Tongue & Brisket, Chancery Lane

One of the handier aspects of writing about a place with a short menu is that I don't have to feel guilty about passing judgment after only trying one or two dishes. Not that I often feel guilty about passing judgment on a place after only trying one or two dishes of course (it would be a pretty thin blog otherwise), but I just feel marginally more confident about the whole thing when those one or two dishes constitute 90% of the menu. Writing about, for example, burger bars or ramen joints is very straightforward - ramen good? Good restaurant. Ramen bad? Bad restaurant. Easy.

In an ideal world and with an unlimited budget, though, repeat visits would be made even if just to try the same item again for consistency. On my first trip to Tongue & Brisket, the salt beef was dry and dense, with odd lumps of gristle and a distinctly amateurish chewiness. The bread was good and I enjoyed the (albeit room temperature) fish balls but I was in no hurry to go back given there are 2 other salt beef places on Leather Lane alone after my custom.

But thanks to a couple of people telling me I must have been unlucky, I did go back, and on a second visit my salt beef on rye was pretty much perfect - moist, firm without being chewy, not too salty or too lean, a supreme example and for a very reasonable amount of money. Not Brick Lane Beigel Bake cheap, obviously, but not Brass Rail Selfridge's expensive either, a happy middle ground of £7.20 for plenty of the good stuff and some proper fresh rye bread. I'd have preferred they used French's instead of the strong English mustard but I'm probably on my own on this, at least in this part of town where a steady line of East End boys and black cab drivers queued up from midday for their hot sandwiches. I didn't see any of them ordering French's.

I went back one more time, just to make sure. This time, I went for tongue, which had the same clever way with the brining but a slightly less well-defined and mushier texture; not completely unpleasant but just not quite as bouncy as the salt beef. Still a great flavour though and good salt levels. The house pickles had, if anything, improved even more, nailing the sugar/salt/vinegar balance expertly and was a very generous portion for your £1.

Which just goes to show you that no matter how many times you tell yourself that it shouldn't ever really be possible to order badly in a good restaurant, and that 99% of the time one visit is all you really need, and all that most people make anyway before making up their own minds, a repeat visit can, on occasion, have its place. On my most recent visit to Tongue & Brisket, on a whim I tried their chicken noodle soup. It was absolutely beautiful, with a good, deep flavour of proper chicken stock made with real care and attention, a fine chicken consommé that wouldn't be out of place in any posh restaurant. And it had taken three visits to even realise they sold it. There's probably a lesson in there somewhere.

8/10

Cheese and Biscuits on Tour - New York City 2015

I hesitate to make any grand statements about the health of anywhere's restaurant scene based on a four-day trip and a handful of meals but, well, that's all I've ever done, and despite trying my absolute best to sample the latest and greatest of what New York City had to offer, just like in all my previous trips to this fine city, somehow in 2015, for the first time, I left rather underwhelmed. I'm not about to pull a Tanya Gold - nothing was a complete disaster and there's every chance I was just a bit unlucky - but I remember the days when this city was the alpha leader of restaurant dining, untouchable from bottom to top, and to find myself even a teeny bit disappointed after a meal is not an emotion I'm used to associating with the place.

But let's start at the start. The first morning I wanted a bagel for breakfast, somewhere handy from the Williamsburg AirBnB we were staying in. The Bagel Store had a big queue - a good sign - but it seemed most people were queuing not for bagels but for something called a "cragel", some odd hybrid of a croissant and a bagel presumably dreamt up on the back of the vicious cronut phase that swept through the town a few years back. I tried a salted butter cragel; it was a bit stale and greasy and I wish I'd ordered something else. Staff looked a bit harried though so maybe they were having a bad day.

For lunch, surely nothing could go wrong in a highly-regarded steakhouse in Midtown? I mean, surely this is what New York does best, right? Except from the very first moment I stepped through the doors of Wolfgang's on Park Avenue, I could tell something was up; there was none of that incredible beefy steakhouse aroma that hits you when you enter the doors of Peter Luger's, or our own Goodman in London. And then once seated by a slightly frosty front of house (a steakhouse cliché but one I am usually happy to put up with) even at head height the trays of beef travelling past to other tables suffered from the same odd absence of beefiness. Not a good sign.

And so my fears were realised - a vast, tender slab of $50 USDA porterhouse, cooked accurately medium-rare and finished with melted butter, that tasted of absolutely nothing whatsoever. "Steakhouse fries" were dry and soily and the house red was only OK, but I knew not to expect top-notch sides in a traditional steakhouse. All I did want was for the main event to be worth the (not insignificant) amount of money they were charging, and this really wasn't. And before anyone says "well what did you expect from USDA beef", I've had plenty of USDA steaks in my time - not least at Luger's - and they've generally been a good deal better than this.

That night we attempted to get into St Anselm (1 hour wait) Maison Premiere (2 hour wait) and Fette Sau (1 1/2 hour wait) and ended up in a little dive bar called DuMont Burger eating buffalo wings. Which, actually, was rather lovely.

The next day we found ourselves in Midtown again and what felt like the only place open for brunch, Sarge's Deli. And again, I'd have been happy to overlook the staff that treated us like an inconvenience had my matzo ball soup not come out of a packet and the rye bread on my pastrami sandwich not been so stale I'm convinced it must have been yesterday's.

So as you might imagine, a lot was riding on our second bash at Maison Premiere that night. This time we did make it in, deciding to take no chances and eat at 5pm (the one benefit of jetlag is you're hungry at weird times), and fortunately the service here was much better, being very accommodating of our strange eating time (technically the kitchen hadn't opened yet). The food, too, was just about worth the effort - a vast selection of east and west coast oysters yielded some dinky little things called Ninigret Cup from Rhode Island which were lean and minerally and sharp as a tack.

House bread was excellent, which was just as well as it came with fully three out of four of the main courses we chose. Why bring us a $4 portion of unordered house bread knowing the amount of bread we'd unknowingly already ordered with the other dishes? Oh well, I'm sure they had their reasons. A seafood selection of mussels "vichyssoise" with bacon and potato "pearls" were very clever French classics in miniature, and sea urchin's always a showstopper. Salt cod brandade and "warm olives" (?) were only OK but they were nothing if not filling thanks to all that bloody bread.

On the last day, burdened by our luggage on the way to Newark (which staff coped beautifully with), we'd booked the Four Horsemen, a bright and clean little spot that had been recommended numerous times from various corners. And indeed it was lovely, at least some of it was. American "Prosciutto" was every bit as good as the real thing, moist and delicate and not in the least bit dry. Country terrine had a great chunky texture and the pickled green tomatoes were a perfect accompaniment, even better than the more traditional (at least in France) cournichons.

Beef tartare with sesame cracker was visually striking and the textures worked well, there just wasn't a huge amount of flavour from the beef, or anything else on the plate for that matter. And fried potatoes with aioli weren't anything different from those available in any Spanish tapas bar, except of course for the $10 price tag for a bowl of potato and mayo.

Romano beans with dry aged beef [mince] was a slightly confused jumble of textures and flavours that perhaps would have worked OK as a salad or side but had little recommend it as a main course. And finally pepper fritters with thyme and honey were just weird, like the soggy desserts you might get at the end of a cheap Chinese meal except with a faintly distressing savoury pepper taste when you bit into them. Not very pleasant.

And with that, we were headed back off across the Atlantic. Hopefully you can see that we did at least try, and my gripes with any of the places we visited on our admittedly rather brief stay were justified. And as I say, we could have just been unlucky and caught some of them on a bad day, or just inadvertently ordered badly but the New York I remember isn't anywhere you could have ordered that badly, at least not with the amount of nerdy time and research I tend to put into figuring out where my next meal is coming from. So I'll put it down to experience and, as promised, not make any grand generalisations about the state of East Coast dining. All I will say is, it's good to be home.

Bagel Store 5/10

Wolfgang's 5/10

DuMont Burger 7/10

Sarge's Deli 6/10

Maison Premiere 7/10

Four Horsemen 7/10

Delancey & Co, Fitzrovia

With my usual route to work disrupted due to a large chunk of central London spontaneously bursting into flames a few weeks back, I've had to get used to a slightly longer commute in the morning. So instead of taking the bus up Kingsway, surely one of the least inspiring roads in Britain, passing on the left Eat, Costa, Subway, Wasabi, Pret, Café Rouge, Caffe Nero, Starbucks, another Subway, another Eat and finally emerging at Holborn station bus stop wanting to emigrate to anywhere that doesn't think cheese and mayonnaise is an acceptable sandwich filling and doesn't need my first name to sell me a bottle of orange juice, I instead take a stroll through Covent Garden.

Covent Garden, it's true, still has its fair share of dreadful tourist-bait grothouses, but dotted amongst them are gems such as the Opera Tavern, Mishkin's, 10 Cases and the ever-wonderful Kanada-Ya. There's also exciting new indoor food market Startisans, which during the week showcases a variety of interesting stalls and on Friday becomes a mini beer (and mead) festival hosting some of London's newest producers. The point is, look even slightly off the beaten track in London and you will invariably find something interesting going on - all any of us often need is a little push in the right direction, be that a block-wide underground electrical fire or even (ahem) a handy app.

So yesterday morning I was winding my way up Catherine Street and noticed a little place calling itself a "Smart Burger and Vodka House". It seems their claimed USP is to be able to match burgers with vodka, and indeed the short menu of all-bases-covered sandwiches (a normal burger, a fish burger, a chicken burger, a vegan burger) each comes with a short list of suggested vodkas. Lemon, saffron and horseradish to go with a cod burger, for example, or cranberry, lemon or mint flavours to go with the vegan. "What an interesting idea," I thought, "just what we've all been waiting for."

Actually, I didn't think that at all. Of course I didn't. No, what I actually thought was, "the very last thing that's going to make me feel happy about having to eat a grilled courgette and pumpkin purée 'burger' is the thought of having to wash it down with a shot of Toilet Duck-infused petrol." So, shaking my head at the seemingly endless ways dollar-eyed restaurateurs will conjure up to squeeze the last drops of bloody juice out of London's burger obsession, I walked away. And instead of a rant about Smart© (their copyright symbol, not mine) Burgers and tarragon vodka, I'm here to tell you about Delancey & Co.

Ironically, there isn't too much to say about Delancey & Co because it's really just a little sandwich shop on Goodge St selling salt beef, turkey and smoked salmon sandwiches in a couple of different breads with a couple of different toppings for not very much money. In New York it would hardly register as anything worth noticing at all, but here in London we've still not quite got past the stage of a New York-style deli being a wonderful novelty, and for that reason Delancey & Co deserves a lot more attention.

A salt beef sandwich on marbled rye was a doorstop-sized beauty, filled with an over-generous amount of meat and loosened with Swiss cheese. The most important ingredient here is clearly the beef, and it was of superb quality, with ribbons of translucent fat woven through the pink flesh and cut into satisfying thick slices. The cheese had been melted on with a blowtorch, a nice time-saving feature, and American mustard added an extra layer of authenticity. My only minor niggle was that the top slice of bread was slightly stale on one side; a shame as the attention to detail shown else where couldn't be faulted. Let's hope these are starting-months niggles.

Friends I was with had similar ingredients inside a Challah roll, which by all accounts was even more successful, firstly not being stale (which helped) but also having a lovely soft brioche-y sweetness which was even more evocatively Old Americana. House pickles were also fantastic, coming in home-cured 'Sweet'n'Sour' and 'Salty' variations a cut above what you might expect from most other sandwich shops in town.

OK so, it is "just" a sandwich shop and yes, salt beef in rye is hardly a concept unknown in the Western world. But people doing this kind of thing this well are still very few and far between - I could point to the Brass Rail in Selfridge's (good but expensive), the Beigel Bake on Brick Lane (good and cheap but on Brick Lane), Tongue & Brisket on Leather Lane (decent but inconsistent) but even doubling the number of purveyors of lovely fresh salt beef in rye bread would I'm sure still not meet demand. At least, it shouldn't do. Salt Beef sandwiches are a wonderful thing, and deserve to be obsessed over just as much as any burger. Having said that, if it ever gets to the stage someone opens a salt beef sandwich and vodka matching bar, I'm emigrating.

8/10

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Salon, Brixton Market

Objectively, Salon - ostensibly a showcase restaurant for the products sold at the Cannon & Cannon deli - are a very solid little operation serving decent British (or largely British) food in an airy room above Brixton Market and are charging very little money for it. It's possibly unfortunate for them that I made my second trip to Broadway Market and to Sabel this Sunday just gone, who are doing this thing that much better (in fact probably better than anyone else), but if you find yourself near Electric Avenue with £15 burning a hole in your pocket you can certainly do much worse.

N'duja croquettes were an attractive golden brown, had a nice crunch and came perched on blobs of ketchup and surrounded by leaves of chicory. I'd have liked a bit more of a kick from the n'duja, and there was something about the ketchup that felt a bit... low-rent, but I was happy enough to eat them. Which I guess is the point.

Welsh Rarebit was a bit wrong, though - a thick, disconcertingly brown gunk laid on brown bread, grilled too timidly to have any of that nice golden crust you get on a good bit of rarebit (see: St John, Farringdon). Pickled walnuts were a nice touch, but there's only so much bitterly beer-y, salty mixture the consistency of snot you can eat before feeling a bit queasy. We didn't finish it.

Dexter beef - they didn't specify the cut but I'm guessing onglet - had plenty of flavour and was cooked well if you ignore the fact it didn't have a char. It's probably a bit mean criticising a restaurant like this for not having a charcoal grill, as often it's a licensing/extraction issue and out of their hands, but there has never been a bit of beef in the history of the world that isn't better cooked over coals. Still, not bad.

Suffolk chorizo with Jersey Royals was nice too, and oddly enough suffered from the opposite problem as the beef as there was way too much of it all - mainly potato. The chorizo had plenty of punch and bite, and the potatoes were little bouncy balls of flavour, but my friend pointed out that leaving those furry leaves on the radishes has way more benefit to visual aesthetics than taste, and there was quite a bit of salty butter swimming about underneath it all.

Still, all said and done, it was a hearty old lunch for £15 a head and we'd had a nice time. It's great fun, too, looking out over the market while you eat, where, as anyone who's ever been to Brixton Market will know, entertainment in various forms is never in short supply. A marvellously gooey rye, baked fresh that morning, was way better than you usually get as a house bread and, slathered in salty butter, made a fantastic appetiser. So Salon are doing enough right that the odd misstep doesn't matter so much. On the days I don't fancy trekking over to Broadway Market, I will be back.

7/10