Archive
The roof’s the limit. We go up to Skymarket.
We’re all going a bit bonkers for street food right now, but what about roof food? Nick Harman thinks he may be in on the ground floor of a brand new trend.
God of small things
The wind buffets SkyMarket, five floors up over Tooley Street, and a large red chili tumbles off its shelf and rolls over to lie beside a fast growing puddle on the deck. The rain lashes down, occasionally finding its way in, and the sky fades to deepest black. In a few hours SkyMarket will open for the evening’s business and the chefs are prepping hard, oblivious to the wind and rain outside and positively basking in the warmth of the cooking range and the heat lamps.
Long way down
A small lift at the base of Magdalen House brings you up to Skyroom, an award-winning roof construction created by David Konn. It looks jerry-built but is in fact sturdy and secure and it’s a kitchen, bar, deli, art and craft gallery and performance space all on one rooftop.
Julian Bayuni is one of the creators of Platterform the company behind SkyMarket, along with Kevin Darcy. Originally both mixologists at Momo where they first met, Julian went on to manage West London’s Notting Hill Arts Club and worked in the Netherlands with The Fabulous Shaker Boys. Together they’ve created plenty of cool pop ups and Platterform itself picked up a Young British Foodies ‘Best Food Experience’ award earlier this year.
Spice of life
‘Platterform suggests what we do as a brand and events company – large plates of food and a platform for ideas, bringing together creative energy, chefs, mixologists, artists, musicians and performers,’ Julian explains. ‘Two years we worked a pop up at Hel Yes! during the 2010 London Design Week just off the City Road and that gave us our initial impetus. I’m used to working in the food world, but this is about more creative ideas and techniques for food and drinks. We want it to be fun and accessible and not intimidate people, but we want to challenge the traditional constructs of what people expect from a drinking or dining experience.’
No reservations
It certainly does that. When you walk out the lift and feel the wind gust you’re already a bit on the back foot but then a vibe familiar to anyone that’s ever been to Camden Market, or a traveller encampment, embraces you. It’s multisensory with four different musical sounds going on around and a wealth of aromas, some from the satay bar perched dizzyingly out over the drop and some from the range where the main dishes are being cooked.
It’s a local, family thing. Julian, who is half Indonesian and from a restaurant running family, even has his stepfather cooking some days, while meat and vegetables come from local suppliers like Maltby Street along with ethical foods such as jams being made in people’s kitchens from fruit that would otherwise go to waste. In season vegetables also come from the nearby St Mungo’s of Melior Street project and the market up here sells a mix of exciting spices and other stuff you won’t find in Tesco’s.’
Hot off the grill
‘We have six chefs in the team, two are Jamie Oliver trained at 15 and are doing a contemporary take on African and Caribbean dishes,’ Julian says as tables are set up. ‘The dishes are added to each week and they really suit the environment; we can’t seriously expect people to sit down for five courses on a rooftop so we keep a casual street food/tapas thing going along with the market vibe. This week has been Indonesian and Caribbean, next week we’ll be adding some Brazilian dishes. And our SkyMarket Bar takes inspiration from the changing food menu with the bartenders creating bespoke cocktails designed to complement the dishes.’
Nuno Mendes of Viajante is a friend they hope will get involved via his Loft Project, and Gok Wan’s been in a few times too. ‘He’s a family guy,’ laughs Justin. ‘He loves this place because it’s a family unit, my mum’s British, my dad’s Indonesian so I think Gok sees the similarities to his own life. He even got my mum into hotel GB for lunch with Gordon!’
Evolving, and almost literally moving, all the time SkyMarket is a concept they hope to take to other spaces like railway arches. And more rooftops? ‘We’re certainly looking around,’ says Justin as I start to make my way down.
Open cooking class or presentation every Tuesday lunchtime between 12pm- 4pm
Experiential drinks brand events including workshops and masterclasses will take place every Tuesday evening at 6.30pm
The Skyroom, 5th Floor Magdalen House, 148 Tooley Street SE1 2TU
info@platterform.com
Ashdown Park Hotel.Foraging and finding luxury.
A very nice house in the country
With a flourish the waiters whip off the cloches to reveal the meal beneath, a sight not seen in London since barrage balloons wobbled in the sky and Evelyn Waugh wobbled out of Whites. You can only imagine what some metropolitan critics would make of this; gleefully sharpen their pencils in preparation for stabbing the restaurant through the heart, no doubt.
It tastes better in silver
Things are done differently in the country though, they hunt things, they kill and mostly eat the things they hunt, they are comfortable with corduroy and welly boots and mud. Here at Ashdown Park Hotel and Country Club part of the same Elite Hotels Group as The Grand Eastbourne. some things are still done pretty much as they would have been done thirty years ago.
A bit of swag
The hotel is, as are so many, a converted country house but it’s a converted convent really. In the 1920s an already pretty large place was bought and added to by rich nuns, grand wings sprouted from both sides and a chapel was tacked on. Then came a spell as an American ‘university’, then a training college for a major high street bank. Finally, around 1993, it became a hotel, club and spa.
It’s size means our journey from reception to suite takes forever; the endless fire doors that encumber each and every corridor making it seem longer. The suite’s smart though; a double aspect sitting room looking out onto rolling downs and a lively fountain. This and a large bedroom furnished with genteelly distressed furniture makes it feel like we were spending the night at Downton as family guests of the perennially sad Earl. Only the flat screen TVs in each room break the spell.
Try and ignore the telly
We’re here for the annual Sunday mushroom foraging and lunch, but on this Saturday evening it’s also a chance to try the restaurant too, so we yomp the corridors, descend the wonderfully creaky grand staircase and enter the 2 AA Rosette restaurant; Anderida.
Except I don’t. Sir is wearing neither tie nor jacket and is swiftly intercepted. “I told you!’ hisses the wife. The Maitre d’ is good about it, he produces a jacket, ‘carry it over your arm,’ he advises, ‘then hang it on the back of your chair.’ Am I enraged by this? No I am just a bit embarrassed as, after all, it was clearly stated beforehand both on the website and in the room. I am not an iconoclast and when in Rome, or when in East Sussex, one does what the Romans do.
And they’re off
Like the cloches, this is a hangover from a better age, one when a gentleman did not need to be told to dress properly for dinner. It may make trendy young, and not so young, Londoners choke over their napkins made from kitchen roll, but from the look of the packed restaurant with its heavy drapes, warm candlelight and tinkling piano, it doesn’t upset anyone else.
Sadly inedible
The food looks the part, once cloches are removed. Head Chef, Andrew Wilson is not serving dinner from the dark ages and my Supreme of Local Partridge, Leg Croquette, Creamed Parsnip, Potato Terrine (complete with authentically crunchy bits of shot), is well-cooked and presented with bags of flavour. This was good as the starter of Sweet and Sour Duck Terrine, Crispy Won Ton and Pineapple Textures had read well but lacked sufficient seasoning and distinct tastes. P’s Salmon and King Prawn Filo Parcels, Fennel Purée, Aioli could have had the power turned up too, especially on the aioli, but her 38 Day Aged Fillet of Beef Wellington from Lamberhurst, with Dauphinoise Potatoes, Roasted Shallots, Aubergine Purée was very good, suggesting chef works best when he works using good local produce.
Off to enormous bed we went then next day down to a breakfast looking out onto the vast grounds and golf course. We have mushrooms with our full English, just in case, then boot up for the coming search under the expert guidance of groundskeepers and mushroomologists.
Can’t eat these either
It’s fun. The secret of ‘shrooming is to keep your expectations as low as your gaze. Adults and small children alike rummage cheerfully around the ferns and foliage as we wander in a group through bosky woodland, grassland and lakeside.
Mushrooms are found but at best are inedible, at worst dangerous. ‘Dinner or death’ our guide cheerfully remarks. The weather has not been kind this year but remains of the sought-after cepes can still be seen, a clue that it mostly depends on luck, although many mushroom hunters hunt by the phases of the moon.
Somehere near is a llama farmer
Surreal site of the day is a herd of Llamas who wander over to to flick their funny ears at us, but thankfully not spit as they often tend to do. They look like aliens in the English countryside, a cross between camels and sheep, yet really rather sweet and endearing.
Not much for lunch
A pleasant hour or two passes as we walk and chat and listen to our expert guides. Then it’s back to the hotel for the grandgourmet mushroom lunch in the old chapel, our boots shucked off and most of us are secretly only in our socks under the linen laden tables.
Beneath a luminous fried duck egg and walnut oil is a thick carpet of mixed wild mushrooms on toast, a brunchy starter. The mush are slippery and varied, each with its own distinct flavour and breaking the egg and letting it puddle through creates a tasty mess.
Puffball. Inedible. Again
Next pot roasted ox cheek with mushrooms en croute and a truffle and parsnip puree. Some find the cheek too gelatinous for comfort, must be Londoners we snidely remark. The meat is tumbling to the fork, the truffle puree not too assertive. Then a suitably classic steamed orange and ginger sponge pudding with clotted cream ice cream and an almond tuile leaves us puffing in our chairs. And with coffee it was check out and car time.
Home James
The problem with these country house hotels is that as you return to London the increasing density of housing is depressing after the aristocratic acres. How, you wonder, can we live in such tiny places.
It may be all wrong for some that these grand houses were created in the first place, but they served society as a small world of employment, status and self-respect for all who lived and worked in them.
Now as leisure machines they do much the same thing, but in Ashdonw Park’s case, happily under cloches.
Ashdown Park Hotel Ashdown Park, Wych Cross, Forest Row, RH18 5Jwww.ashdownpark.com
Angelus, London
4 Bathurst Street Paddington, London, London W2 2SD www.angelusrestaurant.co.uk
Tres Francais, non?
The sight of a man eating alone in a restaurant is reassuring, one you tend to see only in French restaurants. A good French place is where the lone diner never feels like a sad loner; just someone having a meal. The staff treat him perfectly normally and chat cheerfully, knowing just how long to linger before letting him get on with his grub.
There are two single diners in Angelus when J and I come in from out of a wet and windy night. Just a few hundred yards from Lancaster Gate tube, this restaurant created from a venerable old pub is cosily welcoming in a Brasserie stylee. A sense of cheerful informality but with steady professional staff at the tiller. The tables are close together, which is another good sign; I actually like a Brasserie where you can have next door’s conversation as a backdrop and their elbows in your soup.
It’s Angelus’s birthday apparently; five years old and going very strong, and so they have a menu of revisited classics as well as dishes that the locals, and this is a very local restaurant, like to eat repeatedly. This is enough to tempt me out west.
It’s classic stuff. A starter of duck’s liver brulee is something you might find in the quack-obsessed Gascony region, or in Bordeaux’s brilliant La Tupina. The glaze of sugar shatters to reveal smooth, rich, cardiac-arrest klaxon creamed livers ready to be shovelled heavily onto fine bread studded with nuts. It’s as gorgeous as only something so simple can be. A glass of Pacherenc, so much nicer than Sauternes in my book, proves just the ticket to go with it. Read more…
Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder
A little drip
An anti-malaria ‘drug’ in the 1840s, a favoured drink of artists and bohemians in Paris in the early 1900s, absinthe was banned in France in 1915 for reasons that vary. Some say it was because it was seen as containing dangerous hallucinogens, others that the powerful wine growers didn’t like its popularity – at the time of banning the French were drinking 36 million litres of absinthe per year, about six times their consumption of wine.
Whatever the reason, Pastis took over, it doesn’t contain wormwood, Artemisia absinthium, the bitter element and so was legal. Absinthe carried on being produced in Spain but the demand wasn’t enough and in 1960 they gave up.
It was never banned in the UK, mainly because we didn’t drink it anyway, but a kind of mystique grew up in the late 1980s as people brought back bottles of absinthe from the Czech republic and enjoyed the thrill of drinking, what many still supposed, was a daring, illegal quasi-drug.
And then in the 1990s it was imported properly and today it’s made once again in France by Pernod Fils, the big boys of pastis and the original makers in France of absinthe. Read more…
Roast restaurant
The Floral Hall, Stoney Street London SE1 1TL www.roast-restaurant.com
Saved from the scrapheap
It’s been at least five years since I went to Roast. The pace of openings since then has become so fast, so furious, the keen diner need never go to the same place twice. Miss one restaurant’s hyped up, hysterical launch? Don’t worry there’ll be three more along in a minute.
Since my last visit the area around Roast has evolved. Massive building works have changed much of the area’s character but the approach to the restaurant’s lift, past the market shutting for the night, the drifting cabbage leaves and the spray from the pressure hoses cleaning down the wet fish stall, is still oddly romantic.
I remember the lift, I remember there was always a bit of a wait for it. Why? It only serves one floor after all. The lift finally arrives and it has a dwarf in it, no not a dwarf but one of those middle-class small boys with too-long, too much hair. He’s been playing about, no doubt to the benign amusement of his parents. I get in a light blow to his head while reaching for the buttons and return his aggrieved look with a cheery smile. No doubt he’ll tell mummy and daddy about how he met an evil Tory in the lift. Read more…
The Art of Pasta
Clever eh?
The art of pasta for me is mostly getting it al dente. Many’s the time I’ve airily told our guests, ‘This is how we like our pasta cooked, I hope you do too,’ knowing full well that it’s over/under cooked and simply trying to make guests feel they may be wrong to like it any other way.
This book has higher ambitions. Lucio’s restaurant in Sydney likes pasta, likes art and likes to mash the two together. So here you have 160 very good-looking recipes accompanied by artwork from Luke Sciberras and photography by Anson Smart.
You know the book means business because it comes shrink wrapped to ensure no one lays a passata stained finger on its pages before you do, as well as boasting a tasteful cotton page marker.
Head chef Lucio Galletto has written the book, with David Dale and Executive Chef at Lucio’s Logan Campbell. Together they set out to reinterpret classic pasta dishes and push some boundaries with new ones.
You get Lucio’s signature pesto, a ‘sauce’ he reckons is the best in the world as well as the lively Calabrian pesto, plus carby treats such as beetroot ravioli with poppy seeds and melted butter, and linguine with orange pesto and aubergine. Good to see ‘guitar’ maccheroni from Abruzzo which I once ate actually in Abruzzo and still have fond memories of.Then there’s rabbit cannelloni with Jerusalem artichoke sauce and beetroot gnocchi with pancetta and goat’s cheese too.
Pretty good pasta
Simply laid out – fresh pasta, dried pasta, filled pasta, baked pasta, and gnocchi – along with a quick lesson in pasta making, the book makes you stop and drool rather a lot as it ambles through the seasons from light spring dishes with asparagus to classic winter warmers like a fool proof ragu.
It’s a delicious book, an answer to anyone that thinks pasta is boring. It makes you want to fly down to Sydney to try Lucio’s award-winning food at source, but this is the next best thing.
There is definitely an art to pasta because, while it can never aspire to or want to be ‘fancy’ food with intricate cooking and presentation, getting a great pasta dish onto the table means the art of mixing simple yet fantastic ingredients and, of course, carefully watching that boiling water.
{ISBN:1908117427}
Dive right in. Bentley’s Seafood Grill at Harrods
A struggle to get onto at my age
Richard Corrigan is holding a champagne glass, it’s just an ordinary champagne glass but in his giant paw it looks like something from a dolls’ house. Larger than life he stands out even in a Harrods Food hall thronged with press people going Darryl Hannah ‘Mermaid’ on his seafood.
It’s the press launch of Bentley’s Sea Grill at Harrods, and with the iconic store now closed for the evening we’re free to sit and eat anywhere in the hall. Plates and plates of beautiful native oysters appear. Naked but for a shot of lemon juice, they’re some of the finest oysters I’ve eaten anywhere.
Rock oysters come out with a Vietnamese dressing of shallots and fish sauce, while other oysters come with plenty of butter and garlic and baked in the oven, making the flesh velvety textured and a bite to savour slowly.The seafood swimming by has my eyes on stalks, rather like the enormous langoustines that come just boiled and ready to be dredged in a classic Marie Rose Sauce.
Salt and pepper squid with mayonnaise is perfectly fried, the squid tender and the batter crunchy. Grilled head-on large prawns have been split, but not separated. Spiked with chilli they come roaringly hot off the grill and I burn my fingers tearing into them for the meat, but it’s worth the pain.
Your man himself
Salt cod ‘Scotch Eggs’ are served in egg cartons, fish and chips with mushy peas and plaice goujons both come in paper cones. Smoked salmon from Bentley’s own smoker is served in chunks, so you get something serious to chew on. Oh and there’s lobster and dressed crab and champagne too, so no one goes hungry or thirsty.
Of course this new place isn’t going to be cheap, no one goes into Harrods looking for a bargain do they. On the other hand the quality of the seafood is clearly second to none and it’s a fun place to eat.
Richard weaves his way magnificently through the throng beaming his head off. I tell him I am finally stuffed, I can eat no more. ‘You can never eat too much seafood!’ he roars cheerfully.
Bentley’s Seafood Grill is the third London opening in Richard Corrigan’s London restaurant portfolio, which also includes the first Bentley’s Oyster Bar and Grill and Corrigan’s Mayfair.
The menu also features the Bentley’s classic Royal fish pie, a dish first served at the Queen’s 80th birthday as part of the BBC series Great British Menu. A choice of desserts includes dark chocolate mousse and crème brulée and the wine list will focus on the Old World.
Canapés -Victoria Blashford-Snell and Eric Treuille
It’s what your fingers are for.
‘Ooh canapés, how posh!’ it’s a line from Abigail’s Party and if it isn’t it really should be. How many times have those of us of a certain age been offered canapés, normally not nearly enough of them, and what’s more impossible to eat without redecorating the carpet?
Canapes my mother always called them, steadfastly refusing to honour the acute accent and silent ‘s’. From the pineapple chunk on a cocktail stick, to the life threatening vol au vent, canapés were the 70’s on a plate.
Maybe it’s time to think again, after all there’s nothing wrong in theory in lots of pretty nibbles, and the splendidly named Victoria Blashford Snell, along with co-author Eric Treuille may be the people to lead a revival.
They first wrote this book in 1998 but since then tastes and trends have changed and more options are on the menu. Even so V B-S sticks to her avowed policy of keeping the canapés easy enough to make and eat while still looking good and delivering a bit of a ‘wow’. Read more…
Rodda’s clotted cream. Don’t save it for scones
The thick of it
The unannounced arrival of a big tub of clotted cream in the office, courtesy of Rodda’s, causes consternation. Some staff want to organise a working group to go out and get scones. Others want the working group to go out and get scones so they can eat the cream while they’re gone. It’s worse than heroin for turning decent people into sly crims, this stuff.
The sconners prevail after solemn swearing by the rest of us not to raise a spoon until they come back. And so it is that we all sit down to some scones, cream and jam on a sunny afternoon in Carnaby Street.
It’s lush stuff this, I love the oily yellow crust on top that heralds the thick joy beneath. I’m from a generation that only ever got clotted cream when as kids on holiday in Devon. In my memory I ate it wearing grey shorts sitting next to girls who wanted to be boys. Enid Blyton has a lot to answer for in my opinion. Read more…
The Big Cheese – Parmigiano Reggiano
The Keith Richards of cheese
Chief Taster Igino Morini jabs his special Parmesan knife into a boulder sized piece of Parmesan Reggiano and it fractures like a cliff fall, tumbling into irregular lumps. ‘You never slice aged parmesan,’ he tells me through an interpreter before breaking a lump into two and jabbing a piece up under each of his nostrils.
Lumps of loveliness
His eyes glaze over and he sighs before popping a piece into his mouth. Passion is a word much overused these days, but if anyone has it he has. He lives and literally breathes Parmesan, he has to because the tasting room and indeed the whole dairy smells richly of Parma’s famous product,
‘We work every day,’ he says indistinctly through his cheese mouthful, ‘even Christmas. The cows who graze in local areas, and on carefully monitored pasture, must be milked twice a day and the milk has to be processed quickly.’
The ‘thorn bush’ in action
A cheese maker’s day starts early as I found out. That morning I’d stumbled bleary eyed into the dairy after an evening of pasta, parmesan and too much local wine in Parma town to see the team fill the ranks of giant copper lined cauldrons to begin the day’s production.
Unpasteurised milk is gently heated and stirred and a carefully judged amount of a starter culture of yesterday’s whey is added by the artisan cheese maker. Together with rennet this will begin the magical transformation of milk into one of the world’s most wonderful foodstuffs, one that’s over 1000 years old.
The heat is increased and the mix is stirred by hand with a giant whisk called a Spino (a thorn bush in Italian) to separate the rapidly forming curds from the whey, some dairies use machines to do the stirring but that won’t do for these makers. ‘You just can’t ‘feel’ the progress,’ says Igino.
That’s the whey to do it
Their master cheese maker walks along the rows of vats checking temperatures constantly and dipping in her hand to see how the now granular mix is setting. Only on her exact say so does the heating and stirring stop and the mix get left to form up.
Parmesan is a healthy cheese. Nothing is added, nothing is taken away and because of the way it’s made there is so little lactose that it is officially suitable for the lactose intolerant. It’s the long ageing process that allows the natural fermenting processes to give the cheese its flavour and textures and it’s particularly good for children and the elderly being rich in calcium and easily digestible. It also has one of the lowest cholesterol levels of any cheese.
Imagine the size of the ice cream!
Making quality Parmigiano-Reggiano needs muscle as well as passion, and after an hour two men, armed with an oversized ice cream tub wooden spoon, dip into the liquid and straining hard bring the giant ball of formed curd to the surface. It looks like the world’s biggest mozzarella, the size of a beach ball and glistening pure white.
Mr Blobby
This big soft baby is gently flipped into a sheet of muslin and suspended above the cauldron to drain. After a short while it’s cut into two and left for a further 15 minutes. Some of the whey will go to feed pigs for Parma’s other famous export, Parma Ham, but that’s another story.
Each ball is eased into a mould, a ‘fascera’, threatening to catastrophically fracture unless carefully handled. The ball will rest under pressure from a wooden lid, before receiving its ‘branding’ from a plastic wrap-around collar, which impresses an inverted braille version of ‘Parmigiano Reggiano’ into what will be the hard rind, along with codes to indicate date and provenance
Time for a bath
They go then to a salt bath to wallow in contemplative silence for six weeks before their final resting place in a ‘Cascina’. Here racked up on serried ranks of wooden shelves in constant controlled humidity, they will be cosseted, turned and brushed regularly for a minimum of twelve months. Igino shows me how he expertly checks each cheese at this time, tapping his little hammer on the rind and from the sound divining any problems inside.
Don’t mess with this man’s cheese
Cheeses that fail his test will be ignominiously shaved of their rind, so removing their badge of quality, and as simple Mezzano be used for products such as supermarket grated cheese. The survivors will go on to be 12 month, 24 month red seal Parmigiano-Reggiano and 36 month gold seal Stravecchio cheeses.
‘Parmigiano Reggiano is produced only in the provinces of Parma, Reggio Emilia and parts of Modena and Bologna’ explains Igino back in the tasting room. ‘The Consortia del Formaggio Parmigiano-Reggiano was formed in 1901 and today the EU through its Discover The Origin campaign helps us protect the good name of proper parmesan and its PDO (Protected Designation of Origin )’.
‘The colour of the rind tells you the cheese’s age,’ he says peering along the side of a split Parmesan wheel, ‘the deeper the orange the more mature it is. The paste too varies in yellow with age, the younger the lighter. The grain also tells you the age and at 24 months crystals of what people often mistake for salt, but which are in fact amino acids, appear.’
How to break a cheese
Young cheeses smell milky with hints of grass, while at 24 months you can detect butter, pineapple and citrus fruits, nuts and meat stock, the ‘umami’. At 30 months or older that nuttiness is more pronounced and spice comes through. The cheese has now become the big daddy of cheeses, packed with flavour.
Guess what’s in these.
‘Eat it in chunks with fresh or dried fruit,’ recommends Igino, ‘or add to salads with balsamic vinegar. Make anolini with it and cook them in brodo, try it with nuts and of course cook with it – an aubergine alla parmagiana for example. And don’t forget to melt the rind into a minestrone. There are so many ways to enjoy it.’
Packed to perfection
He generously gives me a large hunk of the 36 month aged Parmesan to take away, seriously threatening my baggage weight allowance. No matter, I’ll pay the excess if needed. This big cheese is definitely worth every penny.
Nick Harman 