Le Cafe Anglais - Mar 2012

There should probably be a snidey joke about eating in shopping centres somewhere here but Le Cafe Anglais is no food court cop out. Sure, it's occupied the top floor of handsome from the outside Whiteleys for five years now, but if the shopping centre trades on past glories Le Cafe Anglais resolutely doesn't.

If you'd been told that Capice Holdings or Corbin & King had a hand in the place you wouldn't be surprised (they haven't to the best of my knowledge) - it displays several hallmarks of a well designed, well run restaurant by their exacting rulebook. Attentive, individual staff; an eye for detail; simple tastes and flavours and great, great quality ingredients.

The food was simple and excellent. It breaks neither budget nor boundaries but delivers a solid performance for £30-£35 a head. From an expansive brasserie menu I went for plump, juicy if teeny tiny scallops followed by a simply grilled veal escalope. Good as it was to tuck into after a week of more challenging dining, i admit to slight food envy watching Dr Vole and the Northern Mother tuck into a perfect piece of muscly firm hake, served under a snappy salsa verde atop dense sticky lentils. Competence can be used as an indicator of the ordinary or prosaic, here it was sublime.

The dining room is grand. High windows open up the light flooding over chandeliers and sassy banquettes. Beautiful floral displays set off the crisp white linens and serried tableware. If I had to find fault here it couldn't be with the front of house look or the intelligent wait staff, though I whoever chose such an awful, artless Jackson Pollock for public transport carpet for the space needs their head examining.

Other than that godawful floor covering; if there's a fault, it can only be in the location. It's a shame someone as talented as Head Chef Rowley Leigh was forced to spend his time leaning next to the pass checking his phone and chatting to regulars rather than locked in the kitchen. Maybe the ladies who lunch do so during the week, but you won't find much better cooking at this price level and style within the area and it's a shame that on this Saturday lunch at least, it didn't have a more appreciative audience.

New kid on the block - the Dim Sum Diner - Jan 2012

Great dim sum is one of the world's best meals. A range of tiny parcels and baked goodies, subtly fragranced and served hot from the kitchen to order, ideal for sharing. Average dim sum is forgettable, instantly fading in the memory, good as a temporary pitstop but not really anything more.

Sadly new kid on the block Dim Sum Diner falls firmly into the latter category. It filled a hole, but even an hour after eating Teacher Boy and I struggled to remember the detail of the ones we liked. Writing this up a few days later and I had to fall back on photographs.

There's nothing wrong with the location; a small unit on the populus Queensway drag. The decor is relatively inoffensive; clean, plain and primary coloured surfaces and Wagamamma's style furniture. The staff are friendly, efficient and attentive - the fact we were the only ones in may have helped this. To an extent my ennui came from the prosaic and unimaginative menu; offering a range of dim sum 'classics' (though no cheung fun oddly) and small plate Chinese dishes alongside a random handful of diner fare; mini hot dogs, burgers and a battered fish dropped into the mix for no discernible reason.

Of the good, we enjoyed a punchy and fresh if not terribly authentic Dan Dan Noodle dish. Chilli calmed from the dish's Sichuan street peddlar roots, interpreted here as mince and noodles in a light spicy gravy rather than the tongue tingling peasant soup I would have liked. Still, it was filled with meat and certainly pleasant enough. Pan fried Peking pork dumplings came with moreish dipping sauce, crisp skins and the heat of several suns inside. Steamed pork Xiao Long Bao and hot white clouds filled with sticky Char Sui were perfectly fine. Hot and freshly prepared, I had nothing against them, though the claims that they were 'made in-house with fresh ingredients' were tested by the delivery man walking pre-prepped trayfuls through the restaurant from the outside street.

Sadly the meal went awry with the PR's recommendations. Interesting on paper, disastrous in the mouth. Barbeque Pork Puff Rolls were over-fried cigars with a thick carapace managing to be cloyingly dusty and oil soaked at the same time and filled with red hot viscous gloop. Prawns in a vermicelli crust were drowned in a sweet and sickly mustard sauce that unpleasantly reminded me of an 'experimental' and unsuccessful take on salad cream. Guinness crab meat dumplings were as wrong as they sound.

Despite that, there's much to like. The staff were lovely, the basic dumplings were acceptable and portions are less than £4 each, so it's a reasonably cheap variant, even compared with Soho standards. I'd come back again if I lived or worked in the area though couldn't see myself making a special trip unfortunately.

 Dan Dan Noodles (above) and prawns in a mustard salad cream combi

 The brains below are the Guinness Crab Dumplings... 

   

Saturday brunch at The Electric Brasserie - Nov 2011

In most communities across the social spectrum (and around the world for that matter) the market cafe is a fixture. My Nana used to take me for a bacon sandwich at a tiny hole in the wall place hidden behind the stalls in Hull town centre if I volunteered to help with the weekly food shop with her. She'd been going there for years, as had all of the other old dots who'd pop in for a cup of tea and a chat. While between jobs a few years ago, I spent a lot of time people watching on East Street market through the steamed up windows of a greasy spoon full of market life. Formica table topped, fastened down orange plastic bucket chairs, a mug of tea with the bag still in and white slice, smeared with lurid yellow margarine.
 
It’s no surprise that, as one of the largest markets in London, Portobello Road has a fair few cafes strung down the mile long stretch of antiques stalls intermingled with fruit, vintage clothes and tourist tat. The look and feel changes dramatically as you go under the Westway, and the high end tourists fade away into a more local mixed crowd of different ethnicities.

The Electric Cinema and Brasserie straddles the border, but as a venue owned by the Soho House Group, you can guess which market they mostly appeal to. It’s been a fixture round here since 2001, a relatively early outlier of the gentrification that’s engulfed the streets around. The brasserie isn’t itself a private club, not that you can tell from the attitude of some of the staff, though the ‘House’ upstairs is. An intermittently appealing spot for mid-week coffee and brunch, it’s a ‘destination’ for the wrong reasons on market days.

The venue is looking a little tatty around the edges now. Battered zinc tables and dark wood stretch down the side of a long open bar and kitchen, opening up into a wider dining space at the back like a calm pool behind the frenetic waterfall. We were booked into the front though ‘bumped’ to the backroom following a whispered argument about a 20 minute wait from the party queuing in front of us. On a weekday this would be annoying, out of sight is out of mind to the whirling wait staff. On a Saturday, the chaos front of house means a back table is preferable. A snake of expectant hipsters rubberneck at your plates as they wait at the front desk, always in the way of the dfsgrgaergasergsaerg
 
The brunch menu is full of solid fare; full English and Vegetarian breakfasts with varying combinations, muffins, bacon and eggs in numerous combinations. As well as the obvious dishes, there are a fair few favourites from the full menu including fish or steak and chips and their passable fish pie. Avocado and poached egg on granary toast is a game choice, more avocado than anything else, but a relatively healthy way to cure a hangover. The Eggs Royale were a little disappointing despite their initial visual promise. Beautiful golden yolked eggs served atop a mountain of salmon with hollandaise sauce coating and dripping onto the muffin below. The ingredients were faultless, but with one egg virtually hard boiled and the other’s unset albumen having barely been cooked, it was clear that the eye for detail wasn’t covering all of the dishes to leave the kitchen.

It’s tough to damn somewhere for one undercooked egg, and I’m not going to. I’ve had some wonderfully relaxing breakfasts sat at the front of the Brasserie and a couple of reasonable lunches too, I’d just recommend avoiding it at the weekend and leave it to the tourists. If you are in the area on a weekend, it’s well worth a wander down to the unfashionable end of the market to the lower reaches of Golbourne Road to the street food stalls and the wonderful pastries at the Lisboa Patisserie. It’s one of several tiny Portuguese bakeries and cafes along the road and (relatively) untouched by the encroaching gentrification. Their pastel de nata are small egg custard gems, well worth the trip for a half dozen to take away and a much tastier egg than you’ll find elsewhere.