The Pelican, Notting Hill

While I think the Top 50 Gastropub list is largely great, every year when it's announced there is the same grumbling about how some of the nominated places are best described as 'restaurants that operate out of a pub building' than pubs. I have long argued that to be considered for inclusion in the list punters should be able to go in and order just a drink and a packet of crisps (Scampi Fries ideally) and not be made to feel bad for taking up valuable eating space. So this then would exclude the Sportsman (who haven't allowed 'just drinks' for ages), the Hand & Flowers, the Crown at Burchett's Green and many other admittedly very nice places that just aren't pubs.

The good news about the Pelican (number 92 on the list) is that it's very much a pub. You can just pop in for a drink - plenty do - and there's a good sized bar area (and very handsome bar) for just mingling with friends without being made to feel like you're denting their gross profits. But while you can go to the Pelican just for drinks, at the same time you'd be silly to, because the food coming out of their kitchens is up there with the best any gastropub offers anywhere.

First to arrive, which also neatly reflected the enthusiasm in which it was ordered, was spider crab toast. A generous amount of crab, dotted with chives and dusted with paprika, came slathered on house sourdough and divided into four portions. The very existence of 'spider crab' toast on the Pelican menu speaks to a kitchen attempting to do something a little above the usual gastropub offering. The last time I saw spider crab on a menu, in fact, was at the Parkers Arms - not bad company to be in.

Monkfish "scampi" were tender, meaty little nuggets of fresh fish with a very addictive marie-rose style dip. One of the defining charcteristics of the most recent (and most successful) gastropubs is that the pescatarian, the vegetarian and the omnivore are all given equally attractive options across the board - no token mushroom risotto and 'fish of the day' (that will farmed seabass then) here thankyouverymuch.

But of course meat-eaters, and specifically offal-lovers, don't have anything to complain about at the Pelican either. Bone marrow - two huge portions - came expertly roasted in the St John style, with a brilliant sharp parsley dressing and more of that lovely house sourdough. £2 cheaper here than St John, too.

It was with the arrival of the mince on toast - in of itself an impressive bit of work with deliriously butter-drenched beef topped with grated parmesan - that we realised we had accidentally ordered quite a few dishes that involved bread. This is nobody's fault but ours, but my advice to you is to keep the number of "things on toast" to no more than two so you have more room for other lovely things.

Beef tartare was dressed, quite innovatively, with gentleman's relish (anchovy paste), thus neatly combining two of my favourite things in the world to eat. I also always admire the effort that went into making their own house crinkle-cut crisps, which were a great foil for the beef.

And finally, "5th quarter" (offal) pie, a splendidly bronzed thing packed full of offaly bits and pieces, and served with one of those wonderful glossy meat sauces that has clearly taken someone a very long time to make. With it, in case we hadn't quite ingested enough carbohydrates by this point, was a pretty little portion of mashed potato boasting a ratio of potato to butter of (I'm guessing) around 1 to 10. This is, of course, a good thing.

We had, as you might have gathered by now, ordered way too much food for two people, not out of greed (well alright, not JUST out of greed) but also because the fairly large menu had way too many things on it we'd regret not ordering. I'm already making plans, perhaps after pay day, to go back and try the £75 lobster and monkfish pie (for two), and I bet the duck leg with red cabbage is worth a look-in too. But even with over-ordering the bill only came to £60 each including service, which is pretty good going these days.

Gastropubs - proper gastropubs - like the Pelican do not come along very often, and even more rarely (for a reason I'm yet to fully fathom) do they land in central London. In fact, I think only the Drapers Arms in Islington and the Red Lion and Sun in Highgate, both longstanding favourites of mine, can give it a run for its money and provide that glorious combination of unpretentious watering hole and top-tier modern British food, where how much advantage you take of either is left entirely up to you (and maybe the Audley in Mayfair, although that's pushing the definition of 'unpretentious' somewhat). So thank God for all these people who truly 'get' how to do gastropub, and let's hope they all continue to get the custom - and plaudits - they deserve.

9/10

Apologies, for one final time, for the terrible iPhotos. I have finally been reacquainted with my camera battery charger, and future photos will be (slightly) better.

The Electric Diner, Notting Hill

It's easy to dismiss Electric Diner as the latest in a long line of copycat American comfort food outlets, and indeed I'm going to do just that, but it's also too easy to forget that outside of a select group of bloggers, critics and Twitter-stalking restaurant fanatics (and I have a horrible feeling I qualify for all three), this kind of thing is still a relative novelty. If you find yourself inwardly groaning whenever you learn about a new no-choice chicken restaurant or Soho burger bar, you're in a tiny minority. Most of the population of London haven't been eating at Meatwagon since 2010, still think of ramen as a kind of soup they do at Wagamama, and would consider a new diner selling gourmet hot dogs and cheeseburgers a huge improvement on their local Chicken Cottage or GBK.

It's also worth noting that, Soho or Shoreditch excepted, we're really still not spoiled for choice when it comes to this kind of thing. West London in particular, never at the top of the tree when it came to decent places to eat (the astonishing Ledbury being the exception that proves the rule) is one of those affluent restaurant deserts (see also Hampstead, Chelsea) that would welcome anyone trying to do something even slightly different. So perhaps I shouldn't be to harsh on Electric Diner for being a bit derivative; it is, after all, better this than another bloody Strada.

So I'll try and stress the positives. It's a beautiful room, with a long, sleek open kitchen on one side and low booths nestled under exposed brick on the left, stretching towards a gleaming white-tiled back wall. Staff were pleasant and efficient, and despite the dreaded "we'll need your table back by 7:30" (after arriving only just before 6:15) they were at least attentive enough to feed and water us in just under that time. My Hemingway Daquiri was a great example of its kind - unsweetened and forcefully alcoholic, just like the great man used to like them (only he would order doubles - that's four shots of rum at a time).

But I'm afraid my enthusiasm can't stretch to the food. An £8 portion of chicken livers came served with sweet brioche bread and a small pot of congealed butter in case you weren't finding enough fat elsewhere on the plate. Pickles were decent but couldn't win against such a huge amount of grease and sugar, and so the overall effect was pretty unappealing. Also, it was all stone-cold. Surely it wouldn't have been impossible to fry up a few chopped chicken livers to order? It seemed a bit lazy.

Bologna Sandwich continued in the same vein - sliced mortadella (or wafer-thin ham, which was all it tasted of) and cheddar (I think) inside a very sweet brioche bun and with whole mini gherkins rolling around - a bit slapped-together, a bit careless. I know diner food isn't supposed to be too fussy but there was very little to get excited about here, just thin-sliced fat under melted fat between two pieces of fat. For a tenner.

It seems strange to complain about a side order of bacon being too fatty, but these really were 90% lard, and I think I'm entitled to moan about how even the thin strips of red flesh were crumbly and dry, and the fact that the sugary dressing just made the whole thing even more of a challenge to eat.

The "green salad", ordered because the rest of what was coming our way seemed a little heavy (oh how little we knew) was, despite an adequate dressing, nothing more than a supermarket ready-to-eat bag of mixed greens dumped on a plate, and nowhere near worth £6. Chips had a good crunch but were otherwise unmemorable, and for £4 for a small cup hardly represented value.

The bill for two, with a couple of beers on top of the above, came to £57, an amount I would have been happy to pay had I not left feeling so unpleasantly, overwhelmingly grease-sodden and had there just been one dish I could have considered ordering again. Looking back on the evening now all plates of food just merge into one huge, shapeless, lardy blob - the kind of thing you might start to resemble in fact if you ate there on a regular basis. Also, is there a reason they have their lighting so stupidly low? It started off just barely being enough to distinguish between animal, vegetable and mineral on the table in front of you, and halfway through the meal they turned it even lower.

But after all, this is Notting Hill, and if it's a choice between the Electric and getting on the tube to MeatLiquor, then perhaps it will find an audience. And as I say, if this was your first exposure to London's new wave of pimped-up US junk food joints and weren't on too much of a budget (both eminently possible if you live in Notting Hill), you may find enough to enjoy. It's a nice room, it would be a good place for a drink and it's better than a number of other places nearby. Oh, and they bring tap water without being asked. So they get an extra point for that too.

5/10

Anissa's Nose to Tail Lamb at the Dock Kitchen, Notting Hill

If I was feeling slightly less than charitable, this post would be about Colchis, a Georgian restaurant in Bayswater. I went with a couple of friends on Sunday and suffered the kind of incompetence that makes the job of writing it up a breeze - the wrong wine brought twice, dull food weirdly presented, and the saltiest dumplings in Britain. I could have rattled a condescending review off in record time and had the afternoon to find somewhere else to hate while the comments racked up.

But you know what, there's been far too much Schadenfreude around these parts lately. I know bad meals make good reading but while I don't mind laying into a Jamie Oliver cash cow or cynical tourist dive, I am less comfortable with beating on yet another mediocre-but-hardly-disastrous meal from people whose intentions may well be misguided but hardly evil. Not everywhere can serve the best food or be incredible value, and it's far, far to easy to pick fault in somewhere that isn't perfect than it is to appreciate that actually, we have it pretty good most of the time. So, from now on, I'm going to try and be more positive.

Anyway, the reason I've been in such a conciliatory mood lately is largely due to a meal I had at the Dock Kitchen in West London earlier in the week, a special one-off event and the brainchild of Syrian/Lebanese food writer Anissa Helou with the assistance of Dock Kitchen chef Stevie Parle and his team. Ordinarily writing up one-off events is the least useful thing a food blog might do - it's not like anyone reading this will be able to book themselves in for similar any time soon - but this meal was just so ...unusual, that I thought it deserved a proper report. There are two points to be made before I go any further - firstly, the meal was titled 'Nose to tail lamb', and as you might expect contained bits of a sheep you wouldn't ordinarily see on a restaurant menu. If you are feeling a bit delicate and your idea of a difficult dish is a haggis, then look away now. Secondly, despite containing some of the most challenging items I've ever paid to eat, it was worth every penny even despite the fact there were some bits I will never ever go anywhere near again. Ever.

It all started innocently enough. Chicken wings, marinated I think in pomegranate molasses, were straight from the charcoal grill, salty and sweet crispy on the outside and silkily smooth within. The house bread also deserves a special mention, this presumably being Stevie Parle's work, with the soft, stretchy texture of the finest tandoor-cooked naans.

This is a lamb's tongue. It's not pretty, is it, but surely that's just a few decades of social conditioning talking - objectively it can't really be more obscene than a salami. It tasted salty and soft, not very offally in fact but rather like dense paté, and if you closed your eyes would almost pass as straightforward. Almost.

This roast potato contained a whole kidney seasoned with butter and thyme, and I was on safer ground here as I'd had kidneys in the past. Admittedly, I didn't like them much when I had them before - it was in Canteen in Spitalfields and I remember them tasting like, well, for want of a better word, like piss... actual piss - but here they were much more palatable, soft and meaty and with no unpleasant urine tang, just a vaguely musky tinge of innards.

Finally, our favourite of the starters - another soft and crisp flatbread topped with lamb's fry (liver), sweetbreads and kidneys, and chicken hearts and livers. All delicately spiced (allspice, I think) and perfectly seasoned, this Mixed Organ Grill was great fun to pick your way through - my favourites, as in the past, were the chewy chicken hearts and the creamy blobs of sweetbread. It was enough to forget I was working my way through minor lamb glands and let my guard down. Big mistake.

"Tandoori sheep's head interlude" sounds like a good name for a band, but is actually, as you can see from the X-rated photo above, an actual entire sheep's head, eyes and brains included, on a plate. To eat. Anissa gave a brief demonstration on how to *gulp* split the skull, *wince* scoop out the eyes and *aargh* fish out the brains with our fingers, during which I attempted to appear polite and pay as much attention as possible whilst simultaneously fighting the instinct to run out of the room screaming. Since a humbling trip to Japan earlier in the year, involving raw squid and cod's sperm, I no longer consider myself the brave Mr. Mange-Tout I once did, but even so, I surprised myself at how unnerved I was, staring into the dark, sunken eye sockets of a roast animal skull.

I first tried some cheek - "hmm, not bad" - then graduated to a teeny morsel of brain - "eek, well, OK" - but it was really the eyeball that I was most worried about. I stared at my dinner, and it stared back. I took a few deep breaths and, as instructed, sliced off the dark iris with a knife and fork. The two sections wobbled apart looking like nothing that should ever be eaten. I should say that my friend, much more brave and level-headed than me, was tucking into her side of the head with gusto - not only did she pop the entire eyeball into her mouth as if it was nothing more offensive than a marshmallow, but she also ate most of the tongue and was tearing at the brain with her fingers for as long as the front of house left it on the table. Eventually, under extreme peer pressure I should add, I tried a tiny bit of the eyeball. It tasted like salty lamb blubber, perhaps very slightly less hideous than I'd expected but still not enough to get me rushing to my nearest halal butchers and buying them out of whole carcasses.

After that, a whole stuffed stomach was almost prosaic. Gently pungent tripe, ballooned with spiced rice and herbs, sat in a clear vegetable broth containing garlic and lemon and crispy asparagus. I can't decide whether it was over-eating or shell-shock but I'm afraid I couldn't manage more than half of it. Very tasty though, I assure you.

Rose water sorbet and Lebanese wild orchid root ice cream provided some kind of light relief at the end of the meal. I ate them feeling like I'd just been bungee jumping, or white water rafting - a combination of having broken some personal limits and delighted I'd even eaten as much as I did. And yes, I struggled with some bits of the meal, as I imagine many others would too, but I can't remember the last time I've finished a meal feeling such a sense of a achievement - pathetic really, as there must be people all over the Middle East tucking into a whole sheep's head like you or I might a Cornish pasty.

So, thank you to Anissa and Stevie for having the balls (which reminds me, I guess it could have been worse) to do this, and for treating me and my friend to a completely hilarious, terrifying, delicious and utterly unforgettable evening. I'm never going to be the world's biggest fan of the strange collection of objects that lurk inside a sheep's skull, but by cooking it all so well - always delicately spiced and perfectly seasoned, not a single mistake in any element of any course - they have at least convinced me that this is as good as this stuff gets, and I can safely now stop trying. And I can't tell you how much of a relief that is.

Edit: Apparently lamb's fry were testicles after all, not liver. So I did better than I thought.

The Ledbury, Notting Hill

Some people - the irritating gits - are born over-achievers. Normally the CV and career path of chefs is of little interest to anyone other than the most obsessive restaurant geek (that would be me, then), but how the Ledbury came about is a glowing tribute to the talents of one of our most exciting young cooks. Brett Graham arrived in this country (according to my sources) in 2000. Two years later, he had won Young Chef of the Year. Three years after that, he opened the Ledbury, which this year won two Michelin stars. Not only that, but Graham's other project, a little pub in Fulham you may have heard of called the Harwood Arms, itself won a Michelin star. He's still only 30 years old. The utter bastard.

Graham famously learned his trade at Mayfair's The Square, under a chef with a proven track record of churning out Michelin-starred protegés, Philip Howard. In my ignorance, I was expecting the Ledbury to be a kind of Square Lite, showcasing some of the familiar Howard dishes but with less of the polish and sophistication than the mothership, which has after all been going since the early 90s. What I wasn't expecting was dish after dish of love, sparkle and invention, with a style and personality all of its own, and a front of house as charming and professional as any in the city.

Unusually for this blog, I had been to the Ledbury before but hadn't blogged about it, leaving that task in Hollow Legs' very capable hands. Lizzie's own love affair with the Ledbury began at Taste of London 2009, and with the famous ash-baked celeriac followed by a heavenly summer fruits bellini - Taste may be overcrowded, overpriced and very bad at PR, but for introducing us to this remarkable restaurant a handful of greedy bloggers will be forever grateful. But enough reminiscing; onto The Ledbury 2010.


An amuse of some kind of taramasalata (sorry but if it's not on the menu and I have to rely on my particularly useless powers of recall, then this is the best you're going to get) on a crispy strip of filo (I think) pastry was a pleasant enough start. I've never really had an amuse anything more than pleasant, but then perhaps that's the point - to get your tastebuds going without overshadowing any of the other dishes.


First course from the tasting menu proper (what the hell, you only live once) was a scallop cerviche with horseradish "snow". If you're thinking that sounds a bit too fancy-pants and twee to deliver on flavour, then you couldn't be more wrong; sweet fresh scallops were topped with acidic, spicy frozen horseradish and dressed with an intensely-flavoured dill pesto. It was one of those plates of food that delivered in spades in every department; delightful texture contrasts, intelligently balanced flavours, good use of the deep freeze. Simply brilliant.


Next a clever squid 'risotto' - not a risotto at all in fact, but pieces of squid flesh chopped up to the size of grains of rice in some kind of cream/stock sauce, garnished with a cauliflower foam (I'll forgive them this frippery) and sherry reduction. Bringing to mind the Sportsman's deconstructed crab risotto back in October, it was nevertheless a unique dish, showcasing a both a mastery of texture and flavour and experimentation without sacrificing straightforward pleasure of eating.


The flame-grilled mackerel was up there with the scallop cerviche as the standout dish of our meal on Saturday. How they had managed to get a fragile, smoky char-grilled skin on this tiny cube of fresh mackerel whilst keeping the flesh at the base ever so slightly pink is astonishing. Served with it was a cute little tube (made from some kind of translucent noodle or pasta) of cured mackerel and shiso. Yet another brilliant course.


These three crispy on the outside, moist within cubes of monkfish were served with a shockingly green sauce made from padron peppers. Accompanying the fish was a cylinder of dense (I think) potato fondant, or if it wasn't fondant it was a very very tasty and densely textured boiled potato. There wasn't a single element of any dish which wasn't carefully considered and in perfect harmony with the other ingredients, and each mouthful was a little voyage of discovery.


Doing to tiny cubes of chicken what they had very successfully done to tiny cubes of chargrilled mackerel, these were delicately flavoured, tender and with a good crispy skin. They were served with white asparagus and a creamy morel sauce, which had an astonishing rich flavour and was very attractively presented. The worst you could say about this plate of food is that chicken and mushrooms is hardly an earth-shattering match, but it's a testament to the invention and playfulness on display that this more straightforward assembly of ingredients still made an impression. A sprig of thyme hidden under a delicately seasoned milk skin showed a sense of humour and rounded off the complimentary flavours perfectly.


Last of the savoury courses was a piece of 24-hour slow cooked lamb, lovely and crispy outside and - it almost goes without saying - tender and pink within. Whilst the lamb was as good as you could hope for, it was served with a truly exceptional slice of miso aubergine, almost meaty in its richness. I hadn't previously considered myself an aubergine fan, but this one element of this one dish was perhaps the most revelatory moment in the whole meal. Turns out I did like aubergines after all, I just needed Brett Graham to cook them for me. Who knew?


So to desserts. It seems the relatively low key of the savoury amuse doesn't apply to the pre-dessert course, as this strawberry concoction was delicious. There were a number of different elements to it, but because they're not detailed on the menu I don't have a flipping clue what most of them were. There were chunks of fresh strawberries, some strawberry jelly and a teeny blob of strawberry ice cream, I think. Yeah, that'll do.


Caramelised banana galette with peanut ice cream was, if not anywhere near approaching a duff note, just slightly less exciting than the others. It tasted as good as caramel and bananas and peanut ice cream ever would, but there wasn't really anything extraordinary in terms of invention or technique. This is the problem with getting spoiled so much earlier in the meal - as soon as anything merely good comes along it can't help being a disappointment.

It wasn't just the food on the table that made this lunch one of the more memorable in recent years. Service from everyone, from the friendly sommellier who didn't flinch in the slightest when asked to recommend "something cheap", to the charming maitre d' who recognised us from our one visit nearly six months ago, was everything you could ask for. A world apart from the in-your-face over-familiarity of Bistrot Bruno Loubet a few days ago, these guys were smart, professional, discreet and efficient, a virtual masterclass in perfect service. A casual enquiry as to whether Graham was in the kitchen that day led to an invitation to meet the man himself at work, and so downstairs we trooped, to offer our embarassingly effusive feedback on the meal and even try a couple of mouthfuls of a la carte desserts (a clever violet-flavoured sorbet, and a superb honey soufflé with thyme ice cream). Graham is, depressingly inevitably, charming and eloquent, talking us through the techniques he used to produce the clever flame-grilling effect on the mackerel (cooked above the flames on a kind of thin frame which allows the oil to drip off and make a nice crispy skin) and promising to bring back that summer berry and hibiscus bellini if we gave him "enough notice" on our next visit.


Far from setting up a Square Mark II and gunning for Michelin stars using the tried and tested recipes of his old boss, Brett Graham's food at the Ledbury is unique - as characterful and intelligently experimental, and most importantly delicious, as any other restaurant in London, even the Square which (whisper it) almost seems slightly po-faced and dated in comparison. Some of the most exciting food I've had the pleasure to eat, by a chef at the top of his game, running his own two Michelin starred kitchen, and a throughly nice (and, Lizzie would like me to add, rather dishy) chap into the bargain. And did I mention he's only 30? The utter, utter bastard.

9/10

Photos are Lizzie's. She did the work so that I didn't have to.

The Hillgate, Notting Hill

The blogger vs. professional thing has been done to death, and I'm sure I don't need to go over old ground. Long story short, you stick with anyone who's opinions you trust, and both your bloggers and your paid critics have a duty to reveal any freebies, special treatment or otherwise, just so everyone knows what the deal is. Policy here on Cheese and Biscuits is to not leave a numbered score beneath any free events or invitations to review - as well, of course, as making it clear in the text that said event was gratis. But I think it's important not to be overly apologetic, and also not to try and overcompensate and be more harsh than you would be normally just because a meal has been paid for.

It's stressful, though, accepting an invitation to review. At least, I find it is. No matter how much you tell yourself that it was their idea, they wouldn't invite you for a meal if they didn't want honesty, and nobody has anything to gain from a lack of it, there's a moment during a meal - usually just as the starters arrive - when you know instantly whether this is going to be a good or bad meal. The relief when you think it's going well is enormous - and the emotion far greater if you're being treated to it, the owner/managers hovering nervously on the sidelines, watching your every move. Likewise, if a meal turns for the worse, the next few courses can seem like the longest of your life, and with no bill to pay there's no full stop on the evening, so you just slink out after your last glass of wine, hoping nobody will accost you on the way out with the dreaded phrase "So, how was your meal?". I usually just smile and say "You'll have to wait for the review!", through gritted teeth.

The Hillgate, just around the back of Notting Hill Gate tube station, is not a bad pub. It is sensitively refurbished (with particularly nice toilets), atmospheric with its tea lights and large wooden furniture, and the waiting staff are friendly and competent. And I know I'm spoiled and speaking with the advantage of a geeky mental list of anywhere Michelin-starred or otherwise notable, and I should probably be a bit more realistic about the options available to your average gastropub punter who isn't about to travel halfway across town for a slightly better Scotch Egg and really doesn't give a crap if their risotto is a bit starchy, but I'm sorry, I do. And the problem for the Hillgate is that despite it not being awful, it's still fighting a losing battle against much better pubs for the same price in the city, places like the Harwood Arms and the Cadogan Arms and the Bull and Last and so on and so on. If you don't measure up to the competition, you deserve everything you have coming to you.


So, the dreaded starter. In fairness, my Warm Bacon Salad was as good as you could expect to get in many places. The seasoning was a bit muted, the bacon a little bit on the floppy side, and the poached egg quite bland. But it was still edible, and was a nicely judged portion size. And my dining companions did much better with their sautéed mackerel and beetroot, which was cooked perfectly with a crispy skin and soft white flesh. It also displays a level of ambition above the average when a place has more than one hot starter.


I'm afraid I didn't enjoy my main course much at all. A messy pile of risotto, with God knows how many different ingredients lurking in the mix (bacon, celeriac and cauliflower were listed on the menu, though I'm sure there were more), was the base for a dried out and chewy supreme of chicken. The risotto had also been laced with a reduced stock of some kind, and the flavours were overwhelmingly confusing, like the chef had just tipped out the contents of his fridge into the pan and plonked last night's leftover chicken on top. Although I should say - again - that although a bavette steak was rather bland it had been cooked well and served with nice enough chips.


Desserts were similarly middle of the road, with a pretty mediocre chocolate ice cream and a slightly better creamy rhubarb trifle thing ("chantilly"). Hardly anything to get the pulses racing, and I got the impression they were a bit of an afterthought. But then I suppose gastropub desserts often are.


I will repeat that the Hillgate is not a bad pub. You can do a lot, lot worse in London and if you were lucky with your choices and overlooked the odd slip here and there, you could probably construct yourself a nice enough evening. But you can also do a lot better, and I can't see why, if you found yourself hungry out West, you wouldn't just walk up to Hereford Road or the Cow on Westbourne Grove. But then, perhaps that's just me.

I was invited to review the Hillgate.