The Duke of Cambridge and Beer Exposed, Islington

If there can be any such thing as a "pariah gastropub", then it's the Duke of Cambridge in Islington. Opened as the UK's first 100% organic gastropub in 1998 it remains a solid, dependable place for a bite to eat but for some reason has in recent years attracted the kind of vitriolic backlash from foodies normally reserved for £95 burgers or when Delia "goes cheat". Part of the reason could be that while other food pubs in the capital have matured into rustic French restaurants or gone all "St. John" and started serving spleen and chitterlings, the menu at the Duke has remained steadfastly gastropub-traditional and is aimed squarely at wealthy Islington locals - think Feta Salad, mushroom risotto, Italian sausages - safe, comfortable and familiar. Not that there's anything wrong with that in itself, but the problem with limiting yourself to all organic ingredients is that you suddenly find you have to charge £15 for rabbit stew to make the numbers work.


It was a perfectly good rabbit stew - good deep flavours and a nice variety of herbs and veg, if very slightly overcooked rabbit meat and a bit tricky to dissect from the many tiny bones - but all the while there's that nagging knowledge that rabbit is vermin, and a very very cheap meat, and charging £15 for a stew that basically involves chucking the carcass in a big pot with some bay leaves and veg and boiling it for an hour is, well, a bit cheeky.

Fortunately, the reason for my journey to Islington wasn't only to visit the Duke of Cambridge. I was just after something to line my stomach on the way to Beer Exposed, a drinks festival billed as a different approach to beer and beer tasting and organised by an old acquaintance of mine, Des Mulcahy, whom I first met backpacking in Hong Kong all the way back in 2001. He and his colleague Matt Roclawski have scoured Europe and the world for the finest small producers and microbrewers and invited them all to set up shop in London's Business Design Centre to show us ignorant Londoners how beer is supposed to taste.

The contrast with the awful, cynical Toast Festival in Olympia the previous night couldn't have been more stark. On the way into Beer Exposed you are handed a tasting glass, which you use to get free (and often quite generous) samples from all the stalls in the festival. You pay extra for nothing, unless you are so taken with a particular brew you wish to purchase a crate or two to take home. And the range and quality of the drinks on offer at Beer Exposed are so high, and the passion and knowledge of the producers so infectious, that I'm willing to bet that happened quite often during the course of the weekend.


Organised throughout the day were talks and presentations from beer experts on a variety of subjects. We tagged along with a talk about the way hops are used in beers in the UK and abroad. It seems the story of artisan beer has parallels with that of old world and new world wines - namely that Europe started them off, the US took our processes and combined them with their superior raw ingredients, and now we're learning off the Americans and upping our game too. We learned about the International Bitterness Units scale and how different beers use the hops to different effects, balancing them either with a greater alcohol content (the sweet alcohol balances out the bitter hops) or by using a blend of different hops for a more complex taste. It was fascinating stuff.

It's all too easy for these festivals to turn into a corporate brewery trade fair, and the scale of the achievement of Des and Matt in resisting the pressure and money from the big boys and instead creating a gathering of unique, characterful producers is extraordinary. I'm sure that everyone that took the time to visit Beer Exposed has found a new favourite beer - I found about ten, special mentions going to Thornbridge brewery and the porter from Meantime. And if you didn't manage to make it this year, then keep an eye open for next. It'll be a sell-out, in a good way.

The Duke of Cambridge 6/10
Beer Exposed 9/10

Popeseye, Kensington

I received an email on Friday morning inviting me to Toast, billed as a three-day food, wine and music festival at Kensington Olympia. Actually, I wasn't invited as such, I was encouraged to win a set of tickets by answering one of those ITV-style easiest-questions-in the-world and handing over all my personal details. Having nothing better to do of a Friday night (shocking, but true), I signed up and wasn't in the least bit surprised to "win" 2 tickets to the Friday night Australia day. After work, I toddled along.

I wasn't sure what to expect, and I did have an open mind, but I can honestly say I have never been to a more cynical, soul-less, depressing, corporate ripoff-market than Toast 2008. In the vast, echoey chamber of the Olympia were a handful of poor outside caterers, mass-market high-street wine merchants (Wolf Blass, Jacob's Creek) serving wine costing more for a glass than you can get at Tescos for the bottle, convenience food (shrink-wrapped sausage rolls and £10 factory pies), and many other usual suspects of these consumer fairs - paintball stands, novelty t-shirts, you know the drill. It took about five minutes before we lost the will to live and rushed back outside, leaving a poor Australian singer on the main stage serenading a crowd of about ten. Desperate to redeem the evening, I gave my Urbanspoon iPhone application a shake and found Popeseye, a steakhouse hidden around the back of the Olympia, and so pushing past the touts offering tickets to unsuspecting punters that you could presumably have even by then still picked up from the website for free, we crossed our fingers and made our way.

Without exception, the only truly great steak houses that I have ever visited (Luger's, Hawksmoor, Strip House) have made a virtue out of their limited menus. At Luger's, they prefer you don't even ask for a menu, and instead order "steak for four" and hope for the best. Even at Hawksmoor, where, as a rather patronising concession to non-carnivores they offer one fish and one vegetarian dish, the menu is short and direct - beef steaks in three different varieties in two different sizes, alongside lamb and pork. Sides are extra. A proper steakhouse should be all about the steak, and if the item you are ordering costs anything less than £20 and sits alongside Chicken Kiev or Crab Tagliatelle on a large menu, be warned.


With this in mind, the menu at Popeseye in Kensington reads like a steak-lover's dream. Three different cuts of meat each served in five different sizes, and that's it. Chips come whether you like them or not, and the only additional side is a £3.95 bowl of salad. It is a menu that quite simply has everything going for it, and it was therefore all the more of a crushing disappointment to eventually taste the food.


My £18.45 12oz rump steak was first of all cut incredibly strangely - it looked like two huge lobes of liver flattened out to cover the entire plate. Being so thin it was, of course, overcooked, and though not tough the poor quality meat hadn't contained enough fat to create a good char, and instead was just bitter and burned in places. A friend's 8oz rump was thicker and therefore more easily medium-rare but still of the same poor quality, tasteless watery meat. The menu proudly claims the beef is hung for two weeks and is from 100% Aberdeen Angus cattle, but then you can get an Aberdeen Angus steak from Burger King these days and they taste like crap too (in the interests of research, before you say anything). Accompanying chips were bland and insipid, the kind you would get at any high-street pub.


So essentially we have a steakhouse that serves literally nothing but steak, and can't cook steak at all. I can't explain the good press this place has been getting (the door is plastered with the usual Timeout awards) but I can say that for more or less the same price you can get a dictionary-thick slice of 28-aged sirloin that will blow your mind in Hawksmoor at the other end of town, and a beautiful cup of triple-cooked chips that rank with the best in the city. Oh, and their toilets are indoors, which I'm guessing would make them more appealing in February.

After the violation of Popeseye, and the awful experience at Toast, I was even more apprehensive of my upcoming visit to Beer Exposed in Islington on the following afternoon. As it turns out, I needn't have worried and the two events literally couldn't have been more different in execution, attitude and passion. But that, my friends, is another story.

Toast festival 1/10
Popeseye 3/10

Taste of London 2008, Regent's Park

The response of most people I told I was going to Taste of London this weekend was pretty much the same - take lots of money, because you'll need it. For someone like me, who can somehow get through the best part of £60 just sipping cocktails in a London hotel bar of an afternoon, this was worrying. So I made a solemn pact to absolutely not spend more than the £20 worth of 'Crowns' (the festival currency) that came with the ticket and still try to make the most of what was on offer.

The first purchase of the day was a lovely Caipirinha at a bar whose plugged product I've completely forgotten. Yay advertising. But the Australian bar staff were very cheery and the Caipirinha itself had just the right mix of brown sugar, crushed lime and cachaça.


Our next stop was the Freedom Lager stall where I sampled a pint of their organic pilsner, and very nice it was too. If you want to try it yourself they have it on tap in a bar at the top end of Brick Lane. I know because I went there the other night - goes very well with a salt beef beigel.


After liquid refreshment we were ready for our first food course, and a decision was jointly made to go for Gary Rhodes' (from Rhodes 24 restaurant) White Tomato Soup. This was really lovely - rich and creamy and despite its dramatic appearance tasted like a very well made tomato soup, which in fact it was. I wondered whether they used a special type of white tomatoes or whether they made a consommé and bleached it somehow. Clever stuff anyway.


From Launceston Place we had a little paper cone of roast middle white pork risotto, which was light and fluffy but just slightly too sickly for my tastes - I've never been a big fan of risotto though so I'm sure others would have loved it.

Scallops from Forntum & Mason (their new Fountain restaurant perhaps? I didn't ask) were only OK really. Prettily presented in the shell and the coriander and lentil mixture was tasty but the scallops themselves too tiny to have a decent crust. They were nice and sweet though.


Next we tried a smoked salmon thingy from Rowley Leigh's Café Anglais - they pumped wood smoke into these little plastic containers so it all looked quite dramatic, but the effect was just a gimmick unfortunately as the salmon and baby watercress (literally all it was) was very dull once the smoke had evaporated. It was interesting, actually, how the plastic plates and cutlery provided an uncompromising level playing field for all the restaurants, and although the queue for Le Gavroche (2 Michelin stars) was massive, the dishes they were turning out (admittedly I didn't actually taste any) looked quite lost, whereas a more budget restaurant such as AWT's Notting Grill seemed to adapt quite well to the rustic festival atmosphere and their spit-roasted pig looked brilliant. I mean I know Taste is supposed to be all about fine dining, but if I'm sat in the grass on a hot summer's day with a beer in one hand, give me a pig sandwich over a foie gras terrine any day.


I suppose if the worst you can say about the Taste festival is that it's a slightly posh cook-off/picnic then it's still worth a visit. And although the opportunity was there to ram product launches down your throat (literally) at every stall, you have to give the festival organisers credit for keeping blatant mass-market PR stunts to the minimum and any high-street products tended to be organic (Rachel's Farm) or worthy in some other way. The only really blatant corporate gatecrashers were Cobra beer, but they won my favour by providing endless free samples while I filled in a market research survey for them and earned £5. Drink Cobra beer! See, it does work after all.

We didn't stick around for Marcus Wareing's live demo at 21:30 but I did spot Angela Hartnett and Aiden Byrne manning their stalls, and I suppose it's only natural the level of involvment of the chefs at their festival tents reflected what goes on in the kitchens of the actual restaurants. I don't blame Gary Rhodes or Joel Robuchon wanting to kick back slightly now they're multi-millionaires, I just wish they'd stop pretending to still be head chefs. Or maybe I just deeply misunderstand the restaurant business. Yes, in fact, it's more likely to be that.


I will definitely be going back to Taste of London next year, and I think I'll probably still go along on the same ticket (the £35 Premium option). I had a peer through the glass of the VIP section and I can't say I'm annoyed I didn't pay £95 to stand up in a room of corporate freeloaders and BA employees. Certainly the potential was there to spend a fortune on food and drinks, but there's still plenty to do for the blogger on a budget as well. Here's to next year.

8/10