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

Review: Cher Thai, Clapham

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

Review: Osip, Bruton

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

Review: Tendido Cero, Chelsea

Croquetas

Croquetas

This is the “more informal tapas bar” to the high-end Spanish restaurant Cambio de Tercio over the road. But the apple doesn’t fall far etc, and we still have fine white linen and tapas that have been cooked and presented with the soul of a fine dining chef. Not that I’m complaining about comfy chairs instead of hard-bottom stools and people coming to top up your water for you.

Their tortilla is top notch, gooey on the inside but just firm enough not to be silly, perfectly seasoned too. Their “famous” jamon croquetas have a silky cheese interior and very delicate shells, not at all oily, but for me I’d just love more generosity with the ham. We also have some very friendly chunks of morcilla de burgos, topped with halves quail eggs and sitting on a spicy tomato paste. Jolly good. Finally along the trad lines, we have deep fried strips of calamari and aioli. Again, a very delicately crispy batter and squid that is still a perfect al dente and not at all chewy, very good with a squeeze of lemon.

Parsnips

Parsnips

My favourite two dishes are the more elaborate concoctions. We have roast parsnips with an aubergine puree and nut pesto. No charring on these parsnips, they are soft and golden with a sweet flavour, complemented by the smoky-sweetness of the aubergine puree and pepped up by the roasted nuts and bright green basil. This is a really splendid veg dish and very generous. Finally, we have a beautiful pluma iberica, very pink in the middle and blackened around the edges with a dark and sticky glaze. The roast pineapple chunks served with it are a perfect juicy sweet-sour accompaniment to basically some of the best pork you could ever hope to chew.

So for tapas it probably was £35 each before drinks, but it was very good tapas in convivial surrounds. The wines by the glass average around the £10 mark, so don’t be expecting a cheap glass with your meal. For myself, I actually prefer the places like Jose and Barrafina that seem to cleave more closely to the relaxed tapas culture that inspired them (not necessarily much cheaper, mind you), but if you want to feel more spiffy then Tendido Cero won’t disappoint.

Pluma Iberica

Pluma Iberica