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Just a quick piece of self-publicising-trumpet-that-I-own-blowing, to inform you, the beautiful, intelligent readers of my blog (and any other interested casual passers-by), that I have just had a piece published in the latest edition of the truly excellent and respected independent quarterly food writing magazine ‘Fire & Knives’ issue no.8.
To say I’m absolutely chuffed is an understatement. It looks amazing, and to see my name in print and in such a quality publication as well, is an incredible feeling.
I’ve written about the trials and tribulations of hosting a supper club. Our Bristol based ‘Montpelier Basement’ providing ample inspiration and ammunition. (Shazza, I’m looking at you).
If you fancy getting yourself a copy; and I highly recommend you do, if for no other reason than to experience the glorious heady smell of it’s printed pages (I’m not kidding, the aroma is something else, like glue sniffing for respectable adults) Then you can pick up a copy at good independent bookshops, or you can grab a subscription online here.
So you’ve bought this amazing, incredibly expensive free range, organic piece of lamb. You’ve slow roasted it for hours until it’s just so ridiculously soft and moist that it’s practically falling from the bone. The accompanying roast potatoes are crispy, the vegetables perfect. Your guests are sitting at the table waiting. The expectation is high, but you’re feeling pretty smug. You bring out the lamb joint on a platter, to ‘ooohs’ ‘ahhhhs’ and gasps of appreciation. The beautiful meat enveloped in an invisible wafting cloud of sweet, mouth watering, lambness, silently cloaking your guests in it’s warmth. You carve and serve, savouring this moment. You are amazing. You are ‘The Daddy’…
Cough.
Retch.
SPLATTER.
That’s the sound of your guests, in unison, involuntarily projectile vomiting your beautiful Sunday lamb roast out onto your face, the walls, the table and each other in utter disgust. You look around the table, confused. They’re angry, there’s swearing and pointing, people are getting up and leaving. Your best friend gestures at you angrily as if shaking a handful of coffee beans. You don’t think he wants coffee.
And then slowly, it dawns on you. The awful cheap arse ready-made supermarket mint sauce accompanying your lamb. What a complete and utter fool you’ve been. It all could have been so different if you’d made it yourself.
*Curtain Closes*
Cheer up. I'm going to tell you how to ensure that this sorry, entirely realistic scene never happens to you.
But first, a bit of back-story.
In March this year, I ate at The Sportsman in Seasalter, Kent. Accompanying my lamb cutlet was the best mint sauce I’ve ever tasted. So amazing was it that both ‘E’ and myself sat there, awestruck for a full 5 minutes. Tasting, analyzing and debating just why the hell it tasted so good.
We’ve subsequently served lamb at our ‘Basement’ supper club a few times, and tried to recreate The Sportsman’s mint sauce each time. We think we’ve almost cracked it.
This simple recipe comes in two parts. A base mint sauce, and then a basic stock syrup made using Demerara sugar to sweeten it.
Mint Sauce
Makes 150ml (Easily enough for 6-8 people)
You’ll Need: -
(Base mint sauce)
150ml malt vinegar
Bunch of fresh mint
2 heaped tablespoons Demerara sugar
(Stock syrup)
Equal quantities of Demerara sugar and water, 200ml of each should do it.
(To Finish)
More fresh mint, finely chopped.
For the base mint sauce, there’s no need to pick or chop the mint, put it in a saucepan and pour over the vinegar. Add the sugar and bring to the boil, cook for a few minutes until the sugar has dissolved. Leave to cool. The mint sprig can be left in. This can be kept in a sealed jar, in the fridge pretty much indefinitely.
Make the stock syrup by bringing the sugar and water to the boil for around 2 minutes, until the sugar has dissolved and it becomes syrupy. You can use this straight away or keep in the fridge for up to 2-3 weeks.
To serve, strain a small pot or jug full of the base mint sauce into a small serving jug. Add a good handful of finely chopped mint and stir well. Add a generous amount of stock syrup, stir and taste. Too sharp? Add more and keep on adding small amounts until it’s exactly how you want it. The Demerara stock syrup adds a caramel note that really makes this mint sauce taste superb.
Finally, serve with your lamb and receive the adulation you so richly deserve.
This is a dessert we’ve served up at our Bristol based ‘Montpelier Basement’ supper club a few times recently, including our London debut at The Coach & Horses. It seemed to go down incredibly well, so I thought I’d write the recipe up on the blog .
In actual fact it's three recipes combined, stolen from three different chefs; Gordon Ramsay, Tom Kitchin and Jason Atherton. Between them they hold a multitude of Michelin stars but it took our culinary genius to slap the three elements all together in one bowl. So a massive 'in your face' Michelin starred chefs!
Ok first up, the ewe’s curd cheesecake mousse. This is an awesome recipe from Tom Kitchin. He uses Crowdie, which is a Scottish cream cheese. We used Homewood ewe’s curd instead, which is produced locally in Somerset by Tim & Angela Homewood, and is absolutely fantastic.
Cheesecake Mousse
Serves 4
450g Ewe’s Curd
125g Sugar
1 ½ Tbs Flour
1 Tbs Vanilla Extract
Zest of 1 Lemon
1 Egg
1 Egg Yolk
Preheat the oven to 150C. Mix the cheese, sugar, flour, vanilla and lemon zest in a blender until smooth. In a separate jug, mix the egg and egg yolk together, then pour into the blender with the cheese mixture and blend until smooth.
Pour into a 23cm baking dish and cover with foil. Bake for 35-40 minutes until set. (We cooked a much bigger volume, so it took quite a bit longer to set). Allow to cool and then transfer the mixture to a blender, and blitz until smooth. Leave to set in the fridge for at least 1 hour.
The butterscotch apple sauce is a Gordon Ramsay recipe, in fact, a component part of another dessert. It’s incredibly sweet but tastes amazing partnered with the slightly sour cheesecake mousse.
Butterscotch Apple Sauce
Serves 4
1 Large Granny Smith Apple, peeled cored and chopped.
1 Vanilla Pod
100g Caster Sugar, plus 2 Tbsp
100g Unsalted Butter
100ml Double Cream
Put the chopped apple in a small pan and sprinkle over 2 Tbs of water. Slit the vanilla pod and scrape out the seeds, adding them to the pan with 2 Tbs of caster sugar. Stir into the apple and heat until sizzling. Then cover and cook for 5-7 minutes, stirring occasionally, until soft and pulpy. Cool then crush to a chunky puree with a fork.
In another saucepan, gently heat the 100g of sugar with a splash of water until melted. Stir occasionally. When clear, raise the heat, stir in the butter and cook to a light caramel. Do not stir at this point or it will become fudge.
Remove from the heat, and cool for 5 minutes before mixing in the cream. Cool to room temperature, before stirring in the apple puree. Refrigerate.
The third component is a Jason Atherton recipe for Spiced Shortbread. We’ve found it works really well, is incredibly simple to make and the spices give it a bit more of an interesting flavour.
Spiced Shortbread
225g Unsalted Butter, cubed and softened. Plus extra to grease tin.
250g Plain Flour
80g Rice Flour
¼ Tsp Salt
½ Tsp Ground Star Anise
¼ Tsp Ground Cinnamon
100g Golden Caster Sugar
Cinnamon Sugar Topping
1 Tsp Ground Cinnamon
1 Tbsp Golden Caster Sugar
Preheat the oven to 150C. Grease a 23cm square baking tin with butter and line it with buttered greaseproof paper, allowing plenty of overhang on opposite sides to act as handles.
Sift the flours, salt, star anise and cinnamon together into a large bowl; set aside. Using a mixer, beat the butter until soft and fluffy. Tip in the sugar and beat for 2 minutes on high speed until creamy. (You can do all this by hand, but it’s hard work!) Add the creamed mixture to the flour and knead together by hand until uniform in texture.
Press evenly into the prepared tin and bake for 1 hour until golden. Leave to cool in the tin for 5 minutes.
For the topping, mix together the cinnamon and the 1 tbsp of sugar in a small bowl.
Carefully lift the shortbread out of the tin (it's extremely fragile at this stage), using the overhanging paper as handles and place on a board. Cut it in half, and then into 1.5cm fingers. Sprinkle with the cinnamon-sugar mix (We also added a bit of leftover ground star anise to this). Place on a baking sheet, spaced apart and bake for another 10 mins to dry out. Transfer to a wire rack to cool and store in an airtight container.
Cobnut Crumbs
We sprinkled the final dish with cobnut crumbs. Basically roasted cobnuts which if you don’t know are like hazelnuts and smell absolutely incredible. Discard the outer husks, use a nutcracker to remove the shell and bake the nuts in a 150C oven for up to an hour, until hard and browned. Cool and then blitz to a crumb texture.
All that’s left to serve is a bit of assembly.
If you’re dexterous and suave, shape the cheesecake mousse into a quenelle and place delicately on the plate. Or if you’re me, dollop some on like a bricklayer shovelling cement. Next to this, add a generous portion of the butterscotch apple sauce. In an extremely cheffy asymmetric style, smugly place your spiced shortbread across the other two components. If you have a moustache, as this stage, you must twiddle it, if not, arch one eyebrow. Slice some apple and fan it out in a pleasingly pretentious fashion. Finally, sprinkle some cobnut crumb over everything.
Bon appétit. Your work here is done.
A few weeks ago, at the Abergavenny food festival, I was in the audience for a talk on the subject of hangover cures held by chefs Fergus Henderson, Shaun Hill and journalist, Chris Hurst.
The cures suggested onstage weren’t a million miles away from my own hard won antidotes, gleaned from many wasted years of trial, much error and scant few conclusions. But then I was gobsmacked, some might say literally. Introduced to something entirely new in my experience, something revelatory. A potential silver bullet for all future suffering caused by a surfeit of alcohol, the cure-all that is a Dr Henderson.
As I entered the theatre, I was handed a small glass of murky, brackish, green and brown liquid, seemingly the contents of a flu sufferer’s hanky, scraped into a glass over ice. The straw protruding from it, obviously functioning as a stake through its foul heart. This revolting looking cocktail, (an unholy combination of the Italian herbal monstrosity Fernet Branca and Crème de menthe), was being touted by Fergus Henderson as the answer to any and all hangovers.
Against my better judgement, I bravely took an exploratory sip. Instantly, I was seven again, at the dinner table being force-fed boiled to death cabbage or sprouts, eyes closed and face contorted into a deathly grimace, lips curled back in the absolute epitome of disgust. But then, a funny thing happened. The shock dissipated, faded away and left behind it a curious green, brown, minted haze tinged with a bizarre almost electrical current of mental alertness. On stage, Fergus likened the feeling to a rebounding ‘ping, ping, ping’ down his chest.
Astounded, I took another sip, and another, amazed to find that I actually liked it and wanted more. The ultimate test of course would be the stupidity/bravery of self-prescribing a Dr Henderson whilst in the throes of a raging hangover. Against my better judgement, I’m seriously tempted and shall report back when I do.
Dr Henderson
If you fancy trying this wonder cure yourself, the ratio for a Dr Henderson is two parts Fernet Branca, to one part Crème de menthe, mixed together with ice.
Good luck.
In the meantime, my own tried and tested hangover cure is thus. If you’re sensible, as soon as you come staggering in, no doubt stinking of kebabs and Sambuca, head to the kitchen and neck a whole pint of water before bed. This one simple action could save you from enduring the whole hangover experience entirely. Obviously a glutton for punishment, I always forget to do this and wake up feeling like death, in which case I follow the next step.
The pint of water you forgot to drink before slumping into bed, combined with 2 Paracetamol is the foundation of the cure. If you’re going to be sick, obviously get this out of the way before, or all your efforts will be wasted. Next you want to lie very still, in a darkened room, softly moaning in agonised self pity. Do this for around an hour until the pills kick in and it all becomes a bit more bearable. Then you can crawl into the bathroom to brush your teeth and have a hot shower. After this, you’ll emerge feeling a hell of a lot better. But you’re not there yet. You need a steaming mug of tea, and a fried bacon and egg sandwich. The greasier the sandwich, the better it works in soaking up alcohol. I have no idea of the science behind this, best not to question it, just accept its absolute rightness with blind faith.
Follow the prescribed steps, and you will feel fantastic and ready, once again to face life and all it’s challenges.
But I should point out, this only works for the standard everyday hangover. Sometimes, and we all do it, we go a little bit bonkers. We push it just that little bit too much, stupidly convinced of our own particular invulnerability to the devil drink. The resulting hangover is nothing short of epic. In cases like this, try and drink the water, and keep down the painkillers. Forget about the shower and brushing your teeth (making it to the bathroom for anything other than copious bouts of vomiting will be beyond you). Bacon and egg sandwiches? Forget it, just the thought will plunge you into a spinning hell of misery and nausea.
Basically, if you were a racehorse, they’d be dragging you out back and putting you out of your misery with a Webley. You’ll just have to lie there, endure and wait for it to wear off.
Obviously, a hangover is a very personal thing. I’d love to hear how you deal with it.
What do you recommend as the best cure for a hangover?
Am I wrong; is there in fact a remedy for an epic ‘pray for death’ hangover?
Have you ever tried a Dr Henderson the morning after? And did it actually help?
I absolutely love food, every aspect of it. I love reading about it, I love cooking, and I love eating in restaurants. Hushed and rarefied temples to fine dining? Hell yeah! Slutty takeaway grub, pawed at while I’m stumbling along the pavement on the way home bladdered? Tres Je’taime. I love that too…. I love it. I love it all.
And that’s the problem readers…I have too much love to give, far, far…. far too much. Often when I’m left feeling particularly bloated and corpulent after yet another week of loving excess, my thoughts turn to simpler, healthier pleasures.
It’s at these times I change into asymmetric natural robes of my own design that are soft, feather light and flow around my body like silk. I then spend hours in silent contemplation. Afterwards I like to exercise on a bamboo mat in the living room in my own freeform version of Tai Chi (involving lots of forward and backward rolls, slow motion ‘voguing’ with some particularly emotional mime action, all conducted to a custom soundtrack of wind chimes and monkey mating noises)*
As you can probably imagine, getting myself all Zen is extremely tiring and leaves a fella feeling particularly ravenous and sharp-set. What then could be more healthy and filling than a bowl of gorgeous Vietnamese noodle soup, pho?
I adore pho, particularly with slices of beef in it, but as ‘E’ is a pescetarian and…
A) It’s felt like too much like hard work to make a meaty version AND a non-meaty version
B) A non-meat version has to be healthier right? And the whole point is I’m trying to eat healthy here.
I set about throwing together a veggie pho.
I found a recipe online, and bastardised it a bit. The results were bloody good. Admittedly it’s probably not religiously authentic. I wouldn’t really know. I haven’t been to Vietnam. My only experience of eating pho is in the Vietnamese restaurants that line Kingsland Rd in London and in the eponymously named ‘Pho’, the small and rather excellent London and Brighton chain. You just can’t get decent pho at all in Bristol.
But the main thing is that it’s healthy and filling and tastes like it’s actually doing you some real good, cleansing your innards and leaving you both content and virtuous. (Which, lets face it, is a combination of feelings that is generally alien to most of us).
Veggie Pho
Serves 4
The recipe comes in two parts, which sounds more of a pain in the arse than it actually is. First you make the vegetarian broth, and then the second part is just a bit of slicing and assembly, basically slinging it all in a bowl. Start to finish; you can easily have the whole thing on the table in 30 mins. Oh and if you have an Asian grocery shop or supermarket near you, get all the ingredients there – it’ll cost sod all.
Veggie broth
You’ll need:
2 litres water
2 scant level tsp Marigold Veg bouillon (Unless you have 2 litres of decent veg stock knocking around – if so, definitely use that).
3 Tablespoons soy sauce
8 medium garlic cloves, peeled and coarsely chopped
1 small onion, diced
One-thumb size piece of ginger, unpeeled.
Two 3-inch cinnamon sticks
2 star anise
2 large bay leaves
Add water, veg bouillon or stock, soy sauce, garlic, and onion to a large stockpot and bring to a boil over medium heat.
Meanwhile, char the ginger on all sides over an open gas flame or in a small frying pan and add to the stock. (This is a completely new technique to me, not entirely sure what the point is, but suspect it adds a subtle ginger smokiness. The finished broth didn’t taste burnt at all, so just go with it).
Add the cinnamon, star anise, and bay leaves to the broth. Reduce the heat to low. Simmer, partially covered, for 20-25 minutes.
Strain the broth through a fine sieve. Adjust seasonings if necessary. Return to pot and keep hot until ready to use in Pho.
Vegetarian Pho
You’ll Need: -
2 Litres Vietnamese style broth (recipe above)
200g Rice noodles (I like the thicker ribbon type)
2 handfuls bean sprouts
4 Bok Choi – Leaves left whole, stems finely sliced.
1 handful of Basil leaves
1 handful Coriander, coarsely chopped
3 Spring Onions, finely sliced.
3 Tablespoons chopped, roasted, unsalted peanuts.
1 lime, cut into wedges
3 fresh red chilli peppers, sliced into rounds
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
Whilst you’re making the Veggie broth in the recipe above, you can cook the noodles. Use the timings on the packet (normally soaked in boiling hot, but off the heat, water for 10 mins or so) drain and divide the noodles among four warmed bowls.
Assemble the soup by placing the bean sprouts, cabbage, greens, basil, coriander, spring onion, and peanuts on top of the noodles.
Ladle the hot broth onto the noodle mixture.
Eat it straightaway, whilst boiling hot. If you like a bit of heat, sling in the chillies. Definitely add a squeeze or two of lime and maybe a dash of soy or fish sauce if you think it needs it, scoff it down and feel that virtuous healthy feeling expand within you.
The great thing about a recipe like this is, it’s so adaptable, you can throw any fresh greens in really – spinach, chard, Savoy cabbage, finely sliced carrot whatever you have knocking around, it doesn’t have to be authentic, as long as it tastes good. Oh, and if you don't care about it being veggie, the following additions would all work well; cooked prawns, cooked shredded chicken or finely sliced roast beef.
*My own design asymmetric natural flowing robes, freeform Tai Chi program and wind chime/monkey shagging soundtrack are all available to purchase. Drop me an email at the usual address for a pricelist.
It’ll come as no surprise to the readers of this blog, that as well as taking photos of pretty much everything I eat in restaurants, I also take photos of the food we cook at The Montpelier Basement, a Bristol supper club I run jointly with ‘E’ (well, photos of most of it, when it’s not too hectic in the kitchen…which, invariably it always is).
Sadly we had to let the official ‘Basement’ photographer go in a recent round of entourage cutbacks, along with the personal manicurist, hairdresser and stylist. (but you’ll be pleased to know we kept the all-important Feng Shui consultant. The upshot of this is we now look like absolute shit, but our dining room is orientated in a way that pleases the gods immensely).
But I was recently struck by the thought that I write a food blog and I hardly ever write about what we’re cooking at the supper club on it, which could be considered something of an oversight perhaps.
So, time to remedy it, with a selection of some of the best things we’ve cooked at ‘The Montpelier Basement’ in the last few months (errr…and that we have pictures of, and were reasonably happy with). Snatched pics in bad light, as we’re trying to frantically get food out to the diners, before it gets cold isn’t a recipe for great snaps, but here goes…in no particular order….
The end of May saw us serving up ‘chilled cucumber & horseradish soup with Cornish crab’ (or Homewood Ewe’s curd for the veggies). Cold soup has never really appealed to me much, but I’ve recently discovered that on a hot balmy evening, there’s nothing more refreshing. I was quite pleased with this, the horseradish giving a surprisingly subtle punch despite loads going in.
A dessert of ‘elderflower posset with deep fried elderflower fritters, drizzled with local St Werburghs honey’ was bloody awesome, even if I do say so myself. The contrast between the cool, fresh, silky posset and the hot, crisp elderflower fritters worked so well. As with anything that’s deep-fried at the supper club, it was incredibly messy churning these out for 18 people with tempura batter alles uber da platz.
‘Cornish smoked haddock fishcakes with watercress and hollandaise’, possibly one of the most substantial fish courses we’ve served up. The smoked haddock was fantastic quality, really subtle procured by our fishmonger Joe at Source in St Nicholas market. Absolutely cracking combined with my favourite sauce of all time, hollandaise (which is always fun to make when you’re making it for a crowd…how much butter!?)
An ‘egg & bacon salad’ was basically a locally sourced take on the classic French dish. ‘Soft boiled pheasant egg with Devonshire dry cured bacon, frissee and sourdough croutons’. Our diners were amazed when we got 18 just soft boiled eggs out of the kitchen in no time at all. To do this we used a cheffy trick of pre-boiling the eggs so they were just underdone, then plunging into iced water to stop the cooking and then refrigerating. To re-heat we plunged them back into boiling water for 30 seconds. We were really pleased with how this turned out, as it’s such a simple dish, but easy to cock up.
‘Braised shoulder of salt marsh lamb with peas, broad beans and potato’. This is a Jason Atherton recipe and is fantastic because most of the preparation is done in advance. The lamb shoulder is braised slowly for hours in a combination of chicken and beef stock, and allowed to cool, then taken out and ripped up, discarding all fat and gristle. The resulting meat is then rolled up into clingfilm cylinders and refrigerated, where it firms up. To serve, it’s cut into portions and fried off last minute. It’s already cooked really, so you’re just re-heating and browning the outside. I think this is a really impressive dish. A sprinkling of chopped rosemary to finish, and that’s it.
The beginning of July and for dessert we served ‘Homewood ewe’s curd cheesecake mousse, Wye Valley raspberries & spiced shortbread’. We pinched the mousse recipe from Tom Kitchin’s cookbook, but used the excellent local artisan produced Homewood Ewes curd to make our own version. It’s almost a deconstructed cheesecake. We were really pleased with this.
The end of July, and this was the vegetarian option, offered instead of the treacle cured salmon, ‘Beetroot mousse, horseradish crème fraiche, pea-shoots and Harts Bakery bread’. A striking colour, horseradish and beetroot are a classic combination and it seemed to go down well.
This is one of my favourite dishes ever, ‘Gloucester Old Spot pork belly, black pudding, gooseberry chutney & potatoes’. It’s another one of those recipes, like the lamb shoulder, where it’s mostly prepared in advance, which is perfect for a supper club. The pork belly is rolled and tied, then braised in stock, removed and laid out flat, it’s then weighted down to press it and refrigerated. To serve, it’s portioned up, and fried to order. We made the gooseberry chutney in advance, the tart sharpness cutting through the fatty pork nicely…. and the potatoes…mashed. The best mash I’ve ever made in fact, sheer silky creaminess, lets just ignore how much butter, full fat milk and double cream went into them. Just to finish it all off, we crumbled some black pudding over the pork.
Another chilled soup, tomato in this case. Ok, technically it’s gazpacho (even more so as it’s Spanish chef Jose Pizzaro's recipe), but as all the ingredients were perfectly in season in England at the time, it’s too bloody good and there were so many fantastic tomatoes around, we had to make it. The recipe is simplicity itself and it astounded me that it tasted so fantastic for seemingly such little work. We used locally grown Radford Mill organic tomatoes, and served it with something else pinched from Tom Kitchin; a dollop of Basil Sorbet (which tasted incredible by the way).
Finally, right up to the most recently held ‘Basement’ one of the best desserts we’ve made, ‘Mirabelle plum & thyme tart with cinnamon ice cream’. The plums were also from Radford Mill and were organic. Plum and thyme went together incredibly well. The cinnamon ice cream was also one of the best we’ve made so far, but it’s always a pain to make enough for 18, as our machine is one of those small, cheap ‘freeze for 24hrs before using’ jobbies, which means much scheduling and planning in order to knock up the required amount.
So, there you have it. Some of the better food we’ve cooked in recent months at The Montpelier Basement (that we have photos of). I’m proud of all it to be honest. To knock 18 of any of those dishes out, from a small domestic kitchen, under pressure, with a room full of expectant guests and no practice run… it's always going to be massive sighs of relief, cheesy grins and back slaps all round, I reckon. At the very least, we haven't poisoned anyone...yet.
P.S. On Sunday September 25th, we’re bringing the whole Montpelier Basement dog and pony show to London, at Farringdon’s The Coach and Horses pub, for one night only. It’s already fully booked up, but if you fancy being added to the waiting list, or want to come along to any future possible Basement On Tour dates, or any of our regular Bristol ones for that matter, drop us a line at montpelierbsmt@gmail.com and we’ll add you to the mailing list.
Good service is absolutely key when you’re running a restaurant. A friendly smile here, a kind word there, some extra attention paid. It can all help to smooth over a multitude of problems. Most people, myself included, can be incredibly forgiving if the service is good or a complaint has been handled professionally and with a bit of charm. To put it bluntly, if I’m handing over my hard earned cash to eat at your restaurant, I expect a friendly welcome and some looking after. I mean, if I really wanted sullen cheerless service, I’d eat ‘E’s food at home, (I'm kidding of course)
Unfortunately, it seems that one member of the front of house staff at the recently opened Riding House Café didn’t get the memo. Our very first impressions upon entering the place were tainted somewhat by an unsmiling, glacial, unwelcoming but oh so trendily attired, fashion model proportioned, lanky greeter, who rubbed his designer stubble and sized us up from a vantage point that seemed to be located somewhere between an arched eyebrow and down his nose.
“Table for two?”
We followed as he pranced and sashayed through the restaurant as if on a catwalk, before gesturing silently to an empty table and tossing two menus onto it without even breaking stride as he continued on, to chat to someone at the bar.
What an absolutely abysmal start.
‘E’ and I looked at each other; eyebrows raised quizzically. We then began an urgent hissed and muttered conversation on how to deal with such awful initial service. We decided against walking straight out, because we were there now, we were hungry and we really wanted to give it a try. The reviews for the most part had been fairly positive and we were curious. But don’t think for one minute that the poor attitude hadn’t been noted. We didn’t like the cut of his jib one little bit.
Looking around us there was no doubting that the restaurant fit out has been done fantastically well. What an absolutely beautiful and interesting looking space. There’d obviously been no expense spared and no detail overlooked. Lovely, and I’d imagine a pretty good place to prop up the bar on a Friday night.
Glancing at the menus, it seems that we’d unwittingly timed our arrival in a sort of ‘menu no-mans land’, not quite lunch and not quite dinner. Only a hand full of the mains were available, and a selection of the menu’s small plates, which is The Riding House Café’s ‘thing’.
Not really fancying any of the available larger dishes, we decided to order a few of the small plates to share. All are priced between £3 and £5 and don’t appear to be influenced by any particular country or cooking style.
A bowl of spicy broad beans were a pretty standard nibble, and priced at £1.50
The bread selection with artichoke puree was far more interesting. The bread was pretty decent and the puree bloody gorgeous. Well worth the £1.50
A bowl of veal and pork sausage, lentils, mustard and sage was pretty good, the mustard sauce was perhaps a bit over salty but I’d have happily paid more money and stuffed a bigger portion of this.
Pipérade, anchovy, basil was a disaster in the offing. Onions, peppers and tomatoes precariously perched on a wafer thin piece of toasted bread, just waiting to crumble and deposit the whole oily mess down your no doubt, white shirt. Happily I ate without incident, the anchovies were nice and fresh and it was pretty decent at £3
Beetroot carpaccio, sheep’s ricotta, merlot vinaigrette. So incredibly simple that I bet the kitchen is slinging these out in their sleep. But, it’s a small plate of decent ingredients that work well together. A scattering of pumpkin seeds added a nice bit of crunch. Yours for £3.
Finally, Atlantic Prawns, lemon and mayonnaise. Not a lot to say really, incredibly simple, unmucked about with, lovely fresh big prawns. Anyone who’s seen comedian Stewart Lee will know that massive prawns equal quality of life, so they get a big thumbs up. A bowl of these were £5
Sadly in this strange limbo time between lunch and dinner, the dessert options seemed to be severely limited to what was proffered by a (much more happier and professional) waitress from beneath a glass dome. Declining a lump of rocky road or a raspberry muffin type thing as just a bit too Starbucks for our liking, we, as the more sordid journalists often say, made our excuses and left…. pausing only momentarily to do the grown up thing and flick V’s in the general direction of the appallingly ignorant front of house model.
The Riding House Café is a fantastic looking restaurant and bar, beautifully and tastefully designed. I loved the look of it.
However, I didn’t love the ‘too cool’ service we received on our visit. It was frigging abysmal and goes a long way in undoing any wish I may have to return or recommend it. But, to be fair, it was just the one guy and if by now he hasn’t learnt to slap on a smile, do his job properly with a modicum of charm and the management is in any way competent, then he’ll have probably been given the boot. Harsh perhaps, but as my old Dad would say, tough titties.
The small plate idea is good, the prices reasonable and the food pretty good. Not setting the world alight, but not dropping any bollocks either. It performs the function of something to eat while you sip your drink in the rather fabulous surroundings admirably. I’ve heard the burgers are good, and if I’m in the area I might pop back to try one of the main dishes, but I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to visit again.
The Riding House Café
43-51 Great Titchfield Street
London
W1W 7PQ
Telephone: 020 7927 0840
http://ridinghousecafe.co.uk
