Review: The White Horses, Rottingdean

Roast beef

Roast beef

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 blue seaside skies through the picture windows. It’s a marvellous setting for a relaxed lunch and we came on a Sunday to try.

Being Sunday, we mostly picked the roast beef. They’ve put a good deal of effort into the makings of a good Sunday roast. The beef was very bravely pink, giving it a lot of great flavour. I will admit that I’ve had more tender roast beef, and if you’re going this pink you want it tender as possible, but I’m splitting hairs here as it was certainly the right quality for the price-point. Loved the Yorkshire pudding, a puffy and un-greasy specimen which they had topped with a scoop of lusciously slow-braised beef cheek. I’ll whisper it: that was the best bit! That said, the gravy was top-notch and plentiful. Roast potatoes were waxy, good on flavour if not crunch. And a roasted chunk of hispi cabbage with blackened edges accompanied well, along with sturdy roast carrots full of earthy flavour.

I couldn’t help adding a sticky toffee pudding on the end. For research, of course. This was a very good one: the pudding moist even without the sauce, the sauce plentiful and bitter-sweet, and the scoop of clotted cream ice-cream on top was silky and rich.

Sunday roast was £23, just about spot-on for the quality, but I’d say the attentive service and the lovely setting tip this over into a strong recommendation. Certainly if you’re planning to be anywhere east of Brighton, a long stretch of coast where there’s almost nothing else worth your time!

STP

STP

Review: Toklas, Embankment

Cocktails at Toklas

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 a pre-theatre quickie. The play was brilliant, by the by, a most bonkers and over-the-top modernisation of a Shakespeare comedy, which is frankly what you need to do if you want a modern audience to actually find a Shakespeare comedy funny!

The dining room is relaxed and very with-it, classy old tables and comfortable chairs in a stripped-back space. We picked a couple of cocktails to kick us off, an accomplished calvados and benedictine concoction and a good sour based around mezcal. Then we got stuck into a starter to share; breaded and fried pieces of skate with buttered agretti – a kind of delicate spaghetti-like form of samphire from Italy – and dressed tomato. The skate was firm, excellent dipped into the aioli humming with garlic on the side.

Skate

Skate

For mains I went with a pork chop and Maureen picked linguine with crab and chilli. The linguine was splendid, perfect pasta and plenty of crab worked through it. Lush, and just a touch of chilli. My pork chop came with escarole, something from the chicory family which was braised and spiked with raisins and capers. I did like this veg a lot, great partner to pork. The chop was a solid specimen, good fat on it, some nice charring. For me it was a little over. In most pork chops there comes a point when you realise you’re just soldiering on rather than actually enjoying it. Only the best are enjoyable to the last bite and this wasn’t one of those. Not bad, but then for £30 perhaps I was expecting a faultless chop?

Their chips are amazing, though. Beautiful, salty, crunchy shards of potato. Shards is the right word, they looked like a potato had shattered into the perfect chips.

So that was our meal. A three-course meal will be in the £55 region and I personally think I can find equivalent three courses in London for a chunk less than that. Toklas is solidly good, classy, and worth knowing about… but it’s not going to become a regular for me.

Just chips

Just chips

Review: Row on 5, Mayfair

Row on 5

Row on 5

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 looked-after, the food is just one notch beyond expectations, the surroundings are plush and the whole experience is essentially indulgent.

There’s another class of dining in between these two: fine dining, usually tasting menu, sometimes ambitious and/or ethnic, friendly service. It’s this end of things I seem to have lost interest in. It’s often pricy without being truly indulgent, and yet the needs of fine dining means it can’t be as BOOM with flavours. At the end of the day, I usually forget those meals within a couple of weeks of eating them. Snack, snack, snack, seafood, fish, meat, cheese, pre-dessert, dessert, petit fours n coffee, rinse and repeat.

Venison dim sum

Venison dim sum

Of course that was the essence of the menu at Row on 5 too. A lot of particularly good dishes, which I’ll come back to. But the memorable meals are so often the wider experience. They have a beautiful lounge space downstairs and a beautiful dining room above, with striking lighting and a great open kitchen. It feels properly glamorous. The service is pitched just perfect too: very friendly, but highly polished. You are made to feel special. They have a gigantic wine tome. HUGE. ENORMOUS. And while I usually grumble at wine lists where so few wines are sub-£100 that you’d feel like a pauper ordering one of them, on this occasion the passion implied by the gigantic tome makes it alright. Their wine collection is on display all over the restaurant too; when we returned downstairs for petit fours and coffees, they sat us in the private wine room where we could mooch the collection and their wine library. See? I’ll remember this meal for a lot longer. As long as the food was okay…

Wine tome

Wine tome

It was. Superb, in fact. I’ve had a few venison main courses this winter, but the piece of sika deer loin here was in another class. I’ve no idea whether it was the sourcing, storage or cooking but it was a magical piece of meat. Even if the blackcurrant and beetroot elements were hardly innovative (just very excellent). The five-spicy dim sum of shredded venison was a delicious but also stunningly presented addition, like a tiny fuzzy comet.

Having started in the middle I need to rewind, as some of the snacks were splendid. The dice of tuna loin on a crisp little squid ink case, topped with a tiny slice of fatty otoro tuna, singing with a fragrant hit of yuzu, was one of the standouts. Delicate pieces of raw langoustine with tiny crisp flowers of finger lime on top and a sabayonne of salted egg was another. The base was a clear tomato gel with a wonderfully deep and smoky flavour over which the finger lime hummed beautifully. Also very much loved the scallop, unashamedly meaty and dense, well caramelised with a frankly yummy XO glaze. Best scallop I’ve had in a while.

Langoustine

Langoustine

The bread course was more indulgence, more like a crisply glazed pastry served with chicken skin butter. Naughty. The main fish course was turbot, of course. The sauce was bold, made with monkfish liver, dotted with fermented chunks of razor clam and peeled grapes, finished with plenty of lovage oil. The whole dish was lovely. After the venison came a lovely little Stilton tartlet, a refreshing zip of kaffir lime snow on a Sauternes jelly, and then a very accomplished chocolate pudding full of bitter-sweet flavours and Jerusalem artichoke ice cream. Yes, yes, we’d enjoyed the Giant Wine Tome too much at this point for me to keep careful notes…

The bill was, of course, as massive as the wine tome. The menu is £250 per head before drinks. It’s a price I’m willing to pay (occasionally!) for a special occasion, to feel indulgent and indulged for a whole evening; we were there from 18:30 to 23:00 …so if you calculate your restaurant bill per hour, this is ironically much closer in value to some modern tasting menu places where you’re in-and-out in 1.5 hours and the bill is around £300 for two! I’ll leave you to decide where you place value, but Row on 5 definitely scores highly in flavour, quality, indulgence and service on anyone’s scale.

Tuna snack

Tuna snack

Review: Asador 44, Cardiff

Beef tartare

Beef tartare

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 Licked Clean is a great blog that I’ve followed for ages, and the couple of places I’ve been on prior visits to the city leave me pretty sure that we see eye-to-eye on food!

This visit we went to Asador 44, a Spain-inspired grill place that is now most definitely a Cardiff institution. So I was only somewhat hopeful that it would still be as good as when TPLC first reviewed it years ago. The dining room is big, friendly, casual and cosy. This was the final Sunday lunch of the year and service was slow, both up front and from the kitchen. I’m imagining an unexpected seasonal staff shortage. It was all fine.

Whole sea bass

Whole sea bass

The food was great though. My starter of ex-dairy beef tartare with grated cured egg yolk on top and a big crunchy charcoal cracker flecked with fennel seeds to scoop it up with was jolly good. Full flavoured beef, as you’d expect, but nothing gristly in there. Maureen’s grilled king oyster mushroom was good, with a sticky diced aubergine relish on the side. For main course I shared a whole sea bass with friend Tim. This was a cheerful monster of a fish, beautifully cooked off of the grill. Both the richly smoky romesco sauce and the brightly minty salsa verde were excellent. We went with a side of tenderstem broccoli, which came with an ajo blanco sauce that lacked a real garlicky punch and some bits of almond cracknel that were too big and so oddly separate from the broccoli. The other side was a silly bit of a Sunday-lunch-nod; Yorkshire pudding with chorizo. I thought it would be somehow cleverly done, but was a big and rather dry Yorkie with a few bits of fried chorizo dropped into it. Maureen’s confit duck leg sat upon a lovely baked rice with sticky burnt edges, shot through with morcilla and more salsa verde. The duck leg was fine, maybe a bit dry.

So we had a mixed bag at Asador 44, with some lovely fish and baked rice, a nice tartare, but some just-okay sides and duck leg. It’s probably be around £45 each for a decent meal without drinks and I think that’s probably nudging the high side for what we ate. That said, I’d say it’s a solid recommendation if you’re visiting Cardiff and want somewhere to eat in the very centre of the city.

Baked rice and duck

Baked rice and duck

Review: Heaneys, Cardiff

Scallop roe hash browns

Scallop roe hash browns

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 fashioned made for a very good pre-prandial sip while we waited for the first snacks.

The best snack was a cube of hash brown enriched with scallop roe, a dollop of taramasalata on top and a little caviar on top of that. Absolutely wonderful, definitely one of those “please just line up eight more of these for me and I’m all good” snacks. The little cheese tartlet was nice too. They turned out a really splendid sourdough, full-flavoured with a good crumb and very twangy, and a black and scrunchy crust.

Splendid sourdough

Splendid sourdough

Chalk stream trout came in a light truffle and ponzu broth. This broth was a stunner, light and very full-flavoured but without going into umami overload. I’d have preferred it with a white fish or shellfish. Next up, a beautifully cooked piece of monkfish draped with lardo and set on cubed turnip. I felt the cream sauce rather took over the dish, certainly couldn’t detect the Iberico pork used in it. I freely admit to not loving (most) cream sauces with fish! Hen of the woods in a miso broth topped with lots of crispy onion was great. Then a lovely bit of sea bass, the skin a beautiful crispy shard on top, with a brown butter jus and a chunk of braised salsify. And a blob of creamy foam.

The venison main wasn’t cutting any new ground, but was a great example of its type. Lovely pink piece of loin, some jolly seasonal accompaniments of beetroot, red currant, blackberry and red cabbage, and then a side serving of spiced and gamey venison sausage. Loved that sausage.

Coconut and passionfruit

Coconut and passionfruit

For pre-pud we had an ice lolly of coconut, passionfruit and white chocolate. I guess I’ve had enough ice lolly desserts now that I see them as gimmick; this combo could have been presented much more appealingly on a plate. The main dessert was a warm chocolate pudding around a centre of banana miso caramel, jerusalem artichoke ice cream and crispy chips on top. That banana miso caramel was inspired and indescribably yummy and I’ve always got time for that funky-earthy hit of jerusalem artichoke.

All in all a really enjoyable tasting menu for £85 a head. You could comfortably add £40-50 to that if you wanted a meal of the same quality in London. I don’t know if that makes Heaneys a bargain or Cardiff a bargain! Maybe it’s a bit of both? Anyway, although I can’t really shout Heaneys out as particularly ground-breaking or earth-shattering, I can totally recommend it for a splendid dinner on a visit to Cardiff.

Venison

Venison