Review: Sune, Hackney

Crisps with boquerones

Crisps with boquerones

Okay, so we should have said something. Then again, recognising when your dining room is too cold and fixing it ought to be part of the service. The lady at the table next to us kept her scarf on through her meal and everyone else kept their jumpers and cardigans on. A fella two tables over did the same very English thing as us: didn’t say anything until the end of the meal, when the lady bringing the bill asked how everything was and got a meek “well, actually it was a bit cold” out of him.

I’ve got that off my chest now. The weather had just turned from mild to bitterly cold that very day, and sometimes heating systems definitely take a day to get themselves caught up. So let’s put that behind us and look at our actual lunch at Sune, a sleek little modern restaurant overlooking the canal near Broadway Market.

Tartare on croque monsieur

Tartare on croque monsieur

Apart from the cold, service was friendly but a bit sluggish; our 3-course lunch spread out over 2 leisurely hours and that wasn’t our doing (heck, we’d have liked to have headed elsewhere for a warm-up much sooner!). Comfy seating and pleasingly solid crockery. The menu can work as 3 courses or small plates and the food is comfortably good.

Our snack is a plate of potato chips with egg yolk sauce drizzled over, scattered with chives and nuggets of boquerones. It’s a nice bar snack and I’m definitely going to take it home. Needed more of the egg yolk for that to really impinge on the crisps. Next up we have an unexpected marriage: steak tartare on top of a croque monsieur. This is actually one of those sleazily-good combos, the tartare heavily dosed with paprika, the bechamel more like gooey American cheese, the bread underneath from a soft white loaf. A bigger one of these would just be a really great filthy lunch.

Trout and mussels

Trout and mussels

The other two dishes were more restaurant-y. Salt baked celeriac had a great firm texture and beautiful flavour, served with lamb’s lettuce salad and caramelised almonds. The trout was full-flavoured and gently cooked, served on a luscious vermouth sauce with a scatter of sea veg and a couple of plump lightly pickled mussels. I guess we should have taken their advice and ordered a side with it; as a main course it was effectively just the piece of fish.

These four dishes ended up on the light side so we finished off with puds, actually perhaps the stars of the show. My burnt citrus sorbet has bags of flavour and little chunks of the fruit through it, and was topped with silky blow-torched meringue. Maureen’s pear tarte tatin was a gorgeous little number; the fruit, the crisp pastry and the slighty-bitter caramel all nailed. Refreshing dollop of milk ice cream on top.

I like the food at Sune, if it was in my neighbourhood I’d probably think of it as a local favourite. That said, it’s not really splendid enough to make me take another trip across town for. Of course we also didn’t have the greatest experience – but I’m very willing to just put that down to the weather and maybe a busy Saturday service.

Pear tarte tatin

Pear tarte tatin

Review: Flesh & Buns, Covent Garden

Splendid yakitori

Splendid yakitori

Flesh & Buns has a proper Japanese izakaya vibe, hidden down a staircase below Sevendials Market, with dark wooden decor and plenty of buzz (it’s quite a big place once you get down there). The menu also reads as a pleasing romp through the more sticky and crowd-pleasing side of Japanese cuisine.

We started with three of their small plates. Simple chicken yakitori was absolutely superb: two skewers of juicy chicken thigh, packed with flavour from the marinade, stickily charred on the outside. Didn’t come with any sauce or dip, didn’t need any. I’ve seldom, if ever, had better. Next up was a filthy thing they call “beef fat chips”. The chips are actually cubes of boulanger potato that have been dropped into beef fat, crisp on the outside and yielding within, wonderful umami beef flavour and a cheesy sauce to dip in. Finally, sweetcorn fritters, four small spheres light and crisp with a bright chilli-citric dipping sauce. So far, so yum.

Piglet

Piglet

Their signature mains are various dishes served with a pair of soft buns (think bao, but a little flatter and less elastic). We picked crispy piglet belly and portobello mushrooms. The pig belly was very good, flavourful and tender as you could wish for. The skin was more like a delicate glaze than a crisp topping. Went very well in the bun with slivers of apple pickle and shredded carrot. The mushrooms had been grilled with a peppery ponzu glaze and came with some very good pickled daikon, pickled cucumber and a thick horseradish sauce – all good. The two buns each weren’t really enough for this, but I guess we could have ordered more (others did). Instead, we left enough room to share some little round doughnuts with a full-flavoured “black sugar” custard inside and a frosty dusting on their crispy outsides.

All in all, a delicious meal. Probably £30 each before drinks, although we propped our bill up with a top-notch sake and a couple of very drinkable umeshu negronis to start (the umeshu makes for a sweeter drink than gin as a base, but not over-sweet and with a pleasing extra fragrance from the plum). If I fancied some sleazy Japanese food and was in the middle of town, I’d head back to Flesh & Buns for sure.

Beef fat potatoes

Beef fat potatoes

Review: Kolae, Borough Market

Kolae grill

Kolae grill

I wonder if there are two different threads of “modern Thai” in London? My favourite spot, Plaza Khao Gaeng, is full of bright, bold flavours and feels as unashamedly colourful as a Buddhist temple in Bangkok. Another favourite, Kiln, focuses on fierce often spiky flavours mixing earth and fire… more like a trip to the shadowy jungles along the banks of the Mekong? I dunno.

Anyway, if there are two vibes of modern Thai then Kolae in Borough Market belongs firmly to the fierce & earthy Kiln vibe. It’s a big place, laid out in an industrial style that’s getting so familiar it’s going to be hard to remember which modern Asian place is which soon. We sit at the bar counter and the team look after us really well.

Hogget chop

Hogget chop

First bite is crispy fried prawn heads with turmeric, very strongly prawn-y and munchable. There’s also some crunchy puffed rice crackers, dressed with the only bright flavours of lunch; plenty of ginger and chilli in the salty-sweet dressing.

We pick two dishes from the Kolae grill: squash and a hogget chop. The chop is full of flavour and nicely grilled, the deft touch of slicing it into bites and then reassembling them on the bone shows a lot of care (it’s a Thai place, so of course we only have forks and spoons). The squash is one of my favourite things, it’s sturdy texture has lovely charred edges from the grill and a really warm and earthy sauce slathered over it. A sauce that I can’t even begin to work out the makings of, sorry. Good though.

Fiery, fiery venison

Fiery, fiery venison

I like the sour mango salad, particularly the generous scattering of tiny fried dried fish. It’s good but, again, more complex and earthy than the bright zip of a “typical” Thai salad. Our other main is a minced venison “kua kling” curry. This is a delicious portion of plump venison mince cooked in an absolutely fireball of a sauce – the first couple of mouthfuls are fine but the heat builds and builds. Undeniably good, gnarly, earthy, delicious, but very much fire.

I soothe my tastebuds with their dessert of charming green pandan sticky rice, coconut sorbet, peanuts and soft slivers of amber jackfruit. All desserts should be like this: fragrant, refreshing, delicious.

Lunch was plenty big enough for us, and about £32 each before drinks. This feels about right for what is a very good addition to the modern Asian eating options around London. We sampled a good makrut lime-led cocktail and enjoyed a couple of glasses of white wine from a really interesting list.

Cheers!

Cheers!

Review: Behind, Hackney

Behind

Behind

Back from a six week trip to Patagonia and I was looking forward to some fine dining! It’s not that you can’t find any good food in Chile… it’s just really hard, especially as we were (deliberately!) exploring the back of beyond. Some of the best bits were straight from the sea: if you’re ever in Chilean Patagonia look out for “puye”, a dish of tiny fish fry very similar to baby eels in a garlicky pil-pil dressing.

Behind in Hackney is also a seafood menu, very much more classy but also packed with big flavours. The dining room is only about 20 covers, a modern setting dominated by a curvaceous blond wooden counter. All the chefs share all the front of house duties, which makes for an informal and friendly atmosphere. They’re super-helpful and love talking about the food and the wine list.

Magic prawn

Magic prawn

We began with two accomplished bites of mackerel, a tartare and a tiny but perfectly charred slice of fillet. The next dish was a knock-out. Half a beautiful red prawn, uncooked but with the head meat made into a simple but powerfully pungent sauce with some Riesling. Served with a small cup of clean and warming prawn broth and a lovely springy little prawn bun, this was really single-minded excellence.

They followed it with a more complex bundle of flavour; a piece of trout long-preserved to build density and umami, wrapped in nori, with a parsley and turnip sauce, a big oyster leaf full of oceanic flavour and all doused in a beurre-blanc made super-salty-smoky through the inclusion of strong kipper and trout roe in the sauce.

Trout and kipper beurre blanc

Trout and kipper beurre blanc

Another very clever combination was built around monkfish cheek with celeriac, pear and mint, the overall flavour being beautifully fragrant on the sturdy white meat. Then a very easy to love dish of pumpkin and crab tortellini with candied pumpkin seeds and a crab bisque absolutely humungously full of flavour. The final fish course, a piece of plaice, was quite restful after this rollercoaster of flavours.

Desserts were neat and delicious. A cleansing shot of rhubarb with apple foam, a fragrant herb sorbet with a dollop of lemony meringue on the side, a lovely swig of lassi absolutely humming with cardamom, and then a dark chocolate concoction shot through with black olive to cut the richness.

This menu was 100% aligned with my food preferences: big flavours, unexpected combinations, lots of umami. Everything was delicious, I don’t remember a bum note anywhere. At £98 each before drinks this is totally worth a special trip if you like some of the same things as me.

Crab and pumpkin tortellini

Crab and pumpkin tortellini

Review: Kachori, Elephant & Castle

Muttar truffle kachori

Muttar truffle kachori

There are two demons inside me. One of them was saying “hey, wow, this new area around the back of Elephant & Castle is looking pretty cool now… nice urban park, handful of hip street food options, couple of sharp looking pubs, couple of glossy modern restaurants.” The other was saying “yeah, but where exactly are all the people who lived here before but now couldn’t afford even the tiniest one-bed flat in these shiny new high-rises going to live?”

I’m not a social issues blogger, though, so I’m going to chicken out of that conversation and talk about Kachori, one of the glossy modern restaurants here. It’s a big place, loads of covers, but comfy enough and they didn’t want to flip our 7pm table. There’s plenty on the menu, a mixture of more modern Indian street-food inspired stuff and curry house classics.

Bikaneri kachori

Bikaneri kachori

The best starter was boned guinea fowl off the tandoori grill. This was beautifully soft from its warmly spiced marinade and smoky from the grill. Tempered curd rice was a mildly pleasing accompaniment, new to me. We tried both of their kachoris, with a good sturdy crisp shell and – in my case – plenty of warm and green spices. I’m not sure there was much point in labelling it as a “truffled” kachori, the spices comfortably overwhelmed any hint of truffle flavour. Good though.

We had some good and not so good mains. My goat varuval was a dark and earthy dish, chunks of flavoursome meat in a dry sauce full of warming spices. Maureen’s Cod Malay Meen could have been re-badged “Cod in Cream of Tomato soup” as the smooth orangey sauce was terrifically mild in flavour to the point of being quite unappealing. But then, we had a very good tadka dal on the side, packed with garlicky and smoky flavours. The cauliflower side also had good flavour but was a bit over-salted.

Desserts were very worthy. My mango and cardamom kulfi was exactly right, plenty of perfume but not over-sweet. The salt caramel, jaggery and peanut parfait was exactly as good as it sounds, like an extremely elegant and fragrant Snickers ice cream.

You’d probably pay £45 each for food before drinks, so this isn’t a cheap meal. On the whole Kachori feels like a decent option for modern Indian, but it doesn’t sit at the top table of spice-driven restaurants with the ones I return to regularly.

Mango kulfi

Mango kulfi