Review: Ekstedt at the Yard, Whitehall

Ekstedt kitchen

Ekstedt at the Yard is one of those restaurants that has gone all-in, put the gas and electric out to pasture, and claims to cook the entire menu on wood. This is why there is a mighty pizza oven just by the chef’s table, ensuring an extremely cosy evening no matter how many layers you try and strip off. We’re definitely at “peak wood” in restaurants, even though in an adjecent world there’s a lot of evidence gathering that wood-burning stoves are one of the remaining top pollutants in our towns and cities and should probably go the way of the petrol car. What that will mean for open-fire cooking in restaurants I have no idea. Presumably their industrial extractors already take out a lot of the emissions that would otherwise be puffed up a chimney?

Turbot and mussels

Turbot and mussels

Ekstedt is tucked away in the New Scotland Yard hotel, down in an atmospherically dark dining room. It can’t really help that, there are no windows to speak of. Sat at the chef’s table we get a good view into the working kitchen and they made it more of an experience by inviting us in to watch the first starter being cooked using a dramatic, sputtering, red hot dipper of beef fat. Forging oysters! Which were very lovely, the texture still raw inside, the flavour of the fat coating the sturdier outside, and dressed with a cream and herb oil.

The eight course menu had some delights and a couple of duffers, a lot of smoked flavours as you’d hope, but surprisingly no charring or scorching on anything. Perhaps they find it difficult to balance the finicky needs of “fine dining” with the robust cooking needed to char-grill meat or veggies?

Sweetbread

Sweetbread

Little canapes of beef tartare and smoked trout were good, the beef densely flavourful and paired with salsify and a hit of coal oil. Then came the oyster, very good, though the flavour of the cream and herb oil really powered over much of the subtlety of oyster-cooked-with-burning-beef-fat. The little wholemeal flatbread “taco” was a properly Nordic not, with a little fricasse of cauliflower and mushroom flavoured powerfully with juniper. Nice filling, but I found the flatbread a bit dry and worthy.

Very much loved the cuttlefish and pickled mushroom ragout, with noodle-y slivers of thin white cuttlefish laid over it. This was followed by a perfect piece of cloudy white turbot, served with fat, sweet, smokey mussels and a Jerusalem artichoke puree. A very nice fish dish, but another dish where it was hard to see how much the open-wood cooking was contributing. Next up was sweetbread and for me this was a failure. Under-cooked sweetbread is just a gooey, sticky mess of white protein with an unpleasant flavour. Oo-er. I’m sure its what they intended, and I liked the hay smoke flavours that pair very well with sweetbread, and the little crunches of toasted buckwheat seeds, but when four out of six diners leave the majority of a dish, and the other two ate it but didn’t like it at all…?

Cep souffle

Cep souffle

The main course of lamb was fine, with roast fungi, aubergine puree, and little lollipops of lamb belly terrine served off to one side. The lamb itself was neither the most delicate nor the most flavourful that I’ve had recently, and I still somehow felt that all the fire, iron and smoke going on just the other side of the service pass wasn’t really coming to anything on the plate. It was a nice bit of lamb.

Good puddings. Nice little strawberry palate cleanser. Then a truly excellent cep souffle, unabashedly mushroom-y and the wonderful aromatic cep only enhanced by the sweetness of the dish. Woodruff ice cream was a perfect pairing, the funky hay-like foraged flavour working well with the cep. Juicy blueberries gave a slightly acidic balance.

So the menu ended on a strong finish. And we were very well looked after all night by the team, the sommelier in particular spending a lot of time talking over the wines on the wine flight. And of course, this was a family celebration, so everyone had a great time and the food gave us plenty to talk about. But I’m left with an odd question. What’s the point of all the wood and iron and flames in the kitchen, if so much of that primeval pleasure gets polished away by the needs of fine dining?

Ekstedt’s tasting menu was £150 each when we ate at the chef’s table, and it was fine but isn’t going to be one of my best meals of 2025.

Cooking our oysters

Cooking our oysters

Review: Laxsa, Soho

Beef rendang

This year we’ve been doing a tour of SE Asia without leaving London. So far we’ve eaten Thai at Chet’s, Cambodian at Mamapen, Burmese at Lahpet, Filipino brunch at Kapihan and Laotian at Lao Cafe. Needing a bite of lunch in the middle of town today, we hit up Laxsa, a tiny Malaysian place in Soho. It’s apparently been there for years, and it looks very much family-owned and from the utterly un-designed school of old school ethnic London eateries. You’re just here to sit down with a bowl of Malay food and then move on with your day.

And they’ve got just what you’d hope on the menu: laksa, rendang, char kuay teow, roti canai, nasi lemak and more. We ordered roti canai with curry sauce to dip the soft and crisp-edged roti into, and then I had a beef rengang and Maureen the prawn laksa.

My rendang was spot-on for flavour, lovely and rich with a powerful aroma of star anise. The beef, although slow-cooked, was still a bit on the chewsome side but fine. Maureen’s laksa was even better, the coconut-based gravy humming with spices and fish sauce. Hidden within were a few juicy prawns, some bubbly chunks of tofu to soak up the curry, and veggies mixed in with the vermicelli noodles.

Malay, like Thai, includes the most deeply fragrant combinations of sweet-salt-spice-sour on the planet, and they’ve got it all there at Laxsa. It’s cheap and cheerful: for £20 each you’ll have plenty to eat. They’ve got a cocktail list along with softs and classic Malay drinks like iced Teh Tarik. I’ve pinned it on the map, it’s a useful spot to know.

Next stop(s): Indonesian, Singaporean, Vietnamese and then we might have to spread further into Asia!

Laksa

Laksa

Review: The Horse Guards, Petworth

The Horse Guards

The perils of building a pub lunch into a proper walk in the country. By “proper” I mean a 16km hike, not a hour’s stroll. And the perils are clear: not eating enough beforehand (worried about not having an appetite) and so getting starving hungry on the walk, making the last hill before the pub into something of a terrible mountain. And then eating so much at the pub that the second half of the hike is a tightrope walk along the edge of indigestion! It’s all too easy to eat too much when the food is as good as The Horse Guards, though we were at least smart enough to stick with one glass of wine. Also a trial, though, as their wine and drinks list is deeply enticing for a simple country pub.

The Horse Guards is in Tillington, a pretty little village a short walk from Petworth. It hides itself fairly well, showing nothing much from the outside if you miss the sign up high, while inside it is small, friendly and cosily inviting. There’s local eggs and medlar jelly for sale on the bar. The menu is very seasonal and focused on properly local produce, but also nicely exploratory and inventive. For instance…

Panisse

Panisse

I started with chickpea panisse, wild garlic pesto and local feta. The panisse were pretty perfect, silky as set custard inside and properly crispy outside. Went down very well with the pungent wild garlic and the salty spikes of cheese. Maureen’s started was pork haslet with mustard, pickled mushrooms and veg. The haslet had a strong meaty, almost gamey, flavour and was a joy to munch on toast with pickles.

Maureen’s main was confit Jerusalem artichoke, sitting like glistening brown… erm… help, simile failure! Abort! Abort! Anyway, they were sitting very handsomely in a lake of Beauvale Blue cheese fondue, along with vivid green broccoli stems. Pumpkin seeds added crunch, wild garlic a lovely allium hum. The artichokes were full of nutty flavours and ate beautifully. My dish was a carpaccio of pink roast beef from Goodwood, with new potatoes glazed in miso and a generous wallop of bitter red roast raddichio. The sweet jus and herb oil cut the bitterness off the veg and amped up the flavourful beef. Loved every mouthful. An aside: we ordered a side of fries, having arrived starving, but they were totally unnecessary (and yet very good and very easy to eat!).

Jerusalem artichoke

Jerusalem artichoke

Had to try a pudding, even though it already felt like the rest of the hike might be a bit of a puff. This was a nice slice of rich St Emilion au Chocolat – a dense and fudgy chocolate tart – with a generous dollop of whipped and sweetened cream cheese on top, lots of luscious preserved cherries and a scatter of bright blue borage flowers. These gave an intriguingly oyster-y note (intentionally?) worked really well off the chocolate and cream.

The Horse Guards instantly becomes one of my favourite country pubs for dining, the menu much brighter and less predictable than a lot of the Cotswold gastropubs I’m very familiar with. You’d pay around £45 for three courses before drinks, which is fair for the sheer quality. I can’t wait to find an excuse to return, which is a very good sign.

The bar

The bar

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