Review: Chet’s, Shepherd’s Bush

Chet’s bar

I remember the first (only?) Thai meal I had in America. This was, admittedly, almost eighteen years ago in California. Huge chunks of chicken breast, capsicum peppers, baby sweetcorn, all bathed in a sauce that was gunky and thick with coconut cream and flavoured with… well, nothing. Just the mildest hint of some familiar Thai flavourings – maybe a tad of lemongrass and a whiff of lime leaf. We ate a fraction of it, just to fill a hole.

So I wasn’t sure what to make of the “Thai-American” vibe of Chet’s restaurant in…

Ha! As though I’d eat out somewhere that didn’t already have good reviews. One of the challenges in writing catchy reviews: it’s much easier to be funny trashing a place than praising it, but unless you’re (a) paid to write reviews or (b) a culinary masochist then you’d never waste your time and money at a place that gets truly bad reviews.

The menu at Chet’s is definitely unlike any other Thai restaurant. Although they’re based in the glossy Hoxton Hotel it’s decidedly casual dining: sandwiches, rice bowls, burgers. The Thai comes out in the flavourings and the sauces they throw in with these dishes. And don’t let the casualness fool you, this kitchen puts a lot of care and attention into each dish.

Roti and khao soi

Roti and khao soi

Take the snack we shared: roti with khao soi sauce. The little pot of khao soi was exactly as I remember it from northern Thailand, a beautifully fragrant yellow curry, humming with lemongrass and turmeric. The roti was pliant but fried to a beautiful nutty crispiness around the edges. Pulling off chunks of that half-soft/half-crisp roti and dipping it was a pleasure I could enjoy as a mid-morning snack every day of the week. Best roti ever? Yeah, maybe so.

I ordered a grilled pork rice bowl, a tasty bit of well-charred marinated pork with a pot of zippy satay sauce to pour over it. Simple and satisfying mid-week lunch. Maureen ordered the more main-course-y pineapple rice. This was a magnificent thing: half a pineapple hollowed out, with a cascade of colourful and fragrant fried rice tumbling out of it in a friendly mound. To be fair, this would have done both of us for lunch on it’s own. The rice had a beautifully warm garlicky and gingery flavour, only a little heat, moistened by the pineapple juice and scattered through with the diced pineapple softened by cooking. I can’t use flavours along to describe how satisfying this was to scoff. The neatest touch: they’d fried some of the rice hard enough to turn it crisp and crunchy, adding a great extra texture that actually rather made the dish.

Their cocktails are solid too, a smoky bloody Mary and flavours of banana in the sour. A good lunch would be £20 each without drinks. The evening menu looks to have more solidly Thai dishes on it. I’d be keen to go back, this is a great place to know if you find yourself around Shepherd’s Bush.

Pineapple rice

Pineapple rice

Review: Mamapen, Soho

Mamapen

Right in the middle of Soho is apparently the only place doing Cambodian food in London: Mamapen at The Sun & 13 Cantons pub. I’m not sure how long that statement will stay true? I’ve only spent a few days in Cambodia and didn’t search out a lot of local food (indeed, the only street food I ate gave me a two-day love affair with toilets), but it seems to me that it may not have enough unique elements to pull it out from the melange of SE Asian cuisines around it. Time will tell!

And I don’t know how typically Cambodian the food at Mamapen is either. Not that this matters, if it’s good eats! Our first dish was “pork toast” with a fried egg on top. Inside the nice crispy panko was a good amount of savoury minced pork on a piece of toast. This was a good, filthy snack with a perfectly cooked egg atop and a generous wallop of crispy chilli oil. Next we had “tofu knots” which turned out to be pieces of tofu skin tied into sturdy knots, dressed heavily with lots more crispy chilli oil and crispy onion bits. To me these knots were just a little uninteresting in themselves, and the dressing thuggish.

Curry

Curry

A skewer of shiitake mushrooms, very beautifully charred off the grill with a tangy dressing, was much better. Should have ordered another couple of skewers. The main that we shared – sour pineapple curry – was very good indeed. Unashamedly big chunks of pineapple, char-grilled a little first, came with roast squash and pickled unripe mango in a cheery bowl of highly distinctive curry. Definitely on the sour side, fermented almost, with flavours I couldn’t entirely identify. No heat to speak of, heavy on the coconut milk instead, but a lovely flavour.

Glancing down the menu of “hash browns” and “fried chicken bun” will show you that this is all meant to be food full of cheerful, easy pleasures. It definitely hits that spot if you pick the right dishes (I wouldn’t order tofu knots again!) and for the middle of Soho it’s very decently priced indeed: £30 each will give you a good meal, before drinks.

Pork toast

Pork toast

Review: The White Horses, Rottingdean

Roast beef

Roast beef

The White Horses Hotel in Rottingdean used to be a pretty typical boozer and meh restaurant on the seafront of the postcard village of Rottingdean, along the way from Brighton. Recently bought and re-vamped, now it’s like walking into the set of an Agatha Christie, all tasteful art deco furnishing, cane backed chairs and bright blue seaside skies through the picture windows. It’s a marvellous setting for a relaxed lunch and we came on a Sunday to try.

Being Sunday, we mostly picked the roast beef. They’ve put a good deal of effort into the makings of a good Sunday roast. The beef was very bravely pink, giving it a lot of great flavour. I will admit that I’ve had more tender roast beef, and if you’re going this pink you want it tender as possible, but I’m splitting hairs here as it was certainly the right quality for the price-point. Loved the Yorkshire pudding, a puffy and un-greasy specimen which they had topped with a scoop of lusciously slow-braised beef cheek. I’ll whisper it: that was the best bit! That said, the gravy was top-notch and plentiful. Roast potatoes were waxy, good on flavour if not crunch. And a roasted chunk of hispi cabbage with blackened edges accompanied well, along with sturdy roast carrots full of earthy flavour.

I couldn’t help adding a sticky toffee pudding on the end. For research, of course. This was a very good one: the pudding moist even without the sauce, the sauce plentiful and bitter-sweet, and the scoop of clotted cream ice-cream on top was silky and rich.

Sunday roast was £23, just about spot-on for the quality, but I’d say the attentive service and the lovely setting tip this over into a strong recommendation. Certainly if you’re planning to be anywhere east of Brighton, a long stretch of coast where there’s almost nothing else worth your time!

STP

STP

Review: Toklas, Embankment

Cocktails at Toklas

Toklas occupies a very handy spot, just off the Strand in what is quite a wasteland for useful places to eat. So it’s been on our radar for a while. So having tickets to see Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell in Much Ado About Nothing at the Theatre Royal gave us the perfect opportunity for a pre-theatre quickie. The play was brilliant, by the by, a most bonkers and over-the-top modernisation of a Shakespeare comedy, which is frankly what you need to do if you want a modern audience to actually find a Shakespeare comedy funny!

The dining room is relaxed and very with-it, classy old tables and comfortable chairs in a stripped-back space. We picked a couple of cocktails to kick us off, an accomplished calvados and benedictine concoction and a good sour based around mezcal. Then we got stuck into a starter to share; breaded and fried pieces of skate with buttered agretti – a kind of delicate spaghetti-like form of samphire from Italy – and dressed tomato. The skate was firm, excellent dipped into the aioli humming with garlic on the side.

Skate

Skate

For mains I went with a pork chop and Maureen picked linguine with crab and chilli. The linguine was splendid, perfect pasta and plenty of crab worked through it. Lush, and just a touch of chilli. My pork chop came with escarole, something from the chicory family which was braised and spiked with raisins and capers. I did like this veg a lot, great partner to pork. The chop was a solid specimen, good fat on it, some nice charring. For me it was a little over. In most pork chops there comes a point when you realise you’re just soldiering on rather than actually enjoying it. Only the best are enjoyable to the last bite and this wasn’t one of those. Not bad, but then for £30 perhaps I was expecting a faultless chop?

Their chips are amazing, though. Beautiful, salty, crunchy shards of potato. Shards is the right word, they looked like a potato had shattered into the perfect chips.

So that was our meal. A three-course meal will be in the £55 region and I personally think I can find equivalent three courses in London for a chunk less than that. Toklas is solidly good, classy, and worth knowing about… but it’s not going to become a regular for me.

Just chips

Just chips

Review: Row on 5, Mayfair

Row on 5

Row on 5

I’m developing some clear preferences in my old age, I think. Nowadays I’ve got a strong preference for more informal mid-range dining, preferably ambitious and often ethnic. Small plates almost always feature. But as Row on 5 has just reminded me, I also love a real splurge on a destination restaurant where you feel super looked-after, the food is just one notch beyond expectations, the surroundings are plush and the whole experience is essentially indulgent.

There’s another class of dining in between these two: fine dining, usually tasting menu, sometimes ambitious and/or ethnic, friendly service. It’s this end of things I seem to have lost interest in. It’s often pricy without being truly indulgent, and yet the needs of fine dining means it can’t be as BOOM with flavours. At the end of the day, I usually forget those meals within a couple of weeks of eating them. Snack, snack, snack, seafood, fish, meat, cheese, pre-dessert, dessert, petit fours n coffee, rinse and repeat.

Venison dim sum

Venison dim sum

Of course that was the essence of the menu at Row on 5 too. A lot of particularly good dishes, which I’ll come back to. But the memorable meals are so often the wider experience. They have a beautiful lounge space downstairs and a beautiful dining room above, with striking lighting and a great open kitchen. It feels properly glamorous. The service is pitched just perfect too: very friendly, but highly polished. You are made to feel special. They have a gigantic wine tome. HUGE. ENORMOUS. And while I usually grumble at wine lists where so few wines are sub-£100 that you’d feel like a pauper ordering one of them, on this occasion the passion implied by the gigantic tome makes it alright. Their wine collection is on display all over the restaurant too; when we returned downstairs for petit fours and coffees, they sat us in the private wine room where we could mooch the collection and their wine library. See? I’ll remember this meal for a lot longer. As long as the food was okay…

Wine tome

Wine tome

It was. Superb, in fact. I’ve had a few venison main courses this winter, but the piece of sika deer loin here was in another class. I’ve no idea whether it was the sourcing, storage or cooking but it was a magical piece of meat. Even if the blackcurrant and beetroot elements were hardly innovative (just very excellent). The five-spicy dim sum of shredded venison was a delicious but also stunningly presented addition, like a tiny fuzzy comet.

Having started in the middle I need to rewind, as some of the snacks were splendid. The dice of tuna loin on a crisp little squid ink case, topped with a tiny slice of fatty otoro tuna, singing with a fragrant hit of yuzu, was one of the standouts. Delicate pieces of raw langoustine with tiny crisp flowers of finger lime on top and a sabayonne of salted egg was another. The base was a clear tomato gel with a wonderfully deep and smoky flavour over which the finger lime hummed beautifully. Also very much loved the scallop, unashamedly meaty and dense, well caramelised with a frankly yummy XO glaze. Best scallop I’ve had in a while.

Langoustine

Langoustine

The bread course was more indulgence, more like a crisply glazed pastry served with chicken skin butter. Naughty. The main fish course was turbot, of course. The sauce was bold, made with monkfish liver, dotted with fermented chunks of razor clam and peeled grapes, finished with plenty of lovage oil. The whole dish was lovely. After the venison came a lovely little Stilton tartlet, a refreshing zip of kaffir lime snow on a Sauternes jelly, and then a very accomplished chocolate pudding full of bitter-sweet flavours and Jerusalem artichoke ice cream. Yes, yes, we’d enjoyed the Giant Wine Tome too much at this point for me to keep careful notes…

The bill was, of course, as massive as the wine tome. The menu is £250 per head before drinks. It’s a price I’m willing to pay (occasionally!) for a special occasion, to feel indulgent and indulged for a whole evening; we were there from 18:30 to 23:00 …so if you calculate your restaurant bill per hour, this is ironically much closer in value to some modern tasting menu places where you’re in-and-out in 1.5 hours and the bill is around £300 for two! I’ll leave you to decide where you place value, but Row on 5 definitely scores highly in flavour, quality, indulgence and service on anyone’s scale.

Tuna snack

Tuna snack