Archive for April, 2009

My Restaurant Week – delicate octopus at Corrigan’s Mayfair and stellar steak frites at Soho’s latest hot spot

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

Corrigan’s Mayfair
Met up with the affable Mark Wogan for lunch to talk about the London Restaurant Festival. He has some good ideas. Mark is a former chef who now acts as an agent for the likes of chefs Richard Corrigan and Mark Hix and also his father, Sir Terry. I’m a big fan of Richard Corrigan, not only as a chef but also as a bloke. He has an unguarded passion for food that was sown, as a young boy, on his family’s modest small holding in Ireland. The menu at Corrigan’s Mayfair is still one of the most exciting in town. The dishes, like the man himself, are a welcome affront to the senses. I started with the octopus carpaccio with baby squid, chorizo and feta and then went for the kebab a la Greque with Salt Marsh lamb kidney. The octopus was served as delicate slivers and the smoky zing of the chorizo released flavours in octopus that can be dormant if served lazily. The kebab was buxom and succulent. On other occasions I have tried the suckling pig sausage with oysters and duck tongue, linguine cooked in red wine with pecorino bone marrow and the crubeens beetroot horseradish. The prune and Armagnac ice-cream is stellar, as is the rhubarb soufflé. Richard joined us for a glass of red. He’s extremely enthusiastic about the London Restaurant Festival and will be taking part. I have persuaded him to sit on the London team for our ‘University Challenge’ quiz that will pitch four London chefs against four New York ones. All the questions are related to food, restaurants, recipes, wine and so on. We’re also looking at including one of Richard’s restaurants in the Gourmet Odyssey event.
Address: 28 Upper Grosvenor Street, London, W1K 7EH. Tel: 020 7499 9943

The Wonder Bar

To lunch with Ewan Venters, the inventive and genial food director for Selfridges. Fay also joined us. I never fail to be wowed by the enterprising approach to food at Selfridges. There are well over a dozen restaurants at the store and we met at one of the most ingenious. The sleek Wonder Bar sits alongside the wine department on the ground floor and has a wine ‘juke box’. This is a nifty machine that keeps wine in prime condition once opened thus allowing people to have fine wine by the glass. You can put money onto a card and then self serve if you wish. The food comes on boards and is aimed at those wishing to share. There’s fine Domecq Jamon Iberico Bellota and superb Frank Hederman Beech smoked salmon with capers and beetroot chutney. Ewan sits on the steering committee of the London Restaurant Festival and we are in talks for a very exciting project at Selfridges during the festival.

Selfridges & Co, 400 Oxford St, London, W1A 1AB.

 

Sanctum Soho

Sanctum Soho has just opened and I visited early on to get a feel for the restaurant. I must admit an interest here as A Private View Ltd, the consultancy company I have with Fay Maschler, helped find the chef and compile the menu. He’s a gifted young man called Gavin Austin who is passionate and lacks self-indulgence. He’s a talent to watch out for and cooks with a lot of integrity using simple, well-sourced ingredients. I had scallops with bacon and peas and it was neatly presented and full of distinct flavours. It was also nice and hot. The rib-eye steak was exceptional and the fries hot, crispy and tasting of potato. It will be a few weeks before the place is up to full speed but with the food already this accomplished it’s certainly one to watch.

20 Warwick St, London, W1B 5NF. Tel: 020 72926100

 

Zafferano

Fay and I had lunch with the owners of this popular Belgravia Italian. It’s part of London Fine Dining Group that also has Aubergine, L’Oranger, Allora and Memories of China in its stable, among others. Zafferano is an elegant place serving precise and authentic dishes. The food is always beautiful to look at and they are swift to get seasonal specials onto the menu. I started with some linguine and morels. They were earthy and nutty. The escalope Milanese was thankfully not hammered into the mean-spirited thin offering as is so often the case and is like eating a greasy bit of cardboard sprinkled with pebbledash. Instead it was succulent and the bread crumbs golden jewels. London Fine Dining Group are keen to be involved in the London Restaurant Festival.

15 Lowndes St, London, SW1X 9EY. Tel: 020 7235 5800

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My Restaurant Week – Oysters at J Sheekey, Sichuan tapas and the best burger in Belgravia

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

J Sheekey
During lunch at J Sheekey with Chris Hughes, the effervescent character behind the Taste food events, we discussed having a bit of a shindig during Taste to tell people more about LRF. Taste is a partner of the London Restaurant Festival and will also have an event during the inaugural LRF in October. I never tire of J. Sheekey. It’s refined without being stuffy and the recently designed oyster bar is one of the most delightful places to sit and eat in London’s West End at the moment. It’s redolent of the oyster bar in Grand Central Station in New York but more intimate and better food. We sat in the main restaurant which is no less agreeable and I had some sound oysters and an excellent bream, simply pan-fried.
Address: 28-32 St Martin’s Court, London, WC2N 4AL. Tel: 020 7240 2565
Book online

Sukho Thai

Dinner with friends at this Thai restaurant that remains, to my mind, one of the best in London. The service is sweetly deferential and the food is presented with delicate modesty. The tom kha soup and the soft shell crab are particularly good as is the fresh tuna in spicy lemongrass and mint and the corn fed chicken with cloud ear mushrooms.

Address: 855 Fulham Road, London, SW6 5HJ. Tel: 020 7371 7600

 

The Pantechnicon Rooms

You can get one of the best set lunches in town at this elegant neighbourhood bolt-hole on the rapidly emerging hot spot of Motcomb St. It’s owned and run by a savvy young team whose first project was The Thomas Cubitt Pub on Elizabeth Street, just down the road towards Victoria. Theirs is a canny operation. They take ordinary pubs on the Grosvenor Estate and transform them into extremely well designed, and finished, pubs and dining rooms. The Estate loves them for it and so do the locals if the packed house when I visited was anything to go by. I had an excellent burger with a beaker of piping hot fries and a beer for £12. I’m going to head back soon as I gather they’re about to start serving muntjac deer – very pioneering and delicious too. I gather they’ve just bought The Orange Brewery on Pimlico Road for their third venture. Good luck to them.

Address: 10 Motcomb Street, London, SW1X 8LA. Tel: 020 7730 6074

 

Ba Shan

In keeping with the current vogue for small plates of food this new place in Soho specializes in the more unusual dishes from Northeast China. It’s Sichuan tapas in a way and known as ‘Xiao chi” (small eats). The restaurant itself is intimate and dressed as if to resemble a cross between a marketplace and an authentic, simple Sichuan restaurant with small wooden benches. The effect nibbles at edge of naffness but manages to avoid a full-blown feast of foibles. I was a guest of Richard Vines, the restaurant critic for Bloomberg and a supporter of The London Restaurant Festival. The smiling staff, many having just arrived in the UK, was engaging and helpful despite some language difficulties. I loved the lotus leaf buns, five-spiced beef and jia mo with cumin-spiced beef. For a full review you should read Fay Maschler’s in The Evening Standard. Read Richard Vines’ review here.

Address: 24 Romilly Street, London, W1D 5AH. Tel: 020 7287 3266

 

The View

Not in London but this unprepossessing little place above Whitsand Bay is well worth mentioning and a real find. It’s far superior – and far less expensive – that Rick Stein’s places in Padstow on the north coast.  I had sardines that had been simply grilled and not fiddled around with followed by an exceptional piece of turbot. All local suppliers and the head chef/owner Matt Corner is notably talented. He runs it with his wife Rachel. Also, the name of the restaurant is no shallow claim as the view across the sea to Rame Head is breathtaking.

Address: Treninnow Cliff Road, Whitsand Bay, Cornwall. Tel: 01752 822345

http://www.theview-restaurant.co.uk

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A taste of things to come

Monday, April 6th, 2009

 

 

Since our event at the Club at the Ivy a couple of weeks ago work on the inaugural London Restaurant Festival has gathered pace with encouraging briskness.

 

The heady degree of enthusiasm for the festival from all quarters is now being matched with hard graft from the team here to ensure that we not only give London’s restaurateurs a great boon but also offer Londoners, and visitors to our great capital, the most engaging and satisfying restaurant festival possible in year one.   

 

As one of the aims of this blog is to keep you updated with our progress I plan to post regularly.

 

I had a great lunch with Chris Hughes on Tuesday. Chris is the man behind the successful Taste events and I’m pleased to say is now one of the partners in the London Restaurant Festival.

 

We are extremely pleased to have him and his team – particularly Taste editorial director Tess Willmott – on board. Tess joined us for lunch along with our festival manager Penny Smith and we discussed the possibilities for Taste’s event during the first London Restaurant festival in October. There were several new and exciting ideas batted around and we’ll let you know specifics further down the line.

 

We also agreed that the London Restaurant Festival would have a colourful presence at the main Taste event in Regent’s Park that takes place this year June 18-21.  On that, tickets are now on sale for this event. See www.tastefestivals.com

 

I also spent some valuable hours with another of our key partners this week. Visit London are an integral part of the London Restaurant Festival and one of their contribution to date has been the construction of this superb website. Of course, this site as it stands is just an hors d’oeuvre compared to the slap-up offering that is now under construction.

 

I sat down with Julie Chappell, the head of media at Visit London, and Joanna Tatti, the technical project manager, to methodically go through all of the content, functionality and so forth of the website. Work is now underway to build a site that will serve as the ‘mother ship’ for the London Restaurant Festival and it will launch in July.

 

They are an extremely impressive and professional team and we are lucky to have them supporting us.

 

I popped into the RSVP show at the Business Design Centre in Islington as Tim Etchells had asked if I would speak on why restaurants make good venues for entertaining clients and corporate events.  

 

Tim is a founding partner of the London Restaurant Festival and his company Single Market Events Ltd runs RSVP and also London Fashion Week and the British Motor Show among others. He’s arguably the most experienced figure in events management in the country so Fay and I are extremely pleased that he’s seen fit to support the London Restaurant Festival in such an integral way.

 

The following day I visited a particularly interesting event. Earlier in the week I got chatting to a man on my train to London. He is called Bryan Toye and his company – Toye, Kenning and Spencer – is a distinguished livery company established in 1645. He’s also a prominent figure in the Royal Warrant Holders Association.  

 

We got onto the subject of the London Restaurant Festival – my ability to re-direct any conversation onto one about the festival is becoming finely tuned – and he mentioned a food and drink fair taking place in London at which all those taking part shared the privilege of holding a royal warrant.

 

This struck me as a rather ingenious idea so I went along last Thursday. It was being held in Victoria and was only quietly promoted at the request of the royal household. Despite this, word soon got about, the sun shone and the place was buzzing with people scoffing their way through the most delicious sausages from HM The Queen’s favourite sausage maker from Newmarket, breads for Partridge’s, truffles from Prestat and cheeses from Paxton and Whitfield. There were about 30 stalls.

 

It was the first time such an event had taken place and not only was it intriguing to see what HM The Queen and HRH The Prince of Wales like to eat but also to discover some suppliers I had no knowledge of.

 

I had a chat with the people who created the event as I think there may be scope for a similar one during the London Restaurant Festival. We shall see.

 

Other possible events were explored this week during a visit to Sister, a PR company on Carnaby St who look after that area and also Regent’s St.

 

We discussed an event focused on Ganton St that is now almost exclusively made up of restaurants and also a new take on a Mad Hatter’s Tea party inspired by David Bowie on Heddon Street. Watch this space.

 

So, busy times. I’m now off to see Mark Wogan, a former chef, passionate foodie and son of Sir Terry, who is an enthusiastic supporter of the London Restaurant Festival and tells me he has some ideas for events. I’ll let you know about that, and much more besides in my next blog.

 

Please do get all the people you know to register on www.londonrestaurantfestival.com and also tell your favourite restaurants to get in touch and get involved.

 

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