Fish and chips

Review: The Wensleydale Heifer, Wensleydale

I like the decor at the Wensleydale Heifer. It’s cheerfully bright and unashamedly personal: they like the things they like, and that’s how they’ve decorated. No attempt to design for an expected demographic or conjure up a particular aesthetic. Except I guess that “cheerfully individual” is an aesthetic in itself? Anyway, the cheerful individuality and …

View full post
Sunday roast

Review: The Aysgarth Falls Hotel, Aysgarth

This was a Sunday roast, albeit in the evening, the Aysgarth Hotel being one of those places that just does nothing but the roast right through Sunday. On the other hand, being one of the few places actually serving dinners on a Sunday evening in the middle of the Dales, it’s handy to know! The …

View full post
Pressed lamb

Review: The Sandpiper, Leyburn

The Sandpiper is a classic country pub in the diminutive but charming little market town of Leyburn. The dining room is very no-nonsense, just serried ranks of wooden tables at which two, four or six people sit quietly devouring dinner. Because the food is jolly good. I picked the grilled goat cheese salad to start, …

View full post
The Rat Inn

Review: The Rat Inn, Anick

They’ve got a lovely view from the garden of the Rat Inn, over the Tyne Valley towards pretty Corbridge. Inside the pub is lovely too, one of those (seemingly) effortlessly ideal pub interiors, dark timbers, fireplace, brass whatsits and a chalked-up menu. The big thing at The Rat is their sharing steaks, Chateaubriand and rib …

View full post
The Beaumont

Review: The Beaumont, Hexham

Hexham is a very handsome little market town with a lot of history and a splendid old abbey as a centrepiece. Just a stone’s throw from the abbey is The Beaumont, the town’s grandest hotel (at least, as grand as a small market town could need). It’s an old Victorian building, very effectively modernised and …

View full post
Review: The Wensleydale Heifer, WensleydaleReview: The Aysgarth Falls Hotel, AysgarthReview: The Sandpiper, LeyburnReview: The Rat Inn, AnickReview: The Beaumont, Hexham

Pinxos in San Sebastian

Categories:

Events and Visits

23 April 2023

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)

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Review: LPM, Mayfair

Categories:

Fine dining, London, Restaurant Reviews

21 March 2023

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

Tags: , ,

Leave comment

Review: Toba, St James’s

Categories:

London, Restaurant Reviews

21 March 2023

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

Tags: , ,

Leave comment

Review: Cher Thai, Clapham

Categories:

London, Restaurant Reviews

21 March 2023

Fishcakes

Fishcakes

Cher Thai is a small but busy little Thai restaurant around the corner from us that opened up just before lockdown began. We went early on, had an utterly bland green curry with wretched chunks of red and green pepper in (why? why?!?), and wrote it off. But three years later it’s still thriving and packed most evening so we decided to give them another shot.

Happy news! It’s really quite good. The menu is mostly classic UK-Thai dishes although they have gone all over Thailand to include things like larb salads and there was even iced Thai milk tea (the drink menu is otherwise short and not very exciting).

Larb

Larb

We picked a chicken thigh larb salad, a whole steamed sea bass and some classic fishcakes. The larb was good, plenty of punchy fresh herbs, loadsa mint, well-balanced sweet/citrus dressing and the chicken thigh was soft, moist and chewsome with good sticky flavour from the marinade. The whole fish was great, plenty of good white meat, a really lovely broth with the classic Thai balance of sugar, lime and fish sauce and a reasonably fiery hit of chilli. We slurped it up happily. I can also report that the fishcakes were very good specimens of their type.

So we have a local Thai that’s worth popping around to. You might only need to spend £24 for a starter, main and rice each.

Sea bass

Sea bass

Tags: , ,

Leave comment

Review: Osip, Bruton

Categories:

Fine dining, Michelin, Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

4 March 2023

Osip

Osip

Bruton is a tiny town on the Somerset-Wiltshire border, with two medieval schools and a rural perfection that hasn’t gone unnoticed by a scattered variety of artists, architects and antiquarians who dot the high street but wouldn’t look out of place in a quiet corner of Fitzrovia. It’s also got a Michelin star in Osip, a “farm to table” restaurant with a 6 or 9 course tasting menu.

Somehow with the farm-to-table moniker I was expecting the kind of rustic setting of Coombeshead Farm, Oxheart or The Smallholding. But Osip is a properly grown-up white tablecloth dining room with the kind of refined cooking and plating to match. Doesn’t mean it isn’t all sourced from local farm, of course, but it wasn’t quite the ambience I’d expected! Nice though.

Leek and pear salad

Leek and pear salad

We start with a good selection of snacks, including a lovely bite of battered Jerusalem artichoke with malt vinegar black garlic mayonnaise. Was as good as it sounds. Then on to some splendid malted sourdough with strongly hay-smoked butter than I loved to bits (and ate too much of). This also came with the absolute star of the evening: a broth of roast root vegetables and lapsang tea with burnt garlic oil on top. Hot, pure, gorgeous umami that was perfect for a wintery evening.

First starter was a neat little salad of leek and ricotta with thinly shaved nashi pear. Following that, celeriac porridge topped with winter truffle and grated egg yolk. Very satisfying texture and flavour from the celeriac, sweet and brassic and silky and creamy. This was followed by a fish course of sea bass, where they’d taken great care in crisping the skin to a perfect crunch without overcooking the white flesh. Nice job. The mixture of pine nut, broccoli puree and pickled kale worked well.

Venison

Venison

Main course was an excellent venison dish, local fallow deer served as saddle, fillet and belly (our taxi driver pointed out the wood the deer was from as we drove past on the way home). All splendid though the fillet was perhaps the best piece of venison I’ve had in a long while.

Two puddings. The palate cleanser was a spiffy pumpkin sorbet, though the main flavour was orange citrus, with a pool of local apply brandy on top. The main dessert was a chocolate dish, including a rich mousse, a sticky-sweet sourdough ice cream and two crisps, one of them dotted with buckwheat. A fair ending although it didn’t quite knock my socks off. The mini pastel de nata as a petit four was great.

The 9-course menu is £120 before drinks. I’d say that’s probably around the right price for the quality, although maybe more than you’d expect in rural Somerset. There wasn’t enough to ooooh and aaaah about for me to say that I’m dying to return, but there’s some really good cooking going on here.

Celeriac porridge

Celeriac porridge

Tags: , , ,

Leave comment