So Alistair, where have you just been? Well, that would be Tallinn.*

*BOOM!* etc.

Excuse me. Appalling puns to one side, Tallinn is a beautiful city full of annoyingly good-looking people and well worth a visit, especially if you take in the Komeediklubi while you’re there (sorry, I don’t speak Estonian, so I have no idea what the name means.) The Old Town is particularly delightful – a lot of the rest is a little Soviet severe – and I was staying in the very pleasant Merchants House Hotel where my room even had its own personal sauna, which made me especially well disposed towards it. This has never happened to me in over a decade of getting other people to pay for my hotel rooms – even the remaining snow around the courtyard embellished the scene in a manner completely alien to, say, the Holiday Inn Express Cardiff, where I find myself writing this, and which, you’ll be amazed to hear, doesn’t even have a courtyard.

Chicken salad

This was my second trip to Estonia, in the excellent company of the criminally under-rated (except in New Zealand, where they keep, quite rightly, giving him awards,) Carey Marx and his wife Carrie. Carrie and I were once in a play together where I didn’t say a single word (probably the best kind,) and she is vegan, which I’m fairly sure is regarded in the Baltic states with much the same suspicion that UKIP reserve for mainland Europe as a whole. Last time I visited, Paul Foot and I went to a restaurant just off the main square that was so laboriously ‘Estonian’ all it was really missing was a gift shop, and perhaps a little soul. To be fair, the food wasn’t bad, I’m just naturally suspicious of a menu where every dish begins with the words ‘A traditional…’ We had some cured things and even pork jelly, which is apparently the national dish, now happily marked down in the “Well, I’m glad I tried it…” column.

This time we took a recommendation from the promoter, Andrus, who, in light of Carrie’s dietary requirements pointed us in the direction of von Krahl AED as it apparently had great vegetarian and vegan food and lots of ‘organics’, which is, I believe, a word used to calm non-meat eaters in times of potential stress.

Duck breast

This is terribly unfair, dated and possibly racist of me, but the thought of a vegetarian restaurant in Tallinn didn’t particularly fill me with confidence or much in the way of anticipation. I needn’t have worried, however, as a) Andrus is a bright chap with excellent taste in most things (including comedians) b) Tallinn is a modern, thriving European capital city and c) they also served meat. What you actually had here was a restaurant with a vegetarian section in the menu as opposed to an ‘option’. I have to report there was goat’s cheese (there is always goat’s cheese,) but only in a foam, so that can be excused.

The restaurant itself is in an old house of what would appear to be impeccable Eastern European vintage, which has pulled off a nice line in historical comfortable bohemian, to give it its correct label which I have just invented. Our waiter was both helpful and very enthusiastic, which he managed to convey without being irritating; not always an easy trick to pull off.

Herring, black bread, quail’s egg & beet ice cream

Carey opted for a very good chicken salad to start as he is doing his best to behave like a reformed smoker these days, brightened up with pea shoots and alfalfa sprouts (the salad, not Carey.) He sensibly decided to forego the tomato sauce partly because he doesn’t like tomatoes but mainly because it was a salad. Carrie’s vegetable soup was slightly less successful because it was so utterly inoffensive but also because both dishes suffered enormously in comparison to mine. I don’t wish to show off here (yes I do,) but I’d gone the full Estonian and ordered herring on black bread with beet ice cream and it was stunning. The rich dark bread – think malt loaf without the currants – and the sharpness of the pickled fish which would have been a bit much on its own, were complimented beautifully by the luxuriousness of a soft poached quail’s egg, the heat of which was in turn calmed by the ice cream. Not only was this a lovely looking dish, it was one of the most satisfying taste combinations I have tried in a long time and frankly, worth the trip on its own.

Chickpea cutlets

The main courses were less exciting. Our waiter had made quite a fuss about how Estonians cook their duck breast, so when it arrived with slightly flaccid skin and just past the point known as pink, I was a little disappointed. The meat was tender and still juicy, but the portion was rather small, and while the cabbage and vegetable rolls provided a nice al dente texture, what was billed as a pumpkin salad appeared more like a slick of liquidized baby food and the Põltsamaa Kuldne fruit wine sauce was fairly unremarkable and a little too sweet. Not actively bad, but certainly suffering in comparison with my starter. Carey also had the duck, while Carrie’s chickpea cutlets were somewhat bland and, I’m afraid, exactly the sort of dish that people are afraid vegans might serve them, with more baby food and a ‘vegetarian foam’ that hadn’t quite worked. Having said that, ‘vegetarian slick’ really doesn’t read quite so well on a menu.

We decide against dessert, as a combination of ridiculously early starts and jet lag meant that we were all in danger of falling asleep in them, and this may have been a mistake. Looking at the menu again, I wish I’d tried white chocolate cream with blueberry powder and sea-buckthorn sorbet – having tried the excellent cooking of Andrei Lesment at Verru, it’s clear that Estonian cuisine is at its best when playing with slightly unusual ingredients and combinations. On this occasion, however, we paid the bill, and at twenty euros a head considered ourselves very well fed in extremely pleasant surroundings. I shall certainly be visiting AED again, only next time I think I’ll probably have ice cream for starter and pudding. And possibly main course as well – I mean, how else am I going to get full value from my sauna when I get back to the room?

Mar 2013

*© Richard Morris

Many people have pointed out to me that as a comedian not in his twenties or skinny jeans, I should play golf. So I do, partly to keep comedy through stereotypes alive and well, and partly because I really like playing golf. I usually play at Wimbledon Common, and very occasionally at Royal Wimbledon, which is rather less common. Their clubhouses are almost next door to one another, in much the same way the Goods were next to Margo and Jerry’s or Peckham is adjacent to Greenwich. Up the road is a pub I have been visiting for several years called The Fox and Grapes which used to serve (a little incongruously) some of the best tapas in London, both in terms of dishes and value for money. I have very fond memories of their Serrano ham and pickled figs, and they imported stuff directly from Spain with a lack of fuss that would leave Borough Market dumbstruck. I even seem to remember ostrich salami served as though it was the most normal thing in the world to get elbowed (winged?) out of the way by one while ordering at the bar in Barcelona.

Chicken liver parfait

To my immense disappointment new management took over and so did a new menu – small sharing plates and more traditional noughties gastropub food that would have been fine if it hadn’t suffered in comparison with what had gone before. It remained a good place for lunch, even if you didn’t rush there from the 18^th green with such haste as before. However, on a visit last year with fellow comedian and golf partner Wayne Deakin, it was pretty clear something else was up. I have mentioned the pub in a previous blog, having popped in only to be stung with what was quite a serious (£50) bill for a one course pub lunch. A quick Google revealed that the pub had been taken over again, this time by Claude Bosi, at which point the food nerds among you will start making funny noises. This is a serious chef with a capital serious, who famously relocated his own two Michelin starred Hibiscus from Ludlow to Mayfair in 2007 like an American buying a bridge, but with considerably more taste. I ate there in 2010 and it was so good it was intimidating – stunning food and immaculate service carried out by an army of staff which almost outnumbered the diners. A starter of scallop with pork pie sauce (the result of a happy accident involving pies not pretty enough to serve in their own right, chicken stock and a food processor, apparently) was a particular highlight. My only quibble with this level of ‘fine’ dining is that very finery – while undoubtedly excellent, the hushed reverence with which everything takes place just seems to make it harder to, well, you know…enjoy it.

Potted shrimps

As the loser of the Deakin/Barrie 2012 series, I owed Wayne lunch, and having just taken a pleasing 1½-½ lead in the 2013 series, I was feeling quite well disposed to the world and more amenable to giving The Fox & Grapes another go as I knew this time I wouldn’t be ambushed by the cost. I’d still be a bit perturbed by it, but at least I knew it was coming.

It was a lovely pub. Enough of the fittings have been retained to give the impression that it still is one, but there is also a slight formality to the room that heightens expectations and quietly lets you know that you should expect more than three types of bitter and some pork scratchings. Service was friendly and the staff do well to walk the fine line between pub and restaurant that the whole enterprise is attempting. So does the menu. There is much to enjoy here, with a nice variation between the traditional – fisherman’s pie, for instance, and the more cheffy – crispy ox tongue with sauce grebiche, or mutton pastilla.

Mutton pastilla

A beautifully smooth chicken liver parfait with pear chutney is something a kitchen like this could be doing in its sleep – and the same can be said of excellent potted shrimps. The pastilla was the star – the heavier tang of mutton slightly greasing the pastry and complimented by a radish, spring onion and pearl barley cous cous. Buttered greens were buttered greens for which I suppose £4 was not completely ridiculous.

Sorry to harp on, but I still find myself quibbling (not for the first time,) about money. I think they can argue that they are doing very good food at relatively modest prices – starters hovering around £8, mains starting at £11.50 going up to £16 for the pastilla – but £4 seems fairly hefty for bread, even if the butter is from Gloucestershire. And who really goes to a pub at lunchtime to spend £31.50 on steak and chips, no matter how Scottish, Buccleuch and Tenderloin Fillet it is? Wayne Deakin certainly doesn’t. Well, not when I’m paying he doesn’t. He has the beef sandwich – which was perfectly acceptable even if it was still just a beef sandwich and we weren’t as excited by the chips as we wanted to be.

It’s a beef sandwich…

All told, our bill, with soft drinks and a 12.5% service charge, came in at £68, which is not bad for this standard of cooking. The problem is that if I want this standard of cooking, I’m probably prepared to pay a bit more for it, in a restaurant, with a bottle of wine and a sense of occasion. It is not necessarily what I want in a pub lunch. Maybe it is my fault for looking back with rose tinted spectacles, and it has to be said they were doing relatively brisk business for a Monday lunchtime, so maybe I am in the minority. I may even be guilty of being somewhat unfair – Hibiscus is too formal, The Fox & Grapes isn’t formal enough – but I don’t think so.  The former is superb if you like that sort of thing, but the latter is just a little too schizophrenic for my liking, neither Royal nor common, and I think we’ll be looking elsewhere for our 19^th hole in future. Unless of course I win the 2013 series, in which case I think we should probably check out Hibiscus again, just for balance, and that bottle of wine. And Wayne can get the bill.

Mar 2013

Spring is naturally a time of new beginnings, or at least it will be when it arrives. In the meantime, I have made some changes of my own – principally preparing to move from my flat in Battersea to a new one almost 200 metres away, like some kind of intrepid Ranulph Fiennes character, without the frostbite. My new place is more spacious, has a beautiful balcony overlooking the park, a gas hob (screw you, ceramics,) a dishwasher, and is even going to have someone else living in it with me. Brave new world indeed.

This is clearly a familial thing, as my brother has also just moved – to Clapton, which appears to have got a lot nicer than it was in the early nineties. Back then I used to head there in my capacity as bar manager of The Dove Freehouse with bundles of cash secreted about my person to pay off various creditors in financial transactions I didn’t understand, or didn’t want to. It’s hard to square the downtrodden Broadway Market of twenty years ago with its present incarnationation as a mecca of painful trendiness and bespoke Scotch eggs, but the tentacles of gentrification are reaching out ever further, and now appear to have made it as far as Clapton.

Full English

My brother’s new home is one of a number of flats (or ‘Scandinavian Housing Commune’ © his girlfriend) set back from the more traditional terraced streets and is almost as nice as my new place, although it does fail the all important ‘being in Battersea’ test. The recently established Tram Depot Café is a ten minute walk away, and it was here they took us for brunch to prove that I was a dick for making up such a test in the first place.

The Café itself made an excellent first impression – a big, bright space, all white tiles, black painted iron stools, copper piping and brickwork, exuding a kind of bohemian 1940’s feel. There is a gallery at the back, and piles of Sunday papers – it’s the sort of place where you feel you could knock back a couple of good coffees, read up on the state of the world, and then go and make some really great art about it, had you any artistic talent at all, which I don’t. You can find out all about the project on the website, so I won’t go into details here, but suffice it to say, it’s exactly the sort of thing you want to see succeed in austerity Britain, and as we set about ordering, I was suitably optimistic.

Vegetarian breakfast

Which is why what followed was a little disappointing. We started well – my brother had banged on about the mochas to such an extent we had to try one, and it was gorgeous – like one imagines that mug of hot chocolate plucked from the river in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory might have tasted, had it contained coffee. My spinach, beetroot and ginger juice was clearly doing me so much good it didn’t even matter what it tasted like, and as a result I didn’t mind the wait for the food.

I pottered off to the most enormous single loo I have ever been in, only to discover that the lock on its sliding door didn’t work, which I can see causing problems as it does open out onto the dining area. On the plus side, they’ve got space for another couple of tables in there, although it’s perhaps not everyone’s favourite place to eat. I then ventured into the back room to look at the art, which was, er…not to my taste, but it’s a good sized space with lots of natural light, so I hope to go back there when it is.

‘Quirky’ Eggs Florentine

Unfortunately, this mix of good things somewhat scuppered by their execution extended to the food. Having just discovered, thanks to bastard genetics on my father’s side, I have high cholesterol, I’m presently trying to avoid red meat, animal fats, dairy products and fun in general, so I went for the vegetarian breakfast. One thing that you need to get right at brunch is eggs – sadly, what arrived on my plate were two rather small hard yolks encased in a little white (with added shell) that had allegedly been poached, but were both fridge cold. Houmous and guacamole were a nice addition, although I’m not sure what sweet chilli sauce brought to the dish. At least it was brought, which is more than can be said for the mushrooms. When this was pointed out, some tepid ones were produced, but it’s safe to say they were not in their first bloom of youth. Meanwhile, across the table, eggs Florentine looked delicious with their sprinkling of pumpkin and sunflower seeds, but the whole dish was stone cold. My brother’s girlfriend was far too nice to say anything until she’d almost finished, by which point it seemed churlish to send them back (to be fair to the waitress, she did offer to replace the eggs when it was mentioned.)

Some art I’m going to avoid commenting on

On the other hand, my other half’s full English was really very good, as she continually reminded those of us with the cold (or ‘quirky’ © my brother’s girlfriend) eggs. A large Cumberland sausage sandwich with cheese, fried egg, tomato and hashed potato was exactly the kind of hearty thing you want to tuck into late on a Sunday morning, even if you can’t because your arteries might fur up immediately, apparently. Clearly the Tram Depot Café can fry an egg, they just couldn’t poach one on this occasion, and I suppose we must take our share of responsibility for not pointing out the problems sooner. The bill came to forty quid for all four of us, and I’m sure we shall be returning to find it has sorted out its teething problems. This is the sort of place you hope becomes part of a brave new Clapton, even if it can’t do much about its complete inability to be in Battersea.

Feb 2013

2012 was apparently the second wettest year on record in the UK and the coldest ever in England. I found the best way of dealing with this was to have a job that involves dicking about in international airspace for most of the autumn and then deciding on a whim to go somewhere hot for Christmas and New Year. This doesn’t make you all that popular with your friends and family, or the promoter who had booked you to perform at three of his gigs on New Year’s Eve, but it’s well worth it. If, like me, you’re also lucky enough to have gatecrashed the holiday of an organized person, you can even end up in Cape Town eating smoked salmon and scrambled eggs on your patio on Christmas morning and wondering how Table Mountain can be so big and impressive yet still not get in the way of the sun at all.

Sushi

I had previously been to Cape Town to perform at the 2007 Comedy Festival, when I stayed in Camps Bay – essentially Chelsea by the Atlantic – which was extremely pleasant, no matter how many trustafarians you wanted to punch. I had a lovely, if somewhat cosseted time, but I enjoyed this trip even more  – possibly because it was a holiday, but also because of the company, the food, the views, the exchange rate, a preposterous amount of biltong, the realization of a lifelong ambition to cage dive with Great White sharks and some deeply challenging customer service.

I also got more of a feel for the city having hired a small hairdryer on wheels known as a Hyundai that whisked us about admirably and meant we narrowly avoided running over the unusually high number of South Africans who don’t seem to know the Green Cross Code. On our first free morning we drove down to The Waterfront, which is exactly where you think it might be, and seems primarily designed to separate tourists from their money, which was fine by us.

*wanky*

We had heard good things about Sevruga, and there is something about massive umbrellas over white linen, in the sun, by the water, that tends to put you in a good mood, even if the word ‘wanky’ might have been coined specifically for menus that have been mocked up to look like glossy magazines in a restaurant named after a type of caviar. Although we hadn’t booked, we were found a table straight away in an unusually helpful and efficient fashion that was to prove something of a novelty when eating by the sea.

Springbok carpaccio

The food was excellent – a starter of grilled baby calamari with a lemon beurre blanc and pickled vegetables was the stand out dish, but my springbok carpaccio was also very good; sweet, gamey and suitably South African. The Sevruga platter was made up of the sort of Californian things I suspect would give a Japanese sushi chef a bit of a turn – lots of avocado and the odd blob of crème fraîche – but it was colourful, fresh and exactly the sort of thing I wanted to eat whilst feeling smug about the temperature. We also ordered a side salad that someone had actually thought about constructing as opposed to simply stripping a lettuce and resting it in a bowl. With a decent glass of sauvignon blanc, one of Graham Beck rosé and a couple of coffees the bill came to 428 Rand excluding service, which works out at £30, so we did a little dance, left a tip and wandered off to look at some painted ostrich eggs we weren’t going to buy.

Sevruga platter

The next day we visited Simons Town on the eastern side of the Cape Peninsula and stopped for lunch at Bertha’s. Rarely have I eaten at a restaurant that is more reliant on the good fortune of its location rather than any of the other features one might normally associate with feeding people. Tables and chairs look out over an idyllic little harbour, and we idiotically ignored the slightly rough and ready looking fish and chip shop across the slipway, opting instead for a meal that I would (very) charitably describe as amusing. We hoped that the table behind us complaining about the wait was a reflection on them rather than the restaurant, but it wasn’t. Our beleaguered waitress had a touch of the thousand-yard stare as she told me an hour later that the kitchen had gone into a “tailspin”. This is a fairly novel description of what had gone wrong, but luckily the food arrived to provide more concrete evidence. Untrimmed chicken livers (I found a blood clot! yay!) arrived swimming in some sort of peri-peri ‘sauce’ or ‘gloop’, the only redeeming feature of which was that it arrived at the same time as our main courses, otherwise we might still be there. My sole was overcooked yet still retained an unpleasantly fishy taste undiminished by raw vegetables that appeared to have been briefly breathed on rather than steamed. These also made an appearance with some chips and some not completely disastrous grilled calamari, which was a pity as we’d ordered salad, while a plate of drab prawns arrived with soggy fried calamari that should have been grilled. We ate what we could, paid the 527 Rand and ran away. I would advise you simply to take the last option.

Chicken livers & grilled calamari

Luckily, our next discovery was one of those places you can file under hidden gem. We had been told by a Namibian bee-keeper and the PhD student who was trying to get into his pants (marvelous who you meet in the pub) that Marika’s served the best Greek food in Cape Town and we were not disappointed when we walked the two hundred metres from our front door to try it. Admittedly, the décor is not going to win any design awards, but the pleasing sensation that you were sitting in someone’s kitchen was only added to when the food arrived. This, Bertha, is how you do chicken livers. Flash fried with lemon and oregano, and, like some beautifully tender grilled calamari, happily complimented by a small dish of homemade chilli sauce so pokey we bought a pot to take home. The house special of Arni Sto Fourno – lamb baked in more lemon and herbs –  was a succulent delight, as was Giro chicken; essentially a traditional kebab wrap, again enlivened with chillli. Service was both helpful and generous – a free taste of the house white before we ordered a carafe for instance – and the bill came in around the £40 mark. We rolled happily up the hill home, fuelled partly by our best meal in Cape Town, but mainly by sauvignon blanc and the chilli sauce.

The next evening saw us hit Kloof St, home to innumerable trendy bars, including Asoka, where we had some excellent ‘tapas’, which I would recommend even if satay, spring rolls and tempura have never struck me as particularly Hispanic. We then passed the Labia cinema (yes we did) before heading down to Long St – a slightly more, um…vibrant area, which we were told to avoid on New Year’s Eve by one bar owner because “someone always gets stabbed”. I have to say I’ve felt more threatened in Leicester Square on a Saturday night, but as we watched white people dancing to a local band in Mama Africa, I could see his point. We finished the night with a quick takeaway Nando’s – well, we were in South Africa, and it’s not every day you can say you’ve had authentic Nando’s, is it?

Fuck it. I’m on holiday.

Moyo is a chain of restaurants offering ‘modern sophisticated African’ food and really quite good frozen cocktails. I have no idea how ‘authentic’ this is and I don’t really care, although I imagine the Masai rarely head off into the bush without at least one daiquiri secreted about their person. The Eden Bay branch offers amazing views of Table Mountain and Robben Island, although the latter is more remarkable for what it represents rather than what it looks like. The restaurant is very child friendly with many of the tables boasting surfboard shaped seats that leave you to dangle your feet in a paddling pool below. Seeing what I imagine was a previously sane pensioner choosing to have his face painted instantly reminded me of Jeff Green’s brilliant ‘Fuck it! I’m on holiday’ routine and I tweeted him a sneakily taken picture. Any restaurant offering face-painting to pensioners must be doing something right.

Stuffed squid

The meal began with some delicious coriander and dukkah spice flat bread, while peanut and shrimp soup had a pleasingly laksa-ish flavour, even if I should remember that dried shrimps are a seasoning rather than a taste sensation in their own right. A roast vegetable cous-cous was perfectly serviceable, as was a burgery sort of thing with chips that I can no longer locate on the menu. My whole squid stuffed with spinach and mushroom was tasty if tough – even if I’m not unreservedly singing the menu’s praises, it had enough variety for me to want to return and service was happily efficient.

Do not go here

Which brings us to Hildebrand, which seriously rivalled Bertha’s for horrors. They were unable to sit us in the sun because the vacant table “had no chairs”. We looked longingly across the Waterfront at Sevruga as the waitron (South Africans often refer to waiters as waitrons – I have no idea why, but rarely have I come across anything less automated,) bought the right bottle of water whilst apologizing for bringing the wrong one. We were just pleased to see it after the twenty minute wait. Weirdly, the only nice thing they brought us was some completely incongruous sultana bread, which, had I known it was going to be the high point of the meal would have had me diving into the harbour to escape. We were told there were no oysters, until the meanest, dried out, milting, cultivated ones were found which was a pity as then I had to eat them.

The worst cream sauce in the world. Ever.

My mussels tasted as if they had retired from active service some time ago and came with, and I quote, “the worst cream sauce I’ve ever tried” (© Ms E. Spink,) which also appeared to contain a lot of flour that could have usefully thickened the tinned tomatoes with raw garlic that were drowning some pasta and prawns opposite me. Or ‘Frutti di Mare’ as the menu had it. Some very soggy vegetables and flaccid chips lolled on a plate with three chives balanced upon them. As a professional in the world of comedy, I can assure you that this is the funniest garnish presently working in world cuisine. The side salad we ordered never arrived, which was a relief, and the bill may have been only 298 Rand, but who wants to pay twenty odd quid to get this annoyed at lunchtime?

Indochine dumplings

We returned to Kloof St for our penultimate night having managed to secure a table at Saigon, a very popular Vietnamese/Asian restaurant that managed to encapsulate most of the ups and a couple of the downs of the Cape Town dining experience. An excellent Tom Yum arrived with a very passable beef Pho and some quite superb Indochine dumplings, before a very sticky but tasty Angry duck and Rainbow vegetable noodles that luckily kept us going for the twenty minutes we had to wait for the other main course. When it arrived, the massive slab of teriyaki salmon looked to me like it had escaped from the sushi station rather than, say, a hob, but the girlfriend pronounced herself happy and I had another glass of the ubiquitous sauvignon blanc to keep me in the same mood. Fuck it. We were on holiday.

Rather than dine anywhere spectacular on our last night, we ended up with friends at Cubańa, a big and fairly brash place near the gay village that had pretty decent fried bar food that we ordered quite a lot of and the most exhaustive cocktail menu I’ve ever seen. To be honest, my favourite thing was the first Romeo y Julieta cigar I have allowed myself in years whilst I reflected that the amount of cocktails we got through should have rendered us considerably drunker than they did. We had a fun night, although if you’re drinking cocktails, I always think it’s better to go for quality over quantity, not to mention a barman over a brochure, but on this occasion, with a flight beckoning, I was just glad to avoid the hangover.

Chive crime

On our last morning we visited Truth, a coffee house and restaurant that I have to declare an interest in as it is owned by the partner of a friend of mine. It’s not quite fully open, but the interior pulls off a great line in warehouse chic and the specially designed furniture is both functional and very cool. David (the owner) is a man who seriously cares about coffee, even if he dismissed my fondness for Bar Italia as some sort of borderline personality disorder. In his defence, he does serve very, very good coffee, although anyone who also puts perfectly good eggs benedict on a wooden board instead of a plate so that the yolk runs off can’t be right about everything. Knowing his partner, I’m happy in the knowledge that this will be pointed out to him on a regular basis.

We jumped inside the Hyundai for the last time, and whirred to the airport with that bittersweet end of holiday feeling – knowing we’d had a brilliant time, but also that we were about to spend a day in mid-air returning to sub-zero temperatures and what I laughingly call work and my other half doesn’t. After waiting half an hour for our hire car rep to show up (he may have been an ex-waitron) we checked in, and stupidly believed someone at airport information who told us there were good restaurants on the other side of security. There weren’t. There’s one called Deli, and forty minutes after we sat down, a pizza arrived, followed ten minutes later by the wrong type of burger. I didn’t send it back – I was hungry and had kept myself entertained watching another customer get progressively angrier about how long it was taking him to order a beer.

Me not being philosophical. At Hildebrands.

I wasn’t angry. I was moderately philosophical. If a country that was a byword for international pariah barely two decades ago wants to take a little while delivering things then so be it. It’s not as if there isn’t a great deal of beauty on offer while you’re waiting. The last time I was in Cape Town, I thoroughly enjoyed myself, but the whole place made me feel a little uneasy and I didn’t particularly plan to return. As he drove us around on our last night, a brilliant taxi driver named Sinclair gave us a hilarious run down of the many things that are still wrong in South Africa, but aren’t there everywhere? This time as I left, I was thinking about coming back, although in future I may well eat away from the water’s edge.

Jan 2013

I have been traveling a ridiculous amount recently. The last two months have seen me in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Cyprus (twice) and I’m writing this from a hotel room in Sharm El Sheik. There’s nothing quite like doing comedy in a country on the brink of its second revolution within a year, but that doesn’t seem to be unduly worrying the British holidaymakers I’m (hopefully) entertaining this evening. To be fair, we are some way from Cairo and President Morsi’s dictatorial edicts, but I’m more concerned that I have forgotten both my pink polo shirt, tattoos and extra biceps, though you’ll be glad to note that I did pack lots of extra snobbery instead. Personally, I wouldn’t mind a minor upheaval over the state of the buffet, but I imagine a little light tutting is about as heated as it’s going to get.

Getting messy at Long Beach

The hotel buffet is one of the trials of the international comedian/traveller. When you rock up on the first day of the tour to see everything spread out before you, gleeful palm rubbing and gluttony tends to ensue. However, by day four you are just screaming out to order something from someone, as opposed to plucking another variation on a theme from a place you’ve already visited approximately eleven times, depending on your boredom threshold and sleeping patterns. I’m not reviewing any of the places I stayed at as that would seem unwise when someone else was paying the bill and I’d like to continue working for them (in most cases.) I did visit Long Beach in The East Coast Seafood Centre in Singapore for black pepper crab, which was quite a relief for Daliso Chaponda as I may have gone on about it a bit beforehand. It’s quite touristy, by which I mean expensive, but it has become something of a tradition for me when I’m there. Having said that, I was then taken to Jumbo Seafood on Boat Quay by my friend Angela, who lives in Singapore, and it was a little more hectic, but equally good, more central and a little cheaper, so maybe it’s a tradition that needs revising. I didn’t blog about either of them at the time because my fingers were covered in crab and black pepper.

Curry à la Ferry

The best food I’ve eaten recently was a carrot and coriander soup and a chicken and sweet potato curry cooked for me in Cyprus by my friend Mick Ferry, but I’m not going to blog about that either because he’s not a restaurant. I wish he was. The food would be great and there’d be some brilliant comedy, not to mention a drink or two, but that’s maybe an idea for the future.

One of the upshots of all this gallivanting about is that I have also missed a couple of those vital editorial meetings for No Pressure To Be Funny I may have mentioned previously. Rather rudely, James O’Brien and Nick Revell have found a new haunt without consulting me, and as far as I can gather, have practically moved in. The Green Man and French Horn on St Martin’s Lane used to be a pub which was especially handy after a gig as it served a very nice pint of Guinness and stayed open til midnight, but not any more. It has been taken over by the team behind Terroirs and Soif and James and Nick have been, frankly, gushing, as have many other, more respectable critics.

Whitebait

The interior is like a pubby Terroirs, if a little corridory, but everything was jostling along nicely, and I ordered an excellent coffee and sparkling water as I waited for my colleagues. One does feel a little packed in, but the seating did afford us a perfect view of the two Frenchmen on the next table who appeared to get through six bottles of wine at lunch without appearing pissed, which deserves some sort of recognition. To be fair, I think they were tasting the wines in a professional capacity, although I do wish they’d had a Green Horn each for additional comedy value.

Jerusalem artichoke soup

I found the menu a little irritating. Prices varied considerably and I’m not sure I wanted to pay £5 for radishes anyway. I was going to have rillons of pork (like rillettes but roasted before serving,) but as I was having black pudding with pot-au-feu vegetables for main course, I decided this was all a bit meaty, and opted for some excellent whitebait instead. These were crunchy, fishy and unbelievably moreish and I have to admit the method I used to eat them is probably best described as shoveling. My only criticism would be that a little tartare sauce or similar would have added another dimension, but they were delicious, as was James’s Jerusalem artichoke soup, although he knew that, because it’s what he always orders. Nick didn’t have a starter, mainly because he appears to have already tried everything on the menu. Twice.

Black pudding, Pot au Feu vegetables

I had chosen my main course because the slip soles and seaweed butter didn’t come with anything else, and for £16.50 I rather wanted them to. The black pudding was superb, while the vegetables were perfectly serviceable, but I did prefer the version I had at Terroirs, principally because there were more of them. Nick’s Saucisse au Coteau were big, chunky, serious sausages, with a lovely meat and herbiness, while James’s mouclade of mussels was the best thing we ate – plump and juicy mussels in a cream sauce with the perfect curry hit. We shared a small carafe of Coteaux du Vendômois, which is pretty much worth going back for all by itself, and finished with espressos as none of the desserts particularly grabbed us – although James tells me I am going to regret not ordering the pear with salted butter caramel until the day I die, or until we go back, at least.

Saucisse au Coteau

And I’m sure we shall. However, my lunch did come to £40, which is pretty steep when you didn’t order quite what you wanted to. I would definitely recommend the Green Man & French Horn, if not quite as unconditionally as my companions, who are probably in there as we speak, and I will also say this for it – it is half an hour away from my house and it is most definitely not a buffet.

Dec 2012

P.S. No Pressure To Be Funny has just launched its brand new website, which can be found here.

The façade of Sir George Gilbert Scott’s Midland Grand Hotel, or St Pancras to you and me, remains one of London’s most iconic buildings. I have always loved it, and place it alongside the Natural History Museum on my list of favourites, a stance that puts me worryingly close to Prince Charles in terms of architectural taste. In my defence, I am a fan of a great many carbuncles too, but there’s clearly something about twiddly Gothic Victoriana that just does it for me and Chaz, even if I don’t share his interest/belief in homeopathy, overpriced biscuitry or the divine right of kings.

The transformation of St Pancras into an international terminal has meant a complete overhaul of all aspects of the building, and while I have not been inside the hotel, I’m very glad to see the outside of it looking so well. The station also manages to look like the sort of thing you might be impressed by when arriving in a European capital, in that it is enormously shiny and contains multiple opportunities to part you further from your cash than the exchange rate already has. Apart from a disastrous coffee at Le Pain Quotidien on a trip to Paris, I hadn’t taken any of those opportunities, but an email from TopTable caught my eye as I was heading off to some wedding celebrations in North London, and it also coincided with the birthday of the friend I’d arranged to go with. The offer concerned two courses and a glass of ‘fizz’ for a mere £19 at the Searcys St Pancras Grand, so it seemed churlish not to take them up on it.

‘Searcys St Pancras Grand is a stunning restaurant …situated opposite the elegant Searcys St Pancras Grand Champagne Bar on the Grand Terrace. Searcys St Pancras Grand is a stylish destination Brasserie…’ according to the website. That’s a lot of Grand-standing to live up to, and my levels of expectation were suitably elevated as I was shown to my seat in the admittedly rather impressive dining room, a convenient distance from the oyster bar where someone was singing jazz to a backing track as inoffensively as that is possible. I was reflecting on how little any of the options on the two course offer particularly appealed, when my companion arrived to point out how glad she was that we weren’t eating at the champagne bar outside as it was bloody freezing. As I was agreeing with this, she agreed with me about the set menu and we began that inevitable twitch towards the à la carte.

Bone marrow

It’s worth pausing a moment to reflect on this – while £19 is undeniably good value, a choice of pumpkin soup, smoked mackerel or chicken liver pate for starters just seemed a little unimaginative, a position that didn’t improve greatly with the mains. Still, they had got us there, which was perhaps half the point, and so we proceeded to order rather more expensively. Half a dozen Colchester rock oysters at £15 while we thought about it seemed compulsory (it is an oyster bar after all) – these were very decent, even if I don’t see the point of mild Tabasco. We also agreed we should still have some fizz, and deciding that we (like most decent people) secretly preferred prosecco to champagne, scoured the wine list to find some. There wasn’t any, but the waitress assured it was available, which seems slightly strange. I don’t wish to appear mean, but I quite like to know the price of whatever it is I’m ordering. A very reasonable bottle of Jeio prosecco arrived which I later discovered to be a not hugely unreasonable £30. That is handy as it’s not an area I particularly like surprises in, but it might have been nice to know in advance.

Poached haddock and transitory fat chips

The starters weren’t bad, if still some way from Grand. A shellfish soup with brandy was a little thin and it was difficult to detect any alcohol – moderately tasty, but it would have benefited greatly from a little rouille and/or a crouton to stick it on. I went for the bone marrow on toast with parsley and shallot. Thanks to the genius of Fergus Henderson, this is a genuine classic (‘God’s butter’ – Anthony Bourdain,) so you’d better get it right, and they didn’t, quite. Don’t get me wrong, it was good, but a little over-sweetened with the shallot, with a distinct touch of lemon, ungenerously cut toast and a lack of the necessary oomph that scraping something from the inside of a shin bone would seem to require.

Plaice, samphire & brown shrimps

Mains were where the game was won and lost. Smoked haddock came with crushed potatoes, a relatively pokey mustard sauce and a perfectly poached egg, while my plaice with brown shrimps, samphire and unadvertised new potatoes was easily the best thing put in front of us all day. I mention the potatoes, because they might have been worth mentioning before I ordered a side dish of fat chips, especially when they arrived, pallid and undercooked and were sent straight back. I also had to ask for the spinach we had ordered, which was so over-salted it went back the kitchen too. As we didn’t want to appear more annoying than was necessary, we did ask them to taste it to prove we weren’t complete dicks. When someone comes back to your table and says “You’re right, we tried it, it was disgusting”, is it unreasonable to expect a little more than for the offending item to be removed from the bill? Bringing ‘disgusting’ to the table is pretty unforgivable, but instead we had to pay for our coffees, which included an espresso that had it been a train, would have got there very slowly, mainly due to flooding. What is it with coffee and St Pancras?

Reading this back, it sounds like we had a dreadful time. We didn’t. It was good to catch up with an old friend in sumptuous surroundings, and while there were obvious problems with the service, it was unfailingly courteous and polite. However, when you’re charging £115 for two courses at lunchtime, you cannot afford to get that many details wrong. As we left, we passed the enormous kitschy bronze of a couple that I don’t like (the bronze, not the couple; I’m sure they’re very nice.) Despite being at the wrong station, it is forever destined to be known as ‘The Brief Encounter Statue’ no matter how much its creator calls it ‘The Meeting Place’. I can see it is reaching for romantic Grandeur, but it doesn’t quite work for me, and the same can be said of the restaurant beside it, if not the building that houses them both.

Nov 2012

Postscript

As a result of tweeting this review to Searcys, I was contacted both by their head of marketing and the restaurant’s general manager, who not only apologised for the problems we had, but also very kindly offered me and a guest a free lunch. I knew there was such a thing. We had more oysters, razor clams with chorizo, scallops and monkfish scampi washed down with a couple of glasses of prosecco. And the spinach was excellent. Oh, and I was wrong about the new potatoes in my original review – they were advertised, so Searcys had every right to think I was a bit of a dick, but I’m very glad they didn’t. Well, at least they didn’t show it. I’m not going to give them another review, beyond saying I enjoyed my return trip enormously and thanking them for such a generous gesture – clearly my initial impression was wrong, and they really do know how to do customer service. I’m almost tempted to start giving out bad reviews more often, but that would be shockingly unprofessional of me. Next time I’m at St Pancras, I may well pop in to Searcys again, and now I can recommend that you do too.

Sapporo sashimi. Unsurprisingly, not available on Qatar Airways. Well, not my bit, anyway.

I didn’t expect to find myself writing this. I thought I might kill a little time during my six and a half hour Qatar Airways flight to Doha writing a blog, before stopping off for a while at one of the world’s more tedious airports. After that it’s another seven hours until I reach Singapore, by which point I’ll probably just want to cry. I was going to write about Sapporo Teppanyaki, a regular haunt of mine whenever I play Manchester Comedy Store, but a waiting time of thirty minutes before I even ordered in a restaurant boasting two other occupied tables means I’m not going to, no matter how good the sashimi, average the vegetable tempura and excellent the Tori chicken noodle soup. In fairness to the manager, when all this was mentioned in my customary, clipped ‘I consider myself a thoroughly reasonable human being, but I am bloody irritated’ dad voice, he did give me 25% off my bill, but what neither of us realized was that his real loss would be the absence of a proper appearance in Food Ponce. Culinary empires have crumbled for less.

The holy row

The other reason is that I appear to be having one of those flights. Most long hauls are uncomfortable affairs, especially when you haven’t found time to check in online and are consequently wedged into a middle seat with a dodgy headphone connection, between two unfriendly men with outrageous elbows. You resist the temptation to weep a little as you settle down for a purgatorial viewing of movies you were never particularly bothered about missing in the first place. Sometimes, of course (in my experience twice in 15 years of regular international travel) you get upgraded, and every now and then, something truly awful happens (I’m talking to you, vomiting hippo man of Boston,) but generally, for those of us condemned to a life of cattle class, international air travel is bearable, if unmemorable. This flight was looking like being on the lower rungs of acceptability, but sharper readers will have gathered that I am unlikely to be writing about a man’s elbows if they are obscuring my view as I type. I didn’t even get to test the headphone socket. I boarded last, and lo and behold, in front of my designated seat (the irksome 11J) lay an entirely empty row of that traveller’s nirvana, the extra legroom seats. Like a scavenger on the Serengeti discovering a fresh kill, I darted cunning glances about me, beckoned an air hostess over and uttered the immortal words,

“Um, I…er, I think I was…possibly…er, last to…, and, these, well, they appear to be, er, so is it ok…if I…um..?”

Reader, she said yes. (Frequent flyers among you may just have punched the air.)

LEGROOM!!! (With added Gallo socks)

It is amazing how little things can improve your airborne experience so enormously. We all know the tantalizing sense of impatience as you shoot more sideways looks around to see if any interlopers are attempting to muscle in on your territory, and the rush of tiny triumph as you realize that this veritable kingdom is yours for the ENTIRE JOURNEY. What I didn’t expect was for this minor euphoria to be compounded by the meal.

Ah, airplane food – the last refuge of the hack comedian, a subject so tired it’s almost worth writing about because you know anyone with any taste won’t have done so recently. A couple of months ago, I saw an irate neighbour’s spoof review of an all night karaoke party, and the author was revealed to be Oli Beale, the same man whose hilarious write up of a Virgin Atlantic meal had similarly gone viral a few years ago. Seriously, read it. It’s much funnier than this. I would love to get Food Ponce to go viral, but it seems highly unlikely as I’m going to be quite complimentary, and that, as we all know, is not funny at all.

I was already very well disposed towards the hostesses, and the first thing they delivered after take off was a nicely balanced vodka and tonic with lemon and none of that arsing about with miniatures too big for the amount of tonic available, which have led to me getting far too drunk far too quickly on far too many aeroplanes. These came with some Bombay mix cocktail nibbles that were actually edible rather than those tiny sawdust parcels that leave the inside of your mouth feeling like the outside of the Sahara.

Award-winning food photography

These were followed rapidly (certainly more rapidly than at Sapporo) by my meal. I was offered fish with mash potato, but as these are rarely items that eat well in mid-air, I went for chicken and rice. This arrived with a little loaf of two halves, one brown, one white, which was warm and tasted of bread, which is a first. A chickpea salad came with a light herb and chilli dressing and a little red onion, and as a less than avid fan of the chickpea, I surprised myself by finishing the lot. Lifting the foil on an airplane meal is never a pleasant task, as memories of previous disappointments cloud your vision while you attempt not to flick any stray sauces on to the clothes you’ll be wearing for the next fifteen hours. However, not only was what lay beneath not bad at all, I actively enjoyed it. Egg-fried rice would not have won any fluffiness awards, but tasted very good, with some genuine heat coming from the chopped chilli accompanying the chicken. To be honest, the less said about the ‘batter’ surrounding it the better, and the same goes for the colour of the cauliflower and carrots alongside, but both tasted like they were meant to, and the vegetables were even a little al dente, which I consider a minor miracle.

A very reasonable apple torte strudely thing came and went in seconds, and a little oblong of Croxton Manor cheddar finished things off very pleasingly, or would have done, had I not discovered a small piece of dark Valrhona chocolate, which pleased me even more. This was all washed down with a Chilean Sauvignon Blanc so perfectly acceptable that I’ve just ordered another one. I do know that the photos on this blog are not necessarily amongst its highlights, but you’ll excuse the lack of any pictures of the food as it wasn’t until I’d finished (all of) it that I realized this was one of the best airplane meals I’ve ever eaten. Ironically, the best was on Virgin Atlantic (It was 15 years ago and I’d been upgraded.)

As I wrote that last paragraph, someone approached and politely asked if I had any objections to them occupying 10H. I’m surprised it took him so long, and do you know what? After that meal and with my wine having just arrived, I really don’t. I’m going to stretch my legs out and see if they’ve got The Lion King. I may even purr.

Oct 2012

Bentley’s. And my mum.

I have been looking forward to this meal for years. Richard Corrigan is a titan in the pseudo-foodie world of Great British Menu and Saturday Kitchen that many of us inhabit in preference to doing much actual cooking, and when he bought Bentley’s in 2005, I was suitably excited. He first bounced onto our screens a decade ago with more than a touch of Irish charm, and a boundless enthusiasm for food that was reflected in his figure as much as his cooking. Recently, he appears to have cultivated a slightly sterner image – the strict schoolmaster with a twinkle in his eye whom students are a little scared of, which only makes them love him more. I once had a superb meal at his first restaurant, Lindsay House, and the idea of him in charge of a full on, not to say legendary, seafood restaurant made me want to at least base an affectionate black and white film on him, or perhaps more plausibly, eat there immediately.

Vietnamese oysters

The main thing stopping me was that I had a deal with my mum, who loves seafood. I love seafood, but I was unaware of this until my late teens as my father is allergic to it. Sometimes I think he’s just not trying, but then he goes pink and puffy and threatens to throw up, which tends to close the argument. In some sort of unconscious display of filial support, I decided in about 1974 that I didn’t like fish, and believed it until someone made me eat a trout in 1990. As the only thing that has made my dad go a stranger colour than fish was me getting my ear pierced in 1988, there has never been any cooked at home. This does mean my mum rarely gets to eat one of her favourite things, so we made a deal a few years back that we would go to Bentley’s together on one of her visits to London. Freud would have a field day in our house.

Mackerel ceviche

Bentley’s originally opened its doors in 1916, and the weight of history does seem to hang fairly heavily upon you as you walk in. We were taken past the seriously magnificent marble oyster bar and upstairs to one of the rooms where William Morris was clearly the only designer pitching for wallpaper. This is one of those restaurants where the pecking order of waiting staff is more clearly delineated than in any military unit, but they were all smiling, helpful and ruthlessly efficient, which is where we encountered our first problem. I like sparkling water with my meal, what I don’t like is someone re-filling my glass after every single sip. After the third time, we asked the waiter to stop it. Then we asked the next waiter to stop it as we were very much enjoying the cheesy wafery things with anchovies through them, (stop me if I’m getting too technical,) not to mention a very good selection of breads including one that might just as well have been called cake.

The menu is exciting – there’s no other word for it. Not in a ‘molecular gastronomy WTF is that’ sense, but in an ‘OMG I really want to eat that’ way (apologies to grammatical purists, but I’m trying to pull us out of 1916 here.) There is a fantastic selection of oysters and crustacea, with starters mostly hovering around the £15 mark, to which you can add at least another tenner for mains. I would have loved the shellfish platter but it was £66 per person, and this was lunch, so we were a little more conservative.

Scallops on crubeen

Or so we thought. I have to report that ‘Vietnamese Oysters’ are one of the most astonishing things I have ever put in my mouth. Served on ice with half a lime, a paste of lemongrass and ginger (but strangely no chilli) and topped with a tiny onion ring for texture, these reminded me of my first ever oyster, but with a lime burst of flavour that I can only describe as unique. In a very, very, good way. Mum began with a pretty mackerel ceviche with a perfect citrus kick. Chefs everywhere must be punching the air at the present popularity of this abundant, cheap and tasty fish, and to be fair, it returns the favour by punching right back. The only disappointment was having to ask a third waiter to leave our water alone. I know there’s a hierarchy, but surely they’re allowed to talk to each other?

Dressed crab

For mains, I opted for scallops on crubeen (pig’s trotter meat, breadcrumbed and deep fried) with a raisin and caper sauce and cauliflower puree. This was brilliant cooking, combining tastes and textures to stunning effect, with watercress adding a little extra zip, but £26.50 still felt like a hell of a lot for four smallish scallops, and a side dish of slightly tired buttered spinach didn’t really bridge the gap. My mother fared better as she had decided to order a second starter; her dressed crab was perfect and everything you would expect – if it hadn’t been, it would have been time to call the waiter over, but we couldn’t do that as mum had bet me sixpence that one of them would try to top our water up again before the end of the meal.

Pineapple carpaccio

We decided to finish with a shared carpaccio of pineapple that arrived with a scoop of lime sorbet and a little fresh mint, just as we realized the room around us had magically filled with expense accounts. While I cannot fault the dessert, or blame the restaurant, there is something peculiarly soulless in realizing that almost no one else around you is actually paying for their meals, but then at these prices, I am hardly surprised. It is probably also what allows the restaurant to get away with the ever-infuriating cover charge. I often think if you’re going to charge me £2 simply for sitting down in your restaurant, then I probably just won’t.

I thoroughly enjoyed the meal, but my biggest disappointment is that it wasn’t quite the reflection of Richard Corrigan I had been hoping for. While the food, unsurprisingly, was excellent, there was a lack of joie de vivre in the whole experience that I’m sure is unintended and certainly not a facet of the proprietor’s personality or his approach to feeding people. Of course, we all know that the main reason I won’t be rushing back is that I don’t have an expense account, an income equivalent to the GDP of a developing nation or a tax avoidance scheme in place à la Carr. We had hardly over indulged, and yet our bill, including a 250ml carafe(tte) of Muscadet still came to £115. Unfortunately, by then I also owed my mum sixpence.

Sept 2012

I’m at the Edinburgh Festival. I’ve been here for three weeks doing a minimum of two shows a day, but on occasion as many as six. As a result, all objective reasoning has been beaten out of me and I no longer have any trustworthy critical faculties. All of which makes me ideally placed to write this review, judging by the amount of critics here working for obscure websites, which now appear to outnumber the performers.

I have no interest in relaying my Edinburgh experience – Food Ponce in many ways came about because I wanted to do a blog that didn’t have anything to do with my day (night) job, although it does inevitably intrude. If you’ve been to the Festival, you’ll know what it’s like, if you haven’t, do come – it is an experience like no other. However, there seems very little point in complaining about the ‘emotional rollercoaster’ to those who aren’t on board, and, far more importantly, have proper jobs and lives to get on with and are unsurprisingly unimpressed by a bunch of show offs congregating in one city for all of August to bark at each other.

What I will say is that both of the main shows I am in have received rave reviews and critical maulings, sometimes on the same day, and the one thing I am very pleased about is that I stuck with my decision to have my first ever alcohol free festival as I’m pretty sure it has helped me stay sane throughout. If anyone is in Hotel du Vin from about 19:51 on Sunday, however, I would like to take this opportunity to apologise for my behaviour from about 19:55 onwards.

I will at least have a reasonable excuse, which is perhaps more than one can say for The Witchery, an Edinburgh institution that I took my flatmate, the excellent Hal Cruttenden, to on our day off. Our raciest excesses this year have been a mild addiction to Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia frozen yoghurt, (although Hal did drink four whole pints one night which has cemented his reputation as the wild man of comedy.) Booking one of Edinburgh’s best restaurants for lunch was as close to exciting as we were going to get, and we were excited as we walked up to The Castle, thinking, quite rightly, that as prime locations go, you don’t get much primer than this. We didn’t even mind hanging around outside for a while as our table wasn’t ready – as anyone will tell you, if you can’t get a seat for something in Edinburgh in August, you’re probably on to a good thing. The room itself is fairly magnificent in an ‘I know I’m fairly magnificent’ way. It’s even called ‘The Secret Garden’, although it’s hardly The Witchery’s fault that you can’t sit in rooms like this any more without expecting a game of Quidditch to break out nearby.

Loch Duart Salmon

It is their fault, however, that the restaurant really didn’t seem quite busy enough to justify the wait for the table, or, as it turned out, everything else. A majority of the tables were full, mostly of what were quite obviously tourists, but this is not a criticism – tourists need to eat too, and, let’s face it, as non-residents paying enormous sums to stay in the city, Hal and I were as much tourists as the pastel coloured Americans just behind us or the Japanese businessmen across the way. Impressive leather bound menus were proffered fairly quickly, but after that, time seemed to slow to a standstill, and that is the kind of magic no restaurant needs to deliver. If you’re going to offer bread, I’m personally in favour of doing so straight away. I’m a bit old-fashioned like that with drinks orders too, and I’m even more impressed if you get them right. To be fair, it was only a bottle of still instead of sparkling water, and I could write these mistakes off as mostly bad luck – this was, after all, the legendary Witchery, which many people had ooh-ed and ah-ed at when I said I was coming. The menu contained lots of history on both the building and the restaurant’s four decades of excellence, which I was able to read in quite some depth as no one seemed particularly interested in taking my order from it. When I eventually managed to beckon someone over, I had crossed the line from understanding to irritable, or ‘turned into my dad’ to be more accurate. Much of the menu, with its emphasis on seafood and game, looked delicious, but with main courses often hovering above £25, we decided to go for the Table d’Hote – three courses for £30 seemed a good way of enjoying a little luxury without adding any more to the Edinburgh economy than we already had in rent.

Verrine of Ham Hock, Cider Sorbet, Granny Smith Espuma, Elderly Lettuce. In a glass.

At this point, sun dried tomato bread appeared, which could explain why it appeared to be so tired. Hal’s hot smoked Loch Duart salmon was the dish of the day – a generous portion of moist and very tasty fish tempered by cauliflower puree, radish and a light cucumber dressing. I mention the full title of my verrine of oak-smoked ham hock with cider sorbet and Granny Smith espuma mainly to underline that there was quite a lot of it to fit into a glass, which was then rather difficult to eat from with a knife and fork. The flavours were good, even if I could have done without the addition of some quite elderly lettuce, but who eats sorbet with a fork? From a glass? These are exactly the sort of touches that would have been forgiven if I hadn’t already turned into my dad.

Sea Trout with Pink Grapefruit and Salt Baked Potatoes

The wait for the mains meant that they were already unlikely to save the day, and when they arrived, they were hugely disappointing. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a main course portion of fish to be larger than a starter one, and I don’t expect one of Scotland’s top restaurants to overcook a piece of sea trout. Or for that matter, to slow-cook a lamb rump until it’s dry, stringy and actually unpleasant. Sea plantain was an interesting touch, but the salt-baking of the new potatoes did little to improve them in my eyes, although that might just be because they were sitting next to that piece of fish. Broccoli with anchovy butter sounded very nice, but was unfortunately more like broccoli in salt water, which for four quid is just depressing. When the plates were eventually cleared, an hour and twenty minutes after our table had been booked, we were asked if we might like a break before dessert, which did at least give Tim Vine some competition for joke of the fringe.

Hal Cruttenden with Knickerbocker Glory

Hal seemed fairly happy with his knickerbocker glory even if it wasn’t Ben and Jerry’s, but I couldn’t quite make my mind up about my marmalade brulée. I might have liked it if I was in a better mood, but marmalade and caramel together just seemed a touch of sweetness too far. Et tu brulée? The bill came to £72.45 without service, or alcohol, although I am surprised that the lack of one didn’t push us over into reliance on the other.

I know that Edinburgh is a tough place in August, and I am the last person who would wish a bad review on anyone, because I know how it feels, but The Witchery was anything but a hit with me. I very much doubt it will affect their numbers – a combination of location and reputation will ensure that they remain a hot ticket, but on this evidence they are not so much resting on their laurels as passed out comatose on them. As is often the case with the Festival, you may have a better time with an undiscovered gem than relying on a performer that seems to be very much going through the motions.

August 2012

So, we were meant to be going to Le Gavroche for lunch as it was my friend’s 30^th birthday and the recession is clearly something that is only happening to other people – we had eaten there once before and were thoroughly looking forward to the rematch, if not the bill. Unfortunately, due to a combination of crossed wires and unbreakable commitments, we were unable to fulfill our booking and had to cancel our table (typing this last sentence has caused me actual pain.) As a result, it fell to me to find somewhere with at least a slight sense of occasion, if not the chance of Michel Roux Jr looming around a corner, and I remembered that my friend had mentioned how much she wanted to eat at Quo Vadis. With his politics apparently gathering devotees in these straitened times, what better venue than the building in which Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital?

Menu with added shadow puppet (photographer’s own)

My apologies for mentioning the economic climate twice in the opening paragraph, but two other considerations did factor in my thinking – firstly the chef at Quo Vadis is now Jeremy Lee, and secondly, he appears to have given the restaurant a good shaking down to almost universal praise, which also seems to have extended to a lowering of the prices, but not the standards.

I’m a big fan of Jeremy Lee. I can’t claim to have eaten his food before, but like so many people these days I get to feel I have through the medium of television, particularly Great British Menu, which I think I can now say has replaced Masterchef in my affections. This is mainly because it is slightly more exciting to see top chefs competing with each other than talented amateurs, but also because it’s slightly less ubiquitous (although passing The Square the other day, I did see they had Philip Howard’s ‘Tasting of Cornish Mackerel Great British Menu Winner 2012’ on the menu, so the rot has clearly begun.) Mr Lee has always impressed me by being admirably restrained and tasteful in his comments, but most of all I like the way that his campness seems to slightly freak out the other Scottish chefs, particularly Alan Murchison – who clearly cooks amazing food but always looks to me like he’s on the brink of a psychotic episode.

Mackerel, watercress & potato salad

I have walked past the imposing building a thousand times, and always thought to myself that I must go inside, or ‘beyond the great edifice’, as the website grandly puts it. Once there, they have managed to pull off the neat trick of formal informality – all linen and wild flowers rather than crystal, cutlery and ‘arrangements’. We were offered the opportunity to have a drink at the bar, but as I’m still not drinking until the end of the bloody Edinburgh Festival, we decided to go straight to our table. We were first to sit down, but what was interesting was how the room filled up almost to capacity through the course of our meal but with no real change to the atmosphere beyond the pleasant thrum of people enjoying being fed. This is a great room to eat in.

Lamb’s sweetbreads with almonds & peas

Continuing the theme of elegant simplicity, we were offered brown or white bread. Both were excellent. The menu offers a number of options on one pleasingly clear card – bites, oysters, a pie, a two or three course theatre menu and an à la carte. To start with I had squid, samphire and bean salad which was beautifully lifted with a little mint and parsley. The addition of breadcrumbs roasted in olive oil added a clever texture that transformed a very good starter into an excellent one. The mackerel, potato and watercress salad was another brilliant balancing act of fresh simplicity and both plates were returned pretty much licked clean. The mains were, it has to be said, a little small, but then we did decide not to order any side dishes, and it was only lunch, after all. I could not resist lamb’s sweetbreads with peas and almonds – the nuts coating the sweetbreads and doing a similar job to the breadcrumbs in my starter – delicious, although if I was to be ultra picky, the tiniest bit greasy on the outside and not the most elegant plate of food I’ve ever eaten. Lamb’s onglet was gorgeous – rich, tasty, and frankly lamby, with slightly charred asparagus setting it off perfectly.

Lamb onglet with asparagus

For dessert, there was an excellent cherry and almond tart that was moist and chewy yet with stunningly crumbly pastry, clotted cream and soused apricots. I couldn’t resist the St Emilion Au Chocolat, which I pretty much inhaled – promptly undoing all my good work on the alcohol front. I seriously would not advise driving after this pudding – added to which, a run might be a better idea as you could clearly use the exercise. This was pure calories, with a dollop of double cream on the side, just in case. Absolutely delicious, although (and I never thought I’d find myself writing this) possibly just a little too boozy even for me.

Cherry & almond tart

With an excellent glass of Italian house white (gavi) and sparkling water for me, our bill came to £68 including impeccable service. I know it’s not the done thing to disclose how much you paid for a birthday lunch, but I think it’s worth mentioning here as, for a special occasion, I think this represented fantastic value. Added to which, she got a present too, so she’s not allowed to complain. I’m sure this line has been used before, but if ‘Quo Vadis?’ means ‘Who goes there?’ then the answer is “Me please, again. As soon as possible. And not just for birthdays”.

July 2012