Restaurant He, Holborn

I honestly didn't plan it this way, but this and the next post are going to be short-but-sweet companion pieces to the CoCo Ichibanya review, focussing on single-dish, or at least ultra-specialised, Asian food. It's just a byproduct of the way I've been eating out recently - I spot an interesting development on Twitter, or mention in a national review, realise it's only a short walk or hop on the tube from work, and pootle on over there for a weekday lunch. I like to eat early, and so a midday lunch not only satisfies my compulsion to run my daily schedule a good hour and a half before the rest of the city, but also helps beat the queues at the more popular places. See? Win-win.

Anyway, the minimally-named He restaurant on Red Lion Street is apparently a Jiangnanese restaurant, and if all I knew about it before I went was that it was Fuschia Dunlop's favourite cuisine, well, that's only because she's the first result on Google for 'Jiangnanese'. Jiangnan is a province that includes the mega-metropolis Shanghai, so is hardly some rural backwater, and yet even in London, increasingly quite good at regional specialisation, this appears to the only (again, thank you Google) Jiangnanese specialist in the whole of the city.

But there's very little point into going into any more detail on the complexities of Jiangnan, mainly because I know bugger all about it, but also because I went to He just to try their £12 business lunch, and extrapolating any grand points about the benefits of otherwise of the cuisine in general would be futile even if it was fair. So without further ado, this is said menu, served 12-3pm, Monday to Friday:

...and this is what turns up when you choose chef's kimchi, steamed egg custard, chef's vegetables and Nanjing Beef Vermicelli Soup:

Of all the bits, only the kimchi was a little disappointing, being underpowered and weirdly sweet. But the rest was great, from the silky savoury custard, piping hot with a smooth texture and lovely salty soy flavour, to the soup itself, boasting a rich clear broth and plenty of bits of beef (and tendon!) and lots of noodles. Even the "chefs vegetables" were impressive, bright green florets of al-dente broccoli glistening in a salty oyster (I think) sauce, even if the presentation was a bit like a TV dinner.

Look, there's really not much more to say than that, but none of you really came here for detail, did you. I liked He a lot, and given it's about 5 minutes' walk from the office I can see myself making regular use of it. It's a nicely designed room as well, with whitewashed brick walls and nicely spaced tables, and very friendly and helpful service who get an extra point for dealing with the utter arsehole suit in the window who complained when they wouldn't let him swap in a much more expensive main into the lunch menu and still pay £12. That's not how this works, mate. I hope you choke on your vermicelli.

I don't know what we have to thank for the sudden proliferation of interesting Chinese restaurants in town - a sudden proliferation of Chinese students, probably, judging by most of my dining companions that lunchtime - but I'm absolutely delighted it's happening and absolutely determined to make the most of it. To complete this little trilogy, then, in the next few days I'll tell you about another little gem. Isn't this fun?

8/10

Zip Bab, Bloomsbury

I get used to moaning about the lack of decent quick, takeaway-friendly options in Holborn/Bloomsbury because that happens to be the corner of the city in which I spend most of my time during the week, but then perhaps there's no utterly ideal London neighbourhood for work lunches. Soho probably comes closest, but even there the queues at the good places mean you spend most of your time standing in the rain instead of eating, and you'll still pay for the privilege. Though I wouldn't trade my daily commute on South West Trains, shonky and stressful as it is, for the pressure-cooker Seoul Metro, I do wish I had the choice of a thousand spare seats at a good noodle bar for lunch like the lucky workers of Korea. I'd actually look forward to lunches like that.

So I strongly considered keeping Zip Bab to myself. I should say from the start that I have never been to Korea, and the entirity of my knowledge of Korean food is gleaned from a couple of meals in New Malden (Jin Go Gae is excellent) and the odd popup by Gizzi Erskine. This, I know, is not any kind of position to be credibly ruling on the authenticity or otherwise of anywhere calling itself Korean. But as far as I ever have an intuition for these kinds of things, Zip Bab feels authentic, and the food feels like the kind of thing hungry Koreans would snaffle down of a lunchtime, and I'm worried that once the word gets out it will turn into another Kanada-Ya - impossibly busy, a theoretical restaurant, just a memory of noodles past.

In the meantime, though, I'm determined to make the most of it. Excuse the range in quality of photos - I only had my big camera on one of my three visits - but hopefully they're enough to demonstrate that whatever it is that Zip Bab are doing, they're doing it very well indeed. My first lunch involved a bit of a mistake on my part - I really wanted the luminous orange Korean fried chicken, in that addictive sweet chilli sauce, as proudly displayed on the window menu. Unfortunately I wasn't paying attention properly and accidentally ended up with "soy chicken", the same big, strong wings and crunchy batter but a different finish. They were still lovely things though, and not much of a downgrade.

Also on that first visit, and not pictured, was a bowl of sweet and sour pork on rice noodles which verged on familiar to this Englishman but was incredibly easy to enjoy nontheless. And in a strange way, though I have no evidence at all to back this up, I can imagine Korean people eating it of a lunchtime, alongside a little bowl of their very decent house kimchi. So I will continue to imagine that.

Despite the food on day one being very good if not spectacular, enthusiastic and charming service and the certainty I'd not yet seen the best of the place necessitated a return visit, and it was here that the fireworks really started to fly. Zip Bab do a small number of "set" lunches, where you pick a main and are given a selection of salads and sauces to go with it. I'm afraid I can't remember how this was listed on their menu, but a quick Google for "Korean lettuce wrap set" reveals it could be something called ssam and I'd advise you to look for that name if you ever fancy a visit. Because it was great - lovely soft pieces of pork, joined with a heavily dressed green salad, topped with a fantastic chilli-miso sauce (also available in bottles on each table), and wrapped in butter lettuce, sort of like a green taco. Enormous fun and quite unlike anything else I've ever had for lunch in Bloomsbury.

By this point, Zip Bab had me sold, so I could hardly not return a couple of days later to sample the original flavour KFC I'd missed out on the first time. It was, as I suspected it would be, lovely - generous of flavour and portion size, with a great sweet/sour chilli dressing and piping hot straight from the fryer. This is the quintissential Korean comfort food, and admittedly it wouldn't say much about a Korean restaurant if they couldn't get this right, but it was still a joy to get up to my elbows in sauce and embarrass my lunch companion. They provided a couple of hot towels, but I was so coated in the stuff I had to get up and rinse off in the bathroom before facing the world again.

And, needless to say, I'll be back again and again, at least until the rest of the city catches on and they're queuing down the street. I spot yet more unusual things on the extended menu, such as a "spicy whelk salad", which sounds like it could be interesting, and I bet their bibimbap is worth the price of admission, but perhaps I'll never need anything more than a portion of sticky, spicy wings, rice and a small bowl of kimchi, and a quiet table in the corner to cover myself in it all. Work lunchers of Bloomsbury, I can only apologise in advance.

8/10

Clockjack Oven, Soho

If all you knew about Clockjack was that it was a brand new proto-chain, with a bare-bones menu serving only chicken with a handful of sides, a Piccadilly Circus location, carefully branded interiors and staff t-shirts, then I would understand why you'd steer well clear. I'll be the first to admit my expectations were low; the memory of the last ill-concieved crime against chicken (the risible Chooks) still burns like so much Frank's Hot Sauce and I wasn't in a hurry to see my hard-earned slip down the necks of another corporate blandathon or, for that matter, some Shoreditch art gallery where you can impress your friends with chicken that tastes like it's been rubbed down in Knorr (hang your head, Tramshed).

And yet from the moment the staff at Clockjack hollered a cheery greeting from behind the carving counter, I knew this was going to be the kind of place I'd have to try very hard to dislike. They're very on-trend these no-reservations, no-choice places but only the most stubborn (not to mention stupid) would automatically dismiss anywhere just because they happen to tick a few of the London restaurant cliché boxes, and everywhere deserves a chance. So with an open mind (or at least as open as I can manage in Piccadilly Circus) I ordered 3 pieces of roast chicken with chilli sauce, a side of double-cooked fries and hoped to God I wouldn't have to fill up at Pain Quotidien on the way back to the office.

Tap water arrived unprompted - a little touch that lightened my heart much more than it should have done. Why on earth does this not happen literally every time we eat out? Why are we even still BUYING bottled water? Tap water is available everywhere, is perfectly nice and is, for all intents and purposes, free. How is it, in 2013 I am STILL being made to feel like an inconvenience by answering the "still or sparkling" question with "tap please". From now on I'm going to make a special mention of anywhere, good or bad, that produces tap water for the whole table without being asked specifically to do so. What's depressing is that I expect it still won't happen very often.

As Clockjack is still in its first month of trading, there was a bit of gentle training still going on with some new members of staff. In front of the impressive gas-fired roasting chambers, as a quartet of chickens slowly rotated in comedy wings-aloft poses behind, someone was being given a carving lesson. And as I was the only customer in the place at 12:15 on a cold January lunchtime, I presume they were practising on mine. It sounded like hard work, so I wonder how they'll cope when the orders really start flooding in, but I was happy to be the guinea pig on this occasion.

I was also very happy to eat the finished product, as my chicken was, thankfully - not to mention completely unexpectedly - perfect in almost every way. I worry about the amount of time freshly-roasted birds hang around before being ordered in these rotisserie places so there's a chance I just hit some kind of perfect sweet spot of timing between too hot to serve and too dry to eat. But I can barely remember a better roast chicken cooked by anyone anywhere - every inch of it beautifully moist, with a golden crispy skin and aggressively (though by no means unpleasantly) seasoned. In keeping with the stripped-back nature of the place itself there was nothing fancy going on in terms of herbs or marinades, but you really didn't miss it. This is incredibly good chicken, free-range with a good strong showing of dark flesh, and yours for £6.95 for 3 joints.

By the time I'd polished off the last of the poultry, my mind was made up. Clockjack was a Very Good Thing Indeed. I could also mention the portion of double-cooked fries which did their job perfectly well, and a nice fresh ranch dressing which I was brought to try alongside the (slightly disappointing) chilli sauce. And if I was going to poke a hole in anything else it would be the rather uninspiring wine and beer list and the embarrassing logos on the t-shirts the women are forced to wear - "UNDRESS ME" they say on the front. Hilarious - but really these things are unimportant.

All you need to know is that chicken specialists Clockjack make possibly London's best roast poultry - and before you scoff at that claim you need to try it yourself - for very little money indeed. My bill came to a touch over £10 which nobody could have any cause to complain about, and I left with my faith in London's ability to cook chicken restored. It really is that good.

8/10

Brasserie Zédel, Piccadilly

Anyone who's ever moaned about the price of eating out in London, consider this little scenario.

You're in Piccadilly, the heart of rip-off tourist London, a stone's throw from the Rainforest Café and God knows how many branches of Aberdeen Angus, and you're hungry. Finding anywhere worthy of your custom is a struggle in this part of town, but you spot a grand entrance to a new all-day brasserie just off Regent St and, deciding it's either that or something from Pret, you wander inside.

Down a plush staircase and into a vast, bright, high-ceiling room bedecked with marble columns and covered liberally with gold leaf, you are greeted by friendly staff in smart monochrome outfits and shown to a table. From the stubbornly French menu you order the soup du jour and kick back with a large basket of crunchy sliced baguette, salted butter and a jug of tap water. The soup is hot and fresh, hardly the world's greatest show of gastronomic fireworks but pleasant and filling, and you have few complaints.

The bill, including service, comes to £2.50.

Whatever else you think of Brasserie Zedel, and not everything was perfect, not by a long way, you just cannot argue with these prices. I don't know the last time you could eat in London with table service and leave with a bill of under a fiver, but I'm guessing it wasn't in this half-century. To put a menu together of such incredible value, set it in such plush surroundings and still make the numbers work is an achievement of monumental proportions - and all the more surprising that it's the brainchild of Corbin & King, whose other projects the Wolseley and the Delaunay are hardly famous for their egalitarian pricing.

Of course, when I and a couple of friends visited one evening last week, we weren't about to stick to soup and water. It is certainly possible to eat well for a pittance at Zedel, but once you've added in a bottle of Picpoul and a couple of courses, I think a more achievable budget is somewhere around the £20 mark - still good value for this kind of thing, just not quite as hilariously cheap.

Of the starters (none over £3), celeriac remoulade was pleasant, vichyssoise was the same after we'd added our own seasoning, and Oeufs durs mayonnaise was actually pretty good, sprinkled with paprika and with nice soft yolks in the eggs.

Mains were a bit more inconsistent - my own steak haché was probably the best of the lot, the mince having a pleasant loose texture and nicely crisped on the outside, although as with the vichyssoise I did have to manually beef up the seasoning, and the fries were pale and flacid. Andouillette is, as I'm sure the more cosmopolitan of you know, a kind of sausage made out of pig's intestines, and however many times I'm assured it's an "acquired taste" and not just some weird practical joke played by French pig farmers, I just can't stand the things. However my friend seemed reasonably happy with his choice - happy as a pig in shit you might say - so no harm done. But I'm afraid a watery prawn cocktail, plucked from the starters, was poor even by £7.75 expectations, and was pushed around the plate a bit before finally being ignored.

The lesson learned is that no matter what you're paying, a bad dish is still a bad dish, and by no means everything on the menu at Zedel is worth paying even a pittance for. But the decent dishes were lifted by the fact we hardly noticed a dent in our wallets, and the good were rendered extraordinary. That steak haché, for example, is available as part of a 2-course menu for £8.75 - admittedly the starter is carottes râpées (chopped carrots) but decent steak & chips for under a tenner even without the token veg would be worth the effort.

If you're looking for immaculately-prepared bourgeois French food, Zedel won't be your first choice. But as a bold experiment in glamorous budget dining for the masses, with enough highlights scattered in amongst the duds to make ordering well at the very least possible, it's worth anyone's while to give it a try. And if the experiment eventually ends in noble failure, at least we could say that for a brief moment in time, it was possible to have lunch in Piccadilly for £2.50. Make the most of it.

7/10

Assa, Covent Garden

In a city as infuriatingly wallet-draining as London it is a pleasant surprise to find a sit down lunch worth eating for less than £20, never mind anything much under that. So Assa in St Giles, serving a set menu of various Korean staples and two sides for £5.50, seemed to be offering a deal too good to be true. You can spend £6 in Pret a Manger only to end up with a lifeless mess of soggy, unseasoned ingredients inside two slices of "bread" barely distinguishable in taste or texture from the cardboard it comes packaged in, and they have queues out the door of every branch every day. And yet somehow, these hideous places survive - indeed flourish, for some bloody reason - barely minutes away from homely little joints like Assa with their home made kimchi and hot tofu soups.


I'll be the first to admit I know next to nothing about Korean food, but it all seemed fresh and tasty enough for such a small amount of money. Sides of sesame-marinated beansprouts and nice salty seaweed came as part of the lunch deal but I couldn't resist paying another £1.50 for the house kimchi, crunchy and pleasantly pungent and a damn sight nicer than the stuff at flashy new restaurant Kimchee in High Holborn which cost £2.30. The restaurant Kimchee, by the way, was so dull I couldn't even be bothered to write it up, but go and read the ever-reliable Marina O'Loughlin's review to see what I mean.


I think I preferred my spicy beef main, the chunks of superbly tender marinated beef flavoured with sweet onions and chilli oil, than what I tried of my friend's tofu broth, but they both looked the part, the tofu served lively and sizzling in its superheated pot and the beef alongside a generous portion of rice in a large, shallow bowl. It wasn't dazzling by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a great deal better than you had any right to expect for £5.50 - just think of Pret - and came with complimentary green tea. When I asked for water, they brought tap, quickly, and with a smile. We couldn't really complain about anything.


Just a few words, then, on a hardly earth-shattering but nice and unassuming place to eat your lunch in central London. But I thought it worth the effort to emphasise that while it's easy to get into the habit of automatically assuming you have to pay through the nose for decent grub in this town, Assa is living proof that there are in fact ways of getting your belly full without noticing that much more of a hit on your wallet than if you'd brought in sandwiches from home. And given the choice between even the nicest cheese & ham sarnie kept squished at the bottom of your bag until midday, and a bowl of cooked-to-order spicy beef and rice, well, I know which I'd prefer.

7/10

Le Wei Xiang, Lewisham

There was a time when I would think less of Chinese restaurants that offered separate, safe, "Western" menus alongside more authentic "Chinese" versions. It seemed like a bit of a cop-out to try and be all things to all people, and as far as I could see if the day-trippers and tourists of London couldn't stomach a bit of chilli and pig intestine, they didn't deserve to eat out at all. Of course, what I had forgotten in my naively idealistic way, was that these restaurants aren't charities or amateur supper clubs, they're businesses, and a "dual menu" system is in fact a neat means of making a decent living out of timid gweilos who won't touch anything more adventurous than special fried rice, while still allowing the chefs to stretch their culinary muscles for anyone brave or, er, Chinese enough to appreciate it.



Of course, if anywhere is going to have a two-menu system, then it goes without saying that the menu that gets used should be entirely the choice of the customer, and not the restaurant. Many Londoners have distressing stories of arguments with belligerent staff in Chinatown who refuse to produce the "Chinese" menu for anyone who doesn't look "Chinese" enough, and react with ill-concealed amusement or horror when you attempt to order anything vaguely interesting. This isn't just a case of arrogant foodies throwing their weight around (though I imagine there is often an element of that), and I appreciate that staff have a duty to inform customers, in as friendly a way as possible, if what they've ordered is very spicy or contains partially-developed duck foetus, but eating out should be all about conviviality and being at ease with your surroundings, and not feeling like there's some extra special club you're not allowed to be a member of.


In short, then, every Chinese restaurant should do what Le Wei Xiang does - have all the boring chicken & sweetcorn soups and sweet & sour pork balls at the start of the menu, and then three pages in under the bold heading "GENUINE CHINESE TASTES", all the good stuff. I'm not going to make the mistake of pretending I know exactly what cuisine is served here, it looks vaguely Sichuan to me but I've been very wrong about these things in the past, so I will just say that with dishes like "Shredded pig's ear in chilli oil", not to mention "Blood curd, pig bowel, ox tripe, ham and veg with dried chilli and chinese spices", it's definitely authentic to somewhere.




In the main, the food was very good indeed. Of the smaller cold dishes, the deceptively simple "Cucumber in chilli oil" was sweet and spicy, with texture provided by a sprinkling of sesame seeds over the bouncy vegetable; "Bean curd and preserved duck egg" was swimming in a sauce rather too salty and heavy on the soy for me, although the egg itself was packed with savoury flavour; but my favourite was "Shredded potato mixed with garlic", laced with a dose of Sichuan pepper so substantial it was like swilling your mouth out with garlicky anaesthetic.



I couldn't understand why a restaurant capable of producing such a heavenly seabass hot pot, moist chunks of bright white flesh in a deeply flavoured mixed vegetable and chilli broth, also somehow produced the most disappointing dish of the evening - "Pig blood curd and bean curd soup". A few measly pieces of completely tasteless red jelly floated in a wallpaper paste of bland, cornflour-thickened water with some lumps of tofu and, unlike the seabass which was eagerly devoured in a matter of minutes (even more impressive considering its generous size), it remained nearly completely untouched throughout the meal.



"Fried aubergine with minced pork in soy sauce" was nice enough but the topping tasted slightly artificial somehow, like something out of a packet although based on the generally high level of attention elsewhere I'm fairly sure it wasn't. Better was a plate of crispy pork and veg with dried chilli, which although not comparing well with a similar thing from Ba Shan, was nevertheless very tasty. And a special mention too should go to Le Wei Xiang's lamb skewers, which were piping hot, perfectly charcoal-grilled and with a complex spicy marinade that even improved on the already impressive offering from Silk Road in Camberwell.


It was a meal, then, of enough highs to make you glad you'd made the journey (the lamb skewers, the seabass hot pot, the shredded potato), and not enough lows to make you regret the very reasonable (£20-a-head ish with a couple of beers each and a LOT of food) bill. It's not the best Sichuan in London (if indeed it even is Sichuan) and the location on a rather gritty high street in Lewisham is probably not going to tempt many people outside of the immediate area. But if you are lucky enough to be a local, just consider how many deprived parts of the city can't boast a friendly, cheap place in which to while away an evening guzzling Tsingtao and snaffling lamb skewers. People of Lewisham, consider yourself envied.

7/10

Thanks go to Mimi and Charmaine for tips & tipoff.

Kêu!, Old Street

Considering the abuse I occasionally get for slating (or otherwise) restaurants based on one visit ("you should be fair-minded enough to visit more than once" - er, no thanks) then reviewing somewhere based on a single dish may seem deliberately provocative. But in the case of Kêu!, a brand-spanking-new Vietnamese sandwich bar from the prodigious talents behind Cay Tre and Viet Grill restaurants, I hope I'm on safer ground because, firstly, being a sandwich shop one dish is all most customers will order anyway, and secondly, people don't generally tend to get as bothered about positive reviews. And thanks to a truly magnificent Banh Mi from Kêu!, this review is going to be very positive indeed.


With Josh from Cooking the Books having visited already this week to try the house special Keu Sandwich (spiced belly of pork with ham terrine and chicken liver pate), and being suitably impressed with it, I thought I should attempt to explore another corner of the menu; perhaps BBQ Mackerel, to see if they are as comfortable with seafood as meat, or even the 'Lap Xuong' sausage just to see what the hell it even was. However, I'm only human - one look at the rows of glistening pork ribs hung up behind the counter at Kêu! and I found myself ordering a BBQ Pork banh mi, along with a £2 cup of blood orange juice.


I was a little concerned at first to see the baguettes were more of the French crusty style than the lighter rice flour type used by the guys at Banh Mi 11, but as soon as I'd taken the first bite it hardly seemed to matter. It was, quite simply, glorious. All the ingredients that make a banh mi so special were there - fresh herbs, the occasional bite of red chilli, the crunch of daikon radish and cucumber and sweet lemongrass, but lifting it into something legendary was a layer of the most unbelievably tender roast pork, perhaps the best example of its kind I've yet had in London, perhaps anywhere. Whether it was merely because I was early enough to catch it straight out of the oven or Kêu! do in fact make roast pig better than anybody else is something only time will tell, but for now I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. I ate the sandwich, with its complex balance of fresh herbs and silky pork fat and chilli, in awestruck silence.


I have since learned that the bread used by Kêu! for their banh mi is the result of months of research in collaboration with Clarke's bakery, and the reason they haven't gone down the rice flour route is that to create the "authentic" ethereally light-but-still-crunchy trademark banh mi baguette involves the use of artificial improvers, something they were unwilling (probably quite rightly) to do. So yes, the crunchy sourdough is a little hard on the jaw muscles and isn't strictly "authentic" but on the other hand it adds flavour, a lovely golden colour and is a top quality craft product in its own right, so shut up and enjoy it.


As if I needed yet another reason to wax lyrical about Kêu!, there's the little matter of the price. This is by some distance the best sandwich I've enjoyed in a long while, nearly a foot long, stuffed with premium expertly cooked ingredients and encased in artisan bread, and to be charged £4.50 for it just seems like some kind of confidence trick or early April Fools joke. Think how much you'd be charged for a 12" "Meatball Marinara" from depressingly virulent Subway, horrible things in soggy plastic "bread" which seem to taste completely identical no matter which of the myriad of processed fillings you choose. Kêu! couldn't be more different - it's cheap, delicious and made by clever, talented people who care, and I intend to spend the next few weeks working my way through the rest of the menu.

9/10