Archive
Dawn of the Dead. Westfield Stratford City opening day
The recession is over?
It’s a bit eerie at Westfield Stratford, thousands of people all walking in the same direction and with the same expression on their face. ‘Day of the dead,’ says M glumly as we watch from behind the safety of our security barrier, He’s right the resemblance to zombies is undeniable, although to be fair most zombies wouldn’t be seen undead in a shell suit and many have better complexions.
It’s opening day at Westfield Stratford City. Some pedants have argued a city has to have a cathedral and Stratford doesn’t but they are missing the point, it does have a cathedral or at least a large temple of worship and it’s this new shopping centre.
The faithful have turned up in massive numbers, are they all skipping work or are they all unemployed? If the latter how will they afford to shop here? Questions unanswered when Boris Johnson clambers shabbily to his feet to deliver a characteristically up beat and witty opening speech. His jokes about Chaucer may go over a few people’s heads but at least he doesn’t patronise the crowd with jargon-filled rubbish the way Ken would have done. Read more…
Brasserie Joel, London
First Floor, Park Plaza Westminster Bridge, City of London SE1 7UT www.brasseriejoel.co.uk
Rather moody
The Park Plaza hotel is south of the river, but only just. Run full tilt out of the foyer and you’ll be in the Thames seconds later and soon bobbing past the London Eye.
South of the river but not of The South, the hotel resolutely turns its back on the area and instead looks toward Parliament across Westminster Bridge. In fact approach as we did from the rear and you find yourself forced to detour around endless pelican crossings before making your final assault on the front door.
Even then it’s not over, the escalators packed with happy tourists take you up to a modernistic foyer (i.e. it looks nothing like one) with no sign of, or signs to, the restaurant. It is in fact a sharp left and left again down a long moodily lit corridor toward a tall reception desk where a guardian coolly appraises your approach while you will yourself not to do a Miranda pratfall.
And yet in the restaurant it’s friendly and family, guests from many nations are eating and there are even small children too. Yes the mood is Hotel, but the food is something else. Back in the 1990s Joel Antunes was chef/patron at Les Saveurs, now sadly gone to the great griddle in the sky, and back then we flocked to eat there. Now he’s back in London and thanks to him this is no ‘hotel restaurant’. Read more…
The Drift, Heron Tower, London
Heron Tower, 110 Bishopsgate, EC2N 4AY. www. thedriftbar.co.uk
The entrance to Drift is around the side of the Heron Tower, but it’s worth going into the main reception to ‘ask directions’ just to get a whiff of that new building smell and stare in awe at the fish tank.
In fact it’s not so much a tank as Europe’s largest privately owned aquarium. It’s so massive you expect a heavily tied up James Bond to suddenly drop into it , and then a shark to appear looking peckish.
After security has firmly set you on the right path you find The Drift itself. A new London restaurant, triple-heighted, with a bar on the ground floor and the restaurant on the first, it’s clangy and modern but not unpleasant. The mix of seating, with tables of various heights plus large refectory ones that seat eight, means it caters for all pay grades in a pleasingly egalitarian manner Read more…
Waldorf Salad: In the garden with Executive Chef Lee Streeton
Chef’s rubber Croc shoes seem at odds with the mud we’re tramping through, but then so are his chef’s whites. ‘I’ve got big plans,’ says Lee Streeton Executive Chef at the spanking new Syon Park Waldorf Astoria Hotel while waving his arms around. ‘This land is mine!’
As veg patches go, it’s already a sizeable one. Courgettes are massed in yellow-flowered profusion. ‘We cook those, they go quick,’ Lee says charging up and down the veg beds in the dwindling light pointing out other plants and herbs growing furiously well in his deep organic beds, all sheltered from the worst of the weather by the hotel’s walls and close presence.
Many chefs these days claim to be pulling produce from the restaurant garden, but if you get a chance to peek outside their restaurants you have to wonder who is kidding who. A patch of herbs and a tomato plant do not a vegetable garden make.
Lee is certainly capable of keeping his customers fed from his. A cynical non-foody might say that’s because his dishes are rather tiny. One tomato can probably make ten plates the way Lee does it. I’m being a bit naughty though because, seriously, Lee’s dishes are examples of fine dining restraint and quality and are about textures and tastes combined with seasonality. Read more…
Meat the experts at A La Cruz
What’s a Greek urn? About 3 Euros an hour. What’s an Asador? Ah now you’re asking. Think a controlled bonfire, not the one your dad used to make from collected leaves and a squirt of petrol, the one that always made a satisfying ‘whump!’ as it set your eyebrows on fire. No this is very different.
Out on the Argentine plains, explains John Rattagan, his bald head shining with perspiration in the fierce heat of the kitchen, an asador is a big wood fire where freshly killed and prepped lambs and other meats are mounted on ‘crosses’ and cooked over its flames. John and his partners have brought this concept to EC1 with restaurant A La Cruz where an asador made of polished steel sits proudly in customers’ view behind thick plate glass. Read more…
Big Burger at Bistro du Vin, Soho
36 Dean Street, W1D 4PS www.bistroduvinandbar.com
If I were designing the perfect burger then before looking for the best meat or best bun supplier, I’d get a tape measure.
Gathering together a random sample of punters I’d ask them to open their mouths as wide as possible. My trained assistant would then measure the ‘gape’ from top teeth to bottom set. A simple calculation would give the average opening and the measurement would be passed on to the kitchen.
The fact is that any burger that requires the jaw dislocation skills of an anaconda is going to be a bit of a bugger to eat. You either push the top and bottom in with the spare hand that you don’t have, or accept that it’s going to get very messy. Using a knife and fork is, of course, just silly.
You can try compressing the burger before attempting eating, but then you have the problem of maintaining a constant hold. If you try and put the burger down, the whole thing springs apart like a broken watch. Read more…
Assaggini
71 Haymarket London SW1Y 4RW assaggini.co.uk
Haymarket is a not a road that I stroll down very often but then who does? It’s more like a motorway with its one-way traffic hurtling down and the buses bellowing that jet engine noise that all old Volvo buses seem to make. Yes I am such a nerd I have actually made a point of noting the manufacturer.
Crossing the road is life threatening, so it’s as well that Haymarket is lined with restaurants on both sides. And what a lot of restaurants there are. Well-known chains, all catering to the Croydon crowd come up West for the night. I can slander Croydon like this because I was born and lived there until I was 16, so I know of what I slag. Read more…
The ToL Foie Gras Burger
63 Charterhouse Street City of London EC1M 6HJ www.clubgascon.com
A Foie Gras burger won Taste of London’s Best Dish this year, a decision that must have had all the other chefs there ripping off their toques and swearing like Gordon with a stubbed toe. All those years practising their craft just to get beaten by a burger?
Pascal Aussignac, the ‘auteur’ of this burger is a great chef and being a Gascon man he loves his foie gras. A few years ago he tried to sell an earlier incarnation of the Foie Burger into the newly opened Westfield. The local market wasn’t ready for this though; a burger that didn’t come in a Styrofoam box caused them to make gun shaped hand gestures and start rhyming things. So the foie burger was relegated to the subs’ bench until its rebirth and triumph at ToL. Read more…
Joe’s Restaurant
126 Draycott Avenue, London, SW3 3AH www.joseph.co.uk
I don’t pretend to be an art critic, I just pretend to be a restaurant critic, but the Banksy craze has always puzzled me.
Banksy started stencilling his stuff on walls in East London, but now his japes have come all the way West to South Kensington’s Walton Street, where the very people he presumably despises can pick up an example for a mere £60,00 or so.
The joke is not going to be on them though because, unless some kind of sanity breaks out in the art world, they’ll be able to resell the work in a few years time for double the price. Banksy is in fact helping rich people get even richer. Eat more!
The Bonnie and Wild
The seafood certainly looks game at The Bonnie and Wild and the game looks good too. This old Manzies restaurant, more used to serving Pie and Mash, Jellied Eels and other dishes that my mother claims to love, probably has never seen anything like it.
By day the original interior, all cracked tiles and wooden booths, is presumably home to toothless old pensioners, the dwindling remainders of the area’s once proud working class population, sucking up the aforementioned oddities. Now every Saturday night, bowing perhaps to the inevitable, it’s transformed into somewhere a great deal classier and rather more expensive. Eat more!
Nick Harman 