MANSON: SNOOZING ON THE BEACH

It's been interesting reading HS's recent epistles from the US of Stateside. Although the portion sizes appear enormo to these European eyes and there sometimes seems to be a few more ingredients than is strictly necessary there's no doubting that the restaurants over there go that extra yard with the food and the service to make sure you have a great time and won't leave feeling hungry or shortchanged.

Only (recent) visits to places like Eddie Gilbert's and The Canton Arms have made me feel the same way about restaurants on this side of the great pond. Too often though it feels like the kitchen is just going through the motions and there's no actual enjoyment or enthusiasm for the job in hand. And to add insult to injury you have to pay through the nose for the privilege. A recent lunch at Manson's was a bit like this.

The restaurant's located on a dreary stretch of the Fulham Road where smug, twee shops are the order of the day. Anonymous in character from the outside, the interior decor at Manson's appears to have been done with the aim of bringing the least offence to the greatest number of diners, Yawn-inducing enough, but the menu and the cooking were unfortunately in perfect synchronicity with their surroundings.

Speaking of the menu, given a boisterous Saturday lunchtime crowd with plenty of kids in tow, the lack of any sort of brunch options seemed odd, but neither were there any more ambitious dishes (unless they appear on the evening menu). It was all rather ho-hum and lacked any personality. Having said that apart from a car crash of a dessert there was nothing hugely wrong with the food: the ingredients were ok if not great and the preparation of those ingredients was good enough. But there wasn't that something special to take the meal to a higher level - that spark that shows the kitchen's in full effect was MIA.

For the first of my starters two small Scallops were decently cooked but sans roe and came on top of a Crab Gratin. The latter tasted fine but needed a pepping up to make it more interesting - a little chili might have helped here. The gratin was in a scallop shell which sat inside yet another shell. On the side was a small, desultory pile of salad, a piece of lemon and for no apparent reason a scattering of rock salt. It was ambitiously priced at twelve quid and took about a minute to eat.

And so it went on. Good-tasting Denhay Ham came with a pile of nicely made Celeriac remoulade with Pommery mustard but the potato croquette added nothing. Veal Chop was ok meat, cooked competently with a pat of anchovy butter on top which resolutely refused to melt - probably because the chop wasn't hot. Chips shaped like small discs were very good though.

Things only got interesting at the dessert stage - but not in a good way. The components making up the Pomegranate Sangria would have been fine individually: nice ice cream; good poached pear etc. It's just that they shouldn't have been occupying the same plate. Nothing went with anything else - a confused mess. A few glasses of mediocre, overpriced wine tipped the bill into the "How Much???!!!" category. Normally, not a biggie when I've had a good time but in this case...well this time it hurt.

Almost daily we're told about how good, how vibrant the London restaurant scene is but just a few visits abroad will soon disabuse one of this notion. Although they're bloody hard to find (and consistency is sometimes a problem), there are some good places around. Manson isn't one of them.

FISHER’S: FULHAM’S FINEST

I’ve not been able to post much recently as I’ve been feeling a bit poorly. My head exploded (yes, really) after eating so much shit food and drinking a surfeit of bad ale. Luckily I’ve now got my shit together, wiped the slate clean, drawn a line in the sand etc. and (hurrah and huzzah) just had the my best plate of Fish and Chips of 2009 in, of all places, Fulham.

Fisher’s is a small unassuming joint on an unremarkable stretch of Fulham Palace Road that for some strange reason is called the High Street although I’ve yet to come across a stretch of road that was less like a High Street than this one. It’s compact and bijou: a small takeaway counter and kitchen abuts a functional but teeny tiny dining area built, not for lumps like yours truly, but for teeny tiny people. Kylie would find it comfortable and spacious.

There was nothing teeny tiny about my plate of Haddock and Chips though. A big, firm, slipper-sized fillet of excellent Haddock had been cooked perfectly, coming as it did in a light, crisp batter. If I had to be picky I would say that the batter to fish ratio was skewed a bit towards the former but since it was grease-free there wasn’t a problem. Chips were golden and had a satisfying crunch. The Mushy Peas were pretty good too.

Speaking of which, I’ve been making my own recently and apart from the difficulty in finding dried Marrowfat Peas – I had to go to South Yorkshire to get mine - they’re easy er, peasy to make (a few hours soaking with bicarb, a few hours slow cooking with a dash more bicarb) and the results are splendid. Indeed they’ve been so good I’m considering bringing a small Tupperware container of them along with me on my next F&C outing.

Making decent Fish and Chips isn’t some mysterious alchemical process. Fresh fish, good batter, oil at the right temperature and the right length of cooking time is all that’s required. I would say on this showing Fisher’s have got it down pat.

Other things to like: well, there’s no irony here (although others might eye that After Eight with suspicion, they’d be wrong), there’s no music blaring out and, most refreshingly, there’s no tedious mission statement or ‘concept’ that they want to share with you – just decent grub. Of course this means that Fisher’s is probably not that popular with the jeunesse dorée of SW6. But for that reason alone I would say it was worth a visit and a whispered thanks to one’s own particular deity.

THE SALISBURY: BOTTOM FEEDING II

I blame Fergus Henderson. He was the man responsible for introducing England to the pared-down style of menu that has spawned a myriad imitations. Actually, the Continentals have been doing the same thing for years – when you order a Steak in Spain that’s precisely what you get.

What you also get, or rather should get, in both instances is an impeccably cooked piece of meat or fish of excellent provenance. Anything less and the dish fails. There’s nowhere to hide with this style of cooking. Now I expect all plainly written menus to deliver on their (unwritten) promise.

So when I saw the word Chipolatas on the menu at The Salisbury, a refurbed pub in one of the grottier parts of Fulham, my foodie bones kicked in and I imagined, not just any Chipolatas but the best ever Chipolatas. The Chipolatollahs if you will.

What I got was certainly extraordinary. Extraordinary in that they didn't have a cocktail stick protuding from them. They were the sort of Chipolatas that'd you'd get, and avoid, at the Office Christmas Party. Luke warm and overcooked the four sad specimens (£3) sat there mocking me. They seemed to be saying How you like me now, foodie-boy ?

Those naughty little Chipolatas weren’t alone, oh no. Food this bad doesn’t come alone. Crab (£3.95) had been mixed with mayonnaise and put on a piece of bread which had been dipped in egg and allowed to dry. Well, it looked that way. There was also a spoonful of something that tasted mostly of garlic.

Coming at me from my right was a couple of Welsh Rarebits (£1.95). I speared one of these bad boys with my fork and yellow gunk spurted out - much like lancing a particularly ripe boil. How one can fuck up Cheese on Toast at any time, let alone in a restaurant completely unencumbered by customers beats me but the kitchen had managed in spectacular fashion. Bringing up the rear were some greasy Blue Cheese Fritters (£2.00). I didn’t have the cojones to find out what the cheese was or why it was blue.

To my right were the heavy mob. Foie Gras (£6.00) bore some resemblance to that engorged liver and was probably the most edible thing on the table but that’s not saying much. It was supposed to come on toast but as evinced by some of the other wheat-based small plates on show this is obviously a kitchen that finds the act of putting bread under a grill as arcane and mind-bogglingly difficult as constructing one of Heston B’s Ejaculating Puddings. Sweetbreads (£2.95) had been woefully undercooked. This is a kitchen that does not understand that fire is our friend.

All the dishes were pretty nasty but not nearly as nasty as the Chicken Curry (£4.00). When I saw it on the menu, I yet again failed to connect with reality as I conjured up a vision of a chef – maybe one looking not dissimilar to HB – leafing through the pages of an old cookery book, possibly Victorian, to come up with an authentic curry from the last days of the Raj (good name for a restaurant). The contents of the small bowl on the table looked like it had come from the seepage of the Welsh Rarebit except it smelled, much, much worse. I tentatively fished around inside the yellow liquid and came up with some pieces of meat that could have been anything, so grey and overcooked, were they. The smell was, how shall I put it, quite pungent. I managed a single sip without gagging.

I’m a greedy bugger by nature so even if food is poor I’ll still hoover it up but in this case I just couldn’t. The whole thing was so miserable, so utterly awful and easily the worst meal I’ve had in London that all I could do was laugh disbelievingly and ask for the bill. The friendly waitress didn’t even notice I’d left most of the food or if she did it didn’t phase her. She did ask if everything was ok but how do you break it to her, and the rest of the onlooking staff that the food is crap. Gentle reader, I bottled it.

Once outside the cold air brought me to my senses and I realised I couldn’t let the night end on such a down note. Someone once said if you have a bad meal, go and have another [meal]. It was only a short hop to the rather wonderful Harwood Arms where I managed to squeeze in at the bar for a pint of Black Sheep and one of their fantastic Veal Scotch Eggs all served by the world’s most attractive barmaid. Suddenly, The Salisbury seemed a long time ago. Let's hope I'm not given to flashbacks.

HARWOOD ARMS:FAB FOOD IN FULHAM

Fulham – ain’t it great ? No, really. And especially when there are places like The Harwood Arms to eat in. Hidden away behind Fulham Broadway this attractive pub cum restaurant is the result of a drinking session between Mike Robinson of the Pot Kiln fame, Brett Graham of The Ledbury and Edwin Vaux. My original plan had been to revisit the Pot Kiln and while browsing their website I came across a link to The Harwood Arms.

Regular visitors to the blog will know that I was mightily impressed by the Pot Kiln a year ago - the Pigeon and Venison was the best I’d ever eaten - so I was very excited to see how this bit of rus in urbe translated from the original. As it turned out very, very well indeed. The combination of superlative ingredients and the skill of ex-Ledbury chef, Stephen Williams in the kitchen meant a cracking meal was up there with the best of the year. This is a chef who can cook.

Bar snacks take the form of English tapas and are taken to a new level. In fact you could quite happily eat these accompanied by a pint or a glass of wine and you would still leave a very happy bunny. Not as happy as me, though. I had my eyes on bigger game.

I had to try the snacks (well of course I did). Venison Scotch Egg came with a crisp panko-like coating with lovely meat and a perfectly cooked soft egg within. I was so impressed I had to try another. Kipper Croquettes were the, er, nuts. Light and moreish they came with an excellent homemade ketchup and a little shallot salad. As good as you’d get in Spain or indeed in any of the Iberian joints in town (now there’s a killer combination: a copita of chilled manzanilla and a kipper croqueta).

For starters proper, a warm salad came with slices of lightly gamey Partridge and studded with cubes of excellent bacon and black pudding. There was a touch of sweetness from some beets and some crunch from chopped hazelnuts. Simple and delicious. Bread on the side was homemade, the soda bread in particular being fantastic.

The Venison at the Pot Kiln had been a highlight and the T-Bone of Henley Fallow Deer was certainly up to snuff. Bambi came as a big fist of meat cooked to an even, perfect pinkness and was very venisonny (a lot isn’t). There were some potatoes that been cleverly cooked to give a soft interior and a light crispy skin. Bringing the whole thing together was a deeply savoury mushroom ketchup.

I thought I might be flagging at this point but there was such a lightness of touch to the cooking that even after a dessert of Bramley Apple Doughnuts and a scoop of Brown Bread Ice Cream I still didn’t feel bloated.

Faults ? Well I did have a long hard think but the best I could come up with was that the Laguiole knife wasn’t quite sharp enough. Terrible, I know.

Prices are ludicrously low for the quality of the food and cooking. Service from the young, Antipodean staff was friendly, efficient and totally fuss-free. To be honest it’s not really a secret how good this place is and though it’s only been open for a few weeks apparently it’s full most nights and also for Sunday lunch. Go for a midweek lunch instead, or better still enjoy a leisurely Saturday – beating a visit B&Q into the proverbial cocked hat - with a bottle or two of wine and have some of the best food you’re likely to get in the capital. No, really.