Restaurants

I will probably never really appreciate wine the same way some other people do. There are now some excellent resources, like Josh’s Wine List, for people who want to be able to differentiate between different types of wine and figure out what they like, without spending a fortune. But I can never really detect much of a difference between a wine that costs £7 a bottle in a shop and a wine that costs £30, and I’d much rather try, say, an interesting sour beer anyway.

Because of this, The Laughing Heart on Hackney Road was never going to be as big a hit with me as it is with many people, particularly people in the restaurant trade. The wine list is long, and expensive – the cheapest bottles start at £30, but the majority cost between £45 and £70.

The menu, though, is fairly standard for a mid-market London restaurant these days, with a few Chinese influences on an otherwise solidly “modern British” selection. Small plates for sharing, divided roughly into what might count as snacks, starters, mains and desserts, as well as something called ‘Lost Souls in a Bowl’, a scallop dish our waiter told us was the head chef’s winning dish on the Great British Menu earlier this year (this season was pop music-themed – a little bit easier going than last year’s pious, manipulative NHS theme).

We skipped that but ordered all the snacks. The sourdough (£3.50) was dense and chewy but with a good, thick crust, and the cultured butter as good as any. Chicken liver pate (£6) was moussey, served with a crispy flatbread that didn’t get in the way of the flavours and a black garlic paste that added a subtle sweet taste.

Beef skewers with cep mushrooms were small for the £7 we paid. The beef was a little chewier than I’d have liked, but the mushrooms gave the same smokey, earthy flavour that I associate with shiitakes, and added something interesting to the flavour of the meat. 

The biggest misfire was the pig’s ear, trotter and cucumber salad (£7), which sounded terrific on paper. This was the Laughing Heart’s take on the Sichuanese smacked cucumber with garlic and chilli oil (or perhaps bang bang ji si) that I make for myself at home regularly, but had none of the punch or flavour of the original (as written by Fuchsia Dunlop) or of the version you can get at Silk Road in Camberwell. It was bland and boring, the pork adding very little except some texture, and at a minimum it needed a lot more seasoning (there is no salt provided on the tables).

The tagliolini (£11) was far better – served with flakes of gurnard flesh, olives and tomatoes, with fresh pasta that bounced in my mouth, it was a fresh and lighter take on puttanesca. The best thing, in fact, was the broth that it came in, which carried the flavours of the tomato and gurnard and which we drank the lot of.

Of the “mains”, Cornish cod served with coco de paimpol beans and runner beans in a mussel broth, was well assembled, with fish that was perfectly cooked to the point of translucence. Both beans worked well – the coco de paimpol were creamy and buttery, and the bits of runner bean added crunch and a grassiness that offset them well – although the broth was forgettable. Though the dish was made well, it was similar to dishes I’ve had a dozen times before, and it was too small to justify its £17 price tag.

The best dish was the mangalitsa pork neck, served with a salad of “white kimchi” and a plum puree (£17). The pork was just superb – served pink, with a caramelised rim, it reminded me of the best char siu pork I’ve had, with the silkiness and meatiness you can only get from mangalitsa pork.

To finish, we had an absurdly small creme brulee made with sichuan pepper (£6). This was creamy and rich, but the sichuan pepper flavouring was too gentle and ended up feeling like more of an afterthought or novelty than anything more. And really, it was tiny. How much can some custard and brown sugar really cost?

Our meal for two came to £127, all told, including a £35 bottle of wine. While it had some real highlights, and for about 25% less might have felt quite special, there were too many dull, small or just bland dishes to justify that kind of price tag. While I would recommend it to fans of wine or people who don’t worry too much about the portion-to-price ratio, and I might recommend to you if you were in the area, I cannot recommend it without these qualifications.

Rating: No medals.

Restaurant quality is pretty concentrated in a few places. If someone asks me where they ought to eat tonight in Soho or Shoreditch I have to ask them if they have any further restrictions to make it easier for me. If someone asks me where to eat in Kingston I’ve had a harder time, despite growing up there.

Part of this is my theory about expensive areas vs cheap areas: expensive areas tend to have nicer shops and pubs; cheaper areas tend to have better restaurants and bars. Perhaps well-heeled denizens of Hampstead or Greenwich prefer to entertain.

In any case, given that I harbour a fondness for the area I grew up in, and that I often find myself in the neighbourhood, I am always on the lookout for good new restaurants. If someone asked me where they ought to eat in Norbiton I would tell them the pub kitchen of The Black Horse – and if they don’t like pub food, then perhaps the Pizza Pilgrims van outside.

The menu is in line with what you might expect from the smart modern facade and light, airy interiors. It’s a modern gastropub with a broad modern British pub menu offering its take on the Scotch egg for a reasonable price.

My companion started with duck liver parfait, served in a jar with toast and red onion jam. He said it was good but I didn’t try it – as much as I try I can’t get myself to like liver, however it’s served.

I had the fishcake, which was technically a main. It was a hefty breaded and deep fried chunk of shredded white fish, dry, crisp and grease-free on the outside, and soft and delicate internally. It came with a runny-yolked poached egg, a tartar-esque sauce, and well-wilted greens. In a sense it’s simple food, but very difficult to do well – here it was comforting and homely.

I didn’t taste the steak and Guinness pie either, but my friend seemed happy: it was hearty and once again, pulling off something apparently simple and straightforward is no mean feat.

My main was a bavette steak with ‘house butter’. Texturally, the butter worked perfectly with bavette, an extremely lean and beefy steak, which was satisfyingly charred on the outside, and a touch on the rare side of medium rare. I have never found a decently-cooked bavette steak I didn’t enjoy, especially because it’s cheap. This was reflected in the menu price (£15, as compared to £21.50 for the regular steak – presumably a sirloin or ribeye).

Flavour-wise, we were told it was centred around capers, tarragon and Worcestershire sauce, but neither of us could shake the idea it was curry-flavoured. The chips were regular chips: reasonably well done but nothing that will blow your mind. I understand why it’s impractical for all restaurants to fry their chips in dripping (a huge fraction of parties will include vegetarians), but now that I’ve gotten used to it everything else is a bit disappointing.

So we left happy. Had we paid, we would have paid something like £35 a head including wine, and we left full. As I say, in future if you ask me where to eat in Norbiton I’ll tell you that you could do a lot worse than The Black Horse.

(No medals.)

I hummed and hawed about writing this review because like almost everyone, I don’t like to attack the little guy. It’s all well and good to slate a high end hip new opening in Mayfair, or an overpriced chain, but if restaurants are mostly small businesses, supper clubs are uniformly microbusinesses. Slagging them off doesn’t feel good.

But I asked myself “would I be happy if a single person went to Monograph because I was trying to be nice?” And the answer was no. You must not let Monograph take your money for their appallingly unbalanced quality-to-price-ratio supper club – please take my advice.

We went to Monograph for four reasons. 1) We like Japanese food. 2) We like sake, and they offered a tasting flight. 3) We like supper clubs. 4) They have attractive design – their website and menu are clean,minimalist and Japanese.

It was £35 for food, and although we did bring our own booze to the art gallery in which it is hosted, we also paid £18 for four small glasses of sake, which were perfectly fine. As you will see, we did not get our money’s worth.

They themed the night by occasionally playing snippets of Japanese adverts and films (including Tampopo, one of my favourites) in extremely blurry rips. They made us close our eyes for the first one, but the distorted sound we heard had no tangible link to the any of the dishes I am about to describe.

Dish one tasted fine, but to call it a ‘course’ is really stretching the truth. Served in a cardboard box like later dishes, our starter (which we ate after a very grand and loud blare of intro music) was literally – literally – just a small handful of watercress with a bit of sweet dressing and a few grams of katsuobushi shavings. It seemed a bit lazy and cynical to make it one quarter of a tasting menu.

Dish two was a bowl of udon noodles in a soy seasoned dashi broth with some (surely shop bought) mackerel flaked in. Yes, I finished it, because I was famished, and no, it wasn’t actively bad, but it was the sort of thing you’d knock together in four minutes with the leftover contents of your cupboards, not one of the dishes you’d plan to showcase your cooking to 20 strangers paying £35 a head.

There was one actively bad dish: the limp and lifeless pumpkin korokke. They should have been crisp and hot deep fried croquettes, but they were just balls of stodge. I ate them because even though this was the third course, I was still extremely hungry due to the incredibly stingy portions we received despite the cheap and basic ingredients.

The only dish with any redeeming features was the dessert, which was neither as stingy as the rest – a selection of rather pleasant mochi – nor as amateur. It was also presented far more professionally. Maybe these folks should sell homemade mochi for a living.

As I left I thought to myself how well several restaurants nearby in Islington could feed me for £53 including drinks. It’s not just the plethora of excellent cheap restaurants where it would be actively hard to spend £53 – Kanada-Ya, MeatLiquor, Chick n Sours. You could even get a proper sit down meal at a good mid price restaurant like Oldroyd, Rok, or the Drapers Arms. It’s just a disgrace, a real disgrace, and I am still shocked and smarting from being asked to spend so much for so little.

The SUL rating system has many virtues, and Monograph is a supper club that the ‘avoid’ rank was made for.

Rating: Avoid.

The bias in reviewing free dinners is not just the quid pro quo element – the PR scratches your back with a free dinner and you scratch theirs with a generous review – but also the balance between price and enjoyment. When you eat a good restaurant meal with a significant price tag the pleasure from the lovely food is balanced out by the unlovely cost.

I say this because a few times a year I get taken out for dinner for my birthday or otherwise and I worry that maybe I overrate these restaurants because I never see the bill.

All of this is preamble to me saying that I had a fantastic birthday dinner at Londrino, where food feels uncomplicated and part of a long tradition (in this case Portuguese), but at the same time novel and unexpected. However, it’s expensive – I’d guess we spent £80-100 a head, though that included the equivalent of four courses and madeira to top off the wine.

Londrino’s menu is, along with so many modern European restaurants in London, designed for sharing. They’ll ‘talk you through’ the menu, but it’s pretty intuitive: bread, snacks, regular starters, proper mains. There’s no reason why you’d actually have to share; equally, why wouldn’t you, since everything at Londrino is good and you get to taste more dishes.

We started with bread, obviously, which was the standard high quality sourdough you can get almost everywhere in town now. It came with a delicious cultured butter that was clearly deeply fermented, with whey, brown butter, and yeasty flavours, and bright yellow in colour – reminding you that ‘culturing’ and ‘fermenting’ are just controlled rottenness.

Next was cabbage with black garlic crisps. Black garlic is garlic cooked over several weeks to make it extremely sweet, slightly tart, and a deep Maillard reaction black. I’d say that the black garlic crisps could have been even more black garlicky, but the cabbage was just the right level of tender.

Then came sardine tartare on sourdough crispbreads. This divided us – half thought it was among the best dishes of the night, and half thought that the deep seawater-seaweed flavour was a bit too much.

Roast chestnut, ceps (porcini mushrooms), and kale, recommended by the waiter as one of his favourite dishes, and unpictured because the gathered diners were wolfing things down faster than I could set up pictures of them, was perhaps too small to share between five and each get a balance of all the ingredients. But it tasted like Christmas, sweet from the chestnuts and savoury and moreish from the ceps.

Clams confounded expectations. They were silky, tender, and without any rubbery chew or bite – and where the sardine was far more fishy than we expected, here there was only the light seaside hint of the freshest seafood. The juice, although presumably just a simple concoction of parsley, garlic, butter and lemon, was even better, and I slurped it down directly from the bowl like a Japanese ramen aficionado.

Acorda & negi leeks was one of the many dishes we had to ask for clarification about. It turned out to be a blended mash – not necessarily in a bad way – of leeks and bread, beautifully presented with a shimmering halo of oil. It really needed more seasoning, but was otherwise okay.

As much as we had enjoyed the starters, the mains absolutely blew our minds. The steak was perfectly cooked to medium rare with a proper char, and clearly a well-aged bit of Denver, with all of those profound funky cheesy flavours. It came with chunks of kohlrabi (forgettable), a strange peanutty vanilla sauce that sort-of worked, and nicely contrasting slices of very lightly pickled and floppy-crunchy daikon.

The aged Peking duck was even better, with everyone calling it their favourite dish by this point of the meal. At the time I thought Peking referred to the breed of duck, rather than the preparation, but looking back I realise it was a ‘take’ on the classic Chinese dish, with pancakes made out of overcooked, squished up and refried sticky rice, spring onions, and black garlic in place of sweet fermented sauce (or hoi sin). Despite the name, the duck did not go through the traditional three day preparation process – it was just an expertly cooked duck breast, served it with crispy skin, melty fat underneath, and uniformly pink.

And then our third main, a 500g sharing serving of presa, a cut of pork from the shoulder that you eat like a steak. At £75, it may seem expensive, and it is. But Bisaro, like Iberico, is the wagyu of pork, and easily better than nearly every beef steak I’ve eaten in my life. 500g of chateaubriand at Hawksmoor would be £67.50, so it’s roughly comparable to other extremely high end meat options.

Either way, it produces a formidable steak: incredibly tender, slightly sweet, and clearly grilled over wood or charcoal such that the outside had a powerful smoky char. On the other hand it came with buttermilk-salsify chips, and while they provided a nice clean contrast to the meaty hunk of, well, meat, honestly I’d have preferred potato chips.

While the cheeses were just a nice selection of (probably) Neal’s Yard options, dessert was worth talking about. We ordered every single option, and they ranged from the familiar and straightforwardly delicious (pillowy brioche with crunchy sweetened hazelnuts and sour caramel), to the strange-but-enjoyable (intensely Japanese-tasting roasted amazake ice cream), to the bizarre-but-we-still-finished-it (beetroot ice cream, and an ice cream so smoky it was genuinely like inhaling from a cigar).

So I recommend Londrino. I had a lovely meal and a lovely evening. But it’s absolutely clear that for someone like me, this is never going to be somewhere that I go outside of special occasions and celebrations.

Rating: One medal.

My two biggest cooking obsessions at the moment are fermentation and wood smoking. So it’s no coincidence then, that I found myself in Rök’s second location (the original is in Shoreditch), where almost everything on the menu is either smoked or pickled. Even one of the beers they offer is somehow imbued with a strong woodsmoke flavour.

The Danish feel extends past the cooking techniques: the decor is resolutely stripped-down Nordic, and the ingredients listed on the menu at least feel like the sorts of game and berries you might find in a cold Northern forest. I don’t know enough to tell you whether they really are.

We were encouraged to start with pickles—we didn’t need much encouragement—and sourdough with butter. The sourdough was clearly grilled over copious smoke, because every blackened chewy bite was deeply smoky, like the smell in your clothes after a long day standing by a charcoal grill. Even better was the extremely generous dense ball of nori butter, giving every bite a luxurious savoury glutamate flavour.

According to our waiter the pickles were traditionally fermented over seven days with only the natural bacteria found on the veg, salt, and sugar. This worked better for one batch than the other. The fennel was fantastic: slightly sweet, sharp and zingy from the acid the process produces, crunchy, and with the sometimes-overpowering anise flavour toned down to a floral herby air. But the cucumber (and gin) variety seemed very lightly pickled: not nearly sour and sharp enough. Nice crisp bits of cucumber are no bad thing, but a let down in comparison.

For starters proper I opted for the Scotch egg, a rare menu item with no apparent Scandi influences: deep fried nduja, a spreadable Calabrian sausage, wrapped around a quail’s egg, and served with dijon mustard mayonnaise. I’m pretty sure the meat wasn’t entirely nduja, or was at least a homemade take on it, since it was far less powerfully spicy and fudgey, but it did give more contrast than regular sausage. On top of a perfectly-runny egg yolk and the mayo lubricant—fresh and sweet rather than cloying—it reminded me how satisfying this little treat can be.

I like nearly all foods, but I really hate liver, so I can’t tell you how the other starter was—crispbread with caraway or nigella seeds and an extremely light, airy and spreadable pate of duck heart and liver, topped with chives and blackberry jam—but my companion said it was fabulous.

However I can tell you that the first main, wood pigeon breast reverse seared over smoke and served with crispy quinoa, a sort of baba ganoush, and a sweet sticky jus, was exactly what I was hoping this sort of place would sell. The pigeon had a solid bite, despite being extremely easy to cut, and the smoking was so well balanced that you never felt overwhelmed—even though you were essentially eating smoke with smoke.

The other main, mutton shoulder with butterbean puree, was less good. It was a generous, lean slab, presented like a steak, and while some of the elements were impressive, it didn’t really come together. Ordering slow cooked mutton shoulder I expected a pull-apart tender mass, but instead it was a firm chunk, with very little of the wood flavour that made the other dishes so beguiling. It seemed like a little too much tenderness had departed, and this wasn’t made up for by the lovely browned exterior. Which isn’t to say we didn’t mop up the entire plate.

The bone marrow mash with garlic oil also wasn’t quite what we were expecting. The folks at Rök most certainly know how to do a good puree, so it was a surprise that their “mash” was more of a baked potato endeavour, with lots of textural variety. This is by no means bad, but not at all what we thought we had ordered. What’s more, compared to the best versions I’ve had (or made!) this one was notably lacking in bone marrow. So, an enjoyable dose of garlicky-fatty potato, but not one that hit the precise spot we had in mind.

At this point (£42/head including drinks and service) we were extremely full, and although the whiskey-roasted peach with creme fraiche and frosted almonds was calling to us, we knew we couldn’t manage it. We promised we’d be back, and since it’s about five minutes walk from my house, I’m certain we will.

Rating: One medal.