Buona Sera at the Jam

Before I was ill, I had one of those days when you just need to be by yourself.  Of course, now I am by myself and craving friends and post-work drinks and pub suppers and train travel and conversation, I can’t imagine wanting to spend any more time with my own thoughts (untroubled and superficial as they are), but the other week I distinctly remember that being the case.  I spent much of the age of 17 in the same mindset.  One Saturday in the early 2000s, I went to the French bookshop on Bute Street in South Kensington, bought a slim Folio edition of a book by Jean-Paul Sartre called ‘L’existentialisme est un humanisme’ and carefully placed it at an angle, poking out of the top of my handbag in what I hoped was a passive aggressive ‘do not talk to me, I am an intellectual’ manner, but actually just meant that people took the piss. It was especially galling to realise I could only actually understand one word in about sixty five. 

Anyway, I left work, bought an ill-advised but successful bright red dress, downloaded a new book to the kindle, walked almost all the way home and then decided to have a quiet, solo supper somewhere nice. You need to pick the kind of place to do this carefully. You don’t want somewhere you’re going to be made to share seating space and (horror) possibly have to talk to strangers, just because you’re alone e.g. Wagamama.  You also don’t want somewhere they’re going to try to make it look like their restaurant is full by putting you and your book in the plate glass window like a freak show display (I don’t think it’s freakish, you understand, but a lot of people do), and, lastly, eating by yourself in a chain – Byron, Pizza Express... – is all kinds of depressing (they even have vouchers so you bring more people, could you really not rustle anybody up?) so avoid those too.  To recap, I was looking for cosy, noisy, secluded, not too big, not too small (they’ll turn your table in favour of 2 or more covers), and probably pasta.  It’s almost always probably pasta if I’m by myself. Not a huge amount to ask.

To cut a very long story short (and skipping out the 20 minutes I spent walking up and down the Kings Road in a welter of indecision), a little restaurant called Buona Sera gave me a superlative plate of salmon and courgette pasta – sparklingly fresh fish and veg, al dente pasta, lovely vibrant seasoning- with a glass of Pinot Grigio, friendly, non-judgemental solo-eating service and 45 unhurried minutes with my book which was, at that point, the most perfect evening I could imagine. As soon as I am restored to sociability, I’ll be coming back with friends.

Buona Sera at the Jam

289 King's Rd, SW3 5EW

020 7352 8827

G'day

A friend of mine, previously known to these pages as Richard O’Brien, emigrated to Australia last year and recently came back for a triumphal visit.  Understandably sick of ricotta, sunshine, avocadoes and optimism, what he really wanted was dark ale, carbohydrates, sarcasm and scotch eggs.  Luckily, all of these things can be found in abundance in South West London’s many pubs, so over the two weeks he was back, we did a mini tour of them.

We started with the old Parsons Green favourite, the White Horse: time and space vortex of a million lunches that have inexplicably turned into evenings.  Unfortunately, having gathered 20 of his nearest and dearest to the pub for a long afternoon lunch and drinking session, it appeared that the place was having an off day. It pains me to say it, but the food was average (scotch egg excluded) and the service was slow.  There was a beer festival on (isn’t there always) but they weren’t allowing people to taste any of the ales before buying; surely more crucial than ever when many of the range will be unfamiliar, and I’m sure the pub used to allow you to do this.  Being Australian now, instead of saying everything was fine, thank you very much, and shuffling off to complain about ‘the time the Horse was bad’ whenever someone mentions going there, Richard wrote an email letting them know it had been slightly disappointing. So casual, so grown up, so New World. I don’t know if they responded but I hope it was just a bad day.

A few days later, my suspicions that Richard had changed were confirmed as we sat in the Harwood Arms. They bought out a canvas basket of hot, freshly baked soda bread and he asked me if anybody was on Paleo here. I assume most of you know what that is but, in case you live under a stone (IRONIC), it’s basically eating like a caveman.  I believe this to be slightly spurious as cavemen didn’t live very long, weren’t very clever and I’m sure would have loved someone to show them how to make bread. They were probably thin though (yes, I’m being facetious; please don’t write in). Anyway, proteins and veg and nuts and grains like spelt or keeeeeen-waaaaa or however you’re meant to pronounce it. Very good for you, but please eat the soda bread, it’s delicious.

The Harwood has always been a really exciting thing to have in Fulham and remains so on my third visit. Richard is a demon for a scotch egg but managed to restrain himself and went for the milder ‘crispy hen’s egg’ starter.  I had cod cheeks with crab and asparagus, which made me wish bitterly for a spot of sunshine and a seaside holiday in Cornwall (not that I’ve ever been on one of those).  I chose the wine, which Richard didn’t like, but I described it is as ‘flinty’ and pretended it was meant to taste like unripe gooseberries, so there wasn’t much he could say. This is in no way a reflection of the Harwood’s wine list; as mentioned before my wine expertise is still a work in progress.

Main courses were rolled pork belly and cheek, which was a big hit, and my brill with smoked cauliflower, which I absolutely loved. Richard said it tasted like being kissed by a Dick Van Dyke chimney sweep from Mary Poppins; a trauma memory so startlingly specific that I could only sit in silence and eat more bread as the bill came.

Last in our round up of Nice Pubs ™ was the Pigs Ear, where we went for Richard’s last evening out before he headed back to his horrible life of sunshine, holidays, recognition in the workplace and cool new friends.

The Pigs Ear is a lovely, traditional pub in Chelsea with a small menu, so between the 6 of us we pretty much tried everything they had on that evening.  There was a slight altercation as some members of the group, including a Psychiatrist, attempted to order the wine based purely on the fact its name was ‘Boom Boom’, but other than that the evening progressed smoothly. Richard had his customary scotch egg, as did a few others, and then there was a lobster bisque and a goats cheese crème brulée that, weirdly, tasted very much as it sounds except not hot. I had thought it would be hot. Main courses were particularly good, with steak tartare, braised pig cheeks, moules marinières and a gigantic côte de boeuf for two all great examples of what is fantastic about the admittedly long overhyped and overused ‘gastropub’ appellation that, when done properly, just means you can catch up with your friends in a relaxed, pub environment whilst eating food that would normally require a separate reservation.  What’s not to love?

 

Sydney Style

The Pigs Ear

35 Old Church Street
SW3 5BS
020 7352 2908

The Harwood Arms

Walham Grove SW6 1QP 020 7386 1847

Marcus Wareing at The Berkeley

I’m not sure how much of the excitement it’ll take out of the piece I’m writing for the Good Food Guide & Waitrose competition if you read it here first, but I don’t think it would be too much to say that the dinner I had with my godfather at Marcus Wareing was exceptional.  Something approximating the below review will hopefully appear in the 2014 edition of the Good Food Guide but, for now, here’s the unabridged, unedited, warts and all version.

The room is like a giant, red velvet jewellery box, meaning that you feel pleasingly cosseted, expensive and sparkly all evening, although I suppose that depends on the conversational skills of your dining companion.  It is a hushed tones and tablecloths kind of place, but manages to avoid feeling anachronistic or at all redolent of the ‘hotel restaurant’. Much as I love hotel bars; the transience, the glamour, the anonymity and the invariably low lighting all combine to imbue them with a special charge of excitement and potential- hotel restaurants are normally a bit less atmospheric.  This cannot be said of Wareing’s room here, and the knowledgeable, friendly team only add to the experience.

The menu is £80 for 3 courses, with 4 choices at each stage.  The food is written out in a staccato fashion - just the ingredients in a list – which is slightly jarring (‘autistic’, my godfather said) against the elegance of the table.  ‘Foie gras, rhubarb, brioche’ was warm and fried, rather than a cold terrine version. It came with brioche, brown butter (a revelation), rhubarb jelly and ginger yoghurt – the innovative, lactic sharpness of the yoghurt against the richness of the liver made it truly memorable.  This is especially impressive because I HATE yoghurt, and wouldn’t have ordered the dish if I had known there was any possibility of yoghurt coming anywhere near it.  So, my eyes have been opened.  It turns out I will eat yoghurt, but only with foie gras poelée. I think that’s my favourite of all the sentences I’ve ever written. 

‘Herdwick lamb, broccoli, wild garlic’ was the apogee of a spring dish, whereas ‘Venison, January king, almond’ owed more to the winter months we’ve now hopefully left behind. Both had reached the levels of concentration in flavour that mark this kind of food apart.  The attention to detail in the sauces, stocks and garnishes are what makes these plates astounding – nothing is superfluous and everything contributes to make it the most superlative example of lamb, venison, or I daresay fish or fowl, that you’ve ever eaten.  Portion sizes are generous for this type of food.  This is definitely not a complaint, but the robustness of the flavours left us flagging as we contemplated the cheese; an excellent selection including a stand out livarot. 

The amuses-bouches that appeared in between – light gougères, ‘cauliflower cheese’, agnolotti with pumpkin velouté, salt caramel truffles – were invariably clever and well judged. The pasta in particular was heavy with floral, vegetal flavours, and perhaps unexpected in an environment that, on balance, owes more to the French than Italian culinary tradition.

Wines were truly multicultural.  We went by the glass, matched to each course, and explored new finds such as a Macvin du Jura and a Santa Monica Pinot Noir, as well as a more classic Chassagne-Montrachet and Spanish tempranillo.

Marcus Wareing at The Berkeley is producing perfectly executed, thoughtful and interesting food, and must constitute one of the best evenings out in London this year.

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

Rome

“Due to an incident at Fiumicino which has resulted in that airport’s closure, we are being directed to land in Milan in 50 minutes time.  We apologise for any inconvenience caused and will keep you updated with further information”. It turns out that there is nothing more annoying in the world than hearing this 10 minutes before you’re supposed to land in Rome, flushed with vodka tonics and success, and meet your friends who are having a late supper near the hotel and waiting for you to get the party started.  Also, don’t try making that announcement on a plane full of Italians. Half the passengers immediately stood up, shouting and gesticulating wildly as they registered their disgust.As much due to fears of mutiny as anything else, in due course we did manage to land in Rome and I appeared in a restaurant off Viale Trastevere to a chorus of cheers. Not really. There were some half-hearted hellos and a pat on the back.  The English abroad.

The last time we went to Rome we discovered the Trastevere district by accident on the last day, following a recommendation for a pizzeria after our trip to the Vatican and before our flight back home. It is incredibly pretty in a faded ochre, narrow cobbled streets kind of way, and totally different from the grand marble imperialism of central Rome.  I wished we had spent more time there but, as my grandmother used to say, if wishes were horses then beggars would ride, so in fact what we did is waited 18 months, got another trip organized, and booked a hotel in the area.  Less magical, more realistic.

The next two and a half days were an exhausting mixture of pasta, wine, late nights, great friends, an incredibly disappointing rugby match, and a Roman taxi driver who was in love with ‘Papa’ Berlusconi and who had a signature trick of making the 20euro note you’d just given him turn into a 5 euro note, and demanding more money. Magical indeed.

Some recommendations:

Baylon Café

Via di San Francesco a Ripa, 151

00153 Rome

During the day this is an arty café with a brunch menu, fresh juices and live music.  In the evenings it’s a bar with a great atmosphere and strong drinks.  If your friend jumps on the counter and sings, for example, the Italian national anthem in an incredibly bad accent, everyone will join in and the barmen will applaud.   This makes a change from the normal end to that story which is ‘and then he got thrown out’. They also sell their wine to take away, which is handy when the hotel room is looking a bit dry.

Ristorante Da Candido

Viale Angelico, 275/277

00195 Rome

It was only about an hour into our ambitious plan to walk to the Stadio Olimpico (an approximately 300km roundtrip) that we became peckish.  Unfortunately the neighbourhood through which we were passing, somewhere to the north of the Vatican along a vast, empty road leading straight out of the city, didn’t look particularly promising.  Every couple of hundred metres there was a flyblown snack bar with a desultory square of pizza in a display case, but that was about it and even most of those were shut.  So stumbling upon Da Candido, full of Italian families having lunch, with the Stadium almost in sight and a casual hour and a half to go before kick-off, was pretty fantastic.  I can’t guarantee they felt the same about us turning up, but they were charming.  It was bowls of pasta all round - I had rigatoni with four cheeses and truffle which is probably the best thing I’ve ever spent 10 euros on my life.  It even managed to keep me going through France’s inglorious defeat, which I was forced to witness a few hours later.  I wouldn’t have thought you’d find yourself in this part of Rome deliberately, but it’s a representative example of the thing that is so lovely about this city: most nice looking restaurants will give you a decent bowl of fresh, interesting pasta and a glass or two of wine for about 15 euros.

Baccanale

Via della Lungaretta, 81

00153 Rome

Via della Lungaretta is right in the middle of the nightlife of Trastevere, and full of small restaurants and bars. This was just a particularly fun one that served lethal cocktails (including my personal favourite choice – Singapore Slings),but you won’t go too wrong pretty much anywhere nearby.

Salumeria Roscioli

Via dei Giubbonari 21

00186 Rome

Saving the best until last.  Our final day in Rome was also one of our friend’s birthdays. This restaurant at the back of a famous delicatessen had been well reviewed online and I’d booked with feverish excitement but, by the time it came to midday on Monday, a lot of us were feeling liverish. The complementary fresh cheese (some sort of tomme?) really sorted the men from the boys. As in the boys didn’t eat it, and 2 girls and one man did.  Not being in a position to make sensible decisions, we took their advice on an antipasti board and some more cheese to start.  Everything was perfect; including some really interesting cured meats that I would look out for again if I could remember their names beyond ‘something ending in ‘-ia’or –‘mi’’.  Soon enough, it was time for pasta. Apparently this place has the best carbonara in Rome, and I wasn’t about to pass that up, despite being borderline terminally full.  It really, really, really was the best carbonara I’ve ever eaten. You know what a carbonara is, I don’t need to explain, but it was a superlative example. The wine we drank, (check out how organised, actually wrote this down)- Allegrini Palazzo Della Torre 2009, was so delicious that I’ve ordered a case of it.  Puddings were the final frontier, so we didn’t go there, but it was an absolutely great lunch and I actually would say that you should look it out if in Rome.

ps. Despite looking for a great Rome based pun for the title of this post, I stuck to the fairly boring 'Rome'.  This is because I was thwarted in the creative process by my mother, who suggested the following:

- 'Romancing the Foam' ('if you'd had one of those foam parties darling, that would be brilliant')

-'It takes more than a day to build Rome' ('I think I mean 'Rome wasn't built in a day' -got there in the end Ma)

- 'Roman Holiday ('great film, and the fashion's back now, with those full skirts')

Kitchen W8

Last week we went to Kitchen W8 en famille to celebrate my sister’s entry into her mid to late 20s. It was certainly a better way to spend a Friday night than my alternative, which was stressing about having entered a food writing competition/watching my flatmate watch reruns of Grey’s Anatomy.

The food arrived after a decent interval of champagne, salt cod croquettes and some gentle sisterly bickering.  Jerusalem artichoke risotto with truffle pesto and a spoonful of Vacherin Mont d’Or was the best thing I’ve eaten this year so far.  It smelt of autumn and earth, and the graininess of the truffle pesto did more than you would have thought to cut through the softness cheese and rice. Describing truffle as cutting through something is probably a stretch, but it’s true.  It made my arteries feel better.

Pata negra pork with its cheeks and rosemary polenta was similarly stand out. I very, very nearly couldn’t finish it, which is pretty unusual.  It’s not at all that the portions are too big, or that the ingredients are too rich, but the concentration of flavour that the brigade manages to get into these dishes is astounding. Everything is notched up and amplified to the extent that you feel you’ve eaten it three times. The pork was the piggiest bit of pig ever. The rosemary in the polenta sparkled.  I adopted a softly softly approach, managed to finish it all and still force down a really great selection of goats cheese. Everyone else had a hazelnut, chocolate and salt caramel pudding that looked incredible and made them all pull some really inappropriately pleased faces.

We drank a Pauillac as a treat for my sister and then an Australian Pinot Noir which was the friendliest wine ever.  It was uncomplicated, easy to drink and went with everything around the table. The equivalent of a smiling Aussie coming over and saying ‘hi, I’m Greg, how are you doing mate?’ and giving you a hug. In a non-creepy way.

You would perhaps expect a restaurant from Phil Howard’s team (The Square) to be excellent, but Kitchen W8 is something more than that.  This is very subjective and isn’t so much about any specific element of food, people, room (although all of those are pretty much flawless) as the fact that the whole place just has a great atmosphere. Despite being smart and beige and having tablecloths, it is cosy, convivial and buzzy, with none of those hushed tones and people following you to the loos.  Everyone who works there is incredibly efficient but also took the time to stop and say happy birthday to my sister.  Things like this are, for me, what make the difference between a good restaurant and a great one. 

Kitchen W8

11-13 Abingdon Road

London W8 6AH

ps. I won the food writing competition the next day!!

Brixton. Yup.

Sunday night.  A time for taking stock of the week whilst watching Drop Dead Diva (officially the worst thing I've ever seen - a 'shallow', blonde model dies and comes back to life in the body of a harassed, 'fat' lawyer, and discovers her inner beauty, intelligence and kind heart. Yup. Literally, that's it. She cries a lot) with a cup of hot water.  I'm trying to cleanse my liver. Google Medical science seems undecided as to whether this is possible or even necessary, and I couldn't find a consensus on actually what to do, so I just put some hot water in my Sunday mug and threw a lemon in for good measure.

True

Anyway, last week I made a tricolore salad with lemon oil, a prawn curry, a wild rice thing with pumpkin seeds, parsley and yoghurt, salmon with pea shoots and hazelnut butter, and a knockout (if I do say so myself) warm mushroom salad from Smitten Kitchen, one of my favourite blogs. I do what people do with Wikipedia articles or Spotify (ending up by mistake reading about The Fall of Constantinople in 1453, or listening to German electro-trance) with food pages. With the exception of the tricolore (I've kind of got those 3 ingredients down), all of the recipes were found by me or my flatmate while browsing online and were as easy as falling off a log.  I'm not going to write them out because they already exist and I can't claim any flashes of genius on my part. Also I'm not a copyright lawyer.  Incidentally, Sister number 2 called me today and told me that my use of phrases such 'as easy as falling off a log' is what will preclude me from ever being truly cool.

Well, sucks to her because I went to Brixton on Friday and loved it. How cool is that?  I feel I know quite a lot about Brixton because Jay Rayner is a big fan of the food stuff going on there and wrote a round up article on, specifically, Brixton Village for the Guardian. I've actually only been there once in the past 5 years, and on that I occasion I was having an existential crisis, a fox screamed in my face and McDonalds was shut because of a stabbing.

So, not great memories, but this time around I had a great time.  It has a slight touch of the East Londons, but in a much, much cooler way. The people aren't posing.  The market hasn't had a coat of gloss paint.  The restaurants don't have concepts.  Queuing for food doesn't seem  pointless so much as practical when people are operating out of small open fronted covered market stalls.  We wandered around and could have eaten at 5 or 6 places that all looked fab. In the end we were so prosaic as to go for one which had a free table, Tapas Pa'Ti, who were doing an incredible deal of 6 plates plus a jug of Sangria for £30.  We then went on to Seven for ginger mojitos.

You can find more information about the whole set up here -  http://brixtonmarket.net.  It's a great place to hang out, and given I'm about as trendy as Mary Berry (we have the same jacket), that's not something I would have thought I'd be saying. .

Annual review

Happy New Year!

For me, the highlight of 2012 was the perfect vodka martini I had at Brasserie Zédel. Apart from that, here are some of the places I’ve been to in the last year that didn’t make it to what I grandly like to call ‘full review stage’. Mainly out of apathy.

MEATLiquor
74 Welbeck Street W1G 0BA
God this was good. The whole ‘dirty’ food thing has now exploded beyond all sense and proportion, hence why I didn’t write about it (I’ll leave that to Marina O’Loughlin, who does it much better), but when I went here last January, I had genuinely never had a burger like it (or chilli cheese fries, for that matter). The denizens of the food blogging community are wild in their acclaim for the MEAT family’s burgers (brioche bun, pickles, sauces with funny names….), and it’s entirely justified. Not everywhere served drinks in jam jars when I went either. It was a simpler time. Go, it’s still great and the queues (SIGH) are slightly shorter.

L’Autre
5b Shepherd Street W1J 7HP
This happened because a group of us had decided to try to get into Burger & Lobster at 7pm on a Saturday night. It’s boring being right all the time so I didn’t mention the obvious problem with this plan, and when we were summarily ejected back on to Clarges Street for a casual 3 hour wait, I calmly suggested Shepherd’s Market. L’Autre was chosen on the basis that it looked funny. And yes, it is funny. It’s a joke. A Polish Mexican (seriously) restaurant with a French name and décor more commonly seen in a ski chalet. I didn’t write about it because it also turned out to be an expensive joke, and I was annoyed. I have just read a review on Trip Advisor in which the only positive comment was that the Mexican and Polish menus are separate, and ‘not fused’. Well great, but it’s still freaking weird to eat a boar stew whilst your friend is tucking into quesadillas. I say ‘tucking in’, but that would be a massive over-exaggeration as the food was not up to much. I suppose we shouldn’t have expected great things given that instead of background music they had boldly gone for the metronomic ping of the microwave door. Ironically, by the end of the night the only thing we could think about was l’autre restaurant to which we should have been.

L’Etranger
36 Gloucester Road SW7 4QT
Don’t let the idea of ‘Asian French’ put you off. For one thing, it works much better than ‘Polish Mexican’ and, if you think about it, given France’s colonisation of various parts of the East over the years, it makes sense that there is a common food culture behind the concept (e.g. banh-mi, Vietnamese baguettes). In my humble opinion this is one of the best restaurants in London at the moment, and they are definitely aware of the French colonisation vibe because they’ve self referenced it; not only by naming the restaurant after Camus’ classic existential story of Algerian alienation, L’Etranger, but also by piping excerpts of the book through speakers in the loos. Which is actually a bit odd. ‘Aujourd’hui Maman est morte’, is not the most relaxing thing to hear whilst you’re powdering your nose. The club downstairs is called ‘Meursault’ which is the name of the novel’s protagonist and also a very nice wine from Burgundy. This delights me. We went there en famille for a Christmas lunch and around the table there were artichoke and truffle soups, asian scallops, foie gras with lemongrass, turkey, miso black cod and lobster ravioli. It’s more of a classically French menu with a very light Japanese (I would say it owed more to Japan than other countries in Asia) overlay – for example you might find oysters with a ponzu vinaigrette, or steak tartare with a soy glazed dipping sauce. Everything is cooked so well and the base flavours are so harmonious that it works. That makes it very, very clever because for the same money (which is a lot – this is Michelin territory) it could be just another fusion nightmare. Save up and go here.

Ashbee’s Wine Bar
22 Hogarth Place SW5 0QY
To be perfectly honest nothing in this place is going to knock your socks off as much as the lady in charge, a fearsome Polish woman by the name of Elisabeth. Or, Elizabeth III, as I once heard her call herself over a glass of honeyed mead. Simultaneously the kindest and most terrifying person you’ll ever meet, she presides over this tiny Earls Court basement in great style. It looks like Paris and apparently she once had the whole of the Philharmonic Orchestra in there (another glass of mead). The wine list is well priced (great Beaujolais) and for £7.95 per person baskets of bread and huge pots of nameless molten cheese will arrive in front of you, roiling with fat and oil and good humour. We once met a Canadian lobster salesman called Bernard here.

L’Art du Fromage
1A Langton Street SW10 0JL
I only know one woman who is as obsessed with cheese as I am and, by a cruel twist of fate, she now lives in America and has to deal with plastic, orange ‘cheddar’. We went here quite some time ago but either I was having a quarter-life crisis or I was too full to write it up. Yes, it’s the second fondue place on the list (scarily, there could be a third as I did go to a fondue restaurant somewhere in Spitalfields but it was 11pm, I was terrified -Jack the Ripper tour- and I have no recollection of where it is or what it was like). L’Art du Fromage is sort of a modern art concept, but for cheese. Imagine a very smelly Tate Modern. Everything is beautifully presented and elegant, which is sometimes difficult when you’re dealing with rennet. It was quite some fondue too; Emmental, Comté and Beaufort with kirsch. Almost at the zenith of my cheese tolerance, and that is pretty high.

Osteria dell’Arancio
383 King’s Road SW10 0LP
Having walked past this restaurant every evening on my way home for the last 6 months, I had become convinced that it was called Osteria dell’Arancini, or ‘Tavern of the little rice ball’. Happily, it is actually Arancio, which means orange. It suffers from being close to La Famiglia, which practically needs a blue plaque nowadays, but it is a very good alternative and the outside tables are a real bonus. In the final days of what laughably passes for summer in this sceptic isle, 2 girlfriends and I sat at one of these and chewed the fat (literally- we had prosciutto) over some superlative northern Italian food. More Piedmont than Puglia, we worked our way through antipasti and meat ragus on parpadelle, drinking rosé and desperately trying to ignore our coats and umbrellas.

Vinoteca
53-55 Beak Street W1F 9SH
I didn’t blog about this because I went with a man who I didn’t want to scare away by writing about him on the internet the first time we had seen each other in a while. My diary is one thing, but this is kind of public. We arrived late and by accident (Polpo was full) and it could not have been more perfect. The wine list is stupidly comprehensive (300!) and the guys behind the bar stupidly knowledgeable about it. Bavette, watercress, horseradish and chips was just about the perfect thing to soak up 300 bottles of wine. Reasonably priced, cosy and lots of fun.

The Chelsea Ram
32 Burnaby Street SW10 0PL
I almost don’t want to talk about this because it is our flat’s secret pub. Obviously other people must know about it; occasionally we go there for a quick drink after a stressful Tuesday and there is a huge table of raucous, young people having a great time, and all the regulars are propped up at the bar watching in bemusement. It’s on a side street in the doldrums of Lots Road, treading a fine line between old and new Chelsea and managing both. With great food on a more interesting level than sausages and mash, the best atmosphere of any pub in the area and a working fire which always has 2 or 3 dogs lounging in front of it, what’s not to love? Once, suffering from a monumental hangover related illness, I sat in the corner by myself with a book, a burger and an alka seltzer for 3 hours. Nobody bothered me. This is what you need in a local pub. They also have a private room for parties.

Princi
135 Wardour Street W1F 0UT
This was a real find in the dog days of 2012, when the weather was gloomy and it wasn’t quite Christmas. We arrived at 3pm on a dreary Saturday afternoon and left about 7 hours later, during which time 4 people had joined the party. It’s a Milanese restaurant that is apparently authentic, although I can’t vouch for that, not being from or in Milan. You order, collect and pay for antipasti, pizza, secondi, drinks etc. from a central bar area, and then try to grab a seat. It’s amazing how something that is manifestly not fun at school, or in McDonalds, makes total sense in a loud, buzzy, pizza café. Being incredibly continental, we actually ate ours standing up against a shelf, as I have seen people do in Rome, refilling from a bottle of white as necessary. The pizza is very good, more doughy than your traditional Neapolitan crisp-based effort (not surprising, given that this is from Milan) and big slices with almost any toppings you can think of are under £5. A great place to start a night out in Soho, or even refuel afterwards.

Noor Jahan
2A Bina Gardens SW5 0LA
Curry is something I rarely crave but if you do have an urge, this is the place to go. A family favourite, we’ve been coming here for as long as I can remember. They must be pleased the sisters and I have moved on slightly from the adventurous ‘4 chicken kormas’ order that characterised our early visits.

Michael Nadra
6-8 Elliott Road W4 1PE
I feel this deserves a quick mention because in its actual ‘review’ I just went off on one about how much I love Chiswick. The cooking here is really exceptional.

La Bella Figura

Exciting times for the fans (officially 0) – this blog has been short listed for a food writing competition run by Waitrose and the Good Food Guide, in which the eventual winner gets to write for the Good Food Guide 2014! I know, we all thought this was just me writing my diary in public and occasionally going for dinner in nice places.

The final takes place in February and involves ‘food based challenges’. Assuming they mean inventive cooking and culinary knowledge rather than ‘how many mini eggs can you fit in your mouth in one go?’ (officially 29), between now and then you can expect lots of recipes as I practice the art of perfection.

Right now though, we’re on our way to Locanda Otteomezzo via a book signing. Last week, courtesy of an invitation from a Pimlico Publishing Powerhouse, we arrived at Waterstones on Kensington High Street and came face to face with Antonio Carluccio and Genaro Contaldo, aka Two Greedy Italians. This was one of my favourite cookery programmes of 2012 (yes, there’s a list and no, Rachel-Khoo-who-stole-my-life is not on it), mainly for the episode about ‘white food’, in which they sat next to an oven in a mountain village all day baking things with butter, cream and cheese.

Carluccio signed my book, which was almost too thrilling, talked about caviar and then told a joke about the mafia and baby Jesus that was so hyperbolically Italian it all became too much. It would work well at this point if I could say that we were all so enthused by the torrid Southern European amore we immediately headed straight for the nearest trattoria, but we didn’t, we went to the pub for a couple of hours and then tried to get into Côte. Sadly thwarted, we followed a memory around the corner to Locanda Otteomezzo, where they appeared to be whipping themselves into a truffle frenzy in a very nicely lit (by which I mean dark avec candles) basement.

Everything was truffled. The bread, the plates, one entire tasting menu. Truffles everywhere. Having drunk Guinness earlier (different story), I was approximately as hungry as one would be after eating a loaf of bread, so I went for the carpaccio with parmesan, rocket and truffle oil. Everyone else had the special of truffled pasta. Now, truffle pasta is one of the best and simplest things in the world (much like one of my sisters) but if you’re going to serve plain pasta with fungus and charge £25 or more for it you really do have to get it right. Everything needs to be fresh, hot and happy. This wasn’t quite there and the whole dish looked sad, tepid and brown. People left bits on their plates, which shouldn’t happen with this kind of food. On a happier note, my carpaccio was delicious and accidentally truffled parmesan is an unexpectedly good thing to eat. (I also note that the reviews online are great, so maybe we ordered the wrong thing. I’m writing this because I don’t want to be abused on Twitter by chefs).

I see from reading my SIGNED BOOK that Carluccio has a recipe for taglierini al tartufo. So next time, I’ll be inviting everyone to mine for a hopefully more satisfying experience.

Locanda Otteomezzo
2-4 Thackeray Street
W8 5ET

The best night of my life?

It’s not often that I am reluctant to write about something, but the evening I went to Colbert and then saw Skyfall is proving difficult. There is just….too much to say. Too many emotions. Too little time. A café that could have been in Paris followed by a Bond film is just so much my perfect evening that I can’t even think about it clearly. When you add in the fact I went with my long-standing restaurant companion who is emigrating to the Middle East in under a month it becomes just about unbearable.

For all of that, I remain convinced you want to hear what I thought. Much like the megalomaniac Dr. No treating James and Honey to his life history whilst they try to eat their supper before getting to the ‘might end in death, might actually escape quite easily’ part of the evening.

So. Colbert. A very exciting event, because not only is it French French French, but it is a Corbin/King (Wolseley, Delaunay, Zédel) French French French, which means it looks like a film set from Piaf.

Due to our pressing appointment with Mr Bond at 9pm, we had booked for 6.30, and when we arrived it was already buzzing. It has been billed as an all-day neighbourhood café and appears to be doing the job. A booking for dinner at the early time of 6.30pm had clearly rung alarm bells of ‘elderly Chelsea dowager’ in the heads of the absolutely lovely team, and my friend and I hilariously found ourselves sitting between two incredibly glamorously coiffed and lacquered women of a certain age, and their silver haired dining partners.

To one side, the diamond-laden lady ordered 3 martinis ‘extra strong’ and complained that the veal sauce was too mustardy; a nuance I imagine it’s difficult to detect after half a litre of Grey Goose. Her husband patiently sipped water and made wry asides. On our other side, the couple drank champagne and wore velvet. It was incredible. Both parties kept up a running commentary on our food choices, wine choices, life choices and film choices throughout. Like your grandparents, but more fun. I highly recommend always eating at this time of the evening.

My friend and I had made a resolution that we would only eat as Bond would eat, which is not that difficult because he spends almost all of the books eating a lot. To give Fleming his due, possibly the only way you could ever describe him or Bond as modern men are in the sustainability of their eating habits.

The books don’t have that Mad Men thing of constant boozing and long lunches. Yes, Bond drinks a lot but his food tastes are conservative and, for the most part, frugal. At work he eats in the canteen. At home, he has a lot of eggs and coffee. When out with M, it’s lamb cutlets, grilled sole and English vegetables in season, and when on assignment it’s whatever is local (he bemoans extortionate French roadside cafés, loves the bouillabaisse in Marseilles, hates the breakfasts in Istanbul and has the best meal of his life in the States - stone crabs and drawn butter). The main exception to the above is that he has caviar with Vesper, but I like to think that’s because she’s his one true love and a bit of a bitch so he was trying to impress her.

To labour the point even further, I think Bond would have liked Colbert. The atmosphere is overwhelmingly lovely and, to be totally honest, the food plays second fiddle to that; but it is simple and good, and has a lot of omelettes.

We shared 12 oysters to start, which were sparklingly fresh but a bit gritty, and then I had steak tartare which tasted like steak tartare (no criticism intended), and my friend had the Croque Raclette. The croque was particularly delicious, which backs up the ‘all day neighbourhood café’ vibe.

We finished it all up with some madeleines and Muscadet, paid a bill which could have been cheaper if we hadn’t ‘gone Bond’ and had vodka as we sat down, and tottered off to the cinema for the best 2.5 hours of this year.

This place is special. Go for a coffee and a croissant first thing, grab an omelette for lunch, drop in for a kir on your way home.

www.colbertchelsea.com

I will leave you with the thought that the scene in ‘A View to a Kill’ where Roger Moore bakes a quiche led to him becoming spokesperson for the British Quiche Council.

Michael Nadra - review (sort of)

There is one group of friends who I spend most of my time with but who get very little air time on this blog. They are called the ‘Chiswick Lot’ (not in a gang way) because when we grew up most of their parents lived in Chiswick. As it happens, one of them still lives with his parents in Chiswick, but almost everyone else has long since spread their wings…to different parts of Chiswick.

In our late teens, Chiswick High Road was the aortic valve of our collective consciousness, and we never really left it behind. Well, you can’t really leave your aorta behind; can you? (pats self on back for the great analogy). One of them recently moved to New York, and wrote to us saying that the things she missed most were, in this order, ‘West Kebab, The George IV, The Katmandu Inn and Tesco’. I know. I know. The Roebuck is a much nicer pub.

I cannot overemphasise how important these people are to me. However, the reason they almost never appear here is that the things we do are still resolutely ‘teenage’. Manfully ignoring the inexorable creep of time, the unrelenting ‘grown-upness’ of work, mortgages and weddings, the undeniable collapsing of the collagen in our faces (seriously, I look like The Scream in the mornings now) and the gentle but insistent tick of biological clocks, we have always managed to bumble along pretending to be 19 years old. They were the ones who were with me during the events previously detailed in ‘A Tale of Woe/French Onion Soup’. Enough said.

Generally, apart from the odd slip up as per the above, I like to keep this blog quite sophisticated. Not only does it befit the underlying vein of Bond but I am also genuinely très sophisticated myself and I want everyone to know it. I appreciate this has gone off message somewhat with recent posts, but the intentions are pure.

So, imagine my surprise when the Chiswick Lot suggested Sunday lunch at Michael Nadra, which is officially nice and can be reviewed. Full disclosure: the one who actually instigated this dramatic shift from ‘see you in the George at 2pm for Jäger’ is a small Dutch woman who has only been hanging around with us for about 8 years, so she’s not fully down with how the group works yet.

Anyway, off we all trotted to the road behind Café Nero where this quite lovely little restaurant gave us one of the best lunches I have had in a long time.

The wine list is extensive and truly excellent. The acid test for a good wine list- apart from drinking them all, for which I did not have time, is to photograph parts of it and send them to my Dad. He is like Rain Man for grapes. Anyway, the reply came back: ‘Corrigan’s or Nadra’. And given that the former is a Mayfair Michelin joint and the latter is just off Chiswick High Road behind Nero, I think that’s a pretty good endorsement.

Without exception, everything everyone had was delicious, and I would have eaten any of it (no jokes please). It’s not often you can say that across a table of 8 people, especially when one of them has ordered a salad. Coincidentally, my flatmate and her boyfriend, The Austrian, went to the other branch in Primrose Hill the following weekend so I have double confirmation that everything is very good. And given the two locations, you have no excuse not to go.

I had soft shell crab tempura with daikon and ginger, which I had expected to be broken up into small bits of legs, all hot and crisply fried. In fact, the crab was tempura-ed whole, which was incredible to look at and hilarious to eat (I suppose I could have used a fork). Next, one of those ‘pork: three ways’ type of events in which each ‘way’ was actually delicious and served a purpose. Quite often those things are a small cube of dry pork belly and then some superfluous bits and bobs, so this was exceptional. Also the best sauce (? demi-glace) I’ve tasted in a while: almost plate-lickingly good.

With two courses for £19.50, or three for £24, this is incredible value and the most enjoyable lunch I have had all year.

http://www.restaurant-michaelnadra.co.uk/

Afterwards, you’ll be pleased to hear that we did go to the pub and the boys switched the contents of all the girls’ handbags around whilst we were away from the table.

Brasserie Zédel - review

This time last week I went to Brasserie Zédel, and had such a great time that I was determined to write a long, elegiac (rambling) piece (love letter) on France, the French, the intrinsic nostalgia of French food, the cult of the Brasserie and the egalitarianism of prix fixe menus. Pourquoi pas? Then I smashed through the Times paywall on Sunday morning to get my weekly hit of AA Gill’s writing, and guess what? He’d done it. Right there. The whole thing, and obviously better than I ever could. He had concluded, as I was going to (I promise), by saying that the food good, but the atmosphere is exceptional. I had the best evening I’ve had in a long time with great friends in the American bar and then the hyperbolically French, gold and marble restaurant. So did Gill (although he probably spent less time in the bar). I’d love to say, in the manner of an Olympian hero, that I have now challenged myself to write something better and more interesting, but I haven’t.

So that’s that.

What I can tell you is that this place is incredible, even if you’re not obsessed with French things. I know that because the people I went with are, if anything, anti-French. Or that’s how it appears from their attempts at speaking the language.

The bar is dark, low, elegant and timeless. I mean that in both the sense that it could be any year from 1950 to the present and it also could be any time of day or night from 5pm onwards. You could get seriously drunk in there. That night, due to my surroundings and also the martinis, I felt a lot like James Bond. Always my favourite type of evening.

The dining room is vast, double height, and sparkles with gold rails and soft lights. The menu is fantastic, with the aforementioned formules à prix fixe (set menus) meaning you could do it very cheaply. Starters on the main menu are mostly between 3-6 pounds, with main courses around the 12 pounds mark. This is sensible pricing for sensible food. There is nothing that is going to blow you away with creativity, but there will be something that all of you remember from a family holiday, interailing expedition, roadside café, trip to Paris, French exchange, a film or even just Encore Tricolore 3.

I had snails which were slightly muddy (but then they’re always really just the vehicle through which pots of melted garlic butter can be delivered to your table without judgement, aren’t they?) and then onglet (hanger steak) in a thick, glossy wine sauce with great chips. We had lots of good red wine. Nothing ground breaking, but I have eaten the exact same meal in France at least 5 times and I mean that in the best, best possible way.

For the record, the most successful starter by far was the oysters (fines de claire - £1.95 a piece) which were exceptionally fresh, and the stand out main course was the confit de canard. We emerged into the Soho night, tipsy, happy and emotional (not me) and were quickly swallowed by a basement margarita bar on Brewer Street. Bien sur.

It came out at £40 a head, excluding martinis.
www.brasseriezedel.com

Tramshed - review

Today, on Tuesday 3rd July, I was forced to take my winter coat out of hibernation. However, a few weeks ago it was so sunny that my friend and I drank a bottle of Pinot Grigio in the sunshine after work and went to Shoreditch for supper.

The East End is not my haunt. I’m not edgy enough. I’m always overdressed. Past the shiny buildings of Commercial Street, beyond the higgle piggle of Brick Lane and through the laboured regeneration of Spitalfields Market, I feel an aura of menace. It’s competitive cool jarring rudely with corporate money and real hardship. I suppose that’s the appeal. I just find it vaguely exhausting.

I have tried. I did Galvin La Chapelle and thought ‘wouldn’t this be nice if it was in the West End’, I went on the Jack the Ripper tour and thought ‘I can really see why he chose this alleyway as his stomping ground’, You name it, I’ve done it. Birthday drinks in achingly hip Hoxton bars, wine tasting in Shoreditch, numerous authentic curry trips, clubs in nameless archways…I have even eaten raclette at 11pm in a deserted and strip lit Spitalfields Market. And most of the time I have just thought ‘how the f**k am I going to get home from here?’.

So there you have it. Confession over, I’m not cool enough for the East. However, if ever there was a reason to gird my loins and head back over, it was for Tramshed. Tramshed is the latest Mark Hix restaurant, which is following the current vogue for minimalistic menus (my favourite so far: ‘Bubbledogs’, serving hot dogs and champagne - opening this month) and only serves chicken or steak. My friend and I were convinced the chicken would be the joke order. Who would order chicken over steak? However, as the night of our reservation (hooray) due nearer, we read increasingly hyperbolic reviews of the chicken at Tramshed, and decided to go for one steak and one chicken on the evening itself.

The restaurant is on Rivington Street in a tram electricity generation shed (or something). It is massive and noisy and looks like a canteen. In the middle is a ginormous, raised Damien Hirst sculpture of a bull with a chicken on its back in formaldehyde. Each to their own. I don’t think I’m cool enough for Damien Hirst either. That aside, the atmosphere is buzzy, informal, and the perfect place for taking 5 friends and getting seriously pissed at the long trestle tables down the centre of the room.

The menu really is as simple as chicken or steak. There are sides, but the starters are salads (served as a mix of 3 plates for the whole table at £8 each) so I wouldn’t bother with them. My friend chose the wine as she was about to go on a wine tasting course and wanted to flex her vinicultural muscles. It was good and red and reasonably priced. The starter salads were crisp and sharp, although the gigantic Yorkshire pudding with horseradish sauce was obviously finished first.

We had ordered a small chicken and a small steak and, excited by the prospect of the superlative chicken, dug into that first. Well…. it was just chicken. I can see if you’re eating battery chickens (which you shouldn’t be) then perhaps this would be very different, but it was just a roast chicken. Good, but a chicken. I am not terribly excited by chickens. What was exciting was the steak, which I thought was faultless, as were the crispy, beef dripping, fries. The table of cheery men next to us, who drank flaming cocktails throughout dinner, had eschewed the chicken altogether and gone for a giant slab of steak with chips and salad. They had clearly been here before.

We got out for £40 a head which I think is great value given you can drop that at most high street chains on a weekend evening. The crowd was cool (natch), the service was great, some of the food really excellent and we had a fab evening.

The ‘how the f**k do we get home from here?’ moment only happened as we tottered through the rain into the smudgy, shadowy glow of the nearest bar, took one look at the menu (presented as the pull out lyric sheet in an old cassette case) and legged it to the nearest taxi.

Tramshed http://www.chickenandsteak.co.uk/