Tag: London

Restaurant review: The Drapers Arms, Islington

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I was meeting Aileen, a very dear old friend, in London for lunch and she gave me carte blanche to pick wherever I wanted. “You’re the food expert”, her message said. “You choose.” And I have to say, that was more difficult than usual; I have a list of London places I want to get round to, but lots of them didn’t seem right for this. I didn’t want us to sit at a cramped table somewhere in Soho, elbows battling, or up at a bar watching an open kitchen. I might go to the edgy places with my cousin Luke, but lunch with Aileen required somewhere in the image of our friendship: comfortable, classy, unrushed with a long history. Somewhere worth celebrating.

Aileen and I, you see, have been friends for well over a decade. Long before I started writing this blog I used to write another – not about restaurants, about something else – and somehow Aileen chanced upon it. And somehow, I’m not even sure how, we went from writer and reader to firm friends. I don’t think I could possibly have appreciated at the time how fortunate I was about that. Because a few years later my marriage and my life imploded and things got almost impossibly hard and Aileen, arguably more than anyone, was the person who kept me together.

In the dark moments when nobody else was there, or (more likely) they had all gone to sleep, Aileen showed up for me time and time again. She always had the same mantra, which I railed against but over time discovered was true: this is a phase. It’s a phase, and it will pass. And it was, and it did, and she never once said I told you so, even though she could have done.

I like to tell people that she saved my life, and she likes to reply that I’m talking nonsense. She might be right, because she nearly always is, but if we hadn’t become friends I don’t know who or where I would be now: I almost certainly wouldn’t be here.

It was a huge honour for me that she was at my wedding earlier in the year, a wedding that might not have happened had I not met her. Late in the evening, when the guests were thinning out, we sat together outside the Lyndhurst and had a good old gas, as if the intervening months had never happened. And the next morning I managed to catch her in the hotel bar before she headed home to Milton Keynes, and that easy, joyous conversation was one of my highlights of the whole weekend. I told her we should do lunch in London soon. So we agreed to, and all I had to do was find somewhere suitable for the occasion.

I ended up choosing the Drapers Arms in Islington, because it just felt right. It’s been going for well over twenty years, one of the generation of London gastropubs that includes the celebrated Anchor & Hope near Waterloo, and in that time it has become an institution. It held a Bib Gourmand from Michelin for much of the last decade, losing it in 2018, but it still featured in this year’s list of the U.K.’s top 100 gastropubs. But the thing that most cements its status as an institution is that nobody talks about it online, because nobody needs to. You won’t find a recent review of it online, and the London restaurant bloggers stopped name checking it a long time ago.

All that meant that although I’ve always wanted to go, I didn’t have a very clear idea what to expect. Aileen and I wandered there, strolling up Camden Passage and looking at all the stalls and boutiques, before heading across to Upper Street and then ambling off the main drag, onto side streets filled with houses you wished you lived in. On the way I went past various restaurants I’d heard of – the likes of Bancone clone Noci, Alsatian brasserie Bellanger and regional specialists Hainan House – all of which have been reviewed by somebody a darned sight more recently than the Drapers Arms has.

It’s a handsome, imposing building, a three-storey, powder blue beauty, and going in the front room was flooded with sunshine from the windows and glass-panelled doors. There were unoccupied tables at the front, and I was hoping our reservation was at one of them, but instead we were led to a room further back which was dingier and less agreeable. Almost every table was taken, and we were seated at possibly the worst one there – equidistant from the terrace at the back or those big windows out front, starved of sunshine.

I plonked myself on a Thonet-style bentwood chair that didn’t entirely feel as if it could deal with my weight at the start of the meal, let alone the end. Around us all the tables were packed with loud, lively, chattering groups, and there was nothing to soak up the sound. I took a picture of the room much later on, which makes it look nicer than it was.

But maybe all that is a tad grumpy. After all it was busy, which you want somewhere to be, and the fact remained that it was an extremely attractive pub, even if we had the restaurant equivalent of the worst house on a good street. I especially loved the emerald-coloured bar, and a print on the wall advertising HP Sauce in the proper bottles.

“Mark brought some home from the supermarket recently in a squeezy plastic bottle and I made him take it back” said Aileen, talking about her husband. “It doesn’t taste the same when it’s not in a glass bottle. I reckon it’s thinner, too.” This, I realised, was one of many reasons why I loved the woman.

The menu changes every day and they publish it on the website, so it was much as I’d expected. It’s curious how some menus present you with very difficult choices while some, despite making all the right noises, are devoid of dilemmas. I would say that, however well it read, the Drapers Arms menu was the latter. Nine starters, all of which seemed to be either gutsy and rustic or, for my money, a little too virtuous. It was all a tad binary for me. You had the same number of mains, although four of them – the fun ones – were to be shared between two.

That made the whole thing a little more restrictive than I’d have liked and if you didn’t like offal or bone marrow, both of which made an appearance, I think you might have found things trickier still. Starters generally clustered between eight and fifteen pounds, mains started just shy of twenty but climbed, for the sharing dishes, up to ninety quid.

While we weighed things up Aileen ordered a negroni and I asked for a Bloody Mary, we clinked glasses and celebrated the prospect of a long lunch with a great friend. They didn’t ask me how spicy I wanted the Bloody Mary, which gave me confidence that it would be good. It was both spicy and very, very good.

It had been far too long since I’d had lunch with Aileen, and I didn’t realise that she was excited about featuring in the blog. “I’ve wanted to do this for ages!” she said. “And I don’t want you using a pseudonym for me, either.” Chatting away, I realised that we both had many of the same criteria when it came to restaurants getting a gold star or nul points. When our bread turned up, it turned out we both had a bugbear about fridge cold butter (Aileen checked it and thought it was okay, for my money it was still a little on the cold side).

My starter was a bisque, and Aileen rested her hand briefly against the outside of the bowl. “I don’t like it when hot food comes in a cold dish” she said. I hadn’t ever considered it, but she had a point.

The problem with the bisque, though, wasn’t one of temperature per se. It was a tasty dish where almost everything worked, but it wasn’t quite the sum of its parts. I loved the depth of the bisque and the crab meat tumbled through it. Spiking the whole thing with dots of deep green oil and red flecks of espelette pepper gave the whole thing contrast and depth.

The problem, and I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, was the octopus: there were a few pieces in the bisque and I just wasn’t sure, in terms of flavour or texture, whether they added enough to be worth it. This dish was fifteen pounds, and I couldn’t help thinking it might have been better, and been better value, without the octopus.

“Another thing that annoys me, while we’re at it” I said to Aileen, “is dishes like soup appearing in shallow bowls like this. It just means it’s really hard to get to all of it, and it goes cold quicker.”

“I agree with that” said Aileen. I cleaned up the rest of my bisque with some of the bread, which was fulfilling one of its most noble purposes: the edible jay cloth for sauce removal. The bread was okay, by the way: two big slices of sourdough and two pieces of baguette is hardly highway robbery for three pounds, but it wasn’t the most exciting.

Aileen’s starter was the kind of dish I would never order in a million years, and a great advert for bringing people with you to review restaurants whose tastes are not the same as yours. It was a bean salad with coriander, chillies and datterini tomatoes, served in a sort of filo pastry basket. Aileen loved it – the flavours worked well and the beans had a nice amount of bite. I had a forkful, which confirmed that it was indeed the kind of dish I would never order in a million years. I didn’t feel like there was anything bringing a fun factor to the plate, but that probably tells you more about me. It also felt steep at eleven quid.

Aileen is planning to retire at the end of the year, and was telling me how she plans to take over more of the cooking from her husband. This dish struck me as having a hint of Ottolenghi about it, and Aileen said she’d tried making some of his recipes. I’ve never followed her example: in my experience, they always seem to involve lots of ingredients and hours of processes, so perhaps they’re best left to the retired.

“Have you ever been to an Ottolenghi?” she said.

“Yes, just the once. I was at this event to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the Cable Street Riots, because my then girlfriend knew someone who was in a Yiddish marching band.” This sentence, by the way, sums up perfectly how very strange my life was in the latter half of 2016.

“There was a march, and a demonstration, and lots of placards and Jeremy Corbyn was one of the people making a speech. It was so boring that we sloped off to the Ottolenghi in Spitalfields and they managed to fit us in. It was all right, but it felt like a glorified salad bar.”

This starter, to me, felt like the kind of thing you’d have at a glorified salad bar.

But no matter. Both of us had chosen far more substantial mains and had ordered a bottle of Gamay to go with them: initially I thought Aileen might have insisted on just having wines by the glass, but that negroni had persuaded her to throw caution to the wind. It was thirty-one pounds, so very much at the shallow end of the wine list, but the list went deeper than at many restaurants.

“That one said 300, and for a moment I thought it was the price” said Aileen.

“No, that is the price.”

“But this is a pub!”

“Well, yes. And no.”

My main course was a sure sign that summer was long gone and that winter, as Leonard Cohen once put it, was tuning up. Lamb faggot and celeriac purée sounded like a glorious, fortifying treat and I was very glad Aileen hadn’t stuck a pin in it, because I always let my dining companions choose first. On paper it was beautiful, and at first sight it was every bit as appealing – a huge faggot, a splodge of mash, a moat of sticky gravy and one accent of not-beige, a crowning garnish of kalette tops. It was a dish to be enjoyed in a cosy pub, even one with three hundred pound bottles of wine on offer.

Things only went slightly awry when I ate the damned thing. The faggot had a terrific, coarse, crumbly texture and the celeriac purée was one of the nicest, silkiest ones I can remember. The kalette was a revelation – still firm, with a zip of mint that the dish badly needed. But the faggot was really heavy on the offal, to the point where it was a little too intense, a bit much even for me. I liked it at the time, and I finished it, but it sort of stayed with me for the rest of the day, in the way you don’t want.

Aileen had gone for my second choice from the menu, a beef and mushroom pie with a suet crust – or, for the purists among you, a stew with a lid. It came without accompaniments, so I was glad we’d also ordered chips and veg. It was placed on the table, and Aileen asked if it came with gravy (she is from Nottingham, after all). We were told, very nicely, that it did not.

At first, Aileen wasn’t sure about the whole affair but I think she warmed to it – the beef was all at the bottom but there was a fair amount of it, tender and breaking into strands. There was carrot and mushroom in there too, and she loved the green beans she’d ordered on the side, just-cooked and topped with crispy shallots. But even though this wasn’t a pie for sharing it was strange that it didn’t come with anything, including a plate to dish it up onto.

It reminded me very much of some of the great gastropub pies I’ve tried in the past, at Hackney’s The Marksman or The Magdalen Arms in Oxford, but it didn’t look quite as alluring as either of those. Still, it was eighteen pounds, one of which goes to Action Against Hunger, so you couldn’t really complain.

“That was lovely” said Aileen. “It needed gravy though.”

I’ve realised I didn’t get any pictures of the green beans or the chips. The chips were skin on (I thought that might be one Aileen’s list of restaurant no-nos, but apparently not) and clearly made in-house. And they were pleasant, but perhaps a little limp and unremarkable. I wanted that contrast of brittle crunch and fluff – and I didn’t care how many times they had to be cooked in order to achieve it – but these weren’t quite there. They were a decent vehicle for the last of my gravy, even so.

Our meal had been a little haphazardly timed – we didn’t get our bottle of wine almost until our mains turned up, so once they’d been eaten we had a lot of wine left. And service was brilliant at this point, leaving us in peace while we finished it and continued our epic conversation. I saw pictures of Aileen’s twins at their prom and wondered, as I’m sure she did, where the time had gone and how the little girls I’d first met all those years ago were suddenly sixteen.

Aileen in turn saw pictures of my wedding, and in between flicking through them and chatting about all sorts we caught up in the way that is such a tonic – a proper state of the nation natter encompassing work, family, friends, the past and the future. And I loved the Drapers Arms for this if for nothing else, for enabling this kind of afternoon.

Eventually, the wine was polished off and the dining room almost empty: I felt strangely proud of the fact that we’d outlasted all our fellow diners. So we got round to ordering dessert, along with a tea for Aileen and a bitter, middling latte for me. That section of the menu was very compact – a duo of cheeses and three desserts – and again, catered to people with different preferences to mine (I’ll eat most things, but I’ve never warmed to custard). So we both went for the lime posset and, like so much of what I’d eaten, it was nearly there.

As with my main course, almost everything was how you would want it to be. The strawberries on top were plump and sweet, the syrup they were in sticky and ambrosial. The shortbread was reassuringly irregular and crumbly: I saved mine to the very end. And the sharpness of lime in the posset worked so well, a welcome variation on a theme. But here’s the problem: the posset wasn’t properly set. Some of it was, but the rest was just liquid and hard to eat tidily, part dessert and part drink. So at the end of proceedings, you got a dish that was something like a synecdoche, a pretty good summary of the meal as a whole.

Our meal for two, including service charge, came to pretty much bang on one hundred and eighty pounds. And if that sounds like a lot, I’d say it could easily have been more. Our wine was distinctly entry level and we had, by accident rather than design, ordered the two cheapest mains on the menu. You could easily come away with a far more dented wallet than we did, although if you had an afternoon as terrific as the one I’d had you’d be fortunate indeed.

We wandered, full and happy, back to Angel tube station to go our separate ways. I could have talked for hours, but the idea of eating another mouthful or drinking another drop was more than either of us could contemplate (“I’m not sure I’ll even eat tomorrow” was Aileen’s verdict, although if she’s anything like me I’m sure she managed it). London looked beautiful in the autumn sun, and all around us Islington was gearing up for a busy Saturday night. We, on the other hand, were both dead set on being installed on our respective sofas by the time Strictly began.

When I think about the Drapers Arms, the thing I keep coming back to is that everything was good, and some of it was very good, but none of it was spot on. I imagine they have better days than they did the day I visited, I imagine there are nicer tables than the one we sat at, and iterations of that menu that would have suited me better. But I’ve had many far worse experiences, too, in countless places. So where does that leave you?

Yes, it was good but not perfect. And when it turns out like that you have to resort to your gut feel, try and weigh up all those almost intangible incidentals that define a meal. Because restaurant reviewers may not always tell you this – in fact many never talk about it at all – but there’s so much more to a meal than food, the room, or even service. I wish I’d liked everything a little more, and yet at the same time I know it will be hard to top as one of my favourite lunches of the year. So the Drapers Arms could have been better, but nonetheless I’m still really glad I went there. Happy that I ticked it off my list, and delighted that I chose it to host such a brilliant afternoon.

The Drapers Arms – 7.5
44 Barnsbury Street, London, N1 1ER
020 76190348

https://www.thedrapersarms.com

Restaurant review: Planque, Haggerston

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Our story this week starts with your narrator sitting outside an achingly hip café called Batch Baby in De Beauvoir Town, a part of London I’d never heard of, gulping down a latte before heading to a lunch reservation at Planque, an achingly hip restaurant in Haggerston, another part of London to which I had never been. It was a Saturday lunchtime, the sun was out – so were my legs, for that matter – and I felt very old and very fat, but mostly very old.

I had taken the Elizabeth Line to Liverpool Street and then hopped on a bus from Moorgate, wending its way past the horrendous roundabout at Old Street and out towards the North Circular, into the bits of London that are Vittles territory, rather than the province of broadsheet critics or restaurant bloggers. I had no idea what to expect of De Beauvoir Town but you couldn’t say it wasn’t interesting – handsome mansions one side of the road, stark and forbidding tower blocks on the other, presumably the legacy of a little light wartime bombing.

Those contrasts went further than the architecture. Up one side street, past a big red sign advertising The Sun, an establishment called the Happy Café offered a full English, and a “Sunday Roast Diner” (sic) with three veg, potatoes and gravy. Round the corner, Batch Baby was tasteful in an artfully yet carelessly thrown together sort of way, on the ground floor of a handsome building which apparently serves as a “community space and creativity hub”. The coffee was immaculate, and some of it was roasted by Sweven, the equally hip café in Bristol’s Bedminster. Do these places have a twinning scheme?

I sat outside, and I felt every year of my fifty years, and every stone of my no-I’m-not-telling-you-how-many stones. Everybody was thin and young and stylish and wearing dungarees and the sort of clothes you used to be able to buy in Shakti. And I remembered when they were first cool, back when I was at university, and then I realised that they were probably first cool in the seventies, before I was born, and that my parents probably looked at people wearing them in the nineties and felt how I felt in that moment, and that only served to make me feel older and wearier still.

Never mind. I loved the coffee, I took a picture, I applied my best filter, put it on Instagram, pretended I wasn’t fifty. And then I checked the time and scurried to the restaurant, just in time for my lunch reservation. On my way I passed a handsome old boozer, a cute Japanese canal by the towpath, a plant-based wine bar and bottle shop, a small plates restaurant with a sideline in sake. There was no denying it: I might not be in Dalston, but I was definitely Dalston-adjacent.

Planque is an exceptionally voguish spot which was recently listed as the 97th best restaurant in the U.K. by the National Restaurant Awards. I felt like I had seen it in dispatches everywhere and when my cousin Luke, who moved to London from Toronto a couple of years ago, suggested we should have lunch in town some time it turned out it was on both our lists. The chef was previously at P Franco, another legendary small plates and natural wine spot in Lower Clapton – another cool part of London to which I had never been – but Planque was meant, by all accounts, to be a step up even from that.

I’d seen reviews that had raved about the food, and others that had waxed lyrical about the interior. And to add to the exclusivity, although they allowed people like me to book tables in the restaurant there was also some kind of private members’ club element where you could cellar wine there, get discounted corkage rates and so on.

My swiftly grabbed photos of the room don’t do it justice but it is indeed a coolly attractive space. It’s built into two railway arches, but this has been lavished with funds and the interior, designed by a Danish studio, does have that very Scandi feel to it. Actually, it reminded me of many places I’ve eaten in on the continent, in Ghent or Copenhagen, but few in Blighty. But that also made me realise that in Europe, nobody would bat an eyelid about a dining room like this but here in England you can rely on people to lose their shit about it.

All that said, it was more a place to admire than necessarily enjoy eating in. The long communal table – again, something I feel like I’ve seen more in Europe than here – was very striking, and the wooden booths for four were attractive (although when Giles Coren reviewed Planque for the Times he complained about his arse going to sleep: now he knows how his dining companions must feel). But if you’re at a table for two, I think you do get a little diddled: those three tables were right at the start of the dining room, near the front door, close together and slightly unloved.

By this point Luke had arrived and we’d ordered a few aperitifs – a negroni for me and a Chartreuse and tonic for him. Luke is in his early thirties and lives in Clapton in an apartment which he assures me is slightly bigger than a studio. He runs multiple marathons a year, and his Instagram is a positive advert for being young and happy and living in London: if he isn’t jetting off to Australia or back to Canada, attending this wedding or that, running a marathon in one European capital or another he is in a beer garden or at a house party somewhere in London, surrounded by equally young and attractive people, living their halcyon days.

As if I didn’t feel old and fat enough already! Just once I’d like to see a picture of him heating up a depressing ready meal or watching Love Island, but it’s impossible to hold it against him. Too likable, you see.

At weekends Planque serves a set lunch only, which is yours for thirty-nine pounds and includes four small plates, your choice of main course and a set dessert. There are a few additional dishes in the bottom section, and with a little light questioning our server gave us a view on where in the meal they might turn up – so some would precede your small plates, some accompany your mains and a couple of cheeses which would come before your dessert (if you’re doing things right) or after it (if you’re not).

All pretty straightforward, but Luke and I couldn’t decide between the two mains. Steamed skate wing managed to combine one of my favourite ingredients with possibly the drabbest cooking technique there is, veal sweetbreads had undergone a similar experience by being turned into some kind of sausage and served with coco beans. Was Planque’s superpower taking the fun out of things? In the end, Luke said we should order both and share, which in most restaurants would be a perfectly viable option.

Wine first, though, and another reason to feel the exclusivity of Planque – and by exclusive I mean expensive. The cheapest wines at Planque are around sixty pounds, and the majority of the list comes in at three figures. My original choice was a Maccabeu from the Languedoc, but our server quickly and firmly told me it was very wild, and that I might well regret ordering it (why is it on the menu then? might be your question: I might have had that question in my mind too).

So instead he steered us towards a Corsican white which was a blend of Muscat, Vermentino and Bianco Gentile, an indigenous Corsican grape I’d never heard of. And, in fairness, it was a beautiful white wine. At eighty-four quid, you’d really want it to be. You can’t easily buy it elsewhere, which I guess is kind of the point, but what research I did manage to do suggested the mark-up was steep.

From this point onwards, though, concepts of value and its relationship to quality, and quantity, became foggier and harder to grasp. A good illustration was our opening dish – scallop tartelettes were divine, dimples of clean, pure, subtle high-grade scallop sheltering the crunch and sharpness of sea lettuce, like the tiniest gherkins. An exquisite couple of mouthfuls, one of the nicest amuses-bouches you could possibly imagine. Nine pounds, for the pair of them.

Then came the four small plates, pretty much at the same time as the tartelettes. I didn’t take a picture of the bread because I don’t think I’d clocked that it was one of the small plates in question. That felt a little cheeky, especially as it was literally the only ballast in the entire meal. Decent bread, gorgeous butter that spread at room temperature. Is that a course in its own right? Not convinced.

Far, far better was a little bowl of consommé, made with lardo and more scallop. If Planque had a gift for removing the fun, this was the most playful reversal of that. Consommé never looks like it’s going to be the most exciting thing you eat during a meal, but it can pack a massive punch that belies its unprepossessing appearance. That was definitely the case here, with that wonderful concentration of salt, sea and smoke. If there had been more of this kind of thing, I’d have been a happy man. I used some of the unremarkable bread to dab up the rest of the remarkable consommé.

The other two small plates also had that Nordic, beige feel to them. I guess using turbot is one way to make a roe dish seem luxe, but I wasn’t sure it delivered disproportionately well. Fish roe seems to be everywhere this year, and I’ve had something like this at Quality Chop House and 1 York Place. The former served it with salt and vinegar doughnuts, which were marvellous, and the latter with fennel, which was interesting.

Here instead you had mange tout which I believe the restaurant grows itself, crudités without the crudeness. It was okay, but I felt like it was trying to improve me. Many people have tried to do that over the years, always without success.

To me the very best of the small plates, and the single best thing I ate in my meal, was just described as lettuce, hazelnuts and Cora Linn. It was a salad, and when I say salad I mean two lettuce leaves scattered with hazelnuts, dressed and festooned with Cora Linn, which is apparently a Scottish take on Manchego. Again, if it sounded like it could be fun, Planque could make it plod. And if it sounded workaday, Planque could elevate it. I suppose that’s a skill of sorts, although not one I’m sure a restaurant should cultivate.

As you can probably tell, the small plates were small. But I was unconcerned, because our mains were on the way and I was counting on them to redeem matters. I was mistaken about that.

So first up, that veal sweetbread sausage. A single disc of it, with coco beans and some wilted greens draped on top. The sausage was, I do have to say, truly delicious – glossy, almost silky, rich stuff, and as far from mystery meat as you could hope to be. The beans were like many people I’ve worked with over the years – firm, nutty and a little boring. There was a meagre puddle of insipid jus. I dutifully bisected the sausage and doled out half of the coco beans onto a separate plate for my cousin, a properly joyless experience. Who wants to eat at a restaurant that literally turns you into a bean counter?

This was a small plate, not a main course, and it followed what had been billed as small plates but were in fact even smaller plates. I was getting a bad feeling about this.

Was the skate wing better? No, not really. When you get so little skate that you can obscure it with two cherry tomatoes, for my money you have a problem. As we ate this dish, after Luke had put precisely half of it on a side plate for me, I explained to him how much fun skate wing can be. How enjoyable it was to have a big fat skate wing in front of you, littered with capers, and to slowly ease the flesh off the cartilage.

Here, the restaurant had done that for you, it just so happened that they’d done it on a fraction of a skate wing, after steaming it – the optimum way of ensuring that something is technically cooked but hasn’t been introduced to anything that could enhance its flavour. Here the flavour enhancement came from three or four perfectly pleasant little tomatoes, two leaves and a lobster sauce which was thin and not exactly honking of crustacean. Was this really the ninety-seventh best restaurant in the country?

Feeling a tad peckish, we decided to interpose a cheese course between our small savoury plates and our no doubt small sweet plate. 24 month aged Comté was truly brilliant, with plenty of umami and grit to it. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and perhaps my expectations had been brutally crushed by this point but I didn’t even think it represented relatively poor value at nine pounds.

“Would you like some bread with that?” asked our server and, desperate for carbs, we said yes. Two more slices, four more quid.

Last of all, our dessert. If dessert isn’t fun a restaurant might as well give up and go home, and gladly Planque did rise to the occasion right at the end. The menu just called it sheep’s curd, plum and raspberry which doesn’t do justice to one of the best dishes of the day – a fantastic, well orchestrated collection of flavours that came together beautifully. The raspberry, lurking within, was the sharp surprise that brought it all together. I was frustrated, because this showed that the restaurant could do crowd-pleasing: it felt like they chose not to.

We decided that having a coffee or a digestif would be throwing good money after bad so, about an hour and a half after we first sat down, we got our bill. It came to two hundred and seven pounds, not including tip, and it’s to Planque’s credit that they don’t sneak in a twelve and a half per cent service charge but let you decide all that for yourself. And service, I should add, was very good – hushed but quietly authoritative, and I was very glad that our server saved us from what sounded like an exceptionally challenging wine.

But here’s the thing – even though the service was good, I didn’t get any warmth. And ironically that was absolutely in keeping with everything else. Planque felt like a cerebral restaurant, rather than somewhere to love, and when London has so many restaurants out there I do wonder who would go to Planque, decide it was absolutely their cup of tea and become a regular. Very thin people, I suppose.

I enjoyed some of what I ate, very much, but I couldn’t help feeling, at multiple times during my meal, where’s the rest? And that reinforced in my mind the vague presentiment that Planque was a restaurant to see and be seen in, more than it was a place in which to drink and be fed. So on that cerebral level I know that the kitchen can cook, I know the wines are good and I know the space they’ve created is very well executed. But I feel like they have missed something about hospitality, because all of that – even all of that – is just not enough.

When you leave a good restaurant, you should feel lots of things. You should feel like you’ve been privileged to have someone cooking for you, you should feel looked after. You should feel a rosy glow, and know that you’ve banked a happy memory. You should feel like telling people about it, and ideally you should feel like going back. This next bit might mark me out as not just old, not just fat, but also a bit of a Philistine, but here goes. Leaving a good restaurant should make you feel so many things. But you shouldn’t leave it, I’m sorry to say, feeling like you could murder a KitKat Chunky.

Planque – 6.6
322-324 Acton Mews, London, E8 4EA
020 72543414

https://planque.co.uk

Restaurant review: Kolae, Borough

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How many of the U.K.’s 100 best restaurants have you been to? I ask because it’s a thing – the National Restaurant Awards – and it came out last week.

Looking through the list, I couldn’t help but feel I was letting the side down as a restaurant reviewer: my score was a measly 7.  Some of them, like Manteca, ranked among the best meals I’ve eaten in the course of writing this blog. But there were at least a couple in that list where I thought “really?” I was pleased to see Wilsons make the list but COR, which didn’t feature, is definitely better than at least a couple of the top 100 that I’ve been to. Still, as I’ve said in the past, the delight of reading a list like this largely lies in disagreeing with it. 

Anyway, as it happens my total only ticked up to 7 because I happened to visit Kolae, a regional Thai restaurant in Borough, the week before the awards were announced. It was ranked 27th, significantly higher than any of the other places I’ve been to, which is an impressive achievement given that it opened late last year. It’s the second restaurant from the team behind Shoreditch’s Som Saa and has very quickly surpassed it in terms of profile (it probably helps that, unlike Som Saa, it doesn’t have any problematic racist incidents in its history).

What this means is that a significant number of restaurant critics have reviewed the place already: Giles Coren for the Times, Tom Parker Bowles for the Mail On Sunday, Tim Hayward for the FT, Jimi Famurewa for the Evening Standard, and Lilly Subbotin for the Independent. Even a couple of restaurant bloggers have already got in on the act, so I can honestly say I’ve rarely, if ever, read as much about a restaurant before stepping through its front door as I had with Kolae.

And the acclaim was consistent, full-throated, verging on the hyperbolic. I mean, get a load of this: Famurewa said it was a “scintillating shot in the arm”, Parker Bowles that it made “the tastebuds tumescent and the gut giddy”. Hayward, the thinking person’s least favourite broadsheet reviewer, settled for the overblown “This has just reminded me why I eat”.

It wasn’t all like that – Giles Coren spent a large part of his review name-dropping Important People He Knew, as did one distinctly regional restaurant blogger – but the important thing was that there wasn’t a single word of dissent: Kolae, according to the consensus, was magnificent.

So it had been on my radar for a while, and an afternoon off in London ahead of a gig that evening – the exceptional Jessica Pratt at Islington’s Union Chapel – gave me a chance to check it out with Zoë. It’s literally just round the corner from Borough Market, a few doors down from Monmouth Coffee, and a pre-lunchtime stroll round the market made it clear just how much competition there was for Kolae to stand out amongst: not just from traders, but nearby restaurants like Barrafina, Berenjak and Bao.

It’s a handsome site, across three storeys, which apparently used to be a coach house in a previous life. I didn’t see the first or second floors, but the ground floor was lovely, all muted concrete and exposed brick. Everything was nicely proportioned: the tables were generously sized and well spaced, and even the bar stools followed suit, being even better padded than I am. So different from, for example, sitting cheek by jowl at Manteca. The Independent summed it up thus: “there’s no other way to say it, Kolae is cool”.

We arrived for a late lunch but even then the room was full of happy-looking diners. No outside space that I saw, really, but the exterior was quite fetching, to the extent where when we left a couple of people were taking pictures sitting in front of the restaurant and uploading them to the ‘gram. “But they haven’t even eaten here!” was Zoë’s baffled assessment.

The menu, on paper at least, looks like it can’t decide whether it’s a starters and mains or small plates restaurant. All the reviews I’ve read say it’s the latter, but the menu lists three things as “smaller” and the rest as “larger” and our server said we should probably plan on three of the larger plates between two. But it’s sort of structured as starters, mains and sides and so we approached it that way. I would say everything seemed reasonably priced, too, with the smaller plates costing about six pounds and the larger ones going from ten to eighteen.

But really, a lot was fluid: at least some of the larger plates felt more like starters or sides, and at least one of the sides, which we ended up ordering, was far more like a main in its own right. Perhaps all the dishes simply identified as food – if so, all power to them. We took it as an excuse to order pretty much everything we wanted and to risk being full. From what I’ve seen, many people who have reviewed Kolae have taken exactly that approach.

Now, before I tell you about everything we ate, I do have to mention heat. Because another thing my research indicated, time and again, was that the food at Kolae might be hotter than you’re used to. A few reviews don’t really talk about it – presumably because those people are hard as nails. But most go to town on it – in no particular order, the food apparently “jolts the senses like being woken at 4am by a sadistic drill instructor”, “blew my bloody head off”, is “blisteringly hot” or leaves you “teetering between burning pain and pure, unfiltered pleasure”.

Does that sound like fun to you? I have to say it didn’t really to me, so I did ask the server which dishes to absolutely steer clear of. There were about three of them. Everything we had was fine, so you won’t get any sub-Fifty Shades Of Grey hogwash in this review.

The first thing we ate was that first step outside the comfort zone. Fried prawn heads with turmeric and garlic were one of those things where you just have to suspend disbelief and give them a go, so we did. Zoë was reluctant approaching the first one but they were crunchy and distinctly moreish and that meant I didn’t have to polish off the rest on my own. I’m not sure how something from the sea could taste quite so earthy, but these did: I can honestly say that I’ve never enjoyed eating brains so much before, and almost certainly never will again. And yes, prawns do have brains. I know, because I Googled it.

Even better were biryani rice crackers, huge slabs of tactile delight with more than a trickle of nam jim, one of those dipping sauces which just has, and effortlessly combines, everything: sweetness, citrus and funky, salty fish sauce, infinitely more than the sum of its parts. This, for me, was the first of many moments at Kolae where I just thought: this isn’t quite like anything I’ve eaten before. Some of that is my own fault for my sheltered gastronomic life, but if anything that made me appreciate how high definition this food was.

The next few dishes, a mixture of small plates, large plates and specials, were variations on a theme and all linked with the name of the restaurant. Kolae is apparently a southern Thai technique which, as far as I can gather, involves marinating in coconut milk and spice, grilling over fire, re-marinating and re-grilling until what you get is glorious, deep and sticky.

The small plate displaying this technique was a couple of skewers with plump – or, if you get your kicks this way, “tumescent” – mussels threaded on them. I liked them, but perhaps having read so much hype about them I expected these eight mussels to be even more magnificent than they were. Worth it, perhaps, just for the novelty of seeing mussels served in such a different, faff-free way.

It was much, much more successfully deployed with chicken – in this case a huge, deboned chicken thigh which came on a skewer which surely could barely have carried its weight. This is where the technique was really at its best, the meat permeated with complexity and delight.

This kind of food makes fools of us reviewers because it exposes our narrow horizons and our limited vocabulary – I’ve seen it compared to yakitori, to laksa, to satay and to massaman. Better to be honest and say you can’t really sum up the smoke, sweetness, spice and comfort and just say that you should maybe order it so one day, you can compare other great dishes to it instead.

The third of our trilogy of skewers was bavette, topped with crispy onions. You get the idea by now, and although I enjoyed it, three different permutations of that concept was probably one too many. It was better value than the mussels, but not quite as good as the chicken.

At this point, the only question in my mind was where in the pantheon of greats Kolae would wind up nestling. The space was fantastic, the food had been eye-opening – just enough challenge, just enough fascination – and it was simply a wonderful place to be on a weekday afternoon. Every now and again flames leapt from a wok in the open kitchen, there was still hubbub even after the lunch rush had passed, and more was to come.

But that’s where things wobbled, if only slightly. Service had been wonderful, and when you got the attention of a server they couldn’t have been more helpful, but it proved increasingly difficult to flag them down. We’d finished a really gorgeous hazy IPA, Juicy Chug, by small London brewery Jiddler’s Tipple, which had gone beautifully with the small plates, but were keen to get some wine.

And we got there eventually, but if the staff had been more on it I daresay we would have drunk more. It’s a decent and interesting wine list, although the vast majority of the options by the glass were north of a tenner. I really loved my choice, a Greek malagousia and assyrtiko blend, but I think Zoë might have shaded it with her New Zealand riesling.

The first of the large plates that came out again demonstrated that this was a fluid menu where things overlapped and echoed other dishes. I’m not saying that the kale fritters were a replica of the biryani rice crackers from earlier in the meal, but they were definitely close siblings, both in terms of the crunch and complexity. This sauce was very different from the nam jim, but I got sweetness and chilli but maybe not the fermentation the menu suggested would be there. It was however another tactile triumph, although I’m not sure it really felt like a side. Perhaps I should have tried the sour mango salad with dried fish, but everything I’d read suggested that eating it would be a fast train to meltdown..

One of the absolute standout dishes of the meal was – surprise surprise – Zoë’s choice. Soy braised pork belly and ribs was outstanding, in a sauce that was far more about the tightrope between sweetness and saltiness, with heat, just this once, taken out of the equation. The sauce was just gorgeous, the meat was that perfect combination of caramelised and yielding, and it was if anything another dish I hadn’t expected – more poise than bombast, in a meal that had mostly been about very forceful flavours.

And this was where the wobble came in again. We’d ordered this and a second main, a prawn and stone bass curry, and we’d asked for a couple of bowls of rice to accompany them. Our server told us that one bowl of rice would easily be enough for both dishes, and that we could always order more if we wanted to. And maybe that might have been true, but it was very hard to judge when we were waiting something like ten minutes for that second dish to come out.

And this is the drawback of small plates and large plates, starters and mains: because, rightly or wrongly, we had ordered a main each and what this meant in practice was that I sat there like a lemon wondering if they’d forgotten my order. By the time it came out, most of the rice was gone. We ordered another one to go with the fish curry, but didn’t end up using most of it.

I waited so long for my main that I didn’t even get a photo of it, which would frustrate me more if it had been more exciting. It was okay but not extraordinary, and I wonder if the staff have had to manage expectations about the heat levels in the menu following some of those hype-laden reviews, because they told me that this dish was on the hot side and reality it was more restrained than I’d expected.

It was possibly the only thing I ate, up to that point, that tasted unspecial: was that because I’d had to wait so long for it, or just because it didn’t quite match the standard elsewhere? Who knows. All the other reviewers seem to have thought it was out of this world.

Kolae’s menu only had two desserts on it, so naturally we ordered both: how could you resist the possibility that you might just eat the twenty-seventh best dessert in the country? Especially as there was a Coteaux du Layon on the menu, a dessert wine I can never see without ordering which always punches above the likes of a Sauternes (or even a Tokaji, for my money).

Zoë had the worst of it, with a dessert which left her baffled and ambivalent. Mango custard with sweet sticky rice and fresh coconut sounds great, doesn’t it? But the reality was a little odd and neither one thing nor the other. The custard was pleasant enough, if not exactly singing with mango, but the layer of lukewarm rice – more claggy than sticky – left her a little cold. Looking at the reviews I’ve seen, Kolae only did one dessert for some time, and all their desserts have been kind-of permutations of what Zoë had (well, left some of) and what I ordered.

That suggests they might still be searching for the right dishes to end meals at the restaurant. On this evidence, perhaps they should keep looking.

I had the smaller, cheaper and better dessert, and arguably the more conventional one. A single sphere of coconut sorbet, gorgeously smooth, came crowned with a salted tea caramel, peanuts on the side. And again, it felt like a few good ideas in search of better execution: I liked the sorbet, I absolutely loved the caramel, I wanted the ratio of the two to be different. And just dumping peanuts next to it felt like an afterthought, when I’d have liked the whole thing to feel integrated.

As I said, previous reviews I’ve seen suggested that Kolae previously only offered one dessert which combined elements of these two. That process of evolution doesn’t feel like it’s concluded yet.

Still, we were full and happy with much to digest. At this point getting attention was a breeze, and our meal – a lot of food, three drinks apiece and a 12.5% service charge lobbed on – came to a hundred and sixty four pounds. I’ve seen a few reviews say that you could spend less, which you could, but I for one didn’t want to come away from the meal thinking anything along the lines of ‘I wonder what those chicken skewers would have tasted like?’

Hours later, after a hectic traipse round Selfridges and Liberty unsuccessfully trying to identify birthday presents, we sat in the very nice beer garden of a pub in Islington, drank two deeply expensive pints of Steady Rolling Man and talked about our meal. It’s always one of my favourite things about going on duty with Zoë, the post mortem, and few things accompany one as well as sunshine and an al fresco pint of Steady Rolling Man.

Our conclusions were fairly similar – that Kolae was extraordinary, and that we were glad we’d taken a punt on it. That the room was incredible, the location was brilliant and that there were many dishes on there the likes of which neither of us had ever had. If the overwhelming critical reaction did have a feel of mass hysteria about it, it didn’t detract from the fact that it was an excellent restaurant.

And yet, there were a few things that just stopped it from being truly great. The slightly disconnected service, for one, and the homogeneity of some of the menu. And the timing issues with the mains did really bug me: I get that when you bill things as large plates and say people might want to share them you may not guarantee they will all come out seconds apart, but a ten minute lag felt like a gaffe and really did take the sheen off what had otherwise been an excellent meal.

And then there were the desserts, the most underwhelming element of the whole thing. I don’t hold with all the tourists wafting round Borough Market with their naff standard issue strawberries swamped in chocolate, but I seem to remember a stall in the market offering raw milk ice cream. If I’d known what Kolae’s desserts would be like, I’d have gone there instead.

But these are, in the scheme of things, relatively minor quibbles. If you have a list of London restaurants you plan to get round to, and Kolae isn’t on it, I’d definitely recommend adding it. If you have any curiosity about this kind of food and this region, even if like me you might lack the experience or the vocabulary to express it, it’s well worth expanding your consciousness with a visit.

And if you’re slightly worried either by suggestions of apocalyptic chilli heat or the visceral horrors of munching on a plate of prawn heads, don’t worry: the former probably won’t materialise, and the latter isn’t mandatory. That’s just the hype talking – the hype that sells papers, results in reservations and gets a very good restaurant an elevated status as the twenty-seventh best restaurant in the country, less than a year after it opened.

Is it the twenty-seventh best restaurant in the country? I’m not sure about that. I’ve wondered, since eating there, whether it would make my top thirty meals of all time: it’s one of the highest ratings I’ve given out on this blog, but top thirty full stop? Maybe not. But the best is the enemy of the good – and whether or not Kolae is the best, the fact remains that it really is very good indeed. Just leave as many preconceptions as you can at home, and enjoy the ride.

Kolae – 8.7
6 Park Street, London, SE1 9AB

https://kolae.com

Restaurant review: Bébé Bob, Soho

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Sometimes I wonder if I’m still true to the newcomer who started out reviewing neighbourhood Sardinian restaurant Pepe Sale all that time ago. Have I managed to keep my finger on the pulse of what Reading diners really want from a meal out, or has my head been turned by all those great meals, all that fine dining, all those plaudits and mentions in the national press? It was something that crossed my mind from time to time, especially as I was sitting in Soho House – my second Soho House of the afternoon – with my friend James, polishing off a carafe of Viognier, ready to scoot across town to Bébé Bob, a restaurant which sells rotisserie chicken at just under forty pounds a head.

If any of you are still reading after that opening paragraph, I feel I should explain: James suggested going to Soho House as he’d got membership a few weeks ago. And the chance to experience life on the other side of those discreet doors, to see how the other half lives – well, how could I resist? So I accompanied him, feeling quite the bumpkin, as he scanned in using the app on his phone and the woman on reception, ultra polite and polished, greeted us by name and explained the facilities, including various roof terraces and the cinema in the basement where they did regular screenings. I tried not to look too “Home Counties hick up in London for the day”, no doubt failing miserably.

Inside everything was ridiculously tasteful, the place filled with the buzz and clamour of a newborn London weekend. I tried to be insouciant, but of course I was meerkatting every time someone went past. Would I see a celebrity? (The answer, by the way, was no.) If anything, the interior was more stylish than some of the people who wandered past, distinctly nouveau, laden down with carriers bearing the logo or one designer or another. I entertained myself trying to guess their story; tech bro; footballer’s agent; lottery-winning fish out of water. What would people have thought James’ and my story was?

But anyway, if I sound sniffy I don’t mean to; it was a fascinating experience, made more fascinating by the knowledge that it’s unlikely to be repeated any time soon. But the chair was comfy, the sunlight flooding in from the roof terrace was welcome, the people watching was Olympic standard and the Viognier was crisp and peachy. I would be a hypocrite if I tried to claim I hadn’t had a wonderful time.

But in the course of writing this I did a bit of research and there were a couple of stories a few months ago saying that Soho House had lost its exclusivity and cachet – one of them in Tatler, no less, saying effectively that they’re admitting all sorts these days. That was in March, but I would say that even if it hadn’t happened by then, the club letting me through the door in April might have signified the moment it truly jumped the shark. The following week I sent James a meme on Instagram describing Soho House as “the Freemasons for influencers”: he didn’t dignify it with a response.

Anyway, I was the one that had chosen Bébe Bob for our dinner reservation, the second half of a one day chicken festival which commenced with disappointing fried chicken at Coqfighter. I thought I was on safer ground with Bébe Bob, an offshoot of Soho’s famous/infamous Bob Bob Ricard specialising in rotisserie chicken almost to the exclusion of everything else. Their website rather spells it out, Any main course the customer wants, as long as it’s chicken or chicken. It also rather splendidly says that Fashionwear is welcome, activewear is not.

Bébé Bob opened last October and has already attracted a raft of plaudits from the people who know about these things. Grace Dent went there at the start of the year and seemed to enjoy herself, even if she called it a “chicken and chips place that thinks it is ‘it'” and made a tired joke about Margo from The Good Life. And restaurant guru Andy Hayler – recently seen enjoying Clay’s Kitchen – visited in March, lavishing the chicken with, by his standards, fulsome praise: “it was a joy (16/20)”, he raved, presumably having a lie down in a darkened room afterwards.

All good omens, then. And I have to say, the interior of Bébé Bob was one of the most gorgeous, luxe spaces I’ve eaten in for as long as I could remember. They claim it’s inspired by the Golden Age, and I can kind of see that. Everything is chic, sleek and deco, plush and subtly lit, and you’ll struggle to find a sharp edge anywhere, from the curvy, velvety chairs to the rounded corners of the wood panelling. Impeccably tasteful, too, especially the art on the walls, Kandinsky squiggles in Mondrian colours. I loved the tiled floor too, reminiscent of Clarice Cliff, although research suggests they inherited that from Folie, the previous restaurant at this site.

But overall, the whole thing was enormous fun, grand but not po-faced, and you got a sense of being on a Cunard liner in the Thirties, going from somewhere glamorous to somewhere equally glamorous. I half expected the captain to announce that we would be docking at Biarritz on the hour, or Poirot to assemble everybody in the salon and reveal the identity of the murderer.

Bébé Bob’s menu does indeed live up to that promise of chicken main courses to the exclusion of all other – and just the two kinds, Vendée for nineteen pounds a pop, or Landais for thirty-nine. The former is “raised outside for most of its life”, which does rather make you wonder about the other less enjoyable parts, while the latter is corn and milk-fed, free-range and given more time and space, apparently developing a deeper flavour as a result. Could it be worth thirty-nine pounds, though?

Grace Dent never found out, because they’d run out when she went, while Andy Hayler, always one to throw money at a problem, ordered the Landais and said it was in a completely different league to anything you could get in this country. Our server, one of a brigade of charming and efficient servers, told us they only had one of the Landais left. We reserved it.

“We were always going to go for the expensive chicken, weren’t we?” said James. We’d spent the afternoon in Soho House drinking cocktails and wine after drinks at the French House. Of course we were.

The menu says that although chicken is the only main on offer, starters are “plentiful”. In reality there were six, one of which was a salad, although I guess I wasn’t counting the three varieties of caviar also available. Starters were between twelve and twenty-two quid and I suppose could have been described as timeless or retro, depending on your perspective: that’s why Grace Dent made that crack about Margo Leadbetter.

James decided to try the prawn cocktail, possibly the archetypal starter from days gone by, and seemed to like it but not love it. The Marie Rose apparently had quite a kick to it, although it wasn’t clear where from: the menu said that cognac was involved but that didn’t explain the heat.

I had been torn between egg mayonnaise and smoked salmon, so I asked our server for advice. He immediately came down on the side of the former. “It’s a lighter dish” he went on to explain. Well, happy days, I thought: it’s been a day of excess already and I had a wedding suit to slim into and only two weeks to do it. We even turned down the offer of bread, that’s how well behaved I was trying to be.

Well, I have to congratulate our server for his gift for understatement, because light doesn’t do it justice. It wasn’t egg mayonnaise as I’m used to, instead being a singly impeccable boiled egg, split open, each half adorned with a firm, salty Cantabrian anchovy. Under that, capers and herbs and a smudge of a delicious, punchy mayonnaise with a hefty hit of Dijon mustard. All very nice, but approaching amuse bouche levels for twelve pounds. I found myself wishing I hadn’t spurned the bread after all.

The thing is, whatever the quibbles about the food you couldn’t knock the location, the surroundings or the sense of occasion. We sipped our way through a very decent bottle of sauvignon blanc from the Loire, which was mentioned in Andy Hayler’s review. It was, in his own effusive words, “Forty-three pounds for a bottle that you can find in the high street for fourteen”. To give you an idea of the wine list, this was easily one of the cheapest wines on there – it was actually forty-four, but that’s inflation for you – and you could easily spend north of sixty quid without even necessarily meaning to.

Service really was lovely, but there was an interesting moment when the servers approached the table next to us with their chicken, ready to serve it with ceremony and solemnity. Our neighbours were American – I’d already clocked that from the accent – but they’d obviously spent too much time in the U.K. I could tell that from their reaction to the arrival of their main course.

“Goodness, that’s very quick chicken” the woman said. This is the kind of thing an English person would say, when what they meant was why the hell are you bringing this out almost immediately after I’ve ordered? I’d expect that in Nando’s, not somewhere like this. Which is, to be fair, the kind of thing I’d expect an American to say when rushed in a British restaurant. When she instead decided to express passive-aggressive surprise I didn’t know whether to be impressed or disappointed; James and I did lean over, after the server had gone, to express our solidarity.

Maybe you only get the delay if you order the fancy pants chicken. That would explain why ours arrived about quarter of an hour after we’d finished our starters – although even that, come to think of it, felt a little bit quick. From the text on the menu nothing about this chicken’s life had been rushed, so it was a pity this part was. It deserved better. But you had to hand it to them for the ceremony – each of us had a breast and a leg reverently placed on our plate, a poultry yin and yang, with the oyster delicately popped in the middle. And finally, thick jus was drizzled from a little jug, anointing the whole lot: I now declare the most expensive chicken you’ll ever eat in your life, open.

I know you want to know what a thirty-nine pound portion of roast chicken tastes like. Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s, err, nice. I didn’t get a stunning moment of clarity where I thought “this is why!” The meat was dense, and I’d like to think I perceived the epic intensity of flavour that the experts had picked up on, but I can’t say I could. These chickens are apparently bigger, from all that time spent living the life of Riley, eating corn and drinking milk in their own sweet time, but I can’t say I felt like there was a huge amount of meat. The skin was rather pleasant, but lacked that crispiness that would have made it top tier. I almost wish I’d been able to try both types of chicken side by side: perhaps then I would have realised what all this money bought you, but as it was I wasn’t sure I had.

By way of comparison, the best rotisserie chicken I’ve ever had – so far, at least – is in a renowned Lisbon restaurant called Bonjardim. There they rub the chicken with salt and lemon until the skin is almost like cracking. It’s outstanding stuff – I once went to Lisbon on holiday and ate there twice in one trip – and as it happens the following weekend James was on a short trip to Lisbon so I told him to check Bonjardim out. True to his word he sent me a photo that induced envy and hunger and made me curse my pre-wedding diet. This shat on Bébé Bob was his pithy review, delivered via iMessage. It cost him ten Euros.

It’s especially a shame because the peripherals were all terrific. The chicken jus almost made it all worthwhile, so deep and sticky and savoury. Which of course means there was nowhere near enough of it to go round: if it had been up to me there would have been a huge bowl of the stuff, and then I might gladly have foregone the chicken. I wondered if the chicken jus was specifically Landais chicken jus, not that it would have justified the thirty-nine quid,

Also excellent was the truffled cauliflower cheese – burnished and brilliantly moreish with a good whiff of truffle without being overpowering. It had to be good for nine quid, but it pretty much was. Although to be fair, by that point after a day in Soho I might have been anaesthetised to the point where the cost of things didn’t properly register with me. It’s only money, after all. And I rather liked the potatoes, which were roasted in chicken fat. They looked when they turned up like they might be a little anaemic, carvery-grade stuff, but feeling the golden shell crack under a knife I realised they were the real deal.

It felt like a little bit of a waste not having dessert, but we both felt like we’d dented our wallets enough and the Elizabeth Line was calling to us. In any event, I wouldn’t have called the dessert menu plentiful either, as out of the seven desserts on offer one was a pair of chocolate truffles, a second was a shot of lemon infused vodka and a third was lemon sorbet with – yes, you’ve guessed – a shot of vodka. That gives you four proper desserts, one of which is a brownie: no wonder we passed.

And that’s when we had that ouch moment that comes in some restaurants, the moment when even though all the prices are clearly displayed throughout and you know exactly what you’re ordering, the bill arrived. Our meal for two – a bottle of wine, two starters, two chickens, two sides and some mineral water – came to just over a hundred and ninety pounds, including service. We knew it would be that much, we ordered the holy grail of chicken, nobody mugged us in an alleyway, but still. We also both mentally tracked back many of the meals we’d ordered and loved over the last few years. The vast majority of them cost less than Bébé Bob.

So that was the end of ChickenFest 2024. We hopped on the train and headed back west full of chicken and equally full of questions. Was Bébé Bob a good restaurant, an average one or a bit of a rip-off? Even as I sit down to tap out the final paragraphs on this review I’m still not entirely sure. It’s a great example of how a restaurant is more than the sum of its parts because as theatre, as an experience, I loved Bébé Bob’s silliness. The starters were decent but small, the chicken was decent but too expensive. What does that amount to? What does it all mean?

Well, search me. I imagine ninety-five per cent of you will look at the mark at the bottom and think it doesn’t reflect the meal I had, but I don’t even know what I think of the meal I had, not even now. I’ve rarely been to a restaurant that so unapologetically makes you take it on its own terms. I’m glad I went once – it’s only money – but I can’t imagine I’d ever go again. If you went and had, in the immortal words of Franck Eggelhoffer, the cheaper chicken, you might emerge having spent less and still had a very creditable meal.

But is that the point, and even then would it be enough when you think of all the excellent restaurants a stone’s throw from Golden Square? Maybe not. Bébé Bob, like Soho House, is a peek into another world, a vision of a life where most of the people there have considerably more money than I do. It was fun to visit: I had a blast. But it was even nicer to come home afterwards.

Bébé Bob – 7.0
37 Golden Square, London, W1F 9LB
020 72421000

https://www.bebebob.com

Restaurant review: Coqfighter, Soho

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Last May, in a bit of a departure for the blog, I reviewed two chicken places in London back to back: Portuguese Casa do Frango, just off Regent Street, and fried chicken specialists Chick ‘N’ Sours in Covent Garden. It was a day of excess with my good friend – and chicken obsessive, naturally – James, in what we dubbed ChickenFest, and we resolved at the start of the year to make it an annual event. That’s how we ended up, on a Friday in April, perched at a table in Soho, ready to do it all over again.

We had wound up in Coqfighter, because my research had suggested that it was very much an equivalent of Chick ‘N’ Sours. It started out in Boxpark, both in Croydon and Shoreditch, before opening a bricks and mortar site five years ago – on Beak Street, which is presumably an accident but a happy accident nonetheless. The reviews I’d seen had been complimentary, although more than one was comped, and they led me to expect a more stripped-down menu than at Chick ‘N’ Sours, but one done very well. Coqfighter also boasts an Instagram feed that would make most people ravenous: it certainly had that effect on me.

In the course of writing this review I went back and looked at quite a few reviews from other people, and it’s strange that literally not a single one told you anything about the room. I wonder why that is, because for me it was the wrong side of the line between functional and dysfunctional. The façade was pitch black, and beyond it the front room was very unprepossessing, One wall was gleaming white metro tiles, the other a vague terra cotta, but everything else was black too.

The furniture was also strange: little black tables, each with a couple of low little black backless stools. There was a second room out back, but it was further from the daylight and far dingier, so we decided against it. From Google image searches the tables used to be longer, communal things: that may or may not be your idea of hell, but I just felt far too old for these kind of seats. Where were you meant to put your coat? I never thought a restaurant would make me feel nostalgic about wedging my well-padded posterior into the ubiquitous Tolix chair, but Coqfighter managed it.

Coqfighter’s menu is more Honest Burgers than Chick ‘N’ Sours, all main courses and sides, no starters. Chicken came in all its permutations: burgers, wings, tenders, fried on the bone and a couple of half roast chicken options. Sides, unless they were also made of chicken – which the best sides might well be, come to think of it – consisted of a couple of types of fries, two different kinds of sweetcorn, coleslaw and a cucumber and sesame salad.

Not inspirational stuff, and I certainly didn’t see anything to rival Chick ‘N’ Sours’ profoundly good chicken toasts. But if you like fried chicken, as James and I surely did, there was plenty here to appreciate. Keenly priced, too: the most expensive dishes were twelve pounds or thereabouts, sides roughly a fiver. Coqfighter’s beer is made by Orbit, so we both had a two-thirds of their house lager and a couple of sodas while we made up our mind. The beer, really, was indistinguishable from a good macro lager like the one I’d had at the Moderation a couple of weeks before. The sodas were a surprise hit – James loved his raspberry lemonade and my sour cherry soda, more sweet than sour, was a real delight.

We ran into headwinds when we placed our order, or rather tried to. I’d earmarked a burger, so I ordered that with no problem. But James fancied the Thai style half roast chicken, Coqfighter’s take on gai yang with soy, ginger and lemongrass, only to be told by our server that it wouldn’t be ready for another forty-five minutes. This was at a quarter to one: were we happy to wait? We weren’t, so James went for his second choice, a two piece of drumstick and thigh on the bone with miso butter gravy.

“Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t do that any more. We’re meant to be taking it off the menu.”

I have to say our server was lovely, friendly and attentive and she later told us, when we were settling up, that it was only her second day in the job. And I did feel for her, sent out to have difficult conversations with customers about how one section of the menu wasn’t available at lunchtime while another dish wasn’t available full stop. Nonplussed, James picked his third and fourth choices instead, and although he was ultra polite, as he always is, I could tell he was a little unimpressed.

Still, you can only order from the menu in front of you on the day and you can only review what you’ve ordered. With that in mind, I think I got the best of things with the chicken burger. The texture was spot on, the coating crunchy and crenellated, and I’m always happy to see a sesame seed bun rather than brioche. The menu doesn’t say whether it was thigh or breast but I think it was the former, which would always be my preference. And the plus of it being fairly compact was that you could actually pick it up and eat it without disgracing yourself or having to resort to the infra dig spectacle of using a knife and fork.

Those were the pluses. But the downside of it being compact was that it didn’t resemble any pictures of Coqfighter’s burgers I’d seen, either on their social media or other reviews. Usually the chicken offered a huge amount of elevation and poked out untidily from either side of the bun as if the bun simply couldn’t contain it, the extraneous bits practically asking to be nibbled. No such joy here. I’d chosen the honey ginger buffalo burger, thinking that it combined three of my favourite things in one magical sauce, but the end result was out of kilter, more sweetness than bite. And what was it with the sauce oozing out on to the plate like a perforated egg yolk? It just made it soggier than it should have been.

James’ tenders, which are the kind of thing I always order in places like this, also looked the part but couldn’t convincingly play the part. They were nearly there but not quite, and it was all about the texture. “The seasoning of these is actually spot on” said James, “but they don’t have the crunch. They needed a little longer in the fryer.” I thought James was being fair: my instant reaction, to be honest, was that KFC does these every bit as well,

This is also the point to mention the dips because we went crazy with these and again, they promised so much but didn’t live up to it. So we had a Korean hot sauce which tasted neither hot nor Korean, and a Korean barbecue sauce which was about as Korean as I am. Neither had ever been anywhere near any gochujang, as far as I could tell: is it just the fashion now to dub things Korean when they’re nothing of the sort? Neither of these was any better than the contents of a little plastic cuboid tub from KFC or McDonalds. We also had a sambal mayo which I imagine did both sambal and mayo a disservice, and some kind of ranch thing.

“I’m pretty sure I saw them all coming out plastic bottles” was James’ observation: he had a better view of that than I did. None of them livened up the chips, which were bought in and dreary. I spotted a few grey patches on mine, which made me leave a fair amount of them, but I didn’t feel like I was missing out. Apparently they are “tossed in our house shake”, but their house shake appeared to be some kind of acrid combination of paprika and dust.

James had also gone for the wings, because he believes that chicken on the bone is always the best way to check any restaurant’s chicken. He didn’t mind these, and they were tossed not sauced – he has firmly held beliefs that this is The Only Way – but had the same kind of feedback as me about the honey ginger buffalo sauce, It tried to be three things at once and failed at all of them.

We agreed to compare notes properly on our debrief in the pub, but even from the conversation we had in the restaurant, the expressions and raised eyebrows, I had an inkling we were on the same page. Keen to get on with our day and put any disappointment behind us we settled up: it came to sixty pounds, including tip.

After a wander and a shop, we grabbed a table at the French House and a large bottle of Breton cider and carried out the post mortem. It was mid-afternoon, the time I like the French House best, and the pub was starting to fill with the kind of characters who only seem to exist in the French House at three in the afternoon. Where did they live the rest of the time? I’d missed Soho, it had been far too long.

“The funny thing is, they were doing a lot of Deliveroo” said James. “I think I must have seen eight different riders turn up in the time we’ve been having lunch.” He was right, and at least a couple had been the same rider twice – either that, or it was a glitch in the Matrix.

“In fairness, if you could eat one of those burgers at your desk you’d probably feel like you were winning at life.” I said. I had a momentary flashback to a time many years and a lifetime ago when a colleague and I picked up a family bucket from KFC, took it back to work and ate it at our desks. It was worth the funny looks we got from the people in the lift. Perhaps we should have offered them a drumstick.

“I just think about Bristol,” said James, “and the chicken at Wings Diner. It’s miles better than this.”

“And I know you didn’t rate the branch of Eat The Bird that’s opened in Bristol, but the one in Exeter was also a different level to Coqfighter.”

“I think Chick ‘N’ Sours is better than this, too.”

I took a glug of my cider and weighed up the pros and cons. I thought about that sesame chicken toast, and how nearly a year on I still remembered it.

“I think you’re right.”

So there you have it: on a simplistic level this is Bristol 1, London 0 but to bring it back to Reading – where I live – Coqfighter isn’t good enough to justify a trip to London, not even if you’re a chicken-fixated eccentric on an annual pilgrimage like James and me. It does highlight, though, that Reading is still missing someone who does this really well: that’s why, when I did my guide to how to avoid chains last week, I didn’t propose an alternative to KFC.

There’s good fried chicken at Clay’s, at Soju, at The Bap, but there’s nothing in the genre of Southern fried chicken to write home about (and yes, I’ve tried Popeyes). You only get that when Gurt Wings comes to town, which is about once a month. I think the new Siren tap room is missing a trick not specialising in this: instead they’re leading with burgers, which feels more of a 2014 Big Idea than a 2024 one. Still, I’m sure they know what they’re doing.

Never mind. Just as the best way to cope with the post holiday blues is to book the next one, the best way to handle this disappointment was also to look to the future. So James and I talked it over, over a second bottle of Breton cider, and decided: next year we’re going to widen the scope of ChickenFest to include duck. We’ll call it PoultryFest, we’ve got it all figured out. The thing is, as we wandered through Chinatown I saw some fine specimens in the windows of several restaurants, and I figured it was time to diversify. It’s important, after all, not to get too set in your ways.

Coqfighter – 6.5
75 Beak Street, London W1F 9SS
020 77344001

https://www.coqfighter.com