El Molí de l’Escala, L'Escala

I have eaten at El Moli a number of times over the 40 or so years I and my family have been visiting this part of the world. The first couple of visits were pre-blog and pre-camera phone and I don't remember much about it other than being sat in those same ancient vaulted rooms (some parts of the building are 12th century) and being bitten by mosquitos. I went back with a couple of friends in 2007 and had a dreadful meal - it's possible that the food had been terrible on previous visits and I just had lower standards, or maybe we were just unlucky this time, but you can read about how awful it was here. Decades passed - understandably - before I was willing to give it another shot, but in October last year I had a genuinely lovely meal of interesting seafood and seasonal home-grown veg (El Moli have their own kitchen garden nearby) but thanks to a suspiciously cheap SD card reader picked up on the streets of Girona, managed to lose all my photos and so couldn't write it up.

So here we are - finally - with a working SD card reader, an early summer reservation in this grand old building on the outskirts of town, and a table for fully 13 of us for a birthday celebration lunch. Eating somewhere like El Moli is a joy when there's a lot of you - most of the dishes are designed to be shared anyway, and though I'd like to think I'd have a decent bash at polishing off an entire fried fish by myself, it's a lot more fun when you can try smaller bits of a greater variety of weird and wonderful seafood.

Before that though, the snacks. L'Escala is famous for its anchovies, and so you'd expect one of the town's leading restaurants to showcase these lovely salty little fellows in various different ways. So here is gorgeous crusty homemade anchovy sourdough served with anchovy butter...

...anchovy-stuffed olives which had a brilliant balance of soft savouriness and saline punch...

...and anchovy and truffle seaweed crackers, possibly the most distressingly addictive snack I've come across in the last few years. Even a couple of under 10s on our table who usually eat little else other than white bread and chocolate managed to gobble a number of these down, a testament to their universal appeal.

From the starters proper, first to arrive were smoked sardines, something that had become a bit of a theme of the trip thanks to the discovery of a place in town that made their own using north Atlantic fish. I'm not sure where El Moli source theirs, but they were still very nice, accompanied by green beans and a gentle herby vinaigrette.

White asparagus, carefully grilled to get a few dainty char marks but not so much to make them tough or dry, were served in another light vinaigrette which made the most of the veg. El Moli do have a slight tendency to add one or two more ingredients than strictly necessary to a plate - the usual Spanish style is to have the main item and nothing more - but this dish was a model of restraint, and all the better for it.

White prawns next, from Llançà, a little fishing town just around the coast near the French border. Dressed simply with olive oil and salt - which is all they needed really - I'll forgive them the slightly redundant sprig of frisée lettuce on top partly because it was nice and crunchy and fresh and also because it soaked up the leftover dressing very well.

I've never had grouper before in any form and though this arrangement of sashimi was perfectly pleasant, I'm not entirely sure there was enough flavour in the raw product to justify serving it raw. That said, I don't know where else you can get grouper sashimi so life experience ticked off there.

There was one other starter-sized portion I unfortunately didn't get a photo of - a plate of sea cucumbers, dressed in nothing more than garlic and oil, which were beautifully cooked and a real treat. Again, the joy of eating seafood in Spain is not only that the variety of stuff available is that much wider, is that it's always served at very reasonable prices - this €38 dish would, if you ever even saw it available, be at least double that in London.

Now it was time for the larger plates, but not before one of the more excruciating moments I've ever been through in a restaurant. We had, during ordering earlier, enquired about the smallest available Cap de Creus spiny lobster, a rare and expensive beastie with a short season, hand caught in the waters around Roses bay. We were told initially that they had a 300g specimen, which at €18/100g mean that we could have a taste of this delicacy for €54 - punchy, but not ridiculous. However, they later realised that the smallest lobster they had was in fact 700g (and brought it out still kicking to show us), meaning a significantly more damaging outlay of €126, so we reluctantly turned it down.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way our reluctant rejection was misinterpreted as a reluctant agreement and so it was with no small amount of horror that we found ourselves being presented with said lobster, now expertly grilled and ready to eat, and had to go through the agonising experience of explaining that in fact we didn't want it and sorry if we weren't clear earlier.

Now, two things to say about this. Firstly, the staff couldn't have been nicer about the whole thing and swiftly and graciously took the lobster back kitchen-side, presumably to make for some rather more extravagant than normal staff dinner. So they could not have handled the situation any better from that point of view. And secondly, although you'd be tempted to blame such lack of communication on the language barrier, I can promise you that our waiter spoke better English than most front of house in London, so that wasn't the issue either. It was just one of those things, an unfortunate combination of us (probably) not quite rejecting the thing as forcefully as we could and them misreading our English politeness incorrectly, which if it had been an extra portion of chips or a plate of croquetas would have been unfortunate, but regarding a €126 serving of some of the Costa Brava's finest seafood became something else entirely.

Anyway, I'm happy to say that the mains we did order were definitely worth our while. Scorpionfish came whole-roasted, boasting a lovely crisp salty skin and bright white, meaty flesh inside, alongside some more grilled vegetables from the kitchen garden. This was partly ordered out of curiosity as I don't think I'd ever tried scorpionfish before, but it was a lovely thing indeed, rather reminiscent of hake in texture.

And it wasn't all about the seafood - this is a 500g "Txogitxu" Txuleton on the bone for an astonishingly reasonable €37.50 - bargains are to be found in all corners of a Spanish restaurant menu. The Txogitxu website proudly states they specialise in "Fat old cows", which can be both an amusing turn of phrase and completely true at the same time.

We had all the desserts, too - well, apart from the Recuit goats cheese and honey which had run out. Torrija is a kind of Spanish French toast, buttery and crunchy on the outside and complimented by a rich homemade ice cream...

...Mille-fuille of seasonal citrus fruit was gorgeous to look out and incredibly easy to eat, with layers of lemon curd binding together delicate flakes of pastry. We probably should have ordered two of these, it disappeared so quickly...

...Basque-style cheesecake, of which we did order two, which had a fantastic creamy flavour and texture topped with sugared hazelnuts...

...chocolate mousse with toasted "garam bread" (fortunately not nearly as weird as it sounds) with olive oil and salt...

...and a strawberry pavlova hiding under a blanket of mousse-like meringue which was full of the joys of summer.

There was also a cheese course, all excellent needless to say, but don't ask me to tell you what they were because I forgot to make a note and they were all super-local varieties that you probably wouldn't see outside of this corner of Spain even if you looked for them.

By this point, aided by a couple of bottles of nice cava (a ludicrously reasonable €20 each) and a glass of treacly Pedro Ximines, we had largely put the Unfortunate Lobster Incident behind us and were further cheered by a bill of €522.30 - pretty good indeed for 11 people. Admittedly the under 10s mainly ate chicken fingers and bread (as well as those puffed seaweed snacks) but a couple of the older kids had oysters and roast hake and chips, and there was definitely plenty of food and drink for everyone. So when I say the spend per head was only just over €47, well, I'm only stretching the truth slightly.

The point is, I can recommend El Moli de l'Escala with endless enthusiasm. Their style of food and service is unpretentious but considered, rarely overcomplicated and always bursting with flavour and charm. They offer a range of exciting and unusual seafood throughout the year (if you ever see Palamos prawns, get them - this applies to any other restaurant too) at prices that feel moderate bordering on bargainous. And when Incidents arise, they handle them with grace and charm. I do hope they found a willing customer (internal or otherwise) for that Cap de Creus lobster. And either way, I hope this post serves as enough of a thank-you.

8/10

Studio Gauthier, Fitzrovia

Hard as it may be to believe from my supremely easy-going and liberal attitude these days (no laughing at the back), there was a time when I was, well, if not completely anti-vegan then certainly vegan-skeptic. To someone who once considered vegetarianism radically restrictive, veganism seemed like vegetarianism with the few remaining good bits (butter, cheese, cream, eggs) taken out, a path taken only by people who didn't really like food in the first place and were looking for a more socially acceptable word to substitute for "dietary neurosis".

And certainly, there are cuisines that (for want of a better word) "veganise" better than others. Most of the SE Asian and Indian subcontinent handle veganism supremely well - certain subgenres of Indian food are largely vegan anyway, and I have it on good authority from a vegan friend who went on holiday to Thailand recently that he ate extremely well almost everywhere. Just don't try being a vegan in France - one member of my family recently asked for a vegan alternative to a set menu starter and was served pâté de foie gras, a substitution very much from the Nana Royal attitude to hospitality.

Sushi, with its focus on fresh fish, doesn't seem like an obvious cuisine to lend itself to going vegan, but then chains like Pret and Wasabi have done so for a number of years already with their avocado and cucumber rolls. What if it was done properly, with a chef's attitude to detail and with real presentational flair? Studio Gauthier attempts to do just that, making excellent sushi that just happens to have no animal in it. Can it really work?

Well, in a word, yes. The first thing to arrive to our table was this cute presentation of plant-based "caviar", the deception strengthened by being served in a little custom-printed caviar tin. The "caviar" itself was remarkably realistic - certainly the equal to the lumpfish roe you can get from Tesco, probably even nicer - and underneath was a layer of creamy, salty plant-based crème fraiche of some kind (probably made from nuts but don't hold me to that). It was all rather lovely, despite the vegan blinis perhaps not working quite as well as their butter and milk-based counterparts and also being somewhat burned. Passing the huge open kitchen a little later, I noticed one of the staff despondently picking through a pile of burned blinis for the occasional one that could be salvaged and used, so clearly something had gone wrong in the preparation that day. I'm sure they're normally a lot better than this.

When it comes to accurately describing the actual sushi, I'm going to have a bit of an issue, as some of the very clever techniques they used to recreate the standard sushi sets are quite beyond my powers of deduction. But alongside avocado nigiri here are "salmon" and "tuna" nigiri made, I'm told from tapioca starch with more fake tuna urumaki, all of it more than convincing. What also helped was that the sushi rice was warm - a detail that plenty of "actual" (and far more expensive) sushi places get wrong.

Another plate of nigiri featured chargrilled aubergine, piquillo peppers with passion fruit chutney and, in the centre there, "Green Dynamite" - crisp rice fritters topped with tofu "crab", and sliced jalapeño dotted with sriracha. Thoughtfully put together and each mouthful bursting with flavour, I think it was about this point that I completely forgot I was eating plant-based food and was just eagerly looking forward to the next thing to arrive.

More "tuna" and avocado and truffled miso nigiri came sharing a plate with a bitesize inari - a spongey, sweet tofu thing stuffed with soft, warm rice. Inari are actually vegan anyway, so perhaps the success of this shouldn't be too much of a surprise, but it was still a very good example of its kind, and right up there with the caviar as one of my favourite things overall.

With a couple of cocktails, the bill came to £43pp, more than reasonable for London these days, certainly for food which although doesn't contain any expensive protein did still clearly have a lot of work and thought gone into it. I'm just docking a couple of points firstly for the burned blinis, and also for slightly inexperienced service charged at slightly-over-normal 15% - we had to ask a couple of times for various things. Also, the room isn't air-conditioned which you could just about get away with when it's 28C (the day we visited) but once it goes over 30C, which it often does in London these days, you're not going to want to be there very long. Still, these are niggles.

Even a committed protein eater like me had a blast at Studio Gauthier - it's intelligent, enjoyable food done well in attractive yet informal surroundings, and for not very much money at all. For vegans though, this could very easily be everything they ever wanted in a restaurant, where instead of having to choose between the only plant option (usually mushroom risotto, or something involving butternut squash) or going hungry, they can have anything they want from this enticing menu, and be just as smug and satisfied as their protein-eating friends anywhere else in town. And that alone has to be worth a trip, surely?

8/10

Uncle Hon's BBQ, Hackney Wick

After traipsing halfway across London, dodging travel works and closed Overground lines and carriages with malfunctioning air conditioning and all the other things that make moving around this city on a weekend in the summer such an endless joy, it's equally annoying to find that your destination is good or bad. If it's good, you will bemoan the fact that somewhere worth visiting is so bloody difficult to get to, and seethe with jealousy of those lucky locals who have such a good place on their doorstep. And if it's bad, you wish you'd spent your Saturday morning and sanity going somewhere else.

Uncle Hon's isn't awful. It's not great, but it's not awful. The brisket (sorry, ox cheeks) was over-tender to the point of mush (it would definitely not pass the competition BBQ "pull-test") and a bit too sweet. Pulled lamb had a decent flavour but a rather uniform texture - the joys of the "pulled" element of a BBQ tray lie almost entirely in finding little crispy crunchy bits of fat and charred flesh; this was just a bit boring. And some cubes of pork belly were decent enough in that Cantonese roast style but was yet more sweet, syrupy, mushy meat next to two other piles of sweet, syrupy, mushy meat and the whole thing was just a bit sickly.

Iberico ribs were a bit better in terms of texture - they did at least have a bit of a bite and didn't just slop off the bone as is depressingly often the case - but I feel like Iberico has become a bit of a meaningless foodie buzzword like Wagyu, ie. nowhere near the guarantee of quality it once was (if indeed it ever was). These were definitely the best things we ate though, and were pretty easily polished off.

Oh I should say pickles and slaw were fine, if fairly unmemorable, and a single piece of crackling weirdly lodged vertically into a mound of rice like the sword in the stone had a pleasant enough greaseless texture but was pretty under seasoned.

Look, I can see what they're trying to do at Uncle Hon's - fusion American/Chinese BBQ food, bringing a bit of a new twist to what is now fairly ubiquitous London drinking-den fare, and with a bit more thought and skill it could have been, well, if not completely worth that awful journey but at least some compensation for your efforts. But after having paid £50pp for what is an only fairly mediocre tray of food plus 3 small extra pork ribs, we were left feeling fairly unhappy, not very satisfied and more than a little ripped off.

5/10

Norbert's, East Dulwich

They're like the buses, these rotisserie places. You wait years for a decent, affordable spit-roast chicken in the capital, and then two come along at once.

I'm being slightly disingenuous and short-memoried, of course. Soho House's Chicken Shop was a reliably enjoyable place to get the good stuff, and was remarkable value as well. But for whatever reason - who know how these things work, certainly not me - the one in Holborn closed (where I would go at least once every couple of weeks back in the day), then Kentish Town, then Tooting, and then after hanging on for a year or two the final spot in St John's Wood shuttered.

And believe me, I've tried my best at the other end of the budget too. About a decade ago I tried Hélène Darroze's Sunday roast (sorry - Dimanche poulet) at the Connaught, and while some of the starter elements were very nice (particularly a genius-level chicken consommé and Armagnac shot - hook it into my veins) the main event was overcooked, dry and disappointing. And, of course, stupidly expensive.

So until recently - with certain notable exceptions - rotisserie chicken was just not something that London did well. But hot on the heels of the Knave of Clubs (in fact I believe they opened within a couple of months of each other) is Norbert's in East Dulwich, a much more modest operation than that grand old Victorian pub in Shoreditch (I'm sure Norbert's won't mind me saying) but still aiming to apply intelligence and skill to the business of roast poultry.

The menu is short - very short, just the aforementioned chicken with sides and a couple of starters - but then that's the whole point of a specialist place like this. This is not a restaurant that does chicken, it is a chicken restaurant, and if you're vegetarian, well, you can find somewhere else to eat. We started with taramasalata which in itself was lovely but the salt and vinegar crisps it came with was, I think, a flavour too far for the same dish, the astringency fighting with the seafood. Much better would have been plain, I think. But still, an excellent tarama.

Before the main event, though, I need to talk about service - particularly wine service. My female friend had picked out a bottle she wanted to try. It duly arrived, but was poured into my own glass to taste, and without thinking (I'm afraid I've still got some way to go in situations like this) I tasted it and said it was fine. Anyone who knows me will tell you a vote of confidence in a wine from me is about as useful and prestigious as a degree from Trump University, so inevitably, when the same wine was poured into my friend's own glass she in fact didn't like it, and was offered something else. In a hapless attempt to salvage both mine and the restaurant's mistake I offered to pay for the first wine anyway, so we ended up in the end spending a small fortune on wine, not all of which we ended up drinking.

Now clearly, the first mistake was theirs (offering the first taste to the person who hadn't ordered it - let's for their sake assume that was an honest mistake and nothing too worryingly gender-based), and the second was mine (tasting it instead of offering it to my friend - there's a small chance I may have been distracted by taramasalata but that's no excuse), but I think the final mistake was the restaurant's really, for not offering to just take back the unwanted wine. But maybe there's some other nuance I've not thought of - what do you think?

The chicken, though, was just about worth the stress. A healthily thick, dark skin packed with spice and seasoning, a brined but not in the least bit 'hammy' flesh, some excellent crisp fries that held their structure and flavour until the last bite, and a supremely crunchy, fresh salad. Perhaps it wasn't quite the same level as the Turner & George chicken from the Knave, for an almost identical price (salad and fries are extra here, but included at the Knave) but was still worth the journey.

We also found space for some nice cheese from Mons cheesemongers up the road, a gruyere style from Ireland which was a perfect temperature. Which didn't help our £72pp final bill but as I say, most of that was wine, whether we wanted it or not.

I'm in two minds about Norbert's. On the one hand it is perfectly acceptable chicken for not a huge amount of money and it's an unpretentious little addition to this corner of East Dulwich. On the other hand the whole business with the wine left us wishing the whole experience had gone differently, and yes it doesn't compare well with a certain other rival rotisserie spot in Shoreditch doing things a little bit better for pretty much the same price. I think I know where's more likely to get my repeat custom.

6/10

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The Knave of Clubs, Shoreditch

I wouldn't normally feel comfortable sticking a score on a place after sampling just 2 dishes from a menu, but I will make an exception for the Knave of Clubs for two reasons. Firstly, they have put the rotisserie "centre stage" at one end of the large dining room and that is what, I imagine, the large majority of their visitors will be ordering. Secondly, I bloody loved the place, so I don't think they'll mind me writing about it even without trying most of what their kitchens can offer.

We started, though, with oysters - an extremely reasonable £20 for 6 large, lean specimens supplied with all the correct condiments. In a town when the average price per bivalve is hovering around the £5 mark (and in some cases is well above that), it's nice to know that there's somewhere still offering value like this.

The same sense of value is evident in the rest of the menu. They really could charge a lot more for a whole chicken than £38, especially given the quality of these birds (from arguably London's best butcher Turner and George), and even if they didn't come with a giant helping of sides. For your money you get loads of chicken fat roasties, a nice sharply-dressed green salad, some slices of baguette and a little pot of light, homemade aioli.

All of this generosity would have come to naught if the chicken itself wasn't up to scratch, but fortunately thanks to the provenance I mentioned, plus judicious use of brining (not too salty but just enough to ensure every bit of the flesh is tender and juicy), plus a really lovely chermoula spice rub, the end result was a truly impressive bit of rotisserie - the best pub roast chicken I've had the pleasure to tear into in recent memory; certainly the best value. We absolutely demolished the chicken then spent many happy minutes mopping up the chermoula cooking juices with the slices of baguette, and for a while, all was well with the world.

The bill, with a £32 bottle of wine came to £51pp - you really can spend a lot more than this and get a lot less, and not just in central London. In fact the whole experience, including the lovely and attentive staff, made me forgive the only real complaint I have about the place - bloody communal tables. But the spots are spread out around them quite generously, and actually just gives me an excuse to return and try the bistro-style One Club Row upstairs in the same building, where chef Patrick Powell (ex- Allegra) is really stretching his wings. I bet it's great. Watch this space.

9/10

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The Parakeet, Kentish Town

I'm going to start this post about the Parakeet, with - unfortunately (for them, and possibly for you) - a bit of a rant. Why is it that no matter how much money has been lavished on a place, no matter how starry the chefs, how extensive the wine list, how exclusive the whisky collection (the Parakeet has some very interesting bourbons), the beer offering is almost always absolute garbage? I've lost count of the amount of gastropubs I've turned up to for a pre-dinner pint that seem to think it's OK to serve an exciting, seasonal modern British menu with a straight face alongside Camden Hells, Moretti, Guinness and bugger-all else. There's nothing poisonous about any of these bog-standard beers, and not everywhere can be the Wenlock Arms, but honestly guys, it's not difficult - serve the mass-market crap if you must but why not have one or two taps available for something from Deya, or Verdant, or Signature, or Pressure Drop, or god knows how many other great independent craft breweries on your doorstep? Would it really kill you?

So yes my evening at the Parakeet got off to a bit of a humdrum start, with a pint of something entirely forgettable, but I'll give them this - at least, unlike so many 'gastropubs', it's still a proper pub, with a handsome and tastefully restored high-Victorian bar area supported by banquette seating at least equal in size to the dining section. And they're both beautiful spaces, with stained glass details and dark wood panelling, the dining area theatrically unveiled with the raising of curtains at the beginning of service.

They can do a good Negroni too, and know how to put together a supremely attractive Spring menu, with a lot of my favourite words - crab, asparagus, wild garlic, oysters - offered at prices that, these days at least, seem almost modest. The point is, the Parakeet are doing lots of things right and so when they do slip up it only serves to remind you how much better it would be if they'd paid slightly closer attention to the details.

This, for example - described on the menu as "Poached oysters & sea buckthorn granita". Now I'm going to be generous and forgive the plurality as a typo, rather than anything more sinister, because it's £5 for a single beastie is pretty much the norm these days. But am I right in thinking "poached" means served warm? This was ice-cold and tasted raw - again, perfectly fine if that's what you want but not as described. And doesn't "granita" mean a kind of shaved-ice frozen affair? This was a very nice dressing, with what can be a sharply astringent sea buckthorn element tempered by apple juice, but I wouldn't call it a granita.

Duck hoi sin tartlets were very pretty little things which tasted as good as they looked - bags of salty, syrupy hoi sin flavour and with nice soft chunks of pink duck.

Crab lasagne bites contained a good amount of crab meat and a very seductive cheese-toastie style arrangement of textures. They were also something I'd genuinely never seen before on a menu, which for this jaded blogger after nearly two decades in the game is impressive by itself.

Hopefully it's not too much of a criticism to say that this plate of artichoke, broad beans (properly peeled, thank you) and sunflower seeds possibly would have been better described and sold as a side, rather than a starter. It had nice shaved artichokes, plenty of big juicy broad beans and the seeds added an attractive crunch, but in the end there wasn't quite enough going on to justify itself as a standalone dish. Nevertheless, we did quite happily polish it off.

The only real dud of the evening, food-wise at least, was the turbot. Under-seasoned, with an unattractive flabby skin and a strangely blobby-textured, soily flesh, it really wasn't a very pleasant thing to eat and was a poor advertisement for what can otherwise be one of the best fish to eat on the planet. The pickled white asparagus and grape dressing it came with, however, was lovely, which although hardly making up for the turbot did mean there was at least something to enjoy on the plate.

Bizarrely though, considering the poor state of the turbot, this battered, deep-fried red mullet was an absolute joy. Inside a nice crunchy greaseless batter was a fillet of superb mullet, every inch of it properly seasoned and bursting with flavour. I'll forgive them missing to remove a few bones from one side - they were easily dealt with, and the masala and curry leaf sauce it came with was rich with tomato and spices. I know through bitter experience that red mullet does not always taste this good, so this was a surprise as well as a delight.

Desserts were enjoyable, but didn't seem to have had the same amount of care lavished on them as the savoury courses. Chocolate mousse was tasty enough and a bed of crunchy puffed oats (I think they were) gave it a bit of texture, but it's not really the best chocolate mousse I've eaten this month (step forward, yet again, the Devonshire) never mind longer ago.

Citrus Bakewell tart was slightly more interesting and I liked the fragile ribbons of caramelised fruit they'd draped on top, but the cake element was slightly dry and crumbly.

Overall, though, the Parakeet are doing more things right than wrong, and if that seems like damning with faint praise it still puts them ahead of a lot of spots in town. I hesitate to mention service on invites like these but everyone seemed very enthusiastic, and kept exactly the right balance between friendliness and professionalism - they also passed the folded napkin test with flying colours. And although the food menu wasn't exactly at the budget end of the scale, they do offer a house white for £29 which is approaching a genuine steal these days. So yes, if I was going to spend this amount of money and take a journey across town for this kind of food there's a few places (not least the Devonshire, but also the Baring, the Drapers Arms and the Pelican) that would be ahead of the list. But if I was a local, I think I'd be pretty happy to have the option to visit. And perhaps that's all that matters.

7/10

I was invited to the Parakeet and didn't see a bill, but totting up what we ate and drank from the menus comes to about £70pp which isn't bad really.