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

Chungdam, Soho

I generally try and avoid focusing too much on service on invited meals. If the front of house know you're in to review they usually try and be that extra bit more attentive, and occasionally too much so, and either way it's rarely an accurate reflection of the average punter's experience.

However, rules are made to be broken, and I feel duty bound to mention the service at Chungdam because it's amongst the most pleasant, knowledgable and mesmerisingly efficient I've come across in a long while. The experience of eating there is like having your own personal chef and confidant, who patiently explains how everything works, offers advice on what goes best with what, and occasionally personally handles the cooking of certain items with a grace and skill that's so utterly transfixing it's like watching close up magic done with beef instead of playing cards.

Now, great service is rarely, if ever, enough of a reason to visit a restaurant by itself, but fortunately Chungdam is serving rather nice food and drink as well, to boot. Our welcome drink was a soju cocktail served in a very pretty frozen coupe glass, wide and shallow, that felt very special even if it did require both hands to safely pick it up. Or maybe that's just clumsy old me.

As you might hope and expect, house pickles were the first foodstuffs to arrive. Sesame beansprouts, house kimchi and pickled radish all had things to recommend them, but we particularly liked the radish which had that irresistable funk of daikon matched with a gentle sweetness.

Japchae arrived alongside the pickles, a dish of glass noodles with beef and wood-ear mushrooms, amongst various other stir-fried veg. Perfectly decent, although looking back at the end of the meal, almost painfully overstuffed with various different cuts of beef and noodles, I think this is one dish we probably could have done without. Would make a nice lunch by itself though.

The real excitement began with the arrival of the first beef dish, raw tartare with slices of pear. The sesame oil made a good dressing but what lifted this dish was the addition of at least an entire bulb (I may be exaggerating... but not by much) of raw garlic, which made the thing burn in the mouth like you wouldn't believe. I'm a huge fan of too-much-garlic at the best of times, but this was unreal. I can only apologise to anyone who shared my carriage on the southbound Northern Line later in the evening.

Alongside that arrived seafood pancake - very good, particularly the citrussy dipping sauce it came with - but eyeing up the five more courses to come on the menu and given how generous the portions had been so far we just tried a square or two each. Bear in mind though, this was a press menu, so you should be able to construct yourself something a bit more reasonable on your own visit.

I was very excited at the prospect of the grade 1++ Korean beef listed on the menu, and it was certainly very nicely marbled and had a good flavour, but in conversation with our waiter it turns out it's not actually Korean, or officially graded 1++ (think Japanese Wagyu grading but for Korean cows) but the closest approximation they could find from UK butchers. Which is absolutely fine and wouldn't have been a problem if they weren't listing 1++ steak on the menu, which I'm fairly sure is against some trading standards laws. So they might want to look at that and put it in inverted commas or something in the future. Anyway we greedily demolished strips of this ultra tender steak with chilli, sesame oil, salt and a number of other interesting dips and sauces, some of which I have no chance of remembering how to describe or spell.

Brisket and short ribs both came sliced ultra-thin, thus needing no more than a few seconds on the tabletop grill before they could be eagerly gobbled down. The brisket came with some nigiry-style pieces of lovely vinegary rice which made a great foil for the beef, but in almost all cases with the beef I preferred it either with the soy dressing or the sesame salt, both of which brought out the flavours in interesting and addictive ways.

A final savoury course of cold noodle soup with kimchi, which even through the fog of beef-addled defeat I could tell was a very intelligent and nicely constructed thing. I half thought about asking for some to take home with me but didn't trust myself not to spill it on the tube, so in the end ate as much as I could - which unfortunately wasn't much - and left the rest. I hope they'll forgive me.

Matcha roll cake was more easy to devour - different stomach for dessert and all that - and was excellent, made by their sister Japanese cafe Shibuya. I've heard good things about Shibuya actually, particularly their ice cream, so I'm determined to make a separate visit there one day.

Meanwhile, I shall continue to digest my meal at Chungdam and recommend wholeheartedly it to whoever asks. True, they've dropped a point or two for mislabelling the beef and for not having proper charcoal tabletop grills like they do at the more authentic New Malden joints, but the former can be easily fixed, and the latter is very likely to be a limitation of their Soho license, who knows. Either way, all that is made up for in spades by carefully presented food of vigour and imagination, and service that you'd cross oceans to enjoy. I imagine it's very, very difficult to have a bad time at Chungdam.

8/10

I was invited to Chungdam and didn't see a bill. I think if you had a normal amount of food and a drink or two you might expect to pay something like £60/head.

Kudu Grill, Nunhead

I imagine everyone has their own idea of a perfect Saturday. Mine goes a little bit something like the following: Meet up with friends slightly too early in a half-empty pub, go on to lunch somewhere interesting, go back to slightly busier pub and then depending on how things pan out find somewhere for a cocktail.

This is how things went last Saturday, and though every stage was a joy (there really is nothing better than a half-empty pub on a weekend morning, just ask Anthony Bourdain) the highlight of the day was, as expected, a long and lavish lunch at Kudu Grill, the latest branch of South London's favourite South African themed restaurants from chef Patrick Williams (previously of the Dairy family of restaurants, another set of people who know their stuff) and Amy Corbin (yes, that one).

Set behind the discreetly darkened windows of an old Truman pub on Nunhead Lane, inside is stylishly appointed - I particularly liked the chairs - and filled with happy chatter. As you might expect from a front of house with such pedigree, everything on that side of things went perfectly from the moment we stepped inside to the moment we left. I have no doubt that the Covid- and Brexit- related staffing issues are painfully real for those responsible for managing them, but I can only say from personal experience that, quite honestly, I can't remember the last time I had a bad time with service in London. That so many front of house teams can still shine so brightly with everything else that's going on is nothing short of a miracle.

Anyway to the food. 'Snacks' are charged extra on top of the (very reasonable) £28 set menu, a very clever ruse because they all sound so attractive you're immediately tempted to order all of them. Firstly, Irish rocks dressed in a fantastic tomato dashi and topped with salmon roe, making a beautiful case for letting a kitchen's imagination run wild on the dressing of oysters.

Biltong was decent - probably not the very best I've had but certainly enjoyable. I just wish I'd been able to taste more (or indeed any) of the advertised "Kalahari" spices, and a giant lump of inedible solid fat (that's it on the left there) probably should have been removed from the bowl before it reached our table. Still, no regrets.

The potato flatbread has, I'm reliably informed, already become a bit of a must-order item at Kudu Grill. Warm from the oven, and neatly divided into quarters, it arrives coated in a healthy amount of wild garlic dressing and draped in lardo. Each one of these things would have been notable enough by themselves, but together they were knockout, a bread course of the very highest level.

I found the grilled prawns a bit perplexing. The peri peri butter dressing was very nice, kind of a South African buffalo sauce, and in theory a great match with BBQ-grilled prawns. However the idea of splitting them down the back to devein but keeping the shells on seemed particularly un-user friendly, creating a far bigger mess than necessary, and added to this they were quite overcooked meaning the dry, woody flesh was incredibly difficult to separate from the carapace. Once we'd eventually managed to finish them I was absolutely coated in bright orange sauce up to my elbows, and deciding that the postage stamp-sized bit of wet wipe they'd helpfully given us (no finger bowl) wasn't quite up to the task, squelched off to the gents to wash up.

Steak tartare was much easier to eat, and in fact much more accomplished generally. It had a lovely gentle chilli note (presumably from the Harissa) and the crispy shallots sprinkled liberally on top added a nice amount of crunch (even if my friend thought it was a bit like eating a smashed up packet of ready salted crisps).

Of course, when it came to main courses there could only ever be one winner. Or rather, two in this case because each of us couldn't bring ourselves to order anything else even for the sake of variety. So, two pork chops it was, beautifully charred from the grill but still moist and bouncy inside, and coated with a liberal amount of "monkey gland sauce", another South African speciality apparently containing over 60 ingredients best described as a kind of a BBQ chutney... thing. Very nice, anyway.

Finally, a word on the sides. "Beef fat crispy fingerlings" were lovely things indeed, seriously crunchy on the outside and smooth as purée inside. By this point we were absolutely stuffed but it's a testament to their overall desirability that I still managed to squeeze a terrifying amount of it down.

And this is charred baby gem lettuce with lemon sesame dressing, another very successful product of the live fire theme.

The bill, with plenty of booze and all those extras and sides, came to £70 each, which I consider to be something approaching a bargain. Certainly in that plush room and cossetted by excellent service it felt like somewhere that could be charging a lot more, a little slice of luxury in a part of town rapidly getting more than its fair share of great places to eat and drink. To highlight this point, in fact, after bouncing happily out of Kudu Grill we bounced over to their sister cocktail bar Smokey Kudu under the railway arches at Queens Road Peckham and enjoyed a very sophisticated cocktail served by yet more brilliantly efficient front of house. As I say, it was a Good Day.

With the dark days of lockdowns stretching wretchedly into the increasingly distant past, you'd think that soon enough the fact of being able to eat and drink out again, and to experience the whole glorious business of talented people doing things they love, would return to become the norm, just another thing to eventually take for granted. But part of me hopes that the horrid memory of having to do without these places just holds on a little bit longer, in order to fully appreciate how wonderful it is to have them back. Happy 2022.

8/10

INO Gastrobar, Soho

All the game-changing restaurants in recent London history have a certain thing in common. Watever culinary fireworks or technical expertise are on display over the course of the menu at large, there's usually one "wow" moment that grabs the imagination and writes the headlines, a single dish (or combination of dishes) that stands as a flagship symbol of everything the restaurant is about. Think about the West Coast burger aesthetic demonstrated by MeatLiquor's Dead Hippy, or the East-meets-West fusion genius of Dishoom's bacon naan. These things have rightly gone down in London food history, but crucially still stand as shorthand for the restaurant, encapsulated in one dish. They're also, most importantly, still on the menus to this day.

I got as far as the very first dish at INO Gastrobar when I began to get that long-forgotten feeling of being a part of something rather special. There have been plenty of exciting new restaurants in the last year or two - astonishingly, considering that most will have been closed for a good proportion of that and those that have opened are struggling with Covid-necessary social distancing, temporary shutdowns and Brexit-forced supply line issues - but through all this somehow the creative food types of the city still manage to adapt and improve, and take the restaurant experience to new and exciting places. And there are few places as exciting, right now, as INO Gastrobar.

The dish in question, by the way, is this. Called "Kakavia", it's part deeply flavoured, extravagantly buttery fish broth, part serving of top-quality seabass (I think) sashimi, and you are instructed to dip the raw fish into the soup one bit at a time, before finally polishing off the rest of the liquid with one satisfying gulp. It's obviously brilliant, both imaginitive and genuinely (at least to London eyes) innovative but also, despite the 'sashimi' element presentation, recognisably Greek, a deconstruction of a traditional fisherman's soup still holding true to the flavour profile of the inspiration whilst pushing in exciting new directions. This is how you should start any meal at INO Gastrobar.

From here on, it was clear that everything that came out of the kitchens would be exquisitely presented, and full of summer joy. Perhaps it was a little bit unimaginitive to go with two dishes both using the catch of the day, but this carpaccio was absolutely worth an order, with nice big thick slices of raw fish and topped with "Greek salad aromas", little chunks of feta, neatly sliced cherry tomato and dried oregano.

The house bread was "hand-stretched" pitta, a neat little thing with a nice smoky crust, seasoned with herbs and salt. It's strange - and often frustrating - that restaurants still regard breadmaking as some kind of ancilliary activity when it's something they'll be serving to 90% of their customers. I'm thinking particularly of even the most well-regarded ocakbasi in town that all get their cardboardy flatbread from the same supplier. But anyway, this was very good.

Tarama was superb, an arrangement of piped star shapes topped with salty bottarga and a slow-cooked yolk to bind it all together. With the warm pitta bread it made an irresistable combination, the roe soaking into the soft of the bread like fishy butter. It didn't last long.

Next a kind of broad bean mousse thing (sorry I'm pretty sure that's right) studded with an interesting collection of miniature onions (again...), various herbs and - wonderfully - chunks of chargrilled eel. Eel is a fish you rarely see outside of specialist Japanese and Chinese restaurants, so to see it presented like this, with confidence and care, in a Mediterranean context is quite thrilling. The "fava stifado" and the onions were lovely, definitely, but the star of this show was the eel, and as soon as it was finished I wanted to order it all over again.

Charred okra, tomato and feta was a little bonus from the kitchen and though perfectly pleasant, didn't really dazzle in the way that everything else had up to this point. You can't really go wrong with feta and tomatoes, but there's not really too much to get excited about here either. Still, appreciate the effort.

Seftalies were much more my kind of thing. Minced beef kebabs wrapped in caul, I had previously only read about these things in publications such as Pit Magazine and by chefs like Big Has so was delighted to finally get to sample them. They didn't disappoint - the beef was loose and richly flavoured, and a deft touch on the grill had got them bronzed without being charred, just the right texture.

The only dish I wouldn't order again is the "funky burger". It didn't really fit well on the menu, it was way too small a mouthful of food for £6, and - most importantly - it just didn't taste of much, not in the least bit "funky" and with a strange sausagey texture suggested it had been seasoned a while ago and left to sit.

But let's not dwell on that because "wild mushrooms" was yet another absolute triumph. Hen of the woods is one of the more remarkable foraged fungi available on these isles - dense and meaty, with a satisfying squeaky "bite", if it's not one of your favourite wild ingredients then you haven't tried it, simple as that. Here the natural faintly chicken-y flavour of the mushrooms were lifted by a lemon and oregano dressing, which gave the whole thing an entirely new dimension. This is a restaurant that knows good ingredients, and how to treat them.

For such ingredients, and the knowledge to make the most of them, you of course do pay. But with 4 glasses of wine between 2 people, a negroni, more than enough bewilderingly good food, a final price including (brilliant) service of £65pp is not anywhere near unreasonable. In fact, looking at the bill again now, I'd say I would have paid a lot more for that meal and it still would have felt like value. The amount of effort, and style, and skill that had gone into all the dishes was quite something to behold.

Lagom, Hackney Wick

Restaurants are funny things. Sometimes a meal can be technically flawless, served efficiently and in wonderful surroundings and yet somehow still leave you cold, whereas other times any number of imperfections and bum notes can, through sheer force of personality, make a very satisfying whole. Whether or not a particular meal "works" is subject to so many different factors, and so many very personal issues and influences come into play, that recommending anywhere can become a genuinely fraught process. It makes you wonder whether I bother writing a blog at all, quite frankly.

The best you can do, really, is find a reviewer whose preferences at least vaguely align with your own, and hope they're right most of the time. I won't give you my own personal list of favourites, but suffice it to say that there are certain food journalists I read because I know that if they like a place, chances are I will too, and there are others I read for sheer entertainment value and take their restaurant recommendations with a pinch of salt. You probably do the same. It would be no good if we were all the same, as my gran used to say.

So the thing about Lagom is, it is cooking the food that exactly matches the kind of thing - mature, intelligent smoked vegetables and meats - I want to eat most of the time I eat out, and came recommended from the kind of people who have, through their various respective outlets, very rarely let me down in the past. Brushing aside the disappointment that the smallest (and therefore cheapest) 100-day aged ribeye available was £120 (others had sold out, even by 1:30pm), we consoled ourselves by ordering most of the rest of the menu, including their signature smoked chicken with burnt lemon.

And would you look at that. Bronzed and fleshy like a Venice Beach bodybuilder, this huge, healthy-looking bird had clearly been smoked long and slow by someone conscious of the fact that sometimes too smoky is not a good thing - it had enough mesquite about it to be interesting and evocative, but not too much that it tasted like an ashtray. Every inch of it was moist and pleasant - even the breast, which is quite an achievement - and although personally I could have done with a teeny bit more seasoning, it was still great fun to eat.

Smoked pork belly was similarly sensitively done, not too smoky and meltingly tender. We also appreciated their (presumably) house BBQ sauce, which was tangy and fresh tasting without being sweet. It was also a very generous portion for £14, which unfortunately the same could not be said for...

...a rather measly bowl of vinegar coleslaw, fine I suppose but nothing earth-shattering. Admittedly it was only £1.50, but it was also just cabbage and vinegar; I doubt their margins would have been damaged too much by the doubling of the portion size.

Far more joy was to be found in the other sides. Crispy potatoes were exactly that - skin on, artfully disintegrated and fried to a nice loud crunch, they came with a very nice aioli (so good in fact that we could have done with a bit more of it) and made the perfect accompaniment to the chicken.

"Cheesy leeks" had plenty of cheese on top, which was good, but were a bit timid on the seasoning on the mixture inside and were only just about worth ordering again. Also, the portion control problem reared its ugly head again here - £9 is an awful lot to pay for a small bowl of cheese and leek.

Smoked mushrooms, though, were absolutely fantastic. We think they'd been smoked first and then either very quickly fried in butter or perhaps just coated in butter before serving - they kept a lovely delicate note of woodsmoke on top of a strong, earthy mushroom flavour and were pretty much the best way I've been served mushrooms in a long time. And loads of them, too, for £5.

Despite the occasional moan I've had over portion size and pricing, it's worth pointing out that the food bill came to £20 a head, which is still well within the bounds of reason for food like this, which after all requires no small amount of technical expertise, a lot of time and fairly specialised equipment to create. Think how many proper smokehouses and high-end BBQ joints there are in town worth the money - Smokestak is about the only other one I'd recommend - which tells you how difficult it is to get this kind of thing right. And yes, a bit of extra seasoning there or an extra dollop of 'slaw there wouldn't have gone amiss, but we still had a great time and polished everything we ordered off completely.

So what I'm saying in the end is, I'm not always looking for perfection in restaurants. I don't mind having to add a bit of salt if required (although I do mind having to ask for it - please just have it on the table), I don't mind the odd wobble in service if they're sensible about it, I don't even mind the odd misjudged portion size or price point. All of this can be forgiven given enough style and flavour, and sheer warmth of spirit, and Lagom is a charming little operation which has these things in spades, alongside a good amount of technical smoking knowhow. It deserves to be spoken of alongside the best smoked food in town. At least, I think so.

8/10