The Little Chef, Popham, A303

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

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

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