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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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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Review: Asador 44, CardiffReview: Heaneys, CardiffReview: Crispin, ClaphamReview: Cinnamon Bazaar, Covent GardenReview: Drunken Lobster, Ventnor

One of those hiatus things

Categories:

General Articles

18 January 2014

I haven’t posted a blog in a couple of months now. But I very much haven’t stopped blogging, I’ve just paused. We’ve moved house. As usual, that has involved lots of things going into boxes and coming out of boxes, and lots of other boxes being stacked in one room, then moved to another. There’s lots of paint tins everywhere, and dust sheets and there are many, many trips out in search of curtains and wardrobes and chests of drawers and everything else.

It’s just a priority thing. I haven’t stopped eating, I just haven’t found time to write about it!

So we’re in Cheltenham now. Managed to squeeze in two last lunches at The Green Cafe in Ludlow before we left. I’d eat there every day.

In Cheltenham we’ve tried a half-dozen local restaurants and haven’t yet found our new local favourite. There was a bistro on Suffolk Road where the service was glacial and the pairing of fruit and monkfish a bit of a misfire. A brasserie in Montpelier, beloved of many locals (the only place busy on a Sunday night) but pretty average. Our nearest deli/cafe is a daft. Oh, the coffee is okay… just… and the cinnamon buns are awesome but everything else, from sandwiches and brunches to the goods on offer in the deli, is just terrifically overpriced. They stock my favourite coffee roaster (Grumpy Mule!) but how can they put £6.25 on the label when five minutes walk away the local organic grocer has it for the correct RRP of £4.25?!?

The good folk of Cheltenham seem particularly keen on TripAdvisor, and are so enchanted by the eateries in town that the first two pages of results are pretty much all 5 stars. I was delighted to find that the coffee shop I’d pass on my morning ramble to the train station served such superb coffee! Except they don’t. And I suffered two cups just to make sure. Funnily enough, it might be okay to drink in, but there’s just that irresistable temptation to fill the bloody paper cup up to the brim with hot milk, isn’t there?

There are good things. Purslane is an awesome little seafood restaurant, top class and especially at the prices they’re charging. Prithvi is a jolly good Indian, though it’s stretching somewhat to describe them as modern; ultimately it’s still meat with spicy sauce. Both of these are a fifteen minute walk.

I hope to get back to the blog soon. This isn’t a post, it’s just stream-of-consciousness. But Le Champignon Sauvage is booked for next Saturday, with a chance to redeem themselves after a lacklustre meal we had several years ago, and we’ve got Nathan Outlaw in February!

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Review: Lasan, Birmingham

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Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

26 October 2013

Lasan
Birmingham is not an easy city to love. The city centre is a soulless jumble of high-end and low-end brand outlets, eatery chains and cheap baguette shops. As though someone has put the word out that folks in Birmingham are fearful of accidentally buying anything independent or original, and everyone has believed them. If there’s such a thing as “second city syndrome” then Birmingham has it, because I’d much rather find myself wandering around Bristol, Bath, Manchester, Portsmouth or York than around Birmingham*.

The odd highlights gleam all the more for it. There’s a spiffy coffee shop, the York Bakery Cafe, and just around the corner the Urban Coffee Co. And on the way into the Jewellery Quarter, an uninspiring district stuffed with hundreds of shops selling bling that would make H Samuel feel rather avant garde, there is Lasan.

Spiffy panipuris with tamarind broth
It’s a calming modern space tucked incongruously away in a bland building down a little side-street, but well worth the finding. This is Indian food served up with thought and originality.

First up we got an amuse of crispy little puri shells filled with a tamarind broth. Awesome bites. Actually, if you have never had panipuri then you should grab the first chance to try them, anywhere you can. The fact that these crisp cups of deliciousness are so hard to find is testament to the stupid artificially restricted menu that most UK Indian restaurants still cleave to. Not so Lasan.

For starters proper we shared a plate of vegetarian starters: crisp pakoras, vividly tasty spinach tikki, cubes of marinated paneer, etc. These were all good, and brightly spiced, though probably not the most refined of the appetisers on offer.

Not your classic curryhouse presentation of a main
Our main courses were a big improvement. I went for the signature Elaichi beef. This was seriously sourced meat; meltingly braised blade, lean yet full-flavoured sirloin, then a bone marrow pakora and some tandoori sweetbreads. The former was a deep-fried snot, the latter were a fantastic way to treat sweetbreads. Best of all was the deep, rich, warmingly spiced cardamom gravy.

Maureen’s dish was a goat biryani, served with daal and raita. This was my favourite ever biryani, lightly buttery rice and goaty pieces of tender goat meat. Needed the raita to provide some moisture, but almost certainly a main I’ll order myself next time.

Pud was a lemon and cardamom posset, notable only for not having enough cardamom scent for my taste. We enjoyed a couple of excellent glasses of wine, unexpectedly good in fact. You’ll be paying around £35 for three courses here without drinks, and although not my favourite ever Indian meal, I think they can probably get away with that for being head-and-shoulders the most forward looking Indian restaurant in Birmingham.

Birmingham doesn't inspire hilarity

* – so if you know of a brilliant little neighbourhood full of cool independent shops, like Manchester’s Northern Quarter or Brighton’s North Laine, please leave me a comment! I’d love to love Birmingham, I work there after all. : )

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Review: The Stagg, Titley

Categories:

Michelin, Pubs, Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

13 October 2013

The Stagg, where the local squire comes to eat
Given that we’re going to be leaving the Welsh Marches soon, it felt like time to return to that most historic and significant of pubs, The Stagg at Titley. You’ll know it of course. You don’t? Call yourself a foodie? The Stagg is of course the very first pub in the entire world to have been awarded a Michelin star. In that sense, in this country at least, it stands as the first spot where the venerable Michelin guide stepped down from its pedestal of starched white linen, fifty page wine menus and waiters folding your napkin for you when you pop to the loo.

For my money, even twelve years later, the Stagg is still doing it right. The front room remains unashamedly a bar, where locals eye up arriving diners over the rim of their beer glasses. The two dining rooms at the back are handsomely decorated and furnished with no attempt to strew the place with rural knick-nacks or photos of pheasants and fox hounds. Yeah, this is where the local squire comes for dinner, no doubt.

Beef. And a BONE. Beef and a bone. Caveman food.
Starters are very good. Pig’s head for sir and sweetbreads for milady. The pig’s head is breadcrumbed, and is a chewy, fibrous, porky delight. Served with a little pickled radish on top of a nice sauce gribiche. This comes in a tiny wee flowerpot with edible soil around the radish. Hey, we are deep in the provinces here, “on trend” is bound to be a year or two off the London pace. Maureen’s sweetbreads are excellent, quite rare in the middle, with a liver and walnut coating. It’s a gutsy mouthful, literally.

I can’t resist my first bit of grouse of the season. I get breast and leg, proper tasty, a good little bread sauce with bags of flavour, parsnips and a scrunchy game chip in “giant Hula Hoop” form. Autumn is here! Maureen’s fillet steak isn’t the most melting ever, though it’s nay bad. With a light shallot jus and some good chips on the side. The dish is saved by a smoked and roasted hunk of bone marrow, which does for the fillet steak what Johnny Depp did for Pirates of the Caribbean.

Charming petit fours, flavoursome little chocolate crisps
We finish with puddings. Yes indeedy, for all it has a star the Stagg is a pub and so you don’t have dessert, you most definitely have pudding. Maureen’s bread and butter pud is the proper job, with crunchy caramelised top and gooey beneath. My “Autumn Eton Mess” is a great concoction of plums and figs, hazelnuts, meringue and lots of fresh whipped cream. I’m sure the fruit has been introduced to some booze somewhere.

I grant you we picked the premium mains, but in essence it’s about £34 for three courses before drinks. That’s very high for a pub, but about fair for the quality. The wine list is utterly reasonable as you’d hope in a pub, plenty of bottles under £20 and some really good stuff. Boy, if The Stagg were fifteen minutes closer to Ludlow I’d eat here a lot!

Game, fungi, fruit, nuts and red wine. Autumn!

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Review: Asha’s, Birmingham

Categories:

Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

1 October 2013

I've not yet enjoyed a great meal in a restaurant with a TV screen. Could be coincidence.
There seem to be two approaches to “contemporary Indian cuisine”. The first approach is to take a step back, look at all the amazing ingredients and techniques found across the sub-continent, and then create a menu of modern dishes riffing on the classics in new and interesting ways. The second approach is to take all the myriad variations on “meat in spicy sauce” that have been available in curry houses around Britain for decades and do them in posher surroundings with a higher price tag. Asha’s fits solidly in this second category, and does a fair job of it without really lighting my fire.

Papdi chat. Colourful, yep.
The decor is dark winebar chic with splashes of Bollywood colour. It feels both classy and manufactured, something you might perhaps expect from a restaurant with outlets in Dubai, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi as well as Birmingham. Service was friendly and polite. Kudos for including four different lassis on the drinks menu (though I’m amused to find that the plural of lassi is apparently “Lassies”).

Maureen’s starter was four big chunks of fish in sturdy batter, with a fresh green sauce. Not enough sauce for these mighty pakoras, so the whole thing was a bit tasteless. My papdi chaat was more flavoursome and definitely pretty, but I’m sure papdis are usually crispy rather than crunchy.

The curry.
For our main course we had a Muscat Gosht and a Hare Baingan Ka Bartha (baked mashed aubergine). Both were utterly buttery, the aubergine particularly so. In fact, I think if I’d tilted my plate it would have slid down the incline. Beyond that it had a fairly modest flavour, just a bit of greenish spice. The gosht was properly spicy, with a fiery kick, but the taste to me was “generic curry” and not much more. Good pieces of lamb mind you, very tender. Really I’d be very happy if my local curry house served up this kind of thing… and in fact it does.

There we have it. If you’re after a good ol’ curry, and you want to posh it up a bit, Asha’s will fit the bill. It won’t be a cheap bill, mind you: we paid £22 each for two courses without drinks. But calling it “contemporary Indian cuisine” is only literally true in that this is indeed the Indian cuisine that most people are eating today.

Puntastic

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Causa with smoked duck breast

Categories:

Lunch or supper, Recipes

25 September 2013

Causa is cold mashed potato. Mmm… appealing! That must be why there are hardly any recipes on the internet for causa. Well, I’m here to add to that paltry tally.

The whole point about causa, and why I like it, is that it should be cold mashed potato with stuff. In this case I happen to have some amazing stuff: smoked duck breast from the Black Mountain Smokery, picked up on our annual wander around the Ludlow Food Festival (perks of living in Ludlow!). Fresh cobnuts are in season too, and the milky, nutty scrunch goes really well with the chewy, smoky duck. What are cobnuts? Cobnuts are essentially hazelnuts before they have been dried, straight from the tree.

Smoked duck and cobnuts, causa in back

Smoked duck breast & cobnut vinaigrette with causa (supper for 2, starter for 4)

1 smoked duck breast, sliced
Causa:
4 medium-size potatoes, good waxy ones
1 dried chipotle chilli
1/2 lime
salt & black pepper
Dressing:
2 tbsp extra virgin rapeseed oil
1 tbsp cider vinegar
Handful shelled fresh cobnuts
Handful flat-leaf parsley
salt & pepper
  1. Wash your potatoes and boil them in salted water with the skin on until they are cooked right through. Rinse with cold water and leave to cool. You’ll find they peel easily, and cooking them in the skin keeps more potato-y taste in ’em.
  2. Chop the chipotle and put it in a mortar with one tbsp hot water. After 10 minutes you should be able to pound this into a red liquid paste.
  3. Roughly chop your cobnuts, then finely chop your parsley. Mix the rapeseed oil and vinegar in a bowl until they emulsify together and then add the nuts, parsley, salt and pepper.
  4. Mash the potatoes, then add a tbsp rapeseed oil, the chilli paste, juice of half a lime and a pinch of salt. Mix well.
  5. If this is a starter, put a blob of mash on the plate and arrange a few slices of duck before spooning some cobnut vinaigrette on top. Watercress would be a nice garnish. I made a supper out of it instead, with more causa and a sliced avocado dressed with lime juice scattered on top. Either way, very slowly roasted tomatoes make a great accompaniment. Enjoy!
Cobnuts

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