Food and Drink in London

Black Wednesday

Five minutes after I'd been presented with my menu at Vanilla Black last night Antonia, a strict vegetarian, dared to take a peek at my expression and - let's face it - smirked. "This is how I feel in just about every restaurant you take me to," she said. Yes, for the second time in a month I'd been manoeuvred away from my usual choice of hearty (for which read meaty) establishments and delivered into the welcoming arms of a vegetarian restaurant. Revenge, it seems, is a dish best served with a deconstructed lentil dhal.

At least at Saf, though, there were some dishes I could choose, even if I wasn't jumping up and down with excitement; here, I was in trouble. Still off the carbs, I stared with despair at pastry, potatoes and rice on every dish. Bugger.

But I was still hopeful. Jay Rayner was a fan of this place when it was up in York and I think he and I have a similar attitude to vegetarian fare: celebrate vegetables as ingredients, by all means but don't try to pretend they're something they're not. I was fully expecting creativity and taste would conspire to make me forget about the meagre portions I'd be left with once the spuds were donated elsewhere. Unfortunately, though, the move down South seems to have come at the expense of the qualities that so excited Jay on his visit.

But don't take my word for it: let's face it, I'm biased in the first place. And maybe I didn't do the dishes justice by cutting the carbs. (FWIW I had a quails egg salad with beetroot and some strange and not pleasant furry leaves followed by cabbage and cheese.) Consider, instead, Antonia's thoughts; she's far more qualified to comment than me:

Black olive and yogurt éclair – a bit dry. And surely the wrong way round: put the squidgy yogurt inside like cream and use the salty tapenade to glaze like the chocolate and then you have a much nicer offering.

Feta and orange cake – they said it was their ‘take’ on cheese and fruitcake. Better to do that properly and have a nice dense dried-fruity cake (I even find myself thinking ‘prunes would be good here’ and I never think that). The orange cake was good but very sweet and cakey. Olives in mini Kilner jar – why?

‘Pizza’ – looked like a rat en croute. Doughy. OK my fault for not seeing that the Chantilly cream thing had vanilla in it – but again too sweet. Actually the whole plate looked like the time I made a pizza at home and dropped it on the floor as I was getting it out of the oven.

In general, you could do this restaurant – with its pretty presentation and sophisticated environment for veggie cooking – far better by cooking lovely seasonal ingredients with fabulous robust English cheeses and understanding the balances of texture or protein/carbohydrate or even bloody portion size much better. I give it a month.

I, meanwhile, will be lobbying for a smirking ban.

Vanilla Black 17-18 Took's Court EC4A 1LB 020 7242  2622

Sweet surrender

I had lunch at Waterhouse the new sustainable sibling of Acorn House, on the Regents Canal, Dalston.

It's a funny location and they must be banking on weekend trade or that the area will up-and-come. The premises are sizable and today I was the only diner. The food is Italianate, Jamie-Oliver-ish, with the day's menu displaying summery lightness. I started with a selection of 'mezze', though I wouldn't have used that word for my selection of truffle salami, coppa ham and smoked mackerel. It was all ok, nothing to get excited about though. As a main I'd ordered 'Roast rabbit with couscous, saffron, honey and spices'. Woah . . . this was almost Elizabethan in its sweetness, my teeth sent an emergency telegram to my dentist. It was so sweet that any sense of the spicing or saffron was overwhelmed . . . my Sangiovese was left joyless. A gorilla's handful of raisins colluded with the honey to make it pretty inedible.

What a shame, as the location could actually be pretty nice. I sat outside next to the canal. It'd be good if they replaced the huge banquetting table I sat at with a few daintier spots. The wine list is pretty decent too - I spotted a few Pieropans including 'La Rocca' and the Colombare sweet wine.  What's more, one has to laud it's eco-friendliness, something to which more restaurants should be paying proper attention.

The restaurant is also expensive - that rabbit dish was a whopping £17.50 (must be those newly discovered spices from the Indies). What price urban regeneration?

Waterhouse, 10 Orsman Rd, Dalston. N1 5QJ  020 7033 0123

May contain nuts...

The fact that I've been putting off going to SAF for a while may not come as much of a surprise. I may take far more of a personal interest in vegetarian food that I used to but I still struggle to muster any enthusiasm for a fully veggie restaurant. To be fair to Antonia (the reason for the personal interest) I've not exactly been under pressure to go to too many. At the risk of peddling a sweeping generalisation, "normal" restaurants who make a bit of an effort with one or two veggie options often appear to be a better bet that specialist vegetarian places who mainly specialise in bland.

Anyway, as if being a vegetarian restaurant were not deterrent enough, SAF is actually a vegan place that specialises in raw food. They do a decent range of interesting looking cocktails to suit the New York decor but, with that kind of food policy, they'd have to have been a lot more than just interesting to get me through the door. Where raw roots failed, however, peer pressure prevailed, and last night the shoe was on the other foot as Antonia tried not to gloat at my struggle to find something – anything – that I could bring myself to order.

Actually that's a little unfair: I think I'd have been more open to SAF (and less freaked out my first look at the menu) if I'd really thought about the implications of their vegan/raw policy. I've been more or less completely off carbs for a while now (in an attempt to address one of the more predictable consequences of my restaurant habit) so a menu that seemed to embrace pasta and rice at every turn seemed like a new and unusual torture. But, not for the first time last night, things were not quite as they seemed.

This, for instance, is SAF's signature lasagne:

Now obviously if I'd thought about it I'd have realised this wasn't going to be any sort of standard pasta dish, what with the lack of eggs and everything, but this was so far from anything even vaguely resembling lasagne that you have to wonder how it earned the monicker at all. Layers...? I guess. But even they weren't that obvious. Let's face it: despite apparently having strata of walnut bolagnaise, sage pesto and some other goodies, it's basically a compacted salad. Nothing wrong with that – indeed, like most of the food we had, it was rather good – but a lasagne...? Hmmm...

We'd started with a selection of five starters between the four of us, including some edamame with wasabi powder, a particularly good choice for me as I was instantly reassured that not everything was going to be cold and raw. Other nibbles included some toasted almonds, olives and curried cashews: all good. A cold cucumber consommé was poured over and around some diced red peppers and cucumber with a quenelle of olive oil sorbet: this divided opinion but I thought it a very well conceived and very grown-up dish. "Caviar" was chives, rendered by some El Bulli style alchemy into slightly bland pearls that were rescued by sweet potato latkes with apple and sour cream (the kind of cream was not specified but one must assume it was one of SAF's nut creations). Spring dumplings came dim sum style with some intense dipping sauce and were good and – praise be – hot.

Then followed the cheese course: not cheese in the traditional sense, of course, but nut cheese (that's enough giggling at the back). A sharing plate of three different cheeses, made, if I recall, from macadamia, almond and (probably) cashew. These were fine but the consensus was that there wasn't much to justify calling them cheeses. A strict vegan might welcome the chance to sample something that was vaguely cheesy but the rest of us can see this for what it is: tasty enough tangy, nutty creations that are basically  dips that were stiff enough to eat with a knife and fork. Presumably the restaurant agrees: if they really thought these really passed as cheeses I imagine they'd be pushing the cheese course as something to have at the end the meal rather than bang in the middle.

Among the main courses, as well as the "lasagne", there was a special of taccos with more cheesy bits and pieces and a wild mushroom croquette which came with some sort of truffle sauce. I'm afraid I was too busy tucking into my squashed salad to pay too much attention but there were four spotlessly clean plates by the end.

We'd had a few post-work sharpeners (imagine) so we didn't sample the cocktails. We did, however, enjoy a bottle or three of a £30 Aligoté, a mid-range choice from a decent enough selection. Service was very good, particularly from our very jolly waitress, although some of her colleagues looked like they could do with a good solid meal. Which, to come full circle, was exactly how I thought I was going to feel at the end of the meal: there were many jokes as we'd arrived about having a kebab on the way home. But in the end it was good. Very good in fact. This is accomplished, imaginative cooking, some of which even comes out of hot pots and pans, and if the determination to name some of the dishes after non-veggie equivalents is an unnecessary affectation the results have just about persuaded me to let them off.

SAF apparently stands for simple authentic food. Disingenuous, to say the least: that's a bit like squashing a salad and calling it a lasagne.

SAF 152-154 Curtain Road EX2A 3AT 020 7613 0007

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.

x

Still or sparkling...?

The thing about trying to get in early when a new restaurant opens (on this occasion the second day – and yet still the estimable Dos Hermanos beat us to it... just what is their secret?) is that you open yourself up the kind of teething troubles that inevitably beset a new business. You have to put up with a few lapses in knowledge among the staff, the odd vague or ambivalent advice on wine selection. But you do so with an air of forgiveness, knowing that what you'll get is (generally) people keen to please, the odd bargain here and there and – with a bit of luck – a healthy boost in visitors from the search engines.

The Water House, then, is a bit of a curate's egg (and therefore just about as expected for as aspirational restaurant in its opening week). Keen and affable staff, certainly, most of whom seem to have tried most of the items on the menu (good, but surprisingly rare, attention to detail). No obvious jitters in the kitchen, either, which turned out decent quality – if unspectacular – food with no lengthy delays. Here and there, though... the odd problem. The manager, enthusiastic enough in his welcome, seemed to be on permanent lookout for people he could give "the tour" to. This involved a trip outside to view the pipes (more on this shortly) and a consequent lack of attention to the diners, particularly those trying to order their bill. Too many restaurants let themselves down by making the process of leaving at the end of the meal drag on, and while it can certainly be forgiven in a new restaurant that hasn't even got its credit card machine working yet, I really shouldn't have had to go and find my own coat. Could have helped myself to all sorts in that cupboard...

Like its sister establishment Acorn House, the Water House is committed to an ecological and sustainable business model. Food is seasonal and locally sourced, water is drawn from the neighbouring Regent's Canal to feed the heating and cooling system and so on. And like Acorn House, this worthy heart is not worn on the restaurant's sleeve (although it is present on the back of the slightly rubbish T-Shirts the staff wear – yours for £8 if I recall). While some restaurants make a great (often slightly desperate) play for the green card, with paragraphs of mission statement guff of the menu and practically birth certificates for the chickens, these guys let you judge the food for itself, only filling you in on the tree-huggy details (and taking you on the tour) if you ask a few questions. Missing a trick? Maybe. But a refreshing and confident approach nonetheless.

I started with a winter salad: an interesting array of greens, including dandelion leaves, with some good contrasting flavours, studded with some slightly over-frazzled pancetta and bullets of pomegranate. I'm not normally one for a plainish salad but this was surprisingly pleasing. Antonia had the burrata di bufala, which came on toast with some crushed olives and was creamy, stringy and very moreish.

For mains I had pork loin with aubergine and spinach and a paprika sauce. This was pretty good but arranged in such a way (see crap pic) that you were pretty much guaranteed 30-odd identical mouthfuls, and consequently the dish dragged on after a while. Nice balanced flavours though, the smoky paprika and aubergine complementing the well judged spinach and perfectly cooked pork.

Antonia had potato ravioli in a rather loose cream and truffle oil sauce. A smallish number of big, flat ravioli with not much filling. A bit disappointing: it's not often you hear a vegetarian saying "It's not often I finish a meal and find myself craving a bacon sandwich". We shared a plate of good cheese to follow, let down slightly by the Montgomery cheddar, which felt like it had been pre-sliced some time ago (less obvious if this was the case with the rest).

The wine list is all organic and quite spendy, with only one or two bottles below the £30 mark (they have further selections by the glass). We were on tap water last night (presumably not from the canal) so we came out shy of £70 including service. Not cheap but certainly not bad value for some (almost) excellent quality grub.

So decent enough food and worthy without shouting it from the rooftops. Worthy of the trip, though, and the slightly scary diversion off the already slightly scary Kingsland Road? I'm not so sure.

Water House, 10 Orsman Road, London N1 5QJ 020 7033 0123

From the ridiculous to the sublime

After nearly three weeks on the wagon (strange but true) I'd been drooling for most of yesterday over the thought of the cool hit of a dry martini. A dinner plan had fallen through slightly but Antonia and I stuck to the bare bones of it by arriving at Angelus for an early supper. The lounge bar behind the restaurant is a lovely space for a pre-dinner sharpener and we duly settled in and ordered one each. Quel domage. Comfortably the worst DM I have ever had. Wetter than a mermaid's wet bits.

So after a decent enough meal, at least for the carnivorous half of the party (who got to suck on a pigeon's head), we decided to pop along to The East Room, a new offshoot of Milk & Honey, the members-only drinking club in Soho. The East Room, behind an anonymous door at the southern end of Tabernacle Street, is dangerously close to the office so I was keen to find out if it would do as a new after (or during) work drinking establishment.

And a great bar it is too. The main room is big but very comfortable. Lots of comfy sofas and plenty of bar stools if you want them. There's a buffet set up in the corner (not sure what the deal is there) and Enomatic machines dotted around the walls that will serve you up taster measures or glassfuls of some very fine New World wines. Once you've equipped yourself with a special card loaded up with cash the idea is that you can sample wines outside your usual budget, or just ones you're not sure about, without committing to a whole bottle. You can apparently keep an opened bottle in these gadgets for ages without the wine going off. They're not the most attractive machines but it's a nice idea and it'll be interesting to see if it catches on. Alas, I don't think they take Oyster cards.

So in theory you could go to East Room, buy yourself a glass of wine and not talk to anyone at all. Which, this close the usual anti-service hub of Hoxton, is quite frankly a pretty attractive prospect. But then you'd be missing out on one of most compelling aspects of the whole establishment: the staff. We could not have been better looked after. From the nice ladies who took our coats to the chap who was mixing our fantastic martinis to the head barman (who I am sure is the chap who plays Spiderman) who scurried off to choose us some brilliant wines from the magic machines... everyone was polite and professional but also friendly, clearly knowledgeable and refreshingly enthusiastic. Not something you can say for many of the bars in the area.

It's open to those members of the public who can find it for the next few weeks. I think they may have said till the end of April. And look: it's nearly home-time on a Friday. I'm off there now...

The East Room, 2a Tabernacle Street, London EC2A 4LU 07000 THSTRM (if you please)

Soup: a hero

After the grimmer than grim effort at Waterloo Brasserie, I'm pleased to say that my faith in soupe de poisson has been almost instantly restored. The example I had at the quirky Queen's Head & Artichoke just off Regents Park was among the best I've had, certainly outside France. The soup was gloriously warm, both in temperature and in colour, the saffron not overpowering, the fish base long and satisfying and the pre-loaded rouille and Gruyere toasts just the ticket. See? It's not that hard...

Other highlights from this long and slightly boozy Sunday lunch included an immensely satisfying plate of roast beef that only suffered through a slight gravy shortage, a fish tank in the upstairs loo and a well-priced wine list that boasted some very entertaining three-adjective descriptions. All of which I've completely forgotten. The roast, incidentally, included some of the finest roast potatoes I have ever eaten.

Highly recommended.

Queen's Head & Artichoke, 30-32 Albany Street, London NW1 4EA 020 7916 6206

A crime of poisson

I can forgive a new restaurant a lot of things.

I can understand if they haven't got the A team welcoming people at the door and this leads to confusion and a certain amount of brusqueness when taking the coats. They're having to train people up after all and hanging up a jacket while smiling at the same time is obviously going to be too much for some newcomers to the restaurant game.

I can just about forgive an overenthusiastic hand on the sound system's volume control, and even a deeply odd choice of music. I won't attempt to categorise it, but I somehow doubt it would have gone down well with the clientele of the pub I drove past recently on the Isle of Wight which boasted music "for your inner thirtysomething". In this case I can forgive it partly because (arguably) a big empty restaurant needs something to pep it up, but mostly because the maitre d' spotted the problem almost as soon as it started and did something about it without being asked.

And I can almost excuse a little shakiness from the sommellier about the wine list, although describing every wine from a page of spendy clarets as 'nice' wore a bit thin after a while.

Where I draw the line, though, is with quite the worst soup I have ever tasted. In a restaurant whose menu is basically a checklist of brasserie classics with a few voguish hearty sharing dishes thown in for good measure, you'd have thought the fish soup would have been a banker. Instead it was execrable. A layer of fat on top that must have been a quarter of an inch thick distorted both the colour and the taste of an underlying soup that had precious little of the latter in any case. I plodded around with the accoutrements while others tucked into some more successful offerings (indeed most of the rest of the food was pretty good) before giving it up as a very bad job. The waitress took the rejection pretty well considering, although it's not clear how her saying she'd it had looked wrong when she'd brought it out was supposed to help. I was offered a replacement which I could't face and not charged for the soup. But the damage had been done. And the chef having a laugh with his mates at one of the only other occupied tables and giving barely a second glace at the soup being sent back under his nose didn't exactly help.

The perpetrator of this fishy felony was the Waterloo Brasserie, recently opened just opposite the Old Vic. I should get in there quick. If you must.

Waterloo Brasserie, 119 Waterloo Road SE1 8UL 020 7960 0202

Menu for Hope: A Bacchic prize

Once a year food bloggers all over the world get together to hold a fundraising event.  It's called the Menu for Hope, was started by Chez Pim and takes the form of an online raffle.

Last year I was gutted that we missed the boat and our blog didn't take part.  This year, we almost missed the boat, but a last dash to the pier and a quick bit of front crawl means that we can now announce our prize.

One of the first and most exciting restaurants we reviewed on this blog was Bacchus, the restaurant who brought us 'fine dining in trainers' and some of the most innovatory cooking you'll find in London.  The people who run Bacchus have also been great friends and given us an insight into the restaurant industry.  It is with great pleasure that I can announce that Bacchus are providing our Menu for Hope prize.

The first part of the prize is to do a day stage with Nuno Mendes, the chef at Bacchus.  Nuno uses a variety of avant-garde techniques and is constantly experimenting to develop dishes.  During the day you'll be able to shadow Nuno in the Bacchus kitchen.  This will doubtless be an educational and entertaining experience.  Don't worry if you're not a whiz in the kitchen, the degree of interaction will be entirely up to you.  He's also an exceptionally nice chap.

The second part of the prize is a meal for one at the restaurant.  Bacchus' menu has certainly evolved and matured over the year and my last meal there was stunning.  Current dishes include seared langoustine with pork shoulder and salted orange, an amazing yuzu crab dish and a pine nut risotto.

Who's benefiting from this?

This year the Menu for Hope is supporting the World Food Programme, in particular a school lunch programme they run in Lesotho.  This not only feeds the kids and helps to keep them in school, this also supports local farmers.

Last year the Menu for Hope event raised over $62,000 . . . an impressive sum.

You should also have a look at the other prizes on offer, which include some rather big foodie names(Hesotn Blumenthal and Harold McGee to name but two) the full list can be found here:

Menu for Hope 4 prize list and entry form

I'll certainly be attempting to win some of those . . . fingers-crossed.

If you've got any questions, please leave a comment.

Remember, last entries are on December 21st . . .

Made of Bricks

I approached Brick Lane.  I had heard tell of a new supper club.  Would this be a private club, like the famous one run by the Swiss chef?  Perhaps I'd have to adopt some strange misogynistic ethos?  I hoped not.  Surely the Brickhouse would be more democratic and have some East London style?  I strode past the beigel bakeries and glanced sadly at the down-by-law hookah lounges.

Examining the menu outside Brickhouse, the nature of the club became clear.  There isn't just food on offer, there's a bit of showbiz.  In the evenings you get a performance to go with your meal.  A proper performance . . . not a shouty chef or a waiter with dramatic inclinations.  Mostly it seems to be burlesque on offer - that can cover, or uncover, a multitude of sins.

I was there at lunchtime though, so the trapeze hung unused while I ordered.  This does mean you that lunch is cheaper than dinner though - £24 for three courses rather than £35 in the evening.  The menu looks reasonably contemporary and there are nods haute cuisine fashion - foams and shotglasses, sherberts and savoury ice cream.

Bread, from the Bread Factory, was fresh and delicious, I particularly liked some with tomato in it. Venison carpaccio made a good light starter though the Szechaun pepper was barely noticeable. The parmesan used was inoffensive but the dish would have been vastly improved by using a better one.

As a main course I had a dish of roasted scallops with parmesan mash, pearl onions , bacon and sun-dried tomatoes.  I wolfed this down.  it's a good combination of flavours, the scallops were fresh and succulent too.  For a restaurant with foodie ambitions though, this dish is probably a little boring.  I'd love to see something here to surprise or delight me.  Go on, tip it into the 'wow' category.

For dessert, a lemon parfait with mascarpone and citrus 'sherbert'.  Now the parfait was nice enough, though I would have welcomed some more lemony bitterness.  What makes the sauce a sherbert though?  Did it fizz?  Was it powdery?

So, I can't really complain - the food was tasty and well-executed.  And this is a more ambitious kind of food than Brick Lane has seen before.  I'd love to see a bit more technical innovation and a more certain identity than simply 'Modern European'.

The supper club is a good idea too.  Reindeer effectively proved the concept and the suitability of the locale last Christmas.  I'm sure some people will see good food as an ideal excuse to see some tasteful deshabillé exhibitions . . . I will have to go back soon and check their full evening menu.

Brickhouse, 152c Brick Lane E1  020 7247 0005