The English can eat

My dinner with Gabriel: Vinoteca

2012-02-29T10:07:00.000Z

"I always think nobody fancies me"I say breathlessly to Gabriel as I arrive, slightly late, at Vinoteca in Clerkenwell. He'd already ordered a plate of anchovies, or were they sardines? They were larger than anchovies. I grab some good bread from the basket, ramming it greedily into the white china inkwell of bright green olive oil, speckled with salt and pepper.
"But it's not true" I gulp "loads of people fancy me". Gabriel's face looks delighted, he is about to enjoy this.
"I realised this as I got off at Farringdon"I continue, pointing to the cheapest Prosecco on the menu and ordering a glass from the waiter "Every moment, walking around, men are looking at me, in the eyes, and I, literally within the space of a blink of an eyelid, reject them." I look at Gabriel, wondering if he is following me. He nods, urging me on. "They look, I look away. It happens endlessly, these tiny signals, so infinitesimal they are almost unconscious. We are all doing it, all day, we aren't even aware of it." I pause. "Do you know what I mean?" I look at my friend.
"Yes" says Gabriel.
"Once" I'm inspired now"I read an article, in the Mail I think, that a woman writer dressed up as a man for the day. She had expert help, a makeup artist, so it was convincing. She wrote that her abiding feeling was how lonely it is to be a man, how as a man you are not allowed to look at anyone."
Gabriel looked confused. I explain.
"A look from a man means two things: confrontation or a come on. A woman can look at anyone anytime and nobody worries."
"They have to worry about giving out the wrong signal" says Gabriel.
"Of course. But a woman's glance is never perceived as threatening."
"Would you go for it?" asks Gabriel eagerly, his blue eyes sparkling. (He's an actor and a Tory. I didn't even know that this particular combination was permitted. Aren't all luvvies left wing?)
I'm amazed that he can be so crass. "You mean?"
"Would you take one of these guys up on it? If they looked at you and you liked. Would you...go off with them?"
"No. Plus they are all hideous. There are lots of men who fancy me but they are all unattractive" I state. The waiter comes up and talks about the Prosecco, saying some guff about less bubbles than usual.
"Prosecco can be too bubbly" suggests Gabriel. He often lies about food and drink.
"Hmm" I frown. When it arrives, it's flat. It's flat yellow Prosecco. That's why it's so cheap. I once bought flat Prosecco by mistake via online shopping. Prosecco is pointless without bubbles. I also order salsify soup and fried artichoke salad. Gabriel only orders mackerel ceviche. I think he's a bit broke.
I say "We can share"
The waiter leaves: "Have you seen Shame?" muses Gabriel.
"A bit. I fell asleep. Everyone says he's got a massive willy."
"Do you remember the bit on the train, where he's staring at the girl."Gabriel looks up then down to the right, meaning he's using his memory. "I'm doing that alot at the moment. Since I split up with my girlfriend, I'm not getting...well...you know"
"Right" I nod.
"So I can't stop thinking about it. I look at girls on the tube."
I briefly flash back to my old boyfriend, the French squatter/cross-dressing lumberjack. He used to look at girls on the North London line. In front of me. It was deliberate torture. Once we got on the train to Hackney together. Inevitably, two stops later he dumped me. Momentarily I'd had enough of the abuse, I stood up and shouted down the carriage to the other passengers: 'Help, help I'm being dumped HELP me, I'm being emotionally mugged'. He looked shocked, then smiled. We were back on. It was a relationship during which I had to be on my toes creatively.

The steaming soup materialises in front of me. It has almonds and raisons sprinkled from a height, a large chef's pinch, in the centre. It's too hot to eat. When I do sip the thick magnolia paste, I can't taste the salsify but the garnish helps.
My salad has thin slices of confit red onion, a good contrast with the slightly bitter leaves of the salad and oily fried artichoke hearts.
Gabriel's mackerel ceviche is carved carpaccio style, almost transparent, the red slices going grey, cooked by the lime but refreshed by the red chillis and samphire dotted around. I have to stop myself from eating all of it.
I'm on my second glass of the flat Prosecco. I have a meeting later about vegetarian sausages, I will be drunk.

Vinoteca
Clerkenwell

Fry up

2012-02-25T22:52:00.003Z

Talking to a friend, a divorced dad with a teenage daughter, who he takes out for lunch every Saturday. He's a foodie so he takes her to nice places, this time the latest rave in restaurants.
His teenage daughter groaned. Where do you want to go then? He asked.
I'd love a fry up... she said.
He took her to a greasy spoon. "I've never seen anyone enjoy their food so much" He said of his daughter. "She loved the sausages, beans, toast, fried eggs. Her mum won't let her eat fry ups."
My girl, the teen, said "Well duh. Who wants to go to posh restaurants? All that experimental food. Plus we have a limited diet, us teenagers, we don't want to eat interesting food."
"What about posh restaurants that aren't experimental?" I ask.
"That's why I like The Gilbert Scott. That's where I want to go for my 18th. It's great. It's simple. You don't have to think about the food. You don't have to look at it. No droplets."
She walks off, to listen to Radio 6 ("6 music!"), to serve herself another plate of pasta, to add another post to Tumblr.

Jeremy Lee at Quo Vadis

2012-01-31T22:52:00.004Z

Bloggaz just wanna have fun

Bloater paste

David/Critical Couple/Jeremy Lee and Wine_Chap/Hollow Legs

Le menu

Eel sandwich: house speciality

Sea kale

Fish n artichokes

Cheeses

puds

Voldermort sat here

Professional host and fellow alumni of the 'Evening Standard's 1000 most influential people in London' year 2010/11, @winechapUK or, to give him his real name, Tom Harrow, set up a dinner for food bloggers at Quo Vadis restaurant. Originally opened in the 1920s, Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital here and Marco Pierre White ran it for a bit, the art deco styled Quo Vadis is a Soho institution.
I walked in, peering about without my glasses to try and find Wine Chap, and I saw Ralph Fiennes (pronounced Rafe, yes I know, there's even a Yahoo question about this). He was sitting right there looking friendly and... with a nose.
Back to me briefly...I wore my new bird fabric Get Cutie dress with a bird headress. I'd like to think I looked fabulous.
Back to Quo Vadis: Jeremy Lee, formerly of the Blue Print Café o'er the Thames, is back in Soho. Darlings, he's home! After all he started out at Alistair Little, plus he's easily the campest man in cookery, with his 50s quiff, sashaying gait and his Prime of Miss Jean Brodie enunciation...
Six of us bloggers were there plus Wine Chap. This included Eat Like A Girl, Hollow Legs, HRWright, Cheese and Biscuits, and a mystery bloke. "Who are you?" I asked.
He seemed reticent to answer. "David" he mumbled.
"Who ARE you?" I boomed insistently "Come on! Blog name please" I snapped my fingers at him imperiously.
He caved: "I'm Critical Couple"
"Ooh you are the one that everyone hates!" I blurted cheerfully.
Strictly speaking he's one half of the couple that everyone hates.
The Critical Couple had only been blogging a little while when they caused enough controversy to have a story about them in The Guardian. They've been profiled in ES magazine. Esteemed restaurant critique Marina O'Loughlin deplores their very existence. Everyone bitches about them. Douglas Blyde seems to be the only person that likes them.
What I've managed to glean so far is that they are a British American couple (he's British, she's American) who have alot of money and choose to spend it on restaurants and good wine. They've also been doing a sort of lazyarse rich banker bastard version of a supper club: they hire the very best chefs in town and pay them to create a fantastic meal around their house. They then invite a select few to enjoy the meal with them. Probably why Douglas Blyde likes them so much. (Only kidding!)
David seemed quite shy. Although he did gleefully mention that he'd recently unfollowed me on Twitter.
"Did you notice?" he asked.
"Yes" I replied.
"It's because I can't bear anarchists who have PRs." he announced.
"But I don't" I said, thinking that I'm not sure I'm an anarchist either but I didn't want to complicate matters further.
"I can't stand hypocrisy" David continued.
"But I haven't got a PR" I repeated.
"Oh" he said "I thought you did".
"Nope. All that publicity...it's just liddle ole me" I shrugged. "I have to admit that when my book came out, I was shameless. I worked every contact. But I figure, you gotta go for it with a book, you've got a couple of weeks max to make a mark"
He went quiet.
We sat down on the leather padded banquette seating. On the table opposite us, St John's Fergus Henderson was eating. Just then, Ralph Fiennes walked past . The whole table went quiet, we all elbowed each other. The whole table that is, apart from HR Wright (the self-proclaimed gayest man on Twitter) who shrieked "OH MY GOD IT'S VOLDERMORT!". Accompanied by a slim dark haired lady, later revealed on Google to be Amanda Harlech, Fiennes slid behind us into a private dining room, painted black with padded walls. As he disappeared, our table erupted with giggles and whispers (just like in that scene of 'Notting Hill' when Julia Roberts goes to dinner with Hugh Grant's friends). I guess you must always be accompanied by that when you are famous: a hesitant hush then an explosion of fame induced hysteria.
On the other hand, despite his fame, I don't really get the point of private dining rooms. Half the fun at restaurants is seeing and being seen.
Then the food started to arrive: potted ramekins of bloater paste (bit livery), mackerel pate (good), something meaty that looked exactly the same, a dish of anchovy aioli. We weren't served separate dishes: they understood their audience here of greedy "let's try that" bloggers. Small dishes just kept arriving. We had already had martinis and champagne and were onto some great white wine, it's fair to say we were getting louder and ever more excited.
Jeremy Lee would come out every so often and greet each table. Hugs for Fergus, flirting and coquettish eyelash batting for us and probably a bit of genuflecting toward Voldermort in the dark padded room.

Next the meat eaters got slices of flesh on a plate, some sort of game. I laughed out loud when I was handed what appeared to be a few sticks of steamed celery covered in a white sauce. Then I tasted it...it wasn't celery but sea kale and the sauce, a lemony buttery sauce buerre blanc. I handed it around and all the carnivores were envious.

A 12 year old waiter arrived with an entire baby goat on a roasting tray. I felt sad. My dish however made up for it: medallions of ~~white fish~~ (I was too merry to find out which) I mean, turbot with roasted artichoke hearts.
Hollow Legs tasted it and shouted "HORN!" (This is apparently a young person's expression of enthusiasm.) It was indeed very good.

Ralph Fiennes wandered out of his padded cell with a 'where the hell is my waiter' look on his face. See! That's the problem with a private room, they just forget you. Out of sight out of mind. (I had the same when I gave birth to my daughter. The hospital put me in a room that used to be a broom cupboard. I wasn't seen by a nurse for days as they forgot about it. Eventually I managed to attract attention by dragging my pee bag and drip stand with me outside of the room and waving down a cleaner)

Dessert time..."What would you like?" asked the young waiter.
"Cheese!" I demanded. We had such good wines, yes I know it's demodé to match cheese and wine but I really fancied a cheese board. I was given Stichelton, Montgomery and something else with a Gerwurtraminer.
Dozens of desserts were brought out. Some of them never made it up to me but highlights included the almond tart and something else. Oh god I can't remember. But I loved it.
I was taking a picture of our table and Mr Fiennes exits his private room. He smiles. He's always smiling. I'm not sure why he seems to be typecast as a baddie because he seems particularly amiable for a star. I said to him: "We're food bloggers". I felt he needed an explanation for the noise level and the frenetic dish passing, loud proclamations of food enjoyment, slurping, licking, sharing and merriment. He nodded, still smiling. His lady came out. "Great food isn't it?" she said.
"Fantastic. What did you have?" I asked
"I had the steak"
"Bit of a boring choice..." I suggested.
"It was really good" she said as they left, waving. What nice people.
Us bloggers climbed upstairs to the private club section. Cheese and Biscuits is a very talented man; not only can he write wittily (c'mon why won't a paper employ him as a restaurant correspondant? He's LOADS better at restaurant reviewing than say, Zoe Williams) but he also plays virtuoso bluesy piano.
Some sort of rock band with requisite shaggy hair dos, skinny jeans and eyeliner jammed with him on the piano. We all sang 'Hey Jude' noisily.
David of The Critical Couple edged over and said with a note of surprise:"I quite like you". A couple of days later I noticed they'd followed me again on Twitter.

Jeremy Lee at Quo Vadis

26 Dean Street London W1D 3LL, United Kingdom
020 7437 9585

Cheese n Biscuits playing

Tinker Tailor Blogger Spy: The Pig

2012-01-27T11:12:00.003Z

Boar's head over the dining room

Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the gossipiest of them all?

Ah the life of a blogger...it's one long breeze. Bet ya jelus. Even I'm jealous of me sometimes.
Generally I can go on bloggers trips at the beginning of the week, after my supper club weekends. Mostly I don't go. But I'd heard good things about The Pig and frankly, not having had a holiday in two years made me desperate to get out of London, even if only for the day.The Pig is a hotel and restaurant in the New Forest, sort of near Southampton.
Did I ever mention that I'm the world's worst gossip? Not because I'm being malicious (ok maybe sometimes) but because, firstly, often I forget that it's supposed to be a secret and secondly, I just love a good story. I can't help it. I love true-ish gossip. I believe it helps World Peace. It's spying without the overcoats. It's all about communication really. One study even says it's good for your health.
The train from Waterloo was one looong bitch fest with fellow bloggers. I work alone a great deal and this is like therapy. But I have now been supplanted as chief gossip and whiner by a certain Alex Larman who started the Quintessially site. He knows about everyone; from Prince Harry (NOT Charles' son he authoritatively informed me) to how to get into Oxford (be one of the top 10% or one of the bottom 10%, the 80% of swots in the middle are fighting it out) to who is gay (he got that wrong sometimes, I informed him that toff blogger James Ramsden isn't actually gay) and who's screwing who (now that would be telling) and who's broken up with who (a certain New Year's tweet: "Douglas Blyde: 0/10").
Eventually fair satiated with rumour, we arrived at The Pig which is like the country house you've always wanted.
China and glass ware is discreetly unmatched. The styling of the hotel and dining room is detailed, careful, tasteful, quirky and characterful. Everywhere you smell burning wood. I love a man who smells of log fires. (I also like men who wear big jumpers, have thick necks, blue eyes and slightly hunched backs). It's comfortable and homely but with style and a staff.
At lunch I was sat next to the poshest man I've ever met, David Elton. A dyed in the wool old style Tory, he had a twinkle in his eye and charm to spare. We couldn't have been more opposite.
I asked: "Was it a struggle to get your business going?"
"Oh yes" he replied.
"What did your wife think?"
"She thought it was awful that we had to get a mortgage."
"Next you'll be complaining you had to buy your own furniture" I teased.
He got the joke. "I once had to explain to an old aristocratic lady what a mortgage was.'It's when families don't have enough hices* to go round'."
Food was delicious. I wasn't sure at first why I was invited as it's a restaurant called The Pig. The menu boasts 'Piggy bits'. I don't eat meat. Foraging and local food, bang on trend, are utilised in the 25 mile menu. (It gets closer to home during the summer months; a ten mile menu, a five mile menu).
I started with home smoked salmon. I can't emphasise enough how different artisanally smoked salmon is from shop-bought.
Then buttery clams in linguine. I mopped up every last smear of the sauce with the daily baked bread.
Pudding, a mint mousse, original and refreshing whilst faintly reminiscent of Wrigleys, placed next to a earthy brown mound of chocolate ice cream.
A look around the bedrooms, the gardens (neat long barrows of wintering globe artichokes), the smokehouse, made my heart ache with envy.
"Do we have to go home?" I pleaded. But they made me.
http://www.thepighotel.co.uk/

Books in the bedrooms

Fabulous gardens designed by David Elton.

Chef in the garden

Buttery vongole

Detail of the dining room

Secret gardens...

Gold-flecked elderflower jelly

Eggs from their chickens...

Mint mousse...

Room details such as vintage phones (my daughter once asked me "How do you dial? You can't press the buttons" I had to explain that you put your finger inside and moved it around)

Boars and Sows toilets

Pink umbrella in a Greenhouse

Vintage terracotta flower pots

Classic Roberts radios in every room

In the smokehouse...

Floor detail...

Wellies lined up for guests to borrow...

Love this idea...a herb garden in an old stone window

Big jugs...

Bottled vinegars

*houses

MEATliquor

2011-12-08T09:48:00.000Z

I've done a guest post about MEATliquor over on Bellaphon's blog. Check it out here.

Helene Darroze at the Connaught

2011-09-19T10:12:00.003+01:00

Posh restaurants, I have a love/hate thing going with them. Every so often I indulge, to inspire my own cooking. I always go at lunch time when it's economically viable for someone without a business expense account. I'm interested in Helene Darroze because she's a female chef and the only one to have two Michelin stars. Last year she lost a star and was no doubt gutted or 'ecoeuré'. She's got a restaurant in Paris and opened in London at the Connaught in 2008. Maybe the expansion knocked her sideways for a bit. This year she regained her second star. This, according to Michelin, makes her officially the best female chef in the world. Helene is a fourth generation restaurateur. There is a delightful sentence in her French wikipedia page where at a banquet 'Le Président de la République Jacques Chirac lui adresse ses félicitations et reprend deux fois de son pigeonneau farci.' President Jacques Chirac congratulated her and twice served himself her stuffed pigeon. (As if we are living in the time of Louis 14th where a chef's worth is based on how many servings the king took of a dish.)

Her food is small, beautifully presented, intensely flavoured and uses ingredients from her region in France, that stretch of the Atlantic coast from Arcachon to Biarritz known as Les Landes. This is one of my favourite areas in France; less brassy and nouveau riche than the Cote d'Azure, but more conservative too. Thérèse Desqueroux, Francois Mauriac's 1920's novel set there, chronicles the Bovary style frustration of a woman married into the bourgeoisie, who had to address her husband as 'vous' and 'sir' and ended up poisoning him, not herself, with arsenic. That's progress.

The Connaught is located in the backwaters of Bond Street/Green Park. As a Londoner, it's always a wondrous journey to visit rich parts of London. It's like visiting a foreign land that I barely knew existed. To think that many tourists, especially the wealthy ones, only ever see this aspect of London; the Ritz/Harrods/West End/Mayfair section of London that is archaic and unrepresentative of the whole. There is little vibrancy in these parts, no street culture, no dirt, and no British people. No wonder the Americans think we are Dickensian. But that's also part of the charm. It's pretendy English out of the picture books or from a Richard Curtis movie.

Opposite the Connaught there are clothes shops in residential houses. Roland Mouret's gallery of dresses hang individually on rails like works of art; his 'galaxy' dress. I suppose this is also the London of Posh Spice when she visits and of movie stars. (Although there were rumours on Twitter this week of Britney Spears buying bagels in Stoke Newington).

So as a treat to myself after Camp Bestival I booked lunch at Helene Darroze with my friend, graphic designer Maria Grist. It was £42 for three courses including two glasses of wine. Not bad. I asked for the vegetarian menu which is more expensive but they were happy to do a cheap lunch version of it.

I'm afraid I lost my notes with the exact names of the courses or the ingredients so you'll have to make do with pictures. Overall the amuse bouches were stunning, the mains good, the desserts good at the time but ultimately forgettable, the petits fours fantastic.

The service was polite, humorous not overly obsequious. All the staff are French speaking. The Maitre D joked that they once had a British guy who started speaking with a French accent after two weeks working there.

Amuse bouche of tomato foam and olive bread. Don't normally like foam, but this was intense.

The waiter explained that we had two types of butter with our breads: salted and unsalted. They are 'à la baratte', churned in small quantities in barrels. You can leave butter made 'a la baratte' out in the sun all day and it wont melt said the waiter. I'm a complete butter freak so this was heavenly for me. Here is a site that sells different types of butter. My favourite is salted Normandy butter which I can eat straight from the packet.

A foie gras cocktail.

This was sublime: strong cheesy flavours with girolles.

Ajo soup: (garlic soup) nice but very subtle in flavour, could have been punchier. Lovely after-taste of almonds.

The waitress made a mistake with my order and gave me a violet aubergine dish. It looks like something alien or science fiction, all those fluorescent green pointy cauliflower bits but very pretty. Not really a main though.

My actual choice was ravioli with artichokes. Fantastic. Only three of them though. Helene Darroze does that tiny food thing. Thank god for the amuse bouches.

Maria's meat main.

A pretty strawberry dessert.

Nice knives and forks with a beehive pattern.

The petits fours trolley was beautifully presented. "What would you like?" asked the waiter. "Can I have one of each?" "Yes of course"I had ten petits fours and he offered seconds.

At the entrance a bundle of Armagnac bottles made by Helene's father, Francis. Some date back to 1900.

I thought this was a reasonably priced meal for two with wine.

Going to the washroom was an experience: the tap is turned on for you as you exit the loo, a towel is handed out. I thought the toilet lady was going to wash and dry my hands for me. This is all part of the Michelin starred experience; you feel pampered. You get to pretend you are rich and important for a couple of hours.

The Connaught

Carlos Place

Mayfair

London. W1K 2AL

United Kingdom

T: +44 (0)20 7499 7070

dining@the-connaught.co.uk

Chan's Noodle Bar

2011-09-04T11:02:00.000+01:00

"A number 89 please and some jasmine tea"
I've been ordering this for years at Chan's. It's not a fancy place even compared to the rest of the Asian restaurants in Hackney and Dalston. Long sharing Formica tables. Bright fluorescent lights. Takeaway customers in hoodies waiting for their order. Graffitti artists talking about their latest escapade up a ladder, spraying a graphic in an unfeasible location. Hood rats chowing down. The locals like it here.
But it hits the spot. For £3.70p you have a large plate of rice ho fun noodles, bean curd chunks, and monk's style vegetables slick with a light brown gravy. If you ask nicely, they give you some sweet chilli sauce to go with.
One of Hackney's bargains.

The Gilbert Scott at St. Pancras

2011-08-13T18:32:00.004+01:00

Arabian night sky ceiling.

Hand painted walls.

Glasses of British champagne to start.

Finally London has a place to match the Musée D'Orsay in Paris! This vast renovation of St Pancras hotel is heart stoppingly dramatic: the combination of pattern, on the carpet, walls and ceiling is daring, conveying the exotic adventurism of British colonialism. The Victorian gothic architecture is matched by sweeping staircases, tall cathedral windows, arched vouted ceilings, brass door fittings and ghostly corridors. Marcus Wareing's restaurant dishes at The Gilbert Scott intelligently match the era and decor. I have seen reports of poor service, but I found the French imported front of house perfectly sufficient. I imagined them getting on a Eurostar at the end of the evening.
It's not cheap however, we spent about £75 each but there are early supper and lunch deals. Both the teen, my friend Mary and I really enjoyed our evening there. I even met my lovely friend Shelley von Strunckel tucked into a booth, but then, she is a local! We chatted about the astrology of the riots, theatre, travel and food. Her companion has a farm in Sri Lanka, he described the avocados "like footballs"...I must go there.
I would love to stay at the hotel but I read that the rooms are less baroque in decor, more corporate which is a shame.

A cured mackerel, potato salad with soup. The ingredient that made this dish sing were the pickled grapes.

I liked the idea of this English dish, a baked onion with thyme and cheese but it lacked umami. Maybe it should be simmered in Marmite, that would be very British.

Stylish waiters with braces and arm garters.

Oyster with pickled lemon slices, I stole the lemon slices off my friend's plate, they were so moreish.

Artichoke tart for mains for me. Basically a big posh vol au vent with one of my favourite vegetables.

My architect friend Mary had sea bream (I think) with a vongole sauce, an intense liquor you wanted to mop up with bread. We also had a side of nutmeggy cauliflower cheese and chunky crisp chips. Lovely.

The teen's fish n chips. Very good. More of the super crispy battered fish would have been appreciated however. Sarson's mayonnaise a good addition. Sarson's vinegar, a traditional British ingredient, is used extensively throughout the menu, which I liked.

My Jaffa cake desert was very good and reflected the intricate patterns of the decor outside. The teen had the "delicious" chocolatey cornflakes: a warm chocolate mousse with cereal that was a clever updated twist on children's nursery food.

An elegant dining room that I would happily eat in every day.

The staircase, a jumble of structured colour and pattern.

The ghostly hallways with Minton tiled floors.

Wouldn't you like to don a bustle and suck on a cigar?

Maybe they could film an update of The Shining here? Kubrick would have approved. Every carpet is designed specially.

Pollen Street Social

2011-08-13T16:29:00.006+01:00

Post Camp Bestival, I felt like I deserved a few nice dinners...and I'd heard great things about Jason Atherton, the chef who runs Pollen Street Social.
I mentioned that I was going on Twitter:
'Get the cocktails, they are amazing' I was advised.
I was also recommended the 'Burrata, heirloom tomato, gazpacho starter'.
The first thing I noticed was the special stool for your handbag... I guess if you've spent £600 on a bag you don't want it's expensive bottom on the floor. Mine cost £30 from Hennes but I appreciate the thought.

Then we ordered some of the famous cocktails which were spectacular:

The ladeez were given a key and promised a little present to collect at the end.

Amuse bouche: blah dip, cute butter board, bread not bad (ear of corn), but seconds not offered.

I ordered the famous Burrata, heirloom tomato, gazpacho starter. Ok, how to explain the size of it without actually taking a ruler for scale. The top pic looks...well large doesn't it? The second pic gives you more of an idea. Three 'heirloom' tomato segments in a vast white bowl. A tea spoon, literally, of burrata. A quenelle of tomato sorbet. Then they did that posh poury thing of the gazpacho around the work of art in the middle. I've done it meself. The punters love that kinda shit and it's a great way of making a soup more interesting with some kind of food sculpture in the middle.
But Jase my love, why so fucking mean with the burrata? I LOVE burrata. This was a prick tease of a dish and not in a good way. With burrata you want a bulging testicle of a cheese curd, that you can gobble teabag style (look it up you bunch of vanillas), not a mingy tea spoon. And the heirloom tomatoes...they may have been different colours but they tasted crap: acidic, flavourless, hard, cold. Tomato sorbet...meh. Gazpacho, another thing I totally love when done right, but it was pretty bland, under-salted too, and no discernable sherry. Nicely plated, a few strands of borage, a pansy petal ect, all very current, all very cheffy, but so what ultimately. Where was the flavour and the hospitality, the generosity? Movie executives talk about 'seeing the money on the screen'. What they mean is, the budget was evident in the movie, it wasn't wasted. For me, this dish wasn't worth £9.50p. I felt deprived. The money wasn't on the plate.

Cauliflower squid with poury broth thing again.

Fish. Samphire. Apparently quite nice.

Came with mini copper pan of paella. Tasted it. Good.

Ox cheeks. My companion liked it. Nobody ever uses the word companion except in a restaurant review.

I decided to order from the vegetarian menu for my main. This pasta sounded lovely, girolles with cream, summer truffle I think, or was that the Swiss cheese grated on top? I had to ask the waiter to keep going with the cheese. Meanie. Anyway as I chewed through the gritty girolles and the dull sticky penne, and played hunt the salsify (very small bits), the head waiter asked us if we were enjoying our meal. I shrugged. His jaw dropped. He came closer: "You don't like it?" he asked incredulous.

"It's, er, well, boring."

"It's boring? Boring?" He couldn't believe his ears.

"It's ok, I'm not sending it back, it's just not very interesting".

He straightened his back and sniffed "I'll let the chef know".

As he was parting, I called out "Don't spit in my food".

This was quite bad behaviour on my part (note to self: no cocktails ever again), especially as it was a business lunch. But my fellow eaters agreed "it tastes like a stir-in sauce!"

Puddings: we were into stronger territory here. LOVED the candied tarragon and will copy forthwith. Was interested in the hay ice cream as want to do some cooking experiments with hay, but there wasn't that much of a hay flavour. This pudding was supposed to come with rice pudding, pessimistically I thought maybe it was a couple of grains hidden underneath the garnish but fortunately a little copper pan of vanillary rice pud arrived to accompany it.

This was good too, with some sort of astronaut's air dried candy on top.(Remember eating something like that in the Washington 'Space' museum).

Maybe it's me though. I just don't think I get posh restaurants, I'm too much of a peasant. If it's all form and little content (taste) then I get depressed and fractious. But customers/critics/bloggers seem to like that here. But it leads me to ask: can the English cook? And do they know how to eat? Why do people want to go to restaurants and pay lots of money for teeny weeny portions?

Royal Ascot Menu from the Waterside Inn

2011-06-15T11:06:00.001+01:00

The formal dining room

Royal Ascot's posh bit, the royal enclosure, asked The Waterside Inn this year to provide the menu for the Panoramic Restaurant. A few bloggers and journalists, including me, came along to sit in on the 'tasting' lunch in the private room of the Michelin star restaurant (25 years with three stars!) presided over by chef/patron Alain Roux.
I cherish his father Michel Roux's books: 'Pastry' 'Eggs' and 'Sauces'; all brilliant resources for the cook with clear instructions and simple but interesting recipes. To the PR's surprise Michel Roux even had lunch with us. I didn't know what to say when introduced, social skills failing me utterly, other than 'Wow'. At 70 years old, Michel Roux is a small leonine man, who despite his haute cuisine background, gives the impression of being down to earth and hard working.
The private room is like sitting in a bourgeois French family living room. The service was formal and discreet, teetering that perfect tight rope of invisible yet amiable. We also met Chef Alain Roux, who managed to be calm and hospitable despite the fact he'd been up all night with his new born son who was in hospital. The epitome of professionalism, he went to work!
People like Tim Hayward (a notorious Francophobe), Janet Street Porter, huff and puff about how French cuisine is demodé. At a recent talk at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival, where I was part of the Fire and Knives panel, I protested "all the basics come from the French. When you go to a decent French restaurant, they wipe the floor with us Brits. We are newbies"
It is old fashioned or classic, but that is also what I love about French cooking: skillfully produced, great ingredients, the bench mark. Despite their reputation for being the centre for fashion, haute couture, France is not as susceptible to it as Anglophone countries. If you want to be a dancer, you first learn classical ballet. Without the foundations, can you successfully experiment?

The dishes photographed here were not the usual Waterside Inn fare, but a special menu for Royal Ascot. We were invited to taste and judge along with some of the representatives of the events company that run the catering at Royal Ascot. I dared, at one point, to venture a criticism that the pasta dish wasn't quite 'al dente'. Michel Roux didn't throw a perfectly baked bread roll at my head with a 'zut alors, 'ow dare you? you totale nobody' which would have been fair enough. He's therefore either a perfect host or intrinsically humble. It was interesting to eavesdrop Michel's sales patter to the suits at Royal Ascot. At times I thought he sounded familiar, well, like me, as he pitched The Waterside Inn as the best restaurant for the job.
To book for the Waterside Inn experience at Royal Ascot go here. It's about £1000 a head, which is astronomical but pretty bargainous considering you get to eat and drink 3 star Michelin food (breakfast, lunch, tea, snacks) and great wine and champagne all day. If you really wanted to treat someone to a once in a lifetime splurge, it's worth it. Get your best hat out!

Amuse-gueules

Starter of a parmesan cream

Michel and Alain at the head of the table

Veggie mains: was really a vegan mains. Nice manderin oil droplets

Saffron tagliatelli with lobster

Exquisitely poached sole with morel mushrooms; proper Michelin star stuff

Salmon (sous vide? very tender)

We were also asked to try the sandwiches as well as the cheese board! I obliged.

Posh swiss roll

Petit fours

My little criticism: "a bit brown don't you think?" You eat with your eyes for sweet things especially

I think this beautifully concocted macaron looks like an arse, maybe Pippa Middleton's.

Chez Bruce

2011-04-15T14:07:00.001+01:00

Best parmesan biscuits ever.

My pick of this meal: asparagus with crab butter. Ambrosia.

Watermelon, goat's cheese and watercress salad. Ok.

Roast cod with roast vegetables, spinach and mash. Lovely roast veg.

Skate with clams and asparagus and saffron. I would have preferred the skate roasted. But good flavours.

Sour sweet passion fruit icecream. A highlight. Butter pecan icecream, meh!

Cinnamon doughnut, apple sauce, vanilla icecream, dribble of toffee sauce: fantastic. Are doughnuts the new black?

Chocolate fondant with almonds. Nice but bit ordinaire compared to the other puds.

Afterwards...the best shortbread biscuits evah! And free refill of expresso without asking.

Chef Bruce Poole has a book out soon.
Bloody Wandsworth. All very nice with it's sweet air next to the common but a nightmare to get to for the tube-dependent North Londoner.

Chez Bruce
2 Bellevue Road
London SW17 7EG
020 8672 0114

Bill for two £95 including two glasses of wine, coffee and three puddings.

Trishna: posh Indian

2011-03-09T23:49:00.004Z

As my publishers have declared that I have two award winning blogs, The English can cook and this one, on the fly leaf of my book, well I guess I better start writing something here again. I haven't actually won any awards at all and I don't allow all those soppy pretendy awards with cuddly bears and flowers 'Gee I really like your blog' badges.
I was invited to Trishna in Marylebone for a wine, beer, cider matching meal with Indian food.
Like Chris Pople, who I was sitting next to, I'm often a bit dubious about posh Indian restaurants but I have to say this one made me think differently about Indian flavours and cooking techniques. They have a new chef/owner, Karam Sethi, from North London, whose mum and dad were accountants. But, in a fit of bohemian rebellion, Karam decided at fifteen to be a chef. He's spent a few years in Delhi at top restaurant Bukhara and I'm sure this informs his fresh approach to Indian food.
We ate in a dark room in the basement. It was like a star chamber of food and wine bloggers.
This tasting was brilliantly led by Winechap, one of the Evening Standard's 1000 most influential Londoners. Like most wine bloggers, he's rather eccentric with his bushy beard, plucked eyebrows and cravat. Every so often he'd pronounce things like "Spain is the new Portugal" and "No one ever goes to the Tate to eat the food".
We tried some great wines, for instance a £150 bottle Riesling ('Uhlen'Spatlese trocken Knebel, 2005) that I could drink all day, from a family vineyard, steeply terraced. I don't even like Riesling so it was a pleasant shock to see what it could and should taste like. We also tentatively sipped some Indian wines: a Shiraz from Sula vineyards (north of Mumbai), 2009 and a Chenin Blanc, again Sula vineyards, 2010, that were...drinkable. Not terrible. Unlike a bottle which, desperate for a drink, I had in India in 1987, a clash between meths and sherry.
I had my first Tokaji which I've wanted to taste ever since I saw the film Dean Spanley where Sam Neill played a dean who, every time he drank Tokaji, reverted to a previous life in which he was a dog. The wine was resinous and a good match for cardomom but I didn't bark.
I enjoyed a Gewurztraminer ( 'Granos Nobles', Luigi Bosca, Mendoza, 2009), one of my favourite wines while being simultaneously light and sturdy enough to stand up to subcontinental flavours.
Ultimately though I'll always prefer lager to wine when it comes to Indian food. We tried Erdinger and Zatec. There were probably others, but I'm a cheap date.
I would urge people to visit Trishna, some really superb cooking going on there. I'd go back and pay. They also have a ridiculously cheap lunch deal for £10.

A hot cheesy football type snack.Delicious.

Coriander bream, a signature dish. So good.

Black pepper fish tikka. Fragrant, fresh, startling.

15-17 Blandford Street
London W1U 3DG
020 7935 5624

Underground: Baker Street

Donde esta la movida? At Brindisa

2010-09-04T20:11:00.001+01:00

You know how some countries become fashionable? Well the 1980s were all about Spain. The country had finally emerged from Franco's dictatorship (he died in 1975). There was an explosion of creativity, best known perhaps in the figure of Pedro Almodovar, director of 'Women on the edge of a nervous breakdown'.
Over in Britain, the newly revived Spain inspired artists, fashion designers and musicians. Rifat Ozbek designed an ornate bolero that even Princess Diana wore. Robert Elms wrote about Barcelona in every free issue of Girl About Town it seemed. Sade split up with Elms, moved to Spain, married a Spaniard and filmed some pop videos there, all tan leather and dusty hidalgos. Madonna wore a flamenco dress in La Isla Bonita.
We also learnt, finally, that Spanish food consisted of more than just paella and grease. Up until the eighties most people associated Iberian cuisine with the 'full board' meals they got in their Torremelinos package holidays.
My first London tapas experience was in Camden, Inverness St, at Bar Ganza. A while later El Parador started up near Mornington Crescent. Small earthenware dishes of boquerones, patatas bravas, pan con tomate y ajo and anchovy olives washed down with Rioja became a regular dinner out. Further up, towards Tufnell Park, there was a tiny Spanish restaurant where, downstairs, flamenco dancers and musicians would hang out until the early hours of the morning after their shifts at the tourist joints behind Oxford St.
In 1988 Monica Linton, opened Brindisa a Spanish food wholesalers, a shop in Borough Market and several restaurant branches.
Food bloggers and journalists were invited to a busy and popular Brindisa in South Kensington to find out more about sherry. Readers of The English Can Cook will know that I'm a fan of sherry, I even did a meal where each course was matched to a different sherry. The reputation of sherry as a serious drink is becoming enhanced with the backing of Heston Blumenthal (who even wrote a book about it) and specialist bars like El Pepito in Kings Cross.
Peter McCombie took us through 11 or 12 sherries, ranging from dry, to resinous, even beeswaxy then sweet. The most interesting were called La Bota (the barrel), discovered by sherry fanatics who spend all their holidays in Jerez tasting from forgotten barrels. Peter disagreed with Heston Blumenthal; tests show that sherry contains no 'umami' in itself but achieves something known as 'umami convergence' when married with certain foods. I often think sherry is a better drink with food than wine.
These were matched with a small tasting menu. Standout tastes include the pale green manzanilla olives; the 'remojon', orange and cod carpaccio salad with artichoke; a sardine in batter (didn't think it'd work, being an oily fish, but the batter was so light); and a lovely sheep's milk cheese, 'oreja merina graza lemena (?)'.
Peter was entertaining and made the sherry seem approachable however I'm rubbish at tastings. Especially after I over-enthusiastically snorted a generous amount of Palo Cortado, which somewhat interfered with my subsequent sense of smell. I also get drunk very quickly* and end up saying stuff like "Peter, do you find that people stop listening to you after a while? " and to Fiona St. George, the PR next to me, on the subject of fertility "I once held a mucus workshop at my house".

*Peter said 100 tastings without swallowing equals a glass of wine. I was swallowing.

La regalade: un jour et une nuit à Paris

2010-08-30T12:56:00.005+01:00

Roller blading gendarmes

8 euro vegetarian thali at one of the Indian restaurants 'Madras café' along the Rue du Faubourg St Denis next to the Gare du Nord.

Thursday I got an unexpected trip to Paris courtesy of the teen (blog post here and here). Arriving in the afternoon starving, we had a cheap quick Indian late lunch near the Gare du Nord. Exhausted, we went to the cinema. When I lived in Paris I spent all my time either eating, cooking or going to the flicks. Unfortunately, the quirky cinéphile taste of 'cahiers du cinema'-educated Parisians, sometimes leads to a mistake. We saw the execrable The Girl Hunters 1963 starring Mickey Spillane, a rare case of a writer playing his own central character.

Chocolatier Trish Deseine, an Irish woman who has performed the miraculous feat of impressing the French with her recipe books and cooking, invited us to stay the night at her place. She made me the best polenta I've ever had; gooey and generous topped with Parmesan and home-made pesto. We sank a couple of bottles of rosé, talked of cookbooks. Around 2 am Trish produced two tightly wrapped packets of tin foil "The dark stuff is Ghanaian" she whispered opening them carefully. Once opened, I saw it was not in fact soft drugs but teensy dolls house bars of chocolate, her own product. We inhaled it, discussing texture and flavour. Trish talks about chocolate like a wine or coffee connoisseur. She should do a workshop.

Trish Deseine's flat overlooking the rustling trees of the park.

Trish gets out the hard stuff at the end of the meal: "Now this is 74% Tanzanian". Trish is launching her own range of chocolate at Selfridges this autumn which will roll out all over the UK.

Crack cacao

The next day we went to a fashionable bistro La Regalade near the Louvre (there's another in the 14th arrondissement) where 'le tout Paris' goes. The men had perfectly coiffed hair, tans and manbags, the women were after-dinner-mint thin and there was one exquisite child in a pressed cotton frock on best restaurant behaviour. The fixed menu was 33 euros and I got a bottle of Gewurztraminer at 25 euros.

I 'papped' the chef Bruno Doucet. French men are effortlessly sexy aren't they? All utter bastards though.

A simple and creatively presented wine menu with colour codes.

Helmets lining the cloakroom. Even businessmen are on scooters.

A lovely funky amuse-bouche: cornichons and onion pickles. Not home-made however. Carnivores get a big terrine of paté, we got some bread and butter.

I loved this: lasagne de légumes confits, mozzarella di buffala, jambon cru et basilic. Really light soft lasagne but no ham for me.

Saumon mariné par nos soins, salade de concombres et gingembre confit aux oignons nouveaux.

Home cured salmon with a cucumber, spring onion and ginger salad. (The salad was not adequately dressed but the salmon was like butter).

The colours of the sauce with the rascasse are so pretty, worthy of Monet 'Les nymphéas'.

Filet de rascasse à la plancha, risotto a l'encre et calamars façon pibailles: filet of scorpion fish, squid ink risotto and squid strips fried like elvers or glass eels.

Pavé de cabillaud de Brétagne demi-sel, cuit dans un bouillon parfumé, haricots de Paimpol au basilic

Half salted cod from Brittany, cooked in a broth, with Paimpol beans in basil.

Next door's rice pudding. Which I tried. You see I simply can't behave like a normal diner in conventional restaurants anymore, I always end up talking to the tables next to me and inevitably, get to try their food. Love the presentation of this and the generous flecks of vanilla but not sure about it being cold. Bruno, my love, some like it hot!

This water seems to be all the rage in the best restaurants.

Choco-praliné de la Regalade. Complete with Mikado stick. Mind blowingly good said the teen.

Grand Marnier soufflé. Believe it or not, I waited ten minutes (too busy chatting) before photographing it, so this is a slightly deflated version.

Graffitted locks on the fence of the Francois Mitterand foot bridge.

Lipsticked Kir Au Pére Tranquille café at Les Halles

The Complete History of Food by Bompas & Parr

2010-07-17T13:11:00.008+01:00

The doctor diagnoses your 'humour': whether you are choleric (red haired, skinny, angry), sanguine (plump with rosy cheeks, enthusiastic), phlegmatic (shy, rational, observant) or melancholic (creative, self-reliant). All medicine used to be based on these four medieval humours. I once had my chart analysed by an astrologer who used William Lilly's methods. They use a points system with planets (in their fall or exaltation for instance) to determine your type. I was overwhelmingly Jupiterian, Sanguine, with some melancholic Saturnian notes.

Making our way across a bridge to a 'flooded' banquet in a ship, apparently there were eels in the water.

I had the antidote to my choleric mood, a reviving mead and spiced liqueur with truffle popcorn.

Each person had a different cocktail depending upon their humour. The cocktails were made by Saf mixologist Joe McCanta.

A very small lift. When I lived in Paris, I had an even tinier lift, fitting only 3 people.

A helper leading the way. The post war period brought a new way of eating: processed food was considered very modern, the equivalent of molecular gastronomy today. I've talked about this before on my Elvis meal post. This room was set up like a 1950s living room and we were given Scratch n sniff cards to 'eat' our TV meal from. The smells were remarkably strong. I went to John Water's Odorama film Polyester and I still have the scratch n sniff card from that. On it were numbers 1 to 10. When a number popped up on screen you had to sniff the relevant 'disc' on the card. Some of the smells were pretty unpleasant: farts for instance.

Next up was another 'modern' food room: you had to take off your shoes to enter a food based bouncy castle with huge colourful inflatables of chips and peas. Everybody entered into it and started giggling and jumping up and down like 5 year olds. Great fun!

We were then lead up to the roof where there was a 'living' bar made out of herbs and plants (rather like a sedum roof). We had a cocktail developed by Paul Tvaroh of Lounge Bohemia, with fizzy grapes.

Then a hallway with lots of tiny mushrooms (through the looking glass?) downstairs to the 'restaurant' proper.

The whole event was housed in an elegant building in Belgravia Square.

This room recalls an avant garde 19th century restaurant held inside a dinosaur!

Unfortunately the only dish was meat which I could not eat. A veggie option would have been nice but perhaps it wasn't authentic to the era...

A sculpture of the gherkin, one of London's architectural landmarks, made out of gingerbread.

Into the renaissance sugar room. A giant turning cake with tiers filled with pastel sugar sculptures. We had dessert, a delicious jelly and a little cocktail.

The jellies were made with ambergris, a substance that sperm whales regurgitate, that was traditionally used to 'fix' perfume, and is found naturally floating in the sea or on the beach.

Sam Bompas, the Walt Disney of food!

A table with a sensitive jelly that wobbles according to your heart rate!

Lastly the elegant bar where you could get Courvoisier based cocktails. It was a good place to talk to others who had also gone on the 'rides'. I met an American couple who having heard about my notorious Harry Potter dinners, failed to grab a ticket and hosted their own simultaneous Harry Potter dinner! They showed me photos, it looked fantastic!

I also met Claire, who is a series editor on Masterchef. My teen once applied for me. I got a phone call but didn't hear anything more. Claire said the issue was probably that I wasn't considered an amateur. Trouble is, I'm not sure I'm a 'professional' either! She said the inclusion in the last series of food blogger Justcookit! was heavily debated: was he a food pro? I felt that having a food blogger on the programme was a good thing, showed Masterchef was keeping up to date with new directions in the food world. Food bloggers are one of the tightest communities on Twitter and, as with all new media, things seem to be tilting towards online content. (Will be interested to see the results of The Times paywall experiment).

I said that the standard of contestants seems very high, that they often look like they've had professional training. Claire explained that they learnt their skills during the Masterchef process, for instance, the test where they work in a real restaurant is held on only their second day. Scary stuff. Claire said that you can never tell who is going to get through: some of her favourite applicants don't make it, it's very unpredictable. We also talked about a recent incident between bloggers and John Torode. Apparently John Torode was scathing about bloggers, which was possibly not a good idea at a bloggers event, but he was hurt by a negative review of his restaurant by one of the attendees. This was interesting to hear because one assumes that someone of his stature would not be affected by a negative online review but of course, he's human, just like the rest of us, and passionate about what he does. Often a restaurant blogger is someone who happens to have enough money to eat out alot (hence the typical restaurant blogging demographic of people that are young, childfree with straight well-paid jobs). Of course, if people are paying for a product/service then it's good to have their feedback. But there are times where you get the feeling that bloggers, like some journalists (but with no editorial filter) are more interested in making a name for themselves or creating a controversial blogpost than giving a fair summary. I would also argue that it's unfair when reviewers don't complain to you directly at the time but save their venom for their anonymous mutterings on the interweb. As both a restaurateur of sorts and a blogger, I see things from both sides here.

A drinks menu projected onto the side of the bar.

This exhibition/event/installation was educational, stylish, fun and interactive. The Complete History of Food is an adventure theme park devoted to food, reminiscent of Disney. I mentioned this to Sam Bompas and discovered that he too is a huge fan of Disney theme parks. (Actually my daughter's father helped to build the Peter Pan ride and Sleeping Beauty's Castle at Eurodisney. Originally the park was supposed to be 'dry', with no alcohol served. The American powers-that-be tried to ban alcohol from the building site of Eurodisney. The French downed tools and refused to work until their lunchtime pastis and pichet de rouge were reinstated! Now Eurodisney serves alcohol in the theme park too, just like French Macdonalds.) What I also liked though was the slightly amateurish feel about it, like a squat party in a grand house, a far cry from Disney sleek. At £25 entry it was also a very good deal.

6TRS5JU2R7ZA

A machine for dining: The Paramount

2010-07-08T19:52:00.001+01:00

The entrance, graphic with copper

The menu

360 degree bar...stunning

Tom Dixon design in the red room

Some kind of meat thing but all the dishes were imbued with a glossy rosy tinge, the light bouncing off the laquered interiors of the Red Room.

Risotto with summer truffle

A gorgeous roquefort soufflé

Tortelloni

The Paramount restaurant, located at the top of Centrepoint, previously a members club, now open to the public, possesses the modernist elan of New York.

On the top floor there is a 360 degree narrow bar wrapped around the building, from which you can enjoy a view of London that is incomparable, above all in the golden dusk of good July weather.
The dining room itself, designed by Tom Dixon, is stylish and atmospheric; it reflects and updates the late 60s office skyscraper 'international' architecture to perfection.
I was, I confess, on a freebie. I, unlike all these other bloggers, don't get offered many blagging opportunities, mainly because I rarely review restaurants; with running my own part-time restaurant, I hardly have time. But it's nice to have relief from my own cooking, see what others are doing out there, nick a few ideas!
I'm a peasant: I believe in simple food, good ingredients, round plates, unfussy presentation. Here at the Paramount the plates are oblong, glass, or slates but this is acceptable because it goes with the concept. The food is equally 'modern'; not my style but appropriately architectural. We were sat in the Red Room.
My amuse bouche and starter were great: a cappuccino of asparagus velouté, a simple roquefort souffle.
My main was ordinary: butternut squash tortellini. Doubtful the pasta was home made. The five tortellini were queued up like soldiers in a firing line.
I should have ordered the beautifully cooked sea bass which had a lovely sauce and a spoonful of caviar.
I disagreed with the puddings. Intellectually. Structurally. Each had at least four tasters: a dusting of something, a quenelle of something else, a teensy contrasting triangle of this, a rondelle of that. This wasn't food, it was a painting by Kandinsky. I had a strawberry bavarois; a wavy squiggle of oblong custard. Around it were dotted dollops of lemon curd, strawberries cut in half, some dehydrated berry...
Very clever but a little too hyper-modern for my tastes. I slagged off Masterchef winner Dhruv Baker because of his silly plating. Little rows of carrots. You can tell these chefs aren't gardeners: where you plant in odd numbers, in organic formations, as if authored by Mother Nature. It strikes me as very male, the rigid formal plating schemes you find in restaurants, rather than the maternal plonk of a casually thrown together platter on the table. But it impresses diners; you look at it and think 'I can't do that'.
This is a place to take a date, get that job promotion, wow the clients. Howard Roark would take Dominique Francon to dinner at the Paramount, and he'd make her pay the approximately £120 bill for two.

Meeting the queen of Fairy cakes

2010-06-25T11:31:00.002+01:00

Mich Turner

Like the American grey squirrel pushing the native red squirrel into oblivion, the American crayfish decimating the native white claw, the fairy cake, a modest, flat, glacé-iced creature has lost out to the blowsy top-heavy cupcake in recent years. The Dolly Parton of small cakes has dominated our pallid native offering; whole bakeries are devoted to cupcakes and prices have risen as high as the frosting.
But we will fight 'em on the beaches, or at least in the baked goods aisle, England expects! The backlash has begun.
I was invited by Allison's flour to attend a fairy cake decorating class. They even sent a car! Luxuriating in the back of the sedan I thought, I could get used to this...
We alighted at the poshest and most beautiful house I have ever seen, owned by a woman called Veronica, who possessed the kind of upper-class English beauty that judges would describe as 'fragrant'. As you entered the hallway, there was a model of a miniature farm, high ceilings, a large vintage chandelier; glimpses of other rooms (oh I would have liked to have looked around!) revealed marble fireplaces and simple but classy furnishings. It was like stepping into a style magazine, 'Interiors' probably. We were led downstairs, down creamy marble steps to a wide open kitchen/dining room. The pale wooden table was big and round enough to fit all of Arthur's knights. Around the room were open shelves with artfully placed displays of retro cookware.
Outside the perfectly judged garden, all cream coloured wrought iron, spiral staircases and casual bouquets, glistened in the June sunlight.
Mich "without a T" Turner, awarded a CBE only a few days previously, was going to be our teacher. She runs the Little Venice Cake Company and has written several books.
At first we are directed to a counter with several Kitchen Aid mixers. Mich starts talking and demonstrating something with butter. We all, press and bloggers, stand there immobile, fazed no doubt by the heat and champagne. I see Mich's face tense:

"Are we supposed to be doing what you are doing?" I venture.

"Yes" she replies.

"Shall we wash our hands?" I continue, being the class goody-goody.

"Yes" she says and moves out of the way of the sink.

We queue up. There's no soap. We use washing up liquid.
Back at our stations we are instructed to put the butter and the sugar into the bowl of the mixer. We turn it on.

"Higher" says Mich. "You really want to get some air in there".

"There are 4 methods of cake making"instructs Mich "1) boiling 2) all in one 3) creaming 4) (I didn't catch it, the mixer was too loud)."

The recipe today was:

Cream butter and sugar together at a high speed.
Crack the eggs, mix in. If it curdles, add a spoonful of flour.
Add 1 tablespoon of flour, fold in which keeps the air in.
Then pour in the rest of the sieved flour including baking powder.
Stir the mixture then make a cutting motion down the middle with your spoon, repeat until all the mixture is folded in, stir, stir, cut, cut.
Bake.

Mich never uses margarine. Quite right too, full of hydrogenated fats, which the body can't absorb. Allinson's 'Nature Friendly' flour is milled from Conservation Grade wheat from farms that encourage wildlife. This is especially important to safeguard the future of bees. Mich also recommends Billington's unrefined icing sugar which gives a caramelised flavour to the icing.
Mich believes the British fairy cake stems from the Victorian era where they used to bake individual cakes in tea cups and decorated with a glacé icing, using no fat. In America, the first mention of a cupcake was in 1828: possibly an extension of their use of cups as a cooking measure rather than weighing, as are poundcakes. They are often crowned with swirled butter creams. Cupcakes became popular because they bake quicker than a large cake, especially important on the wood fired stove of the era.

Now we sat down for our decorating lesson. We are trying to achieve this:

Looks hard doesn't it?

We were given a little kit of instruments to make shapes.

Using 'petal icing', you roll a small ball of red dough, make it slightly pointed, carve a line down the middle and using a fine paintbrush, paint the dots and head with black icing.

For the bumble bee, we made a sphere of yellow icing, then rolled out some white icing with a teensy rolling pin. We then, with a tiny cutter, cut out wings. We glued them to the 'body' with a miniature icing gun of royal icing.

The trick with the piping bag is not to press on the sides, but on the top, with your thumb

I put a smile on the bumble bee's face with a curved instrument.

Kinda cute huh? They had personality.

The journalists concentrating very hard. I said to Mich, feeling confident, "I want to make a dragonfly." The lady next to me piped up "I want to make a horse". We were flying now, blue sky thinking!

At the end, our cakes boxed up, I said goodbye and, laden with my hessian goodie bag of Allinson's flour and my own icing kit, head towards the stairs. Unfortunately, when I got to the stairs, a hardly visible cream marble in a pastel sea of good taste, I fell over. When I got home I opened the box and found this:

All of the cakes were squished into a corner. I still ate them though, while watching Big Brother.

Le Grain de Sel, Cogolin

2010-06-14T00:08:00.007+01:00

Grain de Sel, one of the best restaurants in the area, the Ottolenghi guys rate it.

Chef Philippe Audibert at work at this chic mom and pop operation.

Courgette flower fritters

Tuna? Lost notes.

Meat coiled around in medaillons, can't remember name of dish, on spag.

Brouillarde d'oeufs fermiers à la poutargue.

Creamy soft polenta with shavings of truffle and golden chanterelles

Caramelised fruit and liquorice icecream

"There's more to life than Cogolin you know" opined Cheryl, a controversial theory from the Liverpudlian owner of Le Snack bar on neighbouring Les Prairies de la Mer campsite.

Or Prairies de la Merde as some call it. I lived there in a mobile home for four months, yes, for a while I was trailer trash. I enjoyed every minute. No housework, five minutes from the beach, 'La Boheme' or 'the Bo' and the other English pub 'Monroes' (I'm sure the eponymous Marilyn herself would have loved this joint) a quick cycle ride away... what's not to like? In the summer, there was nightly entertainment, karaoke cabaret singers in the open air stage, rumbling through the site. Never a dull moment, living in a holiday camp. I, of course, was treated like the local witch, what with being a single mum, a suspiciously light drinker, and known to 'read books like'.

"You should go out with Rupert!" said Cheryl's live in partner, an enormous Scouser who had a formidable appetite for coke (powdered) and beer.

"He's got like, um, how big is it?"he hesitated, a builder's imagination in his mind's eye at work "ooh a shelf, about 2 foot long, with...books. You'd like him. You'd get on".

I met the unlikely named Rupert, the local taxi driver, who knew all the back roads to Saint Tropez, a useful bit of knowledge when the main linking road (N98) from Cannes to Toulon is one long engine-busting traffic jam from June to September. He had all the security codes for the private roads see. Rupert, a pudgy guy from Portsmouth, his brain a little fried from a decade on E at South Coast raves, didn't believe in fiction.

"I only allow reference books to be on that shelf".

We weren't destined for each other. He was also extremely narrow minded at Scrabble, refusing the Scottish 'Aye'.

Cheryl, even in her 40s, with the thickened middle of a woman who spent every summer churning out tourist snacks, gargling her constant companion, a pint glass of Malibu and pineapple that staff kept topped up, was a pretty woman. She drank like a professional. She worried about her two feral daughters growing up in the campsite. Cogolin is the local town, the nearest to a real place down there for it's open all year (rather than just being a picturesque backdrop for tourist season like St. Trop). I knew every bar, every shop, every restaurant, every stall on market day (Wednesdays) in brain dulling detail. There was one health food shop, one boutique where you could buy cheap bags and heels, one friendly bar run by Arabs next to the cinema, one other bar next to the hardware shop which sold frying pans with holes in the bottom, soon to be revealed as chestnut roasting pans. A thrill would be a stroll around Leclerc, fingering French stationery, gazing at espadrilles and a rosé in the bar opposite.

Janey, Cheryl and I would meet there on school days, during the long unemployed winter of 2005. Janey had a mysterious boyfriend who we never saw. We heard stories, he was building villas in Cheshire, he was busy, he was travelling, but he adored Janey. I saw a photo: he looked unfeasibly young and good looking for Janey, a raddled blonde who talked of her son, the "golf professional" and her ex-husband, the millionaire dentist. The son crashed her cars and the ex fucked off with a trophy dental assistant. Janey lived on the RMI due to a bad back and could never stand her round.

One day Janey showed me a handwritten letter from this guy, full of sweet nothings "See how he loves me!" she cooed.

After a few months of this, I finally broached the subject with Cheryl: "Erm this guy, is he in prison?".

Cheryl was shocked "How do you know?".

"Well who else writes letters? I mean, when we have email?"I shrugged.

"Don't tell her!" hissed Cheryl.

Anyway they were all criminals in the South of France, Graham Greene had it about right.

Bloody: the vegan coup

2010-05-30T08:52:00.010+01:00

"It's cock worship or the convent, there is no middle ground" saith the Maitre D'Aft.

Mystic Curry at Pogo

or Pogo cafe and the separatist independent state of Hackney

Some of you who have been reading my other food blog The English can cook since the beginning of time will know that I used to volunteer at a vegan cooperative cafe called Pogo. It's in Hackney. I have a theory about places without the tube: they are different: self-administering, land-locked, incestuous, tribal.

People who live in Hackney don't leave their postcode. People who live in Hackney tend only to socialise with other people in Hackney. Unless you happen to be passing by. Which is unlikely. (Unless you are on the way to Norfolk, and we all know what they are like). You really have to make a special effort to visit. You have to wait in the cold and get a bus or brave the dark stations of the North London Line, an overground train that theoretically comes once every twenty minutes. This route used to be called the Freeline, pre-Oyster card. Nobody paid. Like hobos in depression America, you could jump a train, cross North London from West to East and back again, which is the toughest direction of travel in the clusterfucked tube map, constructed primarily to enable people in outlying boroughs to get to the centre to shop or work.

This has the effect of skewing social and fiscal interaction in London villages (for that is what London consists of, a sprawling collection of hamlets, it's not a cohesive town like Paris, with intramuros and extramuros being as clear as jail, i.e. all the poor people locked out in the banlieu, la zone).

Pogo is located between Clapton and Hackney and probably encapsulates everything that is good about that area apart from the murder rate. It's a cooperative venture. Nobody gets paid. The food is organic, fairtrade and vegan. It has sofas and free internet and two computers for public use.

The 'customers' are a mix of mohicaned punks, activists, animal rights campaigners, lesbians, gays, transgender people, care in the community slightly mad people, old musicians, ex-addicts, mums and their pushchairs from the local council estate and even the odd businessman stopping in for a soya mango shake on his way home from work.

To the average passerby it might seem a little intimidating. But you soon learn that there everything is cool, everything is permitted, everything is possible. I've lain on the sofas for hours, clutching my broken heart, trying to dull the pain of rejection on many occasions there. In fact I started to work there during a period when I'd been dumped a couple of times in a row. I found the chopping and cleaning and stirring and baking a soothing routine.

I'm not a vegan. The food is a bit up and down. Sometimes it's squat slop. Other times it's exquisitely fresh, original and creative. You are limited to cooking with whatever Growing Communities delivers which can mean months of cabbage and beetroot. It's hard core aggressively seasonal, and will force invention upon a cook to conjure up new dishes with the same dull ingredients. But it's all cooked with love.

Pogo is as much community space as food outlet. There are books to borrow or swap, discussions, meetings and film night to be held. My gay best friend (buy him a fruit basket) the Maitre D'aft was front of house. This is how he talks:

"Goddess willing. She-mail me. Will you cook me g/f food? By that I mean gay friendly. I'm cunstantly hungry"

He will deliver radical puns at a breakneck pace, trill witticisms with verbal dexterity, flashing black eyes from his rail thin carcass. It's as if Oscar Wilde were reincarnated as a crack-head Jewish boy from Dollis Hill. He left home and whacked through his inheritance, mostly on drugs and boys who did not return his ardour. D'aft can speak and write Hebrew. He lives in a tent in someone's back garden.

All this is over now. There has been a coup. Some freegans (definition: people who will eat anything as long as it is free) collected food, including meat, when the freezers from the nearby Somerfield supermarket broke down. Rather than let it go to waste, they stored it in Pogo freezers in the storage garage. None of the meat was used in the cafe.

A group of volunteers grew angry about this. Pogo cafe is one of the few activist vegan cafes in London. The debate became freegans versus the vegans. The vegans threw away the meat.

At a surprise and secret meeting last week, organised by someone who hacked into the Pogo café email data, the core group of the collective , under attack for allowing this to occur, resigned en masse.

There followed a lengthy, shocked and informative debate on email and a long thread of comments on the Pogo blog (now, sadly, deleted, as they try to eradicate their bloody beginnings?). Accusations were thrown around. Some of the quirkier, more characterful people like D'aft were pushed out.

I support so many of the principles that Pogo was founded to promote: ethical eating, self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality and keeping it local. When I cooked there, there were cliques and I had a few fights, mainly because I'm the boss in my kitchen, no matter how temporary, and that was deemed to be in contradiction to deciding everything on a consensus. The fact that most of the other staff seemed to be sleeping with each other (I was excluded on grounds of age and family responsibilities) didn't help. But there was humour and craziness: one waitress said she was accosted outside by an unknown local asking for urine "Please I need a clean sample to give to the police". Only in Crackney. (She was willing, but had to admit her urine wasn't 'clean' either).

But I can't help being amused by some of the debating points, like this from one founder member: "I wonder why the co-op member questioned did not feel uncomfortable about the animal corpses in the fridge? Would they feel comfortable if a murdered human corpse was kept in the fridge? I'm assuming they wouldn't, which underlies a speciesist attitude that as a vegan I am fighting against."

(This reminded me of the time there was a mouse at the cafe and we weren't allowed to trap it.)

Others railed against the "vegan police" and while acknowledging that keeping the meat was a mistake, that the core co-op had "Over the last few years... worked incredibly hard doing incredibly boring things - accounts and orders cleaning etc.. not fun and not quick. Their motivation was not money - as no-one is paid, if you think that they were intoxicated by power (the power to clean the toilet in the early hours perhaps?) then just stop reading now, you're too far gone. "

This blogger talks about his disappointment with the "massive vegan shit storm" while Alex Bourke, editor of the Vegetarian London guidebook wrote "We should not forget why veganism is fundamental to ecology, equality, sustainability and social justice for humans and all other animal nations."

Three months later: the original collective was overturned, the new collective has been installed. Some of the newbies have now realised that the "hierarchical" original collective actually did the donkey work and that running a cafe, no matter how anarchic and freestyle is pure labour. The originals have moved on.

Last week was National Vegetarian Week, many 'foodies' on Twitter regarded this as an opportunity to take the piss. My own position is that if an animal has died to feed us, it's only moral that much of it should be used, snout to tail eating, but there are increasingly good vegan and vegetarian restaurants out there...and this is the future, whether you like it or not.

How was the Waitrose party?

2010-05-22T11:29:00.009+01:00

Last Thursday night Waitrose held a summer party at RIBA in central London. Getting invited to stuff like this is one of the perks of being a food blogger. Despite a guest list of 300, it's doubtful that anyone will blog this. But hey, every lig deserves to be recorded doesn't it?

The whole place was filled with suits or 'partners'. Suits have a certain effect on me, my behaviour gets worse in inverse proportion to how posh the event is. I get very drunk and very loud. I could have sucked up to the foodie c list like this year's Masterchef finalists who attended (and fair enough in the absence of Delia and Heston they were the nearest to slebs) but having siphoned four cocktails (rhubarb Bellini and vodka & passion fruit) simultaneously from the tray holder standing at the entrance, I don't rightly recall their presence.

The canapes, a Siamese twinning of food styles, were part Delia, part Heston: surburban dinner party fare or cutting edge experimentation. For instance we had Delia's asparagus spears with little cheffy hats served in shot glasses filled with a lemony buttery sauce. It was hard to jam my tongue down the bottom of the shot glass though. I can't bear waste. On the other hand we were given...slugs on a spoon. I kid you not. White porcelain spoons (sick to death of pretentious spoon presentation) with little black bodies on them, snails without shells.

Another weirdy thing about the whole evening is that they were quite parsimonious with the food at first. Caterers normally calculate eight canapés per guest. Frankly I can eat eight just to accompany my first drink. This all leads to a terrible condition, which I've written about before, called 'canape stress' whereby you spend the whole party in a state of anxiety, no doubt a throwback to hunter-gatherer times when famine was a regular problem. You suddenly find yourself cravenly becoming smiley new best friends with the waiters and waitresses, in case they might swerve around you with the tray, insufficiently taking on board your need for a constant supply of substances that occupy your mouth. Freudians! I think I must be stuck in the oral phase. As are all foodies I suppose.

(To be honest I'd rather eat than have sex. Not at first of course, when the oxytocin is pumping and an insanity called being 'in love' reigns for six months. But afterwards.)

I'm not sure what the Waitrose party was about: what were they trying to say? One suit said to me:

"We want you to love us".

"But I do love you"

"Then love us more"
he said slurpily. I guess he was drunk too.

And that's the thing: everybody loves Waitrose don't they? Part of the John Lewis Partnership, which my mother positively reveres, they tick all the boxes: luxury food, dependable quality, innovative ingredients....and they are practically communists!

Every employee is a share holder. The success of the company is down to the workers, it's a cooperative. The original John Lewis was born in Shepton Mallet. If he'd been alive today he probably would have been rocking out at Glasto! He worked his way up from the shop floor and maybe that's why he realised that the best way of running a business is to involve everybody. Despite being around for over 100 years, the John Lewis cooperative business model is the future.

Still, having inadvertently become a kind of event planner with The Underground Restaurant, I find myself perusing all parties with a semi-professional critical eye nowadays.

The opera singer, though charming, beautiful and talented, singing a bit of opera, a bit of Subo and a strange operatic version of an Elvis song, was just wrong. Why? Well you felt like you had to stop and listen, interrupting the important work of drinking, eating and networking. And what were Waitrose trying to prove by hiring her? We already know they are posh and classy. Much better to have something backgroundy or raucous (such as a kletzmer or gypsy band) so that you don't feel, as a guest, like you are crushing the fragile musical hopes of a young girl while you greedily attempt to carouse.

Also onstage was a acrobatic woman wearing a skin tight leopard skin all in one outfit. A photographer from the Daily Mail lurched over to me while she was on, sighing "I'd love to be gripped by her thighs".

Then everybody left apart from a couple of farmers who looked like a different species, tanned, fit, stuffed into posh suits and floral ties, from all of us pale townies. One supplied a product called 'Steve's Leaves" consisting of red rocket, very spicy rocket, and something else. Why didn't Waitrose have a table with invited suppliers products displayed?

Once most people had left, trays and trays of canapes arrived; tea smoked salmon on dry crispbreads (boring and couldn't taste the tea) mixed with salted caramel lolly pops and white chocolate coated pretzel sticks (good) and scallops in spoons (the soy sauce overwhelmed the delicate scallops).

Yes I'm reviewing canapés here. I'll review anything given time.

But I did wonder, where were you lot when everybody was here?

Downstairs many female 'partners' were leaving with armfuls of tall white flowers.

"Where did you get those from?" I asked.

"In that room" one said pointing "we don't want them to be wasted"

On the way home in the tube, blooms sweetly scenting the sweaty carriage, commuters smiled at me, one asked if they could help control the unwieldy bouquet, another struck up conversation, I realised that flowers really do make people happy. Perhaps London Transport should try a little aromatherapy at rush hour?

Paulie and the chocolate factory

2010-04-16T15:07:00.014+01:00

Couverture

Paul A Young tempering chocolate

Getting thicker

Scraping it off the marble

Scrapings

Palette knife

Making shells...

White Chocolate ganache

Using a 'trigger' funnel to fill the shells

A few weeks ago I had a go at 'tempering' chocolate; trying to get a professional shine and smoothness of texture ... when you break off a piece and it has a satisfyingly crisp 'snap' sound. I followed the instructions in Paul A Young's book 'Adventures in Chocolate', currently the world's number one chocolate book which has won the Gourmand book award in Paris.

There are two methods of tempering; on a marble slab and 'seeding'. As I don't possess a large marble slab, I tried 'seeding' which is introducing tempered chocolate to already melted chocolate and controlling the temperature so that it crystallises. Here is a great explanation of the science bit.

Although the tempered chocolates that I had made were ok, I realised that there is nothing like watching an expert to get a true idea of what to achieve. Paul kindly allowed me to come to the kitchen atelier of the Islington branch of his chocolaterie, to watch him temper a batch of chocolate. The kitchen is air-conditioned, you can't temper chocolate in a warm place, and two large slabs of marble are positioned on island worktops.

Shivering slightly, I watched Paul expertly and rapidly pour chocolate over the white marble and with practised movements, shift the chocolate around over the slab, using a palette knife and a metal scraper. After about ten minutes, the chocolate became thicker and shinier. Paul dipped the end of his palette knife into the chocolate and let it dry while he scraped the rest into a metal bowl.

He kept stirring until he sensed the texture was correct: "this way it sets with a nice sheen, no graininess or grittiness".

Brendan on the other side of the room was jumping from task to task, making salted caramel, icecream and brownies. Both of them work very fast, today they will produce 2000 chocolates. Coming up to Christmas the number is more like 20,000 chocolates a day.

On the side stood an enormous cellophane wrapped Easter egg, in glorious colours, as if it had been painted roughly with expressionist brush strokes, ordered by a guy for his girlfriend.

"How much was that?"

"£95"

"Did the client design it?" I asked, looking at the sparkly mini eggs encrusted, fabergé style, into the surface.

"No, he likes and knows my stuff and just said do what you think. The colours are actually in the chocolate, not painted on"

My childhood ambition was to work in a sweetshop. Just work in one, not even own it! Being in this workshop with it's marble benches, was like winning the golden ticket for Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Shelves were crammed with tantalising bonbons, copper pots bubbled with white chocolate, goats cheese, rosemary and lemon ganache, ice cream machines whirred with thick gooey mixtures, diamond, circular and rectangular moulds, the familiar shapes of chocolate selections everywhere, casually piled up. Christmas, Easter, Valentines, presents and treats, celebration, reminiscent in every corner.

"Being around sweet stuff so much, we love savoury food" said Brendan.

Paul works so hard. Only this year has he started to give himself one day a week off. This is the reality of starting your own business, no love life, no time off. He has one week's holiday a year.

"I mostly spend my day off sleeping"

"Do you ever eat crap chocolate?" I ask Paul.

"No"

"I mean" I push, investigative reporter's hat on, determined to get to the bottom of this "if you were stopping at a petrol station, and you fancied a chocolate bar, what would you choose?"

"I always keep a selection of my own chocolates in the glove compartment. I never eat trashy chocolate, there's no enjoyment" answered Paul.

Brendan agreed: "Once you've had this stuff, you don't go near the commercial stuff. I will, on occasion, have a Bounty though"

"Why chocolate? and what's so good about your stuff as opposed to say, Thorntons?" I ask Paul

"There was no defining moment. It just happened! What I make is 100% handmade, natural, no machinery chocolate. It's the hardest, purest way to make chocolates. Nothing is made industrially. Thorntons is mass production. You can't make a decision with a machine. I can make new things everyday. With a machine, you'd have to change the set up, it would take too long, be too difficult"

Paul uses the word 'pure' a great deal. There's almost a monastic dedication to his craft: "I'm not in this for the money. I only use the best suppliers such as Valrhona or Michel Cluizel which have a high cocoa content, are the most expensive. Most of the chocolate I use is French, not Belgian. "

"Why? Does it taste different?" I ask

"It's just our style. I also check their ethics, don't trade unfairly, use child labour... If Valrhona weren't ethical, I'd stop using them"

"The important thing is to dream. People say 'you are a dreamer' like it's a bad thing. But we are all grownup children. You have to have dreams." He pauses while stirring the ganache. "One day I'm going to retire, somewhere pale and calm. But this is a long term project, ten, fifteen years".

Finally I ask : "Any advice for people wanting to temper at home?"

"Buy my book. Work as cleanly as possible. Have a cool room. Some of it will always end up on the floor...If you make a mistake, melt it down, do another batch. Practise. Get comfortable with it. It won't happen overnight."

Simnel truffles

Like marbles of lava...

Chocolate roses

Petrus

2010-04-12T17:29:00.011+01:00

Amuse Bouche of onion velouté

Crab and salmon cannelloni

with baby gem lettuce sauce

Pressed rabbit and foie gras mosaic
with carrot chutney and a hazelnut salad

Pan-fried sea trout with sweetcorn,
wild mushrooms and sorrel sauce

Chocolate sphere

with milk ice cream and honeycomb

Marinated pineapple

with coconut pannacotta (perfect), lime and chilli syrup

Roasted fennel crème brûlée

with Alphonso mango

This is the first time I've eaten a properly Michelin star type meal. Another reviewer was bored by it but I wasn't. It may be old hat, perfectly cooked modern Franco-British food, gorgeous amuse-bouches, accomplished and smooth service, neither too obsequious, nor too cocky... if so, that's a hat I'm happy to continue wearing.

In our little rival set up to #poshlunchclub, Patrick Carpenter, astrologer Bethea Jenner and my former sous-chef Angie Ma, just in from Hong Kong for a couple of days, met up for a midday lunch, à la francaise. We were going for the set menu: £25 for 3 courses.

We sat on a banquette, waiting to be seated, I had a glass of prosecco at £9.50. The waitress poured, half way, and then stopped. I looked at her. She was unperturbed. That was it. I got chatting to the Maitre d' Jean Phillipe Susilovic about our last set meal at River Café and summoned up the courage to ask:"Why only half a glass?"
Unoffended he demonstrated that it was in fact exactly 125ml but the glasses were large.

"Sorry" I said.

"No problem at all" he replied "you want to know, you ask, that's fine. I like directness".

He offered to hang up my charity shop cardigan...

"S'Ok" I said "I'll shove it in my bag".

He smiled.

"You can see I'm not used to posh restaurants can't you?" I laughed.

We had two little cornets of popcorn, one flavoured with paprika, the other with lemon and butter. I love savoury popcorn so that got my vote.

Sitting down, we were first served an amuse-bouche of onion velouté in the most delicate white bone china. Delicious. Brown sourdough and warm white bread were brought, fanned out on a plate. A roundel of butter at room temperature was placed stealthily on the table.

We started to relax. This was going to be the equivalent of a holiday, a weekend away, a proper treat. Even when I asked for the sommelier...
"What would Madame like?"
"A glass of your cheapest white please"
He didn't bat an eyelid. Patrick looked askance at me. "Why did you ask for the sommelier?"

"I didn't know who to ask for the wine. Have I committed a faux pas?" I know Patrick is dead posh about wine, being a bit of an expert. "We are doing the cheap deal and I want to see what their £5.50 house white is like".

It was fine, light and fruity.

Next up was my choice of crab and salmon cannelloni, fresh and vital.

My main course was the trout, crispy skin skyward, with wild mushrooms and sweet corn nestling underneath. This was accompanied by small silver dishes of broccoli with lemon zest and potato slices with rosemary sprigs. Everything was good. Nothing was mediocre.

The servers danced around us, whisking off lids, flashing silver and white, unfolding napkins with a theatrical flourish, clothed in starched precise suits. A variety of little jugs appeared in clean masculine hands, offset by glinting cufflinks, pouring sauces around whatever we had ordered: a clear consommé, a fresh green herb sauce, a lemon butter slick. Stoic footmen stood back in the shadows, holding trays, as if we were being protected by the Queen's Guard. You felt like you were royal. You felt so cossetted, so cared for, that if say, I'd asked for a bit of a neck massage, they probably would have obliged.

Our excitement and pleasure must have been audible; the table next to us cooed over...
"It's so lovely here isn't it?"

"Ooh yes"we squealed in unison.

"Have you tried the Petrus, it's only £49,500"

The maitre d', hearing this, came over with the bottle. It was empty, somebody ordered it last Friday.

"Who?" I asked.

"I'm afraid I can't say" he twinkled.

Imagine getting the 25 quid set lunch and ordering a fifty grand bottle of wine with it!

Desserts on the set menu were à la carte: just before dessert, we were given a silver dish with four doll size icecream cones, filled with mascarpone and lemon.

I ordered the chocolate sphere with honeycomb. When it arrived it looked rather forbidding.

Again appeared another little jug, Jean-Phillipe coughed slightly to gain attention, and eyebrow raised, poured chocolate sauce onto the sphere and...it melted showing the icecream and honeycomb underneath. It was magical! We were all gasping.

Even as we thought we had finished...chocolates appeared. A hand carved wooden box with tiny sections for mini chocolate bars, a dish of powdery chocolate almonds, and another spectacular effect, were we on a film set? a silver dish flowing with dry ice revealed four white chocolate cold lollies on a stick.

At the end we were taken down to meet the chefs, one of them unfeasibly young. Now I know why Gordon Ramsay and his restaurants are feted.

Petrus £25 set lunch
1 Kinnerton Street SW1X 8EA
Tel: 020 7592 1609
Tube: Knightsbridge

Blind Tasting

2010-04-11T18:39:00.006+01:00

Arriving at Dans Le Noir restaurant in Clerkenwell for a blind wine tasting, my mum and I are told to leave our bags, coats, phones and watches in a locker.

‘No light must get into the dining room’ commands the owner.

A group of us are led in, conga style, hand on the shoulder of the person in front while our Italian waiter, Roberto, wearing big shades and an outfit more suited to a rave than a restaurant, leads us into the velvety pitch black interior.

‘Follow my voice,’ he says. ‘Feel the back of your chair.’

I’m obviously too slow, for he then pushes my bum onto my seat.

‘There are six glasses in front of you and behind that a water jug, glass and spittoon.’

We feel gingerly in front of us, the glasses are made of plastic, probably a health and safety requirement of this tasting. I hold my hand up in front of my face. I can see nothing. Voices are louder, there is a base note of panic in the air.

Our waiter is blind, and in a reversal of the usual restaurant hierarchy, he is in control, for we are out of our comfort zone. Dans le noir is a restaurant where you eat and drink in absolute darkness. For this tasting, our preconceptions about drink, labels and flavour will be tested by the loss of the major sense: sight.

I try to write notes on the wine. I dig my nails into the paper to mark where I have written, fashioning my own instant Braille. I don’t dare use the spittoon as I fear I might gob into my neighbour’s lap. Roberto claps but I can smell him coming.

‘Are you normal?’ he asks the lady opposite me

His voice comes near to me. ‘Are you vegetarian my pretty?’ he asks.

How does he know if I’m pretty, I wonder?

I feel heavy plates thud onto the table.

My mum says:

‘I want to take my glasses off. I’m not sure why. It feels wrong to wear them in the dark’
I fumble around with some canapés. I feel the rough texture of what appears to be tiny bruschetta. Are these rolls of wet vegetable courgette perhaps? There is also one mystery item that tastes suspiciously like paté.

There are 4 tastes in wine: sweetness, acidity, bitterness and saltiness. One might add umami, the 5th taste. Other things to take into account are weight and wateriness. In the dark smell came to the fore. I have heard that even wine experts cannot tell the difference between red and white wine served at identical temperatures if they are blindfolded. However the difference seems obvious here; the reds are astringent, more tannin.

A female voice fades in, ‘I don’t mind food and drink in the dark, but not men.’

The hardest task is to pour the water into the glass. No, the hardest task is to put the jug down again without knocking over all the glasses.

Finally the tasting is over, we are led out, my mum is relieved, she’d had enough. I feel relaxed. But then, as a photographer, I’ve spent years in darkrooms. The dim lights in the lobby area, where we emerge, hurt our eyes. We are asked to mark down which wines we liked best. I peer at my notes, they are scribbled on top of each other, like automatic writing.

Upstairs it is revealed that this was a tasting of Jacob’s Creek wine. Would we choose the same wines in a supermarket as those we had liked without knowing the label? This blind tasting was a way of challenging preconceived ideas about taste. I prefer an oaky chardonnay or a full bodied rioja-like Tempranillo, light or no light, but others were surprised by the disparity. I like Jacob’s Creek wine, but imagine if you were given a tasting of Blue Nun or Liebfraumilch, wines that have a naff reputation?

This was one of the most interesting experiences of my life. Highly recommended.

Dans Le Noir
30-31 Clerkenwell Green
Clerkenwell
EC1R ODU

Tel: 020 7253 1100

*Wine writer Anthony Hanson in his tome 'Burgundy' states that "tasters can be divided into 2 groups, group 1 are... uncertain of their skills...anxious that lack of knowledge bars them from deciding for themselves...they remain dependant on others...often have an eye on names and labels and tasting scores, and ...miss out on wines pleasures. Group 2 people are those who have made the jump, who look forward to putting their nose into a glass of wine as soon as it is poured. They know that finding words to describe or talk about a wine is difficult, but they will have a go"

Coincidentally (?) we were divided into two groups, group 1,consumer press and group 2, trade press (or 'normal alkies' and 'professional alkies').

The River café

2010-04-04T16:32:00.013+01:00

Panzotti

Fish

Ruth and Richard Rogers

Staff settling down for lunch towards the end of service

My tagliatelli

Chocolate nemesis

The food blogger Niamh of Eat Like a Girl had a brilliant idea 'Posh Lunch Club' where you try the set lunch menu, generally a good deal, of the really expensive restaurants that you couldn't normally afford.

@alexthepink put out an invitation on Twitter saying that she had places booked for the set 'Winter lunch' (3 courses for £24) at The River Café. I've always wanted to go there. Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, two of Britain's highest profile female chefs, have opened British eyes to proper modern Italian food, and chefs such as Jamie Oliver and Theo Randall have trained there.

Rose Gray sadly died recently but Ruth Rogers was present on the pass (meaning she checked dishes just before they went out) during service on the day that I went. Her husband, the architect Richard Rogers, who designed the restaurant, popped in to say hello too. This is obviously a very hands on operation. The building is light, modern, with an open kitchen which always inspires trust. It was one of the largest kitchens I have ever seen. How lucky, to have an architect husband who can make your restaurant gorgeous.

Patrick Carpenter, the food and wine blogger of Ostrea Udulis was with us. I was still buzzing from the success of the Underground Farmer's and Craft Market and probably talked too excitedly and loudly! Especially after a glass of prosecco.

I got there a little late, it's quite far from Hammersmith tube, so I took a taxi from the station.

My first course was the very simple rocket with parmesan salad. The bread was lovely and soft as was the little dish of grass green olive oil they placed before us.

I then chose a pasta dish of panzotti stuffed with porcini and spinach. Oh my god I simply cannot put into words how divine this was. A white porcelain plate upon which was positioned half a dozen transparent pasta doilys. They looked like vintage underwear, delicate frilly knickers with naughty curly dark bits inside. The panzotti were covered with a butter and sage sauce... I've been making alot of fresh pasta recently and to taste these was to taste the benchmark on how it should be.

After that I thought the hell with the segundis I'm just gonna work my way through the primis. I love pasta so why go through the rigmarole of the other courses? I ordered another plate of pasta...tagliatelli with tomato sauce. This was good but a bit, oh I can make this at home-ish. I didn't order any more pasta. Even I was full.

The others were more traditional and ordered fish and meat. Something else about the River Cafe: everybody looked famous. I don't think they were, but all the customers looked vaguely recognisable. Was I experiencing fantasy celebrity syndrome?

Ruth Rogers went by and, oh I don't know what came over me, I stopped her in her tracks, introducing myself. She was polite and I gave her my card. She probably gets this all the time.

The waiter was very tolerant. Even when I made the mistake of not ordering the chocolate nemesis. Again, I'm not a chocolate pud kinda gal, but this was so light, and counterbalanced perfectly by creme fraiche from Neal's Yard. I order the almond icecream, and it wasn't that great. It was a bit dull. Like nougat without the sweet honeyed bits. I told the waiter. I suggested, suddenly inspired,"it needs something like...a bit of chopped up white toblerone".*
The waiter snorted at the fact that I was telling this Michelin star restaurant how to improve their icecream. He said, between mildly gritted teeth...

"I'll let Ruth know".

He brought me a free dish of caramel icecream which tasted like tarte tatin without the apples. You know, the gooey burnt caramel bit. Very nice.

By the time I'd ordered dessert, coffee, a glass of Prosecco, my bill came to £44. Not cheap by my standards. It's such a shame that food of this quality is not more affordable. But anytime I get a chance to go to a posh resto, taken by someone else preferably, I'd definitely ask to go to The River Café.

Patrick has a booking for the new Gordon Ramsay restaurant Petrus for five at 12.45 on the 12th of April. It's about £25 for the set lunch. Anybody want to join us?

The River Café

Thames Wharf, Rainville Road, London W6 9HA

PS: I haven't abandoned this blog, it's just I've been so busy. I have a massive backlog of restaurant reviews. I'll get round to it at some point...

*Anybody know where to get white toblerone? Except on a ferry? Cos if River café don't want to take advantage of my genius new icecream flavour, well I certainly am!

An Indian afternoon in the snow...

2010-01-11T16:22:00.013Z

VBs supermarket, cheap, full of Indian products and spices...absolutely jam packed on a Sunday

Bought myself a roti board and rolling pin

Pickles and chutneys

Jaggery loaves in hessian

Beautifully laid out fruit and veg

There are many kinds of basmati, they will give you advice which is the best

Once more my blogging friend Bellaphon takes me on a trip...this time to the Sri Lankan 'Oxford Street' between Alperton and Wembley.

What a wondrous place it is... you can get a makeover as an Indian bride for £200 in one of the beauty shops...fantastic pound shops...I bought me plenty of kitsch kitchenware for The Underground Restaurant... exotic fruit (baby clementines!) and vegetable shops laden with mirrors and shrines...enormous and cheap Indian supermarkets. I was told off for taking pictures at the latter...a small squat Indian woman said to me very crossly

"Photographs are forbidden"

"Why?" I argued.

I mean, really, how can taking pictures of jaggery in sack cloth be wrong?

She carried on "This is private property"

I continued to argue back "It's not like I'm going to say anything bad about this place...I love it!"

She started to relent, saying, more doubtfully cos basically it sounded like she'd made up this rule... "I'm sure my bosses wouldn't like it.."

"Bring me your boss! I'll talk to him" I said cheerfully.

She followed me around a bit then gave up, and showed me the amazing buckets of pickles that you can buy by weight.

We ate at Jashan which is a kind of fusion restaurant, very cheap, of Chinese and Indian food. I spoke to the waiter who was Nepalese, but brought up in India.

"Indians think Chinese food is too bland, so we like to add spices" he explained.

This led to some very odd concoctions like dumplings with curry, Chinese battered fried mushrooms in a sort of chilli sauce. Not all of it was successful but there were some excellent dishes in the complicated and extensive menu.

Highlights:

Makai paneer ke Pakore

Sweet corn and cottage cheese fritters with yoghurt. Absolutely delicious, especially with coriander and mint chutney; mango and turmeric chutney.

Dahi Batata Puri

Outstanding, mini puris and potatoes covered in yoghurt, ice cold, a typical street food in India.

Pudhini paratha, mint bread. Very nice.

Plain pilao: beautifully saffron coloured rice topped with cashews.

Kesar Badam Bahar: almond kulfi with saffron sauce. Nice.

OK but not for me:

Chilli mushrooms.

Lowlights:

Chinese/Indian fusion: cheese pao bhaji, supposed to be dumplings but in fact was a sloppy veg mix with melted cheese and two hamburger buns. Odd.

Kaju Mutter: cashew nut and pea curry. Too hot at 'medium' and I like hot food. Not sure cashews and peas go together.

About £15 -20 a head.

Jashan

1-2 Coronet Parade, Ealing Road, Wembley, London, HA0 4AY
Telephone: 0208 900 9800