Dining highs and lows, 2018

Is “disappointment” meant to be the opposite of “appointment”? If so, my dining experiences in 2018 included a bunch of great appointments and a handful of disappointments. Here they are…

Best meal
Too easy. The pass bench at Ynyshir. This is the best restaurant in the UK right now (for my money) and I harumphed loudly at my Twitter feed when I saw the stodgily trad Core by Clare Smyth get a 2nd Michelin Star while Ynyshir is still on its 1st. Maybe the wild west coast of Wales is too far for Monsieur Bibendum? Gareth Ward is a wizard and it feels as though every morsel of superb produce that comes out of that kitchen has been treated like a precious artefact deserving of care and respect. But with flavours that kick arse.

Runner up
The Fordwich Arms, in deepest Kent. Quite apart from the simply superb cooking, you cannot possibly come here without feeling like a country squire, just popping down to his rather splendid local after a bracing afternoon bagging pheasants in the coppice. Do yourself a favour, take a weekend break in this gorgeous corner of England.

Best casual dining
Bristol is just killing it with amazing casual dining places, absolutely killing it. Top of the heap has to be Pasta Loco, where every plate of food is just gob-smacking flavour-packing good, and where the staff couldn’t be more friendly and relaxed yet totally capable and knowledgable.

Top tip for future greatness
I’m good at this. I’ve got form. I raved about Casamia before they had even one Michelin star, and Ynyshir before anyone else had even reviewed them, not to mention Bulrush and the Black Swan who are both now dusted with stars. So. This year my pick for future greatness is: Folium, Birmingham. One dish in particular made me sit up and grin my face off. Ribbons of kohlrabi cooked to the texture of fresh pasta and doused in a pungent truffle sauce with a pile of parmesan. Yes! They made kohlrabi special! I expect great things to come.

Best dish
So, so difficult; amazing bucatini at Pasta Loco, several astonishing morsels at Ynyshir, and that pork knuckle at the Fordwich! But let’s talk about Hambleton Hall. It’s been there for donkey’s years, posh dining on an island in a lake, and I kinda expected some very predictable French fayne dayning and a bunch of dishes I’d have forgotten within a week. But I am never gonna forget that hare wellington, as it was absolutely bloody amazing. Here’s a nice callback: Gareth Ward recalls cooking the hare wellington when he worked at Hambleton ten-odd years ago!

Most disappointing dining
Well, got a couple of candidates. Where The Light Gets In had so much hype thrown at it by the time I visited, on a frozen day in March, that my expectation levels were in the stratosphere. Even so, this was great technique but producing really uninspiring dishes. It was a melancholy meal. And I’ve seen the photos on the rave reviews, and I’m convinced the team at WTLGI just had a really poor menu on during our visit. C’est la vie. Differently disappointing was Jamavar. We visited this fine dining Indian just after their star-winning chef had moved on to pastures new, and so instead were treated to a bog standard curry blowout with various fripperies and expensive crockery to give it the stamp of “fayne dayning”. Meh.

Seriously, WTF?
Shout out to Moksh, Cardiff for keeping us entertained right through their “tasting menu” (though probably not in the way they’d hoped). Clipping a tiny reading light to the side of a plate so that it looks like a tiny street lamp does not turn a dish of (fairly decent) Indian street food into fine dining! And doubling down on the clove-scented dry ice so that it appears with not one but two dishes also doesn’t double the gastronomy, chaps.

Local hero
I couldn’t round up 2018 without recalling the dozens of times we’ve gone down the road to Baker & Graze here in Cheltenham and enjoyed some of the best cafe lunches and naughty pastries I’ve had anywhere in the country… nay, the world. Praised by David Everitt-Matthais in a recent article, which is praise indeed. Cuttlefish stew with aioli FTW. Deary me, and I haven’t even done them a write-up!

Great food abroad
Hats off to Chiang Saen, a town on the Mekong in northern Thailand where we ended up almost by accident. Hungry and lost down backroads, we had an amazing bowl of pork noodle soup made by a lady who spoke no English, though thankfully her neighbour the barber (very cool haircut, dude) came over and translated for us. Then in the evening we sat on the pavement by the dark Mekong and feasted on a river fish cooked in bamboo and laden with so much holy basil and chilli that my mouth was actually at war with itself (Give me more! No, I’m going to die of chilli! But it’s soooo good! No, no, REALLY dying! But I want moooooore!).

Sad food abroad
French provincial Michelin 1-star restaurants continue to be terribly disappointing, especially in the dessert department. This year’s specimen is Le Cercle, Bourges. Sad stuff indeed. But it follows at least four similar experiences in the last few years. The bar is clearly much, much lower in the home country.

DIY
Well, y’know, I cook stuff myself! Shout out to a lovely cookbook: Fresh India, by Meera Sodha. Great vegetarian dishes from all over the sub-continent. Normal rules of Indian cookbooks apply though; always double the quantity of spices specified (and sometimes I wish I’d gone further). My favourite made-up-by-me dish that I can remember is: puree of baked potatoes and leek, topped with smoked oysters. This was a brilliant pairing. Try it, trust me. Modern classic.

And that’s my lot. Stuff I’m looking forward to in 2019? No idea! Sorry, I’m just not that dedicated a food blogger. I’ll see where my wanderings take me, what new openings catch my eye, and then I’ll write about whatever is worth writing about. Take care out there.