Wine tasting in the central Loire

The Loire changes as you head upstream. Down near the sea it’s awash with Muscadet, head upstream and it becomes a broad flow of Chenin Blanc, but keep going and eventually you’ll be swimming in pure Sauvignon Blanc. This is the grape of Sancerre, Poilly-Fume and Reuilly. And Menetou-Salon but I’ll come back to that. And this is the central Loire. Further upstream as far as I can tell the Loire is just water. So pretty much pointless.

Sancerre

Sancerre


I don’t like most Sauv Blanc. I don’t like the sharp, citric blast of zesty greenery. Actually, show me any wine described as “zesty” and I’ll run a mile. That’s just a preference of mine. Luckily the folk of the central Loire feel the same, and try to turn SB into something more elegant and occasionally surprising. They also throw in some light Pinot Noir for the reds.

We based ourselves this year in Bourges, an absolute gem of a little city with a wonderful huge cathedral and a warren of streets full of medieval half-timber buildings. It really oughta be on the tourist trail, it’s a seriously splendid place to spend a day. Look for the Comptoir de Paris for a great bistro meal in the old town.

Comptoir de Paris, Bourges

Comptoir de Paris, Bourges

We successfully deployed all of our well-honed wine tasting tactics on our three days of touring. (1) Find a couple of recommendations from the Oz Clarke book and visit them – check. (2) Ask someone friendly at a winery where you just found some good wine to recommend other good wineries in the area and then visit those – check. (3) Enjoy a great local wine with a meal and then seek out the winery it came from the next day – check. (4) Try at least one completely random place – check.

In the renowned AOCs of Pouilly-Fume and Sancerre it seems hard to find cheap bargains; the wineries we visited all started their bottles at £8-9 for the basic 2017. On the other hand, pretty much everything was excellent, all the winemakers we met were friendly, and there were plenty of places open any day of the week. The wines I love are typically the ones that have been given some more attention – kept for 3 years or so, perhaps on the lees (sur lie) and perhaps some time in oak. This all adds complexity and balance to the Sauv Blanc and rounds out the green acidic flavours beautifully. Sometimes you even get the smokiness that gives Pouilly-Fume it’s name.

Menetou-Salon is the small AOC nearby that you’ve never heard of, but which is pretty much the same geology and climate. It sounds like it might have been a bit cheap and cheerful in the past, but there are some producers now making wines (to my tastebuds) pretty much as good as most of the ones we tried in Sancerre. So that’s my tip for this wine trip!

To be honest, there are more knock-out tourist destinations, and a wider variety of wine available, if you base yourself further down the Loire near Saumur or Tours. But the central Loire is a great alternative and – for me – the best Sauvignon Blanc in the world.

Bourges cathedral

Bourges cathedral

Review: The Fordwich Arms

Fordwich Arms

Fordwich Arms

Kent is super-beautiful. Seriously got some of the most stunning countryside in the UK. I’m using the word bucolic here, and I’m meaning it sincerely. So many of the villages are staggeringly pretty. Visit Chilham, Ickham, Wickhamburgh, Fordwich and Lenham, then tell me it ain’t true. Actually there’s a mistake in that list: Fordwich isn’t a village. It’s the smallest town in Britain.

The Fordwich Arms looks great inside, all cosy wood panelling and comfy chairs, a real squire’s bolthole after a long day sniping at poachers and dealing with unruly tenants. Or whatever squires do. The welcome is warm too and we were nicely looked after. It might look like a pub but it’s a fine dining restaurant to the bone. Please note that we enjoyed a potent Negroni and then sucked down a bottle of 2005 Tondonia Rioja. This may impact the crispness of the reviewing!

Snacks

Snacks

Three little snacks at the start were all lovely, with a tiny roll of celeriac around ricotta and crisp chicken skin being the prettiest. Best taste was the pure pleasure of a slice of pickle and a blob of whipped cod’s roe sandwiched between two potato crisps. Do yourself a favour: buy a tub of taramasalata, a bag of ready salted and a jar of gherkins. Make your own. They’re AMAZING.

First starter was an absolutely magical slice of trout, intensely deep pink and yielding like butter, served with a vivid pea mousse and a good blob of horseradish snow. It’s not an unfamiliar combination but this was cooked and balanced to perfection.

Followed by a more complex dish of hake with (follow me here) asparagus, wild garlic, baby onion, swede puree, wild mushrooms, semi-dried grapes and a cream sauce made with the lees from Gusbourne vineyard. This was a triumph. The sweetness of the grapes, swede and the onions picked up and intensified the wine-cellar-y flavour of the cream and made a real wonder of the smartly pan-fried piece of hake. Very clever. I’d have left the asparagus off, but that’s me.

Pig

Pig

Now, what can I say about the suckling pig dish that followed? Hmm. How about OMGBESTPIGEVER!? This was a monstrously good fall-off-the-bone piece of meat with perfect crackling and a deeply piggy flavour. In a pan to one side, hay-smoked belly was equally profound. Some sensible veg and a deeply good Grand Marnier sauce. Oh, and a couple of pieces of charred apricot that made a tangily brilliant relish for the meat.

Good puds to finish us off. Seasonal and delicious muddle of strawberries and strawberry sorbet. And then a white chocolate dish that paired up very effectively with confit lemon ice cream and coffee crumble. Solid finale from the blob school of fine dining desserts.

The Fordwich Arms is already a serious contender for meal-of-the-year. Faultless cooking, full flavours, three absolutely stunning dishes, a beautiful setting, great service. The tasting menu is £65 at the moment and that’s great value. Get thee to Kent! And do thyself a favour, make a weekend of it.

Hake

Hake

Review: Alchemilla, Nottingham

Alchemilla has one of the most stunning dining rooms going. It’s an old coach house beneath the pavement in front of the splendid old town houses that the coaches once belonged to. Their maitre d’ showed us the photos of the place when they took it on: there were tree roots growing through the ceiling and standing water on the floor. But someone had a good eye for possibilities, because its now a beautiful stripped-back space with natural light coming from the original roof windows and most of the tables tucked into booths that were of course once the parking spaces for coaches. It’s basically magical. And they looked after us beautifully. So how magical is the menu?

Alchemilla

Alchemilla


The first bite, a tiny warm chicken and porcini tartlet, was dreamily good; a light almost liquid mousse with crispy little shards of chicken skin and bright lemon thyme. Neat. The seaweed-flavoured crackling with parmesan was okay, and my cracker had missed a few seconds in the fryer so was still chewy in parts.

Enoki over duck liver

Enoki over duck liver

My next course of duck liver and enoki was, I have to say, destroyed by soy sauce. So overpowering that it lurked on my palate and in my throat and messed with my next couple of courses. I should have sent it back in hindsight. Instead I left some. It’s a nice idea and I can actually see exactly how the salt/umami taste cuts nicely into the duck liver. Maureen did much better with a raw dice of scallop doused in a pleasant mix of buttermilk and dill oil.

A nice piece of BBQ celeriac was smothered by quinoa soaked in a hefty sweet/salt sauce of some kind. Felt unbalanced and odd. The final starter was better, a wild grain risotto with crispy wild grain on top and a healthy grating of aged parmesan. Or maybe the soy sauce was starting to wear out, washed down by some very good Jurancon.

On to the main, a jolly decent plate of duck; pink and toothy breast, slowly roasted leg and a couple of pieces of heart. You can always win me over with a bit of fowl heart. I liked the punchy little pieces of sweet pickled alexanders stem, and the kohlrabi was… kohlrabi. Meh.

Yogurt with sorrel

Yogurt with sorrel

And then the meal really took off, with three superb desserts! First a stickily delicious bit of diced loquat (look it up!) surrounded by loquat stone cream and sandwiched between two delicate amaranth biscuits. Sublime combo of textures and the floral perfume of the fruit. Second pud was a really inventive and scrumptious combination of curry, coconut, cardamom and chocolate. Smart to choose three flavours that really stand up to the chocolate, which provided our dinner theatre in the form of a chocolate foam mousse turned into feather-light “ice cream” by plopping it into dry ice. Final pud was a bright and cleansing frozen yogurt stacked with an architectural display of wood sorrel leaves on pine gel. Proper nordic forest on the tongue.

So what am I concluding about Alchemilla? Our 7 course menu was £50, and that’s a fair price for the level of ambition on show. And, yeah, for the awesome dining room. It’s all part of the experience! That said, there were definitely a few problematic dishes, a lack of balance and refinement mainly. I found them easy to forgive because it was an otherwise lovely lunch, and really exceptional desserts. I’ll go there again next time I’m in Nottingham – it’s a good discovery.

Celeriac

Celeriac

Review: Folium, Birmingham

Open kitchen at Folium

Open kitchen at Folium

I think perhaps the most satisfying thing a food blogger can do is review a restaurant “before it was famous”. It is for me, anyway. My list of great finds includes: Casamia, Ynyshir and The Black Swan. Particularly Ynyshir, which I got to before any of the major newspaper critics or any other bloggers. In pre-blog days we also tried The Hand & Flowers and L’Enclume long before the Michelin man discovered them. So have I found another future star with Folium? Time will tell, but I’ve got a good feeling!

After a run of pop-ups to hone ideas, Ben Tesh and Lucy Hanlon have a bright and modern dining room in the Jewellery Quarter. There’s nothing novel about the decor, it’s textbook modern British fine dining grey with a really open kitchen for watching the action. Service was friendly but perhaps lacking polish (they’ve only been open four months). We picked the £65 tasting menu and skipped the wine pairing.

Mackerel and wasabi

Mackerel and wasabi

Kicking off, a heart-warming bowl of smoked eel and potato foam, with added umami from a rich chicken stock. Unusual to get a hot dish of smoked eel, it was absolutely superb. Followed up with another spiffy starter, of diced cured mackerel with tiny spheres of pickled cucumber, a soft white wasabi sorbet and oyster mayonnaise. Looked beautiful and ate divinely, with plenty of bouncy flavours.

They made a splendid dish out of kohlrabi, my hat is truly off to them for this one. Long ribbons of the veg cooked to a texture very close to good linguine, doused with a rich and nutty parmesan sauce spiked with truffle flavours and a healthy grating of fresh truffle on top. This was a real treat to eat, I’d have scoffed a whole bowlful happily.

Kohlrabi pasta

Kohlrabi pasta

Cod with a mussel and parsley sauce was accomplished, but easily forgotten for the main course. Two plump, glazed pieces of the most delicious salt marsh lamb, with all the fat melting nicely into the meat. The theme of salt marsh was doubled-down with sea kale and plenty of powdered seaweed, and a blob of magic lamb-fat mayonnaise alongside. Very focused. Very good.

Nice pair of desserts to finish; sheep yogurt, spruce, lemon thyme and white chocolate worked just exactly as well as it sounds and showed real finesse. Chocolate mousse and cobnut crumble was equally good. I am a sucker for chocolate and nuts in any form.

This was a great meal, full of ambition and very well executed. The kohlrabi and the lamb were the two dishes that really stood out and, yeah, made me think that I might have stumbled on a restaurant that’s going to be the critics’ darling some day soon. We’ll see. At the very least, Folium gets a proper shout-out from me as a great new option in the middle of Birmingham!

White choc and spruce

White choc and spruce

Review: The Milestone, Sheffield

Battered cockles

Battered cockles

Sheffield. Medium-big industrial city on the edge of the Peak District. I can report that the middle of Sheffield is really quite handsome, worthy of a few hours wandering. And that a twenty minute drive will have you among some of the most beautiful hills in England. Where it seems to fall a tad short is with good dining options, or certainly those that anyone has written about. We ended up at The Milestone, self-identifying as “Sheffield’s premier gastropub”.

It seems to be the linchpin of an industrial area around the old cutlery factories that is currently being regenerated and stocked with bars and more dining options. It’s a friendly place, with a stripped-back pub feel, although it’s certainly dedicated fully to dining these days. The atmosphere is buzzy, tables tucked in close together, but we didn’t feel squished. And they love gutsy flavours here.

Maureen started with battered cockles, marrowfat peas and tartare sauce. Battered cockles are exactly the crunchy/salty flavour bombs you expect them to be. My starter was a sticky chunk of treacle-glazed beef shin with burnt onion puree. Satisfying combo, though the bone marrow bonbon with it wasn’t a great idea; the deep-fried crunch overwhelmed the subtle goo within.

I went all out on soft & sticky with glazed pork jowl for mains. Meltingly soft cheek, good celeriac mash, and the bitter bite of braised chicory to cut through the gooey meat. Nice dish. Maureen’s beef brisket in a soy and peanut sauce was an oddity, served on noodles with a mixture of shredded veg and sesame dressing. But I am here to tell you that it ate very well, the sauce powerful but balanced, the toasted nutty taste working well with the soft beef. The beef perhaps a tad dry, to be fair.

Peanut beef

Peanut beef

Pud was claimed as Yorkshire Parkin but this was a throughly deconstructed affair. The parkin came in the form of shards of gingery biscuit, went very well with chocolate crumb and mocha gel, and the really brave – and delicious – black mushroom ice cream. A thoroughly funky and unashamedly mushroomy taste. I’m not sure the whole dessert was more than the sum of its parts, but I did like all the parts.

I can recommend The Milestone for dinner in Sheffield, though be ready for some thoroughly OTT flavours. At £29 for 3 courses it feels about right to me.

Parkin

Parkin