Fat Tony's at Bar Termini Centrale, Bond St

Since the arrival of Padella, the bijou and blindingly popular pasta bar in Borough Market, the race has been on amongst the London restaurant community to emulate its success - or hell, even some of its success - elsewhere in the capital. Results so far, it has to be said, have been mixed. Stevie Parle's Pastaio looked like it might be onto something but could only manage a very weak facsimile of the rightly famous Padella cacio e pepe, and the shared tables are a trial. More recently I bounded enthusiastically into the gleaming new Lina Stores pasta bar on Greek Street, only to be served completely unseasoned tortellini with horrid hard edges.

So why haven't proto-Padellas spread out across London, when clearly the demand is there? Well, I'm guessing because making great pasta - and running a great pasta restaurant - isn't anywhere near as easy as Padella makes it look. It's a difficult, laborious job rolling out fresh pasta every morning before service, and all sorts of factors - not least the space to operate in - need to be just right. And any Italian will tell you there's far, far more skill, time and effort goes into the construction of a truly excellent tomato sauce than your average punter would appreciate. Padella is no accident, it's the result of years of experience (the team behind Trullo in Islington, also excellent) and bloody hard work.

Given, then, that we're probably not going to be exactly spoiled for choice for great pasta any time soon, all the more reason to shout from the rooftops about anywhere offering a genuinely world-class product. So with that in mind, please let me introduce you to Fat Tony's at Bar Termini Centrale, and the best pasta I've ever eaten in London.

It sounds a bit unfair to the scale of what the Bar Termini team have achieved with Fat Tony's to say that quite how brilliant it is came out of the blue. Food this good is always, to some degree, unexpected, no matter how much previous experience is being brought along. If I had been told half the staff of the River Café were working downstairs at this rather functional spot on Duke Street that Tuesday evening I still would have been flabbergasted by the quality of the dishes they were turning out, but from chef James French, someone whose name was completely new to me before the press release landed in my inbox, the shock is all the greater.

I hardly need to say, given Bar Termini's pedigree, that the drink offering is amongst the very finest in the capital. Intelligently conceived and immaculately assembled, the Marsala Martini is a thing of stark, clean beauty, balanced and fresh to taste. And the Bellini, similarly stripped-back to its essentials and bathed in a gentle peach glow, is - I believe - spiked with essence of fresh fruit (one of Tony Conigliaro's signature techniques) for extra zing.

But OK, OK, the food. Burrata arrived first. A giant, beautiful thing draped in olive oil and speckled with black pepper, it cut open under gentle pressure to reveal a filling of soft seasoned cream, being in every way about as good as a burrata you could hope to encounter in this city or any other.

Another starter was wonderful in all kinds of different ways, pieces of expertly-prepared octopus complimented by potato, fresh herbs and a kick of nduja. There are a lot of great octopus dishes in London at the moment - the Holborn Dining Room version is particularly noteworthy, and this stood up to the very best of them.

Fat Tony's pici cacio e pepe is about the only version of this dish that has been anywhere near up to the standard of Padella's, and in fact - whisper it - may even be slightly better. The sauce is that same worryingly addictive emulsion of cheese and butter spiked with black pepper, salty and dense with flavour, and speaks of a kitchen that really knows what its doing. But the pici itself was so bouncy and vibrant it was practically alive, jumping around on the end of the fork like a Star Trek special effect. Sorry if that simile doesn't make them sound particularly appetising, but there it is.

Pappardelle with beef shin ragu is another classic dish where extreme attention to detail is the difference between a soggy plate of nonsense and a journey to pasta heaven. With soft yet firm folds of pasta bound with an unbelievably rich and beefy sauce, this was very much in the latter camp, again - at the risk of repeating myself - right up with the very best versions of this dish I've sampled anywhere, and probably a little better still. It's also worth pointing out that the generous chunks of beef that appeared in the bowl were tender, flavoursome little things that almost deserve a blog post all of their own.

Bucatini is (I discovered) similar to pici but with a hole running through the middle. What this means is that as well as being coated on the outside with the most incredible tomato and guanciale sauce, it bursts in the mouth into even more flavour when you bite into them, which if you've not experienced it before let me tell you is A Very Good Thing.

You'll have got the idea by now. Everything Fat Tony's do is (apart weirdly from the house bread, which was a tad stale, but we could have just been unlucky) worth shouting about; yes the pasta is worth crossing continents for but, as I said before, this is no kind of accident. Everything this team has been involved with, even since way back in the days of 69 Colebrook Row, has been touched with a kind of obsessive perfectionism and now they've turned their attention to pasta it makes sense that they've ended up making the best pasta in London, too. Some people are just that annoyingly good at what they do.

Anyway, for now I'll let you go and discover it for yourself. With its obsessively-perfect rendition of classical Italian cuisine, Fat Tony's is a singular achievement for its owners and a new jewel in the crown of London dining. If you sit down for a meal here and manage to come away even in the least bit disappointed, then I'll shut down the blog, sell my house and go and live on an island somewhere. In fact, they've turned me into such an evangelical that despite this meal beginning with a PR invite, I decided to pay my bill in full so that my message wouldn't be diluted. And the message, in short, is this - go and eat at Fat Tony's. It'll change everything.

10/10

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

The Salt Room, Brighton

On paper, or rather PDF, Salt Room looked like an absolute sure thing. A proper, grown-up seafood restaurant in a town that knows a thing or two about eating well, it seemed to fit the bill exactly; we were aware of big Brighton names like 64 Degrees, Pascere and Chilli Pickle but had settled on the Salt Room because we wanted something informal yet sophisticated, somewhere we could get messy on fresh shellfish and drink good cocktails and then spill out onto the pier for faded Victorian seaside fun.

And things started well. Happy to escape the insane number of people that flock to Brighton of a weekend - good lord, this place is busy - the warm welcome of the Salt Room bar and the attentions of their head barman soon settled our nerves. Martinis were ice cold, made with an interesting gin from Islay, and a cute Bloody Mary style thing came with a mini pot of nacho chips and pineapple chilli salsa as a garnish. We were about halfway through these when a 20-strong crowd of hen-doers arrived so, thanking our lucky stars we'd got our drinks order in already, we headed for the restaurant.

Apparently all the nice, bright, quiet window seats had been taken by people who had been here before, and knew to request them, so we were sat near the toilets between two massive tables of noisy families with toddlers. Quite why anyone would bring a 3-year-old to a smart seafood restaurant is beyond me - even if they find anything to enjoy about the food they'll be bored witless after ten minutes and want to race around the place screaming.

Amidst all the darkness, chaos and the screaming, there were bits and pieces to enjoy. Clams in sherry with chorizo and beans were a tad on the salty side but contained plenty of plump bivalves if not much chorizo.

Fishcakes had a nice smooth consistency and delicate crust, even if it was a bit low on fish - still, I can enjoy a deep-fried potato croquette as much as I can a fish cake, so this wasn't too much of an issue.

Some of the slices of bread were a bit stale on one side, like they'd been sliced a good while ago. Again, not a terrible failure once they'd been dunked in the leftover clam sauce or spread with the nice homemade tartar sauce but it all added to the impression that their attention wasn't on the details. Even the menu contained a few spelling mistakes (we think they mean XO sauce that came with the crab, not ox...), and details, in a place like this, are eveything.

It all rested, then, on the main seafood platter. If it had been up to scratch, all the issues with oversalting and stale bread and the squealing toddlers would be forgiven. We'd have knocked it all back, polished off a bottle of Picpoul de Pinet and been back on the streets of Brighton with a spring in our step. Sadly, it wasn't to be. But first, the good bits - oysters were full of brine and flavour, and the house mignonette was good. Raw scallop was nice, too, gently dressed with lime.

But the rest of it? I was immediately suspicious that the Salt Room, a specialist seafood restaurant, only offers crab claws and not whole dressed or cooked crab. This makes me think that rather than buying in whole fresh crab, they're getting hold of frozen claws separately. I can't say they do this for certain, but that's the impression I got, and having tasted the end result I'm going to need a lot of persuading that they don't. Similarly the langoustine, desperately overcooked to mushy, had strange, bendy shells - again, if they were cooked from fresh I'd be very surprised. Prawns were similarly mealy and bland. And the less said about some terrible soily, chewy chips the better.

Of course, the tragedy of poor seafood platters is that they still generally cost quite a whack. After having drowned our sorrows in a second bottle of Picpoul the bill came to £62.30 a head, a decent amount to pay for a good seafood lunch perhaps, but for this half-hearted display, served with only the occasional glimmer of competence from an Italian member of staff that, to be fair, was acting as half-waiter half-babysitter for most of the afternoon, it really didn't feel like value.

I hesitate to denigrate an entire city based on one dodgy meal, but I wonder if at least some of the problems with the Salt Room are that they operate in an area so oversubscribed with day trippers that even the mediocre places do well. Maybe when they first opened they served fresh crab and bought in live langoustine and made their mark, but have gradually realised they make just as much money buying in frozen and using yesterday's bread. Who knows.

What Brighton does have going for it, though, is faded Victorian seaside attractions, and lovely cozy old pubs. So we had a go on a ricketty old roller coaster, and a couple of pints in the Pull & Pump, and soon disappointing crab was a distant memory. I will try Brighton again - and very soon in fact, I'm booked in at Pascere next month. But for now, I'll choose my fruit de mer more carefully. Life's too short for mediocre seafood.

5/10

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Tandoor Chop House, Covent Garden

Much as I try and keep an open mind about these things, I've been doing this restaurant blogging thing long enough, and have been burned enough during that time, to build up quite a healthy prejudice against proto-chains. Objectively there should be no real reason why a proto-chain (that is, a restaurant designed from the get-go to be the first of many) wouldn't be any less enjoyable than any independent joint - both, after all, are still in the business of feeding you food you want to eat at prices you want to pay - except, well, the reality just doesn't bear this out.

There are, I'm sure, more reasons for the gap in quality between proto-chains and other restaurants than I could ever realistically go into here, but perhaps the main issue is simply one of attitude. If you start up as an independent restaurant, do better than you'd hoped and scrape enough money together for a second branch, well there's a dignity and humility in that - you've started up for the right reasons, and through good fortune have tapped into a demand. All chains have to start somewhere, I suppose, but how much better to be MeatLiquor or Bone Daddies, growing from a single branch to a nationwide (and international) chain through the sheer superiority of your product, rather than having the gumption to gather a group of investors, ask them to cough up a few million quid and have a nice logo designed. It all seems a bit... cynical.

You may quite naturally assume I'm setting Tandoor Chop House - unashamedly a proto-chain - up for a slating, but of course these things are rarely black and white; if they were, my job would be a lot easier. There's actually a lot to like about the place, not least of which is the seekh kebab roll (not pictured sorry, my photos didn't come out), which comes in a nice earthy coriander dressing and has a remarkable kick of spice. Well worth a fiver.

Or this beef dripping keema naan, which (on my first visit at least) had a great fluffy naan base and a hugely enjoyable beef mixture on top. Cherry tomatoes didn't add much, but then they never do.

"IPA" battered squid and prawns were interesting too, not very Indian perhaps but with a nice tasty batter and containing good chunks of tender seafood.

I didn't much like this tuna tartare thing. Maybe it was just difficult getting my head around eating raw fish in an Indian restaurant, or maybe it just didn't taste very nice - a bit bland and unsettling. Yes, pretty sure it's the latter.

On the subject of the main courses, there are two stories to tell. On my first visit, the lamb chops (above) were superb; perfectly chargrilled, expertly spiced and fantastic fun to eat. You could not want for a better lamb chop. Well, you could, there are probably a few better ones in town (*cough* Tayyabs *cough*), but the point is, they were very good, as you might well hope at a price point of £16.50 for three.

Also excellent (on my first visit) were the chicken tikka pieces, moist and tender and coated with a beguiling spice mix easily the match of any "posh" Indian restaurant in town. With just a touch of char from the tandoor, and a scattering of fresh coriander, they too just about made sense of the £12 price point.

Had my review ended there, with a couple of decent starters and a couple of genuinely enjoyable mains, Tandoor Chop House would have been in the running for at least a 7/10 score and a pat on the back. Unfortunately - for them and me - I went back one lunchtime and ate the above, "green masala pollock", which is probably the most disgusting fish dish of any kind I've ever paid for. Pollock, a cheap, nasty fish, grey and mushy and with a horrid thin flavour, needs a great deal of intelligent treatment to make it edible (I believe it's the main ingredient for fish fingers, which is fair enough), but here, soaked in a weird grassy, underseasoned dressing, it just tasted all kinds of wrong, the memory of a good idea gone old and ill. Try and imagine the exact opposite of the wonderful Haryali Sea Bream dish from Trishna, as if cooked by the demon from Stranger Things in the Upside Down, where everything is decrepit and evil.

And in fact, on my second visit even the Chicken Tikka was a bit sad and dry, not wholly unedible (certainly not as bad as the pollock) but still not quite right, as if some of the joy (or at least the expertise) had left the kitchen. This could have something to do with the launch week chef moving on, but you would have at least hoped he'd leave a competent team behind him.

On a similarly concerning vein, the naan bread, which had been so fluffy and bubbly and full of life in launch week, had settled into the sad, dense, doughy thing you see above by my second visit. As to the cause, who knows, but clearly something wasn't right.

Consistency, especially for a proto-chain but really for any restaurant, is the difference between success and failure. And though I moan about the drop in standards at Tandoor Chop House since opening it's still relatively early days and they still have plenty of time to inject a bit of passion and attention to detail back into their offering. I'm pretty sure nothing would be able to redeem that awful pollock dish but in the case of the bread and the chicken it's probably just a case of going back to basics. Who knows. In a way, I'm glad it's not my problem and all I need to do is carp from the sidelines.

But it's important to stress that I didn't have an uneven time at Tandoor Chop House just because it's a proto-chain. Yes, I do carry a prejudice about them and maybe even with my most objective head on they would have had to try a bit harder to curry my favour (no pun intended... OK maybe a little pun intended). But I mainly can't recommend the place because the food is only occasionally worth the money they're asking for it. And that's a problem, chain or no chain.

5/10

I was invited to the launch week meal, but have paid my way since. Apologies for the lack of bill photo, I forgot to take one, but their website have the prices. Ennismore have asked me to point out that the head chef is still most definitely there and hasn't moved on, but was on holiday for one of my subsequent visits.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Quaglino's, St James

It's fair to say that the last time I was invited to one of these all-in-one entertainment/restaurant/bar venues, it didn't go too well. Circus is (or rather was, I've never been tempted to go back for obvious reasons) a cabaret and dining joint in Covent Garden firmly aimed at bridge-and-tunnel birthdays and hen parties, where vaguely pan-Asian dishes, looking a lot better on paper than they taste in real life, are served, occasionally interrupted by an annoying thumping soundtrack and bit of half-hearted hoop-spinning. It was all a bit... tacky.

The problem is there's a fine line between a classy cabaret venue and a tacky "theme restaurant" and that difference is measured in everything from the décor to the service and yes - the food and drink. On the first measure, the décor, Quaglino's is knockout. Guests enter via a plush and glamorously-lit bar with panoramic views over the vast basement dining hall and stage. After a martini or two, you then descend a sweeping staircase to the restaurant level, where tables are sensitively individually spotlit and surround another huge central backlit bar. It's a beautiful space, and in great nick (unlike Circus), Art Deco lines and styles but with enough soft furnishings to make it feel intimate.

Then there's the service, and yes they knew I was reviewing and I shouldn't dwell too much on this but we didn't want for anything, and managed that clever thing of fussing just enough at the start when drinks and food needed ordering, then fading completely into the background once the conversation started flowing.

But I imagine most of you are here to learn about the food, and I suppose I should come straight out and say that, served without the service and trappings of this incredible space, some of Quaglino's' crowdpleasing vaguely European dishes may struggle to make themselves heard. That's not to say anything we ate wasn't enjoyable, but only that it was solid, dependable stuff, cooked competently, raised to greatness largely by virtue of the context in which it was served.

So autumn squash velouté, a rich thick broth (not very velouté-y really), cooled with chunks of goat's curd, was a decent starter, seasoned well and with texture provided by toasted pumpkin seeds, but hardly an earth-shattering arrangement of ingredients. It soon disappeared though, the bowl wiped clean with some warm house baguette.

Venison tartare with oyster emulsion was, despite my caveats, a dish that could hold its head in any context, with bags of gamey flavour and just a teasing hint of seafood in the "oyster emulsion" holding it together. I've long been of the opinion that venison makes a much better steak tartare than beef, and though I can hear the howls of protest from tartare purists already, I suspect at the back of their minds they all know I'm right as well.

I had tagliatelle with peas (lots of peas... I mean a serious amount of peas... like "we have to get rid of more of these peas or they'll go off" amount of peas) and a generous coating of black truffle, and I polished it all off quite happily. No, the pasta wasn't Padella-good but Padella don't have nice Art Deco lampshades and live entertainment do they? So there.

Confit duck leg I didn't try, but as far as I can gather it went down quite well and didn't suffer too badly from dryness that can affect this kind of thing. And don't worry, it was served with a (good) sauce, I just didn't take a picture of that. I think we also ordered fries but I didn't get a photo of those, either. Look, we were just enjoying ourselves, OK? There was a woman singing cabaret versions of modern pop songs, I was a martini down and someone had given me a very nice glass of pinot noir. That's basically all I need for a perfect evening.

Desserts were suitably friendly. I had a creme brulee which had a nice delicate crust and good creamy vanilla-speckled filling, and we also had a very decent cheeseboard with an ash-covered goat's, a very dense and salty blue and a creamy Brie (which may in fact have been Tunworth). All a good temperature. And a good portion size. All good, in fact.

You'd have to be a really sour cynical type not to be swept away with the theatre of an evening at Quaglino's, and believe me, I would have counted myself firmly in that group before my dinner there. Yes, I was invited, but had we gone and paid for it ourselves even with a martini I don't think the bill would have crept much over £50 a head; the menu we ate was £30 with a glass of fizz, something approaching a bargain for this part of town never mind somewhere with live entertainment and fancy loos. Sometimes, and I'm getting a twitch in one side at the thought of even typing this, sometimes food isn't everything, it's the whole package that matters. And there are fewer fancier packages than Quaglino's.

8/10

I was invited to Quaglino's.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Chick'n'Sours, Covent Garden

"It has runaway success written all over it," I said about the original Chick'n'Sours in Kingsland Road, and with my predictions being so very rarely correct I hope you'll indulge me this opportunity to brag just a little about getting this one bang-on. With their unique and timely vision of Asian-influenced US comfort food this lively little spot in Dalston caught the public's imagination - and appetite - from day one, and in retrospect it was inevitable they'd want to open a 2nd branch at some point.

And ordinarily I'd wish them well and leave them to it; I rarely make an effort to review multiple branches from the same team because, well, usually I've said everything that needed to be said the first time around, and however welcome it would be to have a Chick'n'Sours on every street corner (and that would be very welcome indeed), hopefully all the same reasons for visiting would apply each time. There's no need to labour the point.

Except here we are, and I am going to the labour the point about Chick'n'Sours, not least because there's more than enough new and improved here in Covent Garden to fill the pages of another blog post but because also, even if the menu, the quality of the food and the style in which it is served was a complete carbon copy of the Kingsland Road original, I'd still feel duty bound to tell you about it for one simple reason - Chick'n'Sours... is... brilliant.

Let's start with a new entry in the Covent Garden menu - an irresistable snack called Mexi-nese Nachos. Corn chips soaked in a rich cheese sauce, looser than melted American and with more flavour though don't ask me how, studded with warm bacon bits and "Chengdu chicken" (crunchy skin I think but don't quote me), all topped with some fantastic crisp kimchee and green chilli. Nachos have been reimagined and reinvented so many times in so many dive bars it's a miracle C'n'S have come up with something original at all, least of all something that could very well spoil every other plate of nachos you've ever eaten in your life. A must order.

A must order too are the disco wings, available in a variety of different treatments. Pictured are the 'hot', best described as a vinegar-chilli Buffalo-style sauce, but with extra levels of deeply satisfying umami flavour, the bubbly crust of the wings holding so much of the sauce that biting into each one was a gloriously messy affair. They are the best chicken wings I've ever found in London, combining great quality, meaty chicken with supremely addictive coating and sauce. And that's even before they're introduced to the cooling, creamy St Agur dip.

I worry I'm sounding a bit like a press release, but Chick'n'Sours is one of those places that makes advocates of us all. The house pickles are a colourful selection of Asian-fringed flavours, sweet and sour, from soft chunks of cucumber to squishy cabbage. The pickling is clearly finely honed, a process presumably evolved from the very earliest days in Haggerston, and before that when head chef Carl Clarke was organising Korean popups around town.

Smacked ("Hunan-style") cucumbers, soaked in sesame oil and with a healthy slick of chilli, also satisfied on every level. It seems to be a Sichuan (or at least vaguely Southern Chinese) trick to combine something cooling (cucumbers) with chilli heat, to end up with an addictive contrast of pain and pleasure in every mouthful.

That same contrast is what makes the famous pickled watermelon side so good, a stalwart from Kingsland Road we couldn't help ordering again, refreshing chunks of fresh watermelon that soothe at first before the tingle of chilli kicks in a few seconds later. It's all enormous fun.

Finally, coriander and sesame chicken tenders, doing that same extraordinary balancing act of crunchy, moist, soft, sharp, sweet, you name it. Exciting, innovative comfort food that you'd happily order again and again.

All this is, in short, why I pay other people to make food for me. I said that "in retrospect" it was inevitable that Chick'n'Sours would want to open a second branch but actually, back in May 2015 you can't really blame them for just hoping they'd make it through to Christmas and that they'd find a sensible way of managing the queues. It's only with the passage of time we can appreciate the place for what it was - a genuine game-changer that found a way of reinvigorating the US comfort food trend with exciting Asian flavours and deserved every bit of the "runaway success" (© Cheese and Biscuits 2015) that came their way. And judging by the full house at 12:30 on a Monday lunchtime, this may just be the beginning. Chick'n'Sours is brilliant.

10/10

No chance this gem is being left off the next version of the app. Meantime see where else is good.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad