Hommage a Scorsese

Having not seen The Departed, P, E and me decided to put together a Scorsese evening to make an event of the film; all the more apt that it has now scooped a stack of Oscars. Food would have to play a big part in the evening as it has done in his films, many of which have meant a great deal to me. I shan't ever forget seeing Taxi Driver and Raging Bull as a double-bill at The Everyman (actually it was a triple bill, with Boxcar Bertha, but we were sufficiently traumatised to only be able to cope with two films), nor watching The King of Comedy, Mean Streets or Bringing Out the Dead for the first time. Most of all, I shall never tire of watching After Hours, which somehow manages to be one of the funniest, most stylish and engaging films ever made - and having now spent a night of my own wandering the streets of Soho in NYC (locked out...) I can also identify with the craziness which Griffin Dunne encounters on that very strange night of his.

Although The Departed is set in Boston, the food for a Scorsese evening has just gotta be Italian, so we're having tortiglioni with home-made pesto, salad, pugliese bread and a few Peronis - all from the great Gazzano. The quality of pesto is evidently determined by the excellence, or otherwise, of the basil used, and this is where Italian delis come into their own, because the aromatic basil they sell is a long, long way from the un-perfumed kinds you find in supermarkets (the Israeli origin question is also a non-issue in delis). Three other keys to making pesto, in my book, are: resist the temptation to chop too fine, use much more basil than you think you'll need, because mean pesto ain't good pesto, and make sure that you offer people the chance to add lots more grated parmesan.

While The Departed isn't any great shakes, it's a pretty entertaining genre film of a superior sort and Scorsese fans don't need the great man to produce any more these days. It's not as though he's turned into Woody Allen or some other director who should have given up in 1992 (Husbands and Wives). I don't remember there being much food in The Departed, but Scorsese desrved both his Oscar and a feast.

Vietnam encore

I could be wrong about this, but we are nearing the end of February and I have not eaten Indian food once this year. On the one hand this makes me think "Hot damn! I's going to have to get myself some sag paneer real soon", but on the other hand I have now been out for Vietnamese food on four occasions already and each meal has been excellent, whereas my experience of Indian food in London has been so-so overall. This is not to say that I want to compare Indian and Vietnamese cuisines (or doltishly imply that since they are Asian and "spicy" they must be kinda the same) but simply to wonder if Vietnamese food is becoming a new default eating-out option. Anyhow, enough of the yaddas and onto the food, which was a return trip to Cay Tre a restaurant which seems, rightly, to do very well out of having both a red (great food) and green (good value) stars in the Time Out food guide. I managed to order different things this time around, though only because I couldn't remember the names of dishes and there a number of crispy tofu options to go for. This restaurant is really doing a great job of convincing me of the merits of tofu because, while I've always liked it, there's never been any love there, but the crispy, crunchy way they prepare it and the style of serving (today with a rich sauce and kimch-style chilli'd ginger slices) is right up my strasse. I know that I should be shot for writing "right up my strasse", but it was what I was thinking, as if that is any kind of excuse.

We also had spring rolls, a big plate of water spinach (which S identified as mizuna), noodles with beansprouts (the single, yummiest thing on the menu I reckon - they have almost a smoky taste) and S+R ordered some "kangaroo squid", which was just squid and I didn't quite understand how it got its monicker. I had a banana fritter for pudding which was one of the best I'd ever had (the banana inside was almost molten), but I'll only give it an 8 as they had run out of coconut ice cream (it may be pushing 9 with that).

While decent value, this is not a super cheap restaurant, but it's one that I would happily come back to again and again because everyone seems to leave feeling happy and satisfied, the service is very good, the venue buzzy, and all the tastes are really clear and distinct.

Not about food but for those who like to see the lads scrap

A tale of two cafes

R&S were in town this weekend and were keen to go to Portobello Road market, so we met up at Notting Hill Gate tube and decided to have a quick snack there. It was thus that Bagel Factory got five of my heard-earned quids for a pretty titchy bagel and a bottle of still water. The bagel was OK - cream cheese and salad on onion multigrain - but eating it brought home how important a perception of value is to eating out, and how perceived poor value will always lead to a poor experience and to you abandoning thoughts of going back. Anyhow, at the end of the walk we ended up looking for a cafe in Ladbroke Grove and chanced upon what must be one of the most charming cafes in London, Tea's Me Cafe Deli, 129a Ladbroke Grove. In spite of its naff, naff name, it is a super stylish place with one big communal table, see-through chairs (wow!), trendy wallpaper of the kind you see in Guardian Weekend, and a nifty chandelier. The place only sits about fifteen or so people, so I've no idea how they make money, but the cakes and coffee were excellent and after the hubbub of the market it was a very welcome zone of calmness. The brioche with some kind of candied coconut topping in the picture is much to be recommended. If I lived close by and I spent lots of time hanging out in coffee shops being cool, then I would come here a lot.

A bit parky

For the past six months or so I've been able to look forward to a sandwich lunch on the benches of Clerkenwell church park every two or three weekes with a couple of old friends. Unfortunately JC's work is now taking him away from the area, but hopefully OC will still want to keep our burgeoning tradition alive. Some have commented that it is a bit sad that we take it in turn to make sandwiches and sit around in the park like a bunch of old geezers putting the world to rights. What they don't know is that it gets even sadder than that as we also developed rituals around drinks and, most especially, crisps, whereby the person responsible for making the sandwiches would also have to brink three different drinks and three packs of crisps. Our dazzling intellects allowed us to quickly work out that the most fun to be had with crisps was to select three different "classes" of crisp: e.g. one pack pickled onion Monster Munch, one pack Walker's ready-salted, and one packet of organically-grown, Maldon-sea-salted vegetable chips. Hula Hoops tended to be the top choice with the posh crisps tending to lose out. As you can see from the picture, this week's choice - decided by a lucky dip - was between salt and vinegar Hula Hoops, Quavers and Doritos. JC got the Hula Hoops (but wanted the Doritos), I got the Doritos (but was secretly angling for the Quavers) and I'm not sure how OC felt about his pick.

Festa Italiana

The Italians have a special feast to celebrate and a saint to invoke on the passing of an illness, and it was for this reason that I made my way down to Gazzano in Clekenwell to but myself a big raisin danish to celebrate the waning of my cold (Ok, I admit, although I claimed it was flu, it was probably just a cold). Actually, I made the stuff about Italians up, but I the part about the cake and the celebration were true, and that was a damn fine danish. I'm pretty spoiled for choice with Italian delis here, but more and more I'm coming round to the view that Gazzano's is the one. As the picture shows, it's located in a very cool building and it also has a nifty little cafe out the back.

Motives

I sometimes need reminding that one of the reasons I started this blog was that I wanted to think about the food I ate a bit more, with the aim of losing some weight. That process is somewhat up and down but the overall curve seems to be going in the right direction, so perhaps at year end I will make a packet from my stuff yourself silly, blog about it and still lose weight diet. I'm including this image of an unusually frugal supper as a reminder to myself that it's not always necessary to load up on carbs in the evening. The eagle-eyed amongst will spot that there is quite a lot of cheese for someone who claims to be trying to shed pounds...

Where am I?

A question referring to both my state of mind and the accompanying photo. The question applies to my mood as I've been hit quite a spacey, if mild, form of flu, which is getting on my nerves (Edo-san also has it many miles away and we are agreed that we are becoming "angry men" whilst not able to exercise...), and it also refers to the photo of sushi: is this from Japan or London? The reason that I ask is that I think that Number7's kitchen looks pretty Japanese in this photo and the sushi she kindly provided, from Wasabi on Oxford Street, was the amongst the most Japanese-tasting sushi I've had in Londinium (it certainly made Yo!'s sushi, which we like, seem like a very Anglicized version). The photo shows trays of rolls, salads, ginger boxes and a couple of plum ngiri. Everything was excellent and common features were a serious, salty taste of the sea, plenty of egg, as would be the case in Japan, and liberal sprinklings of sesame seeds, chilli and seaweed, as well as seemingly "untraditional" ingredients like lettuce, which seems very much like food in Japan as it is now. On looking at this feast, I knew right from the start that the thing which I would save to the end, on account of it being the best, was the asparagus and mayonnaise roll, which is in the penultimate row of the left-hand box. Without wanting to crow, I was right because it had that oh-so-luscious smoothness and mildness which is so yummy about Japanese food.

In returning to the spacey dislocation theme, in writing about sushi, I can at least console myself with the fact that things were worse for The Vapors, when they sang:

Everyone around me is a total stranger
Everyone avoids me like a cyclone ranger
That's why I'm turning Japanese
I think I'm turning Japanese
I really think so

Here's hoping to say sayonara to spacey-flu soon, and konichiwa to Wasabi again some time soon.

The Deal

I think we're agreed that more or less the best possible review of a great Tex-Mex restaurant would be a really short one. We all know what such restaurants should deliver, we know what good guacamole tastes like, we know you should feel full to the point of pain afterwards, we know the music... etc etc. Anyhow, Desperados on Upper Street ain't bad, but it gets a slightly longer mention because in spite of some good things about which I'll stay more or less silent (beans they way they should be, some good iced Tequila shots on the house, and a general tastiness to the dishes), they fluffed the stuffed-japalenos test big-time. As b pointed out, all they would have had to do is add one more jalapeno (to our miserly three for £4.95) on the plate and we wouldn't have minded one jot, but as it was I got sidetracked into mental arithmetic wondering just how much three frozen jalapenos costs such restaurants (even factoring in the oil in the fryer and the labour required for the drop-and-fish-the-jalapeno). Still, although we really didn't get stuffed, we decided that wasn't such a bad thing, unlike ol' Gordy Broon who famously dined at this site when it was the home of the famous Granita.

Pearl

Dinner at Pearl, Jun Tanaka's restuarant at the Renaissance Chancery Hotel, on Saturday for my Mum's 60th birthday. Other than the celebration itself, the most memorable aspect of the meal was one of the most attentive pieces of services I've ever encountered. All through the meal, the service had been very good, but the real coup came with our puddings, when the maitre d' brought over my Mum's dish and said something along the lines of "I believe tonight is a special evening". The pudding had a carefully-styled "happy birthday" message and we were presented with two super pudding wines on the house. In some circumstances I might consider such service a bit cloying, maybe even verging on the cheesy (thinking back to my waiting days at a pizzeria in Edinburgh where a "special" cake was taken out for women's birthdays: shaped as a male torso, with, er, prominent whipped cream and cherries...), but the amazing thing about Saturday was that we had not told them about the birthday. In the end, we worked out that a waiter must have overhead the one time we toasted my Mum's birthday earlier in the meal... and I reckon that level of attention to detail is a mark of a pretty great restaurant.

Another really winning aspect of the restaurant is the room itself. I've often found myself slightly let down by the interiors of good restaurants, tending to find them somewhat bland and boring, when I expect pizazz and style. Pearl is so-called because the building was formerly the Pearl Assurance HQ and the restaurant and bar and sited in what was obviously an extremely grand entrance hall, now niftily done out with screens of pearls and plenty of low-lighting. The room is big, so tables are well-spaced and the overall effect felt rather like eating in Gotham City, of Batman fame, which is good for a special meal since I think it's nice in that situation to feel a complete sense of escape and a certain dreaminess.

Two paragraphs in and he hasn't mentioned the food; a good or a bad sign, they wonder. Certainly not a bad sign, but I do want to convey how much the environment created by the restaurant made the meal just as much as the food did. We began with drinks in the bar and four decent amuses: a spoon of refreshing ratatouille, a breaded mushroom mozarella ball, a scallop salad, and pork belly on celeriac. Moving the the table, the pre-starter was a rich, earthy pumpkin soup with wild mushrooms. Bread was really stand-out with the walnut and raisin number the best of those on offer, not least because it was one of the saltiest things I have eaten in ages. My Mum skipped starters and watched me eat what was my favourite thing on the menu: a winter salad of Jersualem artichokes and roasted salsify. For me one of the marks of great French cooking are these kinds of salads, of a kind which you would never make for yourself, and nor could you make for yourself because they display a degree of subtle skill which may seem hard to see, but which comes through in the great pleasure of the eating. The leaves were perfectly dressed, some with a truffled vinaigrette, and the combination of the root vegetables with a classic sauce and the salad was just sensational.

For mains, I went with a canneloni (pictured), which I think was made of celeriac, surrounded by plenty of mushrooms, great sauce and baby Leeks, while my Mum had a pithivier of butternut squash which came with carrots and parsnips which had been roasted to their absolute ultimate point, and were all the better for the immense richness and sweetness this brought to their flavour. The pre-pud was a glass of yoghurt, rhubarb and crumble, which was pleasingly simple, but it was the one dish I felt could have been markedly improved (it needs sassing or jazzing up in some way). For pudding my Mum went for an apple number that featured a salted caramel as well as a sorbet (I didn't get to try it, so I know it must have been good), whilst I followed my pudding philosophy of "order the one which is weirdest/you think you will dislike, because this will be the winner" and I was right, as I tend to be in this one very discrete area of life, because profiteroles with Bailey's parfait, orange and yuzu foam, and chocolate sauce, was just as wild and delicious as I my counterintuition had led me to believe it would be.

A fantastic meal.

Still life with whisky

All that talk of integrity and so on inspired me to pour myself a wee glass of what, for me, is the king of all whiskies: Bowmore, from Islay. As I write this I'm trying to identify the different tastes that it offers and have thus far come up with tobacco (or burnt wood), seaweed, grapefruit and sherry. As someone who has a pretty rubbish palate, I'm quite pleased with this little list as it proves that people must be right when they say that whisky has a much more complex set of tastes and aromatics than wine. I'll resist the temptation to pour myself a few more glasses and see what further whsiky widsom I can offerr my bolg..

Mo'Pho

Back to Pho and I couldn't help but order exactly the same things that I had last time. I think that this is one of those places where I am completely convinced that I have the menu worked out and will always be happy ordering the same dishes. The more this goes on, the more likely I am to stick to this pattern because I'll get increasingly fearful that any other dishes might prove to be a letdown. I'm sure that they'd actually be very nice, but I shan't risk it.
A second visit revealed that I was right first time round that Pho has a quality absolutely essential to lots of good restaurants: integrity. It seems to me that this is especially important with Chinese and SE Asian food because there are so many totally dull old-style and new-style Oriental joints which aspire to offer no more than an approximation of food that you'd actually eat in the region, and charge you plenty for the privilege of this ersatz experience. Pho, on the other hand, has plenty of sauces sourced from Vietnam on the table, a decent list of different Vietnamese lagers, the amazing herbs that I mentioned last time around and, I guess most importantly, plenty of authentic dishes that you won't find in other restaurants. As far as I know, the couple who run the place are English and fell in love with phos whilst in Vietnam, and that really shows. Writing this I have something of a Groundhog Day feeling, because I'm sure that I said much the same things the last time I wrote about Pho, so perhaps it'll become a monthly tradition that not only do I visit the restaurant again, but I also order the same dishes, and then bore whatever audience is left with an identical account of why I like it so much. I think it'll be OK, so long as I do it in an authentic way, full of integrity...

Chips+

Having tried some of London's best-known chippies - like Fryer's Delight on Theobald's Road and North Sea on Leigh Street - tonight it was the turn of Master's Super Fish on Waterloo Road. Some might question the right of a non-fish-eating vegetarian to pass judgement on fish and chip shops, but I like to think that my chip conoisseurship and willingness to explore the margins of chippy's menus somewhat compensate for this in a small way. Given that MSP is pretty close to the river, I should really have walked down to eat my chips near the London Eye, but a long day's hunger got the better of me and I ended up with a table for one on a small wall on a pretty grotty street nearby. One of the big attractions of MSP was hearing that they made there own pickles and I'd say that their pretty gigantic pickled gherkin was probably the highlight of the meal: crunchily hard on the outside and then pleasingly soft and juicy as you bit in. The coleslaw shown in the photo, also hom-made, was also excellent. The chips were not at all bad, but I'm not sure that they're much better than any old chippy, and the pickled onion was a bit rough. Still, with a can of Rubicon Guanabana this was a pretty good al fresco dinner British style.

Homeland food

I guess most people have a homeland food which conjures up the place which they're from, for which they have an affection which lies beyond any kinds of objective criteria. For me, one of those foods is the cheese-and-onion pasty, so on returning to Devon a key mission was finding a good one in Sidmouth. I need not have worried because this small town has at least three bakeries in the centre as well as one specialist pasty-monger: Georgie Pies. This was a very good discovery indeed, on a par with the great pasty shop on the main street of Beer and Oggy-Oggy in Exeter. I'd had lunch and a large dinner awaited but it was time to bracket such considerations, and indeed my vague aim of losing weight, to savour the pastriness, the cheesiness and the all round heartiness of a really good pasty. The other big attractions in Sidmouth were taking photos of the capsized container boat Napoli, which had brought in the crowds, and pictures of the wild seas (as seen in the accompanying shot of a foolish Merovingian getting much too close to the waves).

There's a lot of pleasure at each distinct stage of making sushi: the shopping, the advance preparation, the construction of the rolls, the chopping and grouping them together, and the eating; even the remembering of these things is pretty good. In order, the pictures show:

1. The table ready for the off: big dish of sushi rice, Japanese crunchy dried pea snacks, nori sheets atop rolling mats, a plate full of things ready to be made into some quite lame tempura, a plate full of vegetables ready to be sushi'd, and a plate of fillings (sesame seeds, mayonnaise, cream cheese, Japanese pickles), oh, and a bowl of chopped spring onion. The ingredients came from, in reverse order of glamour, Tesco, Chapel St Market, and the Japan Centre on Piccadilly (I couldn't help trying some of their sushi whilst I was shopping and it was amazing - also super value in that it was cheaper than supermarket sushi and prepared by some seriously serious sushi chefs).

2. Pumpkin, avocado, red pepper and cucumber, because I think the colours look nice.

3. The results of our efforts. The niftiest ones are the red pepper and cream cheese ones three rows in from the left, though the semi-respectability of the avocado ones on the far left seemed a minor triumph at the time as it was in making them that I realised that I had no clue how to use the rolling mat, in spite of much poring over of pictures on Google Images and reading guides to making sushi... I like this picture a lot because it shows that even if a few rolls feel a bit skewiff when you're making them, they look great together, and sushi doesn't need to be regimented to be tasty. This was also proven by the four-year-old sushi master, whose strong, early preference for just mayonnaise and sesame seeds proved no barrier to making great rolls.

4. Proof of irresistibility!

For some time now I have daydreamed that I would make lots of sushi some weeks to take to work so that: a) I would avoid the awfulness of the polystyrene chips with everything food served in the institution in which I work (Jamie Oliver, our universities need you), and b) I would avoid the temptation that even polysterene chips hold for me after a morning's travel and work. Making this sushi made that daydream seem realistic, but before that I think more sushi parties are necessary, and some more experimentation with fillings.

Doughnuts in my life

Madeleines, madeleines, eh... what kind of rubbish, lightweight cake is that to base an important literary conceit around? What's wrong with doughnuts?

When I think of doughnuts, I think especially of Edinburgh and the so-called "Belgian breakfasts" which I used to enjoy with friends, which consisted of a Belgian bun, a fudge-custard doughnut and a can of Coke. There are few meals I've eaten with regularity that I look back on with more fondness and which are more expressive of life lived for pleasure without worrying about the consequences (deep-fried haggis, chips, sauce, Coke and a Mars Bar for pudding is another classic of that era).

The past few years have been interesting ones on the UK doughnut scene, because what was once a fairly homogenous market has now stratified in a pretty extreme fashion. At one end, there are the pricey American interlopers, Krispy Kreme and Dunkin Donuts, and at the other, supermarket special offers of eight or ten or twelve doughnuts for about a quid. And in the middle are the bakers, in particular Gregg's, which has expanded south from its northern heartlands, to offer what I'd consider to be the classic roster of UK doughnuts. Quite why doughnuts should have become such a key signifier in retail battles and why there should be these massive differentials in terms of price and perception was slightly baffling to me, so I decided to organise a "blind doughnut tasting" so as be able to stuff my face in a socially acceptable fashion, er, I mean, to parse apart the complexities of this doughnut conundrum.

For various reasons, the tasting was not quite as scientific a process as I had imagined in my daydreaming at work, not least because I wasn't able to get hold of any fudge doughnuts from Gregg's (note to execs: please open your Leather Lane branch on Saturdays - you will be well rewarded by me for doing so). In the end, there was more or less a straight battle between Tesco's and a few other supermarket doughnuts, in the one camp, and a dozen Krispy Kreme, on the other. Frankly I think that Gregg's, or Crawford's in Scotland, would have put up a much better fight than the supermarkets, because KK creamed them in a pretty serious fashion. The accompanying picture of a plate of doughnuts was decimated much more on the KK end than the Tesco's side, and the grand individual winner was KK's 'glazed chocolate cake'. This is a doughnut with very impressive qualities, we all agreed: a pleasing heaviness, textural contrast between crispiness and cakey softness, deep chocolate, and the retention of a certain pleasing greasiness which is essential in even the poshest doughnut.