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. 

Short review of El Vergel June 2011

El Vergel is a lovely little (mostly) Chilean deli and cafe on Southwark Street. A big old space under a new build apartment block, it's got a half finished air, make do and mend fixtures and furniture slightly at odds with the industrial open pipe and wall effect of the shell. Living nearby and having read a recent description on the excellently written and beautifully designed blog Rocket and Squash, it was on my list of places to try. As it turns out, we just happened to walk past one day.

The deli counter at the front hosts entire families of empanadas when we rock up, during the week I'm assuming it's full of the various salads that make up their lunch menu, fuel for the nearby office workers. There's also a range of sandwiches, a few tacos (including a range just for breakfast) and a tostada or two.

Stopping off for a caffeine hit on our way through and arriving too late for their 'special latin breakfast' (it stops with the parsimony of a seaside B&B at 11am even on weekends), there was obviously only one thing left for me - the aforementioned empanadas. A reasonable £3.50 each, hot and homemade, served with refreshing chilli crackled green salsa. This cuts through the slight fattiness of the pork mince encased in the soft pastry shell. The meat is robust and plentiful, oozing out with intensity, spice and the depth of flavour that comes from a long slow simmer. Will definitely be back for the latin breakfast.

Rodizio Preto - Feb 2011

Where: Rodizio Preto, Wilton Street, Victoria

How much: £15 for access to hot and cold buffets and £20 a head for the full meaty menu

Come here if: you're organising a big party for carnivores who don't take themselves too seriously.

No matter how hard I think about it, I just can't force myself to really recommend Rodizio Preto to you. It's trying so hard (and succeeding) on so many levels, but the whole just didn't quite work. I knew it was too good to be true when, scanning around for somewhere to take the Radio Star for a (very) belated Christmas dinner, I came cross Victoria's very own all you can eat Brazilian meat buffet... So many reasons why that sentence should make sense. 

The restaurant themes itself as a Churrascaria, a Brazilian BBQ restaurant. After filling your plate with hot and cold Brazilian starters and sides (don't get too much.. seriously) you sit back and wait for the Passadores to arrive. Translating essentially as meat waiters, they bring large skewers to your table, carving off hunks of animal to order. 

It's a modern but undistinguished Latin American cafe style place focussed around that large buffet counter. Think 3* hotel breakfast room in the Algarve with canned Portuguese pop pumping out of the TV on the wall and you won't go far wrong. But you're not here for the look, you're here for the meaty experience. Friendly staff give you a card to place on your table that you swivel between 'Sin' and 'Nao' depending on your need for meat. They ignore it mostly, piling delectable cut on top of cut. Feel free to turn them down early on, I looked away from my plate for a second and returned to 4 or 5 lumps of cow. It's a marathon, not a sprint...

The skewers work, really well in the main, though miss hits come with a chicken sausage, too doughy for all of us, and a too tough fillet steak wrapped in bacon (what? Why!?). Other than that, chicken thigh takes the cooking process well, caramelised, crackling skin protecting the tender flesh, but as you'd expect, the real highlights are the slivers of steak, three or four different cuts or twists, served mainly rare and oozing with taste. The umami notes in the charred edges of the steak are heady and superbly flavoursome, tastebombs in your mouth to be savoured. Pork loin is another winner, unctuous porky fat delivering a whallop of taste. I'd recommend taking a thick piece of the beef shoulder too. It's a fatty cut, but takes to the churrasco grill superbly, fat rendering into moist flavour.

The salad bar disappointed a little. It's 'traditional', if you use traditional as a euphemism for cheaply prepared, fairly bland food you don't recognise. Hot sides consisted of rock solid cheese 'puffs', insipid and tasteless polenta cubes, onion rings and little breaded torpedos of deepfried plantain. The cold options were either mayonnaise based cubed veg, rice, or selections of random veg. As I say, keep it tight and leave room for the cow. Have a salad for lunch if you're worried about the state of your waistline.