Black Salt, Sheen

For most restaurants, no matter how lofty their ambitions or discerning the clientele, sheer practical market forces will be the driving force behind at least one or two dishes, whether it's the chic Northern gastropub reluctantly offering fish and chips and a burger alongside their otherwise exquisitely tasteful offering of local game and foraged mushrooms, or the thrusting young modern Sichuan determined to introduce the timid local population to the delights of Old Woman Pock-Marked Beancurd and Man and Wife Offal Slices but can't make the numbers work without adding a few things like Chicken in Black Bean sauce to keep the regulars happy. It's not anyone's fault, it's just how the world works.

But what if I told you that there's a restaurant in Sheen, of all places, that has somehow hit upon a magic formula of serving something for everyone whilst keeping the standard of cooking so high across the board that you can essentially throw a round of darts at the menu from 8ft and still end up with the meal of your life? Where all ingredients, plant or animal, are treated with intelligence and respect they deserve and not a single thing is anything less than essential, never mind tasty?

Now, I have not - yet - tried everything that Black Salt have to offer, but I feel confident in saying you can't go wrong here partly on the basis that when I have asked fans of the place (of which there are many) which are the must-order items, everyone came back with something different, and also because the 8 or 9 items we did order were largely perfect. Starting with this selection of poppadums, so delicate and light that they almost dissolved in the mouth, and three chutneys, all made fresh in-house, from a superb fresh lime pickle to a gorgeously rich and intriguing mango without a hint of that cloying sweetness you get in the mass produced stuff.

As I've said (and I'm likely to say again), not much at Black Salt was less than perfect, but the really astonishing achievement of the place is to elevate the most unlikely and unassuming ingredients - in this case beetroot - to such a level that every dish could call itself a must-order. Inside a beautifully delicate and grease-free breadcrumb casing was a soft, beguilingly spiced filling of beetroot mixture, as rich and rewarding as anything that's ever come out of a fryer. Beside it a neat little squiggle of summer berry chutney, which was just as remarkable in a different way, the kind of clever fruit/savoury sauce that you'd expect from the very finest of fine dining kitchens.

Mixed bhajiya, similarly, got everything right, from the almost honeycomb-fragile texture of the fried vegetables (a balanced mix of kale, spinach, potato and onion, no one element dominating) to the vegetal loveliness of the mint chutney. They really do seem to be masters of texture at Black Salt - the way the fried dishes dance around the mouth is quite something.

Channa papdi chaat had an even more addictive set of textures, from the chunky potato and chickpeas underneath to the crisp of the sev sprinkled on top, through the ribbons of tamarind, coriander and chilli chutneys that bound it all together. There's something extremely satisfying about a dish that cools with yoghurt at the same time as hitting with a punch of chilli, it's a fantastic medley of effects.

You'll notice that we haven't had any meat or seafood yet - don't worry that will come - but it's worth repeating that you really can't go wrong at Black Salt with any dish, and that includes anything marked with a (V) or even, in the case of the beetroot fritter and papads, (VE). Even what would in lesser hands be a throwaway side of spinach boasted a healthy punch of garlic and yet another masterful mix of spices.

But yes, we did order some protein. This is 'best end' lamb chop, and if you're unsure what 'best end' means with regards to lamb, well so was I but I can only assume it means 'ludicrously tender and brilliantly cooked', as that's how it arrived. It had clearly been close to some hot coals, as the odd bit of charring on the bone and edges proved, but the meat was so yielding it felt almost reconstituted, like some kind of Heston Blumenthal experimental lamb made of lamb. Ok, that doesn't make them sound amazing does it, but they honestly were.

Prawns were also - here's that word again - perfect. Cooked to sweetly tender, in a garlic-chilli-tomato sauce that presented the seafood well without dominating, they had more of that delicate charring from the coals and a lovely firm-but-not-chewy bite. Oh and the garlic and tomato chutney they came with was pretty special, too.

If there's one aspect of the offering at Black Salt that's less than stellar, it's perhaps the bread. Having been told the naans were nothing better than OK, we had decided to go for a round of paratha instead. Unfortunately, rather than the delicate folds of swirly pastry we were expecting (and had, unfortunately for Black Salt, been treated to at Hawker's Kitchen in King's Cross a week or so earlier) these were little better than plain flatbreads, stodgy and uninteresting and not very paratha-y at all.

But who cares, because all we really needed was a vehicle to scoop up mouthfuls of their dense, buttery dal makhani, and that was a job even faintly uninteresting paratha could live up to. In fact, perhaps a more pastry-like paratha would have been too rich matched with the dal. Maybe they know what they're doing after all.

Most wines were around the £30 mark, in fact I think there could have been one even cheaper, which is pretty commendable for a London restaurant in 2022. In fact, all the above astonishing food, most of which easily matches the best out of the kitchens at Michelin starred places in Mayfair and Chelsea, came to £34pp, still just under £40 each even with service added on which they didn't even ask for. And much as I love Jamavar, and Kutir and the like, and appreciate that rents in Sheen will not be in the same category as Zone 1, it does beg the question, if you can eat this well for £40pp, why would you ever bother eating anywhere else?

The answer to that hypothetical question, perhaps, comes in the form of a little place in Ewell called Dastaan, sister restaurant to Black Salt, and which is spoken of in hushed tones to those lucky enough to have visited both, as "even better". And if this seems impossible given what you've just read, well I agree, but I am determined to discover the truth for myself as soon as is realistically possible. In the meantime, I will have my memories of Black Salt to love and relive, an unassuming and comfortable little spot on Upper Richmond Road serving some of the best Indian food in the entire country.

9/10

Acme Fire Cult, Dalston

Like lots of places, Acme Fire Cult was closed during the two most extreme days of the heatwave early last week. Being a restaurant largely based outdoors, and with the smaller inside bit not air conditioned, they quite rightly decided they could neither comfortably serve their customers or put their staff through a full shift of cooking over hot coals when even the un-chargrilled air temperature was pushing 40C.

It is perhaps for this reason, then, that due to a reshuffling of bookings, tables at this exciting young restaurant (it's barely a few months old in the current location) are even harder to come by than usual. And believe me, even on a usual day they're pretty hard to come by. Without perhaps deliberately setting out to be one of the most talked about spots in East London, the guys at Acme Fire Cult (that's chef-owners Andrew Clarke and Daniel Watkins) have nevertheless hit upon an attitude and approach that anyone interested in good food in the capital will swoon over, whether they know it yet or not.

Firstly, and almost uniquely for a live-fire restaurant (although Berber & Co had a good bash) the menu is largely vegetable-focussed. Seven out of the nine starters, and two out of the five "large" plates have a vegetarian main ingredient, and while it's true they do serve pork chops and sirloin to those determined to get their fix, myself and a friend found ourselves, unrepentant meat eaters on any normal day, ordering no steaks or chops and just two seafood dishes. The scallops were first to arrive - skewers with plump, rich roe delightfully included (why is this still such a rarity?) and topped with a slick layer of fragrant green curry.

Bread comes from the wonderful Dusty Knuckle bakery right next door (literally, they share a party wall) and appears on the menu in various exciting forms. The house bread, for example, is an excellent sourdough soaked - and I do mean soaked - in "Marmite" butter, the "Marmite" in quotes no doubt down to the fact it's some kind of experimental yeast extract the AFC fermenting and pickling boffins had come up with themselves rather than anything out of a jar from Unilever. Also full marks for having a healthy shaving of truffle as an option for only £3 extra, in stark contrast to a certain mac & cheese dish in Berkshire.

Smacked cucumbers and watermelon, gently and intelligently smacked (pickled), came dressed with ancho chilli oil, and let me tell you now there's few things better than the cooling texture of cold watermelon and the fire of chilli oil battling their way around your tastebuds at once. And for extra waste-free sustainability points, this dish included delightfully bouncy, jellified pieces of pickled watermelon rind as well.

Mutton merguez, lean and gamey and interesting, came with hibiscus-pickled onions and guindilla chillies. On a hot day I am often to be found eating fridge-cold guindilla straight out of the jar, so I was hardly going to object to their inclusion in a Spanish sausage dish. Labneh was fresh and light and cooling.

One of a couple of unordered extras (it helps to be lunching with the editor of a live fire magazine) this is a giant Cuore del Vesuvio tomato which I first thought was a bit underseasoned until I realised that the slick of "green goddess" underneath was a heady, anchovy-spiked dressing that combined beautifully with the tomato and impressive pile of wet herbs on top.

A giant slab of toasted sourdough arrived with a generous amount of white crab meat and salted cabbage and a kind of jalapeno pesto, all of which worked beautifully of course. But binding it all together was the most amazing brown meat and bone marrow sauce, which soaked into the bread and seasoned the crab and cabbage, resulting in an almost decadently rich explosion of seafood flavour. Worth travelling to Dalston for alone.

Also stunning was a coal-roast aubergine in "sourdough mole", Mexican mole made using some kind of waste product of the Dusty Knuckle sourdough baking process. The aubergine was nicely done, soft and smoke-licked and easy to eat, but the mole was genuinely impressive, gently bitter and complex and chocolatey, and impossible to leave alone.

Finally one other veggie bonus, trombetta courgettes, deftly charred on the grill, served on a nice chunky hummus and "vadouvan" (an Indian spice mix) butter. Fried curry leaves provided a bit of occasional crunch, as did some gorgeous fried chickpeas which were studded around the place. It all added up to a very successful thing indeed.

And much the same can be said of the restaurant as a whole. Live-fire cooking has a long and proud tradition in London and is not in of itself any kind of revolution. Similarly attempting to tilt your menu towards a focus on high-quality home-grown vegetables alongside a well-chosen and sustainable selection of ethical meats is something that various places have done and are doing, many of which I've reviewed on the blog over the years.

But it seems to me that Acme Fire Cult have taken what could have been a rather worthy and self-consciously hipster East London operation, and made it, well, fun. All the dishes are intelligently realised and skilfully cooked, service (albeit with the caveat that they did know we were coming) was spot-on, and the attention to detail leads not to a stubborn inertia of suppliers as so often happens but to a judicious and open-minded use of nearby top-tier producers (Dusty Knuckle bakery, and 40ft Brewery beers also in the same little courtyard) when it was clear they were the best option. But none of this would matter at all if you didn't pay your bill at the end of the meal with gratitude and joy and a smile on your face, and that is exactly what we did. Behind the rows of house pickles, the small plates and the pints of Dalston IPA, beats an operation with real heart.

9/10

Nopi, Soho

There's a lot of love for Yotam Ottolenghi, for his Middle Eastern/Eastern Mediterranean fusion cooking, his mini chain of upmarket delis, and for his best-selling range of cookery books. In a city plagued by "me too" copycats and bandwagon-jumpers (seriously, can we stop with the dirty diner joints now? Even I'm bored by them) Ottolenghi stands as a rare example of a style and philosophy of food that is both unique and worldly. Healthy-food, rather than healthfood - all freshness and light and with exotic things like freekeh and pickled kohlrabi, not vegetarian but vegetable-focussed, it's genuinely revolutionary - you can see why it's been so popular.

It just never really interested me. I'd see the queues snaking out of the Ottolenghi shops in calculatedly upmarket areas of town like Notting Hill or Belgravia and the first thing I'd think wasn't "that salad looks like an interesting and colourful take on near-Middle Eastern cuisine" but "that is an awful lot to pay for rabbit food". A "small" selection of three salads from the Islington branch, for example, is £11.50, and these may contain nothing more exotic than broccoli, green beans and mixed peppers. I could understand the popularity, I just could not myself get excited about salad.

So perhaps making a reservation at his flagship Soho restaurant Nopi was a mistake in the first place. Having established I wasn't really the target market for this particular brand of vegetable-bothering, I could have cut my losses and gone elsewhere - Danish steakhouse MASH are doing a 50% offer on Toptable, and was just around the corner. But I like nothing better than to be proven wrong, and dinner with a vegetarian seemed the ideal opportunity to put my prejudices to the test. Perhaps I'd discover what all the fuss had been about all along.

Long story short, I didn't. In fact, I left Nopi stung by an astonishingly high bill and not feeling that for the outlay I'd really received much in return. The irritations began with the menu, which is arbitrarily divided into "Nibbles", "Mains", "Starters/Dishes to share" (underneath the mains for some bizarre reason) and "sides", yet with no detailed explanations offered by the staff and no real clues elsewhere, we were left to wonder why, for example "Vegetable crudites" was a "nibble" and not a "side", or why "crushed beetroot, date molasses, dukkah" was a vegetable starter but "lavash, spiced carrot, pomegranate, spring onion" was a "nibble".

We did our best. From "nibbles" we had a bowl of nuts for £4 (fine, I suppose, but four quid?) and a few slices of decent prosciutto dressed with pickled peppers. Around about this time, as well, some bread and oil arrived, and though the flavours were good, the bread was turning stale on one side. Given the prices charged elsewhere, it seems like extreme laziness to not slice fresh bread to order.

Four tiny calçots, rather timidly roasted in comparison to the ash-coated, leek-thick Catalan style I'd had before, came with a thin, bland, vaguely mayonnaisey sauce and cost £9.50. Roasted aubergine weren't much better, being unnervingly fridge-cold, and perhaps it's for the best that we couldn't detect any of the advertised vanilla.

My "main", a whole roast poussin, was not terrible. It looked the part, had plenty of flesh (only parts of the breast being slightly dry), and I liked the Vietnamese idea of serving it with lime and flavoured salt. It just wasn't particularly... memorable. The skin was soggy with some kind of molasses marinade, and there was no escaping the cloying sweetness (even the bones were slightly pink with a clearly lengthy marinading process) other than to coat it with lime and salt. Chilli sauce was pretty dull too.

"Persian love rice", the other main, was (you won't be able to tell from my godawful photos) pretty and colourful, and the pickled kohlrabi had a particularly nice flavour. Providing texture was a little pile of lotus root crisps, and next to it a sharp and refreshing "courgette tzatziki". It was a perfectly nice collection of hardly earth-shatteringly dazzling vegetables, which cost £19. And that's too much, as is £5 for a small plate of freekeh with (undetectable) jalapeños - this was in every way like one of those salads you get in the little plastic boxes at M&S.

After all my moaning, I should probably repeat that despite everything I can see why Ottolenghi has his many fans. For restaurant-quality food that feels like it's doing you good, in admittedly impressive surroundings (the toilets are particularly interesting, like peeing in the Hall of Mirrors at your local amusement park) and served by attractive young staff that, in the main, didn't put a foot wrong, you can probably do worse. But our bill, with a couple of cocktails and a bottle of the cheapest wine, came to £132.19. And yes I know central London rents are higher but I also happen to know that at Peckham Bazaar (currently closed for renovation, but back open in April), a much more impressive range of Eastern Mediterranean dishes are being produced for a fraction of the cost. Yes, it's a bit further out of town and you probably won't have John Hurt sitting on the next table (as we did at Nopi). But your experience in every other respect will be infinitely better. So if you're not a diehard Ottolenghi fan, save your pennies for the bus fare and head out to SE15.

6/10

The Dairy, Clapham Common

It makes sense to describe Clapham Common as an "unlikely" location for an impressive new restaurant, but actually, all the ingredients are in place (attractive parkside location, moneyed local population, good transport links) for a slew of decent places to eat. So it shouldn't be an unlikely area at all. But for whatever reason, it is. Trinity aside (which has never been my favourite place but is at least trying), every licensed establishment within spitting distance of the tube station is either a godawful loud chain in the All Bar One mold, a dodgy sports pub, or one of those worthy cafés where you pay £5 for someone to mix some cucumber chunks into cous-cous.

So the Dairy doesn't have to try to hard to succeed. Next to the competition, even if it had been only halfway decent it would outclass everything else in the area. But the meal I and a friend enjoyed on Saturday lunchtime showcased what is surely some of the very best food in the whole city, possibly even the country, so much so that labelling it "good for Clapham" is undeservedly cruel.

Having decided on the tasting menu with matching wines (which saves having to actually make the effort to think for ourselves) the first item to arrive was a kind of mini falafel with tahini paste and an incredibly powerful spring of fresh mint. Most herbs and some vegetables, we were told, are grown on their rooftop garden; it's hard to believe you'd get flavour from mint like this unless it had very recently been in the ground.

Potted salmon had a bit of a Scandinavian feel despite the Guinness soda bread it came with. Fresh dill and summer vegetables combined with sweet-cured smoked salmon, bringing to mind a sort of tinned Gravadlax. Cute presentation, too.

Chorizo and squid Scotch egg may sound odd, but these individual flavours remained distinct without being in competition, and with not too much of either to overwhelm the dainty soft quails egg yolk inside. An experiment that could, let's be honest, have gone horribly wrong, and yet we both loved it.

The "charcuterie" course was more proof the Dairy aren't afraid of pushing things in interesting new directions. Salami and n'duja were both good, but the real surprise here was something called 'smoked bone marrow butter'. I don't know whether this was just the wrong side of too smokey, or needed more bonemarrow, or perhaps something called "smoked bone marrow butter" couldn't hope to live up to the heavenly product we'd invented in our own minds before trying it, but something about it just didn't quite sit right. Mind you, we still licked that stone clean so it can't have been that bad.

"Fresh peas, celery, mint and fried bread" is, and I'm hesitant to use such hyperbole but I've had a good think and I've convinced myself it's justified, probably one of the top three nicest things I've eaten so far in 2013. Full of the joys of summer, it was refreshing and invigorating and with a flavour profile so heavenly I couldn't imagine any peas and celery and mint tasting any better anywhere, even at the Ledbury who have been playing with textures in this style for a while (and where, presumably, the Dairy chef must have trained at some point). Beautiful to look at and masterful in terms of the number of techniques used to stunning effect (the savoury sorbet, the rich mousse), this satisfied on every level.

A monkfish dish, though slightly on the salty side for me, was still impressive thanks to lovely moist fish (sous-vided, my much more knowledgable friend guessed) and gently pickled veg. I'll be honest, I was still thinking about the pea and celery dish at this point.

Smoked cod with heritage tomatoes was, again, as much fun to look at as eat - I particularly liked the thin slice of huge tomato underneath it all, which had a lovely firm texture. I don't think it needed quite as much mayonnaise as was provided, but then I'm not the world's biggest mayonnaise fan and my friend polished it all off quite happily.

Suckling pig, objectively decently cooked and attractively presented, just unfortunately wasn't quite what we needed at this stage in a tasting menu and we found the layers of fat hard to enjoy in contrast to the supremely light and fresh courses that preceded it. What did go down well though was a little bundle of cavolo nero which tasted like something plucked from the garden of Eden. Or the rooftop allotment. One or the other.

A little pre-dessert of light yoghurty mousse of some sort with sweet celery sorbet (I'm struggling because it's not on the menu, and the very generous matching wines were really kicking in by this point) brought us back to summer though, with yet more impressive displays of texture and form.

Final proper course was strawberries with vanilla whey and rolled oats, perfectly enjoyable but in comparison to much of what had come before, pretty forgettable. And I'd be tempted to conclude that the Dairy's strengths lie in savoury courses - particularly vegetables - were it not for a completely extraordinary set of petits fours that followed.

Very often just something to nibble on while you pay the bill, even at the the Dairy's spiritual home the Ledbury (I'm going to look like an idiot if, in fact, it turns out they have never had anything to do with the place) they are just a couple of bits of cold fruit jelly in a tin lined with cocoa nibs. Here we had a hot, fresh doughnut rolled in hibiscus sugar, some wonderfully buttery thin shortbread, and a truly astonishing citrus jelly coated in that sour powder you get on Haribo sweets.

So for cooking of nothing often less than sheer, blinding virtuosity, ingredients that make you wonder why we were ever jealous of Spain or Italy or France, and for pitch-perfect service of warmth and efficiency, the Dairy is a truly remarkable new restaurant. It seems churlish to point out that in terms of seating you are given a not particularly appealing choice between the cave-like rear (dark and hot) and the high-school stools near the front (lighter, and cooler, but ouch - bring a cushion). These are things that can be fixed, and will probably matter less anyway as the seasons move on.

All you really need to know is that if you have even the most passing interest in finding out what the very best local culinary talent is doing right now, for not very much money, then you need to make a booking at the Dairy. It is what every British restaurant should be.

9/10