Review: Fox & Hounds, Sinnington

Fox & Hounds

Got a few reviews in a bunch, from a week touring parts of the north of England. As usual we found a whole lot of warm, hospitable and brilliant places to stay and eat and explore. The Fox & Hounds in Sinnington was our first stop. The village is tiny, tucked up at the foot of the North York Moors in a little valley and utterly forgotten by the world – a long way from tearoom-and-tourist packed Helmsley ten minutes down the road. The inn was a great place to stay, dressed up in the kind of country chic you’d expect from the Cotswolds but very down to earth in hospitality and friendliness.

Their food is a good step above pub classics. I started with some beautiful chicken livers on toast, glistening in a lush wine sauce with grapes and crisp onions. The squire would certainly have this for supper of a chilly spring evening! Across the table, little Yorkshire blue cheese croquettes dressed with apple and hazelnuts were even better.

Chicken livers

Chicken livers

My main was rolled pork belly, slow cooked and then finished with a beautiful crispy surface in the pan. It sat on top of one of the best potato rostis I’ve had: totally fulfilling the rosti promise of crispy, scrunchy outside bits and silky, still firm, insides. I’m not sure what’s involved in “pot roast” carrot but it was a handsome beast with bags of flavour. Good celeriac puree. Very good cider gravy. Basically an immensely satisfying plate of food. The confit duck leg atop a bed of asparagus and fennel salad was also excellent.

Scarcely any room for pudding, so I had an affogato made spiffy by the choice of rum-and-raisin ice cream and honeycomb crumbled on top. Across the table a raspberry souffle came out perfectly. All in all a lovely meal, and it worked out around £40 each for two courses or £50 for three. I think that fairly matches the quality, towards the top end of pub dining.

Pork belly

Pork belly

Review: Embers, Brighton

Cocktails by the fire

Embers is a cooked-on-wood restaurant in the Brighton Lanes. Most fun is sitting up at the counter, so you can watch the chefs do their thing with the flickering orange flames, the coals and ashes. Sizzling fat etc. The menu is small plate style and they’re really doing their utmost to bring you maximum char and full-on flavour with every dish. Boom. Although it’s interesting how often the gas-fired blowtorch comes out to finish off the effect!

Aubergine from the embers first, cooked like a nasu dengaku but without the sticky glaze. Nice charring, squidgy aubergine, and a big whack of powerfully good carrot kimchi on top. This was followed by a nicely pink lamb leg chop, topped with a wild garlic salsa verde and slippery bits of slow roast red pepper. Nice glossy gravy, although it felt a tad out of place on the smoky char-grilled meat. Next up, grilled calves liver, cooked to perfection, with a peppy chimichurri and a powerfully umami-salty crumb all over. Vroom. The grilled skate wing was a bit on the small side; a couple of forkfuls each once the meat was scraped off the bone. Big on flavour though, with a heavy char, and a peppercorn sauce that tasted way deeper and funkier than expected. Hits of caper too.

Ember aubergine

Ember aubergine

Final dish was “bonfire potatoes”, and maybe it’s a bit of a signature cos it was certainly dish of the day. Crispy, crunchy, flavour-packed jacket potato skins with a lush mashed potato loaded back into them, on top of burnt brisket ends muddled up with a sticky-sweet-hot sauce. Some crispy scraps on top for added crunch. Mmmm.

They suggested four dishes each, which is barking mad as we were comfortably full after five-between-two (then again, the size varies quite a bit). We had rock-solid cocktails and a decent glass of wine. But I will say that by the end of five dishes we were flavour overloaded and in need of a rest! It’s quite full on, and that’s from a couple who love big flavours. You’d spend maybe £40 each on food, and that’s probably spot on. I think I could be lured back, maybe…?

Bonfire potatoes

Bonfire potatoes

Review: Furna, Brighton

Furna

Furna

I wonder to what degree my enthusiasm for a menu is guided by the whole experience? There’s absolutely no doubt it has an effect: I don’t have professional tastebuds nor zen-like detachment, so how much I enjoyed the fish dish will be influenced by how much I’m enjoying the whole dining experience. But is the effect extreme enough to disqualify the entire review? If I rave about menu A but I’m decidedly “meh” about menu B, would you really be well advised to pick restaurant A over restaurant B? I hope so. Because after all, we’re all hoping for a good experience and although some luck comes into it, generally the best service and ambiance are as consistent as the best cooking.

Anyway, we had a great meal at the chef’s counter at Furna, and I’d recommend booking those seats if you can. Admittedly it was a quiet lunchtime, so we got to monopolise chef and the team with all our questions about the food and the wine and pretty much anything else. The rest of the dining room is dark tones, stylish and inviting. Short but solid wine list and some great cocktails to start.

Trout

Trout

First up were some jolly splendid snacks, including a scrumptious hash brown fried in pork fat with a curl of smoky coppa on top, and a chunk of braised octopus with the most perfect texture and a punchy, sticky XO glaze with a yeasty foamy hollandaise. Both of these were among those happy “line up a dozen of these, I’ll be in heaven” snacks. The little tearable brioche/milkbread loaf glazed in garlicky butter just got demolished by us, served with creamy cod roe as well as butter.

First starter was a single Jersey royal, skin blackened, on top of a cream sauce spiked with smoked eel and apple. The potato was topped with a generous dollop of pike roe, a beautiful golden roe with a slightly more delicate flavour than caviar and a more sturdy bite. Loved it. Fish was chalk stream trout, a rather salty piece of fish but with a real depth of flavour from the curing. The star of the dish was a beautiful sea buckthorn and habanero sauce, a new combo to me but the fragrant citrus and the fruity heat paired very well. The sauce and the crunchy tempura courgette flower on top went a good way to balancing the salty fish.

Lush lamb

Lush lamb

Main course was my favourite lamb dish from the last few we’ve had (dine out on tasting menus in spring and you basically get to find out how many ways there are of doing lamb!). The lamb was beautifully full-flavoured with extra oomph from its finish under flames, but the extras really made it: a cloudy dollop of whipped curds, a courgette-and-basil puree that absolutely hummed with basic fragrance, some tiny bone marrow cubes and well-charred asparagus and other greens. Oh, and a lollipop of crispy fried lamb sweetbread on the side, dipped in a lush cumin-y sauce. Yum.

We finished with a nice slice of lemon tart on a buckwheat pastry, given zest and pop by charred pieces of various citrus fruits (we even nibbled on Buddha’s finger!). Good petit fours too; I’ll take an Aperol spritz jelly over any number of fruit jellies in future, thank you!

We paid £85 for the menu and £55 for an enjoyable wine pairing, although this was lunch time and I think there’s an extra tenner to pay in the evenings. I thought this was great value for the quality of the menu and the overall experience. I’ll definitely suggest Furna if anyone asks for a good fine dining option in the middle of Brighton!

Great snacks

Great snacks

Review: Robata, Soho

Kimchi rice

Today we fancied an izakaya. There’s a good one called Flesh & Buns towards Covent Garden (review here) but we decided to try somewhere new and widen our options: Robata, named for the coal-fired grills used for cooking yakitori sticks.

The sticks we chose were: lamb belly, Iberico pork, king oyster mushroom, sweetcorn. The lamb belly was well flavoured, but inconsistently grilled with one of the skewered bitterly blackened towards the end. The pork was better, although by contrast perhaps not as charred as it could be. The mushroom was either an old specimen or not well trimmed, because there was some jolly leathery bits that took some solid mastication to get through. The sweetcorn was nicely charred and then coasted in wasabi-pea crumbs. Interesting idea, but I actually don’t think they added to the pleasure of a corn on the cob. Also, I get that the corn was cooked and grilled in advance, but it would still have been a better experience served warmer than room temperature.

Sweetcorn

Sweetcorn

We had karaage chicken as a snack. I liked the gochujang mayo it came with, but the batter on the chicken was deep brown and properly thick, like you’d get on a piece of cod from an adequate fish-n-chip shop, and the chicken inside was… not dry, okay, but hardly succulent. It was fine. The best dish was the side of kimchi rice topped with a fried egg, yummy.

This lot was about £32 each before drinks, but it was also a modest meal – we could have eaten more. I’ll be heading to Flesh & Buns when I want an izakaya, and will be giving Robata a miss.

Skewers

Skewers

Review: Apiary, Brighton

French toast

French toast

Apiary is a smart little bar that looks out of place in the middle of Western Road – it ought to be in a much hipper corner of Brighton. But it’s worth seeking out. We stopped off for drinks on Saturday evening and then breakfast on Sunday, and if I superimpose the two then I reckon I can recommend going there for lunch or dinner too!

It’s honey-themed, of course. They’ve got a long list of various modern expressions of mead, a cocktail list that features honey in many of them (but not all, they’re not, like, obsessive or anything!) and a menu where honey crops up in places too. My French toast breakfast was good, well presented fluffy chunks of toasty-edged brioche with plenty of fruit, fresh figs and crumbled pistachios with a drizzle of honey. The mead flight last night included an absolutely knock-out barrel-aged mead with flavours of smoky oak and dark maple syrup as well as a surprisingly elegant banana-infused mead that had a dry caramel-y taste and would have been a perfect switch-out for a dessert wine with a souffle. Maureen’s cocktail was a Salt Bee; salted mango vodka with fermented chilli honey and lime juice, an exceedingly moorish sip with a gentle warm kick.

The owners of Apiary are beekeepers themselves, so this is literally a hive-to-table restaurant! And being where it is, prices are sensible for Brighton. Short review as we haven’t had a full meal here, but they’re a friendly little place doing something unique and very deserving of a visit next time you’re in Brighton!

Mead flight!

Mead flight!