Tomorrow I fly to Bangkok for a 2 months eating & cooking S-E Asian food (see previous post)...and so, last night, by way of a final treat (& in contrast to all the Asian grub I'll soon be scoffing) the girlfriend and I had dinner at St John.
Anyone who knows anything about restaurants in London knows this restaurant, and the towering reputation of it's chef-founder Fergus Henderson.
It didn't disappoint. We ate, amongst other things,...brown shrimps with white cabbage, pigeon & trotter pie (for 2) and ginger cake with vanilla ice cream & butterscotch sauce.
The dishes read almost too simple; you're not entirely sure how they'll be delicious ("errr is it just cabbage and shrimp then...?") but, at St John, they always are.
And they were: the brown shrimp came in a pile of finely shredded dressed cabbage, dotted with delicious little capers, the pie was deep, savoury and moreish; the dessert was in the style of your granny's but with a taste about 10 notches up - the sauce like velvet with just the perfect amount of burnt sugar bitterness tempering the sweetness.
As much as the food, the thing I like about St John is the restaurant's philosophy & atmosphere. It's one of London's most successful and admired restaurants, but it's not pretentious. The food is amazingly simple but utterly delicious. The dishes are the result of finding amazing ingredients and doing just enough to show them off, and nothing more. Everything on the plate is there for the eating, not to impress the eye, and if that means a dish of just four ingredients, then so be it.It seems to me the people who eat at St John are real foodies. Not the flash types you get at Royal Hospital road, but a fairly bohemian mix of people who happen to know good food. The food is not cheap, but £83 for three courses, a shared dessert and a bottle of red isn't that pricey either...you can get some very shit meals in London for that money.
If I was going to open a restaurant then it would definitely be in the style of places like St John, Moro, Trullo etc - small & regularly changing menu, interesting simple food, relaxed atmosphere...
...just perhaps with bowls of rice instead of baskets of sourdough.
Next post from Bangkok!
Andy
St. JOHN Bar & Restaurant Smithfield
26 St John Street
London
EC1M 4AY
Tel: +44(020) 7251 0848
Moro & Morito (this also happens to be the view from my front door).
Had lunch at Morito today. It's the Tapas bar version of Sam & Sam Clark's ever-popular restaurant Moro, which is next door.
I actually live opposite so have no excuse for not having been already. Plus I have previously spent a week in the kitchen at Moro and am already a fan of their food.
The legendary Fergus Henderson was just finishing his lunch at the bar as I sat down, always a good sign.
I had a spiced fish soup infused with Iranian dried limes (£4.50), and a plate of white beans, aioli and butifarra (a white Catalan pork sausage (£5.50), plus some interesting breads and glass of really good pomegranate juice.
All delicious.
Morito
32 Exmouth Market, EC1R 4QL
(no bookings, walk-in only)
p.s for a more comprehensive review see here.
Wing beans - they're beans with.... errr wings.
I'd seen them before in Asian stores (they're used all the way from India to Vietnam & China) but not eaten them until recently....
...Green Papaya - a Vietnamese restaurant on Mare St (in Hackney) introduced them to me. I ate there with a few friends and the wing beans along with a crisp smoked tofu number were, unexpectedly, the most popular dishes on a well packed table.
I was doing some Asian food the other night and thought I'd do my own rendition of the dish. I wasn't certain what Green Papaya used i settled on dressing them with Chinese black rice vinegar, light soy, pinch of sugar and some roasted sesame oil and then scattering with toasted sesame seeds.
Very easy, but it came out how I'd hoped: crunchy interesting beans with sharp, salty, & slightly sweet sesame dressing.
See pic, which comes courtesy of professional snapper friend Wix (see www.jameswicksphoto.com), and basic recipe below...
Wing beans with black vinegar dressing:
Ingredients:
Two generous handfuls of winged beans, cut into 2cm pieces
Salt
A tablespoon of toasted sesame seeds
Dressing: 2 tablespoons of Chinese black vinegar, 2 tablespoons of light soy sauce, 1 teaspoon of toasted sesame oil, 1 teaspoon white sugar & 1 teaspoon water.
Method:
Blanch the beans in salted boiling water for 2- 3mins, drain and then briefly refresh under cold running water (just a few seconds - so the beans stay warm but don't continue to cook and loose their bright green colour).
Mix the dressing ingredients together, taste and adjust if needed, then toss the warm beans in the dressing and finish with sprinkled toasted sesame seeds.
Would go well alongside many Chinese style dishes e.g some ginger-spring onion-soy steamed fish thing, or a slow braised hot pot (i.e rather than with something like a coconut based curry).
More recipes v.soon.
Just quick note to give a thumbs up to a little sushi restaurant I discovered for the first time the other day.
Sushi of Shiori is near Euston / Regents park, on Drummond St (which is also packed with cheap Indian eateries).
The place is small and somewhat pokey but the couple who own it clearly run a tight ship. We had decent yakatori but the unagi nigiri (grilled marinated eel on top of sushi rice mound), super fresh sushi selection, and a bowl of miso soup good enough to bathe in (a Wallace-ism that), were the highlights. Nice green tea ice cream too.
See London Eater's great review and beautiful snaps here
144 Drummond Street, NW1 2PAp.s will have more of my own snaps up here soon as my camera is back in action.
I ate at Koya with a couple of friends the other day. It's a compact Japanese canteen style joint in Soho, it's had foodies queueing out the door every night since it opened. The speciality at Koya is home-made udon noodles, served in various interesting ways, along with other Japanese sides, tempura etc.
My knowledge of Japanese food is limited to what I've eaten in few places around London and what I learnt in the week I spent at Nobu Berkely. So i won't bang on about dashi stocks and the process of making udon noodles by hand...because I'd probably have to make it up.
Suffice to say the food was really good. We ate various udon dishes...i had smoked mackerel with green leaves and a cold pouring sauce, friends had a beef curry and a hot miso pork version. All yummy and the noodles were good - chewy, fresh and satisfying.
As good, if not better, were the sides. We had braised cider pork belly, which was rich, sweet and tender (and served with a blob of brilliant fiery-fresh mustard) and tempura cod with lotus root chips. The cod was spot on, crisp, moist and cooked to perfection, served with a dipping sauce, some minced radish etc. We got beetroot and sweet potato crisps instead of the advertised lotus root but who cares, they were good too.
The tempura cod - banging!
£18 a head with a beer each, not bad. Plenty of other interesting variations on the menu too, so I'll be going back soon.
Koya - go try it, even if you're not big on udon-wormy-noodleness.
Koya
49 Frith St, Soho.
W1D 4SG
Sometimes we have 'late' starts at work (get in for 1:30pm). Lunch first is therefore needed, but all I ever seem to find in my fridge nowadays is old bits of galangal or, if I'm lucky, a lump of hard cheddar.
So am always on the lookout for place to get good cheap, tasty and quick food along my Holborn-Soho-Picadilly cycle route. Yalla Yalla is a Lebanese 'street food' cafe hidden in Soho which I'd heard about, and fairly cheap too, so fits the bill. I went there for pre work feed last wk...
There's no surprises on the menu...falafel, kibbeh, fattoush, grilled meats etc. But the food was good, and not expensive. I had a roast aubergine baba ganoush thing, tabbouleh, pittas and lamb sausage stew. Plus some fresh juice. All was really nice except the tabbouleh (I know it's supposed to be mostly herbs but this one was made from 99% old n tough parsley & tasted like hedge trimmings drenched in lemon juice), but home made lamb sausages in nicely-sour fresh tomato stew, good breads & an excellent smoky aubergine goop more than made up for it.
They do takeaway too.
www.yalla-yalla.co.uk
Here's a couple of ideas on where's hot to eat in London right now...
Trullo: www.trullorestaurant.com/
Just opened off highbury corner, Trullo does a tight menu of rustic Italian dishes.
Opened by a guy who I know from the week I spent working at Moro - Tim Siadatan. Before Moro Tim was at the prestigious St John and was one of Jamie's original recruits for his 'Fifteen' project, and, randomly, is the brother of Apprentice winner Yasmina Siadatan.
Tim Siadatan
The style is similar to Moro, The River Cafe and Bocca di Lupo (not surpising really, when you realise Jacob who set up BDL used to work at Moro and Sam & Sam who started Moro came from the River Cafe); the charcoal grill gets a lot of action, there's a small ingredients-led menu and so on. But it's cheaper - starters around £5 and mains are about the £12 mark.
Book in advance though - with glowing reviews the place has got off to a flying start and tables are hard to come by.
The Loft Project: theloftproject.co.uk
If you want something different and exclusive then this could be for you...not a restaurant The Loft is a Dalston based "platform for the next generation of talented chefs to take up residency and showcase their food".
Errr yeah...well basically it's a private venue which has top quality guest chefs come and cook their own signature menus. It holds a maximum of 16 at one table and the menu is a fixed multi course (normally around 12 dishes) menu designed and cooked by whichever chef is resident that day.
The place is the brain child of Nuno Mendes and the chefs who cook there are undoubtedly some of Europe's most exciting talent.
Check out the schedule of top gun cheffers here
At £120 per head it's not cheap, but that includes wine, and where else are you going to get a private tasting menu from a culinary trail blazer for that price? Errrm.... nowhere? Correct!
Viajante www.viajante.co.uk/
Not content with just The Loft, this summer Nuno Mendes opened the seriously ambitious restaurant 'Viajante' in a very cool venue: the Bethnal Green Old Town Hall.
Rather than read me ramble on about it have a look at these two links to give you an idea of the place:
www.timeout.com/london/restaurants/venue/2:26888/viajante
www.theworlds50best.com/tag/nuno-mendes
The food at newly opened Vijante is some of London's most modern modern and inventive.
A couple of other 'hot' London tables:
What is banh mi?
Banh mi is a Vietnamese baguette, a kind of half French half South-east Asian sub. A legacy of the French occupation of Vietnam, these little beauties are normally filled with a delicious combo of pickled veg, 'Vietnamese' pate, fresh herb (usually coriander) and then some other meat, normally pork, but sometimes chicken or even something like egg or tofu. Condiments wise we're talking mainly mayo & chilli sauce.
If you land yourself a good one you won't be disappointed - think light crisp baguette (apparently because they're made with both wheat and rice flour), crunchy sweet-sharp veg rich pate and meat, fresh herbs, some chilli kick and perhaps a lubing of mayo.
Banh mi joints have been popping up around london for couple of years now and they're getting ever more popular (the English are scared of eating anything that doesn't resemble a sandwich, so they're perfect). Broadway market, Greenwich, various places on Kingsland rd to name but a few and now one right by me - Theobalds rd, near Holborn / Farringdon, called Banh Mi Bay. Quite a modern looking place where you can take away or eat in, the place also does pho, the famous Vietnamese soup.
I went down there for a bit o lunch recently.....had classic pork banh mi: which was pretty good really - v.fresh veg and herbs, nice pate & cooked pork in there, only minor complaint was that bread, while, authentic, could perhaps have been bit lighter an more crisp, plus wanted a little more chilli kick, but no doubt that was my fault for not asking for them to fling more in at the key moment.
In the name of research I also found room for a soup - banh canh, which i believe refers to the thick noodles in there. I had it with prawns, but crab, meat or veg options were also chalked up as I remember.
Was not too shabby. Nice clean tasting broth, fresh prawns cut nicely & obviously not pre cooked, slippery noodles and a bit of herbage (pak chii, coriander, spring onion), some lemon and fresh chilli on the side. More DIY garnish (esp herbs) would have gone down well, but generally a good bowl of grub.
All in all Banh Mi Bay is a v.welcome addition to my locality, and with my exotic themed baguette costing a v.reasonable £3.50 I think I'll be back as soon as I next open my fridge to find I've got bugger all for lunch....so probably tomorrow then.
Vietnamese sambos - search them out!
Banh Mi Bay: 4-6 Theobald's Rd (WC1X 8PN).
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