Crispin at Studio Voltaire, Clapham Common

Although my useless photos hardly do it justice (let's just get that out of the way from the start), Crispin at Studio Voltaire is a lovely space to eat in. The candles on each table aren't the only source of light, but provide a romantic accessory to the tealights dangling above the bar and some tasteful candelabras near dark curtains towards the back of the room - it's all very theatrical and cozy and Christmassy, a perfect setting for seasonal dining.

All of which would mean nothing if the food served wasn't up to scratch but fortunately the team behind Crispin have some form in this department. Bistro Freddie took over the space in Shoreditch vacated by Oklava, and were an immediate hit serving things like rabbit and cider pie, and whole Devon crab. The two original Crispins are still going strong too - one in Spitalfields and one in Soho - each focusing just as much attention on an interesting wine list as intelligent (and affordable) bistro food. And now this space attached to an art gallery just off Clapham Common has already established itself as a popular, and dynamic, local restaurant thanks to a very particular trick up its sleeve.

Cheddar croquettes with pickled walnut ketchup demonstrated a perfect balance between sharp pickle and gooey-rich cheese, with a nice grease-free crust. One of the features of the food at Crispin is that the menu reads rather familiar, but that pleasant accessibility is backed by real cooking skill. You may have seen cheese croquettes with pickled walnut ketchup before (well, you will have done if you eat out as much as I do) but rarely as precisely cooked or intelligently constructed as this.

Similarly with crab with radicchio, fennel and lemon - a beautiful collection of ingredients that demands to be ordered, executed in such a way, with fluffy chunks of fresh crab and nicely seasoned dressed leaves, that it could barely be improved upon.

And it's mastery of technique that ends up being Crispin's secret weapon. OK so maybe pheasant isn't an every day bistro ingredient, and perhaps I do have a soft spot for game and will automatically order it - for starter and main in this case - when I see it. But bashed flat, breadcrumbed and deep-fried like a chicken Kyiv, it takes real skill to turn what can be quite a dry and unforgiving bird into this immensely rewarding dish, golden brown and crunchy outside, gently pink within, a genuine must-order.

But better was yet to come. Both main courses, a generously proportioned pork chop, and a supreme of pheasant, turned out to be absolute masterclasses in the use of the Hibachi grill, a bit of tabletop charcoal-fired BBQ kit that gets a delicate dark thin crust on the meat while leaving the inside soft and yielding. So the pork offered itself in soft, even slices inside a beautifully seasoned, crunchy exterior...

...and even the pheasant, as I said an often unforgiving bit of meat, was juicy and desperately moreish beneath a dark, crisp skin. Accompanying veg (celeriac puree, winter berries) were very good too, as was the rich game sauce, but the real star here was the protein, and by extension that expert use of the Hibachi grill. I can't remember the last time I was served main courses that were such shining examples of the best of live-fire cooking.

So, come for the atmosphere and seasonal charm, stay for the game-changing grill work. Crispin lands in a part of town fairly used to eating well (the much-missed Dairy used to be just over the road, and top pasta restaurant Sorella is just down the hill) but stands out from the crowd even at this early stage - and promises to only improve as the seasons shift and more exciting ingredients become available. And no matter what time of year, as long as they keep using that Hibachi machine in the way they are now, there'll be endless reasons to visit and revisit, all served with a lovely dark salty crust. My kind of place.

9/10

I was invited to Crispin at Studio Voltaire and didn't see a bill. Expect to pay about £70pp with a glass or two of wine.

The Fat Crab, Clapham

One of the best things about being a food blogger in London, and especially as one that has been going as bloody long as I have, is that you generally get to see each of the great global cuisines, or at least global restaurant styles, tackled increasingly successfully. There's Padella nailing pasta, for example, after years of places serving overcooked mush; the Meatwagon finally showing the UK what a proper West Coast burger looked like; Hawksmoor proving that it is, after all, possible to run a top-end US steakhouse using the best British beef. All of the elements on my personal wish list have been more or less ticked off over the years, most recently Tacos Padre and their brilliantly authentic Baja fish tacos.

But there's one style of cuisine, a personal favourite of mine, that we have so far been missing in the capital. The Southern American boil is an ostensibly straightforward, rustic affair - mixed seafood, seasoned (usually with Old Bay but sometimes house spices) and boiled in a plastic bag with potatoes, sausages and corn, opened theaterically directly onto your tabletop and to which you tuck in (suitably bibbed up of course) with your bare hands. It's great fun, and though I've never been to the Southern States I've been told the Crab Hut mini-chain, based in San Diego, is a very authentic reproduction. I loved it, anyway.

On paper, Fat Crab is doing nearly everything right. Of course, the prices are necessarily higher than they are in Louisiana, but you should not be paying bargain prices for things like lobster, crab or crayfish under any circumstances. It seems to wear its authenticity lightly at first, but despite offering langoustine and Norwegian snow crab the method and the approach seems very Southern, with everything cooked in plastic bags and with a customisable level of spiciness in the seasoning.

Things started well enough. Fried Baby Rice Crab is not something I've seen out of North America (and yes I am aware they're all over SE Asia too), so was a delight to be able to try them in London for the first time, the experience of crunching down on an entire deep-fried crab not to be missed (honestly). They arrived smartly, were piping hot, seasoned correctly and great fun to eat. And they were the very last thing that went right in the entire lunch.

I thought it was a good sign that the crayfish (sorry, craw fish) had 'Seasonal' stamped next to them on the menu - surely they would be boiled from live, like in the States? Well, no. Clearly these had been cooked, and frozen, a long while ago, then reheated for far too long, their sad, squishy shells only reluctantly giving up woody, tasteless flesh. The house hot sauce tasted - bizarrely - lovely, buttery and lemony and with a nice cajun kick, but the thin liquid sat in a pool at the bottom of the bag and didn't work as a seasoning at all, just as a kind of dip.

"Local" brown crab (from Dorset actually, which is the kind of definition of "local" that only makes sense in the USA) was a little better, the claws plump and the body containing plenty of lovely soft brown meat. And the clams we had optioned into the mix were tasty too - the shells caught plenty of the house seasoning and survived the reboiling process much better than everything else.

But unfortunately, with the mains we were served frozen fries. And I don't mean they were previously frozen fries served hot, I mean they literally arrived frozen, frosty to the touch. We sent them back, and then eventually once we had finished off the crab and clams and however much more of the mushy crayfish we could stomach, they came back. They were fine.

It should be no surprise, given everything that happened, that I'm not going to recommend the Fat Crab. But what's frustrating is that beneath the incompetent service (at one point they left a bottle of warm, cork-sealed wine on the table for a good 10 minutes with no way of us getting into it), the shoddy cooking and the weird cramped surroundings (there's nowhere near enough room to properly empty the bags out, US-style, so you end up picking food out of the plastic a morsel at a time, like a packet of crisps) there's the germ of a real Southern US concept, albeit one they're quite a way away from realising. All they need to do is improve every aspect of the restaurant experience they offer, and they'd be on to a winner! There's my advice for them.

Anyway onwards and upwards, and the search for a proper seafoid boil most definitely goes on. Perhaps someone can persuade Bea Vo of Stax Diner to relaunch the crayfish boils she did a few years ago under the arches at Borough, using lovely live crayfish from Crayfish Bob. They were great fun. But maybe the logistics of running a crayfish restaurant in the UK are just too prohibitive, and we just need to travel 4000 miles for our boils? I hope I'm proved wrong.

You'll notice they didn't take the frozen fries off the bill - disappointing, perhaps, but not surprising. We paid the £122 for a rather stressful and unrewarding lunch and went off to drown our sorrows in the Fox & Hounds, where there was a lot more table room and a lot less frozen food. Maybe one day, I will sit down to a steaming bag of crab and crayfish and cajun fries and tuck my bib in and spend a happy hour tearing apart perfectly cooked seafood and ending up covered in crab meat and clam juice and walk away from the experience happy, but this day is not that day. And until that day, you'll be best advised to avoid the Fat Crab.

4/10

P Franco, Clapton

It was a warm and pleasant evening in Clapton on Saturday. I know this because for the first 40 minutes at P Franco I was sat on a bench outside waiting for a table to come free, and had it been raining or cold I may not have stuck it out for quite so long. And believe it or not I had it relatively easy - the couple behind us waited well over an hour for their spot, nursing their glasses of chardonnay and watching on patiently as a table of 6 who had been there since god knows when steadfastedly refused to pay up and leave.

This is the problem with P Franco - it is so good, with its extensive wine list and short, attractive menu of seasonal dishes served at extremely reasonable prices, that you do just never want to leave. And with a grand total of 12 seats and no reservations policy, that very soon adds up to a perfect storm of demand far, far outstripping supply. I don't blame that table of 6 for not wanting to leave, not at all - but it does make the place incredibly difficult to recommend at normal mealtimes if the promise of a feed, however good, comes with a lead time the length of a Hollywood movie.

So what kind of food will the residents of Clapton (and elsewhere) wait so very long for? Well, things like this chicken liver toast topped with pickled blackberries, two generous portions for £10 containing ethereally light parfait and excellent lightly toasted house sourdough. Dishes like this are the reason I eat out - even the most accomplished home cook would struggle with the techniques required to produce a texture like that in a chicken liver paté, and why bother anyway when someone would make them for you for a tenner?

Just as extraordinary were these raw beef and mustard leaf wraps, the beef tasting incredible (supplied by Warren's of Cornwall, like much of the best stuff is) and the leaves acting as a nice salady vehicle for the beef as well as providing a good hit of mustard. In contrast to the cheffy chicken liver toasts, this was more of an assembly of top-tier, tastefully chosen ingredients but still with the same kind of value - just £9 for these.

Next, neat cubes of chicken thigh, skins on, crisp and golden brown, came arranged on a bed of swiss chard and all soaked in an intense, salty chicken broth. In the centre of the bowl was an egg yolk to add even more richness and texture and a handful of girolles brought a certain buttery earthiness, but really this was all about the broth, one of those complex, concentrated liquids that probably took a lot of time and a lot of very good chicken to make. If you brave the wait yourself and find yourself with a table at P Franco, I recommend you get this dish along with a portion of the house bread - you're really not going to want to miss sweeping up the very last drops of broth with some nice sourdough.

And finally, mussel, squid and crab tagliolini boasted good firm pasta, plenty of nice fresh seafood and a buttery/citrus sauce that would have been worth the price of admission by itself. At £17 this was the priciest individual dish on the menu, but was still some way off what you'd expect to pay at even a rather modest local Italian restaurant; I shudder to think what they'd want for it at the River Café.

But of course, you can book the River Café, and although that doesn't quite justify the prices there it does mean your evening out is guaranteed a certain degree of stability. P Franco serves some of the best food in East London alongside one of the best collection of wines, staff are efficient and personable and the bill at the end of it all will most likely come as rather a nice surprise (ours came to £110 for two people, but we had, er, rather a lot of wine). All these things are certainly true. But you'll have to wait for it, and as autumn turns into winter the idea of sitting sipping on chardonnay in the freezing cold for as long as it takes for a space inside to come free looks increasingly unattractive.

Oh well, I suppose there are worst things than queuing for dinner, and in the case of P Franco, it most definitely is worth the investment. Certainly, once we'd paid up and skipped happily home it was the cosy embrace of the food and service that lingered in the memory, not the uncomfortable wait to get it. Whatever your feelings on no reservations policies, on every other aspect of the restaurant business P Franco are playing an absolute blinder, and eating there - once you finally manage to eat there - is a profound joy. Good things come to those who wait.

9/10

Minnow, Clapham Common

It stands to reason, or it should come as no surprise to learn, that the best and the worst restaurant reviews are the easiest to write. Plenty of examples of both can be found on this blog, from the jaw-dropping perfection of the reborn Roganic and rural idyll of the Parkers Arms to the filth-strewn dining hall of JRC Global BUffet and the cynically grim Playboy Club, all those reviews pretty much just fell onto the page. This dish was fantastic, this was terrible; here we had the time of our lives, here we sulked home poor and depressed. Easy.

More difficult is anything that falls inbetween those two extremes. When the food, for no very obvious reason, is just a bit... dull. Somewhere you end up not hating it but not loving it either, and leave with a vague sense of disappointment. Somewhere that you'd not rush to return to, but that if you heard someone else enjoying it a lot more, you wouldn't be surprised either. Finding anything insightful to say about places in this category can be torture; and what's worse is that there are so bloody many of them.

But there is a category of restaurant even more troubling than that. The only places more difficult to write up than the mediocre or unmemorable is the mediocre or unmemorable where everyone involved is so unbelievably nice and friendly and enthusiastic that the idea of not being able to reward their efforts with a glowing review makes me genuinely queasy.

Here we go anyway. On paper, Minnow is doing everything right. It's a cosy, comfortable little bistro on the edge of Clapham Common, a few doors down from the Dairy, serving a short, attractive menu of seasonal British dishes for a sensible amount of money. Yes, it's the kind of thing you may have seen before but London will never have enough friendly, independent restaurants serving seasonal food - this is what we're rightly famous for, and from St. John to Quality Chop House to, well, the Dairy - and each new addition to the fold is to be welcomed, regardless of how successfully it turns out. God knows it's hard enough opening any restaurant these days.

I so wanted Minnow to be good. I live about 20 minutes' walk away, for one thing. But from the first bite of ho-hum house sourdough weirdly served with whipped butter and drizzled with olive oil, it was clear we were going to have very different ideas about what made a good dinner.

Oysters were cool and fresh and contained plenty of brine, but the mignionette alongside was weirdly sweet and not acidic enough and just didn't work at all. For a second oyster I asked for a slice of lemon instead, which they provided happily and quickly, which somehow just made me feel more guilty.

An unordered extra snack of crisp fried kale and sugared nuts was probably the nicest single thing we ate all evening, all colour and crunch and plenty of seasoning. I love what baking/frying does to kale, but then I like raw kale too - especially the way the frills in the leaves hold sauces and dressings.

I therefore wasn't too distressed to see yet more crisp fried kale appear alongside some scallops in my starter proper, but it did make me think, if they knew the starter I'd ordered came with kale, why give me extra kale as a snack as well? Perhaps because the kale was the most interesting bit of the scallop dish, the seafood being underseasoned and the bacon jam tasting weirdly not much of bacon at all, but more like a strange, cold, onion chutney.

A generous mound of soft, lovely white crab meat was enough to redeem another starter, although it came hiding under a soft cracker thing which defied reason or explanation. The provided dressing was thick with dark soy and far too powerful, and was largely avoided.

Cassoulet should be a thick, salty jumble of sausage and beans and meat and herbs, generous of form and flavour. I'm afraid the version at Minnow was a seriously wan affair, the confit rabbit tasting of cotton wool, the sauce tasting of little more than tinned bean juice, and the handful of tiny pieces of sausage doing nothing to season or excite. I'm afraid this was a seriously disappointing dish, made more disappointing by the rememberance of cassoulets past.

Hake was better, thanks to a beautifully cooked bit of fish with a nice crisp skin, although the less said about the strange pool of insipid blitzed greenery it sat in the better. "Parsley broth" sounds like it could be nice, doesn't it? This didn't taste much of parsley, and wasn't much of a broth.

Sides didn't impress either, sadly. Chips were soggy and orange (cooked too slowly? Who knows) and the truffle flavour largely absent. Cabbage in anchovy butter seemed to be missing the anchovy element, too, seemingly consisting of little more than charred cabbage absolutely drenched in butter way past the point of edibility.

Normally after a succession of such underwhelming dishes we would cut our losses and leave, but everyone from the chefs in the open kitchen to the amenable serving staff were all just so bloody nice that I was desperate to find something to be positive about other than the crisp kale. Unfortunately, coffee creme caramel wasn't set, and lemon curd sandwiched inbetween two discs of shortbread was absolutely no more than the sum of its parts. Even the (raspberry?) sorbet seemed subdued. So that was that. We paid up and left.

So look, I'm really sorry, Minnow, really I am. Maybe it isn't you, maybe it's me. Maybe I ordered badly or you were having an off day, or I just don't "get" what you're trying to do. But you or I can't escape the fact that a few doors down the Dairy is doing this kind of thing at a whole other level of ability and finesse, and are charging very similar prices for doing so. And next time I'm in Clapham Common, hungry for seasonal Modern British food and £80 in my pocket, it's the Dairy that will be getting my hard earned, not their neighbour, no matter how friendly the welcome will no doubt be. In the end, glittering service, and crisp kale, can only get you so far.

5/10

May the Fifteenth, Clapham

A hypothetical for you. You're a reasonably successful neighbourhood restaurant with a good few years of solid reviews and solid custom behind you. Business is doing OK, but you need a bit of a brand refresh to get people talking about you again, to bump you up the restaurant charts and remind the local population you're still going, and cooking good food. Do you:

a) Hire a good PR firm to send out a carefully-crafted press-release, put on a keenly-priced lunchtime menu to attract the local daytime custom, and perhaps think about an early evening special or no-corkage Monday to energize the post-work commuter crowd?

OR:

b) Change the name of your restaurant to something completely un-memorable and totally un-Googleable and hope for the best?

Abbeville Kitchen had been going since 2011 and I don't begrudge them at all their need for a bit of a rebrand, but why on earth "May the Fifteenth"? Have you ever tried Googling a restaurant that shares its name with a calendar date? It's fairly pointless, let me tell you. It may be a great name for a governmental advisory body or clandestine revolutionary group, but for somewhere that actually wants its purpose to be known, and crucially be found by the general public, not so much.

Anyway, May the Fifteenth it is, and the good news is, if you can find it (hint: it's at 47 Abbeville Road, in the posh, Tube-less bit of Clapham), not much other than the name has changed. It's still a rustic, gastropubby space with a good wine list, a nice line in martinis (frozen glasses, don't you know, and only £8 a pop) and obliging, efficient staff. I'd start with a portion of house bread (sourdough) and a plate of expertly-chosen charcuterie framing a bowl of grassy-green olive oil.

Watercress and garlic soup was rather underseasoned but had a few interesting chunks of, I think, bottarga floating around in it which added to the interest levels a bit. Even so, if you can't season a bowl of soup properly you can't help wondering if it should be on the menu at all.

So, soups aren't their strong point, but there's plenty else on the menu. Roast quail suffered from not a hint of dryness in the flesh, and had a lovely crisp skin. I wonder whether plonking it on the top of a pile of bland roast vegetables was really the best method of presentation, and I'm still of the opinion apple sauce belongs with roast pork, not poultry. But there was a good big slice of sausage in there which packed a good piggy punch, and all said and done £15 is not a lot to pay for this generous mound of food.

Maybe the way to go at May the Fifteenth is the sharing mains. This extraordinary pig's cheek in n'duja dish was all kinds of wonderful, an incredibly satisfying chilli/tomato sauce livened with fresh herbs in which bobbed five or six sausagey, moist chunks of cheek. It came with chips, because there is nothing that isn't better with a side order of chips - especially not chips as good as these, golden brown with a great crunch and smooth interior. This giant pot, warming, generous (of size and flavour) is reason enough to warrant a trip to Clapham by itself; a real classic.

Oh, and someone knows what they're doing with desserts, too. Rhubarb and lemon meringue had some wonderful strong flavours, especially the (presumably forced) rhubarb, a powerful lemon sorbet and a scattering of gently toasted hazelnuts. The kind of dessert that if you can't enjoy, there's just no hope for you.

Plenty to enjoy, then, overall, and I can see myself making very many return trips now I've got their booking page bookmarked and I don't need to Google it again. It's a stupid name for a restaurant, but then, if the most you have to complain about is their SEO score and underseasoned soup, well, you're still doing better than most joints in town. And for those pig's cheeks in n'duja and that rhubarb lemon meringue, I'd put up with a whole lot worse. I wish them all the best, and hope the locals of Clapham Common know how lucky they are.

7/10