London Restaurants by category
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.
Where: Kopapa, Covent Garden
How much: £60 a head (including wine) for 3/4 tapas plates each and dessert
Come here if: your mother told you to stop playing with your food, and you never listened
Peter Gordon, one of the chefs responsible for bringing fusion cooking to mainstream London and the man behind Marylebone foodie Mecca the Providores, has finally opened a new restaurant in Covent Garden. Several notable meals at his old place mean I'm bound for a visit, and so round up an eclectic (read weird) bunch of friends for the visit. Two of them got married after meeting on a plane, one I met running shoeless round a wedding and another lives with me. As I say, weird.
The space is cleanly bistro crafted. There's no sign of zany imaginations here at least. Small tables squeeze into rows and solo diners seated at the long marble bar. It's open all day, for brunch, coffees and main meals - like the Wolesley's chain restaurant style brother, with slightly less style.
A measly four mains appear to follow an enormous number of starter sized tapas plates on the menu, it's clear where you should be ordering. It's truly lip-smacking stuff on paper and not a single item fails to tick my boxes. The joys of fusion cooking are to paraphrase, that you get to try every flavour combination that you walk past in the street. Go and have a look at the menu, seriously, it's hilarious. The delicious agony of shared plate negotiation would be real fun for two or three gastronomic diplomats but it swiftly gets unwieldy for six, not helped by the speed of the service. Apart from a rush of plates at the end it's two hours after we start before anyone is feeling remotely sated. Too often solo single plates arrive leaving the eater looking round guiltily while five forks hover. There's a yawning pause in the middle explained blithely as 'busy kitchen, they're getting to it'. I get that its tapas service, but know that it doesn't have to be like this. A trip to Dehesa, Fino or any of a number of others would tell them that.
So many dishes came listed with 2 or 3 ingredients more than you could identify, or need, or want. It's a style of flavour fusion that relies on throwing a lot of tastes together in your mouth and letting them fight for supremacy. When it's good it's very, very good and when it's bad it's, well, pretty pointless.
Highlights included fluffy, sweet, roast Cassava chips with a tangy chilli sauce and meaty fillets of pan fried John Dory on a garlicky bed of ratte potatoes. Char-grilled aubergine came stuffed with tahini tofu, slightly overpowering the black bean miso and ginger dressing alongside, but stickily tasty. A simple plate of grilled sardine was spot on. It came with a caper, olive and tomato salsa, a marriage of fresh fish cooked expertly and a sharp, made for it, accompaniment. The only total misfire was a dish of lambs sweetbreads. They were cooked well, but totally obliterated by an over reduced sticky sweet mess of Madeira jus that rendered the thing inedible.
Seared scallop on the other hand, didn't have enough caramel colour or texture to stop it rather blandly merging into the pinenut purée it came with. Alongside this a thin pressed Jamon toastie was a welcome textural addition, though I was slightly bemused by the tasteless hibiscus jus slopped on the plate like spilt Ribena. The other no score draw was the panko crusted, rough chopped Iberico sausage stuffed with Cheddar (really? why?!) and shiso (what? a Japanese minty herb, flavour not strong enough to come through) - the bastard son of a corndog and a Scotch egg. Served with Vietnamese coleslaw and a seemingly there for the ingredients list Tamarind Caramel. A double baked cheese souffle is just that, and tasty with it, though I've no idea why it's served with pomegranate seeds. Texturally interesting, but unnecessary and fairly irrelevant.
Like the fusion style it espouses, Kopapa should be much more than the sum of its parts. Sadly they hit the high notes just too rarely for me to rush back, and at the price, it's just not worth the risk. A shame, as there's quite obviously real talent here. I'd be tempted back for a fairly reasonable £15.50 2 course pre-theatre set menu, but not much else.
