Xi Home Dumplings Bay, Liverpool Street

I often like to look up the situation of restaurants I'm heading out to on Google Streetview, just so I know what to expect when I get off the bus and lessen (though not completely mitigate) the chance I might head off in completely the wrong direction. I wouldn't recommend doing this for Xi Home just yet though - Blossom Street until recently was a dark, dodgy alleyway round the back of the old Water Poet pub (RIP) and if you Streetview their address today you may be forgiven you're being sent, Goodfellas-style, to a shakedown joint never to be seen again.

Fortunately, and whatever you think about the flattening of the Water Poet and environs, Xi Home is today part of the swanky new Blossom Yard development, and along with Sri Lankan restaurant Kolamba East is spearheading the what I believe I'm supposed to call "regeneration" of this little area just north of Liverpool Street. And to be fair to the Blossom Yard developers, who could have probably filled the spots very easily with a Gordon Ramsay Street Burger and a Black Sheep Coffee, both Kolamba and Xi Home appear to care about what they're doing, and are doing it very well for not much money.

The problem, such as it is, with Xi Home and many other Chinese restaurants, is that the menu appears to be geared towards groups of 4 up sharing. And there's no problem with this of course - the more of the menu you get to try the better, and there's hardly any finer way to spend time with friends and family than working your way through dumplings and noodles. But with a minimum dumpling order of ten(!), if there's just two of you there's a choice to be made between having quite a lot of the same thing, or over-ordering and taking home leftovers. We chose the latter.

The dumplings, as you might be wondering, were wonderful. Fluffy and soft and piping hot, we went for the Spanish Mackerel variety because I'd never tried them before, but the abalone and even the lobster versions from the 'premium dumplings' section were the same price - about £19 for 10 from memory. There's something particularly addictive about the way that the pastry in well-made dumplings behaves in the mouth, all bouncy and tacky and silky at once, and these were extremely well-made.

Cold shredded chilli chicken was another classic Xi'an (I hope I'm right in saying - I've learned a lot about regional Chinese food over the last few years but I'm definitely still a beginner) dish, with a fantastic balance between poached poultry and earthy chilli heat. Peanuts and spring onions added some crunch, but the star here was the chicken itself, soft but firm, perfectly cooked and nicely presented.

Tempura king prawn with wasabi mayonnaise demonstrated that when Xi Home wanted to go a bit Japanese fusion, they could do it pretty well. The mayonnaise was just the right side of bitter, and the prawns were huge things with an excellent firm bite.

I've been a fan of murgers (it took me four attempts to type that as my computer kept autocorrecting to burger) since I tried the version by Murger HanHan, which now have branches all over the city. This was, I'm almost certain, even better, with an amazing flavour from the soft pork belly filling and the flatbread being just crisp enough on the outside to hold together, and thin enough to not muffle the pork. Really good stuff.

But amazingly my favourite dish wasn't the murger, or even the dumplings, lovely though they both were, but this glorious plate of green beans, dried chilli and ground pork, which despite being arguably one of the least complicated things on the menu, completely charmed with its glossy charred veg, crunchy bits of pig and just the right level (as in, quite a lot) of chilli heat. I'm told this was just as impressive reheated the next day, so it was the dish that gave on giving. A must-order, I'd say.

I hesitate to mention service when I'm on an invite like this, because obviously it's not often representative of what you might find if you just wandered in off the street, but staff were so enthusiastic about the menu they were offering and happy we enjoyed it that it was all rather charming. And I'm sure energy like that can't just be turned on for the press.

Anyway, they had every right to be proud of themselves because Xi Home is a genuinely accomplished and exciting new addition to the food options near Liverpool Street. It's not expensive (price per head would have been about £35 I think with a couple of beers), even less if you went for a less premium dumpling option, and it's now firmly on my recommendation list for this part of town. RIP the Water Poet, long live Xi Home Dumplings Bay.

8/10

I was invited to Xi Home and didn't see a bill.

Camille, Borough Market

Some restaurants just make it look so easy, don't they? The menu at Camille is so enticing, with unusual eye-catching ingredients prepared in exciting and distinctive ways, that it's almost enough to spoil any other dining experience by default, and it makes you wonder if they can do it, why can't everyone else? I thought I might as well lead with this spoiler (yes, Camille is every bit as good as everyone keeps saying it is) because after all that is the most important point to get across in this post - Camille is great, and you should go immediately. But if you want a bit more detail, then here goes.

The operation is so practised and settled you'd be forgiven for thinking it had been going for years, but the site has swapped hands so many times over the last decade or so it feels like it's been something different every time I'd been to Borough Market. Google Streetview tells me that since 2009 it's been a butchers, a chocolate shop, a wine seller, a florist, a Bill's style brunchy/breakfast place and, most recently, a branch of Kings Cross sandwich specialist Sons & Daughters, run by the guys behind Pidgin. Let's hope Camille will stick around a bit longer, because it really deserves to.

I started with pastis (never thought it would come to this), which I only mention because it caused the only minor service niggle of the evening. I'd decided to pay £5 for the Henri Bardouin variety instead of the familiar Ricard variety which was £4 because what the hell, you only live once, but couldn't help noticing that the person behind the bar poured a glass of the more prosaic pastis. If I hadn't been facing the bar I almost certainly wouldn't have noticed the inferior product being used as, well, I don't drink pastis very often and they do tend to taste rather similar (regular pastis-fanciers may disagree), and I'm 100% sure it was a genuine mistake not some kind of costcutting swindle, but it did make me wonder how often this happens - especially with glasses of wine, about which I know even less.

Anyway, who cares. First bit of food to arrive were these oysters with verjus, which (I found out from Google) is a juice made from unripe grapes, crab apples or other sour fruit. It seems they'd turned it into a nice sharp granita, which made a very clever and enjoyable foil for the oysters. Having spent the best part of the last 20 years or so ordering oysters whenever I see them on a menu, it's incredible people are still finding inventive and surprising ways of serving the things.

And Camille, it turns out, specialises in finding ways of serving food that surprise and delight. You may have heard of John Dory - a rarely seen (at least in the UK) and so usually fairly expensive fish known in various different languages on the continent as St. Peter's fish, as the distinctive dark spot on its side is supposed to be the apostle's thumb print (the fact that the fish appears, spot and all, in various pre-Christian Roman and Greek mosaics hasn't prompted a change of name at time of print).

This is a whole, deep-fried young John Dory and it's genuinely one of the most revelatory and brilliant bits of fish I've eaten all year. With a stripped-back St. John aesthetic - just the animal, ugly-beautiful and served on the bone with saffron mayonnaise - it looks at first, spiky and angular, like it might be a bit of a challenge to eat. So it's a joy to discover that actually the flesh from the body pulls away in satisfying chunks and tastes, with an incredible depth of flavour, every bit the premium product. But then you discover that even many of the bones themselves, treated to God knows what kind of clever technique, or maybe just because the animal is young, are edible too - sort of like crunchy fish crackers - leaving you able to strip the thing right down to the backbone. And all this for just £10. This has to be one of the great seafood bargains of London.

Devilled eggs - something you only ever used to see in Anglo-aligned restaurants in the US but have, I have noticed, started creeping onto trendy menus in the UK recently, would have been decent enough even without - a touch of genius - a little cross-fillet of smoked eel on top. So you have that earthy, smoky, seafood flavour paired with rich, creamy, paprika-spiked egg. Incredibly enjoyable stuff.

Next, another unbelievably successful fish course. A whole, beautifully char-grilled red mullet would, much like the John Dory, been more than enough to appreciate by itself, but came in a completely wonderful crab-butter sauce which we attempted to soak up and polish off with every bit of bread and/or potato pave (not pictured, but think Quality Chop House confit potato) that came to hand. And like the John Dory it was enough to make you look out for red mullet on every restaurant menu in the future - a dish good enough to redefine how you think about a fish.

We have nobody to blame other than ourselves for deciding to round out a fish-heavy dinner with a giant whole grilled megrim sole, which was far too much and completely unnecessary and although perfectly decent, definitely not on the same level as the John Dory or the mullet. I think my problem with megrim sole is that it looks so much like Dover sole that you're expecting the same kind of meaty, luxurious, firm flesh, but megrim is (at least the times I've had it) less full of flavour and more, well, mushy. But as I say, I won't score them down on this as we willingly ordered it and it was exactly as ordered.

There was also a grilled sweetcorn with smoked hay butter which had a fantastic mix of textures, with lots of little crispy corn bits - Camille certainly know how to use a grill - and chewy wild mushrooms.

If you hadn't noticed already thanks to my murky photos, the lighting in Camille is very, er, "romantic" - so a few things we ordered the photos didn't come out very well, not both desserts, a chocolate thing with "beef fat caramel" which obviously we had to order, and a mushroom ice cream. Both were, needless to say, great, but as I have a particular fondness for "weird" gelato (I still look back fondly on the pig's blood and chocolate ice cream that Gelupo did for Halloween one year) the umami-packed pied do mouton ice cream was my favourite.

If you're thinking £85pp for all of the above is a bit of a bargain, well I agree with you - but it doesn't quite tell the full story. Either thanks to "blogger's bonus" or genuine mistake, Camille didn't charge us for our wine, so a more realistic price per person would be about £100. Still perfectly acceptable for one is unquestionably one of the best restaurants in central London, but not quite a bargain. So either thank you Camille, or apologies for not noticing the missing items until now, but if it helps I'll definitely be back and I'll settle up then.

It's a curse of visiting restaurants quite as much as I do that you're constantly on the lookout for the fresh and the new, and although it pains me to admit it, for better or worse the "dynamic, experimental and occasional noble failure" will generally win over the "safe and familiar and consistent" every time. But occasionally, a restaurant comes along that is not only approaching the business of serving dinner in vibrant and intelligent new ways, but does so with such confidence and ability that it immediately becomes the new standard. And so it is with Camille, a tour-de-force of modern British/French bistro cooking that has single-handedly just made eating out in London an even more enticing prospect.

9/10

The Ropemaker, Emsworth

As I have surely said on this blog plenty of times over the years, I will never go to any holiday or short trip without at least one meal booked that stands a better than average chance of being decent. This is partly just for the sheer joy of eating out (how sad must your life be if you don't like eating out) but particularly in the case of European trips, there's a pretty good chance the weather will be awful (and don't think even Spain avoids this - it rained for days on end during recent trips to Seville and Girona) so I need an indoor activity to escape to.

And it's just as well the Ropemaker turned out to be as good as it did, because the weather last week in Emsworth was utterly biblical. I foolishly left the dry, comfortable hotel room with only an umbrella and by the time I'd got the 20 min or so down the road to what I'm going to call the Old Town (I'm not sure what locals call it) my jeans and shoes were absolutely soaked through due to horizontal driving rain. After sitting in the Blue Bell nursing a pint and a crab sandwich for as long as it took to stop dripping onto the floor beneath me, which was a surprisingly long time, I reluctantly headed out again into the squall and got soaked to the bone all over again. As I said, it really is just as well the Ropemaker turned out to be good.

This was apparently the first day of a new menu, and though I was slightly disappointed to see they'd taken off their "famous" (as much as anywhere can be famous for anything after only being open 2 months) Bouillabaisse, there was still plenty of things you'd want to eat. This is a cheese soufflé which held a great shape thanks to a gently firm crust, and was lovely and fluffy inside. The cheese sauce was good too - silky smooth and not too overwhelming or too underpowered.

Crab and sweetcorn bites had a great texture and plenty of good crab flavour. Perhaps if I was going to nitpick I'd say they probably didn't need all three of guacamole, apple and pear chutney AND brown crab mayonnaise (the mayo and the chutney would have been more than enough) but I mean, who doesn't like guacamole anyway.

I've had enough bad examples of duck over the years (mealy and dry, overcooked and tough, or cold and flabby) to know that despite appearances it's pretty bloody easy to get wrong. The bird here was fantastic - so tender you could cut it with a spoon but with a defined golden brown skin from careful rendering. The veg selection was all soaked in one of those lovely thick, dark Madeira sauces and carbs came in the form of a neat square of crisp and creamy Dauphinoise potato.

I never got to try the rump steak as it disappeared so quickly, but I assume that's a good sign. It certainly looked accurately rare, and the chips were good and crunchy (although, inevitably, I'd have preferred them peeled). One of the balancing acts somewhere like the Ropemaker has to pull off is keep their traditional local customer base happy but also have enough elsewhere going on to make the journey worthwhile for a curious visiting restaurant enthusiast. And judging by the fact every table in this huge restaurant (and more or less every spot in the huge bar) was taken on a cold, wet Wednesday night is proof that they've hit upon a formula that works. PS. Ignore the photo above, we ate early and this was taken when we first arrived

Desserts were equally accomplished. Bramley apple and cranberry crumble was easily enjoyable, not too sweet or sour, and with a nice buttery crumb. And Pistachio soufflé (the second soufflé on the menu) looked and tasted the part too. We didn't order the cheese, but the tasteful mix of English (Ogleshield,Shropshire Blue) and French (Coulommiers, Couronne Cendrée) names means someone at the Ropemaker knows their cheese.

So who cares about weather, if it just means more of an excuse to stay for longer holed up somewhere like the Ropemaker and get stuck in. As I said, it's already a wildly popular place despite the slightly out-of-town location, so they hardly need my help putting the word out, but I'm happy to report that my night's stay here was extremely lovely (the bed in particular was incredibly comfy, I slept like a log) and I'd recommend it to anyone. Rain or shine.

8/10

I was invited to the Ropemaker and didn't see a bill for dinner, though we paid for our drinks at the bar separately. Visit their website for prices.

Hainan House, Angel

Hainan is an island off the south coast of China about the size of Vancouver Island - that makes it bigger than Sicily and Sardinia and twice the size of Hawaii, with a population of over 10 million people (more than London). And yet inevitably until last week I'd never heard of it. I make no excuses for this - my knowledge of the geography of China is pretty pathetic, and I should do better, but in a way it's the job (or at least partly the job) of these little regional super-specialist restaurants to draw attention to some of the bewildering variety of Chinese cuisine, much like Silk Road did for Xinjiang and Dream Xi'an and Master Wei did for Shaanxi.

So Hainan cuisine then, or rather Qiong cuisine which is how they describe it on their website, appears to involve quite a bit of poaching of meat instead of the Cantonese/Beijing style crisp-skinned roasts, matched with fragrant fermented herbs and vegetables and the occasional claypot rice dish. Hainanese chicken, for example, is a thing you may have heard of before as it turns up in a certain form on the Din Tai Fung menu and is one of my favourite things to order there. Once you get used to the idea of poached chicken (speaking as someone brought up in Liverpool and didn't have it until I was well into my thirties), it really is a very lovely thing indeed.

Anyway I'm getting ahead of myself. The lunch menu at £13.50 for a main and a side seemed an eminently reasonable place to start, and this is beef Hun - strips of dried beef which had a very interesting collapsey texture (not chewy at all) in a tofu beancurd sauce with lovely big fried tofu puffs adding a bit of gentle crunch. But almost my favourite element were the fermented mustard greens, lovely dark green chunks of pickled brassica which provided another level of punchy flavour.

We tried to share the duties of sides to cover as much of the menu as possible. My own choice was pickled mooli, brilliantly strongly flavoured with that familair pongy (in a good way) turnip-y aroma and very generous in portion size.

Tea eggs were also good, soft and subtly flavoured and although I would have perhaps liked a bit more seasoning, although maybe I'm just thinking of the salted egg you get with ramen and these had a different job to do. They still disappeared quickly enough.

And I didn't get to try any of the braised cabbage, as it got demolished when my back was turned, but by all accounts that was very good too.

Thinking we couldn't come all of this way without trying the famous Hainanese chicken, they kindly let us order a half portion of the poussin off the evening menu, and it didn't disappoint. Served at room temperature to showcase the delicate flavours at their best, every last bit was perfectly tender and perfectly seasoned, and the accompanying chilli-pickled pineapple was wildly addictive. I could have ordered a portion of that on its own. A little bowl of mushroom rice, fluffy and light and moreish, rounded off the savoury courses.

Service was alert and pleasant, but then as we were the only table occupied that Friday lunchtime, it was quite easy to command their attention. I'm hoping it's just a case of the word not getting out just yet about this dynamic little spot on Upper Street, because at prices like these - as I said, £13.50 for a main and a side, and £15 with a drink as well, even with service added on is a bit of a bloody bargain. And for the chance to try a style of Chinese regional food that hitherto hasn't been very visible in the capital, it's worth every penny and more.

Overall, there's really not much to fault about Hainan House. Boldly different, great value and smartly presented, even the hilariously precipitous journey to the loos, involving a crazily inclined staircase in three wildly different proportions, like something from a fairground fun house, just added to the charm. Whether it finds an audience rather depends on Londoners see authentic regional Chinese food coming out of Upper Street - even top ramen peddlers Kanada-Ya took a while to get going a few doors' down, even as people were queueing down the street for the St Giles branch. But, with a bit of luck, and a little time, they should do very well indeed. At least, they very much deserve to.

8/10

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The Royal Oak, Whatcote

There are so many different types of restaurant, so much variety in the ways and manner and styles that we eat out, that sometimes it's amazing we find anything in common about the experience at all. And yet somehow we do, and restaurant critics and food blogs exist because, by and large, if one person enjoys a place there's a pretty good chance another person will enjoy it too. I'm generalising hugely of course, but as much as there exists the concept of a Good Restaurant - and I'm pretty sure there is - then there is value in someone telling you about it.

But I have to be very careful when talking about the Royal Oak at Whatcote, because if I had sat down and written a list of all the things I personally wanted from a lunch out, from the culinary method of the kitchen, through the attitude to sourcing of ingredients, to the style and manner of service, I could hardly have ended up with a more perfect representation on earth than this charming old pub nestled in the Warwickshire countryside. And although it pains me to even consider the idea, perhaps not everyone would fall as madly and deeply in love with the place on first visit than I did.

But honestly, they had me at "hello". On a blackboard on the wall in the dining room at the Royal Oak are listed everything in season, and everything you might expect to see on the menu at some point, a menu that sometimes changes a few times a day based on availability. Crab, crayfish, grouse, lobster, muntjac, quail, rabbit, roebuck, snipe... it's like they reached into my brain and saw all my favourite things to eat and then wrote them down on a piece of paper, and paper, by the way, that is not only recycled and recyclable but literally contains wildflower seeds that you can soak out and grow in your own garden.

After a fresh and summery house aperitif that involved orange and fizz and had a single giant square ice cube in (a presentational flourish I always appreciate in short drinks), the first element of the lunch proper was a shot of roe buck consommé. The Royal Oak receive venison from the hills surrounding the village and break down the animal themselves, meaning they get to use the bones and various other bits to make this incredible broth, beautifully balanced between meaty richness and a slight tang of alcohol, with a thick, glossy texture that coats the lips. It was an absolute joy.

The next two snacks arrived together - a silky duck liver parfait sandwiched between delicate pastry, a prune chutney and a layer of ginger gel studded with herbs. And that was beautiful in every way, but the smoked eel with apple was enough to elicit gasps - inside more exquisitely crafted pastry was a smoked eel and apple sorbet, dissolving in the mouth to release distinct and decadent notes of smoked fish and summer herbs alongside the bright fresh wash of frozen apple. It was, also, miraculously good.

Sweetcorn had been teased into a kind of flower-shaped mousse, filled with some powerful wild mushrooms (with an earthy powdered element I couldn't quite put my finger on but which added another autumnal dimension of flavour) and then bathed in a light butter and sweetcorn (I think) velouté. Presentation at the Royal Oak is, as you can probably tell even from my terrible photos, easily at the multi Michelin-starred level but never at the expense of accessibility or flavour - it surprises and delights, but never shocks or jarrs.

Like every modern British restaurant worth its salt these days, bread and butter is presented as a course unto itself, in order to sufficiently showcase the effort that had gone into the various elements before the rest of the savoury courses arrive and steal the limelight. The bread, a near perfect sphere of supremely airy wholemeal loaf, was the perfect vehicle for the butters, not as filling or as powerfully flavoured as the more usual sourdough, but so light and easy to eat it invited you to load up each mouthful with even more butter than you would normally. The butters, by the way, were a 'normal' deep yellow churn, a salty, rich pork fat version and a goats' cheese, and they were all world class but I think, somewhat predictably, my favourite was the pork fat which had little bits of puffed rind on top.

Incredibly, the main body of the tasting menu had yet to start. That kicked off with this pretty circle of rainbow strips of courgette - pickled and grilled alternatively I think they said - draped over some beautifully cooked slices of roe-buck loin (I think it was) and fluffy curd. There was a lot to love here in every different technique and stunning seasonal ingredient on display, but the star - understandably - was the supremely local venison, which had a dark smoky crust and rich, deep pink gamey interior.

Monkfish tail, dense and meaty, came dusted with pine which was a lovely little combo. With it, a cylinder of roast celeriac topped with crunchy, herby breadcrumbs, a dollop of apple purée with nasturtium oil, and what I think was a chestnut purée. And that was all fantastic. But my God the sauce poured on top - buttery and crabby and bursting with flavour, so complex and light in texture but with an extraordinary depth of flavour - was an absolute masterclass, a reason to make the journey out to Warwickshire on its own. We talked about this sauce all the way on the train home, and I was thinking about it as soon as I woke up the next morning. This was a world-changing crab sauce.

The next course, then, had a lot to live up to, but absolutely did. There was a little slice of roast plum topped with sage, next to a vegetable purée of some kind I couldn't quite put my finger on, but which was silky smooth and full of flavour. There was a dainty little pastry case of immensely rich and gamey offal bound by another masterclass in saucing, studded with more root veg and topped with a generous pile of black truffle. But best of all was a quail breast stuffed with apricot and sage, juicy and packed full of flavour, with a fantastic faintly bitter touch from the sage and a salty, golden brown skin. Like everything else it was beautiful to look at, seasoned perfectly, intelligently constructed and a delight to eat. Absolute heaven.

Even an ostensibly simple cheese course managed to impress in a number of different ways at once. The cheese was a new one to me - Yordale from Curlew Dairy, which was a bit like a more creamy and complex Lancashire, a really good bit of cheesemaking. With it, a dollop of local honey and a golden brown Banbury cake (Banbury being the nearest town, and where you're likely arrive if getting to Whatcote by train), sort of like an elongated Eccles cake, sweetly glazed and addictively crisp. It was paired to great success with a South African port, The Bishop of Norwich 'The Liberator'. Wines at the Royal Oak have a heavy (though not exclusively so) South African lean as Solanche (Craven, Richard Craven is the chef) hails from there, and her enthusiasm for everything she serves is extremely infectious.

I'm sure the Oak wouldn't mind me describing the first dessert - blackcurrant sorbet on top of a clever blackberry leaf mousse - as Roganesque, as it had the same light touch and attention to striking visual detail as anything to come out of the kitchens at l'Enclume. It was a dish that reminded you how good blackberries are when in peak season and treated with supreme skill, and how lucky we are in this country to have them on our doorstep.

Damsons, from a tree just next to the pub, came prettily arranged on a sponge cake which had more damson compote inside. But the star of this dish was something they called Honington hay-brown butter, which I think had been smoked and salted and who knows what else to produce the most amazingly rich brown butter ice cream, the kind of thing I think I could polish off pints of at a time.

You will have noticed I have completely failed to be even the least bit "careful" about my enthusiasm and love for the Royal Oak. From the first sip of glossy venison consommé to the final bite of buttery, warm chocolate ganache (above), this was a meal without fault, made with love by people at the top of their game (no pun intended... or maybe slightly intended), and involving a succession of all of my favourite seasonal British ingredients. But what makes the whole operation even more special is that the nimbleness of the kitchen matched with a tireless effort to find what's good at any given moment means the menu constantly shifts to be the best it can possibly be. You'll notice that even in the time they took to print the menu that morning, guinea fowl had been swapped out for quail, to stunning effect. All of which means any given repeat visit has the chance to be bewilderingly brilliant in a whole new series of ways.

I don't know what else to tell you, other than the Royal Oak is as close to my ideal restaurant that exists in the actual world and that you should make every effort under the sun to go. Oh and if you think rural Warwickshire is a bit inaccessible, my whole journey from Battersea door to door took 2 and a bit hours, and that included a 25 min cab ride (£25 each way) from Banbury. So it's just as enticingly available for a leisurely Saturday lunch out of town than anywhere else outside the M25. Oh, and there's a lovely terrace for good weather. Oh, and the toilets are nice. Oh, and there's a good big space between the tables and there's a "pub bit" with a pool table if you want to linger around afterwards. Oh, and... never mind. Just go.

10/10

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I was invited to the Royal Oak and didn't see a bill, but if you want to do it properly, with tasting menus and matching wines, you're looking at about £220pp. And given everything you get in return, I consider that a bargain.