Reviews – Page 10 – Gastronomy Domine

1st November 2007

Istanbul spice bazaar

I’ve just got back from Istanbul, where I spent several days gorging myself on kebabs, dates, grilled fish, honeycomb, morello cherry juice and other good things. I am currently too jetlagged to come up with any really sparkling prose, so this will mostly be a picture post from the city’s spice market, where about 100 small stalls in a covered bazaar sell everything from henna to sumac. It’s an essential shopping destination if you’re in the city and you’re at all interested in food.

This stall was selling loukhoum (Turkish delight – here’s my recipe) and baclava, the tooth-hurtingly sweet pastries soaked in a sugar syrup that you might have had with coffee in Turkish or Greek restaurants. I did not sample the aphrodisiac delight on the right, but judging by the huge chunks that had obviously already been sold on the day I visited, some people must think it’s effective. Behind the blocks are tins of Iranian caviar. The caviar is also sold from blocks, sliced and then jarred. Nilgun, our excellent guide, suggested putting a dab of butter in the top of the jar to keep the caviar fresh.

Raw spices, including several grades of flaked chilli and powdered paprika. I’d already tried some of the very dark chilli in the second row, sprinkled on a rotisserie chicken; we came away from the market with a little packet to use at home. At the left-hand side of the picture you can see almonds for sale, still in their shells; the dried roots at the front next to the bundles of cinnamon are turmeric and ginger. There’s more caviar in tins above the display, next to jars of pomegranate molasses.

Raw honeycomb, kept behind glass to keep insects away. There was a big slab of this laid out every morning at our hotel breakfast; we squashed it with a fork to drive the honey out of the waxy comb, and then ate it with yoghurt, on croissants and on toast.

This stall was labelling several substances as saffron. None of the yellow/orange things on offer was real saffron; the powder at the front was turmeric, and the fat orange stamens on the plastic trays at the left (much fatter than the thread-like real thing) were safflower, which doesn’t taste of much and is used primarily in dyes. Caveat emptor.

Four grades of dates, some prunes, and two grades of apricots. Most stalls selling dried fruit sold hunza apricots in their dark, untreated form alongside the bright orange ones (which are treated with sulphur dioxide to preserve their colour). If you find the less attractive brown ones, buy them; all the flavour and aroma of the fresh fruit is concentrated in them, and they’re much better than the orange ones. We sampled several grades of date, and there was method in the pricing; the expensive ones really were the best, with thin skins and a moist, fudgy interior – it was hard to believe that what you were eating was a fruit.

I’ve got some restaurant recommendations for you, some street food tips and some more market exploration coming up – watch this space.

17th September 2007

Mexgrocer – Salsa Verde recipe

Those of you who read this blog regularly might remember that about a year ago, I mentioned in passing that I couldn’t find any tomatillos in the UK. There were a few Mexican ideas I wanted to try out with some of the little green beasties, but besides growing my own, it looked as if there was no way I’d be able to find any.

Eventually, I gave up on tomatillos. Then, about two weeks ago, I had an email from Sol, half of the husband and wife team that runs Mexgrocer.co.uk. After we’d chatted for a bit, Sol sent me a lovely box of Mexican ingredients to play with, and nestling at the top of the box, I found a bag full of beautiful fresh, ripe tomatillos, wrapped up in their papery husks. Other things in that box went to make a big meal for a group of friends (you’ll read more about that meal later on this week). Sol and his Mexican wife have made sure that you will be able to find ingredients which have been unavailable in the UK for years. There are chocolatey moles (a thick, savoury sauce which I used to smother some sticky sauteed chicken pieces), tamales, nopales (prickly pear cactus – a very delicious vegetable), a breathtaking selection of fresh, dried, smoked and bottled chillies, and some herbs and spices I’ve never seen on this side of the Atlantic.

So then, you ask. What are these tomatillo things? It’s probably simplest if I explain what they aren’t. They’re not cape gooseberries, even though they have a papery, Chinese-lantern-type husk protecting the fruit (cape gooseberries and tomatillos both come from the physalis family). They’re not unripe tomatoes, even though a tomatillo without a husk looks precisely like a green tomato. They have a fresh, lightly acidic, juicy taste, lots of tiny seeds, and are firm and gloriously green when ripe. They feature very heavily in green sauces in Mexican cooking, and if you’ve not tried them before, you’re in for a treat.

Tomatillos keep very well in their husks – pop them in the fridge and they’ll last for a couple of weeks. You can also freeze them successfully if you’re going to be using them in a sauce.

An uncooked, emerald-coloured salsa is the ideal way to show these little fruits off. This salsa couldn’t be easier to prepare, and it’s fantastic with rich foods, its fresh zing cutting through fatty, creamy sauces. To make salsa verde for six, you’ll need:

400g tomatillos
2 mild green chillies
6 spring onions
1 large handful coriander
100 ml water
1 teaspoon salt

Remove the husks from the tomatillos and wash them to remove their natural sticky coating. Halve them, removing the woody bit where the stem met the fruit. Remove the seeds from the chillies, and wash the spring onions and coriander carefully to remove any grit.

Put all the ingredients in the food processor, and whizz until you have a slightly chunky mixture. Chill before serving. This salsa is great used as a dip, and it’s also delicious as a topping for rice, or as an ingredient to lift the flavour of a lovely meaty taco.

9th August 2007

Bryan’s Fish and Seafood Restaurant, Headingley, Leeds

Fish and chips. It’s a meal as British as you can get. Every British town has its fish and chip shop. Some only dispense disappointing bags of wet stodge and vinegar, but some will sell you something astonishing – golden-crisp batter enveloping moist, flaking fish, and chips which have been nowhere near a freezer, cut by hand from a heap of potatoes in a room at the back of the shop. (The chips in this picture do, as a reader pointed out, look rather pale and anaemic. Please be assured that this is just an artifact of my rotten photography; the room was dark and I had to use the flash, which has substantially drained them of colour. They were actually several shades darker and very crisp.)

My grandparents lived near Grimsby, which was historically England’s busiest fishing port, and summers spent with them involved a diet heavy in batter and newsprint. Fish and chips down south with my parents were a little different; the northern variety tended to be fried in beef dripping in the good old days, when we had little regard for our cholesterol levels and a healthy respect for the cold-repelling qualities of a plump abdomen, but down south, where we lived, vegetable oil was the standard frying medium.

Luckily for me, my parents-in-law live only a few miles from the Good Food Guide’s Fish and Chip Restaurant of the Year. Bryan’s, tucked down a side-street in Headingley, serves fish and chips in the proper northern tradition. It’s been in the same location since 1934, and although it’s seen some changes in that time (Dr Weasel’s father, Professor Weasel, remembers 1970s formica-topped tables and old ladies in greasy aprons – now it’s much more chi-chi, with a carpet, glossy banquettes and dishes like salmon with asparagus hollandaise alongside the fish and chips), the core of the business, namely that astonishingly good plate of battered haddock and crisp fried potatoes, remains the same.

There’s a certain amount of ritual involved with ordering fish and chips. There must be strong, hot tea to drink alongside your meal – none of your Darjeeling or Earl Grey here, though; it must be builder’s tea, with lots of milk and sugar. You need an accompanying plate of bread and butter (preferably in alternating slices of white and brown). There must be a dish of mushy peas; these are dried marrowfat peas which have been simmered until soft, alarmingly frog-green, and sludgy (and which have been famously mistaken for guacamole by soft southern politicians visiting the frozen north). Your chips should be anointed with malt vinegar, and salted heavily. This is so very important that John Major interrupted his day-job back in the 90s to advise people that the vinegar should be added first, in order that the salt is not rinsed off by the gushing torrents.

I like a glass of shandy with my fish and chips. It’s a throwback to a mildly alcoholic childhood with my grandmother, who used to feed us sherry before Sunday lunch at home with gay abandon, but who found that the fish and chip shop wouldn’t serve her 10-year-old granddaughter and even younger grandson lager, so had us make do with shandy. My glass at Bryan’s was half Tetley beer from the brewery down the road, and half lemonade.

Bryan’s fish and chips comes in a variety of sizes and cuts. While cod stocks are so threatened, Bryan’s and many other restaurants will not serve the fish, but this is no skin off my nose; I’ve always preferred haddock anyway. There’s also plaice, hake and halibut, all encased in a shatteringly crisp, salty batter. Fish and chips done well requires exceptionally hot fat, which makes the thick-cut chips wonderfully crisp on the outside and fluffy within. It also means that the fish cooks so fast that done properly, the flesh inside the batter is uniquely juicy, flaking at the touch of a fork.

If you’re in or near Leeds, take the detour to Headingley and order yourself one of these giant plates of haddock, sized for Yorkshire appetites. I can’t think of another meal that costs less than £10 which comes close to being this good.

16th July 2007

A Concise Encyclopaedia of Gastronomy

No pictures yet today – the USB cable for my camera has gone walkies. You’ll have to make do with the magic of the written word.

My very dear friend Lorna got married on Saturday. (I am still recovering from the stupid decision I made to try to keep up with her new husband’s Irish friends once the drinking began in earnest. Congratulations to Lorna and Stephen, who are currently eating things in bikini and trunks on their honeymoon in Sicily.) Lorna, clearly having got this being a bride thing back to front, gave me a present the week before the wedding.

We were sitting in a café when she handed over the book she’d bought me, and on opening it I proceeded to get so excited that an old gentleman at an adjacent table got up and said how delightful it was to see young people still able to get excited over books. I immediately stopped being delightful and instead became very self-conscious for about ten seconds before going all twittery again, for this is a seriously, seriously fabulous book. André Simon’s Concise Encyclopaedia of Gastronomy is a real treasure trove of esoteric and quirky information for the obsessional foodie. It was started in 1938 by Simon, a champagne dealer, wine writer and all-round bon-viveur, and was planned for release in three sections a year to be lined up attractively on your bookshelves. Sauces, the first section, was published in 1939. With the breakout of the Second World War, paper shortages and conscription at his English publishers slowed the publication of the next eight sections, but by 1946 the work was finished, and a couple of years later a single-volume edition (the one I was chirruping about in the cafe) was published.

André Simon’s exhaustive treatment of what he calls ‘Gaster-the-belly . . . that temperamental furnace . . . the seat of the soul’ is by turns fascinating and hilarious, and remains useful for the modern cook, with its concise recipes, its instructions on handling different ingredients and its exploration of some truly unusual foods. (I am pretty sure that readers in 1945 had never eaten an agouti, much less enjoyed its ‘best part, the grizzled fur’. I certainly haven’t.) We learn that the flesh of the squirrel is seldom eaten in England . . . and we’re given two recipes for a casserole and a pie. We discover that the fat of the Bastard Antelope ‘quickly becomes cold and clogs in the mouth’. Here is a consomme of swifts, there a roast swan. There’s a recipe for The Bishop, a Cambridge University wintertime concoction of oranges and port. There are pages upon pages of short descriptions of cheeses, some now extinct. And, wonder of wonders, a few hundred early cocktail recipes. (I like the sound of the Jack Rose – the juice of half a lime, a teaspoon of grenadine and a jigger of apple-jack, shaken over ice.) There are edible birds I’ve never heard of (the Tufted Pochard? The Godwit?) There’s a recipe for rabbit in brandy which I’m determined to cook. There’s a detailed history of the Bath Oliver biscuit. A garnish for sweetbreads involving truffles cooked whole in Madeira, hollowed and refilled with quenelles of chicken forcemeat and the chopped centres of the truffles. And there’s a thoughtful instruction to make sure that the only aardvark that I allow to pass my lips should be smoked.

It’s worth looking at some second-hand websites for a copy of this magical book. Simon laments that: ‘Gastronomy in England and in the United States of America has a very limited appeal; it certainly has none of the fascination which Nutrition has for a vast number of people. And yet Gastronomy is to Nutrition what health is to sickness. All who enjoy good health, which means, happily, the great majority of the population, could and should enjoy good food and drink, the fuller and happier life which is the gift of Gastronomy for all normal people: that is to say people who are blessed with all their senses and a sufficient measure of common sense to make good use of them.’ I hope he’d find the food landscape in Britain a bit more congenial these days.

6th July 2007

Bruno’s Brasserie, Cambridge

Update, 19 February 2008
Sadly, Bruno’s is closing after this weekend, doubtless to be replaced by yet another branch of Starbucks or Subway. Thanks to Dan for the tip.

Update, 10 July 2007
A thousand apologies to Dan from the River Farm Smokery in Bottisham, who is, in fact, responsible for the very lovely smoked tomatoes mentioned below – I mistook them for the restaurant’s own. Dan – I am still having dreams about those pigeon breasts you guys provided for the beer festival. Keep up the good work!

Cambridge isn’t exactly buckling under the weight of good restaurants. It’s odd; Cambridge is an affluent city, and the university gives it a really cosmopolitan feel which just isn’t reflected in its restaurants. We groan under the weight of a million branches of Pizza Express and chains like Café Rouge and Chez Gerard, largely thanks to the enormous property prices in the city, which mean that independent restaurants are hard-pressed to afford a pitch. There are still a few happy standouts (the place I live next door to, 12 miles outside the city, is one of them; email me if you want more details). Midsummer House, with its two Michelin Stars, is a very fine restaurant in the centre of the city, although if you, like me, are mildly annoyed rather than amused by some of the twiddles, froth and frills associated with molecular gastronomy, a visit can be a pain in the wallet you might prefer not to bear. Over in Little Shelford, Sycamore House (only open from Wednesday to Saturday) is excellent – I’ll post a complete review later this year.

Bruno’s Brasserie (52 Mill Road, Cambridge, CB1 2AS, Tel: 01223 312702) has been a Cambridge standard for good French bistro food for some years now. The restaurant used to have a Michelin star, and I’ll admit to being a little hornswoggled by some of the aesthetic changes they’ve made since losing it; the food remains very good, but the linen tablecloths and napkins have gone (to be replaced by nothing at all and sad paper squares), and the restaurant has repositioned itself as a ‘restaurant and gallery’. Cambridge happens to have some good galleries, especially along King’s Parade (check out Primavera when you’re in town for some really interesting paintings, jewellery, pottery, glass and sculpture). Bruno’s is not a gallery. It’s a restaurant which displays local painters’ work, sometimes pretty weak, for sale to diners. Acres of canvas does not necessarily make up for the lack of a tablecloth, especially when the paintings are a bit…you know. Still – on to the food and the wine.

Linen and questionable paintings aside, I really like Bruno’s. It’s one of the few good restaurants I’ve found which can cater easily for large groups, and in the past I’ve been to events where friends have rented out half of the restaurant. Service was prompt and excellent even when there were thirty of us. This is good French food with some accents from other cuisines, so starters include this Salade Lyonnaise with a perfectly poached egg alongside more exotic dishes like the mussels in a lime and coriander broth.

The wine list is thoughtful and well-chosen, and there’s also a good cocktail list. The restaurant was very helpful with the wine when my friend celebrated a big birthday there, and allowed the pair of us to prop ourselves up at an empty table and taste a selection from the list. Three ‘palate cleansers’ are also on offer between courses: a champagne and vanilla sorbet, a very lovely passionfruit and lavender sorbet and a watermelon and vodka granita. These will cost you an extra £1.50, but they’re worth every penny.

Main courses are built around really excellent cuts of meat. On previous visits I’ve enjoyed the belly pork (which is almost always on the menu). This beef fillet was cooked exactly medium rare (often a difficult task, for some reason, in British kitchens, many of which seem to only specialise in differing shades of grey). It sat on a crisp and delicate rosti, and was topped with a fierce and very tasty Roquefort butter – sometimes the restaurant also offers a foie gras butter. Those tomatoes you can see were a lovely surprise; they were smoked in the restaurant kitchen and served cold (although one of our dining companions said he would have found them much better if they’d been hot, like the rest of the dish).

I felt like revisiting my 1980s childhood and ordered the strawberry and almond shortcake. This was served with basil leaves and a basil coulis (basil is a lovely herb with strawberries). The fragile, friable shortbread was delicately spiked with almonds, and the strawberries were cheeringly sweet given this summer of no sunshine we’ve been having. This reminds me – if the rain does stop any time soon, ask for a table outdoors on the lovely terrace.

If you visit Bruno’s, parking on one of Mill Road’s side streets or at the Queen Anne car park on Parkside is always available. The restaurant is popular, so you should be sure to make a reservation.

25th June 2007

Moro

The Great She Elephant does not so much celebrate her birthdays as rue them. She suggested Moro (Exmouth Market, Farringdon, London, 020 7833 8336) as the venue for this year’s quiet lunchtime wake for lost youth. I’m always happy to oblige – GSE has fantastic taste in restaurants.

Moro is a restaurant specialising in southern Spanish food with a strong Moroccan influence, run by the Clarks, a married couple who, confusingly, are both called Sam. It’s been going strong for ten years now, and shows no sign of slowing or losing popularity. Tapas is available all day at the bar, while in the restaurant itself you’ll find a menu that changes weekly, showcasing seasonal produce. (The menu for the week is available at Moro’s excellent website, so if you’re like me and mildly obsessive about what you eat for lunch you can start to decide what you want to order days before you visit.)

The dining room is all stark wood and zinc, with a real feeling of bustle contributed to by the lightning-fast, extravagantly tattooed servers. Moro wins extra points for offering tap water alongside the bottled stuff, and for wordlessly topping up the jug when we’d finished (it was a hot, hot day). Although all these hard surfaces make for a noisy dining experience, especially when the restaurant is full, it’s a lovely atmosphere for lunch, especially if you can get a table near the window, overlooking the busy street, or one at the back where you can see into the kitchen. The wine list, mostly Spanish, is really interesting, and you’ll find a near-exhaustive list of sherries to sip as an aperitif. And somehow, despite the restaurant’s exotic menu and massive popularity, they manage to keep the prices sane.

I started with one of my favourite dishes in the world: sweetbreads. Moro’s were glorious little nuggets, dusted in a seasoned flour and fried to a rustling crispness outside, with nuttily soft middles. A cardamom and preserved lemon dressing tied them to chargrilled artichoke bottoms and left me feeling like I’d just eaten an angel. GSE’s cuttlefish was carefully braised over a long period with sherry, until it was soft and toothsome. A broad bean salad, made from beans so young and tender that they didn’t need removing from their skins, provided a great foil in texture and flavour.

If you see the words ‘charcoal grilled’ on the menu, order that dish. GSE’s lamb, which came with a pea and farika pilaf and pistachio sauce, was delicious; pink and sweet in the centre and charred on the outside. I asked for the vegetable mezze platter, which you can see at the top of the page. Hummus, an aubergine purée, a spoonful of a Syrian lentil dish, more of those baby broad beans, French beans in a yoghurt sauce and Imam Bayaldi (stuffed aubergine) were clustered around a remarkable perfumed, shredded beetroot dish which was flavoured with pistachio and fragrant rose water. I felt the Imam Bayaldi would have been tastier served at a cooler temperature (it and the French beans were hot, while all the other mezze were at room temperature), but this is getting into seriously picky territory. A flat bread, baked in the restaurant and filled with crushed nuts, was served alongside to dip into the mezze, along with some sweet and peppery radishes and other crudités, and a spicy pickled pepper.

These are enormous portions, and this rich, very positively flavoured food is deliciously, satisfyingly filling. We paused for a while and then opted to share a dessert (and I’m glad we did; it was very large and again, wonderfully rich). This yoghurt cake with pistachios and pomegranates was like a deconstructed, Moorish lemon-meringue pie. Moist sponge nestled against a frothy lemon sabayon, and more of those lovely perfumey flavours (this time from scented pistachio and heady pomegranate) underscored the whole thing.

Just walking into this room full of the smell of bread and charcoal is a treat. Eating there’s positive bliss.

31st May 2007

Momma Cherri’s Soul Food Shack, Brighton

Sad news – as of the start of 2008, Momma Cherri’s has gone into administration. Reviews of the restaurant from recent months show that people were having much less positive experiences of the restaurant than we did, and it looks like the financial troubles the restaurant was experiencing a couple of years ago have come back with a vengeance. Momma Cherri’s Soul in a Bowlbook is still available for those of you who want to know how to make that excellent chicken.

Brighton wasn’t all rain, bad service and good opera. I’ve been hankering after a visit to Momma Cherri’s (2-3 Little East Street, Brighton, tel. 01273 325305) for a few years, ever since the Times reviewed it back in 2003. Momma’s is an American soul food restaurant, serving up all that good stuff that you find in really traditional cafes and grills in the US – grits, hush puppies, ribs, cornbread, and Southern fried chicken like Colonel Sanders only dreamed about.

You might have seen Momma Cherri’s on Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. A couple of years ago, the restaurant was having some financial trouble – fortunately, they’ve been one of the few businesses to pay attention to Old Celeriac Head’s advice (from a good starting position – he remarked on arriving that the food was excellent but that the business itself needed some work), and they’re now going strong, with new, larger premises near the seafront in Brighton.

There’s an air of barely controlled chaos inside, with some truly bizarre interior design choices (bobble-headed James Brown figurines, Asian tribal masks, big wooden African heads and a whole lot of American flags), giggling staff rushing around and a busy mix of patrons. We visited for brunch (from 11am to 2pm on Sundays) – Momma herself was, sadly, breakfasting at home that day, but the friendly staff showed us round the menu and made us very comfortable.

In a world of low carb, low fat, low taste food, Momma Cherri’s is an absolute godsend. My fried chicken was actually better than any I’ve had in America (no mean feat, this) – deep-fried moist, succulent meat encased in a shatteringly crisp cornmeal coating. Cornmeal and spice mixtures are available to buy at the restaurant if you want to try your hand at reproducing any of the food you eat here; Momma has also just released a cookery book called Momma Cherri’s Soul in a Bowl for those of us who can’t make it to Brighton as often as we’d like to. I’ve only one quibble, and that’s with the use of some pretty mediocre frozen chips to accompany some of the dishes – ask for the excellent hash browns instead of chips when you go.

The Soul Brunch plate, which Dr Weasel very sensibly selected, was a thing of wonder. Here was ham, glazed apple slices, cornbread squares, hash brown potatoes with fried onion, shards of crisply fried bacon, a perfectly fried egg, and, to top it all off (literally – it was sliding off the egg), a slice of pecan pie. This pie is the only one of the desserts (among which was one of my very favourites, key lime pie) which isn’t made in restaurant – the chef is allergic to nuts. We drank two large pitchers of Momma Cherri’s gorgeous homemade lemonade – not too sweet, not too sharp, and wonderfully clean-tasting.

If you’re craving gumbo, jambalaya or grits, head over to Brighton. Be sure to book – it’s a far cry from the days when they had to call celebrity chefs in to save this place. It seems like everybody in the south of England has cottoned on now, and they’re all queuing up for a table. Thanks Momma – we’ll be back soon.

29th May 2007

De Vere Grand hotel, Brighton

Here in the UK, we’ve just had a bank holiday weekend. True to form, the weather took the opportunity to stop being gloriously balmy, and did a very fine impression of somewhere north of the Arctic circa Noah. (I’m being perfectly serious here: the Met Office put out news yesterday informing us that this weekend, the UK was colder than Alaska.) Of course, this freezing, soaking weekend happened to be the weekend we had tickets for Cosi fan tutte at Glyndebourne, where I’d hoped to picnic in the garden; and a hotel room booked in Brighton, where I’d hoped to make use of the beach. Fat chance.

It’s usually pretty difficult to find a hotel room within reach of Glyndebourne during the opera festival, and many local hotels insist that you take a room for at least two days if you’re there over the weekend. I managed to find a breathtakingly expensive room for a single night at the De Vere Grand in Brighton, ten miles from Glyndebourne, which boasts five stars and an interesting history (it’s the hotel which was bombed by the IRA during the 1984 Conservative conference, and it’s opposite the burned-out remains of the West Pier).

£210 will find you a large room in the front of the hotel, with a big picture window looking over the English Channel and the curiously beautiful ruins of the West Pier. £210 is a large sum to be paying for a non-suite room (that’s about $420 for American readers), and I expect something pretty fine for the money, especially in a hotel boasting five stars. I’m still bewildered by the curate’s egg of an experience we had in our 24 hours at the hotel, where the staff were, on the whole, charming, helpful and solicitous; the room seriously sub-standard; and the check in/out experience a total nightmare.

First, the good. On arriving at the hotel, having carried Dr Weasel’s dinner jacket from the car in a torrential downpour, I was greeted by the concierge who took it from me, and told me he’d dry it and have it delivered to the room. He not only dried it (all without asking); he also removed all the cat hairs.

More good: I’d ordered a picnic to be picked up when we arrived, so we could take it to the opera (where it’s traditional to spread out on the lawn outside the auditorium in the long interval over champagne, sandwiches, strawberries and cream). The hotel offers a picnic service at around £20 a head, depending on the contents of the hamper. The gentleman I spoke to was charming, and I asked him to surprise us with the picnic contents. I was more than surprised; I was delighted. He’d packed the basket, which came with proper porcelain and cutlery, napkins and a rug, with beautiful roast beef and horseradish cream sandwiches on white bread, and some smoked salmon and cream cheese on brown, all with the crusts neatly sliced off. There were four excellent cheeses, including a wonderfully nutty Comte, all accompanied by some home-made relishes, including a tangy, sweet onion marmalade, and a relish with allspice and fresh apples. A selection of different grapes and celery, along with some lovely little biscuits, accompanied the cheeses. There was a dish of soft fruits: giant blackberries, sweet raspberries, strawberries and blueberries. And most welcome of all, because it was very, very cold at the covered picnic table where we huddled over our hamper, was a huge thermos of fresh coffee, complete with proper china mugs.

More good: breakfast was in the best tradition of the English hotel breakfast. The buffet spread was vast, and offered Continental and English breakfasts, with lovely little black puddings, delicious rosti, a fresh egg station and extremely moreish muffins, all with a view of the sea. The serving staff were some of the most cheerful people I’ve ever met at eight in the morning. Evening cocktails were also good (they’ll be better when the smoking ban comes into force), with some deliciously strong martinis; and it was great to sit in the conservatory at the front of the building and watch the thunder and lightning over the sea. Our wake-up call was on time, and the correct newspapers were delivered.

Unfortunately, I’m struggling to find anything else good to say about the place. Check-in was late, but not insultingly so. This isn’t something I’d recognise as a five-star hotel, and I do not expect a room I’ve forked out £210 on to have fraying carpets, chipped tiles (they’d made an effort at disguising this with something that appeared to be typewriter correction fluid), someone else’s shortest, curliest hairs adorning the bathroom, upholstery that’s coming apart at the seams, a television that doesn’t work and Britain’s least comfortable bed. This king-sized plank was actually two planks pushed together with a solid ridge standing proud all the way down the centre, like a Berlin wall between husband and wife. My side had some plasticky, sweat-inducing layer under the bottom sheet, and I woke up glued moistly to the bed down the side where my skin met the mattress. Dr Weasel leapt from bed screaming every time a police car howled past the building, sirens on. It seems there are more events requiring sirens and lights at 3am in Brighton than is, perhaps, natural, and the glazing in this place is very noise-transparent. The radiators were a) fierce, b) unadjustable and c) very emphatically on, so the hotel had accompanied them with an air conditioning unit which, also very emphatically on, whined into the night like a conference of wasps.

That excellent breakfast went a long way to soothe my troubled nerves, and we went to check out with a smile. That smile evaporated when we checked the bill and found a number of cocktails on it which appeared to have been ordered and signed to our room the previous afternoon, while we were ten miles away, soaking up some culture. We explained that this was obviously a mistake, given that we weren’t even in the building…and this is where things went badly wrong.

In any other hotel I’ve stayed in, politely notifying reception of erroneous charges is almost always met with an apology and the erasure of those charges from the final bill. This time, though, the receptionist decided to respond with a cynically raised eyebrow, and she told us that there was no mistake: we had definitely ordered these drinks.

I feel a prat quibbling over a sum that’s under £20, but this place had already seen a great deal of our money for a sub-par night, and I found this insistence that we were lying about the drinks massively insulting. On seeing the specifics of the bill, I felt even more insulted – the people who’d signed the drinks to our room had been drinking Shirley Temples.

Several minutes of arguing later, the receptionist took the charge off the bill, announcing righteously that she would be going to the bar later to check the signature on the drinks charge against her record of our own signatures, and charging our card if she found they matched.
We stomped out, glowering, and started to drive towards Cambridge, smug in the knowledge that we do not drink Shirley Temples. Ten minutes later, I received a mildly sheepish, mildly apologetic phone call informing me that ‘someone had made a mistake’, and that we wouldn’t be charged for the drinks after all.

So sorry, De Vere Grand – I’m not coming back any time soon. Put some money into refurbishing the rooms, train your receptionists and cleaners as well as you have trained the excellent catering and concierge staff, and perhaps I’ll think about it in a few years’ time, when I’ve stopped being piqued about the drinks thing…but for the meantime, I’ll be going to the Hotel du Vin around the corner.

24th May 2007

Tuna and borlotti bean salad

This salad is brilliant at barbecues, where it’s a great light, sunshine-filled alternative to any giant hunks of charred meat you might be serving. It’s full of assertive flavours – the lemon, deliciously sweet peppers and raw onion, the celery and, of course, the tuna. It’s also very simple, and only takes a few minutes to throw together.

I’m a lazy cook. I very, very seldom cook beans from scratch – they’re very cheap to buy in cans, and in a salad like this the borlotti beans don’t suffer at all from coming out of a tin. If you prefer to use dried beans, you’ll need to soak them overnight, then boil for ten minutes. Take the pan off the heat and leave the beans to soak in their cooking water for two hours. Borlotti beans are a lovely little legume. They’re related to the kidney bean, and they have a lovely creamy texture and a slightly sweet taste. If you can’t find any, try making this with cannellini beans, which make a good alternative. To make a large bowl, big enough for a large family barbecue, you’ll need:

2 cans tuna in spring water
1 large sweet onion (a Vidalia or other sweet salad onion is excellent in this dish)
1 handful fresh parsley
1 plump clove garlic
1 can borlotti beans
5 stalks from a celery heart
1 orange pepper
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
Juice of ½ a lemon
Salt and pepper

Chop the onion into quarters and slice finely. Mince the parsley and cut the celery and pepper into small dice. Crush the garlic and flake the tuna. Put the beans in a sieve and rinse them under cold running water.

Toss all the prepared ingredients together in a large bowl with the olive oil, lemon and seasoning, and cover with cling film. Leave in the fridge for an hour before serving for the flavours to mingle.

24th April 2007

Flowering teas

One of the things I loved about Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette was the way the food and drink in the movie was treated as an important character, as well-dressed and given as much attention as the talking, walking Madame Dubarry. I’ve already mentioned the patisseries from Laduree which the film featured. Today it’s the turn of the tea from the Emperor of China which Marie Antoinette shares with her brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II.

The unprepossessing bullets of dry, twisted leaves below are the first stage of Numi flowering tea – the same astonishingly beautiful tea that’s used in the film. It’s available to order online from Numi’s website; I found mine at the food hall at Harvey Nichols, where it’s also served at the 5th Floor Cafe. The leaves are sewn together by hand in China – on the outside of these Dragon Lily tea balls you can see long, grassy leaves of white tea. The flowers open once you pour over hot water, and inside, things start to get really interesting.

Sewn inside the ball of leaves is a red lily flower, and inside that are sprinkled a teaspoon or so of tiny, scented osmanthus flowers that escape from the large flower and float in your cup of tea. If all this loveliness weren’t enough, the tea happens to be extremely delicious as well, with delicate apricot head notes and a lovely grassy finish.

Numi has a range of nearly 20 different flowering teas, white, green and black, so you are sure to find something you love. It’s worth splashing out on a box if you fancy drinking something cinematic with your afternoon macarons.