A.A. Gill, Breakfast at the Wolseley

A friendly publisher mailed me just before I left for New York, asking if I'd review a couple of books here for them. Always up for a freebie (I am nothing if not venal, especially where books are involved), I said yes - and was very, very pleased when Breakfast at the Wolseleyturned out to say A.A.Gillon the cover. If you're not a consumer of English newspapers, you may not have come across him; he's an author and journalist with a liking for smoking jackets and waspish prose. These days, Gill is the restaurant critic for the Sunday Times, and his is usually the first page I turn to when reading the papers in bed. His writing is unapologetically baroque and often vicious - his description of the Welsh as "loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls" in the Times about ten years ago (he also said that "You can easily travel from Cardiff to Anglesey without ever stimulating a taste bud,") nearly caused a Celtic uprising and sparked so many complaints from outraged Welshmen (no idea why - I'm married to one of the pugnacious little trolls, and it seemed fair enough to me) that the Press Complaints Commission and Commission for Racial Equality had to weigh in. We Brits love a Commission.

The Wolseley is a café-restaurant next to the Ritz in London, set in a building which was originally a gorgeously opulent showroom for Wolseley automobiles in the 1920s. That aesthetic runs through the restaurant itself as well as the book: the hard cover reproduces the design of the marble floors (themselves copied from Brunelleschi's floors in Santo Spirito in Florence, according to Gill), while a tiny black dust-slip does double duty by carrying the title and author while acting as a slim belt to dress up the cover. I do not usually witter on like this about the outside of a book, but this one is very pretty, and the copious and beautiful photography inside keeps the loveliness factor high. They top it all off with a black satin ribbon bookmark. If this book was a person, it'd be wearing a velvet opera cape.

The book opens with an essay on the Wolseley's history, then one on breakfast; Gill then walks us through a night's preparation in the restaurant kitchens for the breakfast rush, but somehow takes us there via the Turkish siege of Vienna (croissants, pastries, espresso), Capuchin monks in Venice (cappuccino) and the beekeepers of South London (who supply the Wolseley with honey and beeswax for their cannelés de Bordeaux). My only complaint here is that because he's writing about something he really enjoys, Gill is having trouble being as poisonous as usual, and I love him for his poison. Every now and then, though, the sliver-tipped dagger slips through the silky prose, so the restaurant's customer database becomes "a benign Stazi report"; we are ticked off for moving from the "sugar-crusted, multicoloured, zoomorphically shaped processed carbs of childhood for the sombre, brown, bran-rich, blandly goodly flakes of colonic probity and adulthood".

More short essays open each of the food chapters - Vienoisserie; Eggs; English Breakfast; Fruit and Cereals; and Tea, Coffee and Hot Chocolate. Rather wonderfully, you are offered bulleted instructions on how, for example, to prepare the perfectly poached or scrambled egg; a perfect cup of coffee (a discussion of the coarseness of your grind and whether you should select an Arabica or a Robusta); tea types and terminology. The night churns on - Polish plongeurs ("slim-featured, pale-eyed, all of them with the same contrary mixture of relief and resentment: a battened-in, taciturn, steely ambition") flop about with rubber gloves and misery. I said above that Gill's prose is baroque and it can be an acquired taste, but it's a taste well worth acquiring if only so that you can read what he has to say about yoghurt.

The essays are punctuated with a good solid armful of breakfast recipes (not by Gill). These are the dishes we all secretly love and avoid eating regularly for the sake of our arteries and pancreas - eggs Benedict, pain au chocolat, omelette Arnold Bennett, lamb's kidneys with Madeira, crèpes, haggis and duck egg. My heart throbs with the writing, my salivary glands do that squirty thing with the recipes. No recipe for the darned cannelés de Bordeaux, which saddens me, because I love the things.

I am torn between keeping this book in the kitchen so I can practise poaching eggs (a trick I have never quite got the hang of) or on the bedside table so I can read about the English breakfast's "cacophony of meat" before bedtime. I suspect I'm just going to be running up and down the stairs a lot. Just as well, given all the black pudding.

Bouchon, Las Vegas

I have a sense that Thomas Keller, one of America's best chefs and a man with impeccable style and taste, doesn't really do the Vegas thing. Bouchon, his Las Vegas outpost, feels positively out of time and place in this very modern, very garish city. By hiding it in a little-travelled corner of the sprawling Venetian Casino Resort, he's successfully made it feel private, out-of-the-way and oddly genuine in a city full of fibreglass souks serving sushi. (It really is out-of-the-way, in a corner of the Venezia tower; from the car park you will need to take two separate elevators, and if you're approaching from the casino you will have to swallow your pride and ask for directions, because it's near-impossible to locate otherwise.)

Bouchon is a glorious Palladian room housing a Lyonnaise bistro (or 'bouchon'), all marble-topped tables, encaustic tiles, sweeping arched windows, a pewter bar and pristine white-aproned serving staff. The restaurant has won a number of awards, many for its breakfast, and made Anthony Bourdain spit with rage over the French fries (of all things), which he admitted were better than the ones he serves at Les Halles. It serves what is, for my money, absolutely the best breakfast you will find in the city - we made a point of walking the two and a half miles from Mandalay Bay each time we went in order to burn as many morning calories as possible before arriving.

Breakfast diners are given complimentary butter, jam and an epi of freshly baked bread. Bouchon's bakery has a giant reputation, and you're well advised to sample the pastries on offer at the top of the menu alongside the excellent bread. Pains au chocolat are a beautiful example - hundreds of impossibly fine layers of flaky croissant dough, beautifully crisp outside and meltingly tender within, coiled around a stick of bitter chocolate - just begging to be dipped in your coffee. Even that coffee is something special; Chef Keller has selected the blend of four beans from all over the world, and it's a beautiful, dark, chocolatey roast, fantastic with those pastries.

We used to live in Paris before we got married, and I haunted patisseries like Angelina, Laduree and Hédiard. I am utterly alarmed to find better pastries than were available in any of the famous Paris names in a place like Las Vegas. My favourite pastry was probably this cheese Danish - a cloud of sweetened cream cheese on the lightest, flakiest, melting-est Danish base I've ever encountered.

Breakfast entrées include Dr W's favourite, the Bouchon French Toast. This is prepared bread pudding style - a tower of hot, custardy brioche, studded with jewels of cooked apple, drizzled with maple syrup and garnished with thin, thin slices of raw apple. If held at gunpoint, I couldn't choose between the amazingly light and flavourful boudin blanc with beurre noisette and scrambled egg (the only quibble I had over a few meals at Bouchon - these eggs weren't among the best I've eaten, being rather dry and hard) and the croque madame, which oozes glorious bechamel and Gruyère. That croque madame comes with the pommes frites which made Tony Bourdain enter a deep depression, and they're very good indeed. They're dry, crisp, fluffy inside, and hard to stop eating. But for French fry perfection in Las Vegas I recommend that you visit Stripsteak, a Michael Mina restaurant at Mandalay Bay, where the trio of duck fat fries (always served as an amuse bouche, and also available as a side dish) - one pot with paprika dusting and a barbecue sauce, one with truffles and a truffle aïoli, and one with herbs and a home-made ketchup - are far and away the best I've ever eaten.

Bouchon always offers a few daily specials on the blackboard. Peekytoe crab hash with onion confit, a poached egg and hollandaise was, according to the lady at the next table, 'Perfect. Gorgeous.' Dr W's tomato, bacon and spinach omelette with sharp cheddar was a simple preparation presented brilliantly. And Keller's quiches are justifiably famous - tender, moist and delicious, with a brittle, short crust.

Service here was charming and unobtrusive. On each visit, our waiters were very happy to answer questions (even rather technical ones about the sourcing of ingredients), and refilled coffee and water unobtrusively.

As you've probably gathered by looking at the number of dishes mentioned above, we didn't feel much like eating breakfast anywhere else once we'd eaten our first Bouchon meal. Somehow, we didn't manage to make it to the restaurant for an evening meal - I'm leaving supper at Bouchon as a treat for our next visit to Vegas, which is probably my favourite city for eating in the world.

Corned beef hash

This breakfast recipe is subject to another of those language difficulties that occasionally pop up when writing about American food in Britain. Here in the UK, when we say corned beef, we always mean the fatty stuff in trapezoidal tins that your Mum used to put in sandwiches with Branston pickle for your packed lunch. In America, corned beef can refer to the stuff in the cans, but usually means something more like what we in the UK call salt beef - a slab of beef brisket which is salted and preserved. ('Corned' means treated with corns, an archaic word for coarse grains of salt.) You can make this recipe with either kind of corned beef, but if you have the 'fresh' sort (from a deli, and not out of a tin), you'll need to chop it finely before you begin.

Those trapezoidal tins have a long history - they were originally produced as military supplies, and British soldiers were eating corned beef in the Boer war. I wonder how handy bayonets are for opening tins. These days, tins of corned beef are really easy to find in the supermarket, and are very inexpensive. This is a really, really cheap dish to make, coming in at under £1 a head, and you may already have all the ingredients in your storecupboard. It's also absolutely delicious, and a great breakfast to set you up for an active day ahead.

Finally, a word on the eggs. I used very fresh hen's eggs, but this is an occasion where it's really worth trying to get your hands on duck eggs, which are big, delicious and somehow very well suited indeed to this recipe. Some butchers carry duck and goose eggs - ask next time you visit.

To serve two, you'll need:

2 baking potatoes, scrubbed but not peeled
2 large onions
1 can corned beef
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon chilli sauce (I used Sriracha - see below)
1 tablespoon Angostura bitters (use a tablespoon of vermouth if you don't have any)
½ teaspoon onion salt
¼ teaspoon thyme
½ teaspoon paprika
¼ teaspoon ground cumin
8 twists of the pepper mill
1 tablespoon fresh parsley, chopped finely
4 eggs
Olive oil


Chop the corned beef into 2cm cubes and mix thoroughly with the herbs, spices, Angostura bitters, Worcestershire and chilli sauces. Choose a reasonably sweet chilli sauce with a good amount of garlic in it - Sriracha is great here, but experiment with other sauces if you have a particular favourite, and use more or less if you prefer extra heat or a milder dish. Set aside while you prepare the onions and potato.

Chop the onions in half and slice each half finely. Heat about a tablespoon of olive oil over a high flame in a non-stick pan, and tip the onions in. Chop the potatoes, with their skin, into 2cm cubes. Continue to fry the onions until they begin to take on colour, then add the potatoes to the pan with a little more oil. Keep stirring every minute or so.

When the potatoes are cooked through and are turning brown at the edges, and the onions are brown and caramelising (about 15 minutes), add the beef mixture to the pan. Stir thoroughly and turn the heat down to low. In another pan, fry the eggs. (I like mine with set whites and lovely runny yolks to mix into the hash.) Turn out the hash onto hot plates, and place two eggs on the top of each portion. Eat with toast and a big mug of hot coffee.

Smoked salmon kedgeree

Kedgeree is one of those curious dishes to come out of colonial India, with European ingredients (in this case smoked fish, usually haddock) alongside Indian spices and rice. There's an Indian dish called Khichri which is a close cousin of our kedgeree, made from rice, lentils, onions and spices.

Here in the UK it's a (now rather uncommon) breakfast dish. When I was a kid, our neighbours used to invite the whole street round for a New Year's breakfast, in which kedgeree played a starring role. Kedgeree is a good idea if you've a lot of people staying in the house; you can prepare it the day before and microwave it for a very rich and delicious brunch.

This kedgeree is a bit more delicate than the traditional smoked haddock version. It uses barely cooked smoked salmon and fresh, sweet and juicy king prawns, and instead of strong onion, I've used spring onions. The salt used in curing the salmon is sufficient for the whole dish; you will not need to add any extra.

It's important that the rice is chilled before you cook; if it is warm or hot, the grains are prone to break up and become mushy in cooking.

To serve four, you'll need:

100g basmati rice, cooked and chilled
10 spring onions, chopped
1 inch of ginger, grated coarsely
1½ tablespoons Madras curry paste (I used Patak's)
10 raw, peeled king prawns
1 pack smoked salmon, torn into shreds
1 egg per person
½ pint chicken stock
¼ pint double cream
1 handful coriander, chopped
1 knob butter

Carefully slide the eggs into boiling water and boil for six minutes; the yolk should still be soft, and the white just set. Peel, halve and set aside.

Stir fry the ginger and spring onions in a wok until soft, then add the curry paste and prawns and stir fry until the prawns have turned pink. Add the rice to the wok and stir fry. After five minutes, add the stock and salmon, and continue stir frying until the salmon has turned opaque.

Remove the wok from the heat and add the cream and coriander. Stir well, and serve with a segment of the soft, creamy egg.

This dish is inextricably associated with New Year in my head, so I served it this evening with a glass of toasty, nutty champagne. Delicious.