Stokey Bears, Stoke Newington

I first came across Burger Bear when they were doing their thing in the old Red Market near Old Street. Back then, the "market" was just a gap between two buildings previously used as a car park; traders pitched up with little fanfare (few had anything so fancy as a branded van; most were just foldable gazebos over a hot plate) and sold to the lunchtime crowd, a healthy number of people rain or shine given the huge number of offices in the area.

Even in those days, though, you could tell Burger Bear were going places. Their queue was always that much longer than anyone else's, the buzz about their product that much louder. Though far from the first street trader to bring a genuine American cheeseburger to London (Yianni had most beat by a few years) it was obvious that this was an operation that truly understood exactly what made a great burger, and by golly it showed in their signature Grizzly Bear, loose-mince medium beef bound by plastic cheese, with just a touch of bacon jam and rashers of gloriously crisp streaky bacon. Like most people, from the first bite, I was a fan.

And I'm pleased to report that, all these years later, I still am. Mirroring the way the streetfood scene at large grew up and settled down, Red Market transformed into a vast multi-level venue hosting corporate prosecco bars and charging an entrance fee, and Burger Bear found a permanent site on Stoke Newington High Street and rebranded as Stokey Bears. But despite this transition, their signature offering still has it where it counts; the mince is still medium-rare with a good thick crust from the hot plate, the bacon is still crisp and the yellow cheese still unapologetically holds it all together in its salty, smooth embrace. It is, without doubt, one of London's great burgers.

And there, you may think, the story should end. If you went to Stokey Bears for a burger, ordered a burger and then ate a burger, you would have no cause to complain. But this being London 2016 and because we are told man cannot live by burgers alone (actually you can, I can prove it) the menu has expanded to include other US diner staples such as hot dogs, which we didn't try, and chicken wings, which - unfortunately - we did.

The main problem with the hot wings was that they weren't jointed. If Stokey Bears honestly think hot wings are better served in huge clumsy unjointed portions requiring the diner to tear them apart themselves, then that's their outlook, but to me it just looks like laziness. And it's one thing having them not separated into mid-joint and drumette but the wing tips contain no meat at all and should never be served with buffalo wings. Used for making stock, certainly, or kept on for certain speciality Asian presentations, but never in buffalo wings. On top of that, the sauce was thin and acidic enough to suggest that not nearly enough (or no) butter had been used in its preparation. Blue cheese dip was nice and chunky though, so there is that.

Angry fries weren't quite what I was expecting but were very nice nontheless. Bleecker Burger's version has blue cheese and hot sauce on but here we have French's mustard, some kind of green relish and what I think is The Rib Man's famous Holy Fuck sauce - and as anyone who's ever dipped their fries in Holy Fuck will tell you, this is a very good combination.

OK, so, there was The Incident With The Wings but overall it's hard to stay very upset with Stokey Bears. Staff were friendly and attentive, there's a good selection of local beers on tap (Beavertown Gamma Ray is always enjoyable), and there are loads of cosy booths to gather your friends in and while away the hours. Most people, all said and done, will be coming to this boisterous spot on Stoke Newington High St for a burger, and I can't think of anyone that would come away disappointed on that front. If the wings hint at a certain sloppiness then there's still enough evidence of attention to detail elsewhere to make up for it. I enjoyed Stokey Bears. So should you. Just don't order the wings.

7/10

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Bao, Soho

A reliable feature of the very best restaurants is when you first glance at the menu and want to order every single last thing. Perhaps only at Lockhart, in recent memory, have I seen a menu so comprehensively attractive as that at Bao, whose expertly-pitched offerings of Taiwanese appetisers and steamed buns, paired with a short list of interesting beers, ciders and sake, contains absolutely no filler, no token vegetarian options or timid crowdpleasing carbohydrates. It is a love letter to food, or perhaps more specifically a love letter to foodies - pig blood cake, trotter nuggets, eryngii mushroom with century egg, guinea fowl Chi Shiang rice; bold and brilliant, flattering its audience with unusual ingredients and daring you to try something new.

Unlike the Lockhart, though, where to satisfy your desire to try the whole menu you'd need a party of at least 8, at Bao the dishes are so keenly priced and the portion sizes so sensible that just two people could almost work their way through the whole lot. I didn't quite - sadly - manage this last night but it's only a matter of time before I do, because believe me, this isn't the kind of place you visit just once.

Ordering is done via putting numbers next to a little printout of the menu, "like in Argos" as my friend pointed out. This means that if you're in a rush and want to order everything at once you can, or if you want to split up your meal into stages you can just come back and order more later. It's a good system. We started with eryngii mushroom with century egg, wich punched way above its weight with a rich umami hit of soy and mushroom, the chunks of jellied egg filling out the flavour and texture. This remained one of our favourite dishes of the night, and not just because (well, at least not only because) we were so ravenously hungry when it arrived.

Next, a huge meaty scallop in yellow bean garlic sauce. Perfectly cooked with a lovely golden crust yet just-so inside, it was clearly a very high quality bit of seafood, treated very well. But the yellow bean sauce was a revelation - distantly familiar from Chinese takeaways past, yet luxurious and refined. It had a marvellous smoky, silky texture and really enhanced the seafood.

Not for Bao anything as humdrum as fried potato. Sweet potato chips were best described as tempura, with a light white batter on each neat little stick of vegetable, and dressed with a soft, fruity 'plum pickle salt'.

You'd expect the buns themselves, which after all made Bao their enviable name on the street food scene, to be worth the trip alone. My own "classic" was every bit as good as I remember from Kerb at the Bussey building in Peckham, and all the better in fact for not having to eat them standing up with a on open bottle of beer in my shirt pocket.

And I didn't get to try the vegetarian daikon option but from what I can gather, that was pretty bloody impressive too. In fact I'm told that the daikon bun is their best seller so far. I'll just have to go back and see what the fuss is about.

40-day aged rump cap from Warrens butchers in Cornwall (the very best butchers in the country, in case you hadn't heard of them) was never likely to disappoint. But dressed in a special aged white soy sauce imported specially from Taiwan, it was lifted onto another level, the fat from the beef combining with soy to produce a particularly astonishing flavour. Describing exactly why the effect was so impressive may be beyond me, but it was as if the soy made the beef more beefy, highlighting yet refining all of the funky notes from the meat.

Aubergine, served with wonton had a great spicy flavour but there's something about the texture of aubergine that I find a bit disorienting. Still, the wontons were fun and it was at least something I'd not had before.

Desserts were no kind of afterthought. Peanut milk was a refreshing shot of, well, peanutty milk, a bit like the bottom of a bowl of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes but absolutely non the worse for that.

And Fried Horlicks ice cream bao? Gorgeous smooth, malty ice cream inside what if I didn't know better I would assume to be a kind of doughnut/brioche hybrid but was - I'm told - some kind of fried version of the normal steamed bao buns. Very clever stuff, either way - another highlight amongst highlights.

We had two beers each, three authentically-inoffensive Taiwan beers and one from Austria just to see what the difference was. Objectively the Austrian beer was better, but weirdly the more bland Taiwan style worked better with the food. I'm sure that was entirely deliberate.

Service was never less than brilliant but there did seem to be more than enough staff for the tiny room. Our seat at the bar gave us the opportunity to engage with the guy serving up sake in little metal teapots and made it incredibly easy to set our own pace through the menu. Maybe if you were sat on a bench near the kitchen or next to the loos you wouldn't think the room was quite so comfortable, but for £30 a head for such creative and exciting food that is largely unique in the capital, I'd put up with far worse.

The only niggling worry is that Bao is already looking like it may be a victim of its own success. Last night, on opening night no less, the queue stretched down the street. So space at this bright and bold little spot on Lexington Street may always be as rare as guinea fowl teeth. But surely - surely you're used to this kind of thing by now. Get there early, and get there soon. Bao is an absolute cracker.

9/10

Beaten by the queues at Bao and want to know where else is good? Where to Eat London 2015, my guide to only the very best restaurants London has to offer, is available on the App Store right now for £2.99. Photos by Hannah.

Turista Libre Taco Tour, Tijuana

It was never supposed to be the highlight of the entire California trip; just an afternoon pootling around Tijuana trying a few of their best taco stalls and back across the border in time for dinner. The initial plan was to go over under our own steam, pick up a taxi/driver and then tick off a few of the more notable street food places. Oh and perhaps a margarita or two; when in Rome and all that.

But then a little company called Turista Libre came to our attention, and so we thought rather than go through the stress and cost of organising our own lives, we'd hand over the whole messy business to the professionals. Founded by a US journalist who now lives in Tijuana, Turista Libre run various organised tours based on different themes; there's a baseball tour, a craft beer tour, a mega monuments tour, and, enticingly, a taco tour which seemed to have our names written all over it. For $50 a head we were told we would visit a handful of taco places, drink a few beers and take a few photos. Seemed like fun. We got a small handful of names together on Facebook, paid the deposit and put it in the diary.

By the time the day came, there were fully 25 people booked in for the trip. Wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, friends of friends, babies, dogs (actually no dogs sadly, Keith would have loved it) - of course it's obvious now, with hindsight, that everyone would want to be a part of a taco tour of Tijuana, but the way the group snowballed came as quite a (pleasant) surprise at the time. At one point I had to call up to check how many was too many. "We should be OK," came the answer, "the bus seats 30."

Bus? Ah yes, because what better way to travel in Mexico than genuine decomissioned public transport, which in turn was once itself an American yellow school bus. That's right, exactly like the ones you see on TV. I'm convinced the day wouldn't have been half as much fun without this battered old thing ferrying us around, so much more jolly than some hermetically-sealed limoliner, although admittedly air conditioning would have been nice at some points. Anyway, safely seated (well, seated, at least, and hoping the bus couldn't go fast enough to be a danger), a shot of tequila to the good, we set off for our first stop, Machatlán mariscos chávez.

As recently as 2009 this bustling courtyard and kitchen was a car mechanics. And in fact, take away the mobile grill, drinks cabinets and picnic benches and it could very easily go back to being one - who knows, maybe they're keeping their options open in case the bottom falls out the taco market. Based on their product though, they should have no need to. Bright white, perfectly-cooked chunks of meaty tilapia, each encased in a crunchy, dark-brown batter and bound by a lovely light mayonnaise salsa, these were about as good an example of the form as you could find anywhere in North America. They were churned out to our large and hungry party at such a rate that nobody received any that were anything less than piping hot. A video I took of the chefs looks like it had been speeded up; you'll have to take my word that these guys really are that fast:

Frenetic seafood taco making at Machatlán mariscos chávez

A video posted by Chris Pople (@cpople) on Feb 14, 2015 at 9:06pm PST

Next stop, after a short spell back on the bus and some more tequila, was the smoke-filled Las Ahumaderas Tacos El Paisa. We managed to occupy most of the seats inside this atmospheric old place, forcing hungry locals to use the bar that opened onto the street, but I'm sure nobody eating the food here dwelled much on the seating arrangements. The grilled adobada pork tacos here were just astonishing - moist, soft tortillas, freshly-pressed, contained a mixture of richly marinated pig and chunky guacamole (you've not tried guacamole until you've tried it with Californian/Baja-Californian avocadoes, they taste like avocadoes squared). They were served alongside nice fresh radishes and limes, as is usual, but also some lovely grilled spring onion/leek things, sort of like Mexican calçot. I'm sure someone out there can tell me their real name.

On a side note, while not enough to completely sour my memories of Las Ahumaderas, a tricky moment arose when someone gave me a can of Michelada to try. Michelada, in case you weren't aware (I wasn't) is sort of a Bloody Mary, but with beer instead of vodka. It sounds disgusting, because it is disgusting, but while a version made with top ingredients and nice craft beer is discombobulating but almost edible, the unholy version willed into existence by Heineken USA brand Tecate tastes like sweet, beery sick. I honestly don't know if there's a single more revolting canned product in existence, so in the interests of public awareness here's a picture of it so you can avoid it at all costs yourself:

Kids: Just Say No.

Anyway on with the tour. Actually not straight on with the tour. First a few of us raided a local liquor store for beer and aged tequila. Then it was on with the tour. It was about this point, as we lumbered back onto the bus loaded up like pack mules, one by one emptying our substantial haul into the cool box, that I started noticing the first fleeting expressions of concern cross our previously calm host's face. This could be why our next - impromptu - stop was a market, Mercado Hidalgo, a fascinating, sprawling indoor/outdoor place with more than enough going on to distract two dozen gringo from the booze for a few minutes, I'm sure was the plan. Except within about 30 seconds the majority of the party had settled inside a charming little taqueria and ordered a dozen frozen margheritas. Some time later (your guess is as good as mine) I somehow, speaking no Spanish, bought a giant block of queso fresco cheese from a market stall.

The atmosphere on the bus would now best be described as "carnival-like". Details are sketchy but somewhere in Mercado Hidalgo someone had found a stall selling bags of confetti, and was proceeding to turn the inside of the bus into a snow globe. The timing of this latest turn of events was unfortunate, as for reasons best known to Turista Libre our next stop was an unexpectedly smart fine-dining spot called Verde y Crema. Bursting into this clean, zen-like space like a confetti-strewn mobile Oktoberfest, I can still now, even through the fog of alcohol, remember the horrified expressions of the smartly-dressed couples and families who had quietly been enjoying a late lunch. I can tell you, because I have photos, our tacos here involved beetroot, queso fresco and coriander on some kind of dark tortilla and I'm sure they were absolutely as lovely as everything else we ate that day.

Events from here on are probably best left to the tequlia gods. I think there was an ice cream shop, desperately shoehorned in by the organisers in an effort to sober us up and prevent an international incident at the border. Inevitably, some of the group never made it that far, and splintered off to downtown Tijuana to carry on carrying on. I remember getting quite upset a terrified elderly Mexican woman wouldn't join me in the chorus to Let It Be. I remember very carefully putting cheese and tequila through the security x-rays but not picking it up at the other end. I'm pretty sure we brought back more babies than we left with.

I woke up with a hangover of the kind the 21st century has rarely seen, with confetti in places I didn't know I had and a distant unpleasant taste of Michelada in my throat. But despite all this, the one thing I am definitely going to do again the next time I'm in California is a Turista Libre tour of Tijuana. It is pretty much the most fun I've ever had for $50 and has not only reinforced my already all-abiding passion for Mexican cuisine but also opened my eyes to the vast possibilities of Mexico itself, somewhere that hasn't had the greatest press in the last few years but is still friendly, vibrant and easy to love. What a day, what a place.


All those amazing photos by Helen Graves, much obliged

10/10

Smoking Goat, Tottenham Court Road

Smoking Goat serves some of the best Thai food you will eat outside of Thailand. I needed to say this up front, and I've deliberately put it in italics because all said and done it's the most important thing about the place. So please bear this crucial fact in mind as you read through the rest of this post, because if it weren't for the food, the wonderful, wonderful food, the following paragraphs would be not much more than extended rant about, well, let's see now...

Firstly, it is noisy. Very, very noisy. Hard surfaces and a low ceiling create the kind of acoustics that encourages everyone in the room to shout just that little bit louder than everyone else, and despite sitting barely two inches away from my friend that night (I'm coming to the seating arrangements, bear with me) we each had to bellow into each other's faces to be understood. On top of that, a powerful sound system supported by two huge speakers near the front door add to the general cacaophony with some bass-heavy dance music. We asked them to turn them down a couple of times during the evening, but they somehow always crept back up again in volume.

So, the seating arrangements. It's a tiny restaurant, which is fine, and tables are very close together, which is also understandable, but there are just so many little standing-room-only drinks perches around the room that when they're all being used (which they generally are within two minutes of the place opening) getting to the toilet and back is like a Crystal Maze puzzle - "I'll stand here so you can get past, now you stand there, good now I'll move into the space left by him", and so on. Also the bench seating along one wall is a plank of solid, uncushioned wood about six inches wide, the kind of thing you might expect to find in a Victorian workhouse or a particularly "character-building" boarding school. It's second only to the booths at Quality Chop House in terms of excruciating agony, and that's saying something.

And finally, they don't take reservations. And under normal circumstances that wouldn't bother me in the slightest - I'm always banging on about eating at midday or 6pm where you can generally snag a spot at even the most oversubscribed places - except that the kitchen at Smoking Goat doesn't open until 7pm, so from 5:30 ish onwards the room is full of people sipping beer and twiddling their thumbs until they can order the Whole Cornish Crab or the lamb ribs or whatever. It's completely counterproductive - those queuing outside (or where it extends slightly inside) know they have to wait until everyone already seated has finished and paid up, and those inside have no intention of leaving until they've ordered the crab. Sure you can eat oysters and chicken wings before that, but you'd be an idiot to have lucked out on a table at Smoking Goat and not waited to order something more substantial.

Anyway so those are all the reasons why you might not want to bother going to Smoking Goat. And here are all the reasons why you absolutely must. Oysters, at an incredible £1 each come with a sharp nam jim (dipping sauce), sweet and vinegary and a perfect foil for the salty bivalves. Fish sauce wings, £6 for four, moist and crunchy in all the right places, in an incredible fragrant marinade, are now coming in a close second for my favourite way of having chicken wings, and believe me I love buffalo wings a LOT so this is high praise. Both of these items can be ordered all afternoon from the bar menu, so if you're happy sipping craft beer and eating your bodyweight in oysters and wings, perhaps you don't need to wait until 7pm at all.

But then again, perhaps you should. The main draw from the menu proper is of course the whole Cornish chilli crab, liberally dressed with herbs, palm sugar & fresh coconut cream. The shell is only weakly cracked, so you will definitely need the extra tools they give you, claw breakers and pickers, because most of the sweet white meat is quite hard to get at. But it's worth every sauce-splattered, hot, dark, noisy, painful minute. If there's one dish that's going to make you forget where you are and transport you to a seafood shack on the white beach at Ko Chang, it's this. Already one of London's signature dishes, the Smoking Goat Chilli Crab is an instant classic.

Other main courses are hardly less accomplished, though. Coal-roast hand-dived scallop with nam yum (lime juice, fish sauce, sugar and chilli according to a quick Google) is a huge, fresh, meaty thing with a smoky crust and a generous roe. Like a lot of Thai food it's superficially straightforward in terms of ingredients but the balance of sweet/sour/smoky/chilli is absolutely spot-on; these guys really know what they're doing.

I was expecting the slow roast duck legs to be stringy and collapse-y, like you might find in French stews or or Chinese pancakes. But these were moist and firm, with a sweet, crunchy glaze and a charming multicoloured dip of pickled kumquats and who knows what else.

I don't think the same dip or sauce is used twice. Lamb ribs are basted with fermented shrimp, chilli and palm sugar, and are served with a kind of sweet chilli dip (though obviously a million miles away from any sweet chilli you may have had squirted around a salad from Thai Square; this was sharp, fresh and incredibly moreish). The flesh from the ribs tore off in thick, satisfying chunks, and had that funky, deep flavour of clearly top quality lamb.

House som tam (green papaya salad) is another minor classic, and comes with all the mains. It's packed with flavour and heat - surprisingly so, in fact, given the chilli levels elsewhere stop thankfully somewhat short of authentic - and is a multicoloured, multitextured joy.

What else? Ah yes, wines and beers are far from an afterthought. The rare and brilliant Brooklyn Sorachi Ace is available in 750ml measures, and the wine list, curated by the omnipresent Zeren Wilson, offered a sweet German Riesling to go with our crab and scallops, and a lovely (and very reasonably priced) glass of natural prosecco to go with, well, more or less everything else.

As I arranged my coat and jumper around myself to cushion against the harsh bench seating, and while yelling conversation at my friend between mouthfuls of chilli crab, I wondered whether there was an easier way of doing all this. If I was a millionaire, maybe I could get someone to queue up and order for me, then as soon as it arrives courier it to my house where I could demolish the crab using a salad bowl as a finger wash and finish with fish sauce wings in front of the X Factor. Or maybe I could wear earplugs and they could have a separate queue for the seats that aren't a medieval torture device, like for people who queue separately for the front of the Nemesis at Alton Towers.

But even as I emerged, sweating, crab-stained and deaf onto Denmark Street after my meal at Smoking Goat that night, I knew with almost absolute certainty that I'd be back. Food like this, especially in London where you can count the number of decent Thai restaurants on one hand, is a rare and precious thing, and though everything that doesn't involve filling your face with smoked lamb and scallops is a test of almost every faculty I possess, what's coming out of that tiny, smoke-filled kitchen is enough to make me forgive almost anything. Uncompromising, infuriating and brilliant, Smoking Goat is a one-off.

8/10

I was invited to the opening night of Smoking Goat, then went back under my own steam for more, the glutton for punishment I am. I'm reliably informed they are hoping to open the kitchen earlier in the evening, so there is some light at the end of the tunnel.

Photos taken with a Canon 700D with 50mm lens, kindly loaned from Canon

The Clove Hitch, Liverpool

Liverpool's restaurant scene continues to improve, taking its own sweet time and in no particular hurry to get anywhere quickly, but even so (and seemingly occasionally only by accident) producing more decent places to eat. Just a couple of doors down from the lovely Side Door (which itself now boasts a more mature, elaborate menu than when I first visited a few years ago) and in a similarly impressive Georgian townhouse on Hope Street, is the brand new(*) Clove Hitch.

Nods to modern dining trends are very much in evidence here, like they are almost everywhere at the moment; there's a bourbon bar downstairs, with a separate menu of burgers and hot dogs, and a long list of European craft beers. It's just something we all have to get used to now - overnight, every bar and restaurant owner in Liverpool decided that they did, after all, want a piece of the London/US dirty food pie and now it's just bloody unavoidable. But despite these affectations, the main part of Clove Hitch is a nice, normal restaurant serving modern British dishes and doing so for a typically Liverpool-modest slice of your wallet.

Scallops with black pudding and cauliflower may sound a bit unambitious but there's a reason these ingredients are so often put together - they taste nice. And yes, OK, they're pretty difficult to mess up, but there's no great shame in that when you're charging prices like this. Smoked chipotle butter added an interesting smoked note and pea shoots took the place of the, er, peas you often see presented with scallops and black pudding. The square plate was a bit weird but only a minor distraction.

Salt & pepper calamari appeared to come not with advertised chimichurri sauce but with the same harissa oil that accompanied the lamb later on, but I have a sneaky feeling harissa would have worked better anyway. They were moist inside and with a gentle crunch, and though again hardly groundbreaking were still perfectly pleasant to eat.

I appear to have not taken a picture of the soup of the day - Stilton and broccoli - but I'm sure you can guess what a bowl of soup looks like and anyway, as it was so dark in there most of my pictures look like something taken at the bottom of the ocean during a thunderstorm. It came with some decent bread which I would have liked to have seen brought to the table a bit earlier, but at least I got to try some.

Aubergine and feta rolls with grilled broccoli and cous cous was a vaguely Eastern Mediterranean thing, nice and summery and some good contrasting textures.

Bloody hell these photos aren't getting any better, are they. This - you'll have to take my word for it - is some grilled, marinated lamb chops with cous cous, mint yoghurt and green beans. Lovely pink lamb, good char on the outside, and the fresh yoghurt matched it perfectly.

And this isn't the Creature from the Black Lagoon but in fact my favourite of the dishes that evening, a wonderful sticky slow-roasted beer-braised beef cheek with buttery wild mushrooms. The sauce it was coated in was one of those treacle-thick reductions that make you want to lick the plate clean. Well it made me want to do that anyway. So I did.

We steered clear of the cheeseboard; although it came from the usually reliable Liverpool Cheese Company the Clove Hitch appear to have gone for a selection of weird flavoured Lancashire and black-pepper-coated creamy goat's that tends to suggest whoever's put together the board isn't really that big a fan of cheese in the first place. So instead we enjoyed a very lovely chocolate & hazelnut tart (with a particularly impressive Frangelico ice cream) and a lemon tart.

The total for three people came to just over £60. The early evening deal included a glass of wine each, and though my fancy London habit of ordering a craft beer bumped up the final total a bit, it was still all an absolute steal considering, well, considering we enjoyed it all. Service was a bit slow but a large office party populating the lower side room probably didn't help on this front, and all said and done we left happy. In a city filling rapidly up with identikit dirty burger joints and lazy Southern Fried Chicken concepts, you can certainly do a lot worse. Even if that's not always stunningly obvious from my godawful photos. Sorry.

(*)I've just been told it's not brand new at all. Sorry.

7/10