Viet Grill, Kingsland Road

Mien Tay Battersea is a wonderful restaurant, serving spectacular food at miniscule prices, with staff so smiley and warm you want to take them home with you. It would be a wonderful restaurant anywhere in London, of course, but as I've mentioned before, its location on Lavender Hill is nothing short of a miracle, and has probably single-handedly raised the nearby house prices to a statistically significant degree. But it's too easy to forget that back where it all began for Vietnamese food in London, on the Kingsland Road in the East End, there are a selection of restaurants who regularly give Mien Tay a run for its money, and fuel the virtuous circle of competition and higher standards that we've come to expect from this most exciting and satisfying of cuisines. One of these restaurants is the Viet Grill.



Unusually for reviews on this blog, this isn't my first visit to the Viet Grill. I usually try and write up places after a first visit, which is perhaps not a completely fair method (to say the least) but is at least consistent, and I estimate I've eaten here well over twenty times since I discovered it a couple of years ago. Other than a lick of paint and the occasional change of staff, though, not a great deal has changed, so I hope this is as reliable a review as any other I've posted. Not very, in other words. But here we go anyway.


If there's one thing that the Vietnamese can do better than anyone else, it's a salad. It's mainly a texture thing - the combination a multitude of ingredients that go pop, crunch, squish and splosh, all on one plate, is addictive and unique, as far as I can tell, to these kinds of restaurants. This mango salad contained fragrant Thai basil, tasty shoots of (I think) lotus stem, a couple of hits of bright red chilli and - best of all - crunchy tubes of salty dried squid tentacles, and it all worked together perfectly. All the fresh, fragrant ingredients not only made an incredibly tasty dish but even made you feel like you were doing yourself good when eating it. And you can't often say that.


Crispy spring rolls were perhaps quite a tame choice (we had eaten the delicious summer rolls on many previous visits and fancied a change) but were deftly fried and had a greaseless crunch. They came with a thin, vinegary chilli dip which was a cut above your average gloopy sweet sauce, as you'd expect.


This beautiful, tender, charcoal-seared 'Feudal roasted beef' was at £9 one of the more expensive starters, but boy do you get your money's worth. First of all, the sheer quantity of it, which would by most restaurants standards be a good main course portion, and also, the beef itself was superb, powerfully marinated and served with an umami-rich soy dressing.


I didn't know what to make of the Saigon pork belly dish when it first arrived - it looked challenging to say the least, the huge cubes of fat wobbling provocatively in the caramelised coconut sauce. But on tasting, all was forgiven. I admit to separating the majority of the fat from the meat and leaving it uneaten - there was too much of it even for me - but the coconut sauce was rich and moreish and the stewed pork pieces had fantastic strong flavour.


Along with a couple of bowls of steamed rice (which I used to soak up the rest of the pork coconut sauce) and a couple of glasses of wine, the final bill came to £20 each, perhaps slightly more than the same meal might have been at Mien Tay but in nicer surroundings and with certainly a comparable level of cooking. Kingsland Road is a fine example of what can happen when restaurants all compete on the same style of cuisine, and instead of trying to survive by slashing ingredient costs and employing pushier fronts of house (a la Brick Lane) instead try to outdo each other by serving better food. It's the way it should work and yet so rarely does. And the results speak for themselves.

9/10

The Cadogan Arms, Chelsea

There I was on the bus, reading Marina O'Loughlin's enormously satisfying evisceration of Zilli Green last Wednesday morning, and something struck me as strangely familiar. Not the writing, which was unique and as vivid as ever (on a tofu dish - "this is a ceiling tile in clumsy drag"), and not even the fact that yet another Aldo Zilli restaurant is revealed to be a cack-handed, cynical vanity project - that too is par for the course. What I recognised was the photo, the very same as that which had graced the top of the Harden's review from a few weeks before. Now I'm guessing that neither O'Loughlin or the Hardens boys had anything to do with the photo that was used to illustrate their pieces - presumably it came from the restaurant PR people and was supplied long after the review - but it did get me thinking. Call me an old-fashioned, self-serving food blogger cheerleader (and many more besides), but I like to see pictures of the food, a room full of happy diners and busy waiting staff, even action shots of the chefs. What I can't see any value in is a perfectly made up, beautifully-lit still-life of a deserted restaurant. Which is ironic, because this was the first picture I took as I entered the Cadogan Arms:


Beautifully lit and professionally shot it may not be (you must know how this blog works by now), but even so, this is no staged PR clipart - this is how the place looked at 1:15pm on Easter Friday afternoon. And, by God, we were about to find out why.


First of all, an £8.50 Bloody Mary, watery and unsatisfying, and shot through with unpleasant chewy bits of horseradish. It was garnished with a stick of celery dipped (pointlessly) in pre-ground course black pepper which throughout the course of the afternoon shed tiny dark lumps onto the tabletop, managing to find their way into clothing, under fingernails, and into the desserts. I'm not going to go into a great deal of detail about the dishes that followed, because everything that is wrong about the Cadogan can be summed up in this drink - badly conceived, badly constructed, overpriced, pretentious, and irritating.


Briefly, then, the food. A starter of steak tartare may have used pretty good fillet steak, only thanks to the sheer amount of mustard they'd put in you couldn't tell. It was a bit like eating lumpy mustard, with a raw egg on top.


My main course was a whole baked mackerel. The best thing you could say about this dish was the flesh wasn't overcooked. The worst thing you could say was that it was a leather-bound, underseasoned chore, surrounded by three weird stone-cold barrels of aubergine-wrapped tomato thing, and some cold slimy mushrooms. A companions 'bubble and squeak' was also stone cold, with a shockingly bitter hollandaise and accompanied by an overwhelming reek of cheap truffle oil.


I don't know why we ordered desserts. Perhaps it was the fact we were both still hungry after barely picking at our mains, or perhaps we were just morbidly fascinated to see what else they could cock up. My deep-fried jam sandwich, a la 60 Hope Street Liverpool, was flabby and unattractive, and tasted like eggy bread covered in jam. It's not supposed to, in case you were wondering - 60 Hope Street is my favourite Liverpool restaurant and the original, though actually not the best dessert they do these days, is far better. Worse, though, was my companion's three pathetic cubes of marshmallow, accompanied by a tiny lump of peanut crackling and a small jug of cold (yes, cold) chocolate sauce. Badly conceived, badly constructed, overpriced, pretentious, and irritating. Are we getting the picture yet?


I don't know why the Cadogan Arms has been getting such good reviews recently - I'd be tempted to write it off as a bad night, or perhaps as it's Easter the head chef wasn't there, but I honestly can't see how some of these dishes - particularly my leather-baked mackerel with aubergine cylinders, or that weird marshmallow thing, would have worked even anyone in the kitchen HAD given a shit.


In case anyone is still on the fence, and is in any tiny way inclined to give the Cadogan Arms another shot - consider this. Although my Bloody Mary cost £8.50, which I take full responsibility for, my companion's lime and soda cost £3. I'll say that again - a lime and soda at the Cadogan will cost you £3. One more time, with feeling - badly conceived, badly constructed, overpriced, pretentious, and irritating.

2/10

Thanks to Andrew Webb of eyedropper for inspiration on the blogger vs. professional photographer bit

EDIT 8/4/10: A very contrite Cadogan Arms have emailed to point out that my Bloody Mary was £6.50, not £8.50, so I'm happy to correct that point. It was still crap though.

Cheese of the Month - Charolais

Having snapped up this pretty little barrel-shaped Charolais in Hamish Johnston last weekend, in a bit of a rush to get back to the house and light up the barbeque before the heavens opened, I assumed that I could Google the important details at a later date, tack on a tasting note or two, and call it a review. After all, that's how this process normally works. I don't, believe it or not, have an encyclopaedic knowledge of cheese - in fact I'd be lost without sites such as Fromages or http://www.slashfood.com, where the intimate particulars of almost every cheese you can think of is listed in extraordinary detail. Very handy they are indeed, to a chancer like me.

But while pulling together a set of notes for Charolais, I came across a number of annoying inconsistencies. Charolais is "traditionally" made, according to Fromages, from a mixture of one part cow's to two parts goat's milk, and although production varies from farm to farm - this is after all an artisan product, not a Kraft cheese slice - from the handful of sites I've browsed it seems this element of mixing and tweaking the mix of cow's to goat's milk is an important part of the character of the cheese. And yet what's this - on 23rd January 2010, according to Slashfood, Charolais became a AOC label cheese, and as part of the strict criteria that comes with this poisoned chalice, using cow's milk in any stage of the process is now strictly forbidden.

I'm a bit grey on these AOC and DOP badges. Protecting culinary heritage and artisan producers is all very well, but it seems odd that a group of bureaucrats can in the year 2010 suddenly put a stop to a perfectly valid method of producing perfectly good cheese that's been going on since God knows when. Or if not put a stop to it then prevent people calling it Charolais. I'm sure they think they're preserving authenticity but in the end it's them that's decided what's authentic in the first place.


The reason I mention all this is because this authentic, authenticated and genuine Charolais, presumably made from 100% goat's milk because them's the laws nowadays, didn't really excite me very much. The texture, first of all, was very uniform and cloying - moisture is usually a good thing but this was rather unpleasant; it coated your mouth like putty. And there wasn't much going on in the flavour department either. At first there was almost literally no flavour at all, but then a hint of a grassy aftertaste prevented the whole thing from being a complete waste of time. Still, it's hardly a ringing endorsement of the strict new designation - if is an example of an AOC Charolais then I can't really see why it was worth protecting in the first place.

So the question is, would this cheese have been any better if the producers had been allowed to use a mix of cow's and goat's milk to their liking, or tweaked various other elements, even if they wouldn't have in the end been able to call it Charolais? My instinct says yes. The habit - and I'm mainly talking about France and Italy here, though there are other examples - of obsessing over and dictating the ingredients, process and geographic location of a cheese at the expense of ending up with a product that is actually any good to eat, seems incredibly counter-productive. If someone started making an Epoisses-style cheese in Canada (don't laugh) and it tasted just as good, I'm sure there would be very few people who would care that it wasn't "authentic". Then again, the Canadians wouldn't know what to do with a cheese that you couldn't melt onto chips, so it's probably nothing we'll ever have to worry about.

3/10

Bob Bob Ricard, Soho

Bob Bob Ricard is a strange, glittering fantasy world at the best of times, as opulent as Versaille and as superficial as Oz, its chandeliers and emerald green lamps leaving just enough in the light to be beautiful, and just enough in the dark to be inscrutable. It's not so much like stepping back in time as stepping into another universe, or taking a trip on the Hogwarts Express to Wonderland, where bizarre details ("Press for Champagne") lurk at every turn, and charming staff in powder pink uniforms prepare psychedelic cocktails and serve beef soup from a teapot. Returning for the first time after the infamous Vintage Vodka Tasting evening, however, was an even more peculiar experience than normal. Occasional details and tastes would trigger a memory of groggy vodka-laced incident from last month, provoking a hot flush of shame or a sharp uncontrollable guffaw, or very often both at the same time. I'm sure my dining companion thought I was going mad. Perhaps I was.


But I said I'd be back, and here I was, settled into a cosy green booth and sipping on an extraordinarily good rhubarb gin and tonic, sweet and frothed with egg white. A vodka Appletini was equally good, served ice cold and in lovely glassware. Based on this evidence it would be well worth just popping into Bob Bob Ricard's downstairs bar for a cocktail, but then I'm not entirely sure it's possible to just "pop in" to Bob Bob Ricard at all. You never really feel in control of your own actions in this place - you're stealthily manipulated into having a good time, whether you like it or not.


I had specifically returned for the Zakuski - bite size Russian dishes served with ice-cold premium vodka. The pickled herring and boiled potato was as good as I barely remember, and salmon roe on quails egg was a delicious combination of soft egg and salty, bursty roe. Kauffman vintage vodka washed them down far, far too easily, and was again served in very attractive glassware, the immediate sight of which whisked me back a month and to a vision of me trying to decide which of two forkfuls of ox tongue in aspic I was holding up was real and which wasn't. I hope I guessed correctly.


The Bob Bob Ricard burger turned out to be one of the best I've tried in London. I won't go so far as to say this was a surprise - nothing in BBR is a surprise, your expectations are assaulted and confounded so frequently the abnormal becomes normal - but it was certainly welcome. Good quality beef, cooked perfectly medium, and a good strong sesame bun. Word has it that BBR are soon to launch an authentic American burger, using Kraft cheese. Another reason to go back, damn them.


A second main course - a special - of roast veal, foie gras and black truffle jus was simply wonderful. Light, pink veal, sliced into delicate pieces, sat on top of a bed of juicy spinach and beside a generous slab of wobbly, buttery foie. And the black truffle jus was so good (and came in such quantity) I ordered extra bread to soak it all up, only just resisting the temptation to drink it straight out of its silver serving jug. One of the best dishes I've eaten all year, and proof that Bob Bob Ricard seem to be able to master French cuisine as well as they do everything else.


I hardly ever order desserts, but I couldn't leave without trying some of their homemade ice creams, including a delicious salty caramel. I was probably too full to make the most of them, but sadly I didn't have a choice in the matter. The restaurant chose for me.


At the end of the evening, I'd spent too much, drunk too much and eaten far too much, but I can't say I feel too guilty - it was all essentially out of my hands. Bob Bob Ricard is a huge, manipulative, mind-altering experiment in decadence, and if you can relax and surrender yourself to their whims and fancies you are guaranteed a good time. Far too much of a good time, in fact - far too much than is good for you. You may think I'm exaggerating, that I'm a glutton and a hedonist and weak-willed. Perhaps you're right. But if you sat down at a table, plush and inviting and romantically lit, and saw a button shining beside you marked "Press for champagne", can you put your hand on your heart and tell me you wouldn't press it? Honestly?

Didn't think so.

10/10

Bar Pepito, Kings Cross

Spanish cuisine is one of the things that London seems to have been doing very well of late; I've never had anything less than a great meal in all of the Brindisa outposts, and places like Dehesa and Salt Yard are consistently excellent, so I was understandably frothing with anticipation at the prospect of visiting London's first, dedicated sherry bar. The idea appealed hugely, and seemed eminently sensible. Think of how many "fusion" restaurants are actually any good - when was the last time you went anywhere that did an excellent fish and chips AND an excellent Thai green curry? It just doesn't happen. The key to a good restaurant or bar is not to try and be all things to all people, but to focus on what you're good at, and do just that one thing VERY well. You won't find Tayyabs putting chicken korma on the menu because some people don't like spicy food - those people just won't go to Tayyabs. And quite right too.


I would have happily blown my own hard-earned cash on an evening supping chilled Tio Pepe and folding in slivers of freshly-carved Jamón ibérico, and in fact very often have, but I was lucky enough to be invited to Bar Pepito on the press night, and didn't pay for any of it. This report, then, comes with the usual caveats that apply to many of these press launches - they give you far more free booze than is good for you, the service is eager to impress, and the PR people are charming and informative. But I have a very strong suspicion that even without any of this, I still would have fallen in love with the place. First of all, it's a lovely little spot, tucked away in an old warehouse around the back of Kings Cross, with attractive bare brick walls and and a very authentic Iberian feel. Secondly, the quality of the tapas is absolutely top notch. Not only do they have a wonderful selection of Spanish cheeses (albeit sweating slightly in the heat of the room - an airconditioning unit will be required to get them through the summer months I think), but they also have a qualified "Master Carver", who last night was expertly carving a leg of genuine pata negra into a plateful of delicate wafer-thin morsels.


And last but not least, the sherries. Despite the owners being Gonzalez Byass they have a commendably liberal selection from other producers, neatly categorized into 'Manzanilla', 'Amontillado', 'Fino' and so on. The Tio Pepe Fino (£3.50 a glass) was as good as ever, but I also managed to try a glass of a sweeter 'Matusalem' (£5.50) which went very well with the cheeses. I'm a complete sherry novice, and I'll leave it to others far more knowledgeable and qualified than me to go into more detail on the drinks, but I thought they were both superb.


Sounds like the perfect bar, so far, doesn't it? And that's kind of the problem. It is. And in a part of town crying out for just this kind of post-work casual-but-different drop-in spot. And it's attractive, and reasonably priced (a plate of that lovingly-carved, top-quality Iberico is £15, a steal compared to some places), and friendly. But it's absolutely tiny. With barely a half dozen customers Bar Pepito would feel buzzy - in full flow on a Friday night I'd be very worried you wouldn't fit inside at all. But then again, the courtyard outside has tables and chairs, and soon summer will be here and happy customers will spill outside with chilled Fino and plates of ham and all will be well with the world. Until then, I strongly urge you to visit Bar Pepito before the secret's out and it's packed to the rafters every night. Because it will be. You mark my words.


I was invited to review Bar Pepito. Initially they will open Wednesday to Saturday from 5pm until midnight.

Fernandez & Wells Espresso Bar, Soho

London should be the greatest city in the world if you love sandwiches, shouldn't it? Just look at every high street in the city. There are more sandwich shops than almost any kind of business, from Pret a Manger to Eat, Benugo to Pod, Abokado, Apostrophe, the list goes on and on and oh God it goes on. London must be a great place if you like sandwiches - just look at the queues! Look at the variety!

Except, of course, it isn't. Apostrophe tantalises at first with its French patisserie style until you realise the beauty is skin deep; ordering from Benugo is like trying to buy a car in Communist Russia ("No, sandwiches are over there. I'm just soup. No, you can't pay here. Take your receipt to the till. No, drinks are from the cabinet."); and the only way Pret could get any more mayonnaise into their produce is if they somehow developed a bread made entirely from egg yolks and olive oil. So thank the lord for Fernandez and Wells, a (very mini) chain which stands so far above the head and shoulders of any other sandwich monger in the area it may as well be on stilts set into those shoes Elton John wore for Tommy.


With things like English muffin with fried egg and black pudding, proper Swiss-style raclette and freshly-sliced Spanish ham on the menu, choosing your lunch at Fernandez and Wells is a thrill and a delight, in stark contrast to the miserable experience of selecting whichever item in Pret is the least likely to give you a mayonnaise-induced coronary. Fighting back the temptation to order everything all at once, I limited myself to a pulled pork and apple sauce sandwich, a handful of stuffed chillies, and a little Portuguese custard tart, and carried them all off to eat in the sun in Soho Square.


The stuffed chillies were great, hardly cheap at £3.50 for five but with a very moreish mix of textures, cool feta cheese balancing the crispy heat of the chillies. That my pork sandwich wasn't quite as good as that available from the Roast of Sherwood on Whitecross Street is hardly much of a criticism - only the addition of some crackling would have improved it. And best of all was that fantastic custard tart, every bit as good as the examples I tried at the world custard tart headquarters, Pastéis de Belém in Lisbon.

Such quality, and expertise in the pastry department, comes at a price. The items above plus a bottle of Luscombe organic ginger ale came to £12, far too much to spend on lunch on a regular basis. But even just the pork sandwich and a glass of tap water would have made a sufficiently filling (and very tasty) snack for £5, and reason to traipse over to Soho from my office in Holborn. And there's every chance I may do just that again very soon.

8/10

If you are a sandwich fan, and I mean a PROPER sandwich fan, then you should consider Jonathan Brown's Sandwichist column for the Londonist a must-read.

What is British food?

Last Tuesday I, along with Food Stories and A Rather Unusual Chinaman, were very kindly invited to the swish new Guardian offices to have a brief chat with Jay Rayner about British food. For some reason they decided to film it. Here it is, in case you want to see how much of a fool I made out of myself:



The Word of Mouth article, with accompanying frothing, rabid comments is here.