Restaurant critic roundup, 11/01

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The Pig, Brockenhurst

Zoe Williams is pleased to find The Pig in Brockenhurst – quite a few people seem to be going here recently – ‘full on a Monday lunchtime’. She enjoyed ‘the freshest crab I’ve tasted this year’ and some ‘giant and gutsy’ scallops with crosnes, whatever they are. The restaurant’s ‘reputation’ is ‘deserved’.

‘An offal lot of offal’: Amol Rajan coins a new phrase during a visit to Hereford Road. Calf’s liver with mash, sage and onion ‘has no surprises and is competently done’ – it was also on the menu when I last visited HR, almost three years ago. Desserts ‘complete an overall sense of comfort’.

Christopher Hirst visits The Pipe & Glass Inn in South Dalton, East Yorkshire. The ‘inventive’ chef may have ‘ambition’, but cauliflower soup was ‘distinctly underpowered’ and beef fillet ‘somewhat bland’. Still, ‘he deserves commendation for a tempting vegetarian menu’.

She might ‘goggle at the luxury’, but Marina O’Loughlin finds herself seated in a ‘leper colony’ at The Delauanay. (Not literally.) ‘Nothing – apart from the cakes and pastries – is particularly elaborate but it’s done well.’ Mussels are ‘plump and sweet’ and beef stroganoff ‘tender and rich’ but she’s made to feel ‘like a second-class citizen’ by Corbin and King. (This has not been my experience at all. When I went, I got a crap table but they moved us quite happily when we asked. And when I went to the half-full Wolseley with a very famous person, they sat us at the worst table in the room.)

‘Create is a good place to eat,’ says Jay Rayner: all the better because it’s a ‘social enterprise venture’ in Leeds that helps to get the long-term unemployed back into work. £14 was an ‘ungrasping’ price for partridge breast with confit leg, chestnuts, sprouts and sautéed girolles (yum), and ‘by the end of lunch even this cynical old dog was ready to clamber on to his hind legs and applaud.’

Continue reading at Bookatable

The gay diet

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Sushi: gay?

A piece for the Guardian on the alleged gayness of certain foods. This piece went semi-viral.

Simon Doonan has just written a book called Gay Men Don’t Get Fat. Doonan is less famous here than he is in the States: he’s a Reading-born, highly successful window dresser for Barneys, a style columnist for the New York Post and elsewhere, and is married to the designer Jonathan Adler. His title alludes, of course, to the mid-noughties bestseller French Women Don’t Get Fat, which did more to raise awareness of the French paradox among the general public than any book before it. Doonan’s text is more of an arch and witty discourse on aspects of gay and straight life, written in a gossipy, frivolous and ultimately rather lovable style.

“Straight foods are basic and uncontrived,” he writes. “Gay foods are fiddly and foofy … Sushi may well be the gayest food on earth. The design of the average ikura gunkan maki or hirame nigiri is, if you look at it objectively, really quite extraordinary. Sushi chefs are basically taking sloppy bits of fish and magically reworking them into exquisite bonbons. How gay, right? … While sushi is swishy, Mexican food is unbelievably macho. As delicious as a burrito is, it is basically just a cross between a turd and a penis.”

The stereotyping is well written and pretty funny, if a touch crass. But like all stereotypes, it may contain some truth. Reading that section, I was reminded of the moment Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno character meets pastor Quinn from Little Rock, Arkansas, who counts praying away the gay among his compassionate duties. Bruno asks whether, once cured, he’ll still be able to have brunch or “eat very, very chocolatey stuff all the time”. Quinn bewilderingly tells him that such excess must be forbidden “if in fact you are doing it because that’s part of a homosexual lifestyle”.

Continue reading at the Guardian

 

Olive oil fraud: pressing truths

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Olive oil. Photo: Joop Greypink / Getty

A piece for the Guardian on the extensive fraud in the Italian olive oil industry

The Italian fraud squad recently announced it was investigating allegations that the country’s largest olive oil producers have adulterated Italian oil with cheaper imports from Spain, Greece, Morocco and Tunisia. Nothing new here: fraud in the Italian olive oil industry is very old indeed. Amphorae used to store olive oil in ancient Rome display several anti-fraud measures, including clear labelling and a primitive form of “traceability”. In the original Godfather novel, Mario Puzo modelled Vito Corleone on a real-life olive oil mafioso named Joe Profaci. Just this month, an American writer living in Liguria named Tom Mueller published a book about fraud in the Italian olive oil industry. The text develops an interesting article on the subject he wrote for the New Yorker in 2007.

Mueller found that fraud was extensive, particularly adulteration and false labelling. The world’s largest former dealer in olive oil, one Domenico Ribatti, plea-bargained his way to 13 months in prison during the 1990s for passing off Turkish hazelnut oil, which he had refined in his own plant, as olive oil. Another prominent importer, Leonardo Marseglia – appropriately based in a town called Monopoli – has variously been accused of selling cheap non-European oils as Italian ones, fudging documents to shirk import tariffs and forming a criminal network to smuggle contraband. Marseglia has denied the charges.

A 2007 EU investigation found that 95% of all known misappropriations of EU agricultural subsidies occurred in Italy, which tells you something of the culture in which Italian olive oil fraud was taking place. George Bennell is the managing director of Belazu, which markets a delicious unfiltered olive oil from a small producer northern Spain, among other goods. (Declaration of interest: the company once paid for me to visit the groves.) “I don’t know for sure that Spanish olive oil fraud is less common than Italian,” he says. “But the fact is, the Spanish produce twice as much olive oil as the Italians, and the Italians consume and export more olive oil than they can produce, so they have to import it.”

Continue reading at the Guardian

The best hangover cures

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Perhaps the finest 'cure' of all

A piece for the Guardian on hangover cures

Kingsley Amis, that imperishable drink – rather than drinks – writer, pointed out that a hangover takes two forms. These are the physical and metaphysical (PH and MH). Food taken on a hangover must address both, though the MH (“that ineffable compound of depression … anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future”) is harder to tackle.

Alcohol lowers your blood sugar and makes you particularly hungry. That’s why hungover people crave fat, sugar and carbs (those two are related, of course): they’re the most efficient ways to take on calories. I often find the PH can be palliated with a lunchtime bowl of carbohydrates, particularly pasta, which helps to effect a restorative nap at around 3pm. Healthy, “minerally” foods are most useful for the MH, as is anything with a level of umami. A few food critics, writers and other industry insiders told me their favourite hangover cures: their selection follows.

Continue reading at The Guardian

 

Philadelphia pepper pot: the soup that won the American Revolution?

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George Washington ... clearly hankering for some Philly pepper pot

A piece for the Guardian’s US site (www.guardiannews.com) on a tripe soup that supposedly won the revolutionary war

On 29 December 1777, so the story goes, George Washington had spent 10 days at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, camped with his army and assorted women and children. The winter had been unremittingly bleak. Up to a third of his forces were bootless – some had left bloody footprints in the snow as they marched into camp – and all were hungry. Local farmers were spurning the unreliable revolutionary currency and selling their crops to the British. ”Unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place,” he wrote, “this Army must inevitably … Starve, dissolve, or disperse, in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can.”

This desolate scene was supposedly improved when the commander’s baker general, Christopher Ludwick or Ludwig, improvised a stew using tripe, vegetable scraps and whatever meagre spices he had to hand. His brief was to “warm and strengthen the body of a soldier and inspire his flagging spirit,” in Washington’s words. Legend maintains that this brew revived the beleaguered army, sustaining it through its darkest months, and helped lead to its eventual victory.

The story, though stirring, is almost certainly untrue. Pepper pot is a Caribbean dish, and it may well be that slaves and freedmen brought a taste for spicy broth to Philadelphia. But Caribbean cuisine makes little use of tripe. The French and (ironically) the English are more partial to the cratered stomach lining of the cow, with its elastic texture and distinctive – not to say unpleasant – taste and smell, this last resembling ripe manure. (Readers who have yet to try the delicacy may now be suspecting it was merely another hardship to befall the Continental army.)

Continue reading at The Guardian

Restaurant critic roundup, 28/12

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‘The best kebab I’d had in years,’ says Giles Coren at E. Mono. ‘The chicken was unbelievable … better even than the lamb’. ‘Overall I was blown away.’

‘Less hideous than anticipated’ is Matthew Norman’s verdict on the biggest restaurant in the country, Za Za Bazaaron Bristol’s Harbourside. This remarkable place serves all kinds of cuisines: Norman had ‘passable’ Tex-Mex chicken and ‘dried out’ sushi, but pho was ‘fresh and nourishing’.

He also found time to visit Oslo Court, the St John’s Wood time-warp serving classics of cuisine bourgeois. Veal holstein was good and steak diane was ‘beautifully cooked’: this is ‘a magnificent restaurant.’

John Lanchester: Manchester WAGs’ favourite Australasia is ‘jolly for a basement’. Soft shell crab tempura was a ‘success’ and black cod ‘good’, but the ‘star of the meal’ was mango soufflé. It’s ‘clever’ place ‘copying the kind of food people like to eat’.

An excellent review from Marina O’Loughlin of the Hansom Cab, a gastropub on the Earl’s Court Road part-owned by Piers Morgan. ‘I actually don’t mind the place’: clichéd beetroot and goat’s cheese was better than a ‘dismal’ sweet cherry risotto, although a piece of halibut was ‘dry and overcooked’.

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How to barbecue a whole turkey

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Over at the Guardian I’ve written about how to barbecue the Christmas turkey. If you’ve never done this, I really recommend giving it a go.

Who’s stalking now

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A red stag in Richmond Park. Photo: Getty

A piece on stalking for the Guardian

When the first deer appears, seemingly from nowhere, I swing the rifle round too quickly and it spots the movement, vanishing without a sound. We wait a few frozen minutes up in the high seat, until the stalker decides it isn’t coming back, and whispers that we should hunt from the ground. Once I’m halfway down the ladder, the muntjac skitters past almost in mockery.

There are probably more deer living wild in the UK than ever. No one knows how many; they are secretive, wide-roaming animals, and populations fluctuate each year. But they breed quickly, lack predators apart from humans, and are superbly adapted to life in the British countryside. These islands’ six free-living species total well over 1m animals, who thrive even though 350,000 are shot and 74,000 are involved in car accidents every year.

Anti-hunting, pro-animal charities and much of the general public question the ethics of stalking. “It’s a bloodsport, a branch of the entertainment rather than the food industry,” says Alistair Currie, policy adviser for Peta. “Many of the animals are not killed instantly, and the killing of individual animals by hunters leads to changes in the local deer population which lead to other stresses.” What of farmers whose crops are damaged or destroyed by deer? “As ever with human dealings with animals,” says Currie, “the solution is a lethal one. Fences keep deer out.” (People involved in deer management claim that putting up costly fences and letting nature control deer numbers condemns many deer to starvation, and many more to acute hunger.) A spokeswoman from the League Against Cruel Sports tells me it’s “crazy” that “untrained people are allowed to go out and shoot deer. At the absolute least, we think there should be a minimum competency of gun use before people are allowed to stalk them.”

Continue reading at the Guardian

Truvia: not so sweet

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A piece for the Guardian on a new and thoroughly grim artificial sweetener

There’s a new sweetener out called Truvia. They call it “the first calorie-free sweetener from the stevia leaf”: it’s white and granular stuff that looks – but doesn’t smell or taste – like ordinary sugar. It launched in America three years ago where it makes use of a ditsy ad campaign, and the UK website shows videos of seemingly delighted Brummies enjoying it with strawberries.

Artificial sweeteners seek to trick the palate into feeling that it has enjoyed the benefits of sugar – energy, appealing taste – when nothing of the kind has happened. Many are thousands of times sweeter than ordinary table sugar, so you can eat far less of them for a comparable effect. As western waistlines continue to swell and people worry about their diet, the global sweetener market is now worth hundreds of million of dollars. Many businesses have a considerable interest in promoting sweeteners over natural sugar.

In the UK, Truvia appears with the familiar Silver Spoon logo, that outfit having the “distribution channels” to disseminate the product here. But in fact Truvia is a joint effort from agribusiness giant Cargill and Coca-Cola. References to the latter are exceptionally sparse on Truvia’s UK website.

Continue reading at the Guardian

 

Restaurant critic roundup, 05/12

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The Riding House Café, W1

‘I wanted to order about two thirds of the things on the menu’, says Zoe Williams at the Riding House Café. Starters were ‘timid’, but a rack of pork with lentils and smoked sausage was ‘gorgeous’. ‘I’m already very fond of the place.’

Ducksoup’s dishes are ‘impressive for their simplicity, quality of ingredients and big flavours’, saysMatthew Norman. Quail with sumac was ‘immaculately grilled’ though smoked trout with lentils and caluletto was ‘fine, if forgettable’. But Norman has ‘a gnawing sense of being too old for the place’ and ‘I wouldn’t come back’.

‘The food is dire’, says Lisa Markwell at Union Jacks, the first branch of Jamie Oliver’s new pizza chain. An ‘Old Spot’ (roast pork shoulder, quince and apple sauce, stilton, crackling and watercress) worked best when she ate the pork and quince separately. ‘I’m left with vaguely slimy stilton on chewy bread.’

Continue reading at Bookatable