TERROIRS: TERRIBLE

My apologies for some of the pictures in today’s blog post. They really aren’t terribly good, but then that seems particularly appropriate because our meal at Terroirs, one of London’s current restaurant hotspots, really wasn’t terribly good either.

But, I am getting ahead of myself.

It is HP’s birthday next week and, as I shall be out of town on the day itself we scheduled a celebratory supper last night at Terroirs. We had visited the restaurant once before, sitting at the bar for a few snacks before a meal at Goodman, and were not overly impressed by the offer of warm sherry and oily duck scratchings. Since then, the restaurant has opened a large cellar restaurant space and garnered rave reviews from just about everyone. I still had my doubts, but it was HP’s birthday and his choice. With age, apparently does not always come wisdom.

The new (ish) space is lovely, lively and buzzing and our table, over looking the bar gave us the perfect chance to watch the comings and goings of the staff as we drank a glass of Vouvray and munched on a bowl of scratchings and tapenade. The scratchings had not improved since our last visit. Indeed, they tasted like they could have been made on our last visit and left a claggy taste in the mouth. The tapenade was better and came served with some excellent, thin crostini.

When you eat out as much as we do, your first instincts about a restaurant usually turn out to be the correct ones and my first tastes of our three shared starters confirmed what we suspected about Terroirs on our previous brief visit. The place may be jumping and the menu may read well, but the execution is sloppy and the final results depressing.

A dish of clams with ham and chilli came with enough added salt to make my blood pressure medication worthless. A salad of smoked duck breast with beetroot and hazelnuts should have made the most of terrific ingredients but swamped them with so much dressing as to make any flavours impossible to detect. Even a plate of the best anchovies on earth from Cantabria in Spain, served with toast and shallots, proved to be one salty dish too far and had us fighting over the water bottle.

So much has been said about Terroirs addition of the Provencal classic, chicken roasted with forty cloves of garlic, to its menu that we decided it would be worth the forty-five minute wait to experience it prepared in the style of the late, great Keith Floyd. There is something decadent about sharing a whole roast chicken between two people in a restaurant and I still have regular daydreams about the blackleg chicken with foie gras and fried bread at Petite Maison.

There was a loud, strange whirring noise when Terroirs’ example was brought to the table. It was the sound of the late, great Keith Floyd spinning in his grave at what they had done to the lovely dish he popularised in the early 1980’s. At its best, chicken cooked in this way should offer up moist flesh, a skin crisped to golden, simple cooking juices and soft garlic cloves from which the pulp can be squeezed on to bread or directly into your mouth. Instead, while the plate looked impressive (there’s a theme here) all it offered up was grease and lots of it. The skin was flaccid and unpleasant and while the chicken was juicy, none of the subtle flavour from the slow cooked garlic seemed to have permeated the meat during the cooking process. The gravy too lacked depth, but particular ire has to be reserved for the roast potatoes, attractive looking golden hunks of starch, which promised much but tasted actively nasty in the way that only roast potatoes that have been pre-cooked and reheated can. Their casing was tough and the insides had a slightly stale taste that had us pushing the bowl to the side.

For all the plaudits its menu is receiving, the truth is Terroirs is a wine bar, set up by wine people, serving not great food and it is only to sample its extensive and interesting wine list that we would ever choose to return. HP was keen to try their speciality of natural wines and for £27.50 we chose a 2009 Cuvée Octobre, bottled immediately the Syrah grapes come from the vines and served chilled. It is interesting to say the least, but not in a good way, so after a couple of gulps and a shudder, I left it to HP to polish off while I ordered a small pot of a much more agreeable Marcillac.

The bad taste left in the mouth by the chicken meant we skipped dessert and were presented with a bill for a whopping £126 including a charge for service which was friendly enough when you could catch the servers eye as they scurried around the packed dining room. A lot to pay for a meal which only served to confirm what we had suspected from our previous visit.

As I said before, your first instincts about a place usually turn out to be the correct ones and, as if to prove it, we raised our spirits and a last glass to HP’s birthday in the splendid bar of Rules. We had visited the bar within a couple of days of its opening and our first instincts told us that Brian Silva would make this one of the “must visit” cocktail bars in London.

We were right about that, I am pleased t say. I am a lot less pleased to say we were also absolutely right about Terroirs.

EATING FOR BRITAIN: A DAY IN THE KITCHEN AT RULES

With the writing for EATING FOR BRITAIN well under way, it is interesting to see what sort of picture is being formed of Britain past and present by its food. It is not meant to be a history book. There would be little point to that when Colin Spencer has already completed that mammoth task better than anyone else has and probably ever will. However, amongst what I hope will be amusing and readable chapters of my journeys to meet producers, chefs, farmers and shop owners, I hope there will still be enough information to form a worthwhile opinion about the way we eat in the UK.

While the notion that the Industrial Revolution and rationing fractured links to a glorious past of rural abundance and recipes passed from grandmother to mother to daughter may be far fetched, so is the idea that all strata of society viewed food as fuel and of function rather than of beauty. Feasting and fine dining may have only been the pleasures of the wealthy few, but that does not mean they did not exist. Just as they do today for those who wander around, er Borough Market to buy their produce.

You will thank God that there is actually a point to this, as a little over a week ago, I spent a day in the kitchen of a restaurant which truly does have links with our past, Rules. Opened two hundred and fifteen years ago as an Oyster house, Rules was a last chance for Thomas Rule who had led what their history calls a “wayward” life. Over the years, it seems to have maintained that slightly louche appeal and it is little wonder that King Edward VII made it his venue for a bit of rough with Lilly Langtry.

I have always been a fan of Rules, even as it went through a down period in the 1990’s when waiters wandered around with mini computers taking your orders and some wines were listed as “from the former colonies” Now, after considerable refurbishment and the opening of London’s best cocktail bar, it seems to have regained much of it’s former glory. The kitchen too had its challenges until five years ago, when the owner, John Mayhew brought in Richard Sawyer as Head Chef. Richard, is the sort of “old school” chef whose food I always love to eat, with years at the Savoy followed by almost as many working with Michel Bourdin at The Connaught behind him before he finally pitched up at Rules.

I had asked Richard if he and his crew could show me how to make two dishes for my book; Potted Shrimps and Steak & Kidney Pudding. Staples of the Rules menu for just about ever, these dishes really do have a link with our past. The earliest cookery manuals giving advice on potting for preservation and Hannah Glasse's instructions on how to make a good beef & oyster pudding are precious little different to making the ones I would see today.

Richard was already monitoring deliveries when I arrived and half of the thirty-person brigade were at their sections preparing for the fully booked lunchtime service. I was soon dressed in whites and then spent the next seven hours wandering around the kitchen trying not to get in anyone’s way as I flashed away with my camera and recorded video footage of the dishes being made.

You can see from my pictures and videos that, while I certainly saw the two dishes I had come in search of being prepared, thanks to the generosity of Senior Sous Chef’s Paul and Gary, I also saw a whole lot more during my time in the kitchen. The first thing that struck me was how quiet the place was with little shouting as people got on with their tasks in a hugely professional manner. The second was the quality of the ingredients, delivered in a constant stream down a steel chute from street level to await inspection by Richard. Whole Salmon, Plaice and Halibut ready to be trimmed by Richard himself. Lobsters from Scotland and The Scilly Isles, Beef from Rules's own closed herd of Belted Galloway and young grouse and roe deer from their own Lartington Estate. It’s impressive stuff and, as Richard himself put it

“If you can’t get excited about ingredients like this, you must be dead”

As the lunch service approached, I watched the two dishes I had come to see being prepared and the care both Paul and Gary took confirmed to me why they usually form my first two choices whenever I visit Rules. While I knew they were well made, in my ignorance, I had little idea that so much work went into making the relatively small portions that make it onto the plate.

When it came time to choose my own lunch, however, I shied away from my normal choices and turned my attention to the fabulous looking grouse that sat in the cool room ready to be roasted. I am one of those people who like their game to taste of game, so the notion of eating grouse a mere nine days after The Glorious 12th would normally not appeal, but when Paul showed me one plated up ready to head to the restaurant, I changed my mind and asked for one of my own, which they offered me as their guest.

It had been pan fried on each side to take on some colour and then just roasted for fifteen minutes and rested for a further ten minutes until the flesh was a perfect and consistent pink. It was topped off with bacon andsat on a bed of hispi cabbage sweated off with chestnuts and lardons. Traditionally, the livers would have been served with the grouse, but at Rules they use a duck liver pate and then serve the bird with the classic accompaniments of Madeira sauce, game chips, breadcrumbs, Cumberland sauce and bread sauce topped with a thick slick of clarified butter. Quite frankly, it's superb stuff and I stood at the pass gnawing at the bones and spooning the sauces into my mouth until I realised that I was in the way of service.

My time in the kitchen at Rules was coming to an end. I stopped for half an hour to watch Richard trimming three large saddles of Roe deer, removing every last scrap of meat until what remained looked like the result of a piranha attack. Then I did a quick round of the kitchen to say a heartfelt “thank you” for the good humour and generosity of the staff as I asked stupid questions and got in the way

I am hoping that my time at Rules will make an interesting chapter for the book, but what I am certain of is that after my time there, I shall never look at the restaurant or the dishes that come from its kitchen in quite the same way ever again.

RULES: GAME ON AT LONDON'S BEST NEW BAR

HERMANO PRIMERO SPEAKS
It was a cold and wet evening. I was in London's famous West End to meet HS but being a bit early I'd whiled away some time in Stanfords looking at maps and planning our next Iberian adventure. There was still some time to kill before we met up so I went looking for a small boîte where I could have a quiet drink and contemplate life, the universe and well, everything.

All the pubs were full, packed with the lager swilling B&T crowd. As I passed Rules Restaurant I thought about DH's last visit to this famous old institution. I remembered an old guy lunching by himself. He'd been seated at what was his usual table and was brought what was his usual drink: a Martini. Very dry. Very cold. With a twist. Maybe Rules had a bar ?

I entered and enquired if I could just have a drink. The FOH motioned towards a door I'd never noticed before. I went through the door and up the stairs where a member of staff welcomed me with a friendly "Will you be joining us for a drink this evening ?". I liked this place immediately. The bar was small with just a handful of tables, some occupied by groups enjoying a preprandial glass of champagne.

I ordered a Dry Martini. It came in a chilled conical glass and was very good. I chatted with the bartender, Michael, about cocktails, unusual bitters and the like and ordered another drink. This time a Negroni, made with Cinzano Orancio and finished with some Poire William. An excellent cocktail with all the flavours coming through separately yet working
perfectly in unison. This was obviously a place which took its drinks seriously. I needed to find out more. This was obviously a job for that student (for we never stop learning) of the cocktail: Hermano Segundo.

HERMANO SEGUNDO SPEAKS
Regular readers of the blog will have noticed that HP is the less binary of DH. He is more forgiving of bad restaurants (well, some anyway) and less gushing about good ones. So, as I sat at the bar of The Cork & Bottle on Saturday, sipping on a very good but very expensive Albariño, I was surprised to receive an effusive phone call from him regaling tales of a new and “secret” bar just opened in a former private dining room at London’s oldest restaurant, Rules.

Cocktails are rapidly becoming an obsession with me to rival that of food (cut to image of image of Dr Choudry shaking head as he looks at reports of high liver enzymes) and I truly believe that the great cocktail mixers are as talented and passionate as great chefs. They are usually nicer people too, but that’s story’s for another time.

The man in charge is Brian Silva. Formerly of The Connaught and one of the revered quartet old school of bartenders that included Salvatore Calabrese, Peter Dorelli from the American Bar at The Savoy and Gilberto Preti of Duke’s, Brian has now turned his considerable skills to the revival of the bar at Rules and has created what is arguably the most interesting back bar in the city with many bottles from his own collection.

After making sure he was due to be working, DH bundled up on a cold Tuesday night to find Brian busy mixing Sazeracs, the oldest cocktail of all, for a couple at the bar and we quickly decided that we should stand at watch the expert rather than sit on the rather uncomfortable seats. Usually, I am slightly didactic when it comes to cocktails believing that the mixer’s skill in making one of five cocktails (for the record, The Manhattan, The Martini, The Sazerac, The Old Fashioned and The Daquiri) tells you all you need to know, but when presented with a man of Brian’s provenance and obvious ability I was happy to leave myself in his hands.

What followed was a happy blur of the mixer’s art. Slings, sours, new twists on Bloody Mary’s and even a slightly wicked concoction using Absinthe, which I had to push away for fear of the inevitable consequences. Like a successful tasting menu in a great restaurant, not everything worked for me but the flawless execution in the making was apparent. Also like me, Brian thinks cocktails should be about booze and balance not fruit. In an age when untrained barmen think throwing as many berries in a glass and adding 'tini at the endof the name is cocktail making, his mixing is a welcome oasis to so much of the dross out there.

It is not all flawless, but appropriately for a place that has changed glacially over the last two centuries, Rules is taking it steady and doing it properly. Some sofas are being made for those of a larger behind and gamey bar snacks will soon be on offer alongside the slabs of well kept Monty’s Cheddar already available. With cocktails beginning at £10.50, comparable to many hotels and mixing of this quality, DH have quickly marked down this little gem of a bar as one of our “go to” places when the wicked world gets too much for us.