a chemical weapon, deadly distilled mustard gas designed to incapacitate and maim. I can eat spoonfuls of English mustard without breaking a sweat, can happily polish off a plate of the infamous Silk Road hand-torn cabbage and have been known to only wince briefly during a portion of the Heron's laab ped, but this was something else. This wasn't lunch, this was being maced.

I know, I know, I should have said something - I suppose I was just too shellshocked to speak. I wouldn't even have ordered it in the first place if it hadn't have been a daily lunch special but in fact, out of sheer curiosity I might go back and order it again just to see if the first time was a mistake. Because if it wasn't, and the Wasabi Tonkotsu from Shoryu is served like that to everyone, then I have a duty to inform the Department of Health. Not to mention the Ministry of Defense - I'm sure they could make use of it somehow.

Having only just survived the Death By Wasabi Tonkotsu, then, I was in no hurry to return to Shoryu, but enough people rated it and enough positive writups online convinced me that perhaps not everything on the menu there was designed to cause permanent damage. So on a second visit I tried the standard house Tonkotsu ("Ganso") which was, thank God, not just edible but rather nice, with a soothing milky broth and generous helping of bouncy egg noodles. Perhaps the slices of rolled pork weren't quite as powerfully flavoursome as those at Tonkotsu on Dean St., and perhaps Bone Daddies has a slightly more exciting variety of styles, but this was still a good ramen.

Hirata buns, ordered out of sheer curiosity rather than hunger as the Tonkotsu would have been a plenty big enough lunch on its own, were decent enough. I guess it's not their fault that I prefer the Korean style more, but cheap mayo and pork fat is not a combination I'd fight to try again and the bun casings were rather dense and wilted. Generous amount of them for £6 though.

Of the sides, edamame would have been nicer warm and a parcel of onigiri rice stuffed with pickles was a strange side to pair with noodles on the lunch menu, but neither were offensive. These both came alongside the Wasabi Tonkotsu though, and I think a lump of nori-wrapped wire wool would have slipped down like ambrosia next to that.

But as I say, I can't know for sure whether the Wasabi Tonkotsu was deliberate or not, and in the interests of fairness I will try and focus on the elements that didn't nearly cause hospitalisation; Shoryu is objectively is doing plenty of things right. I only wish I had the time and money to try more of the menu, such as the fried chicken and soft-shelled crab that Bone Daddies do so well, but even just a very competent house Tonkotsu and a glass of water for £10 is a reason enough to visit, and based on the crowds flocking to 9 Lower Regent's Street, plenty are. It's perfectly fine, it's just not my favourite of the new mini-wave of ramen joints in London. And that's not just because they may have tried to kill me. Honest.

6/10

The Electric Diner, Notting Hill

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 12:03:00 +0000

It's easy to dismiss Electric Diner as the latest in a long line of copycat American comfort food outlets, and indeed I'm going to do just that, but it's also too easy to forget that outside of a select group of bloggers, critics and Twitter-stalking restaurant fanatics (and I have a horrible feeling I qualify for all three), this kind of thing is still a relative novelty. If you find yourself inwardly groaning whenever you learn about a new no-choice chicken restaurant or Soho burger bar, you're in a tiny minority. Most of the population of London haven't been eating at Meatwagon since 2010, still think of ramen as a kind of soup they do at Wagamama, and would consider a new diner selling gourmet hot dogs and cheeseburgers a huge improvement on their local Chicken Cottage or GBK.

It's also worth noting that, Soho or Shoreditch excepted, we're really still not spoiled for choice when it comes to this kind of thing. West London in particular, never at the top of the tree when it came to decent places to eat (the astonishing Ledbury being the exception that proves the rule) is one of those affluent restaurant deserts (see also Hampstead, Chelsea) that would welcome anyone trying to do something even slightly different. So perhaps I shouldn't be to harsh on Electric Diner for being a bit derivative; it is, after all, better this than another bloody Strada.

So I'll try and stress the positives. It's a beautiful room, with a long, sleek open kitchen on one side and low booths nestled under exposed brick on the left, stretching towards a gleaming white-tiled back wall. Staff were pleasant and efficient, and despite the dreaded "we'll need your table back by 7:30" (after arriving only just before 6:15) they were at least attentive enough to feed and water us in just under that time. My Hemingway Daquiri was a great example of its kind - unsweetened and forcefully alcoholic, just like the great man used to like them (only he would order doubles - that's four shots of rum at a time).

But I'm afraid my enthusiasm can't stretch to the food. An £8 portion of chicken livers came served with sweet brioche bread and a small pot of congealed butter in case you weren't finding enough fat elsewhere on the plate. Pickles were decent but couldn't win against such a huge amount of grease and sugar, and so the overall effect was pretty unappealing. Also, it was all stone-cold. Surely it wouldn't have been impossible to fry up a few chopped chicken livers to order? It seemed a bit lazy.

Bologna Sandwich continued in the same vein - sliced mortadella (or wafer-thin ham, which was all it tasted of) and cheddar (I think) inside a very sweet brioche bun and with whole mini gherkins rolling around - a bit slapped-together, a bit careless. I know diner food isn't supposed to be too fussy but there was very little to get excited about here, just thin-sliced fat under melted fat between two pieces of fat. For a tenner.

It seems strange to complain about a side order of bacon being too fatty, but these really were 90% lard, and I think I'm entitled to moan about how even the thin strips of red flesh were crumbly and dry, the fact that the sugary dressing just made the whole thing even more of a challenge to eat.

The "green salad", ordered because the rest of what was coming our way seemed a little heavy (oh how little we knew) was, despite an adequate dressing, nothing more than a supermarket ready-to-eat bag of mixed greens dumped on a plate, and nowhere near worth £6. Chips had a good crunch but were otherwise unmemorable, and for £4 for a small cup hardly represented value.

The bill for two, with a couple of beers on top of the above, came to £57, an amount I would have been happy to pay had I not left feeling so unpleasantly, overwhelmingly grease-sodden and had there just been one dish I could have considered ordering again. Looking back on the evening now all plates of food just merge into one huge, shapeless, lardy blob - the kind of thing you might start to resemble in fact if you ate there on a regular basis. Also, is there a reason they have their lighting so stupidly low? It started off just barely being enough to distinguish between animal, vegetable and mineral on the table in front of you, and halfway through the meal they turned it even lower.

But after all, this is Notting Hill, and if it's a choice between the Electric and getting on the tube to MeatLiquor, then perhaps it will find an audience. And as I say, if this was your first exposure to London's new wave of pimped-up US junk food joints and weren't on too much of a budget (both eminently possible if you live in Notting Hill), you may find enough to enjoy. It's a nice room, it would be a good place for a drink and it's better than a number of other places nearby. Oh, and they bring tap water without being asked. So they get an extra point for that too.

5/10

The Kitchen Table at Bubbledogs&, Fitzrovia

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 13:48:00 +0000

From the moment it was announced that husband and wife team Sandia Chang and James Knappett, ex of Per Se, the Ledbury, Roganic and you-name-it of world-class restaurants here and abroad, were opening their own place, the buzz was deafening. When it was further announced that their first collaboration was to be a small bar in Fitzrovia specialising in hot dogs and champagne, well, some anticipation turned to chuckles.

I loved Bubbledogs. It was - still very much is - a serious cocktail bar that cleverly matches what, for the want of a better description, I'll call "gourmet fast food" with a brilliant selection of grower champagnes and a smart front of house team that never put a foot wrong. It was ludicrously busy from the day it opened in the way these places often are, but there are very few people who ever braved the queues and got a table that would have cause to complain. Tasty food, great atmosphere, and friendly service; a perfect neighbourhood bar.

Ah, but - the story went - the best was yet to come. Behind thick leather curtains at the back of Bubbledogs was to be Kitchen Table - chef James' pride and joy, a gleaming Rolls-Royce of an open kitchen surrounded by just 19 seats, where lucky diners would watch in awe as a 13-course tasting menu was prepared in front of their eyes, each dish presented by the chef who designed, sourced the ingredients and cooked it. A foodie and chef-groupie utopia, a personal chef "experience" that laid raw the creative process of cooking and represented the very pinnacle of achievement in modern British cooking. I was certain I'd love every minute of it.

And don't get me wrong, the food was frequently astonishing, as accomplished as you might expect from a chef with Knappett's pedigree and as good an advertisement for London's place at the top of the food tree as you could possibly imagine. And if it wasn't for a few bizarre minutes halfway through the evening, I would have skipped out of Kitchen Table singing its praises as much as every other Tom, Dick and Marina that's set foot there. But I'm afraid, in the end, my memories of that evening aren't as golden as I was hoping they'd be.

We can start in happier times, though. First course of raw razor clams, cucumber, horseradish and mint was very like something you might be presented at the start of a Ledbury tasting menu - fantastic fresh seafood, lifted by just the right mix of aromatic herbs but still tasting unapologetically of the main ingredient. Loved the presentation, loved the showmanship - a great start.

Sea bass was a cured, largely raw piece of fish with a skin that had been blowtorched over 'wood coal', which as far as I can gather is a state of being somewhere between wood and coal. The smell as these things were being prepared was amazing, like a log fire in a fisherman's cottage, and though the texture was unexpected - chewy rather than flaky - the extra bite just meant the flavours lasted longer in the mouth. That on top by the way is fennel marmalade - a masterful accompaniment.

The next course was chicken skin, rosemary mascarpone and bacon jam. Do you think anyone in the history of the world has never not enjoyed chicken skin, mascarpone and bacon jam? No. I wasn't about to be the first.

"Kale" was a clever thing, a parmesan-soaked sponge of raw kale, topped with flakes of pickled radish. When you bit into a particularly spongy bit of kale the sauce burst out like a kind of inside-out Caesar salad, smooth and salty and fresh.

Perhaps my favourite course of all, "Cod" contained the most perfect gyoza-like gnocchi dressed in cod's roe, topped with fresh shaved chestnuts. There wasn't much more to it than that, but it was crunchy, salty, rich and umami in all the right places and an absolute delight.

Then, just as the second glass of bubbly was having its desired effect and it looked like this was shaping up to be one of the most enjoyable evenings in a long time, it all went a bit wrong. Not with the food - that continued in a similar stellar vein - but with the atmosphere in the room. Halfway through my cod course I looked up and saw Knappett's face twisted into something halfway between anger and agony. I have no idea what had happened - as I say you wouldn't have known anything was amiss from what was presented to us to eat - but from the obscenities shot at his sous chefs to the way he was suddenly throwing plates and pans around, he was clearly not a happy man. In fact, he looked furious, the kind of rage I'd only previously seen from a man dressed in chef's whites on TV in a programme involving Gordon Ramsay, and the reaction from all around him was immediate - the waiters racing around wide-eyed, the juniors in whites chopping and slicing and prepping in an even more terrified and frantic fashion.

I looked around in astonishment to see if anyone else had noticed what was going on. On the face of it, they hadn't - people were chatting and enjoying their meals in much the same way as before, but then actually very soon, so was I - in the face of such an abrupt change of attitude, your first reaction is to pretend nothing's happening and hope it blows over, in case acknowledgement of the issue makes things worse. Even when one poor member of serving staff got called a "lazy c**t" (I don't think I'm paraphrasing) over the shoulder of a bemused Australian diner, nobody reacted. Could this be the kind of thing people were expecting?

Well, I wasn't, and I didn't like it. Call me a big old softie but I shrink when people lose their temper in any situation, never mind one in which everyone is taking part in the same interactive dinner, and I found the whole thing excruciatingly embarrassing. In a few minutes Knappett had gathered himself together enough to introduce the next course but by then the damage was done and I can't say I really found my appetite again. Which is a shame - for everyone - because food as good as this deserves an atmosphere suitable to enjoy it in, and front of house staff as good as those at Kitchen Table deserve to not have their efforts overshadowed by a head chef with a short temper.

So, in a thin semblance of normality, the evening continued. The calcots and cod dish, seemingly the cause of a kitchen meltdown, was wonderful - flaky cod fillet, smoky veg and a wonderful sharp homemade romesco sauce studded with toasted almonds.

Sous-vide mallard with blood orange and chard wasn't my companion's favourite dish but I am yet to not enjoy wild duck and thought the orange and olive combination, while definitely experimental, not wholly unpleasant.

Roebuck venison, served with roast cauliflower and damson yoghurt, was just about the best bit of bambi I've ever eaten - so full of flavour despite (we were told) not being hung at all, tender and fresh rather than gamey and bitter.

More venison came in the form of ragu under house pasta and smoked egg yolk, topped with panko breadcrumbs and tarragon. Again, lovely.

And a cheese course was a blob of unpasteurised Stichelton with some dainty curls of champagne-compressed apple.

Desserts, if not as wildly successful as those that had come before, still spoke of real skill. Alphonso mango purée (frozen when they were in season, they were careful to point out) and yoghurt ice cream was like a posh Solero (in a good way), lemon and cream cheese curd even survived the addition of beetroot ice cream (something I'd previously vowed to hate forever more) and finally a rhubarb "Tunnock's tea cake" was a clever and powerfully-flavoured last bite that contained a great mix of soft and crisp textures.

But what to make of it all? Perhaps much of my discomfort is a personal thing, and the more emotionally grounded amongst you could have shrugged off the Incident as just one of those things that must happen from time to time in any professional kitchen. It would be naive to think they don't happen, in fact, in restaurants all over the world every hour of service. But my point is, I'm not that naive. I know these things happen. I just don't want to see it. And even if you are the kind of person who can happily sit through the sight of a chef/owner striking the fear of God into all around him, only a real sadist would enjoy watching sous chefs and sommeliers desperately trying to do their job and pretend all's well while all hell breaks loose behind them.

And even if this was a complete one-off, and normally Knappett is as level-headed and composed as Mahatma Gandhi on a spa break, the Incident still made me question the whole logic of having the process of preparing food so nakedly on display. Is not some of the joy of eating stunning fine-dining like this the mystique of not knowing exactly how the magic happens?

There's a fine tradition of open kitchen bars in Japan, for sushi and yakitori amongst many others, but these are much different beasts - the sushi master will just press a piece of raw fish around some warm rice and it's done, or place some skewers of marinaded chicken over charcoal as needed - actions calculated to be part of the presentation rather than part of the preparation. Watching a poor junior chef, towards the end of a 12-hour day, desperately shaving as much raw chestnut into a bowl as possible without slicing his fingers off is not fun, or educational. It's just cruel. And had I been shielded from all that, the tantrums and the terror and the toil, I would have enjoyed my dinner infinitely more.

But here we are. And though I didn't enjoy my evening at Kitchen Table as much as I'd hoped, there is still the unavoidable fact that the food is some of the best you can find in town. If I'm the only person to ever catch them on a bad night, then consider the above nothing more than an anomaly, an excuse to pontificate grandly on the whole logic of open kitchens and, all said and done, a report of what I had for dinner one day. By all means, go, eat and drink and be merry, you'll probably love it. But I think I may just lean towards an "ignorance is bliss" perspective from now on - when it comes to eating out, too much reality is rarely a good thing.

6/10

EDIT 2: I've received a response from James that stands in such contrast to the usual cheffy posturing on Twitter I hope he won't mind if I publish it here:

@chrispople @marinaoloughlin I don't find this as bad news,like all the chefs I have worked for the passion to our food can run high at
— James Knappett (@jamesknappett) January 25, 2013

@chrispople @marinaoloughlin times every thing has to be right and at times they r not so tempers rise, to us this is care
— James Knappett (@jamesknappett) January 25, 2013

@chrispople @marinaoloughlin But no excuse for guests to c that so I'd like to apologises for offence caused and did not intend this at all
— James Knappett (@jamesknappett) January 25, 2013

EDIT: Forgot prices. The menu is £68/head and bottles of champagne start around £35 ish. We paid £108/head all in with drinks & service.

Clockjack Oven, Soho

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 16:05:00 +0000

If all you knew about Clockjack was that it was a brand new proto-chain, with a bare-bones menu serving only chicken with a handful of sides, a Piccadilly Circus location, carefully branded interiors and staff t-shirts, then I would understand why you'd steer well clear. I'll be the first to admit my expectations were low; the memory of the last ill-concieved crime against chicken (the risible Chooks) still burns like so much Frank's Hot Sauce and I wasn't in a hurry to see my hard-earned slip down the necks of another corporate blandathon or, for that matter, some Shoreditch art gallery where you can impress your friends with chicken that tastes like it's been rubbed down in Knorr (hang your head, Tramshed).

And yet from the moment the staff at Clockjack hollered a cheery greeting from behind the carving counter, I knew this was going to be the kind of place I'd have to try very hard to dislike. They're very on-trend these no-reservations, no-choice places but only the most stubborn (not to mention stupid) would automatically dismiss anywhere just because they happen to tick a few of the London restaurant cliché boxes, and everywhere deserves a chance. So with an open mind (or at least as open as I can manage in Piccadilly Circus) I ordered 3 pieces of roast chicken with chilli sauce, a side of double-cooked fries and hoped to God I wouldn't have to fill up at Pain Quotidien on the way back to the office.

Tap water arrived unprompted - a little touch that lightened my heart much more than it should have done. Why on earth does this not happen literally every time we eat out? Why are we even still BUYING bottled water? Tap water is available everywhere, is perfectly nice and is, for all intents and purposes, free. How is it, in 2013 I am STILL being made to feel like an inconvenience by answering the "still or sparkling" question with "tap please". From now on I'm going to make a special mention of anywhere, good or bad, that produces tap water for the whole table without being asked specifically to do so. What's depressing is that I expect it still won't happen very often.

As Clockjack is still in its first month of trading, there was a bit of gentle training still going on with some new members of staff. In front of the impressive gas-fired roasting chambers, as a quartet of chickens slowly rotated in comedy wings-aloft poses behind, someone was being given a carving lesson. And as I was the only customer in the place at 12:15 on a cold January lunchtime, I presume they were practising on mine. It sounded like hard work, so I wonder how they'll cope when the orders really start flooding in, but I was happy to be the guinea pig on this occasion.

I was also very happy to eat the finished product, as my chicken was, thankfully - not to mention completely unexpectedly - perfect in almost every way. I worry about the amount of time freshly-roasted birds hang around before being ordered in these rotisserie places so there's a chance I just hit some kind of perfect sweet spot of timing between too hot to serve and too dry to eat. But I can barely remember a better roast chicken cooked by anyone anywhere - every inch of it beautifully moist, with a golden crispy skin and aggressively (though by no means unpleasantly) seasoned. In keeping with the stripped-back nature of the place itself there was nothing fancy going on in terms of herbs or marinades, but you really didn't miss it. This is incredibly good chicken, free-range with a good strong showing of dark flesh, and yours for £6.95 for 3 joints.

By the time I'd polished off the last of the poultry, my mind was made up. Clockjack was a Very Good Thing Indeed. I could also mention the portion of double-cooked fries which did their job perfectly well, and a nice fresh ranch dressing which I was brought to try alongside the (slightly disappointing) chilli sauce. And if I was going to poke a hole in anything else it would be the rather uninspiring wine and beer list and the embarrassing logos on the t-shirts the women are forced to wear - "UNDRESS ME" they say on the front. Hilarious - but really these things are unimportant.

All you need to know is that chicken specialists Clockjack make possibly London's best roast poultry - and before you scoff at that claim you need to try it yourself - for very little money indeed. My bill came to a touch over £10 which nobody could have any cause to complain about, and I left with my faith in London's ability to cook chicken restored. It really is that good.

8/10

Wabi, Holborn

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Pople) — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 11:20:00 +0000

There's very few times I feel more self-consciously clueless about food than when I'm eating in a Japanese restaurant. Sure, learning the ingredients and preparations in any foreign culture can be a challenge - I'll die happy the day I can order dim sum and not feel like I'm playing a scratch card - but Japanese food is surely one of the most advanced and perfected cuisines on the planet, and comes in such a variety of guises learning even the basics can seem an impossible task.

For a start, there's rarely anything so straightforward as a "Japanese restaurant". Instead, there are udon bars, ramen bars, yakitori joints, sushi bars, okonomiyaki, kaiseki, Brazilian-fusion and probably a few others I'm yet to discover. The intense skill and focus needed to perfect each of these styles of food results in extreme specialisation, and anywhere brave enough to attempt more than a couple of them at once is setting themselves up for a fall.

If anyone can have a decent bash at a pan-Japanese restaurant though, it's a former Nobu head chef. Nobu, whatever you may think of their showy, A-list bait restaurants and eye-watering prices, always knew how to produce decent food, and Scott Hallsworth has worked in their kitchens in various glamorous locations all over the world for over a decade. The influence of the mothership doesn't just extend to the food, either - the vast basement space on Kingsway is nicely done, the gently spotlit black wood tables and cream banquettes giving a ever-so-slightly bland but familiar Mayfair vibe, and all front of house being very smart and smiley.

Miso soup was, well, Miso soup, but had a couple of shimeji mushrooms bobbing about in the broth to liven things up a bit. I quite liked that they didn't even offer the option of a spoon so I didn't feel too self-conscious loudly slurping it directly out of the bowl.

I'd ordered a single piece of otoro (fatty tuna) sashimi just to see how their raw skills were, and it wasn't bad, but nowhere near as good as the one from Sushi Tetsu a few months ago and just felt slightly less-than-perfectly-fresh. Also, despite sternly being informed on the menu that the sashimi was "not served with soy sauce", it arrived with, er, a little bowl of soy sauce and a specific instruction from the chef to dip the fish in it. Which was a bit odd.

The BBQ grill set, though, was just lovely. Skewers of soft sliced onions dipped in a powerful miso dressing, delicately boned chicken wings with a perfect crispy skin, a good dollop of powerfully-smoked aubergine salsa, and the most wonderfully cooked (if slightly underseasoned) lamb chops that were just so addictively tender I stripped them clean to the bone in seconds. The sesame-ponzu dressing was a great and time-tested match to the charcoal-crisped protein, and a blackened half of lemon topped it all off. The kind of food that, unless you were a vegetarian or had some other kind of eating disorder, you could not fail to appreciate.

Any criticisms, then, will be largely due to one thing - the prices. It is very easy to spend a lot of money in Wabi and not have a great deal to show for it, and I say that having enjoyed the food there very much indeed. With a (bitterly sharp, presumably a mistake of some kind - it tasted they'd forgotten to sweeten it) salad, some decent pickles and a bowl of rice my fairly modest lunch came to £27, and though I'd happily pay it again, Bincho Yakitori in Soho does better (and cheaper) skewers, Asakusa in Camden does better (and cheaper) sushi and although I didn't try their tempura if it's any better than Koya's I'll eat my kimono.

But for an area that's hardly blessed with great restaurants and for doing what it does with a good amount of style and flair, Wabi is worth a visit. Die-hard foodies will be put off by the very anti-2013 lack of extreme specialisation, but I can only see it getting better as the staff and kitchens bed in, and you'd have to be a real contrarian not to be won over by almost everything about the place. For better of for worse, it's Holborn's very own Nobu.

7/10