POPPIES: JEELIED EELS, JELLIED EELS WOBBLING ABOUT LIKE WONKY WHEELS

Jellied Eels? Not bleedin’ likely guv. I think it was probably being force fed them by my grandparents whilst on holiday in Bournemouth that led me to think of them as the Devil’s spawn. HS loves them so go, as they say, figure.

If you really want to try them (and I strongly suggest you don’t) you can get them from Tubby Issacs seafood stall on Petticoat Lane but they also have them at Poppies Fish and Chips a brand, spanking new chippy just opposite Spitalfields Market.

I haven’t had any Fish and Chips for ages and to be honest I hadn’t missed eating them. If you’re going to pig-out on carbs then you might as well do it on carbs of decent quality and there hadn’t been any new openings of note. I also wanted somewhere close by so Poppies suited the bill.

The first shock is how bright the place is. Combine that with an interior decorated like a Piccadilly Circus souvenir shop and 50’s hits playing on the PA and it would be inadvisable to visit with a hangover or like I did, feeling slightly under the weather.

Still it didn’t seem to put off the punters: Shoreditch hipsters with stupid haircuts and skinny jeans queuing for takeaway; groups of lads lining their stomachs before a few pints; Japanese tourists admiring the Formica tables. And me, of course.

Food was a bit of a mixed bag. Despite all the shiny, modern exterior it’s still a bog-standard London chippy at heart which means the scoff churned out is ok if not quite delivering F&C nirvana.

The fryers had made a decent fist of cooking some Whitebait. The little fish had been given quite a light coating of flour before frying so you could actually taste the fish as oppose to the oil. Perhaps they could have been a tad more crisp but it was marginal and at £3.95 a painless way to start a meal.

The Fish and Chips themselves weren’t so great. A thin fillet of Haddock was soft and was enveloped by limp batter that hadn’t really bubbled up in the prescribed manner. Chips were of the pale and uninteresting variety and also could have done with a bit of crisping up.

Homemade tartare sauce was mayonnaise-heavy and needed more chopped up gherkins or something similar to give it texture. Mushy Peas – also homemade - were slightly bizarre - more like a Pea Soup (a nod to London in the 50’s perhaps?). The taste was too pea-like and the last thing mushy peas should taste like are peas. I don’t know why places in the South bother, I really don’t.

So not the best Fish and Chips you can get in the capital – although I haven’t been for a while I suspect Masters Superfish still holds that crown – but at least they had the virtue of not tasting oily and craving the carbs I did finish the lot, but felt slightly grubby afterwards: full of regret and self-loathing (as us svelte Metropolitan types are wont to do after a binge).

One for the tourists.

GALVIN LA CHAPELLE – IN SPITTING DISTANCE

A week ago or so somebody on Twitter (cheek - I’m not that bloody old) mentioned that they’d had a little preview of the interior of the Galvin brothers gastrodome which hosts fine-dining restaurant La Chapelle and the casual Café de Luxe. They raved about how fantastic it all looked. I joked that I hoped there was some money left over for the food.

Well, they were right about the interior: the main room of the 19th Century Grade II St Botolph’s Hall with its vaulted ceiling, arched windows and huge columns is stunning and I found it hard to stop myself rubber-necking, open-jawed, like some hick tourist. Lower on the horizon there were banquets and acres of napery.

In the café there is a voluptuously curved zinc bar snapped up after the closure of Aurora in the Great Eastern Hotel when it was taken over by Hyatt. A wine cupboard contains enough vintages of Hermitage La Chapelle in various sizes to last one several lifetimes. All very Conranesque. Though not so surprising as one of the brothers, Chris, spent many years working for Sir Tel.

As a rule I’m pretty down on lush interiors. The money for them has to come from somewhere and as other costs - lease, salaries - are more or less fixed that usually means some sort of compromise. And that’s how much of the food tasted and came across as – compromised.

A Lasagne of Devon Crab. Oh dear. A cylinder, the texture of sponge and which tasted of the same. The Crab component ? Undetectable. Chanterelles which although having quite a delicate and subtle taste didn’t shine through at all and were a bit slithy to be honest.

It’s pretty dispiriting when you realise that all isn’t well with the cooking and you’ve still got (at least) another three courses to go. You start looking for exit strategies: feign illness and pay up ? Get completely pissed to anaesthetise oneself against the horrors ? Or do as I did and smile politely and hope for the best. It was like being stranded in a tropical island paradise and discovering the only other woman was a randy Barbara Cartland.

A salad of Partridge and Pomegranate was a good idea, the tartness of the fruit working with the slight gaminess of the bird. But the idea of drowning the whole thing in a thick, sweet, maple-based sauce wasn’t. It killed the taste of everything on the plate especially the little salad garnish. There was a little roasted leg that was good and meaty and crunchy but the dish as a whole was a big misfire.

I had high hopes for my fish course. Grilled Red Mullet with Herb fritters and a bouillabaisse vinaigrette sounded like it could be a classic. Unsurprisingly given the arc of my meal thus far it wasn’t. The two fillets were some of most tired pieces of fish I’ve had recently. Showing few signs of having been grilled, they were soft and smelled fishy. Not good. The herb fritters tasted of fritter and little else. Barbara had now tracked me down and was making come-hither gestures at me.

It might have been a coincidence but after Chris Galvin had gone back into the open kitchen, post the meet-and-greet thing, my next dish was much better. Tagine of Squab Pigeon was a sort of deconstructed version served in a, er, Tagine. The Pigeon itself was moist and cooked a perfect shade of pink. It sat atop excellent couscous, the grains of pasta all light and separate. There was a blob of spiced puree (Chickpea ?) that was a little over-processed but tasted great. A cylindrical brik of, I guess the leg meat, was a bit oily but not disastrously so. The Quail egg was perfectly cooked but superfluous. The accompanying small pot of harissa was terrific.

The Pigeon had restored my confidence in the kitchen enough for me to order a pudding. Prune and Armagnac Parfait did what it said on the tin although in truth it’s never the most interesting of desserts, more of a default choice. Still, it left me chipper enough to roll out the old chestnut about my parfait being “parfait”. Very funny sir, I haven’t heard that one, oh, since I served the last person who ordered it.

I’d like to think the Pigeon Tagine was more representative of the kitchen’s abilities but the flaws in the other dishes were so manifest as to make me wonder whether another visit would yield better.

The transformation of La Chapelle has obviously been a labour of love given the meticulous attention to detail and the Brothers Galvin seem like nice enough people as do the staff who were models of friendliness and efficiency on only their second service. Like any restaurant venture it’s a high risk strategy to put so much into one place but if a recent visit to a packed River Café is anything to go by if you provide people with a decent product they will come. Let’s hope they do.

STJOHN BREAD AND WINE: RETURN OF THE MAJ

One of the last times I visited St John Bread & Wine I had a bowl of Quail Heads. That's not a typo. They weren't Quails or Quail Eggs or even Quail Legs, they were the heads of little Quails. There'd obviously been a little wager in the kitchen to see who would be dumb enough to pay for bin fodder. Hermano, take one step forward.

What were they like ? Well, apart from the off-putting rictus grin of their little heads, they'd been roasted so that they had a satisfying crunch. My Vegetarian dining companion couldn’t bear to watch.

StJB&W was a couple of minutes from where I worked so became a de facto canteen for me. When I changed jobs I couldn't visit for lunch and the evening crowds mitigated against a walk-in which is how I used the place. Even so I still used to pop in from time to time for their great Ice Cream or an Espresso and Vieille Prune.

My original intention had been to try upstairs at John Torode's new place The Luxe which HS blogged about recently. The upstairs restaurant still wasn't open and downstairs had appeared to have morphed into a rather grim looking bar. Which is where StJB&W came to my rescue. It was fully booked for the evening - as I suspect it usually is - but I must have been wearing my pathetic face as the very kind FOH took pity on me and found me a table.

The St John style of food hasn't changed much, even going way back to a DH visit to Fergus Henderson's first gaff above the French House in Soho. One or two decent ingredients cooked simply and served sans any significant garnish is the MO and given the restaurants popularity there really isn’t any reason to change things.

A meal always starts with a big pile of their great bread and before I realised it I’d scarfed down two pieces. The other two proved useful in mopping up the juices of my starter, a Blood Cake, which was an unctuous slab of Black Pudding. It was slathered with a bacon-studded compote of prunes.

Unfortunately, the Grouse I had my eye on for my main course wasn’t ready but I enjoyed a whole Plaice. For me, the pleasure in eating all of a fish lie not so much in the flesh but in winkling out all the tasty gelatinous nuggets in the head in a similar way that demolishing a Chicken carcass is more satisfying than eating slices of breast.

For me, puddings have always been the highlight of a StJ meal. My Honey Roasted Figs, Spiced Ice Cream and Shortbread had echoes of a recent dessert at Seven Park Place. Not as refined maybe but just as enjoyable.

Tiredness precluded launching into the digestif list but I scored a dozen Madeleines to take away and very nice they were too with a cup of tea.

I shall still pay The Luxe a visit when they finally open their restaurant but they’re going to have to be pretty good to compete with StJB&W. My guess is that they may well be relegated to the role of Plan B for people who can’t get in the place over the road. Let’s hope they’re not too disappointed.

THE LUXE: THE BURGER SUCKS

I can’t think of too many places that have experienced an opening as delayed as new John Torode gastrodome, The Luxe. When HP, who is the god of such matters, first sniffed out that it was on the cards, I had yet to finish the journey for EAT MY GLOBE. That’s how long ago it was.

Since then and for the last year, every weekend walk that has taken us through Spitalfields market has taken us past the painted hoardings of The Luxe with precious little evidence that anything was actually going on behind then. Then, just a few short weeks ago, an announcement came through suggesting that things might be afoot. At the tail end of last week, on my way back from a splendid meal at Needoo Grill, I saw workers putting the last licks of paint on the outside in preparation for today’s opening.

It was a long time coming, but based in on my burger, they still have some way to go. It may be unfair to judge on one meal, but we are talking about a hamburger here people, not a ten course tasting celebrating the life of Escoffier and on that basis, Hawksmoor just up the road has little to fear in the local burger turf wars.

Eventually The Luxe will spread over three floors and initially there was talk of JT doing for game what he did for steak at SOS. I have had mixed experiences at his first joint. The upper level was interesting and one of the first to introduce you to your cow before you ate your steak. I had some good meals there but it was and remains hideously expensive. The middle level was too absurdly noisy to ever consider it as a venue to eat and the ground level has bouncers to keep you away at night and trendy crowds to scare you away from their reasonable breakfast offerings at weekends.

Anyone who has eaten at Smiths of Smithfield will feel immediately at home in The Luxe. The ground floor is currently the only one open and has the same atmosphere as its sister with blaring bass heavy music making your ears bleed and insanely attractive staff whose perkiness just about wins you over. The menu too is instantly recognisable with that incredibly silly way of quoting prices (4.5 pounds) and a familiar list of breakfast staples, hot & cold sandwiches and a few dishes that actually require some cooking skill.

I am not quite sure why people seem so keen to name their burger after their gaff. If you do have such hubris, however you need to make sure it is any good. “The Luxe Burger” isn’t. It is a rather insipid affair in which good meat, delivered medium or well done, hides its light under a few salad leaves, a blob of coarse grain mustard mayonnaise and a slice of Kraft cheese that could have been given a bit longer to melt. The bun is more of a floury bap, which may raise a few giggles, but lacks the sweetness of a good minced beef delivery system. All in all, a pretty desultory effort particularly for a place styling itself as an urban canteen. Chips were little better and, remarkably enough for a place that had been open a matter of a few hours, tasted as if they had been cooked off in stale oil. I dipped a few in an shallow dish of passable mayonnaise and then pushed the rest to one side.

With a Quilmes Beer heftily priced at £3.40, sorry 3.4 Pounds, the bill would have come to £16.50, bringing it close to Hawksmoor’s pricing for a whole lot less quality. With the soft opening discount of 50% of the food it was an agreeable £10 including tip, still not enough to make me want to rush back, but numbing the pain of the full cost.

It doesn’t matter, however, because, by this weekend, the ground floor of The Luxe will already have become a beacon for the hip and trendy of East London. They will come to sit and chat in the light airy dining room. They will come to drink coffee and expensive beer as they read the Sunday papers and they will come to eat fish finger sandwiches while they talk about Gilbert & George.

John Torode knows exactly what his is doing and with The Luxe he has judged his audience perfectly. It’s going to be a smash hit just don’t go there for the burger.

(As a reminder of what a good hamburger should look like, the last picture is of my dream burger from Marty's in Los Angeles)

YET ANOTHER DOS HERMANOS SUNDAY: BELLY’S GONNA GET YA

Dos Hermanos (that’s us) never need much incitement to eat large pieces of Pork and HS’s pronouncement on Sunday that he wanted belly and he wanted it now meant a quick trip to the small Longwood Farm stall in Spitafields Market. Despite the presence of oh-so-dreary chains gradually edging out the independents Longwood Farm has been pluckily plying its trade for as long as I can remember. Let’s hope it stays that way for many years to come.

Anyway. Soon after, I arrived home with my precious booty - five pounds of organic belly pork – and whilst I anointed it with salt, olive oil and a little dried thyme and stuffed it with Sage, HS opened up a bottle of Thornbridge Brewery’s Kipling beer. It’s described as a South Pacific Pale Ale which means absolutely zip to me but it tasted great – crisp and bitter. A perfect preprandial drink.

So good that we had to try the same brewery’s Jaipur Pale Ale, a hoppy beer that I liked even more than the Kipling. HS also opened up a pack of Mehmet Murat’s wonderful Olives. With Walter Becker on the stereo the World sort of made sense again – if only for a few hours.

To go with the Pork the usual suspects of Apple Sauce and some Purple Sprouting but also some Red Cabbage which I’d cooked for an hour or so combined with softened slices of onion, chunks of Apple, crushed juniper berries, bay leaves, cider vinegar and cider. An excellent accompaniment for Pork or indeed any fatty meats.

The nice thing about cooking Pork Belly is that it’s very hard to overcook so once you’ve got the crackling going you can turn the heat down a bit and basically forget about it. The rest of the cider I’d used with the cabbage went into the roasting tin to make a gravy.

A simple fuss-free lunch and HS got his belly. I think he may even have it now…

LE BOUCHON BRETON: A TALE OF TWO OPENINGS

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DH have topped and tailed this week’s eating adventures with two new openings.

Of the first, York & Albany, we expected great things. Angela Hartnett was in the kitchen and, although no one claimed this was going to be another Murano, where we had a good experience recently, she can usually be relied upon to send out a solid meal.

Of the other, Bouchon Breton, we expected little even though the menu had been constructed in consultation with Michel Roux Jr. It was, after all, situated amongst the dross of Spitalfields' chain restaurant dining quarter and is the sister restaurant to Bouchon Bordelais in Battersea, an area of London where you are more likely to find Lord Lucan than a decent meal. Added to which, we have experienced enough faux brasserie meals in our capital to dampen any expectation that this would be any different.

While I can appreciate the notion of letting restaurants bed in for a while before visiting, neither of these two places offered a soft opening and the hubris of charging full whack from day one means that they should be subjected to the same critical examination as if we were to visit in two weeks or indeed two months time.

It says much about the London’s inconsistent dining scene that we came out of both restaurants shaking our heads, but for very different reasons. York & Albany because, quite frankly it crashed and burned delivering a bewilderingly average meal, Bouchon Breton because, despite everything stacked against it, it proved to be the real deal and one of the better DH experiences since my return to the UK.

It didn’t start well. As we moved to the cavernous dining area, the only diners in the restaurant, the staff decided that we should be treated to the traditional Gallic sounds of Gloria Estephan & The Miami Sound Machine at full blast. The Maitre D’ shook his head and in pure comedy French muttered “They want Saturday Night Fever and it is only Friday” before running off and making them change it for the more appropriate sounds of Serge Gainsbourg talking about shagging.

The menu reads like a dream for any Fracophile and even for me who isn't and thinks that Paris is a dreadful, ossified chocolate box of a city. But, none of that would matter if, as is so often the case, the cooking is lousy. The taste of some excellent butter with simple baguette gave a clue that they might give a damn. So too did the fact that they took the time to present three meaty Belon oysters, which HP chose as a little pre-appetizer, with the same care as they would a dozen.

Our starters were brought in two courses, another nice touch, so we could share more easily and the arrival of a plate of frogs’ legs covered in a crisp, feather light batter told us that, while the chef in the kitchen may not be a celebrity name (formerly of Le Gavroche, I believe) , he certainly knew what he was doing. Accompanying the legs was a small pile of equally dainty sweet onion rings and a terrific tartar sauce.

We were still cleaning the batter crumbs from the plate with licked fingers when they came to take it away and replace it with a platter of Burgundian snails in their shells, which had been stuffed with parsley, garlic and enough butter to leak out into pools on the plate. I had forgotten just how good a dish this is when done well and both HP and I ate in silence as we pulled the snails from their shell and then mopped up the juices with more bread. The sort of dish that makes you realise why you fell in love with food.

As indeed was the main event, which of course, the moment our eyes lit on the words “Cote De Boeuf” was never going to be anything else. 28 day aged and from a range of Angus, Limousin or Charolais cattle, the 1kg steak comes in at a hefty £45 for two but is worth splashing out the cash for. Perfectly prepared, rare as requested, and carved at the table by the Maitre D’ the juices leaked pleasingly over the wooden board on which it was served. What’s more, it smelled and tasted of beef, a feat that York & Albany singularly failed to achieve earlier in the week when their own attempt at steak was napped in a bog standard El Gordo veal reduction so you could taste nothing else. This was seriously good steak and with it came a well made salad, a huge sauce bowl of béarnaise and a barrel load of excellent, crispy frites. Steak frites done properly. It could catch on.

Desserts were always going to be an anti-climax after that and they didn’t let us down. We left a good looking cheese board well alone and went for a perfunctory selection of ice cream for HP and, for me, a Dame Blanche, named after the three act opera, which brought together chocolate sauce, chantilly cream and ice cream to no great ovation.

I suspect that Bouchon Breton is the only restaurant in Spitalfields with a sommelier, also formerly of Le Gavroche, and he earns his corn carrying around a weighty list with bottles priced well into the hundreds to attract city types with any money left. They could do with a few more entry priced bottles, for rubes like us, but a bottle of Buzet at £27 was presented with as much care as if we had raided their stash of Petrus.

That and two glasses of white with our starters brought our bill to a not inconsiderable £130 including service, but unlike a similar amount at York & Albany, I don’t begrudge a penny of it for a food and service that shows what a place can do on opening if it sets its mind to it.

The question at York & Albany is, can it get any better particularly when Angela Hartnett scurries back to Murano in search of her star? The question about Bouchon Breton is can it keep up these standards? I am pretty sure I know the answer to both of those questions.