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

Review: Toba, St James’s

Chicken wings in goop

Chicken wings in goop

Toba is an Indonesian restaurant in the glossy little corner of St James’s where all the restaurants need to be wearing a bowtie. You can’t have industrial-retro, handwritten menu boards or bistro furniture here. Which feels like it leaves Toba a little oddly placed, trying to keep a bit of street-food style Indonesian but needing to make sure it stays a bit smartened up and priced accordingly.

So we have a lamb shank curry, and the gravy is a lip-smacking warm and earthy Indonesian curry that I could drink by the gallon, but the lamb shank is unexpectedly just that: a whole lamb shank. And even though I could drink that gravy by the gallon, we actually only get a few spoonfuls of it, quickly lost in the rice and the big dollops of (admittedly lovely) lamb that come off the bone.

To start with we have potato cakes, and I’ve always loved these as snacks, but it’s hard to elevate them to a “dish” and why is there too little of the sweet soy sauce for one of these cakes, let alone three of them? The butter chicken wings with salted egg and chilli sound really good but the gooey mix on the wings doesn’t really sing out with any particular flavour apart from butter.

Soft cod n torch ginger

Soft cod n torch ginger

Our other main dish is cod fillet with a house sauce including torch ginger and an unusual little peppercorn-like spice with a very sour and fragrant flavour. The torch ginger is also good, gentler and more perfumed than normal ginger. The cod had very much fallen apart and I can’t help wondering if a more sturdy and also full-flavoured fish would have stood up to the brightly spicy topping better.

The trio of sambals we ordered alongside are just eye-watering mixtures of fierce chilli. I found they added more pain that relish, even in tiny amounts. Even Maureen – who lives for chilli and coped just fine during the meal – reported after we left that her eyeballs had begun to feel hot.

So, nice to find a more inventive Indonesian restaurant having some fun with the flavours of the islands. But it’s not quite as accomplished as other south-east Asian favourites we love. Open for less than a month at the time of writing, though, so I do think it’s worth trying again once they’ve spent a while tweaking and settling the menu. £40 each before drinks is a bit much for the quality, but this is St James’s!

Mighty lamb shank

Mighty lamb shank