Kimchee - muted Korean in Holborn May 2013

How the times have changed… A few years ago, a moodily lit, artfully ambient dark wood and slate room serving authentically ethnic South East Asian cuisine would have had queues out of the door. And it's certainly not that Kimchee is any worse than original contender Busabi Eathai, on the contrary, but we're no longer surprised at being able to eat such exotica in the midst of the city.

Kimchee promises an 'authentic, full Korean dining experience in the heart of London…' Apparently their founder hand noticed a paucity of decent ones. Given the number clustered round the Tottenham Court Road end of Covent Garden, he hadn't looked that hard. That said, you can't quibble with the description he provides. It's certainly a full experience, the menu must have forty or more dishes on it, many of them not seldom seen outside Seoul.

The majority of dishes fall into the 'small plates' territory. An extended number of them are a riff on the battered and deep fried, though sadly the few we shared didn't deliver anything that soared above the ordinary. Overly thick fried dough smothered the life out of already fairly tough squid, the knockout blow delivered by an acrid sweet chilli sauce. A Prawn Tuigim delivered a measly two (albeit decent) crustacea locked in a 'tempura' batter overcoat that could have held Hannibal Lecter.

Things got slightly better with the main, a competent if pedestrian dolsot bibimbap. After a heavenly experience in Naru a few months ago, I was definitely in the mood for another go on the hot stone bowl filled with gradually crisping fragrant rice and veg. Here it just lurked rather than jumping out. There was no discernible sesame aroma, scarce veggies and little kick from a side bowl of chilli sauce. If I'm back, it'll be to take something from the evocatively fragranced grill at the front of the restaurant, the smell of which was one of the few real highlights of the place.

Despite uncomfortable bench seating, the dark woods and soft stone delivered a handsome enough dining experience and for a business lunch where you're more concerned by chat than chow it gets a nod for being unobtrusively acceptable. It's a missed opportunity but one that still just about manages acceptability in the hinterlands of Holborn.

The Anchor and Hope in Waterloo - Perfection revisited May 2013

I don't say it often, but dinner at the Hope and Anchor is practically perfect in every way. It's been a while since I'd been, and longer since I'd written about it, so thought that a re-review was due. I'm very pleased to say that its place in my personal grubby, food stained list of London's dirty, sexy and cool restaurants is still assured. If this review sounds smug in any way, that's because it is. I'm still purring like a contented cat a week later...

If you can't cope with the recycled pub schtick, the buzz and irritations of tightly packed, shared tables or are looking for a quiet romantic dinner (at least one that doesn't involve sucking meat juice from your fingers) then steer clear. If you're fond of being hypercritical, you'll be pleased to know it's also unsurprisingly difficult to get a table, even early week, so either get there really, really early or be prepared to wait in the over spilling and rowdy bar. Whinge about that, because you won't be whinging about much else.

Arriving late we were lucky enough to stroll straight in. Skipping the usual wait at the bar with it's attendant reasonably priced (if basic) cocktails and well kept pints, we opted for a lovely drop of spicy Douro from the shallow end of the wine list as we took to our rickety wooden chairs at the brushed wood shared farmhouse table at the front. For the Farmer, this was home away from countryside home, particularly when he'd settled long enough to peruse the single sheet menu with its gruff single word descriptors of fish, flesh and fowl.

Hunks of fresh tangy sourdough with a huge pot of butter were followed by fresh, fragrant and wonderful British asparagus, succulent green vestal virgins dipped in a fresh buttery mayonnaise and decapitated as quickly as we could get them down our greedy little necks.
  

Coming down to the mains eyes and bellies just couldn't resist the whole mustard braised rabbit for two to share. A quick check before committing for both of us - "How's the rabbit? Worth it?" The waiter's smiling eyes glazed over as under his breath he muttered "it's absolutely fucking beautiful guys". The staff are utterly delightful - when you ask opinions, you really get them. They smile as they reel off the staff dinner menu from last week, smile as they advise a cheaper wine than we were planning on and genuinely seem to love working there. And who wouldn't with this kitchen? I'm tempted to pay for a job here, just to guarantee tasting this food daily, though I'd struggle to get through the tightly packed tables after a week or so of it.

As well as raising a delightful herd of rare breed beef (and an equally delightful family) the Farmer has the most marvellous day job. He's a classically trained singer for hire (like a gun for hire but with marginally better better life prospects). It'd be a cliche, though not entirely untrue, if I said he was loudly singing in praise of the Anchor and Hope. That being said, there was definitely a contented hum from us both as we sucked the last bones dry. Soft, slow braised bunny in a creamy sauce sopped up with triple cooked chips. It's never been the healthy option, but when it tastes this good you just don't care.

 

The Borough Barista - A very short note May 2013

An independent coffee shop just off Haymarket has got to be a good thing. The area has the stink of the chain and the tourist trap and with it's rough grey Farrow and Balls and rough hewn benchery it just screams lo-fi and proud.

But hold on a second… £3.90 for a small sausage sarnie and an extra 60 pee to eat in! Not when you're going to serve it to me on a paper plate alongside coffee in a take away cup.

Hell. Fire.

Coffee might be proudly served from a a La Marzocco Machine (a sign of quality for those who know their beans?) but even the undoubted cache of the cup o'Joe (excellent though exact bean unidentified) didn't distract me from the that punchy pricing. If I'm near Piccadilly and want to spend nearly £9 on my breakfast, I'm going to the Wolesley…

  

Shanghai foodie report 2 - Mid priced dining - May 2013

 

Beer Braised Duck at Guyi

In a city where authenticity and taste reign supreme, it’s not unusual to see a Porsche or a new Maserati parked up outside an anonymous hole-in-the-wall diner known for serving the best Mao Shi Hong Shao Rou (Chairman Mao’s favourite braised pork dish) in town. As a foodie, I wholeheartedly agree with this attitude. Price definitely doesn't need to equate to quality and this sprawling city is rife with great restaurants where it's difficult to spend to spend much more than a tenner a head.

To sum it up in a street or two, my abiding memories of Shanghai will be of the variety of contrasting tastes around Jinxian Road and Yongkang Road, two similarly charming, quiet little streets in the French Concession. Most importantly, both were not only interspersed with a number of chi-chi boutiques but bars, coffee shops and several of those Porsche-attracting holes-in-the-wall.


Jinxian Lu and Gourmet Zone 

Queen of the strip is Mama LanXin. A garrulous broad, she seems almost amused by her popularity, treating her fiefdom of six tiny plastic-covered tables as a fragrant and bustling extension to her living quarters, the patrons as much her guests as her evening's entertainment. There's no picture menu, but for the occasional visitor that doesn't matter: unless you order immediately as you enter, you'll end up with what she thinks you'll like. she licks her lips at the prospect of an encounter with tourists, the exchange with the laowei played for amusement to the rest of the room. Suck it up. A range of Shanghainese specialities including fresh honey-coated shrimp and deep burnished hong shao rou, pillowy soft chunks of pork belly slow braised in soy and spice, are worth a mild ribbing.
 

The queue outside LanXin

If you can't cope with the wait (and there will be a wait), her daughter has Maolong, a similar joint next door, or you can wander down to the end of the short road for slightly smaller queues outside Haijinzi, or deep, umami filled boiled broths at the bullishly named Number One Hot Pot. Abutting Jinxian Road is the odd but rather wonderful food emporium Gourmet Zone. If you can tear yourself away from quirky soft darts and excellent cocktails at the Side Bar, you'll find three floors of restaurants huddled together for the warmth, with a wide range of options available. While the Burmese / Vietnamese / Laotian border region of Yunnan is (very well) represented by both Southern Barbarian and atmospheric Monsoon, Di Shui Dong has cornered the market in homestyle Xiang cuisine. Queues are often down the tiny wood-clad staircase, so it's definitely worth going early week and early in the evening (that's before 7 in early-dining Shanghai). Food from Mao's home province Hunan is (often literally) gutsy, almost always spicy and deep braised, slow cooked deliciousness. Treats to try include the inevitable Mao's pork; spicy bullfrog with its tiny toothpick bones, fresh white flesh and chilli falling apart in your mouth; 'twice cooked' cured Hunan ham with dry fried green beans, and a number of river fish dishes, most famously 'split head' style, with finely chopped peppers covering the soft steamed flesh. If you've got a sweet tooth then finish on toffee-covered sweet potato 'chips'.


Yongkang Lu and the Embassy district
For an expat-friendly twist on the French Concession, you can do a lot worse than an evening stroll along Yongkang Road. A range of tiny, trendy bars, mainly of with a Gallic bent, ideal for a pastis and equally good for a (European or American) craft beer. Particularly worth a punt are The Rooster and The Handle Bar, tiny little loft spaces ideal for a swift half, the fairly self explanatory Sailor's Fish and Chips and a good value branch of Sushi'O. French bakery and casual eatery Les Stagiers felt less Shanghai expat, more Verbiers gap yah and the Oirish bar at the end of the short road just looked smokey and nasty, one for those who really can't tear themselves away from the black stuff.

 

Further to the West by a few blocks, you hit expat central with the large and bustling Shanghai Brewery, nearby Camel Sports Bar and the slightly more upmarket (and pretentious) Boxing Cat Brewery. Sure they're fratty, a home from home for the financial workers and Embassy drones, but the food and beers fast-track you right back to the States. Not what everyone's looking for but they and the range of European restaurants around them are a refreshing change if you find yourself Shanghai'ed out.

Around there too you find Anfu Lu bisecting Wulumuqi Middle Road. Both streets also have a range of reasonable restaurants, the first more Western in feel with casual European dining courtesy of Mr. Willis and a couple of excellent, rare wine bars in Just Grapes and Enoteca. The second is more Chinese in general, with several Muslim West Chinese noodle restaurants and the very earthy Hunan Country Kitchen, home of some very stinky tofu!


Other areas and restaurants of note
You could reference any number of restaurants on any number of roads offering similar fair-priced dining experiences. A food blogger would have their work cut out just trying to cover a small area and I certainly couldn't in the limited time I had (though reader, I tried…)

The two mid price heavyweights most often recommended on Western forums are Din Tai Fung and Jesse. There are branches of both around the city. The latter is a traditional Shanghainese dining experience, the former a Taiwanese interloper and (whisper it) home to possibly the best xiao long bao in the city that invented them. Also well worth a look is the reservation-free Hunan institution Guyi, home to some excellent ribs, more divine bullfrog and deep fried, chilli spiced eggs, a side dish so addictive they should be illegal. If you're living on the mild side, then the two branches of Lost Heaven will be a bone-free oasis with their expat-friendly Yunan cuisine. Their Bund location is also home to an excellent roof terrace - welcome in the spring, it's got to be a haven in the heavy summer.

Those deepfried eggs at Guyi

XLB by the book at Din Tai Fung

Mao Shi Hong Shao Rou at LanXin

LanXin

Prepared for Number One Hot Pot

Perfect spare ribs at Di Shui Dong

Minced Pork Wraps at Lost Heaven

  

Shanghai foodie report 1 - Dining at the high end - May 2013

 

Three on the Bund

Try to sum up the food scene of any city in a few hundred words and you’ll struggle. Try and do it to one containing over 23 million hungry people in its metropolitan clutches and you’re on a hiding to nothing. I might as well give up now.

Shanghai isn’t a city for sightseers. It’s a city for shoppers, and above all eaters. From the rarefied (if a little smoggy) air of the Bund and the towers of Pudong down to the lanes and shopping centres and street kerbs you can’t go anywhere without being assailed by the sights, tastes and smells of a million and one altars to the god of this secular country.

After several weeks attempting to eat my way around the place, I thought it wise to cover off a few highlights by price point rather than hitting everything I’ve experienced. I’ve updated a Google map for the city below that will contain the best of the rest as well as the recommendations I got but couldn’t find time for.

View Shanghai! in a larger map

Shanghai fine dining
Long, long gone are the days of the colonial caste that inhabited the Shanghai Club (the archaic membership ‘ran’ the city were so set in their hierarchical ordered ways that as the town fell to the Japanese in 1942, a visiting British naval officer wasn’t allowed in until a committee had been convened to vote him a temporary membership, despite the bullets peppering the building). It’s here, under the glare of the Pudong skyline, that the great, the good and the wealthy are still congregating.

Occupied still by banking and commerce, the Bund also features a plethora of high-end restaurants to match any city in the world. Three on the Bund, the only privately owned real estate on the strip, is an elegant building, the restaurants on its different floors carefully curated by superchef Jean Georges Vonerichen, the Alscace's answer to Gordon Ramsay. Unusual in that it doesn't feature rooms, in every other respect it has the impression of a very successful five star hotel.
 

Chocolate Budino at Mercato

You could stay in Shanghai for a week and only eat at Three on the Bund, such are the range of different restaurants within the different floors. We had a particularly standout meal at new Italian Mercato. It’s odd not to be eating with chopsticks, but once over that, there’s a lot to love here. A focus on locally sourced ingredients gave us amazing (in all senses of the word given the Chinese lack of dairy empathy) burratta, cut with a divine lemon compote. We followed that with Kingfish carpaccio and crispy skinned chicken to die for. The building also hosts the iconic Jean Georges, masculine Argentine steakhouse Colagreco and casual bar dining at Unico.

Also very much of note on the Bund are beautifully presented French classics ‘with a twist’ from Mr. & Mrs. Bund (their foie gras mousse is all manner of right), haute Middle Eastern at nearby M on the Bund and who knows what at the hilariously bonkers sounding Ultraviolet, an ‘immersive’ food experience where what you see and hear are given as much respect as what you eat. Like Heston Blumenthal on no sleep and an enormous bag of mind altering drugs. 

 

The dining room at Table No1 

 Other than those few, if it’s non Chinese you’re looking for, you’ll find a wealth of European and American comfort food (including the obligatory Morton’s Steakhouse) among the gleaming towers of Pudong and the usual swathe of Western friendly tastes in most of the higher rated hotels. You’ll also find Ramsay alumni and chef du jour Jason Atherton occasionally skulking behind the pass at Table No1 in beautifully Brooklyn inspired boutique hotel Waterhouse at South Bund. Visit for casual dining and the modern interpretations he’s known for in London (including Pollen Street's deconstructed English Breakfast). I loved a delicate sole dish with light aromatics and gently steamed veg. It’s also, perhaps unsurprisingly, offers another English breakfast in the morning and possibly the only ‘proper’ herby English sausages you’ll find in Shanghai. Heaven for the slightly homesick on a Sunday morning!

‘Fine’ Chinese dining is somewhat harder to track down. The Whampoa Club also at Three on the Bund serves an elegant mixture of Chinese Imperial dishes and Shanghainese classics in a beautiful art deco jewelbox, We Jing Ge at the Bund Waldorf Astoria and the Family Li Imperial Cuisine off the same boulevard also offer a la carte and ‘grand dining’ set menu recipes ‘borrowed’ from the Forbidden City. Siblings Fu 1088 and Fu 1039 also deserve a mention, the pair serving traditional and high end Shanghainese (think sweet, sauce covered and fish focused) in large elegant Latinate villas near to Jing’an Temple. They are made up of a succession of private rooms and large tables so ideal for group and family dining, the preferred Chinese way.

 

Many, Many Mao

In general though, the Shanghainese don’t seem to have quite the same desire to spend big on home style foods, preferring (and I’m in absolute concurrence) to eat good at one of the many smaller provincial restaurants dotted around the city. There’s something bewildering but utterly pleasing about seeing a Porsche parked up on a non descript side road, is owner parked on a plastic stool outside a tiny hole in the wall serving the best damn take your pick in Shanghai. Now that’s cultured capitalism… I’ll cover some of those off in the next piece. 

The Reform Social and Grill - What What! May 2013

Spring! As the first rays of life-giving sun hit your upturned cheeks and the nights recede into long placid evenings with the promise of chilled rose wine. A thousand BBQ's rumble out of garages, the long forgotten, rusty and oil stained armoured vanguard of summer. Spring! A time of salads and green and the lightest of touches. Spring! The perfect time to visit a gentleman's club inspired grill restaurant then… ah. No.. sadly not.

I'd had the Reform Social highlighted to me by a number of people back in the depths of winter (i.e. various points in the last 12 months) and the reports had all said broadly the same thing. Pretty decent food, if heavy on the meat and puddings, and a dark, clubby, cocoon of a space with snug leather seating you could drown in. 

In summary, ideal for a long gentleman's luncheon before the weather breaks for the better... Well I'm no follower of fashion (just look at my wardrobe) and that's why I'd waited until the first fragrant days of warmth and light before pulling on my crushed velvet smoking jacket, adjusting my monocle and finding a saucy young slip of a gel to entertain.

Slotted underneath the Mandeville Hotel just off Marylebone High Street, the hotelish (and not entirely in a good way) bar was our first entry point. The way robustly blocked by a florid and fully padded post work crowd enjoying a discount deal on fizz we squeezed uncomfortably through to the dining room at the other side of the lounge. 

   

Here I was pleased to see a full crowd of mixed ages. My gentleman's jacket wouldn't have looked entirely out of place, but neither were we marooned in fuddy-duddy land. The table of birthday partying hipsters and a gaggle of courting couples dining gave our section of the long dark room a gentle (and genteel) buzz.

Things started very well with a crisp, clean and perfectly cooked duck 'Scotch' egg, wrapped in a pliant and piquant black pudding shell. It clashed with an unnecessary trough of apple sauce, but solo was note perfect.

The mains sadly were less accomplished in their delivery. Both arrived on a generic root vegetable puree, hay cooked hake was a fine piece of fish, but smokier and saltier than a Glaswegian sailors mission. Stuffed lamb breast, a substitution for the stout sounding Angus rose veal chop I'd been salivating for, came as an underwelmingly small and fatty roulade filled with a fishy breadcrumb mix and topped bafflingly with tight and over-battered scampi, an odd mix that did none of the constituent parts justice. A side of pumpkin with chilli and sage gave none of the flavour of either and was verging on undercooked to boot. There's a good looking grill section here filled with some handsomely sourced cuts. I can only blame our ordering for missing them out.

Thankfully there was a knowing hand on the desserts, reason almost to return in themselves. My Bakewell Pudding, a crispy puck of choux filled with tart fruit and covered in thick vanilla custard the colour and consistency of whipped butter. A darkly decadent chocolate and blood orange pot was equally moreish. Given what I saw of the cocktails, I'm tempted to return for a lush's afternoon tea combining the two.

On a slight negative note, there was a noticeable level of fractiousness among the front of house team, commands and critiques hissed not sotto voce enough to be unheard as the harried team flew around us. It wasn't ideal. They were pretty good face to face, just less so when talking to each other.

There's less knowing cool than at that other modern bastions of of 'private member's-chic' like Dean Street Townhouse and Hawksmoor (both of whom definitely hosted planning meetings for this place) but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It doesn't do it quite as well as the aforementioned, but does well enough at a reasonable price that you won't probably shouldn't mind.