Banquet 88, St Katharine Docks

The St Katharine Docks are a very pleasant, picturesque and pedestrian-friendly part of London that deserves much, much better restaurants than they has hitherto been blessed with. Banquet 88's immediate neighbours are Café Rouge, Côte and Slug & Lettuce and though I can sense some of you bristling with indignant contrary defences of this particular rogues gallery ("The Côte lunch menu is actually pretty good value" ... "The Café Rouge steak frites aren't completely inedible" ... "I once ate at Slug & Lettuce and didn't die"), the fact is that being so close to one of the city's most popular attractions (the Tower is just through an underpass) means that the undiscerning tourist dollar is a considerable and ugly influence.

How odd, then - and pleasantly surprising - that Banquet 88 isn't a lazy proto-chain or timid tourist-friendly slop merchant but a vibrantly authentic modern Cantonese restaurant serving a menu so full of courageous and exciting dishes that it should have any Chinese food-lover (that's lovers of Chinese food, not food lovers who are Chinese, although I'm sure both are welcome) wanting to order from every corner of it.

So obviously, given the menu dares you to go as full Chinese Mode as you can, we tried not to disappoint. This is hand-pulled chicken with jellyfish, a dish that carefully balanced both the obvious contrasting textures - the bounce and chew of the jellyfish with the firmer strips of chicken - and lovely light flavours, with both proteins benefiting from a subtle sesame-vinegar dressing. With strips of crunchy cucumber and spring onion layered on top, this was an immensely satisfying and enjoyable salad (...type thing), very appropriate given the flag-cracking weather outside.

Hot and sour sesame aubergine came so fresh out of the fryer that we could barely go near them for about 15 minutes after they landed on the table, but once the searing hot sugar had cooled down a bit they were great, little gooey sticks all sharp and sweet with an addictive crunch and chew.

Banquet 88 are apparently known for their cheung fun, so we could hardly ignore that section of the menu. This is prawn with crispy red rice skin, which cleverly combined the sweetness and bite of fresh prawn with a layer of crunchy fried doughnut, all wrapped in a traffic-light red noodle wrapper that, we were assured, was not artificial but naturally coloured from the red rice used to make it. The chilli dip was great too.

More dim sum (Banquet 88 are pitching themselves as a kind of updated Yauatcha, with the whole menu available all day) came in the form of these pretty crab dumplings, containing plenty of fresh crab and having a nice just-firm-enough bite. Excellent of course - by this stage of the evening, excellent was becoming the norm.

Cantonese roast pigeon needed a very different skill set to the dim sum but was equally accomplished. The neat little portions each had a crisp, delicate skin next to expertly seasoned meat and was all distressingly easy to wolf down in record time. Perhaps if I'm going to be picky I would have liked some kind of dipping sauce for this, but there was still some chilli sauce and crispy chilli oil left over from the dim sum so that worked well enough.

In some restaurants you're lucky to get your seafood served in the right species of shell - there's been a worrying trend recently to present dressed crab inside scallop shells which is just... all kinds of wrong) but not many places serve fresh scallops not only in their shells but still attached to the very shell they lived in. So not only were these creatures served plump and fresh and dressed in a lovely garlic-vinegar sauce with glass noodles but you had the added joy of prying the meat from the shell, which lifted off in a single satisfying chunk. This is literally the first time I've ever had scallops served this way, and I'm very much hoping it won't be the last.

We did allow ourselves a couple of fan-favourite Cantonese dishes. Half a roast duck was extremely good - perhaps not as life-changing as the multi-course version served at Shikumen in Shepherd's Bush (currently, worryingly closed, though I hope just temporarily) but still mostly everything you could wish for, with another one of those delicately crunchy skins and good soft meat.

Even beef ho fun - something approaching a Cantonese staple - was the very best it could be, with big slices of smoky chargrilled beef, slightly pink inside, enveloped by giant lengths of soft noodles.

Finally from the savouries, a plate of pea shoots was a revelation. On the plate it looked like spinach or bok choy, attractive but familiar. But the taste was pure, summery, sugary pea, with a topping of crab roe to season and enliven it. I'm sure the kitchens at Banquet 88 can work wonders with whatever seasonal vegetables they can get their hands on, but this particular dish will live long in my memory of this dinner, one not short of highlights.

So far so brilliant then, and I'm tempted to ignore the sweet courses and leave on a high note, but it's probably worth wondering why I've never had a great time with desserts in Chinese restaurants. Two different dishes were brought out - a selection of mochi (I know, they're Japanese), and a mango pomelo sago pudding thing, and as expected I didn't much like either of them. The mochi, like any other mochi I've ever tried, were the texture of raw bread dough with all the personality of wallpaper paste, and the mango...thing had a decent mango flavour but a slightly off-putting too-firm texture. I've been lucky enough to eat at some very smart and high-end Chinese restaurants and I've never really understood why so often the wheels seem to come off after the savoury courses are done. But then maybe it's just me.

Either way, let's not dwell on the desserts (I certainly didn't). Banquet 88 had done more than enough to put it right near the top of my favourite Chinese restaurants in London before the mochi arrived and looking back over my photos a few days after I just want to go back and order all the other things I didn't get a chance to sample the first time - abalone maybe, or baked eel, or sake cherry foie gras. And although I didn't see a bill, and though it is possible to load up on some pretty premium ingredients (caviar features in certain corners, I noticed) a quick and dirty sum of the items we chose comes to a food bill of about £170 for 3 people - and we had leftovers. You will certainly pay more for a lot less in other parts of town.

It is, then, and after all, possible to run a restaurant with style and heart in the heart of Touristland, and although I'm not holding my breath for a world-class Southern Thai specialist to open on Leicester Square or for Westfield Stratford to get a Bob Bob Ricard, the point is that maybe we shouldn't be so surprised when somewhere with integrity opens so close to so many places without. And we should be very, very thankful that they have because it's places like Banquet 88 that make London one of the most rewarding and exciting places in which to eat on planet earth. OK so maybe I'm biased. But I'm not necessarily wrong.

8/10

I was invited to Banquet 88 and didn't see a bill.

Melusine, St Katherine's Dock

We're close enough to the dark days of countrywide COVID paralysis that I'm still ticking off post-lockdown firsts - first trip to the cinema, first haircut, first altercation with an over-aggressive chugger. Avalon by the Melusine (I'm re-reading the press release now and I'm still not sure of the distinction between seafood restaurant Melusine and the popup Avalon, which appears to occupy the same building and has the same menu...)* is my first post-lockdown invite, a chance to try a seafood restaurant in St Katherine's Dock that had not previously pinged my sonar, and (of almost equal importance) an excuse to walk home over Tower Bridge, surely one of the most spectacular ways of ending an evening in town.

There's an inherent risk in visiting a seafood restaurant, at least a decent seafood restaurant that relies on unpredictable supplies of seafood, and it's that you allow yourself to get excited about ordering, I don't know, spider crab or langoustine or chocolate clams or something, only to find out with some disappointment that on the day of your visit, they don't have any. Having been seduced by the photos of langoustine on the Melusine website I was a bit upset to discover on arrival that they weren't on that day's menu, but I put a brave face on and ordered some kumamoto oysters instead. I am nothing if not adaptable.

And the oysters were great - cute little things with a good mignonette dressing on the side. As the name suggests, kumamoto are originally from Japan, but have long since been grown all around the world and are a regular feature on the menu anywhere trying that little bit harder to expand their oyster offering. They're very satisfying to eat, sturdy and compact, with a deep shell containing more flesh than you'd think at first glance, and a nice sweet flavour.

"Crispy" Torbay prawns were exactly that, introduced whole to the deep fryer and presented with the instruction to "eat the whole thing, including the head". Which, of course, we dutifully did. The prawns themselves were sweet and soft inside, with the shells just the wrong side of chewy but still doable, the slight oddness of the texture more than offset by the novelty of being able to throw handfuls of whole prawns into your gob at once, like a hungry pelican. But they were complimented beautifully by a strong aioli, yellow with garlic, which packed a happy punch.

House bread was a very decent sourdough, and a little olive oil and balsamic dip, which seemed appropriate given the Mediterranean-ness of the surroundings and menu.

I'll never say no to razor clams. I hope one day to go and forage for them myself on the beach - apparently you look for a telltale "keyhole" shape hole in the sand, and pour loads of salt down. The razors will rise up out of the ground wondering why it's got so salty all of a sudden, and you grab 'em. These examples, plump and fresh, were dressed in a garlic and seaweed oil which added some lovely colour as well as allium zing.

Main course was lobster and chips, because there's something nicely rebellious about pairing an ostensibly luxury product with a more everyday accompaniment - Elizabeth Haigh's fried chicken with caviar is another example that springs to mind (and very lovely that was too). The lobster was perfectly cooked and handily had the de-shelled claws laying on top, leaving just the job of removing the tail meat from the shell for the customer - a deeply satisfying thing to do. It goes without saying that it didn't need the roasted green pepper weirdly dumped on top (why?) but the beastie itself was perfect, and the chips were crisp and nicely seasoned.

There was also a samphire and cucumber salad, the details of which escape me so it can't have been that notable, but it performed the job of "being a salad" perfectly well.

We had overindulged on seafood and chips and couldn't manage a full dessert, but did notice on the way into the restaurant freshly-baked canelés very invitingly laid out on a tray. And this, topped with a superb passionfruit jam, ended the meal beautifully.

In the end, then, Melusine/Melusine-by-the-Sea/Avalon did more than enough to impress. Sure, lobster and roasted green pepper will never be happy bedmates, and I'd have liked a slightly more expansive shellfish offering, but these are minor blips in what was otherwise a very enjoyable evening. And there's every chance as the weeks roll on, and the grim memories of lockdown fade into the ever more distant past, that the menu will be even more worth the journey to Tower Bridge. And if not, well, for us Southies there's always that glorious walk home.

8/10

I was invited to Melusine/Melusine-by-the-Sea/Avalon and didn't see a bill, but I think dinner for two under normal circumstances would have come to around £50pp - pretty reasonable, really.

* Some clarification on the whole Avalon/Melusine thing from their PR - Avalon is the popup that is currently available Thursday-Saturday until the end of September outside on the dock itself, weather permitting. As it was raining the day I visited, the popup was cancelled and we had the usual Melusine menu.

La Dame de Pic, Tower Hill

The other day I spotted on my twitter feed a menu from an Alain Ducasse restaurant. It was posted by Nottingham-based chef Sat Bains, without much comment other than to indicate he was very much looking forward to trying it (and who can blame him with turbot and lobster on offer), but there was something about this menu that I couldn't quite work out. Where in the world was this place? Were those prices in Japanese yen? No, far too cheap. Hong Kong dollars, making the starters between £13-£20? Possibly, though none of the ingredients looked particularly Far Eastern. I googled "Le Meurice".

You're probably ahead of me. Turns out, Le Meurice is a hotel in Paris. Those prices are in euros. At the current exchange rates (thank you Brexit) the average British holidaymaker (though I imagine there's nothing average about the kind of British holidaymaker that makes a reservation at Le Meurice) would expect to receive a l'addition of about £1000 per head - and I'm sorry, I don't care how much better Brittany lobsters are than Brixham, or if the Ducasse pasta is that much better than Bancone (though it seems unlikely), this is an obscene amount of money. By way of contrast, Sat Bains' own restaurant, which currently also holds two Michelin stars, will serve you a seven-course tasting menu, including drinks and service, for less than the price of a single starter at Le Meurice. And I'm pretty sure eating in a 5-star hotel in the 1st arrondissement as opposed to an industrial estate under a motorway flyover in the East Midlands can't account for very much of that discrepancy.

The fact is, for as long as Brexit hasn't tipped the whole chessboard up, we have it pretty good here in London. The cheapest way to enjoy Anne-Sophie Pic's food in her home country is the €120 lunch menu - very nice I'm sure, but no choice, and only three courses. At La Dame de Pic in the very grand Four Seasons Trinity Square in London, a lunch menu is £60 for four courses with plenty of interesting choices, and you can make all sorts of claims about the quality of ingredients in Valence as compared to the UK if you like, but you must at least concede that the techniques and ability in the kitchen, and the levels of service from the front of house, are going to match up pretty well.

Of course, this being a fancypants restaurant in a 5-star hotel, even the lesser menus are embellished with plenty of extra bits and pieces. Leading the charge was a stunning langoustine-yuzu consommé, the kind of thing only a tiny handful of the world's top chefs could produce with such an incredibly delicate balance between seafood richness and citrus perfume. It was absolutely wonderful, and I could have downed a bucketload of the stuff.

There was also a seaweed corn puff thing wedged into a piece of (hopefully sustainably obtained) coral...

...a paste of I think they said was fish roe, inside a delicate wrap made out of vegetables, presented inside a (hopefully also sustainably obtained) tropical murex shell...

...two pretty little tartlets containing salmon roe...

...and finally a huge crab shell containing two balls of some kind of citrusy liquid that exploded quite amus(bouch)ingly in the mouth. My only slightly criticism is that when something is presented in a crab shell, I'd quite like the edible portion to contain some crab. Ditto the whelk (though perhaps not the coral). Still, all very impressive nonetheless.

And this is stout butter, cleverly arranged into the shape of a flower. Perhaps the shape of a mini pint of Guinness may have been more appropriate, if somewhat less attractive. It came with a superb sourdough (not pictured sorry) which had an interesting slightly sweet note, which worked incredibly well.

Then one final off-menu appetiser - cute little curls of gently pickled carrot, set in a kind of jasmine and carrot jelly. Perhaps a little fridge-fresh for my liking, but that could have been a deliberate tactic to keep the jelly together. The flavours were nice though - floral and heady.

Finally, the menu itself began with the Pic signature dish. "Berlingots" are apparently little pasta parcels stuffed with seasonal cheese (at this time of year, Gruyere and Vacherin) and wild mushrooms. Tesselated neatly on the plate, they were then dressed with what the menu said was "Woodruff, barley and roasted hazelnut consommé" but I'm pretty sure there was some umami-spiked, earthy mushroom stock in there as well. The dumplings - sorry, Berlingots - themselves were exquisitely constructed things, the casings al-dente but still delicate enough to burst with gentle pressure in the mouth to release a smooth, rich cheese sauce. Together with the consommé they made one of those perfect seasonal dishes, where every element is a hymn to the bounty of the land and for as long as this dish was available you'd be happy if winter lasted twelve months.

Unbelievably, the main course was even more impressive. I can hear the words "game pithivier" at the best of times and my heart skips a beat - the version made with grouse at the Holborn Dining Rooms is always worth spending time on - but here, with tender chunks of funky venison and buttery foie wrapped in a coarse, offaly paste and encased in golden flaky pastry, it was even more gasp-inducingly decadent, a true masterclass. Sat in another beautifully constructed game sauce, the kind you find yourself scraping up with your fork once it cools and lapping up like Marmite. Or maybe that's just me.

I was also lucky enough to sample a bit of the turbot main, which was as densely-flavoured and meaty as only the best (or rather biggest) turbot can be, dressed in yet another wonderful seafood sauce.

For dessert, we had the famous Pic millefuille, and I must have been really enjoying myself and the matching French wines by this point because I completely forgot to take a photo of it with my good camera. Anyway apologies for the murky shot above, but it's a lot better than I've made it look - the layers inside included vanilla ice cream, pastry and cream, all encased in a white chocolate cube. Quite a striking thing, and that I thought it was perhaps a teeny bit style over substance is probably just due to the fact I'm not much of a pastry person. I do appreciate the effort, though.

I didn't see a bill, this being a PR-led exercise, but as ever you're more likely to get better value on a weekday lunchtime than going full tasting menu of an evening. Of course food like this isn't cheap, and neither should it be, but I can tell you I've had much worse food at a similar price point, not least Anne-Sophie Pic's fellow countryman Alain Ducasse - yes, he of the €180 starter - whose London outpost at the Dorchester left me completely baffled.

So yes, for as long as it lasts, we do have it pretty good here in London. True, occasionally international chefs treat the city as a bit of a cash cow, opening half-hearted branding exercises with little of the style or effort of the original (I'm looking at you as well, Ametsa with Arzak Instruction) but on the rare occasions where continental operators have their heart in the right place and put the hours in, you can eat berlingots and game pithivier for as much as a 5-star hotel in Paris would charge you for an extra shaving of black truffle. At least, for now you can. Better get your reservation in before March 29th, eh?

8/10

I was invited to La Dame de Pic and didn't see a bill.