London je t'aime

Dear London,

It seems to be in vogue to write open letters at the moment, so I’m writing one to you.

I take you for granted.  You are like my family. You are meant to be there, always, in the background.  I don’t visit your galleries or check out your museums or do anything beyond tread my quotidian path across a tiny corner of your vast face, and I’m sorry for that.

I know we’re not meant to like the Shard.  Its only point is the one at the top of it, and it has been seen as a totem pole of the forces that conspire to make London cold and expensive and hated.  But have you spoken to anyone who has looked out from it and seen you? I have never seen anything like it.  Everything is so familiar; the gentle hills of Hampstead Heath, the spider webs of the train tracks around our feet at London Bridge and the vast, urban sprawl to the left and right, as far as you can see. Canary Wharf looking unimportant.  Traitors Gate steeped in the blood of hundreds of years. And the shimmering brown river winding all the way through it like a piece of ribbon. It was wonderful.

I don’t think I’m wrong about East London (she said, darkly) but I tried it again last week, because of seeing my city from a different angle.

We went to a pop up restaurant in a photographic studio in Stepney.  It was called Chateau Marmot and the chef, Laurent Quenioux, and his team had come over from LA for 10 sittings.  We sat amongst hipsters, old couples, young couples, some suits, a goth…. Funnily enough it couldn’t have been more London, in the best sense of the word. 

It was a six course set menu with matched wines. We hid the menus so everything was a surprise.  The food was impeccable.

First came a teeny tiny razor clam with guacamole, pico de gallo chipotle and spots of black corn.  It nodded at Mexico on its way to Ceviche on Frith Street.  It was spicier than you might have thought for the first plate of the evening.

Next up was a bright venison tartare with a cute little quail's egg to mix into it, some chocolate rubble that added crunch and a smooth liver pate that was heavenly.

Raw halibut came with cubes of root vegetables, a little salad and splashes of a spiky, herbal tarragon ‘varnish’. 

A light broth came after that – it tasted of autumn, with chestnuts, pumpkin and a poached egg.  It was polite and cleansing.  On the side was a little croquette which I couldn’t decipher and some cubes of foie gras, which I could.

The main event (although all the dishes were equivalently small, really) was a slow cooked pork cheek ‘parmentier’ with confit shallots and mash. I know how chefs make mashed potato (butter butter butter butter butter butter), so I’m always excited by it in restaurants, but when they put it in front of me they said it had been made with bananas.  As I said, I’m trying to be more open to new things but mashed bananas is baby food.  Conceptually it may have been a pork and bananas Caribbean idea?  Luckily, I couldn’t really taste it and everything else was delicious.

The pudding was a persimmon cake with barley ice cream and corn panna cotta.  I really don’t like panna cotta (it wibbles and wobbles too much) and my flatmate really doesn’t like corn (sweetcorn freaks her out to a hysterical degree) but of course we both tried it and you know what? It wasn’t that scary at all.

London, I love you.  You mean the world to me.

Laura

I don't get paid for this

Two quick recommendations:

1. Chosen Bun are delivering burgers of seriously great quality and seriously hot temperatures in south west London. The deep fried macaroni cheese bites are like crack - really moreish*. We had the Viking burgers and a rum milkshake; the grown up equivalent of milk before bedtime. I also think it's cute that they named a lot of things on their menu after friends who helped them get started.
@chosenbun on twitter
www.chosenbun.com

2. If you're central and want a healthy lunch at your desk, email iwant@fittata.com and a man on a bike will arrive with 2 or 3 delicious little carb-free baked frittatas with a salad of your choice.  Last week the 'fittata' flavours were mushroom and parmesan, chorizo and chilli or salmon and dill. £5 for two or £6 for three.

*that's a Peep Show reference, not a cry for help.

From breakfast with love

The best chat up line I’ve ever heard is ‘my chef does a great breakfast’.  The only reason it didn’t work was because I was young and I thought I wasn’t that type of girl.  In fact, it remains true that I don’t eat breakfast, but for James Bond I can make an exception.

There's a new Bond book in town and it starts with Bond having breakfast at the Dorchester, so the Dorchester decided to host 'Bond's breakfast', and got William Boyd in to sign copies of his book. My uncle procured four tickets but was being a sexist, misogynist dinosaur and said he couldn’t deal with three women at breakfast so I had to bring a boy, even though breakfast is normally a ‘date number three’ kind of thing, if that. I called up an old faithful (which sort of sounds like I took a dog) and off we went. 

Bond’s breakfast was half a dozen rashers of bacon and four eggs, scrambled.  There was a muesli and yoghurt option, which doesn’t really deserve any more of my time, and an omelette (Bond does eat them quite a lot – one of his favourite suppers is an omelette fines herbes), which I would have ordered but for the fact I wanted to see if I actually could eat six pieces of bacon and four eggs. It’s the same mentality that has led to me see how many pizza crusts I can fit in my mouth at a dinner where we were being introduced to a friend’s new girlfriend for the first time.

We ordered vesper martinis and were told the bar wasn’t open yet which was slightly embarrassing, or would have been if it hadn't been a WWJBD day.  They arrived anyway and were perfectly ice sharp, although I would note that they don't go down easily at 10am.

We were so involved in drinking and chatting and laughing and soaking up the atmosphere and all the other things that people do over breakfast (bearing in mind at least two of us are related) that we ordered late and our food arrived moments before William Boyd got up to read some of the book and kindly answer questions. Well. Dilemma. Do you eat through it, your fork squealing across the china in the dead silence of the velvet room as thirty pairs of eyes swivel, disapprovingly, in the direction of the table who are, clearly, half cut? No, probably not. James wouldn't have done it either; a low profile being essential in his line of work. So we waited, politely, as Boyd eloquently answered some interesting (and some fairly stupid) questions, and when he had finished I'd accidentally eaten six rashers of deliciously crisp bacon with my fingers and everyone's eggs were cold.

Chalk this up as yet another incredibly useful food review. 

Guo Yue's restaurant club

I never really eat ‘Chinese’ food.  If we ever went to a Chinese restaurant as children, my sisters and I would just sit at the end of the table munching away on prawn crackers and seaweed, leaving little crispy bits of green straw scattered over the table all around our plates, whilst the adults drank Tsingtao and ate weird, translucent, floppy things and talked about crumbling marriages.

 

Later on, it was a university takeaway staple.  The night after we’d drunk 800 alcopops, snogged people we hated and posted every single moment of the evening onto facebook in a epically detailed album of 60+ photos, all with their own captions (and I was so STRESSED all the time! I had so much to do! I was going to have a breakdown with the amount of work I did!), three of us would decant plastic containers of sweet and sour or chicken in black bean sauce and sit on the floor of one of our rooms, watching a gentle film. I’d never had sweet and sour chicken before university. I’d also never seen curry house rice with all the different coloured bits, or been called stupid so many times during one supervision that I’d snapped a pen in half and thrown it into a fireplace, threateningly (Golden Age of French Theatre my ass), but those are different stories.

 

Of course, this is because what I was eating (not the pen bit, the Chinese food bit) was a blanket English bastardisation of a thousand different culinary traditions.  But I didn’t know that.  The upshot is, it doesn’t really excite me, and whenever I read about a new place specialising in Sichaun spiced oiled pork belly, or Cantonese steamed buns, or duck gizzard skewers from somewhere else, all of which are delicious and different and interesting, I just think ‘sweet orange gloop’ and then ‘meh’. This happened most recently at Flesh & Buns, but I’m blaming that on the fact it was so loud I couldn’t hear myself think so forgot I wasn’t going to be interested. And then I went somewhere that changed my mind.

 

My godmother hovers in the background of these pages, always good for a cocktail or a fun evening out, but also a very good cook in her own right, and someone who is really interested in food to boot.  She makes spanakopita from scratch on weeknights, and she went on a course to learn how to make dim sum dumplings. That’s the kind of person she is.

 

The man who ran her dumpling course is called Guo Yue, and he plays the Chinese flute well enough to have a Wikipedia entry on the same (I promise I didn’t write it). He does occasional restaurant nights with set menus that he emails his contact list about in advance, and they are always fully booked. I can’t improve on the descriptions in the actual menu he emailed everyone ahead of the dinner we went to, in a small restaurant on Cleveland Street a few weeks ago.  It is beautiful. If this isn’t evocative of a time, place and culture ‘other’, I don’t know what is.  Everyone sat with strangers and shared everything out from plates in the middle of the table, Guo Yue played a flute made of jade and passed round rice wine. It was out of this world.

 

                                                                                                                               STARTERS

A PLATTER OF WU LONG TEA SMOKED DUCK, PAPER PRAWN ROLLS, CRISPY SALMON WITH YUE'S SPECIALLY MADE SAUCE 

                                                      HONEY GLAZED CHINESE WILD MUSHROOMS SLOW COOKED WITH ONE STAR ANISE AND RICE WINE

                                                    STEAMED AUBERGINE WITH FRESH GREEN AND RED CHILLIS, SESAME SEED PASTE AND FRESH CORIANDER

                                                                               TENDER BONELESS CHICKEN COOKED IN SICHUAN AROMATIC CHILLI SAUCE

                                                                                                                 MAIN COURES

FRESH TIGER PRAWNS COOKED IN CHINESE RICE WINE WITH WILD CHINESE GARLIC SHOOTS

                                                              BEEF COOKED IN A HOT POT WITH FRESH GINGER, SPRING ONION AND GREEN JADE MANGE TOUT

STEAMED LEMON SOLE (OR SEA BASS) WITH A VERY SPECIAL CHILLI BEEN PASTE, SPRING ONION AND RED BERRY

                                                        SILKY WOOD EAR, FRESH BAMBOO & VERY THINLY SHREDDED PORK COOKED IN MANY DIFFERENT INGREDIENTS

                                                                                             (THE NAME OF THIS DISH IS PERFUMED SILKY PORK)

                                                                   ONE OF THE DISHES I ATE THE MOST WHEN I WENT BACK TO CHINA AND WHEN I LIVED IN CHINA

                                                                       CHOY SUM COOKED IN A SPECIAL WAY WITH FRESH GINGER AND GARLIC AND RICE WINE

                                                                                              LIGHTLY COOKED CHINESE SILK MELON WITH LILY FLOWER

                                                                                                                        FRESH FRUITS AND CHINESE TEA

Honky Tonk- review

I was lying by the pool in the middle of a vineyard in France (which is pretty much like throwing a duck into the middle of a lake and giving it lots of bread) when I was seized with a pang of emotion for most of my immediate family and texted them to suggest having lunch on the Sunday I got back.  They were clearly not feeling the love, or just hadn’t started on the rosé at midday, and the only one who was interested was Sister Number 4.

 

Famed for her inability to organise anything, arrive anywhere on time, or respond to texts unless in her direct and immediate interest (a genuine feat given that her phone is superglued to her face), I wasn’t too concerned when she hadn’t replied to a single message on Sunday morning.  I finally got hold of her at about 11am.  She grumbled down the phone like the kraken for about five minutes before she grudgingly agreed to let me buy her lunch at Honky Tonk on Hollywood Road.

 

It started to rain as I left my flat so I was forced to break into the casual ‘I’ve been caught in a downpour!’ jog that you see in films, complete with waving a newspaper ineffectually in the air above my head. I got pretty into it and was therefore surprised to notice, from a fleeting glimpse in a shop window, that I didn’t look like an artfully tousled film star so much as a loping Neanderthal with mad hair. I put my jacket over my head and walked the rest of the way staring at the pavement, lamenting my own hubris.  Just another one of those things that isn’t true in the movies, like running through airport barriers to stop the love of your life getting on a plane. Don’t. You’ll get shot.

 

I loped into Honky Tonk, feeling as proto-human as I apparently looked, and waited for the sister at the bar. The restaurant bit at the back was empty but for a lot of balloons, which looked sort of sad in the clear, grey light of a rainy afternoon.  On reflection, given the hard liquor and rock music, this is probably more of a Thursday night kind of place than a Sunday lunch one, but they’ve tried to allay that with a good looking brunch and good looking staff. We asked for marmalade margaritas. Tequila is a struggle at 1pm, which is probably a good thing, but they were great.

 

The menu is full on Americana. Not completely Southern grits, not wholly the dirty burger thing, not just Tex-Mex, but a roll call of the greatest hits from the good old US of A that complemented the stars and stripes playlist perfectly. Sister number 4 didn’t know what a quesadilla was (she also doesn’t know what a bison is, incidentally) so we ordered those and some pork ribs to share for our starters.  They were eaten with glee.  The quesadillas were bite size and especially delicious. The ribs were not an overwhelmingly Desperate Dan style rack so were manageable, but this is still filling food.  I only just forced down my mac ‘n’ cheese (and I was so good last time at not ordering macaroni cheese!) and my sister’s little face crumpled when she realised that there was absolutely no way she could fit bourbon and dark chocolate s’mores into her jeans.  

 

There was a lot more to explore here in terms of cool American drinks (juleps, sazeracs, picklebacks, craft beers) but it felt a bit wrong to bomb through those at lunchtime, so I will be back one evening to do their menu justice: this is more a watering hole than a gastronomic temple, but none the worse for it. 

The Fish and Chip Shop - review

I booked The Fish and Chip Shop on Upper Street ages ago and had become more and more excited as time went on, as had the boys coming with me; two of the Chiswick lot, previously mentioned in these pages as...people I never mention.  When I asked them to choose pseudonyms for themselves, the first suggestions I received were 'Erotic Errol' and 'Legend aka I. Am'.  So they lost their voting rights and shall remain nameless.

In an effort to be cool (when in Rome Islington after all), I arranged to meet them for a few drinks at Slim Jim's, a rock and roll bar with bras on the ceiling.  I find this a bit sleazy.  There was a bar in Paris (directions available on request) where they put bras on the ceiling, but the waiters were topless and took the bras off the girls themselves, which made the whole thing a bit more tit for tat.  I can't imagine why you would go up to a fully dressed Axl Rose lookalike and hand him your bra but, then again, my idea of a good time is drinking too much indifferent Sauvignon Blanc and having an argument about apostrophes, so what do I know.

Anyway, I arrived to find one of my friends inside, downing a whisky. "Hullo", he said, and then, "let's go", which I thought was a little forward before we'd even eaten.  It turned out that our other friend was not there, having been refused entry.  For a brilliant moment, I thought he'd been turned away simply for being lame, which would have pretty much sorted our group out for conversation for the next ten years, but alas it was because he was wearing a suit.  I'm not sure a dress code is a particularly rock and roll thing to enforce, really. Wearing a suit doesn't automatically make you a jerk, nor does it reveal anything about what music you like.  It's a uniform as much as a policeman's clothes, or wearing a Metallica hoodie and having a ponytail when you're forty five years old.My friend, however, is a jerk, so they got it bang on with that one.

So there we were, a rebel without a cause, a rebel without a clue and yours truly, all dressed up (too smartly in some cases) with nowhere to go.  We killed some time in a pub and arrived early at the restaurant.  Despite our table not being ready, they kindly found us a perch (not on the menu, being a muddy river fish) and we ordered some cocktails.  These took quite a while to arrive but it was insanely busy and they'd given us a place (also not on the menu) to sit, so no complaints there.  We waited with baited breath.  Once moved to the comfier booth we were furnished with gimlets and an 'Old Man and the Sea' - "it tastes of watermelon", said my companion, sounding startled.  He was at once demonstrating a sensitive palate and the memory of a goldfish (again, not on the... I'll stop), as watermelon featured prominently in the drink's description on the menu.

The room looks 'traditional', but not like a traditional chippy at all.  Well, at least not like any of the ones near me.  If you're imagining strip lighting, peeling linoleum, formica and an obese man tossing scrag ends of fish into a stinking fryer whilst a desultory saveloy oversees an incidence of youth knife crime in the corner, you could not have got it more wrong.  It looks like a seaside pub, or maybe a ship.

The menu is short and sweet, and all fish.  You could do the whole thing without touching fish and chips themselves - there were good looking plates of grilled fish and vegetables and a shrimp mac 'n' cheese, which I forced myself not to order because all I want to eat is macaroni cheese all the bloody time, like some demented overgrown five year old.  AA Gill said it was good though.

We shared London particulars, three scallops with chilli and parsley butter, and crab on toast with avocados.  The scallops were delicious; butter slurped from the shells by two thirds of the company (the third was trying to keep his suit clean).  The London particulars are the 'famous' new thing - pea and ham croquettes with a mustard sauce.  Ham and pea soup is called a London particular after the fog of the same name (also pea souper...).  The croquettes were hot and crunchy and way better than soup.  Last was the crab - great quality meat, but a little dull compared to the other two.  I'm sure people said the same of our table.  One of my friends commented on the toast, but I can't remember what he said.

We had a bottle of their own blend wine, which was decent, and ordered cod and chips (me - classic, traditional), haddock and chips (friend 1, apparently northern), scampi and chips (friend 2, apparently from the 1970s) and two wallys (aside from my companions).  They're big gherkins, and you'll only need one.  Which I said eight times.  No matter, I'm about to lurch into the present tense and eat the best fish and chips of my life.  That good. The cod - flaky, pearlescent, perfectly cooked.  The batter - crisp, light, crunchy.  Absolutely excellent.  The boys said the same about theirs.  'Best chips in London' was bandied around.  The tartare sauce was zingy.

The only thing I would say is that I was extremely full.  I couldn't finish my food, which happens but rarely, and I was forced to call it a night before I was beached.

Flesh and Buns - review

Flesh and buns is a really dodgy name; like something that would happen if Hannibal Lecter developed a teatime snack range with Hovis.  The same people also have a ramen restaurant called Bone Daddies, a name I don’t get either, so I’m clearly just not on their wavelength.  Still, no matter, they’re not naming my children, and I had heard great things about the restaurant.

After an emotional reunion, my flatmate and I arrived in Seven Dials; once the most notorious rookery in London, and now somewhere you can buy Cath Kidston teatowels and SuperDry t-shirts. I pass no judgement, but let’s just say I always thought Gin Lane looked quite fun.

The restaurant is a cavernous basement. I had read a few reviews (I have almost no original thought) that mentioned the trendy décor, but I couldn’t see any, despite intensive lighting. It was all white, and alright. We were at the end of a loooooooong communal table that ran right through the middle of the place.  The decibel level was such that we had to shelve our best gossip for later on; the two Spanish men sitting next to us were charming, but I’m pretty sure they would have been bored by it. Honestly, even I’m bored by it, and it’s my actual life.

Rather ambitiously, the waitress told us to order five starters and then a ‘flesh and bun’ to share. Five starters? Neither my flatmate nor I suffer from a lack of imagination with regard to overconsumption, but even for us this seemed a bit much. We confirmed this with our table mates, who had just shared one main course. Both of them were small though, and sadly gossip-less. We compromised on three.

The starters were really, really good. Spicy tuna rolls were elegant, soft shell crab was crunchy, and the prawn tempura were crisp and blisteringly hot.

And now for the concept. The ‘flesh’ is a choice of meats or fish which come, generously, with a variety of sauces and salady bits, as well as the ‘buns’; four soft, steamed hirata buns.  These looked vaguely alarming - floppy and pallid not being a desirable attribute in any part of an evening out -but are the very latest thing.  To clarify, when I say ‘latest thing’ I mean in London. Apparently people have been eating them in Asia for yonks.  They were ok - certainly filling, and very fluffy. We had them with flat iron steak and I thought everything was quite sweet and cloying, especially compared to the sparkle of the starters.  I’m almost certain that’s what they’re meant to taste like though, I have an earworm telling me that Japanese and Chinese taste runs to sweet in bread, so it’s a palate thing rather than a criticism. Unless my earworm is wrong.  He could be. He once told me glass was a liquid, a ‘fact’ I have whipped out to stunned and admiring glances from my friends and family (sort of) for years now, and which I recently found out is not actually true.  ('No it isn't' said my flatmate in a clear, confident voice, fixing me with a gimlet eye as we nursed our hangovers one Saturday lunchtime at a sunlit window table somewhere on Fulham Road. If this sounds like a dream sequence, it's meant to. My dreams died that day).

I digress.  For me, the concept of Flesh and Buns wasn’t particularly compelling, but it has a fun atmosphere, charming staff, you can book, and it is cheap -  we were out with a bottle of wine for £35 a head – so I would recommend it.  Because you read this for the restaurant tips, right?