Food and Drink in London

Two Gordons talk fruit

Sometimes when things have been a bit quiet, you need to liven things up with a big silly news story. I haven't blogged for a few months now, but this morning Gordon Ramsay handed me a gift. Thanks Gordon, how did you know it was my birthday?

I've never been a real fan of the man, mainly because his media persona is objectionable. I know this is a character that he's created, but all that means is that he's getting what he's asking for . . . objection. My other concern is that I like top chefs to be innovators. I'm sure Ramsay's food is delicious (Ben says so), but it's not exactly interesting. A while ago now, he jumped on the 'local and seasonal' bandwagon. Hugh-Fearnley Whittingstall had been banging on about this for ages and mid-range restauranteurs and gastropubs around the country had also been adopting this ethos for a while. Late to the game, in his last couple of TV series, Gordon was suddenly talking about simple, fresh, seasonal, local produce . . . not quite the same as his haute cuisine style would suggest, but maybe it was down to the fact that he was launching a series of gastropubs.

This morning, on Radio 4, I heard Gordon saying he had met with Gordon Brown to suggest that fines should be levelled against restaurants that didn't serve local and seasonal produce. This was for taste and sustainability reasons. There are problems with both these points.

If it's taste you want, are you going to pick a British pigeon or one from Bresse? And some frozen veg is good . . . . many chefs will prefer frozen peas over fresh ones. And does it follow that you should spurn tropical fruit in favour of British ones? More rhubarb crumble then . . .

A quick glance at Gordon's online menus shows that he's a bit of a hypocrite too. Sticking to fruit and veg, the obvious culprits are all over the dessert menus. Pineapples, bananas and oranges all over the place. Maybe he grows them at the Eden Project?

The worse offenders in terms of sustainability are at the Maze Grill where you can get fine Creekstone prime USDA beef and Wagyu imported from Japan (I'm guessing this last but as you can get Wagyu from Australia and the US, either way . . .)

Don't get me wrong, I think sustainability is a worthwhile concept and some is better than none. I don't think you can pick and choose though and it's fairly ugly to see it used as merely a PR stunt.

There's a good set of comments on this over on the Guardian's Word of Mouth site.

P.S. If you want to see somewhere that takes sustainability very seriously, try Acorn House or Konstam in London. Further afield, Y Mochyn Drwg, my brother's restaurant in Wales.

No Spain no gain

Spain is a favourite destination for foodies, and not just for the theatre of El Bulli. Throughout the country there are restaurants worth seeking out, among them a compelling mix of traditional and modern cuisine. From tapas bars to Michelin stars and, as we saw last weekend in Barcelona's fabulous markets, some of the best ingredients you could hope for.

Barcelona is a fantastic city, replete with amazing architecture (which we mainly ignored) and cool bars and restaurants (which we didn't). The highlight was dinner on Saturday night at Comerç 24. As his first placement since leaving catering college fellow blogger Aidan Brooks (aka Trig) has been working in the kitchen there for six months or so now, during which time it has won a Michelin star. I'm sure he won't want to take all the credit.

I understand that as little as twelve months ago Comerç24 was squarely a tapas bar, albeit an upmarket one. It has kept the general style of small dishes, which lend themselves particularly well to a couple of decent priced tasting menus, but there are influences from all over the place now and real ambition and creativity in the cooking. One dish in particular will stay with me a long time.

Annoyingly, my new phone/camera jobbie ran out of juice early on so three photos are all I have in terms of evidence and memory joggers...

Openers were some grissini (which were fine), olives stuffed with anchovies (big and slightly scary for someone who's not a big olive fan), pig skin crackers (an improvement on the prawn crackers you might get in your local Chinese but not worth crossing continents for) and gold-dusted macadamia nuts. More interesting things were happening on the veggie side of the divide: some cute filo tartlets that seemed to contain just heaps of parmesan but actually had something liquid inside too (apparently yuzu was involved). I was too slow to taste one so I imagine they were very good. Likewise a pair of dainty toasted asparagus sandwiches.

The dishes proper tended to arrive in pairs, which makes me think I must have forgotten some, but here goes...

Mackerel and citrus fruit salad arrived with alongside a tuna tartare in a moat of egg yolk and soy. Both lots of fish were super fresh. A lovely start to the meal. For Antonia (who was having a full vegetarian tasting menu alongside my version - top marks there) the avocado maki roll that finally killed off my camera's battery, and probably something else at the same time. The roll was very accomplished, involving delicate slicing and quick work to get it to the table before it lost its colour (it was one of Trig's).

There followed some or all of the following in approximately this order. (Two bottles of localish Nunci, from a big separate list of reds that came handily accompanied by a nice French chap who seemed to know what he was talking about, have further conspired to blur records of the evening.)

Favas al a Catalana: broad beans and catalan blood sausage in a soup made from the bean pods. The sausage came as small grains of intense porkiness and worked well with the beans and the soup. The signature Kinder egg was presented only to Antonia, but at least this time I did get a taste of it. A lovely suspension of perfectly cooked egg in a creamy potato (I think) foam, probably with some truffles thrown in for good measure.

Cod tripe with artichoke two ways: a tiny dollop of artichoke ice cream with a blob of fishy mousse shared equal billing with a tiny cod and artichoke stew. Good stuff. The winter garden salad I can't comment on, other than visually it was stunning: lots of ingredients and pretty flowers. Antonia loved it. Maybe I should buy her flowers more often!

Then came my highlight: a single cuttlefish raviolo, the fish forming the pasta rather than the filling, which was an intense morel thing. It came with a very thin toast, a few smears of ink and instructions to eat the whole lot in one go. Good advice. Quite one of the best things I have ever eaten. It all but brought tears to my eyes. Antonia was almost as impressed by a glassful of piping hot cauliflower mousse topped with truffle oil. I later had something similar with dense oxtail buried within it. Very good.

There was a cold soup poured over some more delicate veg and flowers (interesting but a bit similar to the earlier salad), some more cuttlefish, this time draped over a line of black rice, and a simple but successful salad of asparagus and mandarin.

Sweets started with a delicate shot glass of mint soup with passion fruit foam. Then a quartet of bitesized goodies, three of which were a chocolate mousse with salt and olive oil (a traditional local combo), a tiny financier and an Oreo cookie stuffed with vanilla ice cream. There was also a fun bowl of yoghurt with "muesli" and frozen raspberry pieces and more passion fruit. The cheese plate we requested while we waited for Trig to help clean down the kitchen (a spectacle in itself from the vantage point of our seats at the bar) contained an unexpected but very welcome stinky stilton.

All this, a quick chat with the chef and a few more glasses with Trig added up to a very fine evening indeed. Planes were nearly missed the next day...

Restaurant Comerç 24, C/ Comerç 24, 08003 Barcelona, Spain +34 93 319 21 02

Swine by the glass

Just a quick one today to thank everyone who made my birthday party last week such a blast. The bits I remember are very memorable indeed. Particular thanks must go to Jane and rest of the team at St John, who looked after us with such patience and aplomb, and to the special guest, who, despite losing his head, far exceeded my own humble effort and really was the star of the show.

Thank you all.

Before.

During

After.

My shingle friend

Unlike Jay Rayner, who (to bastardise Mark Twain) presumably regards a walk as a good ride in a Golf spoiled, I rather like a stroll. Even better, a healthy yomp on a crisp winter's day. Better still, a healthy yomp on a crisp winter's day by the seaside with a splendid lunch to look forward to.

And so to Littlehampton. There's a sentence you don't come across very often...

The occasion was a kind of strange self-congratulatory treat after Antonia and I had both successfully been off the booze for a couple of weeks (it looks so trivial in writing). I say strange because the two weeks weren't quite up and the treat therefore involved... no drinking. But somehow we muddled through. We were staying in Bailiffscourt Hotel, of which more, I think, when we go back: the quality of the breakfast and the general level of service suggest we really ought to try the food in the restaurant proper rather than the making do with the decent enough fare available in the rabbit warren of parlours and lounges.

Got to love a hotel that provides wellies, though, so on Sunday morning, after a pre-breakfast swim in both indoor and outdoor (!) pools and, of course, a richly deserved post-swim breakfast, we set off on the two-mile walk along the beach to Littlehampton in search of a rather special café Antonia knew all about. Now I'm no expert, but this was a bloody long two miles. Not only was it blowing a fierce gale (despite the glorious sunshine), the beach was also of the big-pebbles-making-it-very-tough-on-the-calves-and-very-easy-to-fall-over variety. And when we finally reached the pier that we (rightly) assumed would bring Littlehampton into view, trendy beach café and all, the relatively modest walk stretching out in front of us turned out to be a sadistic optical illusion as the path took us on an inland diversion that must have added at least another mile and a half to the trip. No matter: all very bracing and worthy and we'd certainly earned our lunch.

And a very fine lunch it was too. The venue was the East Beach Café, a striking addition to Littlehampton's long, straight seafront. All dramatic curves and overlapping shapes evocative (on the outside) of shells and driftwood and (inside) of the weathered chalk pebbles we'd been slipping on an hour or so earlier.

The building is the brainchild of Thomas Heatherwick, a designer cum architect who's not above dropping in unannounced with his family on a busy Sunday lunch service to see if the staff and the cooking can live up to the space he's created for them. I'm happy to say that they can: not only did they find room for the Heatherwick clan (and the two of us), they served up some real treats.

I started with a dainty ramekin of potted shrimps, out of the fridge long enough to wake the flavour up a bit but not to melt the delicately crispy surface of the butter on top. Underneath, well judged spicing kept things interesting without dominating crustacea that had clearly gone in super fresh. For Antonia, big meaty field mushrooms on toast, which looked the business. For mains, I had a special of sea bream with sprouting broccoli. Brilliantly simple and - frankly - simply brilliant. Antonia had a mixed leaf and green bean salad with mini Welsh rarebit toasts. And chips, obviously. All good stuff.

So both a building and a menu that utterly confound expectations for seafront dining. Not for the East Beach Café sausage, egg and chips, soggy cod and squeezy sauce bottles in a damp and dingy dump. Instead, a stunning building, fresh fish, home potted shrimps and (in the evening) guineafowl terrine with quince paste. And on a freezing cold Sunday in the second week in February it was packed. Apparently it is every day.

Would that every seaside town had a place like this to walk to. (Jay, you might want to take a cab.)

East Beach Café, LittleHampton, West Sussex BN17 5NZ 01903 731 903

True love pays

(This photo really has nothing much to do with this post. I just saw these cakes in the Hoxton Food Hall and thought they looked cool.)

So a couple of weeks ago, in a rare flush of organisation that was only tempered slightly by the rapid realisation that the world and his mother (or at least his girlfriend) had already had the idea, I went on the hunt for somewhere nice for dinner on Valentine's Day. Now this is something I've historically avoided, partly through (often) having no-one to take, but also because I can cook a bit and I was pretty sure I was going to get ripped off in a rammed restaurant trying to squeeze every last penny of starry eyed lovers. But this year, partly because I didn't think I'd have a functioning kitchen come the big day, I thought it was worth a stab and was delighted that an online booking via OpenTable seemed to have bagged us a table at Theo Randall.

Now I have never been to Theo Randall, but I knew it by reputation and I thought it would be about right: newly designed room, upmarket Italian fare, plenty of veggie options for Antonia etc etc. A bit like Locanda Locatelli (which is great) but somewhere new for both of us. Perfect.

And then I got the call. Let's charitably say that it was OpenTable and not the restaurant that called me because of a quirk of the online reservation system rather than the restaurant's embarrassment at what they were planning to charge us. "There's a set menu that evening Mr Bush, and it's £95 for three courses," said the nice lady. "Perhaps you'd like to have a look at the menu on the restaurant's website and give us a call back." Too right I would.

And it was true. Ninety-five quid. For three courses. I've been known to splash out on that much and more for a tasting menu but for three courses with precious little choice that has to be some sort of record. And from a generous selection of veggie mains and pastas on the à la carte menu we'd have been left facing the three words every vegetarian dreads at this time of year: wild mushroom risotto.

Fuck that. We're off to Magdalen.

Happy Valentine's Day.

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