Lovely hummus

Review: Tayer + Elementary, Shoreditch

We only popped into Tayer + Elementary for a late bite of lunch just after this cocktail bar and eatery opened doors for the day at just after 3pm, but I’m already sure that this is is just a temporary review pending a return visit! Before 5pm they only serve little bar snacks, but even …

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Ducksoup

Review: Ducksoup, Soho

Ducksoup is a tiny wine bar in Soho serving up small plates alongside natural wines. They try very hard to pack everyone in. If you’re sat at the bar counter your elbows will be wedged to your ribs by the folks either side of you. We were sat at one of the little tables down …

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Seafood tapas at Barra de Cañabota

Tapas in Seville

San Sebastian might have become the darling of international foodies with its buzzing Basque pintxo culture, but Andalusia and it’s great capital of Seville are the original home of the tapas cuisine that now spans the globe. I can certainly remember that awkward phase of “British tapas”, “Thai tapas” and “modern tapas” before restaurants thankfully …

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Lechon with liver peppercorn sauce

Review: Donia, Soho

Donia, up on the top floor of Kingly Court, are serving up Philippine food through the filter of London modern high-end small-plate cooking. I find Philippine cuisine hard to pin down. It doesn’t have any of the powerful sweet-salt-hot-sour melange of other SE Asian cuisines, and doesn’t go in heavily on the spices like South …

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Hake and gorgonzola

Review: The Gaff, Bath

Whether the name of this restaurant rhymes with the city it is set in depends on what part of the country you come from. : ) Having not visited Bath properly for a few years it was nice to go back and mooch around for a day. I was struck yet again by what a …

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Review: Tayer + Elementary, ShoreditchReview: Ducksoup, SohoTapas in SevilleReview: Donia, SohoReview: The Gaff, Bath

Review: The Beacon, Tunbridge Wells

Categories:

Pubs, Restaurant Reviews

15 April 2019

The Beacon

The Beacon

Not everything about our three courses at The Beacon was perfect, or likely to be particularly memorable. But I’m not too bothered because it was an absolute bloody pleasure to sit by the open fire and just soak up the (completely concocted and utterly brilliant) atmosphere of this majestic Victorian pub on the outskirts of good ol’ Tunbridge Wells. Whoever transformed this place must’ve absolutely loved every minute of it, and boy does it show in every little detail. A small pile of old books stacked on a windowsill, decanters on the sideboard, the whole shebang. If Farrow & Ball had a baby with Antiques Roadshow it might look like The Beacon. You cannot help but feel like gentry here. Very comfortable gentry, just in from an afternoon yomping across the bounds on a spirited courser… or whatever it is they used to do.

Pear salad

Pear salad

Really, I can’t think of a more spiffy ambience. And they’ve stunning views over the Weald for summer evenings on the terrace. Wot wot. This isn’t a pub though, it’s most definitely a restaurant with a bar. So how about our dinner?

Well, the flatbread crisps were chewy but the turnip chutney with them was delish. Maureen’s starter was a beef carpacio. T’was very good, with a pungent dollop of truffle-oiled mayonnaise and some fair shavings of parmesan. My salad of poached pear, walnuts, chicory and blue cheese mousse was classic and nice enough, although the blue cheese mousse was criminally un-blue-cheesy. There was a bit of crumbled cheese on the pear but that kinda feels like making an excuse for your mousse.

My main was skrei cod, a very nicely roasted piece of it with buttered brown shrimp on top. The sturdy helping of caper mash accompanying was good, so was the fennel and very well roasted salsify. My heartiest commendation on a fine bit of fish. Maureen’s pork belly was a huge and juicy piece of flesh. They’d made no attempt at crackling, but the skin was chewably porky anyway. Mustard mash with some black pud crumbled on top was good with it, nice bit of cabbage, and a tiny wee roasted apple with a dollop of caramel was a pretty accompaniment… but frankly nowhere near as nice to eat as apple sauce. Still, jolly good show old boy!

Pork belly

Pork belly

I had just enough room for pud: orange and almond cake with marmalade ice cream. There was some serious marmalade overload here: marmalade icecream, sitting on a dollop of marmalade sauce, and then the block of cake glazed thickly with marmalade and sprinkled with delicately crystallised orange peel. I had marvellously fragrant marmalade breath right through to breakfast! Just a pity the cake’s texture was a bit off; very fine and floury, no crumb to it at all. No idea why as I’m not that good of a baker.

Three courses at The Beacon cost us £38 each. Well, this is Tunbridge Wells after all! Nice house cocktail to start and a bearable glass of Rioja from a reasonable selection of wine. On its own the food comes nowhere near £38 for the quality, I’ve no idea how they get a 4 from Hardens. Or maybe I do? It really is such a lovely place to have dinner I suspect the surroundings are enough to elevate the food! I wouldn’t hesitate to take anyone there. You should stop in too.

Cosy at the Beacon

Cosy at the Beacon

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Review: Sticky Walnut, Chester

Categories:

Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

7 April 2019

Chester

Chester

Should I spend the intro waffling about Gary Usher, the owner of the Sticky Walnut who has crowd-funded four more well-loved bistros around the north-west of England on a wave of social media street cred and chutzpah? Nah, I’d rather talk about Chester.

You need to come and chill for a weekend in this city. It has the most amazing medieval half-timber colonnaded shopping streets. It has by far the best and completest city walls in England that you can walk around. It has canals below the walls. It has the beautiful River Dee running through it. It has wonderful fragmentary Roman remains including a shrine to Minerva and an amphitheatre. On a sunny day its red-brick and gritstone buildings look stately and feel soaked in history. Visually and historically it can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with York or Bath… it just needs more visitors, so the dining and shopping scenes have a chance of catching up! Well, at least there’s the Sticky Walnut.

Cod

Cod

It’s a cosy bistro tucked away in a hip suburb not far from the city, simple decor and friendly staff. Only four whites and four reds by the glass, but bottle were sensibly priced and we found a friendly Rioja to look after us.

My starter was a sturdy breadcrumbed brick of softly braised pig’s head, topped with cubes of sweetly caramelised apple and served with a blob of very splendid brown sauce (I might quibble at the menu calling it barbecue sauce). Yum. Maureen had a piece of tandoor-cooked cod, blackened on the surface but very soft and silken within; great technique, great result. The blob of “nori mayo” worked well with it, distinct sea flavour coming through.

For main I went duck. There was plentiful amounts of pink roast duck breast, all very decent. Far more decadent and vile (in a good way) was a small brioche bun stuffed full of softly shredded duck leg. Cor! And a shout-out to the punchy drizzle of spring onion oil, the rich blob of plum sauce, and the perfect al dente texture of the char-grilled cabbage chunk. Maureen meanwhile had a mighty chunk of amazing slow-braised featherblade, drowned in delicious sticky gravy. And nothing says “great neighbourhood bistro” like the fat truffle and parmesan chips that came with it.

Duck

Duck

It was necessary to have pudding. Maureen enjoyed an earl grey and brown butter rice pudding with Armagnac prunes. Who wouldn’t? The bergamot came through clearly among the otherwise earthy and comforting flavours. I went for the custard tart, because apparently you’re supposed to. The custard was light as a dream, the pastry was nutty brown and delicate. Smashin’.

Can’t help but love the Sticky Walnut. Three courses does almost hit £40 before drinks, though. I’ve had very good meals at places that throw in bread and an amuse for that amount. This is about as good as bistro cooking gets though, and I can’t imagine recommending anywhere else for your weekend break in Chester. You are coming, aren’t you?

Pig's head

Pig’s head

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Review: The Hare & Billet, Blackheath

Categories:

London, Pubs, Restaurant Reviews

7 April 2019

The Hare and Billet

The Hare and Billet

Chicken is almost always at the bottom of my menu choices. It’s just… chicken. I sometimes get the feeling chefs put it on the menu with a big implicit label: “For Nervous Diners! The Safe Option!” because it tends to get put on a plate with some fairly boring accompaniments too. Then of course sometimes I go for the chicken anyway and it turns out to be delish. All depends on the chef.

This time I was drawn to it instead of the obvious Sunday roast beef by the promise of a chipolata and bread sauce. You don’t often see that on the 364 days of the year that aren’t Christmas Day! And the bread sauce was good; thinner and more full of herbs and spice than I’m used to, it made for a nicely restful relish for the beautifully roasted half-chicken. Waaaaay too much meat for just one of me, but it was very juicy, fully flavoursome and with skin crispy enough in places to be worth gobbling some of too.

Accompaniments were a mixed bag. The Yorkshire pud was okay, but without enough crispy poof to make the premier league. Roasties were a bit more chewy than crunchy of skin, but good textured ‘taters. Huge honey-roasted carrots I enjoyed; just enough funkiness in the honey to cut some of the sweetness. Good gravy.

I like the pub too. The Hare and Billet has a great spot overlooking Blackheath, with a rambling pubby interior and lots of friendly staff. Good selection of beers and gin, to be fair didn’t check the winelist. The roast beef looked okay too. Roasts were £16/£17 and I guess that’s a tad steep for the quality – this wasn’t the best Sunday roast I’ve had this year. But it was perfectly good, and the Hare and Billet is a good pub to have a short walk from home.

Roast chicken

Roast chicken

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Review: A Wong, Victoria

Categories:

Fine dining, London, Restaurant Reviews

4 April 2019

Goldfish dumplings! Awwww!qGoldfish dumplings! Awwww!

Goldfish dumplings! Awwww!

I could not stop laughing at the goldfish dumplings. An awful lot of effort had gone into artfully crafting something so beautifully naff. And I just didn’t get the dish either. The little goldfish had minced prawn inside them, which was a bit boring, and were accompanied by a piece of seared foie gras. Why? No idea. Luckily this was the one single oddity in a dinner of otherwise beautiful and delicious Chinese cooking in A Wong.

They do the small-plate-not-small-plate thing here. Where you just order whatever you like, but they suggest ordering one dish from the first section (that looks suspiciously like starters) and one dish from the next section (crispy duck and other pancake-wrapped things) and one or two dishes from the next section (shall we call it… mains?). Gosh. Almost like a traditional Chinese restaurant.

Street tofu

Street tofu

Anyway, all our small plates were brilliant. “Chengdu street tofu” was a bowl of beautiful silken tofu jumbled with veg, peanuts and a warm chilli kick. “1000 chilli chicken and snails” had an even brighter puff of chilli in the mouth, taken up another notch with citrusy Sichuan pepper. “Moo shu pancake wraps” was a rather salty concoction of unctuous pork, wood ear mushroom and egg with pieces of crispy tofu skin to add scrunch once you’ve got it all wrapped in the rice pancakes. Crispy duck was crispy duck, a perfectly good specimen.

“Dong po slow-braised pork” were deeply sticky and gloriously sweet slices of belly pork topped with crispy lotus root. The “Market veg” were stir-fried greens with a pleasing juicy saltiness, lifted with spring onion oil, and then topped with lots of generous black truffle. “Gong Bao chicken” was good. “Goldfish dumplings” were hilarious, as noted.

Dim sum

Dim sum

Oh, and for a Chinese restaurant they REALLY rocked the desserts. Poached meringue with fruit textures included an array of all your favourite tropical fruits, from mango cream and lychee sorbet to passionfruit, all brightly full of flavour. Okay, perhaps the chocolate, banana and truffle dish was a bit of a jumble. Nice enough if you have to have a chocolate pud, though. My favourite was the very left-field “Coconut water ice, blackberries, Xinjiang mulberries, yoghurt and mochi”. The water ice was just that, definitely not a sorbet. The berries likewise. And the yogurt. Somehow I felt transported to the icy Xinjiang mountains on a sunny autumn day.

To be fair, at this point we’d got through a couple of bottles of very good wine! Quite a reasonable wine list too, varied and fair priced. I really enjoyed the meal at A Wong and am dying to come back for dim sum one lunchtime. You’d probably pay £45 each without drinks for dinner, and that’s probably fair for the top-notch inventive Chinese cuisine.

Ice, ice, baby

Ice, ice, baby

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Review: Copper and Ink, Blackheath

Categories:

Fine dining, London, Restaurant Reviews

4 April 2019

Broccoli bite

Broccoli bite

There’s a helluva lot of care and attention that goes into fine dining – even informal fine dining – that you only notice when it’s absent. When our dessert showed up at Copper and Ink, with two cubes of chiffon cake, there was plenty of jealous comparing going on; lucky me, my cubes were nearly twice the size of everyone else’s! Similar story with the beef main; everyone had a noticeably different sized chunk of rump. And they were maybe running low on watercress in the kitchen because the sprigs got smaller and smaller around the table; all I had was a single yellowing leaf and Maureen’s was missing altogether.

That leaf should probably not have got over the pass, and it’s a fair summary of my thoughts: Copper and Ink aren’t yet able to execute perfectly on their ambition.

Beef n leaf

Beef n leaf

First starter of parmesan beignet with broccoli was pleasant, a clean start with an innocuous foam. The next course was a scallop well seared and served with a chermoula so very punchy that the rest of the dish never recovered. I had rabbit two ways; bonbon of shredded bunny and ham-wrapped loin, with minced mushrooms and a deep jus. Really jolly good, except the spinach puree served with it was over-salted.

Main course was the rump. Cooked rare but not so well prepped; half of us found some unchewable gristle in our piece. Parsnip, potato and shallot accompaniments were all pretty good, but the plating was just a bit duff. The bit of onion ash looked like someone had been cleaning out an ashtray nearby.

Choc tart AND BASIL SORBET OF THE GODS!

Choc tart AND BASIL SORBET OF THE GODS!

The last two courses were desserts and both were splendid. Chiffon cake with orange sorbet and scorched meringue blobs was a good start, probably dish of the day for me. Followed by a sturdy little slice of chocolate tart topped with fresh strawberries and a scoop of basil sorbet on the side. This sorbet was absolutely banging, fantastico, SORBET OF THE GODS. Like being beaten around the head with a huge bunch of fresh basil on a Ligurian hillside. So I guess they saved the best ’til last!

It’s worth reiterating that this was a very reasonable £40 for 5 courses and although I can pick a hole in each dish, we basically had a pleasant meal. The wine list also needs a shout, as it’s packed full of interesting bottles and the two we picked were top-notch. But I do know lots of places to go for a much more consistently brilliant meal at this price point. All that said… they’re a brand new restaurant and a young team, so I’ll definitely come back in a bit and see if they’ve sanded the rough edges off.

Chiffon cake etc

Chiffon cake etc

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