Soif

It always rather irks me, when reading about a restaurant outside of Zone 1, to see it described condescendingly as a 'good local restaurant', as if to reach it would require a journey worthy of Gulliver and that the preparation of decent food is somehow dependent on the possession of a W1 postcode. 

To those of us who live in Zone 2 (or - horrors - even further afield) it's the central London gaffs that need travelling to; our local restaurants are just our restaurants, ta very much, and many of them are very good indeed.

One such, which I've only just got round to visiting despite the enthusiastic recommendation of others fortunate enough to have it on or near their doorsteps, is Soif in Battersea. The third wine bar and restaurant to open in a group which now numbers four (the others being Terroirs, Brawn and the newly-opened-at-the-time-of-writing Green Man & French Horn), Soif follows broadly the same if-it-ain't-broke don't fix it formula - great produce, rustic dishes, carefully-chosen wines in convivial casual surroundings.

If that sounds like your idea of somewhere fantastic then I'd heartily concur; the slightly bistro-by-numbers interior might feel a little dated but there's nothing not to love about the food. While choosing from the daily-changing menu, chalked up on a large blackboard, three of us grazed on an excellent charcuterie selection - butch rillettes, the fat countered by tiny, mouth-puckeringly sharp cornichons, herby pork terrine and salty, paper-thin salame toscano - and a dish of perfect little leaf-on radishes Peter Rabbit would've risked Mr McGregor's wrath for.

The fat, tender chicken livers on toast with anchovy and rosemary butter which two of us chose for our starters were so big on flavour and beautifully balanced that I found myself craving them for breakfast the next day; I'd go so far as to say it was one of the best things I've eaten all year. Steak tartare - simply done, un-fannied about with, a process yellow egg yolk on top ready for smooshing in - was excellent.

Other mains - a nice hunk of roast cod with moreish, Moorish spiced chickpeas and alioli and a blushing pink magret of duck with garlicky sarladaise potatoes - were gutsy and faultless. It was a shame that bavette with duck fat potatoes was only available for two; I fancied red meat but no two of us could agree to have it so I ended up having the steak tartare from the starters, padded out with an exemplary green salad.

Instead of dessert, neither of the only two choices for which appealed, we shared a selection of immaculately kept French cheeses including  Soureliette, a wonderful unpasteurised ewe's milk whose nutty sharpness was the perfect match for a tangy bleu d'Auvergne and smoky Curé Nantais. I often find the prices charged for cheese in restaurants rather hard to fathom; £10 for three decent-sized pieces here seemed about fair.

As you'd expect from a restaurant whose name means 'thirst', drink is taken seriously and Soif's lengthy wine list is big on natural varieties, idiosyncratically categorised. There's a decent selection by the glass and carafe but cheap it ain't, with very few bottles under £25. That said you get what you pay for and our 2011 Roussillon 'Les Foulards Rouges' was, like my fellow diner Rich, full-bodied and bursting with character.

Two bottles of it, aperitifs and service pushed the bill for three up to £183 - just over £60 a head - which took me rather by surprise. The food had been good, and exceptional in places - those chicken livers, my gosh - but that still felt high, especially as similar quantities of even-better food and booze at sibling restaurant Brawn had only come in at about two-thirds that.

No matter; Soif is a very good restaurant and one to which, being lucky enough to be able to call it local literally, I'll be returning. Wherever you live, it's a journey I'd recommend you make, too.

Soif, 27 Battersea Rise, London SW11 1HG Tel: 020 7223 1112 http://www.soif.co 







Posted by +Hugh Wright

The Lawn Bistro, Wimbledon

Say 'Wimbledon' and the first thing that springs to most minds is usually either tennis or The Wombles, or to those of a more literary bent, Nigel Williams' brilliant trilogy of SW19-based novels. 

It's safe to say that one thing Wimbledon is not closely associated with is great restaurants; save for a couple of local gems - notably San Lorenzo Fuoriporta, an offshoot of Princess Di's favourite Knightsbridge Italian that during the tennis resembles a megastar players' canteen - the dining scene in SW19 is mostly limited to branches of some of the better chains and a couple of above-average pubs.

That could well be about to change, thanks to the arrival late last year of The Lawn Bistro in Wimbledon Village, where I enjoyed a splendid dinner with my local-resident pal Will recently. Here, the food is so accomplished, service so polished and the atmosphere - for the most part, but more on that later - so enjoyable that it will surely become as much a draw for visitors as the All England Lawn Tennis Club round the corner to which its name alludes.

The Lawn Bistro was opened in September 2011 by Akbar Ashurov - a man with such an unusually light online footprint that had I not seen him with my own eyes I might have doubted his existence - and Ollie Couillaud, formerly chef at (among others) Chiswick's high-end local favourite La Trompette. Couillaud was absent on the night we visited but a brigade ably led by his affable, rugged head chef Neil delivered a meal big on aces and with only very occasional faults.

In keeping with the comfortable modernity of the long, angled room, the daily-changing modern European menu is serious but accessible both in composition and price. At £27.50 for two courses or £32.50 for three - with hardly any of the supplements which I know I'm not alone in finding a huge irritant on supposedly set-price menus - it's not cheap but is very reasonable for the quality of the food that comes out of Couillaud's kitchen.

If our pre-starter of carrot and coriander soup with toasted seeds and hazelnut was immediately forgettable after the first mouthful, everything that followed more than made up for it. Our starter proper of ballotine of crab and leek was a beautiful, long neat cigar of sweet fresh filling, bathing in a luxurious champagne velouté in which a couple of oysters had been poached to just doneness. Not normally a fan of cooked oysters I found these lovely, retaining their briny flavour and plumpness but given an extra dimension by their warmth. Pickled ginger brought a fragrant, Eastern touch to the plate.

As a (much appreciated) little extra between courses, we were given a dish of venison carpaccio which as well as paper-thin slices of excellent meat brought together the earthiness of beetroot and celeriac remoulade with salty Parmesan and a slick of wonderful beef jus that took me by surprise with its intensity. Absent from the main menu, this is one of those dishes that if you see it, you should order it, as much for the thrill of that jus as for the brilliant rest.

Our main courses were perfect exemplars of what this restaurant is about: really smart but unfussy interpretations of classic bistro dishes. Plump, pink magret of duck, sitting on a subtle artichoke purée with some fondant potatoes and crisp curls of parsnip alongside and drizzled with a sticky port and orange sauce was at once wonderfully retro and totally now, given a lively kick by the inclusion of some boozy griottine cherries. Seared tuna - a pleasingly fat slab of fish - came with just-made caponata, butter bean hummus, olives and, for texture, a chick pea crisp. In isolation the flavours were all very low-key, but brought together on the fork the undertones made for a clever, complex mouthful.

After a livening palate cleanser of lemon sorbet in vodka - there's a combination I could get dangerously used to - we finished off with a seriously good pud of croustade of caramelised apples with hazelnut ice-cream. As well as enjoying the contrast of still slightly tart apple with the sweetness of the ice cream, I loved the witty presentation; the apple-filled, cone-shaped croustade came placed on top of a scoop of ice cream so that the whole resembled a dropped Cornetto, evoking childhood memories albeit without the tears.

Wine is taken very seriously. Diners pass through the wine room on the way to the loos and it's worth stopping to marvel at the glass-fronted cabinets' contents. We decided to order from the interesting selection available by the glass, discovering along the way a Slovenian sauvignon blanc - classically sauvignon on the nose but lighter and refreshingly more acidic on the palate - and a 2008 Austrian Blaufrankisch which, with its peppery black fruit, reminded me of a Gigondas. Good old Pedro Ximenez was perfect with the apple croustade, although so too was a wine we tried out of sheer curiosity, a sweet Helmut Lang Beerenauslese Chardonnay - I'd no idea that one of my favourite minimalist fashion designers produced dessert wines as good as his jeans.

Service, from smartly-uniformed (and terribly handsome) staff was excellent, perfectly-paced, courteous yet informal and with all the niceties of a smart restaurant without the silliness or stuffiness of fine dining. The atmosphere started off quiet but soon built to a comfortable lively buzz; alas as the restaurant filled, a table of five ladies d'une certaine age and a male pal, celebrating one of their birthdays, was seated next to us and even before their celebratory fizz started to kick in it quickly became apparent that their preferred means of communicating with each other was to screech and shout. Of course, restaurants can't know when taking a booking what a table's volume control is like, but perhaps seating a five next to a two is something best avoided.

That very minor gripe aside, everything that was within The Lawn Bistro's control I liked very much indeed. Our bill, for three courses, six glasses of wine, two stickies and 12.5% service came to £125 which felt reasonable; had we stuck to a bottle of wine from the lower end of the list - prices start at just£18 - we could have shaved about £30 off that.

The Lawn Bistro isn't just a welcome addition to Wimbledon, it's a fantastic new restaurant for all of London. It's certainly won me over, game, set and match.

The Lawn Bistro, 67 High Street, Wimbledon Village, London SW19 5EE Tel: 020 8947 8278 http://www.thelawnbistro.co.uk/

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Ida, Queen's Park

One of my dear late father's favourite aphorisms - which I always thought of, fondly, as his statements of the bleeding obvious - was to say to anyone who complained that they couldn't find something, "You always find it in the last place you look!" It never occurred to him that this was the case because having found something you cease to look for it, but I loved him too much to point this out.

Now, as my brace of regular readers will know, my pal Michael Ford and I have had a few hits and misses in our search for a restaurant that caters just as well to his vegetarian lacto-free diet as to my 'if it baas, moos or oinks, kill it, heat it, sauce it and serve it' approach to eating. But would you believe it, my dear old dad was right after all because it looks like we've found it in the last place we looked - right on newly-moved-to-London Michael's doorstep.

Trinity, Clapham

For all that this blogging lark is really rather fun as hobbies go, for a number of reasons I don't actually do it very often. Firstly, I don't write about every meal out that I have; I'd be a hypocrite to sneer at those who write up (seemingly) every sandwich or takeaway they eat, given that it was a particularly splendid sandwich counter which inspired my first post, but I don't have the time or inclination to do it myself.

Secondly, while I don't have any hard-and-fast rules to speak of (in blogging as in life...), I generally don't write about meals that fall into certain 'private' categories; I include in this meals with family (with the occasional exception), business lunches and friends' birthday dinners - for this reason, and this alone, a particularly dreadful central London Mexican restaurant can breathe a sigh of relief.

The main reason however is that I'm essentially a creature of habit, and once I find somewhere I like, I go back again and again (and in some cases, again); great for the restaurateur's balance sheet, but not so good for generating new material. I might tweet about how good (or otherwise) a meal at a favourite restaurant was, but I don't 're-review'. Or rather, didn't, until now.

Charlotte's Bistro, W4

Photo: Paul Winch-Furness www.paulwf.co.uk

As well as the many trends in food to have emerged in the last year or so - gourmet Scotch eggs, historic British dishes redux, goat's curd with everything, three-meat blends - something of a fashion has sprung up for giving new restaurants names which don't quite do exactly what they say on the tin.

Thus, Bar Boulud is not a bar but a seriously upscale burger joint, Riding House Cafe (more of which at a later date) isn't a cafe but a buzzy all-day brasserie, and Charlotte's Bistro isn't a bistro but a...well, here's the thing. I'm not quite sure what it is, or rather, what it wants to be. Whatever it is, it's very good, with mostly terrific food, a pleasant room, efficient service and a clearly extremely talented - not to mention charming - chef. The problem, if indeed to anyone but me it is one, is that the whole is not quite the cohesive, knock-your-socks-off sum of its parts.

Capote Y Toros, West Brompton

Within a few doors of each other in West Brompton, the leafy little stretch of Old Brompton Road that's posher than nearby Earl's Court but not quite South Kensington proper,the same proprietors operate Cambio de Tercio - reputed to be one of London's best Spanish restaurants - Tendido Cero, a traditional tapas bar, and now Capote y Toros, a ham and sherry bar to which I was invited - you might say 'summoned' - recently by my good pal, Spanish food buff and culinary girl-about-town Rachel McCormack.

Let's just contemplate the beauty of that concept for a moment: a ham and sherry bar. A bar specialising in Spanish ham - the really good stuff, from pigs fed on acorns so that their flesh becomes all fat and nutty and sweet - and sherry, dozens of different varieties of it from the palest dry Fino to treacly dark Pedro Ximenez, as well as an all-Iberian wine list. In addition to the (amazing, silken) jamon, there's a list of about twenty tapas, most of them using sherry as an ingredient. Even in Spain such places aren't all that common, so for one to pop up in London is a rare treat indeed.

The Fat Delicatessen, Balham

One of the many great things about living in London is that we are absolutely spoiled for wonderful local café/delis, where we can enjoy a quick, delicious snack or light lunch and then, if so minded, buy the ingredients to make it at all over again at home. As well as well-known mini-chains like Ottolenghi, small but flourishing independents populate many of the 'villages' which, cliché would have it, make up our fair capital; locals love to think of each as being their 'little secret'.

Apologies to the locals of Balham then for blowing wide-open this particular little secret, the absolutely  delectable, worth-the-fare-to-zone-3 Fat Delicatessen. I'd walked past it numerous times on the way to and from visiting a friend who lives round the corner and always meant to go in; having finally done so for a lunch with said friend (let's call him Matthew, as that is in fact his name) and Alyn recently, I'm extremely glad I did.

Criterion Restaurant, Piccadilly

Criterion Restaurant is rather like Narnia. Not only in that you step through unremarkable doors into a realm of almost unbelievable splendour, but also in that however much you might ask around you'll struggle to find anyone who's ever actually been.

For several years a high-profile outpost of Marco Pierre White's in-name-only restaurant stable, after the turban-wearing one's departure Criterion struggled for some time to find an identity for itself and slipped from the culinary radar, sustained I would imagine by special offers and passing trade - of which, on Piccadilly Circus, there must be plenty.

Now however Criterion is seeking to assert its status as a serious food destination and based on the evidence of my recent visit, they certainly mean business. Membership of the Sustainable Restaurant Association asserts their eco-credentials and all the favourite foodie buzzwords - local, seasonal, organic - are present and correct on a menu which majors in best of British with some high-falutin' fine dining touches. Served in what is indisputably one of London's most spectacular dining rooms, a neo-Byzantine orgy of soaring mosaic ceilings embellished with more gilt than Midas' loo, it's an attractive proposition - but does it deliver?

Brunswick House Café, Vauxhall

Brace yourselves dear readers for something of a surprise. You might even want to make sure you have a stiff drink to hand. Ready? OK: I have started going regularly to the gym. Or more specifically, to The Gym, a back-to-basics, no-frills, great value place in my south London neighbourhood where I go once a week in a determined effort to burn off at least one dessert's-worth of the calories which I selflessly consume in the pursuance of producing the present blog.

Even more rewarding however than this expenditure of energy and burning of fat, is that The Gym is a mere lunge from Brunswick House Café, a just-about-faultless little enterprise which is quietly punching above its weight as I try to regulate mine. Brunswick House is a vast Georgian mansion, erstwhile London home of the eponymous Dukes and relic of a bygone age when the hunting grounds for which Vauxhall was famous were deer parks rather than the open-all-hours dance clubs and gay saunas of today. Derelict for many years, Brunswick House is now the London flagship of salvage experts Lassco; once-opulent ballrooms and salons are crammed full of signs, statues, knobs, knockers and bric-à-brac spanning the last two centuries at I Saw You Coming prices.

The café occupies a couple of rooms on the ground floor, including the beautiful ballroom, an Aladdin's cave of columns, chandeliers and concert hall props. As well as a point-and-choose selection of pastries and pies, the daily-changing menu extends to about a dozen simple, modern dishes combining best-of-British ingredients with more Euro-leaning salads and sides. Thus for brunch last Saturday, lucky punters - myself, Alyn and PV The Artist included - were able to choose from dishes as simple and splendid as our order of soft boiled eggs, sea salt and sourdough toast; Blythburgh breakfast slider, duck egg & Emmental biscuit; and confit Old Spot bacon, beaten eggs and apple chutney.

As at another of my favourite places, The Drapers Arms, the minimal menu descriptions are not an affectation but actually tell you everything that will appear on your plate, other than for a little garnish here and there. Simple preparation of obviously top-notch ingredients in imaginative combinations is a formula guaranteed to win me over every time, and my slider was as satisfying and clever a brunch dish as I can remember having. Alyn's boiled eggs were as brilliant as they were basic, their bright daffodil-yellow yolks proclaiming their freshness as they oozed onto the toast. PV's bacon and eggs inspired the most plate envy though; the 'bacon' was more like thick sliced gammon, the 'beaten eggs' a golden galette somewhere between scrambled eggs and omelette.

To accompany the fantastic food there's a lengthy list of heritage cocktails (it was too early for a Sazerac, even for me, but I'll be back of an evening) and all-French wines, none of which is marked up by more than £10. This is a welcome trend which started at Trullo and has evidently spread south of the river, but while this might make for good value on some wines relative to other, grabbier venues, the presence of bottles priced at up to £37, modestly marked-up or not, seems incongruous alongside a food menu on which nothing costs more than £7.20. We just settled for the house white, a Le Lusc Ugni Blanc Colombard 2009 at £15, which was fine for a bottle that we knew had cost only a fiver. The frozen tumblers provided with it were a very nice touch on a day warm enough to allow eating outside on the cute, scruffy terrace.

A brunch dish each for three people, wine and entirely discretionary service came to under £12 each. You'd struggle to pay more for a main and a drink, and could get out for even less; factor in an extra tenner and you could have a cocktail and a pud. Casual and friendly service is provided by a young and enthusiastic staff and the clientele is as eclectic and attractive as the surroundings. Brunswick House Café is, like The Gym and my going to it, fairly new; I have a feeling we'll all work out.

Brunswick House Café, Brunswick House, 30 Wandsworth Road, London SW8 2LG Tel: 020 7720 2926 http://www.brunswickhousecafe.co.uk  

Racine, Knightsbridge

If the love of money is the root of all evil, then Knightsbridge must be the most evil place on Earth. Everywhere you go in SW1, conspicuous wealth and consumption abound; gaudily customised supercars line the pavements outside the ever-heaving Harrods, all the £30-million plus penthouses have sold out at the new One Hyde Park development, and three-star chefs are falling over themselves to open restaurants in five-star hotels. As if enclosed in a protective, recession-proof bubble, the occupants of Knightsbridge appear oblivious to austerity, be they resident in one of the area's exclusive red brick terraces or visiting for the summer from one or another emirate.

It's only in an area like Knightsbridge that a place like Racine could have 'firmly established itself as a favourite neighbourhood French restaurant' as the website proudly states. Almost anywhere else, chef-proprietor Henry Harris's slick, classic bistro would be considered pricy and posh, to be saved for special occasions, but in relation to most nearby competitors Racine is comparatively inexpensive (though cheap it ain't), and markedly less formal. It's also, deservedly I'd say based on my recent visit, doing a roaring trade.

My lifelong best friend Andrew and I were having dinner to celebrate his recent success in being appointed to a senior sales position at Emporio Armani just up the road (as an alumnus of the label I know first hand just how damn hard it is to even get a foot in the door) and chose Racine on the basis of our having both heard good things about it. In fact, Racine has been on my radar ever since it opened; I was an early adopter of Henry Harris's honest, luxurious cooking when he was at Fifth Floor at Harvey Nichols just round the corner and was immediately interested when he left to set up Racine - I just didn't get round to actually eating there until last week.

Like the area, the food at Racine is very, very rich. Harris appears to hold no truck with modern healthy eating fads; the menu is a delightful list of patés, mousses and remoulades, of roasts and grills and chops. Everything is garnished, sauced or buttered, and served in abundant portions; naturally, I bloody loved it even though I waddled out at the end of our meal and may drop dead of a heart attack before the week's out.

To start with, Andrew had a warm garlic and saffron mousse with mussels and I chose hot foie gras with wilted endive, piment d'Espelette and spiced bread. Andrew's mousse was almost soufflé-light but still very creamy in texture, tasted subtle without being bland and paired nicely with the flavour of the handful of plump, poached mussels surrounding it. My liver was just gorgeous; warm, quivering, unctuous and indulgent, it went beautifully with the nutmeg spiciness of the toast and the slight bitterness of the endive. My palate isn't refined enough to have detected any particular flavour of Espelette pepper, but as the sum of its parts this dish worked very well.

Main courses were equally as good if also rather heavy. As a lover of both offal and blue cheese I was never going to choose anything but the grilled veal kidneys with Roquefort butter, which came served additionally with some velouté-smooth mashed potato. The two fat, silky kidneys were full of flavour, cooked just through to a pale rose and bathed in a good couple of ounces of salty, tangy butter. It was a a terrific combination which given the choice I would probably have preferred without the potato; it was undeniably beautiful mash but just tipped the dish as a whole over into over-richness. Andrew's breast of duck with new season's grelots (baby onions), lovage and a gateau campagnard - a sort of apple-y rosti - was more balanced, the duck almost quackingly pink and the vegetables complementing rather than competing with it.

Determinedly we ploughed on to desserts figuring that we might as well be hanged for un mouton as un agneau. My pot of vanilla cream with Agen prunes was essentially unburnt crème brulée served over fruit in an upright dish, simple but enjoyable and evidently made from only the very creamiest cream, the kind of stuff that looks at extra thick double cream with pity in its eyes. Andrew's pud of choice was even simpler but also even better, vanilla ice cream of exceptional quality - home-made or not we weren't told - with a little jug of preposterously perfect hot Valrhona chocolate sauce.

Fancying a light-ish red wine we drank a very agreeable 2007 Chateau de Tersac, Corbieres which coped well with the succulent textures and flavours of the food and was fairly priced at £21. The wine list is long but undaunting, sub-divided helpfully into 'from Europe' (though by and large this means France) and 'from around the World' and then into by the glass, half bottles and bottles. There's something for every palate and price range although a black mark is awarded for the incessant pouring of it - three waiters in as many minutes had to be told Non, merci until it sank in that we could and wished to do it ourselves. Service was otherwise charming, polite, and well-paced.

Our bill, on which we received a 25% discount thanks to a Toptable offer, came to a very fair £80 and even if we had paid the full whack of £96 I'd have felt we'd got good value for money. My only objection, as much out of principle as confusion, was that Racine charges a lofty 14.5% service, an inexplicable whisker less than the 15% only really charged in the hautest of places but a hefty 2% over the more usual twelve point five. Knightsbridge being Knightsbridge I expect Racine's regular clientele don't bat an eyelid at such piddling sums; to the rest of us however it's an unwelcome extra expense and that's, well, just a bit rich.

Racine, 239 Brompton Road, London SW3 2EP Tel: 020 7584 4477 http://www.racine-restaurant.com/ 
 

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• Rare million pound luxury car clamped outside Harrods (bbc.co.uk)

Bonnington Cafe, Vauxhall

Atrocious photograph courtesy of R.B. Swift

For a couple of reasons, the validity of which I'll leave it to you to judge, I don't have a very great deal to say about the food at Bonnington Cafe.  First of all there doesn't seem much point, as the menu at this moderately famous, co-operative-run vegetarian restaurant in Vauxhall changes every day depending on which co-op member is taking their turn as chef. Because of this, what was on offer when I visited will bear no resemblance to what might be available should you go - as I hope you will - other than that it will be vegetarian or possibly vegan. Secondly and more typically, is that being BYO, the seven of us who ate there recently brought and drank so much of our own that my memory of what was bought and eaten is slightly impaired.

There's plenty that I can tell you however, most importantly (and I hope usefully) that I liked Bonnington Cafe very much indeed and that it's a terrific little place. What started as a squat cafe in the early 1980s is now a respectable - but not too respectable! - commercial enterprise, funding the work of the local community's Bonnington Centre of which it occupies the ground floor. Gastropubs and brasserie chains everywhere pay designers thousands of pounds to recreate something approximating the decor of Bonnington Cafe, with its mismatched furniture, candles in jam jars and eclectic artwork, but this is the real deal, organic, the product of evolution and hands-on community involvement over many years.

While it might be possible to replicate some of the interior elements, no smart consultancy or marketing wonk could hope to recreate the atmosphere of this place. Being so deeply rooted in the community and true to its co-operative values, Bonnington Cafe welcomes everyone and as a result attracts a very diverse crowd. So, on the night of this visit as well as our table of noisy, expensively dressed thirtysomethings popping champagne corks there was also a group of very intense, patchouli-scented, bindi wearing groovers, a cute couple on a date and a table of arty-looking chaps with immaculately waxed moustaches. Oh, and there was an accordionist playing, not that it was a French-themed evening, just y'know, parce que. It all makes for a very warm, inclusive, comfortable place which more 'professional' restaurants could learn a lot from.

I suppose at this juncture I should say something about the food, or at least what I remember of it. My starter (there are two choices for each course, chalked up on a blackboard) was listed as 'Spanish tapas' and further described by our waitress as being 'sort of nuts, some beans and spices, in like a tomato sauce' which prompted the couple on the next table to chip in "It's nicer than it sounds!" The dish which I received resembled nothing I've eaten on my extensive travels in Spain but was nonetheless a very tasty bowlful, nicely seasoned and very nourishing. The alternative was pea soup; it was a bit heavy on the parsley for my liking (though in fairness, any amount of parsley is too heavy for my liking) but perfectly good as soup goes and an enormous helping too.

For main courses (and this I'm afraid is where the liquor starts to affect my memory) there was a 'Cuban platter' or some sort of pie; I had the former and liked it very much. Along with some spicy, rich veggie mince came some golden savoury rice, along with - oddly I thought, but if it's typically Cuban, mea culpa - a baked banana. It was filling and moreish, the mince as hearty as any meat-based ragu I've tasted. The pie...well whatever it was I know no-one complained about it which gives the chef a perfect 7-out-of-7 for customer satisfaction if not for memorability. For pud there was a choice of chocolate or peanut tart, the latter vegan (I'll take their word for it that the cream-ish swirl it shared plate space with was dairy-free). Both were good, and as with everything cooked with love and served in generous portions for the price.

Ah yes - the price. A final clincher, if you weren't already tempted to give Bonnington Cafe a whirl, is that starters and puds are three quid each and mains are all seven pounds, so a good, filling, ethically-conscious meal can be yours for just £13. In fact not all of us had three courses so the bill for seven of us came to a ridiculous £85; we rounded it up to £100 only to have our gorgeous French waitress run after us as we staggered off into the night crying (assume your best 'Allo 'Allo! accent for this), "You 'ave left faaar too motch monnay!" We very happily told her to keep it.

Bonnington Cafe, 11 Vauxhall Grove, London SW8 1TD Bookings are made directly with the chef; check website for their numbers: http://www.bonningtoncafe.co.uk 

Trullo, Highbury

Notwithstanding the three-figure pocket money, sumptuous homes, elite private education, Porsche for your seventeenth birthday and winters in Zermatt, it can't be easy being the child of a famous parent.  Follow mum or dad into the trade in which they made their very bankable name (Rufus Wainwright say, or Michael Douglas) and you will forever be compared to them, and find your family labelled a 'dynasty' as if your achievements derive only from your DNA and not any actual effort. 

Plough a different furrow - viz, Stella McCartney - and unkind souls will say that you only got where you are because of your famous name, which is deeply insulting not just to you but also to your fans or, in Stella's case, customers, as it implies that ladies only buy your exquisitely cut jump-suits because your dad co-wrote 'Eleanor Rigby'. 

It must then be doubly hard when both parents are very famous indeed; from expensive cradle to cosseted adolescence the burden of society's expectation weighs upon your honey-hued, Ralph Lauren-clad shoulders as the gossip mags wait to see whether you'll take after mum (step forward Georgia May Jagger) or dad (take a bow, Sean Lennon). Jordan Frieda, son of pop legend/gay icon Lulu and hairdresser extraordinaire/global haircare deity John Frieda, has done neither and, after a creditable stab at acting during which he most notably played Prince William - a man who also knows a thing or two about having famous folks - has opened Trullo, a perfectly nice little neighbourhood Italian in Highbury.

There's not a great deal of information on Trullo's website but from what I can gather someone who's involved in the project (possibly Frieda himself) has worked at River Cafe in the past and Trullo seeks to emulate, if not actually replicate, Ruth Rogers' and the late Rose Gray's simple cooking of excellent produce to authentically Italian methods. They're certainly not replicating the River Cafe's notoriously nosebleed-inducing prices; everything on the succinct, daily-changing menu is very reasonable and most wonderfully of all, no bottle on the all-Italian wine list is marked up by more than a tenner, a pricing model which must have other, greedier restaurateurs quaking in their boots.

If you're wondering what I was doing so far from home, in the noisy environs of Highbury Corner, the answer is that I'd arranged to dine once again with the delectable James Ramsden and we wanted to try somewhere new to both of us, which isn't easy when you eat out as much as we do. Trullo had blipped quietly on the outer circles of both our radars and with the added selling point that it's basically at the end of James's road, we booked ourselves in. 

Good job we did too, because even on a Tuesday night the place was packed, with hopeful walk-ins prepared to queue. This must be down to some seriously good PR or wildfire word-of-mouth, because from the outside Trullo's not an immediate draw; its midnight blue exterior and discreet half curtains are rather foreboding.

Inside, it's groovy and modern but extremely noisy and with a slight air of the unfinished; display shelves run around the walls but display next to nothing, and the smell lingers of the battleship-gray paint on the vertiginous stairs down to the lavs. The menu borders on the combative - it takes a certain amount of proprietorial chutzpah to have veal, lamb sweetbreads and two fish dishes as the only main courses - and staff appear to have been briefed to expect customer confusion given that we were asked, twice, if we had any questions (to which I responded mischievously by asking, 'What sort of questions do you expect?').

Starters were fine. Grilled ox heart with horseradish creme fraiche was an unfussy plateful of thin, nicely chewy slices of smoky bovine ticker, while James's Heritage tomato and mussel soup was a satisfying bowlful of good-if-not-great mussels atop robust chunks of toms of every colour - more a stew than a soup. We shared a pasta dish of stracci with green beans, pesto and black olives which was unremarkable, the only real interest coming from the fun, irregularly-shaped pieces 'scratched' from a sheet of pasta. I had to ask James if the pesto, which didn't taste super-fresh, might have come from a jar; he thought not but we agreed that it tasted like it might have come from a good deli. This is not praise.

Mains were a lot better and my lamb sweetbreads with broad beans, summer carrots, pancetta and borlotti beans was particularly belting (though, memo to the menu writer, having borlotti beans as one of only two side dishes on offer when they already feature on a main course is not a good sales ploy). James's veal saltimbocca with baked radicchio was also molto bene and jumped appropriately in the mouth; thicker slices of veal might have been nice but there was plenty of it, and the crisp baked leaves were a tasty touch. 

The only real let-downs were the desserts; cherry ripple ice cream was bland and a grilled white peach with mascarpone and Amaretto was pleasant enough but carried no trace of the almond flavour one would expect from its extended bath in the liqueur. They rounded off the meal well enough but added nothing to it.

From that altruistically priced wine list we chose a Nero d'Avola at a bargainous £16; it was a great bottle for the money, bursting with black fruit and mellow sweetness. Adding three courses each, the shared pasta dish, aperitifs and digestifs (yes I know it was a schoolnight but I still made it to school today, so there) we still only managed to rack up a bill of £84; even with a tenner added on for service - entirely voluntarily, no discretionary 12.5% nonsense here - we felt like we'd had very good value indeed if not the most amazing meal of our lives. Service was fast, friendly and mostly relaxed, delivered by delightful staff wearing smiles suggesting that no-one involved in the business can quite believe their luck.

Jordan Frieda - and his less-recognisably-nomenclatured partners - are certainly onto a winner here; once the initial buzz has died down I can see Trullo fulfilling its aspiration of being a good, perhaps the best, restaurant in an affluent, eats-out-a-lot neighbourhood. Personally, I liked it well enough but weeell...it didn't make me wanna shout.

Trullo, 300 - 302 St Paul’s Road, London N1 2LH tel: 020 7226 2733 http://www.trullorestaurant.com

The Drapers Arms, Islington

If you'd told me, as recently as say two years ago, that one day I'd find myself bound for a pub in an Islington backstreet for dinner with a handsome stranger ten years my junior who I'd met on the internet, I'd have laughed in your face. (Replace 'pub' with 'flat' and substitute 'casual sex' for 'dinner' and you'd be nearer the mark, but that's not for here). That however was before I, said handsome stranger and indeed said pub discovered the joys of Twitter, the worldwide micro-blogging phenomenon which has made meeting people and going places we might never have come to know otherwise seem like completely normal behaviour.

The young man in question was the food-writer and supper-club proprietor James Ramsden (or to give him his Twitter sobriquet, @jteramsden) and the pub, The Drapers Arms or @drapersarms. Brought together on Twitter through our shared foodie leanings, James and I had built up something of a rapport in recent months and decided to take the plunge and make our virtual acquaintance actual. We chose to do so at The Drapers Arms on the strength of James's being a local and my having been charmed by the proprietors' passionate and eloquent 140-character musings about food and wine, and so it was that on the eve of my 34th birthday I came to be making this once-unimaginable assignation.

Despite our meeting being entirely platonic, I had all the nerves one would expect of a blind date, but James turned out to be as easy-going and charming off-line as on- so any initial awkwardness was swiftly dispelled. The Drapers Arms certainly offers very attractive surroundings to meet in; the pub is an unfussily but sensitively tarted up old boozer with high ceilings, stripped wood floors and blackboards announcing the day's menu highlights. There are some nice nods to interior design fashionability, among them the apple green-painted bar and a wall of bookshelves holding Penguin Classics. Outside is a really lovely trellis-walled garden with abundant bench seating and zinc topped tables, and as it was a pleasantly mild evening we chose to eat here.

Anyone who remembers the dreadful fashion in fine dining restaurants a couple of years back for giving technically-elaborate dishes one word menu titles might fear, on first seeing The Drapers Arms' menu, that the trend was making an unwelcome comeback in N1. Their fear would be misplaced though as the descriptions, while brief, in fact list everything that you will find on the plate, such is the beautiful simplicity of the food on offer.

Thus, our starters of 'hot crispy Old Spot pork, chicory, buttermilk & mustard' and 'smoked eel, bacon, pea shoots & chives' and our mains of 'poached sea trout, hot buttered samphire' and 'grilled quail, pearl barley, chickpeas mint & cucumber' were lovely, un-fancified platefuls of just those ingredients. Our starters were particularly good, with some nice touches. The buttermilk and mustard had been emulsified to make a smooth, punchy dressing mellow enough to flatter the fat dice of pork and shattering shards of crackling; the bacon accompanying the eel was presented as moreish half-inch lardons.

The stand-out dish of the whole meal was my quail; generously but not excessively seasoned, it was a plump, moist little delight so tasty that the carcass was torn apart and bones chewed to strip every last shred of flesh. The accompanying silky mix of barley 'n' beans was fresh-tasting and filling. The only very minor disappointment was James's sea trout, which he felt was a little over-cooked. Served cold with a generous helping of hot samphire it was nonetheless as saltily, satisfyingly bracing as a windy afternoon on Poole Quay.

Too full for puds, we chose instead a glass of Banyuls which was very generously offered on the house; I say generously but perhaps it was reward for our still being upright having already made serious inroads into the mostly-Old World, small producer-biased wine list. We'd started off with a bright, summery 2008 Picpoul de Pinet (which James had very sweetly remembered, from our online oeno-chat, that I'm a fan of), followed it up with a St Cosme from the same year (my favourite, a ballsy, rich 100% Syrah) and then just for good measure seen off a bottle of a light, berry-and-cherry ripe Sangiovese. Before you reach for the Yellow Pages to find me my nearest branch of Alcoholics Anonymous, let me assure you that three-bottle dinners are as rare these days as, well, meeting young men I've met on the internet for blind dates.

As the final cherry on a cake already made up of great company, super food, splendid wine and very agreeable surroundings, the service was absolutely perfect; a friendly, entirely informal vibe underpins a very evident sense of professionalism and care from a young, trendy team. It doesn't hurt of course that the boys are gorgeous (I think the hunky monkey in the checked shirt in the photo looks like a hotter Prince William) as I do find that a handsome staff aids the digestion magnificently. James would I'm sure not want me to neglect to mention too the brace of beautiful, welcoming girls. The bill was completely unscary; service included it came to about £50 each. A couple enjoying the same quantity of food but a normal volume of wine would be unlikely to rack up half that.

To anyone wishing to cavil that I'm being contradictory heaping such praise on a gastropub when I've been so critical of the genre in the past, I would say that I don't see (and I don't think the proprietors see) The Drapers Arms as being a 'gastropub' with all the aspiration to culinary fanciness that that implies. This is just that loveliest of British things - a great local pub, serving lovely and lovingly-prepared food, which just happens to be as good as you might expect to find in fancier places charging twice as much.

I liked The Drapers Arms - and the delightful Mr Ramsden - very much indeed. Both, if they'll have me, will be getting a second visit.

The Drapers Arms, 44 Barnsbury Street, Islington, London N1 1ER Tel: 020 7619 0348 http://www.thedrapersarms.com Twitter: @drapersarms 

 

The Mount Street Deli

As the regular reader - go on dear, wave so we can all see you - of this blog will know, I'm a huge fan of, and something of a pro bono brand ambassador for, Caprice Holdings. Until very recently I'd never found a restaurant I liked more than The Ivy; the place which stole its place in my heart, though only by a very narrow margin, was its stable-mate Dean Street Townhouse. There's nowhere in town I trust more to look after my precious mother than J. Sheekey, and I return time and time (and time) again for gossipy, glamorous nights at Rivington Grill. My affection for the company was further cemented last year by their generous support of an event I organised for my beloved Crusaid.

You can imagine then that I was rather excited to hear that the group has opened its first retail outlet in the form of The Mount Street Deli, just opposite another of the jewels in its crown, Scott's. I was asked along as a guest, on the second day of opening, to sample some of the products on offer, and from what I saw (and tasted), Caprice have another hit on their hands.

For the uninitiated, Mount Street is a very elegant thoroughfare (albeit currently blighted by seemingly incessant roadworks) running from Park Lane to Grosvenor Square. Always popular with the extremely well-heeled residents of Mayfair for its galleries, restaurants and specialist shops - gunmaker Purdey occupies a corner plot across from haute china supplier Thomas Goode - in recent years Mount Street has become synonymous with luxury fashion and is now home to many of London's highest-end boutiques, attracting wealthy local and international shoppers. The Mount Street Deli brings something genuinely new and completely suited to the mix - a delicatessen-cum-cafe stocking produce of sufficiently impeccable quality as to appeal to the street's very discerning clientele.

The food offering falls into two main categories, each of which has clearly been very thoroughly thought through. The eat-in offering - there's seating for 16 inside and 8 on a cute terrace - majors on fresh, home-made, seasonal and organic cafe staples, mostly British but including some smashing Italian salumi alongside menu favourites from some of Caprice Holdings' restaurants. The take-away selection is focused on the ne plus ultra of ready meals; dishes prepared in the kitchens of and usually only served in the members-only environs of the private clubs in the Birley Group, itself now a part of Caprice. There's also a lovingly sourced and carefully edited selection of preserves, chutneys, breads and confectionery ideal for giving as gifts or impressing dinner party guests.

From the cold counter I tried a variety of treats including plump, nutty jewelled cous cous, a few slices of silky salami and moreish mortadella, a mighty fine sausage roll (which I'll admit I would have preferred hot) and some lovely plump, briny olives which would have been perfect had they come wrapped in a vodka Martini. The hot dish of the day was a boldly savoury beef hot pot of which every spoonful spoke of slow, patient stewing, stirring and seasoning. A selection plate from the afternoon tea and puddings menu enabled me to sample the Deli's carrot cake, chocolate brownie and millionaire's shortbread out of which not just the latter will delight the area's super-rich.

The faultlessly enthusiastic manager Hannah Gutteridge is very proud of her coffee and an accompanying latte was excellent. What I really would have liked was a glass of wine; alas for the time being at least The Mount Street Deli is unlicensed meaning one can only browse and possibly take away the interesting and very reasonably priced wines on offer (a 1997 Pauillac at £75 caught my dipsomaniac eye). Although that remained on the shelf, I did leave with an armful of some of the quirkier goodies from the deli section including  a star anise and pink peppercorn mustard from Henshelwoods and some addictive chocolate lime biscuits from Island Bakery Organics.

Overall, I liked The Mount Street Deli  as much as I like its sister restaurants and bars and will definitely be back both to eat in - especially when the veal ravioli from Daphne's is on the menu - and to pick up some of what must be the poshest ready meals in London. The ultimate seal of approval however comes not from me but from the wonderful, elegant American lady who struck up conversation with me over coffee. Lucky (and, clearly, wealthy) enough to live 'just over the road' from The Mount Street Deli, she had already taken home dinner from it on day one and was now back on day two for coffee, a bite to eat and to meet her equally elegant husband. That the locals have taken the place so enthusiastically to their hearts before the paint is barely dry is a sure sign that Caprice Holdings have, yet again, got it absolutely right.

The Mount Street Deli, 100 Mount Street, London W1K 2TG Tel: 020 7499 6843 http://www.themountstreetdeli.co.uk/

Canton Arms, Stockwell

I’ve never been a fan of gastropubs. The concept of fancy, restaurant-standard nosh being served in the informal environs of a local boozer has always felt uncomfortable to me, an unwelcome example of two perfectly serviceable and separate entities encroaching on each other’s purpose - like listening to the radio on your television, or sending written messages via the telephone. As a result, I was less excited than others might be at the news that my local boozer, the recently-closed and sorely-missed Canton Arms in Stockwell, had been reborn not just as a gastropub, but as one where the food was attracting rave reviews from the big critics.

The only gastropub (and God, even that clunking neologism of a noun jars with me) I’ve ever really liked is the Anchor & Hope behind Waterloo Station. I was impressed by the absence of the pretension which seemed to afflict most others of its type, as well as by the fantastic quality and value of the food; I still go misty-eyed and drool a little when I think of the rabbit terrine I once had there. It softened the blow, therefore, to hear that the lady now in charge at Canton Arms is one Trish Hilferty – nope, I’d never heard of her, but Fay Maschler had which is fine by me – who once presided over the hot-plate at the Anchor & Hope (and ergo may well have been responsible for that terrine). Both having a day off last Friday, Alyn and I wandered round there - it takes a whole, ooh, minute from my flat – to try out a spot of lunch.

Pleasingly, the change of ownership hasn’t led to much of a change of decor. What before was a really nice, comfortable, friendly neighbourhood pub appears to have been left pretty much untouched, except that the back bit where there used to be cosy battered old sofas and a few tables for eating at now has only the latter, and has had a fresh lick of deep red paint to make it look vaguely restauranty. It’s a nice space to eat in; it’s not trying too hard to impress, tables are well-spaced and the high windows let in plenty of natural light. A decent number of other tables were occupied despite the fairly late hour, although interestingly the pub itself was otherwise deserted.

We were directed by a very friendly chap at the bar to a roomy corner table, and within a couple of minutes an equally smiley waitress brought tap water and good bread and butter. So far, so good. But then we looked at the menu, and things started to go downhill. It was so brief, and most of the dishes so insubstantial, that I wondered at first if we had been given a list of tapas. But no, the slip of paper was clearly headed ‘Lunch’ and I reproduce it in its entirety here:

Now, call me old-fashioned – and many do – but on a lunch menu in a pub gastro or otherwise, shouldn’t there be at least one failsafe dish such as a steak, pie or stew? To offer only two main dishes – that boring, bistro staple ‘omlette’ [sic] and lemon sole – and four tapas/starters smacks of a kitchen that has decided to serve what it wants to serve, and not what lunchtime customers might actually want. All the dishes sounded perfectly nice in their own right, but to our eyes that ultra-curt list did not a cohesive menu make. When I mentioned to the aforementioned friendly chap at the bar that it might have been welcome to see, say, a steak on the menu, I was told entirely uselessly that they had had onglet earlier in the week.

Given that we were hungry, and were going to the flicks in a couple of hours, we decided to stay put and try to cobble together a lunch out of what little was on offer. We ordered all of the first four dishes, plus a green salad, and a bottle of crisp, floral Le Vele 2006 Verdicchio to wash it all down with. To give it its due, the food was mostly good. The ‘Spanish ham’ – whether it was jabugo, or iberico, or pata negra, I couldn’t tell you, nor how many jotas it had; as far as the menu writer cared it was just ‘Spanish ham’ – was lovely, melt-in-the-mouth stuff and went very nicely when chewed with a mouthful of the perfectly fine omelette. The devilled lamb’s kidneys were superb, full of robust flavour enhanced by the tangy liquor they bathed in; the accompanying ‘toast’ had no crunch or notable flavour but at least absorbed the tasty juices.

Less successful was the cuttlefish, which was over-cooked, swimming in too much of the intensely powerful ink and not a patch on the cuttlefish dish I enjoyed recently at Rivington. Sauted potatoes were, without forewarning, substituted for the chips which should have come with the omelette; I don’t mind things being substituted provided that a) I’m told about it and b) the replacement item is good. Neither was the case here, and when I mentioned this to the waiter it was met with indifference. It comes to something when the best thing we ate, and the only dish to really stand out, was the green salad, which was a generous mound of super-fresh peppery leaves dressed in a perfect quantity of extremely good vinaigrette.

Overall, we were both entirely underwhelmed by the experience. The food really was nothing special – omelette, for God’s sake, is fine for Cafe Rouge, but in a gastropub? – if reasonably enough priced; our bill came to comfortably under fifty quid even including that nice bottle of wine. Yes, service was mostly lovely, but undermined by the staff’s incredulous response to anything other than fulsome praise; perhaps the galaxy of stars bestowed by Jay and Fay has gone to their heads already. I want this to be as good as the real critics believe it to be, because who wouldn’t want a stonkingly good gastrogaff practically on their doorstep? Even given my antipathy to them, I certainly would. But until I see evidence to the contrary – and I’ll certainly give Canton Arms a second shot – I remain to be convinced that I do.

Canton Arms, 177 South Lambeth Road, London SW8 1XP Tel: 020 7582 8710 No website.