The Marksman, Bethnal Green

The gentrification of Shoreditch is now so advanced and so final that even those that still privately bemoan the disappearance of the old working-men's clubs, the spit-and-sawdust pubs, laundrettes and pound shops, have stopped commenting on it in public. That battle has been lost. This is now a place of wine bars, speakeasies, popups and street food, £5 a pint and £40 a head, the new shorthand for London itself, beards the new bearskin, tattoos the new Tower Bridge.

And I'm torn myself, for though of course I hate to see any part of our collective heritage priced out and forgotten, the problem with the kind of people who are setting up shop in this part of town lately is that so many of them are annoyingly good. Sagar and Wilde, for example, is exactly the kind of wine bar that every oenophile wants on their doorstep, an intimate and comfortable place staffed by helpful and passionate staff. It replaced a pub called the British Lion which was very popular with skinhead BNP supporters and had more regular visits from the local constabulary than brewery vans. Perhaps it is a shame that the "old" Shoreditch has disappeared, but I am not a racist, I am a glutton, which is an altogether more acceptable 21st century sin, and the new Shoreditch is far more my kind of scene.

The Marksman, just a few steps down the street from Sagar & Wilde, has, too, been modernised. Exactly how different it is from its previous incarnation I can't tell you because I've never been inside before, but I get the impression they're trying to make the change as painless and subtle as possible for all concerned. It's all very tastefully done and it definitely still feels like a cosy boozer, with wobbly furniture, bar stools and even a group of burly old boys occupying their corner of the room as they presumably have for many years previously. But look a little closer and the signs are there - table service, craft beers, and an intriguing new menu. Things are afoot.

Two freshly-shucked rock oysters, dressed with apple and pickled elderberries, just the thing for a warm summer's evening. I liked how they were balanced on top of their own shell lids, I liked how the oyster meat was loosened and I liked how the gentle acidic/floral notes that had been added to the minerally shellfish.

And I liked absolutely everything else. In fact I can't remember the last time I've enjoyed a more comprehensively perfect menu. A sign of a good restaurant is that the food you order you enjoy, and you're happy to pay for it, and want to go back once it's all over. Surely a sign of a perfect restaurant is that choosing between salt hake & potato rissoles, devilled crab on toast or beef & barley bun is just an exercise in satisficing, and that picking a dish at random would have yielded similarly stunning results. This is the beef bun by the way, a sweet, soft sphere containing the finest loose-meat pie filling, accompanied by an ethereally light horseradish cream. You could work for a thousand years and not be able to improve it, a thing of exquisite beauty.

Similarly devilled crab on toast. I've had devilled crab on toast before, very nice crab on toast too. But this was devilled crab on toast made by someone who finally knows what devilled crab on toast should be. Thin bread, just soaking enough of the juices without being collapsey, topped with an oil-flecked "mayo" so light it's almost a foam, and of course plenty of fresh white crab meat, fresh herbs and chilli. Perfect.

Megrim sole was gently butter-browned, the flesh cooked so well it lifted off in huge, bright-white, meaty chunks. The sharp & seasalty salad it came with was a colourful balance to the buttery fish, and was itself impressive enough to be a talking point. I wonder if anything could be improved about this plate of food, and I suspect not. It was, again, perfect.

As for the other main, curried kid with sourdough roti, well, what would you improve about a vast haunch of slow-cooked goat, dressed in thick curry oils and spices so that each last square inch of this beautiful piece of meat was seasoned flawlessly? Or a clever sourdough flatbread topped with a clear tomato jam, a nod to a curry house naan but something much more delicate and sophisticated? Nothing, that's what. This was, again, perfect.

I'd heard rumours of the brown butter & honey tart on the Twitter grapevine but still nothing could prepare us for the reality of a thin pastry base supporting a custard/honey mixture so precisely on the edge of collapse that the whole thing dissolved in the mouth like butter-honey candy floss. It was, of course, perfect.

And a chocolate ganache, smooth as silk, with a malt ice cream and surrounded by (I think) booze-soaked, slightly dried cherries, little chewy flavour bombs, topped with bits of cherry-sugar crackling. Which bit of that doesn't sound great? What would you add or remove? Nothing? No, me neither.

What the Marksman deserves to be - and what I sincerely hope it remains - is a perfect example of how a traditional East End boozer can be revamped and reimagined for a younger and more food-savvy audience without sacrificing any of the features that made it a pub (as opposed to a restaurant, or bar) in the first place. If you can keep the old boys at the bar happy, whilst serving magnificent, innovative dishes alongside a carefully-chosen wine list, then you have walked that line perfectly and deserve to do very well. Meanwhile, no matter what the future holds, know only this - that there are few better places to eat and drink in town, and you'd have to have a heart of stone not to completely fall in love with the place. The perfect pub? Probably. The perfect score? Why not.

10/10

The Marksman will be in the next version of the app. But if you can't get a table, try my app for other options in the area.

Viajante revisited, Bethnal Green

The words "El Bulli-trained" have been attached to chef Nuno Mendes for as long as he has been working in London. It is a tag that has followed him from the ill-fated but briefly brilliant Bacchus in Hoxton in 2007, to the clandestine Loft supper club the year after (although how accurate a description the word "supper club" is to anywhere charging £100 a head is debatable) and then, from March last year, to Viajante, an ambitious and wilfully idiosyncratic operation in what must be the most unlikely location for a 5-star hotel in London, the old Bethnal Green Town Hall, nestled amongst the kebab shops and strip joints that surround Cambridge Heath station. Having worked at El Bulli is a big deal of course, and whatever you might think of Ferran Adria's tricks and foams you wouldn't deny any chef the opportunity to put it on his or her CV, but even Viajante's own press releases only coyly refer to Mendes doing a "stage" at the eponymous restaurant some time in the 90s, and it is his time with superchefs Wolfgang Puck and Jean-George Vongerichten that seem to have been more a more substantial feature of his culinary education.


Chef back stories are dull, and I only mention the above because however accurate or otherwise "El Bulli-trained" is as a shorthand for Nuno Mendes' cooking style, it is the one that he is, for better or worse, most associated with, and, crucially, the one that is foremost in most diners' minds as they take a seat in the strangely solemn dining room at Viajante. People, I'm guessing, come here for clever twists and techniques, unusual ingredients, an international and ultra-modern menu of shocks and surprises. They also come here for theatre - there's an open kitchen, which judging by the arrangement of tables and chairs in the room is almost literally a substitute stage, and perhaps they also come here to see Mendes himself. There was no sign of him last night, though, and as I stared out from our corner table as a half dozen chefs silently assembled plate after plate of elaborate bijou tasting dishes, I wondered what was supposed to be so entertaining about it. Surely an open kitchen should be full of fire and smoke, frantic activity, blood, sweat and tears. In Viajante, with all the "proper" cooking done in a prep area downstairs, all the show-kitchen chefs have to do is tweezer the prepared elements onto a selection of bizarre tableware and send it out. It all seemed a bit sterile.


But, to the food, and the first couple of amuses were very decent. "Thai Explosion" was a kind of biscuit made with familiarly Thai ingredients such as chicken, lemongrass and coriander, softly sweet and very clever, and "Crab doughnuts" were just that, inventive and very well put together, the kind of thing which in less skilled hands could have been a complete disaster (mmm fishy doughnuts) but here was great fun.


The first disappointment came with the "Bread and butter", a course in its own right thanks to a selection of two house "butter" creations, one involving chicken skin and one darker one allegedly somehow containing black pudding. Despite the bread being fresh and warm, neither of the "butters" really tasted of much other than, well, whipped butter, a particular blow to me as the chicken skin butter was the highlight of my first visit in summer last year. I don't know whether they've changed the recipe or I remember it being better than it was, but having hyped it to my friend it was a bit embarrassing when it turned out to be a bit of a let down.


And talking of let-downs, "Fresh cheese with peas and flowers" was pond water, the "cheese" being little more than thickened, opaque gunk and entirely unseasoned. The peas were nice but no more than that and the flowers made it all look quite pretty, but it was a hugely underwhelming, bafflingly unsuccessful course. It was also far too cold, seemingly straight out of the fridge, lending it a rather soul-less pre-prepared feel. All kinds of wrong.


The two courses "Squid with ink, pickled radishes and sea lettuce" and "White, green and wild asparagus with milk skin" both suffered from the same fridge-fresh temperature issue and both were lacking in flavour and seasoning. You could see what they were trying to do - the ribbon-cut squid in ink matched with fresh pickled radish should have been a home run, and there's not much you can do to asparagus to make them bland, but we could find anything to get excited about. Frosty, literally and metaphorically.



And then, shockingly, a flash of brilliance. "Leek heart with lobster and leek consommé" was astonishingly good, the lobster cooked two separate ways, boiled and I think a ceviche or marinade of some kind, and both deliciously moist and tasty. They came with fantastic charred leek pieces which added a smoky earthy note, and the resulting broth was scooped up with evangelical fervour. A really great dish, although it did occur to me how a kitchen capable of this could have served the peas and flowers thing with a straight face.


"Cod and potatoes with confit egg yolk and saffron" was also excellent. Lovely bright-white flakes of moist cod, a earthy smothering of saffron foam and - best of all - a fudgy, rich egg yolk to coat it all, it was a sort of deconstructed fish pie, at once familiar and unfamiliar.


And then just as we were beginning to think it may have been worth the trek to Bethnal Green after all, "Duck heart and tongue with mushroom floss and spiced broth" brought us crashing back to earth. Although the textures were interesting and the presentation pretty, the flavours were too subdued to be enjoyable, and a lack of seasoning meant all the pieces just merged into one vaguely edible stew. Not disgusting, and not that far off being right, but still wrong.


Even worse was "Pork secretos with artichoke and red wine tapioca", notable at least as the first dish using Iberico pork that I've ever not enjoyed. Simultaneously containing dry flesh and wobbly under-rendered fat, the pig itself was the biggest disappointment but with tough artichokes and a weird smear of underseasoned scarlet porridge to go with it, nothing else on the plate was enjoyable. It was, even taking into account the presentation which had at least been consistent up to this point, a sub-gastropub turn-off.


"Frozen maple with shiso and green apple" wasn't great but was at least interesting, the savoury sorbet working well as a palette cleanser and I liked the sharp shiso and the range of textures in the ice. Then, just in case we weren't discombobulated enough, the first of the desserts proper, "White chocolate with grapefruit and lemon", conspired to be surprisingly good. There was a really interesting blend of textures between the teeny meringue buttons and the soft white chocolate mousse, and the citrusy sauce finished the whole thing off very nicely.



Desserts in fact seemed to be amongst Viajante's strongest cards, the final one "Pickled and raw cucumber with milk sorbet" being just the right side of challenging and containing soft, sharp, crunchy and smooth elements all working in harmony. Pickled cucumber in a dessert, and it was quite nice - who knew?


But despite the odd highlight, I'm afraid the over-riding memory I will take with me from my experience at Viajante is of disappointment. Disappointment for a number of reasons, not least the niggling feeling that it was better the first time, that some of the dishes were so poor, that the room seemed even less conducive to having a relaxing evening. Disappointment that the odd superb dish was enough to remind me that they can produce world-class food when they want to and that I can't just write off it all as overthought nonsense. But mainly disappointment because this largely humdrum meal out in the furthest reaches of the gritty East End cost us, with only one bottle of cheapish Riesling between two and a Kir Royale each, the best part of £250, pitching it into battle with the Ledbury, Le Gavroche and pretty much every other fine dining restaurant in the capital. And based on my experience, it is a battle they are always going to lose.


So it seems, after all, that Viajante may be El Bulli's representative in London. Believe me, this isn't much of a compliment - I won the El Bulli lottery a couple of years back and trotted off to Girona only to suffer a self-important, maddeningly inconsistent meal of salty fruit, raw squid guts and other stomach-churning "experiments" interspersed with the odd edible treat. It was overlong, overwhelming and overpriced, and yet there was enough about it that was thought-provoking and challenging, and just about enough good courses to see what all the fuss was about. On the journey back from Bethnal Green last night I felt a very similar way to how I felt in the car back along those scary coastal roads north of Roses - slightly queasy, slightly confused and ever so slightly ripped off. Viajante is interesting all right, but it's not for me.

5/10

Viajante, Bethnal Green

Way back when, in the very early days of this blog, I visited Nuno Mendes' first restaurant Bacchus in Hoxton. It was a lovely little restaurant, serving attractive and unusual dishes for not very much money, and I remember wondering why it wasn't more popular; even at the time I visited, rumours were abound that it was losing money and would soon have to close. Later that evening, I found out why. From the window of my friend's flat a couple of doors down, we watched two people beat each other (and, occasionally, surrounding vehicles) with iron bars, until the police arrived and chased them off. It seems that the lure of reasonably priced gourmet food - "Fine dining in trainers" was their unofficial tagline - wasn't enough to tempt discerning punters up Hoxton Street to enjoy a vicious street fight to follow their coffee and petits fours, and so very soon, Bacchus was no more.

Mendes disappeared for a little while, then resurfaced on Kingsland Road running a popup restaurant called The Loft. On occasional evenings, groups of 15 or so would be treated to a £100 mystery tasting menu of his experimental (he trained at El Bulli, naturally) cooking, and by all accounts the project on these regular nights was a great success. Unfortunately, my own experience of The Loft came at the hand of a group of enthusiastic but incompetent Central St Martin's students, who organised an event called Evocative Foods. I'm sure Nuno was doing his best with the presumably rather incoherent brief, but we paid £30 a head to queue up for few plates of cold vegetables and a weak cocktail, and after spending most of the evening thirsty, hungry and completely baffled, we eventually left for a few pints in a local pub then some soft-shelled crabs at Cay Tre. Andrew Webb, another unlucky victim of the Evocative Foods evening, wrote up the experience brilliantly here - it's well worth a read.

So I wasn't exactly chomping at the bit to try Viajante. I'm no fan of the overthought El Bulli school of shock-effect food, early reports from brave individuals were tilted towards the positive but still mixed, and perhaps Cambridge Heath Road is no Hoxton Street, but it's still hardly an area of town you'd otherwise make a special effort to visit. But in the end, peer pressure and a very reasonable 3-course Saturday lunchtime menu (£25 for 3 courses) forced my hand, and off I went.


First of a handful of amuses was a "crostini" of Romesco sauce, Gordal olives and I think the odd blob of goat's curd. Impressing mainly thanks to the intricate and attractive presentation, the ingredients nevertheless blended well and got the meal off to a good enough start.


Next was a whole roasted broad bean pod, which had been split and stuffed with cream and various micro herbs. It wasn't particularly memorable - the beans themselves hadn't been cooked very well (presumably as a result of baking inside the pod) and none of the flavours really stood out. Looked the part, though. Perhaps that was the point.


Yet another amuse which, as far as I know, didn't form part of the advertised three courses was this strange sandwich thing, tasting of some sort of oily fish, perhaps sardines or mackerel. This was actually pretty tasty, seasoned well and with good texture contrasts, but they insisted on serving it without cutlery, so it was difficult and messy to try and get this delicate sandwich paste from the serving plate into your mouth.


"Bread and butter" was far more enjoyable. Three thin sticks of freshly baked bread were dipped into a wonderful rich "butter" made from bacon, chicken skins, salt and sugar. It was incredibly addictive and an unusual mix of flavours which actually made sense as a whole. I could have eaten about six of these - sadly Viajante, and my arteries, conspired otherwise.


Five "courses" in, we were finally presented with the first of the three lunch menu items. This was a crab, beetroot, apple and goat's curd salad, which despite the fancy jellified and shaved beetroot was actually a very familiar - in fact almost clichéd, combination of ingredients. The crab was nice and fresh and the goat's curd was lovely, but there really wasn't anything here to set the heart racing.


The next course, however, was much better. A meaty and perfectly seasoned slice of lemon sole topped with shaved asparagus sat beside a weird confit egg yolk, the consistency of which was like nothing I've ever eaten - sort of fudgy and thick. It was topped with a tapioca sauce, presumably cooked in some kind of vegetable stock, and another couple of slices of asparagus, this time grilled. This was a great plate of food, and shows that when Mendes' experiments (although actually I didn't see him in the kitchen on Saturday) work, they really, really work.


Pre-dessert was an alarmingly sharp lemon and thai sweet basil sorbet, which didn't so much clean our palates as blast them clean away. The citrus explosion and the fragrant basil was a happy combination though, and again was something I'd not tried before.


I don't really know what to say about the dessert proper. On one level, it was a mixture of unadventurous but nice enough chocolate desserts which had been rather pointlessly topped with a couple of blocks of crushed ice. But just look at the ridiculous presentation - all the ingredients had been squeezed onto the very edge of a massive plate, and I do mean the very edge - some of the sauce very nearly dripped off onto the table. It was a presentation so pretentious it cried out for some sort of response, so in active protest I drew a big chocolate penis from the sauce with my spoon. I don't care if you think that was childish - I felt better for doing it.


Petits fours consisted of a gorgeous citrus marshmallow, delicate and ethereally light, and a mushroom chocolate truffle. Yes you did read that right - mushroom and chocolate. It actually wasn't anywhere near as disgusting as it sounds, particularly not if you, like me, are fans of some of Paul A Young's more offbeat offerings (blue cheese truffle, marmite truffle, etc.), and it closed up the meal quite appropriately - another brave experiment just treading the fine line between challenging and revolting.


Perhaps, despite my misgivings, London needs restaurants like Viajante. Certainly, I can count on one hand the number of times I've been served eight courses for £25 and even though some of them were irritatingly pretentious and put presentation ahead of flavour you do at least feel like you're getting your money's worth, especially considering the backbreaking effort that's gone into them. In fact, come to think of it, I can only think of one restaurant that has served food of this level of invention for such a reasonable cost, and that was Bacchus, so I suppose it all makes sense. If they can avoid the tendency toward nonsense and make the numbers work at this price point, Viajante should, and deserves to, do well.

7/10

Gourmet San, Bethnal Green

If you are a vegetarian in London you really don't often have cause to complain about dining options. Of course that's the kind of presumptuous, blanket statement that's very easy to make as a carnivore, but really - even aside from the 100% vegetarian places (of which there are a healthy smattering), the vast majority of other restaurants could be considered vegetarian-friendly, where non meat-eaters could happily consume a good proportion of the menu and the dishes containing animal protein are clearly marked. There are, of course, plenty of restaurants that could be accused of being vegetarian-unfriendly, where the veggie options are meagre and uninteresting, and where animal fats lurk in the most unlikely corners (I'm thinking here particularly of St. John and its gastropubby disciples). And then, right at extreme end of the scale, where vegetarians are not so much discouraged as shown a metaphorical middle finger in the form of a menu that contains animal product in almost every single dish, there is Gourmet San.


I'm not complaining of course - I had a quite wonderful meal here and can't wait to go back - but this is a restaurant that lists a dish as 'Dry-fried French beans with olive oil' and serves it scattered in pork fat. Their attitude seems to be that there are very few plates of food that can't be improved by the addition of pig, and it's a philosophy I also happen to hold very close to my heart. The beans, by the way, were extraordinarily good, the little black slivers of olive both seasoning and spicing up the crunchy beans, and the pork fat adding a mouthwatering silky richness.


Rather than attempting to construct any kind of balanced meal (I think the staff would have laughed in my face if I'd have asked for a salad), we surrendered to the temptations of the Pork Page (37 pork dishes on one page of the menu) and ordered first a plate of fried pork intestines. Liberally scattered with Szechuan peppers and dried red chilli, this was a challenging plate of food even before you got your head round the fact you were eating pig's colon. But once you become accustomed to the initial startling heat and numbness of the peppercorns, this was great fun - the sliced loops of intestine had been breaded and fried like calamari, and had a lovely texture and piggy flavour.


Next to arrive was my favourite dish of the evening - ox tongue and tripe in chilli sauce. The textures were fantastic - especially from the tripe, which was just firm enough and with that unique honeycomb structure - but the flavours were even more impressive, deep and meaty and perfectly balanced with just enough chilli. I really can't fault this dish at all - even the fact it was served cold seemed to enhance rather than subdue the overall effect. Beautiful.


A portion of pigs trotters in brown sauce initially seemed incredibly generous until you realised that most of it was gristle and cartilage. But what meat there was fell off the bone easily, and the flavours of the rich brown sauce shone. Not my favourite dish, but certainly unusual, and there's something satisfyingly primal about tearing pig skin off huge, chunky bones with your teeth.


A massive bowl of chilli beef had another startling dose of Szechuan peppers and the rich, red broth fizzed and burned in the mouth. All sorts of cuts of cow had been used in this dish, and diving into it was like pulling out prizes from a tombola. It was very soon drained dry.


BBQ lamb skewers were another candidate for best dish. Perfectly tender, superbly spiced and with just enough juicy fat to add flavour without being overwhelming, the fact they were being favourably compared with those sold at Tayyabs should tell you how good these tasted.


Oh, and @hollowlegs ordered plate of aubergine too. I'm sure she enjoyed it.


What's important to remember about Gourmet San is that although some plates of food disappeared faster than others, there was simply nothing that was less than very good - an extraordinary achievement considering the size of the menu and range of dishes on offer. And although the final bill wasn't exactly what you could call super-budget, at little more than £20 a head for extremely generous portions and service that was way more friendly and efficient than it had any right to be, I'll call it a bargain. Szechuan cuisine, at its best, always has the potential for sheer visceral, seat-of-your-pants, sweating, screaming, burning, hilarious, joyous dining. And Gourmet San does Szechuan cuisine better than most.

9/10