Venison dim sum

Review: Row on 5, Mayfair

I’m developing some clear preferences in my old age, I think. Nowadays I’ve got a strong preference for more informal mid-range dining, preferably ambitious and often ethnic. Small plates almost always feature. But as Row on 5 has just reminded me, I also love a real splurge on a destination restaurant where you feel super …

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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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Review: Row on 5, MayfairReview: Asador 44, CardiffReview: Heaneys, CardiffReview: Crispin, ClaphamReview: Cinnamon Bazaar, Covent Garden

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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Review: Pizza Rustica

Categories:

London, Makers and Producers, Restaurant Reviews

5 February 2012

Richmond is not cool. Richmond is arguably (by me at least) the best all-round place to live within the M25, with splendid green spaces all around, superb transport links into the city or out to the country, theatre, shopping, cinema, and good eating. But the avant garde have always made the possibly valid assumption that Richmond is conservative rather than cool, and so the town never sees anything new to eat, drink or buy until it’s already safely mainstream. In spite of the fact that a two bedroom flat on Richmond Hill will buy you a ten bedroom mansion in Dorset, the best place to eat in town is La

Pizza for two, both delish
Buvette, a cracking but staunchly traditional French bistro.

Equally traditional and equally good is the tiny Pizza Rustica, sandwiched so tightly among the shops on the high street that you might blink and miss it. But it’s not unheard of to find yourself wandering Richmond on a Friday night and wondering what to feed on, so this little patch of Italy is worth knowing about.

This evening I had their absolutely signature pizza, the “2007”. They cook the pizza base with nothing more than good cheese on top, then add piles of rocket, parma ham, marinated tomato and shaved parmesan. I can’t eat this pizza without grinning cheerfully. The base is thin and crisp, with a good taste of roasted flour. The ham and cheese add plenty of salt, the tomato a bit of necessary juiciness and the rocket a great balancing bitter greenness.

Maureen went for the “Buffalo”, where again the pizza base is cooked with nothing more than a good garlicky tomato sauce, and a combination of parma ham, basil leaves and fresh buffalo mozzarella is added afterwards. Triumph of Italian flavour, as simple as that. We swallowed these with a couple of perfectly decent glasses of Italian white wine, and then went to the cinema.

You should too.

It doesn’t stop at pizza, though. You can have a Foodie Day Out in Richmond if you know where to look. Among its traditional and unadventurous bounds, picturesque riverside, panoramic parkland and John Lewis-stuffed homes you can find some of the best pizza, chocolate, ice cream and cheese anywhere in the country. Get stuffed.

I just hate it when that happens

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Review: Roka

Categories:

London, Restaurant Reviews

2 February 2012

How exciting! Cameron Diaz dined with us tonight! Okay, she dined in the same restaurant at the same time. Disgusted at the denizens of a nearby table who went up to say hello and shake her hand. Yes, that takes some guts to simply introduce yourself to a major celebrity apropos of nothing. But it also takes a gross lack of empathy. She’s

Yellowtail sashimi with truffle oil and poor lighting
here to have dinner, not to glad-hand the masses. Good grief.

Anyway, Roka is exactly the kind of place to lure celebs, with a stylish interior coupled to trendy Japanese cuisine that was very good, without being very great.

The gnarly wooden bar surrounding the robata barbecue that forms a centrepiece for the restaurant is impressive and appealing. The walls onto the street are entirely glass, which seems to be pandering more to the prurient gaze of interested passers-by who’d like to catch a glimpse of Cameron Diaz than to the diners within. All the hard surfaces certainly give the place a vibrant buzz of conversation, without quite becoming a din.

Service was good, friendliness combined with efficiency. I took some winning over when our server’s opening comment was “the menu is like Japanese tapas…” Ugh. It’s not, it’s just Japanese food. It bugs me that anything which doesn’t follow the starter, main, dessert formula gets labelled “tapas”. Just as anything deep fried in any kind of batter is now “tempura”.

The tempura we ordered was crisp and good, with some especially funky prawns. The trouble being that nothing set it apart from my local sushi place except the price. Likewise the nigiri, the chicken yakitori, the baby back ribs. This last was a special, using top-notch iberican pork, but as the sauce drowned any porky flavour it was hard to spot the difference.

So much for the ordinary fayre. We also picked a couple of dishes from the top-end of the menu, and these were far better. Yellowtail sashimi with truffle oil shouldn’t have worked at all, but the oil provided a beautiful earthy fragrance on the nose without touching the delicate flavour of the fish underneath. And a piece of sea bream from the barbecue was cooked to blackened perfection and completed with a citrussy dressing.

All our gorgeous Roka desserts - I scarcely had time to grab a photo!
I usually feel more healthy and less stuffed after Japanese food, a jolly good thing because the desserts at Roka are the highlight of the meal. You heard me, the highlight. My yogurt and almond cake was scrumptiously savoury, really putting the ‘umami’ into… er… ‘pumamidding’. Fine slivers of toffee banana were pretty and complementary, which gets a big thumbs up as toffee banana is one of those things that always sounds good on paper but turns out to be a mistake anywhere more refined than a banoffee pie. Black sesame mochi ice cream with tiny cherry blossom macaroons was as delicious as it looked.

Naturally enough there’s a fine sake list and I found a zesty number with ozone and nutty note, while the wine drinkers had plenty to choose from and found a really solid Riesling. Nothing on the list was cheap, though.

Conclusion? This is good Japanese food, in a stylish setting in the middle of the west end, and we were very happy as we wandered back onto the street. If you want a visual and gustatory feast that doesn’t leave you stuffed as part of a lively night out, and you have money to burn, Roka couldn’t possibly disappoint. The top-end of the menu includes some really good and succulent cooking, and the desserts are superb.

Badger, geddit? She's badgering him. Jokes within jokes! Haha!

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