Review: Sindhu, Marlow

Partridge

Partridge

A rambling old Victorian pub-hotel on the banks of the Thames at Marlow called “The Compleat Angler” is an odd venue for modern Indian cooking, but that’s where Sindhu is – one of Atul Kolchar’s growing crop of restaurants in the Thames Valley. We came for a mid-week lunch and we decided on the lunch menu, a very reasonable £25 for three courses.

For starters there was chicken tikka nicely blackened from the tandoor, two chunks on a plate with a teaspoon of green relish. My starter was a nice bit of partridge fried in a tangy curry and served on a small round paratha. Others had a trio of tandoor chicken, lamb sheek and prawn, all warmly spiced and well grilled.

Mains were served classic curry style: a dish of meat-in-gravy with rice and dal for the table. The monkfish in a milder tomato curry was deemed good. My lamb in a Chettinad curry was fine, a warming and earthy curry gravy although the lamb wasn’t as tender as I’d have liked. The only oddity about this lunch menu was just how resolutely meaty it was. If you are offered a “three course menu for £25” that feels like it ought to be all-in, but (we realised after everything arrived) if we actually wanted to balance all the meat with some veggies, we really ought to have ordered some of the sides from the a la carte menu! Saving the dal and a tiny bit of diced salad with the chicken starter, the entire meal was meat n carb.

Luckily there was a very nicely executed apple tarte tatin for pudding! Definitely the best choice, even if it gave no nods to the Indian cuisine. The rasmalai that I tried was a light and tasty end, with a lovely saffron flavour in the milk (but I envied the tarte eaters!).

For £25 each, this was a very sound meal in a lovely setting. If I returned, I’d get some vegetable sides.

The Compleat Angler

The Compleat Angler

Review: The Curious Kitchen, Brixham

French toast

French toast

If you are ever down in Brixham, I recommend The Curious Kitchen for breakfast, brunch or lunch. And I think they open some evenings too. Brixham is one of those lovely south-west old fishing towns, hidden in a cove with little streets full of narrow houses clambering up steep-sided valleys of woods and fields. The harbour is full of bobbing boats and there’s a lot of history to explore.

Anyway, first thing about the Curious Kitchen: they make a very good coffee, our flat whites were up with some of the better cafes in London, full flavoured and strong but balanced enough to need no sugar. Then we had brunch. Maureen’s French toast was marvellous, built on their own brioche from their bakery around the corner and with nicely buttery-caramelised edges, plenty of cinnamon and served with a generous handful of good streaky bacon rashers. I went for the pork benedict, another wildly generous plate compared with some of the abstemious one egg benedicts I find in London. But more importantly the eggs were perfectly poached and the hollondaise was a classic slightly sharp lemony-yellow and generously poured. They had chosen their own foccacia as the base, and this was a lovely soft and springy bread with oodles of bubbles to capture yolk and sauce – inspired idea. Oh yes, and it was a pork benedict. So I also had a slide of rolled slow-roasted pork belly with my eggs. Definitely more lunch than brunch (for me, at least) and very good indeed.

We came back on Tuesday morning, so impressed that we were greedy to try some of the other items on the menu, but alas they don’t open on Tuesday (at least, not in February). Our brunch items were £12 and £14, great value.

Pork belly benedict!

Pork belly benedict!

Review: Stage, Exeter

Oysters

Oysters

It’s interesting how tasting menus have become such a ubiquitous part of dining since first appearing just a couple of decades ago. You can have a £225 tasting menu at Lympstone Manor, but just up the road in Exeter you can have a £55 tasting menu at Stage. That’s almost exactly 4 times cheaper, a gigantic range within just the field of tasting menus. Most pizzas are around £15 in London… so what would you expect from a £60 pizza?

Of course a tasting menu involves less prep, less waste, easier service, so there’s plenty of good reasons to go that route. But nevertheless, even today it still implies a certain level of ambition and occasion – no-one pops out for a “quick tasting menu” before a show, or decides that they don’t feel like cooking, so will pop around to their local eatery for a cheeky weekday evening tasting menu.

So is £55 enough to deliver up a worthwhile menu? Well, the dining room at least is a grungy and somewhat difficult space, on the edge of the city centre with stripped-back furnishings and eclectic decor. But we’re comfy enough and made even more comfy by the service which was super-friendly and excellent throughout.

Stage

Stage

The menu began with a pair of oysters, one raw with elderflower vinegar and the other battered with hot mustard and a kimchi sprout leaf – both good, but the latter a really very yummy snack. We also got some hand-torn bread, soft and nicely toasted, with excellent black apple butter. First starter was a blue cheese croquette with slices of pastrami. There wasn’t much cheese presence in the croquette, though the pastrami was very good. Next starter was a piece of confit trout served with roasted beetroot and labneh. The beetroot was excellent, shiny and deeply flavoured from the roasting, the labneh nicely creamy-sour and paired very well. My piece of trout was cooked right through, which was disappointing, though everyone else said theirs was rather better.

The main course was the star of the evening for me; beautifully soft green agnolotti filled with a lovely porcini cream, topped with an excellent beef ragu absolutely full of great flavours

Confit trout

Confit trout

from the tomato and fennel seed. The pre-dessert included a nifty touch: a nice dollop of sourdough and chocolate mousse paired with a Carolina Reaper chilli granita. Sounded scary, but there was just a very nice touch of the ferociously hot chilli in there, providing a little of the distinctive chilli fruit flavour on eating but leaving the mouth mysteriously warmed afterwards. Main dessert was a slim slice of buckthorn tart with a dice of local kiwi fruit and white chocolate sauce. The buckthorn flavour was distinct on its own, but needed some sharper accompaniment to bring it out properly.

All in all a good set of dishes, but for me they felt pitched at a level that belonged on a small plate menu where you might pick five dishes between two and end up at £35 a head, instead of £55 a head for a tasting menu. I like the style of cooking and I enjoyed the experience, so I hope they do very well. And maybe if my trout hadn’t been overcooked and the tart made into a better dish, I’d be summarising slightly differently…? I’ll have to come back and try again some time! I’m certainly willing to.

Beef ragu and agnolotti

Beef ragu and agnolotti

Review: Lympstone Manor, Devon

Snacks to begin

Snacks to begin

Lympstone Manor is in a lovely spot on the Exe estuary and has swiftly earned a Michelin star since chef Michael Caines opened a few years ago. It’s a classic country house hotel, elegantly furnished rooms full of light and lovely things, excellent service throughout. The restaurant offers a classic and a seafood tasting menu and we went for the latter.

We began with a beautiful scallop, diced small and mixed up with a fragrant pink grapefruit vinaigrette. The scallop really shone, creamy and fresh. This felt like a very good opening chord for a seafood menu. This was followed with a confit piece of salmon, perfect texture, with caviar on top. A very neat blob of soy-honey goo paired perfectly, with blobs of gently spicy

Cod and mussels

Cod and mussels

wasabi yogurt and cucumber. Next up, a cloud-like nugget of local cod resting in a daffodil yellow veloute which sang with saffron flavour. Plump mussels contrasted with the clean white cod. So far, all top notch and very safe and sound.

The next dish, a boudin of John Dory with langoustine, ramped up the richness with a full-flavoured chicken and vanilla jus. The fish was topped with a delicate set seafood and herb mousse that worked very nicely and the John Dory itself was more sturdy than the cod and fuller flavoured. Beautiful langoustine tail on top. The jus, and the apple and ginger puree, worked very well with the seafood. The main course hit peak butter, with butter poached turbot in a truffle butter sauce. I may have started oozing butter. There were good flavours of Jerusalem artichoke and leek in there, but the the abiding impression is of a sturdy piece of excellent fish and richness. This isn’t a criticism!

John Dory and langoustine

John Dory and langoustine

Two nice desserts to finish the meal. Pre-dessert was a fine dice of exotic fruits with passion fruit sorbet. Refreshing, and tasted like a highly refined version of classic tinned fruit salad. The main dessert was a very good raspberry souffle, very simple in conception and beautifully executed, with a proper gooey raspberry sauce spooned into the centre.

So it’s £225 per person for the menu and this was classic cuisine at a high level of execution. It’s actually rather a long time since I had a fine dining experience that wasn’t influenced by Japanese flavours and techniques and didn’t make any attempt at pulling in foraged ingredients or emphasis local farm-to-table sourcing. I, personally, like those new influences and find menus more appealing for including them. I also can’t think of any dishes from tonight that stood out as memorable or distinctive, nothing for us to ooooh and aaah over, or to reveal the chef’s particular style. So Lympstone Manor isn’t really for me. But we had a lovely meal, were well looked after and enjoyed our evening immensely. That’s something.

Raspberry souffle

Raspberry souffle

Review: Bibi, Mayfair

Bibi

Bibi

Bibi is very Mayfair. Fully on trend, there is mostly counter seating, but here the stools are plumply upholstered affairs with comfortable backs. Lighting is dark and clubby. A carafe of water is offered, then appears as £3.5 per person on the bill. And the included service charge is 15% of course. We did enjoy perfectly good service throughout, albeit the volume of music they’ve decided on made it very hard to hear most of the dish descriptions. It’s a tasting menu…

Snacks to begin include a cup of very warming mushroom broth, livened with hot spices. Also some cheesy puffed crackers to dip in a three-layered relish of curd, mango and coriander; nice enough but mainly sweet. Then a good quartet of snacks. The beetroot tart topped with caviar was probably the best, shot through with smoke and anise flavours. Tiny raw prawns were a little lost on their spicy diced cucumber base. Lovely bite-sized dokhla topped with cured trout, although again the balance was a bit off; too much of the tasty little cake for the salmon. A decent and very saline poached oyster needed something more than a mild pear granita to pair with it.

Beetroot tart

Beetroot tart

The bread course was stronger, a very indulgent little brioche with some fantastic fermented green chilli butter. Yum. Nice chicken liver parfait too, although there was too little bread for the amount of butter and parfait. I had to watch them take the remains of that lovely butter away! Hmm… raises an interesting question, though. Now that bread has become “a course” in most tasting menus, rather than just something offered at the start of the meal with little fanfare, is it still okay to just ask for more?

Anyway, next was a nice plump piece of monkfish, very lightly cooked and served with a buttery curd sauce that had some of the same fermented chilli flavour. Great piece of fish, although I think it could have stood up to some more serious flavours. This was followed by a beautiful chunk of lamb off the barbecue grill, charred edges but pink and full-flavoured within. My favourite dish came next: a “galouti” kebab of goat, which seems to be a very soft (i.e. spreadable) ball of meat off the grill, sandwiched into a beautifully soft and paper-thin charred roomali roti. Potent spices in the kebab but the flavour of the meat came through well.

Chicken off the grill

Chicken off the grill

The main course was, of course, a complete little curry: rice, daal and a well-seared chicken breast with a splendid buttery curd gravy. The rice was a superb pulao with bits of morel through it, the daal was richly buttery but a bit lacking in depth of flavour. Pre-dessert came in the form of a lovely roast pineapple sorbet with tarragon leaf. Note this: pineapple and tarragon are a BRILLIANT pairing. The main dessert was a lovely creamy concoction in a crisp white chocolate shell, with some delicate saffron flavours a bit beaten by the nice passionfruit curd. The very very fine sev surrounding the crisp egg was a deft touch.

Overall a very good menu, albeit we managed to pick some holes. They’ve some good house cocktails and a decent selection of wines by the glass. We also finished off with a very fine creamy chai served in homely earthenware teapots. The menu is £125 each and on balance I think that’s what I’d expect from Mayfair but, taken more broadly, probably a little steep for the meal we had. All that said, it was a lovely evening and I’d recommend a visit to Bibi.

Saffron egg

Saffron egg