I don’t much like Chelsea. I don’t think many of us do. Whilst it might have been quite fun to wander down there in the 60’s to watch Twiggy snog Georgie, or to hang out with Vivienne and Malcolm ten years later, nowadays it seems to consist mainly of sloaney girls who aren’t as pretty as they think are looking for a Geordie to victimize or someone to buy them a house. Not even Chelsea fans like Chelsea, mainly because very few of them can afford to live there, unless they’re Russian and have managed to siphon off their entire country’s energy profits in dubious circumstances.

I have to admit to a certain fondness for the King’s Road in the late eighties, when, despite its obviously faded grandeur, I still got excited by vintage 501’s at American Classics and once spent an outlandish amount on a 50’s flying jacket that I looked terrible in but loved with a passion. And even now, as a contented habitué of Battersea, I do find myself over there quite regularly as the walk across the river is lovely and (in a sentence written entirely for the benefit of comedians Smug Roberts and Nick Revell) the farmer’s market is mah-vellous. Actually, it isn’t. The farmer’s market is full of unimaginative restaurants for those who read a menu by price and get worried by originality, but the Duke of York Square market on a Saturday is well worth a trip. Try some freshly shucked Maldon Oysters, have a pie, remortgage your house for some Spanish ham and definitely try a Rainbow box from the Caribbean stall, whilst nicking bits of cheese and chorizo from anyone nice/stupid enough to leave any out for you. Then vacate the area.

I very rarely eat on the King’s Road – I’m sure there are some decent places (ok, Pizza Express,) but I can never get away from the idea that someone is secretly pilfering an extra tenner from my wallet just because of where I am, and so many of the options (ok, Pizza Express) just seem to be offering the same old same old. I sometimes pop in to Phat Phuc for a pho, but it’s not exactly a world-beater.

However, we were going to the cinema because having, to my shame, dragged my sorry literary arse through the final installment of the Harry Potter books just to say I’d done it, we now had to go and see the last film as apparently it’s the best (it isn’t.) Working on the utterly misplaced theory that a bad book makes for a good film, I had agreed to go to Cineworld and we needed to eat, as man cannot live by popcorn alone. This led to a lot of wandering up and down and one nearly full-blown argument, until we eventually decided to risk it and go to the Trafalgar.

I say risk, because I have walked past the Trafalgar many, many times and always thought it to be full of exactly the types and all the culinary ambition I have already dismissed. Perhaps the fact it was fairly empty, especially the dining area, improved my mood. As did the décor, which has got that slightly bohemian ‘we just threw this together and somehow it looks both careworn and groovy’ look, which I believe costs thousands. Things looked up further when I overheard the barman discussing the draught ales with what sounded unmistakably like enthusiasm.

Ah. Enthusiasm. Perhaps best overheard, rather than introducing itself, sitting up on its hind legs, offering you its chin to tickle and then licking you throughout the course of your meal. Meet our waitress. She did a good enough job, and in this recession-ravaged-professional-miserablist of a country, maybe a sunny disposition is something to be treasured, but the words, “I’ll be bothering you throughout the meal because (insert tinkly laugh) I haven’t got anyone else to bother!” didn’t fill me with joy. Neither did her amazement that I was having a water and the lady was having a cider. What is the world coming to! And then I had a salad and she had fish and chips! Short of getting her cock and balls out and whapping them on the table, I can’t see what my girlfriend could have done to surprise our waitress more. Although she did come back to check how things were thirty seconds after putting the plates down the wrong way round, so maybe that’s exactly what she was looking for.

The menu is not earth shattering, but then again it’s a Chelsea pub looking to do a brisk trade, so I didn’t expect it to be. I’m not going to tell you what kind of sausages they had with their mash because you already know they’re Gloucester Old Spot. Modern not quite gastropub I would call it, and only because the word gastropub is so overused that it needs qualifying if they’re not doing astonishingly twiddly things with unexpected ingredients. Her fish and chips were, however, excellent. Crunchy batter, well cooked fish, good chips and perky tartare sauce. Apparently the peas were good too, but they’d disappeared by the time I got a look in. My crab, samphire, chicory and butternut squash salad was a revelation. I don’t like brown crab meat. I know I should – it’s the essence of the sea, the bit the Nigels and the Nigellas secretly love to lick off the spoon etc etc, but to me it’s fishy and gritty and the white stuff is delicate and moreish and everything that is perfect about seafood and exactly what we had here. Generous flakes of crab combined beautifully with slightly salty samphire, crunchy leaves and cleverly cut ribbons of squash all held together by a perfectly understated lemon crème fraiche dressing.

At £26.35 this wasn’t massively cheap, but neither was it taking the piss either, unlike the waitress, who proceeded to bring us a customer feedback form and point out that it wasn’t just to say how brilliant the service was but you could also win a meal for two which was actually quite likely between you and me because not many people fill it out so tinkle it was well worth doing wasn’t it just for the fun of it ahahahaha? Seeing as this was (approximately) her fifteenth visit to the table, I thought it best not to pass comment. I still left her a tip, partly because I’m terribly nice too, and partly because I feared if I didn’t, the whole façade would come crashing down and I’d leave the place with her grabbing my ankles and wailing ‘What did I do wrong?’ Which would have been a much better ending than Harry Potter and the Deathly Epilogue managed three hours later.

July 2011

If ‘Love is What You Want’ then clearly I wanted to go and see Tracey Emin’s retrospective for someone’s birthday, because nothing says Many Happy Returns like used tampons, concrete embroidery and shite pencil drawings. I admire Tracey Emin, I find her emotionally exhausting and a couple of things did sing for me, but the bottom line is I don’t actually like her art. I’m allowed not to, and I don’t think I’m supposed to anyway – probably my fault for being the sort of person who should fuck people like Tracey, according to one of her neon signs. Still, I’m glad I went, albeit a bit truculently. (Apparently – I was definitely out toddlered by two little girls who ended up sat on the floor of the giftshop with Tracey sketch books and whom I’m not going to write about in case I get all Daily Mail at their mum for taking them in the first place.)

‘Love is What You Want’ is on at the Hayward and I’d recommend it because you need to have your own opinion, but another advantage (apart from the brilliant straw fox overlooking Waterloo Bridge) to the location is the chance to wander around the Southbank on a glorious day and see all the other people congratulating themselves on their proximity to ART. And restaurants and cafes (and gift shops) to help them consider how deeply affected they were by it all. I’m going to stick my neck out here, but with all apologies to my top secret Italian local (of which more, perhaps, someday,) I think I may have found the best coffee in London. Caffe Vergnano 1882 has got lots of interesting blurb in its menu about where it comes from and how good it is, so all I will add is that the coffee is superb. I go for meetings in the RFH all the time (not with anyone important, obviously) and will now be moving them about fifty yards to the right just for the puerile thrill of seeing 1882 written in chocolate powder on top of my cappuccino.

The menu looked none too shabby either, but that will have to wait for another day as I had already booked a table at Canteen. I’ve eaten there a number of times and always enjoyed it – the name gives a good indication of the surroundings and the menu. Deceptively simple, but hearty should you wish, a little lighter if you’re a lady who lunches. Clearly booking is for those who should really be fucking Tracey – looking on the list at the front desk, I saw I was the only one who had bothered (to book, not to fuck Tracey.) The place was busy – a good sign, and not initially a problem as we were ushered to a solitary booth by the door, with a mirrored wall behind.

(I mention the mirror mainly so I could point out to anyone from Canteen who might be reading, that having one of the waitresses checking her make up in it six inches behind one of your guests heads might be considered a little obtrusive, not to say rude.)

The whole point of Canteen is to work as an efficient, clean-lined café, a sort of upmarket IKEA without meatballs, not quite fine dining, but very good dining. You could almost sum it up in one word – proper. Except they haven’t – they’ve summed it up in the word Canteen, and they seem to have taken this so much to heart that the service was so slow and generally lackadaisical that I was tempted to get up and do it myself. If a glass of Pinot that took ages to arrive is sent back because it’s warm, the fact that the same one comes back a bit quicker with the recommendation that it’s ‘the coldest one we’ve got,’ is not necessarily to be celebrated.

The food was, to be fair, pretty good, but I knew that. That’s why we were there. Admittedly one of us was freaked out by half a pint of prawns  but I can’t really blame Canteen for that, (‘the eggs and the legs and the eyes!’) or that I therefore  had to swap them for my nicely spiky devilled kidneys on toast. Mushroom and celeriac pie came with mash and those greens that seem to announce how much good they’re doing you whilst boasting about how tasty they are, and at £10 with the prawns the lunch special  is great value. The same perhaps cannot be said of my soft-boiled egg, green bean, anchovy and (two slivers of) artichoke salad which is much the same price, but it still tasted delicious to a lady who lunches like me.

Sitting as near the front desk as we did, I did hear a couple of those other ladies moan about the speed of service, and I have to agree with them. Canteen is a great restaurant and a great concept, but at lunchtime on a summers day on the Southbank, it should not be too much to expect a few more staff. Unless they fancy adding the words ‘Self Service’ to the name, which would be a shame because they’d have to get the branding done all over again. Maybe Tracey could do them a nice neon sign.

July 2011

It’s not too far from Penrith, but I’d come on holiday on purpose. Well, not really a holiday, but a couple of days off in the Howbeck hotel in Windermere (voted ‘funkiest’ B&B by the AA last year – I’m not sure how a B&B gets voted funky, but lovely staff, breakfasts involving black pudding and an upgrade to a room with a spa bath certainly help.)

I don’t know if you’ve been to the Lake District. There’s so much breathtaking scenery you could be forgiven for bringing a ventilator, but luckily there’s also plenty to keep the cynic entertained. How many terrible galleries can one area support, for instance, and why do they all have the same shockingly bad picture of a red stiletto shoe on sale? Not to mention outdoor sports shops. There are literally thousands – it’s like the camping equivalent of Douglas Adams’ Great Shoe Event Horizon. If you want walking poles and appropriate footwear, you can buy both and then browse appalling pictures of the scenery to hang in your brand new tent without once setting foot on a fell. Or you could just wander around a big lake in unsuitable clothing and moan about fresh air and natural beauty just in case anyone realizes how much you like it.

You could also head to Grasmere to criticize the unbearable tweeness of the Gingerbread shop(pe?) or you could just buy some, eat it and shut up as your mouth is now doing something worthwhile. Pleasingly chewy, totally delicious. From there, I must recommend Tweedies bar in the Dale Lodge Hotel, where they have had the brilliant idea of serving beer on a paddle. By which I mean they give you a bit of wood with three holes in it, which they then fill with three third pint pots of your choice of ales. I hate to get old and chunky jumpered about this, but I’ve gone right off lager – I’m normally a Guinness drinker anyway – and this is exactly the sort of place to get boring about real ale and how it actually tastes of something. I had a stout and two bitters, one of which was called Hare-Straightener, reflecting the inevitable punning tendencies of your average brewer, and the fact that if you can’t find a crap picture of a stiletto in a Lake District gallery, there’ll be a crap statue of a hare somewhere nearby instead.

An open top bus past Wordsworth’s later and we wandered down to Bowness with a vague recommendation for The Angel Inn. At first I was more concerned that I’d just passed the second fish foot spa I’d seen. I had thought that the claim to be ‘The Lake District’s leading Fish Foot Spa’ in Ambleside was an unnecessary boast, but now I’ve seen three. The entire area is obsessed with feet. Luckily, mine took me up the stairs and through levels of beer garden to the pub. I love a beer garden with levels. It gives you something to aim for. This was clearly reflected in three separate signs telling you to find a table number before ordering – it felt a bit heavy handed, but when your main criticism of a venue is that the signs are too helpful, you know you’ve struck gold. The place looks good inside too, with pictures on the wall that didn’t make me want to wrap them around chocolate or punch them repeatedly. The restaurant appeared to be full (on a Monday) but I didn’t make it that far as, happily, the bar got in the way.

I was weighing up Cumberland Ale vs Conniston Bluebird, when the barman handed me a free sample of the former, so it felt rude not to order a pint. This set the tone for some excellent service – I had hardly sat down in level 1 of the beer garden (Table 40, I thank you) before my starter arrived.

Potted shin of fell reared beef with sourdough toast and homemade piccalilli. Just typing it has made my mouth water. This was stunning – deeply flavoured, toothsome, unctuous (all those adjectives) shin, packed moistly under a melting disc of fat-I-pretended-was-butter, spread on still hot sourdough and one of the best things I have ever put in my mouth ever.

Potted shin and pickles

The homemade piccalilli, cornichons and pickled onions were the perfect accompaniment, and I started making noises that had level 2 looking down on us disapprovingly. No sooner was this whipped away (I may have been licking the pot) than the mains arrived. I get tetchy at the best of times about slow service, but the speed with which a busy kitchen was producing food this good should be remarked upon for novelty value if nothing else. I recently waited over 45 minutes in Leeds Nando’s for some chicken – not that there’s much else to wait for in Nando’s beyond the chance of ringside seats at a teenage fumble. The only criticism of my duck leg confit might be that a small corner of the skin was a little floppy, but these things happen to us all, and that was only the one leg. They’d rather winningly brought two, and the perfectly cooked meat combined beautifully with fondant potato, onion marmalade, spring cabbage and a slightly under seasoned smear of squash. Similarly, the Shepherd’s pie was fantastic – I’d almost describe the filling as fruity thanks to the sweetness of the peas and the carrots, but that would be to undersell its proper meatiness, topped by perfect mash.

I had to head to the bar again to give the Bluebird a go, which led inevitably to an accidental pudding order. Burnt lemon custard with strawberries and shortbread arrived pretty much before I’d ordered it and was a fitting end to one of the best meals I’ve had in a while. I won’t insult The Angel by adding ‘in a pub’ to that last sentence because it’s neither necessary nor appropriate. At £50 for two, with drinks, this was superb.

If you’re going to call yourself a brasserie, on the other hand, you immediately set your stall out a little higher. The next evening, following Trip Advisor, we headed to Mojos Brasserie in Winderemere and I have to report that it has sadly lost its.

I’m loathe to write nasty things because the staff were terribly nice, but the fact that they asked us four times if everything was alright over one starter and two mains did give you the suspicion that they weren’t enormously confident in the kitchen either. A Cumberland skillet of black pudding, sausage and bacon was quite tasty if a little stingey, and accompanied by a few salad leaves and little spots of pesto, which just seemed a bit odd. Beef cobbler was ok, if again somewhat ungenerous, especially on the cobbler front, and my lamb was fatty, but not unpleasant. Vegetables were, er…there, but what did stand out were the brocolli fritters. All I’ll say is that if even the Japanese have trouble tempura-ing something, probably best not to batter it when you’re English. The Scots have their own rules. At £35 with a couple of glasses of wine, I didn’t feel too hard done by, just really underwhelmed and a bit hungry.

On the plus side, there were no pictures on the wall, which probably reflected the only seriously good bit of taste on display. Any stilettos and I’d have been off. Looking around at the other diners, I got the feeling that these might have been the people who went on Trip Advisor and were just pleased not to be too disappointed. When an American couple sat down and asked what a cobbler was, I wanted to rush over and tell them to nip down the road to The Angel before they could have their prejudices about English food confirmed. I could also have told them that a cobbler was something to do with shoes, but this being the Lake District, they’d probably have expected that.

June 2011

I’m a huge fan of the Old Street branch of Cay Tre and have been since it opened. I will happily wait for a table, and have done, many times. Not here. Pho has just opened on Wardour St, and knowing their Brighton branch, Cay Tre Soho seriously needs to up its game. It’s not their fault that I had some braying trustafarians modelling rugby shirts next to me and discussing spring chicken as though it was their girlfriend, but on a simply ambient note, the combination of them and the unnecessarily loud music did make it rather like going to a rave at Henley with like, uh, ethnic catering.

Food wise, in the same way that you can judge a good Thai by its tom yum, you can judge a Vietnamese by its pho and if you’re going to make a big play of the rib-eye steak on the menu, it’s probably best not to serve it with gristly shavings. I like my pho quite hot – so I usually add some chopped chilli and then remove it as I’m eating. Pernickety and slightly OCD I realise, but when you’re presented with one unchopped chilli to add, and a slice of lemon (shouldn’t it be lime?) it’s very hard to cut it up with chopsticks. I asked for some chopped chilli, which never arrived. As a bit of a pho snob (add your own -ing) the broth was watery rather than the comfortingly aromatic variety you find on Old Street. Not much marrowbone here. Maybe the stock needs longer, or they could borrow a meatier one from round the corner. It is Soho after all and…too…many…jokes.

I quite liked the kimchi – pickled Korean cabbage – although my girlfriend didn’t, but that’s a matter of taste, and at least it wasn’t ludicrously overpriced like much else on the menu – eight quid for beans? Really? My girlfriend is, however, very wise, and when I mentioned I was writing this, did ask me to add the words ‘shit’, ‘overpriced’, and ‘cold’ to my review, and she’s head of department for an English faculty so I felt I had to. Her Dong Du curry was quite tasty, but I think she counted two mouthfuls of actual lamb, which, for a tenner, seems a little steep. I even mentioned it when the bill arrived, and normally I’m like both of the old ladies in Fawlty Towers, so it must have been a bit shit, overpriced and cold.

I’ve got a meeting in Soho tomorrow, and I’ve already arranged to meet at Cay Tre. I would say I’ve booked a table, but no one was answering the phone this afternoon. I’ll be trying other things, but they’re going to have to be really good or next time I’m eating in Dean St, I’ll be trying other things.

24 May 2011

P.S.

Ok, as a postscript, at lunchtime the music was quieter, as was the whole restaurant, unsurprisingly. We shared some very good prawn summer rolls to start – zingingly fresh with a gutsy chicken liver and peanut paste to dip them into. We then moved on to different phos – mushroom for him and venison for me. He is almost as big a snob as I am and declared his to be excellent – quite light, but in a good way. Mine was far from light, but also in a good way – succulent strips of venison in a broth that came very close to grabbing you by the lapels and taking you outside for a good kicking because of what you’d said about its mate. Fresh tomato and cucumber added a pleasing freshness, and I finished with a burning tongue and a new found respect for Cay Tre’s Soho incarnation.

However, with a bottle of water, the bill still came to just over thirty pounds. I know this is the West End, but for a shared (and traditionally inexpensive) starter and what were, after all, two bowls of soup, that still seems rather a lot. One of the joys of the Old Street branch is how they manage to cram that much flavour into that much great food at such a reasonable price. That might be a lesson their sister restaurant can learn from, because right now, I think it’s worth spending the difference on the bus fare down there. Actually, come to think of it, you could probably afford a taxi.

26 May 2011

Hello.

While I have been trying to ignore the possibility for some time, it is definitely the future, and everyone is Tweeting, Facebooking, blogging and generally arsing around in cyberspace in a manner which I find quite intimidating.

I am on Facebook and I’m considering Twitter, and I’ve toyed with the idea of blogging for a long time, but I was worried that I might begin with an enthusiasm that would quickly diminish. Whilst I admire both Richard Herring the man and the comedian, how he can be bothered to write Warming Up every single day is beyond me. Added to which, I’m not sure that my life is interesting enough to warrant constant updates – as my friend Paul Sinha said when telling me why he didn’t update his brilliant Indian Poof blog that often, ‘the constant refrain of “I really hate gigging out of town at the weekend to complete fucktards” would get a bit tedious.’ Not that this happens every time we venture outside the M25, I hasten to add. We’ve got more than our fair share of fucktards inside it, but bad gigs are certainly more fun to write about than good ones, and I don’t imagine it’s much fun to read ‘Ashby-de-la-Zouch, stormed it’ either.

The final worry relates to the diary I kept at school when I was eleven, which contains  a narrative of mind numbing tedium, interspersed with episodes of mind numbingly tedious self absorption, and which doesn’t need to be repeated in much the same way as some of the later ‘poetry’ experiments.

However, one of the joys of travelling as much as we comics do is just that – the joy of travelling. Admittedly a five star hotel in Singapore is preferable to a Travelodge on the M4, but we do get to see the world, and one of the things I enjoy most is eating. I love cooking and I love restaurants and I’d been thinking of writing a food blog for some time, so – here it is. Knowing me it’s bound to feature passages of unbearable pretentiousness, unnecessary rudeness and unintentional idiocy, but I’m hoping that’ll be half the fun. That’s why it’s called Food Ponce. I have no idea how often I’ll update it, but I’ve got a number of reviews already written and I eat out a lot more than I should, so hopefully it’ll run a bit longer than one summer term in 1983, and a bit less tediously.

I hope you enjoy it.

All the best

Al x