Shepherd's pie

Review: Cinnamon Bazaar, Covent Garden

Can I write a fair review here? We met up at Cinnamon Bazaar with friends, six of us for a sociable dinner a few weeks before Christmas (though close enough for all the decorations to be up in the streets and the festive menus to be popping up in the restaurants). So perhaps my mind …

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Edamame at Drunken Lobster

Review: Drunken Lobster, Ventnor

The Isle of Wight needs a bridge. How else am I to get over more regularly for good food? Looks to me that the Solent at its narrowest point is only a bit longer than the Isle of Skye bridge, so it shouldn’t be too hard. Loads more people live on and visit Wight than …

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Long Chim rolls

Review: Long Chim, Soho

It feels like Long Chim kinda tricked me. A little bit. Their spiel says: “Long Chim, meaning to ‘come and try,’ invites you to an authentic Thai dining experience. We strive to capture the vibrancy and energy of modern Bangkok, serving the food found in the alleyways, the markets and the shop houses in Thailand’s …

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Review: The Greene Oak, Windsor

Coming back from a long enough trip abroad (this time, a six week jaunt around northern Spain) gives you the chance to look at what’s back home with a somewhat fresh gaze. At least, if you try hard enough. The English pub really is perhaps the most distinctive piece of our human landscape, very different …

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Review: Koyal, Surbiton

Koyal is the third branch of the Dastaan empire. Unlike their Leeds restaurant, this time they’ve opened just a couple of miles up the road in Surbiton. It should make a big difference though: Dastaan is on a suburban shopping parade miles from the nearest train station, meaning anyone from central London has quite the …

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Review: Cinnamon Bazaar, Covent GardenReview: Drunken Lobster, VentnorReview: Long Chim, SohoReview: The Greene Oak, WindsorReview: Koyal, Surbiton

Review: Anchor & Hope, Southwark

Categories:

London, Pubs, Restaurant Reviews

11 August 2019

Tomatoes on toast

Tomatoes on toast

I was a bit disgruntled on getting back to London after 10 years away. There are so many great places I wanted to eat, but what about reviewing them on the blog? Years and years after every major paper and hip London blogger has reviewed them? Bit late to the game, right? And then I had a brainwave. My new series of blogs will be cleverly subtitled: “Yes, but is it still any good?”

So. The Anchor & Hope. First of the great London gastropubs. It set the stage and changed the game back in 2003, when pub food was all lasagne and baltis. Reviews were gushing. But… is it still any good?

Yes. Yes it is.

The first thing that surprises me is that the pub is neatly split in two. There’s one half that is a classic rammed-after-work London boozer, and then behind a curtain there’s a pared back dining room of simple scrubbed wood and dark walls. They could have filled the place with dining tables and never looked back, but they didn’t. Bravo. Service is friendly and super-competent.

Duck hearts

Duck hearts

My starter was stupidly simple on paper and absolutely knock-down gorgeous to eat. Tomatoes, mint and cream on toast. These were big manzano tomatoes, sliced in half and slowly roasted until they’d firmed up from lost water, and developed a ginormous tomato flavour. The drizzled cream had warmed up and picked up a tomatoey stain and some of the mint, and cut the gentle acidity of the tomatoes perfectly.

Basically, I have a new favourite dish to try at home. Already tried it once, worked a treat.

Maureen’s gazpacho was rustic and freshly delicious, but she was definitely envious. Mind you, she won the main courses. Duck hearts that had been devilled in a darkly spicy gravy and served on flatbread with humous and tatziki. Anyone who doesn’t love a grilled duck heart is missing something. I stuck with a veggie theme and went for a courgette and girolle risotto. It had a splendidly summery courgette flavour to it, as they had put in bags of both courgette and butter. This was a hearty risotto! The big crispy ricotto beignet on top was delicious, a dark brown and crunchy batter with milky cheese oozing out into the rice.

And wouldn’t you know it, both the wines we picked by the glass were delicious and at friendly pub prices. The Anchor & Hope is still definitely very good indeed.

Courgette and girolle risotto

Courgette and girolle risotto

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Review: Baker & Graze, Cheltenham

Categories:

Cafes etc., Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

11 August 2019

Salmon and fennel

Salmon and fennel

I’ve left Cheltenham now, and been living in Blackheath for a few months. Sadly there doesn’t appear to be any brilliant local place for lunch here; the best I’ve found is the local branch of Gails and an okay but pricey indie called Hand Made Food. Where is the Green Cafe of Blackheath? Where is the Baker & Graze?

Oooo. Baker & Graze! Cheltenham’s second finest and only a few doors down from Le Champignon Sauvage (Cheltenham’s finest). I can’t believe I never got around to writing a blog about them!

Baker & Graze have been in Cheltenham for only maybe 3 years now. They’re a cafe-bakery that nevertheless cooks up very real and brilliant one-plate lunches. Inside it is comfy, stripped-back brickwork & brass style, and quite often extremely busy. For good reason.

Let’s start with the baking. Probably the best sourdough loaf in Cheltenham (though they might have to fight for that prize with The Sandwich Box). But now let’s consider their sourdough doughnuts. So soft, yet so springy, with decadently generous fillings. I’ve taken boxes of these to parties and people have been talking about them a week later. Oooooooh… and how about a crisply flaky cruffin with a rich prune and chocolate interior. Lush financiers too. And I’ve only eaten a cinnamon roll to match theirs… once, maybe twice?

But it’s their lunches I love best. Plenty of great things on toast. An amazing slow-cooked Moroccan lamb with flatbread and scattered pomegranate. Splendid home-cured salmon with a fragrant and juicy fennel salad and a perfect poached egg hidden within. Or how about some real dedication to sourdough: pan-fried sourdough gnocchi? They came out like deliciously herby dumplings, crispy on the outside, soaked in a beautifully deep and rich venison ragu with a nice drift of parmesan on top. Now and again they also have an absolutely wonderful squid stew on.

They make a decent cup of coffee and keep a range of good quality softs and boozes to have with your food. Most of those lunches are around the £8-9 mark. I will be gobsmacked if you don’t love lunch at Baker & Graze.

Gnocchi and venison ragu

Gnocchi and venison ragu

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Review: Gopal’s Corner at Victoria Market Hall

Categories:

Cafes etc., London, Restaurant Reviews

11 August 2019

Gopal's Corner

Gopal’s Corner

I can still remember with intense clarity the best ever Thai green curry I have experienced. It was in a fairly random restaurant in Satun, a town on the southern border with Malaysia that had no interest for foreigners except as possibly a place to get a ferry over the border to Langkawi. It was like there were two dials, one labelled “fragrant” and the other “rich/earthy”, and both had been dialled up to beyond MAX yet miraculously still balanced each other. Instead of rice, it was served with a soft and flaky roti that tore into papery chunks and sopped up the greenish sauce perfectly.

Which is the tenuous connection with Gopal’s Corner, a Malay rather than Thai place, serving rich curries with roti upstairs in Victoria Market Hall. If you haven’t been, VMH is a buzzing food court with about a dozen offerings from tacos to bao to burgers and it’s about 2 minutes walk from Victoria station. Frankly it’s an extremely useful place to know.

And although I haven’t tried everything, I reckon Gopal’s Corner is probably the best food there. The curries do the same thing as that green curry in Satun: dial up both fragrance and rich earthiness to max. The roti are homely and flaky and tear into papery chunks that sop up the spicy sauce perfectly. The meat in the curry is almost secondary, but soft and good.

It’s also cheap; a bowl of supper for a few quid. See you there.

Gopal's roti and curry

Gopal’s roti and curry

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Review: Fitzroy, Fowey

Categories:

Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

25 July 2019

Fitzroy salami

Fitzroy salami

Let me tell you about Fowey. It’s a town in Cornwall set on an estuary of inky-blue waters, with the picturesque little village of Polruan on the other side and a breezy scattering of little boats anchored in the channel. Nestled in amongst green and wooded hills, its streets are narrow and winding, and its buildings are a muddled mix of ancient fishing village and Victorian seaside town. There’s a small beach a short walk seawards from the harbour. The Cornish pronounce it “Foy”. Fowey is basically heavenly, more deserving of the phrase “picture perfect” than anywhere I know. I could retire here. It helps that there are a handful of decent places to eat.

Pollack and aioli

Pollack and aioli

And perhaps it explains why Fowey was chosen by the folks behind Primeur and Jolene for their first outing outside the capital. They’ve said they want to get closer to the produce, although I have a suspicion that the plate of delicious fennel salami we start with isn’t from Cornish piggies.

Fitzroy is properly London-ish, at least by Cornish standards, and we sit at the bar and watch the small team busy at work in front of us. It’s a small plate menu, and some of the plates are definitely small. This is a minor peeve, but it’s vexing when the size of small plates varies so much that you can’t tell whether you’ve ordered a full meal until it has all arrived. One dish from the first section (which I guess we could call “starters”?) was five tiny slivers of cured sea bass with a drizzle of oil and citrus, while another was five big chunks of breaded monkfish on a thick bed of homemade tartare sauce. Both delicious but one three times the size of the other. And then one of our dishes from the second section (which we might call “mains”?) was a big, friendly slab of pollack with potatoes and aioli while the other was a veg accompaniment-size dish of beans.

Beans! Good!

Beans! Good!

Which was bloody delicious, by the way. Stewed borlotti beans, basil and chard with a heavy drift of parmesan on top. Deeply flavoured and satisfying, this was really the dish that gave me a clue to why Primeur etc are so popular (we’ve not tried any of their London joints yet). The pollack was nicely cooked but it’s a piece of fish, some new potatoes, and a dollop of aioli. I can’t rave about it.

It was a nice supper before a long drive home. You might spend close to £40 each on something the size of a 3 course meal though, which to me is rather closer to London value than Cornish value. I can’t sniff much, though. I rather liked the place, liked the obvious enthusiasm of kitchen and front-of-house, and like having a bit of London pizazz in heavenly Fowey.

Polruan from Fowey

Polruan from Fowey

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Review: The Tolcarne Inn, Newlyn

Categories:

Pubs, Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

25 July 2019

They have it pretty good for seafood in Cornwall. Especially if they’re a seafood restaurant in Newlyn, perhaps the most important fishing harbour in the whole of SW England. We wandered into a fishmonger to buy some fish for supper last night and everything was a third of the price it would be back up country. Not exaggerating. If I lived in Cornwall, I would overdose on fish. Apparently it’s a little trickier as a small restaurant – you can’t go through enough fish to actually buy directly from the market, so you still need to find a fishmonger to keep you in haddock. Even so, it’s going to be at least a day fresher than anything that lands on a London table.

The Tolcarne Inn is very much a no-frills dining room. It’s not really a pub any more, though it has the decor, and it still has rooms upstairs, a menu based on what’s good from the boats chalked up on a board, and a short but useful wine list.

Monkfish and sweetbread

Monkfish and sweetbread

To start we both have monkfish with battered sweetbread, pea mousse and a minty salsa verde. It would be hard for this to not be delicious, and it isn’t. Hang on. I mean it isn’t not delicious, of course. So it is delicious. Got a bit tangled up there, sorry. I proceed…

To mains. My silver mullet is naturally silky and perfectly cooked, with charred spring onions coiled on top along with some bright cubes of beetroot and some plump and vivid orange mussels that have added flavour to the butter. It’s set on a thick dollop of pease pudding, which I confess I’ve had seldom so couldn’t tell you if this was a great specimen. It certainly had a sturdier texture than mash potato and a gently beany flavour. This is a lovely plate of fish.

Ray

Ray

So is Maureen’s blonde ray. Shaved fennel and onion salad is good, along with a sea vegetable that I didn’t recognise and forgot to ask about. We had a bottle of wine quite quickly, you see. The ray was great. The pasta with a sauce of saffrony brown crab that accompanied was f.a.b. and could have stood up as a dish on it’s own. Ate very well with the sturdy white ray meat.

We even squashed in desserts. Lemon verbena posset with raspberries, super-summery and lip-smackingly sharp. Blackcurrant, orange and cardamom pavlova gave up all the flavours it promised in spite of the obvious strength of the blackcurrant. Nice little meringue.

You’ll be up around £40 for 3 courses. So not really pub dining, the price sets it one notch above all but the priciest London dining pubs. But it is veeeeeery good value for the care and attention put into serving up magical local fish beautifully. Good puds, nice atmosphere, decent wine list. Ought to be a candidate for the Top 50 Gastropubs list, really.

Silver mullet and pease pudding

Silver mullet and pease pudding

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