Review: Beckford Bottle Shop, Bath

Beckford Bottle Shop

Beckford Bottle Shop

The Beckford Bottle Shop. It’s a wine shop and bistro in the middle of the beautiful city of Bath. It’s got a Bib Gourmand from Michelin. We stopped by for a light lunch on a blustery day in February. They’ve got the bistro decor spot on, service was friendly, and there’s a good selection of wines by the glass. We picked four dishes off the small plate menu, looking for a light lunch.

Courgette fritti were very good, with a nicely crisp batter and good aioli to dip in. Next up, dressed crab on a potato waffle, garnished with seaweed and chicory. This was a generous dollop

Lamb ragu

Lamb ragu

of white crab, bright and fresh but full of flavour, paired well with the soft waffle and the seaweed extra savour. Char-grilled broccoli with toasted almonds and burnt lemon mayonnaise, I enjoyed the broccoli and almonds but the mayo wasn’t nearly punchy enough with lemon and the whole dish was just too seasoned and so became rather salty after a few bites. Finally, rigatoni with a lamb ragu and pangrattato was comfortable and full-flavoured, with perfect bite to the pasta.

All in all, a good place to know for lunch, although I will say that we weren’t completely bowled over by the cooking, just perfectly happy! We paid about £20 each before drinks, but this was certainly just a light lunch and you’d need a couple more plates to make a filling meal.

Crab and waffle

Crab and waffle

Review: The Bell, Ramsbury

Venison loin

Venison loin

I really loved The Bell at Ramsbury. For starters, Ramsbury itself is a beautiful village nestled beneath the hills of the Wessex Downs, clearly one that was more like a small town back in the mid-20th century but has been forgotten by time (and by everyone dashing past to more well-known points west). The Bell must be one of the finest buildings in the whole place, especially lit up at night. And we did stay the night, so I can say that the rooms are cosy, comfortably well appointed and full of character. And the Bell is also part of Ramsbury Farm Estate, a really good example of modern countryside management, with their own brewery and distillery (the beer at least I can attest is a good’un!), forestry, solar, market garden, butchery, zero waste, etc. So of course the food in their restaurant is absolutely loaded with produce sourced from, oh, less than three miles away!

Maureen snacked on some pig’s head croquettes for starters, lovely gooey bits of piggy goodness in a crisp breadcrumb with (not enough of!) a tangy brown sauce to dab in. I went with an artichoke and hazelnut soup, a very soothing proposition and I’ll admit to adding salt and pepper to amp up the lovely artichoke flavour. Came with a very sound chunk of springy sourdough focaccia.

Fish and chips

Fish and chips

My main was venison loin, still pink but fairly well cooked. Nice deeply flavoured jus, and accompanied by softly cooked turnip, radicchio and a big heap of softly cooked polenta. The polenta was a coarse grain, and had a very full flavour, nothing meek in this, it paired very well with the venison. Maureen went with fish and chips (yep, the menu having a few classics and even pizzas alongside the more grown-up dishes), a very generous helping of fish in good batter, loads of scrunch and not oily. The same could be said of the chips, almost impossible to stop eating. Especially dipped in the tartare sauce, a really refined affair with good punch but also a powerfully fragrant element… was it just tarragon? Not sure, but wish I’d asked.

We even found room for pudding. Maureen’s was top-notch, a lovely vanilla rice pudding with a crisp little brulee crust of burnt sugar on top, delicious compote plums and cinnamon ice cream alongside. My pear frangipane tart was fine, though I’d have preferred more pear and less of the sturdy frangipane. The pear sorbet was lovely, but – just an observation – it didn’t pair with the tart. It was nice on its own, it vanished when eaten with the tart. Better pear ice cream, maybe?

Aaaaanyway, we had a lovely meal in a splendid pub. You’ll pay £45-50 for three courses before drinks, which I think is top end for the wilds of Wiltshire but the quality was excellent and I’d definitely come back.

The Bell

The Bell

Review: Khao Bird, Soho

Mutton fries

Lots of lovely new Thai openings in London recently. Khao Bird is a northern Thai casual eatery that has come up from Brighton, where they started a few years ago as Lucky Khao. Inside is just the kind of bare-brick interior with metal-topped tables and simple chairs you’d expect from a modern Soho eatery. Some nice pops of red neon to remind you that you’re (culinarily) in Thailand!

We went with a fermented tea leaf salad (via Burma), mutton fries, beef and campari larb, a herbal squash curry and Chiang Mai barbecued chicken. The fermented tea leaf salad was a nice muddle of stuff, the slightly funky whiff of the fermented leaves coming through, though the overall effect was also a bit of a muddle of flavour and texture. Mutton fries were just that: chips topped with shredded mutton. The mutton was full-flavoured meat and sticky with spice, the chips were very crisp but also very oily. Tasty filth, though, and I reckon they’d see this as a signature dish!

Chicken

Chicken

The larb was a change in texture and full of punch, albeit I couldn’t really detect Campari specifically. Scooped up with big prawn crackers, there was nothing wrong here. Nothing specifically wrong with the barbecued chicken either, a very tasty piece with lovely sticky-fried skin. I must admit the dipping sauces did nothing for me; a bit sour, with hard to determine flavours. The squash curry was great, though, with the surprising and powerful flavour of roses coming beautifully out of the coconut-y curry with just enough chilli heat to be delicious.

Khao Bird serves up a perfectly decent mix of modern Thai cooking. At somewhere around £30 each before drinks for a decent sized meal, it’s good value too. That said, the dishes weren’t quite as top-notch as some other Thai options we love in London. Won’t disappoint, though.

Squash curry

Squash curry

Review: 27 Harbour Street, Broadstairs

27 Harbour Street

Thanet is a lovely corner of Kent. Margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate are all coastal towns with bags of character and varying degrees of nouveau-hip shops and eateries bubbling up. Stretch the boundary a little and the lovely medieval town of Sandwich makes a great quartet, all within about 20 minutes.

27 Harbour Street lies just on the edge of Broadstair’s little old harbourside and was a welcoming place to tumble into out of a frigid winter’s night. The welcome is friendly and the dark interior with old wood furnishing just added to the cosy. Good looking wine list, seemed very reasonable on the markups.

Sea bass crudo

Sea bass crudo

We got started with some wild mushroom macaroni fritti to snack on. These were proper good. Crispy breadcrumbed cubes filled with a lush macaroni cheese mix humming with wild mushroom flavour. Snacks devoured and wine poured, we ambled through another half dozen small plates (and as an aside: notably more generous small plates than those turned out in most other small plate restaurants).

There was a lovely salad of roasted pear, with nicely charred edges, on a bed of full-flavoured whipped goat cheese and scattered with nutty toasted pumpkin seeds. Then a dish of raw sea bass with proscuitto and a lively apple and chilli puree in the middle. The sea bass and apple worked well, with fragrant ponzu dressing, but I thought the proscuitto was a heavy-handed interloper, both with its chewy texture and heavy saltiness. Next up there were good char-grilled carrots with salsa verde, and a scrumptious piece of blackened hispi cabbage bathed in a truffly emulsion. Lots of cripy onions on top for crunch and black blobs of pickled walnut ketchup for tang. This was very good eating.

Pomme Anna

Pomme Anna

The larger plate that came last (okay, or we could call it “main”!) was a good piece of rump, medium-rare, with a really splendid beef fat bearnaise sauce. Mmmm… beef fat bearnaise. Very special. Roast roscoff onion accompanied it. And it came with our final small plate: a beautiful golden-brown brick of Pomme Anna potatoes, crunchy on the outside and lush within, served with the classic Spanish combo of a bravas tomato-chilli sauce and aioli.

We could definitely have finished there, but then we’d have missed out on sticky toffee pudding with a black stout and miso butterscotch sauce. The muddle of bitter-umami flavours in that sauce elevated STP one step above it’s usual childlike post-pub-meal indulgence. Very, very good.

You’d probably look at £35 each for a three course meal at 27 Harbour Street and that’s brilliant value for the sheer loveliness of the food here. The cooking is generous, full-flavoured and with plenty of little inventive hits. You really ought to find an evening to spend here if you’re off visiting the far east corners of Kent!

Hispi cabbage

Hispi cabbage

Review: A La Russe, Windsor

Mushroom en cocotte

Mushroom en cocotte

Visit Windsor on almost any day of the year and you’ll find a town awash with tourists from across the globe, visitor numbers out of all proportion with the modest-sized town centre. So you’d expect most of the restaurants to be horrid affairs with glitzy frontages and gimmicks, serving up over-priced rubbish to people who will never be returning. And there are a lot of those. But there are a handful of gems, if you look hard enough. Maybe not exactly cutting the edge of culinary fashion, but very good. That’s a fair summary of A La Russe: an absolutely classic French-restaurant-in-Britain. It feels like you could have walked in here at any time since the 1970s. And on the evening we were here (Christmas Eve, admittedly) it felt like all the clientele were long-time locals.

Ribeye with truffle sauce

Ribeye with truffle sauce

So what did we have? Well, the baguette and butter given to the table was exactly what you’d expect: warm, crunchy, soft and incredibly easy to scoff. Maureen started with a half-dozen snails in garlic butter, jolly good though could perhaps have been garlickier. My wild mushroom cocotte was perfect for a cold winter night, bags of pungent porcini and truffle flavours bursting from the gooey Comte cheese cap of the little ceramic dish. For main course I went with ribeye steak in a sauce of porcini and marsala. The steak was a flavourful piece, nicely done and the sauce was just the right indulgent and creamy-boozy-fungi hug for a festive occasion. Maureen’s rabbit with chestnuts and lardons was another comforting piece of French cooking, in a sleek herby white wine sauce.

Somehow I found room for a tarte tatin, which was the perfect classic: solid pieces of apple, but cooked until saturated with the slightly bitter butter-caramel flavour, and the most delicate of crisp pastry beneath. Maureen thought she was going light with the grilled pineapple, but it had been simmered long in a slick of sweet caramel sauce, leaving it just sickly with no balancing juicy tang. Really the only properly bum note, though.

A La Russe is a totally sound option for French cooking in Windsor. Heading for £50 for a three course meal, but that feels like decent value for the quality and the location; the Castle is just over the road.

Tarte tatin

Tarte tatin