Koffman’s at The Berkeley

Dining at Koffman’s is a bit like eating in the ante-chamber of a giant billiards room in a London gent’s townhouse (because I’d know all about that, you see). The edgy feeling that behind one of the doors, is a bustling, incredibly fun dining establishment bursting with vim, vigour and gluttonous diners throwing claret down their gullets by the carafe-load.

The entrance is deflatingly unglam and the only part of the restaurant that looks vaguely like a French brasserie. You walk immediately past a hostess desk onto the upstairs of a split-level, dimly lit dining room, painted light taupe and off-white, all olive-green chairs and statement flower arrangements. It feels distinctively like the lobby of a grand, modern hotel. Not unattractive, by any means, but not quite the expected environment to be quaffing rustic French Gascon food – no matter how refined.

Calamars facon Bolognaise

The dining room unfortunately benefits from no natural light and the host who greeted us was as stiff as the linen we were eating off of. Charming, polite, overly attentive, with a gurning, somewhat creepy smile hinting at post-Ecstacy lockjaw. Our romantic table for two soon felt like a romantic table for five and any hope of psycho-analysing or verbally deconstructing the dishes between ourselves rapidly vanished as a team of waiters hovered around or stood dangerously near our patch pretending to rearrange little breads in baskets.

Stuffed Pig’s Trotter

But let’s not kid around, no one comes here for the gladioli centre pieces. Koffman is a living legend. his pigs trotter is constantly name-checked in every “Signature Dishes of the World” round-up article and ever since watching him make slivers of tagliatelle form a squid on Saturday Kitchen, I have been besotted.

The little breads – perfectly arranged – are rich and buttery in the French way, a small sourdough yeasty and beery, a brioche almost basting in honey flavours.

Pistachio Souffle

I began with the signature squid, calamars façon bolognaise, in which the tagliatelle is thinly sliced slivers of delicate squid coated lightly in a thick, rich, salty, juicy ragout of the tentacles and wings almost ground into a soft pulp with brandy and tomatoes. Three spoonfuls and my plate is clean, my belly is en-route to 50 Shades of Orgasm and I am staring hungrily at Mario’s dish of escargots, swimming in puddles of Normandy butter and topped with pungent bone marrow scoopings. I drink a luscious Sancerre Blanche Vignes Henri Bourgeois 2011 – which tastes of papaya and melons.

A complimentary dish of scallops – sliced into pancake-thin roundels and nestled around a slick of aromatic squid ink puree – and two glasses of bubbly are brought to the table as an apology for cocking up our booking. Apology accepted. What was bizarre was to back the apology up with a small basket of complimentary French fries, stodgy and over-salted, as a random after though. Unnecessary, a total departure from the menu and not even as good as MacDonalds… Why?

CHEESE TROLLEY!!!!

Mario has pig’s trotter for a main, a hulking hunk of a hoof, glossy and slicked with a jus gravy, stuffed with morrels and chicken mousseline, the dish as flavourful, indulgent and delicious as a bath of foie gras – a standout star on this already stellar menu. I make the wrong choice with the Duck a L’Orange – dry and chewy, it is also slightly overdone. Unforgiveable in an establishment such as this, and I wish on the spot to have stayed with the Tante Claire signature staples that made Koffman famous.

A Domaine Le Roc des Anges biodynamic Grenache, Carignan and Syrah 2011, with supple, silky and smoky body washes away any tears the duck might have left. As does the arrival of dessert time and my first whiff of the cheese trolley (it is my life’s mission to document the great cheese trolleys of the world. This one is small, but exquisitely stocked…)

Cognac Trolley

The pistachio souffle that emerges triumphantly from the kitchen like a luminous green puffy crown of eggy wonderfulness is a statuesque pudding of note. A quenelle of perfect pistachio ice-cream pokes its head from amidst the souffle like the Titanic rearing from the murky ocean. We gobble the lot in four seconds flat, missing the point entirely and looking as far removed from sophisticated French diners as possible.

Finally I get my hands on the cheese trolley, served by our host, who by this point appears to have mellowed almost as much as the stonking Brie I take a giant wedge of. I enjoy hazlenutty Comte and a Tome de Savoie, a smelly-as-teenage-boy-socks Munster and a bleu de brebis.

The Cognac trolley, where bottles of honeyed Armagnacs and fine liqueurs jostle eagerly for attention, loosens our jaws to the point where I am in danger of causing a scene, if only to liven up the gaggle of comatose middle-aged gastronomes surrounding us, mumbling into their soups and comparing natty ties and britches.

Thankfully the bill brings me back down to earth. Well into the £200 mark – and whilst this was a special occasion, I still feel I could have had equally as good a meal, in a more convincing and relaxing environment, for less.

Koffman’s at The Berkeley

Bocca di Lupo is a hard place to get a reservation in, even two years after opening. Saturday nights get booked a couple of months in advance, not helped by Antonio Carluccio declaring it his “favourite Italian in Soho” on the Good Food show a few weeks back.

It was, in fact, his appearance at the small marble-topped bar of Bocca di Lupo, slurping on sea urchins (deelish!) and linguine, that prompted me to seek out a revered stool at the bar myself. As luck would have it at 2.30 p.m. on a rainy, sleety, generally disgusting Saturday in climate-change-doomed Soho you can certainly find a spot right by the Chef’s prep area in this small, cosy dining establishment.

The menu is themed around a jolly jaunt across Italy’s regions, a reminder that until a few decades ago, this nation was utterly divided (and still to a certain degree is, with the notion of paese - one’s place of origin – still causing socio-political strife even from one village to the next in many rural parts of the country). Dishes crop up that are incredibly true to form, a feather-soft tripe with fragrant tomatoes and pecorino, alla Romana. Young artichokes, deep fried to a golden brown, alla giuda - in the Jewish fashion of Rome’s ghetto. Agretti with lemon, monksbeard barely steamed and served with nothing more than a drizzle of olive oil and a thick wedge of amalfi lemon, a dish as common as chips on a trattoria menu, but rare to see in London. Other elements are modern twists using classic, high quality Italian ingredients, but all are drawn from plates rooted in tradition and tied to their territory. The restaurant stands out for its ability to focus on simple elements, presented in a fuss-free way to maximise your enjoyment of their primary flavours.

Stand-out dishes were the pastiera napoletana, a cake redolent of orange blossoms and rich with fresh ricotta cheese, an stupidly simple dish of salted ricotta slices on a thick puree of fresh broadbeans and artichokes and the insanely decadent coffee with whipped egg yolk cream and toasted hazelnuts.

When summer finally arrives, take dessert at Gelupo across the road, the famed Soho gelateria (ice-cream shop) bursting with original and fantastic home made ice-cream by the same owners.

www.boccadilupo.com

Not for cage-dancing, this is a respectable establishment

We were taken here by friends of ours on our last trip to Portugal – a couple clearly aware of my recent metamorphosis into a middle-aged homewares shopaholic drawn to “Homes under the Hammer”-type design shows like addicts to crack. A vast stone house at its front, shaded by pines and softly lit by hidden garden lights, Al4uatro Italian interior design shop conceals – in a massive industrial greenhouse at its rear – Casavostra pizzeria, like an open plan Californian designer home, brimming with hungry families and smelling of baked oregano bread.The menu is blissfully simple. Pizzas and pastas, antipasti and salads. A smattering of desserts includes piping hot pizza dough stuffed with nutella, on which to gorge like a 4 year-old at a C-Beebies tea party. Sitting in the main atrium feels like attending a supper club in some lucky bugger’s million pound holiday house.

Warm yer cockles

You imagine there’s a host somewhere and we’re all invited to lounge by their massive fireplace at one end, or poke around their open plan kitchen at the other, we just never meet the host himself. As I pour myself a sparkling glass of rose sangria, I start mentally buying furniture for the upstairs gallery and wonder about catchment areas.

Rose sangria

Al4uatro – home deco shop

We eat rotolli of pizza dough stuffed with smoked salmon and asiago cheese. The white sangria flows pleasantly, the bubbles making us feel summery and carefree despite the February chill outside. My pasta with pesto is unremarkable, but comforting. The gargantuan crackling log fire in the adjacent, palm tree-festooned room has me lulling into a middle-class fantasy somewhere between “Sideways” and “A Place in the Sun”, I barely notice what I’m eating.

My future living room

Service was a tad disappointing, however, there’s enough activity around you, from families of 10 identical children modelling the latest Boden catalogue, to bemused waiters alternately waiting tables and posing ironically beside distressed furniture (is it for sale, or is it actually part of the restaurant?).

This is a haven for those who are tired of overpriced Algarve tourist-spot clams and chouriço. It also makes for a heavenly break from any over-eager Portuguese mothers with a meat-heavy feeding complex. In other words: Casavostra serves salad. Not exceptional, but highly recommended.

Casavostra: Avenida 5 de Outubro, nr 302 – Almancil, 8135-103  PORTUGAL

You’ll need (serves 2):

• 6-8 chicken wings
• 3 tablespoons of dark soy sauce
• 2 tablepoons of runny honey
• 2 tablespoons of olive or sunflower oil
• 1 teaspoon of ginger powder
• 3 cloves of crushed garlic
• 1 teaspoon of chilli flakes
• salt and pepper

How to:

Place the chicken wings in a tupperware you can cover. Season them with salt and pepper. Gather all the rest of the ingredients in a jar and shake vigorously, then pour the marinade over the chicken wings. Put the lid on the tupperware and shake to coat the wings evenly. Pop in the fridge to marinate for an hour or so.

Heat your grill until it is red hot, place the wings on a foil covered baking sheet and grill until slightly chargrilled and crispy, coating with the sauce at regular intervals.

Serve with a fresh green salad or grilled corn on the cob.

Maminha – “grilled booby!”

I am lucky enough to have an other half of Portuguese-South African descent. He also happens to be a hardcore foodie like myself, which inevitably means a dark and sticky end as the poster-couple on a freaky Panorama  docu-tragedy on “feeders”. Every once in a while we jaunt off to Portugal – Quarteira to be exact, in the Algarve – to be fattened up by his mother and make offerings to the Gods of boozy, gluttonous holidays at Bem Bom. Meaning “Very Good” (tongue-in-cheek understatement?) Bem Bom is a family-run rodizio and picanha restaurant doubling as a gushingly saliva-inducing Barbarian temple to skewered meats.

There is apparently a menu at Bom Bem, but so far I have ignored it in favour of others ordering for me, the hallowed rodizio. For those unfamiliar with the concept, it is a eat-all-you-can procession of grilled meats on skewers, carved in slivers directly onto your plate, with accompanying sides. The meat at Bom Bem seems produced in a silk butter factory; beef from Argentina, Portuguese chicken, fatty and velvety Porco preto (black pig).

For rodizio in London you’ll pay an eye-watering price for a lame approximation involving tough meat cuts and a “divided by body-type” pub wine menu. In debt-ridden, recession crippled Portugal, rodizio means €15 a head for a veritable “Carnival des Animaux”: Pork “breast” – maminha, picanha (rump cap of beef), tiny chicken hearts – salty, metalic and sublimely chewy, delicate ribs, fiery piri-piri sausages, plump, oozing fillet the colour of claret… on and on until you weep for the motherland… Plonk is rich, at once jammy and acidic and made by someone’s uncle on a Algarve hillside, served in a carafe and better than you dreamt.

Sides to the fatty, mouth-watering meats are char-grilled pineapple, fluffy rice, grilled plantain and farofa – a toasted manioc floury mixture that you sprinkle over my favourite : feijão preto of pungeant black beans stew.

If you suffer from the disease of “medium rare” – don’t come here. The entire affair is red, raw, bloody and carnal. And I must be nearing some kind of Valentine’s Day 50-shades of media overdose to even come up with crap like that, but trust me, Bem Bom is a vegetarian’s Hades.

For digestion, copious Cardhu single malt can be obtained. A rarity in an area where William Lawson is treated with the same sort of reverence eye-linerered Egyptian slaves once accorded Tutankhamun.

Expect a proper Portuguese vibe, with nary a tourist bar the odd, bewildered golf-player lost on their way to Quinta do Lago resort. Meat lovers. Get thee to Quarteira.

Bem Bom is 10 minutes drive from Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal.

Sunday brain teasers

I do have a soft spot for this quirky hotel brand where I have also overnighted. No fear of being the sad sack brunching alone and needing to play mobile Angry Birds for company here on a Sunday, the Mal Brasserie menu provides a nifty word search and Sudoku on its back page to entertain those enjoying oeufs-for-one.

A spread and a half. And a bit more…

Sunday Brunch is a new initiative at the Mal Brasserie – an eye-poppingly good value spread, with piggy delights galore gracing the Chef’s serving table and mains filling enough to make my post-Crimbo spare tyre look more like the Jeep it was meant to support. 3 courses in total for just £19.95 – and don’t think they have scrimped on the quality either.

Bloody Good Blood Mary

I began with a glossy, rich, soothing and saltily delicious wild mushroom soup, glistening with tiny pools of coppery truffle oil. This was the ideal balm to coat my gut region for the onslaught of pork-derived whoreing that ensued, a triple visit to the buffet table – venison scotch eggs, silky pork rillettes, salumi, coppa, iberico ham carved to order, pickled mushrooms, pickled beetroot, homemade piccalilly, a tranche of wood-smoked salmon, mackerel, tete de porc terrine, waffles to order, pancakes to order, eggs any way you want, a pungeant and feety tome de savoie being shaved into unctuous curls… I could go on, but to do so would impede me with a verbal hernia and thus cause this post to come to an abrupt end, without space to contemplate the burger beyond…

A Bloody Big Burger!

The burger, in fact, whilst perfectly fine, was less of a bang and a pop whizz than the Chef’s buffet. A decent, well-cooked, adequatly sized patty in a golden brioche bun that would be gloriously sized were it not for that fact that I was on my knees screaming for a doggy bag long before this came to the table. I do regret not having opted for the Huevos Rancheros, a particular favourite of mine… Choices, choices? I did say this was value for money….

Megga Eggs!

Finally, post-burger (and post an unremarkable, but again, decent fillet steak and frites) we came to dessert. Crepes Suzettes appealed for its retro chic inclusion on the menu. I had hopes for a flamboyant display of flaming Grand Marnier and lots of fiddling with copper pans and spoons at the table, but they came ready-made and minus the AA-mass exit-inducing whiff of alcoholic fug that usually accompanies them. But damnit, they were good. Very good. Thick, soft, bouncy, cushiony pancakes of sweet love, bathed in an orangey jammy juice and slathered in icing sugar. Sticky and joyfully reminiscent of playschool.

Singularly cosy…

A creme brûlée was pleasant, but I secretly just wanted to wash my face with the Crepes Suzettes a second time rather than order a different desert for the sake of variety.

I can’t recommend the excellent value of this brunch highly enough. Central London location, plush and cosy interior, welcoming and professional staff and a menu to pay smackdown to the heartiest of appetites, all within minutes of trendy Barbican and Farringdon – wherein to whet the artistic appetites, or simply retire for a post-lunch sing song at Karaoke Box in Smithfield…

Malmaison Clerkenwell
18-21 Charterhouse Square, London EC1M 6AH

Brunch available Sundays until 3 p.m.

3 courses – £19.95

Another winner of this year’s Time Out Eating and Drinking Awards, Boqueria is heavy on the Catalan tapas tradition, with reassuringly enthusiastic Catalan staff. Friday night saw it relatively quiet in the back and its clean white interior doesn’t ooze Spanish warmth but the sherry bar at the front of the restaurant was fizzing with happy couples gorging on fat garlicky olives, toasted almonds and no doubt sipping Boqueria’s Sherry of the Week, a nutty, creamy Guttierez Colosia Cream.

The ample menu is adventurous without breaking boundaries – therefore suitable to impress but not baffle. For the middle to low price range Boqueria caters for there are good, strong flavour combinations and well-sourced primary ingredients. We ordered chorizo alla sidra – pungeant, sweet and salty, although I couldn’t detect the subtlety of cider, a delightful, moreish dish of spinach with pine nuts, melted cheese and raisins and fat, juicy langostinos with garlic and parsley. The latter were excellent.

Espinacas alla crema con pinones

A bacalao con samfaina – a Catalan ratatouille – was well cooked and moist, but lacked a bit of punch in the vegetables. Suckling pig with parsnips and a citrus fresh lemon sorbet was far more appealing, with contrasting textures and each flavour and element well-defined. Iberian pork cheeks were good, well-seasoned and generous.

Desserts were delicious. We had a very traditional Crema Catalana which was lusciously creamy and silky. A three layered, triple chocolate tart was super-rich but didn’t feel cloying or heavy, with a crispy biscuit base.

Triple chocolate tart

All in all, Boqueria Tapas is a warm, friendly local tapas bar with chatty, charming staff and an authentic, interesting tapas selection. I wouldn’t travel across London for it, but it makes for a great local regular.

Big Boozer

This pared down, simply elegant Brixton boozer is a haven of craft ale perfection. The Crown and Anchor lifts an otherwise drab, depressing stretch of road to the status of “must visit” and now boasts a well-deserved Time Out Eating & Drinking Award. 

Sunday lunchtime here began with us being the only guests on a miserable day. Where were the hordes, I thought? It’s 12 on the dot! Only a week after awards day and minutes form lunchtime I expected queues around the block. Clearly, I was forgetting hangovers. Within an hour of sitting down to our first round of ales, the masses thundered in like the Guinness advert horses, craving hair of the dog and the ale pumps began chirping like singing kettles.

Three is the magic number!

Crawling into cosy nooks and around vast tables, they were here to sample some of the 7 cask ales and 14 keg ciders and real ales, umpteen bottles of Belgian, Hungarian, German, American and what have you beers and locally brewed labels such as Camden Town, Redemption, Brodie’s and Bogart to name a few…

We got intimate with a paddle – not quite Fifty Shades – this was a crafty way of serving mini tasters of three different ales, for the price of a pint. Alongside this, delicious, proper pub snacks – full of flavour and savouriness, filling, attractively served and just the right side of trendy. Arancini were golden and cripsy. Beer battered monkfish cheeks with saffron mayo were satisfyingly salty and moist. The German sausage platter does exactly what you want a German sausage to do and – well, I rarely bat down a decent cheeseboard.

Cheese, Gromit!

Better still, there are well chosen beer and ale pairings for each dish – that really work and aren’t just  on the menu for the gimmick. We’ll be returning soon for the Sunday lunch…

There’s nothing fishy about this kitchen!

Part of the delightful Llawnroc hotel in the pretty hamlet of Gorran Haven, South Cornwall, The Gwineas Bar & Bistro makes the most of the light, space and restfulness afforded by its wall of floor-to-ceiling windows and glorious sea view beyond.

Pork Belly Rissoles

The interior is simple and quite sparse – although hotel owner Jess tells me some new touches are to be added for the next season to bring winter warmth – but this does let the food sing for itself. And it’s singing a bloody great sea shanty of wonderfulness with a menu offering daily rotating fish and seafood dishes from local fishermen as well as local farm-sourced meats and poultry, and right now excellent game.

Gwineas Bar & Bistro

The specials menu changes daily and Friday – when we had our first of two dinners in the restaurant – is Steak and Fish night, where you can choose any three dishes from the menu for £19.95. The menu is decidedly British, but with an occasional European surprise enhancing the Cornish produce, such as chilli and white crab meat linguine or hazelnut gnocchi with Cornish blue leek gratin.

Scallopio divino!

We opted for Fowey mussels in St Austell clowdy yellow beer. Pleasantly ale-y well-seasoned sauce, meaty mussels and a generous hunk of rich, sourdough bread. I had smoked pork belly rissoles. The pork belly filling of the rissoles was rich and the breading super crunchy – my only fault was that as a starter it was huge, I felt full when my main arrived. A refreshing apple and celeriac salad on the side gave bite and crispness to contrast the pork.

A Mevagissey brill, delicately flakey and just cooked so the flesh retained lots of moisture came with a scent-heavy rosemary and orange butter. The quality of M’s steak was very high, although a medium-rare steak came a tad on the cooked side.

Cracking crackling!

Our dinner of Sunday began with the most moreish and indulgently fatty pork crackling ever, then was dominated by the pure joy of a dish of whopping scallops, booming with garlic butter, sweet fennel and zesty lemon – grilled to bubbly perfection. As starters I had picked Cornish fish stew, which lacked the sucker punch of an equivalent French bouillabaisse but still reflected a robust, lobstery flavour and had a lusciously soft texture.

Luscious lobster

The stew was followed by a proper lobster thermidor, sweet, not over-cheesed, served with a light salad which was the perfect accompaniment where often many places add a heavy vegetable side-side. A duck breast cooked pink and served with bitter cherries was full of flavour.

World’s Most Indulgent Pudding?

Dessert nearly killed us. In that “dear-god-knock-me-sideways-with-goo-puddingy-heaven-and-watch-me-depart-to-lala-land” kind of way. A gargantuan amalgamation of puffy cinnamon doughnuts, salted caramel ice cream and a pistachio mousse. Sublime!

Itinerant travelled with First Great Western and stayed at the Llawnroc Hotel.