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Clockjack, Soho
14 Denman Street, Soho, London W1D 7HJ www.clockjackoven.com
It’s a wind up
Walk through any French outdoor market and you’ll find someone selling spit-roasted chickens from what looks like a modified fairground ride. These machines cook chooks twenty or thirty at at a time, rotating in a hypnotic synchronised dance as they slowly acquire a deep, golden crispy tan.
Walk through any English ASDA and you’ll see much the same thing; golden chickens with tasty promise. So if French itinerant traders can do it, and the green fleece of ASDA can do it, why can’t Clockjack?
The first thing that made J and I, both of us bird fanciers, twitch was the sight of the cooked birds suspended in a glass case rather like museum exhibits and with the deathly pallor of a Streatham crackhead – pasty, ill-looking and worth reporting to the police. From across the room you could see the skin had all the crispiness of a wet flannel. We debated leaving there and then but decided that maybe these weren’t the chickens we’d be eating. God knows what made us think that, blind optimism probably.
Seated at the clearly expensive wooden bar and perched unsteadily on natty stools, we were treated to the sight of a server plucking one of the fowl exhibits from its mausoleum and taking it to bits with poultry shears just inches from our noses. The smell of chicken fat was overpowering, the spectacle unappetising. If it were my restaurant I’d have the chickens dismantled well away from the punters’ gaze and done with noisy theatrical clean blows from a cleaver, not the squelchy sound of shears.
The room could certainly do with some livening up because at lunchtime it was mostly empty. No sounds, no atmosphere just the sight of the Brittany chickens morosely roosting and no doubt wondering what they had done to deserve such a fate. The rotisserie didn’t even have any chickens in it, just naked gas flames wastefully jetting into nothing and warming us globally.
We ate a whole chicken in ten pieces for £17.95 served with a selection of sauces shamelessly squirted into their bowls from plastic bottles behind the bar. Yes it happens in every restaurant, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but why not do it out of the customers’ sight for heaven’s sake?
The chicken skin was, as we guessed it would be, terrible. Greasy, lank and tasteless. Fit only to be peeled off like a soggy condom and as quickly discarded. The unseasoned meat was moist, verging on wet, and tasted of not much at all, not even chicken. The menu boasts that Clockjack’s marinade is a special secret recipe. The secret may possibly be that it’s just tap water.
We gamely ate it anyway; it was lukewarm but it was at least safely cooked through. The sauces were okay if you like synthetic tasting sauces – the chilli sauce was wussy and the Caesar was definitely not fit for an emperor. The chips were decently crispy but they tasted of fish for some reason, perhaps the oil needed changing, or maybe the bloke in charge of the fryer did.
And off we went, having paid £35 for a bird that didn’t fly, some so-so chips and two bottles of beer. For that money we could have done a lot better almost anywhere else in Soho.
This trendy fowl-up may get some innocents flocking in to spend their money, but it shouldn’t get the real bird spotters in a flap. The next time I fancy roast chicken I’ll wait until Sunday and cook my own, or go to ASDA and get one of theirs. At least I know it’ll be roasted right instead of being totally clocked..
Enter the rhubarb triangle
No false modesty here
‘If you listen carefully, you can actually hear the rhubarb growing,’ says Janet Oldroyd Hulme as we all obediently fall silent and strain our ears. Silent that is but for the odd sibilant plastic rustle as a kagoul-clad pensioner attempts to stabilise himself on the cold, wet slippery earth of the candlelit forcing shed.
‘Well you could if these were still at the initial growing stage,’ admits Janet, finally breaking the mystic spell. ‘Rhubarb grows at around an inch a day and at the early stage there’s a definite creaking sound as it pushes up. Right, now back outside please!’
There’s actually a bit of a noticeable creaking sound as the pensioners all get their legs going again and compliantly shuffle out of the shed to the rhubarb shop, threading their way through the spooky, albino-ish shoots visible only by the guttering light of the candles on sticks dotted about.
The weigh in
We’re all on safari in the heart of the ‘Rhubarb Triangle’, the area of West Yorkshire where rhubarb is king, a top seasonal crop appreciated by savvy chefs all over the UK. Each morning the forced rhubarb from here is picked and sent out by fast trains to discerning buyers across the country, including Harrods, where it fetches a high price.
I’ve tagged along with the pensioners’ day trip to the Oldroyd Hulme rhubarb farm to find out a bit more about a vegetable (often mistakenly classed as a fruit) that rather blighted my younger days. My father, like so many dads back then, always grew rhubarb on his allotment and it appeared, stewed and covered in claggy custard, every weekend during its season, the sour oxalic acid coating my teenage teeth and haunting my dreams.
It wasn’t of course quality rhubarb like this. Before ushering us into the ghostly sheds Janet, a fourth generation rhubarb grower, treats us to the history and practice of rhubarb growing, especially forcing. Grown in the UK since 1870 and originally from Siberia, it’s a vegetable rich in flavour as well as having a positive and balancing effect upon the digestive system and one of the most widely used herbs in Chinese medicine. There are even claims that rhubarb root (Rheum officinale) can be useful in treatment of Hepatitis B.
Listen carefully
Back in the day amateur growers like my father would place a bucket over the dormant rhubarb ‘crowns’ in winter so that when the shoots emerged in the spring they would be starved of light and blanched, so producing a lighter coloured stem and a more delicate flavour. After that initial first flush, the bucket would come off and we would then eat ordinary rhubarb until the longed for day when the bitter oxalic acid became finally too strong and it was time to let the plant get on with storing energy in its roots for the next year.
It’s this stored energy Janet explains, that the professional growers harness to create an even more delicate crop than blanched rhubarb; the famous Yorkshire forced rhubarb. Late in the year, once they’ve suffered the crucial cold spell they need to break their dormancy, the two or three year old rhubarb crowns are dug up from their fields to go into dark heated sheds where, seduced by the cosy warmth into thinking that Spring has sprung, they begin to quickly grow.
in the pink
With no light to photosynthesise by the emerging shoots have to call on that stored energy in their roots, which is enough to give them their remarkable growth spurt and to produce their uniquely tender and highly sought after delicate champagne pink stems. Once the growth is over, the exhausted crowns are chopped up and recycled back onto the land.
Not so long ago there were nearly 200 rhubarb growers at work in the triangle, but today there are less than twelve. It’s a shrinkage caused by the availability to the consumer of more tempting exotic fruits, by the increasing lack of the necessary cold autumns, the absence of ‘shoddy’, a cheap by-product of the woolen industry traditionally used as fertiliser, and the decline of the local coal mining industry that gave these sheds their relatively cheap source of heating.
Today bought-in fertiliser and expensive propane are what fuel the rhubarb’s growth and so drives up growers’ costs and the price to us in the shops. And then there are the cheaper, but far inferior, imports from Holland and Turkey to contend with.
£2.50 a packet at source
Traditional growers such as Janet hear the rumours of their industry’s imminent demise but believe the future is actually assured. As she explains, new varieties can adjust for the warmer autumns while modern insulation techniques now make the sheds cheaper to heat. As for the foreign imports, in 2010 the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) granted local forced rhubarb the same protected name status enjoyed by products such as champagne and Parma ham. Now no producers of rhubarb outside the West Yorkshire triangle between Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield can now pass off their forced rhubarb as the real thing. Hooray for DEFRA.
That night in London we cook the bunch of Janet’s forced rhubarb that I carefully carried all the way back to town. We make a simple but classic rhubarb crumble and the flavour is delicate, sour-sweet and delicious and, although Dad can’t see me because he’s now on the big allotment in the sky, I raise a custard-coated spoon in tribute to his taste; he was right all along, rhubarb really is rather excellent.
Visit Oldroyd Hulme rhubarb farm
Find rhubarb recipes
Frying tonight. Madrid tapas tour
San Sebastian may have all the headlines when it comes to food, but Madrid can still make the grade. And when you get tired of tapas, there’s the museums and art to graze on. With Gastronomica Madrid 2013 now in full effect, Nick Harman hit the city streets to see what’s on offer.
Oh to be young again
Do you like football? Do you like tapas? Then you’ll love Puerta 57 in Madrid. Pass through the busy Barra Cibeles, redolent of garlic and the after shave of well-dressed Madrilenos, into the Salón Madrid and you’re gazing down at the floodlit ground of the Real Madrid stadium. Way down there epic matches have been fought and the sainted feet of Beckham once regularly twinkled over the hallowed turf. Up here your only struggle is to decide which of the premier league tapas on offer to put in the back of the net next.
Crispy prawns
I ate a Russian salad that would have made Lenin turn capitalist and plump prawns robed in a delicate web of dry, crispy batter. A plate of cutely shirt button sized clams, briefly steamed open, drenched in garlic, butter and oil and whisked over to diners from a stove just ten feet away, were sweet and nutty. I could have stayed all night.
La Dorada (obvs)
But the essence of tapas is to taste and move on and so fuelled by Rioja it was off to La Dorada. A seafood place (a dorada is a sea bream) with an ancient wooden bar running deep into the gloom at the back, it has a more informal vibe. The fact that it couldn’t be further from the sea, Madrid being pretty much in the dead center of Spain, doesn’t stop the fish here being first class.
Anchovies. Or whitebait. I don’t know.
Whitebait, or possibly fresh anchovies, came in light batter and in heavy profusion together with seared cubes of dogfish, or rock salmon as we sometimes call it in the UK. It’s a relative of the shark (the barman resorted to miming Jaws to explain this) and fried it has pleasingly solid texture, almost like monkfish. A plate of fried eggs slipped on top of matchstick sized battered and fried fish was my favourite here, the egg broken as soon as the plate landed so as to ooze out into the fried fish and make a delicious mess.
Plastic chillies, not so hot
Io restaurant was next, my progress now a little slower owing to the amount of fried food I’d taken on board, not to mention all that Rioja. Deep in the financial zone of Madrid, Io looks the part – smart, shiny, sleek and modern and with a bouncer on the door. ‘No I’m not!’ corrected the hombre, ‘I look after people’s cars as the parking’s a nightmare around here.’
Croquetas
The tapas at Io are advertised as modern; meatballs arrive on dinky white mini-plates along with delicate croquetas of jamon and salt cod with a bath of mayonnaise for them to be plunged into. A little lacking in atmosphere in the evening, Io is probably livelier at lunch when the local businesses pop in.
I’ll have three of those
I swung by the Mercado San Miguel in the old town, built in 1916 this was once one of the city’s main covered market places but today it’s been refurbished to be a more modern home of tapas bars and food shops. The original cast iron pillars soar up to support a roof of wooden planks and its location near to Madrid’s main square makes it popular at all times.
Messy eating
There are over 30 food stallsand a great cookbook shop here by day, but at night the tapas bars spill out to occupy any spare space. It’s crowded all the way up to closing time and like our own Borough Market it’s a bit touristy and pricey, but for at least an hour you can happily wander about, shoving through the good-natured crowds and grabbing a bite here and a booze there.
The chef, not bothered by my gastric reaction to his ‘tortilla’
And finally to Estado Puro. Based in a hotel, this is nowhere as bad as that might suggest. The decor is designery and it’s convenient for a post Prado museum stop. They do a modern tapas menu here, but for me the mussel ‘meatball’ went too far and hit the gag reflex. The chef is ex El Bulli, so that means some creative ideas are on offer. Sliders were overly salty, but then you shouldn’t really go to Madrid to eat that kind of stuff anyway. Much better was ‘21st century tortilla’ which came surprisingly in a glass, the potato foamed on top of a runny yolk with some fried onion. You had to down it one and, tasty though it was, I began to get that familiar Fat Duck/El Bulli sense of queasiness coming on, although I suppose after four hours, lots of fried food and big glasses of red wine, it may not have been entirely the tortilla’s fault.
Olives on sweet pastry. About as unpleasant as it sounds
And so to bed, barely scratching the surface of Madrid’s food offerings, and regretting rather the Spanish people’s seeming suicidal disdain for green vegetables in favour of meat and fried things. But then who doesn’t like fried things, and let’s face it you can always eat salad tomorrow!
Madrid’s Gastronomica festival ‘for the five senses’ runs from 19 January to 3 February offering tapas routes with a signature tapas and a bottle of local beer for €3, as well as selected restaurants serving special set price menus at € 25 and €40. There are also six selected ‘super’ restaurants at €75, one of them being cheffed by our own Simon Rogan from L’Enclume.
Yay chorizo!
The full Madrid Gastronomica programme can be seen here.
Puerta 57, Estadio Santiago Bernabeu, Madrid. Access from Gate 57 in Calle Padre Damián
La Dorada, Orense 64, Madrid, SpainIo, Calle Manuel de Falla 28036 Madrid
Mercado San Miguel, Plaza San Miguel, Madrid, S Open until 10 p.m. Monday to Wednesday and until 2 a.m. Thursday to Saturday
Io, Calle Manuel de Falla 28036 Madrid
Estado Puro, Plaza de Canovas del Castillo, 4, Madrid, (Centro, Cortes / Plaza Santa Ana)
Spanish Tourist OfficePO Box 4009London , W1A 6NB
Chez Gerard -Bishopsgate
64 Bishopsgate, London EC2N 4AW www.chezgerard.co.uk
Tres Braz
Many years ago I’d ride the creaky lift at Covent Garden station and my eyes would fall on an advert that never seemed to change. ‘Chez Gerard,’ it said, ‘ best steak-frites this side of Paris.’
I’d never actually eaten steak frites in Paris, so had no idea of the size of the gauntlet being thrown down, but the claim was intriguing. I meant to go and find out, it sounded tempting enough, but other meals got in the way and so Gerry had to make do without my custom.
And then of course I was too late; the Chez Gerard group was bought in 2011 by a division of Raymond ‘Voila!’ Blanc’s empire, to be rebranded as Brasserie Blancs. However some kind of change of heart has taken place and after a big revamp the restaurant in Bishopsgate is determinedly and proudly a Chez Gerard. Time to check out that steak boast.
It’s very City inside – J and I being the only people in the restaurant not wearing ties. Downstairs is a busy bar while upstairs there’s a la carte on offer. It’s a bit of a climb up there as the lift only takes one person – presumably it was designed by the same people who make the escape pods for Bond villains. Read more…
Flatiron steak, Soho
17 Beak St, Soho, W1F 9RW flatironsteak.co.uk
Covetable chopper
I’m not the world’s biggest steak fan, it’s what people who don’t normally eat in restaurants, eat in restaurants. It’s my distress purchase in a country pub, because whatever else ‘chef’ may foul up from the freezer you can be fairly confident that he can cook a steak, or its minced equivalent the burger, adequately well.
What I would dearly like to rediscover, like lost innocence, is the steak restaurant of my youth, the Tavern in the Town in Croydon. My 11 year old self loved it in there – the faux Tudor decor, the big steaks with the cross-hatch grill marks, the lavish chips, the frozen peas, the tinned slippery mushrooms and the great big grilled tomato. Oh you may curl your lip in middle class disdain, but it was just great.
Which brings us to Flatiron, Soho where a steak is £10 with salad, if you can call a glass of mache a salad and they do. It comes ready sliced on a board, thus negating the need for the very stealable mini cleaver provided as a knife, and flatiron is a New Yawk cut of meat not all that well known in the UK although apparently called a Butler’s Steak over here.
Cut from the shoulder it’s a bit tougher than your average steak and so Flatiron sous vide it. Now sous vide is a tricky thing, it’s very useful in professional kitchens as a means of prepping food in advance, but the resulting meat desperately needs to be finished over or under a flame, otherwise it comes out with both the texture and allure of baby food.
Bring your own cushion
I like to wrestle with a steak, shirts off like William Shatner in Star Trek, the hard-won bits are where the flavour is and that’s why onglet is so good. Flatiron’s steak is butter smooth, you could cut it with an airline spork, but they do a pretty good job of getting some texture and caramelisation on the outside, so saving it from being anodyne but it needs a bit more. Of course getting in a Josper or a charcoal grill would be expensive, but a hotter pan would probably do just as well.
The chips are rather good, the tasty crispy bits lurking at the bottom of the tin dog bowl they’re served in indicative of the real deal. The market greens of savoy cabbage steamed and served in another tin bowl are wrong, it’s school dinner cabbage even though it’s not been boiled to death in the approved manner. The steak sauces meanwhile are serviceable.
Seating is at funky tables with fixed wooden disks for seats that you swing your leg over as if mounting a culinary motorbike. There are no single tables only group ones, but then you’d hardly be coming here for a romantic meal would you. Wines come in specimen flasks of various sizes, which is handy, and they’re good enough for steak.
The decor, menu fonts and other style elements borrow magpie-like from the scenester mono glottal restaurants – your Polpos, your Meatliquors, your Pitt Cues, etc. – but pinching other people’s proven ideas isn’t such a bad idea if you’re looking to steer a safe course.
Whether it is a safe course overall is debatable. Nothing wrong with the food at the price, but the same people who ‘bloody loved’ this kind of thing mid 2012 are now turning their butterfly minds to the next fashionable thought. But for non scenesters who just want to eat in a ‘clean, well-lighted place’ and not make a style statement, tweet or take photos of their food then Flatiron has only a few wrinkles.
Photos- Paul Winch-Furness.
Nuovo Mondo: Modern Italian Food. Stefano De Pieri and Jim McDougall
New World
Pity the poor Italian chef, he doesn’t get the recognition he deserves. Day after day he pumps out great food that is wolfed down by happy patrons but does the Michelin inspector come calling? Does he heck as like.
Italian food is many things but it is rarely pretty on the plate. Packed with flavour, seasonal and local it may be, but no one ever really pointed their Canon Blogmatic at a plate of pasta. But wait.
Nuovo Mondo is a collaboration between Stefano de Pieri, Italian originally of course, and Jim McDougall who was born an Aussie. Together they set out to create dishes that break moulds. Stefano admits he is a conservative chef, marinaded in tradition. Jim, once his apprentice, is brimming with new ideas and together they set out to surprise each other, to create new dishes together and argue amicably in pursuit of the exciting.
The results are seldom complicated but they are visually arresting and read like a dream. You can clearly see the Italian DNA in every dish, but Aussie ingredients, irreverancy and desire for brightness and colour are also clearly there.
Fried bread with a parmesan mousse, potato terrine with anchovy and rosemary, crudo of tuna with frozen white balsamic, cucumber, lime and caviar. And these are literally just for starters.
Mains continue to surprise with duck meatballs and farfalle in a broth, truffle macaroni and cheese, crayfish ravioli with Yuzu butter, the last one of many recipes that bring in the flavours familiar in Australia, less so in Italy. Yabby tails in saffron sauce, braised chicory and fregola seems to meld the two food cultures perfectly while there is still room for Stefano’s Rabbit Papardelle with Sage and Speck and Jim’s deconstructed Tiramisu.
You don’t have to be based in Australia as these two chefs are, to make the recipes. We have it all here in the UK, even if we may have to get some things in jars or frozen. What we can really enjoy is Italian food that is very different to just about anything being served in the country right now.
{ISBN:1742703828}
Down on the farm, a visit to Denhay, creators of classic cheddar and brilliant bacon
Royal connection
More quiche? I don’t mind if I do and perhaps some Dorset Ale? Wonderful. As lunches go this one is pretty near perfect, eaten seated beside a snugly warm Aga in a cosy old farmhouse kitchen while the West Country rain comes down in ropes.
The farm is Denhay Farm and you’ve no doubt seen the name on packs of bacon and cheese in Waitrose. Far from being an advertising invention, like the rather creepy Aunt Bessie or avuncular Mr Kipling, it really is a genuine farm and one that’s belonged in the same family since the 1950s, the latest descendants of the Streatfields having just cooked our quiche. Read more…
STK London steakhouse reviewed
How do you like your steak? I don’t mean rare, medium or ruined, I mean what kind of ambience do you want? The red brick university educated, job in the media, parents in the shires, style of Hawksmoor, or the school of hard knocks, what bloody parents, making a fortune at the bank, style of STK?
Suits you sir?
STK is certainly not going to delight fans of the former that’s for sure. It’s loud, it’s a bit brash, it says ‘shut your mouth and look at my Breitling’. Its location in the new ME by Melia Hotel at the Aldwych end of the Strand puts it just outside touristy Covent Garden but within reach of lawyers and City types from further east.
Perversely I like it almost as soon as we walk in. It’s not the kind of place the wife and I normally frequent, it’s black and cream and chrome and glossy and it’s all rather exciting and we feel that we’re in a different world, one where people don’t fret over gas bills or the cost of car repairs. The DJ, yes there is one, is playing 80s music and while punk was actually the soundtrack to our late teens, 80s music was the soundtrack to our early twenties, a time when we had our first jobs, every night was party night and nothing seemed impossible. Not even wearing white towelling socks. Read more…
Keep taking the tablets -the QOOQ on test
Shiny gadget love
QOOQ, it’s not easy to pronounce, it sounds like you’re violently clearing your throat. ‘It’s Cook actually,’ explains one of the team at QOOQ HQ in Paris as he demonstrates the device. ‘In French Q is a K sound’. Ah well that explains it. Shame no one in marketing thought that one through, though.
Anyway, it is indeed as he says a very French product with software and the physical device proudly made in that country. What is it? Well it’s a tablet, like an iPad or Surface or any of the other must-have devices we see flooding the stores. Unlike them though this is a focussed device, focussed on cooking. Read more…
From deer to here
Sign of the times
‘No, I didn’t lose my little finger in a butchery related incident.’ says Chris chef and also butcher at The Pig & Butcher, Islington catching the direction of my gaze and pausing his heavy cleaver in mid-air. ‘I fell down the stairs a few years ago. A stupid accident.’ It’s reassuring to hear because as Will repeatedly thumps down the cleaver small bits of Bambi go flying, some towards me, and I don’t want a stray digit spoiling my day.
He’s busy butchering a Sika, or spotted deer, on site at his meat suppliers, Chart Farm in Sevenoaks. Here the deer are bred for the table and when their time comes, humanely shot. ‘It’s quick,’ says Chris,’ they’re shot in the fields where they live and they don’t know what hit them.’ Indeed as the soft-nosed bullets are supersonic, the shot deer wouldn’t hear the bang, even if the rifles didn’t already use noise suppressors. Read more…
Nick Harman 