INDIAN ZING: ZINGING IN THE RAIN

A week late in the writing, but I have been out of internet range for most of the last seven days, breaking the back of writing EATING FOR BRITAIN.

Indian Zing was just about empty when I arrived with my friend Paul not long after we had left the Great British Beer Festival. It may have been the early hour, a little past 6.30pm. It may have been the weather, appalling as rain bucketed down in thick sheets drenching us as we ran from the tube station. It may have been its location on King St, more known for its standard curry houses than Indian fine dining, but this restaurant has not yet received the recognition it deserves.

A shame, for even though both Paul and I were coming down from the high of too many pints of mild at the festival, the meal at Indian Zing goes down as one of the best of its kind I have experienced in London for a some time.

It is little surprise as Chef/Owner Manoj Vasaikar has an impressive C.V including Chutney Mary, Veeraswamy and the Oberoi Hotel in his hometown of Mumbai. The menu too speaks to his accomplished and varied background with dishes represented from all over India including a range again from his home state of Maharastra.

We began with a small amuse of chicken malai tikka, which had been marinated with curd cheese and green peppercorns and then cooked in the tandoor until the outside was crisp and the inside meltingly soft. I would be hard pressed to name a better version I have tried in London.

We shared two starters, a “Prawn and Aubergine Kharphatla” where the main ingredients had been marinated in a mildly spiced combination of caramelised onions, tomatoes and pickling spices and “Bhori Paneer Samosa, with Black Eyed Peas” Both again were excellent with the prawns retaining a bite and not being overpowered by the subtle sauce and the crisp, delicate skin of the samosa cracking to reveal its creamy insides.

We moved on to two main courses that have been much debased in curry houses all over the country. The restaurant was coming towards the end of a month long “Biryani Festival” and a separate menu listed seven different variations from which I chose a “Kachi Pakki Biryani” made in the Hyderabad style where raw meat is cooked in a sealed pot with the rice and spices. Alongside this we ordered a classic dish of the Parsee community, a “Dhansak” where more lamb is cooked, this time with spices and lentils.

The biryani was served with a Mirchi Ka Salan, the spicy gravy made with peanuts, tamarind, ginger, garlic and dill. It was, again, as good as I have tried in London with the meat retaining a bite and the spices permeating through the rice as it slow cooks in the sealed pot. The fact I wiped the dish of gravy clean with my fingers tells you all you need to know.

The Dhansak too showed all the signs of proper, unhurried cooking and with only one other couple in the dining room, Mr Vasaikar came out to have a quick chat with us saying that this was one of his own favourite dishes. He spoke with genuine enthusiasm about his menu and that passion and the attention to detail came though in his cooking, with none of the tell tale signs of pre-made sauces that blight so many Indian restaurants.

By now, the combination of beer, pork scratchings, more beer and our meal had taken its toll and we finished our meal with a glass each of juice from the Kokum, a fruit I had tried when in Goa and Mumbai, well known for its restorative properties. With this we chewed in a couple of Paan, a traditional palate cleanser and breathe freshener, made with areca nut wrapped in betel leaf and here also with a little candied fruit.

A suitable way to end an excellent meal and to bring our bill up to £78 (er, did I mention we fitted in a bottle of wine too?) Although certainly not on the cheap side of things it definitely represents good value for a meal of real merit from a chef who patently knows what he is doing.

It’s a long old way from Shoreditch to Hammersmith, but I suspect it wont be too long before I make a return visit to Indian Zing even if there is not the added bonus of half a dozen pints of mild in the first place.

THE ANGLESEA ARMS: AN ISLAND OF GOOD TASTE

If Gastropubs were like football teams The Anglesea Arms was once at the top its game. Back in the day (sorry) when the Gastropub was quite a rare bird indeed and it was seen as a means of producing good, uncomplicated food in casual surroundings and not as a delivery mechanism for hosing punters with massively marked up, pre-cooked food, The Anglesea Arms was generally acknowledged as the Head Honcho, the Chairman of The Board, the Big Cheese, if you will.

Places like The Eagle and The Peasant may have been around longer but the queues at the weekend attested to the fact that the cooking at this Hammersmith favourite was a bit special. Then something happened. AA went dark. I heard a rumour saying it was closed. Then HS told me it had got a new chef and apparently was worth trying out again, after all these years.

The Anglesea Arms is situated in a pleasant little area dubbed Brackenbury Village by the estate agents. This is usually a euphemism for a sketchy area that doesn’t have a tree that’s not been vandalised or a postbox free of dangerous graffiti. In this case though the attribution seems apt. Sitting in a pub cooled by larges fans and cradling a pint of Summer Lightning, the rather grim environs of Shepherds Bush (I can’t believe it’s exactly as I left it twenty years ago) and Hammersmith seemed far away.

There’s no booking here, which back in the 90’s might been a problem for the reservation-phobic DH. But now, on a sunny Saturday, people were arriving, sleepy-eyed, in dribs and drabs which meant nabbing a table wasn’t an issue.

I must admit that Summer Menus don’t get me er, tumid, nevertheless the reasonably-priced menu did have a few things that looked worth a punt although another type of fish (or in addition) wouldn’t have hurt.

Six Irish Rock Oysters were good and fresh although they were spawning. Not to the extent of those I had at Racine and not enough to mute the briny taste. It made me wonder though whether a) kitchens recognise this and b) if they do whether they send them out anyway. Just a thought.

Tongue had been cooked, coated in breadcrumbs and fried. The two large discs needed more salt but were still good and meaty. The little salad on the side didn’t really come together although the Tomatoes were excellent and the Marjoram was a nice touch. Some Sauce Gribiche would have been perfect here.

I have the feeling that the Head Chef at The Anglesea runs a tight ship. A request for a bowl of Chips with my Crab necessitated a little conflab in the kitchen before the nice lady serving me said “The kitchen only has a limited portions [of chips]…but you can have some”. The person who requested some after me wasn’t so lucky.

They turned out pretty good though. It seemed like they actually were “Hand Cut” and while not triple-cooked still had a crisp exterior and fluffy insides. A bit like me really.

With the Chips a dressed Crab provided plenty of messy fun. Retrieving smooth, intense, pate-like brown meat and sweet delicate white claw meat was followed by lots of cracking and sucking of exoskeleton and poking of fingers into various Crab orifices to get full value for the £12 price. Apologies to any neighbouring tables witnessing all this.

A Tavel Rose from Domaine De La Mordoree was good gear and went very well with everything although at a stonking 13.5% it belied the reputation of Rose as a light, gluggable Summer drink and had me walking a couple of inches off the ground as I left.

After chancing my arm with the chips finessing my pudding didn’t seem like a good idea. These days the Ice Cream ante has been upped and kitchens with any sort of rep all make their own. The stuff here was fine in taste although the texture too soft and smooth. For me The Bull & Last’s Ice Cream remains a standard.

Summer’s not a good time to really put a kitchen through it’s paces and it would be worth returning here later in the year, Autumn say, when more interesting stuff comes onto the menu. For now The Anglesea Arms remains a decent choice for a long relaxed lunch. If Gastropubs were like football teams The Anglesea Arms would be…Arsenal.

THE RIVER CAFÉ: A NEW BEGINNING AT THE END OF THE LINE

As we trundled along on The Hammersmith & City line towards The River Café, my expectations for our lunch were not as high as I was sure the final bill was going to be. It was years since I had last set foot in the place and my memory of that meal, of its tired cooking and ingredients that failed to support the much declared search for the finest available, still left a bitter taste in my mouth.

I had railed against it ever since and only persuaded HP to go on this occasion because we were to write about it for someone else, just as we were for St John a few weeks earlier.

Like St. John, The River Café is one of London’s great iconic restaurants and, like St John it too was emerging from a recent refurbishment although for altogether less positive reasons. Also, like St John, I was expecting our meal at The River Café to confirm what I already suspected, that this was a restaurant resting on its expensive, carefully sourced laurels while young upstarts elsewhere took what Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray had started to new levels. It was an expectation reinforced when we arrived bang on time for our reservation, don’t you dare be late here, to be shown to a tiny table, close enough to our neighbours that we could share body warmth in a chilly dining room as we were given the menu with its legendarily scaring pricing structure.

However, once a bowl of bread was placed on our table and we had torn off chunks to dip in a superb olive oil, we took time to actually read the menu. While the prices still lead to a bill higher than the GDP of some emerging nations, they no longer stand alone in that regard in London and, in fact, some of the dishes looked positive value for money, particularly if they turned out to be as good as they sounded.

And, there is the rub with The River Café. If your schtick is predicated on phenomenal ingredients not screwed around with, you have nowhere to hide. On my last visit slack execution made the whole experience a dispiriting one, but HP’s first bite of his signature starter, char grilled squid with chilli flakes and rocket had him glancing at me with that look which can only mean “we might have some fun here” It was good, better than I recall, with the soft, almost buttery squid taking on the heat of the chilli and the pepper of the rocket to perfect effect.

I was less convinced with my Puntarelle “a la Romana” unless that is “a la Romana” means that the small shoots of cicoria should be sloshed too liberally with red wine vinegar. Although I polished it off, at £13 so would you, each bite made my mouth pucker like a reticent sphincter in a gay bathhouse.

A shared pasta dish brought my opinions back into line with HP. Perfect sheets of pappardelle stood up to a bite, as they should and came with just enough coating of a sauce of hare cooked slowly in Chianti for both to express themselves through a strong seasoning of bay and a covering of parmesan. While the small balls of shot that had seen off our little scampering main ingredient almost cracked a tooth, they did at least give evidence to its wild provenance.

The sight of Ruth Rogers in the kitchen reassured us that someone would be looking at the plates before they came to our table and that same look from HP as he took his first slice from a huge tranche of meaty turbot roasted with marjoram and lemons, confirmed that, even at £32 a pop, this was a megastar dish. Better even than my own choice of Fegato, which came to the table perfectly cooked to medium rare and in a messy, ugly but entirely delicious sauce of balsamic and crème fraiche. Serious dishes from a kitchen at the very top of its game.

Famously, The River Café cookbook contains a recipe for Chocolate Nemesis, a recipe that few, if any, have been able to replicate. So, while HP persuaded one of our incredibly friendly and efficient servers to bring him scoops of ice cream that went with all the other dishes, I plumped for that. The ice cream was, of course, superb and HP wiped the bowl clean. The nemesis, well, it was a chocolate cake and how good can a chocolate cake get? Actually, in this case, very good indeed, moist and rich.

With such focus on its pricing, you would expect the wine list to bring sobs from all but the uber-rich. However, it is surprisingly sensible and although they were out of our first two choices, a bottle of Farone and another of Nero D’avola served the meal well and did not bite the wallet too hard. By the time we came to coffee and post dessert grappa, we were glad of the paper tablecloths as our server scribbled the names of our boozy drinks it to help us remember and then slipped us our bill once we had sipped enough clear spirit to numb the oncoming pain.

Of course, it’s not cheap and our bill approached £200, but remove the grappa and one bottle of wine and pro rata their VAT and service and our meal here, with its outstanding moments, was not much above our poor meal at St. John. It convinced us that, while the latter was on the wane, the layoff here at The River Cafe has only served to reinvigorate this once weary veteran to a point where we could see it being around for at least another twenty years.