28 Well Hung, Nunhead

It seems that while parts of Central London still, despite a slew of restaurant and hotels reopening in the past few weeks, resemble something from a low-budget British zombie movie, the suburbs have travelled a slightly quicker path back to normality. With Londoners reluctant to get back on public transport, and many still working full-time from home, the Neighbourhood restaurant or local pub has become the first-choice for an evening out, and - anecdotally at least - some are doing rather well out of it. But whereas in the Before Times a local restaurant would hope to be busy on Friday or Saturday evenings and struggle more earlier in the week, the government's Eat Out to Help Out Scheme now means that Monday to Wednesdays are likely to be slammed, and weekends are quieter. As various restaurateurs have put it, Wednesday is the new Saturday, and Thursday is the new Monday.

So it was on a warm Wednesday evening that I got on the Thameslink to Nunhead, to visit an intriguing little neighbourhood restaurant a few steps from the Old Nun's Head pub. 28 Well Hung (who's that sniggering at the back) specialise in two main areas - high quality, grass-fed meat of various flavours and styles, and organic home-made flatbreads, baked to order on a gas-fired saj. And if there's anything I appreciate in a restaurant, it's high-quality meat and somewhere that bakes their own bread.

"Cull yaw" is a phrase you're going to be hearing a lot of in the near future, if indeed you haven't already. You can read more about these animals, and Matt Chatfield, the farmer who's attempting to reintroduce them to the world in this Vittles article, but briefly they are 8-year-old ewes too old for breeding, and in eating them you're not only enjoying some heavily-marbled, meltingly tender and superbly flavoured meat, but are actually helping suck carbon out of the atmosphere. That's right - cull yaw has a carbon negative effect on the environment. Oh, and the fresh flatbread was, as you might expect, excellent as well - soft and stretchy with a lovely flavour.

I'll start with the good news about the burger first. The beef was good, there was just the right amount of salad and sauce (mayo I think spiked with paprika, though don't quote me on that) and though I worried that the cheddar would be too chalky and strongly-flavoured, in fact it was nice and subtle and had a good gooey texture. But I'm afraid while flatbread has its uses in a variety of dishes, it doesn't quite do the job as a burger bun, making it very difficult to get a bite with all the elements together. In the end I ended up eating it with a knife and fork, which as any burger lover will tell you, is not an ideal outcome.

Onglet could have done with being a little warmer (we really wouldn't have minded if they'd just brought out things as they were ready instead of waiting and delivering everything at once), but still had a good flavour, that all-important onglet-y texture just the right side of chewy, and a very nice herby dressing which really lifted it.

Chips were 'air-fried' using one of those weird machines that health freaks get to convince themselves that a 1% drop in the fat content of their food is somehow the key to a happier life. They were fine - tasted a bit like oven chips - but really, if the rest of the menu is stuffed with dry-aged beef, burgers and cheese I wouldn't see anyone complaining if they'd used beef dripping to cook them, and you'd end up with a much nicer end product. I did like the chimmichurri though.

Staff are still grappling with the complexities of implementing the Eat Out To Help Out discount, and I don't blame them - it must be hard enough serving food in the era of Covid without having to make sure the 50% off only applies to food items and soft drinks, and whether or not to pass on the changes to VAT. Anyway their first go at the bill, above, was wrong, as there were only two of us and only entitled to £10 off each, so the final amount was actually £63.25, a very decent amount for more than enough food and a lovely bottle of tempranillo (actually £33 a bottle). If I was a Nunhead local, I'd be feeling pretty pleased with myself, and indeed every table was taken, inside and in the front and back gardens.

So the slow march back to normality continues. Once the threat of Coronavirus fades we can get back to worrying about our dying planet, and to that end the guys at 28 Well Hung are excellently poised, as a self-styled 'Regenerative Restaurant', to capitalise on the desire to not just have a nice evening out but to do something positive for the environment as well. So good for them, good for Nunhead, and once you've ordered your own portion of the cull yaw, good for you.

7/10

Simpson's in the Strand, Covent Garden

A few weeks ago, during a surprisingly in-depth discussion about crab bisque (what do you mean you've never had an in-depth discussion about crab bisque), someone mentioned that famed Covent Garden seafood spot J Sheekey's had a version on the menu for a very reasonable £9. So one lunchtime soon after I found myself in the corner of the plush dining room, beneath a photo of Dame Judi Dench, tucking into a very accomplished bisque, involving huge chunks of crab in a rich, thick broth. With mounds of fresh baguette to mop up the dregs (which they offered to replenish twice), cosseted by service from surely one of the most practiced front of house in town, and ice water to drink, the entire bill, even including a £2.50 cover charge, came to £15.

And it got me thinking. How many restaurants in London do we dismiss as "expensive" or "special occasion only" where it's actually possible to sneak in for a single starter or a lunchtime special and leave with a bill of about the same size as a cinema ticket? How about settling into a booth at Bob Bob Ricard and having an Egg St Petersburg (£8.50)? Or a pea & mint soup in the shining surroundings of the Holborn Dining Room (£9)? Or even a hot dog and french fries (£7.50) in the ultra-lux Delaunay in Aldwych? The service, the surroundings and the nice soft towels in the toilets are the same whether you're spending £300 on caviar and draining the top end of the wine list or just having a bowl of soup, and why shouldn't they be? There's no minimum spend.

So I knew Simpson's was going to be expensive, that much I was prepared for. I had hatched a plan to share oysters as a starter, share a main and order chips to fill up on, which should give us a fair idea of the kind of thing Simpson's is about without having to take out a 2nd mortgage. It's a grand old dining room attached to the Savoy Hotel, and the markups were always going to be a bit punchy, but surely there's a way of negotiating a budget option?

Well, we tried. Admittedly we didn't try very hard with the oysters, as we decided to go for the natives (£30 for six, about as much as I've ever paid for oysters anywhere), but it was coming to the end of the season and I was worried this would be my last chance until next year so decided to push the boat out. They were nice big healthy specimens but rather disconcertingly room temperature as they'd been served on pebbles instead of ice. We survived this time, but ever since a distressing incident with a room temperature oyster a few years back which incapacitated me for 24h I've tended to be a bit wary if my seafood feels like it's been treated less than optimally.

They very kindly offered to split a single Beef Welllington portion (£42) into two, and I'm glad they did because I think eating twice this amount would have been quite tricky. The Wellington was great - perfectly medium rare inside and with a delicate surrounding of mushroom duxelle and thin, crisp pastry. A little potato fondant thing was fine if fairly ordinary, and some roast veg did the job. But one of the joys of having Beef Wellington is soaking the thing in sauce, and the peppercorn sauce here was pretty bad - bland and unsatisfying and tasting of little more than thickened cream.

Chips were good, though, as you might expect for £5 - triple-cooked to golden brown and crunchy, very much in the Hawksmoor style which if you've ever been there you'll know is a recommendation...

...and for dessert we fell back on the 'free' petits fours, chocolate mint things like a kind of reimagined After Eight. Which were very nice as well.

So, we'd shared a starter, shared a main and skipped dessert, so how on earth did the spend per head still manage to come to £73? A little matter of a ludicrously-priced wine list. If it's true that there's no minimum spend on the food (sort of - it was very nice of them to split the Wellington and they do a cauliflower soup for £11 if you want to play the Cheap Lunch In A Posh Restaurant game) then unfortunately the same can't be said of the booze, where the cheapest - that's the cheapest bottle on the entire list is £48. If even the Ledbury can start its list at £33, then there's no excuse for anywhere else trying it on - when a £16 glass of rosé fizz starts looking like the cheapest pairing with oysters, you know you're in trouble. I realise complaining about the price of booze in one of the most prestigious addresses in London is a bit pointless, but it really took the shine off what would have otherwise been a very enjoyable dinner. And there's just no need for it.

Otherwise, there's plenty to like about Simpson's in the Strand. Yes, it's a ludicrous throwback to a different time (including the clientele - we were the youngest people in there by about 20 years and I was born when John Lennon was still alive) and to take full advantage of every section of the menu would cost a small fortune, but that is, essentially, why people come to these places. To sit in a lovely room, be served by lovely staff, and eat your way through a menu that, despite the odd nod to modernity, hasn't really changed much in the last 100 years. And if that sounds like the kind of thing you'd enjoy, well then help yourself.

7/10

Quality Chop House, Farringdon

The Quality Chop House on Farringdon Road is not, technically, new. There has been a restaurant in that same building with the same name for the majority of time since 1869, serving - as the moniker suggests - no-nonsense grilled meats and the like. There was, in the more recent past, an attempt to sell self-consciously trendy meatball sliders (God help us) which fortunately quickly moved to Westfield where it belonged, but the current owners have restored sanity as well as the attractive interior, and written a menu that harks back to its roots.

Like any such restaurant in London in 2013, though, what constitutes "British" food is up for somewhat liberal interpretation. The menu has plenty of St John-alike buzzwords like Middlewhite pork and the Longhorn beef that Hawksmoor and the Ginger Pig have made famous, but also sells fancy foreign snacks like charcuterie and lardo, and the Denham lamb comes with "confit shallots". Well la-di-da.

It's all good though. Pig scratchings would have been even better with an apple sauce dip, but it was after all just something to soak up a bottle of cava (an Easter treat, but we also needed something to deaden the pain of the unbelievably uncomfortable seats) and each had a nice balance between crunchy and chewy.

A crabcake was perhaps a bit light on the good stuff for £7.50 but was nicely seasoned and had a good crunchy crust. Look how nice the tableware is too.

Lamb ribs had been coated in mint sauce rather than as a separate dip, but once you got over the mess (finger bowls were provided) you realised the lamb had a great flavour and were perfectly cooked to just pink. And plenty of them.

Longhorn mince on dripping toast was everything it promised to be; a straightforward but deeply satisfying plate of loose meat on a thick slab of sourdough made soggy with cooking juices. A bit more toast and a slightly less mountainous helping of beef may have made a more balanced dish overall but I'd certainly rather have too much beef than too little, and £12.50 is a good price for a main course.

There was no room to pick fault with these lamb sweetbreads though. Tender little nuggets of golden brown, nestled in a tasteful arrangement of crunchy raddish and crispy bacon, they were dressed in one of those mind-bendingly rich demi-glace sauces that you wish you could just go away and drown in. Sauces like this are the reason I eat out; to make them yourself would take days, cost a fortune due to the lack of economies of scale, and you'd probably mess it up anyway. Well, I would.

By this time another bottle of Bordeaux had bumped the bill up past the average spend here for two people for lunch, but even so, alongside the utterly charming service (Josie, ex- of Heston Blumenthal's Dinner so there's a pedigree for you) it still seemed like a very reasonable total. And once we'd wobbled off into a taxi we both agreed we'd definitely be back, which in the end tells you all you need to know. I wasn't completely floored by Quality Chop House, it is after all just a solid British eatery serving familiar dishes for not very much money, but it slots so happily into the London dining scene it's like it's been here for the best part of 150 years. Which of course, in many ways, it has.

7/10

Grillstock, Bristol

With its great sweeping Georgian terraces, cobbled hills and shimmering waterfront, much of Bristol is quite disarmingly attractive. Walking from where I was staying in villagey Redland, down the dramatic incline of St Michael's Hill and through the medieval Christmas steps, it's enough to make you come over all Bristol Tourist Board, but for some reason when I lived here as a student I never stopped drinking and sleeping long enough to appreciate it. It was only last year I returned for the first time since my final exams, and found myself completely smitten with the place. And then, this summer, Grillstock happened, and suddenly it was a full-blown love affair.

The idea of hosting an authentic, US-style, Kansas City Barbeque Society (KCBS)-rules competition in dear old Blighty is actually nothing new. Various attempts have been made over the years to run a regular, respectable event showcasing the best of US BBQ but all have either gone under or morphed into that more traditional home-grown beast - food cooked over charcoal grills. I'm sure Laverstocke Park's Field to Fork Festival (to pick one example) is great fun, but real American 'cue fanatics hanker after the "low and slow" approach with pork butt, beef ribs and chicken thighs coated in dry-rub, smoked for hours over cherry wood chips and served with a sweet, sharp sauce.

And this was exactly what was happening, on an impressive scale, at the Grillstock festival in Bristol back in June. I was lucky enough to have been invited as a judge on one of the less important rounds (they weren't about to let a chancer like me loose on the pulled pork, brisket and chicken rounds) but would have happily paid to go; the weekend was about as much fun as I can remember having at any food event, with 21 teams from all over the UK and Europe (US competition BBQ is especially popular in Estonia, interestingly) competing for the King of the Grill title. The quality of the food was astonishing, the serious business of BBQ given due reverence, and the whole of the harbourside was hung with the smell of smoked brisket. It was heaven.

But with the Grillstock festival itself being an annual affair for just a couple of days at a time, where do you go for the rest of the year for proper competition-style BBQ without booking a flight to Memphis, TN? Well, at lunchtimes in St Nicholas Market in the centre of Bristol you can now go to Grillstock's very own stall, where a daily-changing menu of authentic American treats like brisket, pulled pork and chicken wings are served by enthusiastic BBQ lovers. I must declare an interest, in that not only was anything attached to the Grillstock name always going to make me go all-of-a-wobble, but a friend of mine Dan (better known as @essexeating and one half of Bristol supperclub sensations The Basement) is the chef. But even the most hardened cynic would be won over by the food - and the prices - of this little stall.

Beef rib on the bone, surely the best part of a kilo of meat served with a bun and slaw, was an unbelievable £6.50. Inside the dark crust of a herby, salty rub, slow cooking had rendered the meat so tender you could slice off thick, moist strips of it with even the plastic cutlery it came with. Pulled pork - something silly like £4 - was piled high and had some good colouring from the rub, and tasted like they knew exactly what they were doing. And a hot dog, appearing on the Grillstock menu for the first time, was sourced from the same butchers that hot dog legends Big Apple of Old Street get theirs, and was predictably brilliant. It came with yet more pulled pork and Dan's special 'fry sauce' which you can read more about here.

So the Grillstock stall is very good indeed, and reason enough for BBQ-loving citizens of Bristol to be very happy. And judging by numbers filing through this corner of St Nicholas Market on Saturday lunchtime it already has many devotees. But it gets better. Not only do we have the 2013 Grillstock to look forward to (11th-12th May), but next year for the first time ever Grillstock is coming to London (15th-16th June), meaning far more of you have the opportunity to go, and serious fanatics have the option of going twice. I'll be the one with the BBQ sauce-stained shirt and the delirious, meat-sated smile on my face.

9/10

Allens butchery class, Mayfair

If there's a better afternoon to be had anywhere than hacking apart a variety of top quality meat, then I'd like to know about it. Allens of Mayfair, at 117 Mount Street - that's just opposite the Connaught and a few doors down from Nicky Clarke hairdressers, to give you an idea of the area - run butchery classes at their stunning Victorian shop every Wednesday at 1pm and attract a remarkable variety of punters (50/50 male/female most surprisingly) keen to learn more about that mysterious journey between the fresh animal carcass and the neatly trimmed cuts on your plate. I was lucky enough to be invited to this fascinating place with a handful of other food bloggers to see how badly I could disgrace myself when let loose with a chainmail glove and a dangerously sharp knife.

The first animal to suffer at the hands of my knife skills was a plump, yellow corn-fed chicken. From this, we were shown how to separate the breast and the 'drumette' (the forebone closest to the breast) together into what I was surprised to learn was called a "supreme" - aren't these the ready meals you get from Tescos? And also, who knew all these years I'd been carelessly hacking through the part of the chicken Marco Pierre White cherished so much he would get through 40 or 50 chickens in an evening service just to separate this one part - the "oyster"? You live and learn.


Next, a whole oxtail, which satisfyingly and smoothly separated into a dozen or so equal widths, ready for braising - providing, that is, you managed to find the millimetre or so between the joints that your knife could slide between. Easier said than done, believe me.


Then, a whole back of lamb was painstakingly sawn, sliced and trimmed into a pretty 8-rack, the kind you'd see in any high-end butchers but here, we were slowly and deliberately told, they remove the bitter, tougher top layer of skin so as to leave only the soft white fat on the rack. It's how the top hotels like it, and who are we to argue? Having watched David, the head butcher, perform this task in a matter of a few seconds, it was therefore rather humiliating to still be sweating and swearing away at the 'sawing' stage well after most other people had bagged and tagged their pieces. Eventually David put me out of my misery and finished it off himself, in the manner of an impatient parent tying their child's shoelaces.


The sight of an enormous 3-rib rack of sirloin was enough to put the smile back on my face, however. Gorgeously marbled, and clearly of a very high quality, we were nevertheless trusted to remove the roasting joint from the bone and have a go tying it up with butcher's string. The first bit, I had no problem with; it was only when attempting to tie up the joint neatly into a shape that resembled something you'd be happy to put in your oven that I eventually had to ask for yet more help. The shoelace-tying analogy was even more appropriate this time around.


So despite my cack-handed attempts at various tasks, and my sore (or should that be saw?) arms, I left Allens grinning like an idiot. It was fascinating and hilarious fun. Also, I know £100 seems like a lot of money for an hour and a half's course but you get to take all the meat home with you(!), and an 8-rack of lamb, a whole jointed chicken, a whole oxtail and a massive roasting joint of beef (note: I believe usually there is something involving pork instead of the sirloins we were given) must be pretty close to being worth £100 even without the expert tuition and tour of the oldest butchers in London. The next day, after slicing that joint up into nice thick steaks, I roasted them on my trusty Weber BBQ over a fierce heat. They were absolutely stunning.


There was talk, towards the end of the afternoon, of the restaurants that Allens supplies, all prestigious establishments including Le Gavroche, Zuma and - my ears pricked up at this - Rules. In fact, when the season is right, Allens run game butchery classes, showing people how to pluck and gut my beloved grouse, as well as (for those with a strong stomach) the notoriously bloody and strongly scented hare. Sign me up.

I was invited to Allens butchers. Courses cost £100 and can be booked here. Many thanks to Hollow Legs for the pictures - it's remarkably difficult to operate an iPhone with a chainmail glove on.

Other reports of the afternoon can be found at:

Eat Like A Girl, Oliver Thring, Food Stories, and Hollow Legs