With its great sweeping Georgian terraces, cobbled hills and shimmering waterfront, much of Bristol is quite disarmingly attractive. Walking from where I was staying in villagey Redland, down the dramatic incline of St Michael's Hill and through the medieval Christmas steps, it's enough to make you come over all Bristol Tourist Board, but for some reason when I lived here as a student I never stopped drinking and sleeping long enough to appreciate it. It was only last year I returned for the first time since my final exams, and found myself completely smitten with the place. And then, this summer, Grillstock happened, and suddenly it was a full-blown love affair.
The idea of hosting an authentic, US-style, Kansas City Barbeque Society (KCBS)-rules competition in dear old Blighty is actually nothing new. Various attempts have been made over the years to run a regular, respectable event showcasing the best of US BBQ but all have either gone under or morphed into that more traditional home-grown beast - food cooked over charcoal grills. I'm sure Laverstocke Park's Field to Fork Festival (to pick one example) is great fun, but real American 'cue fanatics hanker after the "low and slow" approach with pork butt, beef ribs and chicken thighs coated in dry-rub, smoked for hours over cherry wood chips and served with a sweet, sharp sauce.
And this was exactly what was happening, on an impressive scale, at the Grillstock festival in Bristol back in June. I was lucky enough to have been invited as a judge on one of the less important rounds (they weren't about to let a chancer like me loose on the pulled pork, brisket and chicken rounds) but would have happily paid to go; the weekend was about as much fun as I can remember having at any food event, with 21 teams from all over the UK and Europe (US competition BBQ is especially popular in Estonia, interestingly) competing for the King of the Grill title. The quality of the food was astonishing, the serious business of BBQ given due reverence, and the whole of the harbourside was hung with the smell of smoked brisket. It was heaven.
But with the Grillstock festival itself being an annual affair for just a couple of days at a time, where do you go for the rest of the year for proper competition-style BBQ without booking a flight to Memphis, TN? Well, at lunchtimes in St Nicholas Market in the centre of Bristol you can now go to Grillstock's very own stall, where a daily-changing menu of authentic American treats like brisket, pulled pork and chicken wings are served by enthusiastic BBQ lovers. I must declare an interest, in that not only was anything attached to the Grillstock name always going to make me go all-of-a-wobble, but a friend of mine Dan (better known as @essexeating and one half of Bristol supperclub sensations The Basement) is the chef. But even the most hardened cynic would be won over by the food - and the prices - of this little stall.
Beef rib on the bone, surely the best part of a kilo of meat served with a bun and slaw, was an unbelievable £6.50. Inside the dark crust of a herby, salty rub, slow cooking had rendered the meat so tender you could slice off thick, moist strips of it with even the plastic cutlery it came with. Pulled pork - something silly like £4 - was piled high and had some good colouring from the rub, and tasted like they knew exactly what they were doing. And a hot dog, appearing on the Grillstock menu for the first time, was sourced from the same butchers that hot dog legends Big Apple of Old Street get theirs, and was predictably brilliant. It came with yet more pulled pork and Dan's special 'fry sauce' which you can read more about here.
So the Grillstock stall is very good indeed, and reason enough for BBQ-loving citizens of Bristol to be very happy. And judging by numbers filing through this corner of St Nicholas Market on Saturday lunchtime it already has many devotees. But it gets better. Not only do we have the 2013 Grillstock to look forward to (11th-12th May), but next year for the first time ever Grillstock is coming to London (15th-16th June), meaning far more of you have the opportunity to go, and serious fanatics have the option of going twice. I'll be the one with the BBQ sauce-stained shirt and the delirious, meat-sated smile on my face.
After a faintly underwhelming evening a couple of months ago at Ceviche, the first of the new-wave Peruvian fusion restaurants to open in London, you can forgive me for not being wildly enthusiastic about trying somewhere else ten minutes walk away that, on the face of it at least, appeared to be doing something remarkably similar. Obviously everywhere should be judged on its own merits, but having arrogantly assumed I'd "done" sea-bass ceviche and Pisco sours and not finding many reasons to believe that Lima wouldn't just be more of the same, I rolled up to Rathbone Place with expectations if not low then certainly 'realistic'.
But by the time I'd finished a Pisco Sour (perhaps slightly better than the Ceviche version, although that was very good too) I began to get the feeling that there was something altogether more accomplished about the way Lima was going about things, compared to their rivals. The basement bar at Lima perhaps doesn't have the same shabby Soho atmosphere, but the staff are engaging and the drinks are prepared smartly, and with skill. Upstairs, the dining room is brightly lit by a large skylight (at least it is in early summer) and a large open kitchen makes a entertaining centerpiece while you wait for your dinner to arrive.
Mains were similarly high in wow-factor. Four large chunks of halibut, showing a gentle crust from the grill but still tender and moist, were paired with a sort of smooth peanutty sauce, the contents of which I couldn't even begin to hazard a guess at but take your pick from "huacatay herb, Andean grain, aji mirasol" from the menu. Star of the evening though was a plate of the best suckling pig I can remember being given in London, accompanied by "potato 4000 metres" which tasted less like potato and more like a kind of squash with an incredibly concentrated sweet/savoury flavour. Thanks to a mix of some interesting textures such as sliced white pear and chunks of grilled nuts, this was the kind of thing that makes sense of all the hype about Peruvian fusion food - it really was that good.
It's a sign of a great restaurant that as soon as you've paid up and left you wish you could go back and try everything else you didn't get to shovel down the first time. And I do desperately want to try the "Asparagus Peru" and the "Eco Dried Potato" and the "bay scallops tiraditos". But here's the problem with that - I'll have to get saving. Our bill, with a bottle of the cheapest wine, a beer and a very pleasant pot of "Andean Kiwicha" (sort of a crunchy yoghurty thing topped with the unappetising-sounding "purple corn jelly" but was actually nowhere near as weird as it sounds) came to £100 for two, and was the only slight dampener on what had otherwise been a faultless evening. Perhaps I've been spoiled by no-reservations places like Polpo and Burger & Lobster which can offer top-notch food for less by turning tables ten times of an evening, and I admit it was nice rocking up and saying "table for 2 for Pople, 6:30" instead of "how long's the wait?", but £50 is still a lot of money for 2 1/2 courses and a few drinks.
Also, I wonder how many people will raise their eyebrows at a menu that appears to import much of its contents from a country 6,000 miles away? With every recession-era pointing trend towards local sourcing and recycled napkins, it's very strange to be sat in a restaurant that boasts of just how many food miles (and vertical metres) your dinner has travelled, and asks you to pay a premium for it. Can this be a sustainable arrangement? Should it be?
Despite the nagging environmenal questions though, and the cost, there's still a lot to love about Lima. The food, as I say, is extraordinary not just because London has seen little like it before, but because it is thoughtfully constructed, expertly cooked and tastes incredible. Service was spot on (the Maitre d' has come from Heston Blumenthal's Dinner) and we had a thoroughly enjoyable evening. I wish it had been a bit cheaper, but then you can't have everything. So save your pennies, take public transport to offset your carbon emissions, and go and see for yourself.
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.
