Reviews – Page 8 – Gastronomy Domine

11th January 2008

Michael Mina, Bellagio, Las Vegas

I am a sap. An uncultivated one, at that. Our last day in Las Vegas saw me standing outside Bellagio and bawling my eyes out when the fountains danced in the sun to the Star Spangled Banner, making rainbows appear in the spray.

God Save the Queen has never had this effect on me.

Bellagio is one of my very favourite casinos in Las Vegas. Dr W finds it a bit too busy, especially at night, so we stay at the quieter Mandalay Bay, but we do a lot of our eating at Bellagio. A foodie could easily stay at Bellagio for a week and not feel any need to step outside the building. Both Le Cirque and Picasso have four AAA diamonds; Jasmine is one of Vegas’s top Chinese restaurants (charmingly, all the dishes at Jasmine are priced at some dollars and 88 cents, 88 being an extremely auspicious number which represents long life and prosperity). Prime is an exceptional steakhouse; Jean Phillipe kicked off the new Vegas vogue for fabulous French pastries and houses the world’s largest chocolate fountain. There are another five or so classy restaurants I’ve not tried; all this on top of one of the city’s very best buffets; Petrossian, which offers caviar and high tea; and a few more casual cafés.

Michael Mina is Chef Mina’s flagship restaurant in a city where he runs four of the things. I have no idea how he manages to assure quality across all of his restaurants, but he works it all with some style – no trip to Vegas is complete for me without at least one visit to his Stripsteak (Mandalay Bay); and his two MGM Grand outposts (Seablue and Nob Hill) attract stellar reviews.

I was looking for somewhere really special where we could eat our Christmas meal – although Vegas largely ignores the holiday, some restaurants (Picasso among them) close their doors for Christmas day, so booking can be a little complicated. Happily, Michael Mina was taking reservations. I’ll admit to a little trepidation – would service and cooking be as good as usual on Christmas Day, when people would rather be with their families? As it turned out, the answer was a very delicious yes. We both selected the Cookbook Tasting Menu, made up of recipes from Michael Mina: The Cookbook(full of things you’re unlikely to cook at home because black cod, small and succulent lobsters, fresh truffles, raw quail eggs, fresh foie gras and Kobe beef are probably not available at your local corner shop). An additional $35 will also secure you a signed copy of the book. I turned the offer down; near my baggage limit already, I couldn’t afford the extra weight (and I’m cheap). Although Mina’s particular speciality is fish, there is plenty of meat available on the tasting menus (three tasting menus were on offer on the day we visited, one vegetarian) and on the a la carte menu.

The day’s amuse bouche was a carrot and curry soup – simple but very delicious. Michael Mina’s breads are always a work of art, and the Agen prune and black pepper buns were yeasty little joys.

The menu proper opens with one of Mina’s signature dishes, tuna tartar, which is mixed at the table, requiring two servers. Tiny dice of garlic, jalapeño and apple were mixed into the exceptionally fresh tuna, with the yolk of a quail egg, apple, mint chiffonade and pine nuts.

As usual, I had to ask for a non-lobster alternative for the lobster course. (Anaphylaxis is always embarrassing in public.) Our server, who was so helpful throughout the meal that I wanted to take him home with me and give him the vacuum cleaner, suggested swapping it out for any course from the other tasting menu. This is always an excellent sign in a restaurant (some places will just give you a grudging bowl of the soup of the day, which is utterly depressing when your dining partner is chomping through a perfect hunk of truffled claw-meat). The lobster pot pie is one of Mina’s signature dishes, and Dr W holds that it’s the best lobster dish he’s ever tried. The pastry lid is scored and lifted off for you at the table, and I can tell you it smells about as good as Dr W says it tastes. My substitute course was a crisp-skinned black sea bass with scallop tempura in a red wine jus with cauliflower purée and wild mushrooms. The myriad different but complementary things going on in this dish were pure Mina – and the scallop, barely cooked but crisply enrobed in tempura, was uniquely sweet and delicate.

My favourite course was the black cod in miso (sadly a million times more delicate than my own pretty darn good miso-glazed salmon, which is why Michael Mina is a millionaire chef who owns 11 restaurants and I am only a moderately successful food blogger). This is another Mina million-things-at-once dish; it came with enoki, shitake and something my notebook claims as ‘mystery mushroom’, a soft ravioli (raviolus?) filled with a Chinese shrimp and scallop mixture, all sat in a dark and savoury mushroom consommé on a bed of pak choi.

Rib-eye Rossini was up next. Rib eye is, apparently, Mina’s favourite cut of steak. It’s tender but comes from an area close to the bone; a good piece is gorgeously marbled and has all the flavour that comes from the proximity of that bone. The foie gras on top was seared to perfection. (Fans of this preparation will either be amused or horrified to learn that elsewhere in the city, at Hubert Keller’s Burger Bar and Fleur de Lys, you can order a Kobe Rossini burger, prepared with truffles, dark red wine and shallot jus, and foie gras, approximately like a steak Rossini, for $60. I have never sampled it – Kobe’s too soft to make a decent burger from and anyway, the whole thing sounds like a postmodern Las Vegas step too far for me.)

A trio of Mina’s signature desserts featured the menu’s only nod to that Las Vegas postmoderism – a root beer float. Dr W doesn’t like root beer, but he slurped this down like a baby craving mother’s milk. Fizzy, icy mother’s milk. Three of the best chocolate and pecan cookies to pass your lips also nestle on the plate, next to a chocolate fondant so good that the sale of someone’s soul must have been involved somewhere.

An interesting conversation went on at the table next to us. The lady there told her waiter she’d not found a good cof
fee yet in Las Vegas (I would have pointed her at Bouchon or Jean Philippe). Her waiter said that this has much to do with the city’s awful tap water – tap water that is so chlorinated and oddly sweet that I find it hard to drink. He talked about the new espresso machine in the restaurant, the filtered water and the special blend and roast, and told her that if she didn’t like her coffee it would be on the house.

When she had finished her first espresso, she ordered another double.

So we, of course, ordered coffees, and they were excellent. The petits fours were a real treat – I much prefer an old-fashioned sampling of petits fours to the boring plate of posh chocolates that so many restaurants seem to be offering these days.

So then. How do I top this next Christmas?

7th January 2008

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.

22nd December 2007

I’d like to buy the world a Coke…

…because seriously, most of you are drinking total garbage. I spent half an hour today subjecting my digestive system to a foaming, fructose-laden onslaught of bubbles, colourants and aromatic aldehydes, all in the name of helping you, dear reader, avoid some of the worst the world has to offer in sodas and mixers. I am now nearing diabetic coma and peeing for all I am worth.

Those of you who have driven down the Las Vegas Strip before can’t have failed to notice the hundred-foot Coca Cola bottle nestling (for Vegas) unobtrusively next to the squatting green mega-casino that is MGM Grand. The giant bottle houses a discount show tickets booth and Everything Coca Cola. This is a place (optimistically referred to as a ‘museum’) mostly devoted to Coca Cola merchandise – if it is your dearest wish to be clothed from head to foot in Coke-branded nylon and festooned with Coke pins and magnets, Everything Coca Cola will be right up your alley. Up on the first floor, there’s a bar where you can order the obvious in something called a Collectible Heritage Bottle and sip it through a straw while watching Japanese tourists take photos of one another in the arms of a fibreglass polar bear. The bar also offers one of America’s strangest tasting menus – a selection of 16 ‘International Flavors’. These are drinks produced by the Coca Cola company and sold in places far away. The sort of places where you should be very, very careful when ordering something wet to go with your meal.

We started with Lilt, from the UK. I’m familiar with this stuff; my Grandma used to keep a fridge-full of it, and it’s sweet, but not bad – an orange-tinged soda which tastes approximately of grapefruit and pineapple. Kin Cider from Ireland was also inoffensive. It’s essentially what we Brits call lemonade; a clear, fizzy, lemon-flavoured drink; Kinley Lemon from Israel was another lemonade, this time slightly cloudy and sharpy citric. South African Stoney Ginger Beer was also cloudy, with a pleasantly gingery kick – very different from Krest Gingerale from Israel, which was a lavatorial colour, packed no heat and ached with blandness. Mezzo Mix is German, and appears to be a mildly spiced sort of cross between a cola and a lemonade. I’d actually consider buying this to cook a ham in; it was less sweet than Coke and had a really good balance of spices. And Fanta Blackcurrant from Hong Kong is really very good indeed; it’s flat, and not too sweet, like a very dilute glass of Ribena (a British blackcurrant cordial which most of us toted around in flasks at school).

Things started to go wrong with the eldritch green Fanta Melon, also from Israel. I don’t know what the Israelis are doing to their melons, but they should stop immediately. VegitaBeta from Japan was flat, orange, and tasted of ghastly mystery. China’s Smart Apple was a glass of apple-smelling nuclear waste; Smart Watermelon was bright orange and very similar to something I had washed my hands with at Circus Circus the day before while reminiscing about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Unprompted, I do not think I would have applied the word ‘smart’ to either drink, but clearly Coca Cola’s marketing people know better.

Passionfruit from Argentina was lurid but actually pretty tasty, and reflected its name (amazing, this, given how little some of the other drinks resembled their suggested ingredients). Mexico’s Lift Apple was the colour of nicely oxidised apple juice, and was delightfully unassuming when compared to the Smart Apple, which I can still taste somewhere deep in my digestive tract. Central America started to get seriously weird with Costa Rica’s Fanta Kolita. I was under the impression (thanks to a bleary night with Wikipedia trying to work out what on earth Hotel California is about) that a colita was the flowering head of a cannabis plant, but the orange stuff in the glass appeared to be much less exotic – a Latin version of Scotland’s truly awful Irn Bru, which is advertised in the UK, with good reason, as being made out of girders. Simba Guarana from Paraguay was also downright alarming: a heavy sarsparilla fizz the colour of weak tea.

All this pales into an insignificant froth when compared to the quinine-laced horror which, according to the Coca Cola-clad barstaff, Italians drink voluntarily. I would be unsurprised if they’re using this stuff in Guantanamo Bay to force confessions. Beverly looks totally innocuous. It’s clear and fizzy, like an alluring glass of Perrier water. It tastes of death. Sugary, but chemotherapy-bitter death, a bit like chewing on the icing-frosted pith of a pomelo from hell. I checked with the staff that our drink had not been swapped out for poison by a humourist in the kitchen. They shook their heads sagely and said that sophisticated Romans drink Beverly as a delicious aperitif, presumably to set themselves up for an evening’s pizza, romance and street-fighting.

Today I discovered that the world has still not learned to sing in perfect harmony. Some of us like our drinks overpoweringly sweet. Others like them flat. Others still like violent fizz and medicinal flavours. But the Italians – they’re dangerous. Stay away from them and their death-drinks, because if they’re habitually drinking something as revolting as Beverly they are either crazed or plotting something brilliant and totally, totally evil.

20th December 2007

Lotus of Siam, Las Vegas

I’m back in Las Vegas, one of my favourite eating destinations, for the Christmas holidays. One of the restaurants I’d been very excited about visiting for the first time was Lotus of Siam, a tiny Thai place in a mall about a mile away from the north (grotty) end of the Strip.

Strip malls aren’t the kind of place I spend a lot of time in when I’m in Vegas. This particular mall sports Serge’s Wigs (a shop for showgirls looking to buy luxuriant hair), and a pole-dancing club. But Gourmet Magazine announced a few years ago that Lotus of Siam is the best Thai restaurant in North America, so there wasn’t any question about it – we were going. Saipin Chutima, the lady in charge of the kitchen here, learned to cook from her grandmother, and as a result you’ll find some fascinating family recipes from northern Thailand on the extensive menu.

Don’t visit Lotus of Siam at lunchtime, when the rather undistinguished Chinese buffet is on offer; instead, go in the evening and ask for some of the more unusual offerings on the menu, like the Issan dishes which come on a separate menu. We heard other tables being asked what sort of chilli spicing they preferred on a scale from one to ten, but unfortunately we weren’t offered the choice and ended up with some less tongue-numbing food than we’d have preferred. This isn’t the place to ask for a green curry, a Pad Thai or whatever else you usually order in your local Thai – these dishes will be excellent, but why would you order something you recognise when you can ask for something like the exceptional sour Issan sausage (a little like a Thai cross between mortadella and salami), a dish you won’t find anywhere else?

We asked for Nam Kao Tod – that sausage in a crispy rice salad (see left) as one of our starters. There were tastes here I’ve never experienced before; darkly crisp, deep-fried rice grains marinaded before cooking in something deeply savoury, mixed with the slightly sour sausage cubes and aromatic herbs. Issan pork jerky was less thin, dry and chewy than I’d anticipated – it was juicy and caramelised, served with a little tamarind sauce to drizzle over. Dr W, gargling with porky joy, attempted to annex the whole dish for himself.

A crispy catfish salad (see the picture at the top of this post) was my favourite part of the whole meal. It’s seldom you find catfish that doesn’t taste slightly muddy, but this was fabulously fresh and delicate. The tiny pieces of catfish were fried to a crisp, and heaped on top of a sweet lime-drenched salad made from more handfuls of fresh herbs, roasted cashews, thin strips of carrot, apple, ginger, onion, cabbage and other vegetables. These lively and fresh-tasting salads provide a brilliant foil to some of the darker and more syrupy flavours in the main courses we selected: Kra Phao Moo Krob, a crispy preparation of belly pork with a deeply savoury sauce and lots of Thai holy basil; and Nua Sao Renu, strips of charcoal-grilled steak, still pink in the middle, anointed with another tamarind sauce. (This needed lots of rice to mop up the sauce, which was so packed with flavour my tastebuds could barely cope with it.)

We were too full to manage dessert – a shame, because the coconut rice in particular sounded glorious. Is Gourmet Magazine right in calling this the best Thai restaurant in North America? I’m not sure – these flavours are so different from the Thai meals I’ve had before I find it hard to contextualise, and I’ve been to very few American Thai restaurants. But I am certain of one thing – it was so good that we’ll be eating there at least once more before we go home after Christmas.

14th December 2007

Anthony’s Restaurant, Boar Lane, Leeds

I started visiting Leeds about ten years ago, when I met Dr Weasel. Back then it was already a pretty darn pleasant city to visit, with fantastic shopping in the Arcades, a branch of Harvey Nichols and some amazing municipal architecture. Since then, the place has only got better – the city is positively bristling with good restaurants these days, and Anthony’s (0113 245 5922) is one of the very best.

To be entirely honest, I remain unconvinced by most molecular gastronomy I’ve tried. It’s often fiddly, a bit pretentious – the tubes of slightly (and repellently) high, sticky foie gras wrapped in red pepper toffee I had earlier this year at Midsummer House in Cambridge remain a very expensive nadir of chefly masturbation. (I have not reviewed Midsummer House here, because bad reviews are too easy to write and it’s no help to the reader if I write an armful of invective where a simple ‘don’t visit; they don’t deserve their two stars and they cost too much’ would do. In short, don’t visit; they don’t deserve their two stars and they cost too much.) I’ve tried other restaurants offering molecular gastronomy which have been much more successful. Jean Ramet in Bordeaux, for example, is worth a visit, but only uses molecular techniques in a few courses in the menu. I’d pretty much given up on finding a good meal served in this style in the UK until time and wallet allowed a visit to Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck.

So I was intrigued when, looking for somewhere to take Dr W’s family for a pre-Christmas meal, I read about Anthony’s. The head chef and restaurant director both worked for years at El Bulli in Spain, which is widely considered Europe’s best restaurant and the very best in the world for molecular cooking. (El Bulli’s waiting list for reservations is currently standing at two years, so don’t expect a review any time soon.) Chef Ferran Adria is incredibly picky about who he employs, and Anthony Flinn is the only British chef to have worked at El Bulli. After three years in Spain, he came back to Leeds to set up his own restaurant with his father – a quick glance at the online menu had me on the phone immediately, booking a table.

The restaurant is a very short walk from Leeds station (just as well, given the weather on the day we visited – dead umbrellas littered the pavements and little match girls were perishing in every doorway). We were welcomed into a very comfortable bar area with sofas and low tables, where we were greeted with a wine list, and, joy of Christmas joys, a beer list. I skipped over the wines and went straight for the beers – there was the very pricey but creamily delicious Deus Champagne beer, which is brewed in Belgium and then shipped to the Champagne region of France to be bottle-conditioned in the same way Champagne is, resulting in tiny bubbles and a high alcohol content. I settled for a glass of my favourite Kriek, and we tucked into a jar of juicy purple olives.

Downstairs, in the restaurant proper, we found a large table, beautifully dressed. The lunch set menu is unfathomably well-priced at £19.95 for two courses or £23.95 for three. I chose from the a la carte menu, largely because I had been fantasising about the restaurant’s signature white onion risotto with parmesan air and espresso ever since booking.

An amuse bouche arrived for the whole table (very nice, this, given that one of our party wasn’t eating a starter). A glass of goose jelly, topped with achingly sweet brown shrimp and a nutmeg foam was one of the very best things I’ve eaten all year – right up there with the poached oysters and caviar at Picasso in February.

Two tiny loaves of fresh, white bread came to the table, accompanied by three soft butters. One was salted, one creamed with vast amounts of parmesan, and one, introduced as ‘toast butter’ tasted of . . . toast. Lightly browned, glossily buttered, delicious toast. Suddenly molecular gastronomy stopped looking quite so silly, and began to make a very perfect kind of sense.

The white onion risotto arrived. I have been trying to work out what bits of molecular chef’s kit went into packing such a tremendous load of flavour into those little grains of rice – I’m guessing that a vacuum was involved somewhere. The parmesan foam was a wonderful foil to the strong but sweetly creamy onion of the rice, and the small amount of espresso at the bottom of the bowl was a remarkable and successful contrast of flavours. This was a very generous portion for an appetiser, but I’m very grateful that it was; I could have happily bathed in this stuff. The set lunch starters were a celeriac velouté with a ham hock ravioli – the pasta skin was made from a sheet of scallop – and a very delicate crab filo presentation with cucumber salad. All delicious.

The set main course that everyone else at the table chose was a roast poussin, beautifully presented in a mirepoix of vegetables and a very rich jus with potato puree. I chose the pan fried cod cheek with oxtail. Several fatty little fish cheeks were arranged on the plate in a cep puree which was so darkly mushroomy it tasted curiously of gunpowder. The sticky, gelatinous oxtail was a fantastic contrast, but the thing on the plate that best set off the cod was a pair of sweet malt jelly cubes covered with grated black truffle. Something about the dark, back-of-mouth sweetness of malt, the almost bodily warm odour of the truffle and the cleanly fatty cod together made a kind of magic.

Professor Weasel opted for cheese for dessert. Another time, I’d like to pay the extra £10.50 for what the menu calls the Eleven Cheeses Supplement – Prof W’s three cheeses were beautifully presented little squares, and had him making happy noises through his beard. I asked for the Pear Crumble – tiny, quite hard pears dipped in what seemed to be a very thin beignet batter, deep fried and sugared, accompanied by a smoked brie ice cream (creamily soft and not strong, but a good contrast to the pears), an unsugared walnut jelly and tiny cubes of black olive – surprisingly good with a mouthful of pear.

Coffee was excellent, and again, although only a few of us had asked for coffee, petits fours in the form of chocolates came for the whole table. White chocolate fondant, a creamy pumpkin square and a sesame ganache left us a family bursting at the seams, but absurdly happy. Thank you Anthony’s – we’ll be back.

3rd December 2007

Gordon Ramsay at Claridges

I am not really a lady who lunches. I would very much like to be, but my options are limited, given that I live in the middle of a field in Cambridgeshire. All the same, about once a month I try to meet up with a friend who lives in London, where we lunch as if it’s going out of fashion. I am fortunate in having found a friend who, like me, gets such an absurd amount of pleasure from good dining. She’s one of only a couple of female friends I have who do not just sort of dibble around with wet salads which they do not finish, and it’s good to have a lengthy conversation about hollandaise sauce without being considered a fatso.

Why do so few people I know manage to eat and drink without fear and shame? We worry about the ethics of eating, about the size of our bodies. It’s absurd; food is such a pleasure. Imagine the joy that suffuses your whole body when you eat something as simple as a good bacon sandwich, let alone as glorious as the foie gras mosaic I had at Gordon Ramsay at Claridges. Imagine how good for you all those endorphins and cheery feelings are – and now compare this to the mealy-mouthed, guilt-ridden attitude we’re being encouraged to have to food. You know exactly what I’m talking about – the press releases and government factsheets announcing that any amount of bacon will give you cancer; that eating meat will kill the planet; that thick-sliced bread is making us all obese; that toast cooked beyond the palest gold will fill the female body with specific feminine carcinogens; that the French duck population is being tortured to death to satisfy your shameless greed; that a properly salted meal will raise your blood pressure and stop your heart beating. Where does this awful gastronomic puritanism come from? I believe strongly that the joy, companionship and straightforward sinful pleasure of eating well are in themselves so good for you that any negative effects dealt out by that bacon sandwich are squelched immediately.

This year’s standouts, lunch-wise, have been Le Gavroche (review to follow) and last week’s visit to Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s. Both restaurants offer a really keenly priced lunch menu, and are usually booked out a couple of months in advance – make sure you plan well ahead. The Claridge’s lunch menu comes in at a bewilderingly low £30 (although once you’ve supplemented this with an aperitif and a glass of wine or two, you’ll find the bill creeping skywards).

Gordon Ramsay, for those who have been eschewing food, newspapers, television and conversation for the last twenty years, is one of only three chefs in the UK to hold three Michelin stars – he’s actually been awarded a total of 12 of the things spread among his various restaurants, which starts to look a little greedy. In recent years, he’s also carved out a television career so successful that he’s starting to become almost tiringly ubiquitous. He’s also something of a sex symbol, which might explain the high proportion of female diners at Claridge’s, one of whom was shoving a salad around her plate. (I have never seen the sex symbol thing myself; Ramsay is not referred to by other chefs as Old Celeriac Head for no reason.) Primarily, though, he’s a thoughtful, artistic chef with an eye to the whole dining experience, so service, table dressing and ambiance at his restaurants are given great weight.

The dining room at Claridge’s is surprisingly feminine. Like the rest of the hotel, it’s a glorious slab of art deco frivolity, with soft apricot and oyster touches. It’s a pleasantly quiet dining room with all the soft furnishings and moulded walls, so you can have a conversation with your dining partner without having to listen to everything the people at the next table are saying. I’ve read about Claridge’s daft mineral water list, which can go up to £50 for a litre, but we just asked for sparkling water and were given Badoit – probably my favourite mineral water – and didn’t have to sift through the list of deep-sea Hawaiian stuff and the juice squeezed out of volcanoes.

The amuse bouche was a butternut squash soup. The title fails to do it justice – it was simple but perfect; a creamy, buttery, velvet-soft pool of liquid gold. GSE’s cured trout starter was tender and sweet, and came with delicate little crisps made from Charlotte potatoes and a lovely little salad of cucumber. My own mosaic of pheasant, foie gras and winter vegetables was one of those things I’d be perfectly happy to smear all over myself and run up and down in. It was simply glorious – a perfect foie gras terrine punctuated with jewels of sweet, poached root vegetables and tiny morsels of pheasant. The vegetables lifted the deeply savoury foie to sparkling, twinkling heights, and an earthy little beetroot salad at the side of the plate provided a quiet and sensitive foil. It was one of the best dishes I’ve eaten this year.

Update, Jan 2008 – a couple of months later, Gordon Ramsay published the recipe for this gorgeous terrine in the Times. Good luck sourcing some raw foie gras – if you do make this, I’d love to hear from you.

Partridge, skin seared crisp and then dressed in an almost impossibly glossy, buttery jus came next. It’s good to see partridge at this time of year served innocent of pears – like rabbit and baby carrots, it’s a conceit that is funny the first time you see it, but which quickly gets tired. It came on a bed of diced celariac which had been cooked in more of that wonderful butter – nutty and lactic.

I chose the dessert on the strength of its accompaniment – a ball of star anise ice cream. A plate arrived with an almondy, apple-y paragon of tarts, while the ice cream had a wonderful, almost custardy texture and an intense fragrance from the anise. GSE’s winter fruit crumble, with another ice cream (ginger this time) disappeared before I got a look in.

I’ve only one complaint – my coffee was not, as requested, decaffeinated. We’d planned on some shopping after lunch, and this, in London at Christmastime, is best approached without extreme caffeination. I thrummed and palpitated my way down Oxford Street jittery, but happy beyond belief.

20th November 2007

Michelin Guide Las Vegas

I’m a little distracted today – I just found out this morning that my friend Oli received his long-awaited lung transplant in the night. I’m sure you’ll all join me in wishing him, his girlfriend and his family all the best. And please sign up to the donor register!

Michelin, the canonical French restaurant guide series, have just released their first Guide Rouge to Las Vegas.If you read this blog regularly, you’ll know I spend rather more time in Vegas than is natural for someone living in Cambridgeshire. This is largely down to the city’s amazing proliferation of high-quality restaurants. The days of ubiquitous shrimp cocktails and foot-long hot dogs are long gone (although, of course, this is a consumer paradise, so if you want a foot-long-cocktail-dog, you are bound to be able to find it somewhere). These days, you’ll see real, serious cooking around almost every corner – here’s an Alain Ducasse restaurant, there a Michael Mina one; Thomas Keller of the French Laundry runs Bouchon, a bistro serving up, among other things, Vegas’s very best breakfast at the Venetian hotel; Joël Robuchon wants you to exchange all your poker winnings for a $1000 per head meal at The Mansion; home-grown chefs like André Rochat serve up exquisite French meals downtown . . . these days, Vegas is a serious, grown-up foodie destination.

Our next trip is scheduled for this Christmas, and I promise I’ll spend more time than I usually do documenting what I eat (I always find blogging a bit of a chore when I’m on holiday). If you’re not familiar with the Michelin guides, their scheme is to award one, two or three stars to the very best restaurants in each destination. The number of stars awarded is calculated with reference to the food (of course), the style and elegance of the dining room and the service. Here are the restaurants that Michelin gave stars to this year:

3 Stars
Joël Robuchon at the Mansion (MGM Grand)

2 Stars
Picasso (Bellagio)
Guy Savoy (Caesars)
Alex (Wynn)

1 Star
Wing Lei (Wynn)
Nobu (Hard Rock)
Mix (TheHotel at Mandalay Bay)
Michael Mina (Bellagio)
Mesa Grill (Caesars)
Le Cirque (Bellagio)
L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon (MGM Grand)
Daniel Boulud Brasserie (Wynn)
Bradley Ogden (Caesars)
Aureole (Mandalay Bay)
André‘s (downtown branch)
Alizé (Palms)

I know the city’s restaurants pretty well, and so I was surprised to read Michelin’s final ratings. They’ve done a pretty good job of drilling down 16 of the city’s best restaurants (although I’d quibble with some of the choices, especially at the bottom end) – but the number of restaurants awarded two and three stars is alarmingly small given the range and quality on offer in the city, particularly when you compare the food, location and service with restaurants in France, where the Guide Rouge is far more generous with the stars. Paris boasts 14 restaurants with three stars – even Strasbourg gets two.

I think there are a few reasons for this. First of all, you’ll notice the preponderance of French restaurants in the above list – 12 of the 16 given stars cook in the French style. Michelin have historically valued French cooking over other cuisines (and in the past I feel they’ve made mistakes when trying to extend their cultural ambit, as with London’s downright horrible Tamarind, an Indian restaurant which largely seemed to get its star for reasons of political correctness). Still; Wing Lei in particular deserves more recognition than a single star and Nobu is a lazy choice; there are better Japanese restaurants in town like Shibuya at MGM Grand, Shintaro at Bellagio and Okada at the Wynn. It’s also surprising to see only one steakhouse on the list. Bradley Ogden is excellent, but one area where Las Vegas really excels is in presenting traditional American cuts of meat in thoughtful and, dare I say it, gastronomic ways. Michael Mina’s Stripsteak at Mandalay Bay, Charlie Palmer Steak at the Four Seasons or Delmonico at the Venetian should, by any metric that Bradley Ogden measures up to, be included here too.

Secondly, Michelin seem to be making their old mistake of treating décor as an issue as important as the food. Mix at Mandalay Bay is an Alain Ducasse restaurant in name only – I would be surprised if he sets foot in there from one year to the next, and foodwise, it’s not at all comparable to his (wonderful) Paris ventures. It is, however, one of the most beautiful dining rooms you’ll find in the world, and I suspect that this is where it earns its star. Mix is a restaurant I actively avoid eating in, although the attached bar is great and worth a visit – you get all that wonderful interior design to look at, a great view all the way down the strip and an expensive Martini.

Similarly, Aureole (also at Mandalay Bay) is another good-to-middling restaurant with a breathtaking dining room. Aureole boasts a 42-foot wine tower with ‘wine angels’; waiting staff who abseil up and down the thing to retrieve the bottle you’ve asked for. It’s not Charlie Palmer’s best restaurant in town – the steakhouse at the Four Seasons beats Aureole for food, and also for its wonderful view from the very top of the tower the Four Seasons inhabits.

Now, I may be attributing chauvinism where there is none to the Michelin staff, but I do
feel that there’s still a snobbish refusal to countenance that American food can possibly be as good as what you can find in France. Any of the two-star restaurants might, I suspect, have scored higher if they’d been located in a French city. And a few of those one-star restaurants also deserve bumping up a grade. So buy the guide if you like red, but don’t rely on it for an accurate picture of Las Vegas’s dining landscape.

If you like to travel with a restaurant guide, Zagatserves Las Vegas well, although it does sometimes get a little exuberant. I’ve always liked the series, which sends its own reviewers to restaurants but also builds its short reviews around the thousands of experiences that its readers send in – the Vegas guide also includes a nightlife section. (The Zagat guide to Paris is, for me, rather more reliable than the equivalent Guide Rouge.) The AAA guides are useful and reliable for eating in North America, and several Las Vegas restaurants make their 5-diamond category. Keep an eye on awards from the James Beard foundation as well – if they give a restaurant or a chef a nod, you should pay attention and eat there. You can also get a surprisingly good estimate of a restaurant’s quality by looking at its menu, and these are increasingly available online at the restaurants’ websites. Finally, there are some really excellent websites full of reviews by foodies who love Vegas. I particularly like Larry’s Las Vegas Restaurant Guide, which explores a really eclectic selection of restaurants.

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.