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Anyone who's ever moaned about the price of eating out in London, consider this little scenario.
You're in Piccadilly, the heart of rip-off tourist London, a stone's throw from the Rainforest Café and God knows how many branches of Aberdeen Angus, and you're hungry. Finding anywhere worthy of your custom is a struggle in this part of town, but you spot a grand entrance to a new all-day brasserie just off Regent St and, deciding it's either that or something from Pret, you wander inside.
Down a plush staircase and into a vast, bright, high-ceiling room bedecked with marble columns and covered liberally with gold leaf, you are greeted by friendly staff in smart monochrome outfits and shown to a table. From the stubbornly French menu you order the soup du jour and kick back with a large basket of crunchy sliced baguette, salted butter and a jug of tap water. The soup is hot and fresh, hardly the world's greatest show of gastronomic fireworks but pleasant and filling, and you have few complaints.
The bill, including service, comes to £2.50.
Whatever else you think of Brasserie Zedel, and not everything was perfect, not by a long way, you just cannot argue with these prices. I don't know the last time you could eat in London with table service and leave with a bill of under a fiver, but I'm guessing it wasn't in this half-century. To put a menu together of such incredible value, set it in such plush surroundings and still make the numbers work is an achievement of monumental proportions - and all the more surprising that it's the brainchild of Corbin & King, whose other projects the Wolseley and the Delaunay are hardly famous for their egalitarian pricing.
Of course, when I and a couple of friends visited one evening last week, we weren't about to stick to soup and water. It is certainly possible to eat well for a pittance at Zedel, but once you've added in a bottle of Picpoul and a couple of courses, I think a more achievable budget is somewhere around the £20 mark - still good value for this kind of thing, just not quite as hilariously cheap.
Of the starters (none over £3), celeriac remoulade was pleasant, vichyssoise was the same after we'd added our own seasoning, and Oeufs durs mayonnaise was actually pretty good, sprinkled with paprika and with nice soft yolks in the eggs.
Mains were a bit more inconsistent - my own steak haché was probably the best of the lot, the mince having a pleasant loose texture and nicely crisped on the outside, although as with the vichyssoise I did have to manually beef up the seasoning, and the fries were pale and flacid. Andouillette is, as I'm sure the more cosmopolitan of you know, a kind of sausage made out of pig's intestines, and however many times I'm assured it's an "acquired taste" and not just some weird practical joke played by French pig farmers, I just can't stand the things. However my friend seemed reasonably happy with his choice - happy as a pig in shit you might say - so no harm done. But I'm afraid a watery prawn cocktail, plucked from the starters, was poor even by £7.75 expectations, and was pushed around the plate a bit before finally being ignored.
The lesson learned is that no matter what you're paying, a bad dish is still a bad dish, and by no means everything on the menu at Zedel is worth paying even a pittance for. But the decent dishes were lifted by the fact we hardly noticed a dent in our wallets, and the good were rendered extraordinary. That steak haché, for example, is available as part of a 2-course menu for £8.75 - admittedly the starter is carottes râpées (chopped carrots) but decent steak & chips for under a tenner even without the token veg would be worth the effort.
If you're looking for immaculately-prepared bourgeois French food, Zedel won't be your first choice. But as a bold experiment in glamorous budget dining for the masses, with enough highlights scattered in amongst the duds to make ordering well at the very least possible, it's worth anyone's while to give it a try. And if the experiment eventually ends in noble failure, at least we could say that for a brief moment in time, it was possible to have lunch in Piccadilly for £2.50. Make the most of it.
7/10
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Even as the paint was drying at MeatMarket, the second outpost of MeatLiquor, I saw someone on Twitter describe them as a "chain". How running just two restaurants in the same city, with different menus, makes them the next McDonald's I'm not sure, but it got me thinking about what exactly does constitute a chain. "Lots of identical restaurants all serving exactly the same food" seems a straightforward place to start, and there are no shortage of examples that fit this description, although even McDonald's tailor and tweak their menu to local tastes, and the interiors of any Nando's I've ever been inside (not that many, since you ask) have been commendably diverse.
The word "chain", then, isn't so much a category of restaurant as an insult thrown at anywhere that looks like it's sacrificed individuality and care for corporate consistency and shareholder returns. The ETM Group, for instance, despite running ten sites across London, avoids the "chain" label because each of its pubs has a proper chef and a unique menu, whereas the Real Greek, which I'm reliably informed was once one of the tiny number of places you could get good Greek food in London, has long since expanded, sold out and is now a "chain". The Polpo restaurants aren't a chain, Carluccio's is. The Galvin restaurants aren't a chain, but Café Rouge is. It's all in the attitude.
Vinoteca, then, isn't a chain, even though there are three in London now - the original in Farringdon which is always rammed (no mean feat when you've got St John as a neighbour), one in Marylebone and this, the latest, just a couple of doors down from Polpo and right opposite Bob Bob Ricard. Perhaps they like to choose their locations based on the quality of the competition; I expect the fourth will be in Cartmel or Bray.
Sorry about the appalling photos; it was quite dark in our little corner of the room and they turned out badly even by the desperately low standards of this blog. Suffice to say that these three chorizo croquettas did not look like beached sea cucumbers in real life, and tasted pretty good despite the overly thick, greasy crust and not quite enough béchamel inside.
House bread did a good enough job, and a bowl of salty "Catalan" almonds (not sure whether they were Catalan by origin or cooking style) from the 'snack' menu were just about worth £3, but the first bit of proper cooking was a grilled mackerel fillet in watermelon sauce, a great charred skin and moist flesh demonstrating that someone in the Vinoteca kitchens knows how to cook fish.
Unfortunately, though, the same care and attention hadn't been shown to this artichoke, which was overcooked and seems to have lost most of its tender internal leaves, perhaps an over-zealous effort to remove the hairs from the top of the heart. The dipping sauce was OK but I've certainly had better artichokes.
Best of the mains was my rose veal and girolles, a generous portion of tender veal and silky mushrooms in a garlic butter sauce. At £18 it was at the upper end of what you might want to pay for this kind of thing, but you did get plenty on the plate for your money.
Baked tomato, ricotta & swiss chard "tart" was bizarre though - a square of pastry topped with tomato and chard, looking like a square pizza, and a huge mound of completely tasteless curd on top. The combination of everything in one mouthful wasn't unpleasant, but it's still quite far off what you might expect from something called a "tart" and I got the distinct impression this was just one of those token vegetarian options, the chef's heart not really in it.
So, serviceable food and for not a huge amount of money but not really anything to get the pulse racing. However, Vinoteca has a trick up its sleeve in the form of a huge and carefully built wine list, and I imagine it's for this that many will choose to visit. I am not a wine buff, and will always be more interested in what's on my plate than in my glass, but I know plenty of people who tend to match food to wine than vice versa, and as nice-but-not-exceptional, the food at Vinoteca is perhaps deliberately pitched to play second fiddle to the wine and provide those who appreciate such things a different way of enjoying an evening out.
And it's for that reason I can't be too down on Vinoteca. It's far too easy, in any blog post, to point out mistakes with the food than just say that, actually, none of it was disastrous and the atmosphere and service in this attractive building in the heart of Soho still meant that we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Service was attentive and friendly even before my cover was blown (I was invited to review but managed to slink in and find a table without giving my name) and judging by the happy crowd that had found their way into the centre of town as Olympics Mania raged all around them, it has its fans. Like those that came before in Farringdon and Marylebone, it's sure to do well.
7/10
I was invited to review Vinoteca
There are some people, amongst both bloggers and professional critics, who like playing the role of contrarian. They'll be the first to call out any given foodie trend as having jumped the shark (usually before most of the rest of us have even heard of it), will delight in posting the first negative review of a universally adored restaurant just to see what kind of reaction they can provoke, and will huff and puff and roll their eyes at any indication that anything so utterly tedious as a consensus is forming about where to eat or drink.
Which is all fine, of course - it wouldn't do if we were all the same. And perhaps there is something rather depressingly sheep-like about watching the same group of people falling over each other to lavish praise on the latest burger joint or trendy Dalston roof-top popup; one of the side-effects of there being so many food blogs knocking around these days is that if you are trying to follow them (or, God help you, if you have a professional interest in doing so) you will see the same names and personalities being frothed over again and again. I can see how that might be annoying, even if as one of the people most likely to be doing the frothing (as it were), I'm in no position to judge.
But love it or loathe it, consensus exists for a reason. There may not be any such thing as an objectively perfect place that literally anyone would love, but if somewhere gets a good review in the Metro, or your favourite food blog, or even from your best friend, chances are you're going to like it too. There would be no food blogs or food critics or restaurant guides of any kind if our preferences weren't shared to some degree with other fellow humans; after all, essentially we all want the same things from wherever we decide to spend our dinner money - good food, good value and somewhere nice to enjoy it. Consensus may be boring, it may occasionally be quite irritating, but there's no better way of choosing somewhere to eat.
With all that in mind, then, I was thoroughly expecting to enjoy everything about 10 Greek Street. The consensus (there's that word again) was clear in its favour, from the short list of attractive and accessible dishes, to the bright room populated by obliging staff, to the apparently very reasonable wine list that those more knowledgeable than me about such things (that would be more or less everyone then) declared one of the best in town. So what went wrong?
There was certainly nothing wrong with the house bread, which was very good indeed, particularly a lovely crusty focaccia. This was presented with the glorious words "are you OK with tap water?", and for no supplementary cover charge either, so we were off to a cracking start. But I'm afraid once the food proper started arriving, things went downhill. The razor clams in my starter, for example, each came complete with a huge brown bladder of un-purged fish waste, which was pretty unpleasant. Why they'd gone to all the trouble of properly shelling broad beans but not bothering to remove the gritty sacs of clam guts was a bit of a mystery. I'm all for rustic presentations but I draw the line at being asked to eat shit.
I realise complaining of pork belly being "too fatty" is inviting criticism, but this was hard work to eat. Perhaps a stronger sauce would have made it more palatable, or longer slower cooking to render off more of the wobbly fat, but to be honest I'm not sure. All I know is, the pork was piggy jelly accompanied by half decent vegetables and cost a whacking £19. A friend's ricotta-filled courgette flower was mealy and unsatisfying; no better than the pork although it was £5 cheaper.
With no wine, the bill for two (two courses each) came to £49. Service wasn't included, so we quite happily added on £6; although the food was pretty uneven, we couldn't complain about the front of house. But it was a total that still asked too much for what was pretty sloppy cooking, and I can think of better ways of spending this kind of money on lunch, not least Duck Soup around the corner on Dean Street which has an altogether more skilful set of hands in the kitchen. So, for once on this usually consensus-happy blog, I find myself playing the part of the contrarian. 10 Greek Street has little but praise from anyone I've ever spoken to who's been there, and yet here I am having to leave it a rather mediocre review. Ah well, plenty more clams in the sea.
5/10
As has been proven time and again the world over, from Leicester Square to Times Square, from the Champs-Élysées to the Ramblas of Barcelona, tourist hot spots and good restaurants do not go together. If you find yourself able to fill every seat no matter what kind of garbage you're serving, then why bother to actually be any good? Why go to the extra effort of using nice ingredients when you can make a fortune marking up cheap crap? Why have friendly, knowledgeable and engaged waiting staff when most of the people you're serving are only in town for a couple of days, and you'll never see them again?
Which is why Margot's in Padstow is so extraordinary. It doesn't have to be this good - it's sat in the middle of one of the prettiest and tourist-trodden villages in Cornwall, and I'm sure they could double their prices and start microwaving Asda ready meals and still turn a healthy profit. Admittedly they have some competition from Rick Stein (who appears to own half the town) and Paul Ainsworth who each run very well-regarded (if pricey) restaurants, but from a cursory glance at some of the other menus in town, there appear to be plenty of places happy to charge the best part of £20 for a semolina-flour pizza and glass of coke. Clearly there is money to be made in mediocrity in this town.
Fortunately, wonderfully, there's nothing mediocre about Margot's. A golden roast skate (sorry - ray, it specifically said on the menu) wing, topped with anchovies and doused in a silky herb butter sat on top of a generous pile of creamy mash. The flesh drew off the bones with happy ease, and had a thick, meaty texture of perfectly cooked Dover Sole. I can barely remember having a better seafood dish anywhere.
A slab of Silver Mullet, encased in a perfect crispy skin, came balanced on some new potatoes and a some juicy fat mussels. Another lovely thick butter sauce, shot through with tarragon I think, held all the ingredients in its warm embrace, and the flesh of the fish itself was declared "perfect". And you can't improve on perfect.
You'll notice from the pictures that this isn't fancy, foamy, Michelin-starred gastronomy - it's comfort food, unpretentious and homely but using top-notch ingredients and cooked properly. Even a basket of steamed vegetables were timed well, retaining just the right amount of bite and keeping the flavours of each element distinct.
There was only one dessert - the Sticky Toffee Pudding. Actually, that's not true - there probably were other desserts, but I'm afraid I only got as far as the first item on the menu before making up my mind. It was fantastic - a massive slab of treacly goodness, but surprisingly light and dangerously easy to eat. We had one each.
The bill, with a bottle of Picpoul de Pinet, a nice dessert wine and (charming) service added, came to just under £45 a head. A not insignificant amount I suppose, but we probably could have gone easier on the booze if we'd really wanted to keep the costs down. Which, spirits fuelled by lovely fresh seafood and a bracing walk around Padstow harbour to look forward to, we didn't really. So yes, I thoroughly enjoyed Margot's, and you will too, if you can ever get a table - befitting the honeypot location and reasonable prices, even in early May the place was booked up, and in season scoring a dinner here is nigh on impossible. So why am I making things even worse by lavishing yet more praise on somewhere that is already comfortably oversubscribed? Well, because it's so much better than it needs to be, it doesn't charge the earth and it doesn't compromise on quality in the face of hordes of undemanding tourists. And for those reasons, Margot's deserves all the attention it can get.
9/10
I knew I was going to like The 10 Cases, newish (but not actually that new; it has apparently been open nearly a year) wine bar and bistro in Covent Garden, the moment they served me my first drink. I knew this because, unlike some of the smartest joints in town that sell wine by the glass, when I ordered 125ml of Chardonnay the nice man behind the counter simply put a glass in front of me and poured what looked like the right amount straight out of the bottle. I don't know when the rest of town is going to cotton on to the fact that measuring out wine into metal cylinders looks amateurish and miserly (and with who knows what effect on the taste of the wine), but thank Bacchus for anywhere that treats their bar staff and their customers like adults.
The wine, a 2010 L'Ocre Rouge in case that means anything to you, was fantastic - salty and complex and very unlike your usual buttery Chardonnays. I'm making a special effort to mention it despite my obvious lack of expertise in this area because clearly a lot of trouble has gone into creating a very interesting (not to mention pretty affordable) list and with every single option also available by the glass, working your way through it is a hugely attractive option.
But the wine isn't the only thing to get excited about at 10 Cases. The food - advertised around the room on chalk boards, some crossed off even quite early in the evening, a measure of the popularity of this pretty little space - reads like a Francophile's dream. Words like foie gras and beef get multiple uses; the cheeseboard includes such superstars as Langres and St Marcellin; and an "Aperitif" section contains fully 9 different ways of snacking, including potted crab and roasted garlic. I started with a £4 order of saucisson, presented with crunchy mini gherkins which offset the silky fat of the pork very nicely.
Sometimes the only thing that separates a good restaurant from a great one is attention to detail. House bread, for example - I don't know if 10 Cases bake their own, but it certainly tasted that way, the sliced baguette being warm and crusty and soft and utterly irresistible, especially when topped with half a sachet of (soft and room temperature - take note Other Restaurants) President butter. You can get decent baguette in lots of places; bread like this is a rare treat.
For some reason I was expecting foie gras en cocotte to be a kind of foie gras Wellington, but I think I was getting mixed up with en croute. Anyway, what arrived was a little ceramic pot containing a generous slab of seared liver, topped with a poached egg. It's perhaps a dish that in lesser hands could have been a bit sickly, but we found the mix of rich meaty foie and silky yolk dangerously addictive - and a nice crust on the foie meant the textures didn't get muddied.
Bacon egg and pork cheek "salad" is my kind of "salad" - ie. one that is largely made up of massive bits of pig. The bacon was more akin to expensive pancetta, and had a superb flavour, as did the dark slab of pork cheek (hidden under all that bacon) which split apart into moist chunks under the slightest pressure from a spoon. A poached egg lubricated it all, and the odd crouton gave crunch. This huge bowl of food disappeared in frantic, hungry seconds.
On the one hand, trout, spinach and potatoes isn't an earth-shatteringly innovative dish but when the everyday is done as well as this, you can't really complain. The skin on the fish was crispy and greaseless, the potatoes soft and buttery, and the spinach smooth and well seasoned. If I'm going to nit pick I suppose the huge chunk of garlic butter on the top was overkill; it was so massive it didn't have a chance to melt and so remained stubbornly solid after the rest of the food was polished off. But a small portion of fried octopus (£4 and from the "Aperitif" menu but easily big enough for a starter) was just gorgeous - crunchy and soft in all the right places, and coated in a rich herby, buttery dressing.
So let's just consider what we have here. A friendly, attractive little spot in central London, serving interesting wines and great food, at reasonable prices (our bill came to £67 for two with plenty of vino) and with a smile. The wine bar/bistro concept is hardly new; I can think of a dozen similar places within walking distance, many of them very good. But there is something about The 10 Cases - passion? Spirit? Perhaps just good old fashioned attention to detail and a healthy desire to offer a good product - that sets it above the crowd. If you want this kind of thing, and unless you're a vegetarian I can't think of a single good reason why you wouldn't, there really isn't anywhere that does it much better. Well done 10 Cases. Very well done indeed.
9/10
One of the few criticisms of José Pizarro's tapas bar in Bermondsey - in fact really the only criticism - is that it's always far too busy. In Madrid, a place like José would be one of a number of options to pop in and enjoy a glass of sherry and some carved ham in any given area of town, and whilst some would be better than others, the idea is that you spend a happy evening going from bar to bar, never lingering too long in one spot and with the sheer number of alternatives helping to thin out the crowds. No such luck in SE1 - the nearest decent tapas bar once you've done with José is a cab ride to Soho away, and so the only option is to queue, cheek to jowl with other hungry patrons, hoping at some point you'll be lucky and find a seat. It's worth it, because the food and drink is always so brilliant, but you can see why it's not for everyone. What José needs, and what the people of London need, is competition - and unless you manage to get a walk-in at Zucca (good luck with that), there ain't none.
I am worried a very similar fate will befall Soif, the new restaurant from the guys behind the Terroirs and Brawn. There are lots and lots of restaurants in Battersea but with the odd exception they are all absolutely crap, so anywhere that is any good (Mien Tay, the Draft House) is permanently hugely oversubscribed. And Soif is just so much better than anywhere else in this part of town that I can very soon see it turning into the Zucca of SW11 - booked up six months in advance and with a waiting list like a kidney transplant. For now, though, let's enjoy it before the word gets around and you still stand a snowball's chance in hell of eating there.
Lardo di Colonnata, buttery and rich and presented on a marble tray in thin ribbons, was very tasty although when I've had lardo before it's been simply dressed with olive oil and seasoning and I think that helps lighten it slightly. Having said that though, it still all disappeared very quickly and if you don't enjoy the experience of melting bright write strips of pig fat in your mouth and washing them down with the house red there's something seriously wrong with you.
All the food from here on was, without exception, superb. A bowl of clams in butter and garlic was superficially simple but one of those things that's far too easy to get wrong. Bursting with freshness and seasoned perfectly, the only thing better than sucking back the sweet, juicy bivalves themselves was dipping the house sourdough in the garlicky butter sauce left behind - just brilliant.
This cute little pile of surf and turf is a paprika (I think) studded squid balanced on a disc of thick black pudding. The squid had a great flavour and a nice soft texture but the real star here was the black pudding, so thick and powerfully flavoured it was like a solid slow-cooked stew studded with chunks of pork fat.
And the third of the starters, chanterelles and pancetta, very like something I'd had once at Brawn, was a posh - and perfect - mushrooms on toast, with all kinds of strange shapes combining into an addictive mix of crunchy and soft, sweet and salty.
Based on the number of times I've had a dry partridge with flabby skin, it can't be easy to cook these birds properly. But this example was great - roasted golden brown with a fantastic aroma, the flesh beneath the crust was soft and juicy and full of gamey flavour. The sauerkraut (sorry, "choucroute"), despite my initial reservations, actually made a good sharp counterpoint to the meat, and the combination was all the more impressive once the juices from the bird had begun to mix together. But I still remain to be convinced whether it really did need that huge piece of Montbéliard sausage - it tasted perfectly nice but after stripping the partridge to the bone and knocking back a couple of mouthfuls of sauerkraut I barely had space to really appreciate it. Perhaps those with a bigger appetite would disagree.
There was one other main I forgot to take a picture of - a bowl of pig cheeks in cider and winter veg, but it was of a similar standard to the rest of the food - as soft as Christmas cake, rich as foie gras, comforting as a thick porky blanket. And given how much of my main course I had to leave, I'm not sure how I found room for any chestnut cake, but one slice between three people was just enough to send us wobbling on our way - it was lovely though, soft and buttery and lifted by the accompanying crème fraiche.
The bill, with a 500ml carafe of Cuvee Briand (much of the inspiration for the wine list and the food at Soif apparently comes from the Ardeche in SE France) came to £40 a head, which I suppose isn't super cheap but thanks to the generous attitude to portion sizes we were absolutely stuffed and you can hardly claim for food of this standard that it wasn't good value. Anywhere in London, Soif would be a great restaurant but given the standards of the area it's little short of miraculous. And it's for this reason that my hearty recommendation on 2nd December 2011 comes with a potentially ruinous caveat - this is a great value restaurant serving top food and wines in pleasant surroundings, but it's in Battersea, so be warned: I can guarantee that whenever you decide to try your luck, you won't be the only Nando's or Pizza Express exile on the hunt for a some decent grub.
9/10
