Archive
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.
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.
Always look for the certification marks to make sure you’re buying the real deal. A red seal ‘Stagionatura Parmigiano-Reggiano means 18 months ageing, silver means 22 months and gold is over 30 months. A big piece will keep in the fridge for months vac-packed and for weeks well-wrapped once opened.
I travelled to Parma as a guest of Discover the Origin. Thanks go to Igino Morini of the Consorziodel Formaggio Parmigiano Reggiano and to Giovanna for her translation services
There is a wealth of Parmesan recipes on the DTO website including:
Parmigiano–Reggiano and Cannellini Bean Fritters
Caramelised Onion & Parmigiano–Reggiano Cheese Tart
Parmigiano–Reggiano Ice Cream and Fig and Parma Ham Tatin
Woking it at School of Wok
The prep
‘It’s more of a gentle movement really,’ says Jeremy Pang moving swiftly out of range as I attempt to redecorate his class kitchen with the contents of my wok. ‘A gentle push forward and then a flick. Just relax’, he adds as I spatter some more onion about the place.
I’m actually cooling down the wok’s contents. You don’t adjust the flame under a wok if things get smoky, you just lift it off the hob for a moment and flick the contents over, it’s enough to dump the excess heat before the wok goes straight back on for more sizzling.
Many of us have a wok in our kitchen, for some it’s a white elephant, largely unused and taking up space. But even those of us who fancy ourselves as hard wokers, rarely get the all-important technique right. ‘People end up braising food in the, wok not frying it, because they don’t know how to keep things moving and keep the heat high,’ Le Cordon Bleu trained chef Jeremy explained earlier as he prepped the simple ingredients: sliced chicken thigh, red pepper, onions, cashews and spring onions with plenty of Szechuan peppers. The last would deliver a citric tang and a strange numbing sensation on the tongue but, despite their name, no heat at all. That was to come from a big bowl of sliced birds eye chillies. ‘You like chilli?’ enquired Jeremy as he sliced away, ‘that’s good!’.
The flip
The class kitchen at School of Wok is smart and shiny, at least when no one is scattering food about. Induction hobs in the main, perfectly ok for woks when fitted with a small stand, and a fabulous AEG induction wok hob, basically a large depression in the work surface, that I immediately want to have at home as it’s so sexy and perfect.
‘The order of preference for home wok cooking I’d say is gas first, then induction, then electric,’ says Jeremy, his large cleaver making short work of some spring onions. ‘I’ve carried out wok classes in peoples’ homes and really there is nothing that won’t work, although with electric a flattish-bottomed wok’s best, but not,’ he adds sternly waving the cleaver for emphasis, ‘one of those completely flat bottomed ones, you can’t move the food around properly in those.’
They carry out cookery courses non stop at School of Wok, including day long Chinese cooking lessons and Vietnamese evening lessons too, but I’m taking the one hour Quickfire Wok lesson designed to get some vital skills learnt in less than a lunch hour. ‘We prep, you cook,’ Jeremy told me as I strapped on my apron. ‘We want you to get properly hands on with the wok, so we prepare everything in advance, but I will show you how to marinade the chicken properly.’
The Grind
The thigh meat is his meat of choice, he laughs off my suggestion of breast. “In Chinese cooking we tend to use that more for stocks, it doesn’t have the flavour for main dishes we find. And thigh meat is cheaper, anyway.’ He adds Sesame oil, sugar, Chinese 5 spice, and light soy sauce to the meat and then some cornflour. ‘Just enough to make the marinade look creamy,’ he explains. ‘We don’t add the cornflour at the end of cooking as some people do, that makes the sauce thicken okay but it doesn’t make the chicken crispy which is what we want here.’
And so to wok, using a ladle for everything is handy and saves on washing up. I get some oil, never sesame or olive oil; they have too low a smoke point and will burn long before they reach the high temperature required. Jeremy advises drizzling the oil down the sides of the wok in a circular motion and then watching for the smoke. As soon as it gets to that point, in goes the onion and red pepper. I stir the way Jeremy advises, pulling the veg from back to front using the ladle edge so that everything is evenly exposed to the heat. After a few minutes the veg are pushed to the back of the wok and more oil added before adding in the chicken garlic and peppercorns.
I bring the veg back on top of the chicken so they are protected from too much cooking and when signs of excess heat occur I do the ‘flip’, soon I’m getting quite good at it and feeling very professional and confident. Once the chicken is golden, in goes chilli paste, rice wine and soy sauce, the fresh chillies and cashew nuts. Job done.
The result
To go with it I make fried noodles after Jeremy explains to me how to deal with dried noodles, and that in itself is an eye opener. Adding Chinese greens and bean sprouts I cook them all fast and furiously, then add some dark soy sauce and serve the two dishes up. Although I say it myself, it’s delicious and photographer Al is impressed as he chases the cashews about with his chopsticks.
You can read books, you can watch TV shows but nothing beats hands on experience with an expert at your side every step of the way. Now I can do the flip and understand wok cooking on a visceral level, I’ll be getting the wok out more regularly in the week. Wok on!
schoolofwok.co.uk 61 Chandos Place, WC2N 4HG
We check out the Leisuregrow 100 BBQ. Dragon’s Den’s loss is our gain
The beast in the publicity shot
Like many a male I spent last weekend putting up a barbecue, driven to it by the rare sight of sun and a nagging family. Normally we just wheel out our trusty Weber charcoal BBQ but this this time we’d been persuaded to try a gas one supplied for testing – the Leisuregrow Grillstream 100 and just in time for National Barbecue Week too.
Now like most food fans I’ve always rather looked down my nose at gas BBQs. If you’re going to cook on gas, you might as well cook in the kitchen, has been my argument. A gas BBQ won’t give you that unique flavour, nor can you smoke so well inside it .Food that is, not you and 20 Marlboro.
On the other hand, there is the fact that a charcoal BBQ can be a right pain to light and in any case needs lighting a good 45 minutes before cooking can commence, something which makes it all too much of a fuss for weekday cooking.
Enter the dragon
This particular gas BBQ also had something special to recommend it; Grillstream technology.It was this clever idea that won approval in Dragon’s Den and went on to win a licence for factory fitting to Leisuregrow BBQs. To survive the den and emerge not fatally holed below the waterline is rare, to come out with a bright future even rarer. Read more…
Windsor Burger. Fit for a Queen?
Now I am no burger nutcase, I mean I like a burger now and then just like most people, but I don’t go all weak at the knees or gabble uncontrollably when I hear of another ‘restaurant’ that intends to serve up minced meat in a bun. Maybe it’s my age, when I was a young man burgers were still the food of people who had crude tastebuds and saw food merely as fuel. Americans we tended to call them.
Gourmet Burger Kitchen were not, I think, the first to try and raise up the burger’s image in order that middle-class parents could surrender to their kids peer-fuelled cravings without having the shame of being seen in Maccy D, but they were among the first. Clean wholesome places with no anti-drug lighting in the loos and quality meat on the griddles and sourced from good, traceable places.
Today GBK don’t really figure on the burger foodies’ radar; too chain, too unhip, but they carry on feeding normal people and doing it very well. Getting in the spirit of Jubilee. they’ve partnered up with the Royal Farms in Windsor to create a limited edition burger available for a restricted time only across all GBK restaurants from May 28th.
The Royal Farms in Windsor produce some of the finest beef in the UK and The Windsor is the only burger to be made from The Royal Farm’s world famous Sussex cattle reared in the grounds of Windsor Castle, with the meat then hung and aged to get extra flavour and tenderness.
Only the best grade cattle are selected and the meat is aged on the bone for the maximum allowable time. Each burger is fully traceable and made using a specific blend of chuck steak, short rib and brisket.
The Royal Farm’s beef is in finite supply, one doesn’t want all one’s cows going to the plebs obviously, and so The Windsor won’t be around forever unlike our dear dear Queen. It’s priced at £11.95 and available throughout the Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics until they are all gone.
I tried a preview and it was certainly how I personally like a burger; not too rare in the centre, just blushing slightly, and with the outside pretty well sealed. The brioche bun was naked but for some mustard mayonnaise, and the lettuce and tomato were outside so you had the option of adding it or not. Personally I cannot stand burgers that have everything but the kitchen sink inside them, I want to taste the meat not a hodge podge of ingredients all mashing together in a gloopy mess that goes down my shirt sleeves. The Windsor is much more of a sandwich, simple and unadorned. Mind you I do like a gherkin.
GBK do a nice range of sauces/dips for your chips, although our skinny fries were so anorexic they hadn’t the strengh to survive dipping and we’d have been better off with the thicker options. GBK also serve Coke in original bottles, maybe it’s just me but I think Coke tastes better out of glass and the iconic bottle always makes me smile.
There are GBKs all over London, so if you’re in a royal mood tell the Queen to burger off in the nicest way.
www.gbk.co.uk
North African Cooking by Arto der Haroutunian
What I like about Arto der Haroutunian’s new book is not the fact that I can’t spell his name correctly without at least three attempts, nor that every recipe is mouth-wateringly good. What’s great is that there are no pictures.
Pictures of course bump up a book’s price, but for me the real sin is that they dumb down a cookbook. Pictures serve to lure in the casual cook, the bookshop browser, but they lie.
Sometimes they clearly feature ingredients not mentioned in the recipe, other times they show the dish in a state of art-directed beauty no one but the photographer and stylist can ever achieve. They are about as honest as advertising
A good cookbook lets the aspiring chef see the dish in the mind’s eye and of course in practical terms, you get more recipes in when the photos are left out.
Arto’s book is of course not in fact new, he died in 1987, and this book was first published in 1985 at a time when food in the UK wasn’t such a big deal. There were only 4 TV channels, one food programme and in general food remained a middle class pastime and restaurants rather posh.
Few cookbooks today would risk a long and thoughtful intro discussing North African history, culture, literature, art and food. Reading it is an education into food origins and how dishes evolve as people take them to new lands; whether as conquerors or as conquered. The Muslims in Andalucía for example.
So here we have a collection of dishes in twelve chapters and 300 dishes. From chorbat (soups) through salads, the ubiquitous grilled meats, couscous and tajines, everyday dishes, pickles, pastries and desserts. Dishes from what are today Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya.
The ingredients are simple, short and generally easily obtainable, certainly more obtainable now in multicultural Britain than they would have been back in 1985. You can smell the spices coming off the page and revel in Arto’s descriptions of what you’re cooking and why.
Everything is a revelation and such a change from the ‘modern European’ style of cookbook which endlessly rehashes the same old things in the same old way. Outside of their homelands the majority of these dishes are barely known let alone served but are easily within the reach of the amateur cook.
It’s a generous book, like the people whose cooking it celebrates, it makes you long to take off for North Africa and revel in real food untainted by fashion or fad
{ISBN:190650234X}
Dubai Dining -old skool
What comes to mind when someone mentions Dubai? Ludicrously tall buildings, luxury leisure projects, endless sunshine and a desert held back only by the immense power of money? A place where low paid immigrants with confiscated passports do all the lifting of anything heavier than cash, while expat Brits eke away the time by spending tax-free income on parties, gadgets, cars and food?
This is all true and it’s also a place of hidden pressures, where Blackberries can’t log on to all Wi-Fi networks, because one of the ruling sheikhs has forbidden it. Some people suggest it’s because he owns a rival phone company, others that’s it’s because of the power of BBM. He saw how the oppressed people of another country used BBM to great effect to mobilise their forces and he didn’t like it. There’ll be no repeat of the UK riots on his watch.
You can eat every European menu in Dubai, often cooked by Michelin Star chefs in the restaurants that they’ve opened to siphon off all the money sloshing about. Pierre Gagnaire has one, so does Gordon Ramsay They are all fabulously expensive because ingredients have to come a long way to appear on their menus, and also because expensive means nothing to Dubai’s moneyed class.
In fact it does mean something: the more it costs, the more they like it. It’s status, like the supercars that line the streets but have nowhere to go except to the desert, where they test their top speeds in the middle of nothing, or roll down boulevards in town lurching heavily over speed bumps their exhausts growling grumpily in protest. At least the drivers are all sober though; alcohol is only available in a few places and locals are rather surreally obliged to wear Western clothes while consuming it.
There is another Dubai however, where buildings are less than three storeys high and don’t have Tom Cruise crawling down them. Where the street still meander and disappear into blind alleys, where westerners are notable by their virtual absence, where the smell of souk and spices, not Dior, hangs on the air and the food is fabulous.
Local blogger Arva, better known to her many fans as www.iliveinafryingpan.com, has lived in America but came back to Dubai because she loves it and she loves the food. Kindly putting off business meetings she agreed to whistle stop me, unfresh off the plane, around some of her favourite places in town, ones where the food is what locals want to eat every day.
First stop was Sadaf a Persian (Iranian) restaurant on Maktoum Street. Housed in the base of a grey block of a building on a road that was one of the first paved streets in Dubai, it had the look and indeed the smell, of its 33 years of history. Inside men in thawbs ate with wives completely concealed by burkas, lifting their veils only enough to post their food in underneath.
Borani Esfanaj, strained yogurt with spinach and garlic and puddled with olive oil and scooped up with singed flat bread was delicious, but the real deal in Persian restaurants is the kebab. Minced meat on a skewer, not an elephant’s leg sliced, this was powerfully flavoursome lamb laced with sumac on super long grain rice studded with berberries. Amusingly the restaurant adds a hotel portion of butter to optionally stir in, as people like to do that here. Very good but no time to linger, on to the next
At Breakfast to Breakfast, Al Rigga Road, part of a chain and rather grim looking, the lunch rush had been and gone but they fired up the ‘pizza’ oven to make us manakeesh bi zaatar, a classic breakfast/lunch dish. The flatbread dough is shaped thinly to order and flavoured with sumac and the za’atar herb. Sharp and salty akkawi cheese is spread on top before the whole lot is shot into the oven. A breakfast of champions even for me, now feeling the effects of an overnight flight and being seven hours ahead of myself.
And so we rolled on to Al Tawasol, near the clocktower roundabout. Seriously Yemeni it has a large eating area at front where diners eat on the floor. Those diners are exclusively male; women and mixed groups must go to the back parts where majils ‘tents’ have been created. We kicked off our shoes and crawled inside to lounge back against cushions, or attempt to sit cross-legged. A buzzer summoned a waiter who soon came back with a plastic sheet to protect his carpet/table and a selection of dishes selected by Arva soon followed.
Lentil soup was spicy and smooth but the speciality here is the Yemeni national dish of Mandi chicken or lamb cooked in a Yemen tandoor, (a taboon) that is basically a hole in the ground lined with clay and fired by charcoal. The result is a meltingly tender piece of meat flavoured by both the spices and the smoke and made even better by dripping a harissa style hot sauce on top. We sucked on bones and drank lots of water.
Two final stops. First the Sultan Dubai Al Falafel Restaurant, Muraggabat Road where we ate the best falafels I’ve ever eaten (and I’ve been to a few music festivals). These were Falafel mahshi (fava bean falafel stuffed with a tomato mixture and topped with white sesame seeds). Crunchily fabulous on the outside, melting inside and who doesn’t love the taste of sesame?
It ended of course with Lebanese mint tea at Al Safadi Restaurant, Al Rigga Road, My eyelids were drooping from all the food and missed sleep and I was told I’d merely scraped the top of what was really on offer food wise in Dubai.
Few people go to holiday in Dubai, most are on business trips. However you go, it’s far better to avoid eating at the overpriced posh places or in the burger/pizza joints that are in the tourist areas. Strike out into old Dubai and meet ordinary locals and try the variety of food on offer, the prices are right and the people are friendly and the sun, of course, always shines.
Thanks to Arva www.iliveinafryingpan.com and Samantha at www.foodiva.net for all their help. Before you go to Dubai, look these ladies’sites up. We flew British Airways and stayed sumptuously at the Sofitel Jumeirah Beach
Cinnamon Soho is coming.
Vindaloo pork pie anyone? That’s a big fat yes from me, especially when it’s been cooked by Vivek Singh. He’s been West at Cinnamon Club and he’s been East with Cinnamon Kitchen, now he’s going central with Cinnamon Soho. I visited the building site to meet Executive Chef Vivek and find out more.
Green day
Just back from a pop up in New York, he’s looking bright eyed and is characteristically full of cheerful enthusiasm as he answers questions and tries to ignore our circling photographer
Have you wanted to be in Soho for some time?
Soho has been our list for a while yes, but you never seem to get the right place and to be honest despite all the doom and gloom people talk about there wasn’t much going, Soho properties still get snapped up fast. Luckily for Cinnamon Soho we were offered this old Red Bar before it went onto the market.
Behind youuuu!
So what’s going to be the difference at Cinnamon Soho?
Well the idea if you like is to be more Cinnamon Kitchen than Cinnamon Kitchen! The City has its own style and that affects what a restaurant feels like. Cinnamon Kitchen is more suit and tie than perhaps we imagined it would turn out, Cinnamon Soho will be what we originally intended Cinamon Kitchen to be. Read more…
Taste the real difference – the best of Scottish produce on a plate
Don't be shellfish
The salmon hooked me, a reversal of the way things usually go. The great sides of Summer Isles smoked fish were sliced thickly on the spot and anointed with the barest drop of lemon, no brown bread and butter thank you, and tasted delicious. The merest hint of smoke coming through from the rich, buttery, flesh as well as hint of sweetness from their special brine. You couldn’t compare it with supermarket smoked salmon; it was a different kettle of fish entirely.
Summer Isles were just one of around ten Scottish producers who had lugged their lovely grub from the Highlands all the way down to the lowlands of the RAC Club in Pall Mall. The intention was to show first hand what we miss out on when we fix our foodie gaze on Ludlow or the continent. The Scottish Highlands are a land rich in fine produce, none of which need to consume air miles to get to our plates.
Achiltbuie kipper pate with seaweed relish on oaties and cones of native lobster were passed around and gobbled up. Venison carpaccio wrapped around Highland Blue cheese was burst in the mouth flavour. The RAC Executive Chef Philip Corrick had cooked all the small plates and if you wanted any reason at all to join then to be able to eat his food every day would be a compelling one. Read more…
Nick Harman 