London Restaurant Map 2012 v2 (now with added Zone 2)

IMAGE REMOVED BY REQUEST OF TRANSPORT FOR LONDON
After many requests, and thanks to everyone who gave feedback on version 1, I've managed to find the time to expand to Zone 2. If you click on the image above you can find the large-scale version.

I didn't make too many changes to the Zone 1 section; shifted a couple of bits around and added Draft House to the Tower Hill Gateway stop. I really was concentrating on doing a first full version including Zone 2 and hopefully by V3 I'll be able to make some major revisions to both zones.

I knew the expansion to Zone 2 would be tricky, but blimey I don't envy anyone who lives in the Docklands or near Willesden Junction - there really are slim restaurant pickings round those parts.

Anyway, hope you enjoy, and as before, all feedback welcome for the next version - most likely this time next year...

EDIT 7th February 2013: Yesterday I received an email from Eversheds LLP, lawyers for Transport for London, asking me to take the map down.

So, not having the time or money to fight anyone in court, I've just done as they've asked. Oh well, was fun while it lasted.

Chooks, Muswell Hill, and Orange Buffalo, Brick Lane

"Shoestring, Taggart, Spender, Bergerac, Morse. What does that say to you about regional detective series'?"

"There's too many of them?"

"That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is, 'people like them, let's make some more of them'."

The joke in the above exchange between Alan Partridge and the Chief Commissioning Editor of the BBC was that, bereft of successful ideas himself, Alan merely spotted the most convenient bandwagon and attempted to ride it to success. And as well as being a handy way of shoehorning an Alan Partridge quote into a food blog, it has a (slightly tortured) parallel with what's happening in certain corners of the London restaurant business.

The Giraffe group has by no means the monopoly on bandwagon-jumping but they have definitely been one of the highest-profile offenders over recent years. Strike One was Guerilla Burgers back in February 2010, where, spotting the frenzy surrounding the Meatwagon appearances in South London, they decided there was money to be made selling 'authentic West-coast burgers' in a desirable Marylebone location. Unfortunately 'authenticity' is a subjective term, and to various people's crushing disappointment, not least my own, Guerilla Burgers turned out to be a glorified pub burger served with frozen crinkle-cut chips at a massive mark-up. It was quietly rebranded within the year.

And now, as any food geek will tell you (don't look so surprised, you know who you are), the Next Big Thing is going to be chicken - whether fried, rotisseried or served as wings. Giraffe knows this, too, so they've rushed into field with Chooks, a desperate trend-chasing exercise in creative bankruptcy that has recently reared its ugly neck in Muswell Hill. It is, and I'm saving you the miserable experience of travelling to Muswell Hill to find out the same for yourself, completely awful; overpriced, ineptly constructed food served slowly by inexperienced staff in a room that's a bit like - actually, very like - Meatliquor with the hard edges filed off. The sweet Margaritas are served in jam jars, the cutlery comes in white metal tins, there's even ironic corporate "graffiti" in the toilets. As for the food itself, well, the fried chicken tasted of water and grease, and flabby buffalo wings came with a "blue cheese sauce" that was as thin as mouldy milk. Please promise me you'll never go.

But! But. Thank God not everyone with the desire to operate a food business in central London has timid investors to please or the imagination of a sand fly. I'm not going to waste any more words on Chooks, it doesn't even deserve the SEO score, so instead let's focus on a stall just off Brick Lane that treats its chickens - and its customers - with respect.

Orange Buffalo care about what they do. The wings themselves come in a choice of four flavours, from 'Original' (tangy, mild) through 'Woof Woof' (hotter, more complex) and to the top level 'Viper' which I'm yet to try but given that it contains the fearsome naga chilli I assume packs quite a punch. They are deep fried to a marvellous crispy skin then (correctly, as per the authentic New York state method) rolled in the hot sauce by hand before being presented on a paper tray of chunky blue cheese dip, sticks of celery and side of either onion rings or fries.

The wings themselves are fantastic, made with skill and using very good quality, meaty chicken. The onion rings are little bitesize things, greaselessly fried and with a good crunch, ditto the fries. The blue cheese dip, though, was almost the standout element - a chunky, creamy pile of cooling dairy that provided the absolute perfect antidote to the chillified chicken. Six wings, with the blue cheese dip, celery and a generous pile of either onion rings or fries was £6.50.

I know Orange Buffalo aren't the first people to serve chicken wings. The Meatwagon weren't the first people to serve bacon cheeseburgers, Big Apple didn't invent gourmet hot dogs, and Banh Mi 11 didn't invent Vietnamese pork paté baguettes. But each of these operations were successful - and great - not because they saw a trend and tried to make some money from it, but because they started selling the kind of food they wanted to eat themselves, and their passion for doing so was evident in the end product. The lesson to be learned, time and time again, is this - make the kind of food you want to eat, make it with care, and to hell with what anyone else thinks. A bandwagon is never a good enough reason for a restaurant.

Chooks 2/10
Orange Buffalo 9/10

EDIT 01/11/12: I have been asked to make it clear that the relationship between Chooks and Giraffe is familial not financial - Chooks is owned and run by the son of the founders of Giraffe and is a separate entity. That said, you can see the family resemblance...




I was invited to review Chooks

Copita, Soho

There was quite an interesting reaction to my post about the new Brindisa place Tramontana in Shoreditch. Let me repeat that I had a great time there - I thought the food was very accomplished, the staff friendly and I loved what they'd done with the room and open kitchen. But, it seems, not many other people did. You can read the comments from disappointed customers yourself on the post, but as well as those, no less than food & wine writer Fiona Beckett, whose tastes normally overlap mine fairly reliably, didn't think much of it.

I'm not sure which is stranger, though - that different people could have such different reactions to a meal in the same restaurant within the space of a week, or that, given our wildly differing fetishes and foibles, we ever have enough in common to recommend a restaurant at all. I mean think about this - some people don't even like Tayyabs. I know! Madness.

Following Tramontanagate then, and given the practical impossibility of finding an objectively good restaurant, it perhaps shouldn't have been too much of a surprise that much-loved and award-winning tapas bar Copita didn't excite me as I thought it was going to. But I was mainly disappointed not because I was expecting it to be brilliant, but because I really wanted it to be brilliant - another reliable ham-and-sherry outlet in the centre of London is always cause for celebration.

The first problem was with the Iberico ham, and given my hopeless addiction to the stuff I find it quite hard to forgive problems with Iberico ham. It was £15 for a fairly mean portion - close to the same amount that José sell for £9 - and was pretty badly carved, shredded and hacked into weird irregular bits and pieces, much of it dry and chewy. The flavour was still good, but the way it had been treated made me sad inside.

The rest was better, fortunately. Mussel croquettas weren't anywhere near as weird as they sound, in fact they were better than those at Tramontana, with a nice golden crust and creamy filling. Crispy cauliflower & piquillo sauce began enjoyably, delicately encrusted and seasoned well, but the sauce was underpowered and there wasn't enough of it, so very soon all you were eating was fried cauliflower and wishing you weren't. A lamb bun with harissa was very good though, my favourite overall, with tender chunks of slow-cooked lamb and a good kick from the harissa.

We got a cheese board too but as the waitress merely dumped them and ran off without explaining what they were, I can't tell you much about them other than I liked the gooey goat's and spongey blue, but the harder (mountain?) cheese was a bit bland. £11, mind.

With the cheapest bottle of sherry, itself a whacking £39, the total for two came to £88 and it's really in the value-for-money department that Copita loses most of its stars. The food was good, but not extraordinarily so, and I'm sure Soho rents have as much of an effect on the bill as the cost of ingredients which were generally of a high standard, but I couldn't help feeling that we didn't get a great deal for our £44 a head and had we been hungrier and thirstier the results could have been disastrous. Then again, perhaps you'll visit yourself, have a great time for a pittance and wonder what the hell I was moaning about. Such is the strange business of writing about restaurants.

6/10

Copita have been in touch to point out that their cheapest sherry is £15 for a half bottle, so a bit cheaper than the £39 full bottle we had.

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

Tramontana, Shoreditch

Poor old Brindisa. Once upon a time they were the unchallenged masters of Spanish food in London, beloved by punters, raved about by critics, showered with awards. Then one day some upstart employee called José Pizarro gets ideas above his station and decides to open his own place, an insultingly short walk away from the Borough Market flagship bar. And as if that wasn't enough, next thing you know this José character has them queueing out of the door every night and starts collecting awards like they're going out of fashion. The cheek.

Of course, they have nothing to worry about. While faddish foodies (guilty) chase after the novelty and the new, Brindisa's mini chain of restaurants (now four in number) has been quietly and confidently getting on with producing some of the best Spanish food this side of the Pyrenees. I have never had a bad meal at any of their sites, and if last night is anything to go by, the latest addition to the fold will be nothing but another roaring success.

Tramontana have kept the basic internal layout of previous occupant Saf, but the vast open kitchen has really come alive now it's hung with legs of ham and lit by flaring pans instead of being a plating area for sad little piles of vegan food. (I'm told Saf have a stall in the food hall at Whole Foods Kensington these days, if you miss them terribly. Anyone? No, didn't think so.) It's a really lovely room, and the quiet garden out back will be fantastic, too, once summer returns - in the pissing October rain it's a slightly less attractive option.

There wasn't much to fault with any of the food. Boquerones were sharp and soft, draped over rustic house potato chips. Croquettas, while not quite as good as the supremely accomplished versions from the Other Place on Bermondsey Street, still were perfectly good, stuffed full of rich béchamel and salty nuggets of Iberico ham. And a separate plate of Iberico ham - surely a foodstuff that's as close to proof of the existence of God as you can find - was utter perfection, sliced into exact squares each containing just the right amount of fat and meat.

A daily special of mushrooms and truffle was probably only disappointing next to the quality of other dishes, but I did think it could have done with a lot more truffle and a lot more seasoning. Fortunately the same criticism couldn't be levelled at some little slices of cured tuna, which were incredibly punchy - pretty little things too, glowing in deep red.

Strangely, considering I've spent most of my holidays in Girona every year since I was 8 years old, this was the first time I've ever had fideuà. Best described as a Catalan version of a paella made with noodles instead of rice, this version contained huge, meaty prawns and cubes of squid, the noodles clumping together in satisfying chunks. Bacalao (Catalan for salt fish) was gorgeous too, moist and rich and balanced on top of a commendably light mayonnaise.

Then finally, if Tramontana hadn't already ticked enough boxes in my personal "how to do restaurants right" list, they also do a burger. The slider-size "black and white" is made from white Catalan butifarra sausage and morcilla (black pudding), and is so good it even gives the Opera Tavern's Iberico & foie gras version a run for its money. And at £4.50, it's also a bit of a bargain.

With a £30 bottle of Fino, all this came to just over £97 including service, and between three people I think that's very fair. In all honesty, I knew I was going to enjoy Tramontana - I've been a fan of Brindisa for almost as long as they've been serving food in London. But a restaurant as enjoyable and accomplished as this is never simply inevitable. It's the result of hard work, attention to the important details and, of course, being incredibly good at what you do. That their fourth restaurant still has the capacity to surprise and delight is testament to an extraordinary talent, and London is all the richer for having them.

9/10

London Restaurant Map 2012

IMAGE REMOVED BY REQUEST OF TRANSPORT FOR LONDON

Just a little something I've been working on over the last few weeks. There's no particular rule for the places I've picked - some areas (Soho) are blessed with options, and some (Warren St) are a little more tricky. But I think it just about works.

Any comments/suggestions gratefully received as ever. Click the image to enlarge.

Golden Pie, Battersea

A few months ago a new pie and mash shop appeared on Lavender Hill. A new pie and mash shop. Somewhere you can knock back plates of jellied eels and liquor, washed down with a cup of builder's tea, the kind of place that hitherto has only existed in obscure parts of Hackney and in Anthony Bourdain travelogues. A new one opened in Battersea. Its arrival was, to say the least, unexpected.

I've been twice now. My first visit was on the way back from work on a Thursday evening, at the time the only day of the week it stayed open after 6pm. I bought a little box to take home with me and it cost £3.50, a bargain even if it had been less than good, but I was quite pleased with it - nice crispy pastry, good flavour in the beef filling (even if there wasn't very much of it) and plenty of salty luminous green parsley sauce.

I didn't go back for months after that because of their wilfully odd operating hours. It opened after the morning commute and closed before the evening commute (in Battersea for God's sake) so your only chance was either to go on a Saturday (and I don't know about you but I have higher hopes for my Saturdays than pie and mash on my own) or, as I eventually did, pop in on a weekday lunchtime whilst working at home waiting for someone to come round and fix the boiler.

This time I ordered a big plate of pie, mash and eels for £7.

"I'll give you a little plate for the eel bones." The lady behind the counter said in a broad East London accent, with just a hint of friendly concern that I hadn't quite understood what I'd just ordered. "Would you like a cup of tea, darling?"

I don't drink tea or coffee, so I ended up half-heartedly choosing a can of Lilt from the cabinet. "It'll just be another couple of minutes for the eels, alright darling?". That was two mentions of the eels within my first five minutes - I think she was expecting the penny to drop any second and for me to realise my mistake. But instead I took a seat and cracked open the Lilt.

As before, the food was pretty good. A large portion of not overly-buttery mash soaked up a good pint of that green liquor, and the handful of eels, though surprisingly gelatinous for the 'stewed' option (I hadn't asked for 'jellied'), still provided a decent 'surf' to the beef pie 'turf'.

Halfway through my lunch an old local boy struggled in with one of those wheeled shopping trolleys and ordered a "single" (presumably a single portion of pie and mash, though I didn't see any mention on the menu of any way of doing a "double"). He and the waitress chatted away happily for a few minutes, then before I had even had a chance to spit out my first eel bone, it was "See you Friday darling" and he was gone.

It was all very… strange. It's odd enough that in 2012 a brand-new pie and mash shop has opened anywhere in London, never mind in comfortable, boring commuter-belt Battersea, but the homely service, the wildly unsuitable opening hours and the nostalgic pricing seemed more suitable for the set of a soap opera than a functioning restaurant. I'm compelled to write it up partly out of curiosity but partly because I have this eerie feeling I will be walking past one day and it will have completely disappeared and been replaced by an estate agents, with neighbours claiming no knowledge of its existence and nothing but the faint smell of pastry to mark it had ever been there at all.

Or perhaps it's an elaborate theme restaurant, a kind of Cockney TGI Fridays. Just like Polpo needs its Aperol Spritzers served by tattoo-ed hipsters and TGIs its slappable "Hi my name's Jerry!" cretins with their braces and fifteen pieces of flair, Golden Pie wouldn't work without walls hung with pictures of the Queen and a motherly Eastender offering a cheery hello and making sure you have enough tea. Perhaps they even hire their own themed customers - I mean Lavender Hill is all estate agents and hairdressers. Where on earth did they find a octogenarian pie-and-mash-loving regular barely six months after opening?

But there it is anyway, and if you ever happen to be wandering around Battersea on a weekday afternoon with £3.50 burning a hole in your pocket then you can certainly do worse. And if you can't find it, I can only promise it was there and I didn't dream it and for a brief moment in 2012 there was a bloody pie and mash shop on Lavender Hill. Because if I hadn't been there myself, I wouldn't believe it either.

6/10