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. .

Shortcuts #3

Puff pastry, chicory, blue cheese, walnuts, salsa verde. Oven, 20 mins

The ace of cakes

I had been told to make a cake. Not just any cake, but the cake of my flatmate’s dreams, for her birthday weekend away. It is a cake that as far as I can tell was invented by a great blogger called Apollina, and takes inspiration from one of Stella McCartney’s collections. With the benefit of hindsight, trying to cook something that is cooler than I am may well have been my first mistake. Anyway, it looked amazing and my flatmate was excited and her wonderful mother had agreed to get all the ingredients for me and really, how hard is it to bake a cake?

I’ll allow myself a brief, but unmistakeably hollow, laugh at this point.

A faulty workman blames his tools. Not me. I was the only tool in the room. Something bad happened to this cake and I don’t know what. It could be the fact that I tipped some of the flour onto the kitchen surface, but what are the chances of that being the exact bit that had all the baking soda in it? It could have been the time for which the two cake tins were left on the side whilst we went for a walk to find bloody marys, but doesn’t batter benefit from a rest? Did I somehow horrendously mix up the metric equivalent of American cup measurements? (No). All I know is that I did it step by step, word for word, according to the recipe. And it failed.

My flatmate’s mother is so kind that she didn’t even let me see the sad, unleavened results. When I finally discovered them later on, it was hard to tell what had sunk more: the cake mix, or my heart. They looked like I was planning some kind of revival of a Biblical exodus story, but with sweet flatbreads for a modern audience.

The next evening, we gamely decided to sandwich it with lemon curd and try to ice it anyway, but the thing was unpalatably dense. I wouldn’t have necessarily backed a brick wall if it had come to a showdown between the two entities. Some days later, back at home, I received the heartening news that the birds were very much enjoying it, but one had a suspiciously broken beak.

My flatmate is still waiting for her birthday cake, and I am building up the courage to do it again. They say the definition of madness is to do the same thing twice and expect different results. So, I am not expecting a different result. I am expecting to make the birds of south west London very happy and/or have a home baked missile for the children who hang around by the bus stop.

This is what it should have looked like. I have added a camera effect called ‘sparkles’ which I feel reflects its heretoforth mythical status:

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.

Shortcuts #2

Make arancini with leftover risotto. Roll small balls of the rice in egg wash and seasoned flour, and fry.