Review: Koyal, Surbiton

Koyal is the third branch of the Dastaan empire. Unlike their Leeds restaurant, this time they’ve opened just a couple of miles up the road in Surbiton. It should make a big difference though: Dastaan is on a suburban shopping parade miles from the nearest train station, meaning anyone from central London has quite the …

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Ukiyo

Review: Ukiyo Hand Roll Bar, Covent Garden

So I need to foreshadow this review. I love sushi and sashimi, except for one element of it. The thin seaweed sheet used for wrapping rice in various sushi forms. It’s often hard to bite through, and the texture is neither crispy nor yielding. It’s essentially the closest thing to chewing on paper that exists …

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Glass nooooodles

Review: Liu Xiaomian, The Jackalope, Marylebone

Needing lunch, we settled on noodles at Liu Xiaomian, which has been cooking in the basement of the Jackalope pub in a quiet Marylebone mews for a few years now. This really isn’t one of the modern, polished, faux-street-food restaurants that have been springing up all over the trendy corners of London recently (most of …

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Review: Bala Baya, Southwark

So. Bala Baya describes itself as a Middle Eastern restaurant, as do a few review sites that perhaps keep their info updated. But older reviews and articles, that no-one ever updates, call it an Israeli restaurant. It doesn’t take much nouse to realise why they have re-badged themselves “Middle Eastern” as thoroughly as they can! …

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Review: Som Saa, Spitalfields

One of the first new-breed Thai restaurants in London, I was put off visiting Som Saa for a long while due to a sad episode of racism tangled up with the restaurant six years ago (here’s a relevant Twitter thread). But we were at Spitalfields and needed lunch, and I’m optimistic enough to hope that …

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Review: Koyal, SurbitonReview: Ukiyo Hand Roll Bar, Covent GardenReview: Liu Xiaomian, The Jackalope, MaryleboneReview: Bala Baya, SouthwarkReview: Som Saa, Spitalfields

Review: Gostilna Pri Lojzetu, Slovenia

Categories:

Fine dining, Overseas, Restaurant Reviews

18 May 2013

Chef Kavcic explaining the menu to his guests
Scene setting. We’re in Slovenia, a tiny country on the edge of the Balkans with Italy on one side and Austria on another. A long weekend is highly recommended, a week if you can spare it, and we’ve found at least one top-drawer restaurant for you.

A meal is an entire experience. So of course the incredibly friendly reception we had at Gostilna Pri Lojzetu was bound to help. From our cheerful Romanian waitress, our knowledgeable and enthusiastic sommelier, right through to Chef Kavcic’s wife who gave us a lift back to our hotel, I have to thank everyone for a memorable evening (and no, I didn’t give any hint that I was a food blogger).

But of course, it all counts for nothing if the food isn’t great. It was very good indeed.

Chef Tomaž Kavcic doesn’t make it easy for himself, finding out what each table is interested in and then tailoring a menu to suit them. That takes confidence, hospitality and a great deal of enthusiasm for your work. No menu appeared at any table, the staff explained everything as we went along, and chef was in and out of the dining room a lot.

Dentex in seawater, on the inside of a wine glass
There is a terrace for sunny lunches, but the main restaurant is a cosy and evocative wine cellar, with that unique wine cellar hum in the air. It’s a romantic setting, a room you’re most likely to be sharing with Italians as Pri Lojzetu is set in the countryside an hour from Ljubljana but only twenty minutes from the Italian border.

We began with a great deal of fun. Neatly set on the inside of an upturned wine glass was a cube of firm dentex (a local fish) set in a clear seawater jelly with garnish. This was a blinding good mouthful. We also enjoyed a little flowerpot of super-savoury beef ragu with a disc of baked pastry and clay on top, the literally earthy flavour going very well with the meat. Oh, and this came with a carnation. The carnation was filled with a zingy jot of herbal brew, a tiny hit that set up the beef nicely.

Beautiful bit of sea bass, and the salt
Our first proper dish was actually the only slight duffer of the night, some very good raw tuna and seabass with a slight muddle of local cheeses, orange dressing and tepid basil foam. Three raw shrimps had a gooey texture that coated the mouth like the morning after. I admit I was nervous at this point: copying fads without the execution?

So I was inexpressibly glad to find perfection in the next dish. Citrus cured beef, somewhere between a carpaccio and a braesola, on top of smooth local cheese mousse and a puddle of soothing pea puree, alongside a warm cube of the most excellent slow-cooked smoky pancetta on a salad of fennel and courgette.

And then I loved our next dish. A perfect scallop, coral and all, served in a sumptuous potato puree with fresh local asparagus. Seasoned to perfection (with seaweed salt? Not sure…), it was the most original use of scallops I’ve enjoyed in ages. This was followed by sea bass baked on a salt “stone”, a technique that was dramatic and also made for the best single piece of sea bass I’ve ever tasted, served with a sun-kissed citrus sauce.

A very odd thing happened after the gnocchi, delicious in a smoky cheese and wild asparagus sauce but rather too big for a tasting menu. We left some, to save room for the main as we told our waitress. Oh no, she explained, if you’re full we’ll stop here. In other words: dishes keep coming until you’ve had enough. It’s an admirable sentiment, but a bit left-field for such a fine tasting menu! We didn’t want to miss out so we tucked the gnocchi away with some difficulty and were rewarded with a modest portion of the foie gras with shredded apple and warm cheese underneath. Beautiful and surprising again.

Dry ice works particularly well in the dark and cosy wine cellar
Dry ice made its appearance alongside the dessert of citrus cream and gin jelly – this time beneath a branch of white blossom and filling the room with the herby scent of juniper when chef poured hot water from a sturdy watering can over it. Well, why not?

Eventually we paid about 70 Euros each for the menu, which is excellent value for such an entertaining and delicious tasting menu served with great enthusiasm and hospitality. The Slovenian wines we had paired with each course were memorably excellent, especially the local fizz that had me fooled into thinking I was swigging some rather good champagne. It’s only unfortunate that local production is probably too small to make exporting sensible. Boo.

At just 10 stone, I myself cannot condone a menu that rewards appetite with more dishes

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Review: Casamia, Bristol

Categories:

Michelin, Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

30 April 2013

Tangy-smooth goat cheese mousse and earthy beetroot
For being the fourth city of England, Bristol hasn’t done well for top class restaurants. However it does at last seem to have a gem in its midst, and it’s a home-cultured pearl because before Casamia’s reinvention as a fine dining restaurant under the brothers Sanchez-Iglesias it was their parents’ Italian trattoria for a number of years.

The neighbourhood Italian is still recognisable in the shape of the dining room. The rest of the décor is bright and colourful, deliberately so as they’ve picked up the Japanese practise of redecorating a dining room according to the seasons and we’re here in spring. The menu goes on to include: eggs, rhubarb, asparagus, wild garlic, lamb, mint, micro-salad. We’re definitely here in spring!

One of my favourite bites of the evening was the very first, a little beetroot-purple pastry case containing a light goat-cheese mousse humming with flavour, and an earthy hit of beetroot jam hidden within. This was followed by a breakfast egg: black pudding, toast, tomato ketchup and creamy egg curds all layered cleverly back into a duck egg shell. The next starter was a verdant green, puffed spelt and citrus-marinated shallot in a sauce of pure parsley. Lovely. This was a really strong start and I would have happily reset the clock and eaten these three dishes over and over again all evening.

Salad intervention, eaten with tweezers
There was a clever little salad intervention next. A dozen baby veg, and I do mean baby; tiny shoots surely a few days old. Served dressed and with tweezers, the fun was in picking out a piece at a time and trying to guess what he’d grow up to be. Tiny turnips and leeks were startlingly powerful.

Fish was John Dory, scorched and topped with a sweet apple jelly, bathed in a lovely light cider cream. The jelly calmed the otherwise fiercely fishy taste. The main event was the best bit of lamb I’ve eaten in a very long time. I have trouble knowing whether the absolutely magical lamb taste is down more to the quality of the produce or the skill of the chef, but in any case the sweet mint sauce, dark wild garlic puree and soft stewed alliums all simply and beautifully flattered the meat.

Which leaves us to trot our way through four desserts (or rather five, as we paid extra for the GBM apple pie). The first was a sticky button of carrot cake with dehydrated carrot bits and nitrogen-frozen thyme ice cream, so the little dish smoked cheerfully at the table. I found it clever and nicely textured but underwhelming on taste. A dish of orange, crunchy dried mandarin, icy bloody orange nibble and a soft rosemary cream corrected this immediately, very good indeed. The apple pie was the finest dessert. Dry ice poured over cloves gave a nice hum on the nose, but gimmicks aside the lightest possible

The GBM apple pie, with plenty of drama-smoke
pastry case over soft apples and cubes of vanilla ice cream was delicious. Final pud was a beautiful disc of pressed rhubarb topped with vanilla cream, scorched nuggets of meringue and juniper caramel wafer. It looked the part but the rhubarb was so tooth-achingly cold that it didn’t give as much pleasure as it should.

The Sanchez-Iglesias brothers offer food that is confident, fun and daring. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine anyone finding anything on the menu too challenging or not liking it. I think that’s pretty brilliant. Their faultless cooking is light too; I left feeling satisfied rather than leaden. Casamia feels like a restaurant just waiting for wider recognition, and £68 before drinks is a bargain for a tasting menu of such quality and imagination (and the wine list is just ridiculously good value). Maybe in a couple of years, when this blog is still not famous but Casamia very much is, I’ll be able to mutter a gruff “ha, told you so”?

Ever tried to eat a prop? I'm sure it's happened to the best of us

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Review: The Walnut Tree, Abergavenny

Categories:

Michelin, Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

22 April 2013

I can’t resist examples of the insanity of TripAdvisor. Shaun Hill’s Walnut Tree rocks in at a mighty number 7, while Stephen Terry’s Hardwick squeaks in at number 10. Gosh, Abergavenny must be a veritable culinary mecca if these top-drawer chefs are that far down the list. Well, if the food I enjoyed last night at The Walnut Tree is anything to go by I shall be in heaven when I finally get to eat at “Pizzorante” – Abergavenny’s number 1 dining establishment*.

Plate of rabbit
Back to The Walnut Tree. It’s a dining room, not a pub, and has a pleasantly informal air of white-washed rusticity. Their website sums up a lot with this comment: “No dress code or similar pomposity. Journalists have given independent comment. This site will not offend visitors with smarmy overstatements of what’s on offer.” So it’s a take-me-as-you-find-me kind of place, and the various negative comments on TripAdvisor do seem to suggest that if you don’t like what you find you’ll get short shrift. I must admit that the formidable matron of the dining room had an air of disquiet about her that suggested she might get quite tart with anyone having an issue with their dish. Luckily everything was delicious.

My starter was a single large, perfect calf’s sweetbread. The strongly seared surfaces gave a beautiful meaty flavour to the normally subtle sweetbread, the remoulade and gravy mopped up very well. It was one of those dishes that ate far better than it looked. Maureen’s kerala fish curry was an insanely good, deep, spicy concoction. Just the fish in a curry gravy, it made a mouthwatering starter with a veritable minefield of whole spices to enjoy.

It is what it is, a very good creme caramel
For main I had suckling pig, with approximately hispanic accompaniments. There was a good slab of soft morcilla, a little heap of chorizo and pan-fried veg that I failed to identify, and a little empanada. This last was stuffed with pig, but it was the strong nutty flavour of the crispy brown pastry itself that I loved. The pork itself was excellent, moist and piggy. Maureen’s rabbit platter included saddle, liver, kidneys and a pudding. I’m not sure how this pudding is made, but it was a light, wobbly, savoury wonder. The offal was also great, the saddle itself moist but lacking flavour. Special mention to the potato cubes, splendid.

I polished off a very boozily satisfying Muscat creme caramel with prunes, while Maureen’s rhubarb and cardamom fool was light and tasty. I’ve made an internal memo to try combining rhubarb with cardamom soon, as they matched up very well.

I like Shaun Hill’s cooking here. Despite the Michelin star, presentation is definitely pubby; here’s some things on a plate – enjoy. But all the dishes were enjoyable, combining interesting elements and flavours masterfully cooked. At about £42 for three courses without drinks I think the price matches the quality of the menu spot-on.

Is a website that boasts of not being pompous actually being very subtly pompous?

* – which I’m sure is very nice, for the record I know nothing about the place

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Leave it out

Categories:

General Articles

14 April 2013

That's a lot of salsa verde right there
You don’t need to hear me harping on about the right way to store food. But what’s a blog, if not a place to vent spleen? The long and short of it is: you’ll waste less food if it’s out on show and not lost in the fridge.

The boxes of eggs I bring home sit on the worktop, and if I happen to not use eggs for a while they can sit there for two weeks or more. And they’re fine. And perfect for boiling, poaching, frying or whisking because they’re not fridge cold. You don’t have to keep eggs in the fridge, they stay happy and fresh at room temperature.

Heck, basically this whole post is about what not to keep in the fridge.

Please don’t keep bread in the fridge. The moist conditions, wrapped in plastic, are perfect for breeding the penicillin fur that will have you throwing it out in a few days. Fresh bread is best kept in a paper bag, out on the table, to keep the crust crusty. After a day or two for sourdough this will start to make it stale, the solution to which is sticking it in a plastic bag. Your crust will lose its crunch, but the bread will remain springy and fresh for almost a week.

Mediterranean vegetables don’t like the fridge either. Those poor tomatoes, courgettes, aubergines and peppers have never even heard of frost. Tomatoes in a paper bag sit on my window ledge for over a week sometimes without looking anything less than their best. Courgettes,

Veg, happy and visible, ready to play
admittedly, are best eaten within a couple of days. Subject any of these soft vegetables to the dreaded fridge and they’ll lose half their flavour in shock.

Same goes for strawberries.

Cheese, I grant you, is going to live in the fridge if you don’t happen to have a cellar tucked under your house. So the only point here is to have the foresight to take it out of the fridge a half-hour before you intend to eat it, unless you’re going to toast it or grate it on your pasta. Chorizo, on the other hand, is a preserved meat. Just like parma ham, it doesn’t need a fridge. You’ve seen them hanging up in markets and shops in the summertime in Spain, that ought to be a clue. If anything is going to make a dried meat mankey, it’s moisture.

That’s about it. Take stuff out of your fridge, it’s the wrong place for it.

Actually, let me give you three good reasons to think again about what you shove in the fridge:

  1. You’ll throw less food away; even if veg might last a day or two longer in the fridge, if it’s out where you can see it rather than lost in the back of the veg drawer, you’ll remember to use it
  2. And the inverse is true; the things you do need to keep in the fridge won’t get shoved to the back by the latest shopping load and forgotten, so you’ll use them up more effectively too
  3. Finally, your kitchen will look better. A bowl of tomatoes on the windowsill, eggs in a nifty ceramic egg box, a basket of onions by the back door, a jam jar sprouting a thick bunch of parsley; your kitchen will be looking like Nigel Slater’s snug country den in no time!

Oh, one more. Fresh herbs. As long as they have stalks on, sticking them in a jar of water on the windowsill is going to keep them for a week or more. I don’t know about you, but in a plastic bag in the fridge I’ve found coriander turning into stinky green slurry inside two days. Two quick tips though: (1) the ends of the herb stalks may have dried out, so snip off a little stalk before putting your herbs in water, (2) this doesn’t work with basil, one herb that has to live in the fridge once harvested.

Somebody needs the Ghostbusters

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Review: Ludlow Kitchen, Ludlow

Categories:

Makers and Producers, Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

9 April 2013

Ludlow Kitchen, certainly thinking big
The Ludlow Kitchen wins at local produce, don’t even try to compete. This is because it is the new restaurant attached to the successful Ludlow Food Centre, farm shop extraordinaire. Let’s see… the beef, lamb and pork is all from their own farm and butchered on the premises, they also make their own cheeses, cream and butter on the premises from their own milk, many of the vegetables are grown in their own gardens, jams and preserves made on the premises from local fruit, honey from their own hives. Heck, they roast their own coffee. It helps that their “farm” is actually the Earl of Plymouth’s rather extensive estates. Don’t ask me why the Earl of Plymouth’s estates are in Shropshire.

So how’s the new restaurant? It’s a big barn of a room, filled with bare wood – furniture, beams, fittings – but with a strongly contemporary look. This is a bright space, and the service was also bright and friendly. Well, they’ve only been open a week so they ought to be enthusiastic.

That was a good bit of beef
The starters on offer were all vegetarian, except for the chicken liver parfait. I went for a salad of beetroot and Ludlow Blue cheese. The mix of three beetroots was good, sweet flavours and some crunch from raw slices of golden beet, but the piece of cheese used was a bit of a dry old specimen, more veining than paste. Maureen’s pickled mushroom salad was great; a selection of lightly pickled fungi with a salad of mixed herbs including plenty of tarragon – great idea, the aniseed flavour sang with the pickle.

I went for the onglet steak, and it was a delicious piece of meat, absolutely stuffed with flavour, aided and abetted by pan juices. Good carrots, more herb salad, and some pretty decent chips; thin, crunchy, still with skins on, they took to the pan juices very well. The accompanying bearnaise sauce was a perfect consistency, but sadly over-vinegared.

Maureen’s main was a couple of melting trout fillets with a light sauce of ramsons and lightly roasted baby onions. Onions with trout? But they were young and sweet, and along with the delicate fish and loving wild garlic the whole dish was a paean to Spring. Which I’m sure is just around the corner.

Almond pannacotta - why haven't I had this before?
Puddings were 50/50. Almond pannacotta was brilliant, and a perfect consistency – wobbly to the point of but not quite collapsing. Why haven’t I had almond pannacotta before? Why? Roasted green rhubarb and ginger accompanied it very smartly. Maureen’s rice pudding was a good flavour, sweet and gently spiced, but it was a huge portion. The rice still had plenty of bite, like a risotto. Surely a rice pudding should be soothingly soft? My espresso at the end was very bitter, I ought to have said something.

This is only the Ludlow Kitchen’s first week, and overall I was pleased. The odd tweaks needed are just that, and shouldn’t hide some very honest and flattering cooking of excellent local produce. The starters felt pricey, and three courses ended up at about £26 before drinks. So, not a bargain, but that isn’t going to stop me returning, or indeed bringing friends here when I want to showcase to them the fine local foods that makes this region brilliant.

It doesn't have to improve the taste, eating local is just satisfying

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