PETA in Borough Market

Picking up a flat white from Monmouth Coffee this morning I was greeted by a gaggle of photographers and this rather cougar-ish lady covered in lettuce. Not something you see everyday. I was even more amused by the guy from Brindisa who gatecrashed the photo op whilst holding up a rather impressive leg of cured ham to much whooping and hollering from the baristas in Monmouth. Bizzare food moment of the month.

Bocca di Lupo, Archer Street

One of my favourite places to eat in the world is the front bar at Cal Peps in Barcelona. Twelve or so bar stools along the brown marbled topped bar and an endless parade of the best food in the city. My last trip ended with two stunning meals in the restaurant and it's served as a benchmark for similar set-ups every since. I love its democratic sensibility, you arrive, you queue up enjoying a fino or two and when a seat comes up you eat. Given Barcelona's place in the history of Spain it feels somehow very correct that you can eat some of the best food in the city simply by turning up and waiting your turn. Barrafina on Frith Street, which is a near carbon copy of Pep's is equally egalitarian but we Londoners aren't nearly as patient and you can feel the hot needles boring into your back from people waiting to take your place and whilst the food is entirely competent, I always begrudge the cost and the clientele can grate at such close quarters.

Sitting at the bar in Bocca di Lupo I found myself cursing quietly. See, I’d planned this post rather meticulously. Restaurants where you eat at the bar are better when they are democratic and freed from the tyranny of the booking sheet. Eating at the bar alongside your fellow diners felt proper if you had waited your turn, queued with the self same fellow diners, rich man, poor man, beggar man and thief. Unfortunately, I was wrong. I fell in love somewhat with Bocca di Lupo and I’d booked my table a week ahead of time. Hence the cursing. Maybe I should go wait in the line at Polpo in Soho for an hour to rescue the post, I thought.

I didn’t as my Negroni arrived.  Its bitter medicinal sweetness working alongside probably the best olives I’ve eaten in London. For those that don’t know Bocca di Lupo does regional Italian in small tasting plates or massive tasting plates (also known as main courses) depending on your mood. In the spirit of democracy that this meal started with we opted to try something from every section of the generous menu.

Lamb prosciutto, sliced wafer thin on the Cadillac of slicers pictured above, with pecorino sardo and a few raw broad beans set the pace with a simple elegance and home spun feel as we picked the beans from the pod ourselves. Roman fritti pitched up next, two perfect olives stuffed with minced pork and veal and two deep fried bocconcini, tender, moist and messy. Things eased off the throttle a little with a frittata of spaghetti & parmesan which was too heavy a load alongside the simplicity of the other dishes.

A second wave of dishes included clams with cannellini beans, tomato & basil which was spicy and warming and, as far as I was concerned the star of the show, a pot-roasted escarole endive stuffed with pine nuts, raisins & anchovy which was achingly tender; the bitterness of the endive pitch perfect against the salty sweetness of the stuffing. A big friendly childish chocolate filled donut brought the proceedings to a sugary high and all that was left was to pay the ferociously reasonable bill and fall off the bar stools into the warm clutch of the elitist, bourgeois, leather clad interior of the waiting taxi.

The Ginger Fox, Albourne, East Sussex

The Gingerman group of restaurants in and around Brighton are fast becoming the go to guys for gastro pub dining in East Sussex. With three sites; Gingerman, The Ginger Fox and The Ginger Pig and a fourth on the way in Kemp Town, nominally called The Ginger Dog, owners Ben and Pamela Mckellar are creating something of an empire on the south coast. I ate at the now defunct Gingerman at Drakes a couple of years ago and so when dinner was touted at The Ginger Fox in Albourne some 30 miles from Brighton, I jumped over a lazy cow. Or something to that effect.

We were dining at the restaurant almost two years to the day since it had opened. Plenty of time to bed in then, though despite this, its location bamboozled the taxi driver and we spent about 30 minutes racing down dark country lanes, past ominous isolated gleaming white buildings called things like Exosoft. “That’s where the Apocalypse begins”, intoned a fellow diner from the back of the cab as we sped past one particularly  secure looking example.  Luckily, all thoughts of a viral zombie outbreak were diminished upon arriving at the rather lovely thatched building that houses the pub and restaurant.

The Ginger Fox has managed to retain a sense of itself as a country pub whilst shaking off the more fusty excesses of its ilk. It's a pretty space and the staff relaxed and welcoming. No Slaughtered Lamb glass eyed locals to scare off the city folks. Pity.

A starter of mushrooms on toast with a poached ducks egg signalled confidence in the kitchen and was simplicity itself. A main of lemon sole with potato and Parma ham pancakes was a cosy, motherly hug of a dish. Like slipping into brushed cotton sheets with a hot water bottle. Mango and pineapple trifle finished everything up nicely, a happy homely treat with a jag of old fashioned exoticism. Not everything served up was quite as reassuring. A vegetarian platter looked decidedly confused, not surprising as the restaurant has something of a reputation for discerning carnivores.

No alarms, no surprises. Just confident good British cooking served with a smile out in the country. Probably something of a rarity, now that I think about it.

N.B. I didn't take a camera to the restaurant so I used a picture taken in my garden last year. Of a fox.

Caravan, Exmouth Market

Eating at Caravan was something very like living in a caravan, I imagine. Cold, crowded and dimly lit with constant noisy interruptions. Not that I’ve ever actually been inside a caravan, except for a very large RV in the US which doesn’t really count as it had a garage in it and I got lost looking for the toilets.

Caravan is something of an anomaly. On one hand there’s an impeccable pedigree with Miles Kirby, who was chef at The Providores & Tapa Room in Marylebone for the last six years, in charge. They roast their own coffee, they have some excellent baristas and from all accounts they serve an excellent brunch.  On paper this should be a winner. In reality, in the hurly burly of a Saturday night it had trouble fighting it’s way out a paper bag.

The food is as you’d expect, an Antipodean jag of small sharing plates based around 5 or 6 for two people with clean simple modern flavours. Sort of.  Salt beef fritters were warming but oddly flavourless. Wontons filled with cheese and peas, whilst harking to some classic comedy were not great. A mutton chop was lovely but microscopic; a mackerel dish almost saved the day, two simple little fillets that were stunning and the crowning glory, a great little dish of salt and pepper squid, reminding me of a similar dish at that Balmain in Sydney stalwart, Blue Ginger. Dessert was unassuming and the espresso great.

Being seated by the massive windows was a chilling experience, whilst I’m sure they’ll be lovely when it’s hot and they can throw them open, it was not pleasant with a chill wind blowing. Service was oddly over attentive, we got asked at last six or seven times if everything was fine, which whilst sweet at first got old and annoying fast. Oddly, three people from a large adjoining table decided they would stand next to our table and have a conversation. It was a perfectly civil conversation but they were standing with their backs to us and so their bottoms were at head height for about 20 minutes. It made it tricky to get the waiters attention. Particularly odd behavior as the bar was a couple of paces away and largely empty.

I can see that Caravan would be a hit with the Exmouth Market trendoid brigade and can imagine myself enjoying brunch with an impeccably made flat white in the sunshine of a summery Saturday. In the chill of winter it’s Antipodean charm doesn’t shine through.

Exchange Coffee, Lewisham

I popped along to Exchange Coffee in Lewisham Market this Saturday to taste yet another award winning coffee. Neil Le Bihan took the London Barista Championship heats a few weeks ago and finished an admirable third in the UK finals. Kudos to him. Good to see places based in the badlands of SE London take on the more fashionable parts of London and come out on top.

The Table, Southwark Steet, SE1

I appear to have had some sort of mental and visual impairment when it comes to The Table. It's been one of those lunchtime spots that I'd always meant to look out for and for a couple of years every time I looked at the Time Out cheap eats section I'd remind myself to go. When I finally mustered the energy I was astounded to find that it was where it was. I'd been staring at the place eating Tortilla burritos for months and never twigged. The burritos aren’t THAT good so I probably need an eye test.

First off, a bit of a gripe about communal tables. It's all very 1998 and frankly, bloody annoying. One of a party of prattling drama therapists stole my flat white and someone was conducting an interview with an enormous laptop to my left. Listening to someone sell themselves is a bit like hearing them talk dirty, embarrassing and should never be done over a sausage casserole. It's odd, since in some places it seems to work rather well. Noodle bars and the like seem to be able to seat people happily in rows. Slurping noodles and accidently pinging dim sum into a strangers lap is a perfectly acceptable way to eat. At lunchtime over a sarnie and a coffee, it feels like an intrusion. Also, the staff got a bit confused as they thought as I was sitting NEXT to someone I must surely know them and indeed, pay for their coffee.

That said, I rather like it. It's cheerful place, full of clean lines and simple food. The lunchtime wrapped sandwiches are a nice way to grab a quick bite and the mains are hearty and well made.  Rotating specials and a regular pasta dish make for a satisfying lunchtime if you leave it a bit later and avoid the crowds. It's become my local late lunch spot of choice, though I will occasionally revert back to stuffing a shredded pork burrito into my face when duty calls.

What's a pizza mean?

Pizza has been a dominant theme of late at Jamfaced HQ. A recent trip to Franco Manca in Brixton Market resulted in a frankly garbled post on how authentic the experience had been. Last week's trip to Pizza Metro Pizza on Battersea Rise revisited the notion of a perfectly authentic pizza experience in London. The meals have served as culinary bookends to a little personal journey of discovery regarding this most popular of global fast foods. That fact, that pizza is the planet's favourite junk food is at odds with most of its modern history and its story is a lovely illustration of the fact that we love a creation myth with our dinner.

Pick up a rock, better still, an amphora or handy urn and throw it in the general direction of the Mediterranean and chances are you'll bounce it off the head of a culture that ate something akin to pizza in its ancient history. From the Middle East to North Africa and Greece into the Roman Empire via the Etruscans and onto the Persians and Turks we've been happily topping fast cooked leavened bread with all manner of cheeses, herbs and meats for a couple of thousand years and calling it something a bit like pizza, pide, pitta, petta or pizzette. Do any sort of reading around the subject and pretty much everyone in Europe say they invented it. Even the Scots. However, it's safe to say that pizza in its modern form is from Naples and like so much in Italian life is a result of urban poverty, dodgy politics and the Italians unique capacity for divisiveness.

Italians are, as far as I can tell, the most fastidious eaters in the world. The slightest infraction of any one of a myriad of gastronomic rules results in a crinkled nose and palpable disgust. Of course, the irony is that no two Italians would ever agree on what those rules were. Italy is only a real place when viewed from afar. It took mass immigration to the US to truly define what Italy meant. Nobody back on the peninsula seems to have taken the Risorgimento and unification of the country as anything other than another way of gathering taxes until Italians in the US started telling them otherwise. It comes as no surprise then that for most of pizzas history in the overcrowded, cholera ridden Naples of its birth it was viewed with snobbish disgust as food only fit for the poorest of the poor, people too poor even to eat macaroni. Even the hoary old tale of how the Margherita pizza won its name in an aristocratic version of Masterchef has been spun. The actual letter from the palace on display at the Pizzeria Brandi detailing how the pizza was "found to be delicious" is from some powdered kitchen flunkey, not Queen Margherita and reeks of a sneering derision.

How did it conquer the world? The story goes that homeward bound GI's having fought in Italy brought back a love of the pizza pie and sought out pizzerias amongst the large immigrant Italian communities. London's first restaurant with a pizza on the menu seems to have been Olivelli's on Store Street which opened in 1934. I'd be interested if anyone can confirm this web gleaned fact or offer an alternative. The sole pizza Margherita on the menu may well represent the first time a pizza was eaten in a fashionable London restaurant, though I don't imagine that people weren't selling it and eating it amongst the 10,000 Italians living and working in London at the time.

Pizza is city food. It was codified in a city, transported toother cities where it spread and evolved and it's in cities that it has found its truest expression. Fast, portable food that can be shared. The Italian's, in their way, have codified it further, tried to capture what a pizza means through a protected designation and hoops to jump through for the sake of authenticity. Whilst  it's good to know that they are looking to preserve something that was once so maligned, it's all a bit silly and the result often not what any sane person would think of as a pizza; sloppy, charred and thin. Tasty, but a struggle to eat quickly enough. I for one think pizza has found its spiritual home in the big cities of the East Coast, particularly in the five boroughs. I can't really think of anywhere else in the world that pizza makes so much sense.

Creation myths are important for religions, superheroes and dishes. Like all myths they tell us a great deal about how we would like to see the universe. The stories behind food often tell us more about our own aspirations and hopes than the truth of their origins. Pizza, the most urban of meals harks to something more bucolic; freshly baked bread, tomatoes off the vine and freshly made cheese, a channelling of a olive groves and lemon trees, of soft summer sun and sun flowers waving in the breeze.

Rose Gray: 1939 - 2010

I first ate in the River cafe in 1994 or so and was a irregular regular there for much of the nineties. The place made a big impression on me during those formative years and I was an enthusistic collector of the cookbooks.  It was one of those restaurants that stays with you and in some small way one of the reasons why this blog came to be.