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Fore! Fine dining with a side order of golf at Vinothec Compass
A casual fine dining restaurant on a golf driving range? Let’s get wood at Vinothec Compass.
The grass next to the restaurant appears to be sprouting mushrooms at a remarkable rate, but you really don’t want to pick these. They
are in fact golf balls, and as Michael Caine noted in the film Zulu, there are ‘fahsands of ‘em’.
From the two tiered stand at N1 Golf London, scores of golfers are relentlessly whacking balls out into the sky and the only thing stopping them from sailing on to land in Canary Wharf, glistening like a mini Dubai in the fast setting sun, are giant nets.
I have a go, my only golf experience up to this point being Crazy Golf (if you want to know how to get around the miniature windmill in two shots, just ask me). This is not enough it seems to handle a real golf club as I swipe wildly into the air twice and then hit the ground on the third go with enough force to almost pop my shoulder out of its socket.
One of the many golf pros on standby steps in, adjusting my stance and showing me how to bend my legs, my arms and how to follow through. Amazingly on my next attempt there is a solid connection and the ball arcs outward like a bullet in a most satisfying way. I can see how golfers can get hooked on the feeling.
Anyone can have a go, N1 charges £ 12 for 120 balls (£10 off-peak) or 60 for £6 and there are worse ways to spend a lunch hour or early evening, but it sure makes you hungry. Fortunately there is the 19th hole, Vinothec Compass a new restaurant that’s a long way from the traditional clubhouse with its coronation chicken sandwiches and Jaguar Mk II driving men ordering a G&T for the little lady.
The restaurant is airy, canteen-like which goes with the ‘casual fine dining’ label it has given itself. People today, we are told, don’t like fine dining, have a phobia about napkins, a fear of tablecloths and a visceral hatred for waiters who glide instead of walking.
On the other hand we don’t all want to eat American Casual Dining, or expensive junk food as it’s better known, all the time. So what lies between? Well step forward Vinothec Compass.
Arnaud Compass, a geographer and geologist by training, and Keith Lyon are the founding partners here and they have invited me to sample a selection of miniature tasting versions of chef Jordi Rovira Segovia’s menu along with wines Keith has chosen himself. One wall of the restaurant is lined with bottles bearing simple price tags that belie their far from simple prices.
We eat tapas of baby squid, tomato and coriander along with Chardonnay from Bulgaria, a Château Burgozone 2012. The squid is excellently cooked, smoky and soft and the Chardonnay likes it.
Next up a dish that almost required a magnifying glass to view, this was of course just a taster though, of labneh, dried black olives, asparagus, citrus vinaigrette and fresh oregano with salmon roe. A Volubilia 2013 Moroccan Mourvèdre, Tempranillo, Vin Gris rosé was excellent and the food sharp and clear and the dried olives little nuts of concentrated flavour.
Suckling piglet belly with piquillo was fatty in a good way, melting into the mouth and served with a red that was slightly below room temperature with a slight chill to the bottle. Arnaud explaining that room temperature was often too warm, nowadays. Couvent des Jacobins 2005, a St Emilion Grand cru is a concentrated, darkly attractive wine already softening in its tannins but with still perhaps a few years left yet to achieve its full potential.
A piece of cod that passeth all understanding was next, fresh from Billingsgate and delightfully firm and well textured with slippery Romesco sauce, the wine Arnaud chose came from where he grew up, Dido 2013 from Montsant vineyards. It had nothing to do with the MOR made in Chelsea chanteuse fortunately and was intriguing in its ‘thick’ texture.
Arnaud rather bravely stuck with this white for the, much anticipated by me, Longhorn Onglet, served rare as it simply has to be, from a fifth generation butcher in Chipping Barnet. A superb piece of meat, one that I regard as the best steak of all. Dido accompanied it (sic) very well indeed and I could have eaten a great deal more of it given half a chance.
Finally, a deconstructed Vinothec Cheesecake made with cheese named after Jean Anselme Brillat-Savarin. A feast of fats it was as lush as could be and for once I was happy at the reduced portion size. Arnaud served his last bottle of 1971 Rivesaltes, a part of France I remember only vaguely because while I was there I drank Rivesaltes out of litre containers filled from converted petrol pumps – happy days, if now very blurred ones, of being almost constantly drunk and making expeditions in the dead of night across the border to Spain to smuggle back soft drugs. It was thirty years ago, I hasten to add, so don’t go try writing me up for that bizness, seen?
Anyway we downed some espressos from one man band artisan roaster, Francis Bradshaw and I rolled out into the night in search of a kebab, well as I keep saying, they were very small portions.
You may not feel that trundling out to what still feels rather like the ends of the earth to eat is worth the trip, but I feel you should reconsider. The food was excellent, the wines clearly well chosen and with plenty more to choose from as well. And you get a chance to thwack golf balls into space, what more do you want?
London calling!
San Sebastian may be the unofficial food capital of the world, but for three days this year it went more than a little London. Nick Harman gets a taste of Gastronomika 2013
If this coach goes over the edge and into the sea, a lot of London restaurants are going to have problems next week.
Jose Pizarro is three rows in front, Fergus Henderson appears to have nodded off in his seat in the middle, Nuno Mendes is peering pensively past his fringe and out the window, Junya Yamasaki of Koya is with the bad boys at the back, Bubbledogs/Kitchen Table lads are all chatting excitedly and the Clove Club are members of the happy band. On board are plenty of other brit chefs who are bywords in the blogs, plus a couple of food writers and at least one of those is desperately trying to remember if he’s been rude about any of these chefs recently.
We’re barreling through the darkness en route to a mass dinner at Elkano, a restaurant in the seaside fishing village of Getaria about 24km from San Sebastian (Donostia). We’re going to eat turbot-rodaballo. It’s a simple dish, a whole turbot, or in this case about twenty turbots, cooked on enormous oakwood fired grills outside the entrance.
Nothing more than salt, cider vinegar and oil is added and the fish is served in three defined parts – the bottom side that never sees the sun, the top half with its dark skin and, on the side, a rack of gelatinous bones. The texture and taste contrasts are clear and defined and you drag the local bread through the glorious mess your plate soon becomes and you greedily suck the skin off those bones. Outside, roasting in the heat from the grills ourselves, we gather for cigarette breaks and agree that it is possibly the best fish we’ve eaten anywhere
It’s certainly a long way in style from tweezers and Thermomix cooking; it’s basic Basque and the assembled chefs lap up the simplicity, so refreshing after a day of food art. We’re all in town for Gastronomika 2013, three days of learning and lecturing and this year there’s a strong Brit presence because the festival is flying the London flag, literally, because London has come to Spain, innit.
You’d think San Sebastian, a city that has become a byword for great food would be too cool to like London grub, but far from it. Outside the conference center, a modern structure next to the old town and perched like a giant bathing hut just a few yards from the beach, James Knappett has set up a food truck selling his eponymous Bubbledogs. Within a few hours it proves so popular they have to create a zig zag queuing system and locals and attendees of all ages happily stuff hot dogs into their mouths while dribbling sauce on their shirts just like any London food blogger.
Inside they’ve seen Heston open the show and heard from Jonny Lake of the Fat Duck and Ashley Palmer-Watts of Dinner, they will go on to see Anna Hansen(The Modern Pantry) cook fusion, smell the spices of Atul Kochar (Benares), marvel at the erratic Lundun accent of that man Knappett and watch Jose Pizarro (Pizarro’s) and Cesar Garcia (Iberica) demo. Over the next few days Nuno Mendes (Viajante) will also demonstrate, as well as Fergus Henderson (St John) and Tom Kerridge (Hand & Flowers), the latter to be found wandering about backstage hugely happy with the success of his book, TV show and now UK’s Best Restaurant Award.
Attending these events is both fascinating and frustrating. You get to see, and smell, some remarkable dishes being created but you never get to taste any. The hall is hot and a bit stuffy and during the Spanish chefs’ performances you wear translation headsets which make your ears hurt and sometmes deliver Spanglish. For the chefs it’s about seeing what could be on the menu stylewise next, to see heros in action and go out on the lash in the evening. For me it’s work and pleasure combined but you can only watch so many demos.
Luckily there is the food Disneyworld of San Sebastian to explore. So many tabernas, so little time, and picking the right ones isn’t easy. You peer in and try to judge by spotting who are locals and who are tourists. The latter are easily identifiable, they are taking endless pictures and are filling large plates with pinchos as if at a wedding buffet. With a shudder you withdraw.
Some bars in the beautiful old town have got lazy and serve bad food but get a good guide, and I recommend John Warren of San Sebastian Food, and you will be steered right. In San Sebastian the good and the bad and the ugly are not fixed, so you need the most up to date info if you’re not to blow your euros on the wrong pinchos.
John is scathing about some tabernas and waxes eloquent about others, particularly in the Gros area of town an area little visited by tourists. Here he deftly steers me from place to place, drinking the sparkling txakoli wine, very dry and pleasantly low in alcohol, as we go, while I wonder how much more food I can take before exploding like Mr Creosote.
I also wonder if I am going to get scurvy. John assures me that in their homes the locals eat as many green vegetables as anyone else, but in the tabernas the closest you come to green veg is an olive. If it’s not fatty or fried or both, the Spanish don’t want it. Here in Spain it’s best to forget about your five a day and just concentrate on trying to get just one a day.
Back at the conference centre it’s good to see London being hailed as the most exciting food city in the world. The talk is all of our multi-cultural melting pot and how, having never really had much of a cuisine to defend, we have been omnivorous in our welcome to everyone else’s. Yes we fall for crazes rather too easily, and fall prey to silly hype occasionally, but we keep our eyes open as well as our mouths.
Maybe next year we’ll be the ones holding our own Gastronomika, that’s if all the chefs made it back safely home of course.
Photos taken with the HTC One Mini
Fish Market restaurant, London
16B, New Street London EC2M 4TR www.fishmarket-restaurant.co.uk
The D & D restaurants are all a bit different in style, but all seem to aim at being somewhere to rely on, whether it’s towards the high end at Cog d’Argent or a little bit touristy like the Butlers Wharf Chop House. Fish Market seems to be swimming right in the middle.
Occupying a part of the last of Devonshire Square’s ancient spice and storage warehouses to be converted, Fish Market is one of the more recent additions to the D & D portfolio of restaurants. There are at least twenty five of these in London, which must make them one of the most successful groups around, that is if you don’t count all the burger bandwagons.
It’s nicely placed to catch people passing down the lane to Devonshire Square’s main entrance and offers a menu that navigates unsurprisingly toward the fish side. But if you wanted a steak you wouldn’t have sat down in the first place.
Some rather steep stairs; there is a lift for the differently abled, lead from the patio to the main room which is decked out in a way that may resemble a trawler’s dining room, if I knew what one looked like. It’s certainly semi-industrial, as befits an old warehouse, and thankfully does not have any nets on the wall containing badly painted wooden fish or glass floats.
We decided to sit on the terrace though. D&D have covered this in large umbrellas, figuring not unreasonably that rain is never far away. This is fine but the clouds have gathered a bit and together with the black umbrellas have drained so much light from the area that I can’t even see J across the table, let alone the menu. The clouds soon move on though and it becomes visible.
There’s rather a lot to choose from and to make matters more difficult, there’s a specials board too. The latter is a good idea as fish availability can change so rapidly, but even so it’s from the main menu that we decide to eat with its range from fish finger sandwiches to a big old seafood (s) platter.
Salt and pepper squid, roast garlic and chilli catches my eye. It’s a dish I love, and while I know it won’t be as good as you get in Vietnamese restaurants, I want it still. As it turns out, and turns up, this isn’t a bad stab at all with the squid crispy and a decent mayonnaise to dunk it in. The bit that fails is the chili, instead of being fresh it’s semi dried and gets caught in the teeth. It doesn’t deliver the crunch and burn it should.
J has the Kedgeree Scotch egg, toasted almond and rocket salad which he reckons is fine, the egg golden and not grey and the fish assertive but not looking for a fight. It’s a good dish for this kind of place, reasonably filling, reasonably just behind the trend and reasonably priced.
We’re trying hard to not have battered cod and chips for mains, as it seems everyone else already is, but it looks so good resistance is getting a bit futile. Ever mindful of my svelte figure I do something odd and order steamed haddock. Now steamed fish is something that forever cries out ‘hospital food’ to me, but the mention of a poached egg on top drugs me into ordering it.
It’s much better than expected; the very fresh fillet has been curled onto its side to give it more plate appeal and the steaming has plumped it like a hospital pillow. When the perfectly cooked egg breaks over it there are good mouthfuls to be had with silky, subtle chives in a cream lapping at the base. I actually feel pretty virtuous eating it, not a feeling one normally gets in a restaurant.
J has also beaten the battered cod craving but has cheated by going for roast cod instead. It’s a mighty hunk of fish with the skin fried before it went into the oven so it has a good golden glow and crispness. Pea puree has been ‘skidded’ onto the plate, which makes it look as if the fish only narrowly avoided shooting off the far side, but pea and cod go together well that this slightly retro presented dish is no car crash.
New potatoes for J and chips for me, the latter to undo any good work that eating healthily steamed fish has done. Not bad chips either, not as crispy as they could be despite being fashionably thrice cooked, but very edible nonetheless. When did chip shops ever serve crisp chips anyway?
And so to pud, but in fact we didn’t have any. Sometimes even we feel a little full. Verdict? No nonsense, sound cooking and well-priced especially the set menu. It feels a bit like a chain place and it isn’t fine dining, but it’s still smart and relaxed. It’s busy and certainly suits local office workers and those on lower budgets who don’t want to go somewhere where they have to eat artery-busting blogfood. Overall Fish Market maintains D&D’s rep for getting it right and being reliable and I make it my catch of the week.
Photographs from D&D website
elBulli: Ferran Adrià and The Art of Food at Somerset House
I never ate at elBulli; I’d hazard a guess you never did either. The clientele seemed to be almost exclusively food writers for glossy consumer magazines and the trade press. And yet you almost certainly have eaten something inspired by a dish or technique that originated at elBulli. Like Vivien Westwood dresses, few people actually wear them but they do wear the clothes that derive from them.
elBulli wasn’t always a gourmet Mecca (by the way if you want to have real food cred you should know it’s pronounced El Buwee). Back in the 1960s it was just a bar serving drinks for patrons of the local golf course and run by a German, but a German with characteristically, a master plan.
He wanted a great restaurant and he hired good people and in 1984 Ferran Adrià, until then just one of the staff, was promoted to joint chef and the elBulli story began proper. It was a story that would lead to domination of the World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards.
Adrià would perhaps be still winning except he chose to close, perhaps recognising that everyone gets knocked off their perch eventually and it’s always best to jump. Nowadays the cooking of Scandinavia tends to dominate those awards, with the focus not so much on the laboratory as what chef can find in a skip or under a stone. Fashion in food is fickle and journalists need new things to be the first to discover and champion.
But with this major London exhibition, Adrià has his place in history assured. His maxim of creativity, not copying, can be seen in its gestation and finally its triumph as you wander through the rooms, with food becoming a concept and experience.
The way elBulli is talked about can all be a bit pretentious but anyone who has sat through Adrià’s conversation, he always says far too much and in far too long bursts for the translator to ever keep up, knows that he has more of a sense of humour than the curators of this show are prepared to admit, although they do include Matt Groening’s, the creator of The Simpsons, portrait of Adrià which raises a much needed laugh.
The artefacts from elBulli are in glass cases, as if they were flint headed arrows from the Bronze Age. Kitchen tools like Pacojet are exhibited, but as you can buy such things in the shops, their value comes from where they have been. And did those hands in ancient times walk these machines?
You can see elBulli’s collection of plasticine ‘food’, used to design the presentation and to be referred to for consistency. The strange and wonderful serving plates which, placed under glass and without food, begin to have the rather macabre look of instruments from a Victorian hospital.
It’s a well curated, imaginatively laid out exhibition with excellent use of audio visual. The sombre lighting and the glass cases however can make you forget that this is actually about food, something which should be joyous and flooded with light and laughter.
This can be remedied by going afterwards to the terrace where you can drink the beer of one of the sponsors, Estrella, who have teamed up with Ferran and brother Albert to have their recipes on the side of 4 packs of bottles of Estrella Damm.
It seems an extraordinary tie up, one that if done by Gordon Ramsay would earn him hisses and boos from the food community, but in this case they seem to be politely averting their gaze. Adrià still has a lot of clout and is rumoured to have a new restaurant in the pipeline and no one wants to be on the black list for that.
elBulli: Ferran Adrià and The Art of Food runs at Somerset House until 29 September 2013
The Dysart Arms
135 Petersham Rd Richmond, Surrey TW10 7AA www.thedysartarms.co.uk
I’ve walked past the Dysart Arms lots of times over the years on my way to Petersham Nursery, not that I’d go to that place now, not since Skye Gyngell left. Her long face looking out of the kitchen window like a disconsolate horse was never very cheering but the food was always interesting, if hellishly overpriced. Now it’s just hellishly overpriced..
The Dysart Arms is an old arts and crafts style pub that’s a pub no longer. Like so many it found it couldn’t survive on beer alone and so has changed hands and gone gourmet. A resulting internal refurb suffers a bit from the curse of Farrow & Ball, but they’ve resisted the temptation to paint absolutely everything cream. This means that it doesn’t feel like you’re sitting in branch of Daylesford Organic, a place that sends me into a frenzy of hatred even just thinking about it.
Large flagstones, naked wood tables, grand fireplaces and original leaded windows all create a feeling of cosiness. To add to the happiness the sun is streaming in ‘like butterscotch’ (thank you Joni) while the staff are breezing efficiently about and helping me chase wasps back out the window as I have a pathetic fear of wasps. The set menu is a very reasonable £19.95 for three courses, but we’ve heard head chef Kenneth Culhane is a bit good, a Roux scholar no less, so we hit the a la carte to see if the kitchen can cut it.
Little pre-nibbles that are, in young people’s eyes as naff as napkins and cutlery, are quite excellent, as is the soda bread. We wolf these down and wait for starters proper which immediately set our happy bells ringing when they arrive.
My veal sweetbread is exquisitely cooked, a little crusty on the outside and billowing on the inside. A black truffle vinaigrette blows heavenly wafts across the palate, while fresh almonds deliver a contrapuntal punch. The juices are dribbled and smeared, which again some people dislike seeing but remains the best way of making plates look good while spreading flavours around.
P has scallops, perhaps not on the surface an exciting choice but the squid ink dumplings, are clever and texturally interesting and deliver a colour contrast while the scallops themselves are well seared, plump and fresh. An insolia veloute comes as foam, again a bit old hat for some but it does deliver the flavours very efficiently to the taste buds even if it isn’t fashionable.
Service is relaxed but they know which dishes we are having, this may seem oxymoronic but it’s surprising how many good restaurants still do the embarrassing plate shuffle at table when all it takes is a decent memory, or even a piece of paper, to get it right first time.
P’s main is a visual stunner, so much so that I feel compelled to get the camera out again, but we are in a spot that’s clear of other customers and I am quick as a flash (without a flash).
The iridescent green of the herbal kaffir lime and green chilli sauce is hallucinogenic and sets off the beautifully crisped stone bass on its bed of sweet and nutty celeriac very well. P reports that the whole dish tastes sublime; so it’s not all presentation there is real method at work here as well, but then of course you’d expect no less from anyone who’s been in spatula range of a Roux.
My Wiltshire Heritage beef had been treated with loving respect so as to be properly pink and well rested. With this kind of quality ingredient you really just have to exercise old fashioned skill and resist the temptation to rush.
With my expert eye I quickly identified beetroot on the plate, then checking the menu discovered it was in fact heritage carrot, carrots once always being purple until the comparatively recent orange variety took over. Cut into disks and batons the carrot had the sweetness of old that got rather bred out along with the colour and so was captivating. The flavour of the meat set against the miso mustard sauce, rather an inspired sauce I felt, and the dusty sourness of sumac, one of my favourite spices was excellent.
As with my starter I was drinking the recommended bottled beer not wine, in this case a Goose Island IPA, and it was a revelation just how enjoyable a craft beer can be with well-crafted food. The joy of being able to take a good swallow, and not just sip, can’t be overstated.
We shared a Valrhona Jivra chocolate and praline bar partnered with fashionable salted caramel ice cream and grue de caco for dessert. I am not much for sweet things and I don’t really ‘get’ salted caramel, but this was again an elegant and enjoyable dish. Even better was the selection of cheeses, small but perfectly chosen and perfectly ripe.
Days before going to the Dysart Arms I was referring to it as the Dyson Arms. God knows why, because, as we found, it certainly doesn’t suck. See what I did there? Ah comedy. Seriously though, best lunch of the year, hands down.
Mango Tree and Pan Chai at Harrods
87-135 Brompton Road, Knightsbridge, London, SW1X 7XL www.harrods.com
‘That fish is extremely rare, those three are on the endangered list and this one here is extinct as of ten minutes ago.’ The man itemising the fish on our sushi/sashimi platter didn’t really say that, but with the cost of the board coming in at £120 for two it wouldn’t have been entirely surprising if he had.
You don’t eat cheap in Harrods Food Halls; from steaks to sashimi the prices make your eyes water and the water isn’t cheap either. It’s the kind of spending excess that makes dreadlocked white kids put wheelie bins through the windows of banks before heading off to pay £11 for a gourmet burger.
Looking at the menus at both Mango Tree, and its partner opposite Pan Chai, there is nothing that could be called averagely priced and yet at both places not only is every stool occupied there are people patiently queuing for their chance to whip out their wads. They are mostly tourists, many are Chinese and all are obviously not short of a bob or two.
It’s an unusual spot to have lunch, the Harrods Food Hall. It’s always a frantically busy place and there are no tables at almost all the food outlets, instead you eat at a bar. Why don’t people wander off to find somewhere cheaper, less crowded in the area? The answer is probably to do with comfort zones. Well-heeled tourists feel safe in Harrods, whereas walking the mean streets of Knightsbridge might feel a bit edgy.
There is no point moaning about the prices though; after all if you can’t afford to pay you shouldn’t have sat down. So J and I barely turn a hair when at Mango Tree we find six dim sum priced at £30 (including a bowl of Tom Yum soup), instead we just adopt an insouciant pose and raise our glasses of £15 champagne to two girls who are eyeing us up as possible sugar daddies. Luckily they cannot see my TK Max trainers.
Is the food any good? Well chef in charge for MT Harrods and Pan Chai is Ian Pengelley, who is also chef at the gigantic Gilgamesh in Camden, and he’s a seasoned Western Thai pro. I’ve always liked his food and style and here he has a top team and a budget for the best ingredients.
The Tom Yum soup is rich and fiery just as it should be, four plump prawns are playing submarines at the bottom and shimeji mushrooms are patrolling the surface. I’ve had lots of Tom Yums and this is as good as the best I’ve had, at least in the UK. Coughing on the chilli does not help with our insouciant poses, though.
The dim sum, a plate of fried and plate of steamed are very good, although I am no expert on dim sum. I know what I like and let somebody else count the pleats. From the steamed selection the foie gras and scallop is quite divine and the prawn and chive also excellent.
We eat everything in two bites each, dunking in the soy sauce in between to eke out the pleasure. From the fried selection I especially like the juicy prawn entwined in a bird’s nest of fried noodle, the mix of crunch and yielding flesh is perfect. Duck spring roll is rich and filling and the taro and chicken croquette also stood out.
Over at Pan Chai dry ice is steaming away on our fish platter and you half expect a bloke playing a twin-necked guitar to appear out of it. The sushi and sashimi are all beautifully ‘plated’ and while I soon lose track of what is actually on the platter the menu reminds me: Foie gras, sea urchin, salmon, tuna belly, sea bass, tuna, salmon roe, grilled eel, jumbo sweet shrimp, scallop, yellow tail, tamago and spicy salmon roll. The fresh wasabi is just hot enough to spike without making my nose explode.
Each chopstick tweezered piece demands slow contemplation, as you are metaphorically sucking on a £5 note. Service is discreet yet cheerful which is can’t be easy as some of the rich diners act very brusquely indeed.
You can if you want eat a bit cheaper at both places with some menu savvy, although don’t go for the Wagyu beef curry unless you have £60 to spare.
And while some will say you can get cheaper, and arguably better, versions of all this in Soho, well the answer is of course you probably can but that’s really not the point. Just about everything in Harrods costs more than it would anywhere else; it’s not Bluewater after all.
If you have a burning desire to spend some serious cash in what must be the most iconic store in the world, and you want to get something very decent and decadent for your money, then pull up a stool at either Mango Tree or Pan Chai and adopt a happy smile
Hens just wanna have fun
Nick Harman visits a Happy Egg Co farm to see if the hens are really smiling. Al Stuart takes pictures of birds.
There are just a few chickens to be seen in the area outside the hut at the Happy Eggs Co Bulbourne Farm in Tring, Hertfordshire. The farmer Jean-Paul (JP) Michalski reckons it’s because it’s too hot for them to come out, but it might just be because they’re camera shy.
They’ve had a lot of visiting journalists recently. Happy Eggs Co, owned and monitored by Noble Foods, are keen to show just how contented their chickens are and have been issuing invites to the press left, right and centre. So the 14,000 strong chook flock, housed in huts spaced across the 120 acre farm could be excused for having a ‘want to be alone’ moment.
Now of course serious food journalists would spurn such invitations, preferring to drop in totally unannounced or come over the wire at night dressed as anarchists. Well the first option wasn’t really practical for us and the second we dismissed because neither I nor the photographer wanted to get our noses pierced.
So there is the suspicion that, rather like a care home for the elderly warned of an imminent inspection, the managers have sent the moaners and troublemakers off for the day and shoved all the dead bodies into a locked room out of sight.
That’s cynical though. On this brilliant sunny day, the chickens we see do indeed seem very happy, although chickens tend to have a rather malignant expression at the best of times. Those that have braved the 30 degree plus heat outside are making contented ‘book book’ noises and drumming on the toes of our boots with their beaks like Gene Krupa after too much coffee.
‘All these young trees will soon grow to provide lots of lovely shade for them,’ says JP talking about the wild pear and other fruit trees planted in profusion about the shed area. The hen sheds, which resemble something out of Tenko, are themselves large and airy and are regularly dragged, literally, to new locations to give the hens pastures new to peck about in.
Novelty is important to chickens apparently, they are inquisitive creatures JP says, and this explains why structures normally seen in a kids’ playground are dotted about the hens’ large open areas. Chickens it seems, are girls who just wanna have fun.
Each morning the sides of the sheds are flung open and, when it isn’t so very hot, a tsunami of feathers floods out as the hens eagerly get outside to begin their day pecking at the ground, dust bathing and playing with the toys. Research has shown that bored, unhappy hens don’t just have a lower quality of life, they also lay less good eggs too.
In the sheds the smell is, well actually there is very little smell at all thanks to a grating that lets the droppings naturally fall away from the hens’ laying and sleeping areas. The hens are free to come and go as they please all day long and the hut design means that fresh air constantly passes in and up to exit through the top vents so making it pleasantly cool and breezy despite the sun beating on the roof.
The eggs the hens lay here in the semi shade roll gently to the back of the laying area where a small conveyor belt trundles them outside to be placed in boxes. It’s all very calm and the chickens are as docile as family pets; cheerfully nibbling at feed and taking water from the constant supply fed to their small beak-activated drippers.
JP picks up random chickens and strokes them, which they seem to enjoy, and he explains that he can tell the health of the hens from such inspections. Hens apparently peck at each other when stressed so the feathers look bad and they would not be amenable to being picked up if they weren’t happy.
Of course the elephant in the hen house is what happens when the hens’ laying days are over? Well as you’ve probably guessed they are not given a lethal injection and full military honours burial in a plot overlooking the setting sun, but sold for meat to the far east.
The average life expectancy of a laying hen is fourteen months, when in fact they could live for over fourteen years, but old chickens do not lay satisfactory eggs for the supermarket buyers. JP does try and find the hens a life after lay, but with so many chickens becoming redundant all the time, only a small percentage can ever be rehomed.
Rather sad but the art of farming is one mixing pragmatism with decency. Happy Egg Co farms, as far as we could tell and were shown, are doing everything they can to ensure their hens are properly and ethically treated and the result is better eggs for everyone.
So pay the extra pence for Happy Eggs Co eggs when you’re next out shopping and see if you can taste the difference. Maybe you’ll end up happier too.
This article first appeared on Foodepedia
Lounge Lover, Shoreditch
Art love
Lounge Lover is not a restaurant, the restaurant, Les Trois Garcons, is next door. This means that you’d best not turn up hungry because, frankly, you’re going to leave hungry too and quite possibly succumb to the lure of the chippy on the way home.
But of course you can tell this by looking at the menu; the food occupies two pages and the cocktail list about fourteen so you don’t have to be a genius to see where the focus lies. This place is a lounge, that non-U word for a sitting room, and here the idea is to relax on the gloriously mismatched but oh so desirable furniture and take on board a few drinks.
While doing this you can marvel at the decoration, everything from old French grandfather clocks to a rhino’s head stuffed and mounted and shot in mid roar – what do Rhinos need those enormous teeth for? Aren’t they vegetarians?
In general Lounge Lover looks like the interior of Mark Anthony “Baz” Luhrmann’s mind, a riot of camp, colour and devil may care eccentricity with small private rooms tucked exotically away off the main drag. As my pal A says, and he’s been around, ‘notice how everything is portable? If this place ever went under about the only thing they’d have to leave for the receivers is the paint on the walls.
That’s unlikely to happen, the three chaps who own this, the restaurant, the coffee shop nearby and a chateau hotel in France, know what they’re doing. They set up Les Trois Garcons and Lounge Lover back when this area was a bit dodgy; now the locals are generally richer than the customers. But there is much more competition too, in what was a bit of a food and drink wasteland you can find any number of cool hangouts for the new media types.
Lounge Lover still impresses though, a place to slide into at night for some drinks and nibbles and the nibbles are what we are here for. Even so we order cocktails – after ten minutes hopeless gazing I end up just picking at random, perhaps subliminally influenced by its name ‘A bit on the side’. Why can’t they just number cocktails? I remember the shame of ordering a ‘Slow comfortable screw up against the wall’ back in the 80s and it doesn’t get any better as you get older.
So to the food, the nibble menu’s divided up into raw, cured, fried and sweet and so we take a punt on Codfish ceviche with Swedish marinade, seeing as how ceviche is still fashionable and I like it anyway. It comes on crispy endive leaves and is as good as ceviche gets. The Swedish marinade is a bit of a mystery, what would Swedes use? Crispbreads? But overall we find they slip down fast and easy.
A trio of burgers appear next. Now I’m no fan of burgers, not when so many are bigger than your head and a sloppy mess, but mini ones I can get along with. Duck and cucumber archad, Venison & lingonberry
Madonna sat here, apparently
Aged rump and foie gras are the act here served in mini brioche buns. Again brioche buns are usually very horrid things to serve a full sized burger in, but here their sweetness balances the meats well. It’s not safe to say too much about foie gras, there are a lot of people out there who are simply gagging to stuff up anyone who dares say they like it, but it was good. Best burger is the venison, the berry being classic accompaniment. I have no idea what archad is, sorry.
Sweet potato fries come with a bi curious dip of crème fraiche and chilli sauce, these fries are really rather good and a welcome change from potato chips whether thrice fried or not, while a bowl of battered squid with cumin, red chilli and fresh lime zap is a bit odd as the squid isn’t battered at all. However it is well cooked otherwise, as soft as a politician’s handshake as pliant as one of their policies. The zap lives up to its name and makes me cough. We order more cocktails, try to look sophisticated and order Shoashin braised pork belly with
Nordic apple plunge. The plunge is a kind of applesauce, but full marks for its name, which sounds far more exciting. The belly is taut as a six-pack, the collagens well broken down. It has enough chewiness to make it interesting to chew and applesauce and pork is a no brainer success.
It’s getting a bit dark and LL’ s real clientele are showing up, party people; you can tell the place comes into its own as the night gets old. But we are actually old so we order fresh hot donuts with three dipping sugars dill, cardamom and cinnamon and prepare to leave. The donuts are squidgy and small, which suits us fine, and the cardamom makes an unusual contrast to the sugary sweetness, almost rendering the doughnuts savoury.
We are still a bit peckish but make it home without kebabbing it. Lounge Lover is not a restaurant but the food isn’t bar food either, it’s a place for classy supper post fun and it’s certainly somewhere different and pleasant to put your feet up for a while.
Trying the tapa de ancho at Gaucho
Raw and ready
Before the Hawksmoors, the Goodmans and all the rest there was Gaucho, actually first appearing in the Netherlands in 1976 in Amsterdam. A cut above a steakhouse, aimed at people who felt a little declasse in Harvester, this Argentinian temple of meat is rather different. Animal hides make up much of the upholstery and the meat in all its various cuts, is paraded around the room raw so you can see what you’re getting. So it isn’t’ the kind of place to take Morrissey for a snack.
Always nicely dark inside, you fall over the furniture a lot until your eyes adjust, it also benefits from an excellent Argentinian wine list. At a time when one rather suspected South America was dumping their inferior wines on the UK, the wine list at Gaucho was and remains a taste of what’s really available if you know where to look.
Of course the snobbier foodies never ‘got’ Gaucho, they dismissed it as too downmarket, it wasn’t properly connected to the right people in the right places, and it it was suspected that it might even harbour right wing tendencies, what with it being Argentinean and all. But Gaucho has got 
on with the task, serving up steaks to the masses and doing a good job of it, Gauchos now litter the pampas of London and remain popular with ordinary everyday folk looking for a reliably decent bit of steak any day of the week. Hearing of a new menu, we herded ourselves into the Swallow Street branch for a look see. Read more…
Trying the tapa de ancho at Gaucho
Raw and ready
Before the Hawksmoors, the Goodmans and all the rest there was Gaucho, actually first appearing in the Netherlands in 1976 in Amsterdam. A cut above a steakhouse, aimed at people who felt a little declasse in Harvester, this Argentinian temple of meat is rather different. Animal hides make up much of the upholstery and the meat in all its various cuts, is paraded around the room raw so you can see what you’re getting. So it isn’t’ the kind of place to take Morrissey for a snack. Read more…
Nick Harman 
