Review: Supawan, King’s Cross

Supawan

Supawan

Supawan has been around for a while, we just don’t often get up to King’s Cross. Now we feel like we need to find some more excuses to get up there, because it immediately slots into our top three favourite Thai meals in London! Why? Proper, punchy, full-on flavours and really excellent technique. It’s classic stuff, done very well.

The restaurant itself is a lovely little cave of fun decor with a front room overflowing with orchids. None of it came out of a design catalogue, though, it’s all home-made and the more friendly for it. Service was equally friendly and as it filled up on a Thursday evening (we were there early) Supawan had the vibe of a local favourite.

We started with some sweetcorn fritters and an aubergine larb. If you sometimes order sweetcorn fritters for brunch, know that these ones are infinitely better. For one thing, they are mostly sweetcorn, held together in just a web of nut-brown

Sweetcorn fritters

Sweetcorn fritters

batter. There’s also a fragrant load of finely shredded kaffir lime leaves in the batter. And a punchy chilli paste to dip them in. The aubergine larb is a nice idea too; the gobbets of aubergine filling the place of minced beef, surrounded by all the minty sour-hot flavours of larb salad.

We shared father’s red beef curry as a main, with rice and then a green mango salad on the side. The salad might be the highlight for me, lush flavours from the sour green mango, all soused in a perfectly balanced sweet-sour-salty-fiery dressing with shallots and herbs, roasted cashews and some lovely scrunchy-fried little dried shrimps. The beef curry was wonderfully deep and full-flavoured, though, the heat building as you devoured the lovely slow-cooked beef until you’re in that perfect state at the end of a Thai meal: grinning happily and slightly red in the face.

It’ll be something like £35 each for dinner before drinks and without dessert, maybe a bit more if you’ve a big appetite. So it’s not the cheapest Thai food around, but given it’s absolutely one of the best I’ll certainly be back whenever I need to be somewhere vaguely close to King’s Cross for dinner!

Aubergine larb

Aubergine larb

Review: Dim Sum Library, Covent Garden

Shredded potato

Shredded potato

Different food cultures, different norms. Sometimes it catches you off-guard, though. We ordered various bits of dim sum, and then a fried rice main dish and a side dish at Dim Sum Library. Then we were a bit startled when our side dish and two dim sum came even before we’d been served our drinks, and then the other dim sum and the fried rice arrived two minutes later.

But of course we should have known, as we’ve been to Hong Kong and enjoyed some amazing dim sum. And you pick what you want, and it usually appears then-and-there or a minute later. And then you eat it, and maybe order something else, and then when you’ve had enough dim sum maybe you order a bigger dish to finish you off. Just… that’s not usually the way things are done in central London, even in restaurants bringing cuisines from far across the world to us!

Old fashioned

Old fashioned

We were surprised and amused, not displeased. Because the table was just big enough to contain all these plates, and all the food was delicious and the dim sum all scoffed greedily before they had chance to cool down!

It’s a big, high-ceilinged dining room in a grand building, furnished in dark wood and cool paint, with a huge long bar-and-dim-dum-counter to whet your appetite. Service was great, very friendly. Their cocktails are excellent, I had a great old fashioned given some vegetal smokiness with pu’erh tea. Our side dish was one of my favourite Chinese treats; shredded potato salad, and this one was dressed with a good sweet-sharp vinegar and just enough chilli.

The three dim sum we picked were all excellent and felt very original. The char sui buns were baked in a very delicate pastry with a crunchy-sweet crust, the pork inside just packed with the very intense and vivid red flavour of char sui. There was a “Dan dan xiao long bao” which was a lovely soft little boiled dumpling filled with a flavour-packed hit of

Crispy pork dumplings

Crispy pork dumplings

pork and the fiery broth used in Dan Dan noodles. Then the very dramatic little “Yu Xiang” crispy pork dumplings, which looked like alien egg cases on their folded metal platter. The charcoal-coloured crispy rice casing was scrunchy and delicious, and the delicately spiced minced pork filling was a great counterpoint in texture, good flavour too.

Our “black cod fried rice” had less cod than I’d expected; crispy-fried nuggets of the fish scattered through a lovely crunchy fried rice with oodles of fermented black beans for flavour. Extremely moreish to eat, so much so that I’ve just bought a pack of fermented black soy beans to make fried rice at home!

All in all, a great place to have in Covent Garden, I can imagine coming back frequently. Our meal was about £30 each before drinks, though admittedly this was on the lighter side – I could have tucked in another dim sum or two!

Dim Sum Library

Dim Sum Library

Review: Meat at the Parish, Windsor

Beetroot salad

Beetroot salad

Meat at the Parish is a steak restaurant right in the middle of Windsor, within sight of the castle. At lunchtime on Saturday it was pretty quiet – fair to assume most tourists don’t think of steak for lunch. But hey, we certainly had good service. Inside the decor is rather non-descript dark and modern, comfortable for a long lunch.

My starter of beetroot salad and goat cheese was nicely presented and the beet slices perfectly seasoned, albeit the goat cheese wasn’t particularly special. Maureen had an onion “blossom” – a big onion, sliced into slivers, floured and deep-fried – with spicy mayo to dip into. I’m a big fan of fried onion, and with the spicy mayo it was a great snack.

Onion blossom

Onion blossom

We shared a ribeye steak for main, neither of us wanting a whole 350g steak to ourselves, but that gave us the opportunity to add a few sides: roast garlic cloves, bone marrow, heritage tomato salad and fries. Oh, and a peppercorn sauce, which was pleasant but needed more green peppercorn tang and oomph. The steak was middling, I’ve certainly had less chewy ribeye, though it was correctly cooked to medium-rare with nice char lines. Good fries, really enjoyed the soft cloves of roast garlic with the steak, but the tomato salad was (no surprise in England in March) a bit flavourless.

We finished up with a nice pair of sorbets: honeydew melon and coconut. If you have steak you’ll pay around £50-60 for three courses before drinks, if you pick a different main it’ll be £40-50. For the quality I think this is steep, so I’m probably going to go three doors down to A La Russe for dinner in Windsor.

Steak and sides

Steak and sides

Review: Josephine, Chelsea

Josephine

There’s a type of restaurant. It takes a classic local cuisine, recreates it in a bijou corner of London in a comfortable dining room that looks like the chocolate-box version of the old local restaurants where the cuisine originated, perfects the classic dishes, then doubles the pricetag and tops it with a winelist hefty with mark-up. I know it’s a type, because I’ve been to four or five of them over the years, and Josephine is certainly one.

But in case you got the impression that I think it’s a bad thing, it’s really not. You can’t just pop to Lyons if you fancy experiencing a classic Lyonnaise Bouchon, but you can pop to Chelsea and try one that (I’m willing to bet) is as good or better than some of the originals. Price aside, of course.

Josephine is properly packed, everyone sitting at simple, round, linen-draped tables, squished in enough that the ample waiters sometimes give you a bump and an “excusez moi” as they try to shimmy past with plates for another table. It’s nice, and friendly, and the wine list is full of France, albeit with only a few to choose from in the two-digit category.

Cheese souffle

Cheese souffle

Of course there was nice, crusty bread on the table. I needed it to soak up the spare cream sauce from around my cheese souffle starter. Wonderfully light souffle, good tang of strong cheese, wicked cream sauce. Plenty of room for my main course of andouillette! I’ve got a bad addiction to tripe sausage and tend to order it any chance I get. This was a good specimen, full flavoured without going over, nicely peppery and unctuous texture. Served with a simple mustard sauce and very silky mash potato. Maureen’s veal sweetbread was a sturdy piece, well char-grilled on the outside and very creamy within. The morel sauce it was bathed in was another monster of cream, but packed with the earthily perfumed morel flavour it went perfectly with the offal. Naturally, no-one really wants their meal to just be a sweetbread doused in cream sauce, so we’d ordered sides: dauphinoise potatoes, rustic and pungently garlicky, and green beans dressed with fried shallots.

We squeezed in pudding too. My lemon meringue tart was a lovely specimen, properly tangy custard and crisp pastry, while Maureen had a light and lovely nougat parfait in a pool of raspberry sauce. You might land at around £60 each for three courses before drinks, which is obviously kinda toppy for French bistro classics. These are done very well, though, is all I can say.

Sweetbread

Sweetbread

Review: The Shed, Porthgain

The Shed

Porthgain is a tiny harbour village tucked into a little rocky cove on the north Pembrokeshire coast. It feels like the middle of nowhere on a wet weekday evening in March (Pembrokeshire is like the forgotten version of Cornwall) and so it’s odd to walk into through the battered little door of The Shed down on the quayside and find a bustling crowd in this little fish bistro, many of them seemingly locals.

I had local seabass fillets on a richly tomato-y stew of butterbeans and chorizo, with a handful of battered cockles scattered around. The fish was cooked a little more thoroughly than I prefer, the stew was very satisfying, rich and herby, and the cockles were kinda okay with the batter more fluffy than scrunchy.

Sea bass

Sea bass

Maureen sensibly went with the fish and chips, for which The Shed is renowned. This was a purely splendid piece of cod, cloud-like soft and flakey, in nicely brown scrunchy batter. The chips were splendid, the mushy peas absolutely traditional, while the curry sauce was a big step up from typical chip-shop curry sauce, very much its own thing, warmly spicy and brilliant with both chips and fish. Though to be fair, that cod needed absolutely nothing but a little salt and vinegar.

Their fish and chips was £19, the seabass more like £27, and I’d say the mark-up on a more basic fish-and-chip restaurant was well worth it for the quality and lovely location.

Fish n chips

Fish n chips