Griffin Inn, Fletching

Faced with a sunny, autumnal October Monday, we decided to have a day off and go out for a spot of lunch followed by a stroll. Luckily Penjamin remembered a recommendation from friends for the Griffin Inn in Fletching, Sussex. I'd passed through Fletching previously and had eaten in another pub there but had not yet tried the Griffin, despite the high praise that is heaped upon it (Sussex dining pub of the year, The Telegraph, etc.)

As the weather was so clement, we got a table out in the garden, looking out over the supposed 10-miles of views. I tried the draft beer from Harvey's, which was as good as it should be, whilst Penjamin had the house Chardonnay, of which she ventured no opinion as she necked it.

For the food, I tried the "Bruschetta of wild mushrooms with some sort of cheese that I forgot", not an inconsiderable £8.50 for a single slice of mushrooms on toast. Penjamin had a soup of lentils with cabbage, somewhere around a fiver.

Whilst these are "gastropub" prices, the food was certainly a notch above the norm, probably on a par with the George and Dragon at Speldhurst. The bruschetta was a slice of good sourdough, grilled and toasted and piled with a heap of real wild mushrooms, rather than a handful of cultivated mushrooms bulked out with a few soaked dried mushrooms. The soup was a tomatoey broth with lentils and some strips of shredded cabbage. I feared the lentils might have leant it towards a thick stodge or the cabbage towards Eastern European peasant gruel, but it was an almost Italian light soup with the lentils and cabbage providing flavour rather than body. Still my bruschetta was better.

Lacking imagination of choice, for mains we chose the same, "Samosa of butternet squash with some sort of cheese that I forgot but different to the mushrooms on a bed of chard with some roast potato disks". This came as two large triangular pillows of filo pastry straining to contain volcanic pureed squash with some wonderful spicing. These sat atop the chard and the disappointingly overcooked and chewy potatoes. The samosas were fantastic and the chard faired well as a supporting pile of greenery. At £12-ish they had to earn there price which I think they did, leaving us both sated and the plates emptied.

It's not the sort of everyday pub (and these dishes were from the bar menu, not the a la carte which pushes the prices up another notch) unless you're a retired city gent with a penchant for large lunches and cricket, the ranks of which seemed to be filling the interior of the pub. Service was very good and the kitchens, visible as you passed from inside to the garden, were running full tilt with a large team of staff that goes someway to show that good food and service can be a fairly staff-heavy operation.

They also have an outdoor wood fired oven that sadly wasn't in operation on the day of our visit where they prepare roasts and, I hope, pizzas and breads.

You can never go back...

Recently trudging the streets of Paris again, looking for a bistro where a vegetarian might get something to pass as food for anight, we found oursleves back near a restaurant we went to the same time last year, Sabraj.

I should have realised my mistake, when we found the place. Remembering a restaurant for its decor and not its food and service should have told me something. Maybe times change or maybe I was a fool for not realising that copper and tin plate do not a restaurant make. That requires food cooked well, attentive service and atmosphere.

You could say they had some sort of atmosphere, four or five men stood mysteriously at the back while one waiter tried to do everything himself. The owner helped a little but seemed more keen to talk to the shady guys. While taking our order after a half hour wait, he yawned and looked elsewhere.

Food eventually arrived and I remembered why I hadn't remembered it before. Unfortunately the only sight of the wine we ordered was on the bill, but nobody seemed to be interested in taking any money or discussing it, so we left less money than the bill and walked out, never to return.

A Toby carvery?

Don't.

152

Suffolk, Aldeburgh, where else for lunch but 152? - again.

Puff pastry basket stuffed with wild mushrooms and cream followed by Butternut squash and haloumi risotto with parsnip crisps. Couple of glasses of a Spanish white, finished with cheeses including my favourite, quince cheese. Can't go wrong really.

A Conran in Paris

For a long time now (since Jan 2006), this post has sat around waiting for some attention. Ealier this year, we were on one of our twice yearly trips to Paris and it happened to conincide with the birthday of a friend who just happened to be in Paris at the same time - not surprising really as the friends were there for the same reason, Maison et Objet.

Being a vegetarian with an appetite in France can be quite difficult, so other than special occasions, it's usually pizza or staying in. However as this was a special occasion, namely Richard's birthday, pizza was not an option. Penjamin's advance reading and work had turned up a restaurant from the Conran group, called Alcazar, which she attempted to book in advance via toptable. Now maybe toptable were having a bad day, but their service was to not put it too mildly, shambolic. They couldn't confirm a booking before we left, several days before we wanted the booking and they were supposed to by phone. After calling them several times, they said they couldn't get a reply from the restaurant - this just sounds absurd for a major restaurant! Especially when Penjamin called the restaurant directly some thirty seconds later and booked the table straight away. Make of it what you will and I'll make a pile of doodoo.

So what was the menu at Alcazar like? Can't remember, it was 8 months ago and if you can remember what you ate out that long ago then you should get out more, prefereably to a nice restaurant. Decoration, service, setting, etc. were all swish and well up to scratch. They even treated vegetarians as if they were part of the human population and offered a choice of several dishes, incorporated within the menu as if they were perfectly normal (instead of the seperate, small menu for example at Thackeray's).

Would I go back? Well if the occasion merited the budget, yes. But then there are so many more restaurants to try, I'm not sure I will.

An Indian in Paris

Sunday night in Paris. Vegetarian food? Ha! No point in even trying a smart French restaurant for that sort of thing. The best thing to do if you want cheap and veggie in Paris is go ethnic. Moroccan or cous-cous, Indian, Chinese, whatever.
Close to our hotel we found Restaurant Sabraj (175, rue Saint Jacques, 75005 Paris, tel: 01 43 26 70 03). Our main criteria for choosing it? It was covered in hammered and punched tin and copper sheet. The door, the windows, the whole frontage was done in an Indian styled metal makeover. Inside was the same. The tables were old doors covered in glass and filled behind the glass with spices and herbs.
And one thing you see in France that you just don't get in the UK is people dining alone and reading, looking perfectly happy and pretentiously intellectual, as they do so well in France.
What did we eat? Can't remember specifics, but it was creamy soft curries with good spicing, naan breads, etc. It was supposed to be a northern Indian, Kashmiri driven menu, but I don't know enough to judge its authenticity. But it was good.

Jojo's restaurant in Tankerton

Today we had a late lazy lunch in lieu of decorating the bathroom or spare bedroom and chose to spend it at Jojo's in Tankerton. Where you all cry? I heard about this place six months or so ago when it was reviewed in The Observer. Sounded like a nice place and I saw on their website that they were soon to be closing for renovations so we got in quick before they shut for a while.
Phoning up to book a table, it must be a testament to their popularity that over a week in advance, they had one table for two left at 2:30, and on a cold Saturday at the end of January. In a very drab street back from the sea front.
They don't have a license so it's a BYO for £1 corkage. Allegedly The Threshers down the road does a roaring trade off the back of the place. It felt really weird walking up to a restauarant clutching a bottle of wine, like you're arriving at someone's place for a party. But once inside, bottle on table, the waiter/husband/Paul plonked a corkscrew down on the table, leaving us to do the business. The menu (as you can see on the web site) is quite heavily based on Mediterranean small dishes; tapas, mezze sort of thing. Paul suggested the number of dishes to order which we followed and then promptly felt stuffed with. Dolmadas, stuffed risotto balls, patatas bravas, manchego cheese (with some mind-blowingly potent candied pear slices), hummus, breads, olives, etc. The food is cooked in the kitchen right there in the restaurant (it doubles up as the family kitchen outside of opening hours) and arrived in waves. Paul's wife, Nicki, does most of the cooking with an assistant and Paul dishes out the food from the counter to the tables hardly any distance away. It's all one light airy room, decorated with local photographer's prints, wood flooring, etc. The food isn't the best I've ever had, but it is damn good and it's the whole package that makes the place work; the kitchen, the atmosphere, the service, the regulars fetching their drinks from the fridge. Very informal and friendly; they call you by name if they can. When booking they only wanted a first name, couldn't be bothered with the rest.
They're closing very shortly (February 12th) so they can expand downstairs through to the back. But before you think that this is going to ruin the atmosphere of the place, they're going to keep the same number of covers per day. Whereas currently they sit a mere 14 people in two sittings, the plan is to sit the same number but without having to usher the first sitting out to make way for the seconds. So a few more tables (with some more elbow room they say) but the table will be yours for the day.
Worth a visit, definitely. I hope to go back when they re-open and see what the changes have done for it.

Brighton

Went to Food for friends in Brighton today. Haven't been there for years, so it was quite fun to see how much the place has changed. If I recall correctly, it claims to be the oldest veggie place in Brighton and I remember it (from probably ten years back) as being quite a virtuous sort of veggie place, all soya beans and fresh juice drinks sort of thing. In the mean time, Brighton has acquired the fantastic Terre a terre, which has really pushed the envelope in terms of veggie food. So I was curious to see if Food for friends has responded to the challenge in anyway.
Being a a cold New Years Day bank holiday thing, everywhere was busy and buzzing, but luckily we got a table for two whilst other larger parties seemed to suffer a much longer wait. The short menu with about 8 mains seemed at first appearance suggested that vast steps had been taken towards modernising the menu. Closer inspection though reveled layers of tofu buried in some dishes and an alarming preponderance for brown rice. It's all nicely done and listed with fashionably long titles for the dishes but there still lurks the heart of an 80s wholefood cafe inside.
For instance, my "crispy feta cutlet in spiky japanese breadcrumbs, served with a brandy apple sauce and silky caper and white pepper mash" (£9.45) was machine cut square with perfectly applied and even breadcrumbs. I sort of expected something a bit more casual and less converyor belt, a rough lump of feta half oozing out of its coating.
Ah well, not bad, especially for vegetarian food. Maybe I'm being too fussy, but the prices are not cafe style, and the food didn't quite meet expectations. Shame.

A curious little local restaurant

Thursday just past, we went for a Christmas meal with some of the other shop owners in Chapel Place, to a curious little local restaurant that I was completly unaware of. Morello in Matfield is located in the village post office. During the day it undertakes the usual post office activities but is transformed on Wednesday to Saturday nights into a restaurant. Our group of eight were in the slightly draughty small rear room, but the main area was packed and buzzing.

The menu is a set one, changing daily, but they accomodate other diets given sufficient warning. There are small tasting dishes between courses, the first of which was a pototo and cabbage soup. Copious quantities of walnut bread kept arriving to be followed by a poached, breadcrumbed and deep fired egg, the timing of which must have been a tactical masterpiece to have pulled off. Our main was a cheese souffle served with puy lentils, dessert a creme brulee with berries, again interspersed with little tastings such as a spiced orange sorbet and rounded off by coffee and petit fours. Being a set menu, the charge is set at a not too unreasonable £27.50 for four courses. I didn't get to see the wine list as far more experience others chose and chose well.

They post the menu in advance on their web site, so you can get a feel for what is coming up and jump in and make a booking if you feel tempted, something I think we'll be doing again.

As the knitting monk said, "This is becoming a habit"

Today is Monday. And Monday means lunch. Preferably by the seaside and in a nice restaurant.
And so it is. This time in The Place, Camber Sands. Again. This is becoming a bit predicatable. Anyway through November they have a two-for-one offer on week-day lunchtime dining, two courses minimum, and I can resist anything except temptation, especially when on special offer.
To summarise what we ate, we started with "Red chicory, pear, rocket, and kentish cob nut salad with crumbled stilton" and "Baked ‘stonegate’ goat’s cheese served on sourdough with tomato, rocket & pumpkin seed salad". Despite living in Kent, to my shame I'd never eaten cobnuts. In fact I've never been much a nut eater at all, but recently, what with the walnuts and now this, I can feel a change in the air - maybe it's the season.
For mains we both went for the "‘Olde sussex’ cheddar rarebit on a root vegetable rosti served with red onion marmalade & a mixed leaf salad" which had a well balanced mustard flavour to the rarebit on a soft creamy rosti of carrot, parsnip and potato.
Pushing the 2-for-1 offer to it's maximum advantage, we went for dessert. By now we could see the sunlight breaking through the dark clouds to the west, opening up a possiblity of walk on the beach after lunch to counteract the effects of dessert. "Baked pumpkin cheesecake served with thick local cream" for me, "Bramley apple and cinnamon crumble tart with blackberry ice cream" for Penjamin. Maybe it was the surfit of pumpkins at the previous days pumpkin fair that had weighted my expectation, but the cheescake was a pleasantly suprisingly light concoction.
With water, wine, bread, olives, coffee; £40. Utter bargain. Just trying to work out how we can get back there again before the end of November. Just hope the weather and light can work the same magic turnaround as it did today. By 4pm we were walking over sand dunes freshly cleared by the ealier rain, the pink sunlight coming in at a low angle under the breaking clouds to the west, thrown up against the still black wall of cloud to the east. The beach featured few people and as a many dogs. What little evidence of human presence had been there earlier was washed out on the rain-dappled sand and the light. The previous days turning back of the clocks may have marked a transition from the end of summer into deep autumn, and the turning had cut the time available to us here by an hour, but with days like this, you don't begrudge the slide into winter.

Restauranting yet again...

Today is Sunday. And Sunday means lunch, preferably by the seaside in a nice restaurant.
And so it is. This time in 152 in Aldeburgh. We were visiting friends who have recently re-located to rural Suffolk, the lucky sods. Last time we visited we went for lunch here and it seemed too good a chance to not repeat it.
It's the sort of up-market eatery that could become formulaic if you eat out too much. Wooden floorboards, Farrow & Ball colours, white linen - sound familiar? Still being by the sea side you get a different feel and smell for the place, the latter being of the fish and chip shops up and down the street that pollute the air.
We hadn't booked but it didn't matter as they were full. Bugger. But a table was available in 15 minutes and they had free tables outside with a sea view (but a chippy odour) where menus could be perused and wine drank. Ian suggested a bottle of Rosé, which given the unseasonably warm October weather was a brillianty unseasonable idea I wouldn't have considered. This one was pretty darn good. It was called La Serre Rose de Syrah Vin de Pays d'Oc 2004, imported by Bibendum Wines. (It's interesting to see the mark up restaurants make on wine - £3.78 at Bibendum to £12+ on the wine list.)
Our table eventually became available as our food was waiting (we'd ordered while enjoying the sun outside). The choices were typical of this sort of place; a soup, goats cheese salad, etc. all served with rocket salad and balsamic dressing. Penjamin had a leek tart to start and I had the goats cheese, a good rindless cheese with not too much acidity; I'd guess quite a young cheese. I had a "red wine risotto with tarragon crème fraiche and root vegetable crisps" as a main and I think Penjamin did too. The food fitted it's description, it was tasty where tasty was expected, warming where warming was needed, etc. where etc. was needed. The root vegetable crisps were good. Occasionally I've had a bag of these from the not-so-supermarket in place of crisps as a nod to healthy virtue, but they always taste like cardboard. But these, freshly fried strips of carrot, parnsip and something else were light, crispy and er... vegetably.
Skipping puds (we'd attacked Ella's chips as she showed little interest in them), the bill was £70 -something including wine and water. Service was slick but not oily. Recommended but then I knew that as we'd been before.

Restauranting again...

Tunbridge Wells has a limited number of restaurants that can be regarded as top tier, namely three. One of them, Hotel du Vin, I've been to 2 or 3 times. Another, Signor Franco's (they don't appear to have a website), I've visited once. I won't pass comment on either here as I haven't eaten in them for over a year. The third is Thackeray's and until now I'd never visited it. But tonight that changed.
One of our supplier's was visiting T/Wells and offered to take us out to dinner along with some mutual friends. Now we didn't suggest Thackeray's - the mutual friend did, honest. I wouldn't dare presume to suggest the most expensive restaurant in town as a destination.
So what was it like? In a word; sumptuous. In two words; very sumptuous. In three... oh you get the idea. We met initially in the small upstairs bar area. Lit by huge church candles in storm lanterns and decorated with gold leaf (there are pictures on the web site) it had a dark, almost gothic feel. And served a good G&T as well, though not as good as one I recall from Hotel du Vin, but that might have been the occasion more than anything.
They've got a separate, short, small (A5 format) vegetarian menu that you have to ask for. This struck me as odd - why not include it in the larger (A4) main menu? It left the vegetarians feeling like poor relations and a "special" case. At least they catered for vegetarians, not something you'd get from a French restaurant on it's home turf, certainly one of this calibre.
"So what was the food like?" I hear you cry. It was good. Pricey, but not much by modern standards. Starters around £5, mains £10-15. Some great tasting little between-course tasting dishes. The dining room is the current en-vogue simple design of floorboards, Farrow & Ball colours, white linen, etc. The tableware looked like something from the 1980's though; very large square plates, drizzles of this and sprigs of that. Tasted good though. Penjamin had a tomato rissoto which was very well balanced and I had something else. House wine was good and plentiful, thanks to our hosts repeated ordering. Service was slick, even if the poor girl couldn't quite remember what the tasting dishes were.
So would I go back, especially if paying myself? A tentative "yes". I would go for the atmosphere and the presentation and the whole experience. I wouldn't go purely for the food, but then eating out isn't just about the food, is it?

YARR (Yet Another restaurant Recommendation)

Sunday found myself and my dining partner, Penjamin¹, (like I have different partners for different occurrences) in Camber Sands, a location not exactly overflowing with choice eateries. Oh, there's plenty of fish, chip and heart-attack places and a Pontins holiday camp that no doubt has a fine menu on offer.

There is however one good reason for anyone with taste buds higher than a bottom feeder to go to Camber to eat and that is The Place. I must confess we had been before, some time in the spring but I hadn't written about it here as I was still in a sulk with Blogger for swallowing my earlier posts. Anyway, now that I've grown up come to terms with that, I know feel inclined to write it up.

The Place has got some great reviews, from amongst others, Waitrose magazine, The Observer (several times), The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The New York Post, The Margate WI's Knitting for Fethishists, etc. You can see a whole load of them here (despite the fact that they use spaces in the URL!!! Who designed this website?!).

Generally, anywhere that hyped, I run a mile from². We did however have a personal recommendation this time, from my dining partners Uncle. So that's alright then.

The Place is in essence an updated motel with restaurant, and architecturally still displays some if its former ingloriousness in its outward appearance. Inside though the makeover has been somewhat more successful, if a little formulaic. Simple bleached wood? Tick. Whitewashed walls? Tick again. Contemporary artwork? Tick again again. Chrome bar work with halogen lighting and natural wood tones? Tick, tick, tick. Simple white tableware? Tick... you get the idea, preferably before I get hit for impersonating a clock.

So anyway: the food. Or at least it's philosophy. The Place hits all the right markers for current thinking on food; locally sourced, organic but not to the extreme, sustainable farming and fishing. A menu based on the best seasonal produce and sourced from small, local suppliers. It's how eating should be and a flag with which it is becoming aggressively marketed.

The menu (current one here) changes monthly and though we caught the end of the June menu, the current July menu doesn't look that different, at least from the parts of it I remember. Appetisers of bread and olives (£2) were very good. The selection of breads were in particular good, especially the sourdough, a particular high hobby horse of mine which I must talk about some time. My partner had the soup (£3.95), a pea and mint affair with suitably springy flavours whilst I had a goats cheese souffle with chilli jam on some sort of bruschetta (£5-ish).

We both went for vegetarian mains, of which there are usually two on offer. It is reassuring that the vegetarian options appear to be part of the whole menu and not just an afterthought. They certainly stand up to the rest of the menu and are part of the whole ethos of The Place.

Penjamin had the "poached organic egg on a potato rosti served with nutmeg spinach, hollandaise sauce and a summer leaf salad" (£9.25) whilst I had the "organic Sussex haloumi cheese, red onion, & tomato brochette with spicy cous cous & a summer leaf salad" (£10.75). You can probably see that this is one of those restaurants that wears the names of it's dishes on it's sleeve (or in this case, menu). No beating around the bush with some sort of off-hand description like "stuff on a plate", this is the real McCoy (not to imply that they serve frozen chips).

The egg dish was brought to the table at the perfect point in its cooking as it would have been an easy dish for it to go off the boil and start sliding towards cold clamminess. The haloumi was again well timed. A cheese that can go off to rubberiness once cooked was served with a crisp burnt edge to a soft chewy centre, a feature it held for the duration. The accompanying cous -cous could have coped on it's own almost but certainly held the brochette (a posh kebab) up to standard.

But the real treat (and if fact one of the factors that pushed us into going there) was the side dish of marsh samphire. We'd already spotted it on their seasonable menu on the web site and sure enough, it was still on. No surprise as the season runs from June through September. As you may already know of my thoughts on samphire, I won't wax on again about it here, suffice to say it was cooked well and in such an ample portion, we ended up taking half of it home, something the waitress was happy to sort out. Penjamin even went so far as to ask the kitchen where they obtained it from, which after some confusion about sourcing it from France, resulted in the almost answer of somewhere around the River Rother (don't try saying that too quickly). So, it can be found closer to home than Norfolk...

This was washed down with an Argentinean Libertad Pinot Bianco (£14.95) from the lower reaches of a short but complete wine list. I don't know why wine lists have upper reaches as I can never get that far up them.

We'd gone for a late sitting (2pm is the last for lunch, 9pm for dinner) and consequently didn't slowly rise from the table until almost 4pm, a most civilised time to be finishing lunch I feel as the gap to dinner is now small enough to not be scared of. A bill for some £65 or so including water, coffee and 10% service charge was quite within expectations and certainly good value for the quality of food and atmosphere, the only downside of which, besides the Frank Sinatra CD sticking, was the heat at times. Apparently, opening the windows turns the place into a wind tunnel and the air-conditioning maybe wasn't up to the job (if they had any - it certainly wasn't noticeable in auditory terms). That said, maybe we should have opted for eating on the covered terrace outside, something Penjamin wished for but that I chose unwisely to ignore.

Leaving the car in the car park, it's a short stroll across to the dunes of Camber Sands to walk off the pleasant effects of lunch and admire the kites flying and dogs ear-streaming across the sand.

1. For some reason, restaurant reviewers like to give their dining companions stupid names. I'm sure it's something to do with fiddling accounts and tax returns.

2. Figuratively speaking.

A restaurant recommendation

Yesterday I was in Islington and we decided to have a late lunch after our business was concluded. Upper Street is packed with eateries - most of the chains are represented along with a very healthy number of independant and local places.

We settled on one of the three branches of Cafe Gallipoli. All three are on the same 100m stretch of road and called Cafe Gallipoli, Gallipoli Bazaar and Cafe Gallipoli again. I don't know how they differ from each other as they all appeared to offer the same menu.

The menu is a collection of dishes from throughout the Middle East, with the restaurants having suitable authentic looking interiors. We shared the Meze Bazzar, a selection of 5 cold and 2 hot starters. I wish I'd taken some notes of what was included (or pinched a menu) but I was too busy enjoying the food.

What I can remember of the meal was felafel, a filo pastry filled with cheese and herbs, a superbly smoky flavoured hummus and some yoghurt dish, potatoes in a tomato sauce with some fantastic seasoning, a bean dish and a very real tabbouleh which featured parsley to bulghur wheat in a 10:1 ratio; really a salad flecked with grain rather than the more usual intreptation of grain flecked with herbs. The tabbouleh really was the highlight of the meal. Bowls of olives ae provided on every table and there are bowls of breads to rip and share and dip.

It was one of those restaurants where the staff eat at the same tables as the customers with their families and their children, an always reassuring sign I think.

The bill for all the meze and a beer, a glass of wine, some bottled water and mint teas came to under £20 and I shall definitely return to explore more of the menu. Highly recommended.