The Dead Dolls Club

Anyone who's had the misfortune to be in my vicinity when I've got on my soapbox about foraging will know that I think it's a bit of a con. Growing up as I did in the Dorset countryside, picking fruit, veg and herbs from the land around you wasn't a skill, it was just something you did, a means to an end, a way of livening up picnics when the limited produce on offer at Mrs Eve's Stores didn't appeal or you fancied something for pudding and you'd missed the ice-cream van's weekly visit.

My other great beef with foraging is that for so many restaurants it is seen as a licence to charge ridiculous prices for something that is, bar the cost of the time spent actually foraging (or 'picking stuff' as I call it), entirely free. On various eighty-quid-a-head-ish tasting menus I've seen 'foraged salads' which diners too rich or stupid or both to realise that the ingredients cost exactly £0.00 wolf down with the gusto they would usually reserve for luxury foodstuffs which, while still swingeingly marked-up, have at least actually cost the restaurant something to buy in the first place.

And yet something grabbed me about the menu at The Dead Dolls Club, a cute little place in Haggerston (it's the new Dalston - possibly) where the food is provided by The Foragers, a collective who, their website says, 'believe in collecting, preserving, and rummaging through hedgerows like a child in a sweet shop, but respectfully and gratefully making something simply found into something spectacular'. Which sounded nice. So taking with me a young East London-dwelling trendy, Matt Bramford, so as not to feel too conspicuous in my late-thirties uncoolness, I went along to see if The Foragers could make me eat my ranty words.

I'll say this much for them: they're certainly turning out some bloody good food. The 'Grazing Menu' of small plates is concise at just seven dishes and three sides, and if what we ate wasn't quite 'spectacular' it was at least near impossible to fault. 

In no particular order we tried marinated wood pigeon breasts, served daringly rare with a moreish, sticky rosehip barbecue sauce; venison Scotch quails' eggs, which if rather heavy on the meat-to-ovum ratio were made with piquant, peppery mince of patently good game; and lovely firm chunks of heady Jerusalem artichoke cleverly paired with a tart herb dressing.

Best of all was air-dried mutton - a sort of glorious ovine jerky - with leeks, hazelnuts and a mercifully-not-overpowering truffle vinaigrette, and thick slices of hedgerow berry-cured trout with wholemeal crisps and punchy wild horseradish. Wild horseradish root, freshly grated, is to the creamed sauce we're used to buying in jars what Iranian caviar is to chip-shop cod roe; related, but immeasurably superior in flavour. It served as a one-ingredient advertisement in favour of foraging.

A dessert of goat's cheese with Hertfordshire honey, fennel and hairy bittercress - a herb I thought sounded like a resident of Middle-earth - was an innovative and successful exercise in using traditionally savoury ingredients in a sweet, although there was an unpleasantly waxy residue of some sort which despite our lovely waitress's protestations to the contrary I remain convinced was, in fact, wax, from the honeycomb which formed part of the dish. Lemon posset with wild crab apple jelly and dried blackberries however was flawless, the blackberries particularly bringing back very happy memories of those childhood Dorset days spent picking stuff.

Matt enjoyed a couple of the incredibly potent cocktails, whimsically named after characters from an imagined country house drama, including The Game Keeper - lager-based with rum, amaretto and Angostura bitters - and a special with violet liqueur and absinthe after which it's a miracle the boy could speak let alone walk. Still off booze, I was thoroughly spoiled with some well-crafted mocktails including one with hibiscus syrup in which a hibiscus flower prettily floated. Glassware, when used, was of the exquisite, heavy, etched crystal variety, although tap water and some cocktails were served to my great chagrin in jam jars - quite the most irritating affectation of the last couple of years and one I can't wait to see the back of.

Goat's cheese with honey and fennel by Pete Stean 

If foraged food has struck me as being a bit of a con elsewhere it certainly isn't here, with none of the dishes costing more than £7.50 and those lethal, ample cocktails £9. Combined with very pleasant service and a groovy if rather drafty room, it all made for a very enjoyable evening and one I'd happily repeat. 

I remain of the view that some foragers are leading diners up the garden path, but I like what The Foragers are doing very much. Like hairy bittercress and wild horeseradish, The Dead Dolls Club is worth making the effort to seek out.

The Dead Dolls Club, 428 Kingsland Road, London E8 4AA www.thedeaddollsclub.com / www.the-foragers.com @deaddollsclub @weforagers







Posted by +Hugh Wright

Gyms Kitchen, Leyton

Updated, April 2013 What a difference six months make. Matthew, my friend who took me along on the visit I wrote about below, implored me to come back and give Gyms Kitchen (still no apostrophe...) a second chance, assuring me that the place was much changed, and improved since last August.

How right he was. The decor - which I didn't even mention first time around, feeling that I'd given the place enough of a kicking for the food, but had really not liked - has been softened, with rustic wood panels covering the once-bare walls and saloon doors hiding the formerly visible kitchen and dishwash area.

A much-extended and redesigned menu stays true to the healthy-eating vision (which, do remember, was one of the things I genuinely admired about the place first time round) but offers greater variety - even puddings! - and ordering from it felt much more enjoyable and less of an exercise in parsimony. 

But the biggest and most pleasant surprise was the food itself. Butterfly chicken breast and grilled tuna steak from the grill were adeptly cooked and subtly flavoured with home-made marinades, and beautifully plated on distinctive but unfussy flatware. Sides of asparagus and halloumi (grilled, of course) were well-seasoned and bulked out with crisp, fresh salad. And we very much enjoyed dessert of banana & chocolate protein pancakes with peanut butter and honey - that's pretty much all of my favourite things on one plate there.

Noticeably, the clientele now better reflects the owners' original vision too; the strapping chaps occupying the other tables were remarkably easy on the eye. And those 'eminently threesomeable' waiters? As hot as ever, I'm glad to report.

When somewhere takes as much notice of early criticism as Gyms Kitchen clearly have, and improve this much, I'm very happy to eat my words. And I'd be very happy to eat there, again.



Original Post

Call me old-fashioned - Lord knows I've been called far worse - but I find the current trend for and obsession with 'dirty' food really rather disgusting. Table manners have gone out the window, perhaps unsurprisingly given that the popularity of street food means there are no tables to need manners for. 

If I read one more breathless paean to a burger whose 'bloody juices run down my face and through my fingers' or another review of a barbecue gaff serving up 'melting fatty piggy gorgeousness', written by an apparently sane and presumably not-raised-by-wolves adult now gone feral, I shall probably give up reading (and possibly writing) about food altogether. Enough is enough.

By the Law of Opposites then I should be very excited about a restaurant like Gyms Kitchen, proudly 'serving fresh, healthy grilled meats and vegetables' - the polar opposite of all the triple-deep-fried, lard-basted, confited, hickory-dipped nonsense I find so unappealing. Except that Gyms Kitchen (I've checked, no apostrophe) is not the kind of restaurant it's possible to get excited about, unless you are the kind of serious gym-goer at whom it is aimed, the kind of muscle-bound, mahogany-stained body-builder who sees food as fuel and fat and carbs as the enemy. Which I am not, and don't.

To be fair, I only came to be at Gyms Kitchen through necessity; I was due to cook dinner for a friend who has just moved in nearby but a botched delivery meant that not only did we not have a table to eat off or chairs to sit on, but no crockery or pots or pans either. He'd had breakfast at Gyms Kitchen and enjoyed it so suggested we try it for dinner, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't hope that a place with the slogan 'Eat Clean...Train Dirty' would be heaving with hunks.

Disappointingly, with the exception of the present writer and a brace of eminently threesomeable waiters, the clientèle on the night of our visit was entirely hunk-free, consisting of a large family group and a solo lady diner none of whom appeared to be on their way either to or from the gym. Nor did they strike me as the kind of customer who was overly concerned by the calorie, fat, carb and protein content of their food as listed for every dish on the menu. 

More than likely they were attracted by what I could see as being Gyms Kitchen's wider selling-points, namely convenience and value for money; certainly there was no faulting the portion size of our - huge - grilled lamb wraps for the price, £6 or £8 with the addition of a side order. 

Less attractive though was the actual food itself; huge wholemeal wraps had the texture and consistency of linoleum and the meat within was tasty but tough - I suspect grilled at high heat straight from the refrigerator without time for proper resting  - and in places pure gristle. Side dishes of spicy rice and chargrilled asparagus were just that. There were, unsurprisingly, no puddings, nor any booze, with its evil carbs and empty calories; instead diners can choose from protein shakes (oh God), low-fat smoothies with an optional scoop of protein powder (shoot me now) or a virtuous range of soft drinks. Coffees are, of course 'all served with skimmed milk' as if you'd dare order anything else.

If I didn't enjoy Gyms Kitchen - and I'm sorry to say that with the exception of the company, I didn't - it could be said in their defence that I'm so far off their target customer that I was never going to. And it should also be said in fairness to them that even though it's not my cup of whey powder, their concept is at least thoroughly thought through and honest in its intentions, and I'd like it to do well.

Were it in Soho, say - the spiritual stomping ground of the gay (and they are mostly gay) gym-obsessed body-dysmorphics who absolutely love this kind of thing, Gyms Kitchen would be doing a roaring trade, but it isn't - it's at the top end of Leyton High Road, an odd choice of area to test out a concept which, the website admits, the owners hope will be the model for a franchise. As it is, all the available spots in Soho have been taken up by the kind of dirty-fried-street food pedlars that Gyms Kitchen is anathema to. For the time being, Gyms Kitchen will have to try even harder than they train to make eating clean as appealing as eating dirty.

Gyms Kitchen, 388-392 High Road, Leyton, London E10 6QE Tel: 020 8988 6362 http://www.gymskitchen.com


Posted by +Hugh Wright

Brawn

The last few weeks have not, for me at least, been a very happy time in which to be a restaurant blogger. Criticism of the activity - as if all those doing it form some homogenised entity all writing for the same reasons and to the same ends - has become increasingly vocal and, at times, personal. Calls for bloggers to 'learn to write like journalists' and adopt journalistic standards (an oxymoron some might say in the light of recent scandals) have been hailed as A Good Thing, ignoring the fact that being paid to write for a newspaper or website is quite different from setting up a blog and writing, unpaid, for fun.

When bloggers  - certain bloggers - responded by introducing a table of disclosures '[placing] us at the leading edge of blog transparency', the clear implication being that anyone who didn't follow suit must be a deceitful bounder, I felt that the very heart of my hobby had been ripped out and that it was becoming more of a chore than a pastime.  The almost-final straw came when an article slating restaurant bloggers appeared in a respected publication, written by someone not only who I knew and liked but who had also been my host at a free event for bloggers some months ago. Et tu, Brute? I thought, and started very seriously to question whether the game was worth the candle.

And then I went for lunch at Brawn, and in the space of a couple of hours of near-perfect food, fantastic wines and the most exquisite company, I was reminded why it is that I do this. Not for freebies - though I won't deny they're a nice, occasional bonus - nor for any perceived credit for being the first through the door of a new restaurant to write about it, even if my hastily-written 'review' is so poorly constructed as to be barely intelligible. No, I do this because eating out, when it's as good as this, is so bloody pleasurable that to then relive it through writing about it - even if no-one reads the result - is almost as joyous as having the physical experience all over again.

Viet Grill, Shoreditch

I first experienced Vietnamese food at the age of about 17. My cousin-by-marriage Paulette Do Van had recently published 'Vietnamese Cooking' and invited the family for a feast made up of some of the delicious dishes in her terrific book. At the time - the early 1990s, for anyone uncharitable enough to be wondering just when I would have been 17 - it all seemed ever so new and exciting; growing up in a little Dorset farming village, a Chinese takeaway passed for exotic (hell, Spag Bol had felt fairly epochal) so the fragrant, colourful cuisine of the Indochine was a true novelty. Paulette's stuffed chicken wings were amazing and remain to this day a favourite (if fiddly) thing to make at home.

Seventeen years on and Vietnamese food is understandably and deservedly much more widely available, nowhere more so than along Kingsland Road in the East End. Seemingly every business that isn't an über-trendy bar or edgy boutique is a Vietnamese restaurant, all confusingly similarly named; within doors of each other stand Song Que, Que Viet, Viet Hoa, Mien Tay and Tay Do. It's no wonder that, as a work colleague local told me, arranging to meet at one or other of them requires giving minutely specific details and directions. Locals also know that the many restaurants on the strip fall into one of two categories, summed up perfectly by my dinner date Matt Bramford who asked over drinks beforehand whether we were going to "one of the cheap ones or one of the posh ones".

Viet Grill is, it turns out, one of the 'posh ones', essentially meaning that some thought and money has gone into decor and staff training in contrast to the plastic seats, strip lighting and perfunctory service at some of the 'cheap ones'. The investment has paid off, because this is a lovely, lovely place. Entering under the bright yellow neon sign that makes Viet Grill stand out from its more conservatively façaded neighbours, we were greeted by the smell of incense, a lively buzz ("Hanoisy" one might say) and a very smiley greeter who showed us to our table without a murmur about our being fifteen minutes late. The room was a bit overwhelming at first; the walls are papered in a very bold leaf print which made the space feel as loud visually as aurally, but we quickly became used to both.

For the uninitiated, Vietnam's cuisine draws on the traditions of the many countries which either border, have colonized or have traded with it over the centuries. To quote Paulette Do Van, "From China the Vietnamese adopted their love of noodles, the way of cooking, the healthy stir-fry methods...Laos, Cambodia and Thailand have influenced the Vietnamese in their use of herbs...The Indians and Portuguese brought spices, [and] the French, who colonized Vietnam, forced the Vietnamese to be inventive." This is all in evidence on the extensive menu at Viet Grill, from which we struggled to choose just a few dishes; those we eventually did order were all, without exception, excellent.

First up were both spring and summer rolls (autumn and winter rolls it would seem do not exist, at least not here). The former were the familiar crisp-shelled offering, made exemplary by the filling of whole, fat king prawns; the latter, a pair of beautiful translucent parcels wrapped in sticky rice paper and bursting with fragrant mint, chopped vermicelli and more juicy prawns. Neither needed accompaniment, the flavours speaking for themselves, but the nuoc cham - Vietnam's pungent, fish-based riposte to China's soy - and chilli sauce provided made for great dipping.

Next came a lotus stem salad, a super-fresh, technicolour assembly which as well as the clean-tasting crunchy stems consisted of shredded pork, shrimps, Vietnamese basil, peanuts and lime zest. What the dressing was I'm not sure but it was incredible; slightly sharp, slightly sweet, I'd guess maybe a little galangal in the mix somewhere, its brightness made me gasp for joy with the first mouthful. Alongside it we scoffed a plate of 'piggy aubergine', grilled green Thai aubergine topped with minced 'pork sprinkle' and poached spring onions. All I can say of this delightfully slippy, oily, umami-rich dish is that it made me seriously reconsider my dislike of aubergine; if it's always this good then bring on the eggplant please.

Finally and fortuitously we chose what would appear to be something of a signature dish for Viet Grill. Described on the menu simply as 'Slices of monkfish', a gas burner was brought to the table and chunks of monkfish, marinated in saffron and galangal, were pan fried with great handfuls of dill before being served on top of cold rice noodles with fennel, peanuts, chillis and tangy shrimp sauce to taste. It was one of those brilliant dishes where every mouthful was as good as but subtly different from the last, and at just £13 for two it was extremely good value for money.

Wine lovers and oenophobes alike will delight in the interesting, France-heavy wine list with its brilliantly entertaining and informative descriptions; one wine is described as being "As stylish and distinctive as a Christian Louboutin stiletto", another as having "more fruit than convention demands". Wallet watchers might find the arrangement of the list broadly by grape type rather than price disorienting; look around though and there's plenty to be had for under and around £20 a bottle, including our rich, buttery Calbuco 2009 Chilean Sauvignon Blanc at £21.50 which, as promised, was perfect with our monkfish and indeed pretty much everything.

From the greeter, to our (lovely, knowledgeable, patient) waiter and the manager who insisted on personally showing off his monkfish-frying prowess, service was impeccable and we never felt rushed, even though we took ages to decide what to order  - too busy gossiping about mutual Twitter pals - and lingered over every delicious dish - too busy gossiping about the launch of the brilliant new book from Amelia's Magazine, of which Matt is fashion editor. The bill, for five dishes of superb food, our bottle of wine and 12.5% service came to £64 which felt entirely reasonable. At one of the 'cheap ones' we'd have no doubt paid only half as much, but had only half the fun. I know which I'd rather have.

As a civil rights activist and equality campaigner of many years' standing (under her married name of North) I'm not sure what Cousin Paulette would make of the apparent inequality at play on the Kingsland Road with the potential threat posed to the established, cheap 'n' cheerful joints by classier, chicer venues like Viet Grill. But one thing's for sure; I doubt she'd be able to find anything to fault with the food.

Viet Grill, 58 Kingsland Road, London E2 8DP Tel: 020 7739 6686 http://www.vietnamesekitchen.co.uk/vietgrill