St Moritz

What, as they say, is not to like about fondue? Bubbling gruyere and emmenthal with wine, garlic and kirsch, with piles of bread and nifty forks... I feel myself coming on all Homer Simpson, because I think you'd be somewhat nuts if fondue didn't rock your world... doh!
We had tried and failed to get into St Moritz on Wardour Street a number of times, but booking a table resolved that this evening, and it delivered in all the ways that you'd want it to: alpine wooden walls, Swiss wine, vaguely yodelly-music in the background, a Tyrolean gent checking that all was well, and a giant 1970s cooking pot atop a burner, filled with lightly bubbling cheese of just the right consistency for dipping the bread into. The quality of all the ingredients was good, the service was OK and there was enough cheese to induce just the right kind of leaden-belly-feeling by the end of the evening that we were looking for. It's not especially cheap, but it is one of those types of food that you've just got to have from time to time, and there was a jolly crowd in the house enjoying a really classic dish in just the kind of unironic fashion which it should be appreciated. Try looking at the photos in this posting when you're feeling hungry and tell me that it doesn't look a very appealing way to spend an evening...

A challenge

This is not a blog for "the haters" and I hope that it'll mainly emanate positivity, but there are inevitably moments in a food blog when you're going to want to criticise rather than praise.

What I want to discuss here is the question of restaurants that put you off; places you walk past on a regular basis and think "I cannot see myself ever eating in there". My challenge to myself is first, to develop a list of such places over time and, second, to eat in them if there is ever even the smallest hint that my irrational or rational prejudice against them can be exploded or countered or even nuanced in any way.

First up, Rhum Jungle at the end of Exmouth Market. This is a restaurant I walk past about eight times a week, on my way to and from swimming, and each time I look in I start freaking out at the vista which confronts me: namely the bottles of Hildon still and sparkling water sitting there on every bloody table. It's a Caribbean place and actually somewhere I'd like to go, but not so long as those bottles are there because what they signal, in my mind, is a complete lack of hospitality, which is bad news for a restaurant. If people want bottled water fine, but don't guilt them into it, and what happens with the water on the tables? Is it served as it is, i.e. warm. If so, double aaaarrrgggghhh. One of the marks of classy restaurants, be they cheap or pricey, is if they serve tap water pleasantly and willingly.

Second, Giraffe. Now I know that I'm not their natural constituency, but how can any restaurant brand itself with the slogans "Global food", "World music". Jesus! Serve global food if you will, and play some Baba Maal in the background if that takes your fancy, but don't bloody brand your chain of restaurants around such a sappy, faux-liberal, cynical set of ideas...

Mojo

There's some people's food that you just want to eat whatever they've cooked. They've got a certain mojo in the kitchen and with the same set of ingredients which someone else could eaily ruin, they make something which just tastes good. Once you've identified those who have this mojo, you just have to make sure that you get invited round enough to eat their cooking...

Mr Falafel

So here it is, the best falafel sandwich around. Mr Falafel may merely announce that he offers "The best Palestinian falafel", but it's really the best in London full stop. Located at the edge of Shepherd's Bush market, Mr Falafel is a perfect example of a food-business that succeeds because it is driven by passion. As you can see from the photo the exterior of the hut is covered in posters which detail the qualities of falafel and setting out the ingredients included in sandwiches here; and that's a pretty long list: bread, tahini, fafalel, herb mix, salad, fried aubergines, pickled cucumbers and radishes. The one to go for is the extra-large at £3.50. Whilst waiting for your sandwich to be made you can watch the whole process on a monitor which is hooked up to a webcam which tracks the sandwich construction process.

The best roast potato recipe

B and famiglia N's roast potato recipe/technique: peel the potatoes; fill a baking tray about two thirds full with a mix of vegetable and olive oil, place it in the oven at 200+ degrees for a good period of time, until the oil is very hot; whilst this is going on, boil the potatoes for ten or so minutes (getting them soft enough that a fork can pierce the surface, but not so that it can reach the centre of the potato); drain the potatoes and return the potatoes to the saucepan, shaking them vigorously in the dry pan so that they bash into each other and the pan, generating fluffy edges; heat the front two rings/gas flames on the oven and then carefully place the tray full of oil on the rings/flames and equally carefully add the potatoes to the oil, using a spoon to ensure that all of the potatoes have been completely covered in oil; return the tray to the oven and allow to cook for an hour or so at 200 degrees (you will need to check on the potatoes a couple of times, to see if they are done and also to flip them in the oil). If you get this recipe right the roast potatoes will be sensational, if you only get it half-right they'll still be incredible. Today I slightly under-boiled the potatoes and as a consequence didn't get enough floury, fluffiness working, so they weren't quite crispy enough, but they were still good. Served with Linda McCartney veggie sausages, boiled spinach, salad and celeriac mash with chilli, garlic and onions.

This is felafel week

I feel pretty sure that I am going to be eating a lot of felafel in the coming week, and I also feel reasonably confident that the pictured felafel sandwich from Fatoush Express on Edgware Road, good though it was, is going to be bested twice over. There was nothing wrong with the sandwich but the felafel bar is set pretty high in the Smoke, and although this dish sated a felafel craving, I can't see myself picking FE again over and above other places on Edgware Road like Ranoush Juice. Still, the side order of chips was excellent and I had a feeling that they might have been hand-cut chips, but Number7 thought the crispy markings on the chips came from there having been cooked in the same oil as the felafel. Overall, a pretty good place, if a touch pricey for a sandwich, which doesn't really stand out.

Wish-list

A long, hard, no-pain, no-gain, run this morning, which began in shadowy streets and then opened up into something much nicer on the sunny Thames Path. On the last stretch through Clerkenwell I kept passing restaurants and thinking, "Now that's a place I want to go to", which got me thinking about where I else I really wanted to go, and how it might be useful for a forgetful dolt like me to have a list online of food places he had never been to but wanted to visit. They're not in any particular order and I imagine that I'll add to the list over time:

1. Locanda Locatelli - the restaurant menu I look most longingly at online at the moment.
2. The famous toasted cheese sandwich guy at Borough.
3. St John - loved St John Bread and Wine and would like to give the original a try.
4. Neal's Yard - I can't ever recall buying cheese from there; perhaps I have, but I must get over the slight block I have about going there.
5. Sushi Deli Cafe - a cute looking Japanese cafe near me.
6. New Malden - have vowed for a long time to go to NM and go Korean food shopping and then eat at one of the many Korean places there.
7. Vinoteca - a recommended wine cellar near Smithfield.
8. Gordon's - an olden-days-y wine cellar near Charing X.
9. La Porchetta - pizza chain.
10. Masters Superfish - Waterloo chippie.
11. Tom Aikens or Tom's Diner, or whatever his offshoot is called - the posh one to see whether people who love it or those who hate it are right, the second place because it sounds tasty.
12. Hakkasan - after having truffled edamame dumplings at Budokan in New York, which were one of the top 10 things I'd ever eaten, I am very keen to try what's supposed to be the best dim sum in London.
13. Tbilisi - never had Georgian food before.
14. Mandalay - nor Burmese.
15. Bavarian Beerhouse in London - the name says it all.
16. Restaurant Gordon Ramsay - for set lunch.
17. More Southall - only been to Southall once and want to explore more Indian options there.
18. Ottolenghi - because the food looks so good in photos.
19. Tower 42 - for the high life.
20. Green Lanes - for Turkish food and shopping.
21. Monmouth Coffee Company.
22. Le Champignon Sauvage - OK, it's not in London, but I want to go there.

Back to the 'Nam

In general I have a sense in London that almost all restaurants which are "hot" are in vogue for a reason, which is usually a pretty simple combination of good food and service at fair prices. There are plenty of places which do those things which aren't that busy, so I guess some kind of usp is also good news, as well as a good location, both of which apply to Pho on St John Street in Clerkenwell. I had been hearing quite a bit about this place and it is a very different kind of Vietnamese restaurant to those in Shoreditch in that it majors on super-healthy food, most especially pho. I was very lucky to a get a table as a walk-in, since a hefty queue built up in the hour in which I was there. This was not, however, a bored queue, this was not a perfunctory kind of queue, this was... an M&S queue. No, hang on, let me get that right... not bored... not perfunctory... but a happy and slightly zealous kind of queue, full of people who were obviously really, really looking forward to their pho.

I began with summery vegetable rolls which were about as far removed as could be from vegetable spring rolls in that they were unbelievably fresh and zingy parcels of cold noodles, mint, coriander, basil, lettuce, carrots and beansprouts. With an apple, carrot and beetroot juice, I was feeling bloody virtuous at this point. I then had a spicy tofu and mushroom pho which was de-lici-ous: tofu fried a long way-in, so that it retained its crispiness even within the soup, rice noodles, plenty of mushrooms, ditto chilli, and a whole extra plate of herbs, beansprouts, fresh chillis and lime to tip into the soup. Service was good and it was interesting to hear the owner chatting to another table about the place, because there was a clear match between his passion for this style of Vietnamese food and what was served on my plate and in my bowl. I guess that's another mark of a really hot restaurant: a passion for food and a desire to share that feeling with your customers.

Mrs Kirkham's

Merovingian kindly gave me a round of Mrs Kirkham's Lancashire, a cheese I had only had once before, at Anthony's in Leeds. The more time goes on, the more I appreciate the charms of the great Northern cheeses and this Lancashire is a really a prize example of a cheese that manages to be both rich and subtle, creamy and chalky, and with a nice hint of sourness. I've used it a lot for cooking this week, but was trying to think of a way to make it the centrepiece of a meal and came up with the summery option of a Ploughman's, in part inspired by all those pictures of Branscombe beach which made me think of lunch in Devon pubs. It was a bit of a fussy Ploughman's as these things go - with pickled beetroot, apple, celery, tomato, tomato chutney, salted butter, bread, gherkins and, ahem, sun-dried tomatoes - but I'd like to think that such over-egging has its place in some Ploughmans. I was thinking in particular of the Hope and Anchor in Bristol which offers stellar salads and a huge range of choices of cheese in its version of the platter.

Borough Market

I can't claim to fully understand the issues surrounding the redevelopment of Thameslink services, but everything I have been able to read on the subject convinces me that it is going to be bad news if it does involve ripping out substantial numbers of buildings in and around Borough Market. Sample news story here: http://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/view/2390 An online petition has been established to try to halt a proposal which, if effected, would lead to the destruction of listed buildings within the market and, quite possibly siginificant, possibly permanent, disruption to the market itself: http://www.sabmac.co.uk Given that Borough is now ranked amongst the top two or three attractions in London by a number of travel guides, it seems crackers to destroy what is one of the most successful parts of the fabric of the city. Part of the charm of Borough is that it is beneath the railway tracks and that it's a densely-developed, noisy and bustling place, but messing with the existing ecology of it in the name of redeveloping commuter rail services just seems stupid. I need to become better informed on this issue, but it does seem like this is a classic case of the empty valorisation of the new in a way that ignores the real value of the old.

A king amongst sandwiches

King's Sandwich Bar on Chalton Street has become my favourite sandwich spot when I have been too lazy to make some of my own. It's a justly popular place with seating for about 20-25 inside and 10 seats outside and it offers curries and other hot dishes as well as every kind of hot and cold sandwich. The family who run it would be a good role model for any restaurateur because they're really friendly, produce tasty food, deliver it quickly, price it fairly, prize the consistency of their product, and enjoy chatting to their customers.
The accompanying picture should reveal the other reason that I like their sandwiches so much: they are huge! For the same price as a wilted bed of rocket with a herbed pepper couscous on coriander and lemongrass focaccia from AN supermarket, King's will offer you a jam-packed bap full of cheese, salad and coleslaw. Eating these monsters makes up for the disappointment of going into a deli in New York and ordering a cheese sandwich, expecting just the level of multi-storey layering seen in the photo, and enduring the deflation of getting a very moderate cheese sandwich, whilst all around me carnivores were tucking into mile-high sandwiches of pastrami and salt beef. Thank you King's for showing that Britain is the orginal and best home of sandwichus giganticus.

The best pudding I've had in ages

C&T's riff on creme brulee: rasberry and honey stylee.

Cay Tre

Cay Tre is one of a series of Vietnamese restaurants at the Old Street/Kingsland Rd end of Shoreditch. Having only previously been to the very good Viet Hoa, I've no way of comparing it to the local competition, but as a late-night, cheapish and supremely tasty option it was the business and certainly deserves both the red and green stars awarded in the Time Out guide. We shared a couple of plates of pleasingly greasy spring rolls, before moving onto two beef dishes (about which I know little, though I liked the way that they surrounded the plates with alcohol and lit it, so that the dish sizzled, as seen in the photo) and, for me, deep-fried tofu in a tomato and aromatic mushroom sauce, along with sides of rice and super-fine noodles with beansprouts. The tofu had a great, rippable texture and the sauce probably wins out on the most-garlicky sauce I've ever eaten award. This is by no means a criticism because the garlic was well-cooked and it seemed to fit this really robust, comforting dish. With a few Saigon beers, Merovingian picked up a tab of about £45 after service, which seemed excellent as the portions were large, the service was really prompt and it was one of those meals where the restaurant got everything right. I'll be back...

Cream Puffs

Are cream puffs a good thing? This is a question which seems to have taken hold of the London food blogosphere in recent days and I felt duty-bound to also head down to Beard Papa's on Oxford Street to discover how I felt about cream puffs. This is the first European branch of a Japanese cream puff empire and you can tell that they take it pretty seriously by the fact that: a) bar a few soft drinks and occasional flavours of the day, they only sell one thing, which is the original vanilla cream puff, and b) the customer service ethos is very Japanese, right down to the greetings which you get in Japanese. There was quite a queue, which provided a good opportunity to watch the team at work, baking the puffs, inserting a cream nozzle into the cooled puffs, preparing them for sale, and then packing them up.
As cream puffs go I imagine them to be pretty good and it's a fun, destination cakery, but I'm not sure I'll have another one before I have a Belgian Bun from Gregg's, and I can't feel the same way about them that I do about Cinnabon - now there's a foreign cake frnachise which would send Londoners wild.

Goin' to the Chapel

I feel very lucky that I live near Chapel Market in Islington because it's one of the best street markets around and the kind of thing that London does especially well, because it offers all kinds of good-quality fruits and vegetables at excellent prices (I've found that its getting harder and harder to find such markets outside London). It's just around the corner from a huge Sainsbury's which is also full of fruit and veg with the kind of packaging, posters and fact-sheets on going organic which allows them to charge 50-100% more than the market stalls around the corner, which really do offer seasonality, goods from local producers, and the kind of market-banter (oo'll give me a nugget for this pair o' pineapples then?) which appeals to me.
Just along from the market is Olga's, one of a series of excellent, traditional Italian delis in the Islington/King's X/Clerkenwell area. It's quite pricey but the ricotta is really high quality and keenly-priced at £4.50 a kilo. In summer a pretty perfect dish for me would be chunks of ricotta with quick-boiled broad beans or peas, with plenty of olive oil and rock salt. I've had to save that thought and served it today with avocado, oilve oil and finely-chopped chillis and spring onions. Not nearly as good and a bit too fussy but I'm always happy to make ricotta the centre-piece of a meal. For a long time it was a cheese on which I didn't really have an opinion (say that ain't so I hear you cry...), but, with some tutoring, I have really come to love its subtle, luscious charms.

We hope...

I blame Tasty Treats. Before moving to London I would not have believed that my core allegiance on the chip-front could shift from proper fish-and-chip-shop-chips to anything else, yet six months in Shepherd's Bush living on the same road as the aforementioned TTs turned me on to the charms of super-salty, crispy frozen chips. It's a hard thing to say, it seems almost wrong to admit that you've switched your loyalty from something actually made from potatoes to something kind of cardboard-y that may once have been acquainted with them.
On moving to King's Cross I was on the look-out for a new chip haunt and, in spite of being in striking distance of North Sea and The Tasty Fryer - two of London's best real chip shops, I am now smitten with Pearl. As the picture reveals it looks like any other cheapo kebab shop (with the excellent Prince Albert next door - more on that soon), but tasting is believing and I have now recruited a number of other acolytes into my chip cult. The usp of Pearl is their sauces, most especially the yoghurt, garlic and mint number. Big dollops of that, with a little fresh chilli sauce on the side, whips even mayo and ketchup. The second picture shows a "chip plate" with chillis, salad and olives.

Is everything how you would like it?

A blah end to a super food weekend, saved by some great company. We fancied Tex-Mex, which is way too hard to find in London (the excellent El Vergel excepted), so we tried Oscar's in Whiteley's. Tex-Mex should be so easy to do well: all you need is passable ingredients and kitchen constructors who can put things in the right order into pans and onto plates, plus snappy service and plenty of limes for the Coronas. Oscar's got the beers right but more or less everything else was lazy and smacked of a joint going through the motions, with staff rather more or interested in each other than the customers, fajitas that majored on onions to a degree that made you wonder whether they only had a few peppers and mushrooms left in the kitchen, quesadillas so packed with onion they suggested there had been a run on the queso too, and far too many interjections of the 'Is everything how you would like it?' variety which related more to a concern with the 12.5% service charge than genuine interest in customer satisfaction. All this may sound a bit snotty since it was only a Tex-Mex joint, but at £16 a head for one dish, a shared starter (the photo reveals the artful plating of deep-fried jalapenos in the modern style) and one drink each, this was a few quid more expensive than the excellent Angel Mangal. The food was actually fine because Tex-Mex just is tasty and the service was not awful, but it just goes to show how easy it is to get small things wrong in restaurants and to thus leave your customers unimpressed.

Known goods and unknown goods

A walk I thought would be about one thing turned out to also be about something else. I had started going to the revived Exmouth Market before Christmas and decided that today's gloomy afternoon would be a good time to walk down there to see what was on offer and to then head down to Borough Market so as to compare the two. My pre-prepared conclusion was going to be that Exmouth would whup Borough because the former is small and bijou, whilst the latter is big and mobbed to a degree that can be unpleasant. Yet my real conclusion is that both are good things in their own ways and whilst walking between them it occurred to me that the quiet and not-so-well-known walk from Clerkenwell through the City is great in its interesting and subdued way, just as the second leg, along the Millennium Bridge and the South Bank to Borough, is fantastic even if it is packed out with people.

At Exmouth Market I picked up some raspberry macaroons from a stall called Machiavelli and some rye and walnut+raisin bread from De Gustibus (a Borough import), which was two-for-one by the time I walked past. The macaroons are just sensational with an unbelievably richly raspberry flavour. Not as cutely packaged as Laduree macaroons from Harrods, but at a £1 each, about one third of the price. At Borough I picked up some mature cheshire from Mrs Bourne's which is just the kind of thing that Borough does well: presenting an opportunity for a really top-class regional cheese producer to sell good quantities of their product and providing customers with a chance to buy a really authentic version of a great British cheese which is leagues away from supermarket versions, yet not that much more expensive.

Since the walk was proving so enjoyable I decided to add an extra leg and head along the river from Borough to Bermondsey, which is for my money the best dusk walk in London (especially when started from Bermondsey) because there's a great romance to the city as the lights come on, on Tower Bridge, in the City, over towards Canary Wharf and on the river boats. The other fantastic thing about this stretch of the river is that you finish up at The Angel, with its lovely terrace looking over the river. A great place to enjoy a Sam Smith's stout and to reflect on the well-known walks and markets and the little-known ones being, as they say, all good.

Stuffed Turkey

Having not eaten a great deal of bread in the past week, tonight's meal at Angel Mangal Ocakbasi presented a great opportunity to load some carbs in a manner which I suspect would not have pleased Dr Atkins. I'm not quite sure why but the quality of Turkish food in London is not always given the full recognition it deserves and AMO is an excellent example of the best kind of Turkish restaurant in London: great grills, fantastic bread, super mezze and salads, and very reasonable prices. In the past I had always favoured Mangal II in Dalston but decided to try AMO on the recommendation of Dos Hermanos (http://majbros.blogspot.com/). In terms of the style of restaurant and food, the two are very similar and of an equally high standard. Walking back down Upper St the weird thing was that were stacks of mediocre restaurants packed to the gunnells, whilst AMO was only half-full whilst we were there. It's close to Los Desperados, formerly Granita of Blair/Brown fame, where two Russians dressed as cowboys were trying to lure the punters in...

We began with huge, puffed sesame bread and olives, followed by starters of a yoghurt and garlic dip and some cheese and dill sambosek. The latter dishes came with another, softer bread, several kilos of which are currently lining my stomach. For mains we had the vegetarian pide ('Turkish pizza') and some kind of kofte (I wasn't paying much attention). All the dishes were super-fresh and tasty and the whole lot, with a few soft drinks, came to £25 before a tip. More or less the only downside about the place is that they don't take cards, and that the nearest cash point is quite some distance away: probably only 500m, but it felt like 5km with that bread beginning to settle...

Is Coke tasty?

I like to think that I try to eat and drink things which are tasty, but does Coke taste good? I ask this because I drink Diet Coke every day and few foods or drinks give me as much pleasure as my post-lunch fizzy fix. Does that pleasure come from the fact that I am a shaky Coke addict, or does it actually come from the taste of the Coke? If I compare Coke to another of my favourite canned drinks - San Pellegrino's lemonade - then Coke seems to lose out on all fronts: the lemonade is good because it really tastes of lemons and because it retains the sourness of lemons rather than masking that trait with sugar, it is rightly proud of the specifically Sicilian provenance of the lemons with which it is made, and it leaves you feeling rather more refreshed than would be the case with a can of Sprite or 7-up. The taste of Coke, on the other hand, is hard to identify. Just which vegetable extracts are included and why do they taste so good to me? Why, in mid-winter, is the idea of sitting outside at a Mediterranean cafe with a Coke fizzing away with ice and lemon so damn appealing? I don't want to sound as though I feel guilty about the fact that I love Diet Coke; perhaps its the mysteriousness of this romance which keeps it so strong...

Well-cooked spinach

After Friday's experience it will doubtless relieve all to learn that today I was made some well-cooked spinach: boiled, with its colour retained and served with salt. Very nice.

I'm pretty rubbish at making puddings, but not displeased with my mini apple crumbles as seen here served in a shot glass. The base is crushed digestive biscuit, the middle layer apple stewed in lemon juice with demerara sugar and the top layer double cream beaten till thick with cinnamon. I bought the shot glasses so as to make fun, small puddings that ape flashy ones you might be served in restaurants, and am now trying to think of other layered combos to try. Cherries and chocolate keep coming to mind, but I'm not sure how to make it work.

Memories of Japan

I had meant to start this blog with a report on eating in Japan, but as I never got round to writing that report, this'll just be a brief ode to the joys of eating in Japan and some padding for the photos of some of the dishes I ate on my trip in November 06. Looking back at those photos, here are my 8 key memories:

1. Okonomiyaki is my favourite dish in the world and Fugetsu is my favourite chain restaurant . The care they take over making okonomiyaki there is really something, coming back to your hot-plate 6-8 times during the cooking process to make sure that the finished dish is going to be just right. I guess that if you had told a fussy teenage me that my favourite dish in adulthood would be a combination of egg-fried cabbage, noodles, seaweed, kimchi, spring onions and cheese, covered with mayonnaise and brown sauce, I would have come out with whatever "whatever..." was back then.

2. Kushi-age rocks! Can you imagine anything much better than sitting at a bar with a big bowl of soy sauce and a guy handing you skewers of bread-crumbed, deep-fried peppers, onion, mushrooms, aubergine and quail's eggs, which you can then dip in the soy, and add chilli flakes if that's your thing. You even get a big bowl of raw cabbage to chew on, to whet your appetite and to clean your palate for the sinful ingestion of skewer after skewer of the real deal.

3. Domburi, domburi, domburi. If all the richness of okonomiyaki and kushi-age have got to you, what better than going zen with a domburi bowl of sticky rice with egg, covered in vegetables. The one we tried near Daitoku-ji in Kyoto was made with avocado and tomato in a pretty hippyish joint and I've since had the real deal with more sauce and shitake which was just the thing when you want a meal that tastes great and leaves you feeling saintly.

4. Did I say saintly? Who's to say that the holy wouldn't enjoy the breakfast of doughnuts I had most days in Japan. I'll save the long "doughnuts are the breakfast of kings" spiel for another post and just refer you to the picture of a Mr Donut breakfast tray (only two of the doughnuts in the photo were mine, honest).

5. The food-floors in big Japanese department stores are something else. You could spend hours in somewhere like Hanshin, particularly if, like me, you wander round adding things to your basket and then realise you have to retrace your steps and pay for things at each individual concession. Had some great yaki-soba there and also marvelled at the quality of the patisserie; well, marvelled and ate.

6. A Japanese-style breakfast of miso soup, rice, pickles and seaweed can be a pretty good thing, as I hope the photo from the breakfast buffet in the Tokyu hotel in Hakuba shows. Another great thing about such buffets is that you can load-up on fruit which is, as people say, bizarrely expensive. There's some kind of racket going on there, but I can't work out what it is. That said, the apples and apple juice from the Japan Alps region are awesome, and the breakfast buffets also have chips.

7. I like udon. My stepmother reliably informs me that in a league of classiness, udon and ramen fight it out at the bottom of the pile, with the aristocrat soba sitting pretty in the noodle rankings, but my uncultured palate can't get enough of udon: so thick, so delicious and so likely to be served in a place where you can get slightly cold, but delicious tempura, and cheap too.

8. I guess that if I lived in Japan, the novelty might wear off, but as a tourist the whole vending machine thing is endlessly fascinating. Fancy a beer on top of an isolated mountain top? Just scrabble around for the 300 Yen and look for the machine.

Bacchus

I decided to start the year and this blog with a treat. Bacchus is one of the London restaurants I've most wanted to visit, so on something of a whim I called them early this evening and walked over there for dinner. They've managed to generate a great deal of buzz around the place for a whole series of reasons: the tag-line "fine-dining in trainers", lots of dishes cooked sous-vide, and plenty of El Bulli-style weirdery on the menus. Most things I'd heard about the place were pretty positive, beyond the hype, so I'm pleased to report that it was far from a let-down.

I began with some decent walnut and raisin bread and some excellent salt-encrusted butter. It was rather better than my no-flash, low-light, not-very-subtle, secret-restaurant photography. I'd told them I was vegetarian on the phone, but it was a mark of the well-drilled service that they had quickly rustled up a veggie amuse, which was at the wilder end of the Bacchus dish spectrum: a small bowl which contained yoghurt, olive oil, salt, a spinach puree, an apple granita, wasabi and seaweed. It tastes as you'd imagine such a mix to taste: often pretty good, but sometimes a tad forced. The salt and the apple were my favourite with the spinach a clear loser. I'm not quite sure what how the spinach had been prepared but it had lost its spinachness and become rather like a very cheap and artificial spinach substitute. It made me think, rather wistfully, of the stellar, simple pile of boiled spinach on the brunch plate at Flaneur in Farringdon.

I skipped the starters and went straight for a main of root vegetables, wild mushrooms, lentils and a fennel crisp (at least that's what I think it was). This was just a really tasty dish and a pretty classical, non-fancy dish at that. The mushrooms tasted barbecued, but with a deeper flavour than one would expect from any kind of grilling, though I've no idea if they were cooked sous-vide. The other vegetables (baby onion, carrot, cabbage) were simple, rich and delicious. It reminded me of a similar dish I had recently at Arbutus, but this was better because the flavours were deeper.

The part of the meal I was most looking forward to was pudding because I've stared long and hard at each of the puddings on the Bacchus menu on-line. I like my puddings weird and wild and all of them are here, so I picked the oddest sounding dish: apple panna cotta, ginger bread grounds, lemongrass bubble bath, Thai basil oil. Loved it. Just a great dish in that it looked fantastic, the sour/spicey/oriental flavours all worked well and it just made you happy eating it.

I'll be back I'm sure because the cooking's good, there's actually quite a range of dishes from the classical to the outlandish, the prices are reasonable and the service was good. The food wouldn't be to all tastes and nor would the style of dining (I'm happy to listen to The Cure and synth-dance but I guess it's not to all tastes), but overall Bacchus is a great addition to London dining.