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There's very few times I feel more self-consciously clueless about food than when I'm eating in a Japanese restaurant. Sure, learning the ingredients and preparations in any foreign culture can be a challenge - I'll die happy the day I can order dim sum and not feel like I'm playing a scratch card - but Japanese food is surely one of the most advanced and perfected cuisines on the planet, and comes in such a variety of guises learning even the basics can seem an impossible task.
For a start, there's rarely anything so straightforward as a "Japanese restaurant". Instead, there are udon bars, ramen bars, yakitori joints, sushi bars, okonomiyaki, kaiseki, Brazilian-fusion and probably a few others I'm yet to discover. The intense skill and focus needed to perfect each of these styles of food results in extreme specialisation, and anywhere brave enough to attempt more than a couple of them at once is setting themselves up for a fall.
If anyone can have a decent bash at a pan-Japanese restaurant though, it's a former Nobu head chef. Nobu, whatever you may think of their showy, A-list bait restaurants and eye-watering prices, always knew how to produce decent food, and Scott Hallsworth has worked in their kitchens in various glamorous locations all over the world for over a decade. The influence of the mothership doesn't just extend to the food, either - the vast basement space on Kingsway is nicely done, the gently spotlit black wood tables and cream banquettes giving a ever-so-slightly bland but familiar Mayfair vibe, and all front of house being very smart and smiley.
Miso soup was, well, Miso soup, but had a couple of shimeji mushrooms bobbing about in the broth to liven things up a bit. I quite liked that they didn't even offer the option of a spoon so I didn't feel too self-conscious loudly slurping it directly out of the bowl.
I'd ordered a single piece of otoro (fatty tuna) sashimi just to see how their raw skills were, and it wasn't bad, but nowhere near as good as the one from Sushi Tetsu a few months ago and just felt slightly less-than-perfectly-fresh. Also, despite sternly being informed on the menu that the sashimi was "not served with soy sauce", it arrived with, er, a little bowl of soy sauce and a specific instruction from the chef to dip the fish in it. Which was a bit odd.
The BBQ grill set, though, was just lovely. Skewers of soft sliced onions dipped in a powerful miso dressing, delicately boned chicken wings with a perfect crispy skin, a good dollop of powerfully-smoked aubergine salsa, and the most wonderfully cooked (if slightly underseasoned) lamb chops that were just so addictively tender I stripped them clean to the bone in seconds. The sesame-ponzu dressing was a great and time-tested match to the charcoal-crisped protein, and a blackened half of lemon topped it all off. The kind of food that, unless you were a vegetarian or had some other kind of eating disorder, you could not fail to appreciate.
Any criticisms, then, will be largely due to one thing - the prices. It is very easy to spend a lot of money in Wabi and not have a great deal to show for it, and I say that having enjoyed the food there very much indeed. With a (bitterly sharp, presumably a mistake of some kind - it tasted they'd forgotten to sweeten it) salad, some decent pickles and a bowl of rice my fairly modest lunch came to £27, and though I'd happily pay it again, Bincho Yakitori in Soho does better (and cheaper) skewers, Asakusa in Camden does better (and cheaper) sushi and although I didn't try their tempura if it's any better than Koya's I'll eat my kimono.
But for an area that's hardly blessed with great restaurants and for doing what it does with a good amount of style and flair, Wabi is worth a visit. Die-hard foodies will be put off by the very anti-2013 lack of extreme specialisation, but I can only see it getting better as the staff and kitchens bed in, and you'd have to be a real contrarian not to be won over by almost everything about the place. For better of for worse, it's Holborn's very own Nobu.
7/10
It's taken me a while to come round to the Argentinian approach to beef. An enthusiastic consumer of the dry-aged, US/European varieties, charcoal-grilled to perfection in London's best steakhouses (take a bow, Goodman and Hawksmoor), my experience of anything calling itself Argentinian was limited to chain pub steaks and the overpriced and mediocre Gaucho Grill. And so you can see why it was easier to think "Argentinian = cheap = bad" than entertain the idea that perhaps just because the cheapest steaks available in the UK were from Argentina, those were the ones most likely to be bought by the UK's worst restaurants.
But then, a couple of years back, I was invited to a friend's birthday meal in a little place near the Emirates stadium called Garufa, and halfway through a few hundred grams of ribeye that for once wasn't lowest-common-denominator menu filler, I finally started to understand what the deal was. Argentinian beef - good Argentinian beef - is lean and robust, with a gentle gamey flavour and very little of the buttery, minerally notes that characterised the dry-aged US and European cuts. If it helps, think of it as venison - the fresher the better, salted and seared over a parrilla, perfectly matched with a glass of Malbec. It's so different from traditional Western steakhouse steak it may as well come from a different animal, and once you release yourself from the idea that to be good a steak has to be cuttable with a butter knife and contain ribbons of yellow fat, there's plenty to enjoy.
Of course, you'll also need to find somewhere good to eat it. Garufin is to Garufa what Barrafina is to Fino, or Morito to Moro. Thanks to good pedigree and a light application of tasteful on-trend restaurant design (bare brick walls, uncomfortable seating, small plates, you know the drill) it manages to be buzzier, cheaper and more fun than the original, and is my new favourite work lunch spot. Providing you go easy on the booze you can walk away from a very decent meal for less than £20, and although the steaks are the real focus, there are enough interesting Argentinian specialities elsewhere on the menu to keep even the most demanding colleagues happy.
You know a place is going to be good when even something as simple as a tomato salad manages to impress. Crunchy and well-seasoned, underlined with a lovely smoked pepper sauce, the "Mixta" stands as proof that when restaurants get the basics right, it's that much easier for everything else to fall into place. Similarly, you may think it's not too difficult to mess up cheese croquettas, but numerous distressing experiences in lesser tapas bars across the city say otherwise; here a delicate crust contained strong provolone and the occasional toasted peanut, each sat on a light citrus dressing.
"Rescoldo" was perhaps the only dish I've tried at Garufin that I can't recommend. Consisting of slimy, underseasoned vegetables (some powerfully smoked) topped with a congealed slab of provolone, it was unbalanced and quite unpleasant, and though I can kind of see what they were getting at (a sort of Argentinian ratatouille) it needs a bit of a rethink. Their empanadas, though, were wonderful - particularly the spicy tripe & ox cheek one, a fluffy, crisp coating containing rich offal.
But to the main events. At £14.50, the "Lomo & caracu" is the single most expensive item on the menu, but fortunately was everything I was hoping it would be, a perfectly-seared chunk of tender fillet steak boasting that gentle gamey freshness, and marrow presented in a bisected bone for you to scoop out and eat with it. It's a lot for not a great deal of food, but if you ever needed convincing of the merits of Argentinian beef, it's a great place to start. And some Iberico pork, seared to medium and resting on a bed of creamy sweetcorn salsa, came with a black pudding croquetta - handily negating the need for me to order a separate side of black pudding croquettas. Because there was no way I was going to go to a restaurant serving black pudding croquettas and not order some black pudding croquettas.
The one dessert I've tried - cutely described as Dulche de Leche "Served in all its ways" was another heady helping of South American comfort food. I particularly liked the slices of banana with a DdL crust, and the excellent ice cream.
The fact that Garufin is less than 30 seconds walk from the office is, of course, a huge bonus to the restaurant desert that is Holborn/Bloomsbury and massively good news to me personally. But I'm sure that were it the other end of a 30 minute tube ride I would have been equally impressed by the cooking, the relentlessly friendly staff and the atmosphere of this welcoming little place. They are one of the first restaurants that really have a chance of convincing Londoners there's more to Argentinian beef - and Argentinian cuisine in general - than watery sirloin served at a 300% markup in the dark (yes I'm moaning about Gaucho again), but let's hope they won't be the last. If they can turn a die-hard dry-aged steak snob like me, they can turn anyone.
8/10
Sometimes I even surprise myself with my capacity to get annoyed about bad food. You'd think by now, wouldn't you, after 33 years on the planet, the best part of a decade in London and six years writing a restaurant blog, that a disappointing dinner would just be one of those things, a professional hazard, a passing inconvenience, water off a (force-fed) duck's back.
And yet, the opposite seems to be the case. I find myself getting increasingly grumpy whenever dinner I've paid good money for isn't up to scratch. I take it personally when I'm on the receiving end of some half-assed fusion concept or desperate bandwagon-jumping relaunch. I heave great sighs of anguish over a feeble steak, a sugary Pad Thai or stale Yorkshire Pudding. Perhaps I'm spoiled after so long spent seeking out the very best the city has to offer, but my capacity for disappointment seems to be at an all-time low; and what's worse is that the harder I try to avoid such disappointments, the more often they seem to be thrust upon me.
Take my lunch today, for example. The Holborn Whippet is a newish craft beer bar and diner at the end of Sicilian Avenue in Holborn. Sicilian Avenue is one of those hugely over-elaborate Victorian arcades which at one time you would have hoped housed fine jewellers and shops selling gentlemen's smoking accessories but now, given presumably sky-high rents and its proximity to main tourist drags like the British Museum and Covent Garden, is mainly populated by dreadful nationwide chains like Spaghetti House. But the Whippet is not a chain (at least not yet), and thanks to a very tasteful job on the interior and an impressive line-up of proper beers behind the bar, I had high hopes a similar effort may have been spent on the food. I can't emphasise that enough - I had every right to believe that lunch at the Holborn Whippet would have been worth paying for. I did nothing wrong.
The first creeping elements of doubt appeared once I'd had the chance to study the menu in more detail. The Whippet club sandwich, for example, is described somewhat unnecessarily as "two or three slices of toasted bread with mayonnaise and slices are held together by small sticks". The steak sandwich is apparently both "padded with roasted vine tomatoes" and "Severed[sic] with crinkle fries" which makes it sound rather dangerous. All menu items, in fact, seem to be paired entirely randomly with either "crinkle fries" or "string fries" apart from the Bloomsbury Burger (a name they're so pleased with they've seen fit to TradeMark(TM) it) which is "served with string and crinkle fries", which either means two different types of potato product on one plate, which would be odd enough, or, er, some string.
As it turns out, the Bloomsbury Burger(TM) comes with neither string fries or crinkle fries (or even string) but a mound of pappy school-canteen chips pointlessly scattered with parsley. The burger itself looked the part at first - the glazed brioche bun reminded me somewhat of Goodman's, and there appeared to be a nice dark crust on the two rounds of beef - until a bite revealed watery, grey meat of barely supermarket mince standard. "Cheese" (an optional extra for 50p and not included as standard) was in fact a very strong blue of some kind, cold and unmelted, that had been sandwiched in between the two patties and did nothing but utterly overwhelm the tasteless meat. Salad and some decent sliced pickles did the best job they could, but the battle was already lost.
Oh yes alright then, you can probably have a decent time here if you stuck to the beers and didn't eat. I'll have to give them that. And a few years ago I wouldn't have been anywhere near as harsh on the burger, either - I certainly still wouldn't have enjoyed it but perhaps I would have said that at least the bun was good and the pickles came sliced and it still cost less than a tenner. But unfortunately for the Holborn Whippet this is 2012 not 2008. The very first thing a new diner opening up in central London should do is check out the competition; and either they have, and are unable or unwilling to do things properly, or they haven't, in which case they deserve everything they have coming to them.
Anyway, I don't think serving a nice range of craft beers is ever going to be a good enough excuse for serving crappy food. They're still charging for the stuff, none of it comes free with a drink. It was still my lunch hour they spoiled, my money they took, and had I only bought a club sandwich "held together with small sticks" to soak up twelve pints of Adnams Gold I most likely still would have considered it a waste of money. So, damage done, all I can do is ensure that as many other people as possible don't make the same mistake, and make a solemn promise to try extra hard to avoid any such disappointments in the future. Wish me luck.
3/10
However much fun it's been having so many days off work over the festive period (due apologies and commiserations to those who haven't, of course) it is frighteningly easy, after two weeks of late nights and lie-ins and general dossing about, to lose track of time completely. I strolled into Soho yesterday afternoon with the intention of toasting the New Year at Bob Bob Ricard, only to find it disconcertingly dark and empty and, well, closed. As indeed was Polpo. And Wright Bros. And Dehesa. Turns out yesterday was a bank holiday, a fact I probably should have been aware of, but - to cut a long story short - wasn't. Increasingly frantic, not to mention hungry, I vaguely recalled some Twitter activity centred around newly opened Delaunay in Aldwych, and a grovelly phonecall and 5 minute cab ride later, I and a couple of friends found ourselves in seemingly the only restaurant open on 2nd January in the centre of London.
A lunch of convenience, perhaps, but that's not to say I wasn't looking forward to it. Sister restaurant The Wolseley was never really my cup of tea - sure they do a very nice Eggs Benedict but £13.50? We are still talking about ham and eggs aren't we, not Beluga Caviar? - but the buzz surrounding this latest place was deafening. Fay Maschler swooned, TimeOut gushed, and the word from various first-week visitors was universally, uniformly positive. And after some solid, straightforward dishes sold at a healthy premium, in an admittedly gorgeous room staffed with pleasant and obliging people, I could just about see how it could have gathered some fans. That was, until the bill arrived... but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
After some excellent house bread with Echire butter, the first dish I'd agreed to pay for as opposed to had forced on me (more on that later) was a Veal Holstein. At £21.50 it was a generous portion of nicely cooked meat but the unidentifiable brown smear underneath was less a sauce and more like something that had failed to be removed by the previous dishwasher cycle. The staff did suggest I ordered a side to go with it - unseasoned, damp but fresh tasting spinach - but this was crying out for the volcano of rich veal stock and truffled mash that Bob Bob Ricard's version comes with. Bloody Bank Holidays.
Other main courses were, admittedly, better. A chargrilled slab of Pollock was a beautiful bit of fish, simply presented with a soft boiled egg and buttered new potatoes - comfort food at its most comforting. And omelette Arnold Bennett, when it finally appeared (a mix up with the orders but one charmingly apologised for and fixed) had a good cheesy flavour even if it was a bit runny. House fries needed more salt but were crunchy even to the bottom of the bowl.
Desserts continued in the same not-bad-but-not-quite-value vein. The dangerous sounding Scheiterhaufen was the best of them, a sort of boozy bread & butter pudding, soft and creamy. And an individual black forest gateaux was very pretty although it didn't quite get our pulses racing in the same way other versions elsewhere have. But my own "Mozart" was a very ordinary mixture of tart orange sorbet, chocolate meringue fingers and hot chocolate sauce - in fact it seems strange now, reciting those ingredients back, that it didn't taste a lot better than it did; you'd think you couldn't go far wrong with orange sorbet and chocolate sauce, but I'm afraid it was just a bit dull and not really worth the £5.25.
So that was it, and yes, I can easily moan about the high prices and somewhat unsatisfying food but it's a formula that has made the Wolseley as bafflingly popular as it is today so you can hardly blame them for sticking to it. But it was only when we were presented with the bill that another reason why I had avoided the Wolseley for so many years was brought to light - the dreaded Cover Charge.
The Delaunay - like the Wolseley - is not a cheap place to eat. We had deliberately asked for tap water, like we always do, and had naively assumed that the nice fresh bread and fancy butter was a complimentary way of getting our expensive lunch off to a nice start rather than an obligatory extra course. But no - the Delaunay would rather treat every customer as a potential freeloader, and charge each of us £2 for the privilege of walking through the door and using up their carpet, than trading in this miniscule premium for a payback of good will. Do other restaurants with no cover charge have tables of 12 snacking on free bread and olives then buggering off home? No, they do not. Cover charges are a mean-spirited, cynical and completely counterproductive way of clawing a couple of extra quid off unsuspecting punters and I hate them.
Ahem. I would, of course, in the interests of fairness, welcome a response from any person or particularly any restaurant that would like to defend the "mug's tax" of a cover charge. There was a bit of backwards and forwards on Twitter yesterday between a couple of people in the "well it's only a couple of quid" camp (though doesn't that argument work both ways? If they think we can cough up £2/head without making a fuss, surely they can take that miniscule hit on their profit margins), but largely it seems people are as infuriated by the practice as I am. One individual brilliantly compared them to the Ryanair-style credit card booking fees - not technically unavoidable perhaps if you read the small print or plan ahead, but in practice usually so.
Anyway, as ever with these things the only way of getting our message across is to vote with our feet. I would never advocate anything as deliberately disruptive (and potentially excruciatingly embarrassing) as asking for the cover charge to be taken off a bill - and in fact, that's exactly what most restaurants that charge one are banking on - but we can at the very least avoid such places altogether. Fortunately there aren't many, and even more fortunately, one of them is the Delaunay, and you really aren't missing anything much by avoiding there.
5/10
Until very recently, there was a little kebab shop on High Holborn called Safadi Express. I'm not going to pretend it was great, because it wasn't, but given the choice between that and Eat and Pret and Eat and Pret ad infinitum in this part of town, it was clean and friendly, served nice fresh charcoal-grilled chicken wraps and did a generous portion of hummus and warm flatbread for £3.50. I went there quite often and never had cause to complain. Then one day last week, I popped down to street level at lunchtime and noticed it was all boarded up with a sign saying 'closed for refurbishment'. And barely a couple of days later, a garish blue frontage had replaced the old one, declaring the new resident to be Micky's Fish Restaurant and Takeaway, "Established 1962", "As seen on Heston Blumenthal's In Search of Perfection". Presumably that refers to a different branch somewhere else as I know for a fact this one has been open 5 days, not 5 decades. I thought I'd give it a try anyway, as a decent fish & chip place is a very valuable thing to have within seconds of the office.
If the speed of the "refurbishment" and change of tenant was surprising from the outside, once inside it all made sense. Apart from new heat lamps for the fried products, and the addition of a bottle of malt vinegar on every table, barely anything had changed from the old place. There was still a glass cabinet selling trays of baklava, the tables and chairs were the same, and the ropes and tills and queuing process seemed identical. Even more weirdly, the staff seemed largely the same, too, as if they'd turned up for work as normal on a Monday morning only to be told they'd be serving fish and chips instead of kebabs from now on, and to get on with it. And if all that wasn't strange enough, I was handed a menu, which was exactly the same size and shape, with the same font and layout as Safadi Express. And then the penny dropped - the similarities between the two enterprises were just too great for Micky's to be anything other than a new venture from the same company, who clearly think that knocking out fish & chips requires exactly the same skill set and attitude as hummus and flatbread. How wrong they are.
I knew the fish was wrong even as I queued to pay - they looked limp and sad under the heat lamps, and there was something worryingly... rubbery about the way they moved when picked up to be boxed for order. But I was past the point of no return by now, so ploughed on anyway paying my £8 and taking the box back up to the office.
The haddock was, as I'm sure you have suspected from the rather protracted build-up, a disaster. Overcooked to a formless, dry paste inside and encased in soggy, chewy batter that required quite a bit of sawing to get through, it was lucky I had a proper metal knife from the office kitchen to use as the supplied plastic utensils wouldn't have been anywhere near up to the task. There was also a faintly funky smell from the hardly fresh fish, as if I needed any more reason to hate the thing. In the interests of fairness, the chips were fine, a good shape and creamy inside, although I detected hardly any of the requested salt & vinegar. Yeah, I'm clutching at straws. It was bad.
So there we have it, another mediocre London fish & chip shop to add to the long list of others to avoid but, you're possibly thinking, hardly worth getting so upset about. Why make an example of this place in a town where it's not even close to being the worst way of spending your lunch money? Maybe it's just something about the way it came into being; a careless, hastily rebranded corporate exercise by a group of suits who one day decided the profit margins were better from battered sausages than falafel. And perhaps also it's what the whole sorry affair says about the British attitude to eating out - that if you can't make it a franchise and farm it out to untrained grease monkeys on a minimum wage then it's not worth doing at all. But mainly, it's because I paid £8 for very poor fish and chips. And that makes me sad.
2/10
I have a lot of time for any restaurant that cooks the majority of its food over charcoal. There's something primal about the way marinated meat reacts to the fierce heat and smoke of solid fuel that I find irresistible, whether it's lamb chops cooked in a tandoor or some tender cubes of chicken from a proper ocakbasi. Of course, such cooking requires skill, and patience, and a great big expensive extractor fan, so it's probably not surprising that you're more likely to see gas-fired grills in your local kebab shop and Indian takeaway than proper coals. But when charcoal-grilled food is good, it can turn humdrum raw materials into something quite special, adding wonderful textures and flavours while keeping the inside flesh moist. At least, that's the idea.
The Japanese, in their wonderfully organised and obsessive way, not only have a name for restaurants that specialise in charcoal-grilled food (yakitori) but also for places that specialise even further in skewered meat cooked over charcoal - kushiyaki. Mino Kitchen is ostensibly a kushiyaki restaurant, but also sells sushi, perhaps to cover all bases in case they get some demanding business lunchers. I wasn't here for sushi though - I ordered the "Nana kushi set" of skewers and, because none of the non-alcoholic options on the drinks menu really appealed, a glass of tap water.
Here they are then, in all their skewered glory. An odd looking bunch, I'm sure you'll agree; some of them tasted pretty odd too. There was an eringi mushroom, sliced vertically into one long rather rude looking appendage and incredibly difficult to eat. I tried biting off chunks but it was too chewy, and ended up swallowing the damn thing whole, like a pelican swallowing a sardine. It tasted like a big, chewy mushroom. Shiitake were more manageable but no more interesting - they tasted mainly of the sweet marinade that everything is brushed with on the grill. King prawns were disastrously overcooked into a mushy paste and wouldn't shell properly - not very nice . Weirdest of all though was sunagimo, described as 'chicken gizzards' on the menu yet having the strangest texture - they were bizarrely crunchy all the way through, not just charred from the grill but literally crunchy like celery, even though I'm sure they were indeed parts of a chicken. Chicken meatballs and beef meatballs were fine, nicely crispy outside but rather mealy and offputting inside.
It may sound like I had a fairly awful lunch but really it was only the king prawns that were completely inedible. Most of the rest of it was decent enough and made a distracting if not particularly large meal, and it was interesting sat at the bar watching the chefs put it all together. The only other major issue I had was with the price - these miniscule skewers (a starter portion really) of hardly premium ingredients were £12.50 and it was only thanks to an additional £2.60 small bowl of steamed rice (shovelled in using the wonkiest chopsticks I've ever used) that I managed to avoid leaving with a still empty stomach. But then, this is Holborn, and given the competition (or rather, lack of it) in the area I imagine they will probably do quite well. It may not be the greatest kushiyaki joint in London, but at least it's not another branch of Pret. Small mercies, and all that.
6/10
