Unqualified Restaurant Reservations

☆ / ££

It’s all my own fault and I place the blame fully on myself. We could have gone a few dozen metres further down the road to Silk Road. We could have eaten some of the most interesting and delicious ‘Chinese’ food (’Chinese’ because Xinjiang province is 2,000 miles from Beijing and 2,100 from Hong Kong) for sale in London. We could have eaten a gigantic meal and paid a pittance.

But, alas, my obsession with trying new places and reporting my findings knows no bounds. If we had gone to Silk Road I’d have an itching feeling—only in the back of my mind, but nevertheless present—a little suspicion that maybe Wuli Wuli was worth a try and I should have spent my scarce restauranting time and money finding out.

Of course, it wasn’t, and I should have known that. Wuli Wuli is pedestrian in the extreme. I only considered it as a possibility at all—rather than consigning it to a mental scrapheap like the buffet Chineses of Camberwell—because back in 2011 a few bloggers liked it. But I have an inkling that a few of these rode back on their comments at some time in the intervening period, and on the strength of my experience they’d be wholly justified in so doing.

I came with one piece of info: a suggestion that the Cantonese dishes were OK but that the Sichuan dishes were good. Well, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of Sichuan food, even when ‘mouth-watering chicken’ is rendered as ‘saliva chicken’. But these were not exactly what I expected.

The aubergine with minced pork—the only thing I remembered to photograph—was not the fish-fragrant aubergine I expected. In fact, it wasn’t even similar to fish-fragrant aubergine in any way. Firstly, it was deep-fried in a thin (potato flour?) batter; secondly instead of the perversely wonderful slimy texture I expect and desire it was solid, almost like a parsnip. I can’t say it wasn’t both savoury and satisfying inside—it was—but the sauce was oversweet, sickly and tasted somehow sticky. It reminded me of a diabolical Chinese meal I once ate in Nice.

The dim sum were unimpressive. This was brought into relief not only by the memory of the peerless boiled dim sum at Silk Road just a few steps away, but also the tremendous ones sold in Cambridge market I ate on Thursday. Where the Cambridge dumplings were hot, delicate, and with the signature spicy and numbing taste of the wonderful Sichuan pepper, these were tepid, chewy and tasted of cheap meat. What’s more, these cost £4.99 for six, rather than £5 for twelve.

The beef brisket with flat noodles in soup was yet another disappointment. The brisket was OK: some tender lumps and some chewy ones; many adorned with connective tissue and membrane, some with little bits of soft fat. It’s hard to make eating bits of beef bad on balance. The soup was also OK: it didn’t taste of much but there was a hint of star anise, beef, and chilli pepper. 

But the noodles were useless. I’ve had wide flat noodles that were so good I think about their chewy substantialness most days. Guess where I had them? The Silk Road. These were thin, impossibly difficult to manipulate (we saw a Chinese family at another table having similar trouble so I won’t put it entirely down to incompetence) and massively overcooked. Each bite was a slap in the face, reminding me of all the terrible culinary decisions I’ve made.

I plan—in the interests of extreme fairness to a local restaurant—to order some Wuli Wuli takeaway (which is a good 50% cheaper than eating in) tomorrow, as perhaps I stumbled upon three rubbish dishes. But I don’t think so. I suspect these dishes were entirely representative, and on the strength of them I’d warn you to avoid Wuli Wuli. Camberwell already has a glorious Chinese restaurant and I suppose it’s greedy of us to expect a second.

As well as reviewing food here, I also review for ImALondoner.com and, occasionally, The Culture Trip. With the standard warning that I’ve got better over time at writing this stuff, and so the older stuff is less well-written than the newer stuff, here they are:

No 32 The Old Town, Clapham ☆☆ / ££

Local pub-restaurant right by the common—mediocre food, great roof terrace, decent cocktails.

Cuisson Pop-Down, Piccadilly ☆☆ / £££

Short-term underground pop-up, surprisingly bad given the chefs’ chops, maybe I don’t ‘get it’.

Moc Kitchen, Embankment ☆☆ / ££

Nestled right between Embankment and Charing Cross stations, Moc Kitchen is decent but unexceptional Vietnamese food at decent prices.

The Pearson Room, Canary Wharf  ☆☆☆ / £££

Despite being in a Reebok Sports Club in Canary Wharf, The Pearson Room is actually quite good.

Evoluzione @ Hotel Xenia, Gloucester Road ☆☆ / ££££

Didn’t come off at all; food was mostly bland, with some tasty dishes. Had a good time but wouldn’t recommend anyone else spending all that money.

Pedler, Peckham + Naughty Piglets, Brixton + Peckham Bazaar, Peckham + The Manor, Clapham North all ☆☆☆☆ or ☆☆☆☆☆

A great bunch of new(ish) South London joints, I highly recommend them all.

☆☆ / £

I went to Dumplings Legend because it appeared on Lizzie Mabbott’s (author of Chinatown Kitchen) guide to Chinatown as somewhere with good dim sum. Well, that remains to be proved, and as I said before, could reasonably be proved, since the menu is so big and my survey of five dishes was so narrow. What we ate was good but unspectacular—as my experience with Chinatown has been in general. I’ve never had a bad meal in a Chinatown restaurant, but I’ve never had a meal I really enjoyed either.

We ordered five dim sum off the specialty menu—whose dishes weirdly enough did not appear to exist on the main menu at all. A bit like the British constitution, this menu was not codified and instead spread around a number of documents, some of them obscure. 

The prawn cheung fun we got first were interesting: the outer coating was slick, slippery and succulent like cheung fun normally are, but inside there was a thin, somewhat crispy layer of what seemed to be tofu skin aka tofu bamboo (a high-protein side-product made in the tofu production process). Overall the dish was hard to prise apart at the severed slits and had a tendency to disintegrate—but if you did manage to get it via the sweet soy dip and into your mouth it was very satisfying, filled with little rubbery chunks of prawn and crunchy kernels of chestnut.

The fish dim sum were less good. I don’t know what it was about both the sea bass one and the other ‘seafood’ one, but the fish tasted cheap and unseasoned. I don’t necessarily have a big problem with fishy tastes, but here it was like a solid blended lump of lidl pollock. Also—and this is a possibly anachronistic personal pet hate when it comes to dim sum—the wrapper kept coming away from the contiguous insides.

The general seafood variety, pictured above, had truffles on top but I’m not sure they added much to the dish. They looked pretty cool though, a bit like a rice wrapper abalone.

I haven’t pictured one dish, which I believe was perfectly decent crab. Above are a take on prawn toast. They took huge king prawns, butterflied them, spread them on a piece of bread, battered the whole concoction, added black and white sesame to the top, and deep fried the whole lot. It wasn’t nearly as good as the heavenly deep fried prawn on sugar cane at Elephant & Castle’s Dragon Castle, but it was still a pleasantly different version of a standard favourite. There’s just something about the guilty fattiness of deep-fried bread that goes perfectly with the fresh cleanness of shrimp.

Since you pay about twelve pounds a head including service and tea, even though Dumplings Legend is not the best, overall I can’t fault it and would never put someone off going. Indeed, maybe I’d have loved the place had I chosen different dim sum. I almost expect this, because I can’t really bring myself to believe that a joint where old women hand-wrap dim sum in a glass box at the entrance of a restaurant is anything less than excellent.

☆☆☆ / ££££

After a few months without online or mobile banking for stupid reasons, I discovered I was extremely poor and would need to cut back on my excessive eating out. Unluckily, I made this discovery just days before my reservation at Duck & Waffle—even made months in advance I could only get a spot at 9.30, somewhat later than I usually eat.

A way to go out in style, I suppose. While Duck & Waffle’s food is not outrageously expensive—you could keep your spending down to £30/head plus service—the drinks are rather pricey. A cocktail is at least £14, and a mere bottle of beer is £7; the cheapest wine on the bar wine list is £45. 

One can’t really object, since what you are paying for is a rather scarce view of practically the entirety of London. During the day, this isn’t much of a boast; London is mostly filled with soulless average buildings, with a smattering of the truly beautiful and the offensively ugly (all, of course, in my completely non-expert opinion). But lit up at night, average buildings look beautiful. Compare Hong Kong by day and by night:

The effect is similar in modern London. Anyway, I won’t harp on: the view is excellent and that’s what you’re paying for and no one could possibly object because Duck & Waffle is one of the capital’s most famous restaurants and everyone knows in advance what to expect.

The crowd was quite an interesting one. About 50% young Asians—I couldn’t tell whether they were British, international jet-setters or tourists—and the other 50% equally split between groups that looked like rich tourists and City folk. I don’t know what I expected, but certainly this suggests lots of people are looking at lists of ‘London’s best restaurants’.

This made me think of where I would suggest the visiting tourist ate. Lists of ‘best restaurants’ tend not to be that useful, because so many are not specifically British, English or London-ish. I’m sure there are great burger joints or modern European fine dining restaurants in Madrid or Munich or Marseille but when I go there I want something representative rather than something abstractly good. And there’s not much British about Duck & Waffle.

The food was good though. We asked the waitress what her favourite of the breads was—I assumed that because they wanted you to pay £7 for the bread, it must be special—and we went for it, a parmesan and artichoke one. It was soft and doughy inside with a thick melted cheese coating and thumb-sized lumps of artichoke heart generously dotted around inside.

Lamb breast was hard to cut through; we needed a better knife. The layers tended to come apart together, latitudinally, rather than longitudinal cross sections as the diner desires. Otherwise it was a deep flavour, reminiscent of mutton, but balanced perfectly with the lightly sweet sauce and copious (dried?) gooseberries. It was also done to a dark Maillard-brown crisp.

Goose foie gras creme brûlée is the sort of dish you just can’t help ordering. Cracking the top was as satisfying as usual and while it’s not exactly the sort of thing I’d like to eat every day—even with the comfortingly sweet brioche it was served with—the mix of caramelised sugar and the profound, special, fattiness of the well-fed goose’s liver sticks with you.

When you chop up a raw piece of fillet you expect tender. I have no doubt this was a good piece as it was soft almost (but not) to a fault—who needs flavour when you’ve got texture like this. But the dish did have flavour, with some of the sweetest slivers of shallot I’ve met yet.

If I go to a restaurant, I order the thing with their name on it. This is just a thing I do—I can’t help it—although I make an exception if it’s their ““famous”” burger. Here the commandment was especially salient, given that the eponymous dish also does what it says on the tin. 

The egg and leg are much bigger than they look on the picture—this actually takes a fair bit of time to eat. And these guys know how to confit: leaving a solid crispy edge and dark tender pieces of flesh underneath. The maple syrup could well have been shop bought, but then shop bought maple syrup is very good so that’s no criticism. The waffle wasn’t any different to any other I’ve eaten but that’s not a criticism either. The dish was delicious and I will be recreating it at home.

Finally we got a smoked mozzarella salad, mainly because I was curious what smoked mozzarella tasted like. Actually it tasted exactly as you’d imagine. The mild background protein flavour of mozzarella with a layer of smoke on top. Sort of like the difference between cheddar and smoked cheddar.

Overall the food at Duck & Waffle is good, the service is good, the dusky atmosphere is good, the amazingly speedy lift is excellent and it feels scarily like you’re falling on the way down—and of course the view is excellent. It’s certainly not there as a cynically money-grabbing ploy (as apparently is also the case for Sushi Samba, on the couple of floors below). But it is nevertheless the sort of place where dropping hundreds of pounds would be outrageously easy—caveat emptor.

☆☆☆☆ / £££

I went to Salon with my parents and siblings for Father’s Day. I had searched through dozens of London’s most highly-recommended restaurants and found them too expensive (we went to Hibiscus for my sister’s birthday a year or so ago and I think the financial pain is still firmly embedded in my parents’ memories), too far away or too closed on Sundays.

Salon, part-deli-part-restaurant, was about the fifteenth place I suggested, and once my parents got over the idea that Brixton was a difficult place to get to, appeared to perfectly fit the niche I was looking for. Price-wise, I was looking for something like The Manor, The Dairy, or Picture—a few interesting courses for £30-45. Nice, but not extravagant. Salon offered a four course menu for £29, with bread, appetisers, and petit fours as well (and we ordered a few snacks).

The food was all good—more on that later—but Salon ended up being perfect not because we all really enjoyed the food, but because the lunch was so lovely in such a rounded way. For example: my brother is a very very fussy eater, like I was even at his age, and outside of dishes he is used to at home will only eat simple plain foods. The chef came out and went through a welter of the mishmash of things he had in the kitchen that Alex might like—he settled on hot-smoked salmon with boiled vegetables. They brought us a bottle of champagne even though there was none on the menu, and each time we had a new glass of wine they gave us a few different ones to try.

The restaurant at Salon is upstairs on the first floor of Brixton Village Market. They only have about 15 covers, which made the profusion of staff (something like three waiters and two chefs) seem a bit surprising, especially combined with the very reasonable pricing. It’s decorated in a familiar worn-old-wood, unharmonious chairs and benches, messy-but-tidy way—my parents thought it very hip.

We ordered samphire tempura as a snack—who can resist a combination of two things you love you’ve never tried before—which came off pretty well. It was very salty, especially with the creamy anchovy sauce underneath, and the batter was very delicate.

I can’t even remember what that cucumber dish was like outside of obvious things like ‘refreshing’, ‘clean-tasting’, and ‘palate-cleansing’, but the pea hummus and linseed crackers were fantastic. The crackers seemed to be entirely made of linseeds (aka flax seeds) which was novel, and made them extremely light and brittle. The pea hummus didn’t seem to have anything to do with tahini or chick peas, it was just a delicious cold pea purée.

Bread was as good as you get. Tough, chewy crust; warm straight-out-of-the-oven fluffy dense inner bread, and served with butter topped with coarse sea salt.

Course one was my least favourite. The cod cheeks were their usual substantial rubberiness, a bit like prawn or lobster, though with a denser more consistent middle. And courgette is, in my view, by far for the better for being shaved and served raw or lightly cooked rather than soft and mushy as I often find it. But the elderflower tempura tasted of batter rather than the fresh fragrance I was expecting, and something about the sauce was cloying, a bit like when you get too much mayo.

Ugly picture aside, course two was excellent. The various kinds of tomato were exactly the sharp sweet slightly-sour flavour to balance the thick yoghurt.

Four our main we each received a majestic great lump of pork belly. I have ruminated and ruminated but I can’t work out how they did the crackling and yet kept the pork so perfectly cooked. If it hadn’t been so firmly attached to the rest of the meat I would naturally assume—due to the bone-dry, bubbly-textured top—they had taken it off and deep-fried it, with or without dehydrating it beforehand. I feel sure shallow-frying it skin-down wouldn’t have produced this result. But whatever the chef’s secret, the crackling was truly some of the best I’ve ever had, not rockily dense, but crispy and layered with a sticky moreish underside just above the meat. The meat itself was tender in a layered way that is probably the reason for pork belly’s omnipresence on menus nowadays.

The photo makes it look a bit normal but the alcoholic mess was—in my eyes—out of this world good and the best dish of the night. Just like pork belly, the trend towards crumbs is more and more obvious when they are somehow so good. I mean they’re just crumbled up bits of wheat/sugar/egg/fat right? But somehow combining them with ice cream, or ice cream, black cherries, strawberries and a little bit of alcoholic fruity sauce as here, is glorious. My mum has trouble with dairy so they whipped her up a sorbet.

After dessert we had coffee and they brought us some absolutely amazing salted caramel dark chocolate drops. Unlike, say, a Cadbury’s Caramel bar, the caramel wasn’t verging on liquid, but an extremely dense substance close to a solid. They were so wonderful that we tried to buy some downstairs as we left but sadly they’d run out.

The food at Salon was great, but the care they took with us elevated the meal to another level.

☆☆☆ / ££

One reason I strongly favour short, single-page, menus is that they tend to mean the restaurant serves better food. This could be coincidental—or it could be because a shorter menu allows them to focus on what they do well. Another reason is that it alleviates the paradox of choice where deciding between lots of good-sounding options is psychically costly. But another, sillier and more self-serving reason, is that if I go to a restaurant with a short menu I can try a good sample of their options in one meal and be more or less certain that I’ve got a fair idea of whether the place is good or bad.

Now Chinese restaurants, at least those run by Chinese people, and especially those in Chinatown, tend to have gigantic menus, with dozens of pages of dishes, but unlike with most other restaurants length does not seem to have any relationship whatsoever with quality. But I still find myself ruing the length because I could easily, in picking four dishes out of a couple hundred, miss out on something key or pick something divisive.

So I am never completely certain whether I’ll review a long-menued spot or not, and I feel like suggesting you take my verdict with a pinch of salt. I find Chinatown arcane, and I tend to pick purely based on what I intuit at the time. I have found one good guide to the district, and hopefully this will guide me in the future.

I had been told Hung’s did good congee, and although I am completely unqualified to tell you whether in fact this was good congee, because I’ve never had any other congee, I can definitely tell you that it was good. We got it with chicken and roast duck (next time I won’t be able to resist preserved egg and shredded pork, but I think offal might be a bit of a risk). 

If you’ve not eaten congee, like I hadn’t till this point, then it’s basically overcooked rice in stock with ‘stuff’ added (here is a nice guide). Texturally it’s an unbelievably thick gloop, occasionally punctuated by spring onions or little shards of ginger, as well as the meat. I suspect it would be excellent plain as well. As I say I’m not qualified to judge but we ate the whole thing down and even tipped our BBQ meats in to enjoy the combination. Oh yeah and it would properly fill you up for lunch despite costing only £6.

We are not monomaniacal, but we were clearly feeling rather greedy, and decided to get a giant plate of BBQ roast pork and (more) roast duck. I was surprised to find it all cold, but I suspect that’s me being ignorant more than them doing something badly or wrong. The pork came in thin slices (very tender and lovely to eat) and thicker slices (with chewy bits of connecting tissue and hard fat). As I said, since it was cold we decided to experimentally tip it in the congee which killed two birds with one stone: heating the lumps of meat up and cooling the rice concoction down. It was a huge plate and cost something like £9.50.

I couldn’t go for Chinese lunch and get no dim sum. These grilled pork ones were £4.20 and similar to any others you’ve had, not particularly good (for dim sum—obviously they were delicious relative to food in general) and not bad.

Soup was definitely the general mood. This hot and sour soup was as shockingly glutinous and thick as they always are, and came with the bewildering assortment of silken tofu, strands of pork, little slices of red and green chillies, unknown mushrooms and so on. It was more sour than hot, but I suspect my avoiding crunching too many of the chillies had something to do with that.

Because we drank tea and because the place was generally so cheap, we went away completely full and spent about £28 including service. So a good place for lunch, right? Well it’s hard to say conclusively. It’s at least possible that half of the dishes on the menu are terrible and another third are delicious beyond belief to the degree that my review is useless. But I can see myself going back, and I think that’s worth at least something.

☆☆☆ / ££££

Sometimes reviewing restaurants feels like a fool’s game: they change so much by the time any reader actually goes there that your verdict might be worse than useless; misleading and unfair. Nowhere is that more true than at Carousel, a fact hinted at by its very name—Leandro Carreira’s last night is tonight, so little I say can possibly be held either in favour of or against the restaurant itself.

Indeed, even during Carreira’s 9-day spell at Carousel he appeared to cook very different menus—at least comparing the sample menu given on the website to what I actually ate their last night. I can imagine a chain of sophisticated arguments holding that since the guys behind Carousel chose Carreira, the standard of the food he served redounds onto them, and that one can predict a similar standard from future residencies. But I don’t think this is plausible at all. I’d need to go back a number of other times to make any judgement of the like.

As it happens, I like the idea behind Carousel, which opened in August 2014 to quite a lot of hype, enough that I am likely to one day be this sort of qualified judge, who can really tell you how likely the food is to be good from repeated experience. But it was just the idea that I really loved; the food was mixed to say the least, and with wine (the cheapest bottle of wine on the menu) we ended up handing over something like £130 between two.

We started with an appetiser, or amuse bouche, which was a spinach leaf wrapped around spiced prawn paste (I actually heard ‘brawn’, not ‘prawn’, but I’m pretty sure it was from the sea, not a pig’s head). I always wonder whether you should price these in—are amuse a bonus (as they present them) or something you should expect? They felt pretty pointless. The mushy spinach bite was there, along with a thick grainy paste, and it did indeed taste a bit of brown shrimp. But the vaunted variety of spice was perhaps too much, blending to bland nothingness rather than interesting complexity.

The next dish was not my thing at all! Two tiny little slivers of raw scallop immersed in a cloudy foamy light broth that tasted of… nothing? I don’t know, mushroom? But it was sweet and the powdery grating, which seemed to be of some sort of nut, tasted more like chocolate. It was a bit like eating a bowl of sweetened skimmed milk with two plops of flavourless wobbly jelly.

The second course proper was two cold but lightly-cooked spears of asparagus with a thick creamy substance on top of them. Once again, I either lack the frame of reference to accurately describe the flavour here or it was a mishmash of enough things that all of the flavours melded together into a general niceness. And I did find it rather nice. It was sort of like white chocolate, and once again had a pleasant grainy texture that it was nice to pull through your mouth and feel as well as tasting.

The dishes were all ridiculously small, something which always perplexes me, since surely a trivial proportion of their costs are accounted for by the main ingredients in their dishes. Even an exceptional asparagus spear will only cost you in the tens of pence; surely the most outrageously extravagant scallop is only going to set you back a couple of quid? What’s more, plenty of similar places manage to fill you up by the time you leave without heavy reliance on bread.

But I can’t say this was a serious concern, because we were amply provided with excellent slices of home-made bread, and it was served with a proper portion of butter. The butter was actually one of my highlights of the night—it was whipped with roasted yeast—aka nutritional yeast, the supplement that gives flavour to vegan food and provides them with bioavailable vitamin B12. I am going to steal Sam’s very apt characterisation and say it tasted like very strong and fancy Laughing Cow. I slathered about 10 pieces of bread with it.

The courses after here got better. Next came a slow-cooked egg yolk whose texture and flavour was absolutely fascinating: thick, dense and stickily chewy; and somehow with the flavour of perfectly-done runny yolk. It looked like it might pop and spread out like an oil spill but it was actually completely solid. However, it came on chicken liver paté and as much as I try and try and try to get myself to like chicken liver it always tastes like something I shouldn’t be eating and need to cover up with other better stuff. The light sauce round the edge was a light zingy lime and didn’t intrude too much on the dish overall.

We were offered an extra mackerel course for £8.50. Actually, I think offering us an extra course for more money is a bit of a scam. If you have an extra course and you believe in it couldn’t it just be part of the menu? I know that I didn’t have to go for it but it just seems a bit jammy and sordid to ask me at the table. Perhaps this is the only way interesting ventures like this can turn a profit.

The mackerel was very interesting: crispy and well-done on the skin-side but completely raw and pink on the other. It managed to combine some of the good elements both of sushi and of your standard restaurant fish fillets. It came with bitter and crunchy dandelion. My only complaint would be restating the point above: isn’t mackerel cheap enough that they could afford to give me more than a couple thin slivers?

The final course on the normal savoury menu was cuttlefish with jersey royals. The potatoes were really excellently cooked to a slightly crunchy dryness on the outside. The cuttlefish was fairly generously proportioned relative to the rest of the courses, and had that je ne sais quoi texture that it has when it’s good. I’m not sure if this is down to how it’s cooked or getting a good fresh cephalopod, but you see it calamari too. Bad calamari are rubbery, good calamari have a texture with a consistent give: you don’t burst through it, you wade. It was the same with this cuttlefish.

The dessert was actually the best: densely-packed and heavy folded layers of sweet (portuguese?) cake. I need to start taking notes or recording myself because by this point I had had a few pints and half a bottle of wine and my memory for exactly what it tasted like is not exactly clear.

What is the verdict on Carousel? What can be the verdict on place where the food direction changes so starkly so quickly (Carreira was there from 3rd - 12th June)? Maybe if I went a dozen times I could tell you if it was good or bad in general—I’m not sure if I could. I suppose the fact that I was served very international-tasting food, rather than anything particularly strongly linked with the Basque region, is an indicator that maybe this is what one should standardly expect. But then again maybe not; this could just be Carreira’s own choice and others could be completely different.

Usually I intend my reviews as a recommendation or guide or warning or something just general useful to the reader, but here it’s more just a record of something that happened. I suppose that’s OK too.

☆☆☆☆ / £££

Now that I’ve gone to Artusi I think I’ve been to all the officially good restaurants in Peckham. Peckham Bazaar, The Begging Bowl, Pedler and Artusi—those are the only ones I’ve heard of as being good and I’ve been to them all. They’re all actually great, and Peckham isn’t exactly huge so this isn’t a dig at all.

I strolled in on Tuesday—I couldn’t get a booking but they have a communal table which we actually had to ourselves—after the re-opening of the rooftop bar on the Bussey Building (well worth visiting, nice beers and they have Pizza Pilgrims for £6, £7 or £8). They served us rapidly, with each dish following more or less as soon as we’d finished the previous one, and we were out in something like an hour.

The menu is on a chalkboard—see the unclear photo below complete with invading fingers—and it’s short and to-the-point. There are a few £6 to £8 starters, some pasta that you can get big or small, a few proper mains, and a dessert. This is exactly how I like menus to be. Do a couple of things very well, not ten things decently. Oh yeah and they sold Negronis for just £5.50!

We had the bulls heart tomatoes with bagna càuda—a warm and fairly mild anchovy/garlic/olive oil/butter concoction. It was a pretty simple dish, in essence just tomatoes and cream. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to divine or define what bagna càuda was without looking it up. There were some satisfyingly crunchy crumbs on top.

We also got the broccoli with ricotta and nduja. The broccoli was a bit softer than I like—I prefer it to be more or less uncooked—but it was probably a more appropriate as a vessel for the spicy nduja, balanced artfully with the forgiving and absorbing mild cloud of ricotta.

For primi we had the tagliatelle (small serving) with sausage and saffron ragu. Most of the time I eat boringly few carbs as my only nod to dietary restriction, but I certainly don’t hold back on restaurant bread, and occasionally, I have pasta. One of the ways this benefits me is that I tend to really appreciate pasta when I do have it, especially when it’s really fresh, stretchy, and softly chewy. The sauce was really just heavily seasoned meat and cheese and tomato which is really what I want from it. We wolfed it down.

The final savoury was suckling pork. It came like a roast dinner, with red onions, spinach and roast potatoes. It’s nice to see that the tendency to be specific about all the ingredients in a dish—especially when it comes to animal breeds—is being extended to potatoes. These ‘pink fir apple’ variety ones look a bit like ginger when they’re raw. They didn’t seem that special to me when I ate them but what do I know. The spinach and onions were also quite regular, though very nice, complements.

The suckling pig stood out. I haven’t had suckling pig remotely enough times either to call myself an authority or to not order it whenever I see it. Usually when you have pig skin you want it to be crispy, and by no means am I talking down that illustrious style and school of thought. But the skin and fat here were sticky and chewy almost like a thick sheet of underdone lasagne, albeit one stuck to a wodge of soft unctuous pork fat. It was tender and salty layers of just what I was looking for.

The dessert was pretty good too. I wasn’t exactly sure what olive oil cake was going to be, but I guess I should have realised it was just going to be a normal cake with olive oil performing the role butter usually performs. The cake was a decent but unexceptional cake. The ginger ice cream on the side there was very good, although I always find the balance between the the base ice cream flavour—all creamy and expansive—and the super clean fresh zingy ginger a bit jarring.

Whereas Valentina Fine Foods is the epitome of the otiose Italian restaurant, places like Artusi are exactly why the cuisine is so prominent and prevalent across London. Simple, inventive dishes that you might well not have eaten before. And Artusi is good not only because it serves good food—it just feels like a nice place to be, with its short menu, few covers, open kitchen and communal table in the back. How many places can you get all that and also walk away spending £30 or less with a cocktail?

☆☆☆ / £££

Franklin’s, which I stumbled into more or less randomly at the end of a six hour walk across beautiful sunny South London, is my kind of restaurant. By that I don’t necessarily mean that it’s one of my favourite restaurants—it would be very perverse to give it three stars out of five if it was—but that it attempts restauranting in a way I grok.

For me, the most important guide to whether a restaurant is going to be good is the menu. This is a bit weird. If I have set tastes, and if my tastes correlate with everyone else’s tastes—and I think both of these are true—couldn’t restaurants fool me by having a good menu without necessarily investing in any other element? 

It seems obvious that they could and that the menu as a guide to a good restaurant should be circumvented by canny restaurants. But apparently they haven’t worked this out yet and anything that looks like the above is more or less guaranteed to be good. 

What is so good about it? The obvious printed-out ephemeral nature of a daily menu is appealing, along with the cocktail special (who knows or cares if they are going to serve that tomorrow as well); the separate oyster section, and their individual sale; the obviously interesting options—all of these feature. Best of all on this specific sheet is the final section I had to ask about. Why offer black pudding, Welsh rarebit, woodcock (!) at the very end of the menu, post-dessert?

(The answer is that it’s apparently a ye olde Englishe tradition, and also that Scotch woodcock is a type of scrambled eggs with anchovies rather than, er, a game bird from Scotland; i.e. something much more in fitting with the other options.)

Franklin’s isn’t particularly cheap, and it’s not nearly one of my favourite restaurants. It was practically empty when I was there, and there’s nothing stand-out about the fittings or the decor. But at the same time I really admire the place, and I wouldn’t shy away from recommending it to just about anyone looking for a spot in this end of town.

The oysters, funnily enough, were the best of the lot. The biggest fullest most substantial oysters I can ever remember eating (apparently it’s just the season) with the usual accoutrements. Perhaps every meal should start this way? £2 and everything is somehow thrown into a more enjoyable light.

I couldn’t possibly not pick the pickled wood pigeon. I mean: who pickles a wood pigeon? I suppose what was really surprising is that the taste is quite easily imaginable—basically just a light game flavour mixed with a light hint of gherkin. Texturally it was dense and, although not as moist as, say, a fried pigeon breast, not nearly as dry or solid as it looks above. It came with capers and pesto and, weirdly, a large chunk of inedible mass attached onto one of the breast pieces.

Soused mackerel was the other starter, with samphire and roast tomatoes. While my companion liked this best, I’ve got to say that I found the mackerel’s fishy-fish-fishiness somewhat overpowering. I’m used to milder white fish with cherry tomatoes and mackerel; there the vegetables are a complement rather than a competitor.

I never pass over sweetbreads on a menu, and here I was treated with a good half dozen folded-thumb-size chunks of pancreas. At least, I thought sweetbreads were the pancreas—apparently they can be the thymus too. Is there much difference between the two? I’ve never heard of this distinction before. They were that distinctive middle between flesh and fat, not the best I’ve had but nicely crisped up on the outside and a good component to the dish. The chick peas came in a warming friendly broth.

Roast pork was very down the line, and much bigger than the picture makes it appear. It was very generous indeed, with two thick slices of what I assume was loin, three big potatoes, a couple parsnips, a couple carrots, a sizeable splodge of apple sauce and a heavy hardened slate of crackling. I can’t think of anything interesting to say about it—the pork was tender and juicy and the potatoes were cooked crispy.

For dessert—I couldn’t summon up the hunger to make it to that interesting final course—I had a prune and almond tart. The cream in the picture is messed up because I dropped my phone in it (don’t worry: the phone is fine). Now I’m a huge fan of both prunes and almonds, but for some reason this tart didn’t hit the spot. It just sort of tasted… bland. I could see that there was cakey almond bits and then lumps of prune, but it seemed like their flavour had been sucked out. It wasn’t exactly bad, just not that good.

£44 a head plus service isn’t an expensive three course meal with two cocktails each—it’s roundabout normal for London, even potentially near the lower end—but eating out is expensive in general. £50 is a lot of money to throw at lunch. What’s interesting about Franklin’s relative to all the other restaurants that I’ve given three stars to is that I feel myself eager to go back to see what they’ll do next time.

☆☆☆☆☆ / ££

The last restaurant that I completely gushed about on this blog was also, like Chilli Cool, focused on the famous cuisine of Sichuan province in China. But A Wong, in Pimlico, near Victoria station, is the sort of place where you’re likely to spend more than £50 a head in a darkened room for food that feels quite fine/fancy. If you’re me, you also bump into Iain Duncan Smith.

Perhaps this is no coincidence: my favourite cookbook is also Sichuanese; the wonderful Every Grain of Rice by Fuchsia Dunlop, the first Western woman to train in a Chinese cookery school (buy it now for £8 to 12, you won’t regret it).

At Chilli Cool, we ate eight dishes between the six of us, and ordered at least 12 Tsing-Taos—but we spent something like £23 a head including your standard 12.5% service charge. It looks much more like something you’d see in Hong Kong (I haven’t been to the mainland): a bunch of wooden benches jammed into a square well-lit room with a vague canteen-y vibe. 

The waiter is not a young Eastern European woman but a middle-aged man, surely a first-generation immigrant from China. All smiles, he has no qualms about telling you about numerous things you won’t like on the menu, not to mention telling you that you should steer clear of going next door for hotpot (Chilli Cool has two entrances: one for regular dishes, and one selling all-you-can-eat hotpot for £20/head).

The food is gloriously fantastic, jammed full of extreme savouriness, light sweetness, fermented flavours, very hot spice, and the signature ‘numbing’ mouth-flavour of the Sichuan pepper. It consistently proves Fuchsia Dunlop’s oft-repeated claim that traditional Chinese recipes are based around maximising the amount of flavour you get out of meat—many dishes had just a sprinkle of pork mince and yet tasted so substantial and somehow ‘real’ in a way vegetable dishes often don’t.

The gang were initially sceptical about my order choices—Nick had never had aubergine he liked and everyone was surprised that I wanted green beans, given my typically monomaniacal focus on flesh. Their scepticism vanished when they tasted the dishes. What can you say about the way Chinese cuisine handles pork mince? Somehow it comes out better than anywhere else, almost like it’s deep-fried (but how would that work, it seems impossible!) The green beans were approximately exactly in the middle of soft and hard and the dry-frying seemed to add flavour like somehow the chefs had managed to achieve a Maillard Effect with vegetables.

The best dish, most of us agreed, was the fish fragrant aubergine. It was just perfect. Seriously: if you don’t like aubergine go to Chilli Cool and eat their aubergine now (it’s not actually called ‘fish-fragrant aubergine’; they’ve generated some nonsensical phrase with babelfish or google translate and I’ve forgotten it already). The vegetable—actually a fruit according to wiki—comes in very solid and substantial lumps, with a slick soft texture. It carries all the central Sichuan lightly-sweet hotness. The sort of sweetness and hotness where neither would overpower you even if you munched through a whole plate. And of course the Sichuan pepper is sitting right in the background.

Barbecued squid tentacles were extremely hot. Most dishes were quite hot but they were by far the hottest. They came rubbery and chewy—which I find satisfying and pleasant in squid where it wouldn’t be for meat. Perhaps it’s the freshness and uniform consistency of the sea creature vis a vis the unpleasant reasons for meat chewiness.

I have never ever seen deep-fried duck before, but boy am I glad I came upon it here. The little nuggets were dense, soft with a slight give, and just brilliant. Who knew that a fatty meat like duck would benefit from battering and deep-frying? Unsurprisingly—given the sheer pile of dried chillies you can see in the picture above—the dish was pretty hot. Despite that, it was one of the favourites and wolfed down extremely rapidly.

Unpictured—it came out too blurry and unfocused even for my extreme low standards—is a dish of small chopped-up bony chicken pieces with tea-tree mushrooms. The chicken was decent but unexceptional—you chewed around the bones and you got yourself some nice meat—but the mushrooms were out of this world. Little woody, chewy wires of fungus, with a deep flavour somewhere between portobello/meat and herbal tea. Why have I never come across these before?

The above was a tremendous bowl of hot and spicy beef. There were dozens of chunks of tender beef at the bottom, but most winningly the broth was thick with stocky residue. I had a few bowls of the liquor: drinking it was made slightly difficult by its Scoville level, but it was totally worth the sweaty red face and runny nose.

We were still hungry so we ordered ‘Chinese vegetable’ with minced pork. It was crunchy and refreshing and also made tasty by a smidgeon of the ubiquitous minced pork. However, the flavour seeped in much less here, perhaps because of the robustness of the veg.

The final dish was black bean chicken. It was the least impressive—there was a low-level fermented black bean & garlic flavour but it was most alike to the familiar Cantonese dishes you find in your local Chinese takeaway. On any normal day I’d have reckoned it a pretty decent dish but compared to some of the absolutely fantastic fare we’d enjoyed previously, the wet deep-fried chicken bites were almost pedestrian.

The recently-deceased Josh Nash’s legendary recommendation letter was a one-line “this man is a mathematical genius”. In the same vein, my recommendation for Chilli Cool is a mere “this restaurant is culinary happiness”. You must go, and soon!