Tuesday, 27 May 2008

The Prince of Wales, Battersea





"Er, vanilla?"

"Yes, please"

"Er, how many scoops?"





Prince of Wales on Urbanspoon

Friday, 23 May 2008

Texture, Marble Arch










Thursday, 15 May 2008

The Windmill, Shoreditch

You know those places that you walk past every day of the year and always think "that looks interesting, I'll have to try it one day" and then months pass and you eventually do try it and it turns out to be brilliant, and you hate yourself for having waited so long?

The Windmill isn't one of those places. The Windmill is one of those places you walk past every day of the year and always think "that looks interesting, I'll have to try it one day" and then months pass and you eventually do try it and it turns out to be crap.

I actually remember the Windmill from its previous incarnation as a dodgy East End boozer. It was refurbished a year or so ago in line with Shoreditch's increasing gentrification and now calls itself an Italian gastropub. I never much liked the old Windmill - it had a pool table and places like that tend to attract a certain type of clientele - but I never thought that the New Windmill would be so bad I'd look back on the old place with nostalgia.

I'm still settling back into London restaurants after Spain and France, so sweet, efficient and attentive service is still somewhat of a novelty to me, and fortunately the Windmill at least has this going for it. What it doesn't have is any idea how to cook meat. I ordered the 'Mixed Grill' which consisted of a sausage, a rib-eye steak and a hamburger.

The sausage was flattened out for some reason, but despite this seemed undercooked and suspiciously pink and wobbly in the middle. The hamburger was watery and tasteless, consisting of inferior grey mince cooked to oblivion. But worst of all was the steak, cut so thin and overcooked to such a degree I can only assume one of the chefs was a shoemaker in his day job and accidentally mixed up his materials. Probably the worst steak I've ever been served in London, and not helped by the fact there was no accompanying sauce so even if I had been tempted to eat it (which I wasn't) I would have had to wash each mouthful down with a glass of water. To be fair, the green salad was actually pretty nice - fresh veg (including radishes which I love) and a nice lemony vinegarette, but the 'Italian fries' were flabby and unpleasant, tasting like microwaved potato wedges. Delia Smith would probably have loved them.

I'm not going to write any more about The Windmill because I can feel those horrible wobbly chips repeating on me. Needless to say, I will never eat there again, and neither should you.


Windmill on Urbanspoon

Monday, 12 May 2008

Cheese and Biscuits on tour - Nantes, France

Four days in France, and a glittering opportunity, you would think, for the home of fine dining to show this grubby Londoner how it's done and restore my faith in gallic food. Four days, therefore, to cram in as many restaurants, vineyards and cheeseboards as possible in the sixth largest city in France and capital of the Loire valley, Nantes.

But the omens weren't good. Instead of the baking sunshine I had been used to during my brief return to London, Nantes seemed to be under a permanent cloud of drizzle and on our arrival relatively early on Thursday evening, there was apparently nothing open - not a supermarket, boulangerie, delicatessen, nothing - in the entire city. Taking advice we drove to the Carrefour in Beaulieu, where we arrived just as that was also closing and spent our first night picking at greasy crêpes in a strip-lit mall and got lost in the mind-bogglingly complex Nantes one-way system on the way back. It was to be our most enjoyable meal out of the trip.

The next day, foodie salvation came in the form of a brilliant cheese shop in the centre of town where a friendly French lady helped me pick out a selection of local produce and made our first lunch in Nantes a thoroughly satisfying journey of cheesey discovery. Highlights were a local camembert rolled in alcohol and hazelnuts which had a pungent burn and attractive mushroom shape; a doughnut-shaped goat's which was rich and smooth and disappeared almost immediately; a fantastic spongey unpasturised cow's cheese washed with the local wine which was mild and fresh without being plain; and an astonishingly strong Epoisses-style cheese called l'Ami du Chamberlin which wasn't local but I love Epoisses and couldn't resist.

But the best thing I bought from that cheese shop wasn't even a cheese. "Beurre Cru a la Baratte Bois Moulé a la Main - Demi Sel" (to give it its full title) is literally the best butter I've ever tasted and immediately became the most in-demand item on our lunch menus. As fresh and smooth a butter as you're ever likely to taste, all I can suggest is you visit the sole UK importers Teddington Cheese (other countries you'll have to do your own research!) and get yourself a pack now. You will never want another butter again, I promise you.

That evening, we visited a local institution called La Cigalle, which was an impressively eccentric room containing palm trees, moorish tiling and mirrors and which served food entirely without merit. My gaspacho was OK but had some frozen prawns pointlessly lurking at the bottom of the bowl, and my main course of duck parmentier tasted and looked like dogfood and was served on a searing hot glass plate onto which they'd dumped a wilted serving of green salad. My other dining companions were served cold and overcooked fillet steak - quite an achievement really. The place was rammed too, so either the residents of Nantes rated décor over food or nothing else was open. Either is likely.

Saturday was a day devoted to wine. The vineyards of the Loire Valley are rightly famous for their incredible variety and produce everything from sparkling reds to dark rosés to everything in between. A style that we saw a lot of on our tour was 'Muscadet Sur Lie', a slightly fizzy minerally white which is unique to the area and makes a great aperitif. Another of my favourites was a red made with the Gamay grape, which was light and fruity without being too sweet. It's also worth mentioning that without exception the wine producers were genuinely enthusiastic about their products and led us through the tastings with charm, patience and an excellent command of the English language. Working in a place you love making a product which is appreciated the world over, every day the commute being a leisurely punt through the rolling French countryside with nothing more taxing than the odd stray cow to avoid on the way home. No wonder they all looked so serenely happy, the lucky, lucky bastards.

That night came a second chance for Nantes dining to redeem itself. L'Atlantide is the only Michelin-starred restaurant in town and I thought would be a guaranteed way to sample the best that Nantes had to offer. First, the good points. The room was attractive (if uncomfortably hot until one of our party managed to jimmy a window open) and had great views of the river from its 5th floor location. Service wasn't bad either, although the wines didn't always arrive with the food. And an amuse of eel and langoustine mousse was smooth and fresh, if a little on the buttery side. Thereafter, it was all downhill.

The best thing you could say about the langoustine starter was that it was unchallenging and the prawns were large. But with larger shellfish you have to think about deveining, and these hadn't been. The waste pipes were bitter and soily and spoiled the dish completely. An amateurish mistake for a Michelin-starred restaurant.

The next course of red mullet was overcooked and not very fresh tasting, although the accompanying wild mushrooms were nice. But even if the fish had been fresh and cooked well, it was drowned under an overpoweringly sweet crust of honey and nuts and topped with some tiny shell-on shrimps which nobody had any idea what to do with. Shell them with tweezers or eat them whole and crunchy? Answers on a postcard please. Very odd.

Meat course of lamb shoulder with gnocci and lambs kidney was overcooked and messily presented. The gnocci were dense and stodgy, and the kidney was a tasteless dry lump weirdly set into the lamb meat so the whole thing resembled a large diseased eye.

The dessert was better, but not much. The wild strawberries were surprisingly tasteless - the first time I've ever had bland wild strawberries so heaven knows what they did to them - but the sorbet was quite nice.

The bill came to about €80 each which I suppose isn't bad, but the standard was far below what I could have reasonably expected for a starred place, and certainly below the standard you could get in London for the same price. I know London is a major world city and Nantes is just a regional centre, but this is France - my memories from childhood holidays was just rolling up to the nearest roadside brasserie and having the best meals of my life. What on earth has happened in the last ten years?

I should reiterate, however, that although my experiences in restaurants in Nantes was uniformly poor, there seems to be a healthy and sophisticated food culture on the ground level that you would expect from a major French city. The Talensac Market has a mouthwatering array of fruit, veg, fish, meat, cheese and regional specialities that would shame any regional market in the UK. We saw about five minutes of it before it closed.

Frustrating opening hours turned out to be a running theme of the trip - one vineyard we attempted to visit was literally only open from 10:00-12:00 on Saturday. A window of two hours to get in, get your tastings done and get the hell out. Maybe the owners were just too busy enjoying life to be bothered running a viable company. How very French, and how very enviable.

La Cigalle 4/10
L'Atlantide 4/10

Wednesday, 7 May 2008

Saf, Shoreditch

When I first heard about Saf thanks to a post by Andrew of the eminently readable Eating Albion blog, my reaction sat somewhere between disbelief and open ridicule. Regular readers will know my position on vegetarians and vegetarian restaurants, but for everyone else here is the comment I left on Andrew's piece:

1. The best vegan restaurants will never serve better food than the best non-vegan restaurants, because taste in Western cooking by and large comes from dairy and animal fat.

2. In a normal restaurant serving the odd vegetarian dish, you can be reasonably sure that dish is judged by the standards of the other dishes, and not just ‘good enough for vegetarian’. See
my review of Pearl in Holborn, where my favourite dish (gnocchi and truffles) just happened to be vegetarian. In a pure vegetarian restaurant it will be incredibly difficult - though not impossible - to keep standards consistently high across the menu as your ingredient options are so limited.

3. Any restaurant committing itself to just serving vegan food is already starting with a huge disadvantage, and just by appealing to and satisfying the tiny handful of vegan diners does not really say much about the standard of cooking. If all you’re used to being able to choose is a green salad every time you eat out, I don’t blame you if you’re excited about SAF.

4. There are good vegetarian/vegan restaurants but the successful ones are generally from an ethnic background where meat eating is culturally more unusual. See
Kastoori. Just making French food and taking the butter out is a surefire way to create some pretty bland dishes.

5. That said, I think I owe it to vegans to try out SAF, and I will as soon as I’m back in the UK. I will do my best to keep an open mind, but I’m already not the first to raise a
dissenting voice.

So, ill-informed and closed-minded I may be (not my words, the words of a righteous vegan responding to the above comment), but I am a man of my word and so today made a lunchtime visit to Curtain Road to see if it was as terrible as I knew it was going to be.

First impressions were depressingly good. The room is huge - light and airy, with great high ceilings, attractive furniture and a bar stocked with organic vodkas and gins. There's an open kitchen too and I peered in suspiciously, wondering what kind of cooking could be going on in a vegan restaurant.

When the starters arrived there was an even bigger psychological blow - mine was actually rather good. Tasting nothing like the Boursin cheese advertised on the menu it was nevertheless a very tasty trio of herb, tomato and olive flavoured nut paste thingies, kind of a more solid humous. The accompanying crackers were a bit cardboardy but it was all so prettily presented it added up to a reasonably good plate of food. It was all getting dreadfully upsetting.

Fortunately - thank God - things began to fall into place once the starters were over with. My main course of wild mushroom ravioli looked the part and had clearly been cooked with great skill, but there was something slightly wrong with the pasta. It was anaemic tasting and the sauce had a very strange film on it. At once I decided it was basically a dish crying out for some animal product. Still, full marks for effort and if you're a vegan it's probably the best pasta dish you're ever likely to taste, if that's any kind of compliment.

My dessert, again, was a prettily composed slice of Ganache Tart with berries on top, served with a zingy fruit sorbet. It was perfectly edible, with a good smooth texture and probably as good a chocolate tart you're going to get that doesn't have any chocolate in it. But I return to my same point - this would have been fantastic made with a shedload of butter. These chefs can definitely cook and I couldn't help thinking how great they'd be if they were let loose on some fois gras or a beef carpaccio.

But then that's not really the point of Saf. Saf is a vegan restaurant, self-consciously healthy and worthy, and you shouldn't really be expecting the same taste sensations as somewhere using butter and cream in their sauces. And despite the largely bland food, I actually can see myself going back - it's healthy, attractive and different and the worst you can say about it is that all the talk of Himalayan salt and Ionised tap water can get gratingly pretentious. What's more, the knowledge that all this appealing food is actually good for you means there's none of the pangs of residual guilt from a lunchtime steak and chips or salt beef beigel - that is, unless you decide to load up on the excellent house cocktails and do damage to yourself that way instead. I can recommend the Spiced Apricot Martini, a superb invention.

So, and admitting this will most likely send me spiralling into a cycle of self-loathing and depression, but I liked Saf. The dishes don't quite taste as good as a conventional restaurant but they're a damn sight better than they have any right to be thanks to the extraordinary skills on display from the kitchen staff, and stepping out of a restaurant after a three-course meal feeling like you've actually done yourself some good for a change was a delightfully unique experience. I will be back - I wonder if they can make me a vegan humble pie?


Saf on Urbanspoon

Tuesday, 6 May 2008

Cheese and Biscuits on tour - Catalonia 2008









