Just a quick post to say that if you ever get the chance to eat Rowley Leigh’s food make sure you have his parmesan custard and anchovy toast. It is out of this world…
In fact it was so good I have even dreamt about it and think I might be adicted. Get me a cab immediately to Le Cafe Anglais!
More on Taste of London to come…
Food at Ditto is half price when you use a TasteLondon card. So we made the most of it and chose scallops and beef carpaccio followed unanimously by lobster spaghetti. Awesome.
Sorry I am afraid the lobster isn’t available…
Well why print it on your daily menu then? Unless of course your menu isn’t daily even though that’s its title!
They promised so much and got our hopes up and then dashed them out of hand. You might think this is overdoing it a bit. But the last time I had lobster spaghetti was at the George in Stamford when I pretty much fell in love with it! To then get within inches of having it again and then be denied it was hard to take. I’ll just have to wait till I’m on the Italian Riviera sipping chilled white wine and looking out at my yacht to do it properly.
Scallops came with grilled prawns and an avocado dressing. It looked and tasted pretty but was neither hot nor cold and was fairly wimpy on the flavour front. Big plates and lots of swishes and dabs of sauce. Very Turner prize.
With the lobster spaghetti debacle behind us, I chose pork belly with white beans and a dark sauce which is firmly ensconced now as my default choice. If it’s on the menu I will struggle not to order it and normally fail. It takes something exciting like lobster to trump it!
The pork was partly delicious partly disappointing. It struck me that it had been badly reheated. Dried out patches clashed with moist bits. The beans were both perfectly soft and also dried out. The sauce was a bit unidentifiable. My memory of it is that it was dark brown with a hint of sweetness. The best bit was the side order of garlic spinach.
Gilly’s rump of lamb was generous and sweet. Really impressive. Whilst Cowie’s tuna was pink and tasty. Very light and sexy. Very Cowie.
It’s a very cool little restaurant with a variety of special offers. Tuesday is ladies’ night – 25% off if you’re a bird. They’ve got a projector and screen and art all over the walls. On a Tuesday night it was a third full and we enjoyed being allowed to linger of our meal. Whilst slurping our coffees we imagined what it would be like to enlarge the bar area and make the dining room more intimate. But who were we to offer design ideas!
We’ll probably return at some point but only because it’s local and half price! There are too many other places to try out.
Anna organised for a group of 6 of us to go ice skating at the idyllic Somerset House last night. I was a bit nervous about ice skating having only done it once when I was 5 on some crappy plastic ice rink at Ally Pally. We thought it would be a good idea to go for dinner before hand and use our TasteLondon card to get some money off.
Cowie chose the Essex Serpent in Covent Garden having put Wahaca and Waggamma to one side. A decision we’d all regret later! We had wanted to go to an authentic pub to have some good olde worlde winter grub.
I arrived far too early having pitched up after Lulu’s leaving lunch/drinks. I killed half an hour or so by walking around the fantastic winter night market that’s been set up around Covent Garden. It’s basically all the stalls from Exmouth and Borough Market but with a few extras such as a mushroom man, a Ghanaian stall and a bloke who just makes crepes.
When everyone arrived we all made our way upstair and inspected the “locally sourced, British, seasonal menu”. A few things stood out that we should have taken more heed of.
Summer salads
Red snapper from somewhere a long way away
Mussels with churico (sic)
Ah… in hindsight we should have cut and run right there and then. There is nothing seasonal about a summer salad unless you’re there in July. There’s nothing local about red snapper unless you are lucky enought to love in the Tropics. And there is something very disconcerting about things spelt wrong on a menu. Unless of course it was the Potrugese version of chorizo in which case that’s fine. But the waiter told us it was Spanish.
I was an idiot and chose the mussels. Quite why I decdied to go for the most deadly thing on a worrying menu is beyond me. Luckily I’ve got away with it from a medical point of view. They were supposed to come with a garlic and white wine sauce but it tasted more like the dirty gutter water that my cat drinks when he’s feeling ill. Horrid!
The girls had langoustine which looked like they had been frozen as they oozed their shell water over the plate. The only half respectable starter was an assortment of meats with warm baguette. But then again the baguettes were decidedly dicey warmed cattering pack type things. It wasn’t getting any better!
Things went for bad to worse as we waited an age for our main courses. Cowie went to ask how they were getting on a couple of times and pointed out that we didn’t have long before we had to leave for ice skating.
Then the horror course arrived.
My steak was not medium rare. It wasn’t even medium. Or even medium well. Somehow it was well done and cold! How did they manage it? And they had smothered the incinerated piece of meat with a gloopy mushroom sauce. All this rested on a bed of chips so chilly they needed a good dose of lemsip and a hot water bottle. Shocking.
Harreit’s tuna summer salad featured a slab of grey tuna that was so hard that it could have been used in Roman times as a writing tablet.
Nick had earlier said, “you can’t go wrong in a pub with a burger”. Sadly he was wrong. The waiter had to inspect the locally sourced focaccia bun to see if they had actually put the burger inside it. The sight of the charred blob of beef was a welcome sight!
Anna’s sausage and mash was OK. Not sure you screw that one up really!
Cowie stormed off to pay the bill and get our 2 for 1 discount on the meals which were reluctant to pay for in the first place. I looked over to see Cowie glaring at our cheerful, but inept waiter arguing about the fact that our card show allow the whole meal to be priced at 2 for 1. That’s what the TasteLondon website says anyway. We landed up paying almost full price for everything and being British were far too reserved to kick up too much of a fuss!
So we agreed we’d slope off and write it up in full on the blog and as many suitable websites as possible. The Essex Serpent serves very bad food and is less than honest when it comes to their partnership with TasteLondon. They turned what should have been a great pre Christmas meal into an embarrassment. Cowie felt awful for having organised the meal. Exactly the opposite of how it should be. It also reflects very badly on TasteLondon. Cowie rang them up to complain and they said they would speak to the director of Essex Serpent.
Essex Serpent. Good riddance. It makes you appreciate how good all the other restaurants we’ve been to this year.
Here’s a picture of it so if you see it you know not to go in there.
Tentazioni is tucked away in deepest darkest Bermondsey and is well worth the walk along puddle strewn streets. Cowie and I were going to whistle up to Manchester to dine at Juniper, but thrift got the better of us. So in the grand scheme of things a visit to SE1 is hardly a million miles away.
We used our Taste London card which meant we got our food in BOGOF format. We would never have come to Tentazioni if it wasn’t on special offer.
I guess they aren’t on the beaten track so they need to entice people away from the familiarity and safety of the West End to pay them a visit. Which is exactly how they got us to come here.
It’s a charming, modern space with staff who are eager to help, with walls decked out in red, passionate art. It’s got a really intimate feel that lends itself to romantic evenings.
We were seated upstairs away from the ghastly Christmas music. I wonder what the people downstairs had done to deserve being subjected to Slade and Cliff Richard all night…. they even had the nerve to have their special Christmas CD on sale!
Whilst Cowie nipped off to the loo, I ordered a couple of Belinis to get us in the mood. They were beautifully sweet and reminded me of Dad’s pre Christmas cocktails that normally send us all into oblivion. A distinguished neighbour of ours once had to leave early in a fit of outrageous drunkenness and opened his umbrella in our kitchen and fell over backwards into all the champagne glasses! Smash!
We demolished two bowls of salty, deep olives whilst decoding the Italian menu. So often you think of Italian food as being salads, pizzas, pasta and tiramisu. But the only pasta you could find on the menu was the occassional reference to “open ravioli” or “al forno”. It reminded us massively of our trip to Croatia earlier this year.
Cowie’s langouistine and cougete salad with a seafood dressing was like a work of edible art. The langoustine was sweet and super soft. And the cougette actually tasted of something… which is unusual. They’re normally all soft and msuhy.
My carpaccio of beef was sensational. Deep red. Just like the artist’s pigment it was named afterwards. Here’s the story of it’s origins from Wikipedia which I bored/wowed Cowie with over dinner:
“According to Arrigo Cipriani, the present-day owner of Harry’s Bar, the Carpaccio was invented at Harry’s Bar in Venice, where it was first served to the countess Amalia Nani Mocenigo in 1950 when she informed the bar’s owner that her doctor had recommended she eat only raw meat.[citation needed] It consisted of thin slices of raw beef dressed with a mustard sauce. The dish was named Carpaccio by Giuseppe Cipriani, the bar’s former owner, in reference to the Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio, because the colours of the dish reminded him of paintings by Carpaccio.”
Vittore Carpaccio. Healing of a Madman. 1494
It was juicy and as tender as a the stems of that expensive brocoli when you’ve steamed it for too long. Combined with griddled aubergine, cougette and a big poached egg sized blog of deep tasting mozerella it was the perfect way to start our meal.
Already feeling quite full we were glad that we were given time to linger over our wine before the next course arrived. I had a fit of experimentaion whilst ordering and went for tempura pheasant which was moist and crispy with a delicious garlic sauce and some flaps of buckwheat open ravioli which added a great slipperiness to contrast with the crispy tempura. I loved it to bits and at this point was on the brink of cardiac arrest!
Cowie’s navarin of venison came with crispy polenta croquetas and a deep bacony red sauce that was the very essence of autumn comfort, in the same way that Hagen Daz is the way that hormonal girls feel normal again. The meat was tender and the sauce had that Ramsay sheen. Glossy, tasty and so, so tasty.
Our side order of green beens with thinly sliced shallots, controversially, were probably the star of a very sparlky show. They were drizzled in olive oil and bolstered by a good hit of garlic. Oddly, for us we ordered some chips, which we certainly didn’t need. Which is what the staff must have thought because they never arrived!
We didn’t need pudding, but becauase I wanted to give the white chocolate tart a go, we had the second one free anyway. So Cowie had a brilliant collection of sorbets: lemon, passionfruit and blackcurrant. They were far better than my sluggish white chocolate tart. But that’s my fault for ordering the wrong thing.
Things got even better once we had paid the half price bill… our charming waiter gave us a Christmas present of fresh Tentazioni pasta and a jar of their mushroom sauce. What brilliant service. I cooked it for lunch today and was transported straight back to SE1!
Don’t be put off by the Bermondsey address. Give this place a try. With the Taste London BOGOF deal can you afford not to?
Cowie, Edwin, Anna and I went off to Ooze last night for a long overdue catch up over a half price dinner courtesy of my Taste London card. Cowie and I have been looking forward to trying Ooze out for quite a while. I’ve driven past it quite a few times in a taxi on my way to Charlotte Street and always wonder what it’s like. Reviews have been mixed. I remember Jay Rayner went mental about how awful the All Day Breakfast risotto was:
The Observer, 12 November
Jay Rayner does not enjoy the unfortunately named risotto restaurant Ooze, in Goodge Street, London
“If only there had been a straight up saffron risotto on the menu, or one with wild mushrooms and nothing else. Instead, everything is overworked, and the risottos – priced from £8 to £10 – become less a medium than a base. The wild mushroom risotto comes inexplicably with cherry tomatoes. There’s sea bass risotto with more cherry tomatoes, olives and basil. Or there’s the one I tried (so you wouldn’t have to), the all-day breakfast risotto: loose and watery (rather than creamy) rice, mined with fatty chunks of undercooked pancetta, two small Spanish sausages on top, and piled off to the side, a heap of warmed but not cooked cherry tomatoes. Buried inside was a poached egg which, when split, only added to the wateriness. (Meal for two, including wine and service, £60).”
Given the disappointing review above I was intrigued to see if they had changed their menu and responded to the problems mentioned by concentrating on the classics and not getting carried away with crazy concoctions.
It’s safe to say that they have. My porcini risotto was exceptionally good. Full of mmushroomy depth… although would have been nice if it had been made with un-reconstituted mushrooms as the dried ones seem to make me fart a lot! Anna’s Milanese was delicious. Full of safron and tasting slightly of lemon to match its sharp yellow colouring.
Mains were good too. Our tuna was beautifully raw in the middle and charred on the outside. Just how we like it. But my beans were a bit undercooked and chalky which was a shame. Anna’s lamb chump looked delicious too.
We thought we’d make the most of the half price menu so tucked into delicious deserts. Anna’s baked Alaska looked impressive and Cowie’s crumbled was extremely good too. But neither were any where near as good as the chocolate fondant that Edwin and I tucked into. This was true ooze. Chocolate spreading out from the centre and smothering my plate. You know when you’ve had a good pudding because you wolf it down and then hear from Cowie, “I didn’t want to try it anyway!”…. roughly translated as “how dare you eat it all… I’ve got food envy.”
Here’s our comment card for a slightly shorer review. Well done Ooze. Bloody good risotto. But would love to see some proper mushrooms in the risotto and a slightly more interesting range. Also, could be worth exploring quinoa and kemut grain risottos too for all those people trying to get lower GI carbs into their diets. Maybe they’ll put something on their Ooze blog about it. I’m impresed by their use of blogging as a way of keeping their business in perpetual beta.
Cowie and I are very keen to test Ooze out for lunch, especially as it’s half price with TasteLondon and near work. It’s a bit like a risotto focussed version of Flash Flash in Barcelona.
It’s interesting to see that their website also has a link to their blog which charts the way that the enterprise has evolved from a dream into the start of an exciting business.
More when it happens
The Paunch 
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