Cheese and Biscuits Restaurant of the Year 2015 - The Newman Arms

The traditional way to start an end-of-year post, based on Cheese & Biscuits past (he says scanning the few previous years' posts in an effort not to repeat himself), is to praise the dynamism and ingenuity of the London restaurant scene, pick out a few notable new entries alongside reliable old stalwarts, and repeat once again that there isn’t another city on earth that can match it for diversity, energy and innovation.

And certainly all these things are still true, and yet in 2015 it all - impossibly - seems to have stepped up another gear again. The old stalwarts are still there, of course; at least, most of them. I’ve had yet more excellent dinners at Bob Bob Ricard, Tayyabs, Silk Road etc. etc and however proud of the pace of change in London we should never become so obsessed with the new and improved that we take for granted the enormous achievement of brilliant consistency. They may make it look easy; don’t be fooled.

But she sheer number and quality of new openings just can’t be ignored. I could list at least 20 restaurants that are not just enjoyable and good value but in some way unique or groundbreaking, and have all opened in the space of the last twelve months. And these just the ones I’ve managed to visit; from what I hear about The Hour Glass, Oldroyd, Shuang Shuang, The Ninth and god knows how many others listed on the Hot Dinners New Openings, this number could be a lot higher.

Perhaps it’s not sustainable. Maybe we’re living in some hyper-inflated, self-obsessed bubble that’s on the verge of bursting, and we’ll look back on these crazy times and wonder how we ever thought it would last. Or maybe - and this is just as likely - we’re still only just getting started. What a thought. Anyway, however impossible a task this is, I’m going to pick out a few highlights amongst highlights and do my best to come up with a favorite...


The “Believe the Hype” award - Kitty Fisher’s

In a Venn diagram of “restaurants serving world-class food” and “celebrity hangouts”, the intersection would not contain very many options. Filter that yet again with “restaurants you won’t need to remortgage your house to be able to pay the bill” and you’re really left with just one. This charming little spot in Shepherd’s Market built up a loyal following in that most old fashioned of ways - no PR, no grand launch party, just serve good food (expertly sourced grilled meat & fish, and the occasional stroke of genius like Burnt Onion Butter), treat each customer like family, and hope it works. And if you’ve been, you’ll know - it really does work.


The “Best outside of London” award - The Black Swan, Oldstead

Quite a few candidates for this category, but I’ve settled on this idyllic spot in the North York Moors because it feels to me like it encapsulates everything a regional restaurant should be. Experimental where it matters, though never at the expense of enjoyment, with a maturity and confidence that comes with this amount of time running a Michelin-starred restaurant, the kitchen team at the Black Swan would I’m sure be a hit wherever in the country they happened to settle. But here, surrounded by the most extraordinary natural larder, they construct a seasonal symphony of the very finest British (or rather Yorkshire) dishes.


The “Fusion Fever” award - Chick’N’Sours

It wasn’t long ago that “fusion” ranked just below “carvery” in the list of restaurant description warning signs. But this isn’t some shallow PR stunt, mashing together wildly inappropriate cooking styles for the sake of a few headlines. It could have been that, quite easily. But in the hands of Carl Clarke we have probably London’s finest fried chicken served alongside a variety of SE Asian salads and sauces that soothe the soul, lift the spirits and make you wonder why nobody’s done this kind of thing before. Oh, and try the wedge salad with crispy chicken skin, it's a knockout.


The “Where Have You Been All My Life” award - Hoppers

Yeah yeah, I know, you’ve probably read a million words on this place already, and know all about the bone marrow varuval with roti like the finest French patisserie, the black pork kari with its dense sticky spicing, the egg hoppers themselves with their gently tangy casings and soft egg base. But beneath the hype and the queues there is no con-trick here; Hoppers is talk of the town because it deserves to be. Sri Lankan food given a Soho makeover from the team that brought you Gymkhana, Trishna, Bao, Lyle’s... and basically every other memorable meal you’ve had in 2015.


The “Will Someone Please Give Her A Restaurant” award - Darjeeling Express

Asma Khan’s popup at the Sun and 13 Cantons in Soho is, at time of writing, still going, and therefore there is still time to get yourself down to enjoy the finest homestyle Indian food ever served in London outside someone’s actual home. The terrifying thought that once her residency is over she may decide to do something else is therefore reason for my plea to her now - please find a way of making this work long term. Because this food is too good to lose even for a day.


The “No Choice, No Problem” award - Pidgin

The relationship of absolute trust between a restaurant serving a no-choice, four course menu and a public willing to pay for it must be profound and unbreakable. But if there’s one chef capable of such unshakable faith it’s Elizabeth Allen, whose flair for modern British food and magical lightness of touch across a multitude of disciplines (fish, game, desserts, you name it) has turned weeny restaurant Pidgin into a destination almost from day one. You go to Pidgin, you put yourself in their hands, and you have the time of your life. It’s that simple.


The Runner Up - Galvin @ Windows

As ever with these kind of things, there’s very little to choose between the winner and runner up, and very little to choose between the runner up and any others in the list above, for that matter. But after having chosen a largely cutting-edge shortlist, and sung the praises from the rooftops of our Modern British talent, the contrarian in me feels duty bound to say that my two meals at Galvin this year, one with the parents in September and one for a friends birthday a couple of weeks ago, were as memorable and accomplished as almost any other meal I’ve had in the last twelve months.

Sure, the Galvin tradition is solidly french, but head chef Joo Won has kept the spirit of the menu that won them the accolades while injecting the odd enticing bit of Asian seasoning, ending up with a menu full of excitement and intrigue. Service, overseen by Fred Sirieix of First Dates fame, is as good as ever, and of course faultless. But Galvin @ Windows is more than just a hospitality show. The food is world class, the attention to detail breathtaking.


The Winner - Newman Arms

There are many things to love about the Newman Arms, from the Dickensian charm of its dining room and downstairs bar, to the lovely thick-crust pies they do on Monday lunchtimes served with buttery mash and fresh parsley sauce, to the astonishing Modern British food cooked up by their superstar chef Eryk Bautista the rest of the week, who seems to have completely bypassed the ‘one to watch’ list and nestled firmly in the ‘one to shortly win every award under the sun’ list. Everything about the Newman Arms is wonderful, and owner Matt Chatfield, whose Cornish connections mean Bautista is never short of the country’s finest ingredients to work with, should be very pleased with himself.

But what lifts the Newman Arms above its many competitors is that it has, over the last few months, turned into somewhat of a testing bed for young talent, hosting popups and special evenings from supper club stars wanting to spread their wings in the capital. Recently I ate lovely home made laksa by the Sambal Shiok guys, matched with Riesling chosen by wine expert Zeren Wilson, a collaboration that would have been hard to envisage least of all organise were it not for the generous intervention of Chatfield. So it’s this sense of community and charity that - much like Islington’s Drapers Arms - mark it out as much more than a (top notch) gastropub. It’s the beating heart of London’s place in the world, and is everything that’s uplifting and gratifying about eating out in the city distilled into one quaint pub in Fitzrovia. It is, in short, my favourite restaurant of 2015, and I look forward to visiting as often as I possibly can in the months to come.

And there’s plenty more to look forward to in the months to come besides, not least the 2016 version of my app which will be out very soon, as well as the usual slew of new openings that will no doubt be jostling for a spot in the 2017 version. I won’t preempt the final 100 now; lord knows enough can happen in a week to make a list obsolete never mind the time it takes to publish a new app, but expect to see most of the above and a few more besides. It’s been a very, very good year, and keeping the app to just 100 entries is a challenge on the level of writing the 100 brand new reviews to go with them. You’ll just have to wait and see for yourself who made the cut.

Anyway, with that I’ll leave you for this year. I hope you had as much fun as I did scooting around the capital for dinner, and if you didn’t then I hope 2016 is more to your taste. There are few better ways to lift the spirits than a glass of wine and a meal out in a great restaurant, and I’m convinced there are no better places in the world to do just that, right now, than London.

Cheese and Biscuits Restaurant of the Year 2012 - Bob Bob Ricard

A little while ago I wrote a short piece for lovefood.com about the best meal of my life. In it, I rather clumsily attempted to make the distinction between great meals, which can happen more or less randomly and independently of whether a restaurant is regularly enjoyed by anyone else, and great restaurants which have consistency on their side as well as the ability to knock out a decent dish or ten.

In 2012, I had many, many great meals. L'Enclume in July was an obvious highlight, a tour-de-force of modern British cooking that marked Simon Rogan out as a supremely talented chef with a unique style seemingly plucked from thin air. And thank God, too, for Medlar, finally a Chelsea restaurant worth the money they're asking and one that has, by all accounts, only improved since my visit.

But these are, after all, just meals. I don't live close enough to be a regular at l'Enclume, or work close enough to take advantage of Medlar's cut-price lunch menus, and even if I wanted to go back to another one of 2012's high points, a tasting menu at Ben Spalding's John Salt, Ben and his team up and left Islington just before Christmas, leaving in their wake a rather bemusing press release blaming "different directions" and a good few months worth of cancelled reservations. Look out for Ben opening his own place very soon, but in the meantime his residency at John Salt is being handed to Neil Rankin of Pitt Cue, who if the meals I've had in his Soho BBQ joint are anything to go by, is one of very few chefs who could follow that act.

A great restaurant, then, isn't just where you happen to have a great meal, it's a place you look forward to going to more than anywhere else because you always enjoy the time you spend there. It's a home from home, a comfort blanket of great food and great service, reliable but never predictable, where everything on the menu looks like something you want to eat, and everything you do eat you would happily order again. There aren't many truly great restaurants in London, at least not yet, but there's one spot in Soho that I've spent far too much time and money in over the last year and which still, despite the explosion of quality all around it, has the capacity to surprise and delight every time.

Bob Bob Ricard is my Restaurant of the Year because I've just had too many brilliant times there in the last year for it not to be. I've taken friends, family and colleagues for lunch, dinner, aperitifs and digestifs, and it has not once put a foot wrong. If you were to attempt to describe the look of the place you might begin with something like "Russian-American bistro crossed with Orient Express dining car" but in truth, the singular design vision of owner/managers Leonid Shutov and Richard Howarth (aided and abetted by interior designer David Collins) is like nothing that has appeared in London before or since - it's a marble-clad, velvet-lined palace of pleasure, a surrealist wonderland where - brilliantly - there are no bad tables (everyone has a booth) and illuminated "Push for Champagne" buttons attract the attention of waiters clad in pastel pink and waitresses in sky blue.

The menu makes equally attractive viewing. The Russian influence is reflected in items like the Zakuski Taster Plate, a bijou arrangement of jellied ox tongue, truffled Russian salad and the like, accompanied by frozen vodka in a crystal shot glass. Pelmeni are a silver bowl of beef & pork dumplings served with sour cream, and if you've ever wondered what caviar tastes like and didn't have the hundreds of pounds to throw at places like Caviar House, £25 gets you a taster portion of 12g of genuine Sturgeon roe served in a pearl-like glass pot. The attention to detail - and whatever you think about spending £25 on 12g of anything, the value - is admirable.

BBR's inexhaustible drive for invention and re-invention has created some truly memorable signature dishes that you can't get anywhere else in London. The lobster burger, for example, is a whole breaded, fried tail of lobster in a brioche bun, presented hilariously with the shelled end of tail poking out of the side to let you know which end to eat from. Venison steak tartare is in danger of sounding like something you might be able to find elsewhere until you notice it comes with the option of 10g of sturgeon caviar dumped on top for an extra £15 (either version is superb). And Chateaubriand for one is another dish unique to BBR - the single-portion version of this usually two-person cut down to the sourcing of beef from special miniature cows. You couldn't make it up.

Of course, none of this style and spectacle comes cheap, but BBR is not a place where you ever feel like you're being taken advantage of. The extra rhubarb gin and tonic, the extra dollop of caviar, the irresistible second push of the Champagne Button, they're all good ideas at the time, and it's why a quick pit-stop on the way back from Oxford Circus can so easily leave you staggering out onto Beak Street at midnight, £70 lighter with your pockets stuffed full of complimentary chocolate truffles. It's a place in which to lose yourself, to eat and drink and ignore the problems of the world for a few precious moments. And that, in a sugar-coated nutshell, is why it's my favourite restaurant of 2012.

Honourable mentions

In no particular order, these ten other places have shown me joy and fun times in the last year:

Duck and Waffle on Bishopsgate, and not just for the stunning views - the food is always worth the journey.
José, Bermondsey. There's still no finer Spanish tapas joint in London, and there is plenty of competition.
Tonkotsu, Soho. The signature dish is unmatched in town, a thing of pure and balanced beauty.
Burger & Lobster, Soho, Mayfair and Farringdon. Lobster and chips, £20. Lobster and chips, £20. No matter how many times you say it, it doesn't get boring. Lobster and chips, £20.
MeatLiquor, MeatMarket and MeatMission, Fitzrovia, Covent Garden and Shoreditch. Still the best at this kind of thing.
Tramontana, Shoreditch. The fourth restaurant by the Spanish food specialists manages to be as impressive as ever.
Rita's Bar and Dining, Dalston. Good value, delicious and inventive American comfort food. The hipsters never had it so good.
Lima, Fitzrovia. Finally fulfilling the promise made by other lesser joints that Peruvian fine dining was worth getting excited about.
Patty and Bun, Marylebone. Doing almost everything right when it comes to burgers.
Tayyabs, Whitechapel. Well it had to be in here somewhere didn't it.

Dishonourable mentions

Of course it wasn't all good news.

Chooks, Muswell Hill. A concept and franchise opportunity in search of food worth eating.
Jamie's Italian, Union Jacks, Barbecoa, Fifteen, various places. Will people please stop giving this man money to open restaurants. He's rubbish at it.
BRGR.co, Soho. The exception that proves the rule - the one new burger joint in Soho not worth bothering with.
Skylon, Southbank. The kind of thing we desperately need a lot less of.
Pret a Manger, EAT!, pod, etc. etc., fucking everywhere. For making London worse.

There we are then, and whether or not you agree with all, any or none of the above, I hope you had a good 2012 and you'll find enough of interest to keep reading. Feel free to nominate your own best and worst in the comments - as ever, this blog would be nothing without discussion, disagreement, argument, and finely-tuned lunacy. And you can be sure there'll be plenty more of all that to come in 2013. Happy New Year.

Bob Bob Ricard photos courtesy of the extraordinarily talented Paul Winch-Furness, via the BBR website. Photos of Medlar and l'Enclume are mine. As you can probably tell.

Bob Bob Ricard, Soho

Bob Bob Ricard is a strange, glittering fantasy world at the best of times, as opulent as Versaille and as superficial as Oz, its chandeliers and emerald green lamps leaving just enough in the light to be beautiful, and just enough in the dark to be inscrutable. It's not so much like stepping back in time as stepping into another universe, or taking a trip on the Hogwarts Express to Wonderland, where bizarre details ("Press for Champagne") lurk at every turn, and charming staff in powder pink uniforms prepare psychedelic cocktails and serve beef soup from a teapot. Returning for the first time after the infamous Vintage Vodka Tasting evening, however, was an even more peculiar experience than normal. Occasional details and tastes would trigger a memory of groggy vodka-laced incident from last month, provoking a hot flush of shame or a sharp uncontrollable guffaw, or very often both at the same time. I'm sure my dining companion thought I was going mad. Perhaps I was.


But I said I'd be back, and here I was, settled into a cosy green booth and sipping on an extraordinarily good rhubarb gin and tonic, sweet and frothed with egg white. A vodka Appletini was equally good, served ice cold and in lovely glassware. Based on this evidence it would be well worth just popping into Bob Bob Ricard's downstairs bar for a cocktail, but then I'm not entirely sure it's possible to just "pop in" to Bob Bob Ricard at all. You never really feel in control of your own actions in this place - you're stealthily manipulated into having a good time, whether you like it or not.


I had specifically returned for the Zakuski - bite size Russian dishes served with ice-cold premium vodka. The pickled herring and boiled potato was as good as I barely remember, and salmon roe on quails egg was a delicious combination of soft egg and salty, bursty roe. Kauffman vintage vodka washed them down far, far too easily, and was again served in very attractive glassware, the immediate sight of which whisked me back a month and to a vision of me trying to decide which of two forkfuls of ox tongue in aspic I was holding up was real and which wasn't. I hope I guessed correctly.


The Bob Bob Ricard burger turned out to be one of the best I've tried in London. I won't go so far as to say this was a surprise - nothing in BBR is a surprise, your expectations are assaulted and confounded so frequently the abnormal becomes normal - but it was certainly welcome. Good quality beef, cooked perfectly medium, and a good strong sesame bun. Word has it that BBR are soon to launch an authentic American burger, using Kraft cheese. Another reason to go back, damn them.


A second main course - a special - of roast veal, foie gras and black truffle jus was simply wonderful. Light, pink veal, sliced into delicate pieces, sat on top of a bed of juicy spinach and beside a generous slab of wobbly, buttery foie. And the black truffle jus was so good (and came in such quantity) I ordered extra bread to soak it all up, only just resisting the temptation to drink it straight out of its silver serving jug. One of the best dishes I've eaten all year, and proof that Bob Bob Ricard seem to be able to master French cuisine as well as they do everything else.


I hardly ever order desserts, but I couldn't leave without trying some of their homemade ice creams, including a delicious salty caramel. I was probably too full to make the most of them, but sadly I didn't have a choice in the matter. The restaurant chose for me.


At the end of the evening, I'd spent too much, drunk too much and eaten far too much, but I can't say I feel too guilty - it was all essentially out of my hands. Bob Bob Ricard is a huge, manipulative, mind-altering experiment in decadence, and if you can relax and surrender yourself to their whims and fancies you are guaranteed a good time. Far too much of a good time, in fact - far too much than is good for you. You may think I'm exaggerating, that I'm a glutton and a hedonist and weak-willed. Perhaps you're right. But if you sat down at a table, plush and inviting and romantically lit, and saw a button shining beside you marked "Press for champagne", can you put your hand on your heart and tell me you wouldn't press it? Honestly?

Didn't think so.

10/10

Vintage Vodka Tasting at Bob Bob Ricard, Soho

This is not going to be a long post. I'd love to give you the usual blow-by-blow account of the more than a dozen small dishes we were served at Bob Bob Ricard on Friday, a thoughtful and precise analysis of the mix of flavours and ingredients, and a concise rundown of the styles and influences of this unique Russian-British restaurant. I'd love to talk about the charming, bloody-minded drive of our hosts Leonid and Richard, who have against all odds (and, let's face it, all notions of common sense) opened a huge, lavishly fitted-out restaurant and private member's bar, looking like a cross between the Moulin Rouge and an opium den, in the tail-end of the biggest recession to hit this country since the 1930s. I'd love to tell you about all of it. I can't do that though, because after the sixth icy-cold shot of vintage vodka matched with a pot of Cold River caviar, I had lost my notes, forgotten my name, and begun taking a surprising number of photographs that looked like this:


So thanks to the exceptional and (at the time) welcome generosity of Bob Bob Ricard, I have no real way of knowing exactly what went on for a good proportion of the evening, but certain highlights swim through the murky vodka-laced haze. Ox tongue in aspic, with horseradish cream, was the first item to arrive, so that's a relatively clear memory. The instructions were to get a forkful of food ready, down the vodka in one (this a Kauffman 2006) and then follow it up with the mouthful of food. Somehow I was distracted when this was being announced, however, and looked up halfway through a mouthful of the aspic to find everyone else on the table waiting for me, poised ready with a vodka in one hand and a dainty portion of food in the other.

"Wha'?"

Leonid explained again, slowly, as if to a child. "You have to drink the vodka first."

"Mmm! ... Shorry."



And it was downhill from there. A Russian Premium Standard Platinum vodka was matched with tiny slivers of pickled herring that I can only semi-confidently relate thanks to the illiterate notes on my iPhone and the word "LOVELY!!!" enthused beside it. Boiled quails eggs topped with salmon roe and an incredibly sharp cured fish of some sort were also exciting enough to punch through the alcoholic fog, matched according to my notes with something called a "russan sndrd imp -- SMOOTH!!!!". Presumably it was another vodka.


After that, the notes dry up and the evening is surrendered to the vodka gods. What in the end amounted to a Russian "tapas" tasting menu and matching vodkas swam by in a giggly, messy miasma, a total of at least twelve (probably many more) plates of food each matched with yet another icy shot of premium vintage vodka. According to Leonid, the point of vodka is to be as tasteless and smooth as possible, so as to give you a nice alcoholic buzz without distracting from the food. After the 10th shot of vodka I think I could have been run over by the number 12 bus without being distracted by it, so he's clearly onto something. Oh - one more dish has just occurred to me; a simply stunning bowl of pork dumplings in a cream and white wine sauce, which I will just have to go back and revisit with eyes that can focus correctly. I have a half-formed memory of me stuffing one into the mouth of a terrified woman I'd met barely half an hour previously, screaming "TRY THIS!" with fanatical zeal.



I'm pretty sure, in fact I'm almost certain, that I would have enjoyed the food and the evening at Bob Bob Ricard even if I hadn't have been force-fed nearly a bottle of premium vintage vodka, but unfortunately there's no real way of knowing this until I make a return visit. So until I do, make what you will of the above or go and try out Bob Bob Ricard for yourself. I can heartily recommend it. At least, I think I can.