Osteria, Barbican

On Wednesday evening I broke one of the cardinal sins of eating out - I chose a restaurant based on setting and location, rather than the appeal of the menu or skills of the kitchen. This is usually a recipe for disaster, as it's well known the Curse of Tall Restaurants (a catch-all term that includes restaurants in impressive settings of any kind that don't have to try very hard to attract custom, no matter how far off the ground they are) is always ready to strike at any unfortunate punter that thinks the view from the 30th floor of an anonymous city tower block will make up for any lack of interest on the plate. Well maybe it can, for some people, just not the restaurant spods I tend to hang around with.

But while I am immune to the charms of most Tall Buildings you could mention, can take or leave river views and regard soaring marble atriums and plush furnishing with extreme indifference (this isn't the least bit true, but I'm trying to make a point so bear with me), there's one building - or more accurately, series of buildings - in London in which I would happily spend weeks on end, dinner or no dinner.

The Barbican is a breathtaking work of brutalist genius, a vast complex of soaring, bush-hammered concrete towers, monolothic apartment blocks dripping with hanging plants, and a series of landscaped grounds - including an astonishing sunken water garden - that adds up to as impressive a work of visual and sculptural art that you can find from any century, in any art gallery or museum in the world. I love its romantic spotlit stairways, the walkways threading their way through it all several stories in the air, the confidence and intelligence in every tiny detail of the place. I just love it there.

So yes, dinner at Osteria, on the third floor of the Barbican Centre (the arts complex in the middle of it all) was mainly an excuse to spend a couple of blissful hours taking in the beauty of the surroundings, out of the rain without resorting to standing in the theatre lobby downstairs and gawping like I usually do. The food didn't have to be brilliant, or even very good, to be worth our time.

Happily though, it was - most of it - more than worth the price of admission, and rather than being something to do with our hands while enjoying the view over the lakes and fountains, the food impressed in its own right. House foccacia was only slightly on the insubstantial side but tasted soft and fresh, and soaked up the olive oil nicely.

Ham broth was exactly what was expected and what was required, and so we had no complaints. A good, clear consommé, strongly seasoned and containing huge chunks of pig, the poached egg adding an extra layer of silky complexity, it was an eminently enjoyable starter.

So, too, a dish of grilled sardines coated in anchovy breadcrumbs and samphire. The effort that had clearly gone into removing most of the bones in the fish was appreciated, but it still wasn't quite bone-free enough to eat as a fillet, and the extensive further surgery required rather made the initial labour rather superfluous. They were fine little things though, soft flesh and crisp skin, and seasoned well.

Pan-roasted spring chicken had a strongly citrussy and nicely crisped skin strongly resembling the product from Chicken Shop, and as anyone who's ever been to Chicken Shop will tell you, this is a Good Thing. Perhaps the purple potatoes could have been a little warmer but that's a minor criticism of a dish that was otherwise effortlessly, straightforwardly enjoyable.

Similarly wild boar ragu, perhaps not the most blindingly wonderful bit of pasta I've ever been presented with in my life but cooked nicely al-dente, coated in plenty of parmesan and with a good mound of minced boar to make up for a slightly insipid tomato sauce. But the important thing is, both plates were licked clean. Not literally, that have been a bit embarrassing, but we certainly didn't leave anything edible behind.

We were even enjoying ourselves enough, thanks as much to the attentive service as the stunning views over St Giles Cripplegate and the City of London School for Girls, to order dessert. Sadly here our enthusiasm took a bit of a knock - sorbets were fine, a mango flavour probably being the best of the three flavours presented, the others lacking a bit in personality. But tiramisu was a pretty dubious affair, squirty cream and chopped-up brownie soaked in what felt like half a pint of booze, which felt us feeling rather queasy.

Still, all said and done, we were sat in the Barbican, playing a real part in the life of this extraordinary place, soaking in the atmosphere and making use of the cool 70s concrete toilets. For that alone it would have been worth the £42.75 a head with a carafe of Gavi di Gavi, and for the food to be not just passable but actually pretty enjoyable was a quite significant bonus. Apologies if this has turned into more of an architecture than food blog, but I hope you'll not mind indulging me just this once - rules are meant to be broken, and there's no building in London breaks the rules so comprehensively, and so successfully, as this brutalist beauty. Oh, and Osteria? That's rather good, too.

7/10

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Perilla, Newington Green

If this endless Game of Thrones winter is getting you down and you pine for the long, hazy days of summer then spare a thought for the food bloggers amongst us, and this one in particular, who last took an evening photo of something even vaguely recognisable as food some time back in about September 2017. You can blame my rubbish camera skills if you like (plenty do), but surely some responsibility lies with restaurants whose lighting schemes range from "romantic" to "Dans le Noir" and in which not only is photography impossible but even figuring out what you're eating is a bit of a challenge.

But as April rolls on, the evenings get lighter and the chances of my photos not looking like evidence from a crime scene, and diners being able to fully appreciate the effort that goes into the presentation of their food, increases exponentially. We had a good hour or two at Perilla, light streaming through the huge floor-to-ceiling windows into that beautiful dining room, when my photos did something approaching justice to the extraordinary quality of food served there. Then some time about 7pm the sun went down and it all went to pot again. But hopefully you'll have got the gist by that point.

The bank holiday weekend started, as I always try to ensure they do, with a martini. Icy cold, served in freeze-frosted glass and costing an eminently reasonable £9, it was the perfect introduction to the way they do things at Perilla - tasteful, elegant, and with an absolute confidence that this is the best way of doing things. Which, of course, it is. Anyone serving martinis in glasses quick-chilled with crushed ice are missing a vital stage in the process.

As for the food, well, it's mostly brilliant, or rather apart from one minor misstep it was all brilliant, but more on that later. First we have "Yesterday's bread soaked in fish soup", which as well as being something I was determined to order as soon as I spotted it on the menu, presumably helps Perilla's green waste-free credentials into the bargain. Neat fingers of sourdough dotted with orange and pine nuts came soaked in the most unbelievably intense liquid - in fact closer in style and substance to a seafood bisque, the kind of thing restaurants charging many times the prices at Perilla would be very proud of.

These are rump of beef on laverbread, half Sunday roast half seafood nigiri, a clever combination of flavours and textures quite unlike anything I'd tried before. Part of the joy of eating somewhere like Perilla is to have your expectations exceeded, but to start with two "snacks" that so completely took me by surprise is something else entirely.

To prove that the triumphal first course was no fluke, another soup was every bit as spectacular. Served in a large hollowed-out white onion, the outside charred from close contact with the coals and with a heady smoked aroma, it contained a silky-smooth, light broth of creamed onion studded with delicately toasted hazelnuts, and is absolutely everything I want a soup to be. This dish alone is worth a meal at Perilla.

"Squid Bolognese" has apparently become somewhat of a signature dish on Newington Green, and you can see why - it's a very clever thing, colourful shoreside succulents (shoots of monksbeard taking the place of spaghetti) and winter herbs are topped with minced cuttlefish, producing a wonderful light seafood salad.

Sometime between the Squid Bolognese and the next dish of calves' liver, the sun dropped down over the horizon, and so I'm afraid from this point on you'll have to use your imagination, and take my word for it, that only the lighting levels decreased, not the care and attention taken in presentation. This neatly folded parcel of cabbage leaf opened to reveal discs of potato chips, fried onions and yes, generous slices of liver cooked to a delightful medium-rare.

Given the technical skill, invention and risk-taking on display up to this point of the meal, Perilla could probably have served something genuinely inedible and I'd still be happy to recommend the place. "Baron Bigod stuffed with braised pine nuts" wasn't a complete disaster, it was just a nice enough cheese pointlessly stuffed with nuts, which neither enhanced the cheese or made you particularly excited about the idea of eating nuts. Still, you never know if you don't try.

Dessert was a herb and honey creme caramel, again showing a willingness to play with accepted notions of savoury and sweet but backing it all up with a proper technical ability where it counts. There's something faintly "healthy-foody" about honey and herbs on their own, but topping a nice rich, creamy custard with it made all the sense in the world.

So yes, as you may have gathered, I had an absolute riot of a time at Perilla. To serve an enjoyable, competently cooked meal seems to be the very least restaurants are able to get away with in these troubled times, though of course if that was your level of expectation you'd certainly come away giddy. On every inch of the menu, though, the kitchen seems to go out of their way to surprise and impress, often thorough spectacular presentations to inventive flavour combinations, such as the fish soup or beef and laverbread, but also just through presenting familar flavours and concepts incredibly well (liver and onions).

Everyone, at least everyone I know, will enjoy a meal at Perilla, but perhaps that's not news - they've been around two and a half years now and judging by the crowds on a weekday evening (as I'm reliably informed by a friend who lives just over the road) word has most certainly got out. But whatever they originally set out to achieve in this pretty corner of North London, Perilla is far more than just a good local restaurant - in serving one of London's most exciting sub-£50 tasting menus they should be nothing less than a destination, and deserve to be spoken about in amongst the very best the city has to offer. Didn't see that coming? No, me neither. And I can't blame the low lighting for that.

9/10

I was invited to Perilla and didn't see a bill, though I imagine it would have been about £70/head once booze and service is factored in.

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Gino D'Acampo's My Restaurant, Euston

On a wet weekday evening on the mezzanine level of Euston station, I and my dining companion are perhaps the only two people that are there only to eat. Ordinarily, the customer base of Gino D'Acampo's My Restaurant would consist of frazzled parents and their kids, intercity commuters and the odd hen party, all nervously guarding their luggage while Virgin Trains pick up the biggest chunks from the floor of the 18:47 departure to Glasgow Central. Nobody chooses to spend their evening at Euston, or any departure hall for that matter, from Gatwick Airport to Victoria Coach Station. Which is generally why they're amongst the most depressing places on the planet.

It's this atmosphere of collective anxiety and gloom that My Restaurant has its work cut out to battle against, and under the harsh Network Rail strip-lighting and to the accompaniment of delayed departure announcements and grim security warnings, there's only so far a jaunty colour scheme and comfy booths will get you. So, perhaps taking a cue from its famously ebullient celebrity owner, front of house are the most insanely overenthusiastic and excitable bunch of people I've come across since the affected theme-park bonhomie of the Hard Rock Café, all young Italian men with giant haircuts flamboyantly flapping their dishclothes around and shouting at each other. Halfway through our meal, one whose shift was ending (and who had already thrown a hoodie over his work jumper) insisted on shaking our hands and curtseying (at least I think that's what it was) before heading downstairs for the tube. It was all quite overwhelming.

Typically, of course, I'd find service at this level of rabid fervour utterly insufferable, and indeed there were a couple of moments I wanted to climb into my glass of Chardonnay and die. But you know what, they meant well. And if they feel the need to engage grumpy food bloggers in banter, even said food blogger made it as clear as he possibly could that he'd rather pull his fingernails out than put up with one more second of it, then I suppose they need something to distract themselves from the reality of working in a train station restaurant.

Anyway, I imagine you'll want to know what the food is like, and on this front - initially - everything went exactly according to plan. Which is to say a sharing platter of charcuterie and bread called somewhat optimistically "Fantastico" contained, for a whacking £24.75, stale old slices of grim supermarket hams, soggy foccacia, bendy grissini and the very worst pesto either of us had come across in our lives, looking and tasting like pond scum. Weirdly, the hams were only stale and dry in parts, and the grissini only chewy at one end, which suggests that the problem may be more storage than sourcing. But it was clear none of it should have been served, and was worth nowhere near the prices being charged.

So far, so predictable. Nobody would expect me to have anything even approaching a nice time at any of the public vote restaurants, and suffering through a board of stale salami while an extravagant Italian performs tricks with cutlery is presumably exactly the kind of thing you came here to read. We awaited our main courses with the familiar gut-punch of dread and hopelessness. Things weren't going well.

And then something very strange happened. A £31 fillet steak in green peppercorn sauce arrived, just two pieces of meat neatly arranged on a plate, with no fripperies and no frills, looking like something you might actually want to eat. I cut into one of the pieces to reveal medium-rare, tender flesh, bleeding in the same way you might expect a perfectly good, perfectly cooked bit of beef to bleed. It tasted, if not like the greatest bit of protein I've ever had access to, then certainly better than I've been asked to eat at far more expensive places, places with tablecloths and cloakrooms and toiliets you don't have to pay 30p to use.

More astonishingly, and yet more confusingly, my friend's crab linguini was actually, well, good. Expertly cooked pasta with plenty of bite and bounce, a good, well-seasoned sauce containing lots of fresh ingredients, a bit heavy on the garlic perhaps but not disastrously so, and loads of sweet white crab meat. Surely the crab wouldn't have been picked on site and was probably frozen, but there's no harm in using pre-prepared seafood, and to pair it with such skill with just the right amount of everything else, and season it fautlessly, requires someone in the kitchen to know exactly what they're doing.

We ate our main courses slowly, and in silence. Like a special effects sequence from a pretentious food documentary, the crowds around us jittered and blurred and spun around in hyperspeed as our little table became the calm, focussed centre of the world. As the last forkful of crab-flecked pasta, and the last morsel of tender fillet steak disappeared from our plates, we came to in an empty dining room, all travellers having left for destinations up the country, and with only a skeleton staff to cheerily wave us goodbye into the dark, rainy night.

So yes, there were mistakes made that should be unforgivable. Nobody should be charging any amount, least of all the price of a ticket to Birmingham, for stale prosciutto and bad pesto, and even the good food was too expensive. The service needs to be dialled several notches back from hysterical, and it will never be particularly pleasant to eat your dinner in a train station departure lounge. All these things are undoubtedly marks against Gino D'Acampo's My Restaurant.

But partly due to the wine - we had quite a bit of it, more for insurance reasons than anything else - but mostly because there are some people in the kitchens of this strange goldfish tank of a space overlooking the station concourse that are clearly taking pride in what they do - we left without the expected fug of queasiness and resentment, but with something almost approaching happiness. A first, after so many years, from a You Decide restaurant. So thank you, the voting public, for this one; I imagine next year I'll be back to visiting car parks in Croydon and rage-tweeting about brownfood, but for this brief moment all I have is gratitude. Gino D'Acampo's My Restaurant isn't bad at all.

6/10

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Zip Bab, Bloomsbury

I get used to moaning about the lack of decent quick, takeaway-friendly options in Holborn/Bloomsbury because that happens to be the corner of the city in which I spend most of my time during the week, but then perhaps there's no utterly ideal London neighbourhood for work lunches. Soho probably comes closest, but even there the queues at the good places mean you spend most of your time standing in the rain instead of eating, and you'll still pay for the privilege. Though I wouldn't trade my daily commute on South West Trains, shonky and stressful as it is, for the pressure-cooker Seoul Metro, I do wish I had the choice of a thousand spare seats at a good noodle bar for lunch like the lucky workers of Korea. I'd actually look forward to lunches like that.

So I strongly considered keeping Zip Bab to myself. I should say from the start that I have never been to Korea, and the entirity of my knowledge of Korean food is gleaned from a couple of meals in New Malden (Jin Go Gae is excellent) and the odd popup by Gizzi Erskine. This, I know, is not any kind of position to be credibly ruling on the authenticity or otherwise of anywhere calling itself Korean. But as far as I ever have an intuition for these kinds of things, Zip Bab feels authentic, and the food feels like the kind of thing hungry Koreans would snaffle down of a lunchtime, and I'm worried that once the word gets out it will turn into another Kanada-Ya - impossibly busy, a theoretical restaurant, just a memory of noodles past.

In the meantime, though, I'm determined to make the most of it. Excuse the range in quality of photos - I only had my big camera on one of my three visits - but hopefully they're enough to demonstrate that whatever it is that Zip Bab are doing, they're doing it very well indeed. My first lunch involved a bit of a mistake on my part - I really wanted the luminous orange Korean fried chicken, in that addictive sweet chilli sauce, as proudly displayed on the window menu. Unfortunately I wasn't paying attention properly and accidentally ended up with "soy chicken", the same big, strong wings and crunchy batter but a different finish. They were still lovely things though, and not much of a downgrade.

Also on that first visit, and not pictured, was a bowl of sweet and sour pork on rice noodles which verged on familiar to this Englishman but was incredibly easy to enjoy nontheless. And in a strange way, though I have no evidence at all to back this up, I can imagine Korean people eating it of a lunchtime, alongside a little bowl of their very decent house kimchi. So I will continue to imagine that.

Despite the food on day one being very good if not spectacular, enthusiastic and charming service and the certainty I'd not yet seen the best of the place necessitated a return visit, and it was here that the fireworks really started to fly. Zip Bab do a small number of "set" lunches, where you pick a main and are given a selection of salads and sauces to go with it. I'm afraid I can't remember how this was listed on their menu, but a quick Google for "Korean lettuce wrap set" reveals it could be something called ssam and I'd advise you to look for that name if you ever fancy a visit. Because it was great - lovely soft pieces of pork, joined with a heavily dressed green salad, topped with a fantastic chilli-miso sauce (also available in bottles on each table), and wrapped in butter lettuce, sort of like a green taco. Enormous fun and quite unlike anything else I've ever had for lunch in Bloomsbury.

By this point, Zip Bab had me sold, so I could hardly not return a couple of days later to sample the original flavour KFC I'd missed out on the first time. It was, as I suspected it would be, lovely - generous of flavour and portion size, with a great sweet/sour chilli dressing and piping hot straight from the fryer. This is the quintissential Korean comfort food, and admittedly it wouldn't say much about a Korean restaurant if they couldn't get this right, but it was still a joy to get up to my elbows in sauce and embarrass my lunch companion. They provided a couple of hot towels, but I was so coated in the stuff I had to get up and rinse off in the bathroom before facing the world again.

And, needless to say, I'll be back again and again, at least until the rest of the city catches on and they're queuing down the street. I spot yet more unusual things on the extended menu, such as a "spicy whelk salad", which sounds like it could be interesting, and I bet their bibimbap is worth the price of admission, but perhaps I'll never need anything more than a portion of sticky, spicy wings, rice and a small bowl of kimchi, and a quiet table in the corner to cover myself in it all. Work lunchers of Bloomsbury, I can only apologise in advance.

8/10

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Minnow, Clapham Common

It stands to reason, or it should come as no surprise to learn, that the best and the worst restaurant reviews are the easiest to write. Plenty of examples of both can be found on this blog, from the jaw-dropping perfection of the reborn Roganic and rural idyll of the Parkers Arms to the filth-strewn dining hall of JRC Global BUffet and the cynically grim Playboy Club, all those reviews pretty much just fell onto the page. This dish was fantastic, this was terrible; here we had the time of our lives, here we sulked home poor and depressed. Easy.

More difficult is anything that falls inbetween those two extremes. When the food, for no very obvious reason, is just a bit... dull. Somewhere you end up not hating it but not loving it either, and leave with a vague sense of disappointment. Somewhere that you'd not rush to return to, but that if you heard someone else enjoying it a lot more, you wouldn't be surprised either. Finding anything insightful to say about places in this category can be torture; and what's worse is that there are so bloody many of them.

But there is a category of restaurant even more troubling than that. The only places more difficult to write up than the mediocre or unmemorable is the mediocre or unmemorable where everyone involved is so unbelievably nice and friendly and enthusiastic that the idea of not being able to reward their efforts with a glowing review makes me genuinely queasy.

Here we go anyway. On paper, Minnow is doing everything right. It's a cosy, comfortable little bistro on the edge of Clapham Common, a few doors down from the Dairy, serving a short, attractive menu of seasonal British dishes for a sensible amount of money. Yes, it's the kind of thing you may have seen before but London will never have enough friendly, independent restaurants serving seasonal food - this is what we're rightly famous for, and from St. John to Quality Chop House to, well, the Dairy - and each new addition to the fold is to be welcomed, regardless of how successfully it turns out. God knows it's hard enough opening any restaurant these days.

I so wanted Minnow to be good. I live about 20 minutes' walk away, for one thing. But from the first bite of ho-hum house sourdough weirdly served with whipped butter and drizzled with olive oil, it was clear we were going to have very different ideas about what made a good dinner.

Oysters were cool and fresh and contained plenty of brine, but the mignionette alongside was weirdly sweet and not acidic enough and just didn't work at all. For a second oyster I asked for a slice of lemon instead, which they provided happily and quickly, which somehow just made me feel more guilty.

An unordered extra snack of crisp fried kale and sugared nuts was probably the nicest single thing we ate all evening, all colour and crunch and plenty of seasoning. I love what baking/frying does to kale, but then I like raw kale too - especially the way the frills in the leaves hold sauces and dressings.

I therefore wasn't too distressed to see yet more crisp fried kale appear alongside some scallops in my starter proper, but it did make me think, if they knew the starter I'd ordered came with kale, why give me extra kale as a snack as well? Perhaps because the kale was the most interesting bit of the scallop dish, the seafood being underseasoned and the bacon jam tasting weirdly not much of bacon at all, but more like a strange, cold, onion chutney.

A generous mound of soft, lovely white crab meat was enough to redeem another starter, although it came hiding under a soft cracker thing which defied reason or explanation. The provided dressing was thick with dark soy and far too powerful, and was largely avoided.

Cassoulet should be a thick, salty jumble of sausage and beans and meat and herbs, generous of form and flavour. I'm afraid the version at Minnow was a seriously wan affair, the confit rabbit tasting of cotton wool, the sauce tasting of little more than tinned bean juice, and the handful of tiny pieces of sausage doing nothing to season or excite. I'm afraid this was a seriously disappointing dish, made more disappointing by the rememberance of cassoulets past.

Hake was better, thanks to a beautifully cooked bit of fish with a nice crisp skin, although the less said about the strange pool of insipid blitzed greenery it sat in the better. "Parsley broth" sounds like it could be nice, doesn't it? This didn't taste much of parsley, and wasn't much of a broth.

Sides didn't impress either, sadly. Chips were soggy and orange (cooked too slowly? Who knows) and the truffle flavour largely absent. Cabbage in anchovy butter seemed to be missing the anchovy element, too, seemingly consisting of little more than charred cabbage absolutely drenched in butter way past the point of edibility.

Normally after a succession of such underwhelming dishes we would cut our losses and leave, but everyone from the chefs in the open kitchen to the amenable serving staff were all just so bloody nice that I was desperate to find something to be positive about other than the crisp kale. Unfortunately, coffee creme caramel wasn't set, and lemon curd sandwiched inbetween two discs of shortbread was absolutely no more than the sum of its parts. Even the (raspberry?) sorbet seemed subdued. So that was that. We paid up and left.

So look, I'm really sorry, Minnow, really I am. Maybe it isn't you, maybe it's me. Maybe I ordered badly or you were having an off day, or I just don't "get" what you're trying to do. But you or I can't escape the fact that a few doors down the Dairy is doing this kind of thing at a whole other level of ability and finesse, and are charging very similar prices for doing so. And next time I'm in Clapham Common, hungry for seasonal Modern British food and £80 in my pocket, it's the Dairy that will be getting my hard earned, not their neighbour, no matter how friendly the welcome will no doubt be. In the end, glittering service, and crisp kale, can only get you so far.

5/10

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