Venison dim sum

Review: Row on 5, Mayfair

I’m developing some clear preferences in my old age, I think. Nowadays I’ve got a strong preference for more informal mid-range dining, preferably ambitious and often ethnic. Small plates almost always feature. But as Row on 5 has just reminded me, I also love a real splurge on a destination restaurant where you feel super …

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Baked rice and duck

Review: Asador 44, Cardiff

The food scene in Wales has improved beyond measure over the last decade, with the charge led (I would argue) by Ynyshir on the fine dining front. It sometimes feels like half the best places to eat in Wales are headed by alumni. That aside, Cardiff itself has also burgeoned with good eats; The Plate …

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Scallop roe hash browns

Review: Heaneys, Cardiff

Heaneys is a handsome, friendly, comfortable and capable fine dining restaurant in the nice Pontcanna suburb of Cardiff. Thirty minutes walk, or a ten minute taxi ride on a rainy December night, from the Castle. We went with the long tasting menu, because ’tis the season to over-indulge after all! And a beef fat old …

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Pheasant

Review: Crispin, Clapham

We moved to Clapham five years ago, and the only small independent restaurant that critics and bloggers were ever bothered with – the Dairy – immediately closed. Roll on five years, and we’ve now got Crispin at Studio Voltaire, the third or fourth outpost of this lil’ bunch of small plate places. Let’s hope they …

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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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Review: Row on 5, MayfairReview: Asador 44, CardiffReview: Heaneys, CardiffReview: Crispin, ClaphamReview: Cinnamon Bazaar, Covent Garden

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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Review: Shore, Penzance

Categories:

Fine dining, Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

25 July 2019

Shore, Penzance

Shore, Penzance

Let me tell you about Penzance and St Ives, the two towns on the edge of the Land’s End peninsula (or Penwith, as it’s more properly called). One of these towns has winding cobbled lanes absolutely stacked with lovely shops, galleries and cafes, many of which wouldn’t look out of place in Bath or Brighton. It has a pair of beautiful sandy beaches. It has a renowned modern art gallery and the garden studio of Barbara Hepworth. The other town has a handful of serious granite-clad buildings, a town centre looking kinda down-at-heel and missing quite a few shops. It has a harbour and a couple of rather sad hotels on the promenade.

The first town is St Ives, the second is Penzance. But Penzance has one thing that ought to make its chocolate box neighbour jealous: Penzance has Shore.

Stunning mackerel

Stunning mackerel

Chef Bruce Rennie’s restaurant has 24 covers, which is actually mighty impressive given that he works alone in the kitchen. This explains why the menu is a fixed five courses, and why only one of them is hot. I have to admit that I did notice that simplicity. Doesn’t matter though, this is a £60 menu that showcases fantastic produce and a lot of skill and inspiration.

There is a cup of hot umami broth to start us off, along with squid ink crackers and a roll of nutty dark bread with sesame oil to dip in. The first dish is a dark ruby jewel, a little bowl filled with diced sea bream stained burgundy by a beetroot cure. Like a sort of English market garden ceviche.

Mr Pollack

Mr Pollack

Next up is surely a signature dish. Beautiful piece of local mackerel, cured everso gently so that it picks up a slightly sweet flavour, has slightly sturdy flesh, but is still magically translucent with the oily fish flavours not at all covered by vinegars. The bright wasabi sorbet quenelle on top is perfect with it, the radish heat tempered but the flavour still distinct.

Next up, picked crab in a lovely gazpacho-y cold tomato soup with perfect little flavour-bombs of tiny whole heritage tomatoes. And so to the main course: Mr Pollack. He had been roasted to a beautifully slippery softness, but with a surface seared to a really nicely bitter-sweet black. There was a really deeply flavoured green miso broth with him, and some simple green beans. It all came together beautifully.

Beautiful dessert

Beautiful dessert

Dessert was an eyecatching ring of velvety red, filled with a sturdy almondy baked cream (or something!). I must admit, the lovely local strawberries, vivid basil sorbet and lush vanilla cream impressed my taste buds a lot more. The dish as a whole, very pretty.

Shore is an excellent high end seafood restaurant, and if you are coming to Cornwall you should take the trouble to dine here. It’s £60 and the cooking is flawless. The wine pairing was well thought out and for a reasonable £38 we enjoyed every one. And then of course you’ve got the stunning views of the Lands End peninsula on your doorstep…

Cape Cornwall

Cape Cornwall

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