I like reading about restaurants – as I hope do you. My favourite reviewer used to be Jay Rayner in The Observer, but I think he may recently have been usurped in my affections by Marina O’Loughlin of The Guardian, who writes beautifully, has a tendency to create perfect terms when the language has been too short-sighted to provide them itself, and generally manages to make being a food nerd seem a very funky occupation. These preferences may reflect my newspaper choices as much as anything, but I have also worked with Giles Coren who is a very nice chap even if he hardly stopped talking once in four hours (which is rich coming from me) and we’ve had the pleasure of Matthew Norman’s company twice on No Pressure To Be Funny. I’m still annoyed he took Nick Revell along for one of his reviews, but the meal, at Gregg’s Table was clearly so hilariously bad that I didn’t miss much. He did promise to take me some time, which I mention here just in case he’s reading. Hello Matthew (*cough*.) I sometimes have a look at Fay Maschler in the Standard and I am a big fan of Charles Campion, who brilliantly pulls off an understated love of elegant simplicity whilst looking so unfeasibly like Peter Griffin from Family Guy you lose even more faith in Seth MacFarlane than you did after the Oscars.

A.A. Gill just gets on my tits.

As anyone who has been to the Edinburgh Festival will tell you, everyone’s now a reviewer, including me, so it is important to work out whose opinions you value if you want to pass them on. My friend Wayne Deakin was in Bristol for a weekend and asked me if I had any recommendations for lunch, and I recalled an absolute rave from Ms. O’Loughlin for Bell’s Diner. Wayne also raved, and so when we found ourselves in Bristol a couple of weeks later, we booked a table and headed down to Montpelier to see for ourselves. There was a review in the FT that day as well. It was another rave. Seriously – there haven’t been this many raves in the West Country since the early nineties.

Montpelier is a rather funky/bohemian and yet somewhat down at heel district. This is Banksy’s home turf and he is responsible for a lot of the great street art, although his influence has opened the way for a wide range of other artists to veer between brilliant and quite awful. I used to visit regularly as it was home to the now defunct Jesters Comedy Club and have always been very fond of the area. It is not for nothing that there were riots here a couple of years ago because Tesco was trying to move in and the assorted people of the republic of Stokes Croft just didn’t want them. It would have got in the way of the bicycle shops, galleries and myriad pubs and odd little shops selling odd little things.

Bell’s Diner is almost the apotheosis of this charm – a bright corner building with big windows to throw light on to what is a delightfully artlessly designed space. It takes a lot of good taste to be this artless, and the whole operation retains a sort of unshowy eccentricity that has to be organic to work. And it does. How many other waitresses could show you that day’s FT review merely in the spirit of sharing, without the merest hint of showing off? Where else would buy a collection of old reading glasses just to put randomly on the tables for the hell of it? And where else would have a dansette in the corner and leave DJing duties to the customer? (Fleetwood Mac and then Paco Peña since you ask.)

And then there’s the food. Having ordered a couple of excellent coffees, we were brought still warm bread with Abernethy butter that was so good we had to be careful not to accidentally make it lunch by itself. There was a plate de jour of grilled chicken oyster, but as everything else came in small plates, we ordered eight of them between us, at which point one of our two lovely waitresses pointed out that with the three for £10 offer, it would be cheaper if we ordered another as well. There is something unspeakably brilliant about ordering everything on a menu, and there was something unspeakably brilliant about what arrived shortly afterwards.

I don’t like salt cod. Well, I didn’t until I tried their fritters with aioli and suddenly it was all salty fried pillows and punchy garlic smoothness. Slow-cooked cauliflower in yoghurt with caramelized butter and pinenuts was silky and toothsome. We had astonishing smoked onions with paprika and labneh which I can still taste as I type – and a number of palate cleansing combos such as an excellent feta, watermelon and mint salad. Lamb St Menehold might have been a touch too fatty were it not set off by a zinging tartare sauce, and another tomato and goat’s curd salad to take the edge off. There was morcilla and chorizo and spiced lentils – all kinds of dizzying combinations which managed to be thoroughly individual and yet perfectly complimentary at the same time. We did order quite a lot, and we left not a scrap.

Greed had now taken over, and we were not going to skimp on puddings. A perfect vanilla panacotta with strawberries was mildly superceded by a lemon meringue pie that made me want to take it back to school to show those responsible for my lifelong aversion to this dish exactly what they had done so horribly wrong.

A couple of espressos and a bill of £54 excluding service left us feeling thoroughly replete and as sunnily disposed to the world as the September rays warming us through the window panes. A short stroll around the block later, we got back in the car and I reflected that although the local comedy club may be no more, there is still every reason to return to Montpelier when there are raves like this to be had.

Sept 2013

So the dust has settled on another month of madness in the frozen north, which was in fact remarkably temperate this year – weather wise, at least. I had one of my best festivals ever – great audiences, plenty of extra gigs and delightful reviews, more of which you can read about here, should you feel so inclined. Other highlights included a car thief outside my window managing less than two yards in a stolen BMW before crashing it and my flatmate Mick Ferry asking “Which end?” upon being introduced to someone from ‘War Horse‘.

As a result of my involvement in Peter Buckley-Hill’s excellent Free Fringe, I also managed to not lose thousands of pounds, which, to the uninitiated, is what happens to the vast majority of comedians who are forced to hand out enormous sums to publicists, venues, printers, designers and indeed any passing Scottish person with a hovel to hire simply in order to do their job for a month. Our flat was far from brilliant (it was still over £3k for the month when normally it is rented out for £850) but it was a gigantic improvement on the one we were originally allocated. I cannot begin to tell you how relieved I am that it was Mick rather than Hal Cruttenden who got there first to ‘explain’ (in no uncertain terms) to the young estate agent that we weren’t going to stay there. Hal phoned me from the M1, and you haven’t heard panic til you’ve heard the voice of a camp man with a phobia who thinks he’s heading to a flat containing mould and mousetraps. I don’t think we’ll be using Southside Property Management again.

The Edinburgh festival is a strange beast which is very difficult to explain to anyone who hasn’t been there. It is extremely easy to live a dissolute lifestyle involving little exercise beyond running from one late night gig to the other, before heading to one of innumerable bars full of people in the grip of the same madness and then stumbling home at an hour when most decent folk are considering getting up. Therefore, it is important to eat well, and believe me, this year I did.

I’m a great fan of sushi in general, but particularly when I’m pretending to be healthy, and as a result, I had far more lunches at Bonsai than were necessary. Just up the hill from the Pleasance courtyard, it is an excellent spot to stock up on miso, gyoza, nigri, sashimi and whatever else takes your fancy. Service is casual but friendly, and the whole experience is about as unpretentious as raw fish in Scotland can ever hope to be. I think I managed to spend over £30 on one occasion, but I did have trouble moving afterwards. Like most places, they are happy to accept your money if you want to splash out, but they also offer good value bento boxes and there is a daily changing specials board.

Service was also friendly at Koyama on Forrest Rd, which I tried a couple of times as an alternative, but loses hands down to Bonsai on two fronts – firstly it has replaced a perfectly serviceable Italian I used to go to a lot even if I can’t remember its name, and secondly, if a small helping of edamame beans cost £4.50, imagine what everything else costs. The sushi isn’t bad, but whoever put their set menus together is not the sort of person I would want making me a mix tape, which is an old fashioned way of listening to music for our younger viewers. Bonsai is a five minute walk away, the sushi is better and everything is much cheaper.

Next door to Koyama is MUMS, which serves a brilliant vegetarian haggis, neeps and tatties with a luxurious veggie gravy. Apologies to Scottish purists here, but I wanted vegetables and I wanted comfort and that is exactly what I got. Round the corner is Favorit which is not going to set anyone’s world on fire, but I had reasonably good chicken fajitas there with Marcus Brigstocke after Simon Evans and I appeared in his improv show ‘Unavailable for Comment,’ and returned on my own a few nights later for a really quite good cheeseburger and chips with a glass of white wine because sometimes you just know what you want and you prove yourself right.

This is all within spitting (or staggering) distance of Bristo Square which, since the rise of the Underbelly and the Purple Cow has become the comedic epicentre of the festival in the Old Town. One tends to make numerous (almost nightly) visits to the Gilded Balloon for work and play and food. There are some great burger joints and pulled pork opportunities, Dragon noodles were very good even if they took a while coming (but then they are freshly made…) and special mention should go to The Juice Cauldron which is often the last defence many performers have against scurvy for the month. If you fancy a quick wander down to George Square, there are further opportunities to be separated from your cash, although I would say it has to be the Thai porkbelly salad served out of a metal caravan for me, even if you are late on stage to compere Best of the Fest in the Spiegeltent as a result.

I could name many other places – breakfast at Victor Hugo Deli overlooking the meadows is always a pleasure, and I will always find myself in Ciao Roma at least a couple of times for solid, if unspectacular, Italian food. This is a little unfair on Ciao Roma who also do excellent homemade ice cream, but unfortunately they do pale into insignificance in comparison with one of my (and many others’) favourite Edinburgh eating experiences. Bar Napoli on Hanover Street is an institution, and with good reason. Open all day, with a menu so long you’d be suspicious if it wasn’t for the fact that the kitchen is always bubbling away with activity and amazing smells. You can’t attempt authentic, you just have to be it, and the food here has been an ongoing pleasure to me for years.

This year I popped in on a visit to the New Town and started with a very generous plate of vegetable antipasti, with excellent mozzarella, a drizzle of balsamic and good olive oil, which nearly left me too full for my cuccina (fish stew) until it arrived, garlanded with garlic bread and wafting fishy tomato garlicky goodness at me. The best way I can describe the place is that when one of the chefs saw me taking pictures of my food, he brought over another dish to photograph. Any chef who is so proud of his cooking he wants to show you what you failed to order is alright by me, and I think that little incident sums up everything I love about Bar Napoli. Indeed, I took my girlfriend there when she visited, and I’m happy to report the minestrone, the halibut and the maccheroncini were great too, but then they would be, wouldn’t they? At under £30 for two they were also very good value, which is just another reason to go.

It’s worthwhile popping in to Harvey Nichols Forth (see what they did) Floor Brasserie if you’re in the area, if only for the view, although I did have half a dozen oysters and a very nice ham bagel and chips while lamenting my inability to afford anything downstairs as they’d already cost me £25. Having said that, I am unlikely to return as I noticed from the menu that they were producing a couple of shows in association with ‘Funny Women’, a dreadful organization that charges comedians to enter its new act competition and does nothing of value for women or comedy, as can be seen from the number of companies including Nivea, Dove and, er…Babycham that have worked with them incredibly briefly. The same can be said of a number of excellent comedians including my good friend Jo Caulfield who no longer want anything to do with them. Harvey Nichols probably didn’t know any better, but I imagine it does now.

I do like to try and go for a proper ‘event’ meal (or two) when I’m up in Edinburgh. Last year the No Pressure To Be Funny crew went to the brilliant Sweet Melinda’s, which to my shame I didn’t blog about, mainly because it was more fun to write about the fairly awful time Hal and I had at The Witchery instead. In the meantime, an online piece I wrote about it did make it into a book this year – Secret Edinburgh – so that will have to do for now. This year, however, on our night off, Cruttenden, Ferry and I piled into a taxi and headed down to the Leith branch of Fishers, about which I’d heard fabulous things, to spend the £100 mouse related refund we’d been given by our landlords.

We walked in to see our friend Phil Nichol and his girlfriend already sat at another table, and it soon became clear that Eddie, our fantastically helpful waiter, was very much used to festival types turning up for excellent seafood in a thoroughly convivial atmosphere.

We began with fishcakes, beef carpaccio and langoustine tails with garlic and herb butter, which were uniformly excellent, washed down with a bottle of Muscadet which was perfectly ok, but probably not my finest choice. I also ordered three oysters which I wasn’t charged for when the bill came because it’s just that sort of place and Eddie’s just that sort of guy. Which is exactly why I returned there for lunch when my other half came up for the weekend.

Main courses were equally impressive – a very good steak for Hal who inevitably worried that he was offending someone by not ordering seafood, superb King scallops with crab and potato salad for me, and the stand out dish – Mick’s Aberdeen smoked haddock with black pudding crumb which was a perfectly cooked combination of tastes and textures and about as Scottish as you could get without having Mel Gibson make a film about it. We bravely made our way through a very nice bottle of Barronie de Coussergues house red, and then tidied up with pavlova, sticky toffee pudding and ice cream. Eddie then managed to sell us a combination of sherries that he was kind enough to write down for me, but I think you should just get along and try them for yourself. Each was worth the trip. Our bill came to a very reasonable £150 for a truly memorable meal in wonderful surroundings, and we poured ourselves into a cab home before things got messy.

A week or so later it was a pleasure to once again be greeted by Eddie and explore the menu further. We were not disappointed. Red mullet with a gooseberry compote was an unabashed delight, with a perfect balance of acidity and meatiness, while fish soup was a solid opening gambit across the table. I then had to have the very, very good lobster (the last one, apparently – for future reference you should always order ahead,) while herself went for the haddock and was every bit as impressed as Mick had been. My crème brulee was everything it should have been and I would suggest that the phrase “I actually think that’s the nicest sticky toffee pudding I’ve ever had in my whole life, ever,” is pretty much the last word in sticky toffee pudding criticism. The bill came to £82 excluding service, which was again excellent, and again included some freebies (more langoustine tails) for which we were not charged. For the second time in a fortnight I left Leith a very happy man.

On the last weekend, my brother and his girlfriend came to stay and took me to one of their discoveries, which I must also recommend wholeheartedly. Despite being a large and promisingly retro decorated room, it still appears we were lucky to get a table at Spoon on Nicholson Street for a very late lunch/early supper. It has that pleasing bustle and confidence of a place that knows exactly what it’s doing on a reasonably large scale, but still retains a certain intimacy. Our waitress was a keen combination of efficiency and warmth, and a wild mushroom soup and smoked salmon with home-pickled cucumber were both faultless, although not quite as good as the chicken and ginger broth my brother ordered – a perfect Edinburgh festival dish if ever there was one. I was very boring and went for salmon with green beans and new potatoes on the understanding that it was a dish that left the kitchen nowhere to hide, which was a challenge they rose to effortlessly. Perfect crispy skin, moist flesh, the health giving properties of French beans and potatoes for carbs, which were much needed as I rushed off to another show, leaving my brother with a slightly spiced Toulouse sausage resting on a warming bean casserole and his girlfriend’s perfectly cooked pork chop with greens. I don’t know how much it all cost – although prices were far from extortionate – and I cannot wait to return.

Which would pretty much sum up my entire month. For all its inherent craziness, there is a reason I have been visiting the Edinburgh Festival for twenty years, and now I have even more reasons to return. On the way home, we stopped at the award-winning Tebay services which deserve a blog in their own right, but that must wait to be written, as must Sweet Melinda’s – not to mention next year’s show, and perhaps a guidebook on which Edinburgh estate agents are best avoided if you don’t want to start your festival with a bout of mice-based hysteria.

 

August 2013

The thin sliver of stunning Croatian coast alongside the Adriatic has seen its fair share of conflict over time. It is only twenty odd years since Dubrovnik itself was under siege from the forces of Serbia and Montenegro on the flimsiest of pretexts and it is remarkable how unscathed the magnificent Old Town appears, when a quick cable car ride to the Fort Imperial overlooking the city and the museum therein confirms it was anything but.

As a result, one could understand and even sympathise with any residual negativity Croats might feel towards their northern neighbours. Less clear is what they’ve got against the Swiss, or more specifically, their chard. I rather fell in love with Croatia – the climate and the culture, and to a certain extent the cuisine – so why they insist on serving overcooked and over-seasoned Swiss chard with everything is beyond me, especially when it has the consistency of tissue paper that has been left to marinade in washing up liquid.

Vegetables do not seem to be a Croatian strong point. The seafood on the other hand is excellent, and four of us headed along the coast to Cavtat on our first evening to find some. Cavtat is something of a rich person’s playground, as evidenced by the number of enormous yachts showing off along the seafront. There was some of the usual touting for business from the restaurants, but in the end we ‘opted for’ (they offered us free schnapps) Toranj, which proved to be a fine choice; especially if you like young men playing water polo next to your table, adding a slightly bizarre homo-erotic element to proceedings.

The schnapps arrived with a small plate of smoked mackerel pate – something of a Croatian tradition, and a very pleasant way to start a meal while we got to grips with the menu. To put it simply, if you like squid, go to Croatia. They do a lot of it and they do it very well. Black risotto made with squid ink is ubiquitous, and none the worse for that. There were also plump mussels and some seriously disappointing deep fried oysters. I thought they might be interesting but they weren’t, unless you’re interested in food with the consistency of rubber bands in cardboard but without the flavour.

My main course was a considerable step up as my girlfriend and I shared the fish platter, which is so good I noticed it had even made it into our guidebook. A delightful selection of prawns, langoustines, mussels and clams came with potatoes, a vinaigrette dressing and even some rock mussels, which were new to me and quite chewy – I’m glad I tried them, but I could happily live without ever doing so again. A bit like the Swiss chard they’d partially hidden under the whole sea bass. Across the table a buzzara, or fish stew, was more of the same but more garlicky and requiring a bib to eat, although, if you’ve seen our friend Simon eating ice cream, that’s just more of a general rule to keep him presentable. A plate of grilled squid was just bloody good, even if it too was charded. This was simply very good seafood, cooked properly and wonderful to share whilst men who had forgotten their bibs splashed about nearby.

We weren’t planning on pudding, but maybe the schnapps had kicked in, or the bottle of Malvasija Dubrowcka which was white, dry, delicious and meant we had ordered a couple of chocolate soufflés before we realized what we were doing. The moment they arrived, we broke them open to discover that they were in fact fondants. We suggested this to the waiter, who replied, quite reasonably,

“You can call them fondants if you want, we call them soufflés”.

He was wrong, of course, but it’s not his fault he’d probably never even seen Masterchef and by this point all the evidence had completely disappeared. All in all, an impressive start to the holiday, and whilst not a steal at over forty quid a head excluding service, the days when one could flounce into Eastern Europe expecting everything to be practically given away are over, and with good reason.

Our next port of call was just that, and I could not really recommend it highly enough. Lokunda Peskarija has every right to be awful – not only a tourist hot spot itself, its many tables are also either side of one of the main entrances to the Old Town. However, as tourist spots go, it is pretty special. I can’t do Dubrovnik any justice here – just look at a picture and go. And while you’re there, pop into Lokunda, right by the harbour wall, which is perpetually busy, but cleverly gets round this by serving a simple selection of (more) brilliant seafood in one of the most stunning locations on the planet. I had some proper oysters – because they serve natives here as a matter of course – before we all tucked into pans of mussels, baby squid, grown up squid and prawns. There was some bread, some wedges of lemon and a little glass of Subrian Miličić (dry, white, again) for me. There was no chard to be seen. It all came to 635 Kuna or eighty quid for four and then we all went and had an ice cream from one of the many parlours dotted around that make you suddenly remember how close you are to Italy and how good lemon ice cream can be if done properly.

There are hundreds of places to eat around the Old Town, and as is often the case when in close proximity to World Heritage sites, you take your chances to an extent. There is one street dedicated almost entirely to pizzerias, so why I ended up having fairly unremarkable chicken fajitas there is beyond me (at Šilok, not actively unpleasant but I think we could have chosen better.) However, one of the better appointed destinations is Klarisa, set in a heartbreakingly beautiful courtyard adorned with purple bougainvillea where we sat at an immaculately linen covered table for one of the funniest meals I’ve ever had. The food itself was slightly disappointing for one of the supposedly finest eateries in the city. Things started well with more complimentary pate and service was excellent throughout. An octopus salad was an exercise in tasty simplicity and a swordfish carpaccio was light, zingy and meaty all at the same time. The cold platter ‘Klarisa’ was more of the same, but this time with smoked tuna and marinated sea bass, while a prawn risotto was good but could have done with the wine being cooked off a little more.

Main courses, though (mostly) attractively presented were more problematic. Amberjack is a meaty fish not dissimilar to tuna, and surely the only real sin is to overcook it, which is exactly what they’d done until it just resembled what it was – a large lump of protein on a plate. My John Dory fillet was relatively tasty but spoilt by the slimy and unpleasant skin still attached to it. A sea bass fillet and sole in champagne sauce were much better. Grilled vegetables and chips were perfectly acceptable, possibly because it gave them no wiggle room to include chard anywhere (except under a couple of the fish.)

Only two of us were drinking (a very serviceable house white,) so it is a bit difficult to explain what happened next. Actually, it isn’t. Despite loving both live music and eating out, I have never been that excited about combining the two. Indeed, a couple of days earlier, we had hot-footed it from one restaurant when we noticed the last table was two feet from some empty music stands  – a course of action thoroughly vindicated when we walked by later to hear the worst ever synthesizer-led version of ‘Smoke on The Water’ being murdered for the benefit of the remaining guests. Klarisa had gone a whole step further with gold suits for the band (one of them also had a gold guitar) and the obligatory chanteuse emoting her way through a number of tunes you had hoped you would never have to hear again. It started badly enough with the classic opening notes of a Casiotone preset segueing into what I would charitably describe as a ‘take’ on My Way. At this point, it’s best just to give you a set list – Theme from The Godfather, Delilah (which is when I think we properly lost it,) Norah bloody Jones. Yesterday. Crazy. Hilarity at this point involved hari kari mimes and the idea that no one ever ordered dessert here because they couldn’t make it past Crazy.

We did order dessert, possibly out of guilt, and a pretty reasonable crème brulee with peach compote arrived alongside a less exciting warm chocolate square with vanilla ice cream, and, er, ‘English sauce’ which was, needless to say, the funniest thing we had ever heard. Until that is, we managed to predict both Careless Whisper and Always on My Mind in quick succession at which point we had to leave because hysteria had set in. I couldn’t recommend Klarisa highly enough, but sadly that is not for all the right reasons, and there are probably better meals to be had for getting on towards £200 including service. They did give us a nice complimentary plate though.

My better half and I returned to Cavtat for our last meal which turned out to be a wise choice. We were found a table on the first floor terrace of Dolium that afforded us excellent views of the richest man in Norway’s massive £25m yacht. (Yeah – but is he happy?) Our waiter was an older chap whom I was slightly worried was run off his feet, not helped by an over officious manager (or owner) quietly bollocking him the whole time. This was unnecessary and annoying, but it was the only blot on an otherwise lovely meal.

We started again with oysters and then shared ‘Sea pearls’ – a big bowl of shellfish and squid (although not much sign of the advertised crab) in a glorious garlicky broth. This was followed by a whole sea bass cooked in salt, expertly filleted at the table (take that Mr Manager.) This is so clearly the best way to eat this fish – every time I have it I am amazed all over again by how moist and delicate it leaves the flesh, and this was no exception. Dessert was crème caramel – another Croatian tradition that I’m not that wild about but at least it wasn’t chard – and ‘cake of the day’ which was a fairly workmanlike tiramisu. Free schnapps was offered but declined, and a glass of house white wasn’t the best I’d had, but the standard of both food and surroundings more than compensated.

All in all, a delightful conclusion to a lovely holiday in a country I had previously only associated with tennis players and garish football strips. Thanks to the kindness of my girlfriend’s parents and their very pleasant villa we have an open invitation to return, and I’m sure we shall. Having said that, I am tempted to visit Switzerland first to see if they have maintained their famed neutrality, or are doing something unspeakable to a Croatian vegetable at every meal. Knowing them, they’ve probably covered it in either melted cheese or chocolate, which will never work because, as we all know, revenge is a dish best served cold.

July 2013

It’s not often you open a menu and actually gasp, or rather inwardly gasp as to do so audibly might get you turfed out of the restaurant on the quite reasonable grounds that somewhere like this was not meant for people like you. Starters hover around the thirty pound mark, though you’ll need more than ten times that if you fancy the caviar. In common with most non-billionaires, part of me dislikes eating in that rarified atmosphere where you feel permanently on your best behaviour and another part really loves to see how the other half live. (Half? Half? Who came up with those figures?) Luckily, Toptable offers you the occasional opportunity to snoop more effectively than an American government agency and I am perfectly happy to act as whistleblower on the understanding that extraordinary rendition is something that rarely happens to food bloggers.

 

Heinz Beck is a three Michelin starred chef who is now strutting his stuff at Apsleys at the Lanesborough Hotel on Hyde Park Corner, and, because everybody needs to eat, is offering an extremely good deal for those of us who fancy nosing around his beautifully appointed art deco dining room. A mere forty-five pounds gets you three courses and a glass of rather nice fizz with the opportunity to sneer at those frightful nouveau riche Wellingtons over the road thrown in for free.

 

Apsleys being the faynest of fayne dining establishments does of course mean you get rather more than this – your bouche is well and truly amused. Service is exquisite – attentive and better drilled than the armies of him-over-the-road, even if one operates from a permanent position of worry that they’re about to inform you there’s been a terrible mistake and ask you to leave. To be fair, this is a far more telling reflection of my insecurities than my experience, and it was with some excitement I chose quite a lot of breads from a fairly dizzying selection and took a sip of my rather excellent Franciocorta.

I’d describe the menu as modern Italian with German precision, beautifully presented, and the tone was set with a delightful pre-starter of pea and ricotta mousse, finished with a carrot air, which was far more than the sum of its parts and considerably less pretentious than it sounds. The set menu offered three choices for each course, and we began with a sea bass tartare in bread crust with cantaloupe melon which was more than acceptable, even if the overriding flavour was of the fried bread the fish was wrapped in. Luckily, that is a flavour of which I thoroughly approve. As are Frazzles. I would like to apologise to Mr Beck for our appalling lack of couth here, but as my other half tucked into her exquisite poached (or sous vide?) veal salad with an astonishing tuna sauce, she proffered me a cube of veal jelly with the words,

“What are those crisps, you know, like bacon?”

And she was right, too. Salty cubes of deliciousness perfectly accompanying the softness of the meat and the slightly tart fish.

We were very much up and running now, and about to experience the poshest battered fish I have ever laid taste buds on. My only criticism of cod goujons, in a light tempura with cherry gazpacho and thinly julienned celery with edible flowers was that there weren’t more of them, but at these prices for this standard of cooking I can hardly complain. The accompanying dish was not only the best thing we ate, but also probably the best advertisement for what this kitchen can achieve. Amaranth is a type of cereal I had never come across before – tiny grains not unlike quinoa, but served wet with a poached egg, like the most exquisite porridge you’ve ever tried. Each expertly turned vegetable somehow tasted more of itself than the one before, complimented by purple and yellow flowers which made this incredible dish a feast not only for the eyes and stomach but also the memory.

A zinging amuse-bouche of deconstructed lime cheesecake paved the way for desserts that you just knew were going to be so pretty it was almost a shame to eat them, but a mango mousse with poppy seed parfait and rosemary ice cream and a millefoglie with Chantilly cream and cherry sorbet both belonged in a gallery as much as on a plate. Which is not to say they were not a triumphant end to a meal of already considerable highs.

Just when we couldn’t have been much happier, a tray of handmade petit fours arrived at which point it became abundantly clear to me and my other half that we may not ever be the other half, but we’re very keen to visit occasionally, especially if they make us feel this welcome. With a couple of bottles of water and service, our bill came to £111, which for an experience like this is well worth the money. In fact, if you can’t face spending hundreds on a meal, may I take this opportunity to thoroughly recommend indulging in a little light spying on both the Italians, Germans and whoever else you might find in this corner of West London. Just make sure you’ve got your Toptable password to hand, as otherwise you may be forced to do the washing up for quite some considerable time.

 

July 2013

I love what I do, but, like everyone else, I have good days and bad days. Admittedly comedy does tend to feature a bit more variety than the average desk job, but I can tell you, a hurried drive down the M62, running late from one room of drunken stags in Manchester to another of hens in Liverpool on a Saturday night can be every bit as depressing as turning up for a 9 to 5 at a paper merchants in Slough on a Monday morning.

And then sometimes you get flown to Antibes for a couple of days.

I was there for The Comedy Store, with guitar wielding Christian Reilly, staying at the home of the owner’s wife, Sylvie, and performing at gigs run by their son, Sebastien. Surely only an idiot would write a blog detailing the hospitality extended to him by his employer’s family, but then, as they say in France, je suis cet idiot.

Added to which, without wishing to be too obsequious, the hospitality was excessively good, and when it came to the food, pretty much unsurpassable. Sebastien had even gone as far as phoning me a couple of days beforehand to check if I had any dietary needs – in an industry run almost exclusively on basketed chicken, I cannot tell you how rare that is. I explained that my self imposed ban on red meat and dairy obviously didn’t include France on the grounds that I didn’t want it to, and that as we were in the Med, I would really like some Fruits de Mer at some point. Upon arrival, Sylvie picked us up from the airport and drove us to her beautiful house, then went inside to prepare lunch while Christian and I sat on the patio discussing our annoyance that not all gigs were like this.

I would like to extend my apologies (not to mention my surprise and disdain) to any avid fans of UKIP who might be reading this, but there are just some things that France does better than us, and eating al fresco is generally one of them. I am as much a fan of the good picnic as the next man, but there is something about sitting outside in the Côte d’Azur with a fresh baguette that simply can’t be beaten. Throw in a homemade mushroom quiche, two types of paté, cold roasted peppers with garlic, basil and olive oil, wash it down with a nice glass of rosé and I could quite happily punch Nigel Farage’s lights out whether he had a fag on or not.

And this was just the start – I believe we performed a comedy show at some point in the evening – but after that it was home for a delicious daube (Provençal beef stew,) a few more glasses of wine and bed. The next morning we drove to the boulangerie for croissants and pain au chocolate which Sylvie and I ate outside while discussing what we would eat for our last meal, which is a game I always enjoy. Apparently I am almost French in my tendency to discuss what I am going to eat later whilst I eat, which I regard as one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me.

 

We took a trip into town for lunch, and a wander round the harbour. One of the reasons an English language gig works so well in Antibes is the large contingent of yachties that are there at any given time, which, having grown up on the Isle of Wight, is the sort of sentence that would normally fill me with dread. However, these are, in the main, professional crew for the yachts and super yachts of the rich and famous, and generally more down to earth than your average braying Cowes week Hooray, although perhaps the same cannot be said of their employers. We whistled appreciatively, not to say a little jealously, at some of these behemoths of the sea, then walked round the corner to find the really big ones. It truly is another world when your own personal sea-faring plaything is bigger than the average cross-channel ferry, but I guess that’s what you get if your job title includes the words oligarch, sheik or massively obscene inheritance.

We met Sebastien at L’Oursin (The Sea Urchin) in the old town, which immediately endeared itself to me with its large fresh fish counter opening out onto the square. Inside is all varnished wood, brass and tasteful nauticality, but this was Antibes so we sat outside with everyone else. It is obviously quite touristy, but the restaurant seemed to be doing a thriving trade and featured that French staple, the older waiter who knows this is a proper job for a grown up. There is a serious amount of food on the menu, but in all honesty, what we had was a little hit and miss. Christain opted for a crayfish linguini which was delicious but so rich he couldn’t finish it, while Sylvie claimed her soupe de poissons was a little thin, and if Sylvie says something, you tend to believe her. The stand out dish was Sebastien’s sea bass with roasted vegetables, while my Fruits de Mer was ok – I’ve had better oysters and langoustines, and while these were good, I’m never going to be a great lover of whelks or winkles. However, sometimes the atmosphere and the company is just as important as the food and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t thoroughly enjoy my lunch, especially as it was accompanied by an excellent and very affordable bottle of Bernard Chéreau Muscadet, which also made me forget that while I can do raw clams with complete equanimity, the Englishman in me still prefers his mussels cooked and finds shrimps a bit fiddly.

After a visit to one of the best chocolatiers I’ve ever encountered, it was time to prepare for another gig (oh the hardship,) which I believe went very well even if it’s not really up to me to say so. We ended the day with a late meal of veal escalopes and I now know the secret is to add cornflakes to your breadcrumb mix – so not only was our trip enormously pleasurable, we can now say it was educational as well. After another morning visit to the boulangerie (did I mention I bloody love France?) it was, sadly, time to leave. It would be remiss of me not to thank both Sylvie and Sebastien wholeheartedly for their kindness and hospitality at this point, and I hope the gigs go from strength to strength, mainly so I can go back and do them again. We landed back in a drizzly Gatwick. The next day I flew to Glasgow for the weekend, where I was staying in an Ibis, which I suppose serves me right.

June 2013

I have not always been that fond of Kent. I’m not sure if the proximity to Dover gives rise to some sort of UKIP sensibility, or if it’s the reputation as a retirement home for London villains who haven’t needed to go all the way to Spain, but I’ve seen some fairly distasteful gigs down there over the years. All you need to say to comics over a certain age is “Maidstone Up The Creek” and eyes begin rolling and heads start shaking – as a friend of mine once put it, “At least Essex knows it’s shit.”

It is of course wrong to tarnish an entire county with a reputation based on a few random comedy gigs, simply for the sake of a weak punchline at the end of an opening paragraph, not that that’s not going to stop me. I’m sure the vast majority of Kentish comedy nights are as good as any in the country, and speaking from personal experience, a great many of them seem to happen around the Tunbridge Wells area. The Trinity Theatre and the Therapy Room have always been very enjoyable places to play, and I even remember doing a successful Edinburgh preview at The Forum, a music venue that is also a converted public toilet. You’d be amazed at how many unconverted ones there are.

On this occasion, however, I was not here for work, but visiting a friend with my other half, and on the way we passed through Tunbridge Wells on the lookout for lunch. There was something reassuring about The Black Pig from the outside. You’ve got to be pretty confident in what you’re doing to paint your building black and then emblazon it with four big white pigs and a hand-painted sign. We soon discovered this design ethic extended to the car park at the rear, as our curiosity and growling stomachs got the better of us.

The dining room was another handsome beast – big chunky wooden tables and an appropriately robust feeling to the whole place. We didn’t venture into the bar at the front as our attention was caught by a slightly haphazard chopping board strewn with homemade focaccia, which is always an encouraging sight, and we were quickly shown to a table in the corner of a relatively busy but not overrun Saturday lunchtime. Looking at my notes, the menu is a lot less piggy than I remembered, but then that’s probably something to do with the number of dishes that contained the words ‘Black Pig’ – from chips to gravadlax, game terrine to, er…gin. Branding is obviously pretty important to these people, but at the same time, it felt in keeping with a DIY aesthetic related to the food rather than an attempt to influence your children’s worldview.

I have been known to be quite porcine myself, and while I realised the spring minestrone with courgette and cannellini beans was what I should have had, the tempura soft shelled crab was what I wanted, so we had both as I have a very patient girlfriend. And quite a squeamish one too apparently, as I had to take delivery of two crabs in a light crispy batter because they ‘looked too much like crabs’. They tasted much like crabs too, nicely complimented by a carrot and coriander salad, if not quite as gutsy and, well…down and dirty as the very best examples of this dish can be. The soup was excellent – fresh vegetables and delightful colours but with a couple of olive oil croutons and a generous sprinkling of parmesan to prevent an actual halo forming around it.

For main course, we had venison, Harveys and stilton pie from the Black Pig Classics section of the menu, which it very nearly was – the pie was very commendable but unfortunately the cheese was somewhat absent. The red cabbage was lovely, but the carrot and parsnip mash received the thumbs down from my companion, although in fairness, she is yet to meet a parsnip she hasn’t been rude about – she and her friend Jodie call them ‘the devil’s penis’, and I can’t really blame the restaurant for that. My sea bass on a bed of papardelle with a cockle and mussel sauce, on the other hand, looked hugely inviting, but sadly tasted incredibly bland, which seems a shame for such lovely ingredients.

We decided that three courses at lunch time might be a step too far even for me, so settled back with a couple of very nice coffees and a bill of £60 including service which seemed fair, if not cheap for an alcohol free lunch. It’s always nice to chance upon somewhere doing all the good things well – just a few tweaks here and there and I would be giving it an unreserved recommendation. I just hope they don’t try and put on any comedy. It may be in Tunbridge Wells, but it’s still Kent, after all.

May 2013

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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