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Moro

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Momma Cherri’s Soul Food Shack, Brighton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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De Vere Grand hotel, Brighton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Pearl Liang, Paddington, London

I’m incredibly excited to be reviewing Pearl Liang (8 Sheldon Square, W2 6EZ, tel: 020 7289 7000). It’s a new Chinese restaurant in Paddington with a confident website (beware – it plays music), an interesting menu and excellent credentials (the head chef has defected from Queensway’s Mandarin Kitchen). The Great She Elephant and I went for a dim sum lunch yesterday, and my, I’m glad we did.

Dim sum is tricky. There are a bazillion restaurants in London’s Chinatown and in Bayswater serving these lovely little packets of Chinese flavour, and while some do it admirably well, some are pretty mediocre. It can be hard to find somewhere where the dim sum is exceptional, but I think I’ve found it in Pearl Liang, a couple of minutes from Paddington station.

The restaurant has a remarkable interior. It’s a bit like a 1970s brothel/disco, with plushy purple upholstery, modern flock wallpaper, lots of gilding and little ice-cube lights. It’s all in a new development at the waterside in Paddington (use the map and the directions on Pearl Liang’s website, since it can be hard to find without some help), a curious furtive mauve bolthole hidden among the office blocks.

The dim sum menu isn’t huge by Chinese standards; a selection of about fifteen steamed dishes and ten fried ones, alongside cheung fun (wide strips of silky rice noodle wrapped around a savoury filling and bathed in a wonderfully savoury sauce) and noodles are offered on a menu where you tick a box on a form to order each dish. This relatively small menu is a good move – every dim sum we sampled was cooked with real attention to detail. A sampler platter of ten individual dim sum is available for under £10, with the familiar (Siu Mai, the pork dumplings shaped like a cup, open at one end, and Har Gow, the translucent prawn dumplings) alongside the unfamiliar (a diamond of sticky rice wrapped in a leaf of seaweed and flavoured strongly with caramelised onions, and a ravishing little spinach dumpling). Perched in the middle was one of the best Char Siu Bao I’ve tasted.

We ordered the Doug (crispy dough cruller) Cheung Fun and some Lo Bak Goh to go with the platter, alongside a bowl of Malaysian Char Kway Teow noodles. The Lo Bak Goh, a delicious square of grated Chinese radish (one of my favourite dim sum options) was flavoured with a beautifully made Chinese sausage and delicate dried shrimp, and seared to a golden crisp on the outside while softly shredded inside. The Char Kway Teow was spiked with perfectly fresh prawns, and was subtly spiced. If I were being super-picky (and I am), I would have wanted more wok hei, the smoky flavour of a well-seasoned and extremely hot wok, permeating the dish, but hey – it was still as good a dish of Char Kway Teow as I’ve ever eaten in London. Service is charming and helpful.

The evening menu looks extremely exciting as well. There’s lobster steamboat (a kind of Chinese fondue), fresh fish including Dover sole and sea bass, Buddha Jump Over the Wall (the soup which was said to smell so good that the Buddha abandoned his meditation and jumped over the temple wall to sample it) and some other very interesting-sounding options like a pomegranate sweet and sour chicken. I can’t wait to get back there to sample the rest of the menu.

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Hotel Chocolat Easter Egg

Hotel Chocolat sent me their Signature Egg to review a couple of weeks ago. This was excellent news – I am a big fan of Hotel Chocolat, who are my favourite high-street chocolatiers. They currently have 21 shops in the UK, a mail-order chocolate tasting service and some really interesting products – my very favourite thing in the whole shop is the cocoa nibs, which are simply little shards of cocoa bean with no sugar.

The Signature Egg, cleverly, uses milk chocolate for one half of the shell and dark for the other. This was one of the best chocolate shells I’ve tasted – it’s extra-thick, and the dark chocolate in particular is very good; not too sweet, and extremely smooth with a lovely creamy texture. Hotel Chocolat have their own cocoa plantation in the West Indies, which guarantees the quality of the chocolate. I had some Cadbury’s chocolate in the kitchen to taste as a sort of control chocolate,which was granular and tooth-hurtingly sweet by comparison.

You can see the very pretty mini-eggs that fill the shell in the photograph. They are all liqueur creams…and this is where the Signature Egg, with its gorgeous, thick shell, falls down. On paper, the flavours looked great; pink Marc de Champagne, Tiramisu, Kirsch, Amaretto and so on. Unfortunately, the lecithin-slippery centres all tasted rather synthetic (the pink Marc being a dead ringer for Angel Delight). Advocaat, a flavour I usually dislike, was by far the best (and appropriately Easterish, being made from egg yolks), but the Kir cream managed to mimic cough mixture. Still – these were sweet, and sufficiently grown-up tasting that you won’t find them being stolen by the kids. Unless the kids happen to like Kirsch.

Hotel Chocolat is currently running an Easter-Egg Hunt competition to win a rather lovely-looking Easter Hamper full of chocolatey goodness. You can enter until April 2. Happy hunting!

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Picasso, Bellagio, Las Vegas

Update, October 2009: we went back to Picasso for a return match last month, about two and a half years after our first visit. A good meal, but nowhere near as great as it was back in 2007 – and somewhat alarmingly, the tasting menu hasn’t changed at all, which speaks to me of an over-laid-back kitchen. Service this time was pushier and more obtrusive, the wine pairings weren’t as good as I’d have hoped (a couple of the whites in particular were simply too young), and the prix fixe we settled on was surprisingly tame. The room itself is still fabulous, but I suspect we won’t visit again – a lousy shame, because in 2007, they were absolutely at the top of their game. For nostalgia’s sake, read on…

I’ve held off writing about Picasso for a few weeks because I feel moved to empty the bank account and run away to live at the Bellagio casino resort every time I sit down and think about the meal. It was near-perfect; it’s almost intimidating to write about the place, because I simply don’t have a bad word to say about the experience…and that makes me look like an unthinking, uncritical sort of eater. I’m not; really I’m not – this was just quite simply the very best meal I’ve eaten in my life.

Even if Picasso weren’t serving spectacularly good food, the room itself would be reason enough to visit. Right next to the Bellagio fountains (one of my favourite free Las Vegas attractions – they’re 60ft tall and they dance to a playlist of showtunes, classical music and opera), the restaurant is filled with original Picasso ceramics and paintings, and decked out with vase upon vase upon vase of fresh flowers. Between the fountains, the still-life on the wall opposite me and the enormous jugs of freesias and tulips, even the ravishingly handsome Dr Weasel was having trouble holding my attention. Despite all this grandeur, the room is designed to be very intimate, with little nooks and crannies of seating to make you feel you’re almost eating on your own.

Even if the room were not filled with art and flowers, and even if those fountains weren’t swaying outside the window, the service alone would be reason enough to visit. Perfectly unobtrusive, the waiters changed dirty napkins with such skill you didn’t notice them doing it, poured exactly the right amount of wine, kept the water glasses brimming – there’s a reason the Zagat guide gives this restaurant its top score for service. I am allergic to lobster (as far as I am concerned, one of the worst things that you could choose to be allergic to – I used to love the stuff), and mentioned to the waiter that I would prefer something different for the first course of our degustation menu. Other restaurants have left me without a course when this happens, or with a portion of whatever came to hand in the kitchen (nothing is so galling as sitting there with a small bowl of pumpkin soup while the rest of the table is ripping a couple of lobsters to shreds). Not Picasso. The waiter beamed, told me I could have anything I wanted from the menu…so I took him at his word and selected poached oysters in a delicate beurre blanc, each dressed with a teaspoon of wonderful, wonderful Oscietra caviar. Heaven.

If you visit Picasso, the tasting menu is fit for a king. Lobster terrine (‘totally yum’ according to Dr Weasel – bet you’re glad he doesn’t write this blog) and those aromatic, vermouth-spiked oysters came after an amuse bouche of soupe de poivrons with a truffled potato croquette to dip into the little soup pot. Scallops were sauced with a veal jus, gloriously savoury against their fresh sweetness. An escalope of seared foie gras was prepared perfectly; glass-crisp on the outside with a silky soft interior, with figs and sweet walnuts alongside. Halibut was moist and toothsome, and it seems almost churlish to call my lamb chop a lamb chop – it was one of the best pieces of meat that’s ever been past my teeth. Dessert was a lychee bavarois with one of the most ridiculous and delicious items I’ve seen on a dessert plate – a giant, chocolate-dipped fresh coconut popsicle. And the petits fours with my coffee were delicate and delightful. They even brought a set for Dr Weasel, who wasn’t drinking coffee.

The wine list is large and thoughtful. On another occasion I might choose to have the wine pairing with each course, but this time we chose a Russian River unoaked Chardonnay (a wine that’s extremely difficult to find in the UK, so we tend to order it whenever possible in America), which was absolutely delicious. I love it when the wine waiter ensures he’s not pouring so fast you’ll move through the bottle before you’re really ready; at Picasso our wine was poured carefully so it lasted us until we had finished our main course.

Picasso’s chef, Julian Serrano, has the James Beard award for Best South-Western Chef, five AAA diamonds, and a vast array of Zagat awards. Obviously, a meal of this quality comes at a price, and currently the degustation menu is $115. (This is a positive bargain for those of us used to European prices.) If you visit Picasso, you will need to book at least a month in advance, and make sure you dress well – there were people wearing less smart clothes in there and they looked immensely uncomfortable. I promise you that the meal you eat will be worth the dressing up, the advance booking and at least three times what you’re paying – this is something really special.

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Dining in Las Vegas

Update, Jan 2008 – there are now a lot more reviews of Las Vegas restaurants on this site. Click here to read them all.

I’m back from a couple of weeks’ holiday. Regular readers will notice that I’m a frequent visitor to Las Vegas. Being a neophobe, I decided to squeeze four days of Vegas into the start of the trip. Las Vegas wins my favourite city prize even though I don’t gamble – it has a remarkable concentration of world-class restaurants, some of America’s strangest visitor attractions and some amazingly good bars, clubs, shows and other night-time diversions for the jetlagged.

If you’re a first-time visitor, the sheer choice of restaurants can be overwhelming. These are just a few of the Vegas restaurants that will make your toes curl with gustatory pleasure.

Stripsteak is a new Michael Mina venture at the Mandalay Bay resort and casino (my favourite place to stay in Las Vegas – it’s at the very southern end of the strip, so you can get away from the crowds in some degree of style). Mina is known for his Californian-inspired fine cuisine, and was named Bon Appetit’s chef of the year in 2005. Stripsteak is a bit of a departure for Mina, whose other restaurants tend to be very exclusive, with menus specialising in seafood; at first glance Stripsteak looks like yet another Vegas steakhouse. What a steakhouse, though. The menu is overflowing with Kobe beef, truffles, duck fat and other riches. I can recommend the obscenely good duck fat fries, the perfectly tender and flavourful American Kobe ribeye, the truffled mac and cheese and the carpaccio (potently but not aggressively flavoured with Thai spices) wholeheartedly. (How long the arteries surrounding that heart are going to hold up at this rate is a matter of opinion.)

Red Square, also at Mandalay Bay, is best known as a bar and nightclub. It’s almost intimidatingly hip: there’s an ice bar; a frozen vodka locker where you’re provided with fur coats and hats for tastings; a headless statue of Lenin; and a air of decayed Imperialism. The restaurant, in the face of all this coolness, is often overlooked by guidebooks which are overwhelmed by the excellent bar. This makes this place one of the best-kept secrets in Vegas. Don’t go expecting traditional Russian cooking – Red Square has a high-class but decidedly modern American menu with the occasional twist like Siberian Nachos (won ton crisps with smoked salmon and wasabi tobiko). Try the farmed America sturgeon caviar, which is a fraction of the price of the Iranian stuff also on offer, but just as good. It’s served with a mother-of-pearl spoon, with your choice of blinis or toast points and all the traditional accompaniments. The Roquefort-crusted steak is one of the best in town – and the Martinis and other vodka cocktails are to die for.

Shibuya, a Japanese restaurant at MGM Grand, serves glorious food and gilds the lily with its enormous sake list, employing a specialised somellier. The staff couldn’t be more helpful; last time I visited we asked to move tables when the restaurant was full to escape from some obnoxious neighbours, and were accommodated immediately and without fuss. Toro tartar was glorious, and the miso snow crab legs were fresh, sweet and tender.

Chinois, a Wolfgang Puck property at the Forum Shops, is another restaurant which transforms into a club at night. The upstairs club area is beautiful, but I prefer to visit at lunchtime, when the restaurant is quieter. (Felicity Huffman from Desperate Housewives decided to have lunch there on the same day I did, which I found quite stupidly exciting.) There’s one overarching reason to visit Chinois, and that’s the Chinois Chicken Salad, a light, crisp confection which I would happily sell my own grandmother for. The restaurant is perfectly happy for you to only order appetisers if you want a lighter lunch.

Jean-Philippe Patisserie at Bellagio is not only host to the world’s largest chocolate fountain, it’s also the most consistently excellent patisserie I’ve found anywhere in the world (this after a stint living in Paris and a late twenties spent searching London for the perfect macaroon). Jean-Philippe Maury won the Gold Medal from the 2002 World Pastry Team Championship, and if you are up for afternoon tea or a stellar breakfast, you should drop in. If you can avoid being seduced by the fresh crepes or the gorgeous ice-cream made on the premises, try the Strawberry (made from a slice of crisp macaroon, an almond paste and fresh glazed strawberries), the Exotic (a prize-winning tropical fruit and coconut confection) or the Rose Macaron (raspberry and rose macaroon).

For a savoury breakfast, I’ve found nothing in the city as good as the Stage Deli at the Forum Shops – it’s much, much better than other places serving breakfast mid-strip, so if you’re staying at Caesar’s, the Mirage or TI…or anywhere else, for that matter, head on over. Stage Deli is a branch of the well-known New York deli, but fortunately they have managed not to import the famous New York attitude along with the corned beef. Try the pastrami hash or smoked fish and bagel for breakfast, and any of the giant sandwiches for lunch.

Las Vegas is, of course, famous for its buffets. The food at the buffets is never as good as you’ll get at a restaurant with service, but some of the casino buffets stand out – Le Village Buffet at Paris is one of the better ones, but my very favourite is at Bellagio, where the breakfast boasts an excellent Asian station with congee and pork floss. The slab-carved salmon is smoked in-house – it’s excellent and is served with all the trimmings. Quality remains high across the spread. At weekends, the casino offers a champagne brunch and gourmet dinner at the buffet.

I’m saving our visit to Picasso for another post, simply because it was completely outstanding: absolutely the best meal I’ve ever had, even after years of chasing tables with Michelin stars in France. Watch this space. **Update – the whole review is here.**

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Flavoured chocolates

I’ve recently started fixating on good, high-cocoa chocolates with unusual flavourings. Forget Terry’s Chocolate Orange – I want a bar full of exotic fruits, flower flavours and exciting spices. They’re increasingly popular at the moment; branches of Hotel du Chocolat are springing up all over the place, and Rococo Chocolates, NewTree and good old Green and Black’s are now supplying supermarkets. (Those after the ultimate posh chocolate experience should put in an order at l’Artisan du Chocolat, where flavours include banana and thyme, tonka bean and tobacco. The chocolates are expensive, but those I’ve had have been absolutely excellent – sadly, though, I have eaten the grand total of two of the things in my entire life. If I can get my hands on a box for Christmas, you’ll see them reviewed here.)

At the supermarket this week, I found myself scooping bars of chocolate into the basket like a woman possessed. Made to put most of them back by Dr Weasel, I held onto an organic bar of dark chocolate and cardamom from Rococo, and a bar of lavender and lime blossom milk chocolate from NewTree.

Rococo are based in Chelsea’s King’s Road, and have been producing organic chocolates of remarkably high quality for nearly 20 years. Luckily for you, they’ve discovered e-commerce and now ship worldwide, and some of their artisan bars and gift collections now appear in Waitrose. Their flower fondants are my very favourites, and have solidly replaced Charbonnel & Walker’s rose and violet creams in my affections. Always a sucker for good packaging design, I’m absolutely enchanted by Rococo’s wrappers, which use images from an 1850s French catalogue of chocolate moulds.

This cardamom artisan bar is, for me, about as good as dark chocolate gets. Cardamom has that same affinity with a bitter chocolate as it does with good, bitter coffee, and the 65% cocoa solids and high percentage of cocoa butter give the bar a beautifully clean snap when broken. The crisp, granular shards of cardamom seeds are glorious against the silky texture of the chocolate. It is unfortunate that these are so darn good; I can quite happily eat one in a single sitting.

NewTree (beware – very busy Flash site with music) a Belgian chocolate makers, are a brand I’d not come across before, but once I saw the label on their Tranquility milk chocolate, boasting lime blossom extract and lavender, I was sold. A single bar is said to have the same relaxing properties as three cups of lime blossom tisane. The milk chocolate was slightly granular, but delicately fragranced and delicious. If in quibblesome mood, I might complain that the chocolate was a little sweeter than the ideal, but this seems almost churlish given how well blended the unusual flower flavours were. I don’t really feel qualified to comment on whether or not I was left tranquil; any calming effect may have come from the glass of violet liqueur I was drinking on the side.

NewTree’s schtick is an appealing one; they flavour their chocolate bars with spices and herbs used not only for their flavour, but also for their health applications. With names like Pleasure, Eternity, Young, Digest, Vivacity, Sexy, Tranquility, Serenity and Cocoon, NewTree seem to have hit on something the rest of us have suspected for years – chocolate really is a universal panacea. Grab a bar if you see one, and please report back in the comments section and let me know whether you really did feel serene and cocooned.

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Hyères – restaurants and food shopping

Two weeks spent variously floating prone on my back in the Mediterranean, being splendidly cultural and hunting down Provençal recipes have left me tanned, educated, full of the sort of vitamins you only find in absurdly ripe fruit and vegetables, and with a groaning liver. I blame the foie gras and the local rosé wine.

The house we rented (pictured above) was glorious – a heap of palatial decay whose kitchen bristled with good equipment, including a chinois sieve, a mandoline, oyster knives, griddle pans and some of the sharpest knives it’s ever been my pleasure to handle. I do not, however, recommend its horse-hair mattresses, which made sleeping feel a lot like vigorous exercise on sacks full of prickly potatoes.

Hyères itself is a town surrounded by small growers with a daily market and a huge number of small grocers and little independent foodshops. If you visit, walk up to the Place Massillon in the old town and explore the labyrinth of small streets around it. You’ll find little shops selling nothing but dozens of different kinds of goat’s cheese, artisanal bakeries (in season, you can buy lavender bread), greengrocers which only sell local produce and some fantastic ethnic grocers, including a shop devoted to Arabic spices and a really excellent Vietnamese traiteur. Rotisseries punctuate the streets, but you’re not limited to chickens; quails and pork knuckles were on offer too.

If you visit the town, you’ll find plenty of good restaurants. Les Jardins de Bacchus on Av. Gambetta is a modern gastronomic restaurant, where courses were punctuated with Blumenthal-ish little jokes like a capuccino made from langoustines and foie gras. Service was excellent, and the food very good indeed. For a more casual meal, we really liked Le Jardin (19 Av. Joseph-Clotis), where Provençal food is served on a garden patio from noon until midnight. Try the crudites, which are served with a fierce anchoide and a home-made tapenade. Saigon-Hyeres is a beautifully decorated Vietnamese/Thai restaurant on Rue Crivelli, where the Thai fondue was fragrant and delicious – order plenty, though, as the portions are quite small.

My personal favourite was the Bistrot de Marius, a restaurant in Place Massillon specialising in the local fish and seasonal vegetables. (Bistrot de Marius has no website, but you’ll find other reviews of it online.) You can eat on the square in the shadow of the Knights Templar tower, and the food is extremely well-priced, thoughtfully prepared and absolutely delicious. Their soupe de poissons was the best I had on the holiday (and I sampled many), with a dense, heady aroma, served with a glossy, garlic-y rouille. Try the moules au gratin; mussels prepared in the same way you’d eat snails in Burgundy. A hundred times nicer than snails, and the butter was a joy to mop up with your bread. Red mullet was rolled with a fatty ham and pan fried. Iles flottantes were airy, their crème Anglaise dotted with vanilla – and to cap it all, the after-dinner coffee was some of the best I’ve had. Do drop in if you’re in town.

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Ladurée, Harrods, Knightsbridge

Ladurée is one of my favourite Parisian tea-rooms. They’ve recently opened a branch in Harrods in London, their first outside France. It’s a jewel of a place, with little linked salons in the style of Napoleon III, serving excellent teas, faultlessly French light meals and some of the best patisserie you’ll find in London. These people have style coming out of their ears; Ladurée is the pastry consultant for Sophia Coppola’s film about Marie Antoinette.

My Mum and I were at Harrods for a day of Ladies’ Nice Things, and stopped off for tea and macaroons at Ladurée. Ladurée’s macaroons are what makes them so very famous: crisp discs of ground almonds with a soft middle, sandwiched together with flavoured cream. The macaroons are served festooned with raspberries, pistachio cream and other good things if you have some in the tea-rooms. I bought a large box to take home as well.

These macaroons are flavoured delicately with the highest quality ingredients. There’s a basic range which is available all year round, and some seasonal flavours. (The black one in this box was a seasonal one; liquorice, which was surprisingly subtle and tenderly flavoured.) The flavours aren’t what you’d expect – the pale pink one here is scented with rose petals, the gold one caramel with fleur de sel (sandwiched together with some of the creamiest, most delicious caramel I’ve ever eaten). At certain times of year an orange flower macaroon is available, and I had a violet and cassis one in Paris a few years ago which I still think about fondly on occasion.

Eating at the tea-rooms themselves is a lesson in luxury. Each salon is decorated in a different style; this is the Black Salon, a tiny room packed to the gills with Etruscan caryatids. Zeus, surrounded by snakes, glowers from the middle of the cupola in the ceiling. I am informed that the velvet on the seats is made from pure mohair, and I can’t think of anywhere nicer to enjoy your truffle and morel omelette.

If you visit Ladurée, ask for the violet-scented black tea. I brought a (very expensive) packet home, and it’s glorious stuff; delicately scented and laced with violet and hibiscus flowers. I’m going to have to make another visit in a month or so – I have a dreadful craving for a black truffle religieuse and a large box of marrons glacés.