Morito - Farringdon Tapas - July 2011

Where: Morito, Farringdon
With who: The Ginger Prince
How much: £35 a head for 8 shared plates, with a glass of fino each (slightly spoilt by remembrance of Jose's Manzilla) and a carafe of decent if forgettable house red.
Come here if: you're too old for Shoreditch, but want to sit on the street eating tapas watching hipsters cycle by.

The concept of the post beer bite definitely changes as you get older. I remember the days, particularly with the Ginger Prince, when a dirty kebab or a curry take out from Tooting High Road's finest were the best we could hope for after a night on the ales.

Civilisation is a wonderful thing. A couple of artisan pale ales in Farringdon's recently opened Craft Beer Co. started off the evening, followed by a stroll along Exmouth Market and a sherry while waiting for a space to open up at reservation free Morito.**

I'm a sucker for small sharing foods, helping me avoid 'other people's dinner envy' for a fraction of the price of a tasting menu. Even though we don't have the culture to support lanes of tiny little tapas bars here, there are enough decent places where you can shovel down plates of Spanish influenced nibbles.

Unlike bigger and slightly more upmarket neigbour Moro (the one your parents will really approve of) there are no reservations at the orange formica clad bar, where sharp elbowed trendies joust with local suits for space to pile their terracotta plates and baskets of fresh soft roundels and densely spiced flat breads made in Moro's bakery next door.

The bread is essential. Warm if you're lucky, moreish either way. It soaks up the fresh olive oil bottled on each table and its soft, open structure is perfect for scooping up little piles of za'atar (a piquant Arab herb mix on the table with the salt). The za'tar is a giveaway that this isn't a typical tapas bar, but one heavily influenced by Spain's Southern and Middle Eastern neighbours.

We started with one of the most remote of these influences, a soft, silken, oil infused Iranian Borani. Pureed beetroot with feta, dill and walnut was a perfect accompaniment to the breads and vanished swiftly with another Moorish dish of soft spiced lamb mince served on creamy roast aubergine. Lest there was no crunch to the meal, we sampled salt cod croquettas, soft fish yielding under a buttery breadcrumb carapace so good we followed it almost instantly with another plate, this time of jamon and chicken, a little too mushy inside but forgivably so. I was less forgiving of a dish of Butifarra sausage. Four thin discs drowning in an over oily mass of soft white beans, oddly tepid and served with a splodge of garlicky aioli.

I can never resist pimientos de Padrón when they appear on a menu, here a good value £3.50, hot, flame charred and oiled like tiny green Lucha Libre wrestlers, the rare 'Hot One' threatening to kick your throat in. No luck tonight, though they provided a sharp salty contrast to a menu a little steeped in oil and cream. A final hurrah came with a small wooden platter of crisp baby squid. We realised half way through that they were whole, inch long tubes of fried fry or battered baby. Either way it felt like piscine infanticide on an epic scale.
Busy and buzzy even at 9.30 on a Tuesday night there was a wait, this really is somewhere you stumble into rather than a planned 'eat at eight' mission. If you want that, go to the slightly more upscale Moro next door. Just make sure you eat well enough to drown out any envy of the snake hipped youth hanging outside.
** My 15 year old self just re-read that line and cried big tears.

The Corner Room at Bethnal Green Town Hall - July 2011

Sometimes getting to the place is half the fun... Nuno Mendez (he of Viajante and the Loft Project) brings you The Corner Room. A proper unmarked, no entrance, n information New York speakeasy of a restaurant hidden in a boutique hotel in Bethnal Green. Finding it is like playing hipster hide and seek.

When you eventually guide your way through the too cool for signage, Wallpaper* fetishising hotel front of house that hosts the chic little bistro and breakfast room (if you can even guess the name of the hotel I'll be impressed) you arrive, weary and a little fecked off from the effort in a dainty white, light, tiled space, carved out of the surrounding institutional marble like a Habitat styled hobbit hole. Despite the eulogising that surrounds stablemate Viajante, the Corner Room is currently unmarked territory, certainly we had no problems with a 2 for 7, but it did fill rapidly and there's no booking. Get there early because let's face it, you're unlikely to be just passing.

Starters come in around £6 and most mains are £12. Seasonal and interesting, a baby brother of the more studied El Bulli school influenced food artistry next door, I could have gone for any combination. You'll have to pop in and check the menu as they've got no phone number and no details on the website. I eyed up a wonderful dish of heritage (read weird coloured and shaped) tomatoes with mozzarella and what looked unseasonably like asparagus (caveat, was paying attention to my companion's conversation, may not have been asparagus)

Judging by some of the more rabidly positive comments posted online already, one of the house hits looks to be a wonderfully balanced squid dish, meltingly tender tubes served with Jersey Royal potatoes, seaweed and samphire sitting on a slick of squid ink and a glorious fennel infused oil. It makes the other starter, a ceviche of stone bass, seem slightly muted. A good wedge of firm white fish, but none of the scattered oils and 'erbs really cut through with any conviction.

It was a main of two halves too (slightly). Turbot poached with artichoke and pancetta was pleasant enough, it didn't set my world alight, but anywhere else would have been a solid thumbs up. Next to a slow cooked and pink centred lozenge of pork served with a Portuguese bread pudding it very much drifted into second place. The herby sponge is baked with red pepper before being fried in butter, a crisp fluffy smack of taste against the soft pork flesh.

We didn't have time for any of the desserts available for a fiver at the bottom of the menu but did sample an excellent grassy fresh Portugeuse Vinho Verde from a short but functional wine list with prices hovering around the late 20's. It feels a lot like Angela Hartnett's, similarly excellent, Whitechapel Gallery Dining Rooms, itself a diffusion range from a chart topping talent capable of filling the intimate space many times over. If I lived close enough to either, I'd be there weekly.

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Sunday lunches in Camberwell - The Phoenix July 2011

Where: The Phoenix, Denmark Hill
With who: Dr Vole and The Grumbling Granddad
How much: £10 for roast dinner and all of the trimmings
Come here if: you miss your train


There's a surfeit of places you can get a good Sunday pub lunch in and around Camberwell. It's not got the park views of some of the prettier parts of town, but there's some great old boozers to kick back in with the papers and a pint. I'll do a round up at some point, probably when I've been back to a few of them. The Sun & Doves has a new team in the kitchen since I was last there, The Bear (reviewed here last April) still gets the bulk of the praise in the neighbourhood, and all are being rapidly pursued by new kids on the block at The Tiger and The Crooked Well (opened recently by a team of escapees from The Kensington Roof Gardens). So why did we end up at the Phoenix?


The Phoenix isn't a bad pub, it's just somewhere that's never really lived up to the potential. It was the first pub I went to when I arrived in the area, a beautiful and unusual old building with high ceilings and Victorian design features perched literally over the rail tracks, Siamese twinned with the Denmark Hill ticket office. I knew it as a Yates Wine Lodge back then, a garrulous and gauche youth in clothes that didn't quite fit (a description that worked for both of us), catering to the Doctors and nurses of the local hospital before they fled Camberwell for leafier climes.

A revamp a few years later it turned into the Phoenix, technically one of my closest boozers and one I step past daily on the way back from the daily grind. Yet still I walk past and turn up the hill to the flat or down the road to The Hermit's Cave. Rather harshly I've always put this down to the attitude and experience of the staff. You'd always face a scrum at the bar, mainly because they never knew, or seemingly cared, who was next to be served, and it always felt like a railway pub, aimed at transients, less bothered about pandering to regulars. It's got better recently, a lot better, enough to tempt me back to keep trying again.

A recently revamped Sunday menu promises four roasts, described in terms that point towards a competent buyer at least, if not a chef. I went for the 'roast loin of outdoor reared Norfolk pork' over the '21 day aged West Country Beef'. As a roast, it wasn't half bad. Homemade Yorkshire puddings were a surprise and delight for the Grumbling Granddad, the pork was moist and well flavoured (if the portion was very much on the sparse side) and the roast potatoes had been cooked well the first time round. It'd have been a very competent plate if only it hadn't been so tepid. End of a service you'd have expected it, 45 minutes after the place opened you wouldn't, it screamed that most of the plate had been badly reheated. I would have brought it up, but true to form, the staff, though quiet, were studiously ignoring the few punters in the place.

It's a shame, as there's some real thought on the menu here, it's a hearty, tasty selection of contemporary pub staples with a few that show a real ambition. It's a shame that there were only a handful of tables taken by those waiting anxiously for their trains. 

 

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Joseph Leonard, New York - June 2011

Where: Joseph Leonard and Fedora, West Village, New York 

With who: me, myself and I (and a great deal of pig)

It's a quirky and cosy two-level West Village pub that rapidly became a favourite on my recent trip to New York. Partly for the welcome, somewhat for the atmosphere but mainly for the most decadent piece of ham I've ever eaten.

With only seven tables, each the epitome of the ragged-rustic house style, and a slew of bar seating mean Joseph Leonard is an intimate space, perfect for solo diners such as myself propping up the zinc counter or a quiet dinner with close friends. 

A sign of the resolutely local restaurant, they don't take reservations, so get there early or you'll be hovering around the doorway waiting for someone to vacate their place. Tonight being Gay Pride in New York, and Joseph Leonard being situated opposite the Stonewall Tavern in the heart of the festivities, the crowd is a little on the camp side. Someone's gone all in on the stereo and the music tonight (I hope only for tonight) is utter cheddar.. Cindi Lauper into Chaka Khan into Bohemian Rhapsody went wrong...

It's a relatively small menu, no more than 5 or 6 items per course, focussing on seasonal American fare. The aforementioned pork hock is the permanent house speciality. I was briefly distracted by the interesting cheese and oyster selection, a European cheeseboard with a focus on the raw and oozy, but I put that down to hunger and no one other than the barman to talk to. 

Thankfully I didn't pay too much attention to my conversation with the barman, he tried to upsell me the appetiser of the day, a crispy fried medley of dark chicken meat. If I'd taken the bait, I'd have been in the hospital by now. See, the ham hock had been pre-identified as the must have dish, and I'm not a man to let 95 degree heat get between me and a leg of fried animal.

The speciality deep fried ham hock hits with the subtlety of a moreish, porky brick. It's cooked twice overnight, first in brine and then in pork fat before being deep fried. And my god is it satisfying. Served with a caper and a rocket salad that cut through with sharpness but do nothing to negate the salty kick of the hock. Best served with beer, lots of the stuff. Handy considering the selection at the bar, one might think the two were linked.

It isn't the most obvious combination, a bar / restaurant metro enough to feel like the girls of Sex & The City might drop by for lunch, with as macho a main course as I've ever had. New York, city of contrasts, town of meat...

Stumbling out of Joseph Leonard, flushed with the meat sweats and discombobulated. I felt like a chubby Brit who'd just ingested a week's worth of swine. I needed somewhere to go and drink / sleep it off. Luckily the team behind JL have taken over Fedora, a basement dive round the corner and turned it into a low ceilinged macho speakeasy. It has a small but successful cocktail list, and an old fashioned hit the spot perfectly. It has it's own menu, but after the challenge I'd just been through I didn't have the guts to check it out. I would however recommend it for pre or post-dinner drinks.

Bocca Di Lupo - July 2011

Where: Bocca Di Lupo, Soho

How much: £35 a head including a carafe of house Merlot

Now I have history with fried. Show me a tapas bar, a fine dining restaurant or a street-side snack joint and I'll gravitate toward the section in batter.

BDL is a perfect case in point. A menu spanning the best parts of Italy available on a small plate. It could very well be the older, grown up brother that Polpo doesn't have or a distant cousin for similarly light and upmarket Barrafina.

Admittedly it's got a 'build your own' Frito Misto section and an obsession with the (literally) gutsier end of the pig, but in the main it's a well brought up, properly behaved small plate Italian. Friendly staff in black buzz along the thick, light marble bar into the serious restaurant at the rear. If you're only a two (or a very close three) then snare seats at the wide bar if you can. It's well designed for flowing access behind you and relatively calm, even opposite the frantic kitchen, and doesn't thankfully feel like either an afterthought or a corridor.

There's plenty on the keenly priced sharing menu to tempt the non meaty. I could happily graze from their side dishes, and a small plate of plump, fresh broad bean tortellini was well executed and possibly life extending if not eye opening. But in all honesty, if you're at BDL for a bite, chances are it's going to be porky.

Most of the dishes come with two sizes, and even the small plates are reasonably proportioned. We started with plump olives, as green as snooker baize and a brace of sourdough bruchetta, layered with some of the sweet and seasonal broad beans scattered across several other dishes on the menu, here combined with salty thin shards of pig's cheek and a deep umami laden jus. They paired perfectly with similarly seasonally apt courgette flowers, stuffed with mozzarella and lifted out of their slightly oily batter with the soft bite of anchovy. 

If I were to throw a criticism, it'd be that oil. It slightly marred the courgette flowers and soaked deeply into the sheet holding the so-so Frito Misto too. Not a deal-breaker, but enough to make you regret another order of fried. You build your own frito from a small menu, baccalau was unctuous flaky battered pollack, whole squid gave great texture in the tentacles but over floured rings and bland aubergine, little more than an oil trap, let down the final dish.

Thankfully, and expectedly for a restaurant with its own ice-cream parlor over the road, they made up with the desserts. My guest took a trio of the homemade, fruit stuffed ice creams, here nestling in a toasted brioche roll, I went for Sanguinaccio, the devil's own nutella, a thick chocolate paste with pine nut and pig's blood from Abruzzo, the blood adding a dark note of sweet iron, lifting the dark cocoa to the heavens. I licked the bowl clean. I'm not a proud man...

  

Brunch at Red Rooster - Harlem, New York June 2011

Where: Red Rooster, Harlem
How much: Brunch came in at around $25 with coffee and juice
Come here if: you want a Harlem experience but don't want to go, you know, too local..

"The biscuits are outta control, right?!" It doesn't take much to confuse me, but that sentence came pretty close. 

The biscuits in question are nearer to what the English would call a scone, dense, crumbling and slightly sweet on the outside, served here not with jam and clotted cream, but in Southern US savoury style with thick meaty gravy and chunks of dense herby pork sausage. Conceptually it should be my favourite breakfast.

Shiny new frontage glares out across the 125th and Lenox junction. Red Rooster is the gentrification of Harlem writ large. Walk the road down and you get a different story, not even the area's biggest fan could say there was anything attractive about 125th Street, that windy alley cutting through the heart of the neighbourhood past the Dollar Discount Barns, the numerous drugstores and assorted street sorts hustling the out of towners gurning for photos in front of the Apollo Theater, legendary career kickstarter of legends including Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix and Michael Jackson to name a few.

The Swedish raised, Ethiopian born chef, Marcus Samuelsson brought Red Rooster to life last year in a blaze of sweaty palmed anticipation. He's something of a name in New York. Young, telegenic and with awards coming out of his ears since his early 20's and a critically lauded stint as Exec Chef at Aquavit, everyone has been waiting for him to explode into multi-starred glory ever since. He was the first to cook a state banquet for the 44th President and he hosted Barack O at a $30,000 dollar a plate fundraiser at Red Rooster earlier in the year. It's safe to say he's a Democrat and safer still to say that with recent visitors like that it was going to be a hot table. I wanted to head up to Harlem for a weekend brunch of hot (preferably battered) soul, and figured if I couldn't get in here I'd be fine with one of the many other brunch stops in the neighbourhood.

As it was, I didn't have any problem getting a table, even at 11am on a Saturday it was me and a handful of tourists and older faces. It's a fair bit pricier than most of the chicken or waffle joints running down this end of the street and wherever the neighbourhood is heading, you get the strong impression that few of the faces seen around the street would be factoring in a lunch or dinner here in the near future. The other problem is that it wasn't that good. The coffee, constantly proffered by the preppy kid casting aspersions on the relative sanity of my biscuits, was probably the best thing I had. The gravy was cloyingly thick and too sweet, an odd dissonance with the over herbed sausage. The biscuits were also sadly saccharine, closer in texture and style to the too thick and solid cornbread served alongside with a fridge cold tomato gloop.

I've no problem with sympathetically gentrified restaurants 'celebrating' the food of the local communities, hell, I live in Peckham, I'd love something like that round there, but it's got to be good enough to compete. On the evidence of my brunch, Red Rooster would struggle to make it as a curiosity in London, let alone stand tall in New York's Soul Food heartland.

An unexpected Friday in New York - June 2011

One of the joys of my job is the opportunity for international travel. We've got offices and clients around the world and I adore the fact I occasionally get to visit them. The most recent trip saw me taking in Singapore, Hong Kong and New York in the space of a slightly crazy, badly planned but necessary week. Now obviously I'm there to work (especially if my boss is reading this) but man has to eat too right?

Checking with Twitter (@richmajor if you don't follow) I was delighted to receive the following advice personally from Gael Greene, a legendary food critic who spent 40 years as the chief critic of New York Magazine as well as being the inventor of the word 'foodie'. 

@GaelGreene 

@richmajor Coppelia on w14 went again lasngt. GRt food,mod prices.cian ABCKitchen E18, Ciano 45 e 22, not new but good Mesa Grill 5&15th

Jun 11, 2:15 PM via web

So not just one, but four places to think about. In deference to someone of Gael's stature, I had to make sure I hit at least one of them up in the time I was there.