Hana, Battersea

One of the many enduring mysteries of London dining, alongside the baffling popularity of the Breakfast Club and why hand wash and moisturiser are always presented in identical-looking containers, is why there seem to be so few genuinely excellent Korean restaurants. Much as I sort of enjoyed Asadal in Holborn, Assa in Soho and a couple of places in New Malden (I had a lovely meal at Jin Go Gae but it was a press dinner so not very representative), none have really blown me away and hardly any have warranted a return visit. Most of the Korean restaurants I've come across in London so far have been at best solid, with very similar, somewhat unambitious menus that never really offer great value for money. It speaks volumes that the best of the bunch is probably Zip Bab, which gets a pass for the decent price points and friendly service, even if it's a bit like eating in a doctor's surgery waiting room.

What Korean food needs is perhaps what Silk Road does for Chinese food or Kanada-Ya does for Japanese - ultra specialisation on either one dish or one specific region. A restaurant that unapologetically offers a focussed, coherent vision of what the best Korean food should be, and pours its energies into making that one thing (or one style) as exciting as possible, without sacrificing anything to any notion of what London is "ready for" or what is least likely to offend. If London is anything it's a city of risk-takers, and - so far - Korean restaurateurs are yet to take advantage of that.

If it sounds like I'm building up to announce the discovery of a Korean Bao or Hoppers, well, I'm not. Sorry. Hana is fine in the way that most Korean restaurants in London are at least fine but it suffers from the same lack of ambition as so many others, and barely stands out from the crowd even on Battersea Rise, a road which contains such joys as "Café Rouge with a GCSE" Côte, dull-as-dishwater pan-Asian chain Banana Tree, and, yes, bloody Breakfast Club.

I was pleasantly surprised at first to see that Hana offer three different types of kimchee. I'm reliably informed (though have never been myself) that in Korea the best establishments offer a huge variety, with each restaurant fiercely proud - and protective - of its own particular way with fermented pickled cabbage. The standard kimchee at Hana was decent, though would have benefitted from a bit more of a chilli kick, but the "Kkak Du Gi" (radish) was pretty bland and uninspiring and the "Ohi kimchee" (cucumber) had a rather offputting fizz to it. Perhaps this was deliberate, and I'm showing my Korean food ignorance here, but it spoke of something less "fermented" than simply "gone off".

"Hana Sticky Chicken" should have been wonderful. In fact I don't know how you manage to cook fried chicken in a soy/chilli sauce and not have it be wonderful, but Hana managed it, ending up with a sweet, bland dressing that had plenty of empty chilli heat with none of the flavour. One day a dish called "sticky chicken" will end up tasting as good as it looks on paper, but this wasn't it.

Continuing the theme, "Soontofu Jigae" should be a rich, beguiling seafood soup/stew, powerfully seasoned with anchovy stock and packed full of interesting shellfish. How on earth this ended up with all the personality of tap water is a complete mystery - like Liberace's front room it had plenty of colour and no taste.

I should point out in fairness that my companion said she enjoyed her chicken bibimbap very much, and polished off most of it. But the one bit of cubed chicken breast I tried was unpleasantly dry, and I'm not sure in what reality cheap chicken, rice and chopped veg should cost £10.95. Even Asadal only charge £8.50 for theirs and they have Holborn rents to contend with.

Service eventually settled down but started weirdly. Two members of staff, chatting at the bar, saw me furiously signalling for a beer but instead of coming over themselves waited until a third person appeared from the back and got them to see what I wanted. At first I thought this was because those first couple of people weren't serving staff, but then one of them later brought me my Soontofu Jigae. So I don't know what was going on there, other than me feeling like I was a bit of an inconvenience.

It's doubly frustrating that Hana wasn't the Korean restaurant I'd been waiting for, not just because it's within walking distance of my house (though this in itself should have set alarm bells ringing; nothing good ever happens in Clapham Junction) but because I know Korean food can be so good. Ask anyone who's ever eaten in Korea, and they'll tell you the street food markets and Buddhist temple restaurants and seolleongtang (beef bone soup from an ancient recipe) stalls of Seoul are the stuff of dreams. The best KFC (Korean Fried Chicken) I've come across in London was a short-lived collaboration between Gizzi Erskine and the Soho branch of Tonkotsu, and lovely though it was, it's a pretty clear sign that the Korean foodies of London need to seriously up their game. Come on guys, we're ready for you.

5/10

The Ninth, Fitzrovia

For as long as I've been writing this blog, and a good deal of time before that as well, major life landmarks - birthdays, house moves, graduations, separations and reunions - have been celebrated with a hearty meal. Depending on circumstance and budget these have been anything from a mixed grill at Tayyabs to a 3 Michelin-starred tasting menu on the Costa Brava but they all have one thing in common; out of the ridiculous number of different restaurants I visit in any given year I can only find time to revisit the very best, and so it's world-beating spots like Quality Chop House, Trishna and Goodman that I will gather my nearest and dearest to enjoy/suffer with me.

Ten years ago, when I was turning thirty, my favourite high-end restaurant was Pearl, in the Renaissance Chancery Court hotel in Holborn. You may be more familiar with the site now as being occupied by the Holborn Dining Room, and the Rosewood hotel, but back then this grand space was home to chef Jun Tanaka who served a Mediterranean menu of reimagined classics like ratatouille and leek terrine alongside delicate handmade pasta and fancy schmancy desserts. It was all thrilling stuff, and made a fantastic birthday venue - slick service, a great cheeseboard, and nice toilets.

Subject to the usual drifts and currents of the London restaurant world, Pearl eventually closed, and Jun Tanaka became better known for a street food venture called Street Kitchen which dotted about the place during the London Restaurant Festival, and of course his regular appearances on BBC1's Saturday Kitchen. Then finally in 2016, he got back in a real kitchen and opened the Ninth on Charlotte Street. Which brings us to today.

There are plenty of things about the way Tanaka is going about things at the Ninth that I remember from all those years ago in Holborn. There's the confident pasta section, involving ingredients you'd actually want to eat like langoustine and rabbit. There's the attitude of things like sea bass with Datterini tomatoes and cockles, or veal tongue tonnato, playing with Italian traditions but very much in his own style. But most importantly, there's that sense of excitement and fun, in everything from the food to the service, that just makes you want to work through every item on the menu and then come back for more.

We started with oysters, because we could, and everytime we can start with oysters, we do. They were lean and fresh, with an interesting vaguely Asian ginger vinaigrette, and though they didn't really need the crisp shallots on top it didn't do any harm either.

Flamed mackerel also had an international feel - dill, cucumbers and capers are recognisably Northern European but the way the fish was presented, sliced into bitesize strips and with a spatula to serve, felt like the kind of thing they'd do in Chinatown. It tasted great as well, the mackerel being just smoked enough from the grill and the flesh irresistibly plump.

Equally great was beef cheek with oxtail consommé, the beef so tender and ribboned with fat it was almost sausagey, and the consommé rich and complex, speaking of a broad knowledge of classical French techniques learned from people like Marco Pierre White and Phil Howard. Even the most skilled home cook would struggle to make a consommé like this; and why would you bother with all that anyway when there's someone ready to make it for you for a nominal £11.50 fee?

From here on, with Tanaka's authority over fine dining firmly re-established, the Ninth could do little wrong. The pasta courses were mini symphonies of flavour, firstly agnolotti of rabbit with livers (is there any more beautiful phrase than "rabbit with livers"?), studded with girolles and boasting pasta so silky and smooth it was almost ethereal.

Similarly these striking parcels of langoustine, jet-black with (presumably) squid ink and slick with a deeply satisfying Datterini tomato sauce. I don't care how spoiled you are for great pasta after braving the queues at Padella or the noisy tables at Fat Tony's, great pasta is great pasta and is always enough to make me smile.

Main course was a whole grilled seabass, skin crisp and flesh moist, surrounded by more of those punchy Datterini and a liberal scattering of plump cockles. Tanaka's background in classical techniques was again on show here, the dressing on the seabass in its own way just as impressive as the earlier beef consommé but a completely different style performing a completely different function. I guess the French do know something about food, after all.

Had the meal ended there the Ninth would have been heading for something approaching a perfect score, and yet sadly just a couple of sides and a dessert weren't quite up to the standard of what had come before. I still can't quite believe something called "Black truffle polenta, Comté and egg yolk" could somehow conspire to be disappointing but this needed a lot more cheese, a lot more truffle, a lot more flavour...

...pickled baby artichokes were nothing more than fine, with even the shaved parmesan being oddly muted...

...and most oddly of all, a tarte tatin was slightly sour and underpowered, needing far more sugar to reach that heavenly caramelised taste of the finest examples. Perhaps this was a deliberate decision by the Ninth; all I can say is I like my tarte tatins to contain so much sugar I'm at risk of getting Type 2 diabetes just being in the same room as one, and this was... well, it was disappointing to say the least. Looked pretty enough, though.

And all said and done, the odd mis-step aside (and I realise for tarte tatin fans one of those was quite a large mis-step), there's more than enough reason to spend your dinner money at the Ninth. As he did in Pearl a decade ago, Jun Tanaka infuses his menus with so much love, so many intriguing ingredients and impressive techniques, that it's almost impossible there won't be something on the menu that would have the same effect on you that the beef cheek consommé or the flame-grilled mackerel had on us. Namely, that as soon as it was all done, we wanted to come back as soon as possible and do it all again. And there's hardly any higher compliment than that.

8/10

I was invited to the Ninth and didn't see a bill. From a quick calculation it would have come to about £80/head including more than enough booze.

Bright, Hackney

As much as I am very happy to travel quite significant distances in search of a good meal, as the geographic spread of restaurants on this blog will hopefully indicate, I do sometimes wish there was a bit more going on in my own neck of the woods. Battersea, and the Lavender Hill / Northcote Road area in particular, is a weird wasteland of family-friendly coffee shops and tired throwbacks, with only the Vietnamese restaurant Mien Tay, and Donna Margherita (if you stick to the pizzas), worth visiting out of a good thirty or forty licensed establishments. Considering the number of people who live in the area, a good chunk of whom would surely pay good money for a decent feed, the absence of anywhere offering a decent product is baffling. And yes, I know about Wright Bros and Tonkotsu in Battersea Power Station but that's so far from Clapham Junction it may as well be Vauxhall.

So it was with a certain amount of trepidation I began my journey from SW11 to E8 on Saturday. Surely to goodness Hackney already has more than enough amazing restaurants? The single stretch of bus route from Old Street took me past the Clove Club, Sagar & Wilde, Morito, The Marksman and The Laughing Heart before dropping me outside Mare St Market, a huge and heavenly air-conditioned collective of bars and restaurants and record shops and much else besides which has just opened as if Hackneyites didn't already have enough to shout about. It would simply not be fair if Bright was good too. I didn't need yet another reason to make that bloody trek across town.

Of course, inevitably, Bright is not just good but brilliant, a shining new jewel in the crown of East End dining and more than enough reason to make a hideous hour-plus-long journey in the baking heat. A journey, by the way, which is instantly forgotten as soon as you plonk yourself down at the beautiful wooden bar and are presented with a cold glass of crisp Provence rosé. There's no (obvious) air conditioning at Bright, but huge floor to ceiling window doors at either end of the room provide a lovely natural breeze, and as long as you're not at the picnic tables out front in the sun (or indeed in the rain, hard as that is to imagine at the moment), you should find the setting every bit as charming as we did.

What separates a good from a great restaurant is not always obvious, or even quantifiable, but as good an early indicator as any is probably a menu that contains rare or unusual ingredients or dishes. Whether through lack of imagination or in an attempt to find as broad a customer base as possible, restaurant menus often tend to follow a certain formula - starters of steak tartare, burrata, mains of onglet and fries, sea bass, desserts of pannacotta, sorbet. And often there's nothing wrong with that; not everywhere has to reinvent the wheel. But when did you last see 'Scarlet prawns' on a menu? Perhaps only at top-tier Spanish restaurant Barrafina where they're slightly bigger and called Carabineros, so full marks to Bright for seeking them out, cooking them utterly perfectly so that the tail meat is bouncy and moist and the heads full of that extraordinary salty bisque so complex and rewarding it's hard to believe it could just be found inside the animal as-is.

Katsu, that is breaded and deep-fried pork (usually, or sometimes chicken) sandwiches have started cropping up all over London in recent weeks. I made a trip to Brixton to try Nanban's version, and very good it was too, available takeaway only served from a separate hatch around the side of the building in case you want to go and sample it yourself. The Bright sando is easily as enjoyable, with fluffy soft white bread cradling tender pork, a sharp tamarind dressing and that all important crunch of fried breadcrumbs.

It was Tomos Parry's restaurant Brat, above Smoking Goat on Shoreditch High Street, that introduced London to the Elkano-inspired charcoal-roasted turbot on the bone, and indeed you should definitely go to Brat if you get a chance - that's another restaurant which goes out of its way to find unusual seafood like spider crabs and john dory. But here's the thing, and I hope I'm still welcome in Shoreditch after this comment, but I actually prefer the turbot at Bright. With a glorious crisped-up skin that held an obscene amount of liquid fat, and boasting a blinding white flesh, this was an absolutely magical bit of fish, the result of top-end ingredients treated in exactly the right way. Incredible.

Quail wasn't quite as transformative an experience to eat, but then that's hardly much of a criticism. It was still a lovely bit of bird, robustly seasoned and glazed with garum - a fermented fish sauce favoured by the Romans - and gently pink inside. It's tempting to summarise Bright's cooking style as that Modern British restaurant cliché "good ingredients, simply prepared" and it's true that there aren't a bewildering array of techniques on display here. But there's nothing straightforward about cooking turbot as well as that, or managing to get those prawns to the absolute best state they could be. Simple does not mean easy.

Desserts had the same stripped-back confidence of the savoury courses. "Chocolate, coriander seed & sea salt" was three large pieces of good dark chocolate, seemingly shaped on a crinkled up baking sheet, with an interesting added floral note from somewhere.

And "amazake" (a drink made from fermented rice, like sake but lower alcohol) ice cream with sour cherries was the perfect summer dessert, good soft ice cream boasting clean, precise flavours.

So congratulations - again - Hackney, you lucky, lucky bastards. You didn't need yet another thrilling, dynamic modern restaurant on your doorstep but you've got one anyway, and if it means lazy Battersea-based food bloggers have to suffer the indignities of superheated Routemasters and ten stops on the Northern Line to reach it well, quite frankly that's their problem. And you know what, I will be making that journey again, even if it's 32C and the heating on the top deck is stuck to "on", because if this is the way restaurants in London are heading, with elegant wine lists and dishes of stark, simple beauty, then we have an awful lot to look forward to. The future's Bright.

9/10

Jöro, Sheffield

Before it comes to the stage of trying the food at Jöro, you'd be forgiven for assuming that a certain Place In Copenhagen features as a significant influence on the way they go about things here in Sheffield. There's the name, of course - Old Norse for 'earth' and pronounced 'yoro' which as a nice ring to it and looks suitably Nordic written down with its umlaut. And then there's the building itself - is there anything more thrustingly modern than a converted shipping container? It's beautifully done, too, without a bad table in the house, each well-spaced and sensitively lit, bringing to mind the industrial aesthetic of another Copenhagen institution Amass. So far, so familiar.

And yet to dismiss Jöro as a Yorkshire Noma is to do it a great disservice. And not only because I thought Noma was far too pleased with its mastery of odd techniques to remember to actually give people a good time (I had a far more enjoyable lunch at Jöro), but because really, superficialities aside, Jöro is very much its own animal, taking just as many cues from Asian, and even traditional Yorkshire, cuisine than anything Scandi.

There's also the question of cost. Our evening began with an apology from front of house - one of the courses out of the tasting menu wasn't available, so instead of the usual 8 for £45, they could offer us 7 for £40. By anyone's standards, a 7-course tasting menu for £40, with a matching wine/cocktail option for an extra £35, is still an utter bargain, and would have been worth the trip up to Sheffield even if the kitchen had been less than competent and the advertised 7 courses been the sum total of the food offered.

Of course, this being Yorkshire where the compulsion to overfeed runs deep in genetic makeup of its people (I should know, my grandmother's family owned a fish and chip shop in Wombwell), Jöro aren't about to let you get away with just eating seven courses. Fully three sets of nibbles preceded the "first" course, a lovely linseed cracker dotted with blobs of cream cheese and beetroot...

...a mouthful of warm black pudding topped with apple sauce, rich and comforting...

...and a completely stunning duck croquette, managing to pack more flavour into this tiny cube of breaded, fried meat than almost any similar nibble I've had the good fortune to try for as long as I can remember. With a deep, almost sour game flavour and perhaps a touch of something alcoholic, it was a seriously impressive bit of work.

First course proper was a pretty 'tomato tartare' showcasing powerful San Marzano tomatoes and fresh summer herbs to great effect. Matched with this was Jöro's take on a Bloody Mary, a tomato consommé and vodka mixture that had an even more overwhelmingly "tomatoey" hit than the food. I don't care how jaded or cynical you try to be, there is no way a glass of clear liquid tasting like the world's finest Bloody Mary isn't going to make you gasp. It certainly did me.

Given that everything else from the kitchens at Jöro was so accomplished, it was very odd - not to mention a bit of a surprise - that the bread was so disappointing. Pappy and dry, it wasn't stale as such - at least I don't think that was the issue - it was just nowhere near as good as it should have been. There must be better bakeries out there - I've heard good things about Forge on Abbeydale Rd - so let's hope the house bread offering gets a makeover some time soon.

Anyway we were soon back on track with the scallops. With neat discs of seafood dressed speckled with vibrant parsley oil, and sprinkled with horseradish and samphire, it was as pretty as it was deceptively complex, all the various summer herbs and dressings combining in such a way as to not have any one stand out but allowing the scallop - cured in elderflower vinegar, which just removed the 'flabbiness' of raw scallop without destroying the freshness - to still be the main flavour.

Similarly barbecued pork neck glazed in some kind of sweet/sour, umami-rich Japanese dressing, its intense flavours cooled by pressed cucumber and texture added with toasted cashews. Japanese flavours featured in several of the courses at Jöro, and although jumping around global cuisines runs the risk of being confusing or disjointed, the sensitive and only occasional use of things like yuzu or dashi at Jöro makes perfect sense. It's also worth pointing out that the wine that this course came matched with, a Riesling I think, very cleverly matched the sugar levels in the pork with just the right amount of sweetness, producing a clean, crisp effect that was quite something.

In this broccoli dish, the vegetable blackened and smokey from the grill, paired with a blob of irresistibly addictive black garlic paste and topped with a generous dusting of very good Vacche Rosse Parmesan. By this point, you'll probably guess, we were having a blast. Inventive, exciting cooking like this, presented with flair and skill by an extremely competent front of house team, doesn't along very often, but the knowledge we were going to be sent home stuffed, drunk and happy for around £70 a head made the whole atmosphere even more giddy. As I scooped up the last of the black garlic I began making plans to rent a flat in Kelham Island and spend long, lazy days in the Fat Cat pub drinking pints of £3.40 local ales.

Next a huge, plump duck breast glazed with local heather honey, with a brilliantly sharp and complex wild blackcurrant sauce, beetroot and al-dente hispi cabbage. If I'm going to be brutal, perhaps not the most flavoursome bird I've ever been asked to eat, but cooked absolutely beautifully and so made up for a little depth of flavour with an utterly charming texture. After the dish was finished, the sauces and oils left on the plate - deep vermilion reds of fruits and meat juices, and emerald green cabbage oils, made the plate resemble a work of modern art.

Pre-dessert (yes, that's the fourth additional 'course' so far for our £40) was a smooth sour cream ice cream topped with summer berries, like a kind of fancy Müller fruit corner. Lovely tableware it came in too, a kind of rough stone bowl softened with frost.

First dessert proper was a brown butter and muscovado parfait on top of what they coyly referred to as 'parkin', a Yorkshire cake that's a kind of soft flapjack. The parfait itself, and the neat spheres of sake-soaked apple on top, were hugely enjoyable and worth the price of admission, but unfortunately the 'parkin' beneath, perhaps because they'd decided to tone down the strong ginger element usually present in parkin, was a bit bland, and the soft texture didn't really sit well. Still, full marks for invention and local colour.

"Yorkshire strawberries and raspberries" turned out to be an incredibly light yoghurt mousse of some kind, studded with dried and frozen fruit and spiked with yuzu. Light, refreshing and summery, it dissolved in the mouth like dairy candy floss, and was another great example of Jöro's mastery of technique. Also, being so insubstantial it was, despite our almost completely sated appetites, incredibly easy to eat, a very welcome thing indeed at this point in the meal.

Incredibly, Jöro decided to gift us with yet one more final flourish - petits fours of summer fruit marshmallows, and very lovely things they were too.

But that, eventually, sadly, was it. The bill, as I keep banging on about, came to £143 total, which included more than enough booze - but the Yorkshire generosity didn't even end at the glasses of Picpoul which our sommellier filled up to about the level of a half pint with a cheeky grin. No, Jöro had one final flourish of northern hospitality up its sleeve - no service charge. So we worked out the usual London % and left it in cash, because they'd earned every last bloody penny.

I don't want to focus too much on the bill though, because I don't want to give the impression that my enjoyment of lunch at Jöro was largely due to the fact I knew I was getting a bargain in contrast to what similar meals would have cost down in Shoreditch or Marylebone. Yes, Jöro is insanely good value - a good 30% less than what they could still charge with a straight face and far less you'd spend at far lesser restaurants, even in Sheffield. But the most important thing about Jöro, in fact the only important thing all said and done, is that they serve some of the finest food in the country, in one of the finest cities in the country, and there's absolutely no way you could eat here and not have the time of your life. So let's just leave it at that.

9/10