THE STAG: SUNDAY LUNCH IN THE SUN

Is The Stag really in Hampstead as they claim? I am pretty sure that Fleet Road is one of those that people who live there think is Hampstead and tell people is Hampstead but is really Belsize Park.

No matter, if I am not sure where The Stag is, I am pretty sure what it is. It is the new pub from Jonathan and Andrew Perritt the brothers behind the popular Regent in Kensal Green. I also know that, on what is probably going to be the last sunny weekend of the year, it was actually rather a pleasant place to have Sunday lunch.

While the pub itself has been sensitively restored, The Stag’s main selling point is its garden, which is large and welcoming with booths dotted around the outside and benches in the middle. Rather cleverly, the booths each have their own little heaters so they can be used the year round, but as we sat in shirtsleeves in the Sun dappled garden, they didn’t get a look in. What did was that all too a rare beast in London these days, a decent pint of beer. Inevitably they have the ubiquitous Tim Taylor’s Landlord on draught, the real ale de choix of London’s twenty somethings who seem to think that since Madonna drinks it, it’s safe for them. More unusually they had Flowers on tap too and the young barman actually knew what he was doing, tasting before he poured a full and excellent pint for each of us. People in pubs caring about their beer, it could catch on.

There are only four starter choices on the menu at around the £5-6 a pop and a retro dish of garlic mushrooms lacked any vampire scaring element at all and a handful of the button variety sat in a puddle of murky liquid in their pan. Like rolled up jackets sleeves there is a reason why things like this should just be a bad memory from the 80’s. HP’s chilli prawns at £6 was over priced, but an improvement on my own choice with small, sweet prawns and a decent bite of heat.

The Sunday roast of Orkney Island beef could have been a little more rare, but came with a full complement of trimmings, which, with the exception of some pretty nasty horseradish mash, were all polished off enthusiastically by HP. The carrots in particular came in for special praise for tasting like carrots, which tells you a lot about the age in which we now live.

My own choice of Haddock & Chips met with DH approval too, which, given our shallow and seemingly vain search for the real thing in London, is praise indeed. The batter should have been more like the people and the batter up North, i.e. thicker, but the fish underneath was cooked perfectly and, God bless them, they had left the skin on. The few chips I managed to protect from HP’s roving fingers were spot on too and only a dodgy take on mushy peas let the side down.

The Stag offers a large list of British cheese sold by the 70gm portion. I imagine they hope will be these will be taken up in lieu of ruffian type snacks of pork scratchings and peanuts by Hampstead punters, I have my doubts and we bypassed them in favour of a bowl of profiteroles and some a selection of ice cream whose existence HP wheedled out of our waitress by using his considerable charm. The former were fine, the latter were delicious and came, I suspect from Marine Ices not terribly far away.

From a very short list of wines, we chose a £17 bottle of Sicilian Syrah, an offer we could and should have refused in favour of another pint of beer and that brought our bill to £65 + tip. We were uncertain what the wooden spoon in a glass bearing our server’s name was for and, being sad, lonely and middle aged we engaged in lurid fantasies of admonishing our waitress if she came up short in her task of catering to every DH need. Unfortunately, she was terrific so we never found out. Damn.

£30+ per person strikes me as rather a lot to pay for a meal of decent rather than exemplary cooking but, as HP reminded me, the main courses were good and good value and it is welcome to see a pub staying as a pub serving a bit of food rather than becoming a restaurant with a bar.

I can see The Stag and particularly the garden becoming a welcome hang out for the young folk of Hampstead, or is that Belsize Park?

KERALA: SOUTHERN INDIAN, CENTRAL LONDON

London needs more joints. It needs places where you can check in any notion that you are going to have the best meal of your life at the door with your coat, but can count upon reliable, solid cooking to be provided at a cost which wont break whichever ailing bank happens to get your monthly pay check. London needs more dependable neighbourhood places.

In short, London needs more places like The Kerala Restaurant, even if its neighbourhood happens to be off Regent St, just North of Oxford Circus.

Family owned and run for over a decade, The Kerala is already a popular destination for its cheap as chapatti lunches and, when I was asked to suggest a venue for a vegetarian friendly, Southern Indian supper last night, it seemed like a better option than the expanding chain/declining quality that is Rasa these days. I made a reservation for 7.30pm just in case and I am glad I did as it was already heaving when we arrived and stayed that way until we left two hours later.

The menu is well priced and split into sections highlighting Keralan coastal dishes, Christian dishes, rice dishes and vegetarian dishes. With four of us in a hungry state of mind, we were able to cover a wide range of the non meat options.

Starters included some well made Vada (lentil doughnuts) in yoghurt tempered with curry leaves, some rather more ordinary spiced fish cakes, fried cashew nut pakoda and slightly floppy dosa saved by an excellent filling of spicy potato.

Main courses all hover just under the £7 and our table was soon being weighed down with plates of Vendakka (Okra) , a meaty whole fried pomfret and a splendid beetroot thoran with coconut, so good that we immediately ordered another plate. Similarly our first tastes of a bowl of meen (kingfish) and mango vevichathu had the waiter rushing back to the kitchen to bring another order. The only weak points came with a bland bowl of chickpeas and appam which, while useful for sopping up the sauces, were too doughy and a little tough.

Two of the group had wine, two of us stuck to beer, which brought the bill, (presented with a plate thick, Keralan halwa made with Jaggery, whose caramel taste reminded me of bonfire night toffee) to £100 for four of us including a tip for service which was very, very friendly if slightly harried and forgetful.

As I said, there was nothing life changing about it and sometimes that’s just what you want. Decent cooking in an honest joint at a price that wont make you feel like your arse hurts as you walk home. The Kerala Restaurant definitely fits into that category and London could do with far more of them.

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.

AUBAINE: IT'S STILL ROCK & ROLL TO ME

Let’s begin with another of our all too irregular quizzes of the popular culture variety, shall we?

Why is the telephone box at the top of today’s post, the most famous telephone box in Rock & Roll history? A huge prize for the first punter with the correct answer.

I thought about this yesterday as I went to meet my new chums Martin & Neil Newman for a quick lunch at Aubaine, just off Regent Street. There is little to report about the meal itself, I was treated to good company, a surprisingly tasty and properly cooked Bavette and a few glasses of a decent red. The sort of lunch that has you coming away with a little vino buzz and the urge to go home and nap for a couple of hours.

But, it did remind me of my immediate post college days when, on a massive Penguin Bookshop salary, which failed to get to the right side of £4,000 p.a, I tried to supplement my paltry income by giving guided tours of sights of Rock & Roll import in our lovely city.

It would have worked too if only my idea of the Rock & Roll hall of fame had been the same as my guests. They wanted to see where J, P, G & R hung out or where the Glimmer Twins cavorted with Jimi “Firestarter” Hendrix but, instead I gave them the opportunity to take pictures outside the flat where Mama Cass choked on a ham sandwich (she didn’t actually, but that’s another story) to see where TV Smith & The Adverts were photographed for The NME, up near Langham Place and to admire the graffiti outside the legendary Marquee Club, which informed the world that “Kevin Rowland is a bummer”

Matters were not helped by the fact that the sacred rock & roll memorabilia I promised they would encounter turned out not to be an instantly recognised Hoffnung bass guitar or “that” gold lame suit belonging to The King, but an empty tin of special brew discarded by Steve Diggle of The Buzzcocks, a signed picture of Nico and a guitar string hurled into the crowd by one of The Fabulous poodles. Well, I treasured them.

Cue the return of all monies received, disgruntled complaints in the languages of many nations and the end to my career on the periphery of Rock & Roll’s grand dream. The only place that did pass muster was this old and lonely telephone box and its associated street.

So who can tell me why?

BACK TO THE FARMER: A GUIDE TO SEASONAL FARM FOOD

I am going to be honest here. I am rapidly falling out of love with farmers’ markets.

It is not the principle I find to be wrong there is, of course, much to recommend the notion of delivering fresh food direct from producer to consumer without need for a middle-man. But, I have a few gripes.

The first is that, as with so much in this country, we have take what is a sound idea and one that has worked in mainland Europe for centuries and turned it into a fashion item, a trend and a marketing exercise, a way for people to show that they are better than other people because of their purchasing decisions.

This is more true in London than outside the capital, with places like Borough (admittedly not a true farmers’ market) and Marylebone becoming theme parks to be visited rather than resources to be utilized, but the rest of the country will follow, even if, as in other fashion trends, they are a bit behind the times.

My second bone of contention is the farmers themselves. They may be talented at producing terrific food, but they are often appalling at dealing with the public and a recent visit to Marylebone again confirmed that many of the stall holders acted as if they were doing you the favour by being there, not the other way round. Good farmers don’t necessarily make good sales people and middle men succeed because they know how to market food well to the consumer.

However, I know I am in the minority here and the Farmer’s Market trend is growing apace, evidenced by a copy of BACK TO THE FARMER: A GUIDE TO SEASONAL FARM FOOD which crossed my desk a week or so ago

Nick Jones & Nick Forde have compiled a comprehensive list of every farm shop and Farmers’ Market in London and The South East, from some of London’s largest and most well known to those in the wilds of Kent, Essex, Surrey and Sussex. Alongside the pages on each market and shop are useful guides to Britain’s growing seasons, interviews with some of the key players in the Farmers’ Market movement and even a little bit of politics on the true cost of good food.

I may not agree with everything they say in the book, but it is certainly a laudable enterprise and a very useful resource for those whose views are not quite so jaded and cynical as mine.

Available at £9.99 from some local bookshops or direct from their own website

www.backtothefarmer.co.uk

TIME AND SPACE

Talk about the famous road not taken
In the end we never took it

Large Hadron Collider ? Large Hadron Bollocks more like. We’re living in a new Dark Age where seemingly intelligent folk think the World was created sometime last Thursday. Bad Science and irrationality rules so who really cares about some pointdexters tumescing over imaginary particles. No, what we really want is more celebrity chefs, cookery related programs or maybe a new restaurant complete with a meaningless press release.

Step forward Time and Space Restaurant whose launch at the newly refurbed Royal Institution was, I suspect, not completely unconnected to the aforementioned collider going online. Unfortunately instead of applying their collective, massive intellect to getting someone decent in to do the food, say a Paul Merrony of Giaconda fame, they’ve outsourced - I know, you’re shuddering already - the operation to Digby Trout who are owned by Elior, a sort of French equivalent of Searcy’s.

They obviously needed a bit of PR spin to launch the restaurant so they’ve chucked in Anton Edelmann’s name (like, er, who cares) and also the phrase “molecular gastronomy” which a) no one uses any more and b) seems to be represented by a slow-cooked egg.

Time and Space is, in fact, very aptly named. For the whole evening I was the only one in the dining room so the staff had loads of time on their hands and I enjoyed plenty of space - which I suppose is a result of sorts.

There were other things to enjoy about the place, though. Bread, baked in the restaurant was superb and would put the stuff in much grander establishments to shame. Particularly outstanding was a dense rye bread pungent with caraway and a small roll that had the thinnest crispiest of crusts and a very light crumb. It was so good it had me mentally rolling up my sleeves and preparing myself for the feast ahead.

I have no doubt the Brioche Toast that came with my first course was homemade as well but that was as good as it got. Rabbit and Duck Liver Terrine was served far too cold so the tastes didn’t come through at all. I’m not sure who thought it was a good idea to swathe the terrine in raw carrot but I can tell them it wasn’t and they shouldn’t have. Apricot sour cream was a poor substitute for some chutney or cornichons.

Barnsley Lamb Chops (as oppose to the Pork variety, presumably) was a surprisingly decent piece of meat, cooked accurately pink, it had a good seam of fat. It came with some good, crisp straw potatoes and a blob of Baba Ghanoush. Unfortunately, the catering company have appeared to have enlisted the brainiacs of the RI in an attempt to come up with the thinnest chop in the Universe. I’m just glad there won’t be many people visiting from Barnsley to see it.

Ice Cream was (once again) homemade and very good. Even better was a tuile/biscotti that adorned the pud – methinks there’s a serious pastry chef at work here.

Coffee was poor – but then in this country it usually is.

There are the elements of a good meal here – the bread and pud were exemplary and the meat despite the meanness of the serving was nicely done - but I think they are always going to be battling against the constraints imposed by a corporation whose eye is continually on the bottom line and whose number one responsibility is to the shareholders and not to diners. Let them prove otherwise.

What I said to HS about Searcy’s @ St Pancras also applies here: the food that was served was probably as good as it’s ever going to be. Mind you, things could have been a lot worse, they might have opened another branch of Leon. If that had happened I might found a new use for that Black Hole.

THAI RICE: A WORD IN YOUR PIG'S EAR

What is it about young folk and offal?

Perhaps it is the fact that it actually tastes of something or perhaps it is the fact that the new wave of foodies have been brought up in a world where their meat comes in cellophane wrapped choice cuts with no direct indication that it ever originated from anything which mooed, baaed, bleated of oinked.

Talk about eating offal to most young folk these days and you open yourself up to the charge of “doing a Bourdain” eating something for bravado rather than taste.

Complete tosh of course. In the rest of the world, where people often don’t have the luxury of choosing prime bits of the animal and turning the rest into pet food, offal is not just a necessary staple, but a pre-requisite of many recipes from the stuffed lamb’s intestines of Istanbul, the Beef tendon soups of Hong Kong and the Pani Ca Meusa of Palermo, where lung and spleen come together in perfect sandwich harmony.

I could go on naming countries where offal is essential, but why bother as, in the end, as HP puts it “who gives a f**K if the kids don’t like it, it leaves all the more for us”

I thought about this as I enjoyed a simple Thai meal with my friends, food writers William Leigh and Neil Davey yesterday at Thai Rice on The Portobello Road. The best dish of the meal was a salad of crunchy pig’s ears with cucumber and a spicy sauce. It took me back to my short time in Bangkok with its sharp flavours and unusual textures.

In truth, the rest was more standard, a passable Pad Thai, a dish of glass noodles with prawn and a version of duck red curry neutered so as not to offend the locals. Only a Mee Krob was actively bad with little resemblance to the sublime version I tried at Chote Chitr on my journeys (pictured below yesterday's dreaful version), this version lacked any of the elements of my favourite Thai dish.

For £20 a head including a handful of beers, it represented decent lunchtime value and a good place to catch up and discuss ideas, but it is only a shame they don’t have the courage or the customers to try more dishes including the best bits of the beast.