A week in London – Michelin stars, Indian tapas, French classics and a lot of hummus
Looking at my last post, I realise that I didn’t actually manage to do any of the things I’d intended. Not to worry! Plenty to tell you anyway – edited highlights only, I promise.
The Goose
London kicked off with The Goose. In fact, it wasn’t London at all – it was somewhere called Britwell Salome in Oxfordshire. Or something like that. It was countryside, and it was Michelin starred, which are two things that don’t often appear in the same sentence. The Goose is the kind of unpretentious, friendly pub-turned-restaurant that you don’t normally associate with Michelin qualifications: the staff are relaxed, not starched; the décor comfy, not austere; the food original, not extrovert. As Jay Rayner says in the book I’m currently reading, you go to a restaurant to have fun, not to be glared at menacingly by uptight chefs and pestered by obsequious waiters.
To start, I ordered Britwell pigeon (taking local ingredients to a new level and reducing the population of ‘flying rats’ simultaneously – one bird; two stones) with salted cod brandade, tamarind and lotus root. I didn’t know what a brandade was, and I wasn’t entirely sure I’d tried lotus root before, both of which seemed good enough reasons to dig in. The lotus root was deep fried, making it taste rather like parsnip crisps. Brandade might be the same as a quenelle, but I’m still not sure. The tamarind was thick and sticky – the consistency of marmite but with the taste of a kind of Asian umami.
Next up I had ray, line caught in Devon apparently (does the line matter? am I just ignorant here?) with chorizo gnocchi, clams, beurre noisette, fennel pollen and croutons. (NB. I kept the menu, which had a grammatical error, incidentally. There’s no way I could’ve identified, let alone remembered, all these constituent parts otherwise.) I’ve always been a bit of a fan of these surf ‘n turf-type dishes, especially since the Welsh guy on The Great British Menu made turbot with cockles and oxtail a couple of years ago. But chorizo is greasy, and so are croutons, and so is beurre noisette; for me, the dish lacked a certain acidity to cut through the richness.
I forgot to pick up the dessert menu and, after two weeks and no notebook, my memory fails me. Something involving tea and jelly I believe… The head chef is Ryan Simpson – a name to look out for if you ever find yourself in the Oxfordshire area.
Imli
Once in London (proper London, this time), naturally I ate Indian food. Imli serves ‘Indian tapas’ which, now I come to think about it, is an idea that someone should’ve come up with ages ago. In fact, they probably did, but Imli’s in Soho so it takes the credit. How many times have you ordered Indian and then spent half the evening surreptitiously skewering forkfuls of your dining companions’ curries? And so, between two, we shared potato and chicken cakes with tamarind and mint sauces respectively; various curries, one of which tasted rather too much like Campbell’s tomato soup; and assorted side dishes including excellent samosas. Our waiter, who seemed a little vacant at the best of times, obviously felt sufficiently comfortable with us by the end of the meal to tell us that he’d been out partying till 6 that morning and was somewhat hungover. Honest, but perhaps unwise…
Comptoir Gascon
I used to work in Farringdon, and walked past Comptoir Gascon on an almost daily basis for a year-and-a-half. So I was pleased to have an excuse finally to visit while catching up with a Clerkenwell-based lawyer friend. It’s airy and warehouse-y, like many buildings in the area, with exposed bricks and raw metal tables. But the menu is refreshingly traditional, offering French classics like rillettes and confit de canard. It’s hard to find rillettes in Amsterdam, so I ordered those along with a fillet of sturgeon with lemon and capers served with what must’ve been pearl barley and green vegetables. It was posh comfort food: there’s something about French cuisine that always gives me that feeling of homecoming…
Hummus Bros
‘Give peas a chance’ reads the T-shirt stuck on the wall, for sale to serious chickpea addicts. The toilet is covered in red writing describing the birth of Hummus Bros, London’s first hummus bar. It makes hyperbolous reading, but the concept is a good one. For lunch, my colleagues and I ordered a small bowl of hummus each, with a variety of toppings (mine was roasted vegetables and feta), tabbouleh and baba ghanoush, all of which came with wholemeal pitas. I think it was my only break in five days of Pret lunches (I am a little addicted), and as lunch breaks go, it was a tasty one.
I realise that I’ve written an awful lot already and I haven’t even got onto Sicily yet… food for the next post, methinks…
