My favourite pub in London

If there is a better London pub to eat in than The Eagle, then I want to hear about it pronto. One hears vague chatter sometimes about how the "first gastropub" has gone downhill in its seventeen or so years of operation, but this is, quite frankly, bullshit. The Eagle is a wonderful example of an eating house which knows what it does, loves doing it and generates great happiness for its customers in doing so. In some ways I'm surprised that I feel so passionately about a meat-oriented operation which generally offers vegetarians only one main course, but every single dish I've eaten here has given me great pleasure: generous, rustic, smoky, rich cooking, served up with great wines and beers at decent prices in a buzzy evening atmosphere, or a dreamy afternoon vibe. Last night I had a plate of grilled vegetables (aubergine, red peppers, onions and artichokes) served with flatbread, that lacked only a pot of their fantastic aioli, together with a bottle of excellent Duoro (a stellar wine for £14). Akemi had a linguine of mackerel, lemon and chilli, which was adjudged to be 'muy picante', and 'muy rico'. The bill for two, with wine and a tip and tap water, was £33. I'll be back, and back and back, I hope.

Dem beans, dem beans

For the first time in quite a while I made my white beans, which seem to be regarded with most favoured status by b, k and others. After being slightly disappointed with my last effort, I took the trouble to soak butter beans over night this time around and I think this was the right thing to do. The cooking itself begins with frying off two onions in a very decent amount of butter, then adding a couple of sizeable cloves of garlic, then some white wine (or rose), mustard and a decent amount of salt. The cooked beans are then added to the mix and the dish is finished off with cream, and maybe a bit more butter. This is a certainly a dish that follows the Bourdain rules on emulating restaurant cooking in terms of its fattiness and while making it I'd avise channelling of Gary Rhodes, with his voice announcing "and we'll just finish the dish off with a liiiiiiiitttle bit of butter" (as he empties half a pack into the pan!).

Me gusto mucho gazpacho

It somehow seems wrong making gazpacho in March because one really should wait for the red ripeness of summer tomatoes, but I couldn't resist when I was flicking through the Moro cookbook. One of the nice things about gazpacho is that recipes vary from town to town in Andalucia, so there's no need to worry too much about authenticity: so long as the tomatoes are good, you're generous with the cucumber and careful with the vinegar (I followed the book's suggestion of sherry vinegar this time around and was very pleased with results), and so long as it's served super cold, then all will be well in the world, because gazpacho offers summer whatever the weather's like outside.

Moro's carrot salad

There aren't many recipes that I make more often than the Moroccan carrot salad from the Moro cookbook. It's just a winning dish, not least because it's invariably a hit with those who aren't great fans of carrots and because its depth of flavour is not at all apparent from the look of the dish. This time around I adapted the recipe very slightly to add more toasted and ground cumin seeds than the recipe demands, which gave it a still bigger flavour than usual, which I think was a good thing. The other key to the dish is to make sure that you follow the recipe's instructions regarding the preparation of the carrots: they key being to not overcook them and to then lay them out, well dispersed, to cool. I discovered this week that carrots came from Afghanistan and it seems pretty sure that this dish actually originated in al-Andalus, where carrots were red and yellow (the orange carrot is a later Dutch innovation apparently), so as well as being tasty this dish has nice historical resonance for me.

A good salad

After my silly warm salad, it's nice to discover that one of my all-time classics still works: crumble ricotta, add shelled peas, glug olive oil in, and sprinkle with rock salt before gently mixing.

Wittgenstein said: "Thoughts that are at peace. That is what the philosopher yearns for." "Flavours and textures that work together. That is what the kitchen philosopher yearns for" says William.

Patisserie Deux Amis

If they ever decide to make a British-set sequel to the sequel to Sleepless in Seattle, my bet is that it'll be set in lovely Bloomsbury, and that a key scene will happen in the new, cutesy-cutesy cafe Patisserie Deux Amis. This is the epitome of what you might call an idiosyncratic oparation: an eatery which is the vision of an owner and what they think a good place to be should be. I had a pretty delicious plum and custard danish pastry, though choosing a cake had been difficult as many of them looked viable choices. In this era of Starbucksification, one of the charms of Bloosmbury is all its independent pubs and cafes, even if I don't go to them very often, and its heartening to see new ones opening up. Remember this blog when you're sat in the cinema and the film opens with a giant crane shot of central London, sweeping round the St Pancras Hotel and the British Library, along Judd Street, and then into a little cafe, where we meet our protagonists for the first time...

Fitrovian Moroccan

Menara has been a big favourite for quite a while, but none of us had been for some time, so it was a real treat to return and find that the food there is tastier than ever. Best of all are the cheese sambousek which may be the best I've had in London: there's a deep savouriness and spiciness to them, with a spice we couldn't quite identify at work, and they prove that there can be a great variety in styles of excellent sambousek (from the complex versions here to the equally wonderful, simpler stringy cheese and chives versions found in Abu Zaad). We also had a plate of grilled halloumi for the first time here and the chips were really stellar. Knocked back with a bottle of Moroccan red and some mint shisha, this was a fine evening.

Less/more

After the warm salad debacle, I decided to not muck around with the large passion fruits I bought at Chapel Street market (five for a nugget). Served with strawberry yoghurt and sliced Fuji apple this was a fine pudding (I can say that because it's not as though I did anything, can't I?).

More/sum/parts

I've lived just down the road from The Norfolk Arms for almost a year now and had had no idea that it was both a really good pub and a really good eating pub (recommended by Time Out). The pub is handsome in that very fine way that late C19 London pubs are: iron pillars, big, etched windows, lots of fine detailing and a great sense of space (with no fug of smoke here). I was there with a big group catching up together over Sunday lunch and it said much for the relaxed service and attitude of the pub that they were quite happy for us to occupy a big table for more than five and a half hours! The food was all super competent; not cheap or overly ambitious, but decently sourced ingredients and plenty of tastiness to everything that I tried (the bread was very good indeed). I had a vegetable mezze plate which consisted of houmous, babaghanoush, carrot salad, chillis, vine leaves, marinated peppers and baby pickled onions. It turned out to be a perfect dish to nibble on whilst drinking some cava, catching up with friends and stealing their roast potatoes.

Richard Estes rocks my world

More Sunday fun at Spitalfields, featuring what was, I think, my third or fourth spot of Gilbert and George. Who needs to go to the Tate retrospective when you can see their life as art for real?

We had coffee at a very cute dark-wood olde-days coffee shop just outside the market, whose name I forget, but it was all about the place, the people and the glorious spring sun.

Warm salads

After the absolutely delicious warm salad I'd had in February at Pearl, I decided to make one for myself on Saturday. After all, how hard can a salad be? All you need is decent ingredients, a sense of composition, a delicate dressing for the leaves and a damn rich sauce for the extra ingredients. What you see in the photo is my truly miserable attempt to ape that style, which revealed to me, as if I had not known it already, just how difficult a classic French-style warm salad is to execute. My mistakes were legion, but here's what I've learned:

1. Don't just go to the market and buy whatever looks good and is in season. That may work if you want to make pasta or a series of dishes, but the composition of a warm salad needs to be very well thought-through indeed.

2. Restrict the number of ingredients you use, or else you will end up with a dish that looks absolutely rubbish, and the aesthetics of the warm salad are a very important part of the dish. For the record, I started with a layer of radicchio, on which were roasted carrots, parsnips and potatoes, with mushroom antipasti, fresh peas and a garlic and shallot sauce made with lots and lots of butter (now that did taste good, as Anthony Bourdain tells you such sauces will in Kitchen Confidential).

3. There needs to be a really good reason as to why the leads you use are not fine, classic, green salad leaves. Such leaves look good, taste nice and work well as a point of contrast with warm additions. Radicchio does not; or, rather, it might work in a simple salad with blue cheese and walnuts, but not with my noisy mess.

4. You must really take care to make sure that each of the component parts of the salad is prepared exactly as you desired. As my picture reveals, I got hasty and served the roasted vegetables before they were relly crunched and caramelised, and I could have done with really making sauce saucier.

5. Use a recipe William.

Hommage to The Beer Engine

The Beer Engine in Newton St Cyres is my number one (food) pub in the world, most especially for the cheesiness of the aubergine and tomato bake, with a very solid roll on the side, and salad, and a portion of chips "to share". It is, then, high praise to compare someone's cooking to The Beer Engine, but that was what came to mind when trying Rabs's bean and vegetable bake in Dursley. I believe that the Japanese have a word "umami" which describes a special kind of yummy savouriness that goes beyond our existing language for such things, and this dish had plenty of that: soft, rich, and with a decent cheese to everything else ratio.

Our basic instinct

Apologies for recent radio silence. Lots of posts to write tonight, starting with another film and food evening ten days ago, when we began a Paul Verhoeven season with Basic Instinct and some sushi. Not many sushi innovations to report, but I'm finally getting the hang of tempura, where the solid/liquid content of the mix is absolutely critical if you are not to have tempura that is either too limp or over-battered. Although I'd like to think that purple-sprouting broccoli is the best vegetable to tempura, in truth asparagus and red pepper (both par-boiled) are much better. This time I made the tempura with a half-beer half-water mix, but the difference in taste was negligible.

The tastiest resto in London?

Half an hour after leaving Tbilisi on Holloway Road the tasty flavours of dinner are still rolling around my mouth. Even if I wanted them to disappear, which I certainly don't, I feel sure there would be no way of doing so for the taste imprint has run deep. B recommended Tbilisi and it was sold on the grounds of its tastiness and boy does it deliver. This is the kind of meal where photos are more or less useless, so it's not such a bad thing that my photos are, well, more or less useless. Photos, after all, tell you nothing about flavours and one of the great things about this place is how immensely strong and appealing are the flavours.

We began with a selection of starters that included a bean dip (full set of ingredients not yet divined) a very buttery Russian salad (and the butteriness was all to the good), some hot, bean-filled bread and the most luscious, hot, salty-white-cheese filled bread. The last item was without doubt one of the best things I've eaten since starting this blog: so good that I actually paced myself with it, whereas if it had just been excellent, I would have been the wolf... For mains b and me had a vegetable plate that included more Russian salad, aubergine with tomatoes, a mixed salad, rice with sweetcorn and spinach with walnuts (good spot number 7). The final dish was also in my best few things eaten this year: creamy, rich, deep and long in flavour.

We drank a bottle of Georgian house red which was very good and suited the food really well, and a request for tap water elicited a very attractive, large jug, which is just the kind of service you want. I'd recommend booking because we were very lucky to get a table as a walk-in on a Thursday night and I feel sure that it must be lots of people's "secret restaurant". One last thing that I admired was the spacing of the tables, which was generous and allowed you to have your own little world in the restaurant, which is not a feeling that you get at an awful lot of much smarter, pricier places (this was £20 a head).

Did I say that I liked it yet?

Sushi II

I Still haven't got tempura quite right (as the picture shows, this time there was just too much batter), but the sushi was great: even more eclectic and delicious than before. A key additional ingredient was Japanese style omelette: expertly made, not by me, with soy sauce, spring onions, sugar and dashi stock. The sushi tasted just as great the next day, especially those that combined omelette, cream cheese and ginger.

Chinese in Dorridge

After a light lunch of a bap and pastry, what's so wrong about a dinner of egg fried rice, noodles with beansprouts and a tofu hotpot? Post-Weightwatchers, they say, of the Merovingian, he ain't heavy, he's my brother. But I was stuffed, stuffed, stuffed, and the only consolation my diet had was that we'd had a serious battle in the pool earlier in the day: only 6% faster than his big brother now, but rather more than 6% slimmer...

Same old...

Two things which you know I like: baps filled with plenty of cheese, coleslaw and salad, and big Danish pastries. Wedge's, near the Merovingians in Redditch, delivers every time.