Peppercorn sauce

Just in case you’re making a steak…

1 big shallot, fine diced
3 tsp black peppercorns, 2 tsp pink peppercorns
20g butter
big pinch salt
2-3 tbsp brandy
200ml beef stock
2 tsp mushroom ketchup or worcester sauce
100ml double cream

Dry-toast the black peppercorns, then crush 2 tsp of them. Melt butter and fry the shallot and all the peppercorns for 5 mins or so until the shallot is soft. Add brandy and cook until the brandy has basically all boiled off. Then add stock and seasoning, bubble for 5 mins or so until you’ve reduced by about half. You can stop here until you’re nearly ready to serve, then while your steak is resting after cooking just stir in the cream and heat up for 2-3 minutes.

Review: Kota, Porthleven

Scallops n vinegar

Scallops n vinegar

We ate at Kota on the day after Boxing Day, as we’d gone down to spend Christmas week in Cornwall. I feel it’s worth saying this as I’ve had a few meals around the holiday season that haven’t turned out as excellently as reviews of the restaurant would suggest… and I wonder if it’s that bit harder to source ingredients and have the usual consistency if you’ve chosen to be hospitable and open across the season? After all, many places just close until January. You can see where I’m going…

Kota is described as having a strong “Asian twist” but really these days that needs to be a bit more than just whipping miso into your butter and adding a bit of yuzu here and there. There’s scarcely a chef in the country not using these ingredients now. So Kota is best described as a refined modern British tasting menu. It’s a relaxed and friendly dining room, right by Porthleven Harbour.

Beetroot

Beetroot

Our amuse bouches included a tiny doughnut filled with mackerel pate and a blob of horseradish cream, which was good. And a little cup of celeriac soup with the main flavour of chicken stock and some pickled mustard seeds that were fiercely bitter to bite into. Good little doughnuts though.

The scallop starter included blobs of avocado puree, sea vegetables and a tiny dice of pickled turnip, set in a ponzu dressing. The ponzu was very tangy, and with the turnip on top the whole dish was tooth-shakingly vinegary. A pity as the scallops were generous and very good, fresh and creamy. The second starter was much the best dish of the day, lovely pieces of slow-cooked beetroot glazed with beetroot molasses. This really amped-up the sweet and earthy goodness, paired with a goat cheese mousse full of flavour.

My main was lamb, shoulder and loin. The shoulder had blobs of excellent black garlic miso as a relish and the loin was topped with a piece of cauliflower fungi cooked in a sweet and umami glaze that I absolutely loved. The caulifungi has a beautiful texture like very soft sheet noodles and a delicate flavour. Maureen’s gurnard came with mussels and a good shellfish sauce, brought alive with saffron-yuzu mayonnaise (though only the saffron really came through).

Chocolate balls

Chocolate balls

Dessert was a bit odd, three firm chocolate ganache truffles with three little meringue blobs, on a little lake of a very good coffee sauce. The PX jelly sounded nice but I couldn’t really pick it out of the coffee and chocolate. Maureen’s pieces of baked pear came with milk jam and ice cream, although the ice cream was just barely set and turning rapidly back into cream.

The four course tasting menu is £50 before drinks, and I think it would be good value if all the dishes landed as consistently as the beetroot or my lamb. None of the mis-hits were really bad, but they definitely weren’t right either. Sooooo… given my seasonal warning at the start, I’m going to recommend Kota as worth a try, it’s very definitely keenly priced for a tasting menu. But it’s not particularly Asian and it’s not particularly seafood either!

Review: Coombeshead Farm, Launceston

Bread at the farm

Bread at the farm

Coombeshead Farm make their own superb piggy products from their herds of Mangalitza and Middle-White pigs. There is a rustic Italian boiled sausage called “cotechino” that they make which is absolutely the best thing ever done with a pig’s spare parts. They also have a little restaurant and rooms on the farm, which is where we took ourselves on a gusty day after Christmas.

The dining room at Coombeshead is posh-rustic at its absolute best, with an open fire for charring the meat, big wooden tables, old bentwood chairs with sheepskins on ’em for comfort, and all within the four stone walls of an ancient farm building. Service is warmly friendly and they have quite the range of interesting drinks and wines, lots of it local.

Squash and whey

Squash and whey

The menu is an oddity. It’s a tasting menu but the dishes are pared-back and produce-led to the absolute maximum. Let me try and explain…

We start with crisps of cabbage, artichoke and potato. Oily, salty and with a drizzle of honey glaze, they’re very good. Then a little Berkswell gougere. Frankly I could wolf down a bowl of these, though of course we only have one each! So far, so bar snack.

Next it’s bread. Their dark sourdough is absolutely superb, with a bitter-nutty black crust and the most springy and chewy texture inside that you could imagine. Goes very well with their farm butter. Also with the dollop of Mangalitza pork rillettes that come with a chunky marrow piccalilli. The piccalilli is the best I’ve ever had, subtly warm and sweetly peppery. The final bread accompaniment are some darkly toothsome preserved beetroots, chewy as liquorice and with some fermented wild garlic leaves for zing.

Pork chop to share

Pork chop to share

Starter. This is a piece of crown prince squash, cooked to a most amazingly clay-smooth yet firm texture that is hard to describe. It sits in a pool of whey and brown butter that is just a filthy umami goodness. Lucky there’s a bit of bread left for soaking up duty.

Main. It’s a Middle White pork chop, fresh from the open fire. With a blob of Jerusalem artichoke puree and a bit of kale. The pork is of the finest, and very lightly cooked; the fire has just kissed the outside. The chop is equal parts meat and fat, so you just have to decide how many gooey blobs you want to devour for their flavour. It gets a bit much and to be honest this plate is begging for some potato, or any starch to cut into the fat.

Pudding. A small choux bun, dark and nutty in flavour, filled with creamy goat curd and tart blackcurrants. C’est tout.

Choux bun

Choux bun

Do you see what I mean? Bar snacks, bread and bits, a single piece of squash, a pork chop with garnish and a little choux bun. All for £75 each. In the paragraphs above I have named every single element we were served. You have to wrap your head around the idea that this is equivalent to a tasting menu where each of half-a-dozen dishes has been assembled from five to ten elements, carefully plated and presented together. Which means you have to respect and appreciate the produce and provenance at Coombeshead for its own sake and nothing else. If you’re down with that, you should come, because I doubt there is anywhere else in the country doing it quite like this.

Addendum: I do want to just caveat my review. They explained later that they’re about to close up for a two week holiday (hence very little stock of fresh produce in their lovely farm shop) and it’s certainly possible that this constrained their menu on our visit. Just saying.

Open fire and ready for service

Open fire and ready for service

Review: Jikoni, Marylebone

Jikoni

Jikoni

So I think effectively Jikoni‘s sensibility comes from Kenya, but specifically the Indian diaspora that settled there a few generations ago and adapted their cuisine a bit. There’s also a scattering of modern British ingredients and ideas. The prices are totally out of whack with the dishes they put in front of you. Please don’t say “but it’s an expensive part of town…” this is London and you can hop districts in 15 minutes.

The first bite, dhal makhni and cheddar croquettes, were very good indeed. The spicy dhal lifted the aged cheddar really cleverly and the accompanying carrot achaar added a sweet-bright note. Then we had our starters. First up were charred Brussels sprouts in a hot-and-sour dressing, topped with a good sprinkle of bonito flakes, another very good jumble of flavours and a brave amount of sticky blackening on the sprout halves. The other starter was a woodland mushroom vol-au-vent, and while the mushrooms in their sweetly earthy gravy were good, the vol-au-vent case was stiff and chewy. It tasted worse for being a £16 starter!

Scrag end pie

Scrag end pie

My main was a scrag-end pie which they described as an Indian take on a shepherd’s pie, with saffron mash on top. For £32 I was looking forward to seeing what they’d done with this idea. Nothing, really. It was indeed a dish with curried slow-cooked lamb, topped with saffron mash. It was very nice. But my eyebrow was definitely skyward by now.

Across the table Maureen had scallops with congee in a turmeric and lemongrass broth. The fragrant lemongrass came through very nicely, the congee was as it should be. But this was a starter-sized portion. Especially in the scallop department; four button specimens. Maureen is a small eater and can survive a whole day on a packet noodle, but even she needed a snack by the time we got home. I don’t usually pepper my reviews with individual dish prices but… £36?!

So three courses at Jikoni will set you back £55 each without drinks. It needs to be a whole quantum higher in ambition and execution to justify that. Eye-watering.

Scallop congee

Scallop congee

Review: Noodle and Snack, Fitzrovia

Braised beef noodles

Braised beef noodles

I’ve never been to northern China, but with Chinese cinema gradually spreading I’ve built an impression of giant anonymous housing complexes, warrens of neon-lit shophouses and eateries, huge brown rivers snaking through vast plains covered in crops under chilly grey skies. Feels like the kind of place you need simple, heart-warming and flavour-packed starch.

Noodle + Snack in a little Fitzrovia side street is getting popular, probably due to a recent review in one of the nationals. That’s the only reason we’d have ever known it existed! But we only had a five minute wait for lunch, mainly because they took a little wooden picnic table from outside and squished it into the dining room between two of the other tables. “For you! Hope it’s not too small?” We all grinned, because it was a few inches lower than the other tables so it looked like we were on the kid’s table.

Shredded potato

Shredded potato

We each ordered a bowl of noodles, and shared a dish of shredded potato and chilli. This is a dead simple side dish, the julienne potato just soaking up the fiery and tangy dressing. Maureen chose the sour and spicy Chongqing noodles, with black vinegar in the broth and a really hefty punch. I went with braised beef noodles, and the beef was full of earthy, spicy flavours and just wonderful, the broth a soothing ramen-like stock (I felt quite ready to head out onto the vast plains and tend my crops under a leaden sky after this!). They are very proud of their house-made wheat noodles, and justly so; they had a lovely bite and a really wheaty-nutty flavour.

That’s it. I think the bill was £35 for both of us with some green tea. Absolutely vital place to know in Fitzrovia. There’s soooo much more on the menu.

Chongqing noodle

Chongqing noodle