Reviews and Comments of 'Harriet Fisher' (34)
Rosso Pomodoro is an Italian chain of restaurants with a branch in Covent Garden. There is an important distinction from a chain of Italian restaurants and an Italian chain of restuarants, Rosso Pomodoro started life in Italy and there are branches in Milan, Rome and Naples as well as many other Italian cities and they now have 3 in London, which means that they pride themselves in providing authentic Italian food with quality ingredients. I realise that these phrases are over used and that most restaurants now claim to use quality ingredients, however Rosso Pomodoro also claims to be part of the slow food movement (10 of their dishes use slow food ingredients) which means that they use ingredients from producers who grow rare or threatened varieties of certain foods in a way that protects the environment and at a price that is fair to the grower. The rest of the food they use comes mainly from 6 trusted suppliers.
This all sounds very earnest and right on but actually translates into delicious, fresh, beautifully cooked food with it’s roots in Naples. The tomatoes are exceptional and the olive oil is excellent. There is not a huge range of dishes but I think that this is one of their strengths, most dishes come, not surprisingly, with tomatoes in some form, the main choices being pasta, pizza and a few meat or fish dishes. This is presumably because they limit their ingredients to those that they consider to be top quality. Pasta is handmade, pizzas are cooked in a firewood oven and taste somehow unlike any other pizza I have had in this country service is friendly and efficient. the decor reflects the name and is mostly tomato red and white. On one recent visit someone in our party sent their pasta dish back as it was not very hot, it was immediately taken off the bill and she was offered anything else she might like free of charge.
Rosso Pomodoro is a good quality Italian restaurant with just enough of a difference to make it stand out from the sea of other pizza restaurants in the capital. It offers good vegetarian choices and the best tomatoes I have eaten in London.
The Cut Bar and Restaurant is attached to the Young Vic Theatre and is therefore mainly aimed at pre and post theatre eating and drinking. It is a large open space with outside tables and an upstairs Bar area and does become fairly noisy. Given that you are unlikely to come here for a quiet, romantic dinner the noise is not really a problem and lends the place a lively atmosphere. The food is good and reasonable priced, it is not a wide menu but this means that it is quick to come to the table and what there is is high quality.
Last night I had courgette and aubergine sandwich (burger style) and chips. We shared a large and very green salad with deliciously sharp dressing and a side dish of green beans and shallots. The courgette and aubergine were perfectly cooked, with just enough chargrilling to give them a smoky taste without obliterating the original vegetable. The chips were the best I have had for a long time, crispy outside and soft and fluffy in the middle. Joff finished with a scoop of apparently very good vanilla ice cream.
With two glasses of wine each the bill came to £42 pounds which I think is pretty good value. The service was efficient and friendly and the whole operation friendlier and more inviting than the basement restaurant at the Old Vic.
Village East is a restaurant and bar on bermondsey street run by the people who own the Garrison. Populated mostly by fashionable looking 30 and 40 somethings it has a lively atmosphere, good (ie flattering) lighting and is deceptively large. The bar is at the front and also has a mezzanine level and the restaurant is at the back, again on two levels.
The waiting staff are efficient if not exactly warm and cuddly, which is probably exactly what you want from people serving you food. The place was busy in a Saturday night and the only minor irritation is the insistence on background music which I never really understand in restaurants.
The food was good, a fairly wide range of vegetarian stuff, including roast vegetable couscous with halloumi, artichoke salad with broad beans and peas, and roasted aubergine soup which we didn’t have but which sounded lovely.
The food was well cooked, the veg fresh and not too oily and the green beans served with plenty of butter, which is the best way. In fact we had a vegetarian meal containing a huge variety of vegetables, which is not always the case when eating out.
We shared a starter, a main each, three sides and a beautiful crumble to finish. This, plus two glasses of reisling each came to £77, not cheap but to my mind good value for a decent meal, good wine and well lit, well designed surroundings.
The Milk Bar is the sister coffee bar to Flat White, both are antiodean and both serve fantastic coffee, including a flat White. The Milk Bar is on Bateman street in soho and is small and generally busy with wooden tables and funky staff. As well as coffee they serve
lunch and brunch including a very good plate of scrambled eggs, which was just the right creamy consistency and a vegan carrot cake crammed with pumpkin seeds. Vegan cake is never as good as non vegan cake but this was a pretty good attempt. Lunch was £15 for 2 coffees, 2 scrambled eggs on toast and one piece of cake. Recommended.
Well, I say that all roads lead to Birmingham. Because no matter where I am in the world, from Norwich to New York, I am guaranteed to bump into someone from Brum.
And a recent meal at Napa restaurant at the Chiswick Moran Hotel in west London proved no exception.
On introduction, it transpired that Napa's restaurant manager - an Italian named Mark - had arrived in Chiswick from Perry Barr, Birmingham, via a stint at the Watford Gap services. Small world, eh?
While swapping second city tales, Mark helped the boy and I select a wine to accompany our meal, recommending a light Cotes de Provence rose to compliment my cod and the boy's steak.
Rose seemed the fitting wine too, as Napa's interior has a funky '70s feel, which is also reflected in the menu with dishes such as 'open' beef Wellington and steak Diane.
I opted for a 'classic' Napa starter of crayfish and prawn cocktail, which had it been served in a frilly-edged glass goblet, would have been right out of a Fanny Craddock cookbook.
Served instead in lettuce leaf shells, the seafood was succulent and Marie Rose dressing nicely spiced. Accompanying homemade breads were excellent, with a lovely open texture.
The boy's tian of white Dorset crab with avocado and tomato dressing 'tasted a lot better than it looked'. He also commented on the freshness of the seafood.
He was equally impressed by the 'medium' cooking of his steak, although his hand-cut chips were undercooked.
My fillet of cod on saffron-crushed potatoes with mussels and tomato beurre blanc exceeded expectations, while some accompanying green beans still had good crunch.
The boy's Eton mess was packed with fruit and deliciously creamy, while my passion fruit sorbet a good palate cleanser.
Sadly, prices aren't based in the '70s, with main course dishes averaging about £15, but Napa is worth a try if you are in this neck of the woods.
Napa is currently offering 50 per cent off your food bill until September 30.
There are those which at the time were sublime, but afterwards evaporate into the darkest confines of your memory, only to be revisited in a moment of reminiscence.
Then there are those - relatively few - dining experiences where the tastes are so incredible that they will linger on your lips forever and, no matter where you are in the world, you will hanker after a return visit.
While I know there are a million more food experiences to be had, I will always lust after one more taste of what can only be described as a crispy onion pancake that we ate in House of Nanking in San Francisco.
Food memories like that don't discriminate; they can take place in roadside shacks or prince's palaces.
It just so happens however, that my most recent such experience took place in the very stylish Kai in Mayfair.
Kai is one of only two Michelin star Chinese restaurants in London. So good is the food that I fear every other Chinese meal I now eat will pale into insignificance.
Unlike many such celebrated establishments, there is no stuffiness and diners seemed to delight in being able to tuck into communal dishes.
We started with Kai's signature starter of Wasabi Prawns, which our waiter assured us was 'not too spicy, as it was a special recipe devised by the chef'. He also told us that during Kai's recent participation in Taste of London festival, they traded more than 1,000 portions of this dish.
It's easy to see why. The jumbo prawns were delicately cooked and coated in just the right amount of creamy, 'not too spicy' wasabi dressing, as well a tiny flecks of chopped fresh ginger. The boy and I agreed it was a taste revelation. We also tucked into canapes of prawn toasts and aromatic crispy duck - both excellent examples of classic Chinese fare, while enjoying a bottle of Dr Loosen Riesling recommended by our sommelier. However, the food really came into its own for our main courses of chicken and cashew nuts and aubergines stuffed with minced prawns. The sauce coating the chicken was deep, dark and rich with a good kick from the sundried chillis - a million miles from the MSG-laden gloop you'd find in your bog standard Oriental sauce. And the prawn-stuffed aubergines was a superbly inventive dish, combining the smokiness of the vegetable and sweetness of prime seafood in a pulse-rich black bean sauce.
Even our waiter admitted he was dubious about the dish until he tried it. Ginger and sesame oil, and coriander fragranced rice, were subtle yet stunningly delicious side dishes.
Puddings were zingy pineapple carpaccio with lime, lychees and lemongrass syrup, and another Kai signature dish of pumpkin cream with purple rice and coconut icecream - an intelligent dessert deconstructing the elements of a pumpkin soup and turning it into a divine velvety dessert.
Some of the prices on the Kai menu may leave you breathless, but the quality of ingredients, intelligence of the cooking and -most unusually - the generosity of the portions, make them justifiable.
This is what food memories are made of.
The idea is that you queue at the front to choose the mostly pre-pepared dishes and order drinks and then carry it to your table, unless you order cooked food and then a waiter brings it. The food is mostly mezze with a few main dishes and everything that we ate was beautifully fresh and tasty. The tabouleh was drenched in lemon juice, the hummus smooth and made with good, flavoursome oil and the Pitta was crisp and freshly toasted. Joff had mint tea made with fresh mint and I had an apple, ginger and mint juice which looked murky but tasted delicious and refreshing. salads are 33.30 for a small and £5.50 for a large, mezze are £3.30 and wraps £4.50. All dishes are perfect for sharing, which makes it basically pretty reasonable price ways and there are a range of foodstuffs such as Turkish Delight and Harissa to buy on the way out. All in all it makes a nice change for lunch or a casual dinner and I will definitely be going back. Oh, and Jonathan Meades was there too, which is a good sign, I think.
The Market Coffee House in Spitalfields is an old style cafe opposite Spitalfields Market. It is family owned and so has a little more character than many of the other chain establishments around this area. This character shows itself through the look of the place, all wooden furniture and nooks and crannies, including a lovely old tiled floor down in the basement where the loos are. The food itself sells itself as 'home made', freshly baked rolls with egg, sheese, ham etc, and an excellent bowl of hummus with a huge slice of bread. It is all fresh tasting and not too expensive (egg and cress roll £2.50). The cake counter is pretty irresistible, so far I recommend the banana cake, although it does have chocolate chips hidden in it which I count as a bonus but Joff sees as an ambush, and the individual bakewell tarts. the coffee is good and strong (I think they use Monmouth) and there is always somewhere to sit. I have only one quibble and that is the service; the servers themselves are all very decorative and look as though they have been bought in bulk form an art School but there are a lot of them and it seems to take them a long time to do anything, which isn't helped by the fact that they all seem to do the same thing at once. No system! This doesn't ruin the place by any means and it is fast turning into my favourite lunch spot in the area. I read on their blog that they are opening a restaurant this year, which is good news.
It is a good local restaurant with friendly service, including a waiter from Belfast who everyone asks where he is from, assuming he is from Iran via Belfast, but he is actually from Belfast. The decor is pleasant and unremarkable, but with a relaxed feel. The menu contains things you may recognise from Turkish or Lebanese food but it tastes very different. Persian food, in my limited experience is more aromatic that it's Turkish counterparts, Falafel taste fragrant and subtly spiced as does the hummus. We ordered a mixture of meze priced between £3.50 and £4.50, including; Kookoo, a perisan omellette,Mirza, a lentil and aubergine dip, and Esfenaj, a mixture of spinach and chick peas and the afore metnioned Falafel and Hummus. All were good, not oily as this type of food can sometimes be, all delicately spiced and, as I mentioned before, fragrant (although I couldn't tell you what the spices were). Oh, and we had Jewelled rice, which is a sticky persian rice with a heap of saffron on the top and which is probably my favourite dish in Dish Dash. To finish we shared three scoops of ice cream; Cardamon, Pistachio and Vanilla. Vanilla is Joff's choice I hasten to add. The cardamon and pistachio were absolutely delicious and I urge you to order them if you visit.
The meal cost £30 for two, with plenty of food and a cocktail each. Don't order the cocktails they are average, go for wine or beer. A very good local restaurant and worth a short tube journey if you fancy something a little different with excellent vegetarian choices.
I know it will come as no surprise when I say that we go there to have eggs. This could mean that we have a monotonous diet or that eggs are a good benchmark with which to measure most restuarants, take your pick. Anyway we had eggs. So far I have had fried and scrambled and Joff has had poached and scrambled. All were excellent, the yokes runny in the fried eggs and the scrambled were perfectly creamy but not too runny. The bread, from an award winning bakery, is sliced thickly and seemingly toasted on a griddle pan which gives it a smoky, almost burnt flavour. Lovely. The coffee is good and the service friendly. As far as puddings go I have only had a slice of banana bread which had a toffee ish consistency and was much nicer than it looked.
The eggs cost £4 and the coffee is how much it usually costs in this type of place, which means I have forgotten but it didn't make me shout so it can't have been a lot. They are open 7 - 5 weekdays and 9 - 3 on weekends.
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