China 2013 - It begins... March 2013

It starts here! Six weeks of travelling China, starting in Shanghai. I'm planning on experiencing (and eating) as much of it as I can in the time I have.

Like almost any international city these days, it doesn't have to be a challenge. You can safely closet yourself in one of the five star fun palaces on the Bund, foraying out only to the Disneyfied, repainted lanes of Xintandi and Old Shanghai, eating sanitised (if occasionally stunning) colonially influenced food from big name chefs in other hotels. You totally miss the point if you do.

I'm lucky enough to have a man (fellow food obsessive Dr Science) on the ground, I've been able to jump right in. Hopefully, two weeks here in Shanghai, including a week of intensive Mandarin lessons, will give me a decent jumping off point. I won't bother trying to rehash the historical context, unless it's really relevant, instead I'll assume you have access to Wikipedia or Lonely Planet. If I find better, I'll let you know.

There's a few museums, but as much as anything, Shanghai is food, shopping and food. Pause for a drink and then grab some more food. Fine. By. Me. If New York is represented as the Big Apple, then Shanghai to the newbie is a plate of chilli covered Fish Maw; spicy, boney, resolutely and viscerally real, uncompromisingly challenging the first time you approach and yet utterly addictive with nuggets of absurdly good taste and flavour just waiting to be wheedled out.
 

While I'm looking forward to sampling a fair amount of delicious Shanghainese grub (including the near legendary street food scene), it's an immigrant city, with food from the furthest outposts of the Chinese empire found here. Going for a Chinese is as insane a concept as going for a European, a concept that London at least is close to getting. Depending who you listen to, the 'big four' or 'big eight' regional Chinese cuisines are all represented in the melting pot that is Shanghai and while some, particularly Cantonese, are well understood by the British, there are many that are not.

I had a few people ask slightly bemusedly whether Dr Science and I would be eating absolutely anything (implying dog, stinking tofu, snake, insect, turtle, shark and other contentious eats). While I'm not going out of my way to find it, if it's locally available, not endangered and not just a 'prestige' or 'medicinal' food then I'll give it a try. Stinky tofu is definitely on the list, as are odd body parts, insects and, possibly other things. For the record though, I've ruled out sharks fin and tiger penis (even if I could afford the latter...)

It's going to be an interesting few weeks. Shanghai to Beijing, to Xi'an in the West, then Chengdu and Chongqing in the South West and Guilin further South before heading back to mamma Shanghai. Wish me luck!

 

 

Simply the BEST - March 2013

Right... I'm off. Not forever, but certainly for the next six weeks. I'm going to China! I'll certainly be doing a lot of eating, and will probably be writing about it or taking out of focus badly lit photos of most of it, but won't be updating the blog until I'm back so I'll see you in May. To quote Vinnie Jones, it's been emotional.

In other news, I'm going to try out a new style of semi-regular story when I get back - 'Simply the Best' - I'll give you my top five recommendations in a certain category, while also reviewing the first restaurant ballsy enough to class themselves as 'the best' in that category on Google.

To give you an example, type 'the Best Indian Restaurant in London' into Google, and the first restaurant prepared to ascribe themselves that title is the venerable Gaylord Indian restaurant on Mortimer Street, beloved of corpulent middle aged salesmen and those schoolboys still tittering at the name. 

Check back after the 1st May to find out what I thought of Gaylord (stop it now) and we'll take it from there...

Caravan King's Cross - A stylish success - Mar 2013

Could there be anywhere with a whiter heat than King's Cross at the moment? Particularly for foodies. The rotating (if expensive) genius of a Kerb food market lunch, former 24 hour garage turned hip hangout Shrimpy's and an outpost of Exmouth Market's excellent Caravan. Not to mention the fabulous and fashionable Gilbert Scott, the wonderfully bizarre Karpo, modish gastro grub from recently renovated The Fellow and tapas from Camino? I exaggerate (of course), it still has some way to go before achieving Borough Market status (and is still host to the Faulty Towers of restaurants, Bistro De La Gare, home of the most hiliariously bad meal I ate in 2012). But compared to the flyblown wasteland of five years ago, there's a lot to celebrate.

Recently I've managed a solid trio of visits. A fabulous brunch and a pretty great lunch at Caravan King's Cross and a very, very decent lunch at neighbour Shrimpy's (not all on the same day I hasten to add...)

The quality of the food at Caravan is not at all unexpected given the heritage, but here it comes with added art students and without the queue you'll have at their other place in Exmouth Market.

The menu has a laid back Western Mediterranean vibe with influences and style borrowed from wherever makes tasty. It's effectively much lower priced Ottolenghis with decent coffee and no pretension.

That brunch was a silky aubergine stew with a modicum of smoke and sesame, gently cradling a brace of poached eggs, texture provided by chewy fresh sourdough and a delightfully gamey choritzo style sausage. A little bit of what I needed for the hangover that massively ailed me.

Returning for lunch a few weeks later, I dived into a few of their small plates with my guest. The plates range from £3 to £6 and three would easily do two for a light lunch, five if you're having lunch with me and one or two max if you're studying at St Martins next door. They're not called skinny jeans for nothing.

Tempura tofu was fresh and pillowy light. A crispy air coated marshmallow, flavour added with a hearty sesame and mushroom sauce. Spiced cornbread, fresh from the oven, added a chunk of flavour and a wumph of weight no sane art studentista would go near. Thankfully I was there to take the temptation away. Similarly, lemongrass pork was a significant endeavour for the money, sat on a turnip cake slightly overwhelmed by the tamarind infused juices, it was a pleasant piece of pig. The last two were similarly satisfying; a freshly and lightly fried Malay vegetable samosa and a refreshing broad bean and sweet potato flatbread salad topped with a sharp yoghurt. There's a range of good looking stone baked pizzas too and coffee roasted on the premises (of course…)
 
It's a lovely spot, saved from any arty pretentiousness by great staff and a real mixed crowd courtesy of the nearby station. A deservedly populist hit.

   

Dishoom Redux - Mar 2013

Ah Dishoom... The place I want so hard to love. Buzzy, relatively inexpensive and quirky, geezer-ish Sub-Continental street style food in a pukka Indian cafe, slap bang in the middle of Covent Garden. What's not to love?

They've certainly garnered support over the past year, not to mention another permanent location, this one next to Shoreditch House, threateningly close to the street flyer Kessel Run of Brick Lane.

With its amiably geezerish descriptors, the menu feels like it could been written by a Chowpatty Jamie Oliver, the spiritual brother of their next door neighbour. And like their next door neighbour, it feels like it's ripe for rollout. The all day 'cafe-vibe' schtick a shoe-in for shopping centre supremacy.

The service is shopping centre suitable too. Fast, well trained and entirely impersonal, operating on efficient pre-scripted rails from the moment you're sat down.

The food is pretty good, if not entirely quite there. The 'Ruby Murray' is good, and obviously well cooked with decent quality chicken but it's a little too 'mellow' for me. Keema Pau, a bland minced lamb served with English muffins has little to say for itself sadly. The house black dhal was admittedly lovely, the one dish I'd come back for, braised into a sauce rich and deep enough to feel meat infused, it had flavour to spare. The squid was over fried and the lamb chops a pale grey copy of those at Lahore or Tayyabs. It's all been done worse than this at a thousand curry places around the capital, but it's being done a whole load better at a critically acclaimed handful. On my evidence Dishoom isn't close to that Premier league.

There are just too many really decent Indian, Pakistani and Bengali restaurants I'd go to for a pre-planned curry trip and too many other restaurants in Covent Garden that get my attention for a walk up. Both of which are a slight shame, as it's really not that bad.

  PR photo from restaurant website

Baozi Inn - Stay out! Mar 2013

Offering a somewhat confused meander through North and West China (via Sichuan), the Baozi Inn has quietly squatted on its Chinatown corner for years. It's a bit down at heel inside, but no more than many of the other places that make up the alleys and nooks of Chinatown.

The baozi, ubiquitous across large parts of (particularly Northern) China where it is the equivalent of a sandwich, is a steamed doughy pocket, an oversized dumpling, stuffed with pork, mushrooms or whatever else is close to hand. It's hot, steamy meatiness is most of what I've ever wanted in a snack but for some reason it has never quite hit the spot. Unlike the steamed char sui buns you get on a weekend dim sum-athon, the dough is often too thick and dense for me, and the filling too often a molten hot, fatty meat patty swimming in it's own grease. As I say, it should do the trick...

Other than the leaden baozi which I've had a few times before from here and the stall across the road (each time vowing not to do it again), there's an array of other dishes on the menu. Many are Northern Chinese specialities but there's a scattering from the South West and elsewhere in the vast country. On deeper inspection sadly, none of what I tried recently was good.

Boiled beef fried in rice meal has the intriguing texture of slow cooked jerky coated in soft rice meal, like a rubbery overcooked fish finger swimming in astringent fuel cell orange oil. As unpleasant as it sounds, though they tried to inflict more digestive damage by banging it in a microwave before bringing it out. Beijing style dumplings with dark soy and vinegar were better, though the dumpling skin was much thicker than was entirely pleasant and at £7.50 a portion, three times the price of those at Silk Road.

Fridge cold spinach with beans, lemon and ginger dressing finished an under-ambitious, barely edible trio that left me wishing i'd had a sandwich instead. Not a baozi, I'd have taken a budget service station offering over that little lot, and wouldn't have come close to the £20 I had to shell out.