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

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

Bubbledogs&, Fitzrovia

I was unsure whether to write anything about Bubbledogs&. Firstly, I completely forgot to take photos so all I have to remind me of the wonderful few hours I spent on Charlotte Street last night is one grainy shot of a table groaning with hot dogs and cocktails. True, nobody ever came here for world-class food photography, but an interior as impressive as this deserves as much exposure as possible. Secondly though, and more importantly, lavishing yet more gushing praise on a place that has already, despite having only just opened, received more gushing praise than almost anywhere else in the capital, seems rather pointless. There's probably nothing that hasn't already been said - Bubbledogs& is great, and you'll love it, and you should go. End of story.

But here we are anyway, and although I'll still keep it brief, the scale of husband-and-wife team Sandia Chang and James Knappett's achievement in making a roaring success out of this most unusual of concepts deserves just a bit more praise. The truth is, I was far more looking forward to the opening of Knappett's Kitchen Table (the & of the Bubbledogs&), a 16-seater fine-dining project hidden behind curtains at the back of the main bar, than the bit involving sausages and fizz. I assumed the rest of it was just a gimmick, a headline-grabbing advertisement for the fine-dining real deal to follow, and though I was reasonably sure I'd enjoy eating hot dogs and drinking champagne (being both human and not dead), I wasn't expecting fireworks.

I also wasn't expecting the Bubbledogs& bar area to be quite so beautiful. Exposed brick walls and hanging light bulbs are hardly new in 2012 restaurant design, but wooden panels and dinky little mirror "windows" give the place a sort of log cabin feel, and a gleaming copper-plated bar at one end of the room wouldn't be out of place in any top London hotel. Downstairs, the walls of the bathroom area are plastered quite brilliantly in menus from restaurants all over London and the world - collected personally by James and Sandia I was told. I hardly ever mention décor as it takes quite a bit from anything to distract me from what's on my plate, but this place really does look good.

And we've all had hot dogs before but the range of toppings Bubbledogs has put together are mini masterpieces in fast food for £6 a pop. The Buffalo Dog was a clever rearrangement of Buffalo Chicken Wings into hot dog form, with Frank's hot sauce underneath and a topping of blue cheese and celery. The K-Dog came topped with a generous mound of spicy, zingy kimchee, and the José with guacamole, sour cream, salsa and fiery jalapenos. And if you think the poor pig itself would be lost under this barrage of toppings, think again - it was always the dominant flavour thanks to incredibly good sausage meat, certainly on a par with those from Big Apple Hot Dogs if not (whisper it) perhaps even better.

Sides were just as luridly addictive. North Americans will be more familiar with "tater tots", sort of mini hash browns fashioned into dinky little cylinders, than a native Brit but I'm sure they'll find an appreciative audience here. They went particularly well dipped in "Cheese Whiz", best described as a salty neon-yellow custard, like the kind you get with nachos at a multiplex cinema. It bears as close a resemblance to cheese as a pack of Quavers does to a truckle of aged Comté, but what the hell, I loved it anyway.

As with anywhere charging not very much for great food, Bubbledogs& is likely to be hugely oversubscribed. I believe the current queuing system is similar to Burger & Lobster - you put your name down and kill time nearby waiting for a call rather than line up outside - but this may change depending on how well it works long term. The worry I have is that the room and atmosphere and service is just so lovely that people will be tempted to linger and thus make the queues even more terrifying, but that's still not going to stop me trying. And in fact, they'll even save you a table if you book in groups of six, so maybe just grab a few friends together. And if you can't immediately find six friends? I imagine having a table booked at Bubbledogs& is the perfect way to make some new ones.

9/10

For photos that are far better than I could have come up with even if I had remembered to take any, try The Skinny Bib

The Dogfather and Big Apple Hot Dogs

I'm not even sure it's possible to make a completely inedible hot dog. I'm in no frantic hurry to test this theory out of course - I do have some dignity - but surely if even your local multiplex can produce something worth eating (even if it does cost a million pounds and has been kept warm out on those weird roller heater things for weeks on end) then anywhere can. I have always enjoyed a hot dog, not matter how basic; there is just a certain minimum standard in even the cheapest Frankfurters, and if you can't find it within yourself to enjoy a tube of salty mystery meat inside a bun with a bit of yellow "mustard" squirted on top then there's really no hope for you. Those other American fast food stalwarts, burgers, require skill, good ingredients, and a bit of attention, otherwise you end up with a complete disaster. Hot dogs are easy - even out of a tin they're pretty tasty, and there aren't many other foodstuffs of any kind you can say that about.


But just because the minimum standard of hot dogs is that much higher than other types of fast food doesn't mean that the top-end can't benefit from some attention. A few new street food stalls in London have, in the last few months, attempted to prove that there is more to the humble 'dog than law-dodging West-end traders and criminally marked-up cinema snacks. The Dogfather, who pitches up at the North Cross Road market in East Dulwich, is the first worth a mention. Using beef sausages similar (in fact suspiciously similar... saying no more) to those used in the excellent Meatwagon chilli dogs, the Dogfather dogs are dressed in a variety of fancy ways, from the Mexican Elvis (chilli and cheese and peppers) to the Snoop Dog (bacon, barbecue sauce and mayonnaise) and even a curry-themed version called (ho ho) the Slum Dog. I was impressed not only with the sausage itself, which was wonderfully dense and rich, but with the fact that the dressings had been conceived as a harmonious balance of ingredients in different and distinct styles, instead of just a random selection of toppings left to the customer to use as they wish. I enjoyed it very much.


If I'm going to be perfectly honest though, while I appreciated the flamboyant Dogfather and the unpretentiously filthy Meatwagon chilli dog, it wasn't until a visit to the Big Apple Hot Dog stall on Old Street that I really understood just how good this humble snack could be. Big Apple's trick isn't to glam up the toppings or play to any preconceived ideas of US fast food authenticity but to work directly with a butcher to produce a sausage that is just better than anything available anywhere else. Free-range pork is the secret ingredient, I was told, and it really shows - the sausages (I had something called a Big Frank) are almost as soft inside as mousse, with an amazing pig flavour that lingers late on the tongue and a butteryness that showcases an addictive fat content without being unpleasantly greasy. Texture, too, is provided by a firm and glossy casing which "snaps" delightfully on every bite, as well as a layer of crunchy onions beneath, fried (I know this because I saw him do it from scratch) in butter and thyme. The basic format of any hot dog you have ever tried is there - sausage, onions, bun - but the obvious care and attention that has gone into that sausage makes the end result rather special indeed. I ate mine with a healthy dollop of Polish mustard and a can of Sprite. Heaven.


I would ordinarily have signed off this post with some clichéd tribute to London's street food renaissance, about how the most exciting cooking in the capital right now is by a group of individuals serving great food directly to their customers without the distraction of service and tablecloths or even cutlery. But actually, Big Apple Hot Dogs have already gone big time. Hawksmoor Seven Dials are currently showcasing Big Apple's superb creation on their bar menu, alongside the famous Hawksmoor burger and the £25 lobster roll, and so if you want to enjoy your Big Frank in a proper grown up restaurant accompanied by a dry martini, then head to Covent Garden. I think myself though I'll continue to take the bus to Old Street, and not just for reasons of cost. There's something inexplicably right about standing up by a busy high street filling your face with meat and mustard - perhaps the best place for street food is, after all, the street.

The Dogfather 7/10
Big Apple Hot Dogs 8/10

Pictures, from the top:

The Big Apple Hot Dog stand, Old Street
The Dogfather, East Dulwich (pic courtesy of Food Stories)
Onions frying on the Big Apple hot plate, Old Street
The Big Frank from Big Apple Hot Dogs