Review: Koyal, Surbiton

Koyal is the third branch of the Dastaan empire. Unlike their Leeds restaurant, this time they’ve opened just a couple of miles up the road in Surbiton. It should make a big difference though: Dastaan is on a suburban shopping parade miles from the nearest train station, meaning anyone from central London has quite the …

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Ukiyo

Review: Ukiyo Hand Roll Bar, Covent Garden

So I need to foreshadow this review. I love sushi and sashimi, except for one element of it. The thin seaweed sheet used for wrapping rice in various sushi forms. It’s often hard to bite through, and the texture is neither crispy nor yielding. It’s essentially the closest thing to chewing on paper that exists …

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Glass nooooodles

Review: Liu Xiaomian, The Jackalope, Marylebone

Needing lunch, we settled on noodles at Liu Xiaomian, which has been cooking in the basement of the Jackalope pub in a quiet Marylebone mews for a few years now. This really isn’t one of the modern, polished, faux-street-food restaurants that have been springing up all over the trendy corners of London recently (most of …

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Review: Bala Baya, Southwark

So. Bala Baya describes itself as a Middle Eastern restaurant, as do a few review sites that perhaps keep their info updated. But older reviews and articles, that no-one ever updates, call it an Israeli restaurant. It doesn’t take much nouse to realise why they have re-badged themselves “Middle Eastern” as thoroughly as they can! …

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Review: Som Saa, Spitalfields

One of the first new-breed Thai restaurants in London, I was put off visiting Som Saa for a long while due to a sad episode of racism tangled up with the restaurant six years ago (here’s a relevant Twitter thread). But we were at Spitalfields and needed lunch, and I’m optimistic enough to hope that …

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Review: Koyal, SurbitonReview: Ukiyo Hand Roll Bar, Covent GardenReview: Liu Xiaomian, The Jackalope, MaryleboneReview: Bala Baya, SouthwarkReview: Som Saa, Spitalfields

Food Bloggers Unplugged

Categories:

General Articles

3 March 2012

My last few posts have been restaurant reviews, so for a bit of a break I’ve decided to chip in on “Food Bloggers Unplugged” and let my audience know a bit more about where I come from food-wise. Thanks to All That I’m Eating for inviting me to do so.

What or who inspired you to start your blog?
In July 2010 I went travelling around the world for a year with Otter (that’s a nickname, not a literal otter) and decided to keep a blog: Otter Adrift. Well, it’s what the modern round-the-world traveller does. I’m very pleased with my travel blog, love looking at it and reminiscing. When we got back I still had itchy blogging fingers, and food seemed like the obvious subject.

My audition for TV food presenter... or rather, just cooking in a self-catering cottage in Australia

Who is your foodie inspiration?
For as long as I can remember (that’d be university, 20 years ago), I’ve cooked all my food from ingredients. I never touched ready-meals and even turned my nose up at ready-made pasta sauces. And from about the same time I have always sought to eat out at independent restaurants and cafes in preference to chains.

I honestly cannot think who or what was the original inspiration for this. I think I’ve just absorbed this and that from a whole variety of sources. People describe themselves as passionate foodies. Sadly, I’m just a moderately interested foodie. Pff.

In the same way that I’ve never followed a football team or been a huge fan of a singer or band, I don’t really have any strong feelings about all the abundance of food celebs. Hm. I probably have most time for Nigel Slater.

Your greasiest most batter splattered cook book is?
I have about 20 cookbooks. 15 of them have scarcely been opened since the initial flick through. Of the remaining five, easily my favourite is Nigel Slater’s “Tender”. Because it’s not just recipes, it tells you how each vegetable works and what works with it. For a make-it-up cook like me, perfect.

The best thing you have ever eaten in another country, where was it and what was it?
MmmMMmmm. Black pepper crab in Singapore. That was such a huge crab, and so beautiful. South-east Asia is the best region on the planet for good food. South America, by contrast, is the worst. I recently recreated the black pepper crab at home, and it was almost as good.

Drooling over Singapore black pepper crab

Another Food Blogger’s table you would like to eat at?
Tricky question! Whenever I read another food blog I’m envious of their obvious passion for cooking and how much time they must spend in the kitchen, trying things out and getting them right. It could be Memalee, since I’m still reminiscing about all the great south-east Asian food from our trip while I write this. Or it could be All That I’m Eating, because we share a taste for doing tasty and seasonal things with market produce.

What one kitchen gadget would you like Santa to bring you? (money no object)
How about a smokery? I love smoked flavour in most things, so that’s something I’d like to play with myself.

Who taught you how to cook?
No-one. I didn’t start cooking until I went to university, and my early attempts were disgusting but not deadly. I’ve just absorbed stuff over the years; tips and ideas from cookbooks, TV programs and eating out. Mum has sent me various recipes over the years too, of course! So yeah, self-taught, gradual improvement.

I’m coming to you for dinner, what is your signature dish?
If signature dish means the thing that most friends or family are likely to say “oh, you should try Matthew’s X…” then it’s probably the humble Spanish omelette.

What is your guilty food pleasure?
Well, I’m a helluva food snob so I don’t really have any guilt in the sense of “I shouldn’t eat this crap”; no McD’s fries, no chocolate Hobnobs, no pop tarts, no ready meals. I suppose if I didn’t rein it in my cream tea habit could easily get out of control! So: stuffing myself with scones, jam and clotted cream.

Reveal something about yourself that others would be surprised to learn?
I may be in my thirties and only 10 stone, but I have that supreme ailment of gourmands down the centuries: the gout. I was afflicted about six years ago and I can’t think of any way a big toe could be more painful, unless it was perhaps being hit repeatedly with a sledgehammer. I suspect I’ll blog about this in more detail at some point!

We're all snobs about something, however we label it and whether we like it or not

Finally, I must confess that I’ve looked around the few food blogs I read with any regularity and they’ve all done this questionnaire already – so I can’t keep the ball rolling by inviting another five respondents. I’ll just draw your attention to my list of “Links”, in the right-hand column. They’re all great blogs, so check out any that appeal to you.

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Review: Drake’s, Ripley

Categories:

Fine dining, Michelin, Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

24 February 2012

Ripley is one of the amiably well-to-do villages of Surrey, surrounded by farmland and replete with boutique homeware shops, cosy deli/cafes and red-brick dining pubs. Yet even though Surrey is the most cushy and well-to-do county in all of Englandshire, for the longest time

Yummy little brioche rolls in a very traditional fine dining setting
there was a desert of good places to eat twixt the Thames and the Downs. Drake’s has been in Ripley a few years now, and is definitely an oasis of fine dining.

Some have criticised the ambience at Drake’s, but as we were a table of seven for lunch we rather brought our own ambience with us, making it hard to comment objectively. The dining room is light and airy, with exposed beams and minimal decoration. I liked it. Our little corner had a feature wall with moo-cow wallpaper. Service was friendly and courteous.

The lunchtime tasting menu is reasonably good value at £45. Frankly I might have paid that to sit there and stuff myself with the scrumptious bite-sized roast red pepper brioches that were one of the breads. I could have too; the more of them we ate, the more they brought out. The amuse was a little biscuit of curry meringue with a dollop of chicken liver parfait atop. I am always delighted when I get given something that is both delicious and entirely new to me and this scored on both counts.

First course was a little beignet of onion with crab apple puree, delicious although the almost fluid texture of the onion was a tad unexpected inside the crispy crumb. This was followed a scallop with

Dramatic plating for a lively flavour combination of coffee, beef, carrot and orange
chorizo and sweet potato, all very neat and perfectly executed albeit hardly stirring the blood. The fish course was a tasty little piece of turbot with a trio of roast beetroot and fennel, best described as “nice” and not really the strongest course. Beetroot is always going to be earthy, making it a difficult partner in a dish that was otherwise all about subtlety. At this stage I was starting to think we’d fallen into into a fairly humdrum tasting menu, so it was a pleasure to find our main course much braver. A slow-cooked piece of beef was made bitter with the addition of coffee and then paired with sweet carrots and orange. An interesting and genuinely successful attempt to freshen up what is usually cosy fireside meat, the meal felt back on track.

Pre-dessert: beetroot and orange milkshake. This was a lovely palate-cleanser, an appropriate use of beetroot in a sweet situation, and very thoughtful to bring together two ingredients that had featured in earlier dishes. Dessert was a light and moreish pistachio cake topped

That black olive ice cream was superb
with slivers of caramelised banana and paired with a black olive ice cream. This was a stunner, and the only truly successful use of olives in dessert that I’ve ever found. The bits of olive were somehow crystallised and/or roasted; crunchy, chewy and sweet but retaining a pronounced olive taste. Yum.

I’d be remiss in not mentioning the best set of petit fours I’ve had in a long while. Granted, it helped that I wasn’t exactly stuffed; portions at Drake’s are small, so at the end of the meal I was content rather than full. Nothing spoils petit fours more than having to make a dutiful attempt to wedge them in like the last few items into an already bursting suitcase. Nevertheless, these were delicious and with oddities like a red pepper macaroon Steve Drake is clearly keen to break out from the obvious right to the very end.

Drake’s is good. Our meal was faultless in execution and scattered with enough challenging combinations and surprising successes that it sits comfortably above the more predictable tasting menus. I’d say this makes it worth the less than bargain lunchtime price, although the same menu is only ten pounds more in the evening. Certainly worth dragging yourself out of the metropolis and down the A3 for.

No-one said it was easy to recreate Michelin-star food in your own home

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Review: Dinner, Knightsbridge

Categories:

Fine dining, London, Michelin, Restaurant Reviews

22 February 2012

We came to Dinner for dinner. It would be strange to have lunch at Dinner, and indeed the dark

Pineapples rotate on an 18th century meat roasting mechanism, neatly summarising Dinner's theme
and urbane dining room doesn’t really strike me as a daytime venue. So muted is the lighting that at first I thought every other diner was wearing black, white or grey in obedience to an unwritten dress code that we hadn’t been told about. This is a good atmosphere, though, classy yet convivial, with the arresting use of big white jelly moulds as lampshades to remind us that we’re in the hands of a playful chef. Behind the plate glass that reveals the busy team of young chefs there are a dozen whole pineapples turning on a spit before a crackling fire. This whimsical centrepiece is excusable as chunks of the pineapple are used in one of the desserts. And in the same way these crummy photos are excused by the moody lighting!

Let’s get down to business. And the business is dinner. Starter, main and pud. None of your fancy amuses bouche or pre-dessert, just three courses and all of them a proper size. This is clearly part of the theme; the whole menu is inspired by dishes found in cookbooks dating back from Victorian to medieval times, resulting in menu items like

The famous meat fruit, which as you can see looks exactly like a mandarin
“meat fruit” and “rice and flesh”. Three courses, decent portions, also all very traditional.

My starter was a lamb broth, poured over a dice of veg, slow-cooked hen’s yolk and three pieces of breaded sweetbread. These unfortunately were too small for the sweetbread to overcome the fried breadcrumb coating, but the broth was strong and clear-as-a-bell. “Rice and flesh” turns out to be a punchy saffron risotto with fragments of calf tail cooked until gooey in red wine. Snails lined up on marrow taste deeply delicious. “Meat fruit” looks like a mandarin but is chicken

Marrow and snails to one side, pickled veg to the other. Serious starter
parfait wrapped in a mandarin jelly, a brilliant caprice which is also a great flavour pairing.

Next course, and Dinner turns out to be well named, because the mains are the strongest courses. And really, it is so seldom I find myself saying so that it’s worth pointing out. Pork chop, duck breast, pigeon breast, steak, I think that right around the table we all muttered phrases like “must be the best ever…” or “can’t remember the last time…” between greedy mouthfuls. For me, my pork chop was the clearest connection between Dinner and the Fat Duck. These restaurants are worlds apart in style and substance, but they share in

Now that's a proper main course, a real pile of pigeon and artichoke
spades Heston’s alchemical ability to condense and concentrate the very essence of a flavour into itself. This was without doubt the porkiest pork chop I have ever enjoyed.

Desserts were good, but we had definitely peaked with the mains. I chose rhubarb, which I always do when it’s in season, and then I always wonder why because fine dining rhubarb desserts consistently fail to excite me. Dammit. Around the table there was a great lemon suet pudding, a hefty sticky cake cooked in boozy sauce and a layered chocolate tablet that was pure elegance.

Service was spot on, with all of the friendly waiters keenly knowledgeable about the provenance and creation of the dishes without appearing schooled or forced. The sommelier was helpful

Heston is a league above most others with his presentation. Chocolate bar, what's inside you?
and we enjoyed a great American cabernet franc with stickies to follow. The wine list is long, but the vast majority of the wines run to 3 or 4 digits. With the exception of a house wine there’s nothing under fifty. Accordingly, our celebratory meal at Dinner was about £120 per head all-in.

Dinner is a million miles from The Fat Duck. Someone posed the question: of the two, which would you come back to? We all agreed that it would be Dinner. The Fat Duck is “once in a lifetime”, and that’s both a good thing and a bad thing. It truly is dinner-theatre, and even with the best plays I seldom want to see the same production twice. Dinner is just a really great restaurant. Hardly cheap, but with Heston’s marvellous attention to flavour running through every dish it’s well worth it.

Seriously, how did people eat with those things on?

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Singapore black pepper crab

Categories:

Recipes, Showing off, Spicy food

15 February 2012

The black pepper crab we had in Singapore was hands-down our favourite dinner in an entire year of travel around the world. So perhaps no surprise that when I asked Maureen what she’d like me to cook for a

Just look at the size of those pinchers!
Valentine’s supper it was Singapore black pepper crab. I’d do anything for my lady on Valentine’s Day! Well, and on any other day of the year of course.

Living in Ludlow, about as far from the sea as you can get in England, sourcing the crab was a bit of a challenge. We do have a great little fishmonger in town, but they’re only open Weds-Sat and St Valentine died on Tuesday this year. Fortunately there are a couple of great Cornish fishmongers who will mail order a crab to your door.

Of course, to be properly authentic it would have to be a live crab, which I would then kill and deep fry on the night. However, in the first place I’m likely to burn the house down trying to deep fry anything quite that huge, and in the second place I just knew that if a live crab arrived in the house it would end up with us naming it and then it’d be impossible to dispatch. We’d end up filling the bath with salt water and keeping it as a pet. We would, trust me. So I went with a cooked crab, and the result was virtually identical to our Singapore feast. The crab was just huge. Huge. Major kudos to Wing of St Mawes in Cornwall for supplying such a delicious monster.

Half a crab. Takes forty minutes to eat properly, now that's value for money

Wow. This was wickedly good eats, complete with filthy fingers and stuff all over the table. It’s not for the faint-hearted, there’s a bucketload of spice in here and yet somehow the crab is still awesome.

For the record, I accompanied it with a bowl of Som Tam, the ubiquitous spicy Thai salad made with green papaya. And let me tell you, green papaya is even harder to source than fresh crab – as a fellow blogger discovered. This is especially true in Ludlow. A search

Saffron pannacotta with blood orange coulis - pretty colours, mismatch tastes
on yell.com for the nearest oriental grocer suggested either Birmingham or Bristol. Useful. Eventually ordered it online. Expensive.

Pudding was a simple and rich pannacotta, but to try and keep a theme I flavoured it with two pinches of saffron instead of vanilla, and then added a blood orange coulis on top. Visually the bright yellow cream and the scarlet coulis looked stunning, but I’m not happy enough with the combination to offer it as a recipe; I think saffron needs a different kind of accompaniment in the pannacotta situation.

Singapore black pepper crab (serves 2)

1 big cooked crab (1kg+)
2-3 tbsp butter
2 shallots, finely chopped
5 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 inch piece ginger, finely chopped
2 tbsp black peppercorns, coarse ground
5 birds-eye Thai chillies
1 tbsp dark soy sauce
2 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tbsp palm sugar
Mint leaves
  1. Dry fry the black pepper until its fragrance fills the kitchen, then set to one side
  2. Attack the crab! Take the legs and claws off, crack them so the sauce can get in. Chop the main shell in half, then take out the dead man’s fingers. Set aside all your bits of crab.
  3. Heat your biggest pan, get the butter in and melt it until sizzling
  4. Add the garlic, shallot and ginger, then stir-fry these at a moderate heat for a few minutes until fragrant.
  5. Now add the black pepper, chillies, soy sauce, oyster sauce and palm sugar. Cook for a couple of minutes
  6. Add the crab to the pan and move it around, coating with sauce. Keep it going for a few minutes, until the crab is heated through and well coated.
  7. Serve with mint leaves scattered over. That’s it! Eating it is much harder than cooking it…

Personally, I can’t wait to make this all over again!

Always despatch your crab humanely before plunging him in boiling water. Or buy cooked!

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Review: The Mole Inn, Toot Baldon

Categories:

Pubs, Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

12 February 2012

Living in Ludlow, I often find myself rolling up and down the M40 to the metropolis. So it’s useful to know a few good eats not too far from the motorway, to break up a tedious drive with a nice lunch or supper. One such spot is The Crabmill at Preston Bagot. It’s the absolute epitome of a dining pub; warm and cosy, food with punchy flavours, great value, silly village name, and in no way a pub.

The Mole Inn at Toot Baldon in Oxfordshire is cut from pretty much the same block, sharing more than just a silly village name. If someone ever wanted to put together a catalogue of classy dining pub fittings,

These devilled kidneys were the star of the show at The Mole
furniture and decoration then they could just come here for a photo-shoot and leave happy. Yes, it’s formulaic, but The Mole is at least a very good example of the species with some nice touches like the ancient fragments of carved wood panelling hung as wall décor.

Similar with the food: exactly what I’d expect of a dining pub, but some jolly good specimens for all that. My starter of devilled kidneys was delicious, piping hot and with roasted garlic cloves adding a chewy sweet hit alongside the deep, spicy, meaty sauce. The kidneys were cooked just right. Oddly, it looked as though Maureen’s starter had been given my toast. Her three enormous balls of breaded goat cheese certainly didn’t need the artfully balanced slice of toasted

Why is my toast on top of that goat cheese?
sourdough, and my devilled sauce most certainly did. So I stole it. And lived to tell the tale!

For the record, the goat cheese was too dry and crumbly to be truly a pleasure in such large quantity. The beetroot and onion relish beneath was delicious, and the whole nicely presented, but this was a textbook case for less being more: smaller balls with a finer breadcrumb would have made a better starter.

My main was a slippery piece of haddock perched on minted curly kale, a surprising and delicious combination. It came with a pot of smoked haddocky mash, also lovely and full of gunky goodness. Maureen’s mixed fish grill was good, contrasting red snapper, haddock, salmon.

Haddock and haddocky mash. Only for those who love haddock!
The prawns seemed a bit of a poorly afterthought. Good chips.

We finished up with a STP. It would be a bit much to say that a dining pub can be judged on it’s sticky toffee pudding, but they are as ubiquitous on the menu as green curry at a Thai and so (oh, very reluctantly) we usually order one. This one was sluiced in dark toffee sauce with a pronounced black treacle taste, though the pudding itself was a bit dry and dense. Not a bad STP, but not a memorable one.

The Mole Inn, then. It’s a good place to know if you want a comfy meal in pleasant surroundings and you’re anywhere near Oxford. I think the Bib Gourmand is well earned, and I like it. Can’t bring myself to rave about it though.

I hastily add that we weren't served anything as ingenious as worms at the Mole Inn

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