Sollip, London Bridge

Since I decided, in the spirit of solidarity with a struggling industry, to only write up positive restaurant experiences, I expected that resolve to be tested a lot more than it actually has. In fact, since the beginning of July, only one dinner (out of more than I'm comfortable sharing) was so disastrous a tiny bit of the old me wishes I could have given it a good pummelling on the blog, but in fact even that moment soon passed. Life's too short to dwell on poor meals, especially these days.

The result of this new policy, though, is that recent posts run the risk of being a bit smiley-samey. All I can offer in my defense is that just because I'm not writing up bad or mediocre restaurants, that doesn't mean that I'm being extra kind to the ones I am reviewing - anywhere that's made it onto the blog in the last few weeks really is as good as I say it is, and I'm constantly astonished at how well restaurants are responding to their changing circumstances, not wallowing in self-pity (though that would be more than justified) but innovating and adapting and somehow, through all the madness, serving some of the best food I've eaten at any time. With all that in mind, then, let me tell you about yet another incredible meal I had just the other day at Sollip, a brand-spanking-new restaurant in London Bridge.

I'm generally a bit suspicious of "fusion" restaurants, as for all their laudable ambitions (and the occasional gem), the result is far more often Sushinho than Sushisamba. My suspicion of Sollip's Korean-French concept though, such as it was, lasted exactly as long as it took these gougères to appear. A perfect match of French patisserie and Korean spicing, they were baked perfectly to a soft, cheesey interior and delicate crust, and seasoned with an incredible soy bean/chilli powder which somehow conspired to make these already dangerously addictive little snacks even more irresistable. What a start.

Then, a "gamtae" (seaweed) sandwich, cut with machine-tooled precision, containing a soft, silky filling of briney seaweed and rich Caerphilly. I think they'd fried the bread in butter, too, so the golden sheen on the toast added not just crunch but yet more dairy loveliness. I had never had cheese and seaweed before in the same dish, I don't think, but the match now seems as natural to me as cheese and chive.

You can probably sense where this is going. The food at Sollip is not just exciting and rewarding, but genuinely innovative at every turn while still staying true to the Korean-French mashup concept. It's also beautiful - look at this thing, a daikon radish tarte tatin which had layers of earthy vegetables encased in impossibly delicate layers of glossy pastry. It was accompanied by something called "chilli chive potato cream" and all I can say is I'm glad I didn't know there was a thing in the world called "chilli chive potato cream" before arriving at Sollip because if I did I probably would have had a few sleepless nights obsessing about it. I've had a few since, as well.

Main course was a slab of braised beef short rib, soaked in a complex Korean sauce, shapely and solid on the plate but soft and yielding when sliced. It came alongside and interesting bit of cured cucumber, cooling in the kimchi style, and - a heartstopping moment - a little pot of rice with a knob of truffle butter, releasing flavour and aroma as it melted down. There's only one thing better than buttered rice, it turns out, and that's truffle-buttered rice.

I overheard the table next to mine (don't worry, there was plenty of space between us) asking for an extra sample of the fig from the fig creme brulee, such was its effect on those who tried it. This of course, is an open invitation to return to Sollip and try all of the dishes, not just the fig, that I didn't try the first time. But I can hardly complain the dessert I did order - this perilla (a kind of Korean mint) ice cream - was in any way a disappointment. Side-by-side the oil-based ice cream and granita made an unbeatable combination, apple and dairy and mint oil combining to great effect, with a layer of sesame rice for crunch.

Too often meals that are as controlled and precise visually as the food at Sollip undoubtedly is, you pay the price in flavour. I can think of quite a few restaurants over the years that in aiming for geometric exactness and consistency, in taking too long teasing the ingredients into the required form and shape, some of the immediacy and personality of the ingredients is lost.

Sollip manages to produce food of love and passion at the same time as it looking good enough to hang on the wall, and for that no amount of praise is enough. The gallery-like space and the artful dishes on one level brings to mind other Asian-fusion superstar restaurants like Bao or Xu, and I've no doubt they would be very pleased indeed to be mentioned in that company, as they should be. But Sollip is both a prodigal student of French and Korean cooking traditions, and at the same time a trailblazer in something genuinely new - fusion food that finally lives up to the name, and isn't just an excuse for gimmicks and punning menu items. I do hope I'm not boring you with yet another wildly positive review, but this wasn't going to go any other way. Sollip is brilliant.

10/10

El Pastor, London Bridge

Timing, as they say, is everything. Had El Pastor opened even just a few months earlier than it did, further back in 2016, it would have been heralded as the saviour of Mexican cuisine in London, a slick, satisfying operation which finally showed what anyone who'd ever eaten proper Mexican food had been tiresomely banging on about for all these years (that would be me then), forever to wrestle away this most wonderful and sophisticated of cuisines from the greasy clutches of the Tex-Mex chains.

Unfortunately for them - and by "them" I mean the Hart Bros, the brains behing Barrafina and Quo Vadis - the opening of this shiny spot in Borough Market coincided with not just one but two or three other top-drawer Mexican operations that also landed towards the end of 2016, and what would have been a full-on, focussed love affair mere months earlier was, in the end, diluted with a little more, well, reality. Reviews were positive, but not glowing, and I wonder whether for restaurateurs so used to unqualified praise for their Spanish concept (again, guilty), for London not to be bowled over by El Pastor may have come as somewhat of a disappointment.

But all restaurants must be placed in context, and I could no more ignore the existence of Breddos while reviewing El Pastor than I could ignore Barrafina while assessing José Pizarro or La Tasca(!) or anywhere else. And although El Pastor is clearly a very good restaurant, objectively serving very nice, authentic Mexican food for not a great deal of money, in an exciting "industrial chic" space, and however annoying it is to all of the people that have so obviously put so much hard work into the place, I'm just going to sit here and tell you why I liked Breddos more.

Firstly, the salsas. One of the utter joys in eating in Mexico is that no two restaurants will make salsa tasting the same. I don't just mean variations the levels of heat or that some offer green instead of red. I mean that the house salsa offered for dipping your nachos in when you sit down can be a kaleidoscope of variations from smokey to sugary, savoury to salty, vegetal and chunky to a processed, refined sheen. You never know what you're going to get, and it's enormous fun. El Pastor's selection is of a fairly workaday tomato/coriander chunky affair, a hot habanero (presumably) that was my favourite, and a tomatillo which needed a bit more something. Seasoning, perhaps, or fresh herbs. I'm sure I don't know. But I do know that it pales in comparison to the vibrant and full-flavoured verde at Breddos.

Next, the tortillas. This being London 2017 it almost goes without saying that El Pastor grind, mixamatosis (sorry, nixtamalise) and press their own tortillas, and in fact you can see the whole process happening in the mezzanine level towards the back of the main room. On the face of it, they're doing everything right, including using a rare strain of maize rescued from near-extinction by an artisan producer somewhere in Mexico (apparently). So why do I find the end product a little dry and bland, and not quite as bouncy and full of flavour as the Other Guys?

To assemble your taco you take some of the pork filling - the El Pastor itself - a nice moist pile of slow-cooked pig, a few of the pork scratchings (sorry chicharrón), a bit of salsa, a scattering of fresh coriander, then fold it up and wolf it down. This is why most people will be coming here, and quite rightly too, as it's definitely a top bit of taco work, each element considered, refined and intelligently sourced. Whether you're more of a DIY enthusiast or prefer your taco coming already assembled and dressed, well, that will ultimately be down to personal choice, but I don't like to be left in charge of balancing ingredients and dressings in a cuisine I'm not an expert in. I don't even much like being left in charge of dressing my own salad. But even so, this was a good taco.

There were, despite my grumblings, some very impressive things on the menu at El Pastor. Tuna tartare was a generous pile of fresh tuna bound with a complex chile-sesame paste; easily enjoyed.

Chicken tacos, rubbed in adobo, were nice and moist and full of flavour, hard to find fault with.

And short-rib, also precisely cooked and prepared, equally difficult to complain about. It was all very confident, mature, clearly well researched, and well executed. There was nothing wrong with any of it.

Maybe, in the end, whether you're a Breddos or El Pastor person comes down to your position on the thorny question of authenticity. Do you value as close adherence as possible to the traditional methods of the cuisine in question, possibly at the expense of surprise and running the risk that some ingredients will necessarily be different (inferior) to those in the motherland? Or do you take the personality and main techniques of Mexican food but apply it to masa-fried chicken, Cornish mackerel and Iberico pork and the rest and see what sticks? Which of these scenarios would you be more happy with?

Or maybe that argument is completely reductive, I don't know what I'm talking about and El Pastor, and Breddos, and (for all I know) Corazon and the rest are each perfectly good restaurants all worth your money and I should just shut up and enjoy the fact that we have any decent tacos in London at all. Yes, do you know what, I'll do that.

7/10

We were spotted by the PR and this meal was comped.

Lobos, London Bridge

It was while drooling over the fantastic menu at Lobos Tapas in Borough Market I realised that, just maybe, I am a massive hypocrite. If this had been an Italian restaurant, and a menu full of Italian staples such as beef carpaccio with parmesan and rocket, burrata with basil, wild boar pappardelle, etc and so on then I would be the first to criticise their lack of imagination and the identikit Italian Restaurant Clichés and condemn the whole operation as dull and derivative.

But because this is a Spanish restaurant, and because I like things like Padron Peppers, Pan Con Tomate, Iberico ham and Patatas Bravas and would be disappointed not to see them on a Spanish restaurant menu, instead of criticising Lobos' lack of imagination I will praise their drive for authenticity, and say how happy I am to see all my favourite Spanish dishes listed so comprehensively, and priced so well. Does that make me a hypocrite? Or are Spanish restaurant clichés just a whole lot more exciting than Italian restaurant clichés? Perhaps that's an argument for another time.

All that matters here and now is that Lobos, in this charming split-level space tucked beneath a railway arch in Borough Market, have since opening just 8 months ago firmly established themselves as one of the few genuine top-flight Spanish restaurants in London. Have another look at that menu - is there a single thing on it you don't want to eat? Does the idea of ham, chorizo and smoked bacon croquetas fill you with joy? Can you barely wait to get stuck into a tray of expertly hand-carved Iberico ham? Do the words "Iberico pork selection" make your heart all a-flutter? Well then, join the club.

Pan con tomate was the first to arrive, and was about a perfect a version as you could wish for. With just the right balance of tomato, oil and salt (lots of lesser tapas joints load the bread high with chopped tomato; that is not the point of this dish) spread on soft ciabatta, it was the kind of thing that reassured you that you were in safe hands. If you can get pan con tomate this right, the rest of the meal is a sure thing.

As indeed it was. You rarely see a better example of the ham carver's art than this - a neat grid of exquisitely thin morsels, each containing a nearly exact ratio of transluscent moist flesh and white fat. I held one up to the light so you can see how gloriously well it had been carved. And the beauty wasn't skin deep either - it had the deepest, richest nutty flavour of the very best Iberico ham.

Croquettas were smaller than I was expecting, and more numerous, but were otherwise still very enjoyable - little crunchy flavour bombs. If I'm being extra brutal I probably prefer the larger versions from the José Pizarro locations, whose fillings are a little more smooth and refined and casings that bit thinner and more delicate, but we still happily ate them all. How can you not enjoy deep-fried breaded parcels of ham and cheese? You can't, unless there's something very wrong with you.

Secreto Iberico (not that secreto any more but still a relative rarity) was impossible also not to love, chunks of tender pork glistening with fat and bursting with that incredible deep flavour. Accompanying it was a pile of house potato crisps doused in a powerful bright green garlic salsa which tingled addictively in the mouth. It's hard to explain to the unitiated just how much greater Iberico pork is than most if not all other types of pork. Mangalitza and Middlewhite and Old Spot all have their place and can be lovely, but proper Iberico ham from the Dehesas of Western Spain is just on another level entirely.

The only slight disappointment as far as I'm concerned was a green salad, which had quite a bitter dressing and had packed far too many layers of uninspiring and underseasoned raw courgette and lettuce into a small serving tray. In their defence, I will say that from many years of visiting Spain on holiday green salads are most definitely not this nation's speciality, and to that extent this was probably a fairly authentic Spanish green salad. Also my friend quite liked it so maybe it just wasn't for me.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Lobos, given that it's a tiny specialist restaurant in London in 2016, is that you can reserve a table. And what lovely tables, too - cute 2-seater booths done in red leather, served by enthusiastic staff (the owners are ex-Brindisa apparently) who know everything there is to know about Spanish food. True, you may have seen menus like this before if you've visited certain spots in Bermondsey and elsewhere, but who is ever going to get bored of this stuff when it's done so well?

Certainly not me. I will be going back to Lobos as many times as I can to work my way through the rest of the menu, because food like this and menus like this are to be heralded regardless of any notions of authenticity or how many other places in town are selling croquettas or padron peppers or any of the rest of it. Good food is good food, simple as. And the food at Lobos is very good indeed.

8/10

Lobos is very likely to be in the next version of the app. Meanwhile if you're in London Bridge area and Lobos is full, use my app to see where else is good. Oh and before you say anything yes, I have a new camera. Still getting to know it but it's still a step up on the iPhone I think you'll agree.

Elliot's, Borough Market

Elliot's first came to my attention, as is true of far too many places, when I tried their burger. Currently at number 3 in Daniel Young's exhaustively-researched top ten list, it's a work of near-genius, combining heavenly Ginger Pig mince, homemade brioche, beer-braised onions and - fanfare please - Comté, which is, in my underqualified opinion, the perfect gourmet burger cheese. Anywhere that can produce a burger as good as this surely has more tricks up their sleeve, so I made sure to return and try as much of the rest of the menu as my wallet and appetite would allow.

I know I'm late to the party on this one, not least because Elliot's has been open for over a year, but it is a lovely place to eat. Bustling but not too loud, the exposed brickwork and wooden furniture functional but not uncomfortable, it's really settled into this bright little spot in Borough Market and is clearly very popular as a result. Staff, youthful, graceful and smiley, trotted merrily around and were never too difficult to engage, and we never wanted for anything. With a setup as immediately enjoyable as this, the food only needed to be adequate to be worth the money. Happily, it was much better than that.

But first, cocktails. A Bellini and a Negroni were each, as you might have hoped for £8 and £9 respectively, excellent, and highlighted again how accomplished so many restaurant bars in London are becoming. Time was, even in the fanciest of places the most you could expect was a warm gin and tonic, but we're really getting the hang of this kind of thing now.

With Wright Bros just next door, there can't be many people who would come to Elliot's just for the oysters, and it's probably just as well as these were rather dry, slightly too creamy and the mignonette sauce needed a lot more flavour.

But crab on toast was much better, with a very generous amount of the good stuff and a little dollop of some sort of clever brown meat mayonnaise.

"Deep fried lamb's sweetbreads" were ordered mainly out of sheer curiosity; what arrived look quite like a corn dog but was in fact a row of plump sweetbreads threaded onto a rosemary twig, breaded and fried together. It was nice enough, but I still think I'd prefer them all pan-fried and caramelised. Still, marks for originality.

Suckling pig was beautifully moist and with bags of flavour - this was self-evidently a very high quality bit of pork. Barley added a bit of texture and the sweetness of braised heritage carrots complimented the protein - we particularly enjoyed the carrot that could have been a beetroot crossbreed, which was so dark and inky it coloured the plate.

I've had quite a few pigeon dishes recently, because I bloody love pigeon, but sometimes it takes a stripped-back preparation like this to remind me what's so special about this little bird in the first place. Perfectly pink on the bone, with its legs removed and braised separately with lentils, this was simple and satisfying and the kind of thing I could quite happily eat every day until the day I die.

Finally I should say a few words about a side of potatoes, bacon and shallots which may not be the most earth-shatteringly innovative combination of ingredients but boy did it taste good. The potatoes had a lovely golden crust and were all glossy with bacon fat. Marvellous.

At just over £50 a head with no dessert and not a vast amount to drink, Elliot's is not a cheap dinner. But the attention paid to ingredients, and service, and wine (the list is chosen by Master of Wine Isabelle Legeron, and is largely if not wholly natural if that kind of thing floats your boat) means that you don't begrudgingly open your wallet. This is the kind of place that shows the tourists of Borough Market what London restaurants are about, as well as reminding locals how good they have it. I have a feeling Elliot's may be around for a very long time.

8/10

Story, Bermondsey

There is nothing wrong with a bit of ambition. In a town where most new places are aiming for no more than to be the next filthy burger joint or comfort-food slop-house ("hey guys, can we do what X are doing, only worse and with bigger profits?"), it's hard to get too irritated with anywhere with the opposite problem.

Hard, perhaps, but not impossible. Story tests our patience to such a degree, with its twee, pretentious concept laid on so thickly, that the whole thing threatens so dissolve into self-parody from almost the first moment we sit down. The menu is hidden inside a weather-beaten copy of Bleak House, dishes are introduced as if they were deeply personal emotional statements and not just a bit of food on a plate, and - the real kicker - diners are encouraged, for some bizarre reason, to bring their own book to leave at the restaurant. Or to put it in their words, "Our dream is for all guests to leave a book at Story, which will remain there to evoke the inspiration in others that we hope our food will evoke in you." It's almost enough to put you off your horseradish snow.

That our meal at Story ended up being so enjoyable, then, is thanks to one thing and one thing only - that ignoring all the ego and frills and affected flummery, the food is generally of an incredibly high standard. Which is just as well, because if it hadn't been I'd have wanted to shove that copy of Bleak House somewhere even the most determined of kitchen porters would not have not been able to extract it.

Not feeling brave - or flush - enough for the full ten courses for £65, we thought we'd settle for "just" the six for £45. As it turns out, though, there are so many little extra bits and bobs before and after the tasting menu proper that it certainly didn't feel like we were missing out. Crispy cod skin topped with creamed roe and summer herbs was the first to arrive, and was brave enough to taste very strongly of fish, unlike the kind of reimagined Quavers you might get elsewhere. And it was for this reason I liked them, while my friend wasn't so sure. This was one plot device that was going to reoccur throughout the course of the lunch.

Then nasturtium flowers filled with oyster purée, radishes filled with seaweed butter, eel mousse "Oreos" (Storyeos?), and deep-fried rabbit "sandwiches", all arriving in quick succession but just the right, and fun, side of enjoyable. I preferred the delicate oyster flowers to the rather soggy rabbit bites, but my friend thought the opposite so take your pick. The joy of a meal like this is that you're not forced to love everything; the relentless pace keeps you interested even as the individual elements don't.

Anyone with a passing interest in the London restaurant world will already know all they need to know about the famous Story "dripping candle". Briefly, it's a very ordinary-looking candle but is made out of beef tallow, and once lit slowly melts into the candlestick base where you are encouraged to dip the house bread. Yes, butter would have probably tasted better but it's a thing so inventive and so clever that only the most cynical would take issue with it. Much more fun than actually eating it, in fact, was watching it gracefully dissolve into weird and wonderful shapes during the course of the meal.

"Burnt onion, apple, gin and thyme" was a beautiful-looking thing, and if you can't enjoy a bit of caramelised onion there's something wrong with you. Perhaps the only real criticism to be levelled here is that it seemed very like something you might be given at one of the other current temples of modern British gastronomy, but then any novellist will tell you, there's always power in repetition.

There were things I didn't like about "Beetroot, raspberry and horseradish" - the beetroot hadn't been treated (pickled? marinated?) enough to remove that slightly unpleasant soily taste, and I didn't eat every last expertly carved lump of it. But the horseradish snow was as addictive as the substance it resembled, melting in the mouth into a kind of salty, umami-rich cream, and the superbly flavoured raspberries unexpectedly matched it perfectly. Again, horseradish snow is not a unique concept (see: The Ledbury, amongst others) but who cares when it tastes as good as this.

Then my favourite bit of Story - "Pigeon, summer truffle and pine", which was pretty much everything I like about this kind of food on one plate. The pigeon was bloody and wonderfully smoky (done in the Big Green Egg BBQ stood proudly outside the restaurant), the pine was I think represented by two blobs of shocking green purée which tasted of thick vegetation, and the truffles were liberally sprinkled around the place and were also packed with flavour. But even more impressive were the greens not mentioned on the menu, such as an utterly perfect example of broccoli and some seared root vegetables of some kind which would have been enough to cause a stir on their own. Technically impressive, visually stunning and immaculately realised, this was a world-class dish.

The tersely-described "lemon" was a few clever treatments of the fruit - some more of that snow, a sharp blob of sorbet and a bit of white chocolate mousse. Faintly familiar in that kind of Noma/Ledbury/Clove Club way but nonetheless very easy to eat.

And then another famous Story creation, the "Three bears porridge", where you are asked to guess which is "too sweet", "too salty" or "just right". Of course, none are really "too" anything; it would be a very strange thing for a restaurant to do to deliberately overseason a dish just for a somewhat laboured fairytale parallel. One is sort of a salted caramel affair, one is all toffee and nuts, and I've no idea what went into the "just right" but the fact it was my least favourite probably says more about me than the skill of the chefs. I still ate it.

With just a little chocolate teacake and sweep of impossibly delicate toffee ribbon of some kind, we were done. By now, I imagine you've made your mind up whether you think Story is an overthought pile of foodie-frottism or a fun and exciting to spend a couple of hours of your life, and you will have probably also guessed that I'm firmly in the 2nd camp. We went a bit OT on the booze (two bottles of £40 prosecco between two may not be how everyone will choose to start their Saturday) but there wasn't much on the wine list under £30 and I have a feeling this might be something approaching an average spend, so as with any of these things, if it doesn't look like your kind of thing and you balk at paying this kind of money for lunch, then Story probably isn't for you.

But crucially when you're spending a lot of money on food, or drink, or damn near anything, it all comes down to value. Despite not loving every bit of everything, my lasting memory is of the dizzying highs of that pigeon or horseradish snow or the fascinating organic shapes created by a slowly-melting stick of beef fat. There was enough care and skill shown, overall, for the odd irritation, in the end, to not mean so much. And so, even if this may not be the final, perfect Story, as a first chapter, it deserves our attention.

8/10