Baked rice and duck

Review: Asador 44, Cardiff

The food scene in Wales has improved beyond measure over the last decade, with the charge led (I would argue) by Ynyshir on the fine dining front. It sometimes feels like half the best places to eat in Wales are headed by alumni. That aside, Cardiff itself has also burgeoned with good eats; The Plate …

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Scallop roe hash browns

Review: Heaneys, Cardiff

Heaneys is a handsome, friendly, comfortable and capable fine dining restaurant in the nice Pontcanna suburb of Cardiff. Thirty minutes walk, or a ten minute taxi ride on a rainy December night, from the Castle. We went with the long tasting menu, because ’tis the season to over-indulge after all! And a beef fat old …

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Pheasant

Review: Crispin, Clapham

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 …

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Shepherd's pie

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 …

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Edamame at Drunken Lobster

Review: Drunken Lobster, Ventnor

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 …

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Review: Asador 44, CardiffReview: Heaneys, CardiffReview: Crispin, ClaphamReview: Cinnamon Bazaar, Covent GardenReview: Drunken Lobster, Ventnor

Feasting on Denmark

Categories:

Events and Visits, Overseas, Restaurant Reviews

8 April 2012

Strange customs in exotic places: charging £1.80 for tap water! If the food at Fiskebaren hadn’t been fantastic we could never have forgiven them. The waitress who explained the charge didn’t blush, so I assumed it wasn’t unusual in Denmark and resisted the urge to snark. Reading around later, it certainly sounds like a common charge. Those crazy Danes, they’ll want money for napkin

Teeny tiny cutlery! Gordon Ramsay's Plane Food
hire next. How about wear-and-tear on cutlery?

We started our culinary odyssey back at Heathrow, where with an hour to kill and hungry for lunch we decided to try Gordo’s airport diner. Actually, it was pretty good and not over-priced given the captive audience; £12 for a couple of nice smoked salmon fishcakes with a blob of spicy mayo, a couple of quid more for a big chunk of cod with neat polenta “chips” and punchy aubergine salsa. The cod tasted a bit old. The staff were oddly reserved and seemed to have been brought in wholesale from a small Turkish village, and the cutlery was the tiniest I’ve ever been given to eat a meal with. On balance though, it’s one Gordon Ramsay establishment I might well go back to.

First meal in Denmark: a trendy spot called Fiskebaren, set incongruously in a working district of shipping

Look. At. That. Jet. Black. Hollandaise. Sweet.
factors and meat packers. Distressed industrial interior, dramatically lit, comfy. This was seriously wow seafood. Raw razor clams with a herb cream on a crisp of sweet malted bread. Unctuous tuna tartar with frisky leaves. Big chunk of fried cod roe with pickled root veg, sparky vinaigrette and sticks of sweet herby waffle. Gorgeous cod tongue with perfect slow-roast salsify and jet black herb hollandaise. I would eat here every week.

Next evening: dinner on white linen at Broholm castle. Just a main course, mine being two slabs of perfectly pan-fried foie gras served with a splendid cognac sauce, delicious pickled mushrooms of a delicate woodland variety I didn’t recognise and some juicy green grapes to cut the richness. Maureen’s lamb was pretty good but

This is a plateful of opulence, from the foie gras to the cognac sauce
couldn’t compete. A night and a full four-course banquet here would be a wonderfully baronial treat, though they aren’t really embracing the new Nordic cuisine.

Third evening: well made sushi at a sharp little spot called Karma, startlingly empty on a Thursday evening given the quality of the rolls and snacks. Great tempura oysters, nommy spiced crispy salmon skin. I should explain that our lunch today was at Noma, so we were only filling up the gaps in the evening.

And on the fourth day we enjoyed a luncheon of smorrebrod at Aamann’s. We had very traditional smorrebrod in the little town of Faaborg a couple of days ago, so it was good to be able to contrast that with a more contemporary and thoughtfully sourced take on the classic Danish

Smorrebrod, tasty open sandwiches. Check out the curried pickled herring!
open sandwich. Aamann’s does them veeeery well. I particularly loved the steak tartar, but their take on the more traditional pork pate gave me a better comparison; the quality of the pork and the care in the making was evident in taste, texture and overall deliciousness. If I worked in Copenhagen I would have lunch here every day.

Conclusions? Well, it’s immediately remarkable that we didn’t have one disappointing meal in Denmark. There might be some luck involved, but that’s over three lunches and three dinners. So there are a lot of good things to eat in Denmark even without considering the “world’s best restaurant” Noma. But in case you are considering it, that’ll be the next post…

Oh, and if you’re interested in the rest of my short break in Denmark (or indeed my year of travelling around-the-world) then check out Otter Adrift.

Can't help being sarcastic, but of course it's just Cover Charge by another name

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Ramsons, aka wild garlic

Categories:

Lunch or supper, Quick meal, Recipes, Wild Food

31 March 2012

Wow, suddenly it is spring. There are lambs frollicking in the fields, daffodils nodding at the roadside, and wild garlic stinking up the riverbanks. Just a pity the daffodils aren’t edible. Hmm… in fact, they’re poisonous. “Poisoning most often occurs when people mistake the bulbs for onions.” Silly.

Wild garlic, or ramsons, are perfectly edible, and there’s nothing that makes me feel like spring is sprung more than the taste and whiff of it. You can find it growing on moist slopes, always fairly near a stream or river and usually in woodland, and pretty much anywhere in the country. If you’re in any doubt that you’ve found the right plant, just crush a leaf. The stink of garlicky-chivey perfume is unmistakeable.

A bunch of ransoms, for identification purposes

So, how to enjoy wild garlic? Eggs and butter are a great start, they both work wonders with the perfumed leaves. Oh, and wild garlic is one of those herbs whose flavour is killed by cooking, so it usually goes in pretty much at the end of a dish.

The very, very, very best way to welcome spring is simply to make scrambled eggs and add chopped wild garlic leaves when the eggs are nearly finished. There is no better expression of the lively green flavour, and trust me I’ve tried a few ideas. You want roughly one leaf per egg, fairly roughly chopped, and I won’t insult your cooking skills by reminding you that scrambled eggs require no milk or cream, just a bit of butter, and should be cooked really slowly and scrambled with a wooden spoon.

The very best and simplest use for ransoms

Wild garlic omelette: same idea, just make an omelette instead and try including some cheese.

Oh. Here’s a luverly thing: wild garlic salsa verde. Chop up a bunch of ramsons leaves quite finely, pour on a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Toast a small handful of pine nuts and crush them roughly, finely chop a large teaspoon of capers, add a half teaspoon of dijon mustard, salt and black pepper. This is brilliant with lamb chops, or as a pesto in pasta.

Punches with a fistful of springtime

And my fourth idea of the day for wild garlic is a simple pasta dish for two. Slice up a big leek and gently saute in 50/50 butter and olive oil, seasoning it with plenty of salt and black pepper. You want to cook it until it is completely soft, but don’t let any of it catch and brown. Coincidentally this takes about as long as boiling a pan of spaghetti, which you should also do. Now, add a handful of chopped wild garlic leaves to the leeks and a handful of grated pecorino. Dump this into the drained spaghetti along with a big knob of butter and another glug of olive oil, mix together and serve into warmed bowls with another good grind of black pepper.

Gentle buttery leek and ransoms pasta

The white star-shaped flowers of the ramsons are just as edible as the leaves and taste a little milder, so you can make the pasta (or any other ramsons dish) look really spiffy by simply sprinkling a few flowers on top before serving.

But to recap, if you only pick one tiny bunch of ramsons this year, go for the scrambled eggs.

Spring has sprung

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Review: The New Inn, Baschurch

Categories:

Pubs, Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

26 March 2012

Scotch egg, almost unbelievably yellow yolk, delish
We rolled to the New Inn for Sunday lunch in a bit of a funk. Big meal out on Saturday night, rather too much wine, and then the stupid clocks went forward so lunch at 12:30 was going to feel more like 11:30. Given that we didn’t stumble home until midnight on Saturday, groaning like a pack of wolves who have just devoured a whole herd of caribou, we weren’t the most vivacious quartet on what was a truly gorgeous Sunday morning. Bountiful sunlight, thou art offensive to my tender head and squinty eyes! Begone!

Turned out that a leisurely lunch stretching out three courses of excellent cooking over three hours was just about the ticket.

The New Inn is a cheerful place, all the old wood beams scrubbed up to a natural oaken hue with tables and chairs to match. There’s a lot given over to dining, but it remains a proper village pub too with room to swing a pint and outside tables where beer and sun were being soaked up by the locals. We were served by a friendly and helpful band of young ladies, who ignored our occasional vacant stares and blinky gazes.

Is there anything better in batter than ham hock?
The food cut through my funk big-time. First up we got a perfect scotch egg: vivid yellow and runny yolk, oinkingly porky sausage meat with a serious punch of lemon and thyme. Moving onto the proper starter, plated on slate, a trio of battered balls of chewy slow-cooked ham hock sat on a swipe of shiny mustard mayonnaise. There was nothing subtle about this dish, a good hit of mustard and the sticky cream of the mayo mashing in the mouth with scrunchy batter and salty ham. Woke me up.

I almost never order chicken, but this morning my head, body and tummy were calling out for something soothing. Although breast, it had been roasted properly to keep juice and flavour intact. Kale and mash were good, as was the jus, but it was the sweetcorn puree that lifted the whole dish. Sweetcorn is so badly underused as an ingredient.

All this is irrelevant, because Maureen’s burger came along and knocked my socks off. Massive. Lamb and beef, absolutely blue in the middle, and laced rather raunchily with blue cheese and truffle. I’ll probably dream about it tonight, and not the kind of dreams I’d ever

Big burger! Happy Maureen! Actually, she looks a bit scared.
tell anyone about. Did I say it was massive? It was huge. Maureen roped off the area and began excavations, but eventually I had to come in and help (oh, hardship). The triple-cooked chips were also maddeningly good.

I should note that Tim and Vanessa were also making contented noises about the roast beef and the smoked haddock, and the nibbles I tried were groovy indeed.

It would have been rude not to squeeze in pudding. I squeezed in a lemon posset, which was delicious and always a favourite – rich, tangy and light all at once. Rather niftily served with scrunchy gingernuts and a little slurp of sweet-tart homemade lemonade. Pannacotta was pronounced good, rhubarb ice cream was noted for being good but a little too delicate in the rhubarb flavour.

The New Inn is right at the top end of pub dining for me, from the menu choices to the plating. Everything was delicious and the bill jolly reasonable – £25 each for three hours of relaxed gastronomic entertainment, though admittedly we didn’t have much wine!

You can see who it's supposed to be, right?

‘Cos I’m conscientious I have to say that chef Marcus knew we were coming, on account of the wonders of Twitter.

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A gourmet and his gout

Categories:

General Articles

20 March 2012

I explained to my new doctor that I have gout, have had it since I was 32, and am taking medication for it. He expressed surprise at my age (late thirties), asked if I ate a lot of fatty foods (no, and at 10 stone I’m hardly hefty), and then suggested I should certainly be

Not guilty! Port and cheese
avoiding cheese, port and red meat. All of which is wrong, wrong, wrong. Looks like even in the medical profession gout is a poorly understood condition.

But still, can’t complain. What could be better confirmation of one’s status as a top-notch gourmet than to get gout in your early thirties? Instant foodie kudos! Clearly I must dine out every night on pheasant and lamprey washed down with bumpers of old port, to be so afflicted.

The truth, as always, is a bit more complicated. For starters, it’s largely a genetic ailment so having got the relevant gene from my grandad (a martyr to ‘is gout) I was always likely to develop it. And while a rich diet is definitely going to exacerbate the condition, the usual suspects my doctor trotted out are not necessarily guilty. Port is no different from any alcohol, and alcohol is only a problem if you let it dehydrate you. Cheese and fat don’t contribute noticeably to gout, and there’s some evidence that dairy products are slightly beneficial. It’s a case of guilt by association: the fat old bloaters who suffer from gout in Victorian

Guilty! Blood, offal and especially beef
novels are always devouring the whole cheeseboard and hogging the port bottle. But it’s more likely to be the rich venison gravy or the half-dozen langoustines that did for ’em.

So, what is a gout attack?

It’s a form of arthritis, and often described as the most painful form. The most common joint attacked is the big toe. Pathetic, eh? What kind of man can’t live with a bit of pain in his toe? Imagine a little gnome with a sledgehammer trotting along beside you and smashing your big toe whenever you set your foot down. That’s the first three days. There was too much pain to sleep until I got my foot out from under the sheet. Yep, the touch of a cotton sheet felt like the gnome was using my toe as an anvil for beating out a ploughshare. This is after dosing myself with potent prescription painkillers. After those first few days it’s simply a case of gradual recovery over about a month, by which time I could walk without much of a noticeable limp.

Gout is triggered by an unhealthy build-up of purines in the body, which end up crystallising in distant joints such as the big toe. Purines are typically generated from processing certain kinds of protein-rich food; hence shellfish, offal, meat on the bone and rich stocks are just about the worst possible foods for a gout sufferer (this table gives more detail,

I never expected my toes to appear on this blog
and the whole website is a mine of valuable information on the disease). The other major factor is hydration: purines are flushed from the body via liver functions, so if you get dehydrated then they’re much more likely to start crystallising.

So the perfect hypothetical recipe for a gout attack might be… going to a wedding on a Saturday, drinking far too much wine and no water in the evening, having nothing more than a coffee with a meaty cooked breakfast on Sunday and then going out for a four-course lunch involving scallops and pheasant. Silly me. By Sunday evening a tell-tale tingling throb had begun in my toe. This was going to be my third bout of gout and worst yet. It was at this point that I started reading about the subject in depth.

It became apparent that there are two choices for defeating gout; change your diet or take drugs for the rest of your life.

You change your diet to minimise purine intake. This means: say goodbye to all seafood, avoid any gravies or meat on the bone, don’t even glance at offal and make sure that you drink lots of water with alcohol in moderate amounts. Chicken is your friend, so are veggies and starches. This sounded terrible. What kind of a gourmand would I be if I couldn’t eat oysters, lobster, kidneys, liver, monkfish or enjoy a nice rich beef jus? GIVE ME DRUGS!

The drug you have to take for the rest of your life is called allopurinol, and it is blessedly free of (known) side effects. It does have one kicker: when you first start taking it, the purines that are released when it gets to work may trigger one final gout attack. “One for the road” sort of thing. Lovely.

So, three years later and I’ve had no more trouble with gout. I pick whatever I like off the menu and still drink the odd snifter of port. The modern gourmet doesn’t have to be a martyr to his diet. But I’m lucky; my gout is minor compared to what some sufferers go through.

Our little mascot does actually have a wounded foot, and is at the teddy-bear hospital right now. Get well soon!

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Review: Fernandez & Wells, Soho

Categories:

Cafes etc., London, Restaurant Reviews

12 March 2012

Most out-of-towners will usually find themselves somewhere around Piccadilly Circus, Oxford Circus or perhaps Carnaby Street at some point when they travel up to the metropolis. I certainly do. So it would probably be good to know about one of the best places I’ve ever

The gorgeous display of wild food at Fernandez & Wells
found for brunch, lunch or just afternoon coffee and cake. That would be Fernandez & Wells, on Beak Street just below the bottom end of Carnaby Street (they have a handful of other outlets, but this is the one we know and love).

It’s a very simple, modern space inside and if you want a sofa to surf on then just forget it – these are perches, for a sustenance break and a quick scan of the papers, nothing more. But what a great sustenance break!

The pleasure begins before anything passes your lips, with the display of food on the counter. No glass barrier here, they have confidence that their punters won’t be crass enough to start fingering the sandwiches or pinching the pastries. And in the same way that a face-to-face encounter with a lion on the African savannah is much more exciting than peering at one through the glass of a zoo enclosure, so the treats spread out on the hefty wooden table before you look far more enticing for their freedom.

My sandwich of wafer-thin Spanish pork with deliciously salty manchego was grilled to warm perfection, the bread full of crunch and taste. The rare roast beef in Maureen’s sandwich was melting in the mouth. Later we squeezed in gloriously authentic pasteis de nata.

That bread was scrunchily perfect, and so was the pork inside
I’ve been to Lisbon, I know they were right. If I had been more greedy the last huge slice of rose-petal jam Victoria sponge would have been mine. Maureen washed her sandwich down with a generous glass of fresh blood orange juice, while I had a flat white.

I must mention their coffee. First, I must confess to being a very lazy coffee afficienado. I drink lots of coffee, and I only drink good coffee. There’s no instant in our house, and I’ve lost count of the times I’ve ordered a take-away coffee in a strange town or station and then dumped the whole cup in a bin because I couldn’t stomach the filth inside. But! But. I don’t know any of the right terminology to use in describing a cup of coffee, I’ve never been on a tasting course or avidly read books and blogs on the subject. I just know a good cup of coffee when I encounter it, be it flat white or French press.

The coffee at Fernandez & Wells is up in the top five cups I’ve ever enjoyed, and that’s out of an estimated 20,000 cups of coffee in 40 countries. ‘Nuff said.

One more thing needs saying. F&W isn’t a cheap cafe, the sandwiches are over a fiver. But I don’t really care, I’d rather truly enjoy one of their sandwiches with a great cup of coffee than bolt down an adequate but entirely uninteresting number from Pret or Eat with a cup of hey-it’s-all-caffeine-anyway brew.

Food safaris. Great idea.

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