Review: No 1 Vault at La Becasse

Rumours of the death of fine dining are much exaggerated. In fact, I’d say that in dining rooms up and down the land fine dining is getting busy exploring new ways to stay relevant and special. I’m going to remember cooking my own steak at the Savoy Grill for a long time. And yesterday we were served a seven course tasting menu by chef Will Holland of La Becasse in the “No 1 Vaults Tasting Room”.

When I say chef served us, I do actually mean that he brought every dish to the table, introduced it and then loitered for questions if we had any.

The Tasting Room is akin to the idea of a chef’s table, but in this case it’s a small private room with big windows into the kitchen and three tables. So it can cater to three parties at once, and apparently the presence of chef and the shared experience of the tasting menu tends to break down barriers and actually get people talking. Yes, talking!

However, this Wednesday lunchtime we were the only couple in the Tasting Room. On the one hand, service doesn’t get any more personal than this and the opportunity for a long chat with chef was unique. On the other hand, I felt even more on show than the kitchen. That glass is two-way after all. It was mildly surreal and I keenly felt the need to be a witty and interactive diner.

Of course, this is the introvert in me talking. Other introverts reading this will squirm in sympathy. Proper dyed-in-the-blood extroverts would have been in hog heaven, bantering away with chef and his front of house team. In fact I have to applaud Will and the team for making us feel so welcome, I relaxed quickly and forgot our splendid isolation. Service was excellent (and of course personal) throughout.

The room itself is cool neutrals, warmed by beaten copper light fittings. It needs some art on the wall, but that’s apparently on the way. Bowmore have obviously put some money into this, as I should more properly call it the “Bowmore No 1 Vaults Tasting Room” and

there are a few little touches to remind diners of the sponsorship. Nothing in-your-face, and Bowmore is after all a good whisky. Well, I’m partial.

So, we enjoyed a seven course taste of delicious food. I’ve already reviewed the food at La Becasse, and it is still every bit as excellent as the day the idiot Michelin inspector visited (perhaps with orders from head office to knock one of 10-in-8’s stars off?). My favourite dishes this time…

  • From the canapes a beignet of bone marrow, in which Will had managed to neatly catch the fleeting carnivorous taste richly.
  • Foie gras of a beautiful cafe creme colour, silken and perfect. It wasn’t frozen, spiked or covered in acrid ginger powder. Only recently I was bitching about being bored with foie gras, having had altogether too much of it. Now I realise that I’d just been having very annoying foie gras.
  • A piece of cod with a soft herb crust, so delicate it was like eating fishy clouds, which you’ll just have to accept is a very good thing as I can’t think of a way to describe it better.
  • Finally I enjoyed my favourite souffle for long time. It was light and flavoured with nothing but caramel, served with burnt marshmallow and a dollop of clotted cream ice cream. So far as I can tell, this sublime dessert contained nothing but egg, sugar and cream. Sweet.

We arrived at 12 and said goodbye at nearly 5. So although the bill was £100 each including drinks, this was five hours of pleasure. The wines we enjoyed by the glass (from the list, not a special flight) were all superb selections, including the house white. I try not to use the word superb lightly, these really were. La Becasse is a good example of a restaurant looking for new ways to attract and retain an audience. It’s daft to separate the food from the experience; a meal is much more than just the stuff that ends up in your belly. Though of course this particular experience wouldn’t work at all if Will Holland wasn’t a chef right at the top of his game.

Review: Purnell’s, Birmingham

I struggle to love Birmingham. It’s handsome in parts, ugly in others, and sits in that uneasy size bracket where a city is too large to be friendly but too small to be metropolitan. Someone give me a list of reasons to love Birmingham and I’ll check them all out next time I visit, promise. Then perhaps I can update this intro. At least I’ve found one of the good bits, and that is Purnell’s.

Purnell’s is right in the heart of Birmingham’s ever-rejuvenating financial district and the dining room is a dead match for this; a sober palette of greys, browns and creams with leather-encased chairs and huge light fittings depending from a high ceiling. The lighting is bright, the mood is comfortable and the tables have acres of space. It sets the scene for service that is sleekly professional from a handsome young team that don’t over-engage unless you want them to. If you like cosy, informal, bare wood and irony then you’ll hate it.

Of an evening there are just two tasting menus on offer, though judging by the pair adjacent you can go a la carte if you tip the maitre d’ a nod and a wink. We went the whole hog with the Purnell’s menu.

Glynn’s food has a really strong balance of great technique, popping flavour combinations and a sense of humour. He likes his waterbath and uses it to great effect, notably with fish. One of my favourite early courses was the poached duck yolk with smoked haddock foam, cornflakes and curry oil. This was a complete retake on the classic flavours of kedgeree and the stars of the dish for me were the slippery, perfect flakes of smoked haddock lurking under the piles of foam.

Later on the stand-out dish of the day was madras monkfish, the precisely water-bathed slab of translucent fish had a meltingly fleshy texture that sang a song with the brave spices used as a coating. Of course, a water bath doesn’t guarantee perfection and couldn’t disguise the fact that the venison sourced for the main was quite a chewy specimen with no great amount of flavour.

Actually, I have another candidate for dish of the day: a charcuterie plate of beef carpaccio, corned beef cube and braesola with accompaniments of octopus and sticky candied onion that was all exquisite.

Going back to the sense of humour, or theatre if you like. There was another witty deconstruction when our waiter took us through a three-part remoulade. First was a cube of salt-baked celeriac, to get that earthy and snarky taste onto the palette. Then a grain mustard cream encased in a delicate shell of butter so that it collapsed in a cool/warm explosion that coated the tongue. Finally a shot of spritzed celery and apple juice to clean up and leave us smiling in anticipation of the next trick.

On a special occasion, when you’ve decided to throw £80 at a chef to show you what he can do, it’s absolutely right to be treated to some dazzle and flair, a bit of theatre and fun. Parties are no fun without games.

Parties haven’t had cheese and pineapple on sticks for a couple of decades, though, and this was one bit of retro gastronomy that I don’t think Glynn has really nailed. Nice cheese-filled gougere, lovely goat cheese mousse, but I think the pineapple flavour needs to punch out more to be a proper punchline. One or two other dishes

didn’t quite hit the high notes either, the flavours of British seafood having all the great taste but none of the presentation, but overall we felt treated on course after course.

The first dessert was more theatre, with liquid nitrogen poured over a bowl of mint foam to fill our nostrils with the scent of toothpaste and heighten the pleasure of the chocolate pot with mint ice cream. The star dessert was pure cuisine; a literally perfect vanilla creme brulee served cleverly in an egg shell. This came with a frankly pointless cake that was saved by the zingy textures of apple surrounding it.

Purnells, for me, is hovering just a smidge below the very toppermost restaurants in the country. A couple of shrug-worthy dishes couldn’t knock the shine off of all the big-smiley ones. This is a great evening out at £80 for the full Purnell’s menu. The wine list is much as you might expect from high-end fine dining, with a handful of options around the £30 mark. Go, for sure.

Speedy Ceviche

There was an obscure kid’s cartoon on Saturday mornings while I was at University. It was called Samurai Pizza Cats, it was a parody of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (bwa?), and the main character’s name was Speedy Ceviche. At the time I had no idea what “ceviche” was, except that it was food related. And then a friend of mine found out for me, quite by chance: it is a Peruvian dish made by marinating raw fish in lime and chilli. I’ve no idea how he found out, as this was in the days before the internet had pictures or indeed search engines. Possibly he used a “book”.

There my knowledge languished, until another friend made a ceviche for me in his flat and I fell in love. With the ceviche, that is. My friend already had a lady and so did I, and I’m fairly sure we both prefer it that way.

And yet I’ve had nowhere near enough ceviche since, there being very few decent South American in the UK. We found some classic ceviches in Peru on our trip around the world, and some stunning modern examples in a chilled-out bar in Miami. More recently I enjoyed another good specimen at Ceviche in London. So why haven’t I just been getting my citrussy fish fix by making ceviche at home? Because… er…

What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?

Ceviche is dead easy to make. The best fish I’ve found is sea bass: it maintains a good texture, and isn’t too oily. That said, I also experimented with cod cheeks (cheap!), silver hake (cheaper!) and lemon sole. All were fine, but the sea bass was better. Lime is the usual marinade, but this is another dish where you just need to concentrate on the essentials and within that you can swap ingredients to your heart’s content. Essentials: (a) good fresh fish, cut into bite-sized pieces, (b) a marinade of citrus juices with whatever aromatics you like, (c) 15-20 minutes marinading, so there’s still some juicy uncooked fish in the middle. The recipe below is the classic, but you could try grapefruit juice, or adding shellfish, or switching coriander for basil, whatever catches your interest. I have found some lovely dried Mexican “Pasilla” chillies that seem made for fish. Dried chillies need rehydrating in hot water for 15 minutes before adding to a ceviche.

Speedy Ceviche (serves 2)

300g fresh fish fillets
3 limes
1/2 an orange
1 small shallot
handful fresh coriander
1-2 chillies
salt
  1. Squeeze the limes and orange into a bowl, chop and add the coriander, shallot and chilli (NB: even the orange isn’t essential, but it adds a nice sweetness)
  2. Take the skin off the fish, chop it into small bite-sized pieces and rub them in a couple of big pinches of salt. Put the fish into the marinade; squish it down to everything gets covered
  3. Leave it for 15-20 minutes then take the fish out and plate it. Heroic caballeros drink the leftover “tiger’s milk” along with their dish of ceviche!
  4. Enjoy! I think it’s good with some sweetcorn fritters (courtesy of The Londoner) and a sliced avocado and tomato salad

Molecular gastronomics

I got a Molecular Gastronomy Kit for Christmas! So once the enormous glut of seasonal food was chewed down to the last couple of mince pies and the final gobbet of Christmas pudding it was time to start playing the mad scientist…

The kit is the MSK Molecular Gastronomy Starter Kit and while I haven’t actually seen or tried any other starter kits, I have to say that this one seems to have some strong advantages. For a start, they supply enough of each chemical additive for at least ten recipes, so after you’ve mastered the process you’ve got lots left to wow your friends when you invite them over for a soiree. They also give you the absolutely essential tools you’re unlikely to have in your kitchen: electric scales that measure down to 0.1g and a couple of big syringes. Then there’s a professional recipe making use of each additive, printed on glossy cards; perfect for proving the theory before going off on a Willie Wonkaesque blaze of experimentation.

Just to be crystal clear: this was a Christmas present from my lady, I’m not “reviewing” a freebie.

So the first thing I tried was some rhubarb spherifications, ‘cos there isn’t much that’s cooler than a spherification. Heck, Michelin-starred chefs will serve you up pea spherifications which are pea-shaped things that taste of peas. So, basically, peas with extra hassle. That’s how much Michelin-starred chefs love to spherify things!

Anyway, it failed horribly. My little spheres looked great in the magic solution, but collapsed into pink goo when I fished them out. I used almost every implement and vessel in the kitchen in search of a combination that would result in salvagable spheres, but ended up with nothing more than a huge mountain of washing up.

Some internet research led me to two conclusions: (1) by using apple juice for poaching my rhubarb (my usual method) I was making the liquor more acidic, (2) by poaching in just a splash of juice, I ended up with a liquor that was too thick. I made a third conclusion myself: molecular gastronomy is not a game for the “instinctive” cook, at least not until you’ve learned the science!

Indeed, although the recipe cards are neat they don’t explain any of the why’s and wherefore’s of molecular gastronomy: “300ml rhubarb poaching liquor” is all it says. It takes a lot of reading (Google or a big fat book) to discover that acidity ruins spherification and that the liquor to be spherified needs to be of low viscosity. Yes, this is rocket science. Research isn’t like Googling “chocolate fondant recipe” and skim-reading a few until you find one you like. You put in search terms like “problem with sodium alginate spherification” and soon find yourself staring at scientific papers

on electrolyte capture and hypertension in alginates, including spidery molecular diagrams of chemical compounds that would make Professor Frink blink.

So I got cross with the Sodium Alginate and abandoned it in favour of Gellan Gum. Five minutes and only two ingredients later I had a beautiful plate of glistening Madeira jelly noodles. Wow. Less effort than making a hot chocolate and results that might have diners cooing in wonderment. Even more so because this Gellan Gum jelly is heat tolerant, so these noodles wouldn’t melt if I served them in a bowl of hot ham broth!

Today I’m back to the spherifications. I corrected both the things I thought were wrong and got to work again with the chemistry lab. An hour later and I have my first perfect little glistening spheres of translucent pink, ready to plate on neat little pieces of sashimi. Here’s the hero shot:

Next stop, the land of heat-tolerant and freezable foams! Who thinks frozen shards of gin-and-tonic foam on top of a lime posset sounds good? Yep, I’ve already wandered away from the printed recipes and into Wonka-land. I settled on trying for a frozen horseradish foam to top some mackerel. This used some nifty stuff called “Sucrose ester” which is so seldom used that I could only find one recipe on the whole internet. So I read that, and I read the recipe card from the kit, and I read up a horseradish foam that used a different additive,

and I mixed the three recipes together to see what happened. It… sort of worked. To be honest, I’d be bemused if I was served a lump of this in a restaurant.

I cheered myself up by making pistachio macarons using the “Hy-foamer”, brilliant stuff that will stabilise egg whites even if you add straight lemon juice to them. They came out beautifully. Which means I’m running at about 50/50 successes and failures so far.

So, a molecular gastronomy starter kit. Good investment? If you like cooking and are intrigued at how the top chefs do it, definitely. But as an instinctive cook, I would say that it is definitely not for instinctive cooks! There’s precision involved here, and straying from professional recipes is as likely to result in a deflated mess as it is in whooping and air-punching. I also have to say, a lot of it runs

contrary to my distaste for waste. You make up plenty of bases, be it rhubarb liquor to spherify or horseradish sauce to foam, and then you use perhaps 20% of it making your molecular wonders before ditching the rest. Hmm. Finally, at the end of the day you are mainly creating fripparies, garnishes. I’d be the first to say that a spoonful of watermelon caviar and a lemongrass foam are far more delicious and impressive than a shred of lettuce and some salad cress, but garnishes aren’t normally the domain of the home cook, even an inventive one.

Nevertheless I’ve been enjoying myself, and slowly mastering the techniques. When it works the results are good enough to make me SQUEE! with delight, so I’m almost certainly going to be cranking out something spiffy whenever I’m entertaining friends to dinner. This is one Christmas gift that isn’t going to just migrate quietly to the back of the corner cupboard.

Review: Old Hall Persian, Dorrington

Persian is one of the three “grand cuisines”, along with French and Chinese. For me it conjures up images of delicate meats cooked with perfumed spices and exotic fruits. Yet it isn’t something you see a lot of in provincial towns and cities (well, unless you want to count doner kebabs as cuisine). So to find a Persian restaurant in a small rural village in Shropshire is not much short of astonishing.

The Old Hall Persian is in Dorrington, near Shrewsbury. As the name implies, the dining room is set in an old half-timbered house in the middle of the village. Instead of playing to that ambience they’ve chosen a fairly neutral modern decor, in essence what you’d expect of a small town Indian. This is a family operation and service was very friendly, helpful and informal.

My starter was simplicity itself; thinly sliced mushrooms fried with oodles of cracked pepper, on a paper-thin and crispy piece of oily flatbread. It was delicious. Maureen’s appetiser was a concoction of aubergine and yogurt with sharp citrus flavours, also very good with the splendid flatbread.

For main course I ordered the Ghormeh Sabzi, and it was a lovely earthy bean stew with fine, clear flavours of preserved lime and aromatic spices coming through. It’s one of the national dishes of Iran, and now I know why. Chef Lal has put the recipe up on his website – I have a feeling I may start cooking it a lot. Maureen’s Fesenjan was an unusual stew of chicken with ground walnuts and pomegranate. The dish fell on the sweet side of sweet/sour and although we’re always keen to pick unusual flavour combinations I have to admit that we didn’t fall in love with it. It probably didn’t help that the chicken was bite-sized bits of dry breast. It may be received wisdom that British people want nicely chopped up pieces of white meat in their ethnic cuisine, but I think restaurants really ought to start testing this and serving up chicken on the bone, with all the improved flavour and texture that would bring.

I wanted to try a pudding, as none of them were familiar to me. Because they were Persian! The Sheer Birenj dropped me straight into the bazaars of old Araby, with the high scent of rosewater and other floral notes coming from the sticky ground rice with its little puddles of milk and scattering of sultanas. Very classic, very good.

We drank a glass of wine with the meal, rather oddly served as 250ml measures. I really don’t need a third of a bottle in one go! This is a restaurant, not a boozer. I would also have liked to see a couple of interesting soft drinks on the list; some suitably Persian teas or long drinks.

Given the rarity of Persian restaurants pretty much anywhere, it’s great to find a place that delivers genuinely classic dishes so well executed. The bill came to £30 each, including two drinks apiece. I think that’s about spot-on. If you’re not familiar with Persian cuisine then I’d recommend you take a trip to the Old Hall, it’s a fine introduction.