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

Sitting down to write this, I was pretty convinced that I’d spent yesterday as an accidental vegan, until I remembered that the bean and pea salad I had for breakfast came with a yoghurt dressing which dragged me a few steps back down the path towards animal cruelty. Many of you might be thinking that anyone who starts the day with a pea and bean salad deserves everything he gets, but breakfast wasn’t included with my hotel, and I had decided to turn the lack of choice at the local Tesco Express into a virtue before I realised I was compromising a lifestyle choice I hadn’t actually made.

I do have a sneaking admiration for vegans, mainly for their consistency, not to say bloody-mindedness, and probably above all for their patience. The stereotypical worthiness and what my father always insists on referring to as the ‘rope sandals and muesli’ element I can do without, but in my experience, most vegans are simply committed to something they believe in and don’t wish to appear hypocritical by shoveling down mung beans whilst wearing a parka made of baby goat. On the other hand, as I have said before, I do love meat, and I’m afraid I’m unlikely to give it up for anyone, no matter what their consistency.

Morally, I do feel this means I somewhat surrender the high ground. Why should something die, just because I’m hungry? Well, frankly, it shouldn’t, but if I want to get my protein fix, it inevitably does and I think it’s important to at least accept the reality of that, if not, in all probability, the responsibility.

I was in Nottingham for the weekend, appearing at The Glee Club with a reliably excellent bill that included one of my favourite comedians and Cutting Edge colleague, Roger Monkhouse. As I said when introducing him on Friday, if there was any justice in the world he would be a household name, but there isn’t, so he’s not. Also appearing was the quite new and therefore annoyingly impressive Micky Sharma, and the marvellous Michael Legge with whom I have worked many times and who once memorably described my stand up as “like watching Have I Got News For You, on Dave”, which is exactly the sort of comment I would normally get massively stroppy about if it wasn’t so funny. And accurate.

An angry vegan (This is what they’re all like)

Michael is hilarious company, and considerably more thoughtful about whom he offends than his infamous blog sometimes suggests. He is also, in his own words, ‘an angry vegan’, a subject about which he claims, completely falsely, to have no sense of humour whatsoever. When I asked him why he became a vegan, he replied with the words ‘Adam Bloom’, which is already quite an amusing answer even before you hear the explanation. Adam is a good friend and brilliant stand up, but when Michael saw him doing a routine that elicited cheers for calling vegetarians ‘self-righteous’, after twenty years as one, he decided, on the spot, that he wasn’t ‘doing enough’, and immediately became vegan. The fact that this happened at the Edinburgh Festival, where many people are living on offal deep fried in animal fats only adds to the comedy value of the story as far as I’m concerned.

I only discovered Michael was vegan when I suggested we went for lunch – I’ve already blogged about the rather good Waiting Room just outside Newcastle, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect another meat free meal to pop up on Food Ponce every now and then. Michael discovered the Alley Cat Cafe on the internet, which I imagine is an invaluable resource for vegans, (the Alley Cat is actually vegetarian but offers vegan options) and so we arranged to meet Adam Crow there – another comic, who was in town playing Jongleurs. It was, as you might expect, down an alley, just off the main square.

Passing a cheerfully painted wall outside, we went upstairs to order. The room itself was light, and quite wood beamy and casual, or, as Michael put it “this is what they’re all like”. We were cheerfully served from behind a bar with a very reasonable selection of beers, including the rather good Freedom lager, which I haven’t seen for a while. As I’m booze free at the moment I ordered a ginger beer and had a look at the fairly limited menu. That is not a criticism as such – they are clearly more cafe than restaurant, as evidenced by the large number of wraps, bagels and homemade cakes and biscuits on offer, but I wanted something a bit more substantial, so opted for the marinated tofu steak, as did Michael. Adam went for a cream cheese bagel and what turned out to be very good wedges as he’s “trying to be good” and “lose some weight”, which we all know is best achieved through the medium of bread, cheese and potatoes.

Marinated tofu ‘wodge’

We sat outside and waited for the rain to start falling as it’s June, but luckily our food arrived first. My main problem with my meal was the use of the word ‘steak’, because what arrived just wasn’t one. I guess ‘wodge’ doesn’t scan so well on a menu. What I did have though, was a big wodge of char-grilled tofu sitting on top of some very tasty root veg mash with a commendably rich and spicy red wine and tomato sauce, finished off with a few sunflower and sesame seeds. I must admit I’d be hard pressed to tell you much about the marinade, but the sauce, and the rather nice side salad made for a pretty good lunch, even if I felt the weak point was, inevitably, the tofu. It was at this point, as we’d run through the usual gamut of veggie jokes, that Michael pointed out that the one I’d just made, about how it would have been really good with some actual steak, was the one they all really hated.

The rain then inevitably arrived, so we nipped back inside for a very good cup of coffee. My meal had come to just over a tenner, which you really can’t argue with. By accident, my supper consisted of Tesco cous-cous which I’d picked up as part of a two for one offer with the earlier pea and bean salad, and I have to say I did feel rather good about myself and my intake for the day, although whether that was down to the health giving properties of what I ate or its smugness content is debatable.

Having said that, I had a thoroughly enjoyable lunch, partly down to the company, but also because of the food. I’m extremely unlikely to find myself turning vegan, or, if I’m honest, going out of my way to eat vegetarian all that often, but at the same time, I’m not going to criticize people who choose to consume a lot of pulses, just because they’ve decided not to eat something that used to have one. Which is a very good vegan joke, although I’m sure Michael will tell me it’s a very old one, which was probably heard on Dave, last year.

July 2012

When Nick Revell, James O’Brien and I first started producing our topical panel show and podcast, No Pressure To Be Funny, we did so at the quite lovely, but somewhat distant, Hob in Forest Hill. Despite wonderful support from everyone down there, after a while it became clear that we were going to have to find a new home which was slightly easier to get to. We ended up in the Leicester Square Theatre, from which we amicably parted company after a season to take up a monthly residency at The Soho Theatre earlier this year. This August also sees Amnesty International taking us up to Scotland for a one off special at the Edinburgh Festival, so I think it’s safe to say that, for a show involving quite a lot of sitting down, it certainly gets around.

One thing has remained constant – the huge importance that we all attach to getting together a couple of days beforehand to discuss an upcoming show. It is absolutely vital that these meetings take place somewhere highly conducive to the preparation of top quality comedy debate and merely coincidental that this inevitably means a really good restaurant. I have previously reviewed a quite celebratory meal at Les Deux Salons, where we usually meet, but this was not our original haunt. Back in the halcyon days of 2010, when you were fairly sure which Milliband to back and the idea of a pasty tax or Englebert Humperdink at Eurovision was deemed too far-fetched for satire, we were regulars at Terroirs, just around the corner. The food was excellent and the staff were friendly, helpful and just the fun side of familiar.

Duck rillettes

We enjoyed a heady start to the relationship, as so often happens – I even took my parents along to introduce them and they were thoroughly charmed. However, after a while, faces changed and things started to become a little distant. The food, while still generally very good, took a little longer to order, and even longer to arrive, and we began to drift apart. Things came to a head one day when Nick’s starter had still not arrived as James and I were finishing our mains – when questioned about this for the third time, the waiter gave a shrug so Gallic it would have been comical if it hadn’t been so annoying. Words were spoken and we left. We stopped calling and, inevitably, we lost touch. Life moved on and we started seeing other people – about fifteen metres away, to be precise, which may have been a little indelicate.

Boudin noir & spring vegetables

However, as I have been slightly remiss on the blogging front recently, I suggested that this month we went back to see how things were, and whether we could rekindle some of the old magic. To take the already somewhat overstretched metaphor even further, I’m delighted to announce that No Pressure and Terroirs still quite fancy each other. The smiley service that we originally remembered was present and correct, even if things slowed a little towards the end of the meal, and the food was every bit as good as it used to be. Terroirs was originally at the forefront of ‘small plate’ eating, whereby you can order as many of them as you like, in a sort of French tapas manner, dip into a superb selection of charcuterie, or go for the more substantial plats du jour. Or all of the above. We decided on this occasion to take the traditional three course route – after all, you don’t want to ruin a reunion by being too experimental.

Pork chop

James’s pea and sorrel soup had just that hint of herb that can easily be lost, while Nick’s duck rillettes were large juicy quenelles of moistness, perfectly accompanied by deliciously dense sourdough. I had a large globe artichoke with a mustard vinaigrette that had just a little too much kick for my liking – I must admit I prefer my artichokes warm, with garlic butter – but it remained a thoroughly enjoyable dish, and the heart was outstanding. The mains were pretty much faultless. My superb boudin noir was deliciously crisp on the outside and came with spring vegetables in a gently fresh broth that was further flavoured by the boudin as you went along, while Nick’s wonderfully tasty pork chop with beautifully rendered fat sat perfectly on a bed of peas, broad beans and mushrooms. The stand out dish, however, was James’s rabbit and ham hock broth with pearl barley – generous hunks of delicately cooked and seasoned meat and vegetables in a stock that managed to be both light and hearty at the same time.

A groundbreaking shot of a pannacotta

As we were clearly considering getting back together at this point, dessert was inevitable – Nick went for a salted caramel crêpe that was just this side of properly decadent, while my pannacotta with fresh raspberries was perhaps not as firm as it might have been, but then you could say that about all of us these days. Added to which, I much prefer the sharpness of raspberries cutting through the creamy taste of a slightly wobbly pannacotta than bouncing off an overly rubbery one. James had some wonderful Munster cheese and a slightly less inspiring Bonde de Sologne, and we finished off with an espresso each to kick us into the afternoon. Perhaps we shouldn’t have needed the coffees as we were all drinking water (alcohol might have ruined the moment,) but somehow they just felt right.

As did the whole meal. As we got up to leave, James suggested that this was perhaps the best meal we’d ever had at Terroirs, and I tend to agree, even if I retain a certain fondness for our earlier dalliances. The bill came to a not unreasonable £109 including service, and I think it’s safe to say we may be seeing each other again. I mean, don’t buy a hat, but watch this space.

June 2012

‘Amnesty International presents No Pressure To Be Funny’ will be taking place at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre at 15:00 on August 18th. Guests include Mark Thomas and Pippa Evans. Tickets and further information are available here.

They say that travel broadens the mind, but what they don’t tell you is that one major temptation of doing a ridiculous amount of flouncing around the planet can be the quite pressing one to stay in your hotel room. This may sound daft to those of you who actually have to book time off and make proper grown up decisions about where you’re going to go on holiday, but when life is often a succession of economy class flights and anonymous hotel rooms, the desire to simply lie down in front of unintelligible telly can become quite overpowering. Having said that, I’m quite good at getting out and about when I genuinely am on holiday because I know I’m not being paid, so I try to make the most of it. I’m not complaining – the main reason I take so few holidays is because there is a fairly robust argument that my job is one long one.

There are a number of comics who are notorious for their touring inactivism, beyond the obvious demands of getting to and from the actual gig. I performed in South Africa for a month with an American comic who not only never left his room, he wouldn’t let housekeeping in either. Coupled with the amount of room service he ordered, that room began to take on quasi-mythical status among staff and fellow comedians alike. Ask any touring comic the most consistent offenders and the same names will come tripping off the tongue. The reverse of course, is also true – Nick Wilty, for instance, can’t get off a plane without first ordering a moped and then haring off into the sunset.

Tom 1

Speaking personally, I am not always the most active traveller, but am easily led. As a result, I will always be grateful to Martin Bigpig Mor for forcing me round Singapore’s nature reserves like a bearded and tattooed David Attenborough. I had one of my best ever trips wandering repeatedly through Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown with Steve Allison, and I will always remember Zoe Lyons pretending to be my wife to secure us better pashmina prices in Dubai’s Souk – something her actual wife has always been very understanding about. Similarly, I will never forget Mick Ferry and I catching one another’s eye as we lifted the third pint to our lips during our ‘quiet first night’ on Hong Kong’s Lan Kwai Fong and one of us (it really doesn’t matter which) uttering the immortal line “This is going to turn into a session, isn’t it?” In fairness, we still managed to get up a hill to a Buddhist Temple the next day.

Pomfret fillets

As I type this, I realise that there are so many more stories, but the reason for this somewhat lengthy preamble is to excuse the fact that I didn’t do much in Mumbai this time around. It’s my fourth visit in two years, I was only there for five jet-lagged days and I had quite a lot of work to do. I did, however, want to review a restaurant, so I surpassed myself in adventurousness by going to the same place and ordering the same dishes twice, both times with blokes called Tom. Just call me Thesiger.

The first Tom was the estimable Tom Wrigglesworth, who is one of nature’s travellers. Mainly to his tailor. At 6’4” and built like the proverbial beanpole, Tom has some difficulty in finding clothes that fit him properly and as a result has decided to prop up India’s fabric and tailoring sector on a quite unprecedented scale. He had already made his first visit (by train) when I came round from a post-flight snooze, and continued to make a daily pilgrimage to ensure production was up to his exacting standards. He also fancied dinner in the evening and had heard that Trishna did the best seafood in Mumbai. Paul Thorne, the third member of The Comedy Store’s bill for the weekend, had done his bit of exploring by going to Goa before we even started, so opted out, leaving myself and Tom to head off with Dipen, the taxi driver I first made friends with a couple of years ago and so who now sees more of the UK circuit than most broadsheet reviewers.

Black pepper crab & Garlic crab

Trishna is hidden down a back street I’m not sure I would have found by myself, a doorman greeted us, and we were shown into a brightly lit restaurant with décor that I think was trying to be a boat, scurrying waiters and a pleasing sense of doing what it did well. The head waiter came over to take our order, and basically, we let him. One of my favourite things in the world is Singapore style black pepper crab (if you are ever there, try The East Coast Seafood Centre) so we had one of those, and a garlic one, by which I mean, a really garlic one. Before these arrived, we had a few little pomfret fillets, rolled in black pepper and spices and cooked as kebabs. Moist, tender, with a little peppery bite and utterly delicious. Then we afixed bibs and attacked the crabs. They were sublime. A couple of naans and a pea dish accompanied them, but this was really about dismembering crustacea and getting covered in sauces and bits and sucking flesh out of the nooks and crannies where it was hiding. This is possibly my favourite sort of eating, and we chatted merrily away as we, and the table, became more and more covered in crab detritus. We stuck to Perrier, glasses of which became dirty fingered as we progressed – Trishna’s glass washer has a much harder job than he has any right to expect – and when everything was cleared away we shared an ice cream with fresh mango; a perfect end to an exceptional meal.

Tom 2

After a hugely enjoyable weekend of gigs, Tom headed off for a week’s holiday in Kerela with his wife, before returning to Mumbai and his new wardrobe next week, while Paul caught the late flight back to London. Due to a booking error, my flight was not for another 24 hours, but luckily, this gave me the chance to take Tom 2 to Trishna to show him what he’d been missing as he’d not been before. Tom has been managing the Mumbai Store for two years and I know him from London, so it was great to catch up properly, and this time we threw a rather nice bottle of Indian Sula sauvigon blanc into the mix as well. We changed the peas for spinach, but really shouldn’t have bothered as it turned into exactly the same crab horror film as before. If I was going to be ultra picky, the garlic crab this time was perhaps just a touch overdone, but with that much garlic involved, it’s very hard to take a little problem like that too seriously. We even had the same pudding.

Perhaps I should have showed more originality, but in this instance, I know what I like, and I don’t get to like it that often, so I had it twice, and I loved it. Service was impeccable, and the bill on both occasions (unsurprisingly) came in around the £80 mark – admittedly pretty stiff for Mumbai, but excellent value as far as I was concerned. I really couldn’t recommend Trishna highly enough, although of course if you do want to eat there, you will have to travel to Mumbai first, and leave your hotel room at least once, if not twice. Though if you do choose to stay in, you might be able to carve out a career on the international comedy circuit.

May 2012

That’s me in the corner…

You know the way that celebrities get given enormous amounts of freebies, partly because their endorsement is like advertising gold dust, and also because the providers of these free services and products get some sort of reflected glory by association? Well, that sort of thing has rarely happened to me, mainly because I am not a celebrity. I did recently appear on Celebrity Deal or No Deal, but I think it’s safe to say Jimmy Carr was the celebrity there – the 22 comics standing behind boxes were mere screen filler and it should really have been called ‘Only One Actual Celebrity Deal or No Deal’ in the interests of veracity. It could also have been called ‘Watch Jimmy Balls Up Making A Lot Of Money For Charity’ but he does keep quite a sharp eye on his image, and I’m not sure they could have sneaked that one past him.*

Scallops & pig’s trotters

I did once get free room service in my suite at The International Carlton in Cannes as I was doing a corporate gig there (lobster on the balcony since you ask – or haymaking with sun shining, as I saw it,) and I was once given a very useful bag with a handy compartment for my laptop that is perfect for overnight stays, but the free clothes, cars and watches etc. have generally failed to materialize, with, it has to be said, fairly good reason.

So, imagine my surprise, when, amongst all the spam comments a blog inevitably attracts, I found a message from Andrei Lesment, chef/patron at Verru, who had read my review of his restaurant, and invited me to come along and have the à la carte, on him. This sort of thing just doesn’t happen that often – to me, at any rate. I’m sure it happens to Michael Winner all the time, but I’m very happy not being him. I mention this partly in the spirit of full disclosure, but also because having met Andrei, I very much get the feeling he was aware he was not feeding Winner-lite, but is simply enormously proud of his food and wanted to show it off to someone who appreciated it. On that front, we were all winners.

Lamb chops

I invited my friend Philippa along as it was her recommendation that brought me here in the first place, and it was near enough to her birthday to count as a celebration, so I offered to buy her dinner. We were greeted with a complimentary glass of champagne, which can never hurt, and some of the garlic bread I gushed about last time. The Maître d’ still looks unbearably young, but was kind enough not to draw attention to the fact I’d mentioned it previously, and service was once again excellent. My starter of scallops with pig trotters was simply stunning. The trotter was like delightfully chewy crackling, combining perfectly with the sweetness of the scallops, small blobs of nashi pear, dandelion and a little red curry sauce which essentially took my socks, and blew them right off. And I am hard to separate from my socks. The lamb chop with asparagus and ramsons (wild garlic) tempura opposite was also excellent, if slightly lacking the total ‘wow’ factor of my starter, but that is hardly a criticism.

Venison & pork belly

And then the main courses arrived. I had wanted to try the venison with crispy suckling pork belly, baked beetroot, rhubarb and treacle jus and luckily Phil let me have some of hers. This was a faultless plate of food, the venison standing up perfectly to the saltiness of the pork and the sweetness of the other ingredients and setting off a little symphony in my mouth. As it turned out, the orchestra was having a busy night – superb wild halibut with cauliflower, squash, mussels and lemongrass sauce was another piece of alchemy. The final masterstroke was the addition of monk’s beard, a sort of non-salty samphire that brought everything together astonishingly. We also had some green beans with garlic and the chips – because you have to have the chips, as I have noted before. At this point the orchestra had to put down their instruments to light the fireworks – I really can’t remember two more complex, tasty and original dishes appearing on the same table in a very long time. Perhaps the general feel of the à la carte is slightly more classic French than I had previously realised, but it is the addition of clever foraged ingredients and unusual taste combinations, beautifully cooked, that really make this an exhibition of Baltic brilliance.

Wild halibut

For dessert, Phil went for the burnt vanilla with rum and plum – essentially a crème brûlée – which was thoroughly acceptable, if a little bit humdrum when compared with what had gone before. I, on the other hand, ordered the forest berries, meringue and white chocolate and was transported straight back to tastebud central – a beautifully sharp, tart yet sweet conclusion to the meal. As Phil noted, “I think you won pudding”.

With a very decent bottle of Spanish white at £18.95, the bill (excluding my food) still came to £75 including service – so as you can see, not a steal, especially if you actually have to pay for your own food, which is what I imagine Andrei traditionally likes his customers to do. What is so impressive is how he plays with traditions in his cooking to provide a meal that I think would be hard to better in London at the moment, and that is great value for money no matter how you look at it. Although, of course, I would say that – I may not be a celebrity, but in the unlikely event that Andrei Lesment ever offers you anything for free, I can only advise you to Deal.

Apr 2012

* To be fair to Jimmy, the website for his charity –  Helen & Douglas House – received so much traffic after the programme, it crashed. It’s better now, though, and you can make a donation by clicking on it.