Chez Bruce, Wandsworth Common

Though I had no knowledge of this the first time I set foot in Chez Bruce over a decade ago, this modest spot in Wandsworth (very much not the dodgy end, Love Actually fans) overlooking the common was once home to one of the most revolutionary and influential restaurants ever to exist in London. Between 1987 and 1993, with a young Marco Pierre White in the kitchen heading a team that included Gordon Ramsay and Philip Howard, Harvey's changed the face of British food, taking instruction from traditional French fine dining (White himself trained with Pierre Koffmann), and using the best of British produce but sending it in all kinds of fantastical directions. For those lucky enough to have eaten there, 30 years on it still remains the ultimate expression of modern fine dining, and the masterwork of a singular mercurial talent who after a few more years and three Michelin stars, to the lasting dismay of many, retreated into television appearances, chain steakhouses and endorsements for instant stock cubes, never to cook in anger again.

Bruce Poole, then, had a bit of an act to follow when he took over the site in 1995. Sensibly, Chez Bruce never pretended to be a successor to Harvey's, although I'm sure that didn't stop a few people turning up expecting to be able to order "Tagliatelle and oysters" or "Crackling Pyramide" in the first few months. Instead, CB became what we now call a "local restaurant" - a pretty high-end local restaurant admittedly but one with an eye primarily on winning the hearts of the residents of Wandsworth and Battersea rather than international food snobs or Michelin inspectors. It did win a star of course, but you never got the impression that was the point of the place.

And it's a pleasure to report that all these years later, Chez Bruce is still one of my favourite restaurants in London. On the face of it, it's not a restaurant doing anything particularly extraordinary; it's not particularly cheap, although as ever go weekday lunchtime and you'll pay significantly less than you will of an evening. The dining areas are comfortable and well-appointed, although some tables are better than others; the weird upstairs attic room upstairs has a particular chill of Siberia about it (figuratively, not literally). And the menu could be accused of playing it somewhat safe - in the middle of game season there was no sign of teal, grouse or mallard, just a hare tagliatelle starter and venison main, and venison doesn't really count as game at all in my book.

But. Within this framework of an accessible, happy local restaurant Chez Bruce absolutely shines. Dishes that sound faintly unambitious on paper such as the above "Rare-grilled salmon with citrus salsa, black rice, avocado and mint" are transformed into a deeply rewarding play of colours and textures, the chilled avocado something approaching a guacamole ice cream, the salmon itself buttery and fresh and glazed with lime.

Hare tagliatelle contained generous chunks of meltingly tender hare in a mixture of bacon, chestnuts and herb-spiked breadcrumbs, adding up to an exquisitely tasteful sample of the season. I may moan about them not having any game birds on the menu, but there aren't many restaurants serving hare either so credit where credit's due.

Prawn and scallop raviolo was similarly faultlessly done, plump with fresh, perfectly seasoned seafood wrapped in buttery, delicate thin pasta, all soaked in a deliriously rich bisque. Three slices of pickled cucumber added a bit of crunch, as did some vivid green samphire perched on top, all balancing and enhancing the main ingredients without being over-fussy or extraneous. This is ostensibly simple food cooked by people who know exactly the best way of going about things, and to enjoy the results of their experience is to experience joy itself.

With that in mind, by the time the main courses arrived (and thanks in no small part to some marvellous matching wines none of which I remembered to write down, sorry wine people) there was nothing to do but succumb completely. Venison came as ruby-red loin, seared and seasoned and so tender you could cut it with a spoon, and an utterly wonderful sweet-glazed sausage which was about the best thing anyone's ever done to the animal since Walt Disney's Bambi. Little pieces of spätzle added a charming dose of carbs, and it was all soaked in a glossy meat jus which I ended up scooping up with my fingers (again, this may have been the wine talking).

Chicken with gnocchi, girolles, Jerusalem artichokes and hazelnuts was every bit as great as that sounds but let's not fall into the trap of assuming that assembly of ingredients will always turn out well. Over the years I've had dry chicken, thin wine-y sauces and pappy gnocchi but here, as with everything else, every element was the absolute best it could be, the chicken in particular having a blinding white moist flesh and fragile, golden brown skin.

A shared almond and quince tart was a fine thing, perhaps needing a bit more quince jam and a bit less frangipan but still successful enough to disappear completely within about 30 seconds. Yoghurt sorbet was sharp enough to cushion the tart without being distracting.

And one shared dessert meant more room for Chez Bruce's signature cheeseboard - not the biggest in London by any means, but about 15-20 examples from Europe and the UK (I'm going to have to get used to making that distinction) selected with the same exquisite taste with which they approach more or less everything else. We tried a 48-month-aged Gouda which was as fragile and salty as the dead sea scrolls, a Guernsey milk soft number made by the same people who make Flower Marie, and a creamy, delicate blue in the Cornish Blue mold (forgive the pun) which I'm afraid I've completely forgotten the name of but just take my word for it, it was great.

But of course it was great, because everything Chez Bruce do is great. Yes, £100 is a lot to shell out for dinner but I can think of a lot of places you can do a lot worse for this kind of money, and not many places you can do better. And as I've said, Chez Bruce isn't trying to reinvent modern gastronomy or become an international foodie frotting-den. Nor is head chef Matt Christmas likely to jack the prices up threefold before burning out and ending up flogging Knorr. It's a restaurant entirely comfortable with its place in the world, this cosy corner of the common where once the eyes of the world were trained and where so much began, now quietly finding a new way to be brilliant. Long may it continue.

9/10

Rosita, Northcote Road

"You should write it up," my flatmate said, after I'd spent the whole evening moaning about how much better José would have been for the same price, "because it's a nice, normal restaurant that nice, normal people go to. Not everyone spends every waking hour scouring geeky food websites or travelling to Hendon to spend two hours queuing for a cheeseburger. Normal people eat at places like this."

There is always room for a middle ground, and of course not every Spanish restaurant has to be - or can be - as good as José. But is it my "job" (such as it is) to make excuses for somewhere I know is charging too much for food that might have been impressive ten years ago, or brutally point out a short list of alternatives in town where you'll have a better time? However much of a smug, spoiled, elitist twerp it makes me sound.

Anyway, if I was worried about coming across as a smug, spoiled, elitist twerp I would have given up on this food blog a long time ago, so here goes. Rosita is the sister restaurant to Lola Rojo, also on Northcote Road and where I'd had a very passable but - again - slightly overpriced and uninspiring meal a few years back and never really felt compelled to go back. The USP of Rosita is that is it is nothing so humdrum as a tapas bar - it is a "sherry bar", which as we all know is far more trendy these days and has the added benefit of not actually requiring you to do anything differently other than put the words "sherry bar" above the door.

Dressed crab was decent, and although padded out with egg and bread it was almost worth the £7.50. Didn't feel massively Spanish, though, just like the filling from a crab, egg and cress sandwich put in a shell. "Rositas" were more interesting, little bitesize rolls of toasted bread filled with, in this case, a well-seasoned tuna tartar and one with duck egg and sprouts; they were fun to eat, but still felt like wedding buffet canapés masquerading as tapas.

Grilled King Prawns did at least look authentically Spanish, but suffered from having been slightly undercooked and were a bit gloopy inside - this despite the legs on the poor things being so fiercely cremated they had mostly fallen off. I wonder if this is because of the use of a Josper grill, which may get a nice darkened crust on your medium-rare beef steak but is perhaps too difficult to control on tiny delicate bits of seafood.

The biggest knowing sigh of the evening was reserved for this plate of Iberico Jamon de Belotta, which bore about as much resemblance to the silky slivers of acorn-fed loveliness available at José as a packet of Frazzles. Tough and curly as dry wood shavings, they were an £11.50 waste of time. And "cod churros with green olives" were just bizarre - the chewy sticks of "churros" tasted of nothing more than batter, and the green olives came in the form of an inedibly salty foam that the churros were planted into. It didn't work. They were £6.50.

With a bottle of the cheapest Manzanilla, the bill came to around £73, so let's return to my original point. For a bill for two of that size in José, or Pizarro, or Tramontana, or Barrafina, or Fino, you would have left having eaten some of the best Spanish food outside of Madrid. The sherry would have been ice cold (Rosita's wasn't), the seafood of the highest quality and grilled to perfection, the Iberico ham expertly carved to translucently thin. If I didn't know any better, I may have not grumbled quite so much about how better I could have spent my money. But I'm afraid I do know better, and I'm not about to make excuses for a restaurant that while not a disaster, in 2013 is simply outshone. And if that makes me a snob, and I'm pretty sure it does, I'll live with that.

5/10

The Scotch Egg Challenge at the Ship, Wandsworth

The Ship in Wandsworth is the best pub in London. I don't mean just that it's my favourite, or that you are guaranteed the best time, that it has the best atmosphere, the happiest customers, the best food or drink. I just mean that, objectively, literally, absolutely, it is the best pub in London. You could argue that other pubs are better, but you'd be wrong. It's that simple.


Alright, so perhaps I could be biased. I have known the guys at the Ship for almost as long as I've had the blog; my connection with that building goes way beyond critical detachment and is the only reason I have never felt able to give them the glowing write-up here that they most definitely deserve. I realise that as "press" (sort of) it's in their professional interests to be nice to me, but I have never known a bunch of people so enthusiastic, so genuine and so very successful at enabling other people to have a good time. This is not just the reason people from all over London travel to what is by anyone's standards a rather unusual location, squeezed in-between a drive-thru McDonalds, a cement works and a bleak modern housing development, but also why they come in their absolute hordes. For certain days last summer, to curious bus passengers travelling over nearby Wandsworth Bridge, the scene must have resembled some kind of booze-soaked refugee camp. I guarantee though, that every single person there that day, whether they'd managed to find somewhere to sit or were stood half a mile up Jews Road nursing a Pimms in a plastic cup and musing on the long journey back to the front of the bar, were enjoying themselves. It's just impossible not to, in that place.


But now that I've written my love letter to the Ship, I need to talk about Scotch Eggs. It is a direct result of the Ship management's tireless enthusiasm for everyone and everything that, following a bit of backwards and forwards on Twitter between fellow enthusiasts, they generously offered up their venue as a location for something called the Scotch Egg Challenge. You can read the full breakdown of dates, timings, rules and regulations on the Ship's own blog here, as well as the impressively long and incredibly exciting list of competitors, and I am absolutely chuffed myself to have been also been invited as one of the judging panel. Rest assured I will starve myself beforehand, abandon all previous loyalties as best I can, and remain resolutely impartial even when judging the Harwood Arms' Venison Scotch Egg against the Ship's own monumental Major Scotch Egg. It's a hard job, but someone has to do it.


To any restaurants or pubs that think their own version will stand up to such extraordinary competition, you have until Thursday 4th August to make yourself known to the Ship. I am told that the eggs must be served just as they are, as bought, in the competitor's own restaurant, so that means if you ordinarily make them the night before and sell them cold on the bar during the day, that's exactly how they will be judged on the 4th - a very sensible rule. And to any Scotch Egg lovers interested in discovering which example is definitively the best in the capital, come along to the day itself on Tuesday 9th August from 7:30pm - there are no tickets, no personal invite, all are welcome and an absolutely fantastic time is guaranteed. As I've said before, at the Ship it's just impossible to have it any other way.

The Scotch Egg Challenge, hosted by the Ship Wandsworth

Tuesday 9th August 2011 Tuesday 20th September 2011

(Entries close Thursday 4th August Thursday 15th September)

All other details here.

Photos, from the top:
The Ship from The Guest Ale blog
The Harwood Arms Venison Scotch Egg by Hollow Legs
The Ship, Wandsworth Major Scotch Egg by David J Constable
The Bull & Last Scotch Egg by Dos Hermanos

EDIT: Well, it's been a funny old few days in London, and as you will probably have heard by now, the Scotch Egg Challenge was sadly (though quite rightly) postponed. But fear not! We have a new date for the event - the 20th September - and it promises to be even bigger and better, with more time for even more exciting new entries.

Come one, come all, and come hungry. I'll see you there.