Review: The Checkers, Montgomery

One thing a restaurant really can’t be blamed for is having to share a dining room with a big party of cheerfully noisy people. Indeed, as they’re likely to have a storming drinks bill it’s only to be expected that restaurants would actively court such parties.

The Checkers
is a cosy, friendly restaurant in the modern country hotel style. They scooped a recent Michelin star which was enough to drag us the forty minute drive from Ludlow. We were introduced to some very comfy sofas in the lounge for pre-prandial drinks, but I’d scarcely admired the huge old fireplace beside us when the big party drifted in. Swiftly armed with champagne they stood around us and nearly on top of us, chatting away volubly with old friends. My sofa felt like it had been transported to a house party for very mature students. Jarring, having just started to relax. I needed to find my zen. It would be terribly unprofessional to allow something like this to affect my review. Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking that a top-notch server might have noticed that the four poor souls adrift on their sofa in the middle of the party had fallen strangely quiet, and shuffled them off to their table a little quicker.

Of course we ended up sat right next to the big table. And of course one of the chaps was of the cheerful loudmouth variety who gets noisier as the evening draws on and apparently tells the most hilarious jokes ever heard in rural Montgomeryshire. The braying reached a point where I was ready to ask a waiter to please enquire politely if the table next door would kindly shut the frigging damn hell up? Zen. Zennnnn…

My starter was a generous plate of scallops, beautifully – perfectly – cooked and accompanied by a delicate fennel and ginger salad. They hadn’t been brave enough with the confit ginger, a shame as this was a spot-on match for the scallops when I did find a bit in my mouthful. The fennel by contrast didn’t give the scallops quite enough. Maureen’s spiced yellow fin was also very nicely seared and served up with soy and sesame dressing. For me the puddle of soy washing around the plate didn’t look very pretty, and we all agreed that there was a note of citrus palpably absent from this starter.

For main course I was seduced by roast squab pigeon with date puree, couscous and orange jus. The squab was dense and lovely, treated just perfectly. Good jus, good couscous, lovely slow-roasted tomatoes, but the date puree was a nigardly blob that disappeared with the first three mouthfuls of bird. It was the date that seduced me, dammit, I want more! Maureen’s rabbit was a truly single-minded plate of protein. If there was any carbohydrate present I missed it, and the blob of shallot puree and confit tomatoes were lost in the heap of bunny. Really, deliciously, beautifully cooked bunny though it was.

I finished off with a hot praline souffle, because I like praline and was intrigued to see how they’d managed to balance the obvious sweetness. They hadn’t. It was incredibly rich and sickly, and the scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side wasn’t going to do anything to control that. I couldn’t finish it. Maureen by contrast went for the selection of Checkers desserts and faced a mountain of puddings. They must have all been pretty good as the plate was devastated by the end, but we couldn’t find anything particular to hold up as amazing. It’s always good to have a real “Ooo… YUM!” from at least one pud on a selection plate.

The Checkers is a good find in the wild and woolly Welsh marches. From our visit I would say that their great strength is execution – everything is cooked to perfection. In contrast, they seem to have missed the mark a few times in balancing a plate or picking a combination. I’d go again, to see whether different menu selections turn out to be better balanced, although at £75 a head with only one-and-a-half bottles of wine between the four of us I’ll probably wait a little while.

Review: Tanroagan, Isle of Man

The Isle of Man is one of the most unusual parts of the British Isles. It is as much of a backwater as you can find on these busy islands and that’s a pleasure in many ways. Manx folklore abounds with tales of fairies and monsters, and every damp woodland or ruined chapel has some local fairy associated with it. We roamed mouldering castles, verdant glens and rugged coastline for two days with scarcely another soul in sight and often felt pretty close to bumping into the moddey dhoo, the mooinjer veggey or the fenodyree, to name but three of the Manx fairies. It’s a fey and fascinating place, made more so by the weather which has ranged from cheery sunshine to eerie fog within an hour. I’d recommend a short break over here, though you may struggle to fill an entire week unless you really like hiking.

Of course, in other ways being a backwater eddying along a couple of decades behind the UK can be detrimental, and certainly seemed to be in the case of eating out.

We had supper one evening at the best Chinese restaurant on the island (as proclaimed by more than one apparently independent adjudicator) and it was execrable in every way, from the wallpaper paste consistency of the hot and sour soup to the nasty beef and aubergine hotpot; bits of aubergine cooked down to lumps of snot with strips of black skin hanging off in a gloopy sauce oddly reminiscent of the hot and sour soup. We also tried the renowned Manx kippers, and found them to be just the kind of ho-hum kippers I remember

having for tea as a kid and nothing whatsoever like the gorgeous specimens from the Black Mountain Smokery that we breakfasted on at the Felin Fach Griffin a while back. We tried our luck on a new and rather expensive restaurant in the hills, only to be served the kind of stolidly unexciting food that classy restaurants felt safe charging top dollar for thirty years ago. They’ve obviously also only just discovered Italian coffee on the island, as every cappuccino I tried came as a mug (yes, a mug) of scalding hot milk with a trace of burnt coffee and a scurf of foam on the surface.

So it was a pleasure to enjoy one decent meal, at a little fish restaurant called Tanroagan just off the north quay of the main town of Douglas. The restaurant is tucked down a side road and is a cosy little hole-in-the-wall with just a handful of tables. Rustic décor with blue, yellow and white is just about spot-on for a friendly informal seafood joint. Service was patchy, hilarious considering there were two servers and only one other table seated when we arrived. This seems to be a theme on Man: our B&B had a detailed list of recommendations almost all of which said something along the lines of “good food, service patchy”. Of course, they also recommended the horrible Chinese.

I digress. Back in Tanroagan our starter was a tian of smoked haddock brandade topped with a crisp fried poached egg and surrounded by a ring of delicate hollandaise. The brandade was super, either very good smoked haddock or the chef had salted it a while before making the dish.

For the main course I couldn’t resist sharing a whole pan-roasted turbot. In hindsight this isn’t the best way to review a fish restaurant; rather like enjoying a simple steak, you can’t do much more than judge whether the chef has cooked it to the right degree. In this case he had, and it was a clean and meaty piece of fish. On a plate, with a lemon. Chips were pretty good, and the side of veg was suitably summery, tossed in a little hollandaise to enrich.

Back home I wouldn’t call this meal a bargain, nor would I laud it as a truly great fish restaurant. But given the competition we tried on our three night stay, I’d definitely say Tanroagan should be on your short-list of restaurants for any trip to the Isle of Man. They even made a perfectly acceptable espresso to round off our supper.

Spaghetti alla carbonara, essentially

I found a great recipe for carbonara on a delicious food blog called The Epicurean. He’s most definitely an epicure, having researched the history of carbonara and gone into serious detail on the perfect ingredients to use in the perfect carbonara. It’s a good read.

But it ain’t me at all.

In fact, I’m developing a theory that any recipe has a handful of essential rules and key ingredients, around which you can substitute and adulterate to your heart’s content without spoiling the fundamental dish. Here’s one: guacamole. As long as you (a) have avocado, garlic and lemon/lime in it, (b) don’t add mayonnaise, (c) mash with a fork (don’t blend), then you’re going to have a good guacamole. Pep it with chilli, include coriander, add tomato, sweetcorn, whatever you fancy but stick to the (a), (b), (c) and it’ll still be a guacamole. Or we could look at Som Tam, the staple Thai salad: (a) some raw shredded veg that has crunch, (b) lime + sugar + fish sauce + chilli + garlic + peanuts, (c) mash (ideally in a pestle), don’t just mix and certainly don’t food-processorise (is that a valid verb?). If you have those essentials then it doesn’t matter an awful lot if you are missing the beans, the tomato, or the dried shrimps, or indeed if you can find no green papaya and only have a celeriac in the fridge. The results will still be recognisably Som Tam.

So it is with most recipes, I think.

And so it is with a spaghetti alla carbonara. Purists will insist that it must use guanciale pancetta and that any addition of chicken or vegetable is no longer a carbonara dammit. But from my experimentation I would say that the essentials of a carbonara are as follows: (a) no cream goes anywhere near it, (b) the sauce is made by emulsifying egg yolks and pecorino with a splash of the starchy water from the pasta, (c) the meaty flavours of cured pork are vital, (d) toast and crush your peppercorns. This last one is important. If you want black pepper to sing out as one of the main flavours of a dish, rather than just a seasoning, you need to toast whole peppercorns for a minute in a dry pan and crush them. Pork fat + pepper + emulsified egg = carbonara. Frankly I have trouble getting pancetta of any kind in Ludlow, so it’s superb home-cured streaky bacon from the local butcher for me and spaghetti from the supermarket. Tonight I threw in par-boiled fine beans, the other night it was a fine dice of mushrooms fried in garlic.

Anyway, the essential recipe is down to The Epicurean and you can find it here. I’ve replicated it below with my own notes.

Spaghetti alla carbonara (serves 2)

200g spaghetti
50g pancetta
2 egg yolks
40g finely grated pecorino
1 tsp black peppercorns
  1. Get the spaghetti boiling in a big pan of well salted water.
  2. At the same time chop the pancetta (or streaky bacon) into small bits and fry them until the fat is golden and crispy in a pan. Let the pork and its fat cool a little. If very little melted fat has been generated, add a glug of olive oil to the cooling pan.
  3. Beat the egg yolks with a third of the pecorino and half the pork fat
  4. Drain the pasta, reserving some of the water, then dump the pasta into a large bowl
  5. Add the pancetta/bacon and fat to the pasta and stir, then add a good splash of pasta water and stir again. Now add the egg mixture and stir some more, then add the pepper and most of the pecorino and stir until you’ve got a sticky emulsified sauce all over the spaghetti.
  6. Job done. Serve and then sprinkle the rest of the pecorino over the top

It goes without saying that you can add any vegetables you like to the pasta at the same time as the pancetta. I think you could probably do the dish with parmesan instead of pecorino if that’s all you have. Probably not with edam though. You don’t need much of the pasta water, perhaps a couple of tbsp. Streaky bacon is a good substitute for pancetta, but back bacon doesn’t really have enough fat. I’m betting that a handful of chopped fresh herbs would add something special to this dish.

Now, does anyone want to add any “essential” recipes of their own in the comments? Or point me to any links?

Review: La Trompette, Chiswick

It does get difficult reviewing restaurants that are very good but not explosively brilliant. Unless something interesting happened on the way to the restaurant, or there’s something on my mind I’d like to moan about, it’s hard to decide how to make the review interesting. As you’ll have spotted, my reviewing style is not to deliver a detailed dissection of each plate of food with an accompanying photo, I’d rather cover the dishes in brief and pick out a few high- or low- lights to make the case for my conclusions. That’s just how I roll. So I need something else to say beyond a description of the dishes, or you’ll all fall asleep.

My other problem is that I just won’t do florid writing. This bothered me when writing my travel blog as well. I distinctly remember reading another blogger’s description of a journey through rainforest mountains in SE Asia: the view was indescribable, like

discovering Shangri-La, epic vistas of verdant forests clinging impossibly to sky-piercing peaks, etc, etc. When I made the same trip I thought: dense jungle, arresting views, but I’ve seen better. I’m not going to wax euphoric about a plate of food that is just well-cooked, well-presented and very tasty. After all, I’ve eaten some genuinely phenomenal food in my time and I don’t want to give a misleading impression about the “merely very good” by over-enthusing. Likewise I can’t bring myself to throw vitriol at food that was at least fairly edible.

So, at the end of the day, if I have to write about a meal that was jolly good yet not amazing and if there’s nothing else on my mind remotely related to it, then you’re liable to get a fairly beige review. See what you think of this one about a jolly good Saturday lunch at Michelin-starred La Trompette in Chiswick…

My starter of goat cheese panacotta on a sauce vierge led me to wonder why anyone would take the trouble to make goat cheese

panacotta, since a chunk of the raw cheese on the same sauce would have been every bit as good. However, it was good. Maureen had a smashing piece of mackerel neatly accompanied by earthy balsamic beetroot. Across the table the lasagne of braised rabbit with broad beans looked very good and was lauded.

For main I settled on roast chicken supreme with morels and a creamy wild garlic sauce. Goat cheese starter and chicken main? I confess, I’d had several rich meals on the trot and needed some lightness. In the event, the chicken was gorgeous, juicy and packed with taste, and the sauce was a warm, stinky, rich delight in the mouth. The whole dish made me want to pile on an outrageous accent and declare “Zis. Zis eez ze proper French cooking!” Maureen, also feeling over-fed,

picked out the parmesan gnocchi with globe artichokes. Along with the girolles, pea puree and grelot onions there were certainly plenty of strong flavours on the plate but nothing tying them together.

Over dessert we were able to compare the warm ginger cake with pineapple and crème fraiche to the almost identical dessert I had at Medlar the night before. This one was tasty enough, but I declare Medlar the winner.

All in all, a delicious lunch. The restaurant is light, bright and elegantly decked out, the staff deliver pretty much perfect service with a friendly informality. For dinner the three courses will set you back around £40 before wine, so although a wonderful neighbourhood restaurant for Chiswick it’s not quite a bargain find.

Review: Medlar, King’s Road

The guys who run Medlar spent many of their formative years at Chez Bruce and other Nigel Platts-Martin establishments, so if you think that might give you a clue to the kind of meal to expect at Medlar, you’d be exactly right. Think top-notch classic French cuisine without too much fuss and with the odd spot of invention, in a clean and modern dining room with informal yet faultless service.

My starter won me first by scent: the pungent green notes of ravigote sauce as it warmed itself up on my testicles. I had crispy fried lamb’s testicles, a lovely texture like very firm liver and a great medium for the sauce – much like a salsa verde. Maureen’s ceviche of halibut included some lovely slivers of translucent fish, but the word “ceviche” comes with an expectation of punchy citrus and chilli flavours while this was a much more delicate affair. Across the table a tart of duck egg and duck hearts was received with rapture as was a crab ravioli.

For main I enjoyed an assiette of pork three ways, served with a sauce vierge which I found a very delicious idea as it kept the whole plate light and allowed the pork to play its own tunes. Maureen’s lamb rump and sweetbreads was a stickier and richer offerings, with marrowfat peas as an unusual ingredient. It was every bit as delicious as the pork. Our friends enjoyed roast John Dory and a thick fillet steak respectively, the steak served with a bearnaise sauce that I can testify was scrumptious as I pinched quite a lot of it.

Yet my favourite course was the last. An individual parkin served with roast pineapple, walnuts and a blob of crème fraiche. The warmly gingery parkin was divine; while not a moist cake, it was of such a carefully light texture that it ate deliciously without needing any of the accompaniments. They were delicious too, but the cake was enlightening. By contrast Maureen’s banoffee tartlet seemed strangely at odds with the rest of our meal. Apart from the use of a filo pastry case, it was in all other regards a banoffee pie. Nice enough, but something to enjoy after

steak or lasagne at a comfy country pub, surely?

Throughout the meal service was informal but excellent. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves at their work. I noticed that the staff weren’t asked to wear any particular uniform, a good touch to enhance the relaxed atmosphere.

You couldn’t fail to enjoy a meal at Medlar; the cooking is exceptional, the service brilliant and given their postcode it isn’t exorbitant. I can’t rave much beyond that: it lives comfortably in a stable of other London restaurants all delivering top-notch classic French cooking with enough modern ingredients to keep us interested. Within that stable Medlar is one of the thoroughbreds.