Richard's Reviews

May 2011

It is always difficult returning to a favoured restaurant to find it changed. I went to the Summerhouse a couple of times last year are really liked its relaxed atmosphere and laid back nosh, as you can see from the review below.

How times have changed. I went again on a Bank Holiday Monday. We had a late booking, but arrived a bit early. The place was heaving. Nonetheless, we were seated straight away. I had asked, when booking, if we could get a waterside table, but was told that there was no booking for this, just turn up and see if you can get one. There were none free, but about 10 minutes after we sat down, a table at the front did come free, so I asked if we could take it. Alas no, others had bagged it. Fair enough, but why then 20 minutes later when we left, was it still empty? Had it been booked?

And yes, we lasted only 30 minutes here. I cannot tell you what the food was like this time, nor what the drink tasted of (not even the tap water) for we were ignored totally for 30 minutes. Not one single waiter (and there were many) found their way to our table. I have never considered waiving my napkin, Michael Winner like to get attention but, after half-a-bleedin’-hour of sitting there watching the surgically enhanced breasts at the next door table carefully take all the batter from her fish, eat the fish and leave the batter and chips, I now know why he does it.

I know I could have said something, but surely I shouldn’t need to? Anyway, when we heard the table behind us moan to the waiter about the 45 minute wait to get their starter, we just knew that it wasn’t going to happen. 30 minutes later we were sitting at the counter in Polpo supping on a Bellini. This is what I said a year ago about Polpo: www.squaremeal.­co.uk/review/Polpo/94079. Unlike the Summerhouse, a second visit a year later only underlines just how superb the place is.

ps as I cannot do a second, separate review with a new set of scoring, I have left the scores from last August about the… More

A moral dilemma: is it ethical for a restaurant to include on its wine list the prices that you'd pay at its competitors' pads? Does it make it any easier to take if the person most prodded is Gordon Ramsay?

I know one restauranteur who thinks it is a poor show. Me? I can see both sides: sure, it is nice to know that the Haut Brion is a quarter of the price here than at Marcus Waring, but then the food isn't really a quarter as good, so what does the comparison show? Add to this the fact that none of the wines appear to be cheaper anywhere else (did you check out the Union Cafe Bob?) and a fear that our friendly Bob is merely being mischievous. Now, were he to put the wholesale prices that the wines were bought at, that would be interesting.

And the wine list is very interesting. Along with the said HB (£362 if you must ask) there is a terrific selection by the glass, including the fine Grand-Puy-Ducasse and even the glorious Yquem '96, in both 100cl and a “tasting” size of 50cl. Genius. In fact, why do you need then to put down your fellow restaurants? Man-up Bob; you have a great wine list, don't knock others.

The room itself is, I think, supposed to be reminiscent of grand station cafes from the time of steam trains, sort of up-market American diner, with pink waistcoated boys and turquoise besuited girls. I'm afraid, to me it looked like I'd imagine the waiting room at a high class brothel would.

The menu is all day and mixes French and Russian, with British bits thrown in, so you get caviar and vodka shots, next to onglet, next to cream teas. All a bit confusing, but then Russia and France have a long culinary history; we have, if legend is to be believed, Napoleon's Russian troops in Montmartre to thank for the word “bistro”.

There are nice touches – a button to press for champagne, a plug for the toaster that comes with afternoon tea, that sort of thing. But its all a bit gloomy on a bright summer's afternoon.

The food was perfectly adequate, but didn't… More

You really do not want to go here with a hangover. The assault on the eyes would drive you hurtling down the narrow, barely lit, health and safety defying, spiral staircase to the loos. Only for the senses once again to be overwhelmed by weaver birds’ nests, frogs and wooden statues of naked pygmies surrounding the porcelain.

Yes, the place is decorated in what might be termed an idiosyncratic manner. Very idiosyncratic. If the Indonesian masks next to the fairy lights posing as flowers don’t get you, the Korean Karaoke-like renditions of Beetles hits will.

The food too could be described as challenging. Think crickets and love bugs, crunchy in a green salad. Think kangaroo spiced with “21 spices from Yemen”, that well known home of Skippy and his fellow marsupials. Think a gnu stroganoff. Think zebra.

It isn’t all odd for oddness sake: the wine list (housed in what might have been a canopic jar) has a 1961 Petrus (at nearly eight grand) sitting next nothing else that gets past a ton. OK, that is odd. But there is a main course of spiced Mexican belly pork. It comes in a Tom Yum broth. OK, that is odd too.

In fact, what am I talking about; it is all odd.

Many years ago I went to a restaurant in Nairobi that served barbecue skewers, churrasco like, of antelope, zebra, giraffe etc. Alongside this, it had similar skewers of lamb and beef. Having tried them all, it is easy to see why we eat far more lamb and beef in this country than zebra.

So go and try kangaroo and crocodile, they will no doubt be the best of their kind that you will try in this country. Thereafter, stick to lamb and beef, which just taste better.

The search for the best steak in London continues: it’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.

We arrived early, and were ushered into a gentleman’s club of a bar, all mahogany, leather and low lighting. The (heavy) bar seats are, as the friendly barman cheerfully told, extremely comfortable. And the cocktails are extremely good. The list is long, but the barmen happy to make suggestions based on your likes. This is a very fine bar, with very fine barmen, making very fine cocktails.

When our table became available, we were escorted from the cosiness of the bar to the cavern of the dining room, all bare bricks and high ceilings. We were post-theatre so wanted merely a main. Fine, but this, we were told, would be thirty minutes. Fair enough, although how a medium-rare steak takes more than 15-20 minutes I am unsure. By this stage of the evening, all the sensibly sized sharing steaks had gone, and we were left with the smallest: a 1.1kg rib-eye, so maybe 30 minutes at a squeeze.

40 minutes later, our friendly waiter (think Toby from In the Loop) came back to tell us it would be eight more minutes. Nice and precise. 15 minutes later, another missive from the kitchen: one minute until we could tuck in. Ten minutes later, it arrived. Over an hour. For a medium-rare steak?

For this to work, the steak had better be the best piece ever, cooked to perfection. It wasn’t. The steak itself was a lovely piece, nicely marbled, thick and pink on the interior. It was also really greasy. Not juicy; greasy. There is a profound difference. So were the peas and lettuce (although, given that they seemed to have substituted mangetout for petit pois, that was the least of my concerns with the dish).

It wasn’t all bad – the chips were lovely. We did a comparative tasting between the triple cooked and the beef dripping. Both were greaseless, both fine examples of the fryer's art, but the triple cooked won hands down: cut thinner, they were crispy and precise. Alas, a fine £4 bag of chips… More

Kiwis – check

Flat White – check

Bare brick walls and trendy art – check

Cool location – er, no.

Yes, all the classic combinations for an achingly hip and trendy, so cool it hurts coffee shop are present but, instead of being in Hoxton or Soho, it is in a Leather Lane. Home to a daily tat market that makes Petticoat Lane market look like Harrods.

The cool kids’ loss is the City’s gain. The coffee is seasonal, freshly roasted, ground in front of you and really rather good. Service is individual, with each cup/glass being lovingly created, so the wait is longer than at Starbucks. But hell, you get coffee here, not some hot, brown milk with shed-loads of syrup added to disguise the disgusting muck being served.

Food is croissant and muesli (organic and free range, a bien sur), lunch is bagels and the like and afternoons come with lemon drizzle cake and Pasteis de Nata.

Go. We need more coffee nerds like the founders: with any luck they’ll be taking over disused Starbucks and Costa Coffee venues soon.

I love both Polpo and Polpetto, so was hardly likely to be entirely unbiased when it came to trying the third of the Russell Norman trilogy. And it is good. If anything, Spuntino is the best of the three so far.

Like P&P it specialises in small, sharing plates. It has that same distressed feel about it that P&P both have, with old school enamel plates, mismatched tumblers and bare brickwork and lights, but is much airier than either of the P's. It is the atmosphere that sets it apart though: it is much more fun, much more upbeat. There is country/blues (old Johnny Cash, early Elvis, Blind Boys of Alabama, that sort of thing) playing over the sound system. There were tourists looking wide eyed and out of place alongside Soho locals and somebody who looked like Joe Ninety in an M&S cardie, modalising with a size zero, both slurping down each other and the mac & cheese.

The no booking policy is going to grate. As is the service, which is relaxed to the point of forgetfulness. Being democratic, you get here and join the queue. You wait for a space (one table, otherwise a big U shaped bar, with place settings along it). Then you wait for the place setting of the departed person to be cleared (or, this being an American styled joint, the “deseated” person). Then you wait a bit more. Then you fend off some tourist trying to jump the queue. Then you just go and sit down in the place and let them clear it up for you. Not a problem for a late Saturday lunch, but at the height of a sitting, this could be bothersome.

That said, the waiting staff are uniformly friendly, having got that whole baggy trousered look, with vast arrays of underwear and tattoos on display, down perfectly. Now I am not averse to the odd tattoo (and some of these were not only odd, but must have been really quite painful to apply), but I could do without so many stripped jocks being shown: even the aprons were tied below the buttline.

The name Spuntino comes from the Italian for nibbles, and a spuntino of… More

A US foodie friend of mine doesn't do fish and chips. It's not that he doesn't do real junk food (he is American after all), so is a specialist in burgers (there are definitively no decent ones in the UK or, indeed, outside the US). He also loves his kebabs (or kebobs, as he is want to call them): the place next to Lidl on the Seven Sisters Road gets the nod for these, ahead of the efforts of Topkapi which was too posh, being dismissed as: “lamb salad”. He cures and smokes his own bacon for goodness sake. But no, fish and chips he just cannot handle.

This is a shame, as not only can it be excellent, this wonderful restaurant local to us does some of the finest in town, and I should like to introduce him. The restaurant has recently taken over the crepe place next door. I'm not sure what it is with crepe restaurants and Marylebone, but the last one got taken over by the Real Greek and this one too fell to the Greek owners of the Golden Hind.

The centrepiece of the room is an enormous, old style fryer, alas no long functioning, but still giving off that small of tallow fat and beef dripping that pervades the room. The room itself isn't much to write home about – it is functional, the tables are nicely spread out and it is light. It also has that lovely smell of fat and vinegar that always lingers too long when you fry at home, seeping into the clothes, but here, it just adds to the atmosphere of the place.

The cod (sorry, I know that I shouldn't) is lovely: golden, crispy batter, opening up to allow the steam to escape from a firm, white, flakey piece of fish. The chips are good, thick and have just the right amount of sogginess to soak up the vinegar and the mushy peas an almost luminous green. Service is friendly and brisk and the fact that this is a BYO can do no harm to the queue that is ever-present, competing with the ever-present queue out side Relais de Venise opposite. Me, I would stick to the fish and chips and the luminous green mush that you get here, as opposed… More

As we arrived at Nopi some friends of ours were leaving: chuffed to have beaten us to eat at the New Foodie Place Du Jour, they practically crowed about how great it was. And it is good, of that there is no question. The food is all lovely little dishes; the tapas style, that is all so de rigueur at the moment. They are well executed and well presented. But, and you just knew that there was going to be one, I felt ever so slightly let down by the whole experience.

The room is white tiled and functional (it doesn't have that lavatory appearance that tiled rooms can somehow have), with the tables nicely spaced and lights that look as though you can pull them down to lower them, '70's style. I resisted the temptation somehow.

The receptionist, bar staff and waiting staff were to a person fantastic; just on that right side of friendly without being over-familiar. The head waiter seemed mortified that he might have brought the wrong dish, when actually, given the number of dishes that we had ordered, I had simply forgotten. The waitress, however, did get the wine wrong, but insisted with such certainty that it was what I had ordered, we let it slide (it was lovely, by the way, and, as it had been a toss-up between two equally priced bottles, I wasn't that concerned that she brought me my second choice).

I like the way too that there is sparkling and still filtered water gratis, and there is none of that mucking around with a service charge for the, beautifully chewy, sourdough bread, a couple of slices of which arrive with some peppery olive oil once we were seated.

No, it was the food: it wasn't poorly prepared or poorly presented, but the expectation was so high that it simply couldn’t reach the heights that I had come to expect. Not at these prices: and yes, it is not what you'd call cheap. Tapas often can be expensive, but when the portions are sub-starter sizes and weigh in at above-starter prices, well you expect something out of the ordinary: you want uni or Jamon… More