Review: Rockfish, Brixham

Rockfish terrace, cloudy eve!

Rockfish terrace, cloudy eve!

There are more than a dozen Rockfish restaurants along the Devon and Dorset coast, a successful little chain by anyone’s standard, and the one at Brixham in Devon was the first and is the place where most of their fish are landed.

The dining room does have a bit of a chain vibe, anonymous rows of identical tables and pre-printed everything, but it’s warm enough to get a table on the outside terrace then you’ve got a lovely ringside seat to Brixham’s fishing harbour and can gaze out to sea, watching as the brave boats chug away when twilight beckons to go and catch tomorrow’s menu. The fish on offer in the restaurant very much change with the season, and they make this clear by having the team run through what’s on and what’s not to each table, circling the fish and scribbling the market price on your table with a marker pen. It’s a good touch. But how’s the food?

Cuttlefish

Cuttlefish

We both pick some crispy fried cuttlefish to begin, done just as you’d have crispy squid in a Chinese restaurant; fried in the lightest possible batter and having a good bite but not chewy, well seasoned and with a bit of sweet chilli sauce to dip in. Nice enough. Maureen goes with a skate wing in caper butter for main, and it’s an absolute monster. Beautifully cooked with an even brown crust to the skin and tons of juicy meat beneath. I’ve gone for Dover sole and this is also a fine, large fish, big for one person, and dressed very simply in loads of browned butter. The fish is also perfectly cooked, and a whole Dover sole in nut-brown butter is always a treat. The fish comes with bottomless chips, decent specimens with some crispness to them, and we also order a side of samphire. I think this has been fried in butter, which served to over-amp the saltiness but also add an interesting nutty-burnt tang to the veg.

We finish up with a perfectly decent creme brulee. Rockfish is at heart a trad seafood restaurant, cooking all its spankingly fresh seafood very well indeed and not trying to dazzle with flavour pairings or pretty plating. This is probably sensible, it has an awful lot of tourists to feed (one hopes). Three courses is probably around £45 and given the generosity of seafood I think this is a decent price.

Skate wing

Skate wing

Review: The Club House, West Bexington

The Club House

The Club House

Palaver! We decided to stop at Hive Beach Cafe – one of our favourite spots on the coast – for a seafood lunch on the way home from Devon. Then, kablooie, one of the tyres on the car went pop. We ended up in a lay-by off the A35 waiting for the AA man. Who was brilliant, by the way, putting a temporary wheel on the car and phoning around so that we could limp into Bridport and get a new tyre scarcely an hour after the blow-out. Don’t ask why we don’t have our own spare wheel.

Sadly, even the hour meant that lunch service had finished at Hive Beach. But miraculously, their sister restaurant in West Bexington seems to have all-day service! The Club House, as the name implies, is laid out a little more yacht-club chic than the Beach Cafe. This caused us to indulge in a glass of their house bubbly (made down the road at Castlewood in Devon); a really lovely drop of summer fizz, with some nice biscuity notes as well as clean peachy flavours.

Then, both yearning for crab, we both picked their “loaded nachos”. These turned out to be beautiful, big, fried wheat tortilla chips that were sturdy enough to hold up under a mountain of crab meat, white and brown, dressed with a luscious brown-meat sauce along with salsa fresca, creamy guacamole and a hefty squirt of lime juice. The crab was beautiful and fresh, the whole dish perfect for a breezy summer’s day, well worth £17.

So now you know: The Club House is just as good as Hive Beach Cafe, and even keeps slightly more generous hours. Next time you’re on the Dorset coast, eh?

Loaded crab nachos

Loaded crab nachos

Review: Da Mario, Kensington

Da Mario

They’ve been serving Italian food at Da Mario in leafy Kensington for decades and decades. It is exactly what you would expect from an antique London Italian restaurant, from the mish-mash of old furniture to the photos of famous visitors on the walls alongside pictures of glorious bits of the mother country. At Da Mario they get to include Princess Di among their roll of honour. The menu is packed with all the classic pastas, pizzas and extras that you’d expect.

We shared an aubergine parmigiana to start, and it was exactly what you’d want: the decadently herby-oily cheese and tomato flavour with some aubergine hiding in there somewhere. Maureen had the rigatone amatriciana for main, and the tomato sauce had a smoky depth of flavour special to Italian restaurants that I’ve never been able to replicate as a home cook. My rigatone with mushrooms and chunks of parma ham in a cream sauce was also excellent, the ideal bite to the pasta and a warm glow from the nicely balanced sauce. Rich and satisfying.

Wine by the glass was great quality at a ridiculously cheap price for Kensington, clearly knowledgeably sourced through many years of experience. With pastas around £15 and starters around a tenner, two courses for £25 is clearly splendid value pretty much anywhere in the country, let alone here. It’s trad, for sure, but in an area renowned for having nowhere much to eat it’s well worth knowing Da Marios.

Rigatone con fungi

Rigatone con fungi

Review: Chisou, Mayfair

Chisou

Chisou

Sushi makes for a good pre-theatre meal: it’s light, service is usually fast, and of course I love it. Hmm… I suppose I could add that we also don’t usually drink much with sushi, so should be altogether less dozy for the performance, although this time we indulged in a flask of Chisou‘s house sake! Luckily Evita was sufficiently high-octane that we had no worries about staying alert throughout.

Tucked down a little side street off Bond Street, Chisou feels like a typical small Japanese restaurant, with faultless service and a chorus of “irasshaimase!” when guests arrive. We sat at the counter, there are plenty of small tables, Japanese decor and a kind of tidy clutter. It feels welcoming.

Tongue

Tongue

Edamame with a properly spicy sauce added made for a good snack (especially with the sake) while we chose our food. Nine pieces of sushi omakase, a crab and unagi roll labelled as a house special, and some sliced ox tongue. The sushi is all very good and I’m surprised that every piece is different fish, including three cuts of tuna and everything from yellowtail to mackerel. The roll is excellent: plenty of white crab meat with a little brown for flavour makes up the centre of the roll, glistening pieces of unagi eel perched on top with the classic sweet unagi glaze. The ox tongue reminds me of the first time I had this delicacy the Japanese way: sturdy, pleasant texture with a good umami flavour from the seared outside and a sprinkling of salt and pepper. Nice treat.

The house sushi is good, clean and crisp but with some fruity notes coming out. We paid about £30 each for the food, which feels like decent value for good sushi in central London. Chisou definitely goes on my little list of good places for casual eats in town.

Unagi crab roll

Unagi crab roll

Review: The Vine Tree, Crickhowell

Cheese biscuit

Cheese biscuit

Actually The Vine Tree is across the river in the village of Llangattock, but I’m guessing more people will at least have heard of Crickhowell. The lovely little town in the Usk Valley, upriver from Abergavenny and beneath the Brecon Beacons? No? It’s a lovely area, you should take a break there.

The Vine Tree got a new head chef in Matthew Sampson about three months before our visit, along with a new tasting menu format. We were there on a Thursday night and the ambience was a little quirky. The dining room has a small bar, with mainstream beer taps, and the decor seems to still be waiting for a refresh to be in keeping with their destination tasting menu ambitions (Crickhowell is small, there are not enough locals here for an £85 tasting menu). The wooden chairs are a bit unforgiving. On a Thursday night there were only two other tables occupied, in a place with surely forty covers, and just one front-of-house and two in the kitchen. Service was good and friendly, though.

Bite of sea bream

Bite of sea bream

We went with the shorter £60 menu. Snack of a cheesy biscuit topped with Welsh cheddar and black garlic ketchup was tasty enough, the biscuit a chewy texture when I was expecting crunch. First little starter was a bijou piece of sea bream topped with slivers of jalapeno and served in a clear tomato broth with jalapeno oil. This ate very nicely, with a salt tang from the salmon roe on top. Second starter was a little dish of hen-of-the-woods mushroom in a deeply umami broth of mushroom and onion. Absolutely top-notch flavour bomb.

I went for the beef main, a thumb-sized piece of slow-cooked beef finished to a magnificent char on the barbecue, topped with a cherry ketchup and then cabbage and nasturtium leaves. Really ravishing bit of meat paired with the clean, sharp fruity flavour of the cherry. Maureen’s cod was perfectly cooked and served in a warming cider veloute with a good dollop of bright yellow pike roe on top. Pudding was a spooful of beautiful chocolate mousse scattered with crunchy puffed spelt grains and a bright tang of orange and olive oil; very luscious but over too quickly.

Beef

Beef

I should mention the nice little Parker House roll for bread course, and the dish of luscious little lemon and burnt butter madeleines they served with coffee, because these did much to make the meal feel sufficient. Sadly that’s my main takeaway from our dinner: how small every course was, even by tasting menu standards, how we scoffed every morsel of bread when we’d normally be saying “mustn’t eat too much of the bread, it’ll spoil our appetite…” It’s a shame because I thought the cooking was really excellent, I enjoyed the flavours in every dish, and it would be a good find in the middle of the Brecon Beacons if the portions were only just a little more… generous. Which is the right word. It’s not about whether a fine dining meal has filled you up, it’s about whether it feels generous.
Madeleines

Madeleines