Bluebird - review

There was gossip to be analysed, so the sisters and I decamped to Bluebird for lunch.  I arrived at 11.47am but, as it was a sunny, bank holiday Monday, the patio was full and there was already a queue of glossy people dehydrating, quietly and patiently, whilst they waited for a table. I went upstairs, where it was much cooler.  The only thing about my current penchant for shoulder pads (“what’s wrong with your normal shoulders?” said one friend, completely missing the point much as he’d just missed my entire arm during a hug by bouncing off the aforementioned item in my jacket), is that you get a bit hotter than normal concealing statement foam about your person.

So, inside it was.  As I surveyed the noisy rabble below, with an icy eyebrow and a powerful cucumber martini, I felt content.  Then my sisters arrived and asked me why I was wearing stupid shoulder pads.

We proceeded through cocktails with only the most minor of disputes. We’re more King Lear princesses than Disney princesses, as sisters go, but, after a brief game of musical chairs, this was pretty amicable.  More cucumber martinis and then the spirit du jour, or at least it was a few months ago- I lose track, pisco with passionfruit. We had the 3 course set lunch menu, reasonable at £25 a head with a glass of wine.  We split our starters as neatly as our doubles matches into two butter lettuce salads with champagne vinaigrette, and two mini kilner jars of potted, salted beef  and toast. Both were popular, although I thought the salad was a bit basic and was more of a side order. It had no ‘good bits’ in it, if you see what I mean. Nuts, avocadoes, tomatoes, spring onions, cheese, bacon…the things that turn a ‘salad’ into a SALAD.  

Main courses were two pork bellies with mash, one pea risotto, and my order, the joke, a piece of salmon so small that it looked like a starter. It was good, but genuinely half the size of everyone else’s, which didn’t help our natural sibling rivalry.  Cleopatra killed her sister, you know.

Normally I will swap any obligatory pudding order for cheese, but this didn’t appear to be an option so I went for the tiramisu, which at least has mascarpone in it.   I was also able to regale the table with the factoid about it meaning ‘pick me up’ in Italian. The withering looks were balm for the soul. Sister number 2 ordered a sticky toffee pudding with banana, and asked if the bananas could be left off. The waiter laughed at her because apparently the bananas were part of the sponge. I think, if you’re going to laugh at your customers, you should at least know that the fruit in sticky toffee pudding, if any, is normally dates.  The incident at least provided a moment of solidarity between us, as we tend to close ranks when threatened externally.  The pudding was good when it arrived, except they had cunningly disguised the clotted cream as a nice scoop of ice cream, leading to much exaggerated gurning when Sister number 2 dug in.  This time, we laughed more than the waiter.

Mine's the water

Bocca di Lupo - review

And now for something completely different. Not really, but it isn’t French.

My friend who moved all the way to Dubai just after our perfect evening of Colbert and Bond (she didn’t think it was so perfect, clearly), was back in London for a few weeks, so we went to Bocca di Lupo for lunch and a long catch up.

I had always assumed I’d been to Bocca. Not just because everyone has been, but because I can picture the room in my head, I’m pretty sure I’ve met the chef, Jacob Kennedy (untrue), and I have the cookbooks; even the black and white one specifically about pasta shapes. Who would do that if they hadn’t even tried the restaurant yet? Turns out, I haven’t been, I’ve just read a lot about it. This happens to me sometimes when I read too much. When I was 8 I became convinced that I was actually Laura Ingalls Wilder from Little House on the Prairie.

We sat at the bar, which I already knew was thick, cool, white marble with rounded edges, although actually I’d never seen it in real life. The menu, which again I was familiar with, is fantastic and I could have ordered everything. My friend has actually been before, so knew the score. We ended up with a couple of starters, some pastas and some grilled meaty bits, all to share. She didn’t want to drink too much so we had a nice bottle of white from Puglia (Bianco Salento, Lamadoro).

Venison tartare with parmesan was completely delicious, not that I expected anything less from the cervine version of one of my top things to eat, ever. Two small pastas, sea snail tagliolini and veal and pork agnolotti with walnut sauce, were excellent. The sea snails were finely chopped; you couldn’t see them, they just added a vague, sea salty flavour to the ragu. The fat, pillow shaped agnolotti were even better – the walnut sauce on top…oh my gosh. We also had a deep fried courgette flower each – crunchy and perfect.

For our ‘main course’, although, really, everything was little and could perfectly happily have come in any order, we had a lamb sweetbread and artichoke skewer and a slice of buristo each. Buristo is a blood sausage. Not nice as a concept, but it didn’t have the gritty texture that black pudding has, nor that worrying, ferrous tang; it was fantastic and relatively non-scary. Not having troubled ourselves with anything green up to this point, we ordered a side dish of agretti. That’s monksbeard, in English, so I basically still don’t know what it is; it looked like a smaller, wispier version of samphire. Very nice, sautéed with butter and lemon.

From the interesting, tasty food, via the smiling, efficient service, to the buzzy, warmly lit room; everything was perfect. Over the course(s) of a long lunch, Bocca has become one of my favourite places in London. Which is why I’ve been there so many times before, obviously.

In which I have a successful dinner party

Having found myself unexpectedly in London over a bank holiday weekend with no plans (don’t cry for me, ardent reader*), I decided to invite some of the family to mine for supper. To be perfectly frank, the idea was to impress them. Or at least to stop my Dad believing that I’m a hopeless female with an attitude problem. I’m sure that, secretly, he thinks all of his children are awesome, but on a day to day level it’s mostly a litany of disappointment for him. Anyway, he said he might like some fish, and no carbohydrates, and he would bring the wine. I decided to ignore the wine/carbohydrate paradox, and concentrate on cooking something good.

*I am seriously pleased with this joke.

I went through aaaaaaaaaaall of my cookbooks, to the extent that my bookshelf collapsed on top of me and I was hit in the face by an avalanche of words. Lacking the energy to fix the shelves, I have simply piled up all the books at the end of my bed, like a wall. Sister number 3 once told me that books wouldn’t keep me warm at night, and I have had the very great pleasure of proving her wrong for the last week, since they are very effectively blocking the draft from under the door.

Having decided on either halibut with peas, pea shoots and bacon (J Sheekey cookbook) or turbot with milk puree and baked celeriac (Phil Howard on BBC Food website), I wrote out the lists for both, girded my loins and headed for Waitrose.

As always, Waitrose was fantastic. As always, they didn’t have quite the right stuff. Instead, I picked up some monkfish and teeny scallops, threw a mishmash of the rest of the ingredients from both recipes into the basket, lost interest in the whole thing, bought some edible flowers and went home to read Pippa’s column.

I made a lemon tart (something to put the flowers on) from a Mary Berry recipe and that sorted pudding. I used some ready rolled puff pastry to make salmon and parmesan straws (J Sheekey cookbook). I remembered a recipe on a blog I love, Dash and Bella, for soft boiled eggs cut in half with crème fraiche, parsley, salt and hot sauce on top of them. So I did those too. I opened a jar of ‘pizza express olives’ – the bog standard pitted, black ones and tipped them into a nice bowl. I put some champagne in the fridge. That takes care of the nibbles, I thought, as I put on 'J'en ai marre' by Alizée (the thinking French man's Britney Spears) for the 8th time and danced around the kitchen.

Then I calmed down and made this:

Monkfish, scallops, peas
Serves 4

4x monkfish fillets
2x packets of teeny scallops from Waitrose
500g petit pois
Bunch of spring onions, finely chopped
6 rashers of smoked, streaky bacon, chopped up
1 shallot, finely chopped
1x little gem lettuce, chopped
Splash or two of double cream
Mug of vegetable stock
Pot of baby coriander and baby amaranth leaves (completely optional, they looked cute in the pot in Waitrose)
Butter
Oil
Salt and pepper

You can do everything before people arrive except cook the fish.

-In a large frying pan, soften the shallot in butter and oil, and add the bacon.
-Add the vegetable stock and let it boil and reduce by half
-Cook the peas in a saucepan of water, drain, add to the frying pan with the spring onions.
-Add as much cream as you like (within reason), season with pepper and let bubble and thicken.
-Stir through the shredded little gem, so it wilts gently.

You can leave this on the side now and have the nibbles with your guests. Things did not get off to a good start when Dad arrived with fantastic wine and asked for a corkscrew, which I couldn't find because we're more of a screw top household...

Soon enough, everyone was sitting down and I fried the fish.

-Monkfish: 4 mins on each side in a hot pan seemed to do it. Books kept telling me to season one side, fry for 4 minutes, turn and finish in the oven, but my oven doesn’t fit the handle of my frying pan in it, so I didn’t do that.

-Scallops: a couple of minutes in the same pan when the monkfish is half done.

I served this in shallow bowls (pea mixture in the middle, monkfish on top, scallops around the sides, baby leaves scattered insouciantly over the whole….) with sourdough bread and a sharp watercress salad.

Everybody said it was pretty good. Understatement.

Brasserie Chavot - review

Great news for the fans; I may not have to go and live in France. I realise this is a dramatic statement, and most of you weren’t even aware I was planning a move to the Hexagon, but it goes something like this.

I am in love with France. I have been since I was about 4. I love everything about it. I like people I meet purely based on whether or not they are French. Sometimes I dream in French. I’m suspicious of wine that is not French. I want to eat steak tartare every day. As a teenager, I used to buy Le Monde from our newsagent and pretend I understood it. I consciously try to practise my French at least once a week, in case it slips away from me and rusts. The one memory which embarrasses me so much that I still cringe when I think about it (and really, there is MUCH more embarrassing stuff I should worry about) is saying ‘non!’ in a rude voice and walking off when a little French girl on the beach asked me, in French, if I wanted to play a ball game with her. Why, aged 5, was I so obnoxious, you might ask. I was just worried she’d say something in French that I wouldn’t understand and I’d look stupid. If only my 5 year old self had known that she was going to spend most of her life looking stupid, she might have gone and had fun with the little French girl. She might even still be friends with the little French girl, who might just have had a really charming and intelligent French elder brother, who she would probably have married and then lived in Paris forever and ever, with occasional trips South for some sunshine and moules marinière (fig.1, below).

I digress. But basically, I should live in France.

Why, given the above, have I now decided that, ultimately, I won’t have to move there? Because London is suddenly FULL of French brasseries. So now I can go and sit in any number of places in my stripy top and have my steak tartare without having to travel. This is the ideal situation. My default life setting is ‘indolent’, all of my friends and family are here, and since they moved the Eurostar to St Pancras it has all just been a bit too much of a hassle.

So I’m thrilled by this benign invasion of red leather banquettes, awnings, black waistcoats, plastic cane chairs and snails, and I was even more thrilled -imagine a small, fleeting smile- when the latest one popped up on Conduit Street, which is close to where I do my Dolly Parton (as in working 9 to 5, not as in a tribute act in Soho).

Brasserie Chavot has those grand, heavy European curtains around its door, which I like a lot. Obviously I liked the whole thing a lot. If you show me something that looks French, I will almost always like it a lot. I nearly bought a fridge magnet the last time I was in Paris which was a perfect, miniature cheeseboard, cast in resin. I know. Unfortunately our fridge is one of those ones that’s built in with a wooden door, and I didn’t know anyone else who would appreciate the bizarrely intricate craftsmanship of the magnet, so I had to leave it in the shop.

I had a glass of white wine (Château Deville 2009 Entre-deux-mers) in the little bar with a beautiful tiled floor at the front of the room whilst I waited for my flatmate, who was late. I had ordered her a glass of wine too. It stood there, balefully, getting warmer and warmer until she turned up. We liked it so much that we had another glass each. This is INSANE. I don’t mean as in we drink too much (he who is without sin, etc), but rather that it is an economic madness to order 4 glasses, not a bottle. Terrible decisions like that are what makes restaurants expensive.

We shared the steak tartare (it actually says ‘tartar’ on the bill, which has caused me a brief moment of self doubt) and the snails bourguignon. Both of these were really clever. The tartare had a mustardy dressing mixed through it, which was different and an improvement; two adjectives which don’t always follow in restaurants (God, one of those isn't actually an adjective. What has happened to my brain?) and the snails were fantastic. If you didn’t think anything could top garlic butter, think again. Or just try these. A dark, sticky, beefy sauce, full of snails, with pomme purée on top, all served in a cute glass fishbowl. Loved it. The main courses were good and steady; a lamb chop on cous cous with a Moroccany vibe, and a ribeye and chips, which is not going to win prizes for adventurous ordering but was delicious.

Too full for pudding, or even cheese, we fortified ourselves with espressos and left to cause some mischief in Mayfair.

Vingt-Quatre

I am cross with Vingt-Quatre. It has always got away with serving pretty mediocre, overpriced food because having a restaurant open 24 hours a day on the Fulham Road is just so handy and fun and convivial. It does a roaring trade in midnight suppers and 4am breakfasts, but I imagine someone who happened to wander in for lunch would be underwhelmed on every level, and not least because the decoration owes a lot to provincial 90s disco. Maybe it’s not so neon in the daytime. Side point: mirrors. Don’t put mirrors everywhere in a place which caters almost exclusively to the nocturnal, i.e. drunk, element of life. I spent a good 10 minutes pouting at myself over my friend’s shoulder. I apparently even took a photo when she went to the bathroom – see below - smooth.

Actually, the croque monsieur I had on that occasion was really quite good, but the atmosphere was ruined by the bouncer. An actual bouncer. Not someone with an ipad and an earpiece standing behind a lectern in a self-important manner, which is bad enough, but a fully kitted out, heavyweight bouncer. Now, with its close proximity to the dens of iniquity that line the Fulham Road, catering for everyone from teenagers on their exeat weekends via people who want to be on Made in Chelsea, to old men who work in Finance and really should know better, I’m sure they get awfully pissed up groups of people milling around outside wanting nothing more than to scarf a club sandwich at 2am. And I’m sure, given the fact that all of the groups mentioned above are loud and self-important, they get some aggro. I’m also almost certain that it must be pretty lame aggro. It’s not exactly Brixton – although I admit the smashing of the Hugo Boss windows in Sloane Square during the London riots did give the area a touch of street cred I feel it previously lacked.

Anyway, I can’t imagine why there was a bouncer blocking the door. He rudely enquired whether we intended to eat a ‘main meal’, each. Well, I don’t know. I might intend to sit there and eat three courses, but maybe I’ll look at the menu and decide I want a bowl of chips and a bottle of champagne. Or maybe someone will call me with dramatic, late night news and I’ll have to rush out, flustered but purposeful, in a flurry of scrunched up napkins and scraped back chairs, before anything has passed my lips- let alone had a chance to get to my hips. I’m being facetious, as ever, but seriously, come on dudes, two girls looking for a midnight snack are really not a problem for you, or your business. Don’t set a bouncer on us. If it’s the safety of your patrons that concerns you, two forty year old venture capitalists scuffling outside the restaurant (I’m imagining Colin Firth and Hugh Grant here) after one too many jagerbombs kindly offered by the pretty ladies with the sparklers in Dukebox are hardly going to require a bouncer to separate. Equally, I understand eight teenagers taking up a big table, ordering one burger and eking it out for three hours so they have somewhere to sit is annoying. But I would have thought those are quite easy to spot and, being thin emo/goth/vegan/peace frog/beliebers, are probably not going to require a giant bouncer to tell them to move on. After we had solemnly sworn that we both intended to eat, said bouncer made a gesture through the glass window, which I understood to be the international symbol for ‘2 people’, but equally could have been an homage to Churchill or indeed an appreciation of Star Trek. Relief; we were allowed in. We promptly went back outside again for a cigarette.

2 croque monsieurs (messieurs?), a bowl of chips, a 500cl carafe of indifferent wine, and a £60 bill? Somebody saw us coming.

A plague on both your houses

I realise now that I am one of those people who are prone to tonsillitis, but I have managed to miss this over the years in my search for more obscure illnesses from which I am suffering. Hypochondria is one of my least attractive features, but I actually can’t help it if I am pre-disposed to getting weird symptoms that I have to google and then it turns out that they are fatal. 

Anyway, I had tonsillitis (I will laugh in your face if you call it a sore throat) first when I was 19- I was on holiday in France with my family who were uncaring to say the least, so I just sat in my room and facebook flirted with boys for sympathy.  A year later, I was in Paris and it came back; a doctor on the Boulevard St Germain charged me 70 euros to take my top off and gave me some paracetamol.  This time I have had it twice in a month and as a result of some complications (from being happy and carefree and not maintaining my usual constant vigilance towards googling my health) I am sick sick sick.  The less said about it the better, but the long and the short of it is that I’m convalescing at home.

Being an independent, post-modernist ironic joke of a woman in my mid to late 20s, I realise I should be doing this at my flat, but I am nothing if not relentlessly realistic, and I know it would have been about 2 hours after the first of my flatmates got home from work before I was saying it was fiiiiiine to have a drink, and yes I probably would love a Marlboro light because you know you really can’t smoke in hospitals, they’re pretty strict on that, and actually I’m very much ok now so if I don’t take these antibiotics tomorrow maybe my stomach won’t feel so shit and I can go to that party on Saturday. My flatmates wouldn’t have pressurised me by the way, I just have no will power. And I really don’t want to feel like this anymore.

At home, at least two sisters will be scandalised, disappointed and possibly stop thinking of me as their ultimate role model -footage not found- if they see me hoofing down the codeine with a white wine chaser. 

It also means that I am under my mother’s tender loving care. This is exceptionally annoying, but I’m almost certain that for once this is mostly my fault not hers. I am exhausted and sleeping most of the time, but am finally feeling just human enough to wake up to argue and be rude. I am eating nursery food.  Shepherds’ pie, macaroni cheese, boiled eggs, soups, yoghurts...  You may be surprised that all of these are suitable for someone with such a tender, recently compromised throat.  You may be thinking of crispy mashed potato with the pie, or crunchy bits of bubbling cheese on top of the pasta; rest assured, the way my mother makes the above, they are all the same consistency.

She is currently whipping up a broccoli and stilton soup whilst listening to The Archers.  Sister number 4 has just emerged from her study leave pit and come thumping down the stairs shouting, ‘What are all the bad smells? Why does everything smell of manure?’ 

I’m not sure lunch is going to go down so well. I can’t wait to go back to work.

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