The Five Fields, Chelsea

This was actually the second time I'd sat down in the dining room at Five Fields. Unfortunately on our first visit a power cut meant no sooner had we got settled than a very apologetic front of house had to find us a short notice table elsewhere; a very minor inconvenience for us (particularly considering the alternative was the wonderful Medlar) but a disaster for them, losing an evening's full house of bookings and god knows how much food spoilage. This isn't actually the first time I've had a booking cancelled because of a power cut - it seems to happen in Soho a hell of a lot; maybe it's the rats - and I'm reliably informed that compensation from the energy companies is rare to completely non-existant. Which seems desperately unfair.

Anyway a return date was soon found and here we finally were, nibbling on pleasant amuses of foie gras paté and fresh crab. I can't remember many canapés that have really set my heart racing; it seems to me that you'd be silly to waste an opportunity to start dinner with a bang, and yet most restaurants seem to settle for a couple of mouthfuls of comfort food. Which isn't to say they weren't welcome, of course, just a bit disappointing.

Pre-starter of onion consommé continued the theme; nice but fairly ordinary. The cube of soft gruyere had a gentle earthy flavour and having a chunk of sweet pickled onion floating around was at least unusual, but the broth itself was really no better than the French Onion Soup at Zedel, a restaurant with no pretentious to fine dining and - to say the least - in a rather different price bracket.

But then the bread arrived and all of a sudden the journey was worth it. This buttermilk-based invention is, without a shadow of a doubt, the best house bread I've encountered in a very long time, although perhaps it's not technically "bread" at all, more of a savoury pastry. Inside a brittle, golden brown crust were soft curls of soft, sweet brioche, steaming warm from the oven, just the most perfect texture inside and out. Alain Ducasse once famously said he deliberately serves cold, sub-premium bread at his restaurants because he doesn't want people filling up before the proper dishes arrive. This is probably just an excuse for being rubbish at bread, but I can kind of see his point - I could have happily eaten 10 of these and nothing else and still gone home happy.

Another little extra course, this time beetroot done a number of different ways. It was very pretty, colourful and with an artistic arrangement of various geometric shapes, but the success or not of the whole enterprise rather depends on your attitudes towards beetroot. And to that end, I'm afraid I'm not that much of a fan. I don't hate beetroot any more than I hate parsnip or sweet potato or turnip, but it's not exactly a death row vegetable is it. Still, enjoyable enough.

Rather a lot, then, was resting on the starter courses proper. First - huge, meaty Orkney scallops crusted with toasted pistachio and surrounded by various forms of cauliflower, and these were very good indeed; not just the scallops themselves which were perfectly seared golden brown leaving the bright white flesh inside firm and tasty, but cauliflower is always a good match for scallops and the textures of veg made all kinds of interesting crunch and contrasts.

My own dish "Rockpool" is a Five Fields signature dish of sorts, and certainly comes with plenty of fanfare. It's presented in two parts, the first "cold" stage consisting of a bowl of seafood granita and a slate of various shapes and techniques of caviar, sea urchin, smoked eel, you name it. It's a dish that was more admirable than enjoyable. Bits of it were very nice - I loved the oyster (I think it was anyway) bowl with the citrussy granita on top, and the best item on the slate was a sweet glazed bit of mackerel, rich and rewarding. My problem with it all was only that the flavours and aromas were a bit too reminiscent of an actual stagnant rockpool; evocative and technically impressive maybe, but still not exactly what you'd usually consider dinner. The next stage, some good firm langoustine tails in a slightly oversour seafood sauce, had a similar curate's egg quality.

Between the starters and main was this, the first time I've ever had a dish served on a 400-million-year-old ammonite fossil. If only the food had been as interesting, as what was inside these neat green spheres was a mouthful of the kind of everyday apple sauce you might have with your pork chop. I mean I'm sure it wasn't, but it certainly tasted no different.

Red grouse was, I'm fairly certain, cooked sous-vide because there was no nice bubbly skin, in fact no sign of a direct heat source of any kind, just two tranches of medium-rare breast meat surrounded by neat chunks of winter vegetables. There is a time and a place for sous-vide cooking, I'm certainly not totally against it in all situations, but when I compare the golden brown, crisp-skinned birds fresh out of the oven at, say, Racine to these characterless lumps of salted rubber, well, there's no contest. It seems to me that too often sous-vide is a technique used for the benefit of the kitchen more than the enjoyment of the customer, and though I can appreciate consistency is at least more important in a fine dining environment than in a neighbourhood bistro, it should never be priority number one.

Cornish Turbot, hiding here under a clever piece of dried skin, was by all accounts a more enjoyable main course. Pan-fried to a nice dark exterior, the inside firm and fresh, there was little to complain about. I'm not entirely sure raw blackberries are a perfect accompaniment to anything other than a fruit salad, but that could just be me.

This miniature bowl of foam was presumably a palate-cleanser of some kind, as it was quite surprisingly bitter and not entirely fun to eat but admittedly did zap our tastebuds back into the middle of next week.

Finally the desserts. Mine was a mango, peanut, celery and buttermilk affair, a Dairy-style arrangements of different forms and textures but lacking something - salt? Sugar? Heart? It was perfectly pleasant, but entirely forgettable, a sign of a kitchen whose interests quite clearly lay elsewhere.

I think the other dessert was called Orchard, as it consisted of coils of fresh apple in an apple sorbet, with some bits and pieces of ice cream and doughnut things. It also felt like a refugee from a much cheaper restaurant; this kind of thing is done better by any of those new-wave British garden restaurants like Picture, the Dairy or Toast, and for little more than a fiver.

Five Fields is, and will more than likely remain no matter what I have to say on the matter, an incredibly popular little restaurant. Plenty of people have had enough of a good time at this cozy spot just off Kings Road to regularly propel it to the top of more than one 'readers favourites' list on sites like TripAdvisor, and whatever you think about those lists they must at least have a loose relationship with the truth. I just honestly wish I felt the same - dishes swung between oddly timid (sous-vide grouse, scallops and cauliflower) and recklessly experimental ("Rockpool"), never often stopping at enjoyable along the way, and for the prices being charged "enjoyable" is really the least you could ask. Most likely, Five Fields just isn't for me. And all said and done, I'm sure that's the least of their worries.

6/10

Thanks to the power cut kerfuffle and the intervention of a kindly PR, we didn't end up paying for our meal at Five Fields. Photos taken with a Canon 700D with 50mm lens, kindly loaned from Canon.

Bibendum, South Kensington

I sometimes get the feeling that the more the pace of restaurant openings in London quickens, the more of a creature of habit I am in deciding where to eat out. This is, for a food blogger, clearly a bit of a worry - I generally don't re-review places (and certainly not anywhere whose score hasn't changed), and as last month proved, it only takes a couple of unfortunate illness/power cut events combined with a dearth of new experiences elsewhere to make these pages look, well, a bit sparse. So although the gravitational pull of Bob Bob Ricard, The Dairy, Tayyabs, MeatLiquor and the other Top 100 (pluggy plug plug) are stronger than ever, there's still not much of an excuse, in a city as dynamic as this, to not at least make a bit of an effort to try somewhere new.

So this month I'm redoubling my efforts to get out there and visit some places that have been on The List (yes, I do have a list, it's on the Notes app on my iPhone but it's still a list) for way longer than they should have been. The only question was, where? And given the frightening number of options, how on earth do you decide? Then I remembered Uncover, a restaurant booking app I'd been asked to test out a couple of weeks previously. The idea (I think) is that it will keep a database of high-end or oversubscribed restaurants with last minute availability, so that if you want lunch or dinner somewhere nice that very day, it will throw up a list of options.

It's early days (the app is still in soft launch mode) but it's already quite a fun way of booking a meal. Searching from my house in Battersea (it's vaguely based on location) it offered lunch tables last Saturday at Medlar, Hawksmoor Knightsbridge and our eventual choice Bibendum, each of which I would have happily patronised. Admittedly it also suggested The Admiral Codrington (which has gone dreadfully downhill since burger maestro Fred Smith left) and Ametsa with Arzak Instruction which hasn't exactly set the world alight but I guess it was never likely to be exactly tuned to current critical consensus.

Anyway after a couple of prods at my iPhone screen and a bus ride, we were in South Kensington, settling into the plush dining room of what is surely one of the more beautiful dining spaces in London. Michelin House is an Art Nouveau masterpiece, stunning outside and in with its handpainted tiling, floor mosaics and stained glass windows depicting the proto Michelin Man in a variety of energetic activities - riding a bike, kickboxing(?), everything apart from driving a car weirdly. Perhaps it made more sense in 1911. Anyway, downstairs is the newly refurbished Oyster Bar in the cavernous (and rather chilly) main hall, and very popular it looked too, but we were booked in upstairs, an altogether more genteel (and warmer) environment.

The menu is a real crowdpleaser, priced as you might expect in these parts (£31 for 3 courses) but with thankfully just enough interesting sounding dishes scattered amongst the usual mid-high-end clichés (chicken liver parfait, haddock and chips with tartare sauce, you know the drill). House bread was from Sally Clarke and was a gorgeous baguette still warm from the oven. And look who provided the butter, M. Bibendum himself in what was once presumably an ashtray. I wonder how many of those go missing week by week.

Fennel soup was comforting and had a good light texture even if it was slightly underseasoned, but came with a couple of crunchy slices of anchovy toast which were incredibly moreish. If you've ever tried that Gentleman's Relish stuff you see in posh delis, try and imagine that only runnier and even more powerfully salty - I couldn't get enough of it.

The other starter was this generous fillet of brill, firm and relatively flavoursome in a creamy sauce that was again perhaps slightly underpowered but still enjoyable. Sometimes, a bowl of fresh white fish in a seafood sauce, served by smiling staff in a beautiful dining room, doesn't have to be anything much more than solid to make it all worthwhile.

Of the mains, cod with Swiss chard fritters and sauce "choron" (a Béarnaise with tomato added, apparently) was the more successful; in fact was very good indeed. The fish was absolutely stunningly white and split apart into moist flakes with only the most gentle of persuasion. The fritters added crunch, and wrapping up the fillet itself in more chard made it a bit like opening a Christmas present. Very festive.

My own duck breast wasn't much worse. Unfortunately, though, despite perfectly medium rare slices of nice moist bird, and with seasonal sprouts, pancetta and juniper as a very decent accompaniment, the whole thing was spoiled slightly by an incredibly powerful bitter orange sauce, which just seemed a bit clumsy. I did finish it though, so it can't have been that bad, and on the side was a little layered potato fondant thing, full of flavour and crunch, which I would have happily eaten again and again.

At the risk of sounding like a pastry pedant, doesn't the word millefeuille suggest at least two layers of ingredient? A couple of blobs of dark & white chocolate fondant inside layers of biscuit is only a millefuille if a bungalow is a duplex. Anyway, flavours were decent, and the boozy soaked cherries added a nice extra element.

Everyone knows what to expect from Christmas pudding, and this was a perfectly good example. The egg nog ice cream was nice, rich and vanilla-y, a clever extension of the brandy sauce underneath, but this was never likely to win any awards for Innovation In Dessert Design. It was a Christmas pudding.

So yes, there were bits that were less than perfect. But it's strange how it's only now as I impassively review the photos that I remember the errors here and there, whereas at the time it was all just so much... fun. Certainly that had something to do with the service, which never missed a beat, and the house prosecco which slipped down very easily, not to mention the booking process which didn't involve anything so annoying as having to talk to a human. But when you want a lunch experience to run like clockwork, and you don't mind throwing some money at it to make it happen (a bill of £130 for two is punchy perhaps, though not entirely unreasonable), this is when places like Bibendum, this grand old dame of Fulham Road, come into their own.

7/10

Uncover paid for this meal, or at least most of it (I went slightly over budget like I usually do). Here's a link if you want to try it yourself. Photos taken with a Canon 700D with 50mm lens, kindly loaned from Canon.

Smack Lobster, Mayfair

Yes, it's true, there's yet another new lobster restaurant in town. I've never been a believer in "too much of a good thing", so I don't really care how many there are as long as they're half decent but of course that's the problem - most of them aren't. If your business plan is simply to make money off a trend forged more bravely and more successfully by others, then experience shows your end product will be as bland, cynical and depressing as your motiviations for doing it. And despite its enviable number of trailblazers and risk takers, London has never been short of its bandwagon-chasers either.

But Smack lobster comes with a pedigree more promising than most. Surely one of the great London dining success stories of the last few years is the brilliant Burger & Lobster, which alongside employing some of the most skilled barpeople in town (gotta love those martinis) paired huge live Canadian lobster (grilled, boiled or in a roll) with crunchy fries, green salad and served the lot for a flat fee of £20. Apprently they also do burgers too.

Smack Deli is the Burger & Lobster team's go at fast food. You order from a short menu, wait around with a little buzzer in your pocket for your order to be ready, then either eat it in the functional seating area or take it boxed up back to the office. It's a great idea - egalitarian, attractive and accessible, bringing lovely fresh seafood to the Pret and Eat lunchtime crowd, and doing so with speed and style.

More good news - the lobster rolls at Smack are, whilst necessarily not as good as those from parent restaurant Burger & Lobster, fresh, tasty and insanely good value - £7.5 for (as far as I could tell) a whole lobster's worth inside a warm, crunchy brioche bun. The ordering system works well - I waited barely 30 seconds between picking up my buzzer and picking up my food, and though this is easy to do when you're not cooking the animals to order (the seafood itself is cold, but not of course frozen) no waiting around means no queues. I'd have liked some hot sauce on offer in the dining room, perhaps some more exciting accompaniments (courgette fries were the only option - what's wrong with potato?) but at these prices you can hardly complain. This is fresh lobster on a tiny budget, the kind of which I'd previously only seen in North America. On the face of it there's not much not to like, and on the strength of their product and process alone, Smack deserves to roar across town bashing the awful mayo-laden Pret and Eat branches into oblivion and bringing lobby rolls to the masses.

Except what's this, one of the styles of sandwich - the Japanese-inspired one, of course - is called the Happy Ending. And a sign pointing to overflow seating downstairs boasts of "wine, beer & naked women". I know, minor things really in the grand scheme of things, and perhaps I shouldn't be so bleeding-heart about it all and just let them get on with it, but... well, why is it when a restaurant is trying so self-consciously to be "edgy" that misogyny is always the first port of call? From mediocre burger joints looking for an easy route into the local papers, to trendy noodle bars plastering their toilet walls with pornography, "edgy" almost always means the same thing.

I mean, you don't see restaurants advising their interior designers to be 'edgy' and 'controversial' in other ways do you? I'm not seeing any East-African-pirate-themed hot dog stalls popping up in Camden ("All our meat is reared on hijacked container ships! Only one Khat Salad per customer!") or Civil-Rights-themed rib shacks in Soho ("Downstairs for beer wine and more slavery - sorry, spaces!"). And despite one hapless Mayfair restaurant happily boasting about hosting a Nigel Farage lunch a few weeks back (the restaurant industry being famously rarely in need of immigrant labour), I haven't yet noticed anywhere going the full-Third-Reich on the menu ("Two Goering Burgers and fries please." "Himmler Spritz?" "No, tap water's fine thanks."). Attention-seeking restaurants make casual references to prostitution because - for whatever reason - its gets them noticed (and yes, written about by do-gooders like me) more often than it gets them boycotted. Which says fairly worrying things about our attitudes in general.

Anyway, that's probably enough on the matter for now. The real shame of course is that while lesser restaurants have used "controversy" to raise their profile, there's absolutely no need for Smack to have done the same because their product is good enough to stand on its own. So hopefully, eventually, they'll rewrite the menu, take that stupid sign down and make an honest living selling fresh lobster rolls to happy customers. Let's leave the gimmicks to the other idiots, OK guys?

6/10

Photos taken with a Canon 700D with 50mm lens, kindly loaned from Canon.

Lyle's, Shoreditch

You'll notice it's been a little while since my last blog post. At first I had no better excuse than plain old laziness; I hadn't been anywhere particularly interesting, and so rather than write up some 6/10 set lunch at a South London gastropub that would be immediately forgotten seconds after I posted it, I thought I'd wait until something better came along. Then, just before something better did come along, I got very sick - "man flu" seems to be the fashionable way such things are dismissed these days except this wasn't just a sniffle; I was bedridden for the best part of a week and had to cancel all my birthday plans including a meal or two that would most likely have made very interesting blog material.

Then finally, just as I was back on my feet and looking forward to getting back in the saddle (sorry, illness seems to have affected my ability to use metaphors), a restaurant I was sure would make good copy (Five Fields) - and had been on my wishlist for a while - suffered a catastrophic power failure five minutes before our meal was due to begin. All was not entirely lost as we were quickly rehoused at the wonderful Medlar (whose cheeseboard deserves a blog of its own) but I was still in need of somewhere to write about. And things were getting desperate.

So to the rescue today, and not a moment too soon, comes Lyle's, somewhere that in an ideal world I would have been to months ago (it opened back in May) but - well, no, I'm not going to make any excuses about why I haven't been yet because I'm not really sure myself; the point is, I've been now, and it's great, and here's why.

You can always tell a huge amount about a restaurant from the quality of their house bread. When Lyle's first opened they were getting someone else to make it whilst their own was in development, but these days it's their own product, and my lord, what a good product it is. A not-too-thick crust, a gorgeous tacky crumb, and paired with a deep yellow, salty house butter, there are barely any finer ways to start a meal.

Pheasant liver toast & crabapple jelly is a twist on a bistro staple; there's something slightly lighter and smoother about pheasant as opposed to chicken liver, or perhaps that's just a more experienced hand in the kitchen than on display in your average local pub starter. Either way, this was very enjoyable. Yeah alright, the presentation's a bit turdy. Who cares.

You probably can tell everything you need to know about how good the game broth was from the picture, but I just want to stress how the neat circles of oil floated in the liquid like glimmering jewels, and that the egg was utterly perfectly cooked, the deep orange yolk of the Burford Brown bursting out when prodded with a spoon. I can demolish even a fairly mediocre game broth, and this was very far from mediocre.

The modestly-titled "crab & salsify" had a fresh, rich mixture of white meat and neat discs of salsify in a sort of thick liquid half way between a bisque and a sauce. It was frothy and light, but somehow held its shape as I heaped it onto the house bread. Clever stuff.

Pear & bitter leaf salad is of course not a new combination of ingredients, and if I'm to be brutally honest this was probably the least interesting of the small plates at Lyle's. But that's probably entirely deliberate. We only ordered it because we ordered everything - if you're the kind of person going round London ordering bitter leaf salads for your lunch then you'd probably be very happy with it.

Ox heart, pickled walnuts & brussels tops was my favourite dish, not because I automatically prefer anything involving grilled offal (though admittedly this must have played a part) but because the meat was dense and minerally, charred from the grill, the pickled walnuts played the part of capers, adding acid and complimenting the meat, and the brussel tops were just brilliant, soaked in butter and with a satisfying crunchy texture. If Lyle's can occasionally be accused of playing it safe (as with the bitter leaf salad for example), here is a dish, despite its superficial simplicity, that would have been less good had anything been added. Or taken away, for that matter.

What looked at first like a pile of beetroot actually hid some huge chunks of moist smoked mackerel, and the flavour combinations (along with the shaved horseradish on top) worked surprisingly well. It usually takes a lot for me to appreciate beetroot in any form (don't get me started on its seemingly ubiquitous use in desserts in fine dining restaurants, and whoever made a beetroot beer I tried in a craft pub in Camden once needs their license revoked) but this was firm without being dry, sweet without being soily.

Mallard legs & celeriac seemed to me like a visual pun on an Italian duck ragu with tagliatelle, but duck and celeriac are a fantastic match, and the more gamey Mallard here brought another dimension into play.

Finally, the flavours in smoked haddock, potato and buttermilk will be familiar to anyone who's ever had a fish supper in their life, but there's not much not to enjoy about decent fish in a nice creamy sauce. Perhaps the texture of the haddock was a little too crumbly, but it was all seasoned nicely and I was particularly impressed with the forensic knife skills on those chives - just look at them, millions of perfect miniscule green hoops.

Industry experts will tell you that whilst spods like me wave their SLRs around and bang on about offal, most of what makes a normal person's restaurant experience memorable is rather more to do with service, atmosphere and value. And though the food is clearly top drawer in many respects, it is in these three ancilliary categories that Lyle's leaps ahead of the pack. Service was friendly, attentive and relaxed in that East London style - as formal as they need to be, but with a ready smile. The room, and so therefore the atmosphere, is nothing short of beautiful; bright and clean and whitewashed with a nod to St John (chef James Lowe, of Young Turks fame, used to head up St John Bread & Wine just down the road) but somehow less austere and intimidating.

And with regards to value, well just take a look at the bill. Nine generous (albeit starter-sized) dishes, 3 glasses of very nice wine, and a total including service of under £30 a head. It's easy to point at the occasional famililarity, or complain that a certain set of ingredients aren't setting the world on fire, but all said and done you're eating dishes you'd be happy to come back to again and again, and you're doing so in a lovely room served by lovely staff who can't do enough for you. At lunchtimes at least, Lyle's is a joy.

8/10

Photos taken with a Canon 700D with 50mm lens, kindly loaned from Canon.