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Review: The White Horses, Rottingdean

The White Horses Hotel in Rottingdean used to be a pretty typical boozer and meh restaurant on the seafront of the postcard village of Rottingdean, along the way from Brighton. Recently bought and re-vamped, now it’s like walking into the set of an Agatha Christie, all tasteful art deco furnishing, cane backed chairs and bright …

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Just chips

Review: Toklas, Embankment

Toklas occupies a very handy spot, just off the Strand in what is quite a wasteland for useful places to eat. So it’s been on our radar for a while. So having tickets to see Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell in Much Ado About Nothing at the Theatre Royal gave us the perfect opportunity for …

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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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Review: The White Horses, RottingdeanReview: Toklas, EmbankmentReview: Row on 5, MayfairReview: Asador 44, CardiffReview: Heaneys, Cardiff

Review: Sticky Walnut, Chester

Categories:

Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

7 April 2019

Chester

Chester

Should I spend the intro waffling about Gary Usher, the owner of the Sticky Walnut who has crowd-funded four more well-loved bistros around the north-west of England on a wave of social media street cred and chutzpah? Nah, I’d rather talk about Chester.

You need to come and chill for a weekend in this city. It has the most amazing medieval half-timber colonnaded shopping streets. It has by far the best and completest city walls in England that you can walk around. It has canals below the walls. It has the beautiful River Dee running through it. It has wonderful fragmentary Roman remains including a shrine to Minerva and an amphitheatre. On a sunny day its red-brick and gritstone buildings look stately and feel soaked in history. Visually and historically it can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with York or Bath… it just needs more visitors, so the dining and shopping scenes have a chance of catching up! Well, at least there’s the Sticky Walnut.

Cod

Cod

It’s a cosy bistro tucked away in a hip suburb not far from the city, simple decor and friendly staff. Only four whites and four reds by the glass, but bottle were sensibly priced and we found a friendly Rioja to look after us.

My starter was a sturdy breadcrumbed brick of softly braised pig’s head, topped with cubes of sweetly caramelised apple and served with a blob of very splendid brown sauce (I might quibble at the menu calling it barbecue sauce). Yum. Maureen had a piece of tandoor-cooked cod, blackened on the surface but very soft and silken within; great technique, great result. The blob of “nori mayo” worked well with it, distinct sea flavour coming through.

For main I went duck. There was plentiful amounts of pink roast duck breast, all very decent. Far more decadent and vile (in a good way) was a small brioche bun stuffed full of softly shredded duck leg. Cor! And a shout-out to the punchy drizzle of spring onion oil, the rich blob of plum sauce, and the perfect al dente texture of the char-grilled cabbage chunk. Maureen meanwhile had a mighty chunk of amazing slow-braised featherblade, drowned in delicious sticky gravy. And nothing says “great neighbourhood bistro” like the fat truffle and parmesan chips that came with it.

Duck

Duck

It was necessary to have pudding. Maureen enjoyed an earl grey and brown butter rice pudding with Armagnac prunes. Who wouldn’t? The bergamot came through clearly among the otherwise earthy and comforting flavours. I went for the custard tart, because apparently you’re supposed to. The custard was light as a dream, the pastry was nutty brown and delicate. Smashin’.

Can’t help but love the Sticky Walnut. Three courses does almost hit £40 before drinks, though. I’ve had very good meals at places that throw in bread and an amuse for that amount. This is about as good as bistro cooking gets though, and I can’t imagine recommending anywhere else for your weekend break in Chester. You are coming, aren’t you?

Pig's head

Pig’s head

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Review: The Hare & Billet, Blackheath

Categories:

London, Pubs, Restaurant Reviews

7 April 2019

The Hare and Billet

The Hare and Billet

Chicken is almost always at the bottom of my menu choices. It’s just… chicken. I sometimes get the feeling chefs put it on the menu with a big implicit label: “For Nervous Diners! The Safe Option!” because it tends to get put on a plate with some fairly boring accompaniments too. Then of course sometimes I go for the chicken anyway and it turns out to be delish. All depends on the chef.

This time I was drawn to it instead of the obvious Sunday roast beef by the promise of a chipolata and bread sauce. You don’t often see that on the 364 days of the year that aren’t Christmas Day! And the bread sauce was good; thinner and more full of herbs and spice than I’m used to, it made for a nicely restful relish for the beautifully roasted half-chicken. Waaaaay too much meat for just one of me, but it was very juicy, fully flavoursome and with skin crispy enough in places to be worth gobbling some of too.

Accompaniments were a mixed bag. The Yorkshire pud was okay, but without enough crispy poof to make the premier league. Roasties were a bit more chewy than crunchy of skin, but good textured ‘taters. Huge honey-roasted carrots I enjoyed; just enough funkiness in the honey to cut some of the sweetness. Good gravy.

I like the pub too. The Hare and Billet has a great spot overlooking Blackheath, with a rambling pubby interior and lots of friendly staff. Good selection of beers and gin, to be fair didn’t check the winelist. The roast beef looked okay too. Roasts were £16/£17 and I guess that’s a tad steep for the quality – this wasn’t the best Sunday roast I’ve had this year. But it was perfectly good, and the Hare and Billet is a good pub to have a short walk from home.

Roast chicken

Roast chicken

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Review: A Wong, Victoria

Categories:

Fine dining, London, Restaurant Reviews

4 April 2019

Goldfish dumplings! Awwww!qGoldfish dumplings! Awwww!

Goldfish dumplings! Awwww!

I could not stop laughing at the goldfish dumplings. An awful lot of effort had gone into artfully crafting something so beautifully naff. And I just didn’t get the dish either. The little goldfish had minced prawn inside them, which was a bit boring, and were accompanied by a piece of seared foie gras. Why? No idea. Luckily this was the one single oddity in a dinner of otherwise beautiful and delicious Chinese cooking in A Wong.

They do the small-plate-not-small-plate thing here. Where you just order whatever you like, but they suggest ordering one dish from the first section (that looks suspiciously like starters) and one dish from the next section (crispy duck and other pancake-wrapped things) and one or two dishes from the next section (shall we call it… mains?). Gosh. Almost like a traditional Chinese restaurant.

Street tofu

Street tofu

Anyway, all our small plates were brilliant. “Chengdu street tofu” was a bowl of beautiful silken tofu jumbled with veg, peanuts and a warm chilli kick. “1000 chilli chicken and snails” had an even brighter puff of chilli in the mouth, taken up another notch with citrusy Sichuan pepper. “Moo shu pancake wraps” was a rather salty concoction of unctuous pork, wood ear mushroom and egg with pieces of crispy tofu skin to add scrunch once you’ve got it all wrapped in the rice pancakes. Crispy duck was crispy duck, a perfectly good specimen.

“Dong po slow-braised pork” were deeply sticky and gloriously sweet slices of belly pork topped with crispy lotus root. The “Market veg” were stir-fried greens with a pleasing juicy saltiness, lifted with spring onion oil, and then topped with lots of generous black truffle. “Gong Bao chicken” was good. “Goldfish dumplings” were hilarious, as noted.

Dim sum

Dim sum

Oh, and for a Chinese restaurant they REALLY rocked the desserts. Poached meringue with fruit textures included an array of all your favourite tropical fruits, from mango cream and lychee sorbet to passionfruit, all brightly full of flavour. Okay, perhaps the chocolate, banana and truffle dish was a bit of a jumble. Nice enough if you have to have a chocolate pud, though. My favourite was the very left-field “Coconut water ice, blackberries, Xinjiang mulberries, yoghurt and mochi”. The water ice was just that, definitely not a sorbet. The berries likewise. And the yogurt. Somehow I felt transported to the icy Xinjiang mountains on a sunny autumn day.

To be fair, at this point we’d got through a couple of bottles of very good wine! Quite a reasonable wine list too, varied and fair priced. I really enjoyed the meal at A Wong and am dying to come back for dim sum one lunchtime. You’d probably pay £45 each without drinks for dinner, and that’s probably fair for the top-notch inventive Chinese cuisine.

Ice, ice, baby

Ice, ice, baby

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Review: Copper and Ink, Blackheath

Categories:

Fine dining, London, Restaurant Reviews

4 April 2019

Broccoli bite

Broccoli bite

There’s a helluva lot of care and attention that goes into fine dining – even informal fine dining – that you only notice when it’s absent. When our dessert showed up at Copper and Ink, with two cubes of chiffon cake, there was plenty of jealous comparing going on; lucky me, my cubes were nearly twice the size of everyone else’s! Similar story with the beef main; everyone had a noticeably different sized chunk of rump. And they were maybe running low on watercress in the kitchen because the sprigs got smaller and smaller around the table; all I had was a single yellowing leaf and Maureen’s was missing altogether.

That leaf should probably not have got over the pass, and it’s a fair summary of my thoughts: Copper and Ink aren’t yet able to execute perfectly on their ambition.

Beef n leaf

Beef n leaf

First starter of parmesan beignet with broccoli was pleasant, a clean start with an innocuous foam. The next course was a scallop well seared and served with a chermoula so very punchy that the rest of the dish never recovered. I had rabbit two ways; bonbon of shredded bunny and ham-wrapped loin, with minced mushrooms and a deep jus. Really jolly good, except the spinach puree served with it was over-salted.

Main course was the rump. Cooked rare but not so well prepped; half of us found some unchewable gristle in our piece. Parsnip, potato and shallot accompaniments were all pretty good, but the plating was just a bit duff. The bit of onion ash looked like someone had been cleaning out an ashtray nearby.

Choc tart AND BASIL SORBET OF THE GODS!

Choc tart AND BASIL SORBET OF THE GODS!

The last two courses were desserts and both were splendid. Chiffon cake with orange sorbet and scorched meringue blobs was a good start, probably dish of the day for me. Followed by a sturdy little slice of chocolate tart topped with fresh strawberries and a scoop of basil sorbet on the side. This sorbet was absolutely banging, fantastico, SORBET OF THE GODS. Like being beaten around the head with a huge bunch of fresh basil on a Ligurian hillside. So I guess they saved the best ’til last!

It’s worth reiterating that this was a very reasonable £40 for 5 courses and although I can pick a hole in each dish, we basically had a pleasant meal. The wine list also needs a shout, as it’s packed full of interesting bottles and the two we picked were top-notch. But I do know lots of places to go for a much more consistently brilliant meal at this price point. All that said… they’re a brand new restaurant and a young team, so I’ll definitely come back in a bit and see if they’ve sanded the rough edges off.

Chiffon cake etc

Chiffon cake etc

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Review: The Rattle Owl, York

Categories:

Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

18 March 2019

Soup

Soup

Hey, front of house folks. If you have a table of braying, cackling, bellowing morons dining in your restaurant then I totally understand that there’s not much you can do about it. The other tables seated nearby trying to enjoy a friendly Sunday lunch really do just have to put up with the raucous, ear-shattering, bonhomie of the sextet of swine gurgling their way through several bottles of wine in close proximity. But it’s really, really hard to enjoy the deliciously cooked food at all. So what you could do is just maybe quietly show some sympathy. An apologetic wince, or maybe just a quiet “sorry about that” when you bring our bill. It would be a nice gesture.

We found an app on the iPhone that measures volume. Apparently that table generated the average volume of “alarm clock” rising at times to “power tool”. Given that, maybe it would have been worth a member of staff, perhaps a manager, telling them to SHUT THE BLOODY F*CK UP AND LET OUR OTHER GUESTS DINE IN PEACE, YOU PACK OF BRAYING ASSHOLES!

Then again, they were ordering an awful lot of wine. And we know how the markup on that goes. : )

Beef

Beef

So let me try and push the noise to one side and review the rest of the experience. The Rattle Owl is a nice looking restaurant with a long, thin dining room and an art deco vibe. Our waiter at Le Cochon Aveugle recommended their Sunday lunch, and that was recommendation enough for us.

I tried a white onion soup to start, with goat curd and char-grilled silverskin onion. This was nice but the soup was rather over-salted. Maureen’s smoked salmon was good. But of course roast beef was the main event. Beautiful bit of beef, very well treated, meltingly good. The Yorkie was huge and puffy but burnt a little too brown. Fine veggies, including a well braised leek and excellent roasties. Gravy was decadent, but oddly distributed: Maureen’s beef was bathing in it, mine only sprinkled on. Wines by the glass were reasonably priced and good.

Sunday lunch was £21 for 2 courses and I’d say that’s about square value. You’d be very lucky to stumble on a roast as good as this by chance, though I can’t say it was epic. And of course it’s also hard to disentangle the effect of six raucous tossers on my enjoyment of the food. C’est la vie.

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