Rock Lobsta, Shoreditch

Given the huge number of burger trucks, popup restaurants and other temporary and/or mobile outlets swamping London at the moment, it is perhaps inevitable that not all of them will be very good. And ordinarily a mediocre popup wouldn't be worth the effort of a blog post - these things are often small-scale affairs and temporary to the point of fleeting, and to bash one here, especially one that is only going to be around for a long weekend in any case, may seem at best pointless and at worst pointlessly cruel. But my experience at Rock Lobsta last night was just so irritating in almost every respect that out of a sense of duty to anyone out there who may otherwise be tempted to visit this slickly-marketed operation, and in a desperate attempt to persuade the people responsible for it to stop treating street food as a restaurant PR campaign, I thought I'd put a few words down.

Firstly, it's not just the prices that bother me about Rock Lobsta. I was being as realistic as I could about what it's possible to achieve involving fresh seafood on a budget in this country; we are never going to have access to a US$6 lobster roll or the kind of seafood outlets the lucky residents of San Diego enjoy. But I do think that for £15 I'm entitled to something a little more dramatic than a spoonful of bland lobster meat ("natives" I was told but this was hardly the best advertisement for British produce), drowned in cheap commodity mayo and laid inside a dry brioche bun. Accompanying pickles (including samphire) were nice, and there was a handful of salt and vinegar crisps to attempt to cut through all the mayonnaise, but everything had the overwhelming flavour of rip-off.

And it wasn't just the lobster roll itself that stuck in the throat. An £8 plate of crayfish, once you'd pulled them apart and extracted the teeny sliver of meat from the tails, contained just six prawn-sized edible morsels, hardly enough even to taste. They were presented with something they called "saffron mayonnaise" but which tasted remarkably like the cheap stuff that came in the lobster roll only with something that made it go yellow - possibly saffron, who knows. I also ordered a beer, which was £4, and the total should have come to a crazy £27 but for some reason they only charged me £20. Perhaps it was a mistake, perhaps it was just guilt.

Rather embarrassingly I had brought along a couple of friends to suffer the evening with me, one of whom has Coeliac's disease and therefore has to avoid gluten not through any kind of vague holistic reason but because it literally will hospitalise her. We realised the lobster bun itself was no-go but thought maybe some kind of Atkins option would work and asked what went into the rest of it. "It's just lobster" was the stunningly inaccurate response. Er, there's mayonnaise though too, isn't there? What goes into that? "I don't know, it comes in a jar". This painful exchange wasn't made any easier by one of the other chefs uttering very audible "move along now" noises, and so in the end said unfortunate friend left fuming and kept her money, possibly to spend on a three course meal somewhere that cared.

It's worth repeating that if I had paid £15 for a lobster roll and it had been juicy and tasty, with fresh mayonnaise and soft white bread, I wouldn't have been in the least bit put out. The Hawksmoor lobster roll, in fact, is £25 - admittedly it contains a whole lobster but it comes soaked in garlic and hazelnut butter and with proper béarnaise sauce on the side and is really lovely despite carving a hole in your wallet so large you could fall through it. Everything about Rock Lobsta felt shallow, a cleverly-promoted bandwagon-jumping exercise in food PR calculated to stir up interest for the inevitable bricks-and-mortar offering in the near future. And although I'm sure they're not making a fortune, at this stage at least, in the end it just feels like an advertising stunt and not an honest attempt to serve real street food, and that really grates. There may yet be a way of bringing decent lobster rolls to the UK and making the numbers work, of showing love and care to the king of crustaceans and paying more than lip service to the notion of value, but Rock Lobsta, sad to say, ain't it.

3/10

Al Waha, Westbourne Grove

In stark contrast to some other world cuisines I could care to mention (*cough* Mexican *cough* Thai *cough*) it seems there are a lot of very good Lebanese restaurants in London. A casual enquiry on Twitter as to which of them was worth visiting drew a huge list of recommendations from all over the place, along with some remarkably enthusiastic reviews - "Maroush Juice serves the best halloumi in the world"; "Mr Falafel...puts crack in his falafels"; "Levant on Wigmore street - excellent food, swanky restaurant". So, spoiled for choice and fairly confident most of the places on fhe shortlist would have served a decent meal, we in the end booked Al Waha on Westbourne Grove, based on the fact that it was relatively easy for both myself and my dinner date to get home, and that the tips had been ever so slightly more slavering than for anywhere else.


One of the "problems" of crowd sourcing restaurant tips on Twitter is that the experience you end up with is probably quite different to if you'd just wandered in off the street and made the most of anything on the menu you recognised as edible. We turned up at Al Waha with a good half-dozen "must order" items, some of which weren't even on the printed menu, and so there's a possibility our eclectic ordering impressed the kitchen staff into trying that little bit harder (well, you never know), not to mention that the dishes themselves were possibly the cream of what Al Waha can produce. That said, the meal we constructed for ourselves through the power of social media stands up as possibly the best Lebanese food I've ever eaten in the capital; never less than good, and often astonishing.



The first proper dish to arrive was a bowl of Fattoush (£4.50), a vegetable and herb salad livened by crispy slivers of deep-fried pita bread. It is a dish - like most salads - that relies upon absolutely fresh ingredients to be anything more than edible, but fortunately here it was excellent, full of interesting textures and aromatic flavours.



Falafel (£4.50) were, I'm afraid, rather under seasoned and needed either a lot more salt or a lot more of the miserly portion of sesame dressing they arrived with. It's a shame, too, as the timing on the frying was perfect, creating a lovely crust and soft insides. Perhaps an off day on the falafels, but they were still decent enough.


Chicken wings (Jawaneh meshwiyeh) (£5), crisply fried and dressed in a punchy garlic sauce had a great grilled flavour but I just didn't like the way they'd hacked each wing in half across the bone; chicken marrow makes me queasy and anyway, isn't it far more fun when you disassemble a chicken wing yourself than have it hacked apart before you get the chance? Again though, you could pick fault but you could still very easily enjoy.


Things really stepped up a gear with arrival of Kibbeh Nayeh (£10), a simply brilliant dish of raw lamb mixed with crushed wheat and punchy - but balanced - spices. Artfully presented, arranged into bitesize portions and topped with fried onions and what I think was chunks of moist liver, it was a delight to eat, addictively chillified and uniquely Lebanese. Also superb was a dish of Hummous Kawarmah (£6), the house hummous soft and light as whipped cream and topped with chunks of salty lamb and pine nuts.



Sojuk Sadah (£5.50) were one of a couple of types of house spicy sausage, softer in texture than you might expect and packed full of zingy spice. I suppose they could be described as a sort of Lebanese chorizo, with a similar kind of oily fire, and went down a storm. But even better than that, and our favourite dish overall - all the more amazing considering it was just something we'd spotted on the menu and didn't come recommended as such from anyone - were sweetbreads (haliwat) cooked absolutely to crusty, wobbly perfection in a light lemon dressing and surely the bargain of the year at £7.50 a plate. I have rarely, if ever, had sweetbreads cooked this well in some of the top Michelin-starred restaurants in the country; they disappeared in seconds.



I don't know if Al Waha is the "best" (whatever that means) Lebanese restaurant in London. And I'm not going to pretend it was perfect - the Lebanese wine at £13.50 a half bottle was fairly horrible (my friend thought it could have been corked but we gingerly sipped at it anyway) and the annoying cover charge of £1.50 a head seemed to get you little more than a tiny bowl of boring olives and a bizarre basket of raw, undressed vegetables that defied use or explanation (what exactly am I expected to do with a whole spring onion!?). But it is very easy to ignore such niggles when the rest of the meal (and, I should also mention, the friendly and attentive service) was of such a high standard, and more than that, a couple of the dishes - the lamb kibbeh, the sweetbreads - were worth any amount of hardship. Al Waha is a treasure, and I will certainly be back.

8/10

José, Bermondsey

Someone pointed out on Twitter the other day that with the launch of Bar Pepito, Capote y Toros (review coming soon on London Confidential if they ever get round to launching the site) and now José in Bermondsey, London now has more dedicated ham and sherry bars than Barcelona. Whether or not this is completely accurate - and I think it's probably a bit unfair to Barcelona where ham and sherry isn't really a Catalan thing - it's nevertheless a trend I can thoroughly get behind. In fact, it's surprising it's taken this country so long to wake up to the combination of Iberico ham and cold sherry, as you'd have to be lacking a significant part of your brain (or be a vegetarian, and let's face it that's more or less the same thing) not to enjoy these most wonderful ingredients. Iberico ham, in particular, is a genuine gastronomic wonder; produced correctly and carved properly it has an almost impossibly rich, complex flavour that builds the longer you hold it in your mouth, with notes of forest and moss and the acorns that the pampered black pigs themselves feed on. It's my Desert Island dish, my Death Row meal, my one true food love.

The Iberico ham at José, you'll be pleased to hear, was superb, sliced into translucent strips and arranged carefully on a salad plate for £9. Great value, and value in the most literal sense - this is a world-class product, expensive to produce and requiring specialist skill to present, and alarm bells should ring if it's ever priced at anything less than a premium. We savoured the silken shards of pig in between mouthfuls of the always wonderful La Gitana Manzanilla, the salty sherry matching it perfectly.


If we'd only gone to José to get deliriously happy on Iberico and Manzanilla it still would have been far from a wasted journey, but certain items on the chalkboard menu just sounded too good to miss so despite a large (and expensive and ultimately rather disappointing, more here anon) lunch elsewhere we still found room to squeeze in a plate of croquettas and something called "Pluma Iberica". Firstly, the croquettas were something approaching perfect - a delicate thin crust broke to reveal a soft béchamel filling shot through with dark chunks of more of that brilliant ham, they were as good as any I've had in Spain or anywhere else for that matter. But the Pluma Iberica was truly astonishing. Strips of pork seasoned and seared to rare, they were served simply with a couple of strips of preserved piquillo peppers (try saying that after a bottle of Manzanilla), and tasted, thanks to aggressive seasoning and expert timing on the grill, like the finest aged beef steak, marbled with fat and bursting with flavour. It's a dish rarely seen in this country, presumably because serving pork even pink is a controversial step to some people, never mind as under as this, but I will be eternally grateful for José for having the cojones to put it on the menu here. I still can't stop thinking about it.


Three tapas and a bottle of Manzanilla may seem like a rather flimsy amount of food to base a whole review around but I have every confidence that everything else at José, including the fresh seafood which looked magnificent presented under a glass case in the counter of the bar, would have been equally wonderful had we found room for it. In fact, you don't even have to take my word - see the Dos Hermanos review here, or the gushing reports that are stacking up on London Eating. Or, and this is something you absolutely must do, just go yourself. José is as good a restaurant as you could ever want.

9/10

Red Dog Saloon, Hoxton

Timing is everything. You have to feel sorry for the guys at Red Dog Saloon, who battled through a soft opening week blighted by a broken smoker (a not inconsiderable issue for a barbecue restaurant), only to have their limelight stolen away from them by a van parked under Hungerford bridge. A few months back, in fact even a couple of days back, I would have approached Red Dog with only the expectation of something better than what I'd already had in London, and let's face it, that's not setting the bar very high. Yesterday though, as I took planted myself in a spacious booth in the attractively refurbished room in the corner of Hoxton Square (I've never been to an actual Southern USA BBQ joint but I'm willing to gamble that Red Dog does a decent impression), it was, unfortunately for them, with the memory of a stunning lunch at the Pitt Cue Co. as a gastronomic benchmark.


Things did start very well though. I'd be the first to admit that when it comes to buffalo chicken wings, I'm very easily impressed. Or perhaps they're just very easy to get right - I even quite like the version at TGI Friday's (look, you try and find something to eat at Gatwick Airport, OK?), and everything else they serve is completely bloody inedible, so that might tell you something. Either way, these were crispy outside, moist inside and doused in enough of Frank's Hot sauce to make the whole thing very enjoyable indeed. I also liked the blue cheese dip they came with, which was refreshing and salty.


My friend's cheeseburger was good enough to be worth the money, and if that sounds like damning with faint praise then you only have to poke your head out of the door in London and see just how many terrible pub burgers are being pushed on unfortunate punters for £10 or more each. This version, at £7 including fries and beetroot slaw and presented authentically in a greaseproof paper-lined plastic basket, wasn't bad at all - not a Meatwagon beater obviously, but it did at least contain American cheese, the bun was soft and held its shape, and was cooked nicely medium rare. The beef was a bit lacking in flavour - Red Dog use never-frozen chuck but it's not aged, which I think is often the difference between a nice burger and a great burger - but the pickles were good and there was a pleasing absence of any kind of salad; how many times does a great big lump of iceberg lettuce, or, even worse, rocket (bleugh), just make it all more annoying to eat instead of adding anything positive? More often than not, I'd say.


And so to the main event: the BBQ meat. For a place that makes a big show of its "World Championship", "award-winning" smoker, you'd hope that at the very least this area of the menu would be worth the entrance fee. And indeed it was - just about. The pork rib was huge and moist, and did have a nice earthy note of mesquite alongside the mix of spices they'd used for the rub. My only real issue was the lack of texture contrasts, as despite having a good firm flesh (none of that horrible "falling off the bone" nonsense that seems to pass for authentic slow cooking in most restaurants in London serving ribs - I'm looking at you, Hard Rock Café) there was no crust. How much better it would have been with a thick, dark coating of smoky, caramelised goodness - like for example these babies that Simon Majumdar of Dos Hermanos enjoyed on a recent trip to the States.


Chicken was, again, moist and firm and perfectly edible but I do wonder about the logic of slow-smoking chicken at all - surely this isn't an animal that really has enough of a fat content to make slow rendering down over so many hours necessary - a quick blast over the coals would have given a nice crispy skin (sadly missing here) while keeping the flesh inside juicy. I could be being overly critical; this huge plate of food was only £12.50 (well, it would have been had I been paying for it) and it is a better standard of BBQ than I've had anywhere else in the city... with one exception, of course. Don't blame me, then, blame Pitt Cue. As I said, timing is everything.


I am going to struggle to sum up my meal at Red Dog Saloon without sounding either hugely patronising (though that doesn't often stop me) or hugely disappointed, and believe me, I'm not. By the standards of the city, and let's remember it's a very big city, Red Dog does very nearly the best BBQ money can buy - I ate all of it, more or less enjoyed all of it, and I would probably go back. Service was efficient and friendly, the American beer selection is top-notch (Sam Adams, Sierra Nevada, Brooklyn East IPA and more) and even a margarita was as good as I've had from most places. But it is still, sadly, a BBQ restaurant serving ever-so-slightly dissatisfying BBQ, and though it's not bad, it needs to be better. Perhaps, one day, it will be. Time will tell, and timing, as I said, is everything.

6/10



I was invited to review Red Dog Saloon

The Pitt Cue Co., Southbank

Sometimes it feels like when it comes to food (and many other things besides, without going into too much detail), you always want what you can't have. My obsession (I may as well face facts, it is an obsession) with burgers, something I've kept reasonably under control in the last few months but still bubbles just under the surface like a dormant addiction, was borne of a craving for decent US fast food joints like Shake Shack or In'N'Out, coupled with the fact that none such places existed in London. But then before too long came Byron, not perfect but pretty damn good for a chain, serving tasty pink burgers in cool minimalist surroundings, and soon after that the big boys got involved - Hawksmoor and Goodman both serving up their famously brilliant beef inside extensively researched (and thoroughly taste-tested) buns. Then finally, we were granted the Meatwagon, and at long last the very best west-coast US burgers had met their match in the capital. The dream was realised - and how we rejoiced.

So, once the Meatwagon had become my second home and I'd eaten my way through their menu too many times to count, attention drifted onto another staple of US comfort food that was desperately unrepresented in London - BBQ. I used to be a big fan of Bodean's, the mini chain of smokehouses that are scattered around some unlikely locations in London (Clapham, Fulham, and so on) but to say they've gone off the boil in recent years is a bit like saying that Nottingham Forest aren't quite the dominant force in European football they once were. Each subsequent visit was like watching another set of needles fall off a dying Christmas tree, until eventually we are left with a sad, bare shell - the basic structure and purpose of the place is still there, but none of the joy and life. And the less said about Barbecoa the better; I foolishly allowed myself to hope that a restaurant backed by the might of the Jamie Oliver empire may have amounted to little more than a confusing, directionless menu of massively overpriced commodity meat. How wrong I was.


And yet who would have guessed, after all these years, that the holy grail of succulent pulled pork, crispy charred chicken wings and heavenly slow-roasted brisket lay not in a gleaming city-centre 160-cover concept restaurant but in an unassuming food truck parked under Hungerford Bridge on the Southbank? The Pitt Cue Co. is a modest operation at first glance - just three guys dishing out paper boxes of BBQ food to the hungry masses, punctuated by the occasional train rumbling far overhead - but there is enough thought, expertise and painstaking attention to detail gone into every single thing they produce to make the senior management of anywhere else in London foolish enough to claim to serve "authentic" US BBQ break down and weep.



Pulled pork is where this kind of food begins and ends, and Pitt Cue have absolutely nailed their version, with huge, silky chunks of pork, slow-roasted Gloucester Old Spot I believe, impossibly soft and melty and yet - crucially - not unpleasantly greasy. Perhaps this is where lesser versions have been going wrong - you need a big animal with plenty of fat to allow for the slow cooking to loosen and tenderise the flesh without it running horribly stringy, as any number of jaw-achingly tough examples I've suffered elsewhere have demonstrated. God knows how much of a profit they're making on £7 for this clearly top quality protein, not to mention some wonderfully smoky beans and crispy slaw shot through with fresh parsley, but for now let's not worry about such things. The Pitt Cue Co pulled pork is priceless.


Having scoffed the pig in a happy few seconds, I took a portion of chicken wings with me for the walk back to the office. Marinated overnight, skewered on a rotisserie for slow-roasting then finished above direct flames for crisping up, these were also as close to perfect as I can imagine. The marinade was smoky and rich with a complex mixture of herbs and spices that brought to mind a Mediterranean barbecue, and they came not only with more of that lovely slaw but a huge chunk of fresh grilled bread - from Wild Caper bakery in Brixton I was told. The best bit I found was the very tips of the ends of the wings, which had blackened and caramelised into a kind of chicken scratching.


As I was on my own this lunchtime there was only so much I could put back, and I'm afraid I can't tell you about the brisket, though it certainly looked the part, or even the ribs which appear on the menu only from 4pm daily. But on a previous flying visit, too brief to sample food but determined to try something, I ordered a "pickleback" - a chaser of rye whiskey and a shot of home made pickle juice. If you think that sounds challenging or unusual, then you haven't tried it - something about washing back a mouthful of fire water with sharp, softly sugary pickle just absolutely works and is, as far as I'm aware, unique (at least in this country) to this cheerfully experimental and idiosyncratic little venture. It is the pickleback, in fact, which acts as the easiest shorthand to the whole approach that Pitt cue Co. take - fun without being careless, obsessive about the details but not at the expense of taste, everything I ate or drank was perfectly judged and perfectly delicious. Did I mention they sell Brewdog beers by the can? Oh, stop reading and just go. Go now.

9/10

Read equally glowing reports of the Pitt Cue Co. here, here and here.

Cheese and Biscuits On Tour - Japan

It's not so much culture shock as culture electrocution. From the moment you arrive in Japan, you are subjected to an overwhelming, indecipherable barrage of population and neon and noise; of train stations like underground cities that stretch for miles in every direction; of restaurants piled on top of restaurants piled on top of shops, squeezed into the most impossibly tiny cracks between impossibly tall buildings; of Zen gardens, raked gravel and the gentle fog of incense; of frantic activity and astonishing order; of service polite to the point of humbling, a thousand variations of smiles and nods and bows that makes human interaction in this most overpopulated of societies not only possible but a constant, life-affirming joy. There aren't enough words in the world to describe just how much it all is, just how much Japan there is in Japan. It's civilisation squared. It's also completely wonderful.


But I imagine you're here to read about the food. Needless to say, at 3 meals a day for two weeks, I will need to be more than a little selective about what to write about, which, considering nearly everything I put in my mouth was interesting in one way or another, is not going to be easy. But like Japan itself I can only hope I can create some kind of narrative out of the chaotic jumble of holiday photographs and sake-sodden tasting notes, and I'll try my best to not get anything too horrifically wrong.


Getting things horrifically wrong, in actual fact, was the one thing I was most terrified of before I landed in the country. Having heard all kinds of stories of complex social rules of engagement, and the numerous seemingly innocuous ways in which a clueless Westerner may inadvertently break them, I spent my first few hours desperately attempting not to offend anyone. I had read somewhere that blowing your nose in public was a no-no, and when the bright Tokyo sun hit my jetlagged eyes and caused my nose to run, I locked myself in one of the many pristine public lavatories in case someone saw me empty my sinuses, contacted the authorities and cancelled my visa. Of course, this turned out not to be true, as a brief but enlightening trip on the JR line amongst a cacophony of sneezing and snorting commuters soon demonstrated.


A bowl of udon in Ueno station (nice and messy, ¥700 ish) and a J.S. Burger in Shibuya aside (¥900 but look, they had free WiFi, OK?), my first proper meal was at Yotaro, a tempura restaurant in Roppongi Hills, organised through the magic of Twitter, the kind intervention of @legbye and a very helpful contact on the ground in Tokyo. You'd think that, armed with a name, a location, a superfast hotel internet connection and a set of detailed instructions from the nearest tube, finding it would be reasonably straightforward but, this being Tokyo, I spent half an hour stalking the alleyways of Roppongi asking in every building that looked like it might sell food until eventually I called my contact, had him call the restaurant, and the chef came running out into the street to find me. Turned out I had walked past it a number of times but assumed it was someone's house. Japanese restaurant signage is very discreet.


The meal was fantastic. Starting with grilled conger eel in miso, followed by beautifully-presented sea bream sashimi with the most incredible yuzu/ponzu dipping sauce, the tempura tasting itself consisted of at least a dozen items - "shrimp sandwich", prawn, whiting, squid, lotus root, Japanese peppers which bore a remarkable resemblance to Padrons, mushroom, aubergine, and another prawn - each fried to order and brought out one by one with instructions to eat them first dipped in salt. Then a whole sea bream was baked in rice and meticulously filleted using chopsticks and presented with a little tower of bouncy pickles and a great clear vegetable broth. I had been told that Yotaro was awarded a Michelin star in the famously star-heavy Tokyo guide and I couldn't resist asking the chef (who spoke excellent English thank God) if this meant anything to the Japanese. "Not really," he replied, "but for a while we had a few more foreign visitors." A land where Michelin means next to nothing. My kind of place.


And so, collecting a couple of members of my family along the way and boarding the bullet train from Tokyo station, to Kyoto. Where Tokyo was impressive in a dazzling futurist kind of way, Kyoto is refined and elegant and effortlessly beautiful. It is a city of ancient temples and ancient lantern-lit alleyways populated by silken geishas and sharp-suited salarymen. The food market was endless and endlessly fascinating; we gorged on fresh fried chicken thighs and a selection of interesting pickles, none of which I could pick out of a line-up, and ate bright red baby octopus, the head stuffed with a quails egg. That evening we climbed a rickety wooden staircase in an anonymous ramshackle backstreet to a sushi restaurant, and ate uni nigiri washed down with copious amounts of house sake. One little custom I very much approved of was the tendency to serve sake in glasses stood in a high-sided saucer, and then to overfill the glass so the sake fills both the glass and the saucer to the brim. Or maybe I just like lots of sake and don't care which traditional Japanese custom I can use an excuse.


Lunch on one of the Kyoto days was, and I'm guessing will forever remain, one of the most unbelievably beautiful places I've ever enjoyed a meal; a steep-sided, moss-covered mountain gorge framed a series of crystal-clear waterfalls, over which were suspended wooden platforms holding tables and cushions (this, like most of the poshest Japanese restaurants, was a cross-legged affair). To the sound of running water and under bamboo shades hung with paper lanterns, we ate exquisitely presented sushi; local vegetables, whole deep-fried river fish, silky sashimi and more of those bouncy, sweet pickles. It was one of those moments so ethereally magical it's hard to believe it happened at all - I can hardly even believe the photos.


But I'm not going to pretend that every moment of every meal in Kyoto or elsewhere was that easy. In my own arrogant bloggery way I assumed I was sufficiently battle hardened to unusual ingredients and textures to be able to casually throw down my neck everything coming my way in Japan. In fact, oh so naively, I initially relished the opportunity to challenge myself and for the first couple of days actively sought out anything that looked like it might not go down without a fight. I'm not sure when exactly the last of that confidence was completely crushed; perhaps with a shockingly bitter whole fried fish in a multi-course foraged menu in Kyoto which was like swallowing a mixture of soil and bones; perhaps with an entire, raw baby squid I blithely assumed was marinated or treated or something (I mean come ON) only to have the poor recently deceased thing burst in my mouth like a bag of fish guts and provoke a swift but decisive reaction from my oesophagus; or perhaps it was the warm cod's sperm. Yes, probably the warm cod's sperm.


The thing to remember, of course, is that while the occasional dish or ingredient was challenging or, yes, sometimes downright revolting, the experience of eating the meal in such special circumstances - inevitably gracious service, stunning interiors (the Japanese must be the world masters at interior design, everywhere we ate looked like it was from the pages of a glossy magazine) - meant that you always came away satisfied. Occasionally though, a restaurant would test my good will to the limit. One night in Kyoto, in yet another effortlessly pretty, lantern-lit restaurant hanging over a quietly flowing canal, we were presented with a harmless-looking bowl of spinach/egg roll, a pretty selection of seasonal vegetable and edible flowers, topped with what looked like a lump of fish mousse of some kind. The waiter explained, in Japanese, the ingredients (fortunately we had a translator with us by this point), said translator (actually my brother-in-law's brother who has lived out there for nearly four years now) passed on what he thought we needed to know, and I merrily scooped up all of the "fish mousse" in one go and swallowed it. Try and imagine, yes, a fish mousse, but one that has been made from last year's catch and left in the sun for most of the time in-between to gather flavour. It tasted like no food should ever taste, grimy and funky, with the texture of porridge and the inescapable musky notes of fish sex.


"What the hell was that?" I gasped as, somehow, mercifully, the last of it wobbled down into my stomach.

"Oh that's cod's sperm. I didn't want to say anything in case you were squeamish. I don't like it."

I didn't much like it either. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I found it pretty bloody disgusting. I also didn't like the fact it reminded me of its presence in my gut every time I attempted to wash away the taste with a swig of bland Japanese lager. Still, I guess that's what's known as a Life Experience.


After the always entertaining but occasionally terrifying experience of eating out in Kyoto, Osaka seemed much more my cup of tea. The city is known for Takoyaki, fried balls of octopus meat in thick batter, often dressed with brown sauce and mayonnaise and always, always delicious. We came armed with lists of recommendations for the "best" Takoyaki but quite honestly, everywhere we ate, from the most unpromising city-centre tourist trap to a standing-room-only streetside stall, was never less than excellent. An average-evening's restaurant hop also often involved a serving of Okonomiyaki, a sort of pancake containing meat and veg and basically anything you fancy. Cooked on a hot plate built into the table, coated in more of that sharp brown sauce and mayonnaise and squirling bonito flakes, it's a theatrical, hugely enjoyable way to eat and we made the most of every opportunity.


More high-rise and less beautiful perhaps than Zen-like Kyoto, though no less interesting for that, Osaka was probably my favourite stop in Japan. The Shinsaibashi shopping area was continually interesting, every restaurant or stall seemed good and friendly enough to spend the day in, and despite the fact that hardly anyone spoke English (even fewer than in Kyoto, which is saying something), accomplishing anything seemed remarkably easy. One night we found ourselves in the suburbs eating the greatest ramen I think I've ever had in my life, accompanied by a dozen crispy gyoza dumplings, and yet I didn't get the impression this particular ramen joint was a destination or better than any number of other places. The minimum standard of eateries in Japan is simply astonishingly high; it is no exaggeration to say you will eat well (if you have a strong enough stomach) anywhere, something you can't say about many countries. And even if you don't eat out, the supermarkets and department store food halls are a wonder in themselves. Where else has a single melon on sale for £100, and yet in the same room two thick chunks of unbelievably marbled Wagyu steaks for £15? I indulged myself one night towards the end of the trip - because I'm worth it - and cooked up a couple in a friend's flat. They were, of course, superb.


There's a lot more left to be said. This continually enthralling country will resist all best efforts to summarise it sufficiently - I wanted to talk about silky udon in Shikoku, the breathtaking Imperial Villa in Kyoto, cold soba for lunch, fish ice-cream, fermented sushi that tasted like blue cheese, pork shabu shabu in Shinjuku Tokyo - but perhaps I should call this post before long-winded spills over into self-indulgent. You can click here and here to see the rest of the photos I took on the trip, and there are even a few shaky videos here if you don't suffer too badly from seasickness (or haven't just "enjoyed" a dish of warm cod's sperm). Now I'm back in the UK, nursing my broken bank balance and surrounded by the pile of anthropomorphised snacks I swept into my carry-on luggage in the 7-11 at the airport, memory has only served to gold-plate my experience in Japan, to frame and polish and mount it as one of the great journeys of my life. Perhaps you only really enjoy a moment once it's passed. Unless, that is, the moment in question involves warm cod's sperm.

Clos Maggiore, Covent Garden

This post is an extended bout of procrastination disguised as a restaurant review. Instead of writing up the two weeks I've just spent in Japan, a terrifying task due partly to the number of places we ate at but largely because I recognised next to none of what I put in my mouth, I am wrapping myself in the comfort blanket of more familiar territory - a Mediterranean fine dining restaurant in Covent Garden. Clos Maggiore is one of those peculiar places that despite being very good, positioned right in the centre of the busiest part of London and certainly no more expensive than anywhere else doing this sort of thing, survives despite being completely ignored by most bloggers and restaurant critics (with certain exceptions), at least judging by their remarkably brief page on Urbanspoon. I chose it because it was handy for myself and my dinner companion and the online menu looked interesting, but tried not to get my hopes up - in this most tourist-trodden and unreliable part of town, for every Rules there's a thousand depressing places like Incognico.


Fresh house bread is always a good sign of a confident kitchen, and the Clos Maggiore focaccia was verging on brilliant, moist and light inside and coated in a thin, salty tapenade. Even better were some firm breadsticks dipped in white truffle paste, with a flavour so powerful it clearly contained a good amount of the good stuff. I flicked through the telephone directory of a wine list, briefly kidding myself I knew what the hell I was looking for, then gave the job to the sommelier who was quite happy to recommend a £35 Chilean Malbec. Which was very nice, in case you were wondering.


Stuffed morels with chicken mousseline was exactly the kind of dish you hope you're given when you visit a restaurant like this. Generously proportioned morels, sliced underneath to reveal a solid filling of firm chicken mousse, it was seasoned aggressively and dressed with nice fresh greens and I absolutely loved it. Chicken and mushroom may be a pairing that's been done to death in dishes all over the world but only for a very good reason - it works. Even the vinaigrette on the lamb's lettuce was out of the ordinary, containing walnuts and I think some kind of chicken cooking juices. My companion's starter of marinated wild scallops was, by all accounts, equally good.


Duck breast main was less impressive, but only slightly so. In a repeat of the incident at Simpson's, I was told "the duck comes medium-rare, is that alright?" only to be presented with a piece of meat cooked to grey all the way through. I didn't send this one back though, as despite the lack of colour it was nevertheless moist and tasty and I finished it off quite happily. A dainty square of sugary oatmeal biscuit matched the duck well, as did some sharper lumps of plum and roasted chicory hiding underneath. I suppose the biggest criticism you could have of this course was that it was straightforward bordering on unoriginal, but that doesn't mean it wasn't tasty. My companion I think did better with his lamb, which came in the familiar roast loin/confit belly arrangement and was also very edible, particularly the confit belly which had all kinds of lovely textures.


I'm afraid I forgot to take a picture of the cheese course but I'm sure you can imagine what six neat wedges of cheese arranged on a plate look like. The brie was my favourite - the fact they all looked like they had been sitting around warm for quite a while seemed to affect the brie less than, say, the Comté, which was beginning to sweat - but it was a decent, varied selection and well worth the £6 odd. We washed them down with a glass of sweet port. Well, why not.

Service was attentive but unpushy, and I should make a special mention of the rear dining room itself which, lit by a large skylight and framed by white flowers and fairy lights, created a remarkably luxurious and un-Convent-Garden-y atmosphere. As is so often the case in London, only the bill seemed slightly incongruous - at £70 a head for 2 and a half courses and one of the cheaper bottles of wine, Clos Maggiore could never be described as a bargain. But considering that, after all, we had at the very least enjoyed the food we were given, paying the Central London Premium seemed almost reasonable. It was a thoroughly pleasant meal in a thoroughly pleasant restaurant and made a thoroughly pleasant evening. Right, that's enough of comfort and familiarity. Now to Japan.

8/10