Pan con tomate with a view

Review: Joia, Battersea

Joia has one very good thing going for it: huge floor-to-ceiling windows with 15th storey views out over Battersea Power Station and beyond. It’s a light and spacious dining room and it feels lovely to be here. That said, on arrival we had a similar experience to La Goccia: the lady on the door took …

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Lamb curry

Review (again): Paradise, Soho

I reviewed Paradise a few years ago when we first went and enjoyed our best Sri Lankan meal in London to date. We’ve been back a few times since, whenever we’re longing for punchy whole-hearted spice and cool cocktails. So this isn’t a full review, I just wanted to highlight that they’ve now switched focus …

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Chicken and waffle

Review: Mollie’s Diner, Oxford (ish)

“Mollie’s Diner, Oxford” is actually beside the A242 about 20 minutes drive from Oxford. Just in case you thought it was a useful hotel for visiting Oxford! It’s a roadside diner and motel (hotel, really) and we found it very handy for two days of walking along the Thames Path nearby. As a hotel I …

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Review: The Three Horseshoes, Batcombe

When the April rain and cold finally clears away and you get your first really warm, sun-soaked day of the year. Well, it’s nice to sit outside a country pub and enjoy a good meal al fresco. Which is just what we did on the way back from Devon at The Three Horseshoes in the …

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Dough balls

Review: La Goccia, Covent Garden

La Goccia is an Italian restaurant in the same courtyard as the Petersham restaurant and from the same stable. It’s got a glamorous inner dining room with a bar counter, and a lighter outer room off the courtyard. This is where we were led when we arrived, pretty much the first guests of the evening …

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Review: Joia, BatterseaReview (again): Paradise, SohoReview: Mollie’s Diner, Oxford (ish)Review: The Three Horseshoes, BatcombeReview: La Goccia, Covent Garden

Review: Victor’s at Schloss Berg, Germany

Categories:

Michelin, Overseas, Restaurant Reviews

27 October 2011

John Dory with blobs. Christian Bau is very keen on his little blobs.
Arriving at Schloss Berg just after dark in a taxi was a slightly surreal experience. We were expecting an old German castle with high pointed turrets and perhaps a couple of floppy grey weimaraners lounging on the stone steps. Instead we passed a brightly lit sign welcoming us to “Schloss Berg Casino” and then arrived at an enormous car park in front of a modern building with a glass pyramid on the roof, glowing with rainbow coloured lights. Disconcerting, although it turned out that the old castle remained intact behind this brassy add-on, and our dining room had proper old timbers holding up the ceiling. There was even a suit of armour in the basement by the toilets.

There were lots of lovely touches at Victor’s which all helped polish the third star. I’m remembering… stylish ceramic butter knives, interesting knobbly plates that looked like they were made from the shells of exotic sea creatures, olive oil we dripped onto our bread with a pipette, comfy swivel chairs to sit in. It’s a tiny dining room, only 34 covers, and very convivial. Service was restrained but extremely attentive throughout the meal, with all the immense attention to detail you would expect at 3 stars. Some details did hit the wrong note for me: after our main course the crumbs were cleared from our table, but since two of us had (gasp) created marks on the tablecloth that couldn’t be brushed off, we had a fresh white napkin placed over our part of the table. I felt like a naughty child. Of course, at the end of the meal I dipped the bill in my uneaten petit-four and then tipped my water glass over, so perhaps I shouldn’t feel too offended.

Food! There’s a lot to get through.

Greetings!

Oi, Auberge du Lac! This is how you use white truffles...
We had a few different canapés, including a crispy breaded riceball with a splendid flavour of brined olives and a cornet filled with smoked eel cream and topped with a red blob of steak tartare. Then no less than three proper pre-starters, which are charmingly called ‘greetings’ at Victor’s and were almost large enough to be a starter in other restaurants. The first was a collection of three little riffs on the theme of carrots. The idea horrified Maureen, who hates the little orange devils, but in fact they were delightful. Albeit also as a reminder that the main purpose of carrot is to be covered by other flavours (cumin, coriander, apple and miso among others here). The next greeting was a trio of crab and a real bucket of textures; wobbly crab jelly, crispy breaded crab ball, unctuous crab ‘tartare’, scrunchy toasted seeds, tingly apple sorbet, crunchy cucumber package and a soft cheesy mousse beneath it all. Perfect. The final greeting was a stunning chestnut soup liberally topped with sliced alba truffles, served piping hot so the truffle scent envelopes your whole headspace. This soup was so rich it was actually obscene. In a good way.

Starters ‘n’ fish

Goose liver. The dried wafer of cep lacked flavour but was certainly pretty
On with the proper courses. I liked the way the waitress actually called it that: ‘here is your first proper course…’ Anyway, it was foie gras. Sorry, goose liver. Chilled goose liver wrapped in a thin layer of carrot(!) and seaweed, surrounded by a little mushroom ragout with pearls of frozen foie gras and a vinaigrette of Japanese lemon. This ragout was brilliant, and to be honest I could have done with only one of the three pillars of goose liver provided. Not a criticism of the dish, just that I’ve personally become bored with chilled goose liver.

Next up was a huge scallop, perfectly cooked, surrounded by various constructions of butternut squash; thin discs, blobs, coins and tiny cylinders filled with purée. There was a nice foamy beurre blanc to bring it together, but to my palate it lacked the tarragon flavour promised. The second seafood was a piece of John Dory, again beautifully cooked, crusted with nuts and topped with a crispy bit of skin. It came with four flavours; blobs of sour Japanese lemon, blobs of sweet potato, a tiny quenelle of salty anchovy relish and a puddle of spicy ginger oil. These came together as designed, more than the sum of their parts, the ginger just warm enough to be noted rather than overpowering the fish. It’s a brave chef that pairs ginger with fish. But I guess for me this dish was more courageous than clever; he pulled it off, but did he really need to?

Main course

Three stars doesn't excuse you from putting a bit of potato with your meat. Better than salty brown slime.
I have to confess that by the main course we were all stuffed. The meal was just too big. Of course we didn’t have to eat everything, but it’s hard to know how large a meal will end up being when you’re still in the early stages. Anyway. Three tablets of sturdy back beef, cooked medium, along with a slender piece of slow-cooked rib with a lovely crust. These were accompanied by delightful baby roasted onions, a crispy breaded ball of onion and a couple of blobs of over-salted grey-brown mulch. This was described as Japanese aubergine, but I can do without novelty if the result is unappealing in texture, colour and seasoning. Very good beef, but as a construction this dish was unbalanced in my opinion and one component was poor.

And to finish
Pre-dessert was a spiffy re-constructed apricot with chocolate mousse and different elements of green tea; very delicious on the eye and in the mouth. This was followed by more for dessert, an artistic presentation of chocolate with hidden passionfruit elements that came together very nicely indeed. It was good and surprisingly light. Chef Christian Bau has a very deft touch with chocolate. And the petit-fours were the finest and most extensive selection I have ever been presented with, just a pity I couldn’t find the tiniest corner of space to stuff them all into. I did my best.

Concluding words

I haven't waddled out of a restaurant and gone 'oof!' climbing into a taxi for a long time
I left thinking that perhaps Christian Bau is more naturally a pâtissière than anything else. His plates are always beautiful, he seems to have a natural affinity for sweet flavours, and the strongest dishes were definitely the desserts, petit-fours and ‘greetings’. For my palate, he wasn’t as balanced in putting together tastes and textures on a main dish; not enough to bite into, not enough punch. Surely 3-star meals don’t have to appeal chiefly to elderly ladies with wobbly dentures?

But what the heck. We had just the kind of over-the-top fine dining experience you would hope to have at a 3 Michelin star venue, and the food gave us lots to talk about over the two superlative Mosel Rieslings we enjoyed with the meal (one was a 1975, the oldest table wine I’ve ever drunk and yet a mere £80). We’d have enjoyed it more if we’d been given less, though.

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Wine-tasting in the Mosel

Categories:

Events and Visits, Makers and Producers

27 October 2011

We are wine connysewers, most definitely
The high point of any wine-tasting trip for me is finding an unexpected gem. In Champagne this took the form of a cosy bar in Epernay which showcased small makers who produce far too little of their wonderful champagnes to ever be exported outside France, heck, outside Champagne. In Burgundy it was a little wine cellar that we hadn’t picked during our internet research but just happened to like the look of while driving past. Here in the Mosel it was a glass of Riesling we had with lunch that led to a conversation with the waitress, which led to directions to a little village totally off the main “Mosel wine route”, which led to us stopping at a tiny winery we would have driven past a dozen times without thinking it might be (a) open or (b) worth stopping at. The winery is Steffen-Prum and their 2010 ‘Lesurus’ Riesling Spätlese is really jolly good for 6.90 Euros a bottle. I’m hoping it’ll keep and improve after a few years.

Wine wander along the Mosel
We’re in Germany for just under three days, with our good friends Tim and Vanessa. The Mosel valley is a splendid place for a wine-tasting weekend. I can’t compare it to a British landscape, we simply don’t have river valleys on this grand scale. For mile after mile the broad Mosel winds between high hills. The lower slopes are clothed in vineyards, the hilltops covered in trees. This morning a white

Saarburg, looking pretty as the morning mists clear
autumnal mist was slowly lifting as we drove downriver, the landscape romanced by a hazy bronze sunshine. Every couple of kilometres a handsome Germanic village dominated by a tall spired church hove into view, although frustratingly most of the wine cellars seemed to be closed. On a flippin’ Saturday! We assumed it was because this was still grape-picking season, and the owners were all far more interested in bringing home their livelihood for the next year. The real reason was far more properly German: the rules state that a winery can only open to the public for a total of four months in any year, and so it looks like we just picked a somewhat drier patch. We learned this at Mönchhof, a wine estate that was hosting a private tasting and vineyard visit, but who very kindly let us come in and have a slurp. Their Rieslings were among the finest I’ve tasted, and we repaid their kindness by buying the odd bottle or three.

Old assumptions
This is actually my first ever visit to Germany, perhaps surprising given I’ve visited France, Spain and Italy at least four times each. For some reason I never developed a romantic view of the country, expecting dull townscapes much like Britain and a lot of factories. Plus, of course, my stomach plays a big part in deciding where to travel and nothing I thought I knew about German cuisine inspired me. All I had been told was to expect lots of sausages, lots of potatoes and lots of sauerkraut. And so eventually it was my proclivity for the great Rieslings of the Mosel that finally got me over here.

Picturesque
It turns out that the towns are beautiful and the food is good, so as usual I’m proved wrong on all counts. Trier, our base for the weekend, is a small city but heaving with majestic old buildings. It just happens to be the oldest city in Germany with the greatest collection of Roman ruins anywhere north of the Alps. More pleasing still are the picturesque (yes, dammit, picturesque – I don’t care if I sound like a tourist brochure, there’s no more accurate word) medieval towns we have stopped off at on our meanders down the Mosel and up the Saar. I reckon Visit Britain would kill to have a couple of towns like Bernkastel and Saarburg to advertise.

And to soak up the wine…

Why have butter on your bread when you can have delicious homemade lard?
We’ve had some yummy food as well, although there has been a certain ‘heartiness’ to most of it. Who could be unhappy with a plate of chanterelles fried with onions and bacon, accompanied by a heap of buttery sliced potatoes? Well, someone watching their weight might be a bit unhappy. Especially if their previous meal was a plate of blood sausage, onions, apples and fried potatoes… and their next meal was thick lamb chumps with boulangère potatoes and bacon-wrapped beans. You get the picture. My adjectives for local Mosel cuisine are: hearty, savoury, simple, tasty, rustic. Tonight should be a little different, as we’re dining at Victor’s Restaurant, Schloss Berg, possessed of 3 Michelin stars. I’ll save that for another post.

German wine. It’s a bit technical

Our own approach to wine-tasting lies somewhere between the two extremes!
Back to the wines. I’m no expert on wines, and so I’ve learned an immense amount about Riesling over the course of this weekend. The wines are rated according to sugar levels in the must, going from lowest to highest: Kabinett, Spätlese, Auslese, Beerenauslese, Eiswein, Trockenbeerenauslese. By default this translates to the sweetness of the final wine, but for Kabinett, Spätlese and Auslese the winemaker may choose to ferment more off the sugar and get a drier wine. So you get these terms coming into play: trocken = dry, halbtrocken = half-dry, feinherb = off-dry. From our experience this weekend, a Kabinett or an Auslese with the description ‘trocken’ will be pretty much as dry as familiar ‘dry white wines’ from pubs back home. Whereas on their own the Kabinett will be off-dry, a Spätlese definitely medium and an Auslese really sweet. Now, all this is true of young wines, and in fact we found most makers and wine bars tended to offer 1 to 3 year old wines. But these Rieslings can be aged for years and years, which results in them gaining lots more complexity and also drying out to varying degrees. We found a good winebar last night where we could try various Rieslings from about 2003 onwards and thus test this idea. It’s true, although I have to admit we didn’t actually find any truly great examples.

Concluding
So, although I’m not confident enough to start rating and recommending particular wines, I’d definitely recommend a wine-tasting trip to the Mosel. It was pretty darn cold in late October and fewer wineries were open, so you might want to pick a different time to come! Then again, the leaves were turning and the chanterelles were in season so I suppose October had its compensations. Happy days.

This is posted a few days after it was written. Well, wine-tasting is hard work. And we got through 43 Rieslings in 3 days – hoo-rah!

Cheers!

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Review: Lambs, Stratford-upon-Avon

Categories:

Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

20 October 2011

Now that's what I call a Sunday lunch. It's got everything!
This Sunday lunch was a great antidote to last Sunday’s lunch. We were in Stratford-upon-Avon for the day but having done no research were picking lunch randomly from the multifarious eateries the town is blessed with.

We didn’t pick entirely randomly: Lambs had both Hardens and Michelin stickers on the door, though not a star I should hasten to add. Anyway, here’s a quick review.

They’ve made good use of the old Tudor building, plenty of period charm inside and appropriate décor to keep it contemporary. It’s a style I like, though it is so common now as to be cliché. Service was attentive and friendly; they asked me if I’d like my roast beef pink or cooked through, and even asked me whether I wanted my beer cold or at room temperature. That’s more than I expect from a price-point of around £14 for a main course!

Maureen went for a smoked haddock fishcake with spinach, poached egg and hollandaise. This was generous in size and essentially looked and tasted exactly as you would want it to. If I’m really being mean, the hollandaise could have been a little tangier. I had the roast beef, beautifully pink in the middle. It was quite a spread, with a puffy yorkshire pudding, slow-roasted shallot, crunchy roast potatoes and cauliflower cheese sharing the plate with the beef, roasted baby carrots and parsnips in a separate bowl with some cabbage, and a condiment plate of horseradish, mustard and extra gravy. The horseradish tasted freshly grated. From the beef right through all the veggies, it was one of the best roasts I’ve had and a reasonable £13.50.

Lambs, on Sheep Street. Surely no coincidence.
So, if you find yourself looking for a Sunday lunch in Stratford-upon-Avon and are daunted by the enormous spread of pubs and restaurants in the town, several of which will doubtless be crappy pack-in-the-tourist places, I can at least offer you one you should be able to trust.

Multifarious is a big word, and I want to repeat it just to make sure you all spotted me using it back in the first paragraph. Just like many words in this wonderful English language it does have a specific and worthwhile meaning. It means: many and varied. Not just many, but many and varied. Throw it into a conversation near you, today!

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Spicy crab apple jelly

Categories:

Preserves, Recipes, Wild Food

18 October 2011

Crab apple jelly. Obviously.
I’ve never given crab apples a second thought before. Just passed the odd tree in a hedgerow on a country ramble and fatuously observed “crab apples” in the same way that I tend to say “sheep” or “blackbird” or “horsie” whenever the relevant thing comes into view. Nope, I’m not the least bit embarrassed about saying “horsie”. It’s just something I do.

But in a spate of inventiveness brought on by living in rural and foodie Ludlow I stopped at a couple of crookedly gnarled trees on a recent walk and bunged about a kilo of spotty crab apples into the rucksack. Never being content with the basics, I decided to try adding spice to my first attempt at crab apple jelly. Before you check: no, there’s nothing else worth doing with crab apples apart from jelly.

But it is a terribly satisfying bit of alchemy. From a bunch of mean looking little apples gathered from the ground beneath a hedgerow tree you distil a beautiful deep amber-red jelly with a flavour that is already naturally a little spicy and only faintly but still noticeably apply. Here’s how…

  1. Throw a kilo of crab apples in a pan with enough water to almost cover them but not quite. Throw in a couple of dried chillies, a couple of fresh thai chillies and a handful of star anise pods.
  2. Bring this to the boil, and leave it simmering for 30 minutes or so. Go in with a wooden spoon and mash the apples a bit to make sure they’re all well broken. Don’t let all the water boil off (I made this mistake first attempt). If you end up with the consistency of mashed potato then you’ve boiled too long and won’t get enough (or any) liquid out.
  3. Dump the apple pulp into a cloth or muslin bag and leave it suspended over a pan overnight to strain the fluid out. Other recipes say never to squeeze as you’ll squeeze some of the cloudy pulp through, but perhaps because I was using a proper cloth jelly bag I found that gentle squeezing was needed in the morning to get all the clear, sticky nectar out.
  4. Add sugar to your pan of fluid in roughly a 7-to-10 ratio of sugar to liquid. Yes, that’s plenty of sugar. If the amount scares you, I suggest never eating jam or marmalade ever again.
  5. Now, boil this syrup for something up to 30 minutes but probably less. What you’re doing is boiling the remaining water off so you end up with something that will set to a jelly. I found that I noticed a change in the way it was boiling, and decidedly less steam. You can test pretty well just by dipping the underside of a cool spoon into it – if you immediately get a little layer of jelly stuck to the spoon then you’re done
  6. Pour it into a couple of jam jars that you’ve sterilised with boiling water. Put the lid on and then just turn the jar upside-down; the volcanic jelly will make doubly sure the lid is sterilised!

Homemade crab apple jelly on buttered not-homemade toast... mmm.
I found that 1 kilo made about 2 jars full. Very nice on buttery toast. And since the recipe is sorta-kinda a chilli based condiment (preserve? condiment? dunno) I’m going to enter it in the Sweet Heat Challenge competition I found on another food blog. Yep, what I feared has come to pass – now that I have a food blog I spent half my time reading other people’s blogs! It’s only fair. : )

Anyway, as with any recipe including chillies, feel free to experiment with just how hot you want the outcome to be. For the record, I found that the chilli flavour was distinct but much less prominent that if I had cooked a pasta sauce or chilli con carne with the same amount of peppers! So be a little brave.

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Review: Auberge du Lac, Herts

Categories:

Michelin, Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

16 October 2011

The Auberge du Lac on a perfect autumn day
It was a gorgeous autumn day, crystal blue sky and sun-dappled trees with a scurf of fallen leaves at their feet. The Auberge du Lac with its splendid lakeside setting were thus shown off to perfection. The Auberge is an old red-brick hunting lodge and inside they have a readily familiar country house style dining room with a conservatory addition. It’s a very satisfying place to arrive at for a celebratory meal of any kind (happy birthday sis!).

Now, can any industry insider please tell me, is it common practise to use your least competent or trainee staff for lunchtime sittings? Because this meal reminded me so much of our lunch at the Vineyard at Stockcross. Both Michelin star restaurants, both well-reviewed more generally, and both offering up clumsy and inattentive service on our outing there. I won’t bore you with all the individual infractions, that would be a dull list. But there were at least six, and it really isn’t normal at a Michelin establishment to have to get up from the table to go and find someone for the bill.

One of the service goofs was at least funny. The Auberge du Lac were celebrating the start of white truffle season with a couple of special dishes added to their luncheon menu. But unfortunately our waitress didn’t know which way up the truffle slicer went. Maureen ended up with scattered crumbs and lumps across her linguine after the girl’s brutal attempts to slice the truffle using the wrong side. She had spotted her mistake by the time she served my father, and came back around the table to casually slip a couple of proper slices on Maureen’s dish. Wrong! Yes they’re white truffles, and yes you’ll get a bollicking for using up extra to rectify your mistake. But this dish carries a £20 supplement and the diner is going to feel short-changed with two sliced and some naff crumbly bits.

Truffles aside, my starter was a lovely slippery piece of cured mackerel with a tiny beignet of smoked eel on top that packed a good punch. The pickled carrot and turnip was an appropriate addition but a little sharp.

Although the food was great, the service was slightly fishy.
My main course was a very good piece of slow-cooked mutton, still red through and with a thoroughly hill-farmish taste. It came with a pleasant parsnip purée and cabbage. Maureen’s truffled linguine was good, though so simple as to only be interesting for a truffle connoisseur. Across the table my brother had the best dish; monkfish with confit duck leg and ras el hanout, which he declared perfect.

My dessert was a trifle disappointing. It wasn’t a trifle. It was a blackberry tart with a wee scoop of tangy granny smith sorbet and some autumn fruit. The trouble was the tart, which had certainly been stained with blackberries but which hadn’t picked up any flavour from the fruit that I could find. Others chose the cheese trolley, which was extensive and good, or a chocolate marquise that was deemed tasty.

You can probably predict my conclusion. The food was generally delicious and always competent, but nothing terribly memorable in combinations or ingredients. The Auberge is a beautiful setting for a celebratory meal but may not be a great culinary destination for gastronomes to make a special journey. We paid a very reasonable £35 per head for the lunch menu. I’m sure the poor service was just a patch of bad luck, but it would have been better if the maître d’ had offered an apology rather than just suggesting that next time we book a private room for “such a large party”. A family, of seven.

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