Tag: Oxford

Restaurant review: Pompette, Oxford

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This review begins, as a couple of mine have before, outside the Missing Bean on Turl Street in Oxford, a little before noon. I have grabbed a couple of seats outside on the cramped little benches, my dear friend Jerry is inside ordering lattes and pain au chocolat. It will rain later, but the morning is still surprisingly bright, fresh and clement. Loads of people are enjoying their coffee al fresco, sharing in the sharp and long-awaited happiness of being able to do so, all contented smiles and budging up to make room for others. Those that aren’t are just walking past, adding to the rich pageant of an Oxford morning when it feels like spring is within touching distance.

Jerry and I have met in Reading station, just next to the ticket machines, and been those annoying people in our train carriage nattering and catching up – his holiday in Gran Canaria, my continuing convalescence – all the way to Oxford, the first thirty minutes of a conversation that, all told, will go on for about twelve hours unabated. Jerry and I are in Oxford to explore somewhere new for lunch, and all is right with the world.

That makes this the third instalment of a trilogy of Saturday lunches with Jerry in Oxford. It began indifferently last spring, when we braved Gees, a restaurant that turned out to be the city’s largest, most expensive salad bar (fun fact: the owner was recently charged with murdering his centenarian mother).

It continued in the summer when we sat outside Arbequina on the Cowley Road, drinking Asturian white wine in the sunshine and enjoying one of my meals of the year. It was meant to conclude in November at Pompette, the French restaurant out in Summertown, but the weekend of our reservation I was sleeping at home, freshly discharged from hospital.

So it’s surprisingly emotional to have it back in the calendar and to see it happen, to sit on the train with my friend, to drink coffee with him in one of my happy places, lunch just around the corner. The welcome blast of sunshine suggests that winter is nearly over, that nature is healing, but I am healing too.

Pompette celebrates its eighth birthday this year, and in that time has cemented itself as one of the only restaurants in Oxford to get any visibility outside the city. It got glowing write ups in the national press shortly after opening, and since has made its way into the Michelin guide and the Good Food Guide. The critics stop reviewing places after a while, but the guides always keep score, and Pompette was again listed last year by the Good Food Guide as one of Britain’s 100 best local restaurants. It’s in good company, along with the likes of Clay’s, Upstairs At Landrace, Paulette and overall winner – and one of my favourite discoveries of all my time writing this blog – Lucky Lychee.

I have eaten at Pompette a couple of times, but not for something like five years. I went the winter after it opened with a group of my friends known as the Guild Of Ponces and thoroughly enjoyed it (to read about a meal we had at a less convincing French restaurant, click here) and then I took Zoë there the summer after the pandemic. We had a lunch there that was good but flawed, and at the time I decided not to write it up: after all, it was 2021 and it didn’t feel like the right time to say “here’s a hit and miss meal only a train and bus ride away”. Who would have cared?

But Pompette always hovered high on my Oxford to do list, and as Jerry and I ambled through the door bang on time for our reservation I was reminded why. It’s a big space but a very, very attractive one, split into two large dining rooms with space up at the bar and a private dining room upstairs. It’s impossible not to love, with the exposed brickwork, calming deep blue walls, gorgeous framed prints and handsome furniture: even the shelves of merch – cookbooks and tote bags – are appealing.

You would think the sheer scale of it would make it feel vast and impersonal, but I was impressed by how little that was the case. It takes some doing to create a sense of intimacy in a dining room built to these proportions, but our little table in the window was nicely spaced from our neighbours. Shortly after we were seated, just after one o’clock, a group of speculative diners was turned away: at the time I didn’t understand it because the room was still sparsely populated, but before long nearly every table in our half of the restaurant was occupied.

And they had multiple lunchtime sittings, too: a studious group left the table for four next to us just after we left and a lively, fun pair of middle-aged couples swiftly took their place, bedding in for an even boozier lunch than mine and Jerry’s. By then Jerry and I had already kicked off proceedings – a manzanilla for him and something called a Picon Bière for me, a half of Méteor with orange bitters in it, an Aperol for the Untappd classes.

I absolutely loved it, and like the demi pêche my friend Dave discovered last year, or the panaché I loved in Montpellier it gave me a new-found respect for the ways the French have worked out to make beer all fancy. We toasted one another’s good health over a little bowl of almonds, gleaming with oil and dotted with salt, just like the ones I’m used to buying in Malaga.

Pompette’s menu is ostensibly French – chef Pascal Wiedemann hails from the Alsace, although he made his name in London at French restaurants Racine and Terroirs – but it wanders well beyond the Alsace and, to be honest, beyond France’s borders too. I’ve had vitello tonnato there before, and the menu the day Jerry and I visited boasted stracciatella, pumpkin gnocchi with Gorgonzola, boquerones with Manchego and croquetas; in that sense it’s almost the same ball park as the sleek pan-European fare at Branca. There’s also hispi cabbage, which very much places it as a restaurant in the U.K. in 2026.

But the spine of the menu is Gallic: cod brandade, pot au feu, jambon de Bigorre and cervelle de canut, a Lyonnais dip made from fromage blanc, speak to that. And that’s the other thing I would stress about Pompette: don’t read too much into the menu on their website. Jerry and I agreed on the train up that it looked, from our research, pretty limited but was boosted on the day by a trio of very tempting specials. Without that, if you couldn’t find anything you liked, you might end up resorting to steak, which always feels to me like something of a fallback in very good restaurants.

The years have ravaged the pricing: when I look at the picture of my receipt from 2021 the main course was shy of £20, whereas nearly everything is £30 or more now. But none of that feels like it matters so much when something knocks it out of the park, and that’s exactly how I felt about my starter. A puck of boudin noir came encased in bronzed but fluffy brioche, the whole thing moated with the kind of thick, reduced sauce you can almost see your face in. A little wedge of beautiful quince was a fig leaf to wellness, dusted with espelette pepper which I thought the dish could probably do without.

But really, this was one of those plates where, for as long as it’s in front of you and some of it remains, the world is a kind and happy place. When I think about what it was like, I can only remember eating anything comparable in France and when I described it to my boss the following week – he is a keen Oxford fan, especially of the Daunt Books just round the corner from Pompette – he said “so it was sort of like an incredibly middle-class hot dog, then”. Well, no. No but also yes.

Jerry was determined to conquer the gastronomic spectre of his trip to Gran Canaria, where he trudged through a very disappointing fish soup, so he braved Pompette’s soupe de poisson. But, spoiler alert, no bravery is really required when you order somewhere like Pompette. At Pompette, it is all about everything – from the cooking to the eating to the meal itself – taking absolutely as long as it needs to take, of perfecting over time and distilling to an epitome.

Just as this became the epitome of the perfect Oxford lunch with Jerry, the soup was its best self, utterly reduced and concentrated, so deep in flavour that you needed a metaphorical diving suit. Jerry adored it. I didn’t try it, although if I’d had a spoon handy I’d have given it a go, but even after it was finished that aroma, intense with fish and lightly coaxed with aniseed, stayed with me, making me wish I’d ordered it. The rouille, Gruyère and croutons were all present and correct, and Jerry made me try a bit of the crouton because he couldn’t believe its lightness. I did as I was asked. I couldn’t believe it either.

By this point we were slightly ahead of the table next to us, so we got to earwig on their conversation with the serving staff, who without exception were absolutely at the top of their game. The server told our neighbours that although you felt like there ought to be shellfish of some kind in that soup, there was none: but they used every single bit of the fish, guts and all, to produce that extraordinary flavour.

At this point we were caught by our neighbours paying far too much attention, which led to some good-natured bickering across the rest of a very happy lunch. One of the couples were locals – and very lucky to be, too – and their friends were up from Oxford. One was a lawyer who occasionally worked in Reading, so I made sure to recommend Clay’s to her. Our interest in their advice from the wait staff was eventually mirrored by their interest in seeing what Jerry’s and my food looked like, and by the end I think they were half tempted to join us in the pub for a post-prandial debrief. Anyway, two of them ordered the soup and both of them loved it.

One of the chaps at my table couldn’t persuade his friend to order the special Jerry and I had, which meant I felt bad when it turned up and was spectacular: he had to settle for sharing an enormous pork chop instead, which looked like a more than serviceable consolation prize.

But fortune favoured me and Jerry, in the shape of the most beautifully cooked duck breast swimming in a thick, glossy bigarade sauce – more of that bitter orange from my apéritif – and festooned with rind. Again, Pompette’s preturnatural talent with sauces was deployed to stunning effect: I think of all the cuisines out there French is my favourite, and it’s because of things like this. They are the clincher.

It turned out that Jerry was trying to lay ghosts to rest with this order as well, having cooked duck at home a while back and found that it came out tougher than Tom Hardy after a crash course of anabolic steroids. By contrast this was pink, the fat soft and moreish, the skin crisped and burnished, every contrasting texture timed and rested to be spot on all at once. “I bet this duck had a fantastic life” mused Jerry. Not as fantastic as ours right now, I thought.

The accoutrements with this were also bang on. I have never much liked endive, but Pompette has the talent many great restaurants do, where it can win you over on ingredients you thought you didn’t care for. This, braised and blackened, was a perfect foil. If I had one criticism it was that the splodge of celeriac purée, great though it was, was pretty small.

But on the other hand the thing on this plate you wanted to be huge was, and that was the croquette of duck leg. The picture down there doesn’t do justice to how big this was, or how substantial, how dense, how utterly crammed with shredded duck leg, herbs, salt, fat and nothing else. The duck breast was in the middle of the table, but this was the star of the show. And this main, to share, was £60 for two.

Ironically, the reason the gents at the table next to us didn’t order the duck special was that the dissenter didn’t like the sound of the duck leg croquette. I told his friend that he should consider making new friends. There was a pause, and I worried I’d gone too far, and then he spoke.

“Thank you!” he said.

By this point we had polished off a bottle of red that was a new one on me, a Vinsobres from the Rhone Valley. The wine list was absolutely magnificent, and will part you from plenty of money if your resolve weakens for a moment. Our server recommended a handful of reds from Jura’s legendary producer Tony Bornard, and they all sounded right up my alley, but I struggled with spending £100 on one: to Pompette’s credit, most of them are £50 retail so that markup is positively encouraging. But again, our server was superb at navigating us to something more kindly priced – £54, with a more conventional markup – but quite exquisite. We swirled it in huge, fishbowl-like glasses, and enjoyed every drop.

Pompette’s dessert menu is small – just the three options, plus a cheeseboard, with suggested wine pairings for all of them. I always give dining companions the first choice, but I was delighted that I could easily have ordered any of them. Once Jerry had chosen I was torn between the rhubarb and custard tart or the kirsch choux bun with warm chocolate sauce, and my server made the clever point that the latter had been on Pompette’s menu since day one so would always be there for me, whereas rhubarb had a season. I was sold. This argument also worked on the neighbouring table, roughly as we were settling up.

It was an absolute joy – a mild custard with just enough wobble, an acceptably thin pastry base and a gorgeous lacquered, almost tiled top level of rhubarb. I’m not used to being given a knife and fork for dessert but this dish did need it, because the rhubarb still had fibre and resistance, and otherwise would have slid clean off the rest.

But having a proper cross-section, as was intended, you realised what a precise balance of sweet and sharp it was. A puddle of crème fraîche next to it was topped with a splodge of rhubarb compote stewed beyond the point of resistance. See, it can also be like this, it seemed to say. I had this with the Jurançon they recommended for Jerry’s dessert, because it interested me more than the suggested pairing. £12 for the tart, £6 for a small glass of golden dessert wine, absolutely zero complaints.

Jerry went for a seemingly less French choice, a slab of sticky ginger cake with a coconut and rum sorbet slowly melting on it. This was perhaps French by way of Guadaloupe, and for me the best and most interesting thing about it was a glorious wedge of roast pineapple. Jerry liked it, and was determined to have dessert over cheese (with hindsight, I should have pointed out that they weren’t mutually exclusive), but the sorbet was the weak point for him. I think he was right – it was all coconut and very little rum, and something sharper might have worked better.

I know comparisons can come across as invidious, but I couldn’t help but view my companionable, libatious, drawn-out lunch at Pompette through the lens of my whistle stop tour of Hypeland at The Devonshire, the subject of last week’s review. This meal was less expensive – including tip our snacks, apéritif, three courses, bottle of wine and glasses of dessert wine set us back just over £216, slightly less costly than the Devonshire. Pompette’s room was nicer and more spacious, the service absolutely faultless.

And it was the kind of meal I wanted, a celebration of lunch, of good company, of having nowhere to go and eating in a restaurant with no desire whatsoever to move you along. The best part of three hours passed in a flash, and at the end of it we availed ourselves of the very tasteful loos and gorgeous-smelling hand soap and made our way back out into North Oxford knowing we’d had a lunch for the ages. Daunt Books followed, and then racing the rain to North Parade, our second Parade of the day, where the back room of the Rose & Crown had a table with our name on it and crisp cider behind the bar. It was, as days go, pretty unimprovable.

Reading doesn’t have anywhere like Pompette, despite the fact that Caversham would very much like to be Reading’s Summertown, or Jericho. That Reading can’t attract this kind of place is one of the eternal mysteries which I fully expect to be bemoaning until either I get bored or you do (let’s be honest: you’ll get bored first). That Oxford is a 30 minute train ride away, and Pompette is a short bus ride from the city centre is something, on the other hand, you will never hear me complain about.

I’ll almost leave the last word to Jerry this week. “It would be a perfect special occasion restaurant” he said. He’s too modest to appreciate that every lunch with him, for me at least, is a special occasion. But he does read this blog, so now he knows.

Pompette – 9.0
7 South Parade, Oxford, OX2 7JL
01865 311166

https://www.pompetterestaurant.co.uk

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Bar review: Bigfoot, Oxford

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

This might be the first time I’ve been able to say this in over 30 years of working for a living, but my boss – he doesn’t read this blog, so I can get away with admitting this – is one of my favourite people. He’s a few years older than me, but I suspect he’s hired in his image and our politics, our cultural references, our general outlook on life and our regular Guardian reading match up nicely. I couldn’t help but think of him the evening I stopped by Bigfoot, a little spot on Oxford’s Cowley Road specialising in cocktails and tacos.

The thing is, my boss – like me – is a big music fan, always on the hunt for new bands to listen to. Unlike most people I know, his taste in music didn’t stop in an arbitrary year, preserved in aspic, leaving him just listening to old favourites. His Spotify Unwrapped is interesting every December, and we often swap recommendations: without him I wouldn’t have discovered the loping lo-fi jangle of Talking Kind, or the weird and wonderful 70s Algerian funk (I’m not making this up) of Ahmed Malek.

Unlike me, my boss is still a regular gig-goer, especially in Oxford where he watches all sorts of bands in all kinds of ramshackle venues. He took his wife to see a band called Shit Present last year on her actual birthday, without a shred of irony, and she joined him without complaint. That’s quite some marriage, I imagine.

My boss reports a consistent phenomenon at those gigs. The band is invariably young, lean and hungry, in the foothills of its twenties and having the time of its life. And the audience? “They’re all 6 Music dads like me” he says, ruefully. It happens when he goes to see Bar Italia, or Stick In The Wheel, or some band I’ve never heard of playing music you could describe without irony as a soundscape. His ears like a challenge.

When I stopped in Bigfoot, I got an inkling of how he must feel. Because everybody in there was young, from the head honcho behind the bar with his beard/beanie/fisherman’s jumper combo to the friends catching up at the table in the window, to the chaps behind me who were mansplaining to one another about “the societal pressures on women” without any women at their table, as if they had a fucking clue. Outside, in the January cold, a table of four young women directed subtle evils towards me, the mouldy old fiftysomething nabbing one of the only spots inside all to myself.

Bigfoot opened in December 2023 and has consistently offered cocktails in general, and margaritas in particular, ever since, along with tacos. It has slightly bowed to market forces since, adding beer and wine to its menu, but otherwise has continued to plough this admirable, idiosyncratic furrow. I was in Oxford with some free time for a solo meal so I thought, Why not? I forewent a table for one at somewhere more obvious and slipped into the no reservation spot early doors to snag a table.

It helps that I love that part of Oxford so much. I occasionally read some rabid panic on Facebook from someone still complaining about 15 minute cities, and I think the main problem is their lack of imagination. Because on the Cowley Road, if you stand outside Bigfoot, you are within a 15 minute walk of the Magdalen Arms or the Chester Arms. Arbequina and Spiced Roots are mere minutes away. You can buy Oxford’s best coffee at The Missing Bean, or drink in Peloton Espresso, my favourite Oxford café. What’s to dislike?

Not only that, but just across the road is the Ultimate Picture Palace, the arthouse cinema where I saw stuff like Le Samourai, Betty Blue and Paris, Texas, over thirty years ago. You can browse music in Truck Records nearby, which also happens to do good coffee.

And a very short walk from Bigfoot there’s also the Star Inn on Rectory Road, where Oxford’s best beer garden is hibernating, waiting for spring, and DEYA’s Steady Rolling Man is always on tap. I had very much enjoyed Peloton and the Star before ambling into Bigfoot, as it happens, and I was hoping that Bigfoot would complete a beautiful OX4 trifecta.

I loved the interior, all scruffy and ineffably cool, spider lights and baskets of limes hanging from the ceiling, art on the walls. A couple of cramped tables in the window had bentwood stools, and along one side of the room were what looked like bespoke benches with narrow tile partitions between them serving as tables, just deep enough to accommodate a glass or a plate of tacos.

Their curves matched the undulations of the bar, and the whole thing had a feeling of otherness that I loved. I felt like I could be in Bairro Alto, the Realejo or the 11th arrondisement, somewhere far cooler than me or, in all honesty, most of prosperous Oxford. That’s the great thing about the Cowley Road, it’s the metaphorical two fingers up that says the rest of this city might be like a supersized version of Henley on Thames but not us, buster.

The red on white menu by the bar screamed simplicity: four tacos, two of them vegetarian, all of them £2.80 a pop. They also do chips and dip, and burritos on Saturday but that’s your lot. Similarly, there were five margaritas, a couple of bottled boozy seltzers and a slightly confusing menu of what seemed to be beer and chaser combos. The beer choice was limited but considered: Modelo, the Mexican classic; the iconic American Pabst Blue Ribbon; and – this was an inspired choice – Mash Gang’s Chug IPA, one of the best AF beers made in the U.K. To complete a general feeling of bounty, the evening I was there three of the margaritas on offer were a fiver each.

I’m not a margarita aficionado but when in Rome and all that, so I gladly left my comfort zone and ordered Bigfoot’s classic, the textbook combination of tequila, agave, lime and salt. It came on the rocks – crisp, bracing and tasting every bit as boozy as I suspect it was. I don’t know which brand of tequila Bigfoot uses – I saw El Tequileño behind the bar, there might have been others – but this was the sort of cocktail I could easily see becoming habitual. Each sip, sharpened with a jag from that salted rim, was a delight.

Next time I’d be tempted to try a mezcal margarita; a look behind the bar revealed an impressive array, from multiple variants of Ojo de Tigre to La Higuera. The folks at Bigfoot are serious about being good at the narrow range of things they do.

The tacos didn’t so much subvert expectations as invert them. I expected my favourite to be the chicken thigh, but it was the most underpowered of the lot, the chipotle a little quiet, the mayo on them equally muted. White onion, too, felt like it was there to make up the numbers. But that’s not the same as saying it was bad, and if it hadn’t been outperformed by everything else on the menu maybe I would have been perfectly happy with it.

Far better were the carnitas tacos, with so much more going on: pork shoulder braised to a tangle, along with pickled red onion which provided the contrast missing from the chicken. The finishing touch – only knobbers call it a hero ingredient – was the pineapple, which made everything pop; you can argue about whether it belongs on a pizza if you want, not without justification, but it does belong in a taco. These were the wettest and messiest of the tacos, however carefully you fold them up and however precise your bite: more napkins might have been helpful.

The one I expected to like least and liked the best was the curveball, the oyster mushroom taco. Miso glazing gave it a very pleasing savoury depth and a meatiness that stopped me missing birria, or ropa vieja, or beef in any other guise; Bigfoot’s Instagram suggests they have been offering birria tacos as a special, but they weren’t on the night I visited. Of all the tacos I tried these were my favourites, with a zigzag of relatively subtle jalapeño crema and spring onion in a pick-up-sticks formation.

The tortillas were thick and soft, up to the task of holding everything in and piled high enough to introduce, nonetheless, an element of jeopardy. I don’t know if Bigfoot makes them, but a bowl of tortilla chips with salsa at a neighbouring table looked bought in: I decided not to give them a try.

I was having so much fun that I didn’t want to leave. The air was humming with the kind of great music that makes you reach for Shazam – or would do, if this part of Oxford wasn’t a mobile reception blackspot that somehow catapults you back to 1996. Outside the table of young women was playing cards, and I made a mental note to add card games to the list of things that became hip far too late for me, despite all my many hours playing cribbage on holiday after holiday in my thirties. One of the women peered balefully through the window at me. When is grandpa fucking off? the gaze seemed to say.

By this point, all the tables inside were occupied and the outside tables, too, were filling up. Where were these places when I was in my twenties, I wondered? When I was the right age to drink in these kinds of places either they didn’t exist or they did and I didn’t drink in them, most likely because I didn’t know about them.

The only place I could think of in Reading terms that had a feel anything like this was Bar Iguana, in the early Noughties. I remember going there once, nearly twenty-five years ago, and the bar staff were too busy kicking around a hacky sack to serve me. Even then I was too old for that bar, but I didn’t know it at the time.

Bigfoot was far more inclusive to the advanced in years, and the barman told me about a drink I’d eyed up heading to another table: the watermelon margarita, also on the specials menu. So naturally I had one and it was possibly more perilous than the classic margarita because it carried its alcohol content far less ostentatiously.

A chap at one of the other tables, trying to impress his date, asked the barman if it had cinnamon and star anise in it, and was very pleased with himself when it turned out that it did. I didn’t get any of that, but it was sweet and incapable of giving offence and probably dangerously boozy. The watermelon came through to the exclusion of anything else, but I quite liked that. At the end of the meal, I did dainty little watermelon burps all the way down the Cowley Road.

And I had more tacos, of course. I could claim this was to flesh out my research, but in truth it was because I liked them and to test the only one on the menu I hadn’t eaten. Nopales tacos came with cooked prickly pear cactus, refried beans, cheese and salsa roja and oddly, in some ways, they felt the most traditional ones I tried. The presence of cheese was welcome, and it turned out that cactus – or this cactus, anyway – had a texture a little like soft green peppers. I was glad I could say I’d tried it, but it didn’t outperform anything else on my little plate.

All that – seven tacos and two £5 margaritas – came to just under £34 including tip. I thanked the chap with the beard and the beanie effusively: far too effusively, probably, because I will never be cool. I expect he was grateful for my custom in the way the members of Bar Italia are grateful that my boss turns up to their Oxford gigs.

It felt like that embarrassing bit in In Bed With Madonna where Kevin Costner tells Madonna backstage on her Blonde Ambition tour that he thought her show was ‘neat’ and, after he leaves, she pretends to stick her fingers down her throat. At least I didn’t say Bigfoot was neat, or at least I don’t remember using those words.

Bigfoot doesn’t do dessert, but you have ice cream café George & Delila a few doors down – see what I mean about 15 minute cities – or you can, as I did, cross Magdalen Bridge, waft down The High and end up in Swoon Gelato. I sat at the front, in the window, with a salted caramel gelato feeling, as you do when you hit the OX1 postcode, a little less old and unhip. I didn’t mind all that anyway, but if I had the gelato would have made it all better.

I’m conscious that this review might be even more niche than usual for my Reading based readers. If you go to Oxford, you probably want a proper meal as part of a trip to the city, and stopping at a small, scuzzy bar that happens to do tacos may not really suit your purposes, unless you’re off to a gig nearby at the O2 Academy. They do lunch, I suppose, but only on Saturdays. So this one might have more appeal to locals, or that small section of my readership that lives in Oxford (or the Oxford subreddit, which is always so kind about my work).

But I thought all that and then thought sod it and decided to write it anyway. Because I keep coming back to what I said earlier on – if this bar was in Paris, or Lisbon, or Granada, and I’d visited it on a trip to one of those cities it would appear in the city guide I subsequently wrote. I would say that the place is charming and likeable, the tacos are very good and that it’s a fun place to hang out for a few drinks even if you then go on somewhere else.

I really loved it: admittedly, that was after two margaritas, and it’s possible that after three I’d have loved everyone and everything. Even so, I heartily recommend Bigfoot, if you’re anywhere near that area and in anything like the mood for what it does, especially if you combine it with Peloton and the Star, the other elements of that holy trinity. Getting old is no fun but, as friends always tell me, it beats the alternative. Finding spots like Bigfoot, however – even if it makes me feel a 6 Music dad at a happening gig – never, ever gets old.

Bigfoot – 8.1
98 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JE

https://bigfootoxford.com

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Pub review: The Chester Arms, Oxford

On By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

The concept of choice in restaurants, I’ve always thought, brings out the inner Goldilocks. Too wide a menu and paralysis sets in, but if it’s too narrow you can’t help feeling straitjacketed. It’s why restaurants that only offer one or two dishes: Le Relais de Venise with its entrecôte, or Burger & Lobster with its – well, you know – have never really caught on here.

I’m reminded of the immortal words of Peter Butterworth in Carry On Abroad, an evergreen favourite of mine, when his Spanish waiter Pepe comes out with the immortal words “of course you are having choices! You can having sausage and chippings, sausage and beans or beans and chippings. That’s choices”. And believe me, I don’t think anybody would have enjoyed dining at the Palace Hotel in Elsbels.

The only time we omnivores really think it’s acceptable to restrict our choices is when we go to a restaurant that offers variations on a theme: burger restaurants, pizza parlours, Nando’s. And yes, Nando’s does technically serve stuff that isn’t chicken but that’s hardly the point, because nobody goes there for that. If somebody at a table at Nando’s is eating a halloumi burger, you can be very confident that they don’t eat chicken and have been dragged there by some inconsiderate sod who does.

Then, of course, there’s the other occasion when we feel as if we have no choice: because there’s something on the menu that we must have, or always order. But those things, as I discovered when I counted down Reading’s top 50 dishes a couple of years ago, are hugely subjective. My wife might be unable to visit Kungfu Kitchen without ordering their deep fried fish, and believe me she is, but other people would mount an equally passionate case for the sweet and sour aubergine, or the lamb with cumin.

Besides, the better the restaurant – like KFK, or Clay’s – the less likely it is, really, that there’s a single must-order dish. What are the chances that a kitchen so skilful would produce just the one thing everybody has to eat? Pretty slim, if you ask me.

No, generally the concept that a restaurant has something you must try, a legendary dish in the making, is another by-product of hype, and usually comes out of the mouths of critics when they visit somewhere, soon after it opens. I’ve tried Brutto’s coccoli, Town’s saffron risotto and Kolae’s fried prawn heads, all acclaimed as instant classics when those venues opened, and they varied from quite nice to very good. Were any of them dishes those restaurants should be exclusively associated with? Not really. Two of them weren’t even the best thing I had in those meals, but it shifts newspapers to rave.

So no, restaurants that become synonymous with a single dish are rare in general, and I don’t think Reading has any to speak of. But that makes the subject of this week’s review even more unusual, because it does occupy that very niche territory. The Chester Arms is an Oxford pub just off the Iffley Road, east from Magdalen Bridge but a smidge closer to it than the Magdalen Arms. It has been under its current management for over ten years. And it’s very much famous for one thing in particular, its steak platter.

Now, it feels wrong to me for most restaurants to describe their own dishes as famous. I still remember the overblown, unsubstantiated hype for The Botanist’s hanging kebabs, for instance, which were more hanging than famous. It’s a bit like restaurants keeping a certificate in their window from over ten years ago, or restaurant bloggers describing themselves as ‘multi award-winning’ when they have, in fact, won none. Famous is something other people are meant to say about you, not how you describe yourself.

And yet in the Chester Arms’ case, you might make an exception. The pub’s homepage describes them as “home of the famous steak platter” and the dish has its own page on their website. It’s the creation of head chef Hamzah Taynaz – although Companies House makes it seem like he might have parted company with the pub over the summer – and it looks like a doozie: onglet cooked rare or medium rare, chips, béarnaise, cabbage with bacon, dressed salad. £50 for two people, or £70 for three, which on paper at least is impressive value; it was £30 and £45 back in 2015, but it’s been a bruising decade.

The thing, though, is this: I have been told to visit the Chester Arms numerous times, by people I know and by people who’ve tipped me off online. It’s been the place at the top of my Oxford to do list for quite a while – I would have reviewed it last month were it not for a medical misadventure – and every single person who has told me to go there has mentioned the steak platter. Some of them had eaten it, and raved about it. Others hadn’t, but left me in no doubt that if they did go there it’s exactly what they would order.

In fact, when I went to Arbequina last month I happened to be on the same train as someone I follow on Instagram, and when I messaged her to ask where she’d eaten in the city I was unsurprised to find that she had gone to the Chester Arms. “We had a great meal there” was her verdict. “It lived up to the hype for us.” So finally, last weekend, I got my chance to try it for size.

My plus one for this meal was my old friend and Oxford compadre Dave, and as we had a pre-lunch latte in Peloton Espresso’s very agreeable back garden I told him that this meal made him, with the exception of Zoë, my most capped plus one. Not bad going for a man who valiantly resisted joining me on duty until a couple of years ago, I told him.

“I thought you’d expect me to have opinions about everything!” he laughed. “And I’m too easy-going for that, I just want to eat nice food. But then I realised that actually you aren’t fussed about all that, so now I don’t mind tagging along.”

Dave was, I had to concede, probably correct. He likes to make much of how low maintenance he is, by which he means that he’ll generally do whatever you like and doesn’t have strong preferences. In the past I may have found that a tad frustrating, but as a dining companion for a restaurant reviewer, it turns out, it’s pretty much a dream CV. Besides, Dave quite rightly pointed out that for our forthcoming holiday to Bruges I had insisted on the dates, insisted on a hotel, changed my mind and picked another hotel and so on and so on, so maybe I quite liked having a low maintenance friend after all.

The Chester Arms is another of those lovely backstreet boozers I didn’t even know existed and like the Star off Cowley Road, it reminded me a little of Reading’s Nag’s Head and the Retreat, only built to a different scale. It was a big, handsome corner plot with a decent-sized garden and inside it was a very attractive room with wooden floorboards, large sturdy tables ringed by fetching booths and plenty of natural light. It was a properly gorgeous space which made me think, as so often, that I really missed the Lyndhurst.

Having said that, I do have to say that some of its tables were more equal than others. The place was absolutely packed – you have to book quite far in advance if you want a table – and without much in the way of soft furnishings, which made it a cacophonous place to be. The two tables nearest to us were the handsome ones for larger groups but our little table with unforgiving chairs, near the kitchen, next to a stack of high chairs, felt like one they put in the seating plan because they could, not because they should.

In fairness the table directly in front of me was possibly even worse. The large group settled in nearby was full of people who were young, exuberant and happy to be there. I love Dave dearly, but we could only manage one of those three. “They’re probably all catching up at the end of their summer holidays, ready for term to begin” he said equably, and I felt even older than usual.

The Chester Arms’ menu was compact in the way you’d expect when most people are there for the feature attraction: a handful of nibbles, only three starters to speak of and three main courses which were not the steak platter. One of them was a vegetarian mezze selection (“perfect as a starter to share, or to be enjoyed as a main for one”) which had, by the looks of it, strong Nando’s halloumi burger energy. The starters were under a tenner, all mains save the steak platter hovered around twenty pounds.

Now, to get this out of the way from the off, our service was brilliant from beginning to end. Our server was young, American, properly charming and looked after we two avuncular has-beens perfectly, and I can’t say enough good things about her. With one exception, which is that I saw a blackboard with specials being shown to other tables later in the afternoon but we were never told about it or given a chance to look at it. In an ideal world it just said, in big cursive script, Stop fooling yourself, we all know you’re having the steak platter but, as I didn’t see it, I can only guess.

Dave was reluctant to have a starter in case the steak platter turned out to be too much, which did make me wonder if some kind of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers situation was going on, but I managed to persuade him to share the most appealing starter with me. Actually it might have been the absolute best thing I ate all afternoon, so I half wished I’d just pressed on without him. Lamb koftas were a trio of plump nubbins, beautifully coarse and with just the faintest whiff of offal to them, really gorgeous stuff.

They came with flatbreads which felt bought in, but which were good nonetheless, a small stack of guindilla and what was described as green tahini. I’m not really sure what that was, because tahini is a paste with a very distinctive taste and texture and this was none of those things, and it didn’t have a particularly strong note of sesame, but I quite liked it anyway. Dave was unconvinced by it, but won over by the koftas. He let me have the spare one, because he’s a good egg, and even though they were almost more faggot than kofta it did make me wonder what a Chester Arms mixed grill would be like. That had better not have been on the specials menu.

We had a while to catch up after that because each steak is cooked to order and takes, if the menu is to be believed, 45 minutes. So he sipped his pint of alcohol free Rothaus, and I had a pale from DEYA: we were both keeping our powder dry for a more substantial session post lunch. I didn’t know at the time – I learned this from Instagram after the fact – that landlady Becca Webb had just come back from a tasting tour in Bilbao with her wine suppliers, and if I had I might have paid closer attention to the wine list. Next time.

Anyway, Dave and I had a good old chinwag, if constantly drowned out by the relentless, unforgivable youngness of people at our neighbouring tables, as we struggled gamely with the heat from the nearby kitchen. The problem with a restaurant where everybody orders the same thing is that each time it comes out from the kitchen you perk up, think it’s yours and then realise it’s going to another table. But in a way it’s genius, because it raises your anticipation over and over again, and every passing platter looked amazing.

Besides, it distracted me from Dave giving me a litany of people he knew, roughly our age, who were either seriously or terminally ill. They don’t call your fifties ‘sniper’s valley’ for nothing, and after I’d heard about three of them my fight or flight health anxiety kicked in and I asked him, ever so nicely, to stop. Is this what we’ve got to look forward to? I wondered to myself.

I can’t imagine anybody’s life expectancy would be enhanced by what turned up at our table about half an hour after our starters, but just look at it. You’d shave a few days off the end of your life for one of these, wouldn’t you?

It’s difficult to give any kind of scale with a photograph like that but trust me, that serving plate was substantial. Our two serving plates were on the smaller side, but that just gave you an excuse to go back again and again: not for nothing did the pot of utensils on our table include forks, sharp knives and a little set of steak tongs.

Everything about this dish was bang on or thereabouts. The onglet was cooked beautifully medium rare and, in the main was buttery and absurdly easy to cut, any tension in the fibres expertly soothed away; I appreciated the irony of eating something that was better rested, most likely, than I will ever be. The béarnaise was ever so slightly thin with a slight hit of vinegar, but it hadn’t split and went very well with the steak; I might have liked a little more, between two, and a spoon to dish it up with but as quibbles go those were minor.

The other thing I loved, though, was how complete a dish this was and how every component brought something to the table. The heap of savoy cabbage shot through with lardons was truly joyous, the chips were thick, crunchy and surprisingly good. And even the salad, which I’d dismissed in the run-up as a makeweight, was not an afterthought. It was properly dressed, and it supplied the lightness and acidity that would otherwise have been missing from the platter.

Our server had asked us if we wanted to upgrade to the platter for three (“nice bit of upselling”, said Dave) but we’d decided not to, mostly because I thought if I was reviewing the place you’d want to know if a platter for two actually served two. And my verdict is that it does: we finished all our steak and most of everything else, and even in the time between finishing and our almost empty plates being taken away we were both picking with forks – dunking a chip in the béarnaise or trawling it through the juices from the onglet, or the good stuff that was left after you’d airlifted the cabbage away. If service had been less on it, I think our plate would have ended up clean as a whistle.

I tried to send a picture of the platter to Zoë – because she’d asked, even though I imagine it would have made her seethe with resentment – and failed, because the mobile signal in that part of Oxford is like taking a day trip to 1997. Perhaps it was for the best.

Our server asked if we fancied dessert, so I asked Dave if he fancied dessert – because I’d have looked like a right fat bastard scoffing one on my own – and I was hugely relieved when he decided to join me. Perhaps the bodysnatchers hadn’t troubled his house in Wootton Bassett after all. The dessert menu was also compact: three desserts, or ice cream with Pedro Ximenez, or a selection of ice creams, or an affogato.

Another thing to like very much about the Chester Arms was the very appealing selection of digestifs, and the options of red or white port, Sauternes or PX: I had another half of the pale instead, but on another day would have veered in the direction of something smaller and sweeter. The pale, by the way, was decent if piney: not DEYA’s iconic Steady Rolling Man but a reasonable stand-in. I’d have checked it in on Untappd, but I was in 1997 so it hadn’t been invented yet.

I was tempted by something ice cream based, but the server couldn’t tell me where the Chester Arms’ ice cream came from and I wasn’t invested or entitled enough to make her ask. So instead I went for my tried and tested choice, a tiramisu. It was about as different as possible from most of the ones I’ve had recently – not loose, airy and boozy like the tiramisu at, say, Paesinos or RAGÙ. It was more old school, by which I suppose I mean inauthentic: much firmer, much denser, crammed into that Duralex glass like they’d almost forgotten to say when.

And it was gorgeous. I’d forgotten that authentic is overrated, with all the honest-to-goodness Italian food cropping up in places like Reading and Bristol, but this was a delight from first spoon to last – far, far more cream than sponge but laced with Courvoisier and Frangelico. I loved it far more than I expected to, and it made me think again that the Chester Arms might be famous for its steak platter but it had made the canny choice of ensuring that none of the other items on the menu were an also-ran.

Dave had the crème brûlée, which is just one of those dishes I never personally order. I tried a spoonful of it and it, too, was right on the money: just enough warmth, the carapace just the right thickness, the cream vanilla-speckled and exemplary.

We didn’t tarry, because by that point it was incredibly warm and both of us fancied stretching our legs. Besides, I had promised to introduce Dave to the Star and his beloved Liverpool had finished playing, so the lack of mobile reception was no longer the positive nuisance it had been. My advice is that if you’re going to spend time somewhere with absolutely no phone signal, the best idea is to do it in the company of someone where you can talk for hours without feeling the need to check your phone. So that’s exactly what I did.

Our meal for two – two and a half courses each, one of them that steak platter, and a pint apiece came to just under £100, including a discretionary 12.5% service charge which was totally earned. When you think that half of that whole bill was down to a single dish that the pub endearingly describes as a “small steak”, you have to hand it to them.

I’m really glad I finally made it to the Chester Arms – partly because it’s been an ambition for such a long time and partly because it was fascinating to try a restaurant in this country which really is synonymous with the one dish, to see if that reputation is justified. And it absolutely is – if you like steak at all, you would have a ball hopping on a train to Oxford and making your way to the Chester Arms. And if you don’t, but you know someone who does, make sure the two of you take a friend with you: you can have the fish and chips and they can have the time of their lives.

I do find myself wondering though, still: what was on that specials board? But I know that it could have had skate wing on it, or fried chicken, or countless other things, and I still would have ordered the steak platter. So does the steak platter qualify as famous? Yes, I think it probably does.

But if I went back to the Chester Arms again, knowing what their kitchen is capable of, would I really still order the steak platter a second time? Also yes. I’d be even sadder, though, if they’d taken those lamb koftas off the menu, because it was the dish I’d want to order every time, if it was up to me. That’s choices.

The Chester Arms – 8.4
19 Chester St, Oxford, OX4 1SN
01865 790438

https://chesterarmsoxford.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Arbequina, Oxford

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

Late last Saturday morning I was sitting outside Missing Bean on Turl Street with my great friend Jerry, drinking a gorgeous latte in the summer sun, about to tuck into a pain au chocolat with impeccable lamination; I remember thinking that, on a day like that, there felt like no better place to be than Oxford in the sunshine. The train up from Reading had been packed, and we’d stood in the vestibule making conversation with our fellow captives, two young polite Swedes with perfect teeth and an Australian who had fought her way there to the loo and, realising how spacious it was, was tempted to lock herself in there for the rest of the trip.

And when we got to Oxford – well, it was a Saturday in August and the weather was fine, so naturally the city was packed. A curious blend, throngs of tourists swarming round Radcliffe Square, the Bodleian and the Covered Market but also packs of graduands, in their gowns, on their way to the Sheldonian Theatre for their final rite of passage. The Oxford year isn’t like the calendar year and this all happened on the very outskirts of it – one academic year ended, another not quite ready to begin, the city reclaimed by residents before the whole thing started again in October.

Nonetheless, from where we were sitting the view was gorgeous, the food and drink were excellent and the people watching was close to unparalleled. I’d asked Jerry if he was free on the off chance at very short notice and had been delighted that he was, and at this point we were barely an hour into what would turn out to be another effortless nine hour chinwag, punctuated by this walk or that, this spot of shopping or another, lunch, coffee, beer garden, train home. Even at the start of the day, I knew it would be a good one: with Jerry, it always was.

But would it be a good lunch? I’d thought carefully about this, because although I always have a wonderful time with Jerry when he joins me for a review I cannot say, hand on heart, that we usually have a good meal. I’m not saying that he’s a jinx, far from it, but I feel guilty that he’s joined me for some of the most middling meals I’ve had for the blog in the last few years. He was the person I took to Zia Lucia for pizza that was nothing more than pleasant, and then he also came with me to Maidenhead’s Storia for much the same experience.

Then to cap it all, the last time we lunched it was in Oxford – at Gee’s, where £200 got you a lot of disappointment. Because Jerry is so lovely, he never resents us marring our time together with mediocre food, which makes him a far better person than me. But I still feel bad about it, and I decided after that lunch in Gee’s that Jerry, more than anyone who comes out on duty with me, deserved a nice one. But where to take him?

The thing is, places I review for the blog probably fall into three categories. There are the ones I expect in advance will be good: these are more likely to happen in places like Oxford, London or Bristol that support a large and thriving restaurant scene. And then there are the places I merely hope will be good, and that hope can run the whole spectrum from reckless optimism to wishful thinking. Don’t get me wrong: I always hope for the best but sometimes, especially in Reading, that hope can border on the blinkered or forlorn.

Originally I was going to take Jerry to the Chester Arms, out off the Iffley Road, which falls into the first category. It’s famous for one thing and one thing only – its enormous steak platter, which comes groaning with handmade chips, cabbage and streaky bacon and béarnaise sauce, which they have been serving up for over fifteen years. I’ve heard about it so many times but never managed to make it there, but as we were deciding where to go Jerry dropped the bombshell: he’d just had a dental implant, so needed something a little less taxing on the molars. Would I mind if we went somewhere else?

So the subject of this week’s review falls into the rarer third category: places I have been, that I remember liking, where the mixture of hope and expectation is more of a balancing act. You don’t so much expect they’ll be good, you more hope that they’re as good as you remember. And Arbequina, the tapas restaurant down the Cowley Road, definitely falls into that category. It’s been there nine years, very much blazing the trail in that part of Oxford, and after getting a rave review in the Guardian the year after it opened it’s stayed out of the limelight, even though it’s one of only two Oxford restaurants to be mentioned in the Michelin guide.

It’s quietly done its thing. No cookbook, no appearance on Saturday Kitchen or Great British Menu, just keeping going and keeping afloat. Growth has been steady and incremental: first it expanded into the neighbouring unit four years ago and then, earlier this year, it announced that it was crowdfunding to open a second site in Oxford’s Covered Market, The council had approached them with an offer – not something that would ever happen here in Reading – and so far the crowdfunder is just over half the way there, with the restaurant still hoping to open the new site later this year.

So yes, Arbequina has history. And I have history with it too, because I’ve been eating there, on and off, for the last eight years or more. Plenty pre-COVID, when I always adored it, but only once, for some reason, since the pandemic ended. That was three and a half years ago, and it sowed seeds of doubt that maybe Arbequina wasn’t the restaurant it used to be. But I should have checked in on it long before now, and ambling across Magdalen Bridge with Jerry, in good time for our lunch reservation, I found myself getting excited about a reunion with somewhere that used to be one of my favourite places.

It’s in the fun part of the Cowley Road, past the restaurants Florence Pugh’s dad used to own, past Spiced Roots, but just before brilliant café Peloton Espresso, or Truck Records, or – far further up – the turning into the food enclave of Magdalen Road. It’s a lovely site that has kept the old shop fronts from the chemist and watchmaker who used to trade there, the tasteful writing in orange sans serif on the glass the only sign of Arbequina’s name. The room inside is lovely, with unpretentious decor, a handful of tables, both low and high, and a long zinc bar where you can sit and watch all the work in the very small open kitchen.

But it was a Saturday in August, and the awning was out, and neither of us could think of anything finer than sitting out on the pavement watching the Cowley Road live and breathe, so we did exactly that. I ordered a rebujito from their cocktail menu – a drink I grew to love in lockdown but which I had for the first time at Arbequina, rather than in Andulusia – and Jerry joined me. It was fresh and zippy, a harmonious blend of the lemon, mint and that savoury note of fino.

The other thing we had right from the off, while we made up our minds about the rest, was Arbequina’s tortilla. I remembered it well enough to know that you simply had to order it, and I also knew from repeated personal experience that sharing a slice felt like a good idea right up to the point where it turned up and you could only eat half of it. So I insisted that we got a couple, and Jerry agreed – partly because he’s just a very agreeable cove and partly because I sold it as about as kind on his teeth as it’s possible to get.

But ‘kind’ undersells it, because it’s a positively indulgent treat and, however good anything else you eat at Arbequina might be, it always sets the standard for other dishes to beat. I had forgotten, over the last three and a bit years, just how good it is, but it was magnificent: so soft, only just structured on the outside and a glorious mess within.

Egg, potato, onions, thyme – that’s all there is to it, but of course that’s a hopelessly reductive way to describe a masterpiece. Jerry did better, dubbing it sumptuous. Why do I never use that word in reviews? Maybe I was waiting for this dish.

Because you could have tortilla in dozens of places, in Spain and in this country, and not approach the brilliance of this. Every forkful but the last was wonderful, and the last was wonderful yet heartbreaking. But I knew that at least not sharing it meant that last forkful took longer to arrive. It was so sweet, so exquisite that I thought I tasted things in it – maybe nutmeg, maybe cinnamon – that weren’t there.

When Ben, the manager who looked after us that day, took our empty dishes away he explained that there really was nothing else in there. The sweetness came from the onions, which were cooked for a mind-blowing twelve hours. When Jerry heard that he said “I don’t envy your gas bill” and the manager smiled. Jerry had accidentally hit on one of the reasons hospitality is so thankless right now, and he meant no harm by it.

That tortilla under our belts, it was time to take a serious look at the menu and plan our assault on it. Many of the dishes I remembered from previous visits – chicken thighs with romesco, or toast thickly spread with ‘nduja and honey – were no longer there, but the menu still read nicely. Just shy of twenty dishes, most of them at or adjacent to a tenner: only one approaching twenty quid and a last, Iberico tenderloin to share, closer to forty.

It didn’t break into sections, or flow quite the way that the menu at, say, RAGÙ did, but it had plenty of potential and so Jerry and I did what I’d done countless times before – made a list of things we definitely wanted to eat, broke it up into waves and decided to order and graze, little and often. And along with that we had a gorgeous white, an Asturian albariño blend with a certain bracing saline quality: I’d chosen it for no other reason than that I’m on holiday in Asturia soon, and fancied getting a sneak preview.

My verdict? Roll on next month. At £45 it was the most expensive white on a very compact list – four reds and four whites, mostly from Spain, and a bigger selection of natural wines from all over. But the markup was far from harsh, because I reckon it would cost you about £20 retail.

Sometimes things can be delicious because they’re simple, and Arbequina’s chorizo was a classic example. Sliced lengthways and cooked on the plancha until the outsides were caramelised and blackened, it was superlative stuff. Not cooked in wine or cider, not sliced and fancified, just cooked and served. I’d love to know where Arbequina buys it – it’s certainly not Brindisa, because theirs can be a bouncy horror compared to this.

It irked me that they gave you five of them, though, because that’s an especially tricky number to share. Well, with anybody but Jerry, anyway. “Go on, you have the last one” he said. He’s just lovely like that.

Almost as simple, even more beautiful to look at – and perfect for a sunny al fresco afternoon – Arbequina’s watermelon with jamon was a joyous dish. The melon was plump, sweet and vibrant, and very much the star of the show. But where it wasn’t quite as successful as, say, the similar dish I had at RAGÙ recently, was that the supporting players were perhaps hiding their lights under a bushel somewhat. The two bits of jamon folded on top felt slightly meagre, the honey and chilli rather lurked at the bottom of the plate, shunning the limelight.

But to be fair, if you’re comparing this with the dish at RAGÙ it’s only fair to also note that this was £8, and the Bristol restaurant’s version was over 50% more expensive.

Jerry was in no rush – I always forget that he’s not a trencherman like I am – so at this point we asked the manager if we could hold fire, sip our wine and come back to the menu. And he let us do exactly that, keeping us posted on when the kitchen would take last orders so we could have the leisurely lunch we had in mind. Jerry and I had plenty to catch up on, so we nattered about all sorts, only punctuated by Jerry having an almost Tourettes-like reaction to every single electric scooter going past. I love the multitudes people contain: Jerry is possibly the most affable person I know, but he really hates those electric scooters.

The one dish Jerry really wanted from the menu was Arbequina’s take on an Andalusian classic, berenjanas con miel, or fried aubergine with honey. Now, I wouldn’t have ordered this because I’ve never liked it in Spain – usually the aubergine is sliced thin and fried in a crispy batter, and drizzled in a dark sticky molasses that is a million miles from honey. It takes some doing, in my book, to make aubergine a good thing and this dish, whenever I’ve had it abroad, doesn’t pull it off.

But Arbequina’s version takes everything that could be good about that dish and junks the rest. So we got three soft, caramelised wedges of aubergine, drizzled with an ambrosial molasses without any sour, burnt note, the whole thing bathed in a mild whipped feta – almost more yoghurt than feta – and scattered with pomegranate and torn mint. Have I sold it to you? I hope so. Arbequina sold it to me, both literally and metaphorically. One to add to the vanishingly small list of aubergine dishes I actually like, most of which are on the menu at Kungfu Kitchen.

Our last two savoury dishes were, apart from the tortilla, the highlights of the whole thing for me. I am a terrible rubbernecker in restaurants and I kept seeing a dish go past to other tables which looked eminently snackable, a giant heap of fried, crispy, golden things. But I wasn’t sure what it was, and when I asked the manager I couldn’t explain it well enough – I blame the wine – to get him to tell me what the dish was. But then Jerry wanted the prawns, so it turns out we ordered it by accident.

So these, it turns out, are Sanlucar Crystal prawns – little critters, soft shell, fried in a golden coating, dusted with chilli and served with a generous dollop of alioli. Never had them in my life, now fully wondering where they’ve been for the last fifty-one years.

And again the funny thing is that like the aubergine, this wouldn’t normally be in my wheelhouse at all. I don’t like whitebait, can be squeamish about eating things whole. I’m not one of those macho restaurant bloggers who likes to wank on about sucking the head of a prawn – they try to channel Bourdain, but really they’re Swiss Toni – and, with the exception of one meal in Kolae I’ve managed to convince myself that I really don’t want to munch on a prawn’s brains.

So why did I love these so much? I really don’t know, but I did. I keep using the word fresh in this review, or it feels like I do, but that’s what they were – so fresh, so light, so simple, with that spritz of citrus, that whisper-quiet crunch and the ozonic tang of the sea. On the Cowley Road. Now, I love the Cowley Road but I’m not going to pretend for a minute that eating these prawns there was in any way a congruous thing to do.

I hadn’t especially wanted Arbequina’s patatas bravas – I often think they’re a way to needlessly bulk up meals in tapas restaurants – but I was drawn to their more exotic sibling on the menu. And it was another really wise choice: billed as crispy new potatoes with tonnato and salsa verde, it was a real humdinger. The slices of potato, thicker than crisps but very much sharing that lineage, were stellar, a triumph of texture.

The thick slick of tonnato was perfect for dipping and dredging: I didn’t get an enormous amount of tuna from it but I did get plenty of savoury saltiness, so I’m guessing anchovies played a part. And I don’t think salsa verde showed up to this dish at all. In its place, I suppose they had deconstructed it by instead scattering everything with salt, parley and lemon zest. I probably would have preferred a salsa verde, because I love the stuff. But I’d forgotten about the salsa verde when this dish turned up so instead I just thought isn’t adding lemon zest to this clever? They knew better than I did.

By this point we’d been there the best part of an hour and a half, in which time tables had come and gone but the restaurant had kept a happy trickling momentum of customers in the sunshine. The Americans at the table next to us ordered some of that tortilla, and inexplicably left some of it: we decided, on balance, that we didn’t know them well enough to offer to take it off their hands.

We both fancied something from the dessert menu, and I talked Jerry into a red dessert wine which came in a wide, low tumbler and was like nectar. I didn’t catch the name, and my bill doesn’t give the detail, but red dessert wines are always worth a try if you find one, and I suspected it would go better with the chocolate mousse even than a Pedro Ximenez.

Other desserts are available, of course. Arbequina was offering a panna cotta, a Basque cheesecake or the almond-rich wonder that is a Tarta de Santiago. But I think chocolate mousse should be on far more menus than it is, so whenever I see one I order it – and Jerry, being kind to his vulnerable gob, followed suit. It was, as so often, the perfect way to finish a meal.

I’ve had Arbequina’s chocolate mousse plenty of times, often enough to track its evolution. It used to be a dense quenelle of the stuff – drizzled with olive oil, scattered with coarse salt, served with a torta de aciete for good measure. But over time, Arbequina’s version of this dish has changed, become less uncompromising, dropped the olive oil and become, on the outside at least, more conventional.

But don’t be fooled: it might come in a glass, the torta de aciete may have been replaced with a dome of crème fraîche but the mousse is still theirs, and still sublime. The salt now runs through the whole thing rather than just finishing it off, and it works beautifully.

It was the right way to end a lunch that had been unassailable in its rightness. Our bill came to just under £175, including tip, and nothing about it had felt out of kilter or anything short of marvellous. We settled up with glad hearts, and were on our way – the grand total of a couple of doors down to have a post-lunch coffee outside Peloton Espresso.

But then another delightful discovery lay in store – a short walk down the Cowley Road and we came to Rectory Road and the Star, the best Oxford pub I’d never been to and another long overdue discovery. It was like a cross between the best things about the Retreat and the Nag’s Head, with a huge handsome beer garden and Steady Rolling Man on tap.

So we grabbed a table, carried on chattering, beers passed, tables of people – and the people watching opportunities they presented – came and went. We had nowhere to be, and every reason to linger. Really it was the best afternoon, and one of the best things about it was knowing that at last, Jerry had got the excellent meal he deserved. Finally, I got him a nice one.

Much later on, we retraced our steps, walking east to west through Oxford, the sun setting in the distance. The pavement outside Arbequina was even busier, with people about to have one kind of outstanding dinner or another. The Cowley Road was alive, the antithesis to the stuffiness we’d encountered right in the centre. “It’s bit like the Oxford Road isn’t it?” said Jerry as we sloped back towards Magdalen Bridge. And I replied that it’s what the Oxford Road could be like, with better landlords and more imaginative restaurateurs. Still, it’s nice to dream.

Arbequina – 8.9
72-74 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JB
01865 792777

https://arbequina.co.uk

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Restaurant review: Gees, Oxford

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

For my money, there are a few finer things in life than a long, leisurely Saturday lunch with a very good friend. Especially when you’re in a fetching room, in a beautiful city, faced with a cocktail, an appealing menu and excellent people watching opportunities. In fact, one of the only things finer than that is to do exactly what I’ve described above, but on a Friday, with four whole days off stretching out in front of you. So I was very happy indeed to find myself sitting in Gees’ gorgeous conservatory on Good Friday with my dear friend Jerry, Easter weekend only just beginning.

By this point, the day had already got off to a magnificent start. The train to Oxford was quiet, deserted almost, and it was the first time in as long as I could remember that it only took a couple of minutes to exit the station, a station whose abysmal design doesn’t seem to have significantly changed in the thirty or more years that I’ve been making that journey. We had a bimble round the Covered Market, we bought bread and cheese for later on, we had a beautiful latte in the Missing Bean on Turl Street, chatting away non-stop. 

Jerry and I had never been to Oxford together before, so we compared our experiences of the city over coffee, looking at the connections between his mental map of the place and mine. I thought how nice it was to introduce him to some of my favourite spots, particularly as if it wasn’t for Jerry (it’s a long story) I might not know Oxford half as well as I do. The weather could’ve been nicer – the day was dry yet overcast, which never paints Oxford’s buildings in their best light – but the company was unimprovable.

I had chosen Gees for our lunch because it had been on my to-do list for quite some time. A glorious spot on the Banbury Road mainly famous for its conservatory slash greenhouse dining room, there’s been a restaurant on the site for nearly forty years, a mind-boggling record. It started out as Raymond Blanc’s restaurant, with John Burton Race in the kitchen, then five years later it became Gees and has stayed that way ever since. It’s now part of The Oxford Collection, a small and exclusive group including The Old Bank and Old Parsonage hotels, and their respective restaurants.

That length of tenure means that Gees was already trading when I turned up at Oxford in 1992, sporting terrible spectacles and even worse clothes, to study my degree alongside some of the brightest people I have ever met (and some of the thickest too, would you believe). Not, of course, that I would’ve eaten there then. As I’ve said before, my meals out were limited to regular trips to the fish and chip shop on Carfax, and the rest of the time I was either heating up an M&S chili con carne in the microwave of our communal kitchen, or enjoying – and I use that word as loosely as humanly possible – the food in my college halls.

Many Oxford colleges have an excellent reputation for food, as it happens. They also have shitloads of land and investments, and in one case their own deer park. My college had none of those things, which is probably why they accepted the likes of me: the food there was purgatorial. So Gees was for a long time a kind of mythical place, the sort of restaurant other people went to, people with wealthy parents and substantial allowances. It wasn’t until much later, probably twenty years or so later, that I went there, just once.

That too was in another life, with my then wife and a bunch of our friends who turned out, when push came to shove, to be her friends. I don’t remember much about that meal, except that it was deeply convivial, but I do remember following it up with a lot of drinks in one place or another and stopping on the way to the station for a shameful KFC. I always intended to return to Gees, but somehow I never did.

I was quickly reminded, as we stepped through the door, what an attractive place it is. Most of the seating is indeed in that big conservatory, with its banquettes, leather-backed chairs and handsome tiled floor, and it makes for a great place to eat. Even on a cloudy day the room fills with light, and something about that light, the room’s airiness, the bustle of its supremely efficient staff and the chatter from prosperous neighbouring diners created a truly brilliant atmosphere. If I gave out ratings for rooms alone, Gees would take some beating. 

Gees’ menu is sort of modern European, with something from everywhere. Oysters and in-season Wye Valley asparagus were on offer, as were Serrano ham croquetas and braised octopus with romesco. But Italian dishes and ingredients tend to dominate – pizzetta, pasta, burrata, aubergine parmigiana, the list goes on. It’s as tempting a menu as any I’ve seen on my travels for a while, and on another day I could have ordered almost anything on it.

I think I read somewhere that Gees was influenced by the River Cafe, and I could imagine that in both the menu and the surroundings. Not that I’ve ever been to the River Cafe: for all the rave reviews I’ve read, paying nearly forty pounds for an asparagus starter has always been beyond my means; that said, I’m sure some of my Oxford contemporaries have been more than once. Gees’ asparagus was perhaps more keenly priced at under twelve pounds. Starters more generally weighed in at between ten and twenty pounds, pasta dishes close to twenty and main courses between eighteen and thirty-five. Not River Cafe levels, but not cheap either.

Another thing to love about an unhurried lunch is the possibility of an aperitif. So Jerry had something which the bill described as a “Bergamont Spritz”. It’s not in the drinks menu online, so I’m assuming it contained gin, some kind of sparkling wine, bergamot and – surely – a typo. I had something called a Contessa Negroni which swapped out Campari for Aperol in the classic, simple, three ingredient cocktail. You might wonder why this has never been done before, and now I can tell you: because it doesn’t taste as nice as a proper negroni.

That was all forgivable, though, because the bar snack we ordered to go with them was a real cracker – little dabs of anchovy sandwiched between two sage leaves, battered and fried. These were outrageously good, salty little treats and a really excellent idea. A far better idea than putting Aperol in a negroni, anyway. I wasn’t to realise, at that point, that my bar snack would be far and away the best thing either of us ate all day, so instead I sipped my cocktail, enjoyed the surroundings and felt pleased with the course the day was taking. At all the tables around me, people were doing much the same.

The problem is that after that, despite the room being lovely and our bottle of txakoli being cold, fresh and zippy it felt to me like Gee’s menu delivered wobble after wobble. Take my starter, which was described as venison tonnato. Now, I thought that sounded like an interesting idea: a vitello tonnato swapping our the veal for venison could, after all, possibly work. And it might still be an interesting idea, but it wasn’t in a million years what this dish was.

Instead of thinly sliced venison, you got a piece of venison fillet, cooked through without pinkness, thickly sliced and drizzled with a pale sauce that contained absolutely no tuna. Not the slightest hint of it, not even a whisper of tuna. I don’t know what it tasted of – not a lot, really – but it meant that both the main ingredients of vitello tonnato were missing, replaced with things that were damage not homage. And then there was a big pile of salad, because this starter cost fifteen pounds and they had to find ways to distract a paying customer from realising that this wasn’t in any way what they had ordered.

Ordering a salad by mistake seemed to be quite an Oxford thing: I was reminded of a similar incident at Branca when I went there earlier in the year. I didn’t mind that then, because my stealth salad at Branca was still an excellent dish. This, not so much. If it had been called “venison salad with tonnato dressing”, while not 100% accurate, I’d have had fewer quibbles. Of course, if it had been called that I’d have ordered something else.

The problem is that not only is stealth salad seemingly an Oxford thing, it’s also – to paraphrase Dr Dre – a Gees thing. Jerry’s soft shell crab with saffron aioli was nice enough, but you get an idea even from the picture below of how diddy it was. Again, salad appeared mainly to be there to fill negative space, a kind of gastronomic find the lady deception. A different salad to that accompanying my starter, with shaved fennel and olive oil. Again, not mentioned on the menu but, in truth, a large part of proceedings. Jerry gave me a forkful of his crab. There was so little that I felt guilty taking it.

Jerry is on some kind of medication that reduces his appetite (although, gladly, not where booze is concerned). He quite enjoyed this, but I think you’d have to be on that medication to find it enough. And Jerry’s drug regime came in even handier with his main course: butterflied sardines, which apparently came with tomato, sumac pickled onions and chermoula.

I try not to talk about value much in restaurant reviews these days: things cost what they cost, and restaurants need to make money. So for me to mention it, pricing has to verge on the egregious and, at twenty-two pounds, that’s why I’m bringing it up here. Here they are in their glory, all five of them. This, to me, looks like a starter. Is that all there is? you might ask. Where’s the tomato?

Well have no fear, because this dish – the generosity never starts – came with tomatoes and radicchio. Rocket, too, to match the rocket dumped in the centre of the Maltese Cross of disappointment that was those sardines. Double rocket, the treat nobody ever asked for: still, it beats pea shoots, I suppose. Why did the menu not mention that this was yet another salad? Was Gees just a glorified salad bar, and nobody had told us? Was it north Oxford’s upmarket tribute to Harvester, Gregg Wallace’s favourite restaurant? It was a puzzle and no mistake.

Yet I couldn’t help feeling that really we had just ordered exceptionally badly, because the dishes arriving at other tables looked more like actual food. A tall, substantial burger was brought to one of our neighbours, with a decent-looking portion of chips. Lamb cutlets piled high on a plate were put in front of the chap next to him, although in fairness they were on top of some little gem lettuce and peas. See? Another salad.

My main gave Gees one last chance to dish up something more convincing. And I’ll say this for my chicken cacciatore: it was not a salad. But it wasn’t great either. The pool of stretchy polenta was pleasant enough: I would probably always choose mash over polenta, but the menu clearly advertised it, so I couldn’t complain. And I did really love the sauce my chicken came in: rich with tomato, sharp with capers, studded with judiciously-cooked carrots and celery, a vegetable I always think is underrated in this context.

The chicken was the problem. I’m really partial to chicken thighs on the bone, but you have to achieve one of two things and ideally both. A crispy skin, if you can get that right, is a truly wondrous thing. But I would pass on that if the chicken is so well cooked that it flees the bone at speed, and breaks into strands. That’s when chicken thighs become properly magical. If Gees had achieved that the chicken, with that sauce and some of the polenta (if you must) would have made for splendid mouthful after splendid mouthful.

But to get both of those wrong, to have flaccid skin and firm, almost rubbery meat that needed to be prized away from the bone? That’s really not great. And to charge twenty-eight pounds for two undercooked chicken thighs that weren’t fit to grace the sauce they came in? Cheeky doesn’t even come close.

No side dish could rescue this sorry affair, though in Gees’ defence their braised leeks in feta and dill, served warm, were delightful. I’m no fan of dill, generally, yet I loved this dish and at six pounds it was better, and better value, than nearly anything else we ate. About the same size as those sardines too, come to think of it. It was a beautiful lipstick – applied to a pig, yes, but a beautiful lipstick nonetheless.

Would you have stayed for dessert? We nearly didn’t but felt like we had to see it through, like a disappointing box set. To Gees’ credit I asked who they bought their ice cream from and was told they made it in house. That probably swung it, and Jerry was delighted with his affogato, served with Pedro Ximenez.

I mean, again, if I’m being a stickler (which I am), if you swap the espresso for PX then what you have might be lovely but it’s no longer an affogato, just as the negroni wasn’t a negroni, the tonnato not a tonnato. Gees seemed to have taken Lewis Carroll, another Oxford type, very seriously when he wrote in Through The Looking Glass that “When I choose a word, it means just what I choose it to mean”. Words, salad, word salad: it was all the same to Gees. Let’s call the whole thing off.

To close on a damp squib of faint praise, Gees’ ice cream is pleasant stuff. I tried vanilla and chocolate – don’t expect any leftfield flavours – and both were very good. Smooth, no ice crystals, plenty of specks in the vanilla and an excellent balanced depth in the chocolate. Two scoops for eight pounds didn’t feel like highway robbery, although it made the nine quid Gees charged for Jerry’s single scoop with a slug of Pedro Ximenez seem decidedly impudent.

What else is there to say? The whole meal, service included, came to two hundred pounds between the two of us, including an optional 13.5% service charge. The cognitive dissonance is strong in this one, because I had a lovely time and the best of company, the room is hard to fault and the service is excellent. You almost enter some kind of trance where despite the preponderance of foliage on the plate and the underwhelming nature of so much of what you eat, you still have a very nice time.

It was, food aside, as enjoyable a lunch as I’ve had this year. Just think how much of a riot we’d have had if the food was at the standard of somewhere like Upstairs At Landrace, a restaurant considerably more reasonably priced than Gees! And there’s the elephant in the conservatory, the question of cost and value. Because when the bill arrives the spell is broken, and you think about what a hundred pounds could buy you anywhere else.

I have to hand it to Gees because they are very popular and an awful lot of people have become very taken with the place. But unless we ordered very poorly, I do have to ask myself: how on earth did Gees manage that? I’m starting to feel bad for Jerry because whenever he comes out with me on duty, however nice a time we have, the food seems to be pricey and middling. Take Zia Lucia, or Storia in Maidenhead: the poor guy can’t catch a break. I will have to think much more carefully about our next meal out, because Jerry deserves some food as brilliant as he is.

To make amends, after we finished our lunch I took Jerry to the Rose & Crown on North Parade, my very favourite Oxford pub. We sat in the back room and polished off a couple of pints, and I told him how I used to drink there thirty years ago, and how it almost felt like it hadn’t changed a bit. A lovely international group – three French, one Slovenian – perched on the end of our table and we ended up in conversation about all sorts of things: the English; Brexit (always Brexit); where to eat in Montpellier; Oxford’s best restaurants, you name it. None of them mentioned Gees in that context, and I can’t say I blame them.

It was only later that I realised that the Rose & Crown, like Gees, has been under the same management since the Eighties, which means that those first drinks I had there, fresh out of university, were under the same landlords looking after me and my very good friend over thirty years later. That gave me a warm feeling in a way that nothing I ate that day managed, however lovely Gees seemed on paper. Forty years, whatever way you look at it, is one hell of an achievement, even in a city which has a track record of keeping establishments alive for many, many centuries. I am glad there are still institutions like Gees and the Rose & Crown in Oxford. But when I go back, only one of them is on my list for a return visit.

Gees – 6.5
61-63 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PE
01865 553540

https://www.geesrestaurant.co.uk

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