St. Leonard's, Shoreditch

Looking back over the God knows how many years I've been writing this blog, it seems that my most breathlessly enthusiastic and hyperbolic reviews have been of places that are about more than just great food. Great food is obviously a given - this is after all why you're here - but it's the stories that often turn a great experience into a special one. I'm thinking of Yianni's journey from flipping the best burgers in Britain to opening the industry-altering #meateasy popup in New Cross, the discovery deep in the rolling Lancashire countryside of two women running the platonic ideal of a food pub, or when some Italian food enthusiasts decided to open a tiny no-reservations pasta bar in Borough and it ended up being exactly what thousands of Londoners had been waiting for. It's these stories, the unusual or surprising circumstances leading up to the creation of fantastic food, that lift the whole experience into something else.

The conception of St. Leonards (that sounds like a Catholic order) has, it must be said, very little of the unusual or shocking. It is the simple story of some extremely talented people who, with one popular and successful restaurant - Brunswick House - already under their belts, decide to open another one. They find a medium-sized site recently vacated by the Spanish restaurant Eyre Bros and open it out into a bright, clean space; they hire a phalanx of charming and dedicated front of house staff dressed in smart monochrome to work the floor; and they kit out a vast kitchen with a centrepiece wood- and charcoal-fired hearth, over which hang various tantalising cuts of beef on the bone and tuna collar. And then, finally, they serve some of the most exciting and innovative food London has ever seen.

OK, so, maybe St. Leonards is special after all. Restaurants like this do not come around very often, and nor do they happen by accident. Jackson Boxer and Andrew Clarke have pooled their considerable experience into a menu of such stark, beguiling beauty that if you took it to an open mic poetry night you could read it top to bottom and receive a standing ovation. Certain phrases attack the senses even if you're not exactly sure what they imply - "soy butter", "buckthorn mollases", "tuna bone caramel", "XO crumb", and the less the menu explains, the greater is the desire to discover them for yourself.

Attention to detail - precise, exquisite attention to detail - is everywhere, even when a dish is literally no more than a product of clever sourcing, such as this Noir de Bigorre ham, sliced to order into soft, salty, nutty folds. Noir de Bigorre ham has apparently been produced in the countryside around Lourdes for longer than the Iberico pigs from Spain, and though nothing is likely to beat a top bit of Belotta to my heart any time soon, this certainly gave it a run for its money.

If you're anything like me you will fiercely resist anyone mucking about too much with oysters, and though I have enjoyed the odd baked bivalve in my time - most recently at the short-lived offshoot of Mien Tay Mrs Le's - usually I want nothing more than a squeeze of lemon. But here are St Leonard's dressed Lindisfarne to completely change everyone's mind on the subject. Wild black pepper infused pickling liquor (I mean try not loving that concept, I dare you) and pickled garlic scapes complimented and elevated the lean oyster flesh to create an extraordinary mouthful of fresh, briney sweetness. I never want oysters any other way again.

Then, a cherrystone clam, its shell shining blue like fine Wedgewood pottery, dressed in a smoky, earthy Sichuan peppercorn oil and topped with daintily chopped spring onions. All St Leonard's strengths were on display in this one bit of seafood - the playful use of Asian spices, the interesting and rarely-seen main ingredient, the beautiful and precise presentation.

Some neat oblongs of mackerel next, their silvery skins glittering beneath dandelion stalks. Underneath, a layer of dense, umami-rich soy dressing - "soy butter" - which I did my best to mop up with the mackerel before finally resorting to using my fingers. I didn't care if anyone was watching.

"Chawanmushi" is apparently a kind of savoury custard, here combined with foie gras for extra levels of meaty decadence. On top sat a few pieces of smoked eel - always impossible not to love - and crunchy pieces of pork skin. So foie gras, smoked eel and pork scratching. Together. Yes, it was brilliant.

Sweet baby onions, charred on the hearth, would have been a decent little snack even of themselves, and actually quite similar to a course at famous Scandi weeds-and-pickles restaurant Noma I had a couple of years back. But here they came on something called "tuna bone caramel", which I can best describe as possibly the greatest fish-based sauce you'll ever taste in your life. God knows how many laborious techniques go into its production, or how many grinding man hours, but the result is a thick, dark sauce somewhere between bagna cauda and treacle, so dangerously addictive it should come with a parental advisory sticker.

There are few things more reliably rewarding than a bit of charcoal-grilled bavette, even when not particularly good quality beef. Of course St Leonard's use the best beef they can get their hands on - from Swaledale of Skipton - and so the result is a tender, powerfully-flavoured dish, overhung with woodsmoke and topped with grated cured bonemarrow for bonus beef.

Maybe I don't need to say anything about the next dish. Maybe all you need is the photo above, for an object as overwhelmingly beautiful as that to do all the talking. Or maybe all you need are the words "monkfish, buckthorn mollases, beach herbs" and you can let your mind fill in the details of the firm, blinding white flesh glazed in sweet syrup, the ethereally light hollandaise underneath, the pile of salty succulents above, plump with freshness and life. As much as any dish at St. Leonard's should be a must-order - and there's some competition for that particular role - I'd wager you'd leave with the greatest regret leaving not having tried this bronzed beauty, an absolute masterclass in fish cooking.

Sorry, perhaps I need a second to compose myself. I should try and offer a bit of balance, some sour lemon to cut through the oozing cheesecake of hyperbole. OK then, here you go - the rhum baba wasn't very good. Dry and woolly, it was certainly soaked with a generous amount of rum but the alcohol could still not prevent the sponge from sticking to the roof of my mouth. So, yeah, St. Leonard's isn't perfect.

But "salt caramel & East India sherry tart with cardamom ice cream" was perfect, displaying a willingness for bold experimentation that had been a feature of the savoury courses. With an expertly-judged smooth, light filling and great soft ice cream, it was everything you'd need in a caramel tart.

I began this post with the desclaimer that St. Leonard's has no intriguing backstory, no rags-to-riches journey from street food to bricks and mortar, no heartwarming reality TV triumph against adversity. For lazy restaurant bloggers and overworked food journalists the lack of a "hook" could mean it doesn't grab the attention - or headlines - as much as other places. It doesn't even have a car lift to accommodate paparazzi-shy celebrities.

But the very fact that St. Leonard's isn't an "accident" or an "experiment", and has no eye-catching gimmicks, could perhaps in the end be the very reason for its success. It exists because certain people want it to exist, and because those same sickeningly talented individuals have nailed, at every turn, everything that makes a restaurant great, while ignoring any irrelevant extra bells and whistles that don't. Make no mistake, there's every bit as much of a revolution going on here as in that strange dark space above a pub in New Cross back in 2011, or at the end of a two-hour queue in Borough, but hiding in plain sight as a "normal" restaurant in Shoreditch means that St. Leonard's stands even more of a chance of knocking you sideways. It certainly did me. And it's only a matter of time before it does to you, too.

9/10

I visited St. Leonard's at the tail end of soft opening, so received 50% off the bill as you can see above. A more normal price per head would have been about £80.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Nuala, Old Street

It's a sign of just how old I and my peer group in London are getting that meals in fancy new restaurants often begin with a period of reminiscing about the previous use - or uses - of the building we happen to find ourselves in. I remember this particular spot on City Road, when I worked in the area in around 2008, being home to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, but my dining companion last night's knowledge of the area stretches back even further, to when it was apparently a grim, bare-bones nightclub with blacked-out windows and murky reputation. That was when you'd occasionally catch Noel Fielding in the Dragon Bar just over the road, and a pint cost £4. Yes, that far back.

Anyway, in the now-almost-unrecognisable Silicon Roundabout, up pops Nuala, as flashy and "designed" as befits the area but with a welcome as warm and kind as an Irish mammy. Yes, Nuala takes a certain inspiration from the Emerald Isle as head chef Niall Davidson (formerly of, well, lots of places but most recently Chiltern Firehouse) hails from there, but the menu is far from traditional and has rather more Dalston than Dalkey about it. The friendliness and charm of the front of house, though, seems very Irish.

From "Snacks" (you'll know how the menu is organised if you've eaten at another cutting-edge British-Irish restaurant, the Dairy, in the last few years) we tried cod's roe crackers, superb smooth, salty tarama on top of delicate corn crisps, and neat discs of home made soda bread, sweet and soft, topped with shavings of foie gras and enchanting ribbons of preserved clementine.

"Crab salad in chilled cucumber broth" performed the intricate task of balancing white and brown crab meat utterly perfectly - just enough brown to have that earthy umami kick, sweetened with just the right amount of white - and the "broth" - in fact more like a gel - had a clean, defined cucumber taste. It was the kind of crab dish you always hope to find on a menu like this, but it's by no means a given that every kitchen can pull it off. Nuala managed it though.

Then the best sweetbreads I can remember eating in a long time. Huge, beautiful things, glazed with a superb meaty jus and without a hint of the mealiness that can affect lesser examples, they would have been astonishingly successful even without the "cauliflower rarebit", rich and smokey from the open grill, which accompanied them. Much like the crab dish, you hope when you see something like this on a menu it will live up to the promise, but only very rarely is it realised quite so brilliantly.

Rabbit is another tricky meat to get right - cooked well, it can be lean and gamey without being dry, but I've lost count of the number of times I've been presented with vaguely rabbity lumps of cotton wool, in otherwise even quite accomplished restaurants. Needless to say, at Nuala they know what they're doing with a bit of bunny, and a lovely grilled leg was presented alongside a couple of medallions of stuffed loin, all of it beautifully moist. Chunks of salt-baked celeriac sat in a subtle cream sauce studded with samphire, and added up to a very rewarding plate of food indeed.

Even superficially more straightforward dishes had plenty to recommend them. True, rump is often a chewier cut of cow, ordered often with the tacit understanding that whatever you lose in texture you'll gain in taste. And yes, although it took a bit of chewing, the taste from this beautiful bit of steak, Torloisk Highland cattle cooked to medium-rare over the coals and funky with a good deal of dry-aging, was well worth the effort and then some. This producer is a new one to me, but I will certainly be looking out for it on menus in the future.

It's at this point in lesser restaurants, whether the savoury courses had been mediocre or even quite good, that, sated and slowing, we'd pay up and leave. However we were having such a blast at Nuala that not only did we not dash home after mains but, having come to the conclusion that this kitchen could basically do no wrong, we decided to order all the desserts. So, a char-grilled pineapple, delicately filleted and arranged into a pretty yellow rose was joined by a quenelle of buttermilk/lime sorbet...

...pumpkin ice cream boasted a fantastic sliky-smooth texture that only the very best home made ice cream has, and a chocolate and coffee affair had a nice big caffeine kick paired with cool, light dairy. All of it was polished off so thoroughly they could have re-used the artful stoneware without use of a pot-washer.

There's a lot of pessmism blowing aroud the London restaurant scene lately. Some of it, no doubt, is well-founded; the effect Brexit will have on our ability to attract quality talent from Europe and the world is yet to be quantified, and ingredient inflation is already making things very difficult for Spanish and Italian restaurants (and many others) who import much of their menus. But however easy it is to succumb to fear and despair, and however much the following months and years may give us reason to do so, it seems London's restaurants, for now, have decided to just sod it all and carry on being brilliant anyway. So, the best advice I can give is to make a booking at Nuala immediately and make the bloody most of it.

9/10

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Madame D, Spitalfields

I like to think I can put up with a great deal of discomfort in the pursuit of good food - noise, queues, darkness, annoying useless hand dryers instead of paper towels - but if there's one thing guaranteed to ruin my evening it's the dreaded phrase "communal seating". I don't care how many people you think it's necessary to shoehorn into your shoebox of a restaurant in order to turn a profit; there is absolutely no excuse for forcing people to squeeze in next to each other like tube passengers to eat their dinner. It's awkward, uncomfortable and completely counterproductive to the most basic levels of hospitality. If two strangers' elbows are clashing while they tuck into their starters your tables are too close together, simple as that.

With that in mind, Madame D's couldn't have got off to a worse start. Initial delight that they were able to fit the two of us in on a busy Wednesday night turned to despair after we saw where we'd be sitting - in the middle of a desperately overcrowded row of tables so close together that someone deciding they needed the toilet necessitated the whole table being pushed out into the middle of the room. I'm sure the extra £50 from a two-header made all the difference to that evening's profits, but is it really worth winding your guests up so much to achieve it?

Anyway, rant over - for now. I mention this only because the food at Madame D's is so good that it deserves a nicer environment in which to enjoy it. A much nicer environment. Naga chilli beef puffs weren't anywhere near as hot as the involvement of the fearsome naga would suggest, just full of meaty beefy flavour and surrounded by nice soft pastry.

Prawn crackers - presented in what I hope is an ironic plastic bag and not just picked up from the local cash'n'carry - came with an interesting Newari-pickle coleslaw (not as good as the Darjeeling Express Newari pickle, but not bad) and a genuinely lovely szechuan pepper sauce studded with pickled prawns, which impressed with a complex set of flavours and a good hit of chilli offset with cooling tomato. I'm not entirely sure why this snack, more often than not offered for free in Thai restaurants, cost £8.50, though. Maybe they were very expensive prawns.

Hakka chilli paneer was another rich and satisfying set of flavours and textures, fresh vegetables and fearsomely hot chillies, studded with bouncy, salty cubes of cheese. It's abundently clear that the guys behind Madame D's (just as they proved at Gunpowder) are experts in constructing and presenting lively, characterful small plates Indian cooking. It's just a shame it has to be enjoyed while attempting to tune out the conversations of three different sets of diners within easy earshot.

The one large dish we ordered was this masala lamb noodles, served in a tiffin tin, and topped with a fried egg. Sort of an Indian-spiced spaghetti Bolognese (I'm sure they'll hate me saying), it was, like all the food that had come before, confident and inventive, rather unlike anything I'd seen before in London (other than the odd set of flavours at Darjeeling Express), and endearingly quirky.

Unfortunately despite the food - and the supremely attentive service, it has to be said - being so good, all everything else about Madame D's made us want to do was to wolf it all down as quickly as possible and get the hell out of there. Still, at quieter times, and perhaps if you managed to snag a table whose proximity to fellow diners was somewhat less than intimate, there's the potential for a really bloody lovely time to be had. So perhaps it's best, for the sake of my blood pressure, I just focus on the positives. Like those naga beef puffs, or the hakka chilli paneer. Lovely, calming, quiet, hakka chilli paneer.

7/10

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Red Rooster, Shoreditch

Please don't think that this review is the result of the fact I've not had a truly terrible meal for a while and I'm short on some kind of slating quota. I never want to have bad meals - nobody does. Quite the opposite; I spend most of my life trying - with considerable success, considering the numbers involved - to avoid them. But no matter how cautious and vigilant, you only need to let your guard down for a second to be in trouble. A bad meal is always out there somewhere; they creep upon you, stalk you like jungle cats, getting closer and closer as you wait naive and oblivious until at the last moment they strike, and you can only struggle helplessly as they tear at your soul and your wallet.

The problem with a lot of bad restaurants is that while seemingly caring little about what ends up on the plate they often manage to scrape together enough money - somehow - to employ people who can write a good menu. And the Red Rooster menu reads well - well enough, clearly, for one to assume a decent dinner there wasn't outside the realms of possibility. An interesting international melange of influences, ceviche, gravlax and fried chicken sat beside jerk pork, clam chowder and a cheeseburger - London has seen Southern US soul food before (most recently and most successfully at the late, lamented Lockhart and Shotgun) but this seemed something genuinely new, reflecting the fascinating (and well worth reading up on) background of head chef Marcus Samuelsson. The point is, we thought it was going to be good. Otherwise why bother?

Worried by the potential size of the £58 main course we had our eyes on (more on that later) we decided to share a starter of what we'd been led to believe was a Red Rooster classic - fried chicken and waffles. What arrived was a small, butterflied thigh piece, topped with chilli sauce and pickle, on top of maple waffle. The chicken itself wasn't bad, just boring - watery and plain and desperately needing more spice and seasoning. The waffle was cold and chewy but otherwise OK with a nice maltiness, and the chilli - sorry, Rooster - sauce was best described as "wet". Pickle was bizarrely good, though, so there is that.

OK, so far so bland. The "famous" Red Rooster fried chicken wasn't even the best in the East of London (certainly not with Chick'n'Sours a short bus ride away) never mind the Western Hemisphere. So perhaps the main course would redeem the place? Well, no. No, it really wouldn't. For an astronomical £58 you get three "bonemarrow" dumplings which tasted of little more than suet, a strange bed of frozen [SEE EDIT BELOW] peas, corn and chopped asparagus, and on top a two-bone piece of beef (very) short rib, I'm guessing no more than 400g or so including the bones.

We dutifully carved our miniature rib roast into two, and tried it. It was chewy from not having been cooked long enough, but to be honest I don't mind a bit of bite from a rib roast. What I do mind is paying £58 for a piece of beef so completely underseasoned - literally not a hint of salt - and underpowered that it hardly could pass as beef at all; this was a desperately poor quality bit of cow. If you had been presented with this strange pan full of frozen veg and mystery meat at a dinner party, you'd dutifully eat it, murmur quiet appreciations and quietly decide never to return, but to be asked to pay £58 for it in a hotel restaurant in Shoreditch is insane. This apparently is their signature dish, the name "Obama ribs" reflecting some kind of connection with the ex-president from which he'd be best advised to distance himself.

In a desperate effort to claw some positives from the evening I should point out that the house aquavit that came with the bill was very decent, all staff were lovely and smiley, and our waitress in particular seemed to genuinely be interested in learning that £58 is quite a lot to pay for a couple of mouthfuls of beef. And though the table they had initially given us was terrifyingly close to a live band, they quickly and happily reseated us in the conservatory when requested. But really, these are things that we should be taking for granted in a London restaurant in 2017; I'm doing them a favour for even pointing it out.

We noted with some alarm that another of the main courses - a whole fried chicken (£55!) - comes to the table adorned with a lit firework. Had our dinner been better - a lot better - this could perhaps be appreciated as a bit of naff but guiltily enjoyable theatre, a gimmick but not without its charms. However in the context of our dreadful evening, it felt like a distraction technique - that they hoped somehow people would put up with paying astronomical prices for clumsily presented, sloppily cooked food as long as was camouflaged by enough TGI Friday's flair. Well, it may have worked in Harlem but I'm afraid this is London, and up with this kind of shit we will not put. Red Rooster doesn't deserve this prestigious spot on Curtain Road and I hope this vast space is very soon put to better use. I wonder if Chick'n'Sours are looking to expand?

3/10

[EDIT: I've been assured by the PR that the peas were in fact fresh, not frozen. I'm sure I'm no expert but my friend with whom I ate the above meal still swears they were frozen. Take your pick.]

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

The Laughing Heart, Hackney

First of all, apologies for the drop in usual photographic standards on this post. This meal at Laughing Heart was completely impromptu, the result of there being nothing on TV on a Sunday night during a trip to see a friend in Shoreditch, and I didn't have my Big Camera. So if the food looks a bit less appealing than it would do normally I can only apologise (to them and you), but on the other hand my mate didn't have to put up with my taking ten or fifteen shots of every dish with my noisy compact, so you know, he was happy.

It is quite extraordinary to see the way this part of town has developed over the last few years. What was once a bleak and rather grotty thoroughfare to somewhere else now plays host to a number of seriously good food and drink options, with wine bar Sagar & Wilde stood next to Morito, just down the road from super gastropub the Marksman. The Laughing Heart, then, slots comfortably in to a mature and dynamic restaurant scene, with a local audience quite used to all this small plates and seasonal palava, thankyouverymuch. On Sunday evening, the place was buzzing - if not at capacity - with lucky Hackneyites making the most of the latest lovely thing to land on their doorstep.

Oysters X.O. were the first to arrive. You'll notice that a lot of the items on the Laughing Heart menu are Chinese-inspired; I'm not sure whether this is a permanent direction or just something they'd put on for Chinese New Year. Either way someone in the kitchens has a real affinity for this kind of thing as the balance of dressing, herbs and seafood was spot on, ginger and spring onions and presumably soy and vinegar sitting very nicely with the plump winter bivalves.

I like to think I can divide the population into two categories - those who are unable to read "Brown crab butter" and not order it immediately, and those who will live a sad and empty life devoid of fun or meaning. I am in the former. It was wonderful; fluffy and smooth and rich with seafood like a fine, buttery taramasalata, and has by all accounts already become somewhat of a signature offering. The sourdough it came with was also fantastic, as you might expect given there's quite the choice of top bakeries in these parts.

Next, dumplings, and very good dumplings too, with great delicate casings and lovely vibrant fillings. My favourite was pork and fennel, which had a particularly impressive aromatic kick. As I said, someone at Laughing Heart really knows their Chinese food discipline, and isn't afraid to show it off on a menu that's otherwise solidly Modern European. Ordinarily I'd probably say something about geographic vagueness, but I mean, what the hell, life's too short.

With beef in herb butter and fried potatoes were were firmly back on British soil, and by using 9-year-old ex-dairy cattle they were pushing all the on-trend butchery buttons too. The beef was tender and had a decent flavour, though was by no means knockout; I like a bit more of a chargrilled crust on my steaks, though that may just be a personal thing. The accompanying potatoes were less easy to love, a strange mangled shape and not tasting of a great deal.

But overall, it was a very pleasant meal for a very decent amount of money, and we left happy. The strange hybrid Chinese-Gastropub menu could have very well been a disaster in lesser hands, and while it's true the dishes tended to sit alongside each other rather than combining into some kind of coherent concept, the fact is it was all done so well you could hardly moan too much. To paraphrase Joey from Friends, "Sourdough and brown crab butter? Good. Game & foie gras terrine? Good. Dim sum dumplings? Good!."

So if it seems extraordinary how much Hackney has changed in recent years, surely more extraordinary is that the pace of innovation and invention in the restaurant industry seems only to accelerate. Laughing Heart is an energetic little place with a singularly eccentric vision of what it means to eat out, and yet by the standards of what we've come to expect in London, it feels neither forced nor particularly unusual. A Chinese-European gastropub. Why the hell not.

8/10

reade more... Résuméabuiyad