Review: Crispin, Clapham

Stracciatella

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 stick around! Not to do Clapham Old Town down: we’ve got a couple of great dining pubs and Michelin-starred Trinity, along with some solid mid-range options.

Crispin have transformed the blank atrium of the Voltaire art gallery/studio into a cosy dining space, although it still has a strangely pop-up vibe to it. Maybe inevitable in this spot. Still, sat at the bar we’re comfy and well looked after. The menu is nibbles, small plates and larger plates.

We nibble two Montgomery cheddar croquettes with a dab of brown sauce, they’re good and gooey. Two small plates are deep-fried pheasant and stracciatelli. The pheasant is a leg, bashed flat and breadcrumbed, with the talons still attached to show that it was definitely a real pheasant. It’s a dirty treat with the glob of n’duja mayo alongside, though there’s not much punch to the n’duja. The stracciatella is probably dish of the day, lovely gooey cheese, brightly creamy, served with wide ribbons of raw squash lightly pickled and gnarly dribbles of fermented chilli sauce. It was gagging for a bit of bread or cracker.

Pheasant

Pheasant

The large plate we shared was a chicken parmigiani, ringed with a squiggle of soft ricotta and lavished with a pouring of hot honey on top of the tomato sauce. The mixture was a filthy success, which I suppose is why hot honey has been trending this last couple of years. Your basic dietician can tell you that everything tastes better if sweetened. Try this at home: slice a tomato and then sprinkle sugar instead of salt on it. Thank me (or rather, Maureen) later. Anyway, this dish balanced it quite well, with the ricotta to cut the honey sweetness. It did become a bit rich eventually and the chicken breast beneath was sturdy and dense. I guess it always is, but I live in hope! Oh: we also ordered chips, and these were truly excellent with loads of good mayo.

The wine list looks good and we picked out a couple of decent glasses, though my orange was more interesting than Maureen’s red. You’ll pay £40 each for food before drinks for a full meal, which I would say is a little toppy for this level of cooking. But I’m glad to have somewhere close to home whose ambitions fly higher than avo on toast!

Chicken parmigiani

Chicken parmigiani

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 was more on conversation than food. And yet. And yet that’s kinda telling in its own way. I love food. If there had been anything much to love here, I’d have noticed it. And we’d have talked about it, given everyone at the table rather likes good food as much as me. So the lack of “oh wow, have you tried this?” was telling.

The dining room is a bustling place, packed with serried ranks of tables to make maximum use of the space. After all, this is a popular dining area of London and “modern Indian” is a very popular style. Just ask the queues outside Dishoom. Service was fine throughout the meal, effective rather than particularly friendly.

Shepherd's pie

Shepherd’s pie


And we chomped our way through a bunch of inoffensive modern Indian dishes. My pineapple salad, more snack than starter, didn’t have enough spicy oomph to tackle the sweet juice of the pineapple. Maureen’s fish fry was tasty enough. Tim’s stuffed pan-bread was street-foodie enough that it actually felt a bit out of place in a restaurant setting. For main I went with the shepherd’s pie, which for some reason is on Time Out’s Top 100 Dishes in London list. I’ve no idea how that list was compiled, but this was just a nice shepherd’s pie. There were pieces of soft and flavoursome lamb amongst the gently spiced mince and the saffron-coloured mash had some good saffrony flavour, but the right adjective for the whole was just “nice”. The Xacuti chicken curry was better, a rich curry gravy with south Indian spices, but not something I’d be amazed to find at a good curry house in any small town in England.

One of the surprises of this meal was that we all had room for dessert! I can’t remember the last time I had an Indian meal, even Michelin-aspirant fine dining Indian, and not felt stuffed by the time dessert rolled up. But this time I had no trouble scoffing a very pleasant rice pudding with pineapple sorbet.

At around £35 each before drinks, it has to be said that Cinnamon Bazaar is decent value for its central location in town. But I’d be willing to pay a few quid extra to have my socks blown off with some really inventive Indian street-food inspired cooking, rather than munch my way through this perfectly pleasing but average fare.

Review: Drunken Lobster, Ventnor

Maki rolls

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 Skye, after all. And at more than £100 a throw for a return trip, the ferries are just minting it. Or seem to be. I’m sure it’s very expensive keeping a ferry fleet running. Better to just build a bridge, eh? Then it’ll be much easier for us to get over and have dinner at Drunken Lobster or some of the other great food spots popping up on the island.

Drunken Lobster is a bar with a menu of East Asian-inspired small plates and an omakase option of ten small plates ending up with a dessert. Okay, let’s just call it a tasting menu. That’s what we go with, and enjoy it with a couple of cocktails off of their signature menu. The best of these is a raspberry and chilli margarita, full of big fruity flavour and a nice warm hit of spice.

Sea bass

Sea bass

The menu starts with edamame, simple enough but doused in a sweetly nutty sesame sauce that demands sucking off the empty pods. Then there are two beautiful maki rolls, the seaweed gently coated in fine panko and fried but the rice inside still excellently soft and toothsome. One topped with a little smoked eel was lovely, but another topped with a very fine dice of mango, tuna and lime-y ceviche flavours was absolute perfection.

I loved the crisp squares of Lo Bak Go turnip cake, softly brassic on the inside and crispy brown outside. I also loved the filthy bao bun with a nugget of tempura-battered chicken and hot sauce inside. On the other end of the elegance spectrum was a beautiful little prawn Har Gau, the dumpling delicately translucent and full of flavoursome prawn. As a bonus, an unexpectedly generous dish of tempura skate pieces with a fluffy-creamy spring onion and seaweed dip, plenty of pepper on the tempura fish and all amazing. Chef is also a fisherman and goes out on a day boat from Ventnor harbour, ensuring a varied but insanely fresh catch for his menu! Can’t get that (at this price) in London!

Charsui Iberico

Charsui Iberico

Which explains the snow-white brilliance of the piece of steamed sea bass we had next. Simply steamed but I wouldn’t have had it any other way, the puddle of sake and chilli sauce it sat in giving plenty of warm, boozy flavour to the fish. Four slices of beautifully charred charsui Iberico pork rounded out the menu, balanced well by the little heap of courgette ribbons and char-grilled red peppers they sat upon. Very good, but I’d have loved even more of the superb local seafood if I’m honest! Mmm… not forgetting pudding, a lovely richly flavoured chocolate mousse, enriched with miso and then cut with a bit of saltiness from the caramelised half-pecans sitting on top and citrus from the slivers of candied orange peel. Honestly one of my favourite puds in a while.

And this is £55 each before drinks. That would have been good value for this quality of produce, of cooking and of invention even before the last couple of years of steep inflation. Now it’s a wonderful bargain. I hear that this little company (they have a second restaurant in Ventnor and a bar in Cowes) might have just scored a London opening, so I’ll be keeping my eye out and hoping they can carry the formula over the Solent!

Edamame at Drunken Lobster

Edamame at Drunken Lobster

Review: Long Chim, Soho

Long Chim

Long Chim

It feels like Long Chim kinda tricked me. A little bit. Their spiel says: “Long Chim, meaning to ‘come and try,’ invites you to an authentic Thai dining experience. We strive to capture the vibrancy and energy of modern Bangkok, serving the food found in the alleyways, the markets and the shop houses in Thailand’s capital.” So… yeah, I was expecting a Plaze Khao Gaeng kinda vibe. Bangkok street food in London.

But it isn’t really. The dining room is designed to within an inch of its life, down to the hundreds of glass bottles with fake/fun labels in smoky glass cabinets. It’s actually very lovely, a great atmosphere and friendly service, but its a properly grown-up dining room a million miles from any street food vibe. I’d have to say somewhat the same of the food: very lovely, but hardly taking me back to my last visit to an actual Thai street market.

Squid

Squid

Long Chim spring rolls are a great snack to start: the long cigarillos of crisp pastry totally out-style your average dumpy spring roll, and the mustard green-packed veg filling had plenty of its own tangy-sour-umami flavour even before a dip in the sweet soy sauce. The grilled squid had a great char, cooked nicely al dente. The beef skewer was full of earthy spice flavours from the marinade, the charred beef itself also strong and… hm… beefy. Really, that’s the best word. So far, so good.

Monkfish curry was amiable enough, but the curry seemed to wander about for me, hardly carrying a lot of punch or any single clear flavour shout. Forgettable. The crispy five-spice pork was better. The meat inside a vivid pink from curing, and the salt-tang of the cure carried right through the nice crispy outside and all the spiciness in the accomanying melange of bits-n-bobs. Shallots and chillies and whatnot. Our third dish was a pomegranate salad, which surprised me by being a genuine salad of plentiful pomegranate muddled up with mint leaves and yogurt. Some grilled fresh red chillies in there gave off the occasional bold hit.

Crispy pork

Crispy pork

I enjoyed the food at Long Chim, and they mixed up a couple of very solid cocktails: a banana old fashioned full of warmth and the oily-creamy banana flavour, and a negroni with grapefruity notes. You might be looking at £35 each for a decent meal before drinks, which is good value for the setting. But if I want Thai street food, I want a face full of powerful flavours and an unabashed bang-up of sweet-sour-hot-salt. So it’s unfortunate that Long Chim has opened only two doors up from Speedboat Bar, ‘cos I know which of the two I’ll be picking!
Long Chim rolls

Long Chim rolls

Review: The Greene Oak, Windsor

Mackerel

Coming back from a long enough trip abroad (this time, a six week jaunt around northern Spain) gives you the chance to look at what’s back home with a somewhat fresh gaze. At least, if you try hard enough. The English pub really is perhaps the most distinctive piece of our human landscape, very different from a Spanish cafe-bar, a German beer hall or a French brasserie. Obviously pubs come in all shapes and sizes, but if I ask you to close your eyes and picture a country pub, you’ll be picturing something like The Greene Oak: old wooden tables and chairs, a floor of timber or flagstone, probably timber on the walls or above in the form of beams or panelling, windows that look at least a hundred years old, plenty of glass and brass behind the bar or around the room. And I think this particular ambience comes into its own when the nights close in and the leaves turn red and gold on the trees, when you want to get in out of the weather and meet up with family or friends.

The Greene Oak sits at the end of the road headed west out of Windsor, and looks just like any other food-focused pub in the home counties. The menu is broadly traditional, with a few more ambitious ingredients and combinations than usual. I started with a grilled goat cheese salad, a full-flavoured goat with crisp chicory leaves, apple matchsticks and watercress. Easy to like. Maureen’s mackerel fillet was an excellent piece of fish, skin grilled good and crispy, with a few oyster leaves and a “squid bolognaise” which sounded pretty splendid on the menu and was on the plate a nice thick tomatoey sauce/ragu. Worked well with the mackerel but didn’t shout squid to me.

Fish n chips

Fish n chips

Maureen went with the battered hake and triple-cooked chips. They were both perfectly good specimens: the batter on the fish wasn’t oily, the fish inside was great, the chips were crispy and moreish. Their tartare sauce needs calling out as particularly fine, creamy but punchy. My haunch of venison was a dense, full-flavoured piece of meat. Nice char on the surface. Lush bacon and onion gravy. The two savoy cabbage leaves, flat and chewy underneath the haunch, were a strange accompaniment. Maybe they were meant as set dressing? Bambi’s forest glade? The starch alongside was macaroni cheese with shredded nuggets of slow-cooked venison shank through it. I declare it to be a Very Good Thing.

Somehow I had enough room for a pudding, and went for Sticky Toffee Pudding. Haven’t had a STP in years. This wasn’t bad, but the pudding didn’t have enough date-induced stickiness unto itself (if the pudding is dry without the toffee sauce then it’s not a great pudding) and the butterscotch sauce was tasty but without the necessary blackened toffee bitterness to cut the sweet.

You’ll be down £50 each for three courses without drinks, so this isn’t a cheap pub dinner. Quality was good, but there’s a bit of damning-with-faint-praise there. I’m not going to remember this meal in a week, and if I’m looking for a pub dinner around the Windsor area again then I’ll probably be inspired to try somewhere else.

Venison

Venison