KIPFERL: A SMITHFIELD SAUSAGE

A swift lunch today after a spending a splendid morning making chocolate under the tutelage of master chocolate maker, Paul A. Young in Islington.

It was my new chum, excellent food writer, William Leigh who told me that there was “this new Nordic place near Smithfield market doing hot dogs” which got me excited, particularly as one of the favourite snacks during my journey was at Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur, a hot dog stand in Reykjavik.

Well, he was only slightly out. Kipferl is in Smithfield, but is Austrian, has been around for five years and doesn’t serve hot dog sausages but Teutonic wurst. Still, I can forgive him, because I have been walking past this place for as long as it has been opened and never stepped inside, which means I have been missing out on a very decent lunch option.

Our “Kipferl Special” to which we added an extra debreziner sausage came with three salads of cucumber, beets and potatoes with the inevitable slice of rye bread and for £7 provided a filling lunch to take the edge of the jitters caused by a morning spent sampling so much chocolate.

Now, I just need someone to tell me where I can find a real Nordic hot dog. Any ideas?

ST JOHN: THE CHILD IS THE FATHER OF THE MAN

I think when Gerard Manley Hopkins (amongst others) wrote that line he was referring to the unity of youth and adulthood, but underlying it too, is the sense that as parents grow older and then old, the roles of carer and cared for are reversed with their maturing offspring.

I thought of this last night as I had my first supper at St John (a jolly for the launch of Trotter Gear aside) for nearly over two years. It was, in fact one of the first posts on our then nascent blog and, looking back on what was written about that meal, St. John’s place in the upper echelons of London dining was already under threat as we were served a meal memorable only for tired cooking and over pricing.

Since then, the challenge from ex St. John alumni and those inspired by Fergus’s “Nose to Tail” philosophy has grown from a baby’s rattle to an incessant teenage din with the opening of Great Queen St, Hereford Road, Magdalen and enough other modern British dining rooms to make you feel that this sorry country of ours is actually threatening to deliver its own cuisine at last. DH were keen to see if St. John, after its recent refurbishment, could still compete with the young contenders.

Precious little has changed from our combined total of over fifty previous visits. There is a fresh lick of paint on the walls, some uber modern Dyson hand dryers in the toilets and, er that’s about it. The bar remains buzz central for London’s media and fashion juniors and the dining room retains its stark smokehouse austerity.

The menu style, now copied all over the world, is little changed too, five word descriptions, the token choice for fish eaters and vegetarians and enough game and offal to please any would be Bourdain, but the ingredients are now so common in London it lacks the ability to shock that was once one of its main selling points.

If the dishes don’t shock, the pricing does. St. John was never cheap, but notions of value seem to have been thrown out with the old loo fittings. HP’s classic starter of “Roast Bone Marrow & Parsley Salad” came in at £6.80. It is still a great dish, but HP, who dined at St. John in its opening weeks, declared that it had probably “jumped the shark” at the turn of the Millennium. My starter of “Venison Saddle & Celeriac” was a whopping £9.50, which became even more painful when I was presented with a plate containing four slices of the beast so thin you could read the price on the menu through them. The ingredients themselves were top notch, superb celeriac remoulade and perfectly pink venison, but I could not help think when I saw plates with only three slices going out later in the evening that the piss was very much being placed in the taken category.

An Ox Heart main course came with chips. Bad chips. There was a reason why St.John only ever used to do chips when they had tripe on the menu, that’s because they never knew how to cook them properly. These could have done with another frying and been about half as thick. I always say that you should work as hard eating the meat of an animal as they did growing it. This Ox must have worked damn hard because the tough slices, resembling slices of a kebab, required plentiful chewing to release their lovely offal flavour.

HP’s Lamb’s Tongues was a real misfire. Served with Borlotti beans, the delicate little morsels had been slow cooked to mushiness and had consequently lost their flavour. The beans added little and at a little shy of £17, you have to think there are a whole load of little lambs out there who can’t talk for no good reason.

If main courses failed, puddings were, as always, a delight. Prune & Armagnac Ice Cream for HP inevitably and Ginger loaf with butterscotch sauce and cinnamon ice cream for me, proving that this ageing old girl can still pull out the stops when she wants too.

The bill, a massive £120 included a tip for service which was as friendly but slightly awkward. A bottle of Pic St Loup was added to by the generous contribution of a couple of glasses of vieille prune from top General Manager, Thomas Blythe and sent us staggering out into the increasingly chilly night air.

I can’t help feeling that we are not the only ones staggering. St. John has always been an important restaurant for DH, the daddy of modern British food, but on last night’s showing it feels like an elderly relative that people come to visit because they think they should, not because they enjoy it. I think I may well be spending more time with the children from now on.

HIX OYSTER AND CHOP HOUSE

And they wandered in
From the city of St. John (Slight Return)

Of course this is where I should have been yesterday to celebrate St George’s Day. If anything shouts, nay, screams Britain (sorry, England) it’s Mark Hix’s food. It was still in soft opening mode though and I was told things weren’t running quite tickety-boo. They still weren't when I visited on opening day. Disappointingly the cooking at the Hix Oyster and Chop House just doesn’t pass muster.

I was dining out with one of my foodie chums which was good because it enabled us to have a reasonable stab at the menu – even my gargantuan (ok, greedy guts) appetite is rather on the wane these days.

I didn’t think much of the room or its furnishings: the table was wobbly, the chairs were uncomfortable and you couldn’t hang your jacket on the back of them. There were loads of ceiling fans that I just found distracting and didn’t seem to serve any purpose other than ornamental. It all came across like an attempt at a slightly upmarket Café Rouge.

The menu looked a bit cut down from the one I’d seen on the website but it still read well with lots of good things to choose from. Oysters were served as at Brown’s with the shells on and with meat still attached which meant much messing around with blunt knives. Irritating. Serving them on seaweed just seems like an affectation to me – ice is, as they say, best by test. They tasted good although I’ve had better natives earlier in the season. They didn’t quite have the depth and length of flavour of the best examples.

Of the starters I preferred the Rabbit Brawn although my dining companion wondered how many rabbits you’d need to make it – their heads being not particularly large. In any case it was dense and meaty and tasted of bunny but the portion was rather parsimonious for £8.25. The little accompanying salad of peas and pea shoots was a good idea and tasted fresh and lively. I know Mr Hix’s aim is to make the dishes as plain as possible but some toast wouldn’t have gone amiss here.

They must have been burning five pound notes to make the Smoked Salmon. It’s the only explanation I can think of why three smallish slivers of farmed salmon come in at £10.75. The taste of smoke dominated.

Skate Knobs were fish nuggets fried in a Panko-like covering. Served in a loose, sharp, caper mayonnaise they’d been fried as well as could be expected but like a lot of similar dishes they had a sort of Findus-like quality about them. The solid chunks of fish flesh within were tasty though.

From what I’ve read, Mark Hix’s aim is to try and give the place the feel of an American Steakhouse (now where’ve I heard that before). So the focus should definitely be on the meat. Unfortunately, this is where the food was weakest.

A Bacon Chop lacked fat and flavour. It was cooked rare (too much so for my taste). I know pork and shellfish is a tried and trusted combination but in this case the cockles and laverbread seemed like they’d come from another dish.

Onglet looked a bit better but there was a burnt taste to the meat which was not pleasant. My dinner companion also noted that it was a bit overcooked. A marrow bone had been split and filled with what I think was a marrow bone gremolata and then baked. It just tasted of baked breadcrumbs to me. The best part of the main courses were the sides. Chips, Onion Rings and Béarnaise were all good. A table next to us had the Porterhouse which looked a much better bet on the meat front.

Puddings, enthusiastically priced at £6.75, were not impressive - they looked as if they’d just been chucked on the plate. Buttermilk drop scones were a bit tough and served with a sickly-sweet honeycomb ice cream. Amadei Chocolate mousse was just that. I liked the truffles.

Service was ok – there were plenty of staff milling around – but there were a couple of hiccups. They supersized our wine from a £24 bottle to a £44 quid one although to be fair when I pointed it out they deducted the difference. Also, looking at the bill later on I noticed they overcharged us on two of the starters. Only by a couple of quid, but still.

I’ve got my doubts about Mark Hix. I’m sure in person he’s a decent enough chap but the media portrayal of him some sort of vanguard of British food strikes me as PR-generated guff because he’s failed to deliver on my last two outings to gaffs he’s been associated with. Of course, he’s not doing the cooking at The Albermarle or Hix Oyster and Chop House, but he was here the night I went so presumably he had some control over the dishes going out. And what went out was pretty mediocre.

Still, mediocre goes down a bomb in London these days – it’s more about the scene, you see – and given the Chop House’s prime location I’m sure it will do very well commercially. There are enough know-nothing City boys and Meeja types in the area to make it so. Me, I’m not a fan of artifice so I’m going to continue patronise Vinoteca round the corner. By far the best option in the nabe in my humble opinion.

THE FOX & ANCHOR and LA PLAZA: POST CHRISTMAS TURKEYS

Since returning to London from up North, DH have been out and about trying a few places that have been on the radar for a while but have not yet come high enough in the reckoning to pay a visit.

On Thursday, towards the tail end of a pub crawl, which involved pints at The Dolphin, The Ship Inn and The Mitre, we found ourselves stepping into the recently refurbished Fox & Anchor in Smithfield.

Now owned by the people of Mal Maison, it has been given the full treatment and certainly looks the part on the inside, but there’s the rub. It is, as my blessed mum would have said, “all fur coat and no knickers” with all the thought going on the décor and none going on the food or the drink, well certainly not on the quality, at least.

I guess it is no longer fair to call it a pub anymore. It has been designed to give visiting tourists from the hotel nearby, or those who have paid £165 to stay in one of their own rooms, the feeling they are in a “real” pub with out actually having the possibility of coming in contact with dangerous locals.

So, beer is poured in “ye olde London Towne” glass bottom metal tankards and they offer bowls of pork scratchings and cockles whch sat on an otherwise dpepressing looking oyster bar.

But, the beer is wretchedly kept, we left most of our pints, and served by staff, who may be friendly enough but don’t have a clue about what they are serving. The pork scratchings, £1.50 for a tiny bowl, were nothing of the sort being blobs of chewy cold pork.

I don’t dislike the Malmaison group and, when they have the common sense to have a steak option in the hotel restaurant, they usually make a decent stab at it. So, it may well be that the food coming out of the full kitchen I saw downstairs will be reasonable, particularly at breakfast.

But, on this showing, I think it is strictly one for the tourists.

Yesterday saw more disappointments. First up a trip to see I AM LEGEND, one of the lousiest pieces of cinema junk I have seen in a long time. So bad, it would smell on ice. You know a film is bad when the lead is out acted by a dog.

Still, the idea of a person being all on his own apart from a bunch of savages seems appropriate as supper was going to be in West London (we go there so you don’t have to)

It really is a different country. They do things differently there.

A couple of bad pints in non-descript pubs saw us pitch up at the bottom of Tavistock Rd and a relatively new Tapas bar, La Plaza which opened, I think, in Summer.

Unlike OOPS, this had a lot going for it. Run by a Galician couple, it looked the part of a typical Spanish bar with a functional comida section and a bar stocked with odd looking bottles of mysterious liquor.

The menu too looks the part with Galician specialities like pulpo and chiperones to make you think that they know what they are doing.

It is a shame then that the food turned out to be so average. Not actively horrible, but bar a couple of dishes, no better than chain places than La Tasca and certainly a notch below the bar raised by El Faro etc.

We gave it a good go and ordered 80% of the tapas menu which all came out in rather too rapid a succession.

The Pulpo was probably the highlight, creamy and served, as it should be on a wooden board with potatoes and sprinkled with paprika. But the croquettas, a sure sign of a Spanish bars intentions, were lumpy and unpleasant.

Chorizo cooked in wine was not unpleasant and Zorza, pork with paprika had the right punchiness. The Gulas were described as baby eels on the menu which, of course, they were not, or the dish would have been ten times the price. These are the reconstituted seafood shreds you can buy in any supermarket in Spain. The equivalent, if you will of crabsticks.
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The Alitas were luke warm and tasted actively strange. The pimientos de padron were served suitably blackened and salty, but in a parsimonious portion that would make even The Hart Brothers blush in shame

In Spain, the notion of moving from bar to bar means that you can select the best from each place before moving on. Here, In London, we don't have that option so tapas means experiencing the good, the bad and the indifferent in one place. Unfortuinately, La Plaza offered more of the last two options than the first.

A bottle of Martin Codax, well priced at under £20, brought the bill up to £70 to which we added £10 for service which was suitably Spanish. A large amount but, again reflecting our desire to try as many things on the menu as possible. A normal meal for two with wine and coffee would come in about £60.

La Plaza is certainly may not be worth crossing town for but I guess that is better than The Fox & Anchor, which is not worth crossing The Goswell Road for.

LIKE A BIT OF THE COCK TAVERN IN THE MORNING ?

Blogspot has been down nearly all day and it is only now that I can share with you how splendid my breakfast at The Cock Tavern was this morning in words AND loving pictures.

Mind you, that kind of sums up my life right now. Lousy enough to make me think that any day I don’t jump off a tall building is a bonus (There will be more about tall buildings later, keep up).

I have a day off which has been oh so much fun. A long session at the Osteopath first thing as he attempted to relieve a back problem that is painful enough to mean that I have had no sleep in a week and am barely able to sit. Enter HP with sympathetic noises about “buying a rubber ring”

Then, talking of leaping off tall buildings (see) I went to see Superman Returns not realising it was three hours long. Three hours of sitting on a damaged sacral bone was not my wisest move and I had to get a cab home and am now laid prone on the sofa. You'll believe a grown man can cry.

Still, as my dear granny always said, a good brekkie will set you up for most things. So, this morning, as I cannot train at the moment but am not able to sleep, I decided to head to Smithfield Market and join the cheery porters for their breakfast at The Cock Tavern at a little before 7am this morning.

A pretty full on thing it was too. Sausage, egg, bacon, livers, kidney, black pudding, tomatoes and beans. Along with a large mug of “builder’s” tea, it came to a massive £7.40. Good value and good quality. The kidneys, in particular were a thing of beauty and managed to cheer me up for an all too brief moment.

No sign of any “cheery” porters though. The place was almost empty when I first arrived apart from a group of drunken Scots taking advantage of the unusual licensing laws. By a count of the numbers of empties on their table, I guess they had taken quite a lot of advantage.

After 7am, as the market began to wind down, more porters began to arrive and fill the room with their fun loving Cock-er-ney banter. I left just as the men at the next table began to describe in all too graphic detail what they would like to do to Jordan. That was too much for me on a full stomach.

Still it was a very nice breakfast indeed ,and now the cretins at Blogspot have got things sorted, you don't have to take my words for it.