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Ambassade de L’Ile, London

If you’d asked me last week, I’d have said that it was impossible to accidentally book a table at a two-star chef’s new restaurant while remaining firmly under the impression that you were booking something quite different. My poor Dad, on phoning to confirm the table at what used to be one of his favourite restaurants, even started the conversation with: “Hello. Is this Lundum’s?” And the person picking up said “Yes.” (The correct answer would have been “No. Lundum’s closed six months ago. This is l’Ambassade de L’Ile.”) The waiter did acknowledge that we are not the first party this has happened to. It’s a bad way to start a meal, and I hope they sort things out at their reservations desk; l’Ambassade has no need to rely on the reputation of the excellent restaurant that used to occupy this building, and everyone in our group started the evening extremely irritated at the mix-up.

Still: on getting there, we decided to stay; we had all, after all, travelled between two and three hours to get there, we were seduced by the colour scheme (aubergine shag-pile carpet! White panels of leather with what looked like a dear little belly button in the middle of each one!), and I’d read about the chef, Jean-Christophe Ansanay-Alex before. I was secretly rather thrilled to have the chance to try his cooking. His L’Auberge de l’Ile in Lyon has two stars; he used to cook for Christina Onassis; he only has one arm. Prices here are extraordinarily high, but we were celebrating; it’s nearly Christmas; and I’ve been cooking tofu, pork hock and oxtail and other budget proteins for weeks, so was feeling like a bit of cream and truffles. The à la carte had numbers on it which looked to be denominated in rupees rather than pounds (no starter came in under £25), so we all went for the £90 tasting menu, reasoning that three à la carte courses weren’t going to come in at much less than that.

I’m still a little uncomfortable about the price, especially given that we fully intended to pay for our half, but had our credit card batted away by my Dad, who gets into Father Christmas mode at this time of year. £90 (without wine from the pricey list – and my Kir Royale alone cost £15) seems a hell of a lot to pay for a meal in the current financial climate, especially when you find yourself picking your way through a clot of tramps swigging lager outside South Kensington tube station on your way home.

Ansanay-Alex’s tasting menu does, at least, try as hard as it can to justify its price. It’s almost a pastiche of Lyon’s rich, buttery, creamy cuisine, and there’s a sense that somebody has sat down with a checklist of the most expensive ingredients, making little ticks as he works his way down through scallops, lobster, caviar, white truffles, black truffles and foie gras. The problem with constructing a menu like this is that all sense of balance goes out of the window, with creamy veloutes, buttery Béarnaises and sabayons, absurdly dense reductions and heavy, rich farces rampaging through the menu like a herd of oily buffalo.

L’Ambassade is generous with amuse bouches at the start of the meal and with friandises at the end. A heap of herbs fried in a tempura batter arrives before you’ve even ordered, and our amuses included a really lovely croquette of black pudding in a cider reduction alongside a tiny clam shell filled with a truffly mirepoix of sweet vegetables, topped with the poached clam.

The menu opens as it means to go on – with a mind to the eventual death of your liver. A velvet-smooth cream of scallop soup had a mosaic of lobster-marinaded scallop slices and squares of melting butter resting on the surface. A teaspoon of caviar (the farmed French variety) was inserted into a soft-boiled hen’s egg, surrounded by a thankfully tart lemon sabayon. Sea bass, its oily skin cooked to a salty, crisp bark, sat on a fondant potato (always a show-off accompaniment – they’re hard to cook well, and are a tremendously chefly thing to put on a plate), sitting in an ornamental pond of really dense, buttery Béarnaise, full of a tiny dice of clams and tomatoes. Venison loin, wrapped in a caul with a foie and black truffle farce, was bathed in London’s densest jus. The tiny tower (why is it always towers?) of beetroot and pear was a joyous contrast to all this richness – but oh, so small. At this point I would have paid almost anything for a salad.

Another soup – this time a chestnut veloute with celery leaves, crisp little puffs of parmesan and a slice of white truffle. It’s white truffle season at the moment, and the smell as the dishes approached was glorious. Some white truffle oil was drizzled into the dish – gorgeous, but I wish this buttery, sweet, creamy, nutty, truffly concoction had been served at the start of the meal, when my appetite for all this richness still had legs.

Coffee tart, peanut ice cream, a little disk of hazelnut meringue. “I wish there was some fruit,” said Dr W. “The cream-tasting bit of my tongue doesn’t work any more.” Everyone at the table concurred heartily. (And the pastry in that tart was the single dud of the evening – cakey and rather solid.) We thought this was the end, but the food just kept on coming – a positive bucket full of salt caramels, most of which found their way into my Mum’s handbag; fresh, hot, citrusy Madeleines; almond macarons with a fresh, creamy chocolate truffle centre. Finally, here were cones of gingerbread filled with liquorice ice cream, topped with a hard caramel shaped like, and flavoured with, star anise. This was the lightest, most digestible item we ate. So much so that I gave mine to Dr W to digest.

The (gargantuan) bill arrived sealed with a dollop of aubergine-coloured wax.

This is gorgeous, beautifully presented food, and it’s so French I was fully expecting it to go on strike. But it’s all a little too much at once – this is rich stuff in every sense of the word, and I wonder how it’s going down during the credit crunch. I’d certainly expect a restaurant of this calibre to be far, far more busy on a night shortly before Christmas than it was when we visited. If you’re set on visiting, try lunchtime, when a two-course menu comes in at £25, and a three-course one at £30.

Does anyone know where I can buy some aubergine shag-pile carpet?

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Seaside snacking in Blakeney

I really like the Norfolk coast at this time of year – all bluster, leaden skies and empty salt flats. We were surprised to find Blakeney unexpectedly packed with visitors at half term weekend, and couldn’t find a lunch table at any of the local restaurants. Not such a disaster, it turns out: we equipped ourselves with bottles of dandelion and burdock and pork pies at Blakeney Delicatessen at the top of the High Street, where I also found myself hypnotically drawn to to a moist, sticky slice of orange syrup cake.

Down the hill to the quayside, where we ate our impromptu picnic. Mopping up the cake crumbs to the accompaniment of howls from a little boy whose fishing net had just fallen into the harbour, we looked up to notice that the fish van in the car park at the bottom of the High Street was open and doing good business. Twelve oysters later, we also bought half a pint of brown shrimp (skins on), wrapped up in paper. We slipped the shrimp into a plastic bag, popped them in a pocket and started to hike out along the salt flats. The perfect afternoon: walk for an hour through National Trust coastal landscape, sit on your coat with a good friend, and share a bag of sweet, sweet shrimp. These tiny brown shrimp are best picked up in the hand, the head and tail pinched together between your fingers, and the flesh nipped off between your teeth. The shells are fine and edible; a shrimp with the shell still on will be sweeter and more delicious, although the nice man at the fish van will also sell you peeled shrimp if that’s more your thing.

Back to the village, and we found a nice old gentleman in a booth next to the medieval guildhall, selling seaside sweeties. He sold me a couple of sticks of rock – if you’re not familiar with the English seaside, you’re missing a treat in sticks of rock. A brittle, insanely sweet cane of boiled sugar and peppermint, pulled and folded when still hot until it becomes slightly aerated, rock usually has the name of the town you’ve bought it in written through its length in pink, sticky letters. The words are folded into sticks of rock by hand, a bit like making (deliciously minty) millefiori glass – it’s quite a skilled job, and some of the people making rock have been doing it for fifty years or more.

Up the hill again to The Moorings, a local bistro, for afternoon tea (in my case a toasted teacake and a pot of Earl Grey – the iron-stomached Dr W managed a whole cream tea). We went to the chandler’s to buy a souvenir fridge magnet shaped like a lighthouse, and waddled back to the car via a church fete where I bought a pudding basin. It shouldn’t be the case that a day spent hiking over salt marshes should end with you feeling fatter than when you started, but I managed it with aplomb.

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Toqué!, Montreal

Given that we happened to be in Montreal for our wedding anniversary, visiting Toqué! was something Dr W and I didn’t stop very long to think about. The restaurant twinkles with a positive galaxy of stars from a number of awarding bodies, and has a reputation as one of Canada’s very best, specialising in Quebecois market cuisine – and you’ve already seen here just what kind of magic goes on at Quebecois markets. Toqué! only uses ingredients from passionate local suppliers (foragers feature here as much as farmers do), and something in the local character, water and weather in Quebec makes for some extraordinary produce. This is a serious fine-dining restaurant, with a wine list to die for, utterly gorgeous arrangements on the plate, service that falls over itself to make sure you have everything you want, and a wonderfully romantic dining room. Great company, too: Dr W is my far and away my favourite dining companion.

If you’re planning on one of those special-occasion, intimate-conversation-type meals, I don’t think you could do a lot better than this lovely soft grey and mauve room, where you’re seated a good long way from neighbouring tables, ensuring privacy and quiet. The decor works with you here – gentle light comes from glass globes hung around the space, and the generous upholstery damps any noise from other diners, so your table sits in cocoon of quiet. Service excels too, attentive but not pushy, and my usual barrage of questions about cooking methods and sourcing met with grins and some excited conversation. I love it when the servers are as into the food as the people making it.

It being a special occasion, we started with a tasting of two sparkling wines each (a starry Saumur and some toasty Champagne) before launching into the menu proper. I’d expected a couple of fizzy drizzles in small glasses, given the word ‘tasting’, but we ended up with two full flutes each – much joyful aniversary clinking ensued. The wine list is a fascinating selection from all over the world, ranging from those wines open only to those with fantasy expense accounts, to delicious but affordable bottles from the sort of small producer we barely get to hear about in Europe, let alone taste. When I’m in North America I try to order the kinds of wine that don’t get exported to the UK – here was a 2005 Chardonnay Village Reserve from Niagara (Clos Jordanne, for those of you who can get your hands on it), and it was a great contrast to lighter, Californian Chardonnays, so heavily oaked it was like drinking a buttery syrup.

We decided against the tasting menu simply because some of what was on offer on the à la carte sounded too good to miss. Amuse bouches were a chilled shot glass of red pepper soup (again, have a look at the peppers produced in the area and weep for the plumpness and concentration of sunshine) topped off with a herb foam. El Bulli has a lot to answer for – these days foams, mostly insipid, pop up in all kinds of undistinguished places trying for the haute thing – but this was a densely flavoured, complicated and rich example, packed with herbs. We detected dill, chervil, mint, basil (at least – I’m sure there was plenty more going on in there) in this stuff, marrying gorgeously with the explosion of flavour in the soup.

Dr W’s heirloom tomato salad was achingly sweet, full of that Quebec sunshine again. It arrived with a quenelle of white maize ice-cream, gorgeously smooth and tasting like distilled summer, razor-thin slices of sourdough fried in olive oil, and baby coriander leaves. I’d asked for the squash soup with shavings of foie gras. These were not so much shavings as a gargantuan heap, mi-cuit, butter-soft, and perfectly seasoned. Under the foie were wilted sorrel leaves, adding acidity to the smooth gloss of the soup and foie; hidden right at the bottom was a buttery, truffly cache of hedgehog mushrooms.

You’ll notice that everything we ate was perfectly seasonal. In the hot, maple-orange Canadian autumn, these are all ingredients which are at their peak. (I’m told that in the spring, fiddlehead ferns appear at the table, and that these are so good you’ll never want to eat another vegetable again.)

Both of us had asked for suckling pig. Moist flesh with a crisp skin was surrounded by more seasonal ingredients – here were mousseron (fairy ring) mushrooms which seemed to have absorbed their own weight in butter; confit garlic; more of those sunshine-packed peppers (this time yellow and puréed); tiny, sugary champagne grapes; and something I didn’t recognise. Amazement. This is something that very seldom happens. The mystery objects were tiny, delicious buds, longer than capers and shaped like four-sided torpedoes, pickled in a sweet, spiced vinegar. I called over a waiter – what were these lovely things?

Day lily buds. Things I frequently have in a vase at home, but had not considered eating. Chef Normand Laprise matches them perfectly with the rich and fatty pork. This is a preserve I really have to try making myself some time.

Dr W went for cheeses rather than a dessert, each of which came with a different fruit preparation – a prune jelly on the Brie, pineapple membrillo on the Comte-ish Canadian cheese, strawberry leather on the Fourme d’Ambert and a piment d’Espelet in argan oil on the Gruyere-ish one. (My notes, as usual, become less helpful as the meal went on and I, like the lily buds, became more pickled – apologies for not being able to pin down the names of the two Canadian cheeses.) My poached pear came with a swirl of fruity, aromatic pistachio oil, which seemed to somehow insinuate its delicious self into every corner of your mouth. Pears, of course, are at their best at this time of year, and the accompanying foam and sorbet were so platonically pearsome that I found myself unusually speechless.

Meals this good – from food, to decor, to service, to sheer style – are not, of course, cheap. But we left agreeing that in ten years of dining out together (this meal marked the fact that we have now been married for precisely four of them), this was unquestionably one of the very best experiences we’d had. (“Top two or three, for sure,” said Dr W.) I’m unlikely to be able to return to Montreal for a few years now, but I look forward to our next visit – in a week there, we packed in a slew of the most enjoyable eating we’ve done in quite some time.

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Floral mint tisane

This is my version of the gorgeous Staff Tisane from Alep and Petit Alep (the restaurants share a building at 199, rue Jean-Talon Est, Montreal (514) 270-6396). I’m eternally grateful to the very nice lady with the stylish glasses at Alep – the more formal of the two restaurants, which is only open in the evenings – who was able to find me a table for 11 people with only three hours’ notice on a Friday.

Alep and its little sister are Syrian-Armenian restaurants, and I challenge you to find better Middle Eastern food anywhere outside…you know, the Middle East. There are shish kebabs made with juicy, pink steak tenderloin. Muhammara (a walnut dip) running with pomegranate molasses. Tabbouleh which is gorgeously, correctly heavy on the parsley. We found some of the best prawns I’ve eaten this year; the food here is spicy, elegant and really, really tasty. Try the Menu Degustation at Alep in the evenings, which is extraordinarily good value at only $28 a head for far, far more than we could finish – dips, salads, spicy little beef sausages, seafood, lamb in a rose petal sauce, those glorious shish kebabs – you’ll leave stuffed and very happy. We went back to Le Petit Alep for lunch on the day we visited Jean Talon Market (they’re just around the corner) for lunch, and discovered that the spicy french fries, served with a bowl of mayonnaise, are the sort of thing you’d sell a grandparent into slavery for.

Alep’s drinks were fabulous. I got thoroughly sozzled on the home-made lemonade and vodka on the first night, then drank several of these tisanes the next day for lunch. I started trying to reproduce the tisane as soon as we got back to England, and I’m very pleased with this version. For every glass (or mug), you’ll need:

1 teaspoon orange flower water
1 teaspoon rose water
5 cardamom pods
3 leafy sprigs of mint
Slices of orange, lemon and lime to decorate

Bash the cardamom seeds lightly in a mortar and pestle to crack them slightly, and put them in a glass with the flower waters and the mint. Pour over freshly boiled water, leave to steep for five minutes and serve.

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Au Pied de Cochon, Montreal

The French (and, doubtless, the French Canadians) have a term for the thing that happens to your body after a meal like this – it’s a crise de foie, or a liver crisis. My own liver is palpitating and throbbing, has likely become hardened and greenish in parts and feels as if it’s doing its job about as competently as Gordon Brown, but this is a small price to pay for a sublime meal. Even if it’s a sublime meal that makes you have to go and lie very still in a darkened room afterwards.

Au Pied de Cochon (536 Duluth Est, Montreal, 514-281-1114) is run by foie gras and fat genius Martin Picard. It’s a Montreal institution, always heaving with diners (who are, strangely, quite thin for the most part) – you’ll have to book, and book well in advance. This is a menu where you’ll find foie gras in almost every dish; where offal and fat are treated with something between respect and worship.

We opened with the home-brewed beer and starters which we thought we had cunningly selected to avoid too much richness before the main course. After all – salads and soups are the thinking person’s way to ensure there’s room left for pudding, aren’t they?

Not here.

Dr W’s French Onion Soup was based around a darkly glossy, rich and meaty stock, and came in a bowl large enough to drown a small family in, topped with a battleship-sinking amount of cheese. It was also extremely good, so he drank it all with little thought for saving room for what came next. My own Crispy Pied de Cochon Salad (see the picture at the top of the page) was only a salad in the very loosest sense – fatsome, hot nuggets of pork nestled with walnuts in a salad full of fried onions, roast tomatoes and steaming meat juices, any green leaves wilting gorgeously against the warm ingredients. On top was balanced a deep-fried, breaded square about half the size of a fat paperback book, sprinkled with some fleur du sel. Poked with a fork, it leaked an intensely porky, gelatinous mash of pork hock, made liquid by the heat of the frying. Something in that pork went straight to the self-control centres of my brain and prevented me from stopping eating before the plate was nearly clean.

Starters over, we looked at each other in panic. There was clearly no way in hell we were going to be able to manage our main courses.

Something untranslatable called a Plogue à Champlain arrived for Dr W. It’s a pancake. And a thick slice of home-cured bacon. And some crispy potatoes. And a layer of melted cheddar cheese. And a lobe of foie gras. And a ladleful of a rich, sweet duck and maple syrup sauce.

I realise that this sounds like a total abomination. God knows how Picard came up with it – and it doesn’t make the slightest sense on paper – cheddar and foie gras? Nonsense. But once this stuff is in your mouth, you’ll see exactly why this man is a fruitcakey, cheese-sodden genius. Utterly amazing, completely delicious and approximately 240% bad for you. Between moans of pain from a rapidly distending stomach and imprecations to various deities, Dr W cleaned his plate.

I’d ordered the Duck in a Can. A plate arrived, bearing a large slice of toasted sourdough bread covered with a thick layer of celeriac purée. Next, a waiter with a large, hot can and a tin opener came to the table, unzipped the top of the can and poured the contents over the slice of sourdough with a fabulously meaty schloomping noise. A fat magret de canard, yet more foie gras, some whole garlic cloves and unctuously buttered cabbage, dotted with bits of preserved pork sausage, slipped out in a balsamic glaze – the meat and vegetables aren’t preserved in the can, merely cooked in there in a sort of weird sous vide style. (Something of a shame, in that this means you won’t be able to buy your own can to take home.) Meat touching the bottom of the can had caramelised into a sticky, heavenly layer of goodness – and I have no idea how cabbage can come to taste so good.

This thing was absolutely enormous. Even if I hadn’t consumed nearly my own weight in fatty pork only ten minutes earlier, it’s unlikely I could have made much headway into the dish – as it was, for the first time in my life I found myself eating around a foie gras, because all this richness was becoming simply unbearable. My god, though, the aroma coming off this dish was incredible. So much so, that people at the next table turned, asked what it was and immediately ordered one each.

I tried. Really, I tried, but ultimately the terrible groaning noises emanating from my entire digestive system from the gall bladder down did for me, and I ended up leaving more than half of what I’d been served on my plate. I asked Dr W if he fancied a dessert. He looked at me with dull, bilious eyes and whispered, “No. I think I need to lie down. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to walk back to the hotel.”

We staggered back to the hotel. Slowly. We lay down. We have nearly recovered. We’re going back again on Friday evening.

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Montreal sandwich wars

Every life has a few golden moments. I had one today, when I realised I’d eaten two of the best sandwiches in my life in the space of 24 hours.

First stop – Schwartz’s Charcuterie Hebraique (3895 Boul. St Laurent), where you’ll find great heaps of something called smoked meat, sliced thin and piled on white bread spread with mustard, accompanied by a slightly obscene-looking pickle, some crisp, fresh French fries, and a can of cherry cola. Smoked meat is a Montreal speciality, somewhere between pastrami and a barbecued brisket (but still entirely unlike either), and Schwartz’s is where you’ll find the city’s finest – they’ve been at it since 1928, and are still in the original location. There’s always a queue snaking out of the door. This is not a restaurant you’ll be visiting for the decor, which reminded me of the dilapidated fish and chip shops I used to visit with my Grandma at the end of the 1970s back in England, all Formica tables and framed, yellowing newspaper cuttings. You’re here for the exceptional sandwiches and the meat, smoked daily and piled high in the window.

I’d been warned about unfriendly service, but we found that the staff were actually exceptionally helpful and friendly – try to sit at the bar, like we did, so you can watch the meat being prepared. Ask for your sandwich to come medium or fatty (a lean cut will carry less flavour), chomp down on your pickle to cut through the grease, and make sure that you order a cherry cola, which somehow happens to be the perfect liquid accompaniment for one of these fabulous sandwiches.

One world-beating sandwich joint isn’t enough for Boulevard St Laurent. Head for Chinatown, and about twenty yards from the pagoda gates you’ll find Cao Thang (1082 Boul. St Laurent – this is the same street you’ll find Schwartz’s on, but it’s a brisk walk of about ten minutes between the two). Cao Thang is a tiny shop – really a counter and a fridge – selling Banh Mi, a baguette stuffed with a gorgeous Vietnamese concoction of roast pork and pork sausage with lightly pickled carrots and daikon, a generous sprinkling of coriander and chillies, all sauced with a garlicky, savoury mixture that smells like heaven by way of Saigon. It’s only open for lunch, and there are no seats – we found ourselves sitting on cinderblocks in a carpark across the road and being shouted at by tramps, but so good was my mood once I had chunks of this transcendental (and absurdly cheap) sandwich in my mouth, they might as well have been singing light opera.

Banh Mi isn’t that uncommon in North America, although you’ll be hard-pressed to find one in the UK. The Cao Thang version is a fantastically good example though – crisp baguette (supplied by the excellent Patisserie Belge) moistened slightly in the middle by the filling. This is one of those dishes where you’ll find every bite tasting slightly different – this one full of coriander, the next chillies, the next sweet carrot shreds. (Don’t inhale sharply after a chilli-tasting bite. My friend James did and still hasn’t shopped coughing.)

This is looking like a great week for food. I’m starting to like this city very, very much.

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Alimentum, Cambridge

Finally – a foodie oasis in Cambridge’s wasteland of chain pizza restaurants and noodle bars. Alimentum, which has just received three well-deserved AA rosettes, fills me with a sense that perhaps things in this town aren’t really so bad after all; here, at last, is a restaurant which pays the attention to detail you really want to see in a fine-dining joint.

A few factors make Cambridge a disaster for those looking for a good meal. Almost all the commercial property is owned by the colleges, who keep rents high – as a result, chain restaurants are the most likely to find pitches in the city viable. We’ve got a very fluid population, with students appearing and then disappearing for half the year, and tourists filling the town to bursting point in summer, then buggering off again. The size and employment clout of the university means that most of those applying for work in restaurant kitchens often come with experience of working in a college buttery and nothing else – worlds away from the magic going on in kitchens like that at Alimentum. I very seldom eat in the city – London is only 45 minutes away, and there I can find the sort of restaurants I like.

Alimentum has turned things on their head – Londoners are coming to Cambridge for supper, because Alimentum is only 45 minutes from King’s Cross.

The restaurant is run with a strict ethical ethos. This means local, ethically raised meats from farms which are visited by the restaurant owner. Used oil which is collected and turned into biodiesel; dishwasher water which is recycled and used for heating. There’s a Crustastun unit in the kitchen which is used to humanely kill crabs and lobsters, and even the furniture in the beautiful deco dining room is ethically sourced. All this and fantastic food – it’s glorious to be able to indulge yourself and save the world all at once, as you sip your cocktail through a biodegradable straw.

I started with some crisp-skinned, honeyed quail, served off the bone with a savoury little breaded croquette of risotto. Every preparation on the menu is intricate, but showcases each main ingredient – a main course of beef used the brisket, cooked until gelatinous then shredded, pressed, breaded and fried until golden. The fillet, cooked to a juicy medium-rare with a savoury crust, was cut into thick slices and perched on top, everything bathed in an unctuous demi-glace. This is good, good stuff, deeply beefy and gorgeous on the plate and on the tongue.

Dessert was a jelly made from local strawberries. Not too sweet, and intensely fragrant, it arrived in a pyramid, each side tiled with a sliver of Valrhona chocolate, drizzled with an intense 30-year-old balsmic vinegar. If pudding could sing, this would have been belting out Mozart operettas. There’s also a great (and wonderfully stinky) cheeseboard, which the charming waiting staff will talk you through.

This was a tough menu to choose from; everything sounded tempting, and every diner at my table had a plate I just had to pinch something from. The restaurant’s signature slow-cooked belly pork with pig parts was heartbreakingly, stickily, cracklingly good. The wine list (which, along with the frequently changing menu, is available on the restaurant’s website) is terrific, and the Malbec we selected was a fantastic pairing. Cocktails are also really good fun: my favourite was The Cucumber Number, with Hendrick’s gin, cucumber, raspberries and Framboise liqueur.

It’s worth checking the restaurant’s website for their various special deals – if you book for the Tuesday jazz night, you might see me there.

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The Mighty Spice Company

Update, 28 Oct 2008 – I’m very pleased to be able to tell you that Sainsbury’s has seen the light, and is now stocking Mighty Spice at selected butchers’ counters, so you’re not going to have to drive to London to buy your own tub any more.

A couple of weeks ago, the nice people at The Mighty Spice Company sent me three of their chilled spice mixes to sample. Exciting stuff, this; I’ve not found anything similar to these fresh blends on sale in the UK. The Mighty Spice Company’s offering is a really refreshing change from the oily, musty pastes and sauces you’ll find on offer in the supermarket which taste vaguely of foreign – instead, these blends are made from fresh ingredients without fillers and additives (so they need to be kept refrigerated), and are really well-judged, with clean and subtle balances of flavour. They’ve been in development for two years, and you can really taste the effort that’s gone into tweaking these mixtures to perfection.

Currently, the range includes a Szechwan mix, a Tandoori mix and a Thai Green mix. All three come with simple recipes on the side of the pack (recipes are also available on the Mighty Spice website), but the mixes are so flexible that you can (as, inevitably, I did – I’m very bad at following instructions) improvise around them very successfully. I was really chuffed to find that the mixes are comprehensive enough that I was able to make a positively fantastic stir-fry without having to add (and chop – hooray!) any ginger, garlic or other spices – and the balance of soy sauce and oyster sauce forming the background of the mix was spot on, so I didn’t have to add any wet ingredients either. I made a lamb curry with the tandoori mix, some crushed tomatoes and coconut – especially good the next day, after a night in the fridge to let the flavours mingle, and again, it needed absolutely no additions to the very well-blended spice mix. The Thai mix was a bit milder than I would usually have chosen, but tasted green and fresh.

My favourite? Probably the Szechwan spice mix, which was loaded with Szechwan peppercorns. It’s a good way into the spice for those of you who aren’t familiar with it and its curious tongue-numbing (but not painful) heat, a sensation a little like a cross between a mint leaf and a chilli. In taste it’s nothing like mint or chilli, but pleasantly citric. None of your syrupy, Chinese-sauce-inna-jar flavours here; this was a really bright, lively sauce that worked well with some chicken and sweet vegetables.

I’m sure it won’t be long before you’re able to find The Mighty Spice Company’s products on sale in a supermarket chiller cabinet near you, but for now they’re very new and are mostly available in London. You’ll find the spice mixes stocked at Wholefoods Market, Selfridges, Harvey Nichols and several organic grocers – a complete list of stockists is available here. I’d heartily recommend you spend the £3.99 on one of their mixes for a professional, easy and hopelessly tasty supper. Brilliant stuff – thanks, Mighty Spice guys!

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Delmonico’s Restaurant, Financial District, NYC

America is a country where every third restaurant seems to be a steakhouse. I didn’t want to overdo the steak, having watched Beverly Hills Cop as a child and taken that thing about your colon very seriously, so we decided on one steakish meal over the week we were in New York. This presented a problem – with so many steak joints on offer, which should I choose? There’s Kobe Club, which reviews well but is amazingly expensive (their menu suggests that you order at least two of their 4 oz portions of Wagyu – but the cheapest 4 oz portion is $50, and with side dishes, a shrimp to balance on top of your steak, the very pricey starters, and supplements for any sauces involving ingredients like foie gras, marrow or truffles, it adds up very quickly). I want at least some money left in my wallet for clothes shopping while I’m in New York, so Kobe Club is off the list. Craftsteak also has an excellent reputation, but Tom Colicchio spreads himself awfully thin – he’s currently involved in 13 restaurants across the United States, so it doesn’t feel very special. Good steak is something so many restaurants here do – so I want a restaurant with something extra-interesting to it. Enter Delmonico’s. (Turn your speakers off before clicking this link – there is intensely aggravating music.)

What’s interesting about Delmonico’s? Simple: it’s the oldest continuously run restaurant in the US, and may be the first fine dining establishment in the whole country, having been established in 1827. Those pillars outside? Imported from Pompeii in the 19th century. This is where Lobster Newburg, Chicken a la King and Baked Alaska were invented; the restaurant also gave its name to the Delmonico steak, a cut served in restaurants all over the country. (They also claim to have invented Eggs Benedict, but this seems to be controversial.) Mark Twain has eaten here – so have Theodore Roosevelt, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Tesla, Napoleon III and a positive galaxy of America’s great and good. We booked for a Wednesday night, put on those clothes we’d been able to afford because we didn’t go to Kobe Club, and got stuck in.

The dining room is very masculine; all dark leather and wood panelling, like a meaty gentlemen’s club. Service was smiling and fantastically personal – my cocktails, including the most savoury and well-balanced Dirty Martini I’ve ever tasted, were constructed at the tableside in a silver shaker. The menu still includes some of the classic dishes from the restaurant’s past, although I was disappointed that there were no Delmonico Potatoes – a gratin made from parboiled potatoes grated into long shreds with parmesan and nutmeg. That famous steak was there, though, along with the Lobster Newburg and Baked Alaska.

Dr W plumped for a Caesar salad to start with so he could fit in as much steak as possible later on. It was a good example, dressing clearly made in-house and strongly flavoured, with white anchovies interlaced on top. I went for the foie gras, dusted with crushed hazelnuts and grilled, then served hot with three fruity sauces. The crushed nut/foie combination is one that pops up more and more often these days, and it’s a good one, the toasty richness of the nuts complimenting the buttery foie beautifully. This little lobe was nicely and neatly prepared, too; no stringy or bitter bits.

The Delmonico steak (a wet-aged, boneless ribeye) was thick, and served perfectly medium rare; it was gently crusted on the outside, the fat crisping and delicious, and marbling the whole piece. It was also enormous, weighing in at 20 oz, and I wasn’t able to finish it, which made me extremely jealous of Dr W, whose salad decision was a good one which enabled him to absorb his entire steak into his person. Spinach and parmesan and something called “The Perfect Hash Browns” made for good sides, although I’d quibble with the “perfect” thing; they weren’t particularly interesting or memorable.

It is a happy freak of biology that I appear to have been born with a separate stomach especially for dessert. I couldn’t have packed another atom of beef in there, but Baked Alaska (two spoons, because Dr W was so full that tears were appearing in the corners of his eyes) sounded just the ticket. And where those hash browns hadn’t lived up to their description, the Baked Alaska was pretty much divine. A piped hedgehog made from tens of caramelised meringue peaks surrounded a soft, but not melting centre of gorgeous, gorgeous banana-candy ice cream, sat on top of a piece of sponge studded with juicy pieces of apricots. Regular readers will know that I’m not much of a pudding person, but I would be perfectly happy to eat Delmonico’s Baked Alaska and nothing else for…ooh…at least one meal every day.

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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.