The Scrag End

Osteria Francescana, Via Stella 22, Modena

2011-09-21T12:58:00.002+01:00

“This dish,” Massimo Bottura, chef proprietor of the World’s 4th Best Restaurant*, modestly tells us, “moves from Robuchon at the bottom to Ferran Adria at the top, with my grandmother in between.” What nonna Bottura makes of that particular arrangement is, as far as I know, unrecorded, but it’s certainly the most pretentious thing I’ve heard in a restaurant.

The dish in question is one of the better efforts in our €130 ‘Classics’ tasting menu (a ‘Sensations’ menu would have cost €170, the ‘Traditional’ €100, and a la carte about €45 per dish). It’s a ‘compression of pasta and beans’ that features a wildly rich piece of foie gras at the bottom (the Robuchon, presumably), hints of pasta, parmesan and balsamic in the middle (granny), a bean broth/puree type thing above (ditto), and a kind of foam that tastes of rosemary on top (Adria). “We suggest you put your spoon right to the bottom to have all the sections at once,” says one of our waiters. We try, we really do, but it’s pretty difficult, and we end up slurping half-formed bits of pasta and leave most of the foie gras until the end by accident. As a whole, it doesn’t work at all, but its discrete parts are all wonderful in their ways, so we enjoy it.

This dish, like many at Osteria Francescana, seems designed to challenge diners, to try their patience and understanding as much as their palettes. It is, of course, very impressive to press home-cooked Italian tradition in between two of the great culinary masters of the era, very difficult to smuggle mama’s kitchen into the same shot glass as Rebuchon’s French and Adria’s extra-planetary styles. Massimo pulls it off with something approaching aplomb. But, there’s a question that no one seems to have asked: why bother? For all its allusive pyrotechnics, the dish doesn’t make sense, the flavours don’t work (or at the very least, don’t balance) and the contrast in textures resolves into something cloying and over-rich.

This dish is our fifth of nine. We started, a long time ago, with ‘a memory of Mortadella sandwich’. It sounds like it should be treading the same sort of path as Heston Blumenthal’s sardine ice-cream: that is, providing a nostalgia trip, deploying exhilarating techniques to crystallise a taste memory in a new and exciting form. A ‘memory of Mortadella sandwich’ (the English translation doesn’t help it) does not do that. It’s a strong, light Mortadella pate served with some crispy bread and pistachio. If you had it as a canape at a friend’s, you’d be extremely impressed; as the opening salvo at the best restaurant in Italy**, it’s pretty disappointing.

Next up is an ice-lolly. Or is it? No, it isn’t, actually. It’s calvados-flavoured foie gras on a stick rolled in hazlenuts, with some thick, cool, viscous balsamic vinegar inside. The waiters bring us a knife and fork, then the plate, and then one of them intones the instruction: “We suggest you eat this with your fingers”. In another restaurant, this would be played as a joke (it is, I think, quite funny). Here, it is as if they want you to eat with your fingers but also to remind you that you’re sitting in a very serious, very formal, very good restaurant. This is not a place for fun. The dish is delicious, in the way that foie gras rolled in nuts is almost certain to be. I’m not sure it’s all that innovative, but that’s another matter. It reminds us of a Feast – ‘memory of a nutty lolly’, perhaps.

This is followed by one of the highlights of the evening: a slightly sour, warm, leek, truffle and shallot tart with black truffle shaved on top. The truffle shavings are predictably flavourless (surely I can’t be the only one who thinks that shaved black truffle has a bit of the emperor’s new clothes about it), but the tart is a wonder, autumnal and enveloping and extremely tasty. It’s the first dish of the evening that feels like it could only have been made here.

The next is the next, and the absolute highlight of the meal. Billed as ‘Parmigiano Reggiano in different textures and temperatures’, it’s an extraordinary riff on the local cheese. There is a cold, creamy mousse with a young, intense parmesan flavour, then, getting older, a parmesan tuille, parmesan foam (or air, or whatever you want to call it), parmesan soufflé and, most incredible of all, a sort of custard of 52-month aged parmesan. This is so intense, so joyous, that it’s scarcely believable. If we’d eaten this dish alone for our meal, I’d probably have left thinking Osteria Franscescana deserved every bit of its reputation.

Alas, next comes the Rebuchon/Adria/granny concoction, and we bump a little bit back down to earth. No matter, that’s followed by a cotechino and lentil ravioli, steamed to perfection in Lambrusco (the local tipple). It’s very good indeed, with perfect pasta encasing a luxurious but not too fatty sausage and lentil mix, the three textures playing off each other to great effect.

The kitchen feels like it’s on a roll now, and the next course promises much – bollito misto is about as traditional a dish as you can find in this part Italy. Boiled bits of tongue, head, sometimes trotter, belly and any other odd bits of pig and cow end up here, typically served with a green, herby salsa verde and sweet salsa rossa. It’s like that here, but with a key difference: this bollito is, the waiter proudly states, "bollito non-bollito".

The meat is not boiled, it’s cooked sous vide; the salsa rossa is a sweet impression of a peperonata; the green sauce is green foam. It’s delicious, certainly, but it’s not as good as the one we have the next day for about €12 (review to follow), mainly because what you gain in texture from sous vide, you lose in stock flavour. Again, the techniques are flawless, but the dish fails to provide a satisfactory explanation of its own existence.

A pre-dessert of goats’ cheese ice cream and honey is a marvellous palate cleanser, setting us up perfectly for the main event – zuppa Inglese. This weird concoction of sponge, chocolate and boozy orange, with Alchermes liqueur, is strange enough at the best of times – like an English trifle on LSD. But here, it’s bizarre to the point of unpalatability. Looking like the kind of thing a precocious 16 year old would serve on MasterChef, there’s a delicious chocolate cake sat next to uninteresting, boozy sponge and a cold vanilla thing that hovers somewhere in texture between custard and ice-cream. This in turn is covered with a thick layer of chewy, flavourless pink gelatine that looks and tastes like cellophane. It’s ridiculous. The zuppa Inglese we order with lunch the next day is far better.

With excellent coffee and petit fours, super breadsticks and decent, plentiful bread, Osteria Francescana has the peripherals doing more or less what they should. But over-zealous water and wine waiters (note that plural – there are a lot), create a trial-like atmosphere that distracts from the food and a delicious, cool bottle of Lombardian pinot nero. The restaurant is stuffy and arty (like the food) – everyone whispers, no one smiles.

Italy is arguably the best place in the world to eat because it is blessed with the best traditions, the best ingredients and the best attitudes toward food. At Osteria Francescana, all three go out the window. For €370 for two with one bottle of wine, it’s a bit disappointing.

*may not be accurate

**may not be accurate

Phil Letts' take: 5/10

Pizza East, 310 Portobello Road, Portobello

2011-09-06T12:42:00.003+01:00

You know Pizza Express? I don’t like it. Strada? Nope. Ask? Don't ask. Domino’s? Urgh. Zizzi? No good. Pizza Hut? No thanks. Papa John’s? No idea.

The English (and sometimes American) chain pizza restaurant is a thing of wonder. Many years ago, most likely in the 1980s, when crass interpretations of extra-national fads were the culinary rage and sophistication’s name was dough ball, a conspiracy was born. It’s the only explanation.

If I wanted to serve food from Timbuktu in a restaurant, I might do some research, even visit the country, and experiment painstakingly until I’d approximated as nearly as possible the edible highlights of the culture, perhaps adding a few more familiar touches to ease it into the local market. The UK pizza pioneers seem to have got together, decided what a good pizza looked and tasted like, and set about creating variations on the theme of its opposite. From the base (sloppy and insubstantial or greasy and thick or chewy and floury, depending on your outlet) to the topping (cheese on cheese on cheese, normally, with the odd bit of ‘chicken’, sweet tomato puree and breakfast sausage thrown in), most of the time these pizzas bear as much resemblance to their ancestral forbears as I do to Clive Owen. It’s not that you can’t enjoy yourself with the poor relation, more that it’s just not the same thing.

In the past few years, there have been inklings of a turnaround, rumours of good pizza at Franco Manca (confirmed by yours truly one boozy Easter Sunday, but not reviewed) and Pizza East. Outside the capital, the situation remains grave, I’m afraid.

But Pizza East (originally in Shoreditch, and with a new branch on Portobello Road) is really quite good. Instead of ‘cheese sticks’ or ‘dough balls’ or ‘chicken wings’, there are antipasti of bone marrow bruschette and mushroom crostini, sides of deep–fried aubergine and interesting salads.

The pizzas come based on flavoursome dough, light but sturdy, thin enough not to swallow the topping but thick enough to hold steady. There’s not a stuffed crust in sight. The toppings follow the best Italian tradition of all: simplicity. Few pizzas have more than two (above cheese and sometimes tomato), and a frankly beautiful courgette, ricotta and oregano offering is about as complicated as things get. Mine, a classic Neapolitan, boasted delicate anchovies and tart, vinegary capers. It was gorgeous.

Because it’s conveniently located in my neck of the woods, I’ve now been twice, like any good reviewer should. The second time, we discovered they serve Aperol, which is always worth knowing, and the pizza menu had changed. Gone but not forgotten, the courgette was missed. Happily, artichokes and ham stood in marvellously. On another pizza, burrata, tomato and basil were wicked.

Pizza East is not flawless by any means. It suffers (not financially) from being insanely popular, which with no booking, means waits of up to 45 minutes for a table at busy times. The bases, while better than most in London, are perhaps a touch on the dry side. Prices are fair, but not especially low, and the waiting staff, though very beautiful, sometimes seem slightly overwhelmed by it all. But it feels like a good local, and it’s fun. Most importantly, if you were looking for the country from which it takes its inspiration, you’d pick Italy. And there aren’t many pizza restaurants in London for which you can say that.

Phil Letts' take: 8/10

The Riding House Cafe, 43-51 Great Titchfield Street, Fitzrovia

2011-08-07T17:12:00.001+01:00

Celebrity chefs, nutritionists, the government and even ‘doctors’ agree: breakfast is the most important meal of the day. They’re wrong, of course, having confused ‘waking up early’ with virtue and ‘lack of coffee’ with fatigue. The most important meal of the day is, quite obviously, brunch, even more so if the day is Sunday. With all the benefits of breakfast and none of the puritanical insanity, it is both the most leisurely and the most fully enjoyable of meals. If you eat a huge brunch, you have most of a day to work it off; try that size of meal for dinner, and you’ll be fat and sleepless.

The Riding House Cafe understands this, which is why it confines ‘small plates’ to the lunch and dinner menus, when people can more easily be persuaded to overspend on bite-sized eating. It offers proper, full-bodied breakfast-type dishes from 9 until 12 on Sundays (starting at 8 during the week), and it’s all the better for that.

The ‘full & proper breakfast’ was far too big for an early morning repast, but hit the spot perfectly at 11 o’clock. With plenty of superb Orkney bacon, excellent black pudding and a fantastic pork sausage, alongside the other standard trappings of a full English, it was worth the hefty £9.40 price tag.

Cured sea trout with crème fraiche and toast was delicate and subtle, a lighter, more refreshing alternative to the brunchy big guns, and at £7.50, decent value. For the same price, an Orkney bacon sandwich ought to have been excellent. It was, if only because it contained about 10 rashers of bacon, rather than the usual couple. The bacon at the Riding House Cafe is a wonder, thick, sweet, and far more porky than normal.

All this was good, and avocado on toast reached a similar standard, but perhaps surprisingly, the best things about brunch at the Riding House Cafe were the drinks. Served in an old-style milk bottle, an oat, natural yoghurt, orange juice, honey, cinnamon, banana and spirulina smoothie revitalised and lubricated, while apple, ginger, beetroot and carrot juice felt easily healthy enough to counterbalance the less wholesome elements of the meal. Even the coffee was excellent.

Immediately after this meal, I went shopping in Selfridges. It’s a testament to the quality of brunch at the Riding House Cafe that it saw me through this most unappetising of experiences. Indeed, I managed two hours of West End shopping and a whole wedding reception without screaming at anyone. I’d say that makes it worth a visit.

Phil Letts’ take: 8/10

CAU, 274 High Street, Guildford

2011-07-22T13:39:00.006+01:00

Food in Guildford is a bit of a mystery. The city that brought us the scary cathedral in The Omen is prosperous, stockbroker-full and pleasant. There’s plenty of money floating around and yet, in the 20 or so years that I have known it, I can count the genuinely good restaurants that have come and gone on two fingers. One, an excellent curry place, closed down after someone (quite possibly a rival) threw a brick through its window and generally made life difficult, while the other, Thai restaurant Rum Wong, remains. Guildford should have good places to eat, but it doesn’t, preferring mediocre chains or the odd nice pub instead.

So when somewhere like CAU opens, it feels quite unusual. This Gaucho Grill-alike, sister of a restaurant in Amsterdam, could pass almost unnoticed in London, but in Guildford’s culinary wasteland, its opening is a bit of an event.

The premise is straightforward: steak like South Americans do it. Yes, there are assorted fishy and vegetable starters available, the odd salad, even a chicken sandwich, but you wouldn’t really go here unless you wanted red meat.

We decided against starters, more than making do with crispbread and delightful tomato and aubergine dips, rich and smoky.

For mains, everyone had steak. Mine, a 12oz ribeye at £18.50, was extremely good, beautifully blue, thick and full of flavour. Horseradish sauce on the side was pedestrian, but it hardly mattered. When a steak restaurant is good, there’s a limit to what can be said about it, but a Brazilian-style tapa de cuadril, thinly sliced and fatty, was well-textured and nicely charred, while lomito medallions had more flavour than you might expect from a largely fat-free cut.

Thrice-cooked chips were decent, as was a mixed salad, though the latter was forgotten, along with a water jug, for what seemed like ages but was probably a few minutes. Onion rings proved suitably greasy, but not at all soggy.

A good malbec is really the only thing to drink with steak in my view, and so we did, for about £22.

CAU’s dessert menu is full of dulce de leche. ‘Banana split with a twist’ was delicious – American in its style and indulgence. Plum and strawberry crumble was just ok, while dulce de leche pancakes with caramel ice cream were as sweet as they sound.

CAU stands for Carne Argentina Única. It’s hardly unique, nor are the dishes uniformly Argentinean, but it is good, and at about £35-£40 per head for two courses and wine, just about worth it, especially in Guildford - the kind of place @philippawl (twitter follower number 300) might like, assuming she's not vegetarian. But there is still, surely, room in the city for somewhere really good. Anyone?

Phil Letts’ take: 7/10

San Francisco, the Napa Valley and Heathrow Airport (part two)

2011-06-29T22:42:00.003+01:00

It has been, quite literally, 34 days since I last posted anything on this blog. A potent combination of frenetic busyness and frenetic business, coupled with a congenital inclination to laze, has made the last few weeks completely impossible, rendered palatable at all only by memories of California.

With work finished and leisure begun (see part one for more on that), restaurants could be picked for their promise, not their practicality. San Francisco is a cooking pot of cultures, with Asia especially well-represented.

We began at Akiko’s, a Japanese restaurant near our hotel (the Hotel Des Arts, a treat for those on smallish budgets). With a superb array of nigiri, brilliantly explained by our excellent waiter, we sampled delights ranging from barracuda to tuna, from arctic char to sea urchin and quail’s egg. While it wasn’t cheap to follow the waiter’s suggestions (about $60 per head without much to drink), the quality of fish put most London sushi restaurants to shame, while the decor fell on just the right side of the line between intimate and cramped.

After something like 7 different nigiri, of which the sweet, oily mackerel and smoky barracuda were my favourites, we needed something a little more chunky before braving the evening’s bars and their inevitable Anchor Steam. What with being in California, we considered California rolls, but went instead for the remarkable ‘Forty-Niner’, a shrimp tempura, salmon, avocado, and sesame number that crunched and piqued in all the right places. Akiko’s comes highly recommended, not least because it was the only place we visited where the 20% suggested service charge didn’t make this Englishman blench.

Phil Letts’ take: 8/10

The service at The Slanted Door, a dockside Vietnamese restaurant and Bill Clinton favourite, is pretty good too (but then, that’s true of most places in America). The food is remarkable. Now I’m certainly no expert on Vietnamese food, so you’ll have to forgive me, but this place did the whole ‘fresh, sweet, soy and gingery’ experience better than anywhere I’ve tried in London.

A green papaya salad kicked things off. Refreshing and tangy, it was a textural joy, with crunchy peanuts perfectly complementing the rigid, watery fruit and soft pickled carrots. A Vietnamese crepe with shrimp, pork and bean sprouts explored similarly playful territory – crispy crepe, plump shrimp and sweet, giving pork, engaging easily with rice wine, brown sugar flavours and pert bean sprouts.

Lemongrass pork with a crispy imperial roll and noodles added to the collection of flavours, while bringing a much-needed oiliness to proceedings.

These all proved mere preludes however, both temporally and qualitatively, to ‘Hanoi style halibut vermicelli’. According to our waitress, this dish hails from a particular street in Hanoi, and is almost unknown further afield. Reading the description, you can see why – the halibut is served with turmeric, dill and a pineapple and anchovy sauce. It sounded revolting, so we ordered it, on the logic that the confidence required to put it on the menu might translate into serious quality at the end. It was a complete, genre-trumping triumph, part pina colada, part kedgeree, part Hawaiian pizza but mostly, simply, superbly cooked fish against vivid flavours that felt like they’d just finished a violent argument with a bout of sticky lovemaking.

The Slanted Door must surely be the best restaurant at a ferry terminal in the world.

The Slanted Door: 8/10

A ferry ride and car journey later, we were in Yountville – the Napa Valley’s answer to heaven, but with rather more rich people than camels and needle eyes would have you believe. Thomas Keller is the man down here; his French Laundry has been rinsing best restaurant lists for years. Mindful of budgets, we tried its cooler, more relaxed sibling, Ad Hoc, itself a linguistic companion to Keller’s New York effort, Per Se.

All this Latin confuses me, but Ad Hoc was, inter alia, fun and good. You can’t choose what you eat – the menu is put together on an ad hoc basis (boom boom), from whatever ingredients seem best and freshest at the time. Ergo, on the night we went, there was a heavy emphasis on simplicity; food here is given space to speak for itself. Exempli gratia¸ our starter – a clean salad of lettuce hearts with anchovy, tuna, almonds and mandarin, lightly dressed and unchallenging. It was delicious on a hot evening, though not terribly exciting, and the tuna was more cooked that I’d have liked.

A main course of veal fillet on the bone was much better, with a creamy risotto that, surprisingly, did it no harm, and beautiful fresh peas and carrots. The veal was cooked perfectly, tender and slightly pink; the risotto came rich and white. The portion was enormous.

Then came the cheese course. I’ve always been wary of American cheeses, suspecting that they only really exist to adorn burgers or make up the numbers in a thick, unhealthy dressing. Well, Leonora, a goats’ cheese from Napa, is far too good for that. It was a glorious, nutty delight, complex and creamy.

A chocolate cake with caramel ice cream excelled as well, proving the rule that a good meal starts light, progresses richer, and ends heavy. Yountville residents are few in number, yet blessed with an obscene number of excellent restaurants. Ad Hoc was full to bursting. They are doing something very right.

Phil Letts’ take: 7/10

Post scriptum: Ad Hoc typically charges $55 for dinner.

San Francisco, Napa Valley and Heathrow Airport (part one)

2011-05-26T13:05:00.001+01:00

It started, as transatlantic travel so often does, with a meal in an airport. Gordon Ramsey’s Plane Food, at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, fits perfectly in that gleaming monstrosity, with only a terrible pun to mark it out from the various overpriced designer shops that litter the corridors of this most glamourised of bus stations. A breakfast pancake with cinnamon butter and bananas was a treat however, gooey and soft in all the right places. With orange juice and coffee, it came to a laughable £14.50, but then I suppose it was at least twice as good as the less-than-half-price Wetherspoons would have been.

A mere 15 hours later, San Francisco and Mayflower Seafood. I’d dithered about whether to go to this recommended Chinese restaurant, put off by tales of ethically dubious shark fin soup. Those rumours proved founded, but, shamefully perhaps, I went anyway, though I didn’t eat the offending dish. Like AV voting, my decision was a ‘miserable little compromise.’ It’s a shame about the shark fin, because the Mayflower is excellent. Packed to the gills with locals, it was probably one of the best Chinese restaurants I’ve ever been to, especially at about $25 per head.

Peking duck was fatty and moist, entirely different from the desiccated version we eat here. Frogs legs with garlic and sherry-soaked sausage were a bony revelation, while the more familiar sweet and sour pork was a prime example of the genre.

Beef with honey and mustard sauce excelled too, and Tsingtao beer was exactly the same as it always is. Busy, efficient service and a cacophonous atmosphere made this a great start to the trip, shark fin guilt notwithstanding.

Phil Letts’ take: 8/10 (0 for ethics, mine and the restaurant’s)

Corporate hospitality ensured the next day was restaurant-free, but nibbles will only keep you replete for so long. Our next stop was Pagan, a Burmese/Thai mix (a border town, perhaps). Another reasonable option (about $20 each for more than we could eat), this was rather less interesting.

Burmese beef curry was rich and layered, but everything else was rather disappointing, from a sickly coconut chicken noodle soup to a watery thai red curry and spring rolls that were just plain odd.

Phil Letts’ take: 5/10

Various diners served burgers of varying quality for lunch, but none so exciting I’d recommend attending or avoiding. Thankfully, work then ended and Cute Letts arrived. The proper eating could begin.

After a breezy walk around the fantastically beautiful Lands End, we popped in at the Cliff House, a remarkable double restaurant (posh and bistro) perched, as its name would suggest, on the edge of a cliff. The views were wonderful; the food in the bistro, less so. We went for the daily menu, at $25 for three courses – that’s a pretty good price, which is just as well, considering the rather more elevated numbers had we selected from the carte.

A tomato panzanella (so-called, though I don’t think that’s a particularly accurate description) to start featured beautiful, fresh, flavoursome tomatoes and decent mozzarella, all rather ruined by a ‘balsamic reduction’ that smacked of long-boiled, cheap vinegar, and overpowered the clean, simple flavours of the rest of the dish.

Swordfish followed, simply grilled and only slightly overcooked. Asparagus and carrots were surprisingly bland accompaniments, though a tapenade-type topping was better. A dessert of zabaglione and red fruits rescued things somewhat, the sweet, rich froth a perfect foil for juicy fruits.

An awful Monterey Riesling and a rather better Supery Sauvignon Blanc cancelled each other out in the wine-quality stakes.

Phil Letts’ take: 6/10

And then, and finally for this instalment, we went for lunch on Fisherman’s Wharf, at Nonna Rose. Crab is the thing to have here, so I had ½ a Dungeness version, beautifully steamed and simply served with warm butter, a bowl of tinned clam chowder, and a bib. It was glorious, though at $15 odd dollars for a small half, it should have been. Anchor Steam (my new favourite beer) was terrific alongside. Cute Letts went for a crab and prawn Louie – essentially a giant, uninteresting salad with very nice fish and a mediocre prawn cocktail sauce. It hit the spot without being particularly brilliant.

If you must go to Fisherman’s Wharf (and I suppose you must, even though it’s tatty and overpriced) I should think you could do a lot worse. Thankfully, the rest of our trip was full of extraordinary culinary highs. They’re coming up in part two...

Phil Letts’ take: 6/10

Spuntino, 61 Rupert Street, Soho

2011-05-11T23:01:00.000+01:00

Russell Norman and Richard Beatty, the brains behind Polpo, Polpetto, Spuntino and shortly, Da Polpo, are good at promotion. I liked Spuntino before I’d even been, charmed by innumerable positive blog posts, my previous experiences of Polpetto, and the proprietors’ considerable Twitter charm (Twarm, I suppose).

I loved that it’s on Rupert Street in the proper, seedy bit of Soho. I loved that it’s a sit-at-the-bar style, American-influenced place. I loved the mac and cheese on the menu. So, I’d more or less made up my mind that when I could get a seat at Spuntino, it would be good.

And so it was, sort of. The room is wonderful. It’s a tarted up old bath house, by the looks of it, with one wall seemingly original - slightly scruffy and full of filthy stories. The bar where we sat is charming; the drinks American-influenced and heavy on the Bourbon. It’s an excellent impression of a movie fantasy of an American dive.

The food’s good too. After chilli popcorn as a complimentary snack, a beef and bone marrow slider was generous and comforting, far better than the last slider I ate. Its mackerel counterpart could have been a step too far, but delivered a minty, fishy punch that I loved.

Soft shell crab was a little bland and grimly presented. Tabasco mayonnaise didn’t really kick like you’d hope, while fennel lacked crunch and zing. Chopped salad with a light, Caesar-style dressing proved a more willing partner.

Mac and cheese, on the other hand, was terrific, a dirty, cheap, creamy, calorific delight. Served piping hot, it carried on cooking in its skillet at the table, leaving crunchy, burnt treats round the edge of the pan. It would be a perfect dish for local workers, lunching or grabbing a hearty snack between exertions. Loud conversations between waiting staff about the rubbish films they’d seen recently didn’t quite ruin the effect.

Lastly, we shared a brown sugar cheesecake. As Mick Jagger once sang of something entirely different: “Ah, brown sugar, how come you taste so good?” It’s a fair question, and I expect the answer had something to do with the beautiful syrup on top and fat prunes.

But despite all this tastiness, I couldn’t shake a nagging feeling that there’s something a little bit phoney about Spuntino, like it’s going through the motions. It feels cynical - too professional, perhaps, and without the love that Polpetto exudes.

At less than £20 per head with a bottle of sparkling water, I should imagine it’s a good bit cheaper than other places in the area, but then, many of those don’t sell food.

Phil Letts’ take: 7/10

St John Hotel, 1 Leicester Street, Soho

2011-05-03T20:38:00.004+01:00

Manzi’s was the first posh restaurant I ever went to. The year was something like 1990, I was eight or so, and we were up in town to have lunch and see Les Miserables. I don’t remember much about the meal, but I definitely enjoyed it, for how grown-up it made me feel and for the inklings it gave of another world, full of pleasure and ritual and butter. I think I had some sort of white fish with a creamy sauce – possibly turbot, possibly champagne-based. Though my memories are faint, I have long seen that trip as a kind of beginning: of a love affair with good cooking; of a fondness for tradition in food and history in restaurants; of a life-long tendency to overspend on eating out; and of complete incomprehension of musical theatre.

When Manzi’s closed its doors for the final time in 2006, it had been serving seafood in Soho for 78 years. It’s difficult to imagine any new restaurant enjoying that kind of longevity in London again. But with St. John Hotel, on the old Manzi’s site just off hellish Leicester Square, owners Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver promise to give it a good go.

We went for lunch the day before Easter, when London was hot and empty. A cool dining room was sparsely populated, peaceful and, for those who know the other restaurants in the group, comfortingly familiar.

I started with lamb sweetbreads, butter beans and wild garlic, a friendly mixture of thick, beany stock and sweet offal. It was marvellous, almost conspiratorial, the kind of dish you’d sooner run away with than share. £8.20 is hardly cheap, but when something is a good as this, almost any price would represent a good deal.

Another starter, of potted pigeon with quince and toast, didn’t quite reach the same heights, but it was still superbly fatty, peppery and lumpy.

For mains, we ordered ‘Snails & bacon’ and ‘Broad beans, artichoke and Berkswell.’ Now, I’m not normally one for vegetarian main dishes, but with broad beans so smooth and artichoke so delicately fennelly, this was a great option. Berkswell cheese, grated on top and mixed through, brought everything together in a messy, brilliant mesh.

And then snails and bacon. Until this point of the meal, I thought St. John Hotel was doing a competent impression of St. John – were that the case, it would still be a far better restaurant than most. But the snails and bacon were better than anything I’ve eaten at St. John, or at St. John Bread & Wine. Frankly, they were better than most things I’ve eaten. The snails, braised in cider, stood out sweet and tender against luscious, caramel, smoky bacon chunks and soft, sweet shallots. Underneath it all, a thick piece of fried bread soaked up the liquor, rewarding every mouthful with satisfying crunch. I’d return for this dish alone, day after day, if I could, and I don’t care that it cost £19. After all, that’s the same price as Behind the Black Door, Sarah Brown’s Downing Street memoir.

Desserts maintained the ridiculously high standard. An enormous piece of custard tart featured gravity-defying, crème brulee-like custard dusted with nutmeg and cinnamon. This was so good it was almost moving (or at least, when it was finished, I nearly cried).

And as a final flourish, a bitter chocolate ice cream. In Nose to Tail Eating (my favourite cookbook of all time), Fergus Henderson admitted that he had yet to achieve or even eat the kind of chocolate ice cream he wanted. Well that was then. I don’t know if Mr. Henderson likes head-chef Tom Harris’s version, but it was certainly the best chocolate ice cream I’ve ever tasted.

A glass each of the excellent house white and a couple of coffees brought the total bill to £86 for two. St. John Hotel is not cheap, but it’s better than, say, Dinner by Heston (which was really great), and therefore good value in my book. I can’t remember having enjoyed a meal so much in London, and I didn’t even have to sit through a musical afterwards.

Phil Letts’ take: 10/10

Vrisaki, 73 Myddleton Road, Wood Green

2011-04-22T19:10:00.000+01:00

‘Hell > Wood Green’ (anon. ,Facebook status update, 2011)

I suppose if you believe Hell is an actual place, it must indeed be greater than Wood Green, which is relatively small, and prison to fewer damned souls.

That said, it’s easy to see why, in non-mathematical parlance, you might consider Hell the better location. I guess it depends what you’re in for, but it’s certainly easier to get to on a Friday night in rush hour.

We visited (Wood Green, that is) in order to eat at Vrisaki, a Greek restaurant far closer to Elysium than Hades. It’s a bustling dining room behind a regular kebab joint, full of Greeks and Greek waiters, dressed up in ties and suits and generally making everything feel old-fashioned and no-nonsense.

All four of us ordered the set meze, which at £38 for two people, promised an awful lot. And it largely delivered, with large being the operative syllable. The quantities of food at Vrisaki are staggering. Our starter platter included more dishes than I can remember, but certainly lentils, beans, tuna, taramasalata, hummus, pitta, beetroot, olives, tsatziki, potato, assorted salads and pickled shellfish. And while it’s true that food is about quality, not quantity, it’s also about quantity.

In any event, the quality was pretty good too, especially those dishes that you felt hadn’t come out of large vats or jars. Copious Aphrodite (a wine) was cheap and flirty, helping to smooth out the rougher edges of the food.

Next came a fish, ham, halloumi and veg course, featuring excellent asparagus, decent prawns, and smoked salmon presented in the style of a 1970s Sheffield cocktail party. Piping hot, gigantic garlic mushrooms were hearty, while deep-fried calamari limped a little. Ham and halloumi was pretty awful, to be honest – salty to the point of inedibility. Copious Aphrodite (a wine) was cheap and flirty, helping to smooth out the rougher edges of the food.

By this stage, I couldn’t tell you which course we were on (I don’t think they all have names, and this was at least our fourth new set of plates at the table), but whole trout followed, firm and flavourful, accompanied by more prawns, butterflied and grilled. Copious Aphrodite (a wine) was cheap and flirty, helping to smooth out the rougher edges of the food.

And then on, unabashed, to some meat: about six whole quail in a salty, slightly spicy rub, and some absolutely fantastic sausages, herby (mint and sage, at a guess) and juicy and great. Oh, and a tomato and feta salad, for some reason. Copious Aphrodite (a wine) was cheap and flirty, helping to smooth out the rougher edges of the food.

A glass of metaxa and a coffee finished the meal off perfectly, and if Wood Green is Hell, well then I’m Beelzebub.

Phil Letts’ take: 6/10

Moro, 34-36 Exmouth Market, Clerkenwell

2011-04-18T12:54:00.001+01:00

There are a couple of reasons why you might spend three and a half hours over one meal in a restaurant. But on a midweek night, with work the next morning, it’s unlikely to be because you want to linger long, indulging yourself over a slow-burning tasting menu, quaffing big wines and luxuriating as the late evening stretches.

At Moro, everything took too long. The table was booked for 7.30, for six people. We’d all arrived by about 7.50, admittedly a little later than ideal. Our order was taken at about 8.15. Our starters arrived around 8.45, mains at 9.30, dessert menus (after some prompting) at about 10.05, desserts at 10.30, and the bill sometime after 10.45. We were in no particular rush, fortunately.

Service apart, Moro is a decent restaurant, capable of real excellence, though not consistently enough to be truly great. My starter, a spiced farika (grain), veal and chopped almond soup, was a meaty, earthy concoction, smooth, rich and filling, but with a pleasing almond crunch that prevented it becoming too much. At £7.50, it was the cheapest first course on the menu, though that belies its quality.

The other starters varied from the brilliant (pigeon breast and piquillo pepper with garlic puree) to the merely adequate (a white and green asparagus and egg dish that was overwhelmed by dill). Morel mushroom and prawn revueltos seemed an odd idea, but the scrambled egg mix somehow worked, while butifarra sausage and warm grelos (turnip tops) didn’t.

Mains were similarly variable. Mine, wood-roasted kid with garlic and mashed potatoes, was an excellent reminder of why we should cook more goat in this country. Intense animal flavour combined with a superbly crispy skin and comforting mash made the £19.50 it cost seem reasonable.

Four out of the six mains available were ‘wood roasted’ on the menu, when roasted might have done. I do understand that they want to advertise the woodiness of the roast, but if you start the majority of your menu descriptions with the same phrase, there’s a danger of overemphasis, making customers think that the importance of their ‘wood roasted grey mullet’ and ‘wood roasted kid’ lies in wood roastedness, not meat.

Wood roasted pork with artichokes, chickpeas, sherry, and spinach was very nicely cooked and generous, but it seemed like discrete dishes (chickpeas and pork) that had been thrown together without a thought for whether that was a good idea. Wood roasted chicken with caraway, yoghurt and lentils, was beautifully soft but rather underpowered, neither especially woody nor very interestingly spiced. The caraway shadowed the chicken, when it should have taken it on. A gigantic mixed vegetable mezze was better, with notably excellent beetroot pilau, crispy flatbread and assorted tasty lentil numbers.

I shared a cheese plate in lieu of dessert, and it was marvellous. Various Spanish treats (especially the wonderful blue Picos de Europa) were the right temperature and the right taste. A chocolate and apricot tart was similarly inspired and lighter than expected, while a rhubarb and rosewater fool topped things off ideally.

With a couple of bottles of red and one of champagne (it was a birthday celebration, after all), the bill came in at about £55 per head, including a small discount for the tardy service. Food alone was about £35 each. For what I ate, that seemed reasonable, but I know others disagreed. If you pick well at Moro, then you’ll have an excellent meal. But really, with its reputation and pricing, it should be doing a little better.

Phil Letts’ take: 7/10

Lupita, 13-15 Villiers Street, Charing Cross

2011-04-12T19:45:00.003+01:00

A recent survey found that less than 30 percent of Mexican restaurants in London are any good. Admittedly, the survey was of me, and conducted by me, and I haven’t been to that many, but I’d be very surprised if I was wrong. Really, there’s Wahaca, that burrito place on Portobello Road, and not much else. And unfortunately, the brilliantly-located Lupita does nothing to redress the balance.

It’s not that the food is bad, exactly. Ceviche seems authentic (though my experience is of Liman, rather than Mexican ceviche). It’s been long-marinated in citrus, chilli, onions and other treats. The fish is rather chewy, but it’s nice and spicy, clean and simple.

Quesadillas are pleasantly soft, filled with a mushroom concoction, like a mushroom chocolate mole, that I love but Cute Letts hates. Huiltacoche it’s called, and it is at least interesting enough to divide opinion.

Because the problem with most of the food at Lupita is that it’s just so boring. Refried beans, stingily portioned next to packet tortilla chips (at least, I hope they were from a packet), are flavourless and so long-cooked that they’ve completely turned into a paste. There’s not a lump in sight. Pork carnitas is dry and dull, which for this most desirable of Mexican dishes, is criminal.

We also try some arrachera tacos, described on the menu as a ‘classic Mexican cut of beef, tenderised and marinated in our own special recipe.’ It’s a little hard on the teeth for something that’s been tenderised, while I can only assume the special marinade is not described in full because it’s not very special at all. Again, it’s not exactly bad, rather just woefully uninteresting.

Worst of all is a prawn and nopalitos (cactus) salad, which consists of an array of eight ingredients, from jalapenos to avocado, tomato to lettuce. Never has so much tasted of so little. It’s bland, underdressed and very disappointing, especially since at £7.80, it’s a couple of pounds more expensive than anything else we order.

The beer's nice, the service ok if a little terse. All together, the bill creeps in just below £40 pounds for two. It’s not a bad price for the area, or for the quantity of food. But with Wahaca about 300 yards away, I can’t imagine why you’d want to.

Phil Lett’s take: 3/10

Apologies for the lack of photos. Darkness, as ever, intervened.

The Anchor, Walberswick

2011-04-02T10:03:00.001+01:00

Walberswick. What a thoroughly satisfying word that is. Go on, try it. Try rolling it around for a minute. It’s like a fine wine, with that lovely, open-mouthed wal, the puckering ber and then that gorgeous finish, swooping and stiffening into the k, full of rigour and chutzpah.

I imagine the people of this coastal village absolutely adore it. I certainly did. There’s the sea, the beach, the river and the beer, to name just four. And for a fifth, there’s The Anchor.

Few things afford more delight than walking into a pub and not only seeing some of your favourite beers on tap (Meantime and Adnams), but also receiving a beer menu, listing more than 20 bottles, carefully sought and sourced from the great brewing nations of the world.

First impressions count, and The Anchor could hardly have made a better one. We drank for a while, enjoying the comfortably comfortable atmosphere, then took our seats. The menu is fish-heavy, as you’d expect, and each dish has a suggested beer match as well as wine.

I started with confit cod cheeks, alongside a glass of San Franciscan Liberty Ale. The cheeks, meaty and rounded in both senses, were notable for their richness, playing off a perky tomato, fennel and leaf salad. It was a marvellous start. Three of us had the cod cheeks, leaving just one to branch out with chilli squid, superbly cooked and sweetly sauced.

Mains continued mostly fishy. Mine, a simply cooked whole lemon sole in butter and lemon, melted on the tongue, fresh and a lot naughtier than fish should be. It was hardly an unusual combination, but still provided a reminder of just how brilliant it is to take something very healthy (fish) and render it superbly unhealthy (lashings of butter). Battered cod and chips did something similar, the crispy batter undermining all the good work of that chunky cod fillet.

One of us went for meat: short rib of beef on a truffle mashed potato. The rib had been slow cooked, stripped and remoulded into a little patty, texturally satisfying and pretty tasty too. The truffle mash, an oily, buttery number, was a good as it sounds. Flying Dog Gonzo Porter was a brave beer choice, but proved somewhat foolhardy. At 8.7%, it rather ruined one of our number for the rest of the evening, though we could occasionally make out approving noises through his drunken babbling.

Desserts followed, as is their wont, sweet and sticky. Ever the unorthodox, I plumped for a cranberry and walnut tart with cranberry ice cream. I have no idea why. I don’t really like cranberries, and I certainly have no truck with desserts that carry the stench of virtue about them. I shouldn’t have worried. This was not in the least bit virtuous. The tart cranberry proved an ideal mediator, moderating and translating the rich caramel and walnut of the filling.

I didn’t try the other desserts. They looked good, if that’s any help – a chocolate pudding with coconut and a something-or-other panna cotta (I lost the receipt, so can’t remember what it was). Coffees all round brought the bill to about £40 per head. For what we ate, and especially for the quantity and quality of delicious beer, it was excellent value. We returned the next day for lunch, when beef rib and Yorkshire puddings reached a similar standard.

You may never go to Walberswick, but if you do, visit The Anchor.

Phil Letts’ take: 8/10

The Dock Kitchen, 344 Ladbroke Grove, Portobello Docks

2011-03-28T19:49:00.001+01:00

You know the kind of people who collect trainers? Those people who surf eBay for original Air Jordans, grow scraggy beards as soon as they are able and generally annoy everybody by being younger, thinner and so very much cooler than everyone else? They’re not quite hipsters, though they’re not dissimilar. They tend to have real jobs, normally in advertising or (well-paid) charity, and a love of tight woolly hats. You’ve probably heard them, aged 27, with their dubstep.

The Dock Kitchen feels screamingly in love with this kind of customer. Above a fancy furniture shop? Check. On the canal? Check. In a not-particularly-but-still-a-bit edgy area? Check. A former pop-up that became permanent? Check. Pretentious, self-indulgent, haphazard menu? Check. Really good food? Um, yes.

And that’s the problem with The Dock Kitchen. Despite every cell in my body wanting to hate it - for its attractive waiting staff, its impossibly youthful team of chefs, for how pleased it is with itself - I just couldn’t.

‘Forced Scottish sea kale and agretti with bottarga’ was superb. Not just a little bit good, not just good because ambitious and unusual, but actively, challengingly excellent, all asparagus and coastline flavoured and saltily refreshing.

‘Egyptian’ garlic, roasted with thyme and served with goats curd on toast was similarly inspired. A ludicrously straightforward dish, it involved getting a long-roasted head of garlic out of the oven, drizzling it with olive oil, and spreading some curd on toast. In this instance, simplicity was a virtue.

Main courses were less dazzling, but still pretty good. A fish stew of cod, octopus, red mullet and brown shrimp lacked a bit of oomph, despite its Vermentino and fennel. Chicken with a Persian pomegranate and walnut sauce proved a textural (though not a visual) delight, meltingly cooked with a slight crunch from the walnut. Alas, accompanying broad bean pods in tomato sauce were lukewarm and uninspiring.

For dessert, a saffron rice pudding with blood orange combined sweet and bitter to great effect, while a Seville orange tart was competent rather than spectacular. Add a smart open kitchen, great lighting and engaging waiters to the mix, and this is a pretty winning operation, especially since they sell Paxtaran liqueur to finish.

The kitchen seems to rely on food that requires very little cooking on the night – most dishes we ate would have been prepared earlier in the day. This allows the staff to maintain a sense of unflappable control without actually having to do all that much cooking. But you can hardly complain about a smart kitchen. After all, if there’s one thing any trainer hunter knows, it’s that it’s not cool to be seen to be putting any effort into anything.

Our a la carte meal came in at just over £40 per head for three courses with a glass of wine, a liqueur and coffee. For slightly more, you can eat the restaurant’s set menu, four or five courses that change, supperclub style, depending on the whims of the chef, or what punning title they’ve thought up this week.

The Dock Kitchen treads a fine line between making its customers feel trendy and causing them (or me, anyway) to harrumph curmudgeonly at the smugness of it all. But the food, which is always what these things come down to in the end, is good enough to pull it off.

Phil Letts’ take: 7/10

The Crab & Winkle, South Quay, Whitstable

2011-03-13T10:51:00.004Z

I love the seaside in late winter. The coast has a kind of personality in wind and cloud that hordes of summer sunbathers just can’t match. Whitstable in March is not like Whitstable in July. It’s quieter certainly, colder too, but it seems to breathe more freely – the coast reasserting itself.

We traipsed down on a rare midweek day off, with notions but no expectation of a last-minute table at The Sportsman. That wasn’t to be. No matter, Whitstable (or Crouch End on Sea, as it might be called) has plenty to offer apart from windswept pubs that aren’t really in Whitstable anyway.

Having attended last year’s oyster festival, I was familiar with the fishmonger that sits beneath The Crab & Winkle. Guessing that a restaurant above a fishmonger would be likely to serve good fish, in we went.

It took a while for the waitress to notice us, but we were eventually seated at a table with a sea view from a smallish window. The restaurant has a certain charm, but it’s nothing special to look at (like yours truly in those regards). Service is friendly but rather slow (ditto), while the atmosphere consists of a Kings of Leon album on repeat. I don’t know about you, but I can only hear that my sex is on fire so many times in one sitting before I feel like I should go to the doctors.

But what about the food? Well, here’s where things improved. A ‘pre-starter’ of cockles was a nice touch, but at £3.10 for a plate that you could have got downstairs in a plastic pot for considerably less, felt a little pricey.

Six native oysters followed, at £9.75. They tasted wonderful. Unfortunately, several were cut to mush inside, as if someone had shucked them with a hammer and chisel (I once used a screwdriver – not pretty).

Grilled sardines Provencal were rather better, sprawled across gooey red pepper and tomato. These were beautifully, simply prepared, fresh and very lightly charred. A perky red onion salad helped the dish along. We could almost have been in Provence, if Provence was about 15 degrees colder than it is, and if three sardines cost £6.70 there. Perhaps they do.

My main, a special of whole brown crab at an intimidating £18, was outstanding. Smashing up crustaceans is a rare pleasure, one of the few times when adult men really get to mess around with their food. I took full advantage, cracking claws, sucking legs, crushing shell and at times, even eating. It was marvellous.

Cute Letts went for beer battered fish and chips at £14.50. That’s right. Cod and chips. For £14.50. Mushy peas cost an extra £3, bringing the total for fish, chips and peas to a whopping £17.50.

It tasted great, but it bloody well should do at that price. Even Tom Aitkens’ ill-fated Chelsea fish and chip shop didn’t dare charge £17.50 for fish, chips and peas.

With a couple of bottles of gorgeous Whitstable brewery pilsner, a glass of white wine, and some horrible, bitter coffee, our bill came to £76, exclusive of service. The food at the Crab & Winkle is good, and at times even great, but there’s no way two courses (and a pre-starter) should cost nearly £40 per head. Yes, there’s a cheaper lunch menu option, and yes, the oysters were the priciest starters (though the crab was nowhere near the most expensive main), but really, £76 is a joke. It’s a shame.

Phil Letts' take: 5/10

Seafood Training at Billingsgate Fish Market

2011-03-10T13:09:00.002Z

What better gift for an afishionado than a day learning about the salty wonders of London’s greatest market? As Christmas presents go, this was a good one.

We made our way to Billingsgate not so bright and fairly early one Saturday morning, to the Billingsgate Seafood Training School, on the promise of learning about fish, cutting fish up, cooking fish and finally, taking fish home with us. It sounded promising.

Because it was a Saturday, and because of the comparatively late start (the market begins to wind down at about 7.30), there was no scope to explore the various stalls. Billingsgate is a wholesale market, and most of its business is in selling volume to trade, but some sellers will allow smaller purchases, so it’s well worth going along nice and early if you want some of the freshest fish you’re likely to find in London.

The course was divided into two. Our first session would be dedicated to learning about fish: how to spot the freshest, best quality, how to prepare them, how to tell if someone’s trying to rip you off, and what types of tools to use for the job. The second would be a cookery class.

I won’t go through everything we learnt, principally because I don’t want to spoil it for anyone that decides to attend. But after skinning coley fillets, gutting all kinds of fish, filleting a bream and pocketing a plaice (the results of pocketing are pictured below), I felt significantly wiser and far handier with a knife than I had before. And if I ever spot suspiciously white squid in a fishmongers, or dull-eyed mackerel, or lumpy, oddly over-slimed fish, I’ll know to avoid it. Understanding something about seasons for different types of fish will no doubt prove useful as well.

The great thing about this part of the course was that, for the most part, much of it was not completely new information. The techniques you learn are refinements of things you sort of know, or perhaps suspect, about how you should prepare fish. It’s not like, say, the butchery course at The Ginger Pig; seafood training teaches you things that you can use as a matter of routine, and with relative ease. Far from making the course less attractive, its practicality improves it. These are things you won’t forget how to do, but which will save you from spending an age hacking your fish to pieces in lieu of filleting it, or ruining it by freezing it the wrong way, or cutting through bones rather than around them.

After a generous couple of hours getting our hands all fishy, we moved to the cookery section of the course. This involved some hands-on preparation (with prawns, mussels and squid) and more tidbits of information about how to treat your fish. Mostly though, the second session was a demonstration, of recipes for a gorgeous laksa, lemon sole with beurre noisette, and various uses of the pocket in our plaice. Of the two halves, this was perhaps slightly less interesting, mainly because the recipes and demonstration were quite straightforward. We didn’t learn that much. That said, we did get to eat all the dishes. They were delicious, especially that lemon sole.

Unfortunately, my photos mostly had to be taken at home, of the things we got to take away with us (coley, seabass, sea bream and plaice), simply because it’s quite difficult to operate a mobile-phone camera when your hands are covered in fish. We’ve been eating them since, in one form or another.

At £100 pounds for a course that lasts about 5 and a half hours, this is a decent deal, given you leave with about £30 of fish. But I think I’d try and do it midweek in the future; then, you get an earlier start and a tour of the market thrown in. CJ Jackson and her team are welcoming and patient teachers, and if you follow their instructions, you needn’t even smell that bad afterwards.

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, The Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Knightsbridge

2011-03-07T20:11:00.007Z

Cooking and writing are similar in lots of ways. Good writing, like good cooking, requires a deep understanding of its various component parts – not only the selection of words or ingredients, but their interplay, their correspondences, their echoes and their history. Coleridge said that a good writer (Samuel Johnson, in his example) produces prose in which ‘you cannot alter one conjunction without spoiling the sense.’ Spoiling is culinarily apt, as is what follows: ‘It is a linked strain throughout.’ If good writing means that every word, every clause and every sentence counts, then good cooking might require similar strains of thought and conjunctions between ideas.

Heston Blumenthal is a master of making things count. There is never anything extraneous in his dishes. And if that sounds odd in reference to a man who’s developed television programmes almost wholly about ornament in cooking, then, well, you shouldn’t believe everything you see on TV.

Consider ‘Meat Fruit (c.1500)’, our opening course at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal. A much-admired chicken liver parfait encased in a mandarin jelly, it could serve as an emblem of all that’s great about Blumenthal’s cooking (though, let’s not forget, Ashley Palmer-Watts is the head chef here, even if it’s not his name on the menu). It’s a gimmick, certainly. But then you need the sharp jelly to cut through the luxurious paté. And there’s more to it than that. This is a funny dish (funny ha ha, but also strange), that confounds your sensory expectations in the disjunction between its appearance, texture and taste. You know, as you cut into the orange globe, that it’s not a real mandarin, and yet you still expect the skin to be tough. It’s like getting on a stationary escalator and adjusting your step anyway, if a lot nicer.

But there’s more to it than that too. Meat Fruit drags back through culinary history to medieval banqueting tables, but also alludes to other kinds of culinary illusion. Blumenthal’s admiration for Lewis Carroll is well known, and this dish could have come from Wonderland, with its tricksy pills and mock turtles. Its slightly risqué title adds crude humour, while the 'mandarin' pokes gentle fun at the restaurant's host.

Roast Marrowbone (c.1720) provides fewer laughs, though that circa seems amusingly optimistic. Even so, it is similarly confounding, with rich marrow sat louchely among assertive anchovy, mace and parsley. You expect it to be heavy, but it’s light; you expect it to be meaty, which it is, but it’s also refreshing. There’s even a hint of the Danish school – it looks and tastes like something you could have at North Road or, dare I say it, Noma (I’ve never been).

Many reviewers have done down the main courses at Dinner, at least by comparison with those remarkable starters. That’s unfair. Roast Turbot (c.1830) picks up where the marrow left off, but like any good story, expands and develops the promise of its introduction. This was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten, anywhere. Its ‘cockle ketchup’ is another nice joke, but again, delivers in flavour to the extent that the dish is inconceivable without it. Bitter, sweet and sour, with a very slightly gelatinous texture, it tastes of the sea and the kitchen – a marriage of craft and raw materials that would have impressed those emerging industrialists around at its birth.

Spiced Pigeon with Ale and Artichoke (c.1780) is positively conventional by comparison, proving that excellent artists can always do the simple as well as the complex. The pigeon is perfectly cooked, while the ale seems to hark back to 18th century taverns or rather grander hunting lodges. Of course, it’s also there because it tastes good and because ale is becoming more trendy by the day. It might be slightly weaker than the other dishes, though that reflects more on them than on it.

An English cheese board to share does exactly what it should, though it must be said that it’s rather foisted upon us by an up-selling waiter. It’s an unfortunate trait of the restaurant, this tendency to make you feel like a lesser diner if you don’t have champagne before you start, or you don’t want cheese, or you ask for tap water (we had the champagne, the cheese and the tap water, but we probably would have done even without the pushiness). Indeed, were the food less brilliant, this would be a serious problem.

Desserts mark a return to the humour of the starters. Brown Bread Ice Cream (c.1830) is yeasty and unsettling, but it’s utterly delicious. Taffety Tart (c.1660) contains a chewy, rosy jelly bracketed by crispy, fennely caramel and enhanced by cream and a truly superb blackcurrant sorbet. Variants of texture, taste, temperature and even tone need to be in concert for this to work. It coheres perfectly.

Finally, an earl grey and white chocolate ganache comes with a stick of shortbread. This, like the Meat Fruit, asks you to suspend your disbelief. You know roughly what’s in it, and you know what you think it’s going to taste like. And then it does, but more so, with more tea and more chocolate than seems possible – it’s a high wire act, a magic trick.

Of course, all this costs a lot – about £100 per head including a bottle of Fleurie. But if you’re going to spend £100 pounds on anything, make it Dinner. Coleridge said that prose is ‘words in their best order,’ while poetry is ‘the best words in their best order.’ Heston Blumenthal is a poet of the table.

Phil Lett’s take: 8/10

York & Albany, 127-129 Parkway, Regents Park

2011-02-28T13:08:00.006Z

What’s the difference between a chef renowned for great skill and another known for great swearing? One’s a cordon bleu chef, and the other’s a blue Gordon chef.

No? Nothing? Come on, I spent thirty seconds of my life coming up with that.

Fine, let’s just forget about it.

Anyway, I recently went to a Gordon Ramsay restaurant for the first time. I don’t mean he cooks there – that would be ridiculous – but his name is on the menu and the website, so it counts. And I say it was my first time at Gordo's, but that ignores the trip I made to Plane Food (geddit?) in Heathrow a year or so ago - a trip best ignored. So, more accurately, this was my first trip to a restaurant that bears Gordon Ramsay’s name but at which he doesn’t cook, apart from the other trip I made to such a restaurant, which I won’t talk about because it wasn’t very good.

The York & Albany is a charming pub-come-restaurant at the apex of busy streets in that nowhereland north of the Marylebone Road but south of Camden. It’s a lovely looking place, with glinting mirrors, lustrous carpets and a perfectly decent bar to sit alongside the restaurant.

Four of us went for Sunday lunch, and ordered relatively unimaginatively I’m afraid. There’s an excellent value three-course menu for £21, available every day of the week, which increases by a fiver if you include a Sunday roast. It looked pretty good, and when my chicken liver and foie gras parfait with quince chutney arrived, it felt like it too. This was delicious, sweet and rich, though the texture was rather too glossy for my taste, even if the dish was lifted by excellent, crunchy croutons.

Everyone else went for smoked haddock and horseradish scotch eggs with tartare sauce. These were good too, with an oozing yolk counterpointing the sharpness of the fish and crunchy fried breadcrumbs giving a reminder that, just because something has healthy ingredients, it isn’t necessarily good for you.

For mains, we all went for the roast beef sirloin. This was fine, but not spectacular. Beautifully cooked and nicely fatted, it looked the part but suffered from an odd lack of flavour, like an imitation of excellent beef rather than the real thing. Accompanying Yorkshire puddings were a treat, and far better than the equivalent chez Blumenthal. Vegetables were basic and decent, though there is a balance to be stuck between presenting vegetables so they look rustic and earthy, and just not peeling carrots. I’d err towards over-elegance in this instance, not least because unpeeled carrots often taste a little bitter. A bottle of Puglian Primitivo made an excellent accompaniment, predictably, for about £25.

We were pretty full after this lot, so only one of us (me, obviously) managed dessert - a wonderful dark chocolate ganache with caramelised bananas and honeycomb. This dish was a joyful array of sweet and crunch – a comforting, childish dessert for grown-ups.

I enjoyed the York & Albany immensely. Head chef Colin Buchan is doing a fine job in the enormous shadow of his boss. But there was something slightly unsatisfying about it. It’s extremely competent, but not quite brilliant – lots of style but not quite enough substance. Still, it’s well worth a visit.

Phil Lett’s take: 7/10

Hawksmoor, 157 Commercial Street, Spitalfields

2011-02-09T12:51:00.003Z

They say that in the land of the hungry, the one-Hawksmoored man is king. They’re wrong. That’s why I’m reviewing my second Hawksmoor of the last few months. I enjoyed my November visit to the Seven Dials site so much that the decision to try the Spitalfields branch for a Sunday birthday brunch more or less (actually, less) made itself.

At £35 for two to share, rather than £30 as advertised online at the time, the Hawksmoor brunch is pricey. But when you see what’s in it, suddenly things don’t seem too bad. It’s a hymn to overindulgence, a glorious platter of trotter this, blood that, with more meat than you can shake a stick at (if you shake sticks at things) and just enough vegetable to keep you feeling a tiny bit virtuous. A Bloody Mary and a coffee are not included, but should be obligatory for any right-thinking bruncher.

Three types of sausage – mutton, pork and beef – are large, juicy and suitably animal, perfect for scooping up beans and smothering with tasty HP, onion and bone marrow gravy. Black pudding more than does its earthy job, while bubble and squeak is, in an excellent way, ballast.

When I rule the world, I shall make it compulsory to serve grilled bone marrow with everything. Hawksmoor does, near enough, and the bone marrow in the brunch is predictably sensational. As are the ‘trotter baked beans’, which combine a slightly spicy tang with grimy, glutinous undercurrents.

As for the more common fried breakfast elements, they’re good too, especially a hulking bacon chop that melts in the mouth and salts the palette. The dripping toast is excellent, though rather more limited than its unlimited billing might suggest. You have to ask every time you want more, and the service is, shall we say, casual - we only managed one toast replenishment in a hour.

Indeed, that’s probably the main criticism of brunch at Hawksmoor. Yes it’s Sunday, and yes, people expect a more relaxed atmosphere, but when it takes several attempts and many minutes to have a waiter fill up water glasses (they should just put a jug on the table), it’s probably gone too far. It would also be nice if the brunch came with a tea or coffee – everyone’s going to order them, and it seems mean to increase the cost of an already expensive meal any further. These are quibbles though. Hawksmoor is a fantastic restaurant with a fantastic brunch. I'll be going again.

Phil Letts’ take: 7/10

Tamarind, 20 Queen Street, Mayfair

2011-02-02T22:34:00.004Z

It’s odd to think that Tamarind is now 16 years old. It's a proper milestone, like taking your first steps, or gaining your 200th Twitter follower (thanks @idso). This Michelin-starred Indian restaurant was one of the first in London to combine the virtues of curry house and haute cuisine. Its unassuming Mayfair frontage disguises an old-school formality in the dining room, pitched somewhere between Le Gavroche and the Bengal Lancer.

A party of about 20, we went for the set lunch menu. Because of the numbers, the restaurant was happy to provide sharing plates, meaning everyone was able to try everything, rather than confine themselves to a single starter and main. Add in a reasonable deal on price (it’s normally £27.50 per head for the three-course lunch menu, but we paid less as part of an offer), superb, accommodating service, and it seems like all the nuts and bolts of a decent dining experience are in place.

But what about the food? Well, unlike most 16 year olds, Tamarind seems happy with what it’s got. A starter of spiced chickpeas and cucumber with sweetened yoghurt, tamarind chutney, fresh coriander and blueberries was as delicious as the day I first tried it about six years ago. The slight sourness of the yoghurt dominates but never overwhelms the fruity flavours of the rest of the dish, while chickpeas maintain just the right integrity to feel integral. It’s an excellent dish.

Crab and sweetcorn cakes with berry chutney are good too, though lacking in depth. Like most good dishes, it makes a virtue out of recognisable component parts: you can taste every flavour separately and together. But ultimately, it’s a little dull – too conservative in this most Tory part of London.

The third of the starters promises much. The menu has it as ‘salad of spice roasted duck breast with kumquat, peppers, salad leaves and avocado; in an orange and chaat masala dressing.’ While I’m sure this description is technically accurate, it oversells what is at heart some sweetened bits of duck breast on some salad. It’s pretty bland, and disappointing.

After these slightly uninspiring offerings, most of the mains delight. Tandoor-grilled monkfish comes rubbed in coriander, lime leaf, green chilli and (the menu says) gram flour. It’s the dish of the day, stunningly meaty, subtley yet zestily flavoured and sweet, rich and tangy in equal measure. The lime leaf works especially well, highlighting at once the spice of the chilli and textural luxury of the meat.

A chicken thigh with onion, tomato, ginger and fenugreek is another triumph. Meltingly well-cooked chicken gives a juicy hit, while the other flavours surround and occasionally subdue it. It’s wonderful.

I’ve always liked the sound of nigella seeds (imagine what you could grow with those!), so I’m delighted to find they accompany baby aubergines in the third main course. This works well and best as a side dish, so that’s how we treat it. Along with excellent yellow lentil daal, surprisingly pedestrian Indian gherkins and a saffron basmati rice, the aubergine is decent enough.

Crispy, light and airy naan are as good as those at Dishoom. That’s very good, by the way.

A final offering of Masala tea and ginger ice cream with stewed prunes is another enjoyable dish, though by this stage, I’ve eaten so much of other people’s lunches that I’m too full to really enjoy it.

Tamarind is a decent restaurant and, at lunchtime prices, it’s well-priced. But while the food is good, it feels oddly dated, a relic of an era when London diners were happy with less. At lunch on a Friday, there’s almost no one in the restaurant; and in hedge-fund paradise, that seems pretty ominous. It could do with an injection of energy to complement the undoubtedly competent kitchen. Perhaps what it really needs is a healthy dose of teenage rebellion.

Phil Letts’ take: 6/10

Hummus Bros, 37-63 Southampton Row, Holborn

2011-01-28T11:13:00.001Z

One of the pitfalls of writing a food blog is that it mercilessly exposes personal taste. It’s easy enough to be objective about places if you’re a professional reviewer – after all, it’s not your money you’re spending, and there’ll always be another meal to try if this one doesn’t work out. But bloggers need deep pockets, or they need to be selective. And you (well, I) tend to select restaurants where you’re confident your money won’t be wasted, and where you’re comfortable you know what you’re talking about. So this blog is full of nice Italian restaurants, carnivores’ paradises and curry houses.

It’s unlikely I’d review a place like Hummus Bros unless I was invited (i.e. not paying). I like hummus as much as the next man (I quite like it), but it has too many negative associations for me to want to go to a restaurant dedicated to it. I’m not an over-gassy hippy, and nor do I want to be.

So, while it might not surprise you to discover that Hummus Bros is really rather good, it surprised me.

The evening was a meet-and-schmooze for bloggers. After leafing our way through the slight silly menu – 13 pages elaborating every single dish followed by one page with the actual menu on it – I ordered a main of fava beans, and some tabouleh. My guest went for a chunky beef main with a side of falafel salad. Some excellent pitta bread completed our food order.

Main dishes come surrounded by a palisade of hummus. It’s good hummus, but there’s far too much of it – a pot’s worth on the regular plates, I’d guess. My fava beans were salty and earthy, slathered in olive oil and extremely tasty. A long-boiled egg on top packed a rich and slightly smoky punch.

The beef chunks were slow-cooked and carried an intense tomato flavour, while the tzatziki that came with them was fiercely garlicky. Hummus made a relatively neutral contribution to both dishes, though it should be noted that stewed fava beans and pureed chickpea make for eloquent bowels.

The tabouleh was ok, but without the kind of zip the best versions have. Thankfully there was a bottle of lemon juice on the table, which perked it up quite a bit. Falafel was the only real disappointment of the evening – far too dry for my taste, though the salad it sat on was better.

I’d never had aloe vera juice before, but I’m a fan now. It initially tastes oddly like bubblegum, but then, for reasons inexplicable, keeps drawing you in to have more. Little chunks of the plant float around the drink nicely; it’s thirst-quenching and intriguing. Ginger and mint lemonade was another triumph.

For dessert, I had cheeky little Baklava. Nutty, syrupy and extremely sweet, these were exactly as they should be. My guest meanwhile went for the extraordinary Malabi. It’s a milk pudding very like panna cotta, but served with a terrific date honey, all dark thickness and bitter treacly flavour. At £1.50 a pop, this is ridiculously good, and ridiculously good value.

Indeed, perhaps the best thing about Hummus Bros is its price (though I didn’t pay for this meal). Our main, side, drinks, desserts and espressi would have come to about £23 pounds between the two of us. You could have a very decent lunch here for about £7. The restaurant is friendly and comfortable, and you can imagine a roaring takeaway lunch trade makes up for the odd quiet evening. As a convenient and economical option with often excellent food, it comes highly recommended.

Phil Letts’ take: 7/10

Thomson Airways, 30,000 ft above Northern Europe

2011-01-17T12:44:00.002Z

Take a close look at that picture. Go on, take a real good look. Note especially the shapes, the surfaces. Imagine the texture of those items. There’s that rubbery egg, bouncy and hard; the mushy tomato, compounding its lack of flavour with a lack of body; slab-like bubble and squeak; and most evilly of all, that pasty, textureless, shiny sausage.

How do airlines do it? How do they manage to make food so preternaturally awful? How do Thomson get away with charging £6 per meal for something that you wouldn’t give to a lion that would eat you if you didn’t, for fear of insulting the king of the jungle?

For the record, this ‘breakfast’ tasted worse than it looks. Or rather, the bits that tasted of anything at all tasted worse than they look. Mercifully, the egg and sausage, beyond a vague salty aura, tasted precisely of nothing. The tomatoes, by way of contrast, were somehow synthetic, recalling cheap service station ketchup more than anything else. But even that’s not quite right; in truth, they tasted wholly, almost proudly, of themselves. It’s not a good taste, I assure you. Bubble and squeak at least had a faint whiff of something vegetable about it - very faint, though. Flaccid fruit and a cup of orange juice were better, but not by much.

Thankfully, we had also booked a meal for our return flight, so I was able to sample the delights of dinner too. A pasta salad tasted like sculpted wallpaper paste. More sausages were awful. Onion gravy was pretty bad. Leek mash was pointless and dry. Oddly, and brilliantly, all this was accompanied by some absolutely delicious peas, of the sort you find in France, sweet and moreish. A bread roll made me feel sick. And I couldn’t bear the thought of trying dessert.

That this dinner came unaccompanied by any drink apart from tea/coffee seemed a little stingy, but I suppose when you’re charging for drinks, it makes sense to only give away stuff that makes people thirsty.

Thomson Airlines meals should not be eaten by anyone, ever. To endure one is akin to having your hand slowly crushed in a vice; eating two is for the most hardcore of masochists. Absolutely revolting.

Phil Letts’ take: 1/10 (for the peas)

North Road Restaurant, 69-73 St John Street, Farringdon

2011-01-13T13:07:00.002Z

Sometimes, it’s the little things that count. In many ways, my meal at North Road was the most exciting of last year. The food is ambitious and precisely executed, its flavours often complex yet completely comprehensible. It’s the mark of a very good restaurant to attempt so much without over complicating things or overwhelming customers. North Road should be a great success.

So why then did I feel less than delighted with my visit just before Christmas? Well, there’s something not quite right. Three of us were sat in a section of the restaurant on our own, despite spare tables in the busier, larger dining room. After this slightly disconcerting start, things got odder.

North Road offers an excellent value lunch menu (3 courses for £20). It featured a lobster soup on the day we ate – a lobster soup that caught Cute Letts’ eye. The problem was, she didn’t want the rest of the menu, and the broth didn’t feature on the a la carte. So we asked, thinking it might be possible to pay an a la carte price (i.e. more) for this individual dish. It was not. Not only that, but the waitress could not have been less helpful about it. There was no asking the kitchen or the manager, no attempt to suggest an alternative from the a la carte, and not a whiff of geniality. Cute Letts was told to have the menu.

The service continued grumpily throughout. Wine waiters jumped up to refill glasses every time anyone had a sip, but didn’t smile once. There was a general sense that we were an annoyance to the front of house staff. It was annoying.

And it’s all so unnecessary. The food at North Road is, at times, jaw-droppingly good. The lobster soup, when it came, was umami heavy and intense with rich, dark flavour. Sweetbreads with milk skin and pickled elderberries were extraordinary – sweet offal, onions and sour notes with a smooth, slightly but nicely rubbery milk skin (it’s exactly what it sounds like). A smoked scallop and apple dish sparkled too (literally, with its glistening jelly topping).

Mains were excellent as well. Cute Letts’ plaice with salsify was as straightforward as things get here, and good with it. I had mutton loin, with a powerful smoked onion puree and crispy onion ring, atop a wild cabbage broth. It was muscular and unapologetically macho, but as a combination of textures and intriguing, deep flavours, it could hardly have been bettered.

The pick of the bunch though, was venison loin with beetroot. The loin, rolled in burnt hay ash, had that perfect tenderness that comes with sous vide cooking, while beetroot added to the picture as well as the taste. Smoked bone marrow was dotted hither and thither, counterpointing and enhancing the blood flavoured meat.

Dessert maintained the quality and inventiveness. Jerusalem artichokes, sunflower seeds and smoked ice cream all made appearances, but without any of them feeling out of place. Liquorice and caramel textures provided a highlight. So did comice pears with the aforementioned ice cream and sunflower.

Chef Christoffer Hruskova is going to impress a lot of people with this brave new venture. The cooking was truly dazzling, and at about £50 pounds per head a la carte with wine, it’s not a bank-breaker. But they do need to work on the service.

Phil Letts’ take: 7/10 (though probably 9 for food alone)

The Hinds Head, High Street, Bray

2011-01-04T16:24:00.001Z

Every truly brilliant chef faces a choice sooner or later: refine, improve and experiment by focussing on what already exists; or expand, whether in the form of more restaurants, more TV appearances, more endorsements or more cookbooks. Most try to tread a middle path, wary of Gordon Ramsay-like dilution of standards and public profile on the one hand, and becoming the answer to a quiz question that nobody’s ever asked on the other.

Heston Blumenthal ran The Fat Duck in Bray for several years before he had any significant personal profile. During that time, those lucky enough to attend the restaurant spoke in tones of bemused awe when asked to describe it, as perplexed by the dishes as they were delighted. The Fat Duck is still an unutterably glorious restaurant, with a menu that perfectly combines high magic and low wit. But this is not a review of that, so to the point...

After that initial period of propelling British cooking to previously unknown heights, Blumenthal expanded his portfolio. Rather than go big and brash, he took over a pub just down the road from The Fat Duck, promising old classics cooked brilliantly, with occasional modern twists if and when it aided the flavour. So far, so low key. When it opened, the Blumenthal Hinds Head seemed to have everything right, from the spectacular quail’s-egg-scotch-eggs in the bar, to the marvellous steak and kidney pudding in the restaurant. It very nearly managed to disguise itself as a proper pub too, especially if you were fortunate to bag a table downstairs, in sight of the bar.

Since then, the Blumenthal empire has continued to grow. Heston is on TV more or less every week, he’s producing cookbooks by the series, he’s revamped the Little Chef in public, he’s made an expensive Christmas pudding, and he’s about to open a massive restaurant in Knightsbridge. And you can hardly blame him for that. He clearly deserves every reward, if only for being the absolute best chef around. But...

The Sunday before Christmas, I had an unsettling experience. I had a meal at a Heston Blumenthal eatery that wasn’t excellent. Indeed, elements of it were no more than adequate.

My ham hock and foie gras terrine proved a case in point. It was decent enough, though the primal flavour of the foie gras was entirely overwhelmed by the ham, to the point where ‘foie gras’ looked suspiciously like menu dressing, rather than adding anything desirable to the dish. Cute Letts’ soused mackerel left a better impression, sharp and oily.

The steak and kidney pudding remains, and remains excellent, but the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding were both pretty disappointing. The beef could have come from most carvery trolleys in the country, while the Yorkshire was dry and larger than necessary.

A joyous smoked chicken and mushroom pie made sure that Cute Letts stayed happy – small but perfectly formed, it looked liked the kind of dish you’d photograph for an advert. The smoked chicken taste was intense, while tarragon buzzed around the periphery most pleasingly.

Our final tablemate went for fillet steak on the bone, with a bone marrow sauce. This came pretty much as expected: very good, but not as good as Hawksmoor, though triple-cooked chips helped it along.

Dessert provided a highlight and a lowlight: my apple and blackberry crumble was beautifully sweet and tangy, with crunchy crumble near-saturated with butter and sugar, and bubbling, sticky fruit; Cute Letts’ rhubarb trifle just didn’t match up, drenched as it was with unadvertised rosewater flavour. When will people realise that rosewater’s disgusting? No one really likes Turkish delight, do they?

Now I’m not saying that Heston Blumenthal has allowed himself to be distracted from his primary business (serving food to paying guests) by all the fame and all the tie-ins. That would be premature. But The Hind’s Head felt neglected just before Christmas. The awful upstairs seating could have been a Beefeater, given a salad bar, and this is surely not the aim, even allowing for Blumenthal’s love of all things nostalgia. The food, though generally fine, was simply not up to the impeccable standards we’ve come to expect from his restaurants. At £250 for four including wine, it needs to be better. For about half the price, you can and should go to The Magdalen Arms in Oxford.

Phil Letts’ take: 6/10

Indali Lounge, 50 Baker Street, Marylebone

2010-12-24T19:27:00.001Z

There are no photos accompanying this review. Indali Lounge on Baker Street is extremely dark. Apologies for that.

Now, a review without photos may well seem ill-judged, like Eric without Ernie, a Big Mac without fries, or Nick without David. Odder even than these split pairs though, is the notion of curry without butter, ghee or cream. Surely fat is one of the most important things in good curry dishes.

The Indali Lounge claims to be the ‘healthiest restaurant in London’. It may very well be, though it should be asked why any restaurant, and especially a curry house, would want such an accolade. After all, I can boil my own lentils.

It wears its healthy credentials incredibly heavily too. Dishes are routinely described as ‘low fat’, while the menu makes a point of highlighting that only a smidgeon of olive or sunflower oil will have been used, and then only when absolutely necessary. To someone who believes food should be tasty first and foremost, this seems like mistaking a negative for a selling point, but I realise others may see things differently.

Anyway, to the food. Most of it was decent enough, though the complimentary amuse bouche, of vegetable soup, failed to inspire. Lean, sprightly poppadum crisps and light fruit chutneys made up for it. Kandari chicken malai tikka was moist and tangy with ginger; lamb sheesh, a little dry. A third starter, of soft shell crab, was full of coconut and mustard flavour, and delicious.

Mains were variable. Mine, a lamb biryani, could have done with more fat. The flavours were all there, but the dish was dry in the extreme. I failed to finish it, in an almost unprecedented dereliction of duty. A rather good lamb rogan josh and a tasteless paneer and pea, with no power in the paneer nor perk in the peas, made up the mains.

Black daal was suitably earthy but not buttery enough (not buttery at all, in fact). Dishoom does this dish far better. Perhaps most bizarre were the naan breads, made of wholemeal flour and oats. Though surprisingly palatable, they would have been better with more fat and less roughage. A crumbly texture doesn’t really work with naan.

The service was patchy, with long waits for a jug of water and difficulties securing drinks orders, but otherwise friendly enough, even if the decision to plonk a laminated testimonial from Channel 4 down on the table midway through the meal seemed eccentric. With mains at between £8.50 and about £13, it’s a little more pricey than it should be, though not extremely so. I enjoyed my meal, though I suspect the company, not the food, was responsible for that. If you’re stuck for options, or stuck with a health freak, you could do much worse. Otherwise, Indali Lounge is to be recommended mainly for its novelty.

Phil Letts’ take: 5/10

St John Bread and Wine, 94-96 Commercial Street, Spitalfields

2010-12-21T11:37:00.004Z

This is disheartening. St. John Bread and Wine has long been my favourite restaurant in London, and now I’m going to give it a less than glowing review. How disappointing.

The problem was with the Christmas feasting menu. We were a party of twelve, and so were obliged to choose something for the whole table (bar one guest, who suffers with ‘special’ dietary requirements). We plumped for the goose, at £43 pounds per head for three birdy courses and a sorbet. At that price, it’s not just the goose that’s getting fat.

Now, I know goose isn’t cheap. But when a whole suckling pig would have come in at £27.50 per head normally (+£15 pounds each for the ‘festive’ version, with starter and dessert), and when £43 pounds would buy you about eight dishes on the la carte menu, it’s not unreasonable to expect something pretty bloody spectacular for the price, especially when, almost by definition, these kinds of lunches are also going to yield a pretty high wine spend for the restaurant.* In any other place, the price wouldn't have mattered, but SJBW is justly renowned for astonishing quality AND superb value.

Goose liver pate was fine in every sense apart from the best. Finely pureed and finely spread on a single piece of quite large toast per person, it tasted fine but rather underwhelming, even with little cornichons to garnish. I hadn’t expected full on foie gras d’oie, but a little textural interest wouldn’t have gone amiss.

The next course was rather lovely – confit goose in a salad of bitter leaves, with a tart vinaigrette that punched through the decadence of the crispy bird. Delicious, but there could have been plenty more.

The main, of roast goose and goose fat mashed potato, was another partial triumph. Pink meat tasted rich and gamey, with a crispy, fatty skin adding a brash veneer. Remarkable, mischievous mash, saturated with fat, would almost certainly kill in large quantities. That’s how I’d like to go, at least.

I say partial triumph, not because there was anything wrong with what we were given; rather, the looming non-presence of anything green seemed odd. Fat, rich goose and fat, rich mash would have benefited hugely from some slim cavolo nero, say, or sprouts, or peas, or leeks, or broccoli.

We finished with a perky sorbet. I imagine egg-whites gave the sharp lemon ice its delightfully creamy texture. As sorbets go, this was very good, though a sorbet is never really going to provide fireworks. A slight anti-climax, perhaps.

In most London restaurants, our goose feasting menu would have been an unqualified success. But because of the insanely high standards set by SJBW, this sweet ensemble left a very slightly sour taste. With lots of decent wine, we spent £68 pounds per head.

I’ll certainly return to SJBW – it’s a wonderful restaurant. But I think I’ll avoid the feasting menu in the future, which means no large groups. A shame, since SJBW should be perfect for long lunches with lots of friends.

Phil Letts’ take: 6/10

*The day before we ate, there had been some kind of accident at SJBW’s wine storage facility – £250,000 of wine was lost. Terrible.

Cantinetta, 162-164 Lower Richmond Road, Putney

2010-12-09T12:29:00.002Z

Pity the poor folk who live in Putney. With all the worst trappings of complacent suburbia and none of the benefits, it’s a miserable and clumsy nowhere - Kingston without the shopping.*

On the other hand, it now boasts a very fine restaurant. Cantinetta is the latest in a seemingly endless list of middle-to-high end Italian eateries that have opened in London in the past year or two. After years of fruitless effort, during which Cafe Uno and Bella Pasta passed for Italian restaurants, the English finally seem to be working out how to do it. Even in Putney.

Not that there’s anything particularly English about Cantinetta, beyond its unfortunate location on the Lower Richmond Road (note: this is an extremely long road, and if you look for number 162-164 on Google Maps, it directs you to a main artery about two miles from the restaurant). It’s another Locatelli influenced offering, following hot on the heels of the very-slightly-underwhelming Tinello. Chef Federico Turri is a Locatelli alumnus.

We went for Sunday lunch during the soft opening, meaning the food was half price. I know it’s not particularly good practice to review restaurants during soft openings (they’re designed to let the place iron out any problems before charging full price), but until I can afford not to worry about the prices, I’m going to continue taking advantage of the offers. In any event, the two restaurants I’ve reviewed in this way (Hawksmoor is the other) were both so good as to render the softness of their openings irrelevant.

We shared a light, perky potted rabbit for starter. Served with thick, crunchy bruschette, it struck a beautiful balance between fatty, melting meat and a citrusy salsa verde.

After that, we went for borlotti bean and mussels soup (me) and squash ravioli with pork ragu (Cute Letts). The soup was rich and warming, with excellent borlotti hovering somewhere between firm and melting. The squash ravioli dazzled, the sweet smoothness of their filling offset by the earthy pork ragu and textural delights of precise pasta: near perfection, and the dish of a very good day.

Tagliata di manzo (in this case, a huge hunk of ribeye) came with deep fried polenta that looked and felt like Michelin-starred hash browns, and a thick nebbiolo sauce that ended up being slightly too rich for me. A beautiful dish, nonetheless. We added courgette fries (for a change), which were among the best I’ve ever eaten. Again though, Cute Letts picked the pick. Monkfish with globe artichoke and sprightly salsa verde was magnificent, with just enough tang from the salsa to complement the luxurious swimmer.

However, as Meat Loaf didn’t say, one out of three ain’t bad – I nailed the dessert selection, choosing sebadas filled with pecorino and drenched in honey. Sebadas are a kind of deep fried ravioli, and this dish was unlike anything I’ve ever tasted: warm, sweet and sticky, but with an undertone of frisky cheese to boost the ensemble.

Cute Letts did pretty well too. Her panna cotta was drenched in very nice grappa - a coup for this chubby, creamy dish.

A nice bottle of Sicilian Borgo Selene worked well for £14.50.

Non-soft opening prices would have seen this lot come in at about £40 per person. For this quality, that’s a serious bargain. The restaurant is airy, with a bar serving booze and tiraditi (little snacks, unavailable when we attended) that is sure to make it a local favourite. If it wasn’t in Putney, I’d be there all the time.

Phil Letts’ take: 8/10

*I don’t know Putney all that well, so if this assessment is entirely inaccurate, I’m sorry. It just always seems like a place that thinks it’s very posh, sophisticated and smart, contrary to all available evidence.

Supperclubs, trademarks and the London Underground

2010-11-30T17:47:00.000Z

Many of you reading this will know Ms Marmite Lover. I expect several of you have been to The Underground Restaurant, her Kilburn supper club. I attended before I was a food blogger, and had a memorable day, chiefly because of the sweary biscuits she served. As the self-proclaimed “pioneer of supper clubs in this country,” Ms Marmite Lover is pretty well known.

The Underground Restaurant launched in January 2009, achieving remarkable success extremely quickly. Supper clubs in London are two-a-penny these days, but Ms Marmite Lover (real name, Kerstin Rodgers) claims to have laid much of the initial groundwork for the current boom. From her home in Kilburn, she puts on dinners, lunches, afternoon teas, themed nights and recently, an Underground market, charging up to £50 pounds for the privilege. While she may not yet be making mega-bucks, it’s clear that what started as part-hobby, part-philosophical statement, is now a brand, generating revenue and a significant media profile for its founder.

Unfortunately for her, success means publicity, and with publicity comes scrutiny. Last week, the Evening Standard ran a story about Transport for London’s challenge to a trademark application for ‘The Underground Restaurant’, filed last year. Ms Marmite Lover confirms that she filed the application, and that TfL have sent her no less than three ‘cease and desist’ letters, demanding that she change the name or shut the restaurant down, on the grounds that she is infringing the company’s ‘Underground’ trademark.

The story met with howls of outrage from the foodie community, some of them justified, many of them not. Despite what some people have claimed, this has absolutely nothing to do with trying to ‘copyright’ the word ‘underground’ (that would be impossible), nor is it accurate to say that TfL has tried to ‘patent’ the word (patents cover inventions, not words). This piece is an attempt to look at the issue slightly more realistically, though I’m not a trademark lawyer, and none of what follows should be taken as legal advice of any sort.

TfL owns a trademark for the word ‘Underground’, registered in Class 43 for food services, restaurant booking services and the like – essentially, it’s the European-approved category for restaurants, catering and so on. This trademark entitles the owner to protection from anyone imitating it, passing off their services as the owner’s, gaining benefit by creating a false association with the existing brand, creating confusion about the origin of services or otherwise diluting the value of the initial mark.

That said, for a trademark to be usefully enforceable, the owner must normally be able to demonstrate that it is being put to use in the category for which it was registered, and that someone else’s use of it is confusing or damaging in some way. Effectively, if challenged, TfL might be called upon to show that it not only provides some kind of food or restaurant service, but that it is branded with the Underground mark. I asked TfL if they have any such services, but didn’t get a reply.

Now, without going into whether ‘The Underground Restaurant’ actually infringes TfL’s mark – it would require more information than is available to someone not involved in the case – it is fairly clear why TfL are pursuing it. Any large corporation has a responsibility to its stakeholders (even if they are taxpayers) to protect its intellectual property. It’s sound commercial policy to stop people gaining benefit from a brand name that they don’t own. And while Ms Marmite Lover calls TfL’s own trademark “frivolous” (in as far as it covers food), for the moment, the trademark exists.

Does ‘The Underground Restaurant’ gain benefit from a false association with the London Underground? Probably not, but if the question is even worth asking, then it’s probably worthwhile for TfL to investigate it. Does ‘The Underground Restaurant’ create confusion among customers as to the origin of its goods and possibly dilute the TfL brand? Probably not, though Ms Marmite Lover’s house is not far from the Kilburn Underground station, so it’s easy to see why you might ask the question.

The more pertinent question might be whether it’s worth TfL investing money in tackling what is still a pretty small business. Many people would say no - it’s a clear waste of money that TfL could usefully spend on providing a useable transport service. Personally, I have quite a bit of sympathy for that view. But that said, it won’t cost TfL very much to send cease and desist letters, and the company knows that it has deeper pockets than its opponent. It might well be making a sensible calculation that it can nip a potential problem in the bud by throwing its weight around now. It’s not very nice, admittedly, but neither is it illegal. In fact, it’s probably good business.

So given the situation, where does Ms Marmite Lover go from here? Well, she could close down. That’s probably not an option. She could change the name of the restaurant (TfL have apparently suggested ‘Kilburn Underground’, though that doesn’t seem to solve the problem). That seems unlikely. She could wait it out and see whether TfL feels strongly enough to take her to court. The problem is, that could mean ending up in court. Finally, the two parties could reach an agreement.

“I have had reasonable discussions on the phone with TfL's lawyers. They said I'm sure we can come to an arrangement if you use a different font,” Ms Marmite Lover says. “They changed their mind. I'm hoping to come to an agreement with them,”

In all likelihood, they will come to an agreement. It’s in no one’s interests for the case to go to court. And if there’s a slight irony in a proud anti-establishment figure wanting to register a trademark in the first place, then no matter. As Ms Marmite Lover says, she’s “protecting [her] brand.” TfL would say the same, no doubt.

Tiny Robot, 78 Westbourne Grove

2010-11-15T16:21:00.002Z

It’s a little bit funny, this feeling inside. I’m kind of hungry, and I’m outside. I don’t have much money, but if I did, I’d probably go to The Ledbury instead. They say Saturday night’s alright for fighting. Luckily it’s Friday, which is good for dinner. And while there are many familiar, delicious restaurants around Westbourne Grove, it’s no sacrifice to try a new one. So hold me closer, Tiny Robot, even if your name is silly.

The first problem is the menu. It’s all well and good having a set of dishes listed under the word ‘Balls’, but it’s a challenge to work out how you’re supposed to choose your meal, given that half the menu costs about £3.50 while several dishes cost upwards of £15. Do you have starters? Lots of small things? A mix? Are the dishes suitable for sharing? We didn’t know. Nobody told us, nobody showed us. We asked the waitress, and apparently it’s normal to order lots of things and share them, giant T-bone steaks at £28 notwithstanding.

We had arancini and a couple of sliders, some whitebait, a rocket salad (or arugula, as the American-language menu would have it), and a piece of giant sausage with lentils.

The arancini were tasty enough, though smaller than you might like. Their spinach and parmesan risotto filling was comforting, while a side of herb aioli added a nice kick. We had one pork and one beef slider (meatballs in little burger buns). Mine, beef with ‘spicy tomato’ sauce, was pretty average, its sauce neither especially spicy nor even particularly tomatoey. Cute Letts' pork slider fared little better with its creamy parmesan topping. Neither of us had the guts to try the special turkey and cranberry option.

Now, I’m a rocket man, and in a salad with shallots and a super-light vinaigrette, it’s an excellent leaf. Our salad was just right, an enchanted moment in an otherwise mediocre ensemble. But even the most rocket man of rocket men might have found the whitebait dish a little odd. I don’t have any particular objection to serving whitebait mixed up with rocket, but in this instance, the whitebait was too soggy and threatened to meld with the leaves at any moment. A disappointing experience only partially offset by some delicious aioli (this time, without herbs).

But oh, lawdy mama, the giant sausage and lentils were good. A generous slice of cotechino Modena, a lovely, fatty sausage, sat lustily on a bed of lentils, crispy pancetta, carrots and onions. It was marvellous.

For dessert, we shared a baked Alaska, principally because I haven’t eaten one since I was about five, and they’re bloody lovely. This was particularly good, a ‘pieces finally fit’ kind of moment. Fluffy meringue sat atop rich pistachio ice-cream on a bed of boozy panettone. It was far too big for two, and you can’t order it for one, but I didn’t care. Six mouthfuls made me so sugared-up I felt like a wide-eyed wanderer. Otherwise, I’d have certainly finished it.

The bill came in about £50 for two, including a couple of beers and a glass of wine. Tiny Robot is ok, but you can do a lot better in this area, and I don’t just mean at The Ledbury. Would I go again? Well, I think it’s gonna be a long long time.

Phil Letts’ take: 5/10

p.s. Apologies for the scarcity of photos. It was too dark. The sun had gone down on me.

In praise of...farmers' markets

2010-11-14T12:41:00.002Z

Why would anyone need to praise farmers’ markets? It’s not like there are hordes of people queuing up to hurl insults at farmers selling their wares. We love fresh food in this country and we like knowing where it’s from. There’s no argument.

But in these straightened times, you hear the growing sound of tummy grumbles. ‘Farmers’ markets are overpriced,’ goes a popular refrain. ‘The food is hardly locally-sourced if you live in London,’ goes another, ‘and besides, farmers’ markets are full of twats.’

The third point is unarguable, but I’d take issue with the others.

There are certainly some things at your average farmers’ market that are overpriced. Normally, they are those items that have little or nothing to do with a farm. No one needs to spend seven pounds on a jar of hazelnut honey, and pre-made pesto sauces don’t need to cost a fiver. Indeed, much of what you might call the artisan-food trade at farmers’ markets is a horrendous rip-off. Thankfully, there’s an easy solution to that: don’t buy from those producers unless you want to.

Farmers’ market butchers can seem expensive by comparison with supermarkets, I’ll concede. Certainly, their meat is likely to cost more. Things that are miles nicer than other things tend to. I don’t think £10 for 800 grams of rare-breed skirt steak is too bad (price correct as of two weeks ago). Quite apart from the fact that you’d struggle to find skirt in a supermarket (chortle), this is more than competitive with almost anywhere you could buy it. It was bloody delicious too, even if 'rare-breed' is about the least helpful name for a product I can think of.

Yes, there’s the odd venison kidney for ludicrous amounts of money. If you can get one somewhere else, I suggest you do. Is it locally sourced? That depends what you mean by local. You’re probably not getting your deer from Richmond Park, but neither is your steak from Argentina. I’m happy to know that I know where it’s from, whether that’s Wiltshire or Northumbria.

The trick is to be discerning. Some price comparisons from my most recent visit:

Market eggs (free range) - £1.20 for half a dozen

Supermarket eggs (free range) – £1.63 for half a dozen (free range)

Market cavolo nero (bunch), leeks (five), broccoli (head), celeriac (one), onions (four), herb bundle, beetroot (handful) - £4.80

Supermarket cavolo nero (not in my local), leeks (five), broccoli (head), celeriac (see cavolo nero), onions (four), herb bundle (not really available), beetroot (handful) – about £5, if you buy the cheapest range, and without the missing items

Market apples (massive bag) - £1

Supermarket apples (not so massive bag) - £0.97 for basics

You get the point. The quality is hardly comparable either.

My local farmers’ market is in Queens Park. I imagine it’s up there with the most expensive in London. I still save money shopping there above my local supermarket, and everything tastes good. It’s better value and similar quality to the Riverford veg box I used to get. It’s better quality and fractionally more expensive than Portobello market. There may be better options in London, but not near where I live, and not with Tesco or Sainsbury’s written above the door.

p.s this is very funny - thanks to The Old Hat Club for sharing

Hawksmoor, 11 Langley Street, Covent Garden

2010-11-07T16:04:00.004Z

If I was called Pete, I’d feel even better about Hawksmoor’s remarkable cocktail, Shaky Pete’s Ginger Brew. After all, on Sunday at lunchtime I did feel somewhat shaky - a result of the excesses of the night before the night before. I’m also a teeny bit ginger (my facial hair, since you ask, and absolutely NOTHING else). And any brew worthy of the name gets my vote. It’s almost the perfect drink for yours truly, then, even if it is named after the barman who created it.

Shaky Pete’s Ginger Brew is truly the aperitif of gods. Unshaven, hungover gods perhaps, but gods nonetheless. This marvel contains gin, homemade ginger syrup, lemon juice, and a foamy London Pride top. They serve it in a glass with a proper handle too, the better to combat any tremors.

Anyway, Hawksmoor is principally known as a restaurant, so I’ll cease banging on about drinks. It’s famous for steak (and Kimchi burgers, if tweeting bloggers are anything to go by). We took advantage of their soft opening, which meant the food was 50 percent cheaper than it is now - good news for a tightwad.

As a result, we ordered extraordinary quantities of food and spent at least as much as we would have done had there not been a discount and we’d been watching our wallets. I had six Cumbrae rock oysters with sausages. The oysters were drowning in excess water, but otherwise delicious, while the sausages were the perfect fatty accompaniment. At £13 pounds (normally, £10 for oysters, £3 for sausages), these would be fine, but at £6.50, they were spectacular. We also ordered potted mackerel, which was large and tasty. It could probably have done with some more toast, but at £5.50 normally, you can hardly complain about that.

But who cares, really? It’s all about the beef. We went for a prime rib to share, with bearnaise sauce, steamed spinach, beef dripping chips and triple-cooked chips, and a side of bone marrow. You heard.

The beef was remarkable – fatty, beautifully pink and full of flavour, almost crispy on the outside with bags of lovely char taste. Also, there was loads of it – 1.2 kilos to be precise. This was a good thing, though also points to a slight quibble with Hawksmoor, at least during the soft opening.

We sat down for Sunday lunch at 1.30. By then, there were no porterhouse or prime rib cuts left at less than that weight. Between two, 1.2 kg is a bit of a stretch, and it would have been nice if the more popular weights (800g-1kg) were more readily available, especially since at normal prices, 1.2 kg would cost £72. That’s a figure to be reckoned with. I expect this is precisely the sort of thing that the soft opening is designed to identify, so it would be harsh to call it a problem, but I’d have certainly felt priced out of any of the sharing dishes if it had been a normal service – a shame, because the meat was truly brilliant.

At £3, the bone marrow side is laughably cheap – gooey, rich and stupidly moreish. Frankly, I’d have eaten four of five of these if I could. The beef dripping chips were super too – thick-cut and ballsy. Their thrice cooked cousins were slightly reserved by comparison, though still excellent. Spinach worked as a kind of annoying hippy at the meat feast – perfectly pleasant, but only really there to make you feel guilty about everything else.

We washed it all down with a bottle of Gayda (I laughed, but then I’m extremely silly). Punchy and nicely leathery, it was worth the £24 pounds we paid.

Taken on the terms it sets itself, Hawksmoor is more or less flawless. I can’t imagine you’ll ever find better beef in London, and the Seven Dials site looks the part and more. Shaky Pete’s Ginger Brew may be the best cocktail I’ve had, though I don’t drink many. I hope to shake him by the hand next time I go. It’s not cheap, but for a memorable meal in Covent Garden, Hawksmoor is a must visit. They are going to clean up.

Phil Letts’ take: 8/10

Camino, 28 Westferry Circus, Canary Wharf

2010-11-02T19:38:00.006Z

Canary Wharf always seems an odd place. But on a Saturday lunchtime, bereft of its bankers, wankers, lawyers and assorted consultants, it’s quite eerie, like a gold-rush mining town with no more gold.

I’ve always suspected that the typical restaurant customer in this part of London has no great need for food, subsisting instead on cocaine, money and poor people. But were they so inclined, the citizens of planet Goldman could do worse than head to Camino, the newish sister restaurant of a well-liked Kings Cross establishment.

I did, at the restaurant’s invitation and expense, and enjoyed the experience, though it’s fair to say Saturday lunch is probably not the best time to go (I chose the time, so you can blame me). We took advantage of the unusually good October weather and sat out on the waterfront, gazing over the odd modern-old buildings that define much Dockland riverside development.

The menu we were given was for brunch. It contained no starters, and when the waiter suggested we try churros con chocolate (little fried doughnuts with chocolate) ahead of our parrillada mixta (mixed grill), I was slightly bemused. Instead, we had to make do with some horrible olives, covered in lemon juice and paprika, I think. They were not good at all. A glass of Tio Pepe compensated somewhat, but I wasn’t optimistic about the rest of our meal.

Happily, things perked up with the arrival of our main. A huge plate of meat and garlic-smothered piquillo peppers, with a mild blue-cheese sauce, it was priced at a muscular £19.50 per head (minimum two to share). Any quibbles about the cost were more than made up for by the quality however. Rib eye steak was perfectly rare, tender and juicy. Pork sausages were interesting enough, with just a hint of peppery flavour to keep us keen. The morcilla (black pudding) was subtle and rich, with the texture of haggis and a fatty, ferrous flavour that I really loved. Some nicely cooked chicken was fine, but lacking zing.

Best of all was the Iberico black pig, served very rare indeed, and quite superb. Unaccustomed to deliberately rare pork, I was surprised and delighted by the fleshy texture of the meat, somewhere between raw tuna and rare steak. Sprinkled with large chunks of rock salt, it was full of sweetness and meaty flavour. A real discovery. The piquillo peppers were good too, though the salad leaves perched on the corner of the plate were disappointingly meagre and poorly dressed. The ensemble would have been great accompanied by potatoes. There were none on the brunch menu, though they are available normally. They should probably just serve them with the meat.

Our excellent waiter recommended a glass of Quinta El Refugio to accompany the grill. It was miles better than a £21 pounds-per-bottle wine should be, all vanilla notes and musky aftertaste.

We followed this with cheese – a ragbag of decent manchego and disappointing non-descriptness, accompanied by a rather nice thick strawberry jam. One of the cheeses tasted simply of Edam; another looked cracked and tough, like it had been cut earlier in the day and left out too long. But, I suppose, if you’re going to serve mediocre cheese, then you might as well do so alongside Upita de Los Reyes biscuits. These were so good I took the wrapping home with me and am now scouring London to find more. Caraway, salt and caramel played on the tongue to create layers of flavours that expanded and retreated in every mouthful. The datey, pruney glass of Pedro Ximenez ‘El Candado’that we drank with it probably helped too. At £4.50 a pop, this is another bargain.

We finished with decent coffee and an aggressive, anis-flavoured Basque liqueur called Patxaran. Very nice.

Camino does lots of things extremely well (including pictures of Penelope Cruz in the men’s loo). The food ran the gamut from poor to truly excellent, while the wine was wonderful and affordable. I imagine it will do very well in Canary Wharf, because it’s a cut above crappy chains like Giraffe, but not so fancy as to deter people who like that kind of place. You can eat and drink well for under £35 pounds per head. And if nothing else, there's the Iberico black pig and those gorgeous biscuits.

Phil Letts’ take: 6/10

The Little Chef, Popham, A303

2010-10-28T21:50:00.003+01:00

Does anyone remember The Happy Eater? There used to be one on the way to Gloucester from London – I don’t know exactly where, because I was about eight the last time I went. We used to visit on the way to see my granny. Essentially, it was a means of stopping sibling fighting using pancakes and maple syrup. The theory, I assume, was that we wouldn’t be too fractious on arrival if we had a small sugar hangover. I can’t remember if it worked, and I imagine the food was pretty foul, but I loved those stops nonetheless.

In the late eighties, anywhere that wasn’t home felt like a destination restaurant, at least to the young Master Letts. Roadside eateries were even better. The Harvester was a bit of a treat; McDonalds, an impossible dream. For some reason, we didn’t go to The Little Chef. I felt sore about it at the time, I think. Something about that smart red frontage and the real-chef shape made it look almost classy. Better than Wimpy, at any rate.

The Little Chef at Popham evokes an odd nostalgia – for childhood experiences I don’t think I had. But what with Heston Blumenthal’s well-publicised battles to turn the ailing chain around, and given that it’s conveniently located en route to Devon, it made sense to pop in to Popham for breakfast.

Why is it called the Olympic breakfast, I wonder? I suppose I could research it and find out, but I prefer to think that it has something to do with Daley Thompson.

In any event, three of us ordered it. Cute Letts went for a cheesy omelette. Four very un-eighties coffees and a genuinely freshly-squeezed orange juice completed the tab. The cheesy omelette was phenomenally cheesy, extremely tasty and perfectly cooked. £6.35 prices it above your local greasy spoon, but it seemed like good value.

The rather fancy menu describes the Olympic breakfast thus: Two Little Chef outdoor bred British pork sausages, two rashers of Wiltshire cured outdoor reared back bacon, two griddled free-range eggs, a slice of Ramsay of Carluke black pudding and a roasted field mushroom with either Heinz baked beans or a chargrilled tomato. Served with a slice of toasted bloomer bread and butter.

Sounds great, don’t it? Well frankly, it was. The mushroom was brilliant (cooked in thyme infused oil, no less). The black pudding was brilliant. The sausages were small, but porky and brilliant. The eggs were brilliant. The bacon was ok. The tomato was also ok. For £7.25, this was just the right combination of fancy-pants pretentious fry-up and actual, proper breakfast.

The Little Chef in Popham has confirmed that everything I thought I was missing as a child, I was, in fact, missing. There is blue sky painted on the ceiling, for goodness’ sake! There are stupid little fake robins that look over you as you eat! The bathroom talks to you! That’s too many exclamation marks!

I doubt I’ll go to another one, as I suspect they’re not all like this, nor ever shall be. I’ll stick to the memories, I think.

Hix Restaurant & Champagne Bar, Selfridges, Oxford Street

2010-10-26T22:23:00.003+01:00

Everybody loves Mark Hix. They say you can’t please all the people all the time, but with Hix Oyster & Chop House, Hix Soho and Hix Oyster & Fish House, he’s had a pretty good go. Even his cookbooks garner near-universal praise. You might think, therefore, that taking over the champagne bar and restaurant in Selfridges would be a breeze.

It certainly looks that way at 7.30pm on a Tuesday evening. Perhaps surprisingly, there are only about 10 people in the restaurant, but then it is in an odd part of a not-as-nice-as-it-thinks-it-is department store. On the plus side, a relatively empty restaurant should mean a pretty flawless service. And on the even more plus side, I’m not paying; Hix Selfridges is priced at the intimidating end of quite expensive.

We start with some aperitifs – I go for the legendary Hix Fix, its champagne and cider brandy providing a suitably degenerate beginning to the evening.

A starter of ‘De Beauvoir smoked salmon’ benefits from the famous Hix cure. It’s really wonderful – sweet and woody, thickly sliced and generously portioned. By comparison, my focaccia with avocado, anchovies and parmesan is pedestrian. Best of the starters is whipped squash with fried halloumi. It’s a textural delight, beautifully seasoned and further enhanced by the rather nice Gavi we’re drinking.

Mains are good too. My steak tartare does its job and looks the part, though the accompanying toast adds little to the dish. I add a side of chips. These, cooked in beef dripping, are clearly very bad for the heart, but I like to think they’re rather better for the soul. They certainly make me feel warm and fuzzy.

My mother in law (who’s paying) orders monkfish and Red Sea prawn curry. It’s very nice without being quite as exciting as it sounds. And for £19.75 (a sneaky price if ever there was one), there should probably be more of it.

Cute Letts has a salt beef and green split pea salad. A wise man once said ‘you don’t win friends with salad’, but in this case, he would have been wrong. This is light and flavoursome, if slightly short of pickley notes to balance the beef.

Her good choices continue with dessert. Seasonal fruits with blackcurrant sorbet are seriously delicious. ‘My ideal dessert,’ she says. I order what I’d previously assumed took that particular honour: chocolate pudding and honeycomb ice cream. I contemplate the ‘shipwreck tart’, but I don’t know what it is and nor, apparently, does the waitress. ‘It’s got nuts in’ is the most I can get out of her. The chocolate pudding is ok, but without the bitterness that I love. Sickly-sweet honeycomb ice cream hardly helps matters. I can’t finish the dish, and it’s not often I say that. Hix fix jelly is our table’s final choice, and it’s excellent.

Hix at Selfridges serves good food, and would make a decent place to have lunch if you find yourself lost in the shop. Otherwise, it’s difficult to see the appeal. It’s not good enough to be a destination restaurant in its own right, and too expensive to be a value alternative to anything (our bill came to £188 for three). There is also a sense that everything is slightly too easy, slightly phoned-in, even. You’d be better off, in both senses, going to Hix Soho.

Phil Lett’s take: 6/10

Tinello, 87 Pimlico Road, Belgravia

2010-10-20T07:49:00.008+01:00

In 1995, 20th Century Fox released a film called Strange Days. Starring Ralph Fiennes as a predictably flawed cop who more or less gets the improbably odd job done, it was a pretty miserable effort. On the other hand, the film climaxes in a sea of frothing ecstasy at a giant street party in Los Angeles on 31st December 1999. This, like other sci-fi parties (notably in Starship Troopers), looks extraordinarily fun - a party so cool that the ways in which it’s cool haven’t even been invented yet.

Tinello, a new Giorgio Locatelli-backed and inspired offering in Pimlico, is similar. It looks fabulous; the kind of space (hate that word) that makes you feel as if everyone else has missed a trick. It prompts you to ask why all restaurants with pretensions to relaxed, smart quality don’t look like this. Hanging lamps give just enough light per table for vision, creating an illusion of privacy and intimacy, while the bricks and woods of the decor are just really, really, ridiculously good-looking. Too cool for school certainly, but then thank God we’re not at school any more.

Owners and brothers Max and Federico Salli are wine-guy and chef respectively. Their Tuscan heritage is sporadically felt – the menu is a mixed bag of Italian favourites, heavily influenced by Roman, Southern Italian and Marche traditions.

With both Antipasti and ‘Small Eats’ available, it’s slightly tricky to work out what to have for starter. We went for some small eats, and regretted it. Crispy courgette fries were so thin as to lose any remnants of vegetable flavour, instead tasting somewhat of grease and not much else. Polpetto and even Byron do similar dishes better. Burrata with garlicky, tomatoey bread was better, though with nothing to mark it out. Polenta with porcini mushrooms was ok, but under-seasoned and too curd-like in texture for my taste. While I’m sure they were fresh, the porcini were diced so they resembled the sort of thing you find vacuum-packed in Italian supermarkets, ready prepped to be stirred into a risotto. Pickled octopus was beautifully soft and giving, though the pickle all but obliterated any marine flavour. It was a disappointing start, only slightly mitigated by the excellent Prosecco we chose to accompany it, and the fact than no dish cost more than £3.50.

Things improved thereafter. For primi, we went for pasta – mine was nduja sausage and tomato with more burrata over pacchieri pasta (like giant, squat rigatoni). The pasta was perfectly cooked, the sauce intense, hot and tasty. A tagliatelle dish suffered from that odd, diced, textureless porcini, but again, the pasta was excellent. Finally, spinach and ricotta gnudi (a kind of mousse-cum- gnocchi) with tomato were delicious and suitably Tuscan, though extremely rich and almost too generously portioned. At between £7 and £10 each, they were very good value.

My main course was genuinely superb. A whole veal chop, beautifully rare, smothered in butter and accompanied by long-baked fennel and sage, is about as good as food gets in my book. The fat on its own had me smiling for days afterwards. The dish was the high point of the meal, and at £20, it felt like decent value, given the tiny number of places in London that even serve veal chops, let alone cook them like this.

Brill, borlotti beans and clams was good too, though the fish itself was rather overshadowed by the excellence of the accompaniments. Cod on celeriac puree made an unusual but winning combination.

A bottle of Roncaglia Colli Pesaresi at £28 and a young Barbera at £40 both made super accompaniments, and at reasonable prices for the quality.

Three out of four of us went for Pecorino in lieu of dolci. So few Italian restaurants in London manage to serve good pecorino with good honey and figs. In Italy, it’s a favourite. This pecorino was strong and rude enough to delight, while medlar honey provided the perfect, thick accompaniment. Fig jam was fine too, but I only really had eyes for cheese and honey. Cute Letts ordered tiramisu. It was ok, though cream-heavy and marscapone-light. The dessert courses seemed underpriced, if anything: at £5.50, the cheese was the most expensive on the menu.

We accompanied this with grappa (for me), Armagnac, Vecchia Romagna and Disaronno. All proved excellent value and quality (well, as much as you can ever hope for a quality Vecchia Romagna).

It felt like we had really pushed the boat out, so when the bill came in at about £70 per head, it seemed about right. In truth, Tinello costs far less than it might do.

The waiting staff were fun, chatty and knowledgeable, and had no problem with our party staying until about 12.15, three or so hours after we entered. For a meal that started so badly, I feel surprisingly positive about the restaurant, though they should probably confine small eats to the lunch menu or just get rid of them entirely. If it is to be a success, you would think the prices will have to go up, but for now, Tinello is a reasonable option with lots of potential.

Phil Letts’ take: 7/10

Ben Greeno's Supperclub, somewhere in Hackney

2010-10-15T13:06:00.013+01:00

Ben Greeno is a cheat. It’s not that he bowls deliberate no balls, or has affairs, or looks over your shoulder during poker games (as far as I know). He doesn’t, I assume, take dives in boxing matches, defraud international financial institutions or not pay his car insurance. He’s not a cheat in that sense.

No, Ben Greeno is a cheat because he claims to run a simple supperclub. You know, the sort that’s springing up all over London, staffed by excellent amateur chefs and run in a slightly chaotic but extremely fun manner. He does not.

With experience at everyone’s favourite restaurant that they haven’t been to, Noma, and big plans of his own Stateside, Ben is no amateur (even if he clearly loves his food). Do you own a water bath for slow cooking an egg over more than an hour? Have you ever served said egg, as your third course, with snails and wild garlic, its texture like good giant frogspawn, its yolk otherworldly? I didn’t think so.

Do you have the time, inclination and skill to prepare Jerusalem artichokes so they look like scallops, coat them in butter and tweezer them, salty, onto a plate alongside glorious hazlenuts, giving the whole the appearance of a Japanese garden? I don’t (especially not the skill).

When we have mackerel at home, Cute Letts and I, we tend to grill it or bake it whole. It’s delicious. If we’re feeling particularly ambitious, we might try to make a ceviche. But it would be a rare day that saw us attempt to present it raw with nasturtium flowers and dill cucumber pickle.

On the other hand, everyone can do pork belly, can't they? It’s easy. Cook it for ages with the right amount of salt and you’re bound to produce a winning dish. Cooking it like Ben Greeno does however, is not quite so straightforward. The pork tasted extraordinary – that’s almost a given here. But the ‘pickled walnut crumble’ topping it was absurdly good: pickled walnuts, blitzed crackling and some breadcrumbs created a salt and sour extravaganza that perfectly complemented the sweet pork. Broccoli worked beautifully with the dish.

I can’t cook desserts at all, so I won’t even pretend that I’d attempt something like Ben’s apple concoction. It was excellent by normal standards, but probably my least favourite dish of the night, given what had gone before. An attempt to do too much with too little perhaps. Apple in lots of different shapes is still apple, and the long, cylindrical pieces proved a real challenge, not giving into spoon work and having to be eaten more or less whole. They were tasty, sweet with muscovado and lightly spiced, but for me, slightly underwhelming.

No matter, salty caramel on teaspoons more than made up for any lingering disappointment.

Supper clubs are generally about atmosphere first and food a close second (certainly in my limited experience at three of them). Ben Greeno’s was about food first, but the atmosphere was brilliant too, helped by the warm-up glass of cider. Everyone had brought plenty of wine, which helped. Excellent company from guests including 360 degrees cheese and Ben’s delightful next door neighbour added to the charm, while Ben proved a genial host. We left at about eleven, but would have liked to stay much later. Others, I assume, did.

Supperclubs like this rather screw up my marking system. The only other one I’ve reviewed seemed so good that it deserved a 9/10, bearing in mind that supperclubs are not, nor should be, marked as if they were comparable to restaurants. But by that rationale, Ben would probably deserve a 10. My only disappointing supperclub visit occurred well before this blog started. It would probably have received a 5 by these standards.

I’m going to cop out and not give this one a mark. Ben Greeno’s is a terrific supperclub, but I don’t think he’s really competing against other places that are so-called. For £35, you get excellent restaurant-quality food, professionally presented, produced and served. I’d get down there fast if I were you. It won’t last forever.

The Magdalen Arms, 243 Iffley Rd, Oxford

2010-10-11T19:55:00.021+01:00

Is there a less appealing word in English than gastropub? It’s infuriating. There’s that horrible appeal to notions of gastronomy (or gastronomie, I expect), the related implication that there is something special about gastropubs ahead of normal pubs, and the unbearable all round smugness of the phrase. You’d even credit it with pretentiousness, were it not for the laughable idiocy of the Greek prefix gastro in the context, which makes the word mean ‘stomach pub’, more or less. What would one of those look like, I wonder?

The point of all this is merely to highlight that pubs are pubs are pubs. Some of the best also serve excellent food. Others don’t. You wouldn’t know it to look at some of the miserable places that use the moniker though. Many are not pubs at all; rather, they’re overpriced mediocre restaurants, or reasonably priced decent restaurants. My rule of thumb is that a pub, gastro or otherwise, is somewhere you could go for a drink, ideally of warm ale and nothing else, on your own, without feeling awkward.

Happily, The Magdalen Arms in Oxford is precisely such a place. Despite really outstanding food, it feels like a location for nursing a quiet pint, or a loud one for that matter, without provoking comment. In this particular instance though, anyone doing that would be missing out.

The food at The Magdalen Arms is brilliant. It’s easily the best food I’ve eaten in a pub, and I’m including the wonderful-but-possibly-not-a-proper-pub Hinds Head in that.

We were celebrating a friend finishing his DPhil, so started with a glass of quince Prosecco. I wasn’t very keen on the idea of quince Prosecco, but it tasted excellent, with a surprising subtlety of flavour and the right mix of slight tanginess and sweet. At £3.80 per glass, it was also wildly good value.

Starters of deep fried brawn with gribiche (quite like tartare sauce) and hanging courgettes with Wigmore were highlights. The brawn was crispy, not too greasy and preposterously piggy, while the Wigmore and courgette concoction had more flavour than a non-meat dish has any right to. Six rock oysters were delicate and tasty, and most importantly, served at the right temperature. I can’t stand places that, whether through paranoia or stupidity, serve oysters so cold they could give you neuralgia. These were cool, but not very cold, and all the better for that.

Snail and bacon salad made up the starter numbers. The lightly and deliciously dressed salad was slightly overwhelmed for me by the bacon flavour, though others at the table disagreed. Either way, that was as bad as things got. The snails were cooked to perfection.

Then, and oh my gosh, there was the lamb shoulder: only available for groups of four or five, priced at sixty four pounds, and accompanied by dauphinoise potatoes the likes of which you wish you could eat all the time. It was truly superb, giving but not at all sloppy, tender enough to be eaten with a spoon but robust enough for you not to want to, flavoured with mint, sherry (I think), possibly some thyme and bay, and accompanied by all the carrots you could ask for. If it’s possible, the potatoes were even more extraordinary, all garlic and cream and cooked just right.

I realise I’m descending into hyperbole here, but this was simply marvellous: better than a similar dish at Hereford Road, better than the one I cook at home, and generous enough that we had both lamb and potato to take with us for breakfast the next morning. The house red was a more than decent accompaniment.

You’d think we’d have left it there, but dessert followed – an English cheese plate and a buttermilk pudding with stewed apples. Both were very good indeed, though I didn’t much care for the texture of the goat’s cheese (the name of which I was too lazy to discover - sorry).

Were there problems with it? Well, it was a little too hot, and the windows only opened a fraction.

When I last wrote about eating in Oxford, I said that there is a little more leeway than in London; that establishments can afford to be worse than their capital counterparts. That may be true, but The Magdalen Arms would be absolutely excellent anywhere in the country. At about 35 pounds per head for three courses, some wine, coffee and an aperitif, it’s well worth the effort. I urge you to go as soon as you can. A stomach pub indeed.

Phil Letts’ take: 9/10

Polpetto, Upstairs at the French House, 49 Dean Street, Soho

2010-09-25T10:42:00.013+01:00

London foodieland can be a pretty competitive place. People are fond of one-upmanship: ‘I know this great place in Dalston, it's like a pan-Asian fusion, but with a great respect for local producers and the farm-to-plate journey’ or ‘you have to try the semolina ravioli at x, they challenge your conception of what pasta is capable of’. It’s like American Psycho, but not American. Secretly, I quite like this kind of thing. It’s good to be in the know, and, on the slightly less psychotic side, it’s gratifying to give someone a recommendation for somewhere you know they’ll love.

I always felt like I had a head start on the more assertive of these bragging types...I could do it for a fair bit of Italy. ‘There’s this great little pizza place I know down the road from Santo Spirito in Florence,’ and ‘well of course, in Gallipoli, the sea urchins are so fresh, they’re literally still urchining when you eat them’ or ‘Matera is certainly of archaeological and historical import, but its culinary traditions demand attention too.’

Unfortunately, Polpetto has rather scuppered that. It’s the kind of place you wish you knew in Italy, but barring (I assume) a handful of places in the Veneto, doesn’t really exist, at least not in my experience. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a restaurant that better deserves the introduction ‘I know this great little place.’

Cosily lit with flickering candles, it squeezes (really) 28 people into a space not much bigger than my living room. The food is mostly for sharing – small plates, tiny plates, and the occasional main-sized plate. We began with a couple of duck and porcini meatballs and some melanzane parmigiano, but stuff tends to arrive more or less when it’s ready. The meatballs were finely flavoured, the rich duck taste preparing the ground for a porcini kick that lingered for sometime afterwards. The melanzane was oil-soaked, cheeky and delicious.

But it got better. Next up was a stunning pork shoulder and pepper pizzetta, on which fatty cured shoulder fought to assert itself against the hot peppers, eventually resolving the whole into something that was both indulgent and kick-ass. Lentils and burrata were salty, but in a good way. I love it when lentils are cooked to that stage that allows you to suck them through your teeth, enjoying all the salty, herby juice while the little pulses struggle to maintain their integrity. I realise I sound like some kind of deviant, but these were brilliant.

Soft-shell crab in parmesan batter was nice too, though the accompanying fennel was the real star of the dish. The crab was pretty standard, if truth be told, if you can have standard soft-shell crab. Pigeon saltimbocca was ambitious, beautifully pink and with some rustic sagey oomph about it.

In contrast, stracchino (cheese), fennel salami and fig bruschetta was mildly disappointing. The bread was burnt-tasting and greasy, the figs were fine but not spectacular, and the salami, while generously proportioned, was nothing to write home about. This was the only real disappointment of the evening.

Next we had a go at some polpette (meatballs - not polpetti, which are little octopi). This was comfort food for grown-ups, with an excellent tomato sauce and lots of fennel in amongst its pork. It was a highlight, particularly when accompanied by beautifully crispy zucchini fries - ideal for mopping up extra sauce.

Finally on the savoury front, we enjoyed cuttlefish with gremolata (roughly, lemon, parsley and garlic). The cuttlefish was great, giving and tasty, while the strong lemon flavour really pushed the dish up a notch. Another triumph.

Desserts were pretty good too. A flourless chocolate and hazelnut cake was very naughty indeed; baked peaches in thyme and cream felt positively healthy by comparison.

We pushed the boat out on drinks. At £27, a bottle of prosecco was slightly regrettable. 500ml carafes of Barbera at £10 each were much better. Four of us paid about £30 pounds each. Were it not for the prosecco, it would have been even better on the pocket.

Polpetto is a fine restaurant. It’s horrifically trendy at the moment and full of people like me – not necessarily a good thing. With a no-booking policy, that means you need to be pretty organised and pretty patient, though early on a Tuesday night, there was no wait to speak of. Once the fervour has died down, I’m hopeful that it will become a Soho institution, one of those ‘little places’ that you return to time and again. I’ll certainly be back soon.

Phil Letts’ take: 8/10

Dishoom, 12 Upper St Martin’s Lane, Covent Garden

2010-09-22T12:16:00.012+01:00

Those of you who are familiar with this blog (all 14 of you) will have read about my curry-love before. You may also be familiar with my rather disorganised approach to choosing when and which restaurants to review. I realise therefore, that you’ll almost certainly have already read several reviews of Dishoom, the new(ish) Bombay cafe-style restaurant on St Martin’s Lane.

However, if pornography has taught us anything, it’s that there is always a market for variations on a theme. I hadn’t been to Dishoom when others were reviewing it, but I’ve been now.

The all-day menu at Dishoom is intriguing, encompassing breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. Its Indian classics, such as Sheekh kebab, biryani and daal, sit playfully alongside some less conventional Anglo-Indian items, like Desi fish fingers, sausage naan roll, chilli cheese toast and porridge.

We arrived at 8.30 on a Saturday evening. There’s no booking, but we were given a table for five within minutes – a refreshing change from certain other London restaurants with no-booking policies. The restaurant was full, but it didn’t feel cramped, the faux art deco decor creating an illusion of space and style similar to what you find in The Wolesley, though not as posh. Dishoom’s a nice looking place, with a nice atmosphere, nice staff, and for the most part, nice food.

It’s one of those places that serves you your food as it’s ready, in no particular order. This increasingly trendy idea is a fairly crap one, but Dishoom navigates it by bringing just about everything quickly. First out were lamb samosas, cafe crisps and keema pau (spiced lamb mince with buttered bread). The samosas were uninspiring – lots of crispiness but not much flavour – while the cafe crisps were offcuts from the samosas: pastry, essentially. No matter, the accompanying chutneys were excellent.

The keema pau told a different story. Its delicate, sweet spicing and excellent texture were only slight ruined by accompanying buttered burger buns. These made an odd contribution, an early example of a recurring weakness for too much Anglo in the more Anglo-influenced dishes. On that theme, the Desi fish fingers were pretty miserable, their spongy texture and uninteresting batter singularly failing to raise the dish much above what you might expect of a rather less salubrious fast food joint.

If it sounds like I’m complaining, then it should, but only really because the weak dishes are so unnecessary. The house black daal was magnificently buttery, while the accompanying garlic naan was thin, delicate and crispy. Spicy lamb chops were decent, though a couple were slightly burnt, and the day’s special vegetable Ruby Murray was sublime. A paneer and mushroom Roomali Roll would make an excellent lunch on its own, though didn’t quite work as part of a dinner – it’s an Indian burrito, more or less; chicken berry biryani was as subtle and richly textured as you could justifiably expect for £7.50. Add copious quantities of bottled Meantime to the mix, and Dishoom has pretty much nailed the quick and tasty experience for this location.

Even the desserts were pretty good - not always the case in Indian restaurants. We tried passion fruit and ginger Gola ice and pistachio Kulfi on a stick. Both were perfectly fine, refreshing and sweet.

The service is efficient and smiley, which is good, though they did manage to serve one of our number salt water instead of tap water. An odd choice, I’m sure you’ll agree. At less than £25 per head, Dishoom is far better value than most places in the area. Indeed, as a pre- or post- theatre venue, you’d be hard pushed to find many better places - it is curry, after all.

Phil Letts' take: 7/10

Origins

2010-09-18T12:05:00.014+01:00

There’s a memorable and irritating scene in Wayne’s World that sees the malevolent Joshua, smooth rival to the rather cruder Wayne, assert his taste and sophistication by serving champagne. The radiant Cassandra, object of his slimy affections, says she has ‘never had French champagne’ before. Joshua knows, of course, that ‘all champagne is French’; anything else ‘is just sparkling wine.’ He tells everyone so, not letting his smug mask slip for one second. Joshua may be right, but he’s also a dick.

These days, people bang on and on about authenticity in food. Stilton should come from Stilton, Parma ham from Parma, Burgundy from Burgundy and Scotch from Scotland. If your coffee says it’s made of civet shit, then you’d damn well better be able to smell it, goes the thinking. But while no one would argue in favour of ignoring the provenance of our food, it’s important not to confuse worthy efforts to protect the quality of a product with rather less wholesome lobbying to maintain a monopoly.

The Discover the Origin campaign is a part-EU funded promoter of protected designation of origin (PDO) foods and similarly protected wines (though these are often labelled DOC or AOC protected). In short, they make sure that people who buy Parmigiano-Reggiano not only know what they’re buying, but also know about its provenance. The campaign is also highlighting Parma ham, Burgundy wines, port and Douro.

It all sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? Of course Stilton should be from Stilton, you might think. Burgundy must come from Burgundy, because it’s a place and a name. Otherwise, Burgundy would be just wine.

But, here’s a thing. Stilton doesn’t come from Stilton. Indeed, cheese made in the Cambridgeshire village of that name could not use the appellation. The PDO for Stilton covers cheese made in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire. Not a town named Stilton in sight.

Similarly, Parmigiano-Reggiano does not have to be made in Parma or Reggio Emilia. Makers in Modena, Mantua right of the river Po and Bologna left of the river Reno also have the right to manufacture the cheese. Yes, they’re close by, but that’s not really the point. Despite what some would have you believe, these names are the names of products, not places. An American consumer of Parmigiano-Reggiano might well assume that their cheese was produced in one of the places that give it its name. They might well be wrong.

What on earth is going on then? What are these designations actually for? Well, they certainly help manufacturers who are licensed to produce certified products. If you can sell a cheese under the Parmigiano-Reggiano name, then you can sell it for more than if it were called ‘hard cheese from Italy’ or some such. Indeed, it could be argued that these designations have as much to do with entrenching and preserving monopolies as with protecting traditional products. All things being roughly equal, there’s no reason why you couldn’t produce a cheese in Scunthorpe using traditional methods that could pass for Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Maybe there’s something I’m missing. Whether it’s cheeses or wines, someone always has a reason why a certain area is the only area for production. Perhaps the cows are different, perhaps the soil is different, maybe it’s the temperature, or the humidity, or the incline of the vineyard.

This idea of terroir is all well and good, and may even be accurate for some products – especially wine. But it seems rich to extol the differences between neighbouring vineyards in Burgundy on the one hand and on the other claim that there’s something specific to all Burgundian wines that means they cannot be made anywhere else. Even the geographical argument is something of a red herring. With wines, Burgundy is a brand, not a place. How many people could even point to it on an unlabelled map?

The appellation benefits winemakers in that area, and it may even provide a certain guarantee of quality (though, as Chianti enthusiasts will tell you, some of the very best wines from that area of Italy don’t meet the criteria for the DOC/DOCG label), but it doesn’t tell you all that much about what the wine might taste like, nor why it’s different from similarly made wines that don’t carry the name.

I would argue that the PDO programme and its various equivalents are about money. And while there may be very valid reasons why Burgundy is protected by the French AOC (on which the EU PDO is based), just because it is from Burgundy is not good enough.

There is a principle in European trademark law that it is not permitted to trademark a generic name. This also applies to geographical protection. So cheddar is deemed a generic term and so unprotectable. That’s why we have Canadian cheddar and not just Somerset cheddar. But really, is champagne not generic? Is Parmigiano-Reggiano? Certainly port could be considered a generic term for a dark, sweet, fortified wine.

So if PDO is not the answer, what is? I would argue for some kind of standard that guarantees quality, not provenance – a PDO without the geographical restrictions. It would undoubtedly be a nightmare to organise, and would almost certainly require some sort of international treaty to get it through, but if someone can genuinely make a Stilton cheese in Canberra that is indistinguishable from one made in Leicestershire, why shouldn’t they?

Clearly this is pie in the sky. No one is going to give up a lucrative monopoly voluntarily. But couldn’t we at least drop some of the pretence? Protecting traditions is arguably a worthy endeavour, and there are certainly examples where the geography of a certain area has not morphed into a generic product description, and really does contribute something to the quality of the product. But it is no coincidence that PDO products are more expensive than imitations. Parma ham costs more than Tuscan ham because of its name, not because it's always any better. Often, it's indistinguishable.

Note: I was inspired to write this piece after a freebie bloggers evening at Cucina Caldesi courtesy of Discover the Origin. While I have some reservations about PDO, it was a great evening. My thanks go to Katrina Alloway for organising, Discover the Origin for providing the fun, and Katie Caldesi for her hospitality and excellent demonstration.

Mem & Laz, 8 Therberton Street, Islington

2010-09-08T21:08:00.015+01:00

Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares used to be a good watch. Crazy people running restaurants badly is a funny idea. Unfortunately, after the first three episodes, it became clear that the show’s approach was a formulaic as its presenter’s angry shtick. These days, Gordon needs only to walk into a restaurant for us to know that the following is wrong with it: bad management, terrible decor and a messy, over-complicated menu. His ‘advice’ can usually be boiled down to three words: keep it simple.

Mem & Laz is not a kitchen nightmare. It’s a busy and economical option in an area not known for its bargains. But it could learn something from everyone’s favourite Scottish swearbag. The menu needs to be much shorter and far simpler. Looking again on the website, I count 88 dishes on the main menu (including desserts but not including side dishes). There was also a separate specials list of about 8 the night we visited. That’s a whole lot of dishes, even for a restaurant that bills itself with the rather unspecific ‘Mediterranean’ label.

There were only two of us, so this review only covers about 4 per cent of the available menu. Sorry about that.

My starter was a special seafood salad at £4.95. It had some octopus and small prawns in it, as well lots of slighty unpleasant lemony vinegar to dress, and assorted leaves and salady bits, none of which were particularly inspiring. It was ok. On the plus side, it was enormous – easily big enough for a main dish.

On the other side of the table was the ‘Deep fried trio of cheeses’ with cranberry sauce and mixed leaves. The camembert was rich and interesting, unlike the brie and mozzarella, which were flavourless and rubbery. The cranberry sauce was sweet and red, which is something. The mixed leaves were mixed and leafy. Again though, if assessed purely by weight, this was a good deal.

Mains were large too. I had pan-fried chicken livers with bacon, spinach and red onion salad. I hate to think how many chickens died in the making of this dish, but I’d guess at 20 or so. To be fair, the livers were nicely cooked, if a bit lacking in flavour. The raw red onion that turned up in every mouthful rather overpowered everything else, I’m afraid, even the gigantic bits of bacon.

Chargrilled lamb chops with red wine sauce, potato and Mediterranean vegetables came recommended by the efficient and friendly waiter. They were probably the best things we ate – generously portioned, quite well cooked (but quite well-cooked as well, if you know what I mean) and with a gloopy red wine sauce that looked like bisto but tasted better.

All this was accompanied be a really very good bottle of Tempranillo. At £11.95, this was my favourite discovery of the meal.

Mem & Laz is essentially a restaurant for students. The portions are truly mind-boggling, the food is inoffensive, and the location and atmosphere are pretty good. We spent £41 pounds between us on more food than we could possibly eat and a bottle of very decent wine. That’s pretty unusual in this, or any other part of town. What’s more, with the largest menu I think I’ve ever seen, you’re almost bound to find something you can eat.

Phil Lett’s take: 5/10

Lan Kwai Fong, 95 Cowley Road, Oxford

2010-09-02T12:23:00.002+01:00

Oxford’s great. It’s like London’s gentler, smaller, slower sibling: not the kind of person you’d want to go on a roaring night out with, but perhaps someone with whom you could spend the hungover morning after.

The food has a similar sense of ease about it. You feel that restaurants get a little more leeway here, that there’s a touch more room for error. Things don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be good.

And who needs perfect anyway? Anyone who’s tried cooking Heston Blumenthal’s Bolognese can vouch for that.

Lan Kwai Fong, on Oxford’s Cowley Road, is certainly not perfect. Kitsch, odd and fun, but not perfect.

First, the food. Garlicky squid was batter and grease heavy, and on the not-crispy side of crispy. Crispy seaweed, in contrast, not only lived up to the ‘crispy’ bit of its name, it also tasted as if it might once have been somewhere near the sea – oddly uncommon in Chinese restaurants. Was it actual seaweed? No, but is it ever in England? It tasted great.

It’s tempting to say that those two experiences summed up the restaurant: tempting, and inaccurate. Nothing else was crispy, for one thing.

In fact, the squid was easily the worst dish we ate, while the seaweed was arguably the most competent, if not the most delicious. That honour was shared between two more meaty dishes.

‘Chicken wings in capital sauce’ doesn’t sound like the most appetising of appetisers. These were sweet, sticky but not cloying, and meat-heavy. Five for £5.50 is a real bargain.

Best of all though was the pork belly, braised in ‘sweet sauce’. If there was a dish of the noughties, it was surely the gastro-pub pork belly, crunchy-crackled, fatty, tasty and cheap(ish) as if the mere fact of using a cheaper cut made something better. This, predictably, was nothing like those dishes. Braised belly is an acquired taste. Or rather, it’s an acquired texture, all chewy and slippery and gloopy. But in the right hands, it’s pretty special. What sweet sauce is I have no idea, though there was certainly soy, sugar, garlic and vinegar in this one, and probably fennel too, with maybe some star anise and cinnamon. For those of us who like our meat fatty, it was a treat.

There were other dishes: beef noodles, pak choi, beef in oyster sauce. They were above average, but with nothing to mark them out either way. The meal came in at about £20 pounds per head for three of us, including a beer or two and some rice, and with plenty left for doggy bags.

But that’s not all there is to say about Lan Kwai Fong. The waiting staff deserve particular praise for their bonhomie, while the venue itself is a hoot. A converted pub, the restaurant makes an unholy and very funny mishmash of pub, cocktail bar, nightclub and eatery, complete with fruit machines, garish colouring, karaoke screens, cocktails that come with health warnings, and a pub garden.

So no, it’s not perfect, but if you find yourself on Cowley Road, you could do a lot worse. I know I have.

Phil Lett’s take: 6/10

Byron, Westfield

2010-08-20T09:52:00.011+01:00

Fifteen years ago, shopping centres in England were simple. You knew where you stood. They were largely unpleasant places, grim and breezeblocked, full of uninspiring shops like British Home Stores and Mad House. As for the food, well, these were not places you’d voluntarily eat. Overpriced coffee and sandwich counters dominated, with the occasional McDonald’s thrown in for good measure. Brent Cross is still like that. So is the Bentall Centre.

Westfield is a little bit different. Yes, it’s still a shopping centre. And yes, despite pretensions to the contrary, it’s still pretty ugly. But here’s a dirty little secret: Westfield is a good place to eat. You have to be discerning, but anywhere with a branch of Wahaca must have something going for it.

The same could be said about Byron. Clearly, I’ve rather missed the boat on reviewing this in a timely fashion, but you know, that’s the beauty of being your own editor.

Now, I could start by taking you through the menu. But what would be the point? At Byron, you eat burgers. Burgers and fried things. Burgers and fried things and milkshakes with malt in. I had a Byron burger – a medium rare beef patty, crispy, dry-cured bacon, cheddar, salady bits and ‘Byron sauce’, in a bun. I’m not sure what exactly is in Byron sauce, but it’s not a million miles from the burger sauce you sometimes have with kebabs. And that’s nice, isn’t it?

The burger was delectably cooked, juicy and flavourful. People go overboard about it, but basically, it’s very good: a big step up from TGI Fridays or Hard Rock, but perhaps not quite in the same league as Hawksmoor and the like. At £8.25 without fries and what not, it’s about right.

We opted for four different fried things. Normal French fries were good, thin and salty; home-made, skin-on chips were fine but nothing more. In contrast, the courgette fries were something of a revelation. Covered in a polenta batter, they tasted as if a Japanese tempura expert had moved to somewhere really unhealthy in the south of the US, and all the better for that. The onion rings were even more delicious: crunchy, light and extraordinarily bad for you, but in a good way. The pools of oil left at the bottom of the basket felt like a kind of endorsement, congratulating the customer on having finished such a fatty Trojan horse.

My accompanying vanilla milkshake was disturbingly good. The balance of ice-cream, malty flavour and vanilla was just right, and my word, they give you a lot of it for £3.75. Highly recommended.

I’m told that Byron is so-called because it means ‘of the cow shed’ in Old English. My etymological knowledge (and that of the Oxford English Dictionary) doesn’t stretch to being able to verify the claim, but it’s terrific nonetheless. I must say though, I was slightly disappointed it’s nothing to do with Lord Byron. I’m reminded of his lines from Childe Harold:

“;there is a fire
And motion of the soul, which will not dwell
In its own narrow being, but aspire
Beyond the fitting medium of desire;”

Replace ‘fire and motion of the soul’ with ‘beef’, and you have the Byron hamburger experience. Sort of.

Phil Letts' take: 7/10

About Thyme, 82 Wilton Road, Victoria

2010-08-16T18:34:00.011+01:00

Restaurants on Wilton Road in Victoria are like busses: you wait forever to go to one, and then you go to two in a week. Ok, so they’re not exactly like busses.

About Thyme is surely one of the worst-named restaurants in the country. Indeed, I’m struggling to think even of fictional eateries with worse names: Catherine of Tarragon perhaps, or Sage Advice. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with a pun. Pitta the Great was a decent kebab shop; Sam & Ella’s does a fine fried breakfast. It’s more that when a restaurant is aiming for real quality in its food, the pun makes it seem worse, especially when it’s as bad a pun as About Thyme.

Anyway, I digress. About Thyme, despite its name, is a delight. From the moment you enter this odd, purple-fronted world, you could be in Spain. Or at least, you could be in not-England. Victoria fades from memory; Iberia floods into view. This is what’s known as a good thing.

The menu (which varies depending on what is available from the market) is a parade of Mediterranean classics, from lambs’ kidneys cooked in sherry, to carpaccio, via lots and lots of black pudding and garlic. The night we visited, there were a couple of rather interesting specials as well (though not so special that they won’t be on the menu at some point in the future). I had them both.

For starters, little elvers, served in a hot clay pot filled with oil and garlic. To my shame, this was the first time I’ve eaten the tiny wrigglers. They were fantastic, combining the textural hit of an extremely delicate linguine with a juicy kick that recalled good squid. And if the flavour was slightly overpowered by the sweet garlic, well, that’s not the end of the world. At £9.50, I’d certainly have it again.

We were a group of four, but only two people had starters – a disgrace, I know. Sautéed tiger prawns with Piri Piri sauce were nicely cooked and as they should be (i.e. garlicky and hot), while a decent bottle of Chenin Blanc did its job for 24 pounds.

For mains, two out of four went for Dover Sole. It was impeccably cooked, beautifully served on the bone, and bluntly accompanied by a burnt butter sauce with capers and lemon. In short, it was exactly what you want in a Dover Sole, and at £24.50, no more expensive than you’d get it in most places in London, though it was still the priciest item on the menu.

But the real star of the show was the suckling pig. It’s one of those dishes that I always order when I see it, partly because you never know when you’ll see it again, but mainly because I’m very, very greedy. The other member of our group took the same view (yes, I know, it’s not good form for a group of four to only eat two different mains). The pig was sweet (that word again), its flesh gooey and its skin that special kind of crispy/chewy that you only really get from suckling pig. From a food miles-perspective, it was naughty - the little piggies are flown over from Spain. That aside, it was pretty much ideal, offset with black pudding, crispy roast potatoes, spinach and piquillo peppers. A robust Malbec did it no harm either.

Alas, I had no room for dessert. A shame. But the coffee was cracking.

Price-wise, About Thyme is at the top end of the middle – £45 pounds or so per head for two courses and half a bottle of wine. It’s worth it, and if you’re feeling wallet-light, you could do it for about ten pounds less at a stretch. But why would you want to do that when you can have elvers followed by suckling pig?

Phil Letts' take: 7/10

Rodizio Preto, 72 Wilton Road, Victoria

2010-08-12T20:06:00.017+01:00

It’s the cry of the frustrated chaetophobe: you can’t get a good Brazilian in London. More justifiably (and truthfully), it's also a lament of food writers.

Where I live in North West London, that’s not quite fair. There are plenty of decent Brazilian butchers in Kensal Rise, Harlesden and Willesden, and even the odd nice cafe.

That said, there’s certainly a gap in the market. And it’s meat-shaped. So it was with some interest that I went to Rodizio Preto in Pimlico. Ten hungry men is likely to be a challenge for any restaurant, but especially one that bills itself as an ‘all-you-can-eat’ churrascaria.

Things began ominously. There’s a knack to all-you-can-eat: don’t waste your time on too much of the peripheral stuff. Avoiding carbohydrates early on is a must, and here, was something of a challenge. The salad bar was laden with tasty potato salads and rice dishes, on top of indulgent deep fried plantain and cheesy, melty, breadcrumbed samosas. Hot Feijoada-type stew meant that many of us had eaten a fairly substantial meal before the meat proper even started, though, it must be said, with mixed reports from the table on quality. Nevermind – the house red was cheap and very cheerful, and there was a humdinger of a chilli sauce.

So, to the meat. For those who like pointless games with their food or enjoy macho tests of eating stamina, the little green and red disk is a godsend. If the green side faces up, it means you’d like more meat. If though, you turn it over to the red side, that means you’re taking a break. Or you’ve quit. Loser.

First up was rump steak, nicely rare, very well-seasoned and really pretty good. This is the restaurant’s go-to dish. It reappeared three or four times during the meal, and was always welcome, sliced from its lovely skewer, kebab-stylee.

Chicken wrapped in bacon came next. It was ok, but a little dry and very salty. Salty sausages and salty ham followed, then brisket (I think) and chicken thighs. The brisket was good and fat flavoured. The thighs had a great barbecue tang. The ham was, you know, ham. At this point, I was filling up nicely, but it would be a stretch to say I’d eaten all I could.

While everything was decent enough, little stood out. But then the chicken hearts, and then the sirloin. These were the best dishes of the day. The hearts had a wonderful, popping texture and a sharp marinade that nicely offset the richness of the meat. The sirloin was very rare indeed, with a fatty rim that was slightly crunchy on the outside and very beefy in the middle - super. Again, we were treated to several repeat performances.

By this stage, the wine had been flowing like water for a couple of hours, slightly impairing the judgment of all concerned. So when I say it felt like the meat slowed down, that all-you-can-eat didn’t really mean all-you-can-eat, I may very well be wrong. Even if there was an attempt to rein in our consumption, it’s fair to say that the restaurant gave us excellent value for money.

The meat and salad came to £20.95 per head, and even with an all-you-can-drink approach to the wine, the total bill was £35 each including service. Rodizio Preto is not subtle or sophisticated, but it is fun. You can certainly get better meat in London, but you’d be pushed to find it in these quantities for an equivalent price.

Phil Letts’ take: 6/10

Picture this

2010-08-07T12:15:00.001+01:00

As you may have gathered from looking at the other offerings on the site, I’m no photography expert. It’s not that I object to them exactly. There is no spiritual reason for my dislike, I don’t think that photographs can steal a soul, and I’m not worried by having photos of me available for public view.

No, my main difficulty when it comes to photos is the taking of them. There’s nothing more effective at ruining a nice occasion than someone taking a photograph. Even on my wedding day, which was, to use an old but accurate cliché, the happiest day of my life, the reception had to take 15-20 minutes off while we ran around being photographed, pulling various guests in and out of frame, smiling and smiling again, and generally causing everyone to miss valuable canapé time. Yes, we now have an album, but it’s an album with lots of posed photos in it.

Holidays are another bugbear. I never willingly look at photos from a holiday I’ve been on, principally because there are normally none to look at. I know I sound like a miserable git, but I’ve never understood why someone might say, climb a high mountain, get to the top, and during the extraordinary moment of exhilaration that accompanies the achievement, decide that the best thing to do is take a photo. Just remember it.

You can see where this is leading. I do understand that there’s a good reason for photographing food for a food blog. I’m not a complete idiot. But if you’re not sucking PR teat, then your meals out tend to be occasions for you and friends/family/dates/lovers to enjoy each other’s company while tucking in to something unholy and delicious. There’s etiquette to these situations, there are rules: listen to others at your table, talk to them, discuss your food by all means, and enjoy yourself. It’s simple.

Taking photos of the food before you’ve begun to eat should, in any right-thinking society, be anathema. It’s not going to look any better in the photo, and if you need it to jog your memory, then you’re drinking too much, or the meal is no good anyway. Anyway, photographing food is a sure-fire way to let a restaurant know you’re reviewing it.

But what about your audience? Well, the audience question is pretty much hypothetical for me at the moment, but in principle, there are some exceptions. I’ll concede that if you’re running a food blog, and you review restaurants, it makes sense to put some photos of the food up on the website. Discretion is surely key.

As a rule, if I’m getting out of my chair to take a photo, then I’ve missed the point, and possibly made everyone else at the table feel uncomfortable. What’s more, I’ve fundamentally compromised my enjoyment of the meal, which will no doubt be reflected, even subconsciously, in my review. In short, it’s rude to the restaurant and it’s rude to the other guests.

For me, if it comes to a choice between being rude to people I don’t want to be rude to, and having slightly worse photos than I might on the website, then there’s really no choice at all. Any suggestions would be gratefully received.

The Whitstable Oyster Festival

2010-07-29T12:22:00.010+01:00

There are people who don’t like oysters. I’ll repeat that. There are people who don’t like oysters.

Why? That’s one of life’s great mysteries, like lumpy peanut butter, or Sandra Bullock. If you don’t like oysters, you should probably avoid reading on. And frankly, what are you reading a food blog for if you don’t like oysters?

I had good memories and high expectations of Whitstable. While training to be a teacher in Canterbury, I used to visit on spare days, swim in the sea, drink Guinness and eat oysters. That I’m now a journalist should tell you all you need to know about my success as a teacher, but Whitstable stuck with me.

For those of us that were brought up to believe you should only eat oysters when there’s an ‘r’ in the month, it comes as a bit of a surprise to find the oyster festival taking place in July. There is a fairly obvious advantage though: weather. On a late Sunday in July, it was beautiful.

We headed for the beach and the festival, but not before popping in at Wheelers to pick up half a dozen rock oysters. Wheelers is one of my favourite shops in England, so go. Its oysters, whelks, winkles, crabs and prawns are always delicious, and reasonable to boot. Our half dozen cost £3.50, which is really not bad.

Then on to the festival proper, complete with crowds, beer and Mackenzie Crook from The Office (a visitor, not an attraction). As well as seafood, there were stalls selling fruit, vegetables, trinkets, tat, booze, burgers, curry and the rest. It was a veritable greedy man’s paradise.

I won’t go through all the stalls. That would be boring (and impossible, given my slapdash approach to note taking). A couple of highlights though: the beer from Gadds (pictured) was spectacular, all bitter caramel and slightly plummy; the cherries and strawberries from four or five different stalls were great, as they should be at this time of year; and the various oyster sellers did their best.

Oddly, the oysters we ate, while fine, were really nothing special. The prized Whitstable natives were few and far between. Rock oysters were the norm, and are all well and good, especially when they’re abundant and cheap, but they’re hardly sophisticated. I eat mine with Tabasco, or sometimes lemon and black pepper, if you’re interested. At least there was no danger of catching an STD.

In the end though, it didn’t matter that the oysters were a bit of a disappointment. I swam in the sea, I bathed in the sun, I ate and drank well, and I saw old men singing sea shanties.

There was also the oyster eating competition. To my great annoyance, I arrived too late to register, but the sight of intrepid munchers guzzling half a dozen oysters and necking half a pint of stout in the fastest time possible is one to warm any cockles, if you’ll pardon the pun. I intend to take part next year.

Kadiri's, 26 Willesden High Road, Willesden

2010-07-26T12:11:00.017+01:00

Cecil Rhodes once claimed that to be born an Englishman is to have won the lottery of life. While that was possibly true when he wrote it, and may even be true now to a degree, it has never applied to food. I’ve always thought that to be born Italian is to have won the lottery of eating. But even the Italians, with all that olive oil, all those tomatoes, and all that pasta, even the Italians don’t make curry.

One day, I’ll write a book about curry houses I’ve known and loved. From Tamarind to Tayyabs, The Painted Heron to The Lahore Kebab House, if the answer isn’t curry, then the question’s wrong. Whether it costs 80 pounds and boasts a Michelin star or sets you back a tenner and lets you bring your own booze, this food is always the right option.

Now, I’ve been to a lot of curry houses in London. The very best fall into two camps: the cheap, cheerful and sizzling, and the expensive, refined and subtle. Geographically, the places to go are out East, or Wembley way, or in Southall (which is so far West it’s not even really London). There are a couple of crackers in town too, in Mayfair and Soho. In my experience, West London and slightly North West has always been a little bit of a curry hinterland. Yes, there are restaurants. Some of them are fine. But I’ve never been to a really brilliant one.

So when I heard positive things about Kadiri’s in scruffy Willesden, I wasn’t expecting too much. The menu looked the part, but still, it was in Willesden.

So how was it? Good. Very good.

We couldn’t decide what to eat, but after the obligatory popadums – thin, delicate and not at all greasy – we decided to go for broke. It’s a sign of a really good place when the menu inclines you towards the vegetable curries, and with chana daal, paneer with spinach and coconut (palak paneer), and aubergine curry, we were so inclined. But limiting yourself is no good either, so we also ordered a ‘small’ mixed grill and the house speciality, mutton biryani, just to ensure we had enough. Oh, and pesharwi naan too. And mango lassis.

They came together at our request, but I’ll deal with them in the order, roughly, that I tried them. First, the grill, where lamb chops were explosively flavoured with ginger and garam masala, tandoori chicken was colourful and lamb mince kababs were juicy and chilli-heavy. For a small portion, it was enormous - £11.95 for ten large, beautifully cooked pieces of meat. I always think you can tell a lot about a curry restaurant by its lamb chops. Kadiri’s, while not in the same league as the best I’ve ever had (The Lahore Kebab House in Whitechapel), were great. Probably in the top five.

The other litmus dish for a curry house is daal. And boy, this daal was good - garlic and burnt garlic, salt and turmeric, spilt chickpeas and all sorts of other goodness. On the thin, sweet peshawri naan, stuffed with mango, the daal was truly wonderful, though you'll taste the garlic for days afterwards.

The aubergine curry was less exciting, but also perfectly cooked. Often, aubergine in curry disintegrates. Sometimes, it’s too greasy. Occasionally, it gets lost in the other flavours, all the onions and cumin and paprika. This did none of those things. It was a relatively unambitious, well-executed and no-nonsense dish. It was delicious.

I’ve never liked paneer. I’ve always lumped it in with halloumi as a cheese that is invariably badly cooked. If I want to chew rubber, I’ll ... um, perhaps not. But a visit to Greece earlier this year taught me that I was wrong about halloumi. And Kadiri’s taught me that I had misjudged paneer too. This was glorious. The spinach and coconut sauce was not too sweet, though it felt creamy and indulgent. But the revelation was the texture of the cheese itself, soft but coherent, and with none of that horrible squeaky texture I used to dread.

Lastly, there was the house special, complete with kitsch earthenware pot. In a meal with many highlights, this was the highest lit. The mutton was so slow cooked as to be melting. The surrounding rice was cardamom and saffron heavy. The ensemble was luxurious and slightly fatty – so rich and yet, still, so clean. I’ve never had one like it, but I will have it again.

Unfortunately, there were just two of us, and my wife, Cute Letts, had eaten some chips after work so hadn’t brought her A-game appetite. We had lots left over. The excellent waiting staff barely batted an eyelid when we asked them to box it all up for us to take home. I’ve had it twice since. We spent £60 pounds on this meal, including service and a before unmentioned large bottle of sparkling water, and it was worth every penny. If we’d have ordered sensibly (i.e., just the paneer, daal and mutton), it would have been less than half that.

They also do feasting dishes – one family had an entire leg of lamb come out while we were there. It looked great, and they devoured it in about 10 minutes. Perhaps the only thing to note is that the restaurant does not sell alcohol, and it doesn’t let you bring your own – no great problem, but worth knowing before you go.

I live in NW10, and now I have a restaurant locally that sells excellent curry (and delivers it). So I’m happy.

Phil Letts' take: 8/10

Recipe: A Summertime Sausage Casserole

2010-07-18T12:40:00.016+01:00

People place much store beside the ‘leftovers’ recipe. This is one of those, but that doesn’t mean it has to be. It happened that I had most of these ingredients in the house, that I was about to go and do a nice big veg shop, and that the tomatoes were ripened to the point where cooking seemed like the best option. Apart from the tomato, onion and lemon, most of the other components could be exchanged. The broad beans could probably be butter beans (though they might not be as pleasingly firm), the chipolatas could certainly be more extravagant, and you could serve this on bruschetta or any decent bread. The main thing is to enjoy the jammy sweetness of the tomato and onion alongside the meaty, fatty sausages and the clean, refreshing lemon. The broad beans are al dente, providing a lovely contrast with the stickyness of the rest of the dish. It’s delicious, I promise, though I’m not a chef.

Ingredients

6 good chipolatas (or other not too strong sausages)

A handful of broad beans

8 medium-sized tomatoes (the better, the better)

1 decent-sized onion

1 lemon

A few basil leaves

A good pinch of sugar

Salt, pepper

A glug or two of olive oil

Instructions

First, remove the broad beans from their pods. Put them in a pan of boiling water for a couple of minutes, then drain and run under cold water until cool. Then you can squeeze the lovely grass-coloured beans from their paler jackets. This is very satisfying, but may leave you with some slightly squashed beans. I prefer to unzip them, ripping the join at the top of the bean and removing it in a slightly more delicate fashion. Set aside.

Peel the tomatoes – put them whole into boiling water for 30 seconds, remove, cool in cold water, and the skin should peel off relatively easily. It doesn’t matter if you can’t get all the skin off, but you do want to remove most of it. Chop the peeled tomatoes roughly, and set aside.

Brown your sausages in a heavy bottomed saucepan. Use a little olive oil to start them off, but they will leave a bit of fat in the pan, so you don’t need much oil at all. Once brown, remove from the pan and set aside.

Now for the base. Finely chop your onion, and gently fry in the same pan until softened. I often get impatient with the ‘softened’ instruction in recipes, but here it is absolutely vital. Add your chopped tomatoes, with a generous sprinkle of salt, and a good pinch of sugar. Cook on a medium to low heat for as long as you can bear (15 minutes or so), stirring from time to time until the whole caboodle takes on a slightly jammy consistency. The sugar helps with this. Then add the juice of your lemon, and if the mood takes you, a little of its zest. Bubble for a couple of minutes, then return the sausages to the pan, mixing them through the gooey mush. I put the lid on here, and leave for about 8 minutes. You don’t want too much of the liquid escaping. If you’re using larger sausages, you might want to increase the cooking time.

Grab a few basil leaves and tear them into the pot about two minutes before you’re finished. They’ll disappear into the mix, but you'll still be able to taste them. Also add the reserved broad beans, and let the whole mix bubble slowly for the final couple of minutes with the lid off. Add a lot of black pepper and a final glug of olive oil, and serve with a couple more basil leaves as a garnish.

In praise of...Breadmakers

2010-07-15T12:21:00.002+01:00

There’s a time and a place for really bad bread. The time is mid-afternoon, and the place is a service station forecourt. At such moments, only the insipid, pallid, cloying experience of the thin white slice will do. Ideally, bread such as this will be filled with processed cheese – unnaturally slick, almost completely flavourless, and yet somehow compelling, like TV soap operas, or Richard Madeley.

But we can’t have this, I hear you exclaim! You’re supposed to be writing about food. Garage sandwiches aren’t food. Well, quite.

As any good Crouch Ender knows, the only way to do bread is to make your own. And by make your own, I don’t just mean shoving some ingredients into a metal bowl with a mixing arm and waiting for electricity to do the rest. No, if you want truly fabulous bread, you need to put in the graft: kneading, turning, slapping, waiting, covering, prooving, shaping, baking. It’s fun, but you need a morning, at least. In truth, it’s the selection of the unemployed/food writer.

Surely, though, the choice isn’t an either/or. Surely it’s not just artisan or Mighty White. Not quite, no. There’s a third way, a middle ground between the disgusting certainties of the plastic-wrapped loaf and the temperamental thrills of the twisty homemade baguette. Breadmakers are good. Sure, it’s cheating, and sure, the loaves they produce don’t taste as good as bread that’s been properly fingered, but they have several clear advantages.

Time: In 2010, does anyone really have time to make bread properly? Sheeeeeit, I barely have time to buy it. With a breadmaker, such problems disappear. One trip to the supermarket will bag you enough flour for say, six loaves. Total time spent: 15 minutes. Then each loaf takes about 10 minutes to prepare. On average, that’s about 12.5 minutes per loaf. Compare that to buying cheapy loaves (about 15 minutes each) or fashioning something fancy (at least two hours), and you’re onto a winner. And yes, I’m aware that you still have to bake it, but with a teeny bit of planning, you can do that overnight. Which leads me to the next advantage of the method...

Smell: Ever wanted to live in a bakery? Me neither, but there’s nothing like waking up near one, is there? Indeed, some have argued that France was actually invented to cater for Brits who like the smell of freshly baking bread in the morning. But in England alas, it’s pretty unusual to live within sniffing distance of a good bakery. The breadmaker solves this problem. Just set the baking programme overnight, to finish about 6.30 a.m., and you’ll wake up to a wonderful scent that makes you feel like some sort of rustic medieval legend. Unless you can knead in your sleep, you’ll find it difficult to wake up to a handmade loaf like that.

Smug: The only reason anyone ever makes bread is to feel good about themselves (apart from bakers – they do it to make a living). You may ‘just prefer it,’ you may even believe that ‘it’s so much better for you’, and you can whine on about ‘preservatives’ as much as you want, but I’ve got news for you. People actually make bread so they can say: ‘Oh yes, I made this bread, it’s so easy, really, I do stuff like this all the time’. They’re the sorts of people that would like to own chickens so they can have fresh eggs each morning, but don’t. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m definitely one of them. Now while a breadmaker doesn’t allow you to be quite as smug as fiddling with dough would, it’s a start. You still feel better than the 98 per cent of the population that think sophistication is the Tesco farmhouse granary loaf. It’s alright – you’re supposed to feel like that.

So for all you budding breadmaker buyers, what’s next? Well, you need a machine. Which is the best? I don’t know, but I had a Kenwood, and I have a Morphy Richards (pictured, poorly), and they’re both good, though I’d say the Morphy Richards is slightly better.

The Old Hat Club, 11 July, somewhere near Angel tube station

2010-07-14T07:39:00.003+01:00

Disclaimer: I should declare an interest. The Old Hat Club is run by some of my favourite people, and my experience there was the reason for the launch of this blog. So you should take everything that follows in that context. That said, it’s still an amazing little place, and I don’t think my generous review would have been any less so if I hadn’t already known Harry, Emma, Ami and Tim (or HEAT, if you prefer).

First, the clientele: you know this scene has got a little bloated when more than half the guests at a pop-up restaurant are food bloggers. That’s like, cannibalism, man. The reason was all the lovely Prosecco, supplied by Riccardo, who had invited said bloggers to promote his rather good drink. A good reason, indeed.

Guests were welcomed with a cocktail – a strawberry and Prosecco concoction laced with black pepper. A little bit of summer in a glass, and something to lubricate the vocal chords. Outside in the garden, next to the frankly intimidating (in a manly way) wood burning oven, we were offered some super black pudding pastry canapés, and some even superer red pepper and bottarga follow-ups, all fresh from the aforementioned oven.

Then inside for lunch proper, and scrowlers stuffed with herbs (the fennel and dill stood out, but there were others) on tomatoes on bruschetta for starter. This was the course of the day, seriously good. A note on scrowlers: they are sardines, but clearly someone thought the world needed lots of words for that particular fish, so some Cornish folk call them scrowlers. Even more impressive was that some unlucky soul had successfully removed every single bone from the fish before stuffing – not easy. The contrast between the sweet tomatoes and fishy, salty scrowler is one that others have exploited in the past. But that’s because it’s great. Sometimes, there’s a reason for doing it like they do it in the Med.

Then onward, to a main course that played on the same tongue-lust for salt and sweet. The slow cooked pork with crackling was melty enough to feel indulgent, yet robust enough to give you something to chew. This atop a sweet, smoked, butternut squash puree – that magic oven again – and some ridiculously naughty, crunchy, goose-fat and smoke covered potatoes. Only something so wrong could taste so good.

That the pork was the least interesting course should tell you everything you need to know about the dessert. A kind of Moroccan citrus tart with sorbet, it was sweet, bitter, giving and cakey in one easy mix. The ginger and sour cherry Florentines that followed were the icing on the cake (or rather, the crunchy biscuit on the tart).

For £30, you won’t do a lot better in London. Anywhere. Really. Just ask all those bloggers.

Phil Letts' take: 9/10

WELCOME TO THE SCRAG END

2010-07-12T14:17:00.000+01:00

It's not fancy, it's not big, and it's not clever, but the scrag end is delicious. In a world where every other person is a food blogger, and many even think that makes them important, it may just be time for a little humility. For simple, honest opinions on restaurants, recipes, supper clubs, caffs and kit, you've come to the right place.