If all you knew about Clockjack was that it was a brand new proto-chain, with a bare-bones menu serving only chicken with a handful of sides, a Piccadilly Circus location, carefully branded interiors and staff t-shirts, then I would understand why you'd steer well clear. I'll be the first to admit my expectations were low; the memory of the last ill-concieved crime against chicken (the risible Chooks) still burns like so much Frank's Hot Sauce and I wasn't in a hurry to see my hard-earned slip down the necks of another corporate blandathon or, for that matter, some Shoreditch art gallery where you can impress your friends with chicken that tastes like it's been rubbed down in Knorr (hang your head, Tramshed).
And yet from the moment the staff at Clockjack hollered a cheery greeting from behind the carving counter, I knew this was going to be the kind of place I'd have to try very hard to dislike. They're very on-trend these no-reservations, no-choice places but only the most stubborn (not to mention stupid) would automatically dismiss anywhere just because they happen to tick a few of the London restaurant cliché boxes, and everywhere deserves a chance. So with an open mind (or at least as open as I can manage in Piccadilly Circus) I ordered 3 pieces of roast chicken with chilli sauce, a side of double-cooked fries and hoped to God I wouldn't have to fill up at Pain Quotidien on the way back to the office.
Tap water arrived unprompted - a little touch that lightened my heart much more than it should have done. Why on earth does this not happen literally every time we eat out? Why are we even still BUYING bottled water? Tap water is available everywhere, is perfectly nice and is, for all intents and purposes, free. How is it, in 2013 I am STILL being made to feel like an inconvenience by answering the "still or sparkling" question with "tap please". From now on I'm going to make a special mention of anywhere, good or bad, that produces tap water for the whole table without being asked specifically to do so. What's depressing is that I expect it still won't happen very often.
As Clockjack is still in its first month of trading, there was a bit of gentle training still going on with some new members of staff. In front of the impressive gas-fired roasting chambers, as a quartet of chickens slowly rotated in comedy wings-aloft poses behind, someone was being given a carving lesson. And as I was the only customer in the place at 12:15 on a cold January lunchtime, I presume they were practising on mine. It sounded like hard work, so I wonder how they'll cope when the orders really start flooding in, but I was happy to be the guinea pig on this occasion.
I was also very happy to eat the finished product, as my chicken was, thankfully - not to mention completely unexpectedly - perfect in almost every way. I worry about the amount of time freshly-roasted birds hang around before being ordered in these rotisserie places so there's a chance I just hit some kind of perfect sweet spot of timing between too hot to serve and too dry to eat. But I can barely remember a better roast chicken cooked by anyone anywhere - every inch of it beautifully moist, with a golden crispy skin and aggressively (though by no means unpleasantly) seasoned. In keeping with the stripped-back nature of the place itself there was nothing fancy going on in terms of herbs or marinades, but you really didn't miss it. This is incredibly good chicken, free-range with a good strong showing of dark flesh, and yours for £6.95 for 3 joints.
By the time I'd polished off the last of the poultry, my mind was made up. Clockjack was a Very Good Thing Indeed. I could also mention the portion of double-cooked fries which did their job perfectly well, and a nice fresh ranch dressing which I was brought to try alongside the (slightly disappointing) chilli sauce. And if I was going to poke a hole in anything else it would be the rather uninspiring wine and beer list and the embarrassing logos on the t-shirts the women are forced to wear - "UNDRESS ME" they say on the front. Hilarious - but really these things are unimportant.
All you need to know is that chicken specialists Clockjack make possibly London's best roast poultry - and before you scoff at that claim you need to try it yourself - for very little money indeed. My bill came to a touch over £10 which nobody could have any cause to complain about, and I left with my faith in London's ability to cook chicken restored. It really is that good.
A little while ago I wrote a short piece for lovefood.com about the best meal of my life. In it, I rather clumsily attempted to make the distinction between great meals, which can happen more or less randomly and independently of whether a restaurant is regularly enjoyed by anyone else, and great restaurants which have consistency on their side as well as the ability to knock out a decent dish or ten.
In 2012, I had many, many great meals. L'Enclume in July was an obvious highlight, a tour-de-force of modern British cooking that marked Simon Rogan out as a supremely talented chef with a unique style seemingly plucked from thin air. And thank God, too, for Medlar, finally a Chelsea restaurant worth the money they're asking and one that has, by all accounts, only improved since my visit.
But these are, after all, just meals. I don't live close enough to be a regular at l'Enclume, or work close enough to take advantage of Medlar's cut-price lunch menus, and even if I wanted to go back to another one of 2012's high points, a tasting menu at Ben Spalding's John Salt, Ben and his team up and left Islington just before Christmas, leaving in their wake a rather bemusing press release blaming "different directions" and a good few months worth of cancelled reservations. Look out for Ben opening his own place very soon, but in the meantime his residency at John Salt is being handed to Neil Rankin of Pitt Cue, who if the meals I've had in his Soho BBQ joint are anything to go by, is one of very few chefs who could follow that act.
A great restaurant, then, isn't just where you happen to have a great meal, it's a place you look forward to going to more than anywhere else because you always enjoy the time you spend there. It's a home from home, a comfort blanket of great food and great service, reliable but never predictable, where everything on the menu looks like something you want to eat, and everything you do eat you would happily order again. There aren't many truly great restaurants in London, at least not yet, but there's one spot in Soho that I've spent far too much time and money in over the last year and which still, despite the explosion of quality all around it, has the capacity to surprise and delight every time.
Bob Bob Ricard is my Restaurant of the Year because I've just had too many brilliant times there in the last year for it not to be. I've taken friends, family and colleagues for lunch, dinner, aperitifs and digestifs, and it has not once put a foot wrong. If you were to attempt to describe the look of the place you might begin with something like "Russian-American bistro crossed with Orient Express dining car" but in truth, the singular design vision of owner/managers Leonid Shutov and Richard Howarth (aided and abetted by interior designer David Collins) is like nothing that has appeared in London before or since - it's a marble-clad, velvet-lined palace of pleasure, a surrealist wonderland where - brilliantly - there are no bad tables (everyone has a booth) and illuminated "Push for Champagne" buttons attract the attention of waiters clad in pastel pink and waitresses in sky blue.
The menu makes equally attractive viewing. The Russian influence is reflected in items like the Zakuski Taster Plate, a bijou arrangement of jellied ox tongue, truffled Russian salad and the like, accompanied by frozen vodka in a crystal shot glass. Pelmeni are a silver bowl of beef & pork dumplings served with sour cream, and if you've ever wondered what caviar tastes like and didn't have the hundreds of pounds to throw at places like Caviar House, £25 gets you a taster portion of 12g of genuine Sturgeon roe served in a pearl-like glass pot. The attention to detail - and whatever you think about spending £25 on 12g of anything, the value - is admirable.
BBR's inexhaustible drive for invention and re-invention has created some truly memorable signature dishes that you can't get anywhere else in London. The lobster burger, for example, is a whole breaded, fried tail of lobster in a brioche bun, presented hilariously with the shelled end of tail poking out of the side to let you know which end to eat from. Venison steak tartare is in danger of sounding like something you might be able to find elsewhere until you notice it comes with the option of 10g of sturgeon caviar dumped on top for an extra £15 (either version is superb). And Chateaubriand for one is another dish unique to BBR - the single-portion version of this usually two-person cut down to the sourcing of beef from special miniature cows. You couldn't make it up.
Of course, none of this style and spectacle comes cheap, but BBR is not a place where you ever feel like you're being taken advantage of. The extra rhubarb gin and tonic, the extra dollop of caviar, the irresistible second push of the Champagne Button, they're all good ideas at the time, and it's why a quick pit-stop on the way back from Oxford Circus can so easily leave you staggering out onto Beak Street at midnight, £70 lighter with your pockets stuffed full of complimentary chocolate truffles. It's a place in which to lose yourself, to eat and drink and ignore the problems of the world for a few precious moments. And that, in a sugar-coated nutshell, is why it's my favourite restaurant of 2012.
Honourable mentions
In no particular order, these ten other places have shown me joy and fun times in the last year:
Duck and Waffle on Bishopsgate, and not just for the stunning views - the food is always worth the journey. José, Bermondsey. There's still no finer Spanish tapas joint in London, and there is plenty of competition. Tonkotsu, Soho. The signature dish is unmatched in town, a thing of pure and balanced beauty. Burger & Lobster, Soho, Mayfair and Farringdon. Lobster and chips, £20. Lobster and chips, £20. No matter how many times you say it, it doesn't get boring. Lobster and chips, £20. MeatLiquor, MeatMarket and MeatMission, Fitzrovia, Covent Garden and Shoreditch. Still the best at this kind of thing. Tramontana, Shoreditch. The fourth restaurant by the Spanish food specialists manages to be as impressive as ever. Rita's Bar and Dining, Dalston. Good value, delicious and inventive American comfort food. The hipsters never had it so good. Lima, Fitzrovia. Finally fulfilling the promise made by other lesser joints that Peruvian fine dining was worth getting excited about. Patty and Bun, Marylebone. Doing almost everything right when it comes to burgers. Tayyabs, Whitechapel. Well it had to be in here somewhere didn't it.
Dishonourable mentions
Of course it wasn't all good news.
Chooks, Muswell Hill. A concept and franchise opportunity in search of food worth eating. Jamie's Italian, Union Jacks, Barbecoa, Fifteen, various places. Will people please stop giving this man money to open restaurants. He's rubbish at it. BRGR.co, Soho. The exception that proves the rule - the one new burger joint in Soho not worth bothering with. Skylon, Southbank. The kind of thing we desperately need a lot less of. Pret a Manger, EAT!, pod, etc. etc., fucking everywhere. For making London worse.
There we are then, and whether or not you agree with all, any or none of the above, I hope you had a good 2012 and you'll find enough of interest to keep reading. Feel free to nominate your own best and worst in the comments - as ever, this blog would be nothing without discussion, disagreement, argument, and finely-tuned lunacy. And you can be sure there'll be plenty more of all that to come in 2013. Happy New Year.
Bob Bob Ricard photos courtesy of the extraordinarily talented Paul Winch-Furness, via the BBR website. Photos of Medlar and l'Enclume are mine. As you can probably tell.
Pity the poor vowel. One minute London can't get enough of you (Mamounia, Kua 'Aina, er... Umu?), the next you find yourself at the wrong end of restaurant naming trends and you're dropped like last season's truffles. Smart Piccadilly bar DSTRKT was one of the first to go 100% consonant, then followed STK (a "female-friendly" steakhouse whatever the hell that means) in Aldwych, and now we have BRGR in Soho, joining an increasingly competitive (to say the least) market for gourmet burgers.
It's easy to eyeroll and grumble about yet another new burger place but actually, unless you're one of those tedious contrarians who will deny yourself any number of nice meals for fear of having anything so traumatic as the same opinion as someone else, who cares how many burger bars, or chicken shops, or ramen joints we end up with as long as they're good. And it's perhaps because so many new restaurants in London have been so astonishingly good in recent months that I'm afraid BRGR's offering seems a bit... crap.
That's not to say there aren't things to like about the place. Only Soho restaurants can get away with squeezing so many tables into such a small room (or rather rooms - there are two), but the low ceilings and open kitchen create a nice bustling atmosphere and the staff are all as cheery and smiley as you'd hope for in a business in its first full week of trading. I perched on a stool in the window and ordered from the depressingly large menu. And it wasn't long before my "6oz Gourmet Signature BRGR" arrived.
This strange, flat thing, looking like it had accidentally been sat on, cost £9.85 if you include the gruyère cheese and jalapeño options (the basic burger comes without cheese). The meat was cooked precisely medium-rare but was surprisingly bland considering this was supposedly the premium blend, and though the cheese was properly melted it didn't taste of anything more than supermarket cheddar. The bun was good though, a glazed, gently-sweet brioche that held firm to the last bite.
Onion rings, though, were a disaster. They tasted of nothing, and when I say nothing I mean absolutely nothing - they were completely devoid of any organic flavour whatsoever, like rings of baked sand. The little cheese dip they arrived with was inoffensive - it at least felt like it had come from planet earth - but nothing could have made those rings worth eating. They would have been expensive at any price but at £3.95 they were an insult, and an Oreo milkshake also for £3.95 was fine but about half the size of the one that Byron charge the same for.
As the second cynical, lazy proto-chain attempting to ride London's current food obsessions to success I've had the misfortune of eating at in the space of a month, I hope that BRGR isn't around for too much longer; I hope it fails. But the rules that govern which restaurants do well and which don't are far too complex for an armchair pundit like me to predict. Look at poor old North Road, which this week went into administration despite the kind of critical reception many places would kill for, and St John Hotel which seems to be struggling not long after winning a Michelin star itself. So who knows if BRGR will survive. All I can tell you is there are better burgers to eat within spitting distance, and if BRGR think they deserve a spot in amongst the likes of MeatLiquor, Patty & Bun, Lucky Chip et all, they're out of their FCKNG minds.
3/10
Someone has pointed out that the onion rings are £2.95 on the bill, not £3.95 as they were on the menu. Either way, that's either £2.95 or £3.95 too much.
"The amazing thing about London," someone said to me recently, "isn't that there are so many new restaurants. It's that so many of them are so good."
Just think, over the last twelve months we've welcomed into the fold Duck and Waffle, MeatMarket, Tramontana, Zédel, Slider Bar, Bubbledogs, Dirty Burger and Chicken Shop, Rita's, Lima, Dabbous - and so on and etcetera, this only a tiny selection (just scanning over my last dozen or so blog posts) of brand new places, all worth visiting. Sure, there have been a few stinkers, but by and large the trend is overwhelmingly positive, and if anything the pace seems to be increasing. Trends flare up and fizzle out with exhausting speed - first it was burgers, then everywhere seemed to be selling gourmet hot dogs, then it was all about fried chicken. Right now we appear to be in the middle of a ramen renaissance, with the original "proper" ramen shop Ittenbari on Brewer St being joined by Tonkotsu on Dean St, Shoryu on Regent St and, the latest star of Soho, Bone Daddies.
As proved by the miserable Chooks in Muswell Hill, though, simply identifying a trend and attempting to cash in on it is a recipe for disaster. The latest "thing" in London may be ramen, but Bone Daddies is not a lazy rip-off of either Ittenbari or Tonkotsu - its identity is inspired by the Rockabilly gangs of Tokyo's Yoyogi park, and the eclectic (ie. somewhat non-traditional) styles of ramen are complimented by a large selection of comfort food sides, and a pounding rock'n'roll soundtrack.
House pickles, for a bargainous £3, came in seven different varieties and should be the first thing anyone orders at Bone Daddies. I won't bother describing them all (I can't, for one thing) but my favourites were a couple of kimchi-style fermented root vegetables of some kind that were fizzy and pungent and delightfully unexpected.
The fried chicken was a little cup of moist nuggets of good chicken coated in a strange, thin, dry (in a good way, bear with me) batter that went very well dipped in the house chilli oil. I don't think I've had chicken treated like this before - I'm more used to the bubbly, thick coating on the kara-age from Tonkotsu and elsewhere - so it's nice to see somewhere trying something new.
Soft-shelled crab was the best I've ever had in London, perhaps anywhere, so that's another one for the "must-order" list. It was absolutely, perfectly fresh with not a hint of that odd fishiness you sometimes get (I can't criticise places in London for this too much, it must be hard getting hold of them in a country that isn't traditionally their biggest market), expertly fried and came with a bowl of punchy chilli/yoghurt sauce.
That the ramen itself wasn't quite in the same league as Tonkotsu isn't that much of a criticism; they were still great fun. The T22 is a chicken bone broth variety that according to the menu comes with something called "cock scratchings" but I'm at a loss to explain exactly what they were; I couldn't find anything in my bowl to fit that description. Mind you, perhaps that's for the best.
Even more wacky was the Tantamen, which was loaded with so much creamy ground sesame and pork mince I could hardly find any broth to drink at all. Both ramen contained nice bouncy egg noodles, decent but unspectacular, but I think I preferred the slightly more, er, normal arrangement of broth, boiled chicken and noodles in the T22 than the haphazard pile of mince and sesame in the Tantamen which was so piled high with ingredients I hardly needed a spoon at all. The option of a 'fat pipette' was added out of sheer curiosity but I can't say it really added much.
If I was a ramen purist, then, I'd find more to my taste at Tonkotsu, who are aiming for strict authenticity and are edging closer to it every day. Bone Daddies, I assume, aren't pretending to be a slice of Tokyo in London and are just offering as much fun as it's possible to have with bowls of chicken and pork bone stock while also serving a fantastic selection of Japanese-inspired comfort foods into the bargain. I'm yet to explore their sake, wine and beer lists (having visited weekday lunchtimes only so far) but I'm pretty sure that it's the late evenings when the place is destined to really come alive, and once word gets around the hungry fun-loving Soho types will be queuing out the door. Until then, make the most of the fact it's still relatively undiscovered, and welcome Bone Daddies as the latest in a long line of really rather good new restaurants in our fine city.
There was quite an interesting reaction to my post about the new Brindisa place Tramontana in Shoreditch. Let me repeat that I had a great time there - I thought the food was very accomplished, the staff friendly and I loved what they'd done with the room and open kitchen. But, it seems, not many other people did. You can read the comments from disappointed customers yourself on the post, but as well as those, no less than food & wine writer Fiona Beckett, whose tastes normally overlap mine fairly reliably, didn't think much of it.
I'm not sure which is stranger, though - that different people could have such different reactions to a meal in the same restaurant within the space of a week, or that, given our wildly differing fetishes and foibles, we ever have enough in common to recommend a restaurant at all. I mean think about this - some people don't even like Tayyabs. I know! Madness.
Following Tramontanagate then, and given the practical impossibility of finding an objectively good restaurant, it perhaps shouldn't have been too much of a surprise that much-loved and award-winning tapas bar Copita didn't excite me as I thought it was going to. But I was mainly disappointed not because I was expecting it to be brilliant, but because I really wanted it to be brilliant - another reliable ham-and-sherry outlet in the centre of London is always cause for celebration.
The first problem was with the Iberico ham, and given my hopeless addiction to the stuff I find it quite hard to forgive problems with Iberico ham. It was £15 for a fairly mean portion - close to the same amount that José sell for £9 - and was pretty badly carved, shredded and hacked into weird irregular bits and pieces, much of it dry and chewy. The flavour was still good, but the way it had been treated made me sad inside.
The rest was better, fortunately. Mussel croquettas weren't anywhere near as weird as they sound, in fact they were better than those at Tramontana, with a nice golden crust and creamy filling. Crispy cauliflower & piquillo sauce began enjoyably, delicately encrusted and seasoned well, but the sauce was underpowered and there wasn't enough of it, so very soon all you were eating was fried cauliflower and wishing you weren't. A lamb bun with harissa was very good though, my favourite overall, with tender chunks of slow-cooked lamb and a good kick from the harissa.
We got a cheese board too but as the waitress merely dumped them and ran off without explaining what they were, I can't tell you much about them other than I liked the gooey goat's and spongey blue, but the harder (mountain?) cheese was a bit bland. £11, mind.
With the cheapest bottle of sherry, itself a whacking £39, the total for two came to £88 and it's really in the value-for-money department that Copita loses most of its stars. The food was good, but not extraordinarily so, and I'm sure Soho rents have as much of an effect on the bill as the cost of ingredients which were generally of a high standard, but I couldn't help feeling that we didn't get a great deal for our £44 a head and had we been hungrier and thirstier the results could have been disastrous. Then again, perhaps you'll visit yourself, have a great time for a pittance and wonder what the hell I was moaning about. Such is the strange business of writing about restaurants.
6/10
Copita have been in touch to point out that their cheapest sherry is £15 for a half bottle, so a bit cheaper than the £39 full bottle we had.
If there's any lingering doubts over the massive influence street food has had on the way we eat in London, just consider two of the city's most popular new restaurants.
Pitt Cue and MeatLiquor both started life as mobile vans, building up a loyal following partly through judicious use of social media but mainly by being damned good at what they do. Once they realised there's only so much money you can make from a car park in Herne Hill or under a railway bridge on the South Bank, each secured a West-End location and (despite the usual grumblings of "selling-out" from self-important food snobs who can't understand why anyone would do anything as mainstream as try and make a decent living out of their talents instead of toiling for a pittance for eternity) success was secured.
MeatLiquor are now about to open their third bricks-and-mortar site near Hoxton Square, and Pitt Cue were named Best New Restaurant by Zagat.
And so, hot on the heels of those street food champions comes Slider Bar, by Lucky Chip, who paid their dues at Netil Market in Hackney where I caught up with them late last year, and more recently at a residency at the Sebright Arms pub, somewhere I haven't had the pleasure of visiting but have heard nothing but good things.
Slider Bar is a collaboration of sorts with the Player in Soho, a well-respected cocktail bar which up until now wasn't known for its food offering. If you're wondering how a 3rd-party burger van can just "slot into" an established bar and start selling food, well, you're not the only one, and the confusing number of menus on each table downstairs on Broadwick St hints at a rather uneasy partnership. The Player has their own little book of cocktails, but then Slider Bar have some on their menu too, presumably made by the same barman but who knows - I was on the wagon this weekday lunchtime but I wonder how they divide the profits when you order from both menus at once.
Anyway, let's not worry about how Lucky Chip and the Player have built their partnership model, what's important is the food, and fortunately they are doing almost everything right in this regard. For £10 I got to choose two different sliders (mini burgers, and yes I know the big is-it-a-slider-or-isn't-it debate and quite frankly I don't care, if they want to call them sliders they can) and have them served with a bijou portion of fries and a pot of aioli spiked with cayenne pepper.
Just one thing stood between the mini "El Chappo" burger and greatness, and that was the choice of bacon. The only suitable bacon in a burger is streaky; this is not a point of debate, this is a simple fact. So a thick, gammony slab of back bacon did no favours for this otherwise delicately constructed little sandwich and could have easily spelled disaster. Fortunately, thanks to some gorgeous aged beef paired with strong (and properly melted) blue cheese, a lovely sweet bun and just the right amount of salad, it was still hugely enjoyable.
A classic cheeseburger was ordered mainly as a control variable, but still had plenty going for it. Shredded lettuce and sliced pickles both win points in my "how to do burger" checklist, and that same aged beef soaked in plastic yellow cheese was a pleasingly familiar combination.
Fries were delicate little things, air-light but full of potato flavour from leaving their skins on. I enjoyed the aioli, too, which is just as well as I'd ordered chipotle mayo. Service is still a bit ropey, as you might expect in the first few weeks of the operation; my waiter gets full marks for enthusiasm (and volume, you could hear him from Soho Square) but rather less for knowledge - I overheard him describing wasabi to someone on the next table as "a kind of cabbage". Still, who cares about vegetables anyway.
With a kind of pink grapefruit virgin cocktail and a bowl of candyfloss sundae as a dessert (nice enough this, a bit Mr Whippy for £4.50 but came with loads of crunchy bits and pieces of puffed sugar and toffee) the bill came to just over £21 - pretty much what you might expect these days, not a bargain but not anything approaching unreasonable either. I imagine you can fair tear through the budget if you go for the drinks though; I already have my eye on the "boilermaker" section of the Player menu which pairs craft beers with shots of interesting spirits, and most of those are pushing £15.
So for the boilermakers, and the burgers, and in fact for pretty much everything else, I will be back to Slider Bar. Soho is hardly short of fantastic ways to empty my wallet but if there's one thing I'm never going to get tired of it's cocktails, craft beer and meat sandwiches to soak them up with. And when there's a Slider Bar, and a MeatLiquor, and a Pitt Cue on every high street in the country, I'm sure I'll still be saying the same thing.
