QUO VADIS REDUXING THE REDUX

It's a total biosphere
The farm in the back
(Acapella)

The other day I walked the length of TCR (Tottenham Court Road) without once being accosted by a Street Fundraiser. It was also a Saturday afternoon. This happens to me all the time. Chuggers, as they are uncharitably known, people with clipboards, attractive women handing out free samples of probiotic yoghurt – they all seem to ignore me.

Personal hygene problems ? Nope. Miserable old git ? Hm. Along with all the good characteristics I have inherited from my parents (no tittering at the back) I have unfortunately developed my father’s tendency to walk around with a scowl-like countenance despite feeling pretty happy most of the time.

I’m happy when baby-sitting my nephew and niece (Yes, Boromama* we are allowed to eat as much chocolate as we like and watch unlimited cartoons until midnight as a special treat and no, we are not trying to pull the wool over your eyes). I’m happy when I arrive in Madrid and go into my first bar for my first cold Mahou and smell the heady aroma of coffee, spanish ciggies and fried fish. I’m happy sitting reading the Sports Section on a Sunday sipping an ice cold Dry Martini whilst a big hunk of meat roasts slowly in the overn and The Dan is on the stereogram. Lots of things make me happy, it’s just that I don’t always show it.

Today’s post is about Quo Vadis. I know, I know, I’ve already done two posts about the place but this time I had the Steak and it sort of fits in with all the recent bovine-related posts on Dos Hermanos.

This last visit was on a Friday night after another hard week and by way of a small commiseration. Burn This has not been a success so the run has been cut short with the consequent disbanding of the Steppenwolf Company (South Yorkshire Branch).

It was quite late by the time I ordered and they had run out of a few items so instead of a two starter strategy and went for a surf and turf, as separate courses.

I know people like to go on about how they prefer shellfish like Crab blah blah and indeed blah but you just can’t beat a good Lobster. This Scottish example was a big bugger which had been simply grilled then dressed with a rough tomato concasse. I started eating it with a knife and fork but discarded them pretty quickly in favour of my bare hands, some lobster crackers and one of those pick things for retrieving the last morsel of rich white flesh from the shell. The juices from the lobster had amalgamated with those from the tomatoes to make a nice little sauce which I mopped up with the good bread.

Turf was a thick Sirloin Steak. Cooked rare and with the fat still on this was one of the best steaks I’ve had. I knew it was going to be good because I could smell it as it was brought to the table. Chips were fantastic – they’re probably the best you can get in London at the moment (in my very humble opinion). There was also a very fine béarnaise and some peas from Secrett’s which were a revelation. They were large, very redolent of pea (very pea-y if you will) with a creamy taste, even though there was no cream. With a big glass of Rioja I was very happy indeed.
I was so full so I toyed with the idea of un trou normand but decided some sorbets and a glass of recciotto would work as well.

After a double espresso manager Nikki Barltrop kindly took me though to the kitchen to meet Head Chef Jean Philippe Patruno and show me the meat locker where the big hunks of Lincolnshire Beef are hung (they’re all butchered on site too).

So now I’ve got a new thing to make me happy - eating at Quo Vadis. I’m pretty sure I had a smile on my face when I left. At least I hope so.

*Bengali for eldest maternal uncle

QUO VADIS REDUX

It's a total biosphere
The farm in the back
(Cabaret Voltaire Remix)

I suppose it was inevitable that those days, where my most pressing issue was where to go for lunch, would come to an end and I would be thrown back into the savage world of wage slavery that is the modern workplace. Or in my case treading the boards again: in rep at a small theatre under the Tinsley Viaduct, playing the part of Pale in a new production of Lanford Wilson's Burn This (“Goddamn this fuckin' place”).

By way of celebration I needed no coercing in returning for lunch at my favourite table of the moment: the Hart Brother’s Quo Vadis in Soho. I’d written about it a couple of weeks ago and how it pushed all the right buttons as far as I was concerned: good ingredients, precisely cooked; on the ball service, comfortable dining room. Attention to all details, in other words.

Lunch on this day started off with some Sea Urchin or its gonads to be more precise. Sea Urchin is up there with Caviar and Percebes in terms of its price and also how it divides people into those who ‘get it’ and those who don’t. Like all seafood it needs to be extremely fresh.

This example was excellent: creamy, rich and briny with a slight sweetness. It didn’t need any accompaniment. I was transported back several years to a meal with the younger Hermano at Sushi Yasuda in NYC, considered by many the best place for Sushi in the US. We were sitting at the corner of the bar - Yasuda-san’s station - and because we had expressed a love of Uni, at the end of a tremendous Omakase he comped us big spoonfuls of the stuff. He explained , with a wink, that they were “for the weekend”. Yes, he did know HS was my brother (I think).

Whitebait was the exemplar of this dish. Fresh little fish had been lightly coated in the harina especial para freir or special flour that the Spanish use for preparing fish for frying. It’s USP is that it doesn’t suck up the oil. This fact combined with good technique meant that the coating was crisp and grease free.

The kitchen at Quo Vadis really has a knack with their timing of meat and fish dishes. My Veal Cutlet was cooked so the flesh had just the barest trace of pink. Covered in a little well-judged sage jus, it was of notably good quality. It sat on a small blob of smooth, creamy pommes puree.

On the side were some more of those great chips – although they weren’t quite up to standard of the first batch I’d eaten – and a fresh, simple salad of shaved fennel and heirloom tomatoes.

A pud of Profiteroles could only have been improved by serving the little jug of dark, bitter, Chocolate sauce hot instead of lukewarm. It needed to provide a better contrast with the cold Vanilla ice cream inside the choux pastry buns.

Afterwards, I had a double espresso and rued the absence of the homemade Pacharán or artisanal Orujo Blanco that the Hart’s serve at Barrafina.

So, four different dishes to last time and I’m very happy to report it’s still all good. Keep up the fine work, boys.

Anyway, I’m off now to get in character and brew myself a pot of that nice orange pekoe tea.

QUO VADIS

It's a total biosphere
The farm in the back

Everything I know is wrong.

My culinary adventures or rather expectations have been rather overturned over the past couple of months. I had Gordon Ramsay down as never putting a foot wrong with his restaurants and then going to two in a row (The Warrington and Maze Grill) which although not bad hardly set my pulses racing – more just a big shrug of the shoulders really. Mark Hix does great british food ? Not at the Oyster and Chop House he doesn’t. The Martin Bros are purveyors of blah gastropubs. Right ? Wrong. They’ve just come up with a corker in The Botanist in Sloane Square.

In a similar vein although I thought Barrafina was ok - mainly because Nieves Barragan keeps it more Spanish than it would otherwise be – I found it expensive and didn’t like the self-congratulatory meeja babble and OTT reactions to the place. But then the Hart Brothers go and open Quo Vadis on Dean Street and blow me down if it wasn’t a real gem of a restaurant.

The place has only been open a day but apart from the smell of newly upholstered leather banquettes I felt like I’ve been coming here for years so assured were the cooking and service. The latter in no small part due to restaurant manager Nikki Barltrop, previously with GRH, who was keeping an eagle eye on everything. Boy, could they do with someone like her at Hix Oyster and Chop House.

The interior’s great as well. Those stained glass windows are still there (I’d only been on this side of them once, about twenty years ago), there’s plenty of wood and napery, Riedel glasses, a bit of art on the walls. But everything is nicely restrained, it doesn’t shout at you but just feels like the sort of place you’d want to spend some several hours in. Which is what I did.

The chef, Jean Philippe Patruno, has been brought in from the Hart’s other restaurant Fino and having someone you know and who knows what they’re doing in the kitchen has paid dividends as the food is terrific.

A word first about the butter. It’s from Lincolnshire and has that slight cheesiness and saltiness of the best stuff. The homemade bread is good too but you’ll want to order more just to get your choppers round some more of that butter.

Razor Clams were four big meaty buggers who’d must have put up a hell of a struggle until quite recently. They were cooked in the Spanish style, a la plancha, with lots of parsley, oil and garlic. As good, if not better than I’ve had in Spain.

There was a similar Iberian treatment of Baby Dover Sole which was accurately cooked and simply served with some lemon. The latter swaddled in muslin which always earns bonus points from HS.

I wanted to try the Beef Rib but I’m a bit of a lightweight these days and when I found out its fighting weight was over a kilo I wimped out and chose some Veal Sweetbreads. In no way the lesser option however, the two big glands were the best sweetbreads I’d had for ages – probably since being treated to a birthday meal at Foliage seven years ago. I’m guessing but I think they’d just been cooked in plenty of butter and herbs until just done. They were had a crisp but not oily covering and were creamy and melting within. There was a fresh creamy Tartar sauce on the side which came on more like a tart béarnaise, which was lucky because it went very well with the chips.

To call them chips is really doing the kitchen a bit of a disservice because these were uber-chips. Very crisp on the outside but light and fluffy on the inside these triple-cooked beauties are the sort of chip that would kick sand in the faces of lesser chips. They were, as we say in East London, very “tasty”.

Ice Cream (what else) for dessert wasn’t up to the standards of the stuff I’d had at L’Anima last week but then they are Italians so it’s in their, er, blood.

As is usual these days with upmarket new openings this experience doesn’t come cheap but to be frank I don’t mind so long as I have a good time and the combination of excellent raw materials, careful cooking, spot-on service and overall attention to detail all contributed to one very contented Hermano rolling out the door.

Everything I know is wrong but, you know what, I don’t care.