THE LORD CLYDE: GETTING THE PUB BASICS RIGHT

A few years ago, when I had a real job and worked just off the Essex Road, I used to occasionally take the long route home to get an added bit of exercise. My walk would take me towards the Balls Pond Road and past what always looked to me like one of the roughest boozers in London, Kendrick’s. It was the sort of place where they think you are slightly suspect if you have your own teeth. I actually popped in once out of curiosity. Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t made particularly welcome and slunk back out again after finishing half a pint of gassy, bad beer.

Once I departed publishing (three years ago at the beginning of March if can you believe it) my commute shortened from a mile or so to the time it took to walk from the bedroom to my sofa. I had no reason to ever pass the pub again since I left the office for the last time and had not given it a second thought in the intervening years.

It was HP who first informed me that things had changed since my last visit. Our current pub of choice, The Old Fountain, is unfortunately one of those that is closed at the weekend and, one evening, when we were both desperate for a Saturday evening pint, he recalled that a local pub, The Lord Clyde had just been awarded “Best Overall Pub” by that excellent website Fancy A Pint

It was not until we turned the corner onto the Essex Road that I realised the pub was actually Kendrick’s refurbished and re-badged. The new owners had not done a bad job either obviously spending at a lot of time, in the two or so years they had owned the place, quietly getting the basics right rather than trumpeting themselves as the second coming of British cuisine like so many of the new generation of gastropubs. Although they served food, The Lord Clyde (run in conjunction with Enterprise Inns, who also work with The Harwood Arms) still felt like a real pub rather than a restaurant with a small bar area.

We had two pints each of very well kept real ale and almost inevitably a scotch egg and bowl of pork scratchings to go with them. There was enough about the beer, the friendly service and the bar snacks to make us note down The Lord Clyde as a pub for further DH attention. When I had the sort of gap in my stomach yesterday that could only be filled with a decent pint and a pub lunch, I decided to walk up and give them another try.

The bar is sizable and, but for the fact it is filled with comfortable chairs and the glow from a real fireplace, could look a little austere. The landlord being a Sussex boy, told me, that he always makes sure they have Harvey’s as one of their real ales and he slowly dispensed the perfect, full pint for me. Unlike HP who dislikes jugs (no sniggering at the back) I am ambivalent about what receptacle pubs serve my beer in, it is usually gone quickly enough for the glass shape not to matter. This pint certainly went down well enough vanishing almost before I had moved to a table to wait for my food.

The menu at The Lord Clyde is pleasingly short and very well priced focusing on “pub grub’ staples that can be done quickly and well to help punters soak up good beer rather than trying to be a fine dining experience. It’s a smart move, one more pubs could follow and a short while after I sat down with my paper, my lunch was popped in front of me.

Even though I am still digesting a whole heap of dead cow from Monday’s Blokes Eat Beef event I was tempted by the hamburger. It arrived with an accompanying bowl of chips and a side order of onion rings. The hamburger was not bad at all. Made with good beef, given a char from the grill and served on a decent bun, which soaked up the juices, which dribbled from the patty.

The owners of The Lord Clyde are obviously not interested in the current “Best Burger in London” conversation and, as with the beer, are just concentrating on getting the basics right. On the whole they achieve their aim, even putting aside my own bugbear wanting my food served on a plate rather than on a plank of wood. The advertised slice of Cheddar was a bit on the miserly side and the chips, despite being of the ubiquitous “tripled-cooked” variety were soft and floury and, obviously way, way too fat.

It is the onion rings however, which should be singled out for real praise. These are some of the best I have eaten, well just about anywhere. Grease free crunchy batter (made with Harvey’s Bitter and cold soda water) gave way to soft, sweet onions in a display of perfect deep frying that would make me want to head back to The Lord Clyde just to order a plate of these to go with my beer.

As it is, I am sure I shall be making the effort to walk up to The Lord Clyde again soon. There are all too few pubs in London offering a full pint of great beer along with a short food menu of competently prepared standards. Other pubs which aim higher with considerably more hubris would do well to take note.

LITTLE SARDEGNA: HAPPY IN HIGHBURY

It was after the man turned up with the unfeasibly large pepper grinder that I suggested to HS, half in jest, that the next thing we’d see would be the accordion player. Sure enough, a jolly chap in a trilby turned up as we were eating our main course and proceeded to annoy the hell out of all the diners with his repertoire of operatic hits, transcribed for the squeeze box. I’m just glad he didn’t decide to serenade us. Little Sardegna is that sort of place, though. A typical neighbourhood joint as HS so astutely noted, and a decent one at that.

We’d walked past Little Sardegna when we’d visited Yildiz a few weeks ago and the author of the blog An Australian Eats In London  had posted a comment recommending it to us. HS fancied Italian so after a detour via Upper Street for good drinks at new cocktail bar 69 Colebrooke Row and a less good pint at some anonymous pub we pitched up at the restaurant which is situated on the slightly less lugubrious section of the Blackstock Road (but these things are relative, you understand).

A bit of a tight fit for two hefty Hermanos, Little Sardegna is nonetheless a cosy little place with candles on the table and Dino on the soundsystem. The menu is pretty standard stuff and not notably Sardinian although there was a range of Sardinian Pastas which I’d never encountered before.

A starter of Fegatini Pollo for HS looked as if it had had a few close encounters with the ugly stick but the taste belied its rustic appearance. Chicken Livers, cooked until soft and melting in a good red wine sauce and served over crisp Carta Di Musica delivered the requisite offal/meaty hit. Surprisingly light the dish had HS greedily mopping up the juices in a rather off-putting way.

An Antipasto plate of Cured Meats made the recent example at Villandry look very silly indeed. The slices of good quality Salami, Cotto and other cured meats were mercifully served at room temperature – the only way to truly appreciate cured meats. There was some soft and mild ricotta-like cheese drizzled with honey and strips of a harder variety akin to Manchego Again not the prettiest plateful but generous and tasty.

I really liked HS’s Lorighittas, a handmade semolina based pasta shaped liked little plaits. They’d been cooked and combined with some small sweet clams and cherry tomatoes and the whole covered with shavings of Bottarga. An elegant and delicious combo which I enjoyed finishing whilst HS had a go at my Malluredos.

Malluredos are a type of gnocchetti that look like little maggots. They came in a rich tomato sauce, dotted with nuggets of very porky sausage meat. Perfect with our wine: a Cannonau and just the thing to keep a typical British Summer at bay. It was a big portion and I found it a little hard going after a while but the human hoover sitting opposite me didn’t have a problem.

Disappointingly, from a small dessert selection they were out of Gelati so I wolfed down a good Tiramisu (which really did) and most of HS’s cheese-filled pastry (which didn’t).

As regular readers of the blog will know I’m a bit of a fan of obscure foreign liqueurs (the rougher the better, although I’m not averse to the occasional artisanal variety either). The standard free drink at Little Sardegna is Limoncello but I had my eyes on Mirto, a drink made from Myrtle Berries. Wisely, HS gave me his. As a digestif it worked perfectly, unfortunately the side effect was that my head felt as if it had been filled with wire wool. I like very much.

A total bill of £68 excluding service seemed a bit high but is now pretty much standard for a three course meal in London and given we’d had an a jolly evening (accordion player aside) and enjoyed good service it is but a minor quibble.

The Dos Hermanos Rule of Thumb for Italian restaurants is usually along the lines of “the quality of the cooking is in inverse proportion to the size of the pepper grinder”. In the case of Little Sardegna, happily, that rule doesn’t apply.

GARUFA: MEAT ME AT THE CORNER

My mother always taught me to be polite.

I hold doors open for people, I always say “please” and “Thank you” and I have been known to help people cross a busy road even if they didn’t want to. “Manners maketh Man” she would say and she was right, polite is a good thing.

Well…….. not always. There is a politeness about a certain levels of restaurants in London that is beginning to get right on my wick, particularly places representing the cooking of nations known for their appreciation of life and their vibrant cuisine.

Too many places now are almost apologetic in the way they present food and neuter menus to avoid offending customers, removing some of the best dishes and ingredients because they think that the fraidy cats of good old London town will run squealing into the streets at the sight of a tripe taco or a brain curry.

DH were discussing this at some length as we stared down our mixed Parillada at Garufa, a relatively new Argentinean steakhouse in Highbury. It’s not that the steaks were bad, they weren’t. The meat had decent flavour and they had been cooked rare as requested. It was all just a bit, well, here’s that word again. Apologetic.

It had started well enough. It’s a pleasant room, although we were pleased to be near a radiator when a chill blast swept through every time the door was open. Our server was friendly if a bit hapless not even knowing which cut of steak was which on our mixed grill. Our starters of empanada were even good enough for us to immediately order another portion after our first bite.

But, these places are about the steak and at Garufa they were just, well just too polite. I can forgive the fact that they were not up to the levels I experienced in Buenos Aires it would be silly to expect them to attain such heights. But a great Argentinean grill should conjour up some level of excitement for the meat being served, the burning embers under the grill spitting up flames, the full on seasoning of the flesh by the grill master and the presence of fat without which as HP says “it just becomes dead protein”

It’s culinary theatre and the presentation of the mixed grill with its challenging cuts of steak, plump morcilla, spicy chorizo, crisp entrails and melting provoletta is, at its very best, worthy of a round of applause. Our last supper at Santa Maria in Hackney received just that. At Garufa, we just gave a bit of a weary shrug as we surveyed the tiny cuts of rump, fillet, rib eye and loin and shared out the undistinguished black pudding and chorizo. Their small electric griddle was hidden in the kitchen as if they were ashamed of it and, of course there were no chitterlings that would be far too scary. Even some decent patatas bravas did nothing add to an experience that did little to justify a place in the memory banks.

It’s not cheap with a cheap bottle of Pinot Noir and a shared dessert of ice cream nudging the bill over £90 for the two of us. Too much for a neighbourhood joint and particularly for one that only confirmed our opinion of so many of London’s restaurants