Belgian waffle

Waffle for illustrative purposes only. No actual waffle appears in this article.

This week Becca and I have been travelling across Belgium and a little bit of the Southern Netherlands, doing a research trip for a project of hers.  We’re staying in B&Bs all the way, so no facilities, so no cooking I’m afraid.  For this week I’m mainly just the driver.  Which doesn’t mean of course that food isn’t still high on the agenda.

Which, I have to admit, in Belgium, makes the agenda pretty pricey.  Our journey – at least the Belgian leg of it – started in Ostend.  When Becca was first planning this trip, a few weeks back, she posted a question on Facebook, asking her friends if they could recommend any places worth visiting in Belgium generally, and specifically anywhere to eat well, and cheaply, in Ostend.  Our friend Darren, previously mentioned on these pages, pitched in with a reply that read something (no, I believe exactly) like: “HA HA HA HA”.  We thought at the time that he was probably just recycling the hackneyed notion that Belgium is boring and therefore that the very idea of there being anywhere in it worth visiting was inherently absurd, and didn’t dignify him with a response.  In retrospect, and given that Darren is very well travelled, particularly within Northern Europe, it seems likely that it was the notion of there being anywhere cheap to eat in Ostend that he was ridiculing.  Eat well: yes.  Eat cheaply: fat chance.

One of the things you get used to, living in London, is that the cost of living is generally pretty high.  One of the compensations (and there are many) is that when you travel, eating out tends to be much more affordable.  Ostend, however, just makes you wonder how come you don’t eat out all the time in London, what with it being such a big, fat bargain… Seriously. 

You’re in Belgium, you’re by the seaside, you think you really probably should just have moules (or mosselen) frites.  And indeed, yes, you really should.  But you will have to pay over twenty Euros for the privilege.  Still, you might as well, because any other main course is going to be that price, or more.  Unless you want to subsist entirely on spaghetti bolognese and omelettes – which is what Becca and I had for lunch, respectively, on our first day, and which, of course in her case would come down to a choice of spag bol or spag bol.  Every meal.  It also has to be said that, even without taking price into consideration, the low countries are not the best place to be for a dairy allergic food lover.  They do love their butter, their milk and cream, and their eggs.  Often whipped up together with chocolate.  Or indeed in the  form of waffles

Anyway, that first night, in Ostend, in the most highly recommended mossel bar in town, I chose the  mosselen look (garlic mussels).  Becca couldn’t, because – yes – they put cream in the sauce (or at least that’s what are waiter said, and he was so solicitously helpful otherwise I wouldn’t wish to cast aspersions on his accuracy here, but I have to admit I could detect little trace of it in mine), so she had a fillet of dorada, with a tapenade crust instead.  The mussels were good, undoubtedly, very good indeed.  But they were still just mussels.  And, frankly, for twenty four Euros (or around twenty one fifty in old English pounds at the current rate of exchange) they have to be pretty fecking amazing mussels, or not mussels at all.  I couldn't really say they were better than the mussels I did myself on our trip to Dorset a few months back, and at that price they really had to be several times as good, and –without wishing to blow my own trumpet here – within the mussels spectrum, I just don’t think that’s possible.  Not that my mussels were as good as they were on account of any skill of mine, but because any mussels dish depends almost entirely on the quality of mussels that go into it, and there’s simply a limit to how much better than those Dorset beauties a mussel can be (that limit being not much).

So were these moules frites worth it?  I gues I’d have to say yes, and no.  No, not in the greater scheme of things twenty odd quid will buy you the world over.  But yes, in the specific context of other available items on an Ostend menu.  Becca’s dorada, by the way turned out to be a big, thick, chunky, flaky fillet, quite unlike the fine textured sliver of sea bream we’d expected, so maybe a problem with the translation (our own, Im sure, not the restaurant’s) there.  It was good though, but again, it’s worth had to be measured against the other menu options rather than in the greater scheme of things.

The Ostend experience set the tone for Belgium, although, to be fair prices did ease (slightly) as we travelled on to Bruges (counter intuitively), and Antwerp (perhaps more predictably).  We did though, come across one exception in the course of our trip.  One quite exceptional exception.

We arrived in Antwerp at a little after one pm, parked up and dumped our bags at our B&B in a tatty, but reputedly bohemian inner suburb, by which time it was getting on for one thirty, which in our experience, was starting to get tight for finding a place for lunch (the Belgians tend towards strictness in lunch being available between 12 and 2).  Our (charming, garrulously helpful) host at the B&B recommended a place just next door but one, which he said was a newly opened and pretty fancy place, but offered a set lunch menu for just €15 which was very good value.

We almost didn’t take him up on his recommendation, largely on account of not being able to see in to the dining room from the street - always a problem when trying to assess a potential lunch venue – but after a quick scout around the immediate surroundings we ended up back there and thought we’d give it a go, if for no other reason than that we had no more than €15 Euros to lose.  And, as it turned out, a great deal to gain.  Not least a strong contender for the best value meal I’ve ever had in a restaurant. 

Firstly we were greeted warmly and casually and, in response to our rather tentative initial enquiry, were assured that Becca’s allergies wouldn’t be a problem as they tried to keep the cooking light and simple, and get away from the traditional Belgian reliance on butter and cream all over the shop (they didn’t use that phrase).  The set menu consisted of a starter of (cream free) courgette soup, and then a choice of lobster salad or lamb and mint tagliatelle – dairy, but not egg free as our host  realised as he was saying it.  Never mind, Becca was quite happy with a lobster salad, and I took the pasta.  We each ordered a beer.

The courgette soup was vividly green and so deep and punchy in flavour that it seemed literally beefy to the extent that we couldn’t decide what stock it might be made with, I eventually plumped for a peppery chicken stock, but if you’d told me it had been beef then I would have confidently withstood any attempt to knock me down with a feather.  It was rather more surprising when our waiter checked with the kitchen and informed us it was a purely vegetable stock.  Which just goes to show.  Along with dairy, you don’t necessarily need meat to generate flavour.

If the soup was good, and it was, seriously, then the mains were simply spectacular.  Becca’s lobster salad in particular – just look at the picture – which was just not a lobster salad but a whole seafood extravaganza.  A full half lobster in the shell, a bunch of big fat prawns, mussels and chunky fillets of at least two different fish (one of which was easily recognisable as red mullet).  And generous quantitities of chargrilled courgette and aubergine for good measure.  It’s a measure of how good my pasta dish was – with it’s kofte style chunks of richly spiced mince, and big mint leaves stirred through like you might expect wilted spinach to be (and in fact like wilted chard was) - that I wasn’t resentful in the slightest.  There was courgette in there, too, the ubiquity of which suggested the chef was dealing with a glut.  Which in turn, far from being a problem, suggested that someone's own garden was involved in the provenance of their veg - and how much more local, seasonal - and probably several other current restaurant buzzwords - can you get than that?  It tasted fresh from the garden too.

And if that wasn’t enough, then look what arrived when we ordered coffee:

And, not only that, but, entirely unprompted, though after a slight delay, as soon as they remembered Becca’s allergies, they brought her a plate of big chunks of juicy, grenadine red water melon to go with her coffee instead.

All of this, including our beers, came in at €20 a head, or around €3.50 a head less than a standard Ostend pot of moules.  By any standards, this is astonishing value.  I only hope they can continue to offer it – when we were there, admittedly on a Tuesday lunchtime, we appeared to be covers 6 and 7 of that service, and by the time our mains arrived we had the restaurant to ourselves.  If any readers of this blog find themselves in Antwerp – or even in the area – in time for lunch, then I’d urge you to get yourselves to Kamu, at 28 Draakstrasse in the Zurenborg district of the city, and hope they’re still doing the €15 menu.  But if you’re looking for a fine dinner, at a more representative price, then I couldn’t recommend the cooking highly enough, whatever it might end up costing.

I better stop now, as I hadn’t intended to write much at all, just a bit of introductory blurb to accompany pics from the trip.  Never mind.  That can wait till next time.

Lobster salad at Kamu, Antwerp.  Bargain of the week/year...

Orwells: A Michelin star down, but certainly not out in Shiplake...*

Arty exterior. Thanks to Leo

It was Becca’s Mum’s birthday last week, directly after Easter, so we extended a holiday weekend visit by a day, to include the birthday itself, and take in a celebratory lunch.  A table was booked at Orwells in, or rather, near Shiplake, a small village just outside Henley, which can be reached from Becca’s parent’s house, on a Spring day that seems to think it’s summer, via an appetite sharpening walk that takes you up hill, down dale (‘drawback’ hill apparently, where the kids would go sledging of a snowy winter, and the principle drawback appeared to be the steep downslope terminating abruptly in a thick and very thorny looking hedge), across a golf course and through a spectacular bluebell wood.  I can think of few more pleasant ways to prepare for lunch.

Our destination was an 18^th century country pub, previously known as the White Hart and with, according to local knowledge, and the Oxford Times, a ‘chequered past’.  The new team in charge have a chequered past of their own when it comes to country pubs, having made the national press last year by walking out en masse from their previous place of work, The Goose at the improbably named Britwell Salome, just weeks after winning it a Michelin star, on account of a difference of opinion with their employer over the poncey-ness or otherwise of their food.  Now, as regular readers will be aware, I don’t generally have much sympathy with anyone producing food that might be described as poncey, nor am I much of a fan of the Michelin star system, and all that goes along with it, but on the other hand, it does seem pretty churlish to publically slag off the chef that you have employed, and whose menus you have, presumably, sanctioned, on those grounds just a week after his efforts have earned your establishment that widely coveted accolade (a covetousness you presumably share, or was it freakish chance that your two previous head chefs earned you one too?  And then also saw fit to quit.  Hmmm. I feel my sympathies being firmly steered in directions they might otherwise not naturally go…).

Anyway, this bit of background knowledge created ambivalent, not to say contradictory feelings in anticipation of my meal at Orwells, establishing a sympathetic bond with chef Ryan Simpson and his crew, while simultaneously setting off alarm bells on my internal ponce alert.  Probably just as well, in respect of the latter that I didn’t take a look at their website in advance, featuring as it does a photo, in loving close up, of foam being spooned onto a stack of ingredients, on a rectangular plate.  That’s a three bell alarm right there…

From the outside the place still looks like a regular country pub, and at first glance the interior does too – although on a second glance the layout of the tables, and the presence of just two draught beer pumps behind the bar suggest this is not somewhere you would come just for a drink.  Still, nothing poncey or uninviting about it.  The restaurant, and its menus, are divided into two, regular gastro in ‘The Pub’ at the front, and fine dining in ‘The Room’ at the back.  ‘The Room’, presumably, is where the really poncey stuff goes on, but that’s not open for a weekday lunch, so we were restricted to ‘The Pub’, which was more than fine by me

Is this really the egg of a rabbit?

We were greeted by a jovially fresh faced young man in chef's whites (who turns out to be Simpson himself, suggesting they run a relaxed, unstressful kitchen, which is a very good sign in my book), and after being seated he brings us a couple of platters of their own home baked bread.  This gets them off to a very good start on two counts: firstly the bread itself is excellent, springy, delicious, and served with home made butter; secondly, they had been advised of Becca’s allergies the day before when she’d phoned to make the booking, and she was presented, unbidden, with her own plate of dairy and egg free wild garlic foccaccia with a dipping bowl of olive oil and balsamic.  And this foccaccia did indeed appear to be subtly different from the wild garlic foccaccia on the main bread plate, so did seem to have been specially made.  This, believe me, is the kind of thing that scores a restaurant big, big brownie points.  It makes you like them.

Other things help to make you like a place, too.  Not least the menu, obviously.  And things like a lunchtime set menu offering two courses for a tenner help a lot, particularly when the staff are totally relaxed and accommodating when it comes to adapting that set menu to allow for Becca’s allergies.  Top brownie points again.  And even more particularly when every item on that menu might itself have been the very thing you’d have taken off the main menu.  We would all have quite happily simply taken the set lunch, but more for the sake of variety than anything else we all chose to take the main (confit chicken leg) and dessert (chocolate torte – Becca was allowed a free choice of what would turn out to be many sorbets) from that, and choose a different starter, except for Becca’s brother Leo, who took the set starter of wild garlic soup, and would order a lemon tart for dessert.

Home cured salmon, pickled veg. Thanks to Jackie for the photo

We ended up with five different starters then, and I would say all were good.  Leo’s soup, off the set menu, was vividly, almost luridly green, and as brightly, freshly flavoured; Becca’s home cured salmon was lightly cured, allowing the flavour and the texture of the raw fish to express itself.  The only disappointing thing about my scotch egg was that it turned out not to be, as the menu hinted, a rabbit’s egg (which seemed specially, magically, appropriate for the Easter holiday), but a quails egg wrapped in rabbit meat, but was nevertheless deeply delicious in a slightly naughty way – very high quality food that still managed to remind you why junk food can be so compulsive.  Wicked Uncle Robert’s asparagus and poached egg (slightly oddly, to my mind, billed on the menu as Slow Poached Yattendon Hen’s Egg, with asparagus only getting a mention as an accompanying ingredient) was as good, fresh and seasonal as you’d expect, and a fine example of that pairing made in food heaven, but suffered perhaps, not by being disappointing, but exactly by being just what you’d expect – and I would also ask, respectfully, if you really need a poached egg and hollandaise with your asparagus. I’d be inclined to think that an either/or.  But never mind.  The one slight disappointment among the starters was, I fear, the birthday girl’s crab cocktail with avocado and mango, which was perfectly nice, but just a little bland (and also, it might be pointed out, distinctly the ponciest dish of the course).

Slightly poncey crab cocktail.  Also thanks to Jackie

A main course of confit chicken, on a bargain set menu, might make you think the chicken just a poor man’s duck, a budget option.  If that was indeed the case, it turned out to be money very well saved.  Not only was the sweet, rich, concentrated chickeny flavour at least as good as any confit duck I’ve ever had, it was also rather lighter, and far better suited to lunch on an unseasonably hot and sunny spring Tuesday.  It came with intriguing and unexpected hints of oriental spicing, and on a bed of bulgar wheat salad that placed the dish somewhere vaguely, but very pleasantly, in the middle east.  We drank with it a Domaine Coste 50/50 blend of Grenache and Viognier which had enough body, and just enough of a hint of floral peachiness about it to stand up to the richness and delicate spice of the chicken.  It was a memorably good main course, by any standards, for which you would happily have paid more for than the tenner of the whole set menu, and not for a moment would you wish it were duck.

Confit cotswold chicken leg. As enjoyed by all. Thanks Leo.

Come dessert, and the chocolate tortes and lemon tart looked beautiful, and tasted as good, and perhaps, like Robert’s asparagus, suffered slightly from being just exactly what you would have wanted and expected them to be.  The star here was undoubtedly Becca’s sorbets, selected from a bewilderingly long list, from which she chose sorrel, at our (young and even more fresh faced than the chef) waiter’s keen suggestion, and because it seemed so unusual, and rhubarb, possibly because it was the only other one from the list she could remember under pressure.  As it turned out it was an excellent choice, both aesthetically, the bright pink and the rather daringly drab green setting each other off very elegantly, and flavour wise, the sweet sharpness of the rhubarb contrasting nicely with the intriguing savouriness of the sorrel.

Lemon tart, chocolate sorbet. Leo again.

All in all, it was a very fine lunch, and coming in at scarcely over thirty quid each for four people splitting a five person bill, including wine, coffees, a pint of ale to start, a birthday bottle of prosecco, and the tip, it was almost too much of a bargain to be true.  Which it turned out to be: they’d accidentally left the prosecco off the bill.  There are times when you notice an item, particularly when it’s the biggest single item, has been left off the bill and you are inclined to keep schtum, particularly if you’ve had poor service (it will, after all, be your waiter who gets it in the neck), but also if you’ve been served rubbish food, or feel you’re being ripped off.  It says more about how Orwells delivered in each of those areas than it does about my honesty when I say that once I’d noticed their error it didn’t cross my mind for a moment to do anything other than point it out to them.  And even then, including the errant prosecco, the total still only just about topped thirty quid a head for all five of us.

Rhubarb & sorrel sorbets

And was it poncey?  Well maybe a little, with its variety of differently shaped plates (and a board for the salmon), it’s stacked crab cocktail and its tendency towards miniature salad leaves.  But on the whole no, not so much as it’d bother you.  I guess if you do want to be bothered by ponceyness then you could always try ‘The Room’ for dinner, but if you’re looking for lunch at a level a notch or two above good standard gastro, for a really good price, then the set menu in ‘The Pub’, will see you right any time you happen to be in the Shiplake area. Or even if you’re a walk up hill, down dale across a golf course and through a bluebell wood away…

* Apologies for the laboured pun, but I can at least plead relevance - Simpson renamed the former White Hart in honour of George, who, apparently, lived in Shiplake as a boy, where he would have been known as Eric Blair. 

Eating out in (and around) Lyme Regis

Tuesday lunch at The George in Chideock:
Pub grub of the very highest order.

Becca and I returned last night from 5 days in Dorset, a short break that constituted our belated Christmas present to each other.  We stayed in Lyme Regis, which is a lovely place, and – not coincidentally – a place in which it is very easy to eat well.  It was, as you might imagine, quite a food-centric trip.  There was some fossil hunting too, of course, Becca being the offspring of one of our nation’s most eminent paleontologists, and Lyme Regis being pretty much where paleontology started, the jewel of the Jurassic Coast and all that (I may have made the “jewel” bit up, but if I have, and the Lyme Regis Tourist Board want to use it, then go ahead, I’m sure we can come to an arrangement.  I’d happily  swap the strapline for fish…) but, at the risk of a stern look from Becca, or even her Dad, I’d suggest that the fossil hunting was mainly a pleasant – and, of course, educational – way of filling the hours between breakfast and lunch, and between lunch and dinner.

We were booked into Mark Hix’s Oyster & Fish House on our first evening, and were enjoying a restorative drink at the bar following the arduous five and a half hour Friday afternoon/evening slog out of London, down to and along the South Coast, when the man himself showed up, then joined us as we moved from bar to table and put the whole meal on the house, which was more than nice of him.  I’m not sure how journalistic ethics apply to blogs like this one, but I’m pretty sure you can’t legitimately review a restaurant in those circumstances, so I won’t.  I will just say that I can wholeheartedly - and honestly, with no sense of pay back – recommend the HIX IPA, the oysters, served with spicy little cocktail sausages, the fino sherry recommended to go with the oysters, the monkfish cheeks – much meatier than cod cheeks – the squid with pearl barley risotto, the scallops and the Hix Fix jelly (a morello cherry soaked in Somerset eau de vie, in prosecco jelly, with more prosecco poured over the top – the most alcoholic dessert Becca had ever had).  Which I think is everything we had.  Oh and the little amuse bouche of deep fried cuttlefish balls.  And the coffee was good too.  And the wine, a Picpoul, with which you can never go far wrong.  Thank you Mark.  And apologies to the staff, for the ridiculously and inadvertently meagre tip that was our sole contribution for a very fine evening.

We asked Mark for recommendations for other places to eat while in Lyme, and he got the waiter to put a call through to book us a table for the following night at his mate Anthony’s place.  Which again was a kindness, as I got the impression if we’d made the call ourselves we would have been told they were fully booked, which, to be fair, they were.  The only problem was that the next day, we did we knew neither where the restaurant was, nor what it was called.  Becca, to her credit, remembered at least that Mark’s mate’s name was Anthony – I thought it was probably Alastair.   So, after a fruitless hour or two in the afternoon, wandering the streets of Lyme, looking out for a place that might belong to an Anthony, or an Alastair, a small place, with a limited but ever changing menu, I had to return, rather sheepishly, to Hix and ask if they remembered where it was they had booked us into, what it was actually called, which turned out to be the Mill Tea and Dining Room, and how to find it. 

Even once, thanks to the very nice lady at Hix, we’d established all of that, our plan was further complicated by our hooking up with our very good friends Sarah and Jimmy who were in the area house hunting, having made the momentous decision to leave London and move their family down to the West Country where Jimmy has been offered a job teaching Art.  So now, in an ideal world, we wanted to change our late booking for a table for two, in a small restaurant that was already fully booked, into a table for four, at a couple of hours notice.  Here again it probably played in our favour that the booking had come via Mark Hix, and therefore we were mistaken for much more important people than I, at least, actually am.  I like to think though that it was more to do with the kindness, generosity and enthusiasm of Anthony and his partner, whose name I had erroneously convinced myself was actually Cleopatra (having been told it while concentrating hard on memorising the mildly convoluted directions for finding the restaurant), and their informal, slightly ad-hoc way of doing things.

Either way, when we called in at around 7.30 ahead of our booking at 9 to see if it might be possible to add two more people, ‘Cleopatra’ showed me the table they had prepared for Becca and I, which was not actually in the restaurant itself, but through a set of French windows leading into the art gallery next door, and said that if Sarah and Jimmy were happy to join us for drinks there, we could wait for a table for four to become free, which would probably be around 9.30.  When we returned at 9, none of the tables of four in the tiny dining room looked likely to clear any time soon, but a garden table and chairs had been brought into the gallery and set up alongside the previously laid table, and we were more than happy to settle ourselves in there for the duration.  As it turned out it wouldn’t be for the duration, we would decamp from the gallery to the dining room between starters and mains, but that was all part of the evening’s charm.  It was too social – and, I admit, boozy – an evening to do the food justice in anything that tried to pass itself off as a proper restaurant review here, but all the food we were served was genuinely excellent, and the service - from ‘Cleopatra’, who was running the floor on her own, so it was as well that she appeared slightly hyperactive – was both exceptional and exceptionally eccentric (they use the word themselves on their website, so I feel confident of causing no offence.  My apologies if that confidence is misplaced, there is certainly none intended) and indeed entertaining.  I can’t remember the last time dinner at a restaurant was quite so much actual fun.  And, at forty quid a head, with home made sloe gins on the house at the end - to make up for the improvised table arrangements when it had been entirely us putting them to trouble and not at all the other way round – it came to terrific value for money, however you measured it.

So, if you’re going to Lyme Regis for the weekend, I would strongly recommend booking yourself into both Hix Oyster & Fish House and the Mill Tea and Dining Room.  If you can only afford one fancy restaurant meal in the course of that weekend, then, at a pinch, I’d probably say go for Anthony and Eleanor (I looked it up on their website), they probably need your business more.  Sorry Mark.  And sorry Anthony and Eleanor if that last bit sounds in any way patronising.  OK, look, everyone: Just go to Lyme Regis and eat at both their restaurants – that way everybody’s happy…

Where else?  Becca and I went for Sunday lunch at the River Cottage Canteen, in nearby Axminster.  Now, regular readers of this blog will now that I have nothing but time for Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and all he stands for.  What you probably don’t know is that Tim Maddams, who appears regularly on River Cottage TV programs and runs the kitchen at the Canteen, was, if only briefly, a colleague of mine at the Rivington; and of all the chefs I ever worked with he was the one I liked, respected, and from whom I learnt, the most.  So it pains me greatly to say that of all the culinary expectations I set off to the West Country with last weekend, Sunday lunch was the one slight disappointment.  It wasn’t that it was bad, just a bit underwhelming.  The razor clams we started with – and I love razor clams – were big and fat and meaty, but, perhaps even partly because of their size, could have done with a bit more piquancy in their dressing, more garlic, maybe a little chilli.  The roast mutton was the big let down though, beautifully tender and full flavoured though it was.  Becca’s portion (and the portions were very generous, I would like to say, in mitigation) was obviously cut from the outside of the joint, and was, arguably, verging on overdone.  Mine, cut from the middle, was rare to the point of scarcely cooked.  And while I like my meat rare, this was just a little bit slippery in texture.  It probably would have been fine had the portions been mixed with each plate carrying the full spectrum from raw to well done, and admittedly we could have arranged this ourselves at the table, but even so, I’m afraid this mutton would have compared poorly with the standard set by Becca’s birthday mutton at St John back in October.  Which is perhaps like disparaging someone’s dancing on the grounds that it’s not as good as Fred Astaire, say, but even so.  Sorry Tim.  Perhaps I should have made more of a point of coming on a day you were actually in the kitchen…

And perhaps we should have gone for Sunday lunch at the George in Chideock, which is just the sort of proper old fashioned pub, with an open fire and everything, that Sundays and lunch were invented for.  And, Tim, if it makes you feel any better, it was thanks to the link on your Facebook page that we found it.  It is a proper old fashioned pub, but it is under the new management of ex River Cottage people, who seem to be doing that thing that should be relatively simple but is so clearly difficult to achieve that it almost never is, of keeping what it is about proper old fashioned pubs that’s really good, and that we all like, while introducing new fangled things like proper, seriously good food.  I guess part of the secret is in keeping that seriously good food very simple and completely unpretentious.  We went there for lunch on Tuesday and ordered the fish of the day, Pollack in a local beer batter, and a venison burger off the daily specials board.  And shared a starter of potted pork and piccalilli.  

Forgive me if I review this meal in reverse: the burger was big, dense and richly meaty, topped with a caramelised red onion and cumin relish, the cumin in which was the element of the unexpected that raised it from being just a really good burger to something really quite special.  It was every bit as good as it looks in the accompanying picture (my picture, that is, not theirs, they may be committed to simplicity and a lack of pretension at The George, but that doesn't quite extend to having pictures on the menu) which, experience has surely taught us since childhood, is something that can almost never be said of a burger.  

The fish was just about perfect too, gleaming white, firm yet softly flaking flesh, that tasted like real fish from the actual sea, inside a light, brightly golden batter that was crisp without being over crunchy and with (for me) just the right amount of melting sogginess on the inside where it met the fish.  Again, every bit as good as it looks.  

But the real star, and the reason I’m saving it till last, was the starter of potted pork.  Which goes straight on to my list (I haven’t determined quite how long a list it is, it’s just a top whatever) of all time best things I’ve ever had in a restaurant.  Slow (and I’m guessing real slow) cooked pork, potted in it’s own fat, served with the best piccalilli I’ve ever tasted with just the right balance of sweetness, vinegar and mustard heat, a handful of cornichons and a couple of slices of good granary toast.  For anyone who likes pork (and regular readers will have guessed by now that both Becca and I like our pork) then this was piggy heaven.  Actually sublime. 

Arbutus. Ah, but...

I was feeling very good about Arbutus when we sat down.  For a start it came about as the result of a spur of the moment decision, and I find those are often my favourite and most memorable eating out experiences.  Secondly, they’d been able to seat us, having traipsed to and fro across Soho from West to East, on a blustery, rain squally night, finding no room at several inns on the way, and being very nearly ready to chuck it all in and get a burger from GBK, or go home.  Thirdly Becca, having recently been paid, was promising to treat me. Fourthly, Becca’s price limit on my treat was ‘mid range’ and Arbutus, despite its Michelin star, is still reasonably enough priced to fall within that limit, particularly if we were just to order a main and go easy on the wine.  Fifthly, I have read and heard many good things about Arbutus over the years since it opened, and had long wanted to go there, to be finally doing so more or less by accident, felt like it should be the set up for a real treat.

And I carried on feeling good about it.  Our waitress was friendly and very helpful, completely unstressed and positive about accommodating Becca’s imposing list of allergies.  The menu looked good, so good we couldn’t stick to the just a main and a carafe restriction and agreed that Becca would cover the main and the wine and we’d split the excess for starters and any other extras.  We placed our orders - warm wild mushroom salad with salsify and chestnuts to start for Becca; pig’s head with potato puree and ravioli of caramelized onion for me.  For mains she had the venison, I had the rack of pork.  Our waitress came back straight away with the adjustments for Becca’s allergies and warned us there’d be a slightly longer wait than usual because they’d have to cook the salsify for her warm wild mushroom salad from scratch, which was fine by us.  We had a chocolate and cherry fragranced Patagonian cabernet sauvignon/merlot to tide us over, from a wine list that is yet another and very good reason to feel good about Arbutus.  The list is not only eminently reasonable, starting around the twenty pound mark, but all wines come by the bottle, or the 250ml carafe, and our carafe at just £8.25, was a cockle warming bargain.

By this point I was feeling very good and well disposed towards the World in general and Arbutus in particular.  But, and I’m sorry to have to say this, I really am, then our food arrived.

The first sign of the disappointment to come, in retrospect, came with the delivery of my pig’s head.  It was served with something close to an apology.  The waitress explaining that the advertised ravioli of caramelized onion was in fact no such thing.  It was a single raviolo composed of onion encased not by pasta, but by two discs of what was described as “andouillette tripe”.

At which point I must pause to declare an interest, or should I say an aversion:  I know I’ve used this blog in the past to advocate the nose to tail approach to eating meat, but I have to hold my hand up and admit to there being a gap in my commitment – a gap that comes between nose and tail, but closer to the tail, and into which fall the stomach and lower intestine.  I’ve tried with tripe, I really have, but I’ve never been able to locate the appeal of the combination of unpleasant texture and no real flavour.  Better tripe though, by far, than andouillette, the sausage made from pig’s colon, with it’s winning combination of unpleasant texture and really unpleasant flavour.  There’s a reason the phrase ‘tastes like shit’ is commonly used for things that don’t taste good, and it’s not because the thing in question actually does taste like shit, nor even that most of us, thankfully, know what shit really tastes like.  Andouillette, though, actually does, literally, taste of shit, and you know what?  It tastes like shit.  And I’m sorry, I’m all for acquired tastes and that, but you know, there’s a line… 

Having said that, I am more than happy to see tripe or andouillette on a menu.  I’m positively encouraged.  It speaks, in a very literal sense, of gutsy cooking.  Bold and unafraid of offending squeamish sensibilities.  Exactly, in fact, what all the rave reviews had let me to expect of Arbutus.  Tripe appeared several times on the menu, and that was fine by me even if I wasn’t going to order it.  But the fact that my andouillette raviolo was not announced on the menu, and the apologetic manner with which it was delivered, complete with advice to put a little of everything on the fork to disguise it’s flavour, was the opposite of bold.  It spoke rather of cooking, and presentation, that lacked the courage of its own convictions. And the saddest thing is, even given my reservations above, I was willing to be won over, even to like the andouillette, indeed it’s a measure of the problem I had with the food we were served, quite how keenly willing I became. Not that it was bad, I would like to stress.  It really wasn’t.  It was just sadly underwhelming, and I wanted it to be so much better.

The pig’s head, a coarse terrine, was a good start in itself, soft and sweetly piggy.  Problem was that everything on the plate, the lozenge of pureed potato, the caramelized onion, even the andouillette, was similarly soft and sweet.  Had it come on toast, with a pickle or sharp chutney on the side, I could have loved it. Becca had been slightly cautious about going for the wild mushrooms following our recent mushroom adventures.  She wondered if it might fare poorly by comparison.  I’m afraid she was right.  It was all just a bit flimsy. And there were no chestnuts, just a very cultivated looking chestnut mushroom among the trompettes, which didn’t really help. The best bit was the carrots, which were apparently excellent, but that’s to damn with faint praise.

Becca’s venison seemed more like it at first, tender, succulent meat, with a surprising suggestion of having been seared in sesame oil, which may or may not have been a result of the accommodation of her allergies.  After that initial surprise though, it all became a bit samey, the meat perhaps a touch lightly seasoned but more to the point the accompanying pomegranate salad and beetroot marmalade hitting too similar sweet notes.

First thing I noticed about my rack of pork when it came was that it was served off the bone. When I order a rack, I want to see the rack – is that too much to ask?  Apparently so.  This rack came disassembled into a disc of lean meat, more steak than medallion, and a lip smackingly fatty strip of belly.  Like the venison it was a soft and yielding piece of meat, nicely cooked to a delicate pink.  Like the venison there was a surprising Chinese-y hint of sesame or possibly an element of five spice to its seared outer surface.  Also like the venison though that surprise was short lived, the meat under seasoned, in this case, I’m afraid to the point of blandness, and the accompanying pumpkin, gnocchi and prunes all similarly soft and yielding and monotonously sweet.

The problem was not that the food was bad, far from it, each element served up was perfectly realized, it was just that all the elements put together occupied too narrow a spectrum of the available ranges of flavour and texture.  There were no spikes on either graph.  Everything was sweet and soft, with very little contrast, no counterpoints of sour, bitter or sharp, crunchy or chewy.  The only item across four dishes between us that had any real bite were those carrots, the only challenge to the tastebuds, that andouillette, of which, by this point, I was thinking rather fondly.

In a sense that’s worse, in a restaurant you want to like, than it would be to catch them on an off night in the kitchen.  If you felt they’d cocked up, you could give them another chance; if you’re left with the impression that the kitchen has delivered everything the chef intended, and it’s left you cold, then there’s not a lot of point.  You just have to concede that your palate and the chef’s are incompatible.  And in the case of Arbutus, for me, that’s a terrible shame because there is so much about the place to like and admire – if only that included the food, I could truly love it. 

We finished with a carafe of dessert wine and a coffee, and split the bill in the end.  At forty quid a head - for a Michelin starred restaurant, in Soho - it was, in many ways, a bargain.  Sadly, it just didn’t rate as a treat.

Balthazar

I'm very much liking the sound of this...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/27/braised-thin-rib-beef-recipe

... except for all the binding with string stuff.  I'd be looking to find a way to do it without any of that sort of faffing around.

I had lunch at Balthazar once, an experience which, for reasons too complex to explain here, was set up to be a horrible disappointment, but proved far from it.  The main course I had - something very similar to the sole en papillote recipe in the sidebar of that Guardian page - I remember as being excellent but that's it, i.e. not terribly memorable, but the starter, a platter of a dozen different New England oysters, and the dessert, the prettiest and finest apple tart I have ever seen or eaten, made it one of the best and most memorable lunches I've ever had.  And the general atmosphere of the place was all, and exactly what I'd hoped for.  There are many reasons I can't wait to go back to New York, Balthazar is one of them.

St John

So, a full sit down meal at St John at last.  As I said in my earlier post, I’ve eaten at the bar there many times, and at Bread & Wine, the sister restaurant in Spitalfields, on several occasions, so it wasn’t for the sake of novelty that we wanted to go, and nor was it likely to surprise us.  The obvious danger therefore, was that it might disappoint.  Not be bad – that really would have been a surprise – just be a bit underwhelming.  A bit so what?  Don’t worry.  It wasn’t.  Not at all.

For those of you not familiar with the bar or restaurant, it’s a big, open, high ceilinged, industrial space – converted from an old smokehouse - with white washed brickwork and exposed fixtures and fittings.  The kind of space that’s quite commonplace now, might even be considered rather passé, but was groundbreaking back in 1994 when Fergus Henderson and co opened up, and why should they change just because lots of others have followed the trend they set?  You might even say the same of the food.  I’m not at all sure that the phrase “Modern British” even existed back then, but it’s certainly being applied to the food in a restaurant or gastro pub near you, right now, wherever in the UK you may be (assuming you are).  That’s as maybe, but in very few, if any of those places, will modern British food be being done as whole-heartedly (that’s an entirely inadvertent pun), or anything like as well as it is at St John, even today.  Nor as unpretentiously, and that’s a big deal.  Very few restaurants anywhere, with the kind of reputation St John has, are so lacking in pretension.  I rather doubt any others with a Michelin Star are.  The service is friendly, efficient and well informed, but not over attentive or obsequious.  The tables are laid simply, and arranged in semi refectory style.  The cutlery and glasses are basic.  It really is about the food here, but it isn’t a shrine to it.  It’s also a convivial, social space, about enjoying the food in good company.  It can get quite loud.

The two of us were given the choice of a table for two that would have felt like we were joining the group of four already ensconced at the adjacent table, or the table on the other side of them, originally laid for three.  We took that, because it was a little bigger, and better spaced, and also it was right next to the pass, which opens directly into the dining room – it’s a sort of semi open kitchen.  I do like to be able to see the chefs at work.  It’s a nostalgic thing, and generally it makes me glad to be sat this side of the pass, but it has to be said the kitchen at St John looks a tranquil, happy place to work (all things being relative and acknowledging the potential deceptiveness of appearances …). 

For starters she ordered the duck heart salad,  which I would have had, but it was her birthday, so she had first shout.  I went for the lambs tongues instead.  They seemed appropriate, offally choices, and we’d both had the signature roast bone marrow and parsley salad before.  For mains she took the roast mutton from the specials board, beating me to it again – curses – leaving me to take the seasonal route, and a grouse.  We chose a Roussillon from somewhere round the middle of the exclusively French wine list.  Bright and fruity, but with enough punch to look after itself.

The starter salads were much the same dish, save for the main ingredient.  Offal and dandelion leaves in a richly emulsified mustardy dressing.  The lambs tongues were yielding and slightly jellified – rather corned beef like, in a very good way.  But the duck’s hearts were the winner, with the rich, sweet softness of chicken livers, but a bit of pop to their texture.  A little like baby squid.

The grouse when it came was a rich golden caramel colour, and had a big bunch of watercress sticking out of it’s arse – an indignity it could perhaps have done without.  The flesh beneath the crisp skin was a deep ruby pink, done just enough and no more, with not a trace of the dryness which is always the risk with game birds.  It came with a little bruschetta of its mashed innards, and a smooth creamy pool of bread sauce.  Good as the grouse was, though, it was her dish that won again.  The roast mutton was exactly what you come to St John for.  Literally and figuratively it was a grown up rack of lamb.  Meltingly tender but with a depth of flavour that could come only with experience, and a thick layer of rich, soft but almost beefy fat, that would have had Jack Spratt reconsidering life choices.  It came with a sharply bright salsa verde and braised fennel, both of which, like the bread sauce with the grouse, complemented the meat perfectly without distracting attention from it. 

Two nil to Becca, then, going into desserts, and those were almost (not quite) a non event, on account of being too full to order the eccles cake and crumbly lancashire cheese, which I really wanted but know from experience to be a substantial meal in itself.  I settled instead for  the plum jelly, with vanilla flecked ice cream, and a glass of PX, while she didn’t so much opt for as fall back (no reflection on St John - dessert and dairy allergies being generally incompatible) on the raspberry sorbet that came with a vodka shot.  Both were excellent, but we were rather going through the motions by now.  Final score was two and a half to a half to the better half, but food, and St John, was the real winner tonight, Brian…