The John Salt - review

I booked the John Salt after reading Fay Maschler’s great review of Neil Rankin’s cooking and, for various reasons, ended up inviting my Dad to come with me.  I then read a few more reviews and realised that it sounded as if nobody in the whole world would hate the place more than him.  I mean, if I wrote a list called ‘Things my Father doesn’t like’ the stuff I was reading about – trestle tables, concepts, aggressively loud music, chillies, ‘bacon panna cotta', on trend barbecue, Islington... – would all feature quite prominently.  My fears were not allayed by an email I received telling me he didn’t recognise anything on the wine list, which is not good given he’s Rain Man for wine.  (I think Maschler’s review had also mentioned a pub style wine list, so this may well be set to expand).   Off we went anyway, and I was pleasantly surprised by his initial reaction to the place; apparently it looks like In De Wulf, a restaurant in Belgium. So there you go. For our purposes, it’s big and industrially bare but warmed up with nice lighting and flowers on the tables.

We ordered some Chablis which was delicious and decided to share 3 starters: crab and fennel on pig skin, raw beef with pear and sesame, and cod with foie gras and orange tempura.  The cod was very good; served warm against a cool foie gras sauce, it was genuinely innovative.  The crab and fennel were in a mayonnaise and sat on top of a giant, properly crispy pork scratching.  This was also great.  The raw beef was Japanese in spirit, and prickled with chilli.  Now, I like chilli, but you couldn’t really taste the pear or sesame, and as Dad pointed out, you might write ‘chilli’ in the description on the menu.  Still, minor niggle, they were a good combination of starters, the room was buzzy, the wine was flowing and both father and daughter were in benign good humour.

We’d ordered green chilli poussin, skirt steak with kimchi hollandaise, fries and a green salad to share.  We didn’t see any of it for quite a long time; enough time almost to get through the second bottle of Chablis and begin chatting to the people next to us (who were also waiting a very long time for their drinks).  When it finally arrived, the skirt steak was cold, as were the chips.  The steak in particular was stone cold, and not with the curled, crisp edges of something that has been sitting on the pass for too long: the meat had been beautifully treated, it was just cold.  Very odd.  We ate a bit of it with the hollandaise, and then stopped.  The poussin was great; very tender.  Green chillies layered the top it, which was bronzed from a honey glaze.  It was warm, but I think that was more to do with the fact that it was whole, rather than that it had got to us any more quickly.   As soon as the waitress came back, we mentioned it to her.  Well, Dad mentioned it, I’m a bit rubbish at that sort of thing. Vidkun Quisling, Dad sometimes likes to call me.  It’s something to do with collaboration.  The waitress was charming, thanked us for the feedback and said she’d relay it to the kitchen.  Price wise, it came to £145, but it turns out that the oh so delicious Chablis was £40 a bottle, which I would not have ordered with my mates, so you could do it for much less.

 

It’s a shame because the food has genuine sparkles of something really creative, and the atmosphere as a whole is fantastic.  I’m not sure what the problem was that evening, or where it had happened along the line, but something wasn’t right in the timings between the kitchen and us.   If the creases iron out, and I lived in Islington, I'd be very happy to have this nearby, but as it stands I'll keep closer to home and wish them luck. 

Dad discovers Instagram

Spuntino - review

Soho is magical on a Friday night, she thought to herself as she sipped a martini at the bar of Bob Bob Ricard. No, not the start of a truly terrible book, but the beginning of my weekend.  To be honest, I was trying to impress someone. And unfortunately not James Bond but my small sister, number 4, who being from West London and having gone to a girls’ school hopefully knows nothing of Soho’s electric glamour.  But she is semi-grown up now and she should, on my terms, not because she’s ended up on Shaftesbury Avenue after watching Twilight VII in Leicester Square with a spotty boy. 

The best thing about Soho is that there’s always a new thing to try.  I had never got round to Spuntino despite loving the whole of the Polpo Group so, given that it was only 6.30pm (no queue), we’d finished our (delicious) drinks at Bob Bob Ricard’s beautiful bar and unfortunately my budget wouldn’t stretch to the caviar in their restaurant upstairs, we headed out in that direction.

It’s obviously unmarked, just a couple of shops into Rupert Street, behind a frosted glass fronting and the room is fantastic.  A huge bar with a smiling team behind it, industrial exposed bricks and electrics, and great music.  I don’t normally notice music in restaurants (or bars or clubs actually, dancing just kind of...happens to me) but the playlist made me sit up and point the tracks out to my sister a couple of times, which is fun.  It was mainly 70s on the night we were there, I don’t know if it changes.

Service, as you would expect given you’re sitting right at the bar, is efficient.  I started with a Dark and Stormy, as I’m having a bit of a ginger beer/ale thing at the moment, and Sister number 4 ordered an Earl Grey Martini, which I could have told her she wouldn’t like, but you’ve got to let them make their own mistakes, don’t you? She nursed it quietly for most of the meal.  It was actually a very good martini, but it was a proper one, not apple or lychee or passionfruit – just the spirit and a whisper of vermouth (and tea) at the end, so a pretty punchy choice.

The menu is small plates and, unbelievably for me, I didn’t just immediately fixate on the macaroni cheese.  Testament to the fact that there was a lot that looked good.  In the end, we shared a truffled egg toast, a kohlrabi salad, 4 sliders and a peanut butter jam ‘sandwich’ for pudding.

The truffled egg toast is already the stuff of internet legend and I can’t disagree.  Sister number 4 said she heard her arteries screaming, but we both agreed it was the best cheese on toast in the whole world.  I’m actually not going to make cheese on toast ever again without an egg yolk and truffles, and I will go back to have it here.  That good.

The sliders (I suppose it’s a neater word than mini hamburgers) were less successful. They were all perfectly correct but just not as exciting as the toast or the surroundings, and very small.  The beef one with bone marrow was the best, but next time I think there are better things on the menu. So, potentially a bad ordering choice there.  The kohlrabi salad, however, was really very good, and showed a deft hand in the mix of the kohlrabi, leaves, feta and seeds. 

The peanut butter and jam “sandwich” was 2 triangular wedges of peanut butter ice cream, with fruit coulis and crushed peanuts. Delicious, witty and clever; Sister number 4 began smiling a lot. Although that may have been the martini.

And now for the slight grumbles.   We were sitting by the door and because of the constant ebb and flow of people into the queue, there was a permanent draft.  That’s nobody’s fault of course, but it changes the evening you have if you’re interrupting your conversation to get up and shut the door every few minutes.

I don’t normally talk about prices here, because I’m not professional and also I believe that if you like something, within reason, you’ll pay for it.  For me, beyond the obvious general budget constraints of a monthly income, which means I can’t eat caviar, price isn’t the most important factor in how, why, where or with who I eat out.  However, I think the pricing at Spuntino is a bit off, which I why I’m mentioning it.  The above food with a 50cl carafe of house white came to £75.  Which is ok, but that’s a set lunch in Mayfair. It is slightly disingenuous to have the atmosphere of a genuinely cool, laid back, New York bar with snacky food when the bill is a not inconsiderable outlay.  More than this, I think the price points were slightly out of line- the generous truffled toast and peanut butter ice cream that we couldn’t finish were £6 each, but each bitesize slider was £5.  The macaroni cheese, which we didn’t have, came out bubbling in a huge cast iron pan for only £9.  It doesn’t mean I won’t be back, as the whole thing was great.  It just means I will be doing a bit more menu mental maths and spying on other people’s portion sizes before ordering.  Maybe that’s what the queue is for.

The Hand and Flowers - review

I know Marlow isn’t actually that far away from London, but walking through its dark, deserted, mist shrouded streets at 7.30pm on a Tuesday evening, it was certainly doing a good impression of remote with a side order of creepy.  You’ll have to bear with me on this, I am a complete town mouse and the minute I see something borderline rural (thatching, a tea shop) I get a little nervous. Proper countryside (or, ‘The Country’) is great: I am prepared. I have wellies and jackets and 8 pairs of pyjamas to layer up for the bedrooms, and that’s all fine. But things like Marlow freak me out.  It’s rural but not. There are no pavements except on the main road, but also a train that goes semi-direct to Paddington in 30 minutes. There’s a low, spectral mist hanging around the edges of the fields but over there is a Pizza Express. And where is everybody?  

All of this works in the Hands and Flowers’ favour somewhat, as, when you see it at the side of the road; warm, bright and full of people and chatter, you’re just so grateful you don’t have to be out in the mist with the ghost of Dick Turpin anymore.  I went with my uncle, and high hopes.

It’s a long, low, beamed room and looks like a nicely done country pub, which it is.  It was odd to look at the room and think of the Michelin stars; a sort of sensory dislocation.  I saw something similar on the Great British Menu the other week: one of the chefs made a pudding that looked a hamburger. Everything was sweet, everything went together, every component was normal, but he’d stacked it up to look like a burger, and when people tried it they didn’t like it very much, but there was nothing wrong with it. They’d just...sort of been expecting a burger.  Similarly, at the Good Food Guide/Waitrose competition that I *blush* won recently, there was a brownish canapé shaped like a lollipop on a stick that looked like it was going to be caramel or some kind of hard sugar, but in fact was a shard of tomato and balsamic vinegar.  Now, there was nothing wrong with it at all (in fact the balsamic was powdered on top, which was really clever) but I couldn’t get my head around it not tasting like I had supposed it would - you  can read more about that here if you’d like to http://www.thegoodfoodguide.co.uk/news/palates-put-on-the-line-at-waitrose-cookery-school

So there you go.  I’m not saying it’s right but, for me, the juxtaposition of a pub setting and two Michelin starred food is a bit jarring.  The Harwood Arms in Fulham is the only other pub I’ve been to with a Michelin star (now removed), and I found the same thing there. I’m not sure a scotch egg can have a star, even if it is the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten.  Maybe this is why a lot of people think Michelin is obsolete.

Anyway, we were in the Hand and Flowers, my Uncle and I, setting the world to rights a.k.a. gossiping about the family, and looking at the menu.  It is a really good menu; you want to eat everything.  Not having time for that, I went for the foie gras and duck parfait, and then the duck with the duck fat chips and savoy cabbage.  My Uncle had crab ravioli with truffles and then the fillet of beef.  Still being at the developmental stage where I’m fine with Blossom Hill in an emergency, I let him pick the wine. We had an English white from Chapel Down that was very good (‘flinty’ is how I would describe it), and an Italian red which I can’t remember much about because, as you will probably have gathered from my ordering, I was dying from a surfeit of duck.  

This is rich food.  An appetizer of whitebait was hot and crunchy and could have been a full sized starter in itself.  The parfait was (sorry) perfect- it even managed to look pretty, which is difficult with whipped innards.  I usually ignore chutneys (quite often they’re in random smears on the plate so you only find them by accident anyway) but the orange one here was great and really cut through the liver.  My uncle ate his ravioli very quickly, which is a good sign, unless he was just trying to psych out the waiting staff, who were lovely and attentive but slightly overenthusiastic.  Our starters arrived half way through the whitebait and we were still drinking the white wine when the main courses turned up. Still, over-eagerness is not something to get too worked up about, especially given that the alternative in a restaurant (being ignored, interminable waits for food) is so horrible.

The main courses were not only rich but huge. My duck had a slightly sweet glaze which lifted it from the background of the cabbage and a delicious little pastry thing, also meat filled.  The chips were hands (and flowers) down the best chips I’ve ever eaten, anywhere, bar none, so go for those.  My uncle didn’t think his fillet was extraordinary, but he once put the worm from a bottle of tequila into a candle at our family Christmas lunch so it exploded, so we don’t necessarily have to trust him.

We shared a cheese plate for pudding, which had some interesting stuff on it, including an epoisses-alike that was really exceptional. 

The food here is very good but I think I would have appreciated it more had I not been lulled into the sensory dissociation of it being in a pub.  Some of what we ate (the parfait, the chips) was absolutely fantastic and it definitely, as Michelin would say, ‘mérite le detour’.

I’ll leave you with an extraordinary bit of schadenfraude.  At the table just across from us were a young couple.  Her: laughing nervously and playing with her hair, him: diffident, smartly dressed, shy.  It was clearly a date and I would extrapolate, given it was the week of Valentine’s Day (the man in my story is actually my Uncle, not my “uncle”, I promise) that they had saved up to come to the Hand and Flowers for a special supper.  All seemed to be going well for them until their puddings came out.  He had ordered a soufflé which appeared to have some honeycomb or something on top. You get the idea, small and sharp bits. He promptly inhaled one of the crumbs and began to choke violently - at which point people at the nearest tables became aware of him - and then, within seconds, the situation had escalated until the poor, poor, poor chap threw up at the table, as the girl looked on in concerned bemusement.  It was without a doubt the most excruciatingly raw empathy I have ever felt for another human being (can you actually IMAGINE? He’s probably been to Pizza Express a million times and never vomited, and then he does it at the Hand and Flowers on date night), as well as (because of the general inappropriateness of bodily functions in public and the nature of the hushed room) one of the most startlingly funny.  To their credit, the staff were incredibly kind and reassuring towards him, and he quickly made a full recovery.

Paris je t'aime

Ah France.  In settling down to write this, I decided to do some deep method acting (well, it works for Daniel Day-Lewis) and have a French breakfast.  In the hotel where we stayed on our recent trip there, that involved fresh, crusty baguettes, echiré butter and those dollshouse sized pots of Tiptree jam.  Here, it involved frozen croissants and putting on Carla Bruni’s last album. Turns out croissants lose their internal structural integrity if microwaved.  Much like Bruni’s husband, if you replace ‘microwaved’ with ‘elected’.

Paris is my favourite place in the entire world. There are definitely cities that are cooler, more fun, easier and friendlier, but I like its standoffish, tired grandeur and superiority complex and feel at home there.  I almost never mention this, but it did actually used to be my home, and I found it impossible to be unhappy. Even when sitting in my unheated attic studio, with grass growing through the trendy jute flooring because of the damp (it looked like I was cultivating a weird Japanese garden in the corner), alone, stalking people I cared about across the Channel via Facebook and eating apple compote from plastic tubs meant for school children’s lunchboxes, I wasn’t truly miserable. 

Ian Fleming writes in A View to a Kill (a short story about Bulgarians in For Your Eyes Only, and almost nothing to do with Grace Jones) something along the lines that Paris is like a faded whore, doing the same tricks every time.  NB. Do not google this in the vague hope of finding the exact quote. In pretty short order you end up seeing that someone has written a blog called ‘Adventures of an Anglo slut in Paris’, which has basically ruined my morning.  Anyway, you can sort of see what Fleming means. You do the Eiffel Tower, get the great views from any of the central bridges, perhaps go up to Montmartre and pretend to be Amélie, or down to St Germain and spend 15 euros on a coffee hoping to be inspired by the ghost of Sartre. You’re always going to feel excited because it’s PARIS, but it’s really not doing anything new for you.

Which is why, when I went to Paris a few weeks ago with most of my sisters and one of their boyfriends, I was looking for something different. Being very much more Sartre than Amélie (especially in looks) I normally stick to the Left Bank, but a friend recommended a hotel in the Marais that turned out to be wonderful and this time at least, Paris did something new for me.

We were there at the peak of the weekend long panic about horse meat in food over here, and I like to think we did our bit to feel involved in the scandale via Sister number 4, who kept ordering ‘steak’ from 10 euro set menus in St. Michel.  I bet there’s enough horse DNA in her right now to get her banned from most UK supermarkets.  The 10 euro menus, though, are a great little thing to know about Paris. You’re not going to eat anything spectacular or life changing, and it’ll possibly involve quite a lot of the loser of the 4.15 at Deauville, but the fact that you can eat a passable paté or salad, ‘boeuf’ bourguignon and apple tart for 10 or 12 euros in the middle of Paris (the 5th arrondissment, mainly) constantly amazes me.

Also amazing was the obsession with American food. London has been in the grip of this burgers and fried dirty wings thing for a while but I didn’t know it had hit Paris.  To one side of our hotel was a diner called ‘Breakfast in America’ which is apparently very famous and managed, on a snowy, miserably cold Sunday, to maintain a queue of about 30 people lined up outside for 4 or 5 hours. Which is impressive. On the other side was something called ‘La Favorite’ that looked more like a café in the grand tradition, with that woven plastic bench seating outside, but inside was an American style brasserie.  We went here for dinner on the Saturday night after a disappointing rugby match at the Stade de France which culminated in yours truly falling under an RER train (not in despair, by accident) and Sister number 3’s boyfriend trying not to laugh for the entire journey back to central Paris.  Meeting up with said sisters (who in our absence appeared to have bought the entire contents of the make up shop, Sephora), we popped next door for supper.

 Inside, it was dark. Really, really dark, like that deep orange at the end of an evening when people are drinking brandy in the half light.  However, the atmosphere and food were perkier.  There were lots of groups of young Parisians having a really, really good time.  I spent a lot of my teenage years wearing black polo necks, cultivating various existential crises and developing an insidious smoking habit prior to my first trip to Paris and now it turns out now that these kids are HAPPY. Annoying.  We had burgers which were very good, all constituents present and correct, with that properly moreish (oh God, horrible word alert) mouthfeel that you need if you’re going to bother to eat a burger. Also, it was definitely beef, which was a relief for sister number 4, who by this point was starting to look a little long in the face. Sorry. With a bottle of nice Sauvignon Blanc it was about 25 euros a head, which is not a bad price to pay to discover a whole new side to Paris.

We stayed at the Hotel Emile, 2 rue Malher, 75004

We ate at La Favorite, 4 rue de Rivoli, 75004  

Tourists