Review: Da Terra, Bethnal Green

Da Terra

Da Terra

Tacos are definitely the fine dining cliche from the last 2 or 3 years. It’s the strangest thing, but I’d swear that three quarters of the tasting menus I’ve eaten lately have included some form of taco. There’s no real point I’m heading for here, I can’t really mock the trend or fall in love with it. Maybe I’m just showing off? After 10 years of food blogging, I can spot a trend!

Anyway, the taco at Da Terra was a classic blue corn shell, albeit smaller than my little finger, filled with beef tartare and smoky with coal oil. It was very good, but nowhere near the best dish we enjoyed. We went with the longer menu, ten courses and snacks, and enjoyed a colourful array of visually stunning creations over a leisurely five hours.

Moqueca

Moqueca

Da Terra is one of those restaurants-in-unexpected-places; you stroll briskly from the tube station along a main road past dubious bars and grubby corner shops, then cross over to the one impressive building amongst a load of concrete jungle. Inside you’ve got a lovely intimate dining room with an open kitchen, dark and cosy corners but (photographer’s joy!) really good task lighting right over the tables. Service is great, chef Rafael Cagali introduces a couple of the dishes himself, and we found a couple of bottles of really good wine.

Where Da Terra shone for me was in the beauty of the presentation. Every dish had several elements and the sense of being a little vignette or stage set. If you’re of the “don’t care, get in my mouth” school of dining you might be eye-rolling about now, but I ate up every charming set piece with my eyes way before actually eating it. And as you’d expect at the two-star level, the food itself was all perfect. Cagali’s cooking is full of robust flavours but all done with refinement. Like a Lamborghini or something. I’m not good on car analogies. Something powerful but also elegant. Is that right?

Caviar for pudding

Caviar for pudding

Some dishes that I really loved. The Moqueca, straight from the Brazilian kitchen. Lovely fish stew where the dende oil gives an exotic and spritely lift to a rich seafood sauce, the halibut with its own firm flavour making a very good choice for the fish. Again the theatre really makes the dish: they first bring you a great copper pot to show you the pre-plated version of the stew, and when the lid comes off the smell is wonderful. There’s also a magnificently complicated chicken dish with a half-dozen elements (including a tiny piece of grilled chicken heart, another shout-out to Brazil). The crispy chicken foot and the egg full of the silkiest chicken liver parfait were both outstanding.

Japanese custard

Japanese custard

Some brave dessert action going on too. First was a nice savoury of goat cheese with a gleaming blob of guava jelly on top. The slightly peppery-funky sweetness of guava really heightened the straw flavour of the goat cheese… so I can see it being a marmite dish for some! Maybe even more so the next dessert, this year’s award winner in the “putting things on a dessert that aren’t meant to be dessert” category: caviar, on pistachio ice cream, on a cachaca baba. And I found nothing at all wrong with a clean salty hit to go with my boozy bit of sponge and fragrant ice cream.

Da Terra is what you’d want from a Michelin 2-star meal: faultless cooking, lots of wow factor, effortless service and plenty to talk about. The 10 course menu is £175 so it needs to be. Solid thumbs-up from me.

Chicken in five parts

Chicken in five parts

Review: Manteca, Shoreditch

Pigs head

Pigs head

We dropped into Manteca for a pre-theatre bite and it turned out pretty perfect; good food and brisk service, we told them we only had just under an hour and they looked after us.

Manteca is another modern no-fuss Britalian restaurant along the lines of Padella or Bancone. Yes, I’m coining a new word! This latest (and magical) trend in Italian cuisine is certainly bringing a much wider range of authentic Italian recipes and ingredients to Britain from the mother country… but with such a sharp twist of modern UK small-plate kitchen-counter styling that I think if you dropped one of them in the middle of Rome it might look a little out of place!

So: Britalian.

Yes, I hate it too. I’m just being an ass! Let’s get back to Manteca. Bonus points for being a really elegant space, comfy seating, soothing wood and mustard colours. Though it was also very buzzy when busy. “Very buzzy” is my understated English way of saying WE HAD TO SHOUT AT EACH OTHER OVER THE TABLE. So bear that in mind.

Ricotta on toast

Ricotta on toast

We started with a fritter of pigs head, fried lovely and crispy without being oily, served with a dollop of good spicy quince goop. The other starter made a great contrast: creamy ricotta on toast with chicory, mint and citrus. Ricotta can be a bit meh, but this one was more luscious than I’m used to while still being fresh. Big hit of mint and orange went really well.

The main action was pasta. Spaghetti cacio e pepe with brown crab meat stirred into it, silky and pungent at the same time. Brown crab is a more than acceptable addition to cacio e pepe. Mmmmmm. My pasta was one for the real pasta connoisseurs; wafer thin sheets of fazzoletti with perfect bite and just enough texture to have the duck ragu clinging to them, with little bits of duck getting tangled up between the sheets.

This was great stuff, and I’m looking forward to going back and exploring a lot more of the terribly appealing menu. This admittedly quick meal was £22 each before wine, maybe you’d go around £36 for more of a feast. Good value.

Fazzoletti with duck ragu

Fazzoletti with duck ragu

Review: Aulis, Soho

Snack

Snack

It’s great when you come away from a meal inspired. In this case I’m both inspired and armed because chef Charlie Tayler has taught me how to make herb flavoured oils! Take equal parts of herb and oil, then whiz them in a blender. Whiz them long enough that the blender heats up, gets really quite warm, because this is what will activate the compounds in the herbs and bleed all the colour and flavour into the oil. Then pass the oil through muslin or a jay cloth; it’ll last for weeks in the fridge. First attempt shall be… kaffir lime leaf oil, I think.

Anyway, this was possible because Aulis is a tiny 8 cover space where the chefs prepare and finish all the dishes right in front of you on the same counter where you eat. So there’s plenty of time to chat. This made for a very lovely experience, aided by some of the best food I’ve eaten this year. Aulis is dubbed an “experimental kitchen” and the menu did keep us super-jaded foodies engaged and excited all the way through.

The view from my seat

The view from my seat

It’s easy to see how Aulis belongs to the L’Enclume stable: insistence on British ingredients, birch rather than maple syrup, English wasabi, Berkswell instead of Pecorino. Lots of clever use of flavourful foraged herbs. My favourite here was a truly exceptional tarte tatin with a verjus glaze to sharpen it back up and a meadowsweet ice cream. If you don’t know meadowsweet then the flavour profile is… hmm… the best we came up with was “sweetly fragrant buckwheat”!

Two absolute favourite dishes from the main part were the mushroom and the turbot. The mushroom was a maitake, apparently the farmed version of Hen Of The Woods, and it had been slowly roasted with such an earthy miso glaze that the texture was like the best possible ham on the bone while the flavour was simply powerfully good. It sat upon a set truffle custard and was topped with a cep foam, so both of the best elegant fungi perfumes set off the rich mushroom a treat. The turbot was a beautiful slice and perfectly cooked, with the lovely addition of a set sage and fish mousse on top. The vivid blob of pumpkin puree sweetened the dish, but the very best part was the smoky cream sauce made with bones and fish roe that pooled around the turbot and had us all wanting to lick the plate. Which is when they presented us each with a tiny, warm, light English muffin to soak up the sauce. Clever!

Cabbage

Cabbage

So much to love here in all fifteen plates. Tunworth cheese ice cream with truffle honey starts out as a chilled dessert, but as it warms up and pairs with the rest of the glass of red Sardinian wine (they deliberately suggested we save some of our main course wine pairing for this!) the pungent hum of the Tunworth comes forward and brings out the truffle flavour to make a really great savoury. Clever! Sturdy cabbage slow-cooked in smoky beef stock, with a delicate wasabi cream on top. Lovely little bowl of dark brown bisque made only from roast crab shells, lifted brightly with a drop of kaffir lime oil. Skewers of lamb belly topped with unripe elderberries pickled – just like capers but distinctly fruity. Clever!

I was fairly blown away with Aulis, and the wine pairing was very intelligently put together and sensible enough that we were still awake, alive and (reasonably) focused right up to the last little petit four. The menu is £125 without drinks, and for a whole evening’s intimate experience with very friendly hosts I’d say this is brilliant value.

Lamb belly

Lamb belly

Review: Sager + Wild, Bethnal Green

Duck and fig

Duck and fig

I love how London is strung together, an endless brightly lit web of streets full of places to shop and eat, and how you can walk in a few yards from one socio-economic area to another. You can be strolling past name-brand boutiques and identikit chain shops along the edge of Spitalfields Market… then drift into a neighbourhood of indie homeware and clothes stores and achingly hipster cafes and eateries in Shoreditch… then blend subtly beyond Brick Lane into an endless row of South Asian clothing and cakes mixed with sharp-lit tatty local groceries and kebab places… and back to a little hipster enclave around Bethnal Green tube. All without ever losing sight of bright lights and shopfronts.

So we ended up at Sager + Wilde winebar with food in Bethnal Green, rather than the other branch back on Old Street. It’s a nicely decked out place under the railway arches, big but with dark wood panelling and an impressive amber-lit bar to cosy it up a little. They are good with wine as well; this month was a special investigation into Beaujolais and we were led to two glasses of very excellent 5 or 6 year old cru wines with surprising body and leather.

Evil j-chokes

Evil j-chokes

The food was good without being knock-out. A pair of butternut squash arancini were well made and had a good autumnal taste with a little chunk of scamorza melted in each. A dish of roasted Jerusalem artichoke were exactly that; anyone familiar with roast Jerusalem artichoke will know what I mean. One of the best flavours in the world, impossible to screw up.

Maureen’s main was a cacio e pepe with truffle. The pungent truffle flavour was built in very nicely although the cacio e pepe itself could have had a bit more bite. Pasta was perfect. Basically a really good dish. My main was duck with figs and vermouth jus. I could pick a hair: the fig was advertised grilled and they forgot to grill it. But actually the juicy fresh figs worked really well with the nicely roast duck breast, and the jus was a very deep-flavoured and silky puddle. Roast heritage carrots were okay.

Three courses without drinks would set you back around £36 and that seems about fair. It’s a good place to have in your neighbourhood and I’d be a regular if I lived here. Or if a random ramble through London led me back. But I’m not going to go the extra yard and suggest it’s worth a special journey.

Cacio e pepe with truffle

Cacio e pepe with truffle

Review: The Mash Inn, Radnage

The Mash Inn

The Mash Inn

I had no idea the Chilterns were such proper countryside; only a stone’s throw from London but with proper twisting lanes, bosky woods, hilltop views and bucolic villages. In one of them, Bennett End, is the old red brick Mash Inn, a restaurant with rooms.

We stayed overnight in a garden room with dinner and breakfast in the morning. For £300 the room was very small and even if the soft furnishings are posh I’m going to take exception to a room with no hooks/rails to hang a towel on and no full-length mirror. They also hadn’t turned the heating on before we arrived, so we spent the first hour in our coats while it warmed up.

Okay, okay, you’re much more interested in the food!

Bold use of lobster

Bold use of lobster

They put up a really jolly good tasting menu, and the pub itself is a beautifully cared for old low-beamed place with nooks and crannies and a roaring fire. The most inspired dish was the main course, which came as a sort of Asian-fusion duck feast. Very beautiful roast duck as the centrepiece, with crispy duck skin crackers, exceptionally good sticky rice, powerful zingy kimchi and good relishes.

The rest of the courses included a lot of interesting elements, though I’m not completely sold on all of them. Definitely a think-y kinda meal. Example: we had generous chunks of lobster fried in tempura batter with a soy sauce to dip in. So that’s definitely a bold thing, to use an ingredient like lobster but serve it as humbly as the mixed tempura in your local Japanese. And it worked. But I think it rather elevated tempura more than it elevated lobster. Example: dim sum dumplings filled with chocolate and a caramel dipping sauce. I’d certainly never had this combo before… but I’m still not certain that the chocolate and caramel really loved the glutinous flour dumpling. Tiny crab cornets were exceptionally good, with lots of brown meat filling the cone.

Overall I’d have to say I’ve had more consistently excellent tasting menus than this for £110, so I’m certainly not going to say the Mash Inn is good value (ref: paragraph 2 on the Garden Room!). But it was an enjoyable feast in very lovely surroundings – both the pub and the countryside – so if money isn’t something you watch too closely, then I can recommend it.

Duck feast

Duck feast