L’oasis

The day: November 29^th 2009, Dinner.
The place: Mile End Road, 237 Mile End Road Stepney LONDON E1 4AA (Tel : 020 7702 7051).
The venue: L’ Oasis
The food: Gastropub
The drinks: good selection of well-priced wines and beers.

Gastropub, what a passion! Ever in search of the UK analogue of the good Italian trattoria, this time we focus on another East End place (after this and this and, in a sense, this), which has the dubious distinction of a raving review by the distinguished gastrocritic Fay Maschler.

As expected, the interior of the (long, spacious) room with the pub area at the end is casual, rustic, lively

And some interesting entertainers on the mezzanine:

There is also an upstairs room.

On the menu, starters go for £4.50-6.50 (e.g. whitebait at 4.50), with a mediterranean ‘meze’ tray to share at £12.50. Mains offer, for example, hearty choices such as Smoked haddock, spinach mash, poached egg, wholegrain mustard sauce at £11.50, or more delicate ones such as Pan Fried Seabass, new potatoes and sorrel sauce at £13.50. The most precious item is the New York strip at £16.50, the cheapest the pan-fried goat cheese with Portobello mushrooms and pine-nut salad at £8.50.

The bread does not arrive. You have to earn it.

Our selection of starters is

– Guinea fowl ballotine, salad, hazelnut dressing, bread (thank God, there is the bread!) (£5.50)

– Ham hock terrine, red onion marmalade, salad and bread (OK, we won’t starve) (£5.50)

These are both appealing dishes. The guinea fowl is palatable, well-made, with a buttery, sweet impression which is well-matched by the garnish, especially the pine-nuts. The bread, though essential for our survival, is forgettable, of the ‘spineless’ variety.

The terrine has a more decisive flavour, it is drier and more acidic, all in a pleasant way, and is very nicely contrasted by the excellent, sweet onion marmalade. A perfect dish for this type of venue. Mmh, this is looking good, might become a regular spot…

While we sip our beers (more on this story later), our mains arrive:

– Home-made fish cake, salad and fries (£9.50).

– Confit guinea fowl leg, braised red cabbage, fondant potato, thyme jus (£12.50)

The guinea fowl has been cooked too much and is much too salty, and is therefore also dry. Not TOO bad but disappointing after the good starters. The cabbage, in a heavy-handed sort of way, provides rustic pleasure on the palate, but the potato is rather dull.

In the fish cake once again we encounter a very unwelcome excess of salt. The chips are really pathetic: defrosted and tasteless, if you discount the abundant salt, that is. The salad has a condiment in it which is unsuitable for Italians, but we think also for French people (and yet we are told the chef is French), and surely for you Brits too! And the fish cake itself? It comes spreading a very pleasant smell, but the flavour doesn’t match the expectation thus created, and it is not moist, it is not hanging together as it should: the crust is rock solid, the interior limp and mushy. A poor dish, memories of the one we had at Creeler’ longingly emerge.

Dear readers, we love you all but there is only so much we are willing to do for the blog…so prudence suggests we share a dessert.

– Banoffee pie with dark chocolate sauce (£4)

This was the last banoffee pie left, and we regret it hadn’t been eaten by somebody else. The portion is slightly ridiculous, the banana mousse (which in practice feels like a whipped cream with some banana flavour) is substandard, and the dough is seriously substandard, heavy and cardboard style (maybe bought in from a low quality outlet).

We drank some very interesting beers: a pint of Kolner (£4.00), a 330mls bottle of Meantime chocolate beer (£3.50) and a half pint of London stout (£?). For people like us who don’t know much about beer, this in itself made the visit worthwhile. All in all, the experience for two cost just £44.85.

The service was cheerful and helpful, really an asset of L’Oasis. The culinary experience started really really well for a gastropub. A real pity, then, that it went progressively down the drain. Given that there was some skill and sensitivity on display in the starters, we are inclined to hope that the rest was due to an off night. For £44 one cannot ask for fine dining, but for some passion, care, and honest flavours, yes. They were not available on this occasion, but we feel we should be willing to give l’Oasis another try. Or maybe just for starters and a drink…

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Mews of Mayfair

The day: 24^th October 2008, Dinner.
The place: 10-11 Lancashire Court, New Bond Street, London W1S 1EY
The venue: Mews of Mayfair
The food: French
The drinks: Interesting, reasonably priced wine list, few choices under £30.

In the heart of Mayfair, we were attracted to this restaurant by a combination of factors: its menu (we’ve had mostly positive run of late with French cuisine), a promisingly negative review of AA Gill, and a 50% discount on food (why do these places do that instead of setting directly more reasonable prices?). The restaurant is on the first floor, from which you can contemplate the wall of vociferous crowd standing out of the bar downstairs:

A climb up the narrow staircase and a warm environment engulfs you: floorboards, cream walls and upholstered benches along the walls, spacious tables. Unfortunately the tables for two are very close to one another – but then again space is expensive in Mayfair (otherwise we’d live there, no?).

On the menu, starters are in the £6-10 range, with an intriguing ‘Le Landes’ Duck and Ham Hock Terrine with Figs (£8). Among the mains, we are tempted by a Peppered Monkfish with Red Wine and Oxtail Risotto (£17), but we’ll opt for something lighter.

The bread arrives:

Offered from a tray, and always refilled, it’s either rosemary or plain. Not much of a variety, you may argue, yet quite good – and you know we do not use the ‘g’ word very often when referring to bread.

Our starters appear:

– Pan Fried Sea Bream with celeriac and thyme (£7)
– Seared scallops with cauliflower and Cox’s apple salad (£9.50)

The scallops were seared wonderfully according to Woman, and you can see from the photo what she means – whereas fussy Man found them very good but ever so slightly rubbery, i.e. overcooked (but just). Nevertheless the cauliflower sauce, in psite of its offputting purple appearance, was incredibly luscious and intense on both palates. An excellent variety of flavours came through in the garnishes and accompaniments (aside from the cauliflower, the tangy fine apples, a remarkable basil flavoured olive oil, and fresh sorrel). An impressive, gustatively complex and good looking dish: a motive that will continue.

The seabream tail, while not fantastic in terms of raw material, was cooked egregiously, with mustardy and smoky flavoured sauces and finely sliced mushrooms and beautiful garnishes adding richness and finesse to this labour intensive work.

Here are our mains:

– Pan Fried John Dory with calamari and parsnip tart (£19)
– Fillet of Pollock with braised lettuce and shrimp gnocchi (£16.50).

With the Jonh Dory a truly regrettable incident happened: Man, carried away by his enthusiasm for its masterful cooking, gobbled up bit by bit the entire piece of fish without leaving anything for Woman! So you’ll have to trust him on the cooking…The miffed Woman can only add her favourable opinion of the reduction (probably veal) and of the tender and flavoursome fine calamari. And as usual by now, many interesting plays and subthemes going on in this rich, meaty dish, the parsnip tart and the ‘polenta’ soaking up and sublimating them. (One of the subthemes were unadvertised frog legs: were they afraid of scaring the public?).

The masterful cooking theme continues with the humble Pollock. However the ‘gnocchi’ were not gnocchi: served in an Italian restaurant, they would have made their way directly back to the kitchen with the complaint that they were just a floury mess with no shrimp flavour to speak of: but these objects being merely a supporting piece in a French dish, we took a more relaxed view…The pollock wasn’t very flavoursome, but conversely, the braised lettuce was a delight, so simple but so intense and well executed, and so well fitting the other material.

And to conclude:

– Pecan pudding with bay leaf ice cream (£7)
– Pistachio parfait with bitter chocolate sorbet (£7.00)

The pecan pudding is very good, very soft, very moist, honey flavoured. The strong pine nuts truly burst out on your palate. A pity this dessert is marred by the melted ice cream (and the bay leaf is very evanescent).

The parfait is good and has an impressive texture, but the pistachio taste has, like the bayleaf above, remained in the chef’s imagination without reaching the dish. It makes way for an alcoholic punch with a whiff of almonds. Very good were the pistachio praline’ and the chocolate ‘sorbet’ (it felt like an icecream).

The water consisted of an expensive 0.75 litre bottle at £5, and the wine of a good Bourgogne (Faiveley 2007) at £29.50. With 12.5% service added, and deploying our 50% bill buster, we reduce a total which would have overshot our £100 rule by more than a tenner to a very reasonable £76.94.

The waiter was pleasant, humorous and swift (we admired his strong but polite and professional attempt to push the specials of the day). Service is informal, with wine and water left on your table and glasses not constantly refilled (we actually like it this way!). The kitchen must have been slightly under pressure, as a swift starter was followed by a long wait for mains (nothing too dramatic anyway). Quite an attractive set of dishes we had at Mews, full of intriguing combinations of neat, rich flavours and rather elaborate preparations, handled by an obviously very able chef. The materials were good even if sometimes probably not top notch. Perhaps because of this, or in part because of this, we were merely pleased, but not ravished, by most creations. So, all in all, an enjoyable and interesting culinary experience which, while perhaps we just about wouldn’t come back to at full prices, is excellent value with the special offer.

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Bart’s (London)

The day: 1st November, dinner (full board available as standard).
The place: West Smithfields, EC1A 7BE, London
The venue: Barts
The food: Traditional English
The drinks: Sorry, no alcohol.

Snow in London in October: ghastly! What better than a short break to beat the winter blues? So we head to West Smithfield.

Forget Carluccio, forget Club Gascon, forget St. John: Bart’s, here we come!

This is the glorious St. Bartholomew’s hospital, known to everybody who uses it as Bart’s. Man is an assiduous (a bit too assiduous in fact), long established and affectionate customer.

The interior is a bit basic, so we skip pictures – we would not want you to be put off.

As for the food, there is plenty to choose from: fruit juice or soup as a starter, then minced meat and potato pie, tuna, tomato and courgette pasta, and cold turkey, not to mention a selection of sandwiches on white and granary. Man opts for the Lentils lasagne, with potato croquettes and peas on the side.

In this colourful dish, let’s see the lasagne first: the decisive cooking confers on them a nicely crispy outside and a moist and creamy inside, with an intense lentil and spice (nutmeg?) flavour. Celery, carrots, tomato, peppers in a triumph of all season flavours. The texture of the pasta is exactly what you would expect in this kind of establishment: you can definitely say that it melts seamlessly in the cream

The hand of the chef is evident also in the croquettes, the crisp outside coating to bite through to reach the luscious interior. Man especially appreciates the light hand with seasoning. To finish the dish off, a generous garnish of boiled peas: just them in their pure essence, no other flavour is allowed to contaminate their pure taste.

For pudding, Man eludes tinned fruit and fruit juice jelly, and goes for rice pudding with a generous helping of custard.

The rice pudding was also similar in melting structure to the pasta, nicely liquefied in keeping with the leit motif of the menu.

Service was cheerful and professional. Man washed this down with excellent premium apple juice from concentrate, the cost of this… well, not a penny. Quite a bargain! But be aware, the treat is by invitation only.

All jokes aside, you do not come to the NHS for top level cuisine. But for top level health care, be assured that, in spite of the scary headlines that hit the tabloids every now and then; in spite of some occasional grumpy nurse here and there; and gritting your teeth through some crumbling facilities, you will in the end get the result that really counts, the most important of all, provided by all the real professionals working at Bart’s. Thank you NHS.

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Chapter One

The day: 26^th July 2008, Dinner.
The place: Farnborough Common, Locksbottom Kent BR6 8NF (tel. 01689 854 848)
The venue: Chapter One
The food: modern Anglo-French
The drinks: Good list, good range of prices, mainly French, also by the glass and half bottle.

When you read the address, you think it must be impossibly far. But we trust technology, and indeed it takes us about only 45 minutes to drive there from East London, with the Blackwall tunnel and all. We blindly follow the machine’s instructions, twisting and turning in unknown areas of the great capital, and we finally get to an obviously wealthy and leafy suburb. There is the elegant and very spacious room of Chapter 1. The place is heaving with customers.

We don’t like seating in small square tables a micron away from our neighbours’.

The waiter leads us to a small square table a micron away from our neighbours’.

But…thanks to the wintry wind blowing from a blasting air conditioner – what can we do, we like to be hot in summer-, we are upgraded or downgraded, depending how you see it, to a larger round table in a corner. There is a noisy party in the vicinities, true, but it’s nearing the end, as we guess from the demeanour of some customers…This is the aftermath:

Tables are well appointed, with proper tablecloth in the stark and elegant interior, with white walls. Mind you, ‘ambience’ here is taken perhaps a step too far, and it is dark, so it is not entirely our fault if you cannot see much from the picture.

The menu offers are eight starters to choose from, and as many mains. And for the Italians among you, as is quite common outside Italy you will find “primi” both in the starters (Risotto of girolles and green peas with crème fraiche and parmesan) and the mains (Roast gnocchi with asparagus, pickled girolles, artichokes, rocket and parmesan foam) sections, the difference in position presumably depending on the portion size. The pricing structure is easy, 3 courses for £29.50, however some dishes come with a supplement, e.g. add £3.50 if you want seared diver caught scallops with cod brandade, cauliflower purèe and a light curried veloute’ as starter, or £5.95 for the Poached rump of Welsh black beef, white onion purèe, ragout of salsify, Jersey Royals and foie gras with Bordelaise sauce as a main.

Bread comes in two types, brown or white: there is a ‘bottomless plate’ policy, but to be fair this is nothing to write home about (just to remind you how intolerably picky we are with bread):

We decide to begin with:

– ravioli of lobster and king prawn with spiced white cabbage and a veloute of lobster and cognac (£3.95 supplement);

– Mussel saffron soup with a paysanne of root vegetables

The Mussel and saffron soup was generous, with twelve buttery, juicy mussels floating in a delicate soup. Unfortunately, though, they were not as flavoursome as their appearance and texture suggested: some of the flavour had infused the soup, but the rest might have been evaporated somewhere up in ether; anyhow wherever it was, it was not in our plate. The (parsley) too had suffered a similar fate, and where was the full saffron fragrance? Overall, a pleasant and correct soup, but not wowing.

The lobster and king prawn ravioli was on an altogether different level: quite stupendous, with the sweet, smoky scent and flavour of the cognac issuing a nice punch to this thick, rich, velvety and balanced ravioli bursting with seafood and flavour. Here, too, a little problem though: the “raviolO” ending is not a grammatical mistake, you do indeed get just a single specimen all alone in that whole wide plate…

But hey, no time to linger, the mains are already upon us:

– Poach and roasted quail with foie gras, smoked bacon, braised red cabbage and raisin juice;

– Braised breast of lamb with roast new season Welsh canon, confit garlic, tomato, artichoke and lamb juice

The quail is fantastic, the saltiness and fat of the bacon wrapping exalting the quail and matching perfectly the sweetness from the red cabbage and the raisin reduction. And did we tell you how sumptuous the foie gras was? Of course, with good foie gras it is very hard to go wrong, but this was a classic, a truly excellent dish expressing very robust and clear flavours.

As for the lamb, the breast had been stuffed and was covered in crusty herbs and was unbelievably tasty, while the canon (very tender loin) looked simply roasted and was so tender and moist and succulent. There is a sense in which this is similar in conception to the quail dish: the richness of the meat fat and the sweetness of the accompanying vegetables. A marvellous ‘simple’ dish, harmonious, with deep and memorable flavours, and very beautiful… if you could see it, that is 😉.

Finally, the third course of our menu:

– Pave of Valrhona chocolate, sugared pistachio, honey comb and caramelised pear purèe;

– Banoffi pie

Man is a bit resentful of the sugar on the pistachio, muttering that it would be oh so much better to get some good pistachios from Bronte, say, and let them speak unhindered by the sugar. The mousse is just fine. Oh but wait, the pear puree is beautifully intense, surely the best component in the dish. And the dark chocolate “cannolo” with white chocolate stuffing is a serious contender for attention, too.

The Banoffee: the banana-and-toffee bit is nice and served in a parfait kind of form. But the absolute showstopper must be the chocolate ice-cream. Easily one of the best we have ever had. Ever. We cannot swear it was the best, but if perfection exists, this came close to it: it was almost moving. And what more does Man make of this? Who knows, the petit four arrive even before the dessert dishes are taken away. But they are beautiful, have a look:

We skip coffee as usual, so with water at £3.00, a half bottle of white Tamaya Sauvignon blanc 2006 at £9 and half a bottle of Domaine de Coyeaux Cote du Rone, Beaumes de Venise 2003 at £15.50, our overall total came to 101.76 (which includes the optional 12.5% gratuity and the £3.95 supplement for the raviolO), just around our £100 rule.

Service was courteous, correct, but too fast (though we seem to have been unlucky, as the front room line is to offer a relaxed service, as we discover later chatting away with the charming and impressive manager Laurent Gillis). Save for our usual mean nitpicking, we had a great dinner, with top ingredients, skilfully prepared to bring the best out of them. Andrew McLeish is clearly a very accomplished chef who is able to express great personality and deliver direct, potent flavours in his relatively simple (but how much skill in them!) dishes. And he must run his kitchen (a brigade of eleven) like clockwork to serve food of this quality, at this pace, for a large number of covers. To go back to nitpicking for a second…we cannot fail to note that portions, let’s face it, are rather mean. The philosophy reminds us (very vaguely) of places like Arbutus: offer very well executed fine cuisine, and keep the costs down to the minimum by limiting the freebies as much as your customers can tolerate (but unlike Arbutus, here you have proper tablecloths, proper service, petit fours and an elegant ambience), skipping amuse bouche, and above all driving portions down to the minimum. Some items are used repeatedly in the dishes (the roasted gnocchi, the ratte potatoes, the artichokes), and supplements are attached to several dishes. Nevertheless, we did have a splendid time, and, sadly for our waistlines, we have added Chapter One to the short list of those fine establishments that we hope we will be returning to. We suspect the star McLeish lost a couple of years ago will return, too.

(Added on 18 January 2009: Michelin agreed with us – they have just awarded a star to Chapter One)

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