Review: Kricket, Soho

Kricket

Kricket

Most of Kricket is counter seating, which is great because it’s fun to watch the tandoor in action and the flames occasionally leaping up around the skillets. But! The stools here are properly upholstered and properly comfy, setting Kricket apart from a whole host of other Soho mostly-counter dining options.

Oh, and I want to call out the service too as having been particularly attentive and friendly throughout. We get good service almost everywhere we go (side-rant: we get good service in 99 meals out of 100 and probably eat out that often every year, so I do want to ask all the people who leave bad service reviews online… is it them, or is it really you?) and at Kricket it was notably good. After our first dishes arrived, the manager even paused to check whether we wanted to cancel any of the later dishes now we’d seen the size of what we’d ordered. Thoughtful! But, no… it all looked far too tempting.

Samphire pakoras

Samphire pakoras

How about samphire pakoras for an insanely moreish snack? A big pile of little crispy battered wrigglers, drizzled with tangy tamarind sauce and dipped in a pot of spiffy chilli-garlic mayo. Their bhel puri was also as good as any I’ve had, a great balance of sweet, citric, spice, cream and crunch.

Venison tartare with a warming spice to the meat, scattered with lots of Jerusalem artichoke chips and some splendid black garlic chutney was perhaps the dish of the day. Their house fried chicken was tasty, with a gentle curry leaf mayo to dip it in, but didn’t really knock my socks off. Final dish was a burnt garlic tarka dal, good flavour and texture, and it went very well with the awesome wild garlic kulcha that we ordered as our bread. Lovely and buttery and garlicky.

They’ve got a strong cocktail game at Kricket too, with really clean and distinctive flavours like the fragrant saffron vermouth in my “Reversal” and punchy flavours of chilli rum and mango blended well in Maureen’s “Dark Matter”. You’ll spend £32-ish each for food, and this is instantly among my favourite modern Indian street-food-style cooking in London.

Bhel puri

Bhel puri

Review: Rambutan, Borough Market

Gundu dosas

Gundu dosas

There is plenty of properly spiky Sri Lankan spice at this new place in Borough Market. Rambutan has an open kitchen counter while most of the seating is big tables with big wooden benches to suit 4 to 8 people. Decor is spartan, adding to the street food vibe, and with a big echoey ceiling and music cranked up the atmosphere is definitely buzzing (read: be prepared to shout your conversations).

We loved every bite of the food. The snack of apple and kohlrabi acharu really will blow your socks off. Gundu dosas are light and tasty fried dough balls with a bright green herbal dipping sauce. Jaffna lamb ribs are fun, jam-packed with flavour and warm spicing but pretty fibrous to chew down. For meat I enjoy the black pork curry more, really fiery and earthy, mopped up with roti. Their roti needs a special shout, being so soft and many-layered, like unleavened bread clouds for soaking up curry.

Lamb ribs

Lamb ribs

Red pineapple curry is my favourite, with enough bitter caramelised notes to make it anything but a purely sweet dish, again a very fiery curry with a colour to match. Sticky pongal rice with chicken is the only just-normally-spicy dish on the table, and it’s very satisfying and soothing. Hm. Okay, so I guess the coconut and pandan dal also isn’t too hot. It’s also wonderful, love the coconut flavour in the satisfyingly warming dal.

It might be £25 each for a satisfying meal before drinks. Rambutan is excellent value, and excellent Sri Lankan cooking, but make sure you’re in the mood for a superabundance of spice and a short stop in a noisy dining room with hard wooden seats!

Roti like clouds

Roti like clouds

Review: The Pig’s Head, Clapham

Table at the Pig's

Table at the Pig’s

The Pig’s Head is a great gastropub conversion of a huge old tavern in Clapham Old Town, with a high glass-domed ceiling and plenty of scrubbed wood, dried flowers and jars of preserved and pickled on shelves. They have a strong focus on meat (though their veg dishes are great by my reckoning) and have resolutely stuck to pub-level dining. No fancy plating and tiny blobs, it’s all good portions and big flavours.

On this occasion we’re here for Sunday lunch, so we skip starters in anticipation of a feast. But if it’s on when you’re visiting then I heartily recommend the pig’s head fritter. There are four different sharing roasts, although after briefly contemplating the Tamworth pig’s head (literally, half a pig’s head brought to table to pick apart) we settle for the 35-day aged beef rump.

Roast beef

Roast beef

This is a deeply flavoured, almost gamey, piece of dark purple beef. They’ve roasted it very rare and the taste is beautiful. I’ll admit, texture-wise we do quite a lot of chewing on fibres, so I’m left not quite decided whether the great taste is worth the chew. The rest of the plate is a splendid Sunday lunch. Firm carrots with charred edges, a big and puffy Yorkshire pudding still moist and chewy, properly crunchy beef dripping roasties, cauliflower cheese made with some very mature and tangy cheddar, lots of spring greens, and of course a really splendid dark beef gravy. All good.

We just about have room to share pudding, which is a good thing because I love their rice pudding brulee. It’s exactly as lovely as you’re imagining, with silky-creamy rice pudding topped with slightly bitter caramelised sugar. Forces rhubarb diced on top gives a lovely sweet fragrance.

Sunday lunch with pud was £30 before drinks. The Pig’s Head is a great local, and a cut above most other dining pubs in London.

Rice pudding brulee

Rice pudding brulee

Pinxos in San Sebastian

It has become something of a foodie pilgrimage, a familiar trail to those in the know. You can follow them on Twitter: someone will share a photo of a little plate of food or a chalkboard menu and the replies are scattered with knowing guesses as to which of the tiny pinxo bars in San Sebastian this particular dish came from.

We spent three days in San Sebastian. Hotels are super-expensive compared to the rest of Spain and we picked a bit of a duffer, trying to be cheap. We went for a wham-bam 3 Michelin star meal at Arzak and although it was perfectly lovely there wasn’t ultimately anything about it that I can remember a few months later (apart from the exceedingly powerful flavour of prawn brains). What I’ll absolutely remember about San Sebastian is our evenings (okay, and lunches) mooching around the old town from bar to bar, trying one or two pinxos at each one with a glass of wine… or vermouth… or tinto de verano if we were starting to get a little thirsty!

Just in case we wind up there again, here’s my notes on what we had where:

  • Vina – Tarta de queso (the silky Basque cheesecake, heavy heaven)
  • Recara – gilda (cocktail stick with anchovy and pickled gentle green chillies, yum)
  • Espiga – Anchovy with garlic crumb on dark bread (yum)
  • Hidalgo 56 – Volcan morcilla (mega yum!) & fried anchovies with garlic chips (yum)
  • Ormatzabal – Morros (pig cheek, sauce, puree potato, extreme yum) & Spinach croquetas (peppery and yum)
  • Martinez – Courgette stuffed with centollo (spider crab cream, very yum)
  • Urola – Scallop on ajo blanco with crispy seaweed (ultra yum)
  • Ziaboga, next village over – Fried pixin, bacalao fritter, bit of salad (medium-yum)
  • Cuchara de San Telmo – Foie de Montfort w/ apple sauce (caramely yum), Carrillera de ternera w/ hummus (pigs ear, massive yum)
  • Tamboril – mushrooms in garlic (very yum), tuna escabeche (nice)
  • Urola again – Truffled mushroom tart (yum), asparagus salad and parfait (yum)
  • Ganbara – Txanguro tart (spider crab, hot pastry, mega-yum!), Fried prawn (yum), local cheese with bitter orange gel (yum)
  • Cuchara de San Telmo again – Suckling pig w/ crackling (piggy yum), Grilled goat cheese w/ veg stuffing (splendidly yum)
  • Txepetxa – anchovy w/ sea urchin, anchovy w/ olive, anchovy w/ spider crab cream, anchovy w/ pepper & salt (increasing levels of happy yum)

Review: LPM, Mayfair

Pissaladiere

Pissaladiere

LPM remind me a lot of The River Cafe. Splendid produce. A real sense of place. A love of good, simple food. Eye-watering prices. I’m particularly bothered by the wine menu. It must be said that there are a handful of wines on there for under £100. But a handful just means you feel self-conscious when you choose one.

That aside, many of the dishes were satisfyingly good. The concept is absolutely meant to be sharing. If you chose the lentil salad for your starter and insisted on having it to yourself, you’d be chewing through a bowl of chilled lentils with a few small cubes of fresh apple and a few nibbles of grilled tomato in it. And then if you chose the veal chop for your main course, you would be served a nice big veal chop. And c’est tout.

French beans and foie gras

French beans and foie gras

This is exactly what I did, and it really was a splendid veal chop with a beautiful salty char. Of course I shared it, and I tried some of Maureen’s Dover sole in return, which was a lovely specimen correctly cooked. The lentil salad I mentioned was very good indeed, the apple and tomato lifting some of the loveliest puy lentils I’ve enjoyed. Oh, and a little snack to start – a pissaladiere – was a perfect specimen with very sumptuous sticky brown onions taking me straight back to Nice.

It wasn’t all heavenly. The gratin dauphinois was really a lake of baked cream with some sliced potato swimming in it, very indulgent I’m sure, but nowhere near as satisfying as one made with the right proportions. The chips were crisp enough but rather dry; not actively bad, but if you’re paying £9.5 for a portion they really should be top notch. Maureen’s escargots were criminally tiny. I’d have been a bit embarrassed for them if they showed up at a local bistro, but at £20 for a half dozen they should have curled up in their over-sized shells in shame. Which I guess they did.

Puddings did something to salvage the affair, with a splendid and generous creme brulee having divinely silky cream and the pain perdu carrying a good note of spice in its crisply sweet crusty edges. But really it’s not often I start throwing out the prices of individual dishes in a review. I only do it when they feel completely eyebrow raising. You can expect to pay £80 each before drinks for three courses and I could only really recommend that if every dish had been as good as the veal.

Pain perdu

Pain perdu