Unqualified Restaurant Reservations

[Unqualified Restaurant Reservations]

Short snippet restaurant rundown

I’ve done these a bunch of times before. Just some short comments on some restaurants I found myself in that for whatever reason I don’t want to review “in full”.

Tayyabs, Whitechapel

Pretty good Indian subcontinent food that in no sense deserves the massive, massive acclaim it’s generated. Totally solid, and very reasonably priced, but nothing special. I ate their chops, dry curry, and a chicken/chickpea one they recommended, as well as paratha and pilau rice. (SUL rating: no medals)

Needoo Grill, Whitechapel

The same as Tayyabs, but a bit less good. Better than mediocre Indian, and cheap, but is that all it needs to be get plaudits? (SUL rating: no medals)

Crab Tavern, Broadgate Circle

Reviewed for I’m a Londoner. (SUL rating: avoid)

The National Cafe, Covent Garden

Reviewed for I’m a Londoner. (SUL rating: one medal)

City Social, Moorgate

Reviewed for I’m a Londoner. (SUL rating: no medals)

Tozi, Victoria

Reviewed for I’m a Londoner. (SUL rating: one medal)

Craft, North Greenwich

Reviewed for Straight Up London. (SUL rating: avoid)

The Albion, Islington

I went for a Sunday Roast at The Albion on a friend’s birthday. It’s an absolutely beautiful place to while away a summer’s day, and their roasts are not bad at all: I had a nicely medium rare bit of beef with a huge Yorkshire and if-not-expertly-then-highly-competently-cooked trimmings. And nice gravy. Could do a lot worse. (SUL rating: no medals/one medal)

Black Axe Mangal, Islington

I forgot to take any pics here, because I was drunk, but I went back a second time to this highly-hyped, well-priced, very small, and extremely hip joint near my house and enjoyed it much more the second time round. Powerfully flavoured food all round: salty and garlicky buttermilk fried chicken wings; some of the best broccoli I’ve ever eaten; and dishes that have faded into drunken memory, leaving only a firm conviction of deliciousness. Highly recommended. (SUL rating: one medal at this point, it may go up)

Xi’an Impression, Holloway

Recommended by all the right people (Fuchsia Dunlop, Lizzie Mabbott), I’ll probably end up reviewing Xi’an Impression, but I’ve held off after my first round, because I will clearly be back. It’s cheap, it’s a regional Chinese cuisine that I can’t get anywhere else in town, it does amazing hand-pulled noodles, and it’s 15 minutes from my house. (SUL rating: one medal at this point, it may go up)

Pizza Pilgrims, Soho

Kingly Court is a lovely little spot, a three-tiered mini plaza thing with decent chain restaurants and nice outdoor seating. I always love Pizza Pilgrims and this visit was no exception—and who can turn their nose up at a high end Neapolitan pizza for just £6.80. (SUL rating: one medal)

Smokestak, Shoreditch

I’d already had dinner, but my friend was still hungry. My first visit was excellent, but my second was even better: deep fried chunks of slow-cooked beef cheek; cured raw seabass; more of the moist tender brisket with chillies and sauce and more. It’s well-priced and I can imagine myself going back many many more times. (SUL rating: two medals)

Tokyo Diner, Chinatown

Tokyo Diner is friendly, quick, and good value. It does basic Japanese stuff, the sort of stuff that’s famous and widespread in the west: sushi, katsu don, katsu curry, chicken karaage. You can order extra rice as part of your dish for free! I did this and then felt extremely guilty when I didn’t finish it. Not the best food ever but totally decent value option. (SUL rating: no medals)

Hai Cenato, Victoria

Jason Atherton’s contribution to the new NOVA does pizza, grilled meats, fish, all with the usual tasteful choices and designs. I’ve just had a couple of pizzas and some focaccia there: the focaccia was decent; the pizzas were also decent. I’m withholding final judgement until I’ve tried more than two very similar things off the menu. They did the job but were not perfect. (SUL rating: no medals)

Stokey Bears, Stoke Newington

One of the more glaring omissions from my best burger list, I walked into Stokey Bears when I was waiting for Scenario, the board/video game pub in Dalston, to open one time. It does burgers that are completely down the line of what good burger places are doing nowadays, but that’s what you want: tender flavourful juicy pink patty, cheese, non-brioche bun, none of the stupid accoutrements, plus crispy buffalo wings. (SUL rating: one medal)

Bone Daddies, Marylebone

I hadn’t been to BD since they opened their first spot in Soho. Now they’re a very successful and constantly-growing chain. Their ramen is still as good as ever—by no means London’s best, but still better than most foods when done properly—although I prefer their pork tonkotsu to their chicken paitan (that I tried this time). They also do cured salmon, and amazing, powerfully smoky beef kebabs. But their chicken wings are diabolical. You do the math. (SUL rating: one medal)

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Also check out my four Straight Up London roundups: (1) (2) (3) (4)

And check out my map of recommended restaurants, as well as my map of places I want to go to. They’re updated regularly.

[Unqualified Restaurant Reservations]

Stuff I won’t get time to review elsewhere

So, er, it turns out I’ve eaten a lot of food in the last couple of months but not been in the mood to review much of it at length. I’ve not gone much further than posting pictures on Twitter and—if I remember—Instagram. But here are a few snippets. As ever, the best places will find their way onto the Straight Up London map, which you should all be using because it’s free, integrates with google maps, and is super useful.

Barshu, Soho

I went to Barshu because it came recommended by Fuchsia Dunlop, the first Western woman to train in a Chinese cookery school and author of many amazing cookbooks, including by absolute favourite: Every Grain of Rice. They even had a display set up to advertise her new book. But I found the food decent but unexceptional. I picked fairly standard, satisfying sichuan dishes—except a sweet potato noodles in chilli oil bowl that was far, far too hot for me—but they didn’t have much of the flair I was expecting.

Pitt Cue, Spitalfields

The Soho Pitt Cue has now reopened as Little Pitt, but I doubt I will be going there much given how good the bigger brother is. The extra space, as well as allowing for reservations and a whole lot more customers, is put to use on a longer, ever-changing menu. I was particularly excited for the smoked steaks, and they didn’t let me down.

Le Coq, Islington

Every cheap trend needs to have its posh version—rotisserie chicken is no exception. I think Le Coq does the job pretty durn well, with juicy chicken far meatier—like guinea fowl—than your regular bird. And the other stuff is good too—I had a delightful tart. Best of all is the pricing: £17 for two courses, £22 for three, and only a few options either side of the chicken.

The White Onion, Wimbledon

The White Onion deserves a real review, because I had an absolutely tremendous meal there for my sister’s 22nd birthday a couple of weeks ago. It’s the sister restaurant of the vaunted French Table in Surbiton, which I haven’t visited, and it’s excellent in every respect. Attentive service, tasteful room, excellent bread, a well-designed menu and perfectly, expertly cooked food. My veal sirloin game in the a powerfully savoury-sweet reduction that I thought about for hours afterwards. They even managed to make my fussy brother’s extremely plain food look appetising. Hell, they even made broccoli moreish by lightly tempura battering and deep-frying it. If this was on Straight Up London I’d give it two medals.

Paris House, Bedfordshire

We went to Paris House as a sort of special jaunt while we were at the Woburn Forest Center Parcs—the restaurants on site are Strada, Cafe Rouge and worse. It was more or less what you’d expect, but we were tempted by the £44/head six course lunch menu, which of course expands beyond six if you have cheese, snacks and so on. All the food was lovingly crafted and exquisitely presented, including some absolutely tremendous bread. But room was slickly and jarringly modern, and bright, not at all befitting to the incredible tudor house it’s in. There was a slight glitch with the music, as well, about which I notified the head chef and maitre’d—they played a single David Gray CD from 2000 on repeat for the entire two and a half hours we ate there.

The Jazz Cafe, Camden

Of course, you don’t go to the jazz cafe for food. When we were there we were there for Kelis, who put on a very good show. But you can go for food, and you shouldn’t shy away. The tables loftily overlook the stage, with an excellent view, and the offerings are mostly decent. My korean bbq beef was ridiculously and inedibly over-sweet, but the chilli deep fried squid with sriracha mayo was addictive and satisfying.

Black Axe Mangal, Islington

Black Axe Mangal was for a while one of the most hyped restaurants in town and yes, I get it, it definitely hits the spot in various ways. They follow through with their theme: offal, middle-eastern, heavy music playing, fast foody utilitarian-Spartan service and decor. But I don’t think the food lived up to its reputation. The “flatbreads” were the best, but they were mainly good because their flavours were mixed with pretty good bread. Ox cheek was done well, but why did it come draped with potato crisps. Still, I can imagine wanting to go back and try the other stuff.

The Swan, Claygate

Claude Bosi, head chef at Hibiscus, the extremely expensive Mayfair doubly Michelin-starred restaurant, has opened up a pub in Surrey. It’s near my parents’ house so we went for my mum’s birthday. It’s pretty good, but not good enough—which in fact is how I’d judge Hibiscus itself. The Dairy will give you better food for £45 a head, in my opinion, than you get at Hibiscus for £115. Similarly, The Swan is better than most pubs around it, but it doesn’t compare to the Canton Arms or its ilk.

Nanban, Brixton

I’ve been to Nanban twice now and I agree with Sam’s judgement on SUL. It doesn’t quite do as well as you might expect it does when you look at the menu and imagine the possibilities, but it works enough to be a place that you can get a craving for. Lamb ramen, for example, just doesn’t come off. But some of the elements taste good enough that you still go out happy. By contrast, curry goat tsukumen really does work, and shows the value of this kind of fusion experimentation. The spaghetti might be a bit too savoury if that’s possible.

Shoryu, Broadgate Circle

I’ve eaten at the Haymarket Shoryu and the Broadgate Circle Shoryu and I stand by my judgement that it’s a decent bowl of ramen, but not nearly one that can stand up there with the very best London has to offer, like KOI, Kanada-Ya and Ramen Sasuke.

Good Friend, Soho

Since Bigbe chicken opened just a couple months ago, and then became Good Friend chicken, I might have been ten times. I adore this place. The squid is diabolical, and the stranger parts of chicken are definitely acquired tastes. But the popcorn chicken and the bashed out piece of breast are around the best food*quality/price ratio you can get in all of central London.

Smokeworks, Cambridge

I didn’t eat enough here to give a final judgement but the beef ribs I did have were solid. The menu looks well-designed albeit perhaps slightly long, and they have their aesthetic down pat. I would go back.

Ping, Cambridge

Ping—if that’s truly its name, there’s next to no info about it at all on the internet except effusive Twitter praise—does the best dumplings I’ve had in the UK. Maybe the best I’ve had anywhere. They do a few different fillings, and they do them boiled or fried for 50p more, about £5 in all for twelve. You sit at their rudimentary metal table and dab them in soy sauce and red vinegar and boy do you have a good time. I went maybe five times in the last week I was in Cambridge, it just can’t be missed.

Ichiryu, Holborn

With the proliferation of ramen joints in London, it was only a matter of time before udon followed along. Udon noodles just aren’t as good as ramen, and the broth isn’t as powerful, so I can see why they’re not so much of a Thing. But still, there’s something to them. I only tried two things so I’m not giving a firm and final opinion, but I would go back for a cheap dinner some time.

Kanada-Ya, Haymarket

Kanada-Ya’s Haymarket branch is even better than the original at Tottenham Court Road and it’s probably my most visited restaurant in London. I can’t decide which ramen is the best—either the spicy minced pork or the truffle ramen—everything is amazing. Even the sides are killer, especially the chashu pork with rice. I truly believe that a Tokyo native would be reasonably happy with the fare on offer here.

Munich Cricket Club, Westminster

We had some very poor German food here one evening: mediocre sausage, stale pretzels and so on. Avoid.

Tongue ‘n Cheek, Westminster

There’s a new burger stall on my lunch time haunt, and it’s pretty good. Burgers come medium rare and extremely juicy, with a nice chewy resilient bun. Best part is the fries which are crispy and light and salty and come squirted with a powerful rosemary sauce which really imparts an amazing flavour.

[Unqualified Restaurant Reservations]

Four little reviews & a round-up

I mainly write my reviews on Straight Up London now, the food & drinks site I started with Sam Bowman & Philip Salter. However, as I’ve said before, this blog has too good of a title to lie completely dormant; also, I’ve been to rather too many restaurants recently to review them all fully. So here’s a URR update on my food activities for my loyal 10 or so readers.

Five on Straight Up London

The Lockhart, Marylebone A lovely upmarket American comfort food restaurant. I went for my birthday with my parents and girlfriend and had a really lovely meal. Not quite as awesome as its sister restaurant Shotgun, but what is?

Queen’s, Camberwell I actually Kickstarter-ed this restaurant for £100, which bought me two tickets to their opening ‘feast’ with matched drinks. I think it’s very cool that they kept the name of the nail salon that used to lie in their location—very modern south London gentrification. And they do great, interesting food, including ‘Turkish ravioli’.

Blacklock, Soho Giant meat chops of all kinds in an underground den, £5 cocktails, cheaper meat on Mondays, and Gordon Ramsay was at the next table when I was there (surprisingly tall & good-looking in person!) What more can I say?

Brunswick House, Vauxhall The tables you sit on are for sale; the restaurant is housed in an old Georgian building in the midst of some true Vauxhall/Nine Elms monstrosities. I went twice, both as celebrations, both lovely meals. Beautiful esoteric decoration; elegant food that just works. I was having such fun that I managed to spend around £150 for two of us both times but we had three courses, cocktails and wine.

Noble Rot, Bloomsbury A deep, dark, traditional-but-new-feeling wine bar which happens to do some extremely interesting food. The slip sole is to die for, unbelievably tender and powerfully smoky. The wine list is allegedly amazing, but what do I know about all that.

Seven on I’m a Londoner

The Grey Horse, Kingston Nice pub with excellent beer list, the longest whisky list in London, and which does surprisingly top notch southern BBQ food. Highly recommended; perhaps the best place in Kingston.

Bella Cosa, Canary Wharf Incredibly poorly-designed, ridiculously over priced, and strangely average new place. I don’t get how or why this exists, and if it is successful then I lost all faith in financial firms’ taste in food.

Bounce, Shoreditch Food is OK, not great, but come on it’s a ping pong place what do you expect. Why do they even do food? Drinks, snacks and ping pong is about enough. People have the whole of Shoreditch to choose from! They could even just get a kebab at Best Mangal across the road.

The Portman, Marylebone Not absolute top-tier for pub food, and on an extremely competitive road, but somewhere that you can definitely get a pretty nice dinner. I have some tips of how they can make it even better.

I ate some game at a Brasserie Blanc Not really a review, but I’ll put it here anyway. Was quite decent.

Wunderlust, Deptford Kind of shocking this place is in Deptford. It’s pretty cool: you get to eat on a bus; the bar/dancefloor plays pretty decent music; and the food is quite good. It’s Austrian.

Piquet, Soho I reviewed this for two places because it’s just so damned good. One of my very favourite places in London.

Two on The Culture Trip

Salut!, Islington I absolutely love what this pair of brothers have done with Salut! It’s tiny, has two staff, and serve about four different options in the day. But each of these dishes are ornately prepared and unbelievably diverse in flavour and texture. Highly recommended.

Oklava, Shoreditch Very ambitious and impressive restaurant, it makes Middle Eastern food into something exciting, surprising and inventive. Everything is bright, spicy, sweet, and bold. I’m not sure about the octopus pide, but everything else we had was expertly prepared and designed.

Four I won’t get round to reviewing

Trinity Upstairs, Clapham I had a special blood orange-based valentines day tasting menu here, which had very few missteps and a lot of strikingly tasty dishes. It’s actually a second restaurant in the first floor of the building that hosts Trinity, with a more casual and modern menu. It’s in the incredibly beautiful Old Town of Clapham by the common, just a few minutes walk from The Dairy. Highly recommended, although The Dairy is still the best.

Zelman Meats, Soho Rex & Mariano was one of my favourite restaurants in town, though I only went once, and I was very sad—with many others—to see it go and lose so much money. Luckily, like a phoenix from the ashes, Zelman Meats was born. When we went they did piles of expertly-seared and medium-to-medium-rare bits of picanha and chateaubriand as well as properly smoked short rib. The bill was about £80 including drinks, desserts and service. I’ll definitely be back for the famous red prawns, which weren’t on the menu that day.

Que Viet, Hoxton There’s a section of Kingsland Road, which goes between Shoreditch, Hoxton and Dalston, that is known as the ‘pho mile’. Like the restaurants in Chinatown, it’s hard to know which is good and which is bad because few of them put any info online, and few reviews exist. I found one list of the constituents of the pho mile online, and little seems to have changed since 2009, when it was written. Luckily, that included Que Viet’s prices and quality: we paid about £30 for food that was both generous (especially the bowls of pho) and delicious (especially the goat starter).

Taberna do Mercado, Spitalfields I only went here for breakfast, so I can’t really speak to the restaurant proper, but this is one of the best breakfasts, if not the best, I’ve ever had. The Portuguese custard tart is out of this world texturally and comparably good in flavour—a real masterclass. The savouries were almost as good, especially the bread with chorizo baked into it.

[Unqualified Restaurant Reservations]

Big round-up

I haven’t written here in a long while, mainly because I’ve written a lot elsewhere.

Two on Straight Up London:

Pestle @ Sacred Cafe, Holloway. I gave it a bad review but chef Seb Holmes commented on my post, plausibly arguing that I came along too early, and the food they are making now is quite a lot better and more in line with what they wanted to do. So take my review with a big grain of salt—I plan to go back.

Shotgun, Soho. Easily the best southern-style BBQ food in London, and by extension one of the best restaurants overall. I gave it three medals, which on our new system places it alongside only Bleecker St. Burger and The Dairy. Seriously, this place is amazing.

Four on I’m a Londoner:

Barrio, Soho. If I had to rate it on the new system it’s zero medals: the food and drinks are both decent but unexceptional, except for the corn on the cob, which is profoundly disgusting.

Maiora @ The Muddle and Swing, Stoke Newington. A decent Thai/Vietnamese crossover pop-up way up North London, run by a talented and friendly duo. Probably not worth trekking all the way, but consider checking it out if you’re in town.

Mommi, Clapham North. A classic of the genre for the area. Overly extensive menu tries to please everyone, not least in aiming for fusion between pan-Latin and Japanese. But it comes off surprisingly well, and is, once again a decent place. Go to The Manor if you’re in the area.

Bird, Shoreditch. I quite enjoyed my meal there but realistically I’d never go back. They make some key mistakes which Ma’ Plucker, for example, doesn’t make, and which I’d guess that Chick ‘n’ Sours transcends entirely.

Three on The Culture Trip:

Piquet, Soho. Piquet is actually just a smidgeon out of Soho, on the first inch of Newman Street North of Oxford Street, two minutes from Tottenham Court Road tube station, but I think of it as a Soho spot. It’s also my favourite restaurant at the moment, and I’ve been back three times. I adore it.

Ma’ Plucker, Soho. The chicken here is a great deal better than Bird’s, and it does roast and pulled chicken too. It’s along the same lines (with sweet sauces and crisp batters and so on) but it just pulls it off better. The chicken is in more manageable shapes, is more tender and juicy, is more thoroughly flavoured and the batter is crispier. The cherry pie is out of this world good but the sexualised anthropomorphised hen mascot is a bit weird.

Sackville’s, Mayfair. A lot of people hated Sackville’s and I can see why. It’s kind of gauche. Everything is outrageously expensive, and covered in truffles. But the burger (more ‘burger’ really, read my description for why) is genuinely delicious, and if you’ve got money sloshing around, why not spend it on something silly like this.

Eight places I won’t get round to reviewing:

The Hourglass, South Kensington. I’ve always thought of South Kensington and the surrounding areas as bizarrely rubbish for food, despite being awash with all sorts of money. The Hourglass is a very strong piece of evidence against that view—exactly the sort of proper food that should be served in beautiful wood-panelled British pub upstairs dining rooms.

KOI Ramen, Brixton. KOI ramen is situated in Pop Brixton, the shipping-container-based boxpark that also houses Miss P’s, a pizza place, basque small plates, and Kricket, an innovative Indian I loved recently. It’s exceptionally good, probably in the capital’s top three ramen joints. And, as you’ll see, I’ve been to them all.

Muga, Soho. Muga is another ramen joint. I stumbled in for a late dinner of ramen and gyoza and was pleasantly surprised. It’s not among the best—probably better than Shoryu but worse than Tonkotsu, Kanada-Ya, Bone Daddies, Ramen Sasuke and so on—but it’s a good place for a satisfying decently-priced meal.

Ramen Sasuke, Soho. Ramen Sasuke takes a bit of a different approach to ramen, one that seems quite ‘authentic’ with lots of different soy sauce and non-soy based soups and seafood broths along with the pork. It was another very pleasant, rapid late-night munch. In the top five ramen spots, but as I often think, ramen is so cheap and lovely at the worst of times that it’s worth going to them all.

Joy Luck, Chinatown. Noted as one of the better joints among Chinatown’s intricate, labyrinthine and hard-to-distinguish-between offerings, I went to Joy Luck twice in the space of the week. By far the best thing I ate was an overpoweringly, gloriously spicy cumin beef / cumin lamb. They’re basically the same, equally powerful and fantastic. The more mundane options were good too and you can just about eat to fullness for £20 odd including a beer and service.

FM Mangal, Camberwell. At least for the next two weeks, Camberwell is my local town and I decided to make sure I’d been to all of the highest-rated spots before I left. FM Mangal was one of these. I went along quite late, maybe half nine, and I was pretty hungry. Service was incredibly slow, and left us very much in the lurch. The bread we were served to start was excellent but the mains were pretty unexceptional, even the quail. Not one to avoid but neither one to make a beeline for.

Shepherd’s, Westminster. Shepherd’s has recently been refit and is fairly swish inside, at least by the standards of Westminster/Pimlico. It’s not great great, but it’s decent enough: you can get a properly cooked steak or piece of venison, and the cold roast middlewhite loin with crunchy outside, lots of rendered fat, and pickled quince is at least quite interesting.

The Delaunay, Covent Garden. The Delaunay is a pretty expensive restaurant attached to The Aldwych hotel with a bit of a dress code and a broad European brasserie menu. The prices are pretty eye-watering (nigh on £30 for some mains) for the quality, which is in the middle of the range, but you go out having enjoyed yourself.

[Unqualified Restaurant Reservations]

Prawnography @ Portside Parlour, Shoreditch

☆☆ / ££

I had followed Prawnography’s exploits since they first appeared in my facebook feed. I liked the silly name and all its permutations (’prawn again’, ‘the prawnographer’, ‘the prawn star’); I liked the look of their photos; I liked the reasonable pricing on the menu; and I liked the simple consistency of their seafood offering. 

I was invited to one of their residencies but something fell through and I didn’t end up going, so when I was offered tickets to try a bunch of their dishes for £20 a head (“Shore for a Score”) I jumped at the opportunity. We ended up spending a lot more, because Portside Parlour offers lots of tempting cocktails, but came away pretty satisfied.

The usual menu looks something like the below. Some seafood, coupled with some flavouring and some carbs to fill you up. The Shore for a Score set menu is not so different. We ate an oyster; a scallop; a slider; some salt beef; and some mac and cheese. I was curious if there might be some sort of fishy dessert—I went in blind—but there wasn’t and perhaps we dodged a bullet there. I think they got the pricing about right.

The cocktails are all somewhere between £8 and £10, which seems to be the ‘normal price’ for cocktails now—places seem cheap if drinks cost less than that and expensive if they cost more. We found everything we drank delicious, with lots of diverse and subtle flavours in most of the menu, but to be honest I don’t know enough about cocktails to say anything useful. I save that for Philip.

The first course was a single oyster, topped with seaweed and cider. Now this wasn’t your Chinese deep fried cabbage ‘seaweed’—this tasted like real seaweed. In fact, the whole thing tasted like drinking a particularly gritty glass of seawater, with the vinegar poking through very little if at all. Perhaps this is a more authentic experience but I prefer raw oysters served with lemon, tabasco, and a sharp sweet vinegar.

The next course was again bivalve, but this time a motile one. It was a scallop topped with a thick, creamy, crumby gratin. There is always something very pleasant how scallop comes apart in perfect contiguous geometric segments when you cut through it. Here it was the same, and we licked the slate clean. They even let us take the cleaned half-shells home.

Third came an (unpictured) tiger prawn slider with crab meat fries. The prawn meat was as bouncy and springy as usual, and the bun was soft brioche; nothing you can complain about here. The fries hit more or less exactly that McDonald’s not-quite-crispy-not-quite-soft texture you want, and the tang of the crabmeat floss made them particularly moreish.

Salt beef on bread (described as rye, but from the taste at least 90% wheat flour) was a slightly surprising, but not unwelcome diversion from the general seafood theme. It was the usual piece of brisket protein, not meltingly tender but with a bit of bite. It was, er, salty, and the traditional gherkin combo was not unwelcome.

Finally we ate a seafood macaroni cheese. There were generous little chunks of prawn and calamari to search through the creamy pasta for, which to be honest is my approach because macaroni cheese is one of a few things I just can’t get myself to be keen on. Maybe it’s because I never had it as a child. This one was probably no worse or better than any other but I just don’t have a taste for the stuff.

Overall my meal at Prawnography was not all that great, but not really because they failed. Everything they brought me was pretty decent for what it was, and they did a sterling job giving you five courses for £20. 

Actually it makes me wish I’d got down to their stall at Magic Roundabout, because I think I’d rather shell out £24 for one big ol’ satisfying spider crab and get that clean seafood satiation, than eat a collection of dishes where the quality and flavour of the ‘shore’ isn’t quite front and centre.

[Unqualified Restaurant Reservations]

Three little reviews

Ichikiri, Westminster

☆☆☆ / ££

Nice little underground Japanese sushi house on Strutton ground in Westminster, off Victoria Road. Feels very ‘authentic’ with utilitarian menus, tables and chairs, rapid service, and a staff apparently entirely Japanese. We ate 12 sashimi, a deep fried soft shell crab, some house pickles, and some deep-fried breaded pumpkin for £40 including service but no drinks. It wasn’t that much food but I was pretty satisfied.

Tonkotsu, Soho

☆☆☆ / ££

One of the ramen noodle joints I hadn’t yet tried, it doesn’t reach the heights of Kanada-Ya or Bone Daddies (let alone the stuff I ate in Hong Kong; not been to Japan) but it’s better than Shoryu. I have yet to try the highly-lauded Ramen Sasuke. I ate a standard bowl and the broth was as rich and flavourful as you expect; the ramen had bite; the egg was creamy; the pork was unctuous and juicy and soft.

Iberica, Victoria

☆☆ / ££

Apparently a chain, this is the first I saw or heard of. I went for lunch with my boss, and it was decent enough: ham and cheese croquettes were creamy; chorizo lollipops were sweet, savoury and an interesting idea; the cod brandade was very strongly olive-y. I don’t really care about service but the waitress’s English really was appalling, with numerous slow restatements of ultra-basic ideas necessary.

[Unqualified Restaurant Reservations]

Newman Arms, Fitzrovia

☆☆☆☆ / £££

I first heard of the Cornwall Project, or the Cornish Grill, when it was providing the food for an appealing-seeming pub-cum-restaurant up North East London somewhere. But when I plugged the address into Citymapper it was just too far to trek for it to be worth it, despite promises the ingredients were some of the best to be had anywhere.

I was delighted, then, when the scheme was linked with the Newman Arms, which is only about half an hour’s walk from my office, and which has a delightful little square wood-panelled first floor dining room adorned with old drawings and faded paintings and a jokey ironic homemade blue plaque for the previous ‘old git’ owner. Downstairs is a tiny, rather pokey pub—apparently founded in 1730—very busy even on a Tuesday night.

The menu fits exactly into the vein popular in London right now: it’s short, it’s British, it’s to the point, it offers offal, it charges about £7 for starters and somewhere between £15 and £20 for mains, and it lists all the ingredients in a given course in lieu of an explanation. 

I have to say that for all its trendiness, this genre of menu—similar to what you’ll find at Franklin’s, or The Camberwell Arms or maybe even St. John Bread & Wine—is just what I like to see. When I go out I want a starter, a main and a dessert; I want a few things done well and with fresh ingredients rather than a wide-ranging mess; I want a menu that changes with the times; I don’t mind spending £40-50 on food and drinks and service if the experience is worth it.

The food was as good—and generously-portioned—as it looks in the pictures. The duck heart was very lightly seared, leaving the middle very rare, but barely challenging: the organ tasted more like duck breast than any scary or threatening part of the animal. 

It was sliced in six generous chunks, suggesting three hearts (or some big ducks!) and topped with ‘worksop’ (I’m assuming that’s the green leaf—google is just giving me a town in Nottinghamshire—but maybe it’s those yellow petals), thin slices of beetroot, gooseberries, and finely-chopped hazelnuts. The hazelnuts made a lovely gnarly crunchy contribution, like dried bits of quinoa or spelt sometimes do in a dish, and the beetroot was perfect in fine slivers. I find it has a blandly overpowering flavour in heftier chunks, cutting through and masking other elements it’s paired with.

The crispy-skinned fillet of red mullet was another generous portion. It had a very fresh seaside flavour, balanced well by the sweet and fruity vinaigrette underneath, which I actually tipped into my mouth off the plate after eating. The broad beans and chopped up tomatillo accompaniment was well-judged.

For main we ate turbot and short rib. The turbot was two thin fillets, well browned on the outside and served with various vegetables. The potatoes—smoked, apparently—were perfect: dense and salty and creamily consistent in texture. The baby fennel tasted like a milder, less aggressive version of the adult variety. I don’t like turbot as a whole fish—or at least I didn’t the last time I had it—but in fillet form it hit the spot both in firm, non-flaky texture and light friendly subtle flavour.

The other main was a huge rectangle of bone marrow crumb-topped shredded short rib. Since the piece was so big—a couple of inches tall and wide and about six along—I expected it to contain a bone but it’s actually just shredded protein and fat. It was very very tender, like pulled pork and tasted beefy like ox heart slow-cooked in red wine. On the side was oyster mushrooms (not a favourite, but certainly an interesting sharp sour flavour) and a bunch of vegetables, again cooked dense and soft and not at all powdery.

I have more than a soft spot for almond-based cakes, which was lucky since this was the only dessert option other than cheese, which I didn’t think I could quite manage. Despite being something like 50% cherry the cake held together pretty well, and combined perfectly with the outrageously creamy vanilla ice cream. I have suffered through both overly sugary and overly plain cakes, especially in the almond genre, but this one was neither—it was pitched right in the golden mean.

Newman Arms was very good. The menu is written as if aimed purely at my enjoyment; the room reminds me of better days in the 18th century; they have nice beers and not-ridiculously-expensive wines; and of course the food is lovely. I wholeheartedly recommend you go.

[Unqualified Restaurant Reservations]

Paradise Garage, Bethnal Green

☆☆☆☆ / £££

The Dairy, by Clapham Common, is probably my favourite restaurant in London. The Manor, its sister restaurant just up the road by Clapham North, is very nearly as good. In my opinion Robin Gill’s third restaurant, Paradise Garage, situation in a rank of bars and pubs in the railway arches in Bethnal Green, is not quite as good. It’s not that it fails in some glaring obvious way, and it’s still by and large an excellent restaurant, but something about it just doesn’t hit the spot the way the other two did for me.

I had the tasting menu, because of course I did. If a place offers a tasting menu, I always get the tasting menu. Why wouldn’t you? The tasting menu is basically the chef picking you a selection of the foods they think taste best and go best together. And when it comes to an interesting multi-course tasting menu, with the kinds of touches that make a meal special, that still isn’t outrageously expensive, this stable of restaurants stands with the best.

Everyone knows that snacks and amuse bouche are a given part of a multi-course feast like this but somehow you never ‘price them in’ do you—it always feels like a present, a tiny surprise, a little treat. This one was very very good. Paper thin crunchy pleasantly oily crackers, a moussey pea and elderflower sauce, and big fiery chunks of radish with the entire leaf still on. We ate the leaves even if we weren’t supposed to.

By contrast bread is something you expect, so when they put it on the menu as a course I sometimes feel a little bit short-changed unless it’s something special. Well it was special here, with some dense cured sausage, and a strongly fermented-tasting whisky butter, which came in a pool of some sort of milkish liquid I couldn’t quite identify.

The next two courses came together. Lamb heart with fennel ‘kimchi’ which was pickled fennel with overwhelming lashings of vinegar and black pepper. The lamb heart itself was excellent: only the slightest hint that it was an organ and not a prime bit of neck fillet, and perfectly medium rare. I soldiered through two bits of the fennel but I really hated it, and I am a big fan of kimchi, fennel, and even pickled fennel (Spuntino in Soho does the best house pickles I’ve ever eaten, including some fennel).

The grilled sweetcorn was a surprising hit: aside from the difficulty of separating the corn from the cob (easy with your teeth, surprisingly hard to saw off even with the very sharp knife they handed us) it was perfectly balanced and thoughtful. There was something so precious about crunching into those little surprisingly savoury hemp seeds.

The next course was another one of the ones that didn’t quite hit the spot for me. I don’t know if this will generalise to others—I can only speak for my own tastebuds which is one of the worrying elements of food reviewing—but it just didn’t quite come off. It was adequate rather than thrilling.

The cockles were fine, with a mild fishy taste—I prefer them warm rather than cold. The yellow and green thin slices of raw courgette were pleasantly refreshing, if fairly easy to pass by. I don’t really get what function the bone dry dehydrated sliver in the middle performed except for drying out one’s mouth, but I’m not going to fault it for being merely interesting and not tasty too. I guess the only real problem I had was with the al dente cooked chunks, which I find unappealing in the same way I find all standardly-cooked courgette unappealing. There’s something about its mild yet somehow pervasive and overpowering flavour.

These tomatoes were very delicious, but the eel jelly really was the tiniest smidgeon to the point where you couldn’t really taste it in the combination.

I have a lot of time for fun gimmicks, and blowtorching us each a little mackerel fillet at the table is a fun one. It’s also practical, as it meant the skin was beautifully crisped up and charred, while the flesh was basically rare. I think I actually prefer mackerel rare, or smoked, to normally cooked-through. There’s something about the mild freshness of the flavour. Here it came with a wonderful assortment of veg, including little bits of rice cracker that were exactly like rice krispies. In a good way.

The main was a chunk of venison haunch with a selection of mushrooms, chard, and a lump of mixed chicken offals. Usually I’m not the hugest fan of chicken offal except for the heart, but I think it came off quite well here: earthy and bloody but not overpoweringly ferrous. Usually I prefer my venison haunch steak to be pink inside, and I found it pretty weird here that it was cooked well, but it didn’t affect the tenderness or the lean game flavour.

We opted for the £3.50 supplementary cheese course. It was Neal’s Yard cheese so you know it’s good, paired with physalises and a very oil-infused thin crumbly cracker. I can’t help ordering this stuff; I feel I need to hoard as many courses as possible when I go to places like this.

The pre-dessert was a scoop of cucumber sorbet (sweet and refreshing) on a few spheres of melon, cucumber and other fruit. It was a perfect palate cleanser.

The ‘real’ dessert was really wonderful, really really wonderful. Sprinkles of fresh fruit, another instance of the meal’s apparent theme (I only noticed it now: slivers of crunchy cracker-type materials), very mildly sweet, but deeply creamy without being overly rich swirls of caramelised white chocolate, raspberry sorbet, topped with shreds of lemon verbena. With so many strong influences it risked being all over the place, happily it all came together perfectly and was one of the loveliest sweet concoctions I’ve eaten this year.

Though we really should have had just one, they gave us a taste of the other dessert option too: dark berries this time with a sweet almond brittle and some very pure white ice cream. The overwhelming flavour was as promised: the delicious sugar-and-spirit-tinged beer taste of Innis & Gun, which is aged for 72 days in rum casks.

Petit fours came with the bill. I’m afraid I can’t tell you what they were. They were sort of like a moist dense brownie—but tasted of the dried fruit snacks you got in your lunchbox as a kid. They were an absolute pleasure to eat. When you exposed the inside, it came up as a sort of contiguous uniform light pink, rather than the darker more textured purple of the outside.

So we ate 13 dishes, came away full, and had a gloriously good time. The place is stylish and modern, set in the railway arch and next door to loud cocktail bars and one of the best beer selections I’ve seen in London (Mother Kelly’s). The staff were all extremely helpful but unobtrusive and just let us enjoy ourselves.

And barring a couple of courses which weren’t so much bad, as merely decent, the food was very good. I have to recommend it. But when I compare it to the sort of meals that absolutely blew me away it doesn’t quite measure up. They haven’t achieved the perfection they managed elsewhere.

[Unqualified Restaurant Reservations]

Smokehouse, Islington

☆☆☆ / £££

I stumbled into Smokehouse. The pub I had intended to go to just down the road was closed for a private event and I had said this looked like a reasonable alternative when I walked past. My friend, who lived in the area, told me he thought it was a restaurant, rather than a pub. 

When we entered we found a pub with a dazzling beer selection sold in 2/3 pints and out of a rank of a few dozen unmarked taps in the wall, tattooed brace-wearing staff, a pretty garden area that was sadly sodden with rain, and a few of the well-worn small tables that seem to be the preserve of good pub restaurants. 

I asked for the menu purely out of curiosity—’Smokehouse’ might have provoked some mild memory in me but I hadn’t seen or heard the name anywhere at this point—but when we perused it we found ourselves unable to leave without sampling something. We ended up having three courses.

The menu is perhaps too wide ranging. I shared it on Twitter when I sat down and one response ran “really the very idea that one can, under 1 roof, consume things labelled ceviche, semi-freddo, kimchi, and scone is ruinous”. On the other hand, its wide-ranging nature means it is full of things one can’t help but wanting to try. I felt a keen sense of loss to look over goat tacos, foie gras & apple pie, and a Korean chopped brisket roll just when picking my starter.

I ended up picking the deep fried oysters to start and the smoked lamb for main. My friend—who is vegetarian—had less of a choice, but I had a little bit of his main and it didn’t taste at all like an afterthought. The place was quite dim, and I forgot that cameras have a flash, so I apologise for my terrible, unilluminating pictures.

The oysters were surprisingly neutral tasting, even though the batter was light and thin, perhaps because of the lack of their residual liquor. They had a pleasant consistent texture throughout; a soft rubbery uniform mass. I really didn’t notice the smoked marrow on the dripping toast, but the toast itself was salty, brittle and tasted a bit like chips made in my deep fat fryer. Which is appropriate, since I use beef dripping.

The main was really excellent. A giant, generous lump of lamb shoulder, a good five or six inches across and an inch deep. The top was crispy as promised, but rather than the natural edge of a piece of animal it was shredded strands melded together into a uniform disc. Dry and firm on top, moist and juicy and tender underneath. I’m sure it really was a young animal because the flavour was subtle, though persistent. It was rather impressive. Underneath you found soya and green beans and the occasional clam, which was all very pleasant indeed.

The dessert was a bit of a mis-step. I realise that semi-freddo is meant to be very cold or even semi-frozen but mine was rock solid to the point where I needed to use the sharp points of the fork to make any impression on it at all. What’s more, when I did get through I invariably shot through at speed and launched pieces of the cake/tart onto the floor. And its icy hardness didn’t just make it less practical but also less pleasurable: colder things never have quite as much flavour and freezing temperatures are never all that comfortable against one’s teeth. This was disappointing, since the cheesecake-like hazelnut bit at the bottom tasted like it would have been delicious had it been served slightly warmer.

I’m embarrassed to say I can’t actually identify the other thing on the plate. It wasn’t mentioned on the menu, as far as I can tell, and I’ve not had the like before. It was very interesting: an extremely light but somehow quite substantial puff of extremely salty and slightly caramel burnt cream. I suspect that its overpowering saltiness would have been better with the slightly more pliable texture of a warmer semifreddo, but I can’t say for sure. Otherwise it was a little bit too much for my tastebuds, but maybe I’m being a wimp.

Really I’m surprised I didn’t know about Smokehouse already; it seems like it’s a bit of a Thing. I can understand why, and I suspect I will be back. But I harbour a suspicion that my pseudonymous Twitter correspondent is right—maybe mastering both bulgogi and bourguignon is too much for even the best.

[Unqualified Restaurant Reservations]

Croft Kitchen / All the Quail, Islington

☆☆☆☆☆ / £££

Some people place a lot of value on the non-food elements of dining out. Don’t get me wrong, it’s important to me to be treated politely and nicely, and it’s important to sit in a well decorated spot with the right volume of music and the right level of light. It’s important to be with the right people, and it’s important that they choose the right glasses and the right chairs and the right cutlery.

But having all said that I am just as happy with brusque and abrupt service, rudimentary chairs and tables, ugly walls, bright lights, cheesy cantopop (Chilli Cool), or even TVs with the latest brash k-pop videos in an anonymous room under a grotty estate pub (The Heron). I just don’t mind much as long as the food is good.

Croft Kitchen / All the Quail did not require enduring any of those privations; it was like a supper club, but instead of sitting at someone’s dining room table with a gaggle of strangers I sat with my family around a big blocky wooden table, suspended by chains from the roof, in the back of a hip-looking coffee shop. And oh boy was the food good. 

Usually I’m sceptical of claims that ‘chef X trained under Y’ or ‘chef forged his skills in Z michelin-starred restaurants’ but this makes me question my view, since their key boast on Twitter is that their chef used to work at Mugaritz, a world-renowned spot 20 minutes drive from culinary capital San Sebastian. I don’t know that the food was Basque-influenced—it felt very British to me—but it was fantastically delicious all round and we ate seven courses for £30 a head.

The combinations were inspired right from the off. Who’d ever considered salting watermelon. It seems insane, like Rury Fischelt of Santanagrill’s amazing ‘bronut’ (slow cooked Mexican beef brisket in a cheap traditional British jam doughnut), but like the bronut it just works. Salt seems to make anything better. In this case it made the watermelon savoury and wholesome-seeming rather than simply refreshing, though the sharp lime zing certainly pointed in that direction. The nasturtium topping gave the whole thing a sophisticated, complex aura.

The second course might, bizarrely, have been my favourite of the night, even though it was barely a shot of cold lettuce soup. Lettuce soup! How could and why would lettuce soup be this good? It was thick, as thick and heavy as some sort of magma. And come on when you hear ‘lettuce soup’ you imagine at best a fresh cleansing drink and at worst some watery flavourless slop. Well let me tell you (let me tell you!) that this was a profound deep flavour, with a butteriness that reminded me very distinctly of Frank’s hot sauce mixed with melted butter. The tiny chunks of salted lemon peel at the bottom were, of course, a savoury delight.

I don’t even like beetroot. I’ve never really ‘got’ it. Its flavour doesn’t really fit into any categories; it’s a bit wet and not really sweet but in the genre of sweetness. But paired with a sweet mint sauce, some rocket-like leaves and, most significantly, fresh redcurrants and raspberries it was a dream. Somehow its empty obnoxiousness became a thrillingly clean companion to the tart fruit. A clever, surprising dish.

Course four tacked in quite another direction. Two or three chunks of pattison, also known as patty-pat, and apparently a South African squash, was dumped in a pool of butternut squash and ricotta. Again, this is exactly the sort of dish I would never make myself, never order, and never really even think about, if presented with only the name, but it turned out to be one of my favourites. The liquid was luxuriously creamy, with satisfying little bits of texture to slurp through your lips, and the bits of squash were reassuringly hard—not crunchy, but sort of like a slightly-undercooked potato.

I’ve just realised I forgot to take a picture of the bread course—which was giant chunks of Peckham rye bread, butter, a fat little pile of pork rillettes, and some beautiful home-made shredded pickles. You can only imagine the joys I experienced mopping up that fat-meat paste.

The course that felt most like a ‘main’ course was the raw seabass with spiralised cucumber and celery and some hidden pine nuts. It was worlds better than the raw sea bass we had the night before at Mommi—it was tender, fresh, friendly little chunks of the fish, with that light neutral purity that fish often has before it’s cooked.

The dessert had us all in raptures. What is reduced milk ice cream? From what I can tell it’s ice cream that goes for deep, solid creaminess—like ice-cold quadruple cream—rather than crowd-pleasing sweetness. On top you have a slightly out-there take on the now-omnipresent dessert crumbing: speculoos, which apparently is a German spiced biscuit. It was lovely. Then you had thin onion-like slivers of sour lemon confit all on top of the glorious (and apparently un-sugared) well-cooked plums. I think this is the best dessert I’ve had this summer, which is surprising when it’s also by far the least sweet dessert I’ve had this summer. I really do think it’s brave to make a dessert with as little sugar as this.

Overall this turned out to be among my favourite meals of 2015. I haven’t even mentioned the well-selected wine (only five options, Basque whites, English sparkling) the generous and helpful service, and the extremely good mix of disco being played (Cheryl Lynn’s ”Got to Be Real”, Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love”), because I haven’t needed to. Because what matters is that, at Croft Kitchen, or All the Quail, or whatever it’s officially called, you get some of the most interesting and best ‘modern’ food available in London, which for £30/head is rather a steal.