Review: Som Saa, Spitalfields

Fermented sausage

Fermented sausage

One of the first new-breed Thai restaurants in London, I was put off visiting Som Saa for a long while due to a sad episode of racism tangled up with the restaurant six years ago (here’s a relevant Twitter thread). But we were at Spitalfields and needed lunch, and I’m optimistic enough to hope that – even if people struggled at the time with basic stuff like apologies – lessons may have quietly been learned.

In any event, the place is still here and their signature deep-fried sea bass is still on the menu. We ordered that, along with a mushroom laab, a pork neck curry and some cashews and fermented pork sausage to start. The cashews are tasty bar snacks, roasted to deep brown with a sweet-spicy-lime-y dusting. The fermented sausage has a great flavour, nicely sour and umami.

Pork neck curry

Pork neck curry

The sea bass is a wonderful beast, curled upon the plate and staring up at us like an angry horror film monster. One side is soft, delicate white flesh and the other is fried to a golden crisp. Both sides are delicious with the big pile of mint-heavy herbs, shallots, lime and chilies piled alongside. It’s a proper signature dish. The mushroom laab was also splendid, powerful earthy-fiery flavours shot through a good heap of chews oyster and other mushrooms. No complaints about the pork neck curry either, which had a brave amount of heat (especially if you stumbled on some of the big bits of chilli) and a mouth-watering sour note.

Som Saa is a good new-breed Thai option. I guess for me it falls somewhere between the earnestness of Kiln and the punchy joy of Plaza Khao Gaeng. You’ll probably pay around £30 each before drinks, which is good value for the quality. We picked a couple of the house cocktails: both good, with clear Thai flavours and highly drinkable.

Sea bass

Sea bass

Native at Netherwood Estate, Worcestershire

Native at Netherwood

Native at Netherwood

We first dined at Native five years ago when they had a place near Borough Market and I really enjoyed their inventive use of native ingredients: they served us aged ex-dairy cow before it was trendy, and Kentish wood ants on our pea pod ice cream. White chocolate and bone marrow caramel served in the bone. It all worked really well and made me smile.

So now they’ve moved into the absolute wilderness of the Worcestershire countryside, taking over the dining room that used to be Pensons, and since we were visiting the area we decided to stop in for the short version of their first tasting menu. The dining room is a stunner, high ceiling and impressive woven light fittings like giant weaverbird nests, huge windows out onto the country garden.

Trout

Trout

The menu kinda underwhelmed me, though, probably because of what I had been expecting. After an excellent snack-bite of sticky duck leg wrapped in a shiso leaf and some very good sourdough with a nut-brown crust we went on to… chalk-stream trout. Gently cooked and with a crisp skin, served with a beurre blanc of woodruff. I’m not sure the earthy-hay flavour of woodruff really goes with trout, but it was mostly overwhelmed by the salty bites of trout roe on top.

The main was… Creedy Carver duck. Aged to intensify the flavour, served with a smoked beetroot puree and sliced roast beetroot. The beetroot was a golden variety called Flaming Barrel, beautifully sweet, and the smoked puree was a splendid relish for the duck. Excellent gravy. Overall a very nice main.

Blackcurrant

Blackcurrant

Dessert was blackcurrants with buttermilk icecream and a good blackcurrant leaf foam. Nice flavour but one of those textureless dessert you scarcely notice. It was served with a tempura blackcurrant leaf, but this had a bitter flavour and the tempura was heavy and oily and overwhelmed the delicate leaf. The bitterness didn’t come from the leaf – I ate one of the leaves that dressed the plate, just to check! It was much better without the batter.

Apart from the tempura leaf, good cooking throughout. But I try to blog my personal reaction to a meal, and after ex-dairy cow and wood ants this was just… unmemorable. Chalk-stream trout and Creedy Carver duck? Sounds like the menu at a thousand 2-rosette country house hotels. I suspect we were just unlucky – there’s every chance their first menu was just playing safe while they settle in and explore their new surroundings (they’d only been open 2 months!). The short menu was £65 before drinks. But there we go: I’ll only likely return if I start seeing rave reviews from all the nationals and the best bloggers!

Duck

Duck

Review: Akara, Borough

Akara

Akara

I’ve said it before, but I love London for its wealth of food. I’d lay good money that there is nowhere else in the world where so many different global cuisines are on offer at both the cheap-and-authentic and top-drawer-reimagined-dining ends of the spectrum. Borough Market, despite its earthy origins, is now a great place to seek the latter. Rambutan for high-spice Sri Lankan, Kolae for top-notch Thai, El Pastor for tacos, Padella for pasta, and now Akara for fiery West African cooking that (I suspect) bears no resemblance in presentation to what you’d find in the restaurant scene of a West African city, but maybe has all the right flavours.

Short rib

Short rib

The dining room is a lovely airy space, curved wood and plants, and on a hot summer’s day spilling out onto the street. We grab a table in the breeze and order cocktails. My Kojo is rum-based with kumquat triple sec, lime and verjus. The lime in it is clarified, so what I get is a short drink with beautifully clear and clean citrus flavours. Maureen’s Kaya starts with fig-infused bourbon and adds more fig and banana notes; it’s another concoction of complete clarity and great flavour.

We start with a couple of akaras – the house speciality, a soft crumbly bun with a slightly sticky and nut-brown outside (think of a financier, but savoury) split in half and filled with good stuff. Mine is slivers of barbecue celeriac, Maureen’s is a fresh crab salad. Then there is a bowl of seriously punchy sauce to dip each in; Maureen’s includes the brown crab meat with habaneros and is particularly lush. The akara are good, I could line up and eat three of these and it would be a fine lunch.

Cod collar moqueca

Cod collar moqueca

But we go on to a couple of the mains. The first is a short-rib kebab, the meat richly flavoured and moist, the peanut-based source (with just a bit of fire this time) keeps great company with it and the charred shallot goes well. This dish also goes superbly with the side of Efik rice that we’ve ordered. It’s a kind of coconut rice, but the grains still have good bite and the coconut is more of a scent than a flavour, with onion-y and buttery flavours in the mouth. The other main is cod collar with moqueca. The moqueca sauce is lush and vivid orange, with the unmistakeable flavour of the palm oil and just a bit of chilli warmth. The cod collar… well, it’s a huge pair of fish chunks, I guess from an area that on a mammal would be around the shoulders ‘cos the fins were still attached. The skin was barbecued black and the meat was dense chunks of vertical fibres rather than the soft flakes of normal cod. Sturdy, flavoursome and really good to eat. There was also a LOT of meat hidden in those collars. Yum.

I topped off with a lime and coconut sorbet, a perfect specimen that was absolutely silky-cream in texture and fragrant with lime. A good meal might be £36 each before drinks, and I’d call that priced just right. This is great cooking, full of flavour and fire, from a part of the world most of us don’t ever visit. I’d go again!

Celeriac akara

Celeriac akara

Review: A Cena, Richmond

Sea bass

Sea bass

I remember going to A Cena a couple of times when we lived in Richmond; it was a high-end Italian restaurant just over the bridge in East Twickenham, serving up truly delicious Italian classics in an elegant but convivial dining room. So needing a table for six in Richmond, we decided to return.

It’s still an elegant and convivial dining room, a good atmosphere for a meal with family or friends, and the prices are still high-end Italian (think £28 for a main) but the level of cooking is more neighbourhood family Italian – just fine, nothing special. Maybe it’s my memory at fault?

We got some foccacia to nibble, and it was okay but it was a fine-crumbed bread of some kind with a bit of olive oil brushed on. Nothing springy or airy about it. My starter was halibut crudo. Good description, as the pieces were kinda crudely sliced and arrayed on the plate with a bit of diced citrus and chilli. The halibut had been a bit too “cooked” by the lemon juice.

Tiramisu

Tiramisu

For main I decided on a half-chicken with San Marzano and a tomato and marscapone sauce. The chicken was well cooked, the breast still juicy. The plentiful sauce was probably what I should have expected: cream of tomato soup in sauce form. In hindsight, I should have got it to share with someone else, along with a couple of sides, but A Cena doesn’t really feel like that kind of Italian. Maureen’s aubergine parmagiani was fine, light on the cheese-n-oil, which is certainly better for your arteries than the uber-gooey examples we had in Italy! Pan-fried sea bass was declared good, as was a tagiatelle amatriciana. I enjoyed their tiramisu with crumbled caramelised white chocolate and pistachios, despite being absolutely stuffed with chicken.

So, a perfectly decent neighbourhood Italian meal. Nothing memorable, nothing (very) bad. You can decide whether that’s worth £50ish for three coursed before drinks. I can think of a dozen other places I’d enjoy more for less.

Chicken n tomato

Chicken n tomato

Review: Rock-a-Nore Kitchen, Hastings

Day boats of Hastings

Day boats of Hastings

Old Hastings is a bit of a discovery – a beautiful little coastal town scattered with old buildings, tucked into a deep valley on the south coast. Not to be confused with plain-old-Hastings, the newer and very ordinary coastal town that sprawls to the west of Old Hastings and eventually turns into St Leonards. Of course, once you get to the actual seafront of Old Hastings then it’s all sweet shops, fish-n-chips, cheap cafes and arcades, but mixed in with this is the very much still working fishing beach, where small day-boats are winched up onto the shingle and the centuries-old gear sheds in their strikingly sober coat of black paint have been preserved. One of these sheds contains the tiny Rock-a-Nore Kitchen where they make good use of the seafood the day-boats bring in.

This is all straight-forward cooking and presentation, nothing esoteric or fancified. Maureen has potted crab and toast to start, a very pure pot of almost entirely white and brown crab with just a little fat, lemon and seasoning. I’ve gone for chicken livers in brandy sauce, also served on good toast which soaks up the lovely brandy sauce. Nothing wrong with chicken livers on toast.

Chicken livers

Chicken livers

For mains I’ve got a dover sole. It’s a lovely sole, cooked perfectly, swimming in butter along with samphire and tiny brown shrimps. Potatoes and carrots served alongside are nicely roasted. Maureen went with a skate wing, and it’s a monster, also perfectly cooked and this time with clams. Nothing could be simpler than well-cooked fish doused in butter with some choice accompaniments, and it’s a pleasure to eat.

So that’s about the size of it. The glasses of wine we had were innocuous enough, but at £9 for a large glass they were pretty good value. That’s the case with the food as well: around £35-£40 for two courses, generous portions and good (if very straight-forward) cooking. Good value for splendidly fresh fish!

Dover sole

Dover sole