Review: Odette’s, Primrose Hill

There is a new(ish) restaurant in Richmond which has a nice big sign beside the door that reads: “Richmond’s Favourite Neighbourhood Restaurant”. ORLY? D’you know what, I rather think the good people of Richmond will be the judge of that. The laurel of “neighbourhood restaurant” is something you earn by consistently providing good food at fair prices in a welcoming atmosphere to the fine burghers of a town or district for a number of years. Writing it on your door the day you open does not make it so.

I won’t embarrass the place by naming it (*cough* Moomba *cough*), but that sign alone has deterred me from ever venturing through their door. Ever. I’m funny like that.

By contrast, as we sat sipping our coffees at the end of our meal at Odette’s we all agreed that if we lived anywhere near Primrose Hill we would eat here all the time. As soon as we walked in we felt at home. The décor is comfortable, the layout thoughtful and helped immensely by the restaurant being spread over a number of rooms in a couple of knocked-through buildings; three other tables would be the most you’d ever be dining with. The service was friendly and although we were kept entertained by the occasional hiccups from the clearly

in-training waitresses who were serving us, it was charming and unannoying. That’s a lesson for anyone: service slips are eminently forgiveable with a smile and a friendly attitude. Oh, and the food was all faultless and highly approachable. That’s how you become a beloved neighbourhood restaurant.

Where shall we start? Starters. Mine was a crispy coated duck egg, essentially what you’d get if you took the pork out of a scotch egg, with a tangy mixture of mustardy celeriac, sliced truffles and watercress. I found the watercress a bit aggressive alongside what were otherwise calming and amiably gentle flavours. Maureen’s terrine of pig’s head and black pudding was a slab of dense and meaty excellence. If pubs ever manage to come up with terrines like this I’d order them a lot more often. Across the table there were cooing noises over lovely looking crab lasagnas, but they disappeared before I could sample one.

Mutton for main, presumably a piece of medium-rare loin (I’m rubbish at identifying cuts) served with long slivers of pickled salsify and an intensely sweet mint sauce. I must admit I’ve had better mutton for flavour before, but the combination with the salsify was excellent and a startlingly good mint sauce brought me out in a happy smile. My favourite touch was the mini shepherd’s pie on the side, and here the mutton really spoke to me.

My dessert of pistachio cake topped with nicely caramelised pieces of a sharp apple and blobs of cloud-soft calvados cream was excellent. But on the other hand, the dramatically coloured and perfectly shaped blackberry souffles across the way were equally excellent and had me a tiny bit envious once I’d tasted one. And on the other other hand,

Maureen’s sharp-sweet lemon parfait topped with an exquisite white meringue with just the right touch of scorching was universally agreed to be best of all. Good puds.

Odette’s provide a very accomplished meal, with a good wine list, in a very convivial setting. Nothing here is going to astonish or amaze anyone, but nothing is going to disappoint either. The price seems about right, around £36 for three courses a la carte, and there looks to be a superb bargain on set lunches. I’m almost tempted to move to Primrose Hill just so it can be my local.

Wet Monday lunch

On a wet, chilly and rainy Monday morning we found ourselves in a car park in Bath sitting in our steamy vehicle. Our challenge? To return home to Ludlow while taking in a good lunch en route, so I’d have somewhere new to review.

And so began a trawl through the Harden’s and Michelin guides – permanent in-car companions for us – for a place to eat between Bath and Ludlow on a Monday lunchtime. The various possible routes take in parts of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire and could include the towns and cities of Gloucester, Cheltenham, Worcester and Hereford.

We actually found a bunch of options with Michelin stars or Bib Gourmands, although not wanting to get too refined on such a random whim we eliminated the two-star Champignon Sauvage in Cheltenham. But there was The Butcher’s Arms at Woolhope, and less than ten miles away but in a different county The Butcher’s Arms at Eldersfield, both lauded by Michelin. The other feature they share is both being closed on Monday. The Gumstool Inn is liked by Harden’s and by Michelin, but not by us. We’ve been once before and were simply very underwhelmed by pub food scarcely more interesting or delectable than what the better pub chains can muster. Owen’s in Tewkesbury is another Bib Gourmand… and also not open Mondays.

Harden’s showed itself to still be a mainly London restaurant guide – only 8 listings for the whole of Herefordshire, 13 for all of Worcestershire. I could probably reel off more good places to eat in those counties without breaking sweat. Just not on our route home.

However, Harden’s could offer more choice in Gloucestershire. Lumiere in Cheltenham sounds superb… but isn’t open on Monday. We’ve wanted to try 5 North Street in Winchcombe for a long time, and now seemed the perfect opportunity as it would only be a small detour. Except, of course, that it isn’t open on Monday. Wild Garlic in Nailsworth is another spot I’ve wanted to try and we’d be driving right past. Hmm. Unsurprisingly, not open on Monday. Casting further off our route, I’d never heard of the Old Passage Inn on the banks of the Severn but it sounded well worth a try. Just not on Monday.

In fact, we were thwarted at every turn by the Curse of Closed Monday. I guess Bob Geldof really was tapping into a universal truth when he complained “I don’t like Mondays” as decent restaurants outside the capital have obviously all decided that no-one wants to bother themselves with a pleasant lunch on the first day of the working week. Of course with the need to offer Sunday lunch it’s only reasonable that they take another day off. It was a trifle hard to look at it reasonably at the time.

Eventually we decided that rather than spend any more time sitting in a car park running down our mobile phones with fruitless research, we might as well pick Cheltenham as a fairly large well-to-do town en route and find a nice spot for lunch once we got there. Yes, you know it. We found ourselves driving fruitlessly around an unfamiliar town centre peering through the rainy windscreen at crap looking cafes and chain restaurants.

Starving hungry and disgruntled, we settled on a place called Moran’s Eating House just out of the centre. Och, it wasn’t bad at all. The food was fresh and decent enough, the service friendly. I had a quirky “chicken, pancetta and broad bean pancake with cheese sauce” which turned out to be kinda like canelloni drowned in enough cheese to keep a pizza restaurant going for a week and certainly enough to make any other flavours entirely irrelevant. Maureen had a jolly good smoked haddock and cod fishcake with pea risotto, pepped up with the rather odd addition of balsamic vinegar. Y’know, bizarrely, balsamic and smoked fish actually sorta works.

So, what lessons do we draw from this debacle? Lesson 1: it is not sensible to expect a good lunch on Monday outside of London unless you already know somewhere kind enough to be open all week. Lesson 2: it is silly to arrive in a strange town and hope to find good eats by driving aimlessly around on a rainy day. Lesson 3: try balsamic vinegar on your kippers.

Review: The Bath Priory

This guest post was written by: Maureen

“Sam is suffering from a leg injury, sustained while training for a cycling event”, said our waitress. “We’ve persuaded him to stay home the last couple of days but he insisted on coming in today for your kitchen visit”. So he did. And patiently answered our questions. And posed for a photo. Sam Moody is the obliging head chef of the Bath Priory and unwitting object of much feminine sympathy. “Don’t you just want to give him a hug?” whispered one of my companions who shall, of course, remain nameless.

I should explain. We six ladies were in Bath for a hen party and one of the highlights of the weekend was to be lunch at the Bath Priory. Having not been since the days of Chris Horridge, I was keen to see how the restaurant had changed with Michael Caines at the helm.

Murmurs of appreciation as we were seated in a private room lined with racks of tantalising wine. Just right for a rowdy hen party! Though of course we were on our best behaviour. The wine list was a worthy tome with a sprinkling of less pricey entries. Service was flawless and charming throughout. But what about the food?

I started with Bath chaps, deemed too scary by my dining companions but described in such loving detail by our waitress that was impossible to resist, at least by me. If only they’d made a pig’s ear of the dish, I could have entertained you with a well-placed pun. But it turned out to be flavoursome and combined well with the crispy crackling, sweet apricot chutney and neat cubes of deeply porcine jelly.

For my main course, a slab of beef cheek the colour and consistency of treacle, swimming happily in braising jus. The rich, sticky coating concealed a perfectly cooked melty interior, a very good example of its kind. Yum. If I have one criticism, it would be the pedestrian nature of the rest of the plate. This gustatory heavyweight deserved a better supporting cast than a smear of mash potatoes, a shallot and a stick of asparagus. Think Freddie Mercury without Queen: even a maestro needs good backup.

Now, pudding and an outpouring of superlatives as the other ladies tucked into their caramel and banana souffle. Clearly a winner! I didn’t taste the souffle, but can report that the paired sorbet was free of the cloying note often present in a banana dessert. But my own dish of coconut parfait with mango and pineapple salsa was no failure. It conjured up a gentle exotic flavour reminiscent of walking barefoot on a beach with hibiscus blossom in your hair.

The petit-fours are worth a brief mention: they were good.

So overall a profoundly satisfying experience. It didn’t have Chris Horridge’s light touch or his genius with presentation. There was nothing remotely health-conscious about the meal we enjoyed! On the contrary, it was very much in the style of Gidleigh Park: rich, indulgent, perfect for a treat. Good value too at £35pp excluding wine.

The kitchen visit was a bonus. Thanks Sam!

PS. The restaurant doesn’t as a matter of course allow the general public into its kitchen – they kindly agreed to a request made weeks in advance. Please don’t presume!

Smoked bacon fudge

I am always most delighted by a restaurant that breaks new ground, taking food in a direction I have never encountered before. That’s probably because I have a well developed sense of adventure, and whereas an element of natural timidity steps in to prevent me going skydiving over the Sahara, when it comes to stuffing things in my mouth I find I’m much more courageous.

So I will always remember my first visit to The Fat Duck and the sensation of “bacon and egg ice cream”. Way back then chefs just didn’t put savoury flavours in desserts, especially not such an expressively wrong conjunction as putting part of a Full English breakfast into ice cream. Of course “way back then” is only six or seven years ago, and yet in such a short time that level of innovation has become a staple of mainstream TV shows like Great British Menu and a common element in the menu of any restaurant aspiring to be cutting edge.

I’m not averse to sampling something truly original which is “interesting” rather than actually delicious, and some of these modern juxtapositions certainly tend towards the “interesting”. The brilliance of that bacon and egg ice cream was that it actually tasted delicious in its own right, rather than merely surprisingly-good-considering. I suspect this had as much to do with the magic touch of bacon as the magic touch of Heston. You could stick two rashers of good quality smoked streaky bacon into an old boot and it would taste good.

So when we were given smoked bone marrow fudge as a petit four at Noma recently, the first thought to pop into my head was “I want more! Why don’t they sell boxes of this stuff?!?”. My second thought was “sod ’em, I’ll make my own then” and hot on its heels my third thought: “I’m not mucking about with bone marrow – let’s use bacon fat!”

And thus was born Smoked Bacon Fudge. Which I can’t find any other recipes for on the internet, so maybe I’ve created something new? Because clearly if it isn’t on the internet then it doesn’t exist. Well, it does now. And it tastes of both fudge and smoky bacon, which is all you need to know.

Smoked Bacon Fudge

100g smoked bacon fat
350g caster sugar
300ml full-fat milk
1 tsp vanilla essence
  1. Put the fat, sugar and milk in a heavy-based saucepan – keep any little brown burnt bits in the bacon fat, they are tiny flavourbombs
  2. Heat the pan moderately, stirring continuously until the sugar is melted
  3. Now turn the heat up and boil the mixture, stirring continuously. The bacon fat might curdle or clump into lumps, but keep stirring and it’ll turn out alright in the end
  4. You need to boil it for about 15-20 minutes, and ideally use a sugar thermometer as you are trying to get the temperature up to 115 degrees C
  5. Turn the heat off, stir in the vanilla essence, then leave to cool for 5 minutes
  6. Stir vigorously with a wooden spoon until it seems less glossy, then pour into a small square cake tin (or like me, make a square by folding greaseproof paper and put in a bigger cake tin
  7. Sprinkle a few sea salt crystals over it if you like a salty tang, but otherwise just leave it to cool at room temperature until you can bear it no longer, then cut into squares and try a piece
  8. Smile when you taste the sweet bacon-y goodness

Raspberry leather etc.

Tonight’s dinner was a fairly typical example of my style of cooking. Have an idea and run with it. Make it up as you go along, drag the laptop out to the kitchen half way through because you realise you need a recipe for one of the elements. Make tonnes of washing-up, put lots of bits of food into whatever receptacle first comes to hand and stack them on any available bit of work surface. Try and keep everything warm. Discover late on that you didn’t prepare an ingredient you intended to include and abruptly revise the dish. Once everything is ready (and everything else is sticky, oily or covered in flour) try and plate it in an inventive way without any prior thought or planning. Realise that you haven’t warmed the plates, sod it. Sit down to eat, moderately exhausted but pleased with what’s finally on the plate. Slap forehead and get up to fetch knives, forks and a couple of wine glasses. Presto!

I’d be the first to admit that it’s a bit crap. I’m fully capable of being more organised, but so often find I’ve decided to try something on a whim and yet we’re going out to see a film or something so there’s not really enough time. What was I saying about being organised?

So!

So, inspired by our trip to Noma I made some raspberry leather. This part was really easy:

  1. Pass a whole punnet of raspberries through a sieve, squashing all the juice and flesh through but leaving the pips and other solids behind
  2. Next, add a little sugar and stir until dissolved, basically until the juice is sweet enough to bring out the proper flavour
  3. Now just pour it onto a greaseproof baking sheet, allowing it to spread itself out into a thin puddle
  4. If you fancy it a bit savoury, sprinkle a little ground black pepper and sea salt on
  5. Put it in a warm and dry place, perhaps near a radiator, and leave it for 24-48 hours until it is completely dry

You end up with a sheet of dark red translucent leather than you can peel off of the baking sheet in one piece and marvel at. I certainly did. The taste is deep and tangy, with some of the satisfying qualities of a good Shiraz. But what next?

I decided lamb chops would be good, with some kind of green sauce and some leafy stuff. The green sauce crystallised when we stumbled on wild garlic while walking along Wenlock Edge today, and then a little further on stumbled on a bank covered in wood sorrel. I never would have known if we hadn’t had it served for us at Noma. We also found enough wild primroses that I felt comfortable picking a few flowers to decorate. And so I present…

…lamb chop with parsnip puree, pea shoot, primrose and wood sorrel salad, discs of raspberry leather and a wild garlic and rosemary sauce, accompanied with Jersey royals. Just don’t ask me why I used a pastry cutter to cut out the raspberry leather.

The whole thing worked really well. The raspberry leather gave a deep tang to frisk up the lovely lamb (nice one, Ludlow Food Centre), the green sauce had a luscious springtime taste that was especially brilliant with the tiny Jersey royals, and wood sorrel leaves have a startlingly bright citric flavour. I’ve included the recipe for the sauce here, as it was so good:

Wild garlic and rosemary sauce (enough for 4)

2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp plain flour
½ pint chicken stock
2 tbsp milk
1 small onion
2 small sprigs of rosemary
12 big wild garlic leaves
  1. Finely dice the onion and sweat it for 10 minutes in a knob of butter, season with salt and black pepper
  2. Add the rosemary (finely chopped) for a minute, then the wild garlic (roughly chopped) but only long enough for it to wilt. Perhaps 30 seconds. Turn the heat off
  3. Melt the butter in a small saucepan, then add the flour and cook, stirring with a wooden spoon, for 2 minutes
  4. Now add the stock a bit at a time, whisking it into the roux and making sure no lumps form. Also add the milk, whisking it in again
  5. Add the onion and herbs to the sauce, check seasoning, loosen with a bit more stock if necessary, and put it all into a food processor to blitz it into a lovely green colour
  6. Great with lamb, new potatoes and anything else that makes you think of spring

I’ll definitely be using this sauce again before the end of wild garlic season. Or, indeed, switching in other herbs as I fancy. Likewise I’ll be making more fruit leather; it’ll be a fun talking point when we have friends over and it’s definitely an original way of serving one of your five-a-day.