Tuétano Taqueria, San Diego

On the shortest day of the year, in the middle of the gloomiest and wettest of England's gloom and wet, I thought it might be fun to review a taco shop in southern California, because it's days like this you need to remind yourself that there are places in the world where the sun always shines.

Tuétano is Spanish for 'bone marrow', and so if you call yourself 'Tuétano Taqueria' this brings with itself a certain set of expectations. I remember being very disappointed as a child when it turned out central Liverpool chippie The Lobster Pot didn't serve lobster (yes, I was that kind of kid) but, fortunately for all concerned, expectations are more than met in this cheerful little spot in Chula Vista, where the birria tacos come with an "optional" chunk of roast bone marrow.

I put "optional" in inverted commas because quite honestly, anyone making the journey here and NOT ordering the bone marrow needs their head examined as it's the loveliest bit of offal you can order in this part of the world. And I'm including the brain and tongue tacos at El Gordo in that assessment.

Anyway I'm getting slightly ahead of myself. The menu at Tuétano is short and no-nonsense, essentially the same ingredient - birria - served in two types of taco casing and also available as a sandwich (torte). Short menus are almost always a good sign, indicating a kitchen focussed and confident in their abilities where it matters, and not trying to be all things to all people.

The first thing we ordered was the standard quesabirria taco - so their own birria mixture topped with lovely gooey cheese, either some kind of pizza mozzarella or a very close Mexican equivalent, in a standard taco casing. For $4 it was a fine example of its kind, the slow-cooked beef and cheese creating that magical combination of flavours and textures that are such an integral part of the Southern California experience, and yet so weirdly difficult to find elsewhere.

Better, as you might hope and expect, was the same filling inside with the bog standard tortilla swapped out for their own hand-pressed on-site version, fluffy little things as light as buttermilk pancakes but holding firm to the last bite - well worth the extra $1 and more than enough reason to visit by itself.

But as I mentioned, Tuetano have a little extra trick up their greasy sleeves, and it's a quite wonderful chunk of roasted bone marrow which for an extra $7 comes slapped on top of your taco speared through with a little wooden stick, like a beefy lollipop (sorry, popsickle). Push the perfectly cooked marrow through the bone onto the top of your taco and you are rewarded with a storm of beefy, offaly wonderfulness, a spritz of fresh lime and chopped coriander (sorry, cilantro) just enough to stop the whole thing tipping over into fatty excess.

They also do a lovely "consommé", not a clear broth in the French style but a heady beef soup made from their own stock, finished with chunks of fresh onion and soft, buttery frijola beans. Typing this back in Blighty with 70mph winds and horizontal rain battering the windowpane makes me think such a powerfully flavoured winter-y soup is wasted on a part of the world where the temperature rarely dips below 'shorts weather', but then life is nothing if not contradictory.

Even the drinks offering has had some love and attention directed towards it. The counter has 3 barrels of Agua Fresca, one of which on the day I visited was a homemade mint and lemonade, the plastic cup it came in dipped in chamoy - a sticky, sweet and sour paste (usually) made from tamarind, tajin and sugar. They also sell Mexican coke and a rather nice non-alcoholic sangria soda, again not a fast array of options but all making sense.

If you've added up the prices I've mentioned above in your head you may have reached the conclusion that Tuetano is a bit of a bargain, and indeed it's not far off, but this being America in 2024 every seemingly reasonable order is at the final stage slapped with sales tax and (increasingly common) a minimum 20% tip, so costs can easily head north of expectations. However, $33pp for probably the best birria taco meal in town is still more than acceptable. You can certainly pay more for less.

It's more than possible I only obsess so much about quesabirria tacos (and believe me, I do obsess about them) because it's the one thing hasn't quite been tackled successfully by any UK Mexican joint. Madre in Liverpool had a decent bash at one point but last time I tried was a shadow of its former self, and most spots in London, even the ones that are so-called taco specialists, don't even bother with birria. But then maybe, like that bottle of holiday wine that tastes so flat and dead when you've gone to the effort of bringing it all the way home, quesabirria aren't meant to travel, and I'll just have to wait for my next trip to California for my next hit. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

9/10

Crispin at Studio Voltaire, Clapham Common

Although my useless photos hardly do it justice (let's just get that out of the way from the start), Crispin at Studio Voltaire is a lovely space to eat in. The candles on each table aren't the only source of light, but provide a romantic accessory to the tealights dangling above the bar and some tasteful candelabras near dark curtains towards the back of the room - it's all very theatrical and cozy and Christmassy, a perfect setting for seasonal dining.

All of which would mean nothing if the food served wasn't up to scratch but fortunately the team behind Crispin have some form in this department. Bistro Freddie took over the space in Shoreditch vacated by Oklava, and were an immediate hit serving things like rabbit and cider pie, and whole Devon crab. The two original Crispins are still going strong too - one in Spitalfields and one in Soho - each focusing just as much attention on an interesting wine list as intelligent (and affordable) bistro food. And now this space attached to an art gallery just off Clapham Common has already established itself as a popular, and dynamic, local restaurant thanks to a very particular trick up its sleeve.

Cheddar croquettes with pickled walnut ketchup demonstrated a perfect balance between sharp pickle and gooey-rich cheese, with a nice grease-free crust. One of the features of the food at Crispin is that the menu reads rather familiar, but that pleasant accessibility is backed by real cooking skill. You may have seen cheese croquettes with pickled walnut ketchup before (well, you will have done if you eat out as much as I do) but rarely as precisely cooked or intelligently constructed as this.

Similarly with crab with radicchio, fennel and lemon - a beautiful collection of ingredients that demands to be ordered, executed in such a way, with fluffy chunks of fresh crab and nicely seasoned dressed leaves, that it could barely be improved upon.

And it's mastery of technique that ends up being Crispin's secret weapon. OK so maybe pheasant isn't an every day bistro ingredient, and perhaps I do have a soft spot for game and will automatically order it - for starter and main in this case - when I see it. But bashed flat, breadcrumbed and deep-fried like a chicken Kyiv, it takes real skill to turn what can be quite a dry and unforgiving bird into this immensely rewarding dish, golden brown and crunchy outside, gently pink within, a genuine must-order.

But better was yet to come. Both main courses, a generously proportioned pork chop, and a supreme of pheasant, turned out to be absolute masterclasses in the use of the Hibachi grill, a bit of tabletop charcoal-fired BBQ kit that gets a delicate dark thin crust on the meat while leaving the inside soft and yielding. So the pork offered itself in soft, even slices inside a beautifully seasoned, crunchy exterior...

...and even the pheasant, as I said an often unforgiving bit of meat, was juicy and desperately moreish beneath a dark, crisp skin. Accompanying veg (celeriac puree, winter berries) were very good too, as was the rich game sauce, but the real star here was the protein, and by extension that expert use of the Hibachi grill. I can't remember the last time I was served main courses that were such shining examples of the best of live-fire cooking.

So, come for the atmosphere and seasonal charm, stay for the game-changing grill work. Crispin lands in a part of town fairly used to eating well (the much-missed Dairy used to be just over the road, and top pasta restaurant Sorella is just down the hill) but stands out from the crowd even at this early stage - and promises to only improve as the seasons shift and more exciting ingredients become available. And no matter what time of year, as long as they keep using that Hibachi machine in the way they are now, there'll be endless reasons to visit and revisit, all served with a lovely dark salty crust. My kind of place.

9/10

I was invited to Crispin at Studio Voltaire and didn't see a bill. Expect to pay about £70pp with a glass or two of wine.

Jeune & Jolie, Carlsbad

To a visitor from lands afar (me) who sees this part of the world in little two-week periods twice a year, Jeune & Jolie feels like it did all the work of establishing itself as one of the best restaurants in California in a metaphorical blink of an eye, a few short months between opening, winning its Michelin star and becoming the last word in sophisticated Cali-French dining.

Of course, it didn't happen quite that easily. They opened all the way back in 2018, and won their star three years later right in the middle of the Covid pandemic, which must have felt like quite the reward for making it through lockdowns and the whole home delivery rigmarole. It's probably fair to say they were always trying to get a star - French fine dining, even Californian-French fine dining, needs Michelin recognition more than most other types of cuisine for validation of their efforts - but let's not forget it's never inevitable, and never easy, and always welcome. Even if, occasionally, the choices made by the tire company can be bizarre bordering on insane.

Anyway, in this case, as anyone who's ever eaten at Jeune & Jolie will tell you, Michelin got it exactly right. While most of the mid-to-big budget restaurants in the San Diego area do their best to project an air of laid-back California cool even as the prices they charge creep ever upwards, Jeune & Jolie give you smart surroundings, sparkling (and - crucially for this part of the world - not over-familiar) service and, yes, some of if not the best food (certainly that I've been lucky enough to try) on the West Coast for less than you'd pay at many less impressive places.

Alongside a round of cocktails - a perfect gin Martini my own choice, a lovely little thing indeed - we had cheekily ordered a plate of truffled gougères from the bar menu because, well, if gougères are available you have to order gougères. That's the rule. And even though they would have been perhaps even a little bit nicer warmed, they were still excellent, delicate little puffs of cheese and truffle, top pastry work.

The raw bar at Jeune & Julie has its own menu, so you can either skip this course entirely (as if) or order as many little extras as you think you might be able to fit in before the four courses of the main event. Here are 3 different types of oyster and an extra dressed version, a local bay scallop, a huge blue prawn and a dressed mussel, all of it impressive but the dressed oyster being the particular standout with its balanced pan-Asian dressing.

Amuse of duck liver and peanuts were next, with a scattering of edible flowers to add a bit of colour. But as with the gougères it was the pastry that was the most impressive element - impossibly thin and light and dissolving in the mouth to brilliant effect.

I have the capacity to enjoy even a fairly ordinary steak tartare (I'm good like that), but when it's done well it has the potential to be a highlight of the meal. This was definitely in the second camp - lovely loose, richly flavoured veal chunks shot through with just enough wasabi to season and provide a bit of heat but not too much that it overwhelms the meat. On top, crunchy sliced radish sprinkled with seaweed, and underneath, a subtle layer of white soy providing more seasoning and Japanese-leaning flavours. This really was very good.

Amberjack crudo, I hope you can tell even through my terrible photo, was a beautiful plate of food and tasted it too, the fresh fish nicely matching the sharp ceviche-style dressing and topped with bits of pickled pear, celery and passionfruit. One of the best things about eating out in a part of the world so far away from your own is the chance to sample a completely alien range of fish and seafood - some vaguely familiar but some genuinely new. Amberjack is a Pacific game fish which I'm going to suggest tastes a bit like wild sea bass, although until I try them side by side I won't know if that description is useful or completely off the mark...

Last of the pre-starters (sorry, course "Un") was this bowl of some kind of melon soup with (real) caviar, crème fraîche and cucumber and though I didn't get to try it myself (there's only so much passing around of dishes you want to do to keep the front of house spending most of their time mopping up spilled food) I heard only good things.

The bread course was marvellous - a big, fluffy, glossy brioche served with soft lemon butter, it was as dangerously addictive as the house bread at the Devonshire, and anyone who's had that will tell you how difficult it is to have just the one portion.

"Deux" - for want of a better word, starters - continued being supremely enjoyable. A mushroom tart had yet more impeccable pastry work encasing a deliriously rich and complex autumnal mixture of chanterelle, chestnuts, almonds and black truffle. "Saint Jacques" was a giant scallop roasted to a beautiful golden brown served with grapes, tarragon and various foraged sea vegetables, and my own dish of pork (sorry again about the godawful photo) was a generous chunk of just-cooked fillet, served alongside some slow-cooked belly (with superb attached crackling), quince and chicory and all bound with one of those brilliant glossy French sauces that you want to take home and eat spoonfuls of in front of the TV. Well, that might just be me - but it was a very good sauce, honestly.

For "Trois", a single mousse-like ricotta gnudi came next to an artfully arranged series of braised and fried seasonal vegetables, the crunchy/creamy artichoke hearts and enoki mushrooms being particularly noteworthy. The food at Jeune & Jolie, as you may have noticed - is neither austere nor rustic, but a perfectly fine balance between the two, ending up impressing with technique and presentation but also never being anything less than accessible and easy. It's an irresistible formula.

This was my main of guinea hen (about as close to game birds as you'll get in this part of the world), cutely ballotined and sliced into medallions, drenched in another gloriously rich and glossy sauce and served with sliced mushroom and sticks of "garleek" (a cross between garlic and leek - who knew?) that had been charred up nicely on the grill. Again - again and again - it all worked perfectly.

And we needn't have worried that the Jeune & Jolie kitchens were putting all their efforts into the savoury courses and leaving desserts as an afterthought. Not a bit of it - an apple-treacle tart served with soft ginger ice cream (I think it was anyway) had a bewildering number of techniques on display all producing a ridiculously moreish result, a dish that would not have been out of place on the menu at l'Enclume or Moor Hall. And I won't inflict the distressing photos of the other desserts on you, but suffice it to say they were equally enjoyable, an autumnal berries dish having some lovely floral notes of orange and violet mixed with toasted nuts for texture.

Petit fours consisted of some weeny tartlets of some kind of citrus mousse, and sticks of Ecuadorian chocolate. I've become slightly obsessed with Ecuadorian chocolate after stumbling across it in a specialist shop in Girona (Spain) recently - and these were just as good as I remember, coffee and citrus notes released with every bite with a lovely snap.

You will have gathered by now that I had a great time at Jeune & Jolie. As I said earlier, it's almost certainly one of the best restaurants in California, never mind just San Diego, a city that has traditionally been left behind by Los Angeles and San Francisco when it comes to this kind of thing. It's smart and serious enough, with an experienced enough kitchen, to serve sophisticated and intelligent food without coming across as pretentious or needy, but does so with such love and flair (aided by a front of house team who didn't put a single toe on any foot wrong) and at such eminently reasonable prices (relatively) that it's virtually impossible not to fall in love with the place. And so I'm afraid I did - hook, line and sinker. And chances are, you will too.

10/10

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.