Restaurants

“Modern British” food is supposed to be the fusion of traditional British ingredients and dishes with new flavours and ways of cooking. Well, maybe. For me, it’s more of an “I know it when I see it” thing.

The “modern American” done by Shoreditch’s Two Lights, allegedly, is harder to place. Pickles, fried chicken, yes – but smoked pigeon or cod and beans? I’m not so sure.

Theming aside, the menu is glorious: pretty much every dish sounds interesting and delicious, and it’s hard to pick just two from each category.

We started with superb negronis, with a lingering, enjoyably medicinal flavour that I can only assume is down to better vermouth than I use at home. The snacks we got with them were small but well-formed. Potato rolls were pillowy and dense, with a chewiness that was a welcome break from the sourdough that is normally ubiquitous at places like this.

Crab was served on a thick, crisp chip with some pickled elderflower on top, and although it wasn’t spectacular (the mayonnaise the crab was dressed in dominated too much) it was a pleasant few bites.

Our first starter was a pile of pickled chanterelle mushrooms and an egg yolk on another well-cooked piece of bread – this time a soft flatbread with some runny Tunworth cheese on top that I didn’t really notice at the time. The bread mopped up the runny yolk and complemented the acidity and umami of the mushrooms perfectly. It was a superb dish.

Mussels, roasted red pepper and lardo on sourdough toast was good too, if a little underflavoured compared to the promise of those ingredients. The mussels were fat and juicy, but the peppers and lardo got a little lost.

Our first main, a grilled Middlewhite pork chop, came topped with kale, grilled green peppers and fried shallots, topped with an anchovy butter. Although it was a little fatty, the fat had the flavour and density that good pork fat does. The meat itself was slightly pink, and carried the punchy green pepper and anchovy flavours beautifully. It was a generous portion too.

The second was even better. The roasted ray wing was the star of the show, and got a special frame on the menu, and deservedly so. It was cooked to perfection: crispy on the outside and around the edges, and soft, moist and near-translucent inside. The mound of pickles, dill and fried potato it came with and the dill-inflected butter sauce it was served in were just the right level of sharpness to balance the fish without overwhelming it.

Alongside these two generous portions were remarkably large sides of crunchy roasted new potatoes and an enormous green salad. The potatoes came swimming in garlicky butter and the salad – something I would never normally notice no matter how good it was – was dressed incredibly well, with a good coating of vinaigrette on every leaf.

To finish, we had peach tarte tatin with ice cream and fig granita. Both were excellent: my companion thought the granita was one of the best desserts she’d ever had.

Coming as a spin-off from the excellent and well-regarded Clove Club, just around the corner, it’s hardly a surprise that Two Lights can pull off these dishes so well. But unlike the somewhat stiff Clove Club, Two Lights feels incredibly casual and relaxed: the dining room, filled with houseplants, could be someone’s sitting room.

The harshest criticism I can make of the food is that some dishes were a little underpowered, but that’s a minor quibble against the innovativeness of most of them, the generous portions, and the feeling of deep satisfaction I felt at the end of the meal. I can’t wait to go back.

Rating: Two medals.

I was invited to Two Lights and didn’t see a bill for my meal, but I’ll happy be paying to come again.

There is a great pleasure in walking to and from a restaurant. I moved house recently and whereas Black Axe Mangal was the closest restaurant to my house before, the Hero of Maida is now just two or three minutes’ stroll from my front door.

The Hero of Maida is a gastropub – one of those rare things that Britain does well, both on its own terms and relative to the world. When people visit London I will often recommend them a diet composed at least half of gastropub meals.

This is especially true now that so many gastropub restaurants are self-consciously digging out the best of what can be found both buried under British soil and buried in British history. Even when the food is continentally influenced, it is the sort of continental influence that is part of the furniture over here.

We shared starters. One was a crab tart. The pastry was extremely delicate: it disintegrated at the lightest touch. It was topped with slices of greengage plum presented like pickles and with a similar influence: sweet and tart, surrounded with crunchy, subtley-aniseedy fennel, and held together with the warming sea floor flavour of crab.

The other starter was a tomato soup. It was essentially the same as one from a can albeit somewhat nicer: creamy, slightly spicy, and, yes, tomatoey. It came with a lovely swirl of olive oil, and it was served in a lion’s head dish. At this point we realised that we didn’t have bread and other tables did. Were we supposed to have bread? I never found out.

Main 1 was a big solid lump of bavette steak with cafe de Paris butter, but a much chunkier cafe de Paris than you get at Relais de Venise. Tender but with a little bite (as you expect from bavette), meaty: yes it was a steak. You couldn’t fault them, even compared to Blacklock or Flat Iron, since it was a decently hefty piece and cooked rather well, plus tastier and beefier than most.

It came with the sort of chips my dining companion likes best: triple cooked and fat so they’re extremely brown and crispy on the outside but still contain a considerable amount of potato innards. Fluffy at best, floury at worst. And they brought us ketchup and mayo without asking.

My main was in many ways better. Browned discs of confit lamb breast, the most giving and forgiving of meat cuts. You can do just about anything with it and it’ll turn out well – as my experiments at home have shown. This time it was fall-apart tender, like confit duck or smoked pulled pork, yet still identifiably meat and with some remaining spiral structure and bite.

It was extremely fatty, but that was well balanced by the soft chickpeas it came with. The only issue with this dish was a slight excess of salt. When the lamb is bacony salty, the first bite is amazing, but by the end you are looking for some relief. Still, it was a very enjoyable dish despite a slight over seasoning.

Pudding for me was the slightly silly choice of three individual scoops of ice cream. The first was an incredible world beater white peach sorbet. How do they do it? The best I’ve ever had. I wish I had tried their other sorbet flavours. The others were regular ice cream: malt, and almond. Both were very pleasant.

I hoovered up these plus half of the other dessert – a fabulous financier, which had a crumb so moist I really did want to ask them for their recipe, along with a reassuringly and satisfyingly crispy crust. In it was embedded a few raspberries, and it came with yet another scoop of ice cream, this time an acceptable vanilla.

A lovely meal, and one I would have no trouble giving one medal. But in a miraculous and generous turn of events, we were informed that it was half off the entire bill in August, despite the fact it was the tenth of September, and despite how clearly unaware we were of this deal. Our waiter almost pressed the unexpected £50 donation into our hands. What lovely folks.

Rating: One medal.

The Begging Bowl was one of the first really high-quality Thai restaurants in London, since joined by places like Som Saa, Kiln and The Smoking Goat, which have brought some of the flavours of Thailand’s north alongside the curries and bright, fresh salads most of us are more familiar with. These northern flavours often centre on pla ra, a fermented fish sauce that can have an off-putting rotten smell, but makes up for it with a richly savoury taste that can stand up to the other flavours that usually dominate Thai cooking.

After a major renovation last year, the Begging Bowl is bright and airy, and sits in a cluster of shops of restaurants that feel more like an English country town than a Peckham backstreet. The menu is geared towards fish and vegetarian dishes, with unlimited rice for £3 per person.

Dishes come out in the order they’re made in, so our first was the parlow, a braise of shiitake, oyster and enoki mushrooms served in a five spice broth. The broth was exceptionally tasty, mixing five spice sweetness with the incredibly rich umami flavours of the mushrooms, and with a transluscent egg along the lines of a bowl of ramen. Although the dish itself was quite small for its £13 price tag, the broth was flavoursome enough to bear a whole bowl’s worth of sticky rice being dipped in.

Next up were the green papaya fritters (£7). These had the texture of onion bhajis, and came with a dipping sauce made with peanuts, lime juice, fish sauce and chilli – a deconstructed som tam. The portion was generous and fun to pick apart and eat with your hands. I’m not sure it fully worked compared to a straightforward som tam, but I appreciated the fact that they were experimenting.

The isaan style pork and papaya soup with dill (£8) was more like a curry in consistency, and used the fermented fish flavouring to create an earthy, salty sauce that the dill offset nicely. Again, the unlimited rice was great for soakage, and the fishy sediment in the sauce gave it an enjoyably gritty texture.

The Northern Thai sausage (£10) was the lowlight of the meal. It wasn’t terrible, but served by itself (with some herbs and sliced ginger) it was just boring. It felt like it might have been a nice ingredient in a bigger dish, with some warmth from the chilli, and roughly ground mince and streaks of fat inside, but on its own it wasn’t impressive at all.

Perhaps my favourite dish anywhere is Som Saa’s deep fried sea bass, which they serve with a jaew-like sauce of lime juice, fish sauce, chilli and coriander. It’s a joy to pick off the crispy bits of skin and flesh and soak up the sauce. The Begging Bowl’s answer to this (£18) is quite different: instead of lime juice and coriander, the sea bass is served in a tangy and spicy tamarind sauce, with a mango salad. The sweetness from the mango balanced the tamarind’s sourness well, although if I was nitpicking I thought these flavours overpowered the fish somewhat. The fish itself was fresh and fleshy, sacrificing some level of crispiness for a more moist interior.

Finally, and unnecessarily given how full we already were, we had nam prik long rua (£10), a relish made from fermented shrimp and crisp pieces of pork belly, served with vegetables and a grilled sardine for dipping. We’d been warned that this was quite an intense dish, and I enjoyed the overpowering salty fishiness of it with the sardine, but coming at the end of the meal when we were already full up it didn’t really stand out. It might have made more sense to serve this kind of raw vegetable-based dish near the beginning of the meal.

At £105 including drinks and an affogato for dessert, our meal was good value and generously portioned, and we could easily have done without one of the dishes. The pricing seemed quite random: the sausage and nam prik long rua both seemed overpriced at £10, and the pork and papaya soup was cheap at £8. Despite a few misfires, the best dishes – the sea bass, the soup, and the mushroom braise – were outstanding, and a match for almost anything any other good Thai place can do.

Rating: One medal.

For some reason, London’s restaurants find it extremely difficult to do good buffalo wings. No matter how good somewhere is in other respects, their wings will likely be slimy, soft and coated in some sweet, sickly, tomato-based sauce.

I have no idea why this is. Buffalo wings in America, even at chain restaurants and dive bars, are usually pretty good. They’re easy to do at home, if you have a deep fat frier or don’t mind improvising with a cast iron pot.

All you want is for them to be crispy (this is essential), hopefully somewhat meaty inside, and coated in a simple sauce of Frank’s (or, even better, Crystal) hot sauce mixed with melted butter. Kenji’s method is pretty foolproof, and involves cooking them twice – the first time, at a low heat, can be done in advance so you only need to give them a short time in a screamingly hot frier to get them nice and crispy outside.

I am so obsessed with London’s shoddy wings I’ve considered doing a piece naming and shaming the worst places, and investigating what it is that they get wrong. Do they only cook them once, at too low a temperature? Is the sauce the way it is for cost-cutting reasons, because Frank’s costs too much, or because other customers want something closer to a spicy marinara sauce than the simpler, traditional, vinegary one? Who knows. I don’t even want to begin thinking about why so many places think putting breadcrumbs on wings is a smart move – too much KFC, I guess. And why on earth is anywhere so lazy as to serve the wings unjointed, let alone with the inedible wingtips left on? This last one is invariably a sign of a lazy, cynical restaurant that should be avoided at all costs.

There are some exceptions. Stickywings on Brick Lane has done a valiant job for a few years now, sacrificing some meatiness for crispiness (a reasonable trade-off) but giving a good, traditional sauce. Thunderbird, despite breading its wings, is OK if you’re in the neighbourhood, and at least serves generously large wings. The original Meatliquour and Meatmission do decent wings as sides, although I can’t comment on the dozens of new Meatliquour branches that have sprung up in the past few years.

Now Orange Buffalo has set up a fixed restaurant, after seven years operating out of a foodtruck in Spitalfields. Sat on a corner in Tooting between a McDonald’s and the Gala Bingo Club, it is a bright, loud fast food outlet with no pretension.

Some of the six sauces are available to sample before you order: as well as two heat levels of their main sauce, we tried a gochujang-based Korean sauce and a chilli-mango sauce. There’s also a barbecue sauce and a sauce advertised as being excruciatingly hot, but I don’t know why you’d want either of those.

The standard portion is eight wings for £8, which is a little mean considering the per item cost cannot be more than a few pence each. A kilo of wings is £1.70 at Sainsbury’s – Orange Buffalo’s may be better quality, but this feels unnecessarily stingy, especially for a dish that many restaurants manage to offer in unlimited quantities. You can add up to six more wings for 50p each.

The wings themselves were cooked excellently. The skin was perfectly crispy, with plenty of knobbly, crispy bits outside, and hot, juicy meat inside. They were slightly larger than usual (which might account for the price, to some extent), and retained their crispiness as they cooled down while we ate through them.

The sauces were good. The original was slightly too thick for my liking, and I would have liked an option to have a simple hot sauce and butter coating, but it tasted good and, texture aside, was fairly close to what I wanted. The hotter “woof woof” flavour was moderately hot, but not unenjoyably so. Surprisingly, the Korean coating was probably the best of the bunch – it was savoury, somewhat hot, and the coriander on top added some freshness to it.

The ranch dressing dip was fairly standard ranch, which is no bad thing – it’s hard to beat the flavour of dill and sour cream/buttermilk with hot wings. But the blue cheese dip was really weird – it barely tasted of blue cheese at all, with no tang or funkiness I’d expect, and had the consistency of egg mayonnaise. A disappointment that I would avoid in future.

There were a few minor issues with the service: the guy taking our order wasn’t really listening to us when we ordered so didn’t take down that we wanted the six extra wings (I realised later on and we were able to add them), and they were served without dips and I had to go back downstairs to get them. Obviously these are not a big deal, but the restaurant was not busy and it’s kind of annoying anyway.

Overall, Orange Buffalo’s wings slightly edge out Stickywings for being the best buffalo wings you can get in London. While they lose a few marks for not offering a traditional buffalo sauce and for serving too few, to my mind, for the price, they are the best-cooked wings you can get without flying to the US.

Rating: One medal.

I used to live right by the Compton Arms, but in 33 months I never once went there. And yet, in the three weeks since I moved flat, I’ve been there four times.

One reason is that the once-crusty regulars pub has been taken over by hipster millennials, and revamped. In: morello cherry goses, revolving IPAs on tap, and a fridge of Belgian sours. Out: your reassuring range of standard pub lagers.

Apparently, this caused a revolt among the pub’s oldest and most loyal supporters – and Fosters has returned to the tap lineup – except now the edited custom Fosters label reads ‘Compromise’.

Another reason is that I had been told by several people that Four Legs, now in residence Tuesdays to Sundays, does one of if not the best burger in London. This is the sort of recommendation that I cannot overlook.

Clearly unsatisfied with the plaudits they’ve earned for their burgers, Four Legs have branched out pretty widely. We couldn’t resist eating a full dinner, starting with the quail.

The quail was piled ridiculously high with truffle shavings, and to our surprise came bone in. I’m not certain that truffle added to this hugely, but then again I am almost always happy to eat truffle, especially at these prices, and the pieces of bird were battered and fried with a great deal of competence. A very pleasant dish.

Next came their take on a Thai green papaya salad. For me, this one didn’t really work: it somehow tasted a bit bland. I think it needed some more fish sauce and some more lime, and perhaps a little bit of sugar.

The leeks were essentially perfect. They came heavy and silky soft, and served on a solid lake of ‘curds’ – not the squeaky squares we were expecting, but a substance more like a mix of creamy burrata and tangy greek yoghurt. And the whole lot was drizzled with grassy olive oil, sprinkled with black pepper, and served with bread.

In a London where good sourdough bread comes by and large as standard this still stood out as particularly moist and dense, like they had implausibly managed to cook it themselves in the tiny pub kitchen alongside everything else.

Ultimately this is all preamble. This restaurant, at least in its current incarnation, is going to live and die on the strength of its burger. So I’m very pleased to be able to announce that the burger is very good, definitely in the top 10 for London and potentially in the top 5.

They get all the important things right. No fancy sauces, no fancy toppings. The onions are chopped so they don’t make it difficult to eat (like the insane practice of serving whole rings). There is no lettuce or tomatoes and the cheese is good honest American non-cheese.

The bun, despite being a brioche, is soft and lightly chewy, and does not have any trouble maintaining coherence in the face of the burger’s juice, grease, and liquid cheese onslaught. The patty itself was roughly average in heft, charred well on the outside, and moist, partly because it was so consistently cheesed and sauced.

Best of all, it comes with essentially an entire layer of finely sliced pickles, and the pickles are clearly homemade: very sharp and piquant, and much sweeter than the overly healthy ones you get in McDonalds.

Basically this is a good burger, from people who agree with me on all the essential points of what makes a burger good. The only issue I have with it is that it was served fully cooked through. However I know that many councils won’t let them serve their burgers pink, so it’s entirely possible that this is somebody else’s fault, not theirs.

Even hampered by the nanny state, Four Legs serve a rather pleasant meal for not much money at all (we spent about £40 on food and about £20 on two rounds of pints). And above all, they are the first restaurant I’ve ever been to that serves nice normal food and a genuinely good burger at the same time. If you’re nearby, go check it out.

Rating: One medal.

To get the first half of the review out of the way immediately: Beer + Burger Store is an excellent beer store. They serve a wide range of beers I’d like to drink, from milkshake IPAs to kettle sours, to spontaneous fermentations; and a wide range I’m less interested in but appreciate the existence of.

Many of the bottles and tins are expensive, but my willingness to pay for novel beer is almost unlimited and my depth of experiences buying online tell me that this isn’t driven by B+B’s mark-up.

But this is a restaurant review website, and while the quality of drinks will often tilt the scale in one direction or another, the strength of my recommendation will always depend mostly on the strength of the food offering. After all, there is a hipster bottle shop, beer bar, or taproom in almost every neighbourhood now, and while this is one of the better ones in Dalston/Haggerston, my absolute favourite nearby would be Seven Seasons on Hoxton Street. If we’re talking pure beer.

Weirdly enough, I ate B+B’s burgers twice last weekend. We were sitting in Highbury Fields on Saturday afternoon and it came up on Deliveroo. Their Deliveroo was pretty good, but it didn’t feel fair reviewing them on the basis of food that had by necessity rested at least half an hour when I ate it. It just so happened that I was in Haggerston that Sunday as well, and I thought why not go back and see what the real version is like.

The short answer is that their burgers are decent, but that decent burgers are par for the course in London now. Back in 2014 I could list every single good burger that London offered; London burgers were so scarce that we queued an hour for the opening of Shake Shack. Now people have learned how to make burgers good, and, presuming there is no Bleecker Burger nearby, there are at least ten places I’d be happy to walk into almost any day.

Beer + Burger Store make smashed burgers, like Shake Shack, but with far more commitment to the concept. Their bizarrely undersold ‘double cheeseburger’ is actually a triple: three smashed down, darkly caramelised, and crisped up patties, thicker than you’d expect, and slathered in American cheese, with a huge number of pickles.

The pickles are a highlight: clearly homemade, particularly excellent, and generously portioned – you get something like 20 little slices. The buns are also a highlight: incredibly soft, chewy, and yielding, and able to take any amount of grease and sauce thrown at them, unlike the fluffy brioche you are often given, which gives up without the slightest fight.

The patties should be another highlight: I love the way they are cooked on the outside, and the surprising heft means you occasionally see a tantalising glimpse of pink or purple. But the beef ends up tasting bland and grey – I think this is due both to significant underseasoning and excessively lean meat going into the mince.

The best burgers require nothing but cheese, onions, and maybe pickles, and all of these merely highlight the beefiness that should be the focus of the dish. Here I found myself adding ketchup to get myself through.

Some of the other options were stronger. The chicken burger was one of the best I’ve had: clearly brined to the proper juicy texture, with soft chewy bun perfectly complimenting the bone dry crunchy batter. I have the greatest admiration for how they offer dipping gravy – how much better it is than ketchup or mayo for chips, or even for your burger itself.

In some ways this is an unfairly negative review. In 2013 Beer + Burger Store would probably have ranked among my favourite burger joints in London. I probably would have featured it on lists of London’s best burgers, and regularly sent my friends there to sample its wares. But it’s the current year, and in the current year the quality of burgers in London is so high as to make B+B just another decent burger joint.

(No medals.)