Lima, Shoreditch

I don't usually like to do invited reviews back-to-back, so this was supposed to be a post about a lovely Catalonian restaurant called El Molí de L'Escala. El Molí serve a daily-changing menu of exciting and unusual local seafood (they had sea cucumber on the menu last week, and scorpion fish), foraged seasonal fare (fully five different types of wild local mushrooms) and world-class premium meats (proper Txuleton from Txogitxu in San Sebastian) for prices so reasonable - even for Spain - you wonder how they make any money at all. We had 3 set menus, a bonus plate of Palamós prawns (the best prawns in the world, trust me), plenty of wine and cava and the bill came to €56 each. It was all absolutely brilliant.

Sadly, due to an unfortunate run in with a dodgy SD card reader from a roadside stall in Girona (note: if the price of an SD card reader seems too good to be true, it probably is) I lost all my photos, so the post about El Molí has been put on the back burner until I can either go back for another reasonably priced lunch or somehow un-corrupt my photos from last week. In the meantime, I may as well tell you about another towering achievement in regional Hispanic food, albeit this time from the other end of the world, Lima in Shoreditch.

I was always predisposed to like Lima Shoreditch because I was a huge fan of their original site in Fitzrovia. Then, as now, there just isn't anyone else, as far as I'm aware, at least outside of Peru itself, doing this kind of thing at this kind of level to such astonishing effect. True, there are South American restaurants all over the place, and one or two fairly decent Cevicherias in London but Lima is the finest ambassador for this cuisine as you could hope for, a really smart and exciting little place operating entirely to its own set of rules and procedures.

Even the table snacks are noteworthy - a little bowl of fried corn kernels, not tooth-shatteringly crunchy like the stuff from the packets but moreish and satisfying, like flaky peanuts. They arrived alongside one of my favourite drinks of the moment, a Margarita Picante (Homeboy in Angel do a very good one as well, if you can put up with the insane noise levels) and I heard appreciative noises made about their Pisco Sour too.

Another snack (sort of), oyster topped with a wonderful basil foam, was notable not just for the base of zingy lean oyster but the surprising chilli hit from togarashi powder, which lifted all the other flavours around it. In fact, everything you need to know about the way Lima approach their menu can be learned from this single mouthful of oyster - accessible, attractive and inviting but at the same time surprising with unexpected techniques and flavours, it was a great start to the evening.

Bluefin tuna tartare came piled on a crunchy seaweedy batter base, providing a nice greaseless contrast to the fish. But the best thing about this dish was a lovely toasted sesame flavour that had been woven into the tuna, producing another whirlwind of complimentary flavours and textures.

The trio of ceviche is a great way to cover as much ground as possible if you're either new to Lima and ceviches in general, or alternatively if you're a food blogger trying to ingest as much of the menu as possible without causing a scene. All 3 examples contained incredible fresh fish - stone bass, sea bass and more of that lovely bluefin tuna - but I think my favourite was the Classico which had some buttery sweet potato spiked with a remarkably brave amount of chilli.

They found yet another way to present tuna in this dish of gambas, tiger's milk and avocado, which burst with colour and inventiveness, little dots of flavoured oils floating in the tiger's milk. Even if the same raw ingredients had found their way into a number of different dishes, they were all different enough not to feel samey, and to be honest they were all good enough that I would have quite happily eaten 6 or 7 plates of the same dish anyway without complaints.

If there was one single element of the entire meal that I could criticize it was that these lamb chops were a little bit on the flabby side - they needed a bit more heat from the Josper to get a darker crust and possibly to render off a bit more of that fat. However the "corn tamal" underneath was genuinely excellent - packed full of buttery goodness with an addictive soft-yet-distinct texture.

And the other large plate, red prawn quinotto (risotto, made with quinoa) was another comforting and attractive thing, with bits of octopus and plump fresh clams studded into the mix. I didn't try the red prawn - there was only one of them, and it wasn't technically my order - but I believe it was very good, although I'm guessing not quite as good as the Palamós prawns from El Molí...

Anyway there's no point crying over spilt SD cards. Lima's desserts continued the theme of exciting, unique and gently dramatic - cute little Alfajores biscuits were a joy to eat and the accompanying lime sorbet exactly the right kind of thing to match with the rich dulche de leche. And a geometrically pleasing puck of light cheesecake on a delicate biscuit base came with 3 neat blobs of lucuma coulis on top. Lucuma, by the way, is a south American fruit tasting a bit like passion fruit which I'd never even heard of before. There's a lot of things that Lima does that you don't see anywhere else - that's one of the supreme joys of eating there.

So yes, after all these years and even after the new location, I'm still a massive fan of Lima. It's tempting to wonder why there haven't been a whole slew of copycat Peruvian restaurants popping up in its wake over the last decade or so as tends to happen whenever a particular trend takes off (see US-style steakhouses about 15 years ago, or more recently smash burgers) but I have a feeling the reason Lima stands alone (or rather as a pair) even today is because this stuff really isn't easy to pull off. It's a culinary style so far removed from most European kitchen skill sets that doing it at all is only within the ability of a select few and doing it this well is only possible by... well, Lima. In short, if you want to see how good Peruvian food can be without travelling 6,000 miles, you have a choice of two spots in London. Both come extremely highly recommended.

9/10

I was invited to Lima Shoreditch and didn't see a bill. Expect to pay around £150/head I think if you make the most of the drinks list.

Med Salleh Viet, Earl's Court

It's a funny old part of town is Earl's Court. Not quite Kensington, not quite Chelsea, not many reasons to visit (certainly not since the conference center/arena got pulled down), it's these days little more than a fairly ordinary provincial high street dumped in West London, with a few rubbish pubs and fast food joints and all of it too busy and noisy to be worth your while. You may have changed here to get to Heathrow from Clapham, you may conceivably have met some friends in one of the grotty Greene King pubs before going on somewhere better, but what you probably haven't done is travelled here on purpose.

And yet tucked around the back of the main drag, down some precarious steps underneath a terrace hotel, sits Med Salleh Viet, an actual bona fide reason to visit Earl's Court. It doesn't look like much at first, although some seasoned food-seekers may recall that Georgian terrace basement locations can host some real gems - think Roti King in Euston, or Blacklock in Soho. Inside, the space is functional but pleasant enough, and, we were pleased to discover, pretty well populated for a rainy Tuesday night - clearly amongst some people, the word is already out.

The evening began with a mango salad, perhaps not the most thorough test of a kitchen's ability, but it at least demonstrated that they knew how to balance the sour and sweet elements of cold Vietnamese dishes - sugar, vinegar, perhaps fish sauce but certainly chilli and lime juice all added up to a very satisfying whole. In fact I'd go so far as to say you should always order a salad (either mango, or papaya or banana blossom) in a Vietnamese restaurant in London - they never disappoint.

Things really kicked into gear though with the arrival of the chicken wings. Giant healthy looking things, with big thick bones and holding plenty of meat (just drumsticks here, no messing about with fiddly double-boned flats) they had a fantastic crunchy coating a bit like the salt and pepper style you sometimes see but these seemed that much more refined and complex. The sweet chilli dip (homemade I'm sure) they came with was the perfect foil for the salty marinade.

Whole grilled squid, sliced into tender, even rings, was dressed in an interesting earthy spice mix (sorry I'm a bit lost when it comes to Vietnamese spicing techniques, but I'm pretty sure there was five spice in there somewhere) and came with another lovely house sauce of vinegar and chilli.

I was never not going to order something calling itself "Pha Lau Bo - Assorted Beef Offal" and I'm happy to say this giant bowl of tripe, tendons, oxtail, tofu, mushrooms and god knows what else absolutely did not disappoint. My favourite element was the tripe, delicate little strips of spongy goodness that soaked up the stock and released heavenly bursts of rich beefy flavour in the mouth, but there was so much to enjoy here it's hard to know where to start. I should say though, that this bowl of presumably fairly cheap ingredients (albeit lovingly prepared) was £25, so is hardly an impulse purchase, but value is a theme I'll return to later.

Meantime, there was this steak bun cha to get through, sticky strips of chargrilled beef, smoky from the coals, on a bed of bouncy vermicelli noodles and with yet another different dip, this time dark soy and chilli amongst other things. As with everything else, it was generous of portion and flavour and accompanied by a bewildering variety of herbs, nuts and pickled vegetables, sending your palate in a hundred different directions at once like all the best Vietnamese food does.

Finally of the savoury courses, Fancy Pho - black truffle and wagyu in which excellent broth was poured over some superbly tender beef to gently poach it before it was ready to scoop up with more top notch noodles and enjoy. In all honesty I've never really rated wagyu above good beef from other sources, but maybe I'm just immune to its charms. I'm sure the Med Salleh rare beef pho (£16.90 as opposed to £29.90 for the wagyu) is very good too.

So yes, the prices. Despite the obvious high standard of cooking and sourcing (and service, although as per usual feel free to ignore this aspect as it was an invite) Med Salleh is not a budget operation. London is not Vietnam, and rents, staffing and ingredient costs are all conspiring to bash the city's hospitality industry into the ground in the last few years, but the fact remains that the lovely Song Hong (the new name for Mien Tay) in Battersea does rare beef pho for £13.50, four summer rolls for £8 (at Med Salleh they're 2 for £8.90) and all from a similar central London location. None of this should mean you should rule the place out of course, but it might mean you'll think twice about ordering that 2nd large main course dish.

Anyway all I can do is tell you how good the food is at Med Salleh - very good indeed - and leave it up to you whether you think it's worth the money and/or trip to Earl's Court. We had a lovely time in this friendly little basement restaurant and would happily go back and pay out of my own pocket, so that's as good as an endorsement as you're going to get really. If you're a local, then this is a very welcome addition to the area, and if you have a craving for authentic Vietnamese food cooked with skill and care, it's almost certainly worth a diversion. The way things are going, who knows, in a few years' time these prices might start looking like a bargain, so maybe you should get there while you can...

7/10

I was invited to Med Salleh Viet and didn't see a bill. Expect to pay about £70/head with a beer or two.

The Counter, Tunbridge Wells

As much as I try to travel as far and wide as possible for a meal, there are certain parts of the world that are somewhat better-represented on these pages than others. Obviously as I live in London, and it's the best food city on the planet, that's the main focus of this blog. But thanks to family living there I'm also generally on top of all things Liverpool (look out for the relaunched Pilgrim, coming soon) and you may have also noticed a slight skew towards Kent, whose culinary gems are spread all the way from the Sussex border to the foodie towns of Deal, Broadstairs and Margate.

And it's thanks to a group of friends living in Tunbridge Wells that I've got to know that specific part of Kent pretty well in particular. A post-lockdown trip to the Kentish Hare proved that there were some really serious gastropubs tucked into the countryside around the town, and I will be forever grateful to them for introducing me to the incredible Tallow, one of my very best meals of recent years.

The Counter, then, a new restaurant/labour of love from chef Robin Read, has some serious local competition from operations that have more than proved themselves, but itself already feels so confident and secure in its Regency location that it could have been there for years. Tables are nicely spaced and sensitively lit by the soft autumnal sun, and staff buzz happily about all the various nooks and crannies (it appears to be two or three premises knocked-through to make a charmingly haphazard whole) with a practiced ease. There's a small bar, and short cocktail offering, but my summer berry martini thing was very decent, and from what I can gather their take on the Negroni was very good too.

The menu proper began with this cute little smoked eel and cep tart which perhaps could have been slightly improved by being warmed through but still had loads of lovely mushroomy filling topped with generous chunks of fish. The mushrooms in fact were described as "Tunbridge Wells Cep" which indicates they were if not foraged then at least grown locally, which was a nice touch.

The bread, served as a course in its own right which is more or less the norm amongst forward-thinking modern British restaurants these days, was an extraordinary thing itself, a sticky, malty-rich sourdough with an ash-touched crust as delicate as French pastry. The 'Chiddingstone Dairy' (just out of town, towards Hever Castle) butter was as rich and powerful as you might expect from Jersey cows, and was nicely room temperature and spreadable. But as if all that wasn't enough we were presented with a cute little cup of vegetable broth, a waste-free way of enjoying the bits of the seasonal veg that couldn't be sensibly used elsewhere - very tasty, and full marks for sustainability too.

Chalk stream trout tasted every bit as good as it looked, and as you can see it looked stunning, with the sashimi-shaped slices of fish prettily arranged amongst carved kohlrabi flowers and dots of dill oil, all of it resting in a cool, clear dashi broth. I've been reading some pretty scary stories about the state of our country's chalk streams in recent years so it's somewhat of a relief to still be seeing products like this on a menu, and a delight to have it treated so well.

Rump cap was an incredible union of impeccable sourcing and intelligent cooking, being what is clearly top-quality beef cooked in such a way as to leave the flesh soft and tender but with an exquisite thin layer of crisp, salty skin and fat on one side. A triumphant trio of sides - swede and black pepper puree, girolles and beer-braised shallot - complimented the beef, and it was all bound together with a nice rich, sticky jus. You really couldn't want for a better beef course.

Of course we had to go for the optional cheese course, in this case Rachel goat's turned into a kind of mini rarebit topped with watercress, beetroot relish (see, there are still exciting ways of doing beetroot and goat's cheese) and more shaved cheese. It was great - the hot, gooey rarebit mixture the ideal format for this cheese, and the toasted bread held its shape very well.

I should probably step back at this point in case I end up boring you with my usual over-effusiveness. Restaurants like this, in case you're new to this blog, are my own particular nirvana - I will happily travel the length of the country in search of strictly seasonal Modern British food served with intelligence and flair, and I've been lucky enough in recent months to come across (either by invite or by sheer luck) a few of them. I can't personally imagine being served a menu like this and not falling head over heels in love with it, but then I don't know why people voted for Brexit or Trump either, or why Clapham Junction station hasn't been bulldozed and rebuilt at any point since the 1970s. Some things will always be a mystery to me. All I can say is that if you have even the slightest interest in being served wonderful food by people who love what they're doing and are incredibly good at it, you should also love the Counter.

Anyway we haven't quite finished yet. Sliced figs (treated cleverly somehow - they weren't quite raw but not quite cooked - maybe sweetened and/or poached?) were topped with a silky mascarpone mousse and a linseed-studded sugar crisp, all of it full of texture and invention.

And then right at the end, a parade of petits fours - fudge, truffle, canelé and macaron - that demonstrated a very capable pastry section and a supremely generous attitude towards unannounced extras, a really nice effort indeed at the end of what had been quite a display of culinary skill for £60.

Of course, our final bill was way north of £60pp thanks to us having a bit more fun than was necessary with the wine list and a final round of single malts, but if you were a bit more sensible and limited yourself just to the matching wines (and OK perhaps a glass of Sussex fizz to start) then you would probably be looking at something more in the region of £120pp - pretty much bang on what you might expect to pay for this kind of thing. Certainly you can pay a lot more for a lot less. Of course you could also decided to go for the full £125pp 10-12 course extravaganza which I'm sure is even more wonderful. Maybe next time.

The Counter, then, is definitely a restaurant worth travelling for, but then if you're lucky enough to live somewhere near the SouthEastern rail route, the fact that its 10 minutes' walk from the station means that there's a good chunk of Londoners and South Easterners generally for whom the journey will be pretty trivial as well. And as with anywhere committing itself to strictly seasonal dishes, the menu will shift and shuffle and evolve throughout the year, meaning that repeat visits will always reward and delight. So don't feel jealous of the residents of Tunbridge Wells having somewhere so wonderful on their doorstep - be happy that for millions of people it's only a short train ride away. And most of all, be profoundly grateful that it exists at all.

9/10

The Lamb Inn, Little Milton

Most visitors to the Lamb Inn will approach from the car park and be greeted with the sight pictured above - an achingly cute thatched countryside pub in whitewashed stone looking like it hadn't changed much in the past few hundred years. And this is, of course, a great way to start. But being a few minutes early for our lunch, we decided to do a little tour of the area and ended up walking past the front of the building where a giant exhaust vent from the Lamb kitchens is heaving out sweet-smelling clouds of charcoal and animal fat into the pretty medieval street. I stood in front of it for a good few seconds, trying to work out what might be on the menu that day, intoxicated by the mix of aromas until my hair smelled of bonfire and I realised if I spent any longer there I may end up not being allowed inside. It's hard to describe, but the Lamb Inn kitchen vent smelled serious, the product of a high-end kitchen doing all the right things.

This was, I'm pleased to say, borne out by the food served inside. I always find chicken liver parfait to be a pretty solid test of a kitchen's skills, and they passed with flying colours, smooth and salty and full of earthy offal flavours without being bitter or grainy. This would have been more than worth the paltry £9.50 they were asking for it by itself, but it came alongside an incredibly lovely bacon jam, with little tiny bits of crunchy pig studded into sticky sweet onion, and a slice or two of top-quality grilled sourdough. I don't remember it being purple though, so blame my weird old camera for that particular effect.

Smoked eel is a good example of the kind of ingredient that only confident and accomplished gastropubs usually serve, as it can be a bit of an ask of your more timid pub-goer (I know a few people that won't go near it, however strange that sounds to the rest of us). The garden greens and baby beetroots brought some nice textures and earthy/bitter flavours, but the star was obviously the eel, so soft and salty and full of flavour that it could be mistaken for chunks of halloumi cheese. This is a good thing, by the way.

But the star of the starters, and in fact one of the best dishes overall, was this single giant crab and scallop ravioli. Not only did it contain a generous portion of bouncy fresh seafood filling, all encased in delicate handmade pasta, and dressed in an irresistible frothy Thai green sauce, it was also on the menu for an incredible £11.50, almost certainly about half, and in some cases less than half, of what you'd pay in most restaurants even attempting to offer a giant crab and scallop ravioli. And apologies - I took the above photo before the sauce was dropped in, so you're going to have to imagine what that looked like.

Enoki tempura suffered just slightly from an excess of grease, as the brush-like fronds of the mushroom can really soak up the stuff, although that's also possibly because it was such a generous portion. It was still all polished off quite happily.

We only had one of the "big" mains, this huge pork chop, expertly grilled and sliced into portions each of which had a morsel of firm but moist meat attached to a melt-in-the-mouth bit of fat and a delicate thin crunch of crackling. The sauce was rich and herby and gently apple-y and the celeriac remoulade studded with (I think) wholegrain mustard for a bit of heat. Doesn't it look beautiful? Well, let me tell you, it tasted even better.

Oh, and the Lamb do very good chips, too.

We nearly didn't order desserts as we were so stuffed from the savoury courses, but these conspired to be some of the best items on the menu. Crème brûlée had a deeply vanilla-y filling and an extra-thick crunchy top which had been spiked with spices of some kind I couldn't quite put my finger on - an improvement on the usual at least, and I'm already a huge fan of crème brûlée. There's an argument to be made that the blackberry ice cream was perhaps an extra flavour too far, but it was absolutely superb home made ice cream, so who cares.

Finally, a kind of reimagined sticky toffee pudding that appeared to be constructed largely of caramel and stewed fruit - at least, if there was a spongecake base there it was incredibly low-key. It was brilliant though - so ridiculously easy to eat with its soft vanilla ice cream topping I practically inhaled it despite the huge amount of food I'd had already. Alongside the seafood ravioli (I think technically I should call a single ravoli "raviolo" but nobody in this country ever does this so I won't either) it was an instant classic, and a Lamb Inn absolute must-order.

It's an incredibly difficult balancing act a lot of these country pubs have to perform - go too haute cuisine and unapproachable and you end up alienating your local audience who will be the core of your customers. Go too cookie-cutter and pub-standards and you're competing with every chain boozer in the area, most of whom have the resources to serve the same stuff a lot cheaper. But get it right - find a balance between accessibility and quality and value for money and with a seasonal menu that without being too overwhelming has something that almost everyone could enjoy, and the rest takes care of itself.

Raymond Blanc's Manoir aux Quatre Saisons is just up the road in Great Milton. We had a little wander round earlier the same day. It seemed very nice, and I'm sure their £230pp lunch has much to recommend it. But if you want local, seasonal, intelligently constructed food for somewhat less than the price of a return to New York (see above) then I would say there's only one choice in the area. The Lamb Inn are doing pretty much everything right, from the service (charming and knowledgeable although obviously given this was an invite feel free to take that observation with a pinch of salt) to the design of the menu to the execution of the dishes themselves. Add in a low-beamed dining room in a 16th century building in the middle of the Oxfordshire countryside and you have all the ingredients of a perfect day out. Thoroughly, wholeheartedly recommended.

9/10

I was invited to the Lamb Inn and didn't pay the bill (although as you can see they did kindly show us one for our records!). We weren't drinking that day so expect to pay £50pp-£60pp for a "normal" lunch. Still an absolute bargain.

Hong Kong Restaurant, Angel

London has never been the kind of place where you can just pick a restaurant at random and have at least a decent dinner. There are too many tourist traps, dingy fast food joints, grim chains and bandwagon-jumping copycats (just see how many smash burger joints have appeared in the last few months) scattered around the city for you to need at least a little research before deciding where to spend your food money.

But it can also be said that this is a town where there is an awful lot of "decent". If we ignore, for a minute, the best-in-class that suck up all of the attention, and do our best to avoid the real dregs at the other end of the scale, there's still a vast swathe of enjoyable, independent, competently run restaurants in-between that while you might not make a special journey across 6 tube zones to visit, if you happen to find yourself in a particular part of town and in need of a nice dinner, fulfil their role more than adequately.

One such place is the Hong Kong Restaurant on Upper Street. A Cantonese diner offering all the usual classics, and complete with shopfront cabinet in which hang various types of roast and glazed poultry in true Chinatown style, it has the settled, confident style of somewhere that's been around for decades but it's all in fact a very clever deception - it's barely a year old. It was about 2/3 full at 7pm on a Friday night, but then as anyone who's continued to commute into central since Covid will tell you, Friday is the new Monday, so having 2/3 of your tables occupied is pretty good going.

We started with some crab Xiao Long Bao, which although perhaps not quite as cleverly constructed as the ones at Din Tai Fung (the filling here was more solid than liquid) still had a lovely flavour and plenty of crab.

Turnip cake were very good examples of their kind, crisp on the edges and soft and salty inside, again with bags of flavour.

But my own favourite of the dim sum dishes were these prawn bean curd rolls, a delicate thin casing containing a fresh, bouncy prawn filling thus making a very addictive mix of textures and marvellous fun to dip into chilli oil and/or soy (as is your preference) and munch down on. I'm going to look out for these on menus in the future.

Roast duck (well I had to choose something from the cabinet) was good as well - probably not quite worth the £22 for a half but a solid main course and satisfying end to the meal, with a nice moist flesh and salty, sticky skin. Again, not any of this stuff is unique in Cantonese restaurants in London (not even, I'm guessing, the prawn bean curd rolls despite the fact I've never come across them before) but for £36pp including beers and tea, there are certainly worse ways to spend that amount of money. Oh and service was attentive and friendly, unlike certain way more famous places in Chinatown I can name...

Hong Kong Restaurant, then, succeeds on its own terms by being a decent (there's that word again) local restaurant charging a reasonable amount of money, and doing everything well enough to get itself firmly onto my 'If I'm in Angel and want a not-extortionate dinner' list. There really isn't that much more to say, and so hence the rather terse review. Some places are just good enough. And there's nothing wrong with that.

7/10