Review: Duck & Waffle, City

I don’t know how long Duck & Waffle will remain a 24 hour restaurant. It’s on the 40th floor of almost the tallest building in London, with no sign at street level that there’s even a restaurant here to attract any passing trade. And given that the city isn’t exactly the buzzing hub of London’s nightlife I’m not entirely sure who they’re hoping will show up at two in the morning for a smoked haddock scotch egg and a £100 bottle of wine?

Anyway, in other cities around the world people pay good money to whiz up 40 stories in a soundless space-age glass elevator and gawp at familiar landmarks from an eagle’s eyrie. So given the chance to look down on the top of the stately Gherkin as a mere by-product of having dinner, and not a high-falutin, mortgage-inducing ten course tasting menu either, every visitor to London really ought to book a table here. Heck, if you live in London you should try Duck & Waffle once too. I’m just not sure the food on offer is good enough to persuade me to do it twice.

It’s sharing plates, by the way. An idea so novel that our waitress felt the need to explain the concept. She also giggled at me when I sniffed the wine rather than tasting it (“Heehee! Why did you do that?”) which was a cute insight into the level of experience of some of the staff up here in the clouds. I have to say though that service was always friendly and mostly useful.

The signature dish is a leg of crispy-skinned config duck on a sweet waffle with a fried duck egg and a pot of dark maple syrup sauce. It’s Chinese crispy duck crashing into an American breakfast; sweet, unctuous, meaty, bready, you’d be daft not to order it. From here on all the dishes seemed to be a bit hit or miss, the menu something of a lottery.

A really big smoked haddock scotch egg with curried mayo was an interesting way of de-constructing and then re-constructing kedgeree, although very, very salty. Three tiny Herdwick lamb cutlets were delicious on a bed of pureed aubergine. Fish of the day was four tiny nibbles of salmon served on a big brick of Himalayan salt. Nice presentation, but someone didn’t think through how such a miniscule quantity of food would be received at table. Grumpily. Then again there was a generous blob of good rabbit rillettes on toast. And a bag of super sweet/salty/spicy crispy pigs ear strips that were very moorish. They bring out the dishes whenever they’re ready, and apparently the heritage tomato salad takes a long time prepping. Pity, as we were gagging for some fresh veg after what was quite a

hefty load of meat, carbs and salt. The tomatoes when they came were good, but the flavour came from the (salty) dressing rather than the colourful but flavourless fruit.

Mercifully the roasted turnips that arrived with half a grouse were a solid hit of fine vegetable. But half a grouse is not a sharing plate. To eat half a grouse you need to tear into the bird with knife and fork, devouring the obvious bits of meat in a couple of bites and then winkling out all the tasty little shreds while bones and flecks of bird fly everywhere. At some point you’ll want to pick it up and chew the particularly awkward bits off. How this can be a pleasure to pass around a table of four I just don’t know. Good grouse, though.

Puds were good, without being epic. Maureen’s torrejas with caramel apples were the best, a cast iron pan full of sticky deliciousness. My peach melba was lacking in the promised caramelised almonds, but this was swiftly rectified (good service, see?). Unfortunately the almonds were bizarrely the saltiest item we had all evening and destroyed the otherwise nice peach melba without mercy.

The wine list is heavily weighted towards three-digit bottles, which I’m sure irritates almost anyone who prefers to spend more on their food than their wine. Because like us, they’ll have to choose from the handful of cheaper options. That said, we found a good New Zealand Gewurtztraminer at £40. The noise level in the all-glass-walled dining room began the evening at “buzzing” and rose to “shouting at the waitress” before subsiding again around 10pm. Oh, and did I mention the views are astonishing?

Duck & Waffle is fair value given the location, we managed £40 each sharing one bottle of wine between four. So having said I wouldn’t come back here, I probably would. I would visit again if I came up to town with my parents, for instance, or some friends. I’d bring them for the views and the experience, and by picking carefully from the menu we’d have a pretty good bite to eat with it.

Review: The Lion, Leintwardine

Why do so many restaurants and cafes insist on putting cappuccino on their menu then serving up a huge cup of hot milk with a mouse’s bladder of coffee squirted into it and a spoonful of phlegm on top? Is it the misguided belief that bigger is always better? Is there a quiet majority of British punters that I’m entirely unaware of who actually like this? If anyone can inform me, please hit the Comments section. I know this isn’t just my own preference. I can quite easily imagine the reaction of any Italian presented with such a concoction: the initial look, mingling curiosity and surprise; the sip, followed by a very Mediterranean grimace; the shaking head and gale of disbelieving laughter.

Of course, the real villains are me and you, the consumer. Until we laugh at horrible coffee and refuse to pay for it, restaurants won’t improve. What would you do if you ordered “scallops with chorizo and cauliflower puree” and received a huge bowl of cauliflower puree with one tiny anaemic scallop perched on top and no discernible chorizo?

The Lion at Leintwardine, alas, is certainly a member of the crappuccino club. I’d love to say that the meal was by contrast faultless, but I can’t. It was decent enough. Let’s have a look…

For starter I chose chicken liver parfait, for two reasons: it was twinned with an intriguing “baby onion parfait” and boasted smoked brioche accompaniment. Well, the brioche was a bit dry and didn’t present any smoky flavour. And of course the menu was at fault; the onions were in the form of a sticky chutney, not a parfait at all. Boooo! In the event I didn’t complain, as the onions were delicious. The parfait was okay, but not as smooth or firmly textured as I’d like. Maureen’s tartare of smoked salmon lacked balance; the plentiful capers might have been fine with a salmon tartare, but with the already salty and smoked salmon they were overkill. The yogurt mousse and pickled apple accompaniments were a delicious hint of what the dish could have been.

My main of Gressingham duck arrived overcooked, but there was no problem sending it back and it appeared with a new piece of nicely pink duck in less than five minutes. Dauphinoise were pretty good, a fine gravy, but the confit garlic were quite harsh. Somehow I think including them in the cooking rather than scattered on as garnish

might have worked better. Maureen’s seared tuna was not. It was cooked tuna. To be generous, it was still moist enough to be palatable but a disappointment nevertheless. The warm salad of new potato, peas, sun-blushed tomatoes and soft-boiled quails eggs worked well enough for a gentle dish.

Pudding. Apparently often the saving grace of a meal. Both nicely presented. My summer pudding was fine, though a bit heavy on the gooey bread. Maureen’s chocolate tart was fine, though a bit heavy on the pastry. I think the puds sum up the meal fairly well: it was all okay.

If you were staying at the hotel here you’d probably be happy enough with having this dining room downstairs. It’s a handsomely furnished small country hotel and the service was friendly and useful from everyone. And the food was okay. But at £45 each including a bottle of wine I’d say you should be able to find better.

Bilberry Tart, Tarte aux Myrtilles

If you’re familiar with the French bakery-cafe chain Paul then you’ll know they do a mean Tarte aux Myrtilles, so deeply purple as to be almost black and utterly loaded with the tiny berries. For me, Paul are one of the few places helping to rescue the word “chain” from being shorthand for “crap”.

I’ve noticed, while seeking recipes, that myrtilles translate into English as “blueberries”. But they’re not. They’re not the fat, blue American imports that Tesco & co refer to as blueberries at all. They are bilberries, whortleberries, wimberries, or whatever local dialectal term for the wild English blueberry you care to name. I wish the supermarket sold these by the punnet, just so I could get them a teensy bit out of season.

But since it’s August and we’re still enjoying tramping into the hills to pick loads of bilberries of our own I decided to make a tarte aux myrtilles. Bilberry tart, as we ought to say. I found a good looking recipe here on La Recette du Jour and didn’t really play with it much at all.

The result was bloody fabulous. Okay, along the way I over-cooked the first pastry case. The instructions said 20 minutes, I checked after 15 and it was too far gone. Lesson: your oven and your cookware are your own, don’t trust the recipe, trust your eyes.

But the second time, the result was a tart-and-a-half! Dead simple sweet crunchy pastry to go with the ever-so-slightly tart but mostly sweet bilberries. The tiny bit of simple custard in the recipe turns the same black-purple as the berries and is scarcely present as a binding, so you’ve essentially just got beautiful fruit and pastry. Veronica at La Recette suggests serving with a blob of crème fraiche. Non. Superfluous to requirements. Just the tart, I promise you.


Bilberry tart (Tarte aux myrtilles)

350g bilberries
170g plain flour
85g caster sugar
85g butter
1 egg
1 tbsp caster sugar
1 tbsp crème fraiche
  1. Cream together the butter and sugar in a bowl until pale and fluffy (easier if the butter isn’t too cold)
  2. Sieve the flour in and use a cutting motion to mix it in until you have a crumbly mixture
  3. Add about 1 tbsp milk, mix together with a fork and eventually use your hand to pull it all into a ball of pastry. Wrap in clingfilm and leave in the fridge for 30 minutes or more
  4. Pre-heat the oven to 200C and grease a 22cm tart tin
  5. Roll out the pastry to just over the size of the tin and transfer it. If there’s one problem with this simple pastry it’s that it falls apart very easily. Don’t worry! You can mush bits back together and basically mould it with your fingers once it is in the tin. In fact, the edges of the tart only need to be a centimeter or so high, and it may be easiest to form them by squishing the pastry up from the base.
  6. Pop the tart tin in the oven for about 15 minutes, but what you’re really looking for is the pastry to be going lightly golden, not properly brown. Take it out of the oven, and turn the oven down to 180C
  7. Add perhaps a half tablespoon of sugar to the bilberries, just to balance the tartness, then tip them all into the pastry case. Stick it back in the oven for another 10 minutes
  8. Meanwhile, beat the egg with the tablespoon of sugar and a big tablespoon of crème fraiche
  9. Pour this mixture slowly all over the bilberries, then put the tart back in the oven for a final 15 minutes, although what you really want is for the visible bits of custard to be set and a bit browned. Turn the oven off and leave the tart inside for 10 more minutes, then take it out to cool
  10. Wait as long as you can, then enjoy!

Bilberry picking

Bilberries are one of my favourite wild foods, right up there with wild garlic and parasol mushrooms. They start to appear in August and can be got into September, it all seems to depend on where exactly they’re growing. You’d also be well advised to look for them somewhere that sheep aren’t grazing, as the fat woolly lawnmowers will happily nibble up all the berries they can find. Up here in Shropshire you can see this easily comparing The Long Mynd and Stiperstones, both beautiful hills clad in bilberries and within sight of each other. Yet the sheep-grazed Mynd is miserable pickings while on Stiperstones we picked half a kilo in half an hour. This is well worth doing, as they pack a whole lot more flavour and goodness than their bloated cultivated cousins the blueberries. And of course food you found yourself is always better. Somehow the dark purple stains on your fingers that resist all attempts to wash it off just enhances the taste!

A couple of handfuls of bilberries make for a very intense milkshake. This one was made with a few scoops of proper vanilla ice cream, a splash of milk and a couple of juicy peaches too. Depending on how sweet the bilberries you’ve got are it may be helpful to add a couple of teaspoons of sugar. I also added a couple of spoonfuls of bilberry sauce for intensity.

This simple bilberry sauce is my favourite thing to do with bilberries for sheer versatility. It intensifies the flavour and you can judge the level of sweetness to balance out any sourness in your crop as I have to admit that bilberries eaten straight from the bush are a bit of a lottery. There are always a few face-puckering moments.

It’s a sweet sauce, perfect on ice cream, muesli, yogurt or anything else needing an intensely fruity hit. But the power of the fruit is enough that you can pair it as-is with savoury foods like duck, mackerel, game, lamb or cheese. Or, use it as a base: I added a couple of teaspoons of brandy and a tablespoon of sherry vinegar to a few tablespoons of the sauce and then simmered it gently for another ten minutes before serving on poached and pan-fried pheasant breast. Another one that worked well was to saute some shallot and garlic in butter, then add the sauce and a teaspoon of Dijon mustard. Finish with a splop of cream.

Bilberry sauce

250g bilberries
2 tbsp apple juice
2 dsp honey
juice of half a lemon
4 star anise
pinch of salt
  1. Rinse and drain your bilberries, picking out any leaves and bits of twig that got in the tub
  2. Put all the ingredients in a small saucepan and simmer for about 20 minutes
  3. Check the balance half-way (blow on the spoon, the sauce will be volcanic!) and add more honey or lemon as necessary.
  4. Pour into a jar straight from the heat and put the lid on, turning upside-down once – the sauce will still be well above boiling hot and that sterilises the jar and lid pretty well. Note: there’s no need to pass through a sieve, there are no noticeable seeds in bilberries and the sauce is better for the texture of the berries.

Enjoy!

Review: Ceviche, Soho

My experience of South American food from the three months we spent there at the end of our year around the world was generally poor. How could a continent that provided us with so many of the most brilliant staple ingredients have such rubbish cuisine? And I don’t just mean the roasted guinea pigs. South America gave us potatoes, sweetcorn, tomatoes, chillies, peppers, peanuts, pineapples, the list goes on. Yet we spent most of our time there wishing we were back in South East Asia or Australasia.

Okay, to be more specific we spent most of our visit in Chile, and whether trying local restaurants in towns well off the tourist trail or opting for Lonely Planet favourites we found the food to range between passable and irredeemably horrid. Meat, meat, meat, uninspiring and usually served with suspect salad. Even their fantastic seafood was treated with sad disrespect by every kitchen we encountered. Odd forays into fine dining were predictably miserable. But perhaps we haven’t given Peru a fair shake yet, as our time there was centred on the tourist hotspot of Cuzco. The food was adequate tourist-fodder, at least up a notch on their southern neighbour. Lima we missed.

Which brings me to Ceviche, a friendly little joint in Soho that gave us a chance to explore more Peruvian delights. There was a nice buzz to Ceviche, as someone who works ground crew on the runway at Heathrow might say. Or as I might say, it was so astonishingly noisy that you had to hold direct-to-ear nightclub conversations with the other people at your table. This did result in me drinking rather too many pisco sours, as it was easier to keep my lips occupied that way than by trying to keep up a meaningful discussion. Maybe that’s their intention?

To the food. We tucked into some good ceviche of sea bass in tangy lime and chilli based marinade. If you’ve never enjoyed ceviche, this was a fine specimen as an introduction. I also picked out a variation that included basil and green mango. Oddly, it was less than half the size of the standard ceviche which for the same price seemed (perhaps unintentionally) mean and the mango and basil didn’t do anything exciting to the dish. I’ve had some dazzling ceviches (in Miami, not Peru) and they could certainly try harder here.

Some very nice skewers of grilled beef heart, one thing I do recall fondly from the continent. If you’ve never tried heart, it is muscle and so more akin to meat than to other offal. Grilled it has a deeply savoury, salty taste. The grilled fish and chicken skewers were also good, though hardly particular to Peruvian cuisine. Causa is a layered dish of cold mashed potato and various toppings. We tried a luridly colourful one of coriander mash with a beetroot topping, it looked the part and tasted… nice. I can’t really go beyond nice. The more typical causa, topped with avocado and a seafood cocktail, was a much better dish.

We washed our meal down with pisco sours and a number of other pisco cocktails, the best by far being a delicious concoction involving passion fruit and cinnamon. The staple pisco sour was also a good specimen, not over-sweet nor too strong. Our friend Tim stuck with wine but couldn’t find a glass that was any more than hmm. His advice: stick to the pisco. Puddings were okay rather than astonishing. Dulce de leche ice cream had the taste but lacked the expected slick deliciousness of that gooey South American treat. The lucuma ice cream had such a subtle hint of the fruit that it may as well have not been there.

If you want to try Peruvian cuisine, or you want to relive your trip to Machu Picchu, I’d say Ceviche delivers a solid experience of the staple dishes that everyone knows. Albeit without the fried guinea pig. But they don’t seem particularly adept when it comes to lifting these staples to another level, or riffing into the world of more refined cuisine. Stick to the basics and you’ll have a good time. With all the pisco sours we managed to rack up £50 per person including tip but every dish is under £10 so your bill is pretty much in your own hands.