Restaurants - page 2

The problem with going out for restaurants is that once you’ve paid for drinks, service, and a few courses you’ve usually spent £50. That’s a fair amount of money for almost anyone. But one thing London has done increasingly well in the five or so years I’ve been living in and around the centre is street food, and street food markets, where lots of vendors gang together and you can sometimes eat well for under £10.

Oftentimes these trucks and stalls will find themselves building enough hype and popularity to eventually open a proper restaurant—like how the Meatwagon turned into MeatMission, MeatLiquor and MeatMarket. They will expand their menus, serve you drinks, charge you service, and so on, but there is something very enjoyable about the raggedy streamlined simplification you get with a good honest food cart.

Last Sunday I went to the Sunday market in Victoria Park (a lovely walk down the canal) and I was surprised just how many great options they have, almost none of which I’d heard of, despite how voraciously I consume info about new popups, stalls, and openings. I ate solid fried chicken tenders, a surprisingly good take on a burger, and was forced out of a sheer fullness to miss out on several other options I would happily have tried any other day.

This is a restaurant review blog, and while I will extend that to street traders, I don’t think other vendors count. So I’ll just mention as an aside that I also bought some incredible chorizo & morcilla, and perhaps the best balsamic vinegar I’ve ever tasted.

Mexican Fried Chicken

I think possibly this stall wants for a more googleable name, but their food offering is already excellent. The good: bone-dry, super rock-hard-crispy coating around juicy, tender (clearly brined) chicken tenders, and you get a solid pile for £8. What’s more, it’s drizzled in chipotle mayo (smoky, savoury and slightly sweet) and sprinkled in chilli powder.

The okay but not amazing: the pico de gallo side lacked a little bit of freshness and zingyness; it was a bit flat. And more than that, it was just hard to combine with either the (decent) skin-on fries that sat under the chicken, or the chicken pieces itself. I think if you were going to have smaller pieces in a taco or a bun or something it’d make sense, but it was pointless in this form. Sadly they’d run out of guac (they were extremely popular while we were there) so we didn’t get to try that.

Rating: One medal.

The Patate

I tried The Patate out of pure curiosity, and thought it was a high risk idea. What they do is slow cook boeuf bourgignon, presumably the day before, and bring it along in a giant Le Creuset. When you want a “burger” they press it into something vaguely resembling a patty, grill it up so the sides are browned, cover it in a fat slab or two of cheese (in our case Raclette, but they also offer Camembert and a blue cheese), and serve it in a brioche bun.

When it comes to hamburgers I am a purist. Yes, you can experiment, but 99% of the time your experiment is going to turn out much worse than simply serving a piece of fatty beef mince with American cheese and some pickles. In fact, many of the London burger joints with the most airs and graces fall, in my mind, short of what you can get at McDonalds or Shake Shack—not to mention the really off-the-wall attempts in fancy restaurants.

But I was really surprised not just at how good this version is, but how much it actually tastes like a regular hamburger despite all the translated differences. Deeply beefy, with a mild cheese made for melting that spreads its lubrication and flavour around, and a no-frills mayo-based sauce. Very good stuff.

Their chips were even better, deeply imbued with seasoning to a degree that puts many other attempts to shame, and once again served with a generous covering of melted Raclette (if you enjoy cheese pulls then this is for you). It may not look like that much food, but on reflection it shouldn’t have shocked me so much that something this fat and protein dense was so filling.

Rating: One medal.

Maybe I was just lucky with my choices, but based on the reliability of my gut for judging culinary books by their covers, I’d say that Victoria Park Market offers even greater riches that those I sampled. Highly recommended—I will be back myself very soon.

Why is it so hard for restaurants to expand? So often do I have a meal at the second or third branch of a chain and find it lacklustre or not up to the standards I built up in my mind. And yesterday’s meal at Zelman Meats in St. Paul’s, the fourth branch of the proto-chain, was yet another case where the latest outpost of a restaurant brand did not impress me.

First, I’ll be clear that I really like and endorse what the whole group around Zelman is doing. I’ve never been to Goodman, and given that Knife in Clapham has the same hard-to-get meat supplier and costs half the price, I probably never will go, but it seems like what you want from a high-end steakhouse. I loved Rex & Mariano and when it was cruelly taken from us, I was a fan of its replacement, the original Zelman Meats in Soho. London needs more steak restaurants that don’t cost an arm and a leg. Basically, this restaurant group has its heart in the right place, and often delivers the goods.

And if Zelman Meats’s city branch was a cheap and cheerful Flat Iron affair, I’d probably be recommending it heartily. But if you’re going to spend at least £100 on dinner and drinks between two, you expect something special, at least if you’re me, and special is what Zelman didn’t deliver.

Look, maybe tempura does technically include any type of batter, I am no expert, but what I am expecting when I am offered tempura prawns is the gloriously light-coloured and light-textured batter familiar to all who have had it once. This was more like beer batter. Beer-battered prawns are a perfectly good thing, although these were slightly overcooked, but it is always frustrating when you don’t get what you expect.

As usual, the “holy fuck” mayo was basically just orange mayo, and I would have preferred that the lime flavour was in there, as wetting the batter with the lime segments sacrifices some of its crunch, and never gives you the distribution of flavour as you’re hoping for.

The burrata was a bit better. Smaller than the gigantic lumps you’re used to, but cheaper too, and that’s probably an overall better trade. I’d say it was considerably less wet and creamy, and therefore more like regular mozzarella than I’ve had before, but it did the job. The only real problem was a severe lack of the promised pesto (you can barely see it in the picture)—just a smearing underneath. Give us a bit more and let us decide if we want it all!

The chips ranged from excellent to completely undercooked. As ever, the parmesan and black truffle topping is a great idea, but I had an unshakeable sense that it was less truffly than I remembered. Obviously in a dish like this I don’t expect big thick shavings onto my plate—I’m only paying £8.50—but this had a great truffle smell without much of a discernible truffle taste. Maybe it was the end of a jar.

On the other hand, both sauces—béarnaise and chimichurri—were great. The chimichurri was a bit different to what I am used to (mainly because it was blended) but I found myself dipping and dipping till it was all gone.

But I’ve gone all this time without talking about what you came for, the steak. Now the good is that you buy per 100g—chateaubriand is £9.50/100g, and picanha is £6.50. That above is 300g of each, which is about enough for two people.

The steak was not bad. But we paid nearly £50; for that, it needed to be excellent—it needed to be worth five flat iron steaks from Flat Iron! And it just wasn’t.

Firstly, it was cooked inconsistently. There were big veins of grey “gradient” in the chateaubriand (left) around the nice medium rare parts, and the two end pieces were grey, tough, and grainy. Even if you are committed to grilling your steak from start to finish, there is no need for this, and if you are willing to cook the middle and the outside separately you can get perfect end to end medium rare every time. I can do it myself!

And secondly, it lacked flavour. Yes, we had sauces, but good steak tastes really good on its own. Chateaubriand is £25/kg (vs Zelman’s £95/kg) in Turner & George, the best butcher near me, and tastes really beefy. Obviously I do not object to restaurants charging more for food—they prepare it for me—but they are not adding anything close to £70 of value. Or they weren’t yesterday.

And so I left Zelman having had some decent, adequate stuff, but spending £42 a head for two courses without so much as a sip of booze. That’s not big bucks but it’s still a decent chunk of change for a not at all extravagant lunch! To go back to Knife, my bill there was just a little more and I drank a bottle of wine, ate three courses, snacks, bread, and much more. So yes, I was more than a little disappointed.

Rating: No medals.

I went to Daddy Bao hoping to not like it, for the sake of making this blog a little more diverse. After a string of two medal reviews I’ve begun to wonder if I’m getting good at avoiding dud restaurants, which is great for me but might be a bit boring to read. It’s the hatchet jobs that are fun to read, or at least the mild deviations from the critical consensus.

And I’ve never really understood the point of bao – soft, pillowy steamed buns from Taiwan that have grown and grown in popularity since Flesh and Buns first brought them to real prominence in 2014. The most highly praised place doing them, Bao, left me underwhelmed. I liked the starters there, but the bao themselves just seemed fine, but dull and expensive.

Daddy Bao is the new offspring of Peckham’s Mr Bao, both doing much the same as Bao and Flesh and Buns. The room is that kitsch 1920s Chinese style that I love. The menu is short and simple, with most bao going for £4.50 each or less. Three cocktails for £7 each are ‘Chinese’ twists on classics – we had the plum wine negroni (exactly what it sounds like – a slightly mellower negroni with a strong plum aroma) and lychee daquiri (which I’m told was excellent).

To start, we got the kimchi, sesame aubergine, fried chicken and pork dumplings. These were good, apart from the kimchi, which was boring. The aubergine’s sesame sauce and bits of pomegranate gave it a powerful flavour kick with bursts of sourness, and the pork dumplings’ skin was impressively delicate – impressive to someone used to the cheap, cheerful and chubby dumplings from Silk Road, anyway.

The fried chicken was crisp, generously portioned, and well-seasoned. The ketchup-hoisin style sauce it came from wasn’t much like “miso mayo” as advertised on the menu, but probably for the better. I would have been quite happy to have had three or four servings of that and be done with it.

As for the bao themselves, while I admit that I still am slightly lost by the fuss around them in general, these were quite enjoyable, and unlike the more upmarket place Bao, they were quite generously-sized.

The best was the “Mr Bao Pork Belly” one which had crunchy bits of peanut and lots of coriander and pickles as well as a generous slice of braised pork belly. Big brash flavours like that go well with the sweet softness of the bun, and make the whole thing feel like a sort of savoury dessert that you’re very naughty to eat as dinner.

The prawn one was less good, because it was too carby (prawns in batter surrounded by bun = a lot of starch) and not punchy enough flavourwise. The beef brisket and coleslaw (for that was what it was – calling it “wasabi slaw” might make them feel better about it, but it doesn’t fool me) bun was weird, like something that had crawled down the Northern Line from Bodean’s into this Asian restaurant, but overall it worked. All this food was at its best with big flavours, and not trying the sort of boring ‘subtlety’ that turned me off bao at other places.

Mostly they were what I wanted them to be – big, sweet, chewy, flavoursome and indulgent. And cheap: including cocktails, our dinner for two came to £50, and we were both stuffed. A good meal, in a nice place, for a decent price. How disappointing.

Rating: One medal.

Note: Pique-Nique has stopped serving its chicken tasting menu. It may well still be a good restaurant, but it now serves typical French dishes at a mid-to-high-range price point, and we haven’t tasted anything on the current menu.

I’ll start with the most important point: Pique-Nique does the finest chicken I’ve eaten in London, and by extension, ever. It has a lovely and extremely French atmosphere, it’s very reasonably priced for what it is, and you will leave happy and full. All you really need to know is that you should go.

But since that would make for a fairly boring review, I’ll go into detail on exactly how they get rotisserie chicken so right, transmogrifying it from a solid but unexciting street food or takeaway option into an ambrosial delight.

First, it’s the chickens. People probably do spend too much time talking about where food comes from, possibly it’s just something to nerd out about and show off what you know. But Bresse chicken is a resounding blow in favour of caring about provenance.

These chickens live 120 days or so, compared to the supermarket standard 42, or 80-odd for the very highest-end free range chicken, making them the free range of free range. They roam around beautiful rolling hills and are deliberately fed only lightly so they seek out insects to eat. And it comes through. They are unimaginably deeply flavoured and delicious compared to regular chicken—a comparison that perhaps comes close is that the breast tastes, throughout, like normal chicken’s crispy skin. And the skin, well!

Second, I think it’s the preparation. Everything is precise and perfect. Properly juicy chicken, presumably from the steady turning on the spit, but coupled with bone dry crispy skin. Maximally creamy and finely riced mashed potato. Served simply with morels and a creamy sauce. Heavily reduced red wine sauce; warm, crispy, chewy, pully-aparty French bread, a clear but powerfully, er, chicken-y consomme. Fluffy chestnut soufflé. You get the idea.

Third, I think it’s the whole approach. Simple, comforting, hearty, delicious. We ate the £41 Bresse chicken tasting menu. You start with a glorious little croquette of shredded chicken with a sweet-sour chutney of some sort, with a cute bone sticking out. Then you get bread with pate—just out of the oven and they keep offering you more until you eventually find a backbone of resistance. If, like me, you abhor liver pate, they just happen to have expertly browned butter in reserve, unmentioned.

Then you get the consomme, which comes with offal on a stick above it. I don’t know if these people are geniuses or if they owe it to their extremely expensive poultry, but the gizzard, heart, and even that wobbly thing on top of the chicken’s head (yes we ate that) were scrumptious, again packed full of savoury depth and punch.

After the consomme you get the aforementioned breast of the chicken. But you’re still going! Soon you are presented with the bouncy, firm thigh and leg and their skin, with a sharply-dressed salad and a shiny and lip-smacking winey jus. I, personally, would confit those chicken legs. I prefer that melt-away soft texture to the more aggressive meaty firmness here, but I’m sure others agree.

You even get to choose what dessert you’d like. We had an entirely anonymous chocolate fondant, no better or worse than one you’d get anywhere, and a glorious chestnut soufflé, totally changing my mind on whether they are just a way to ostentatiously display cooking skills.

For me, chicken has always been a second-tier meat. I believed it was more of a canvas for flavour than the main flavour itself. Well, Pique-Nique shows my old views for the distilled wrongness I now know them to be.

(Two medals.)

The really big names in London restaurants, the ones everybody knows, are all steak places – Gaucho, Goodman, Hawksmoor. Apart from a few new challengers like Flat Iron, which I maintain is a triumph of economics and supply chain management above all else, it’s not always clear where you’d go for a good steak apart from one of those famous, expensive, and occasionally disappointing spots.

Knife, situated halfway between Clapham Common and Brixton High Street, is a surprising addition to this roster. It’s slightly out of the way on a street that is mostly residential, and I hadn’t seen it reviewed anywhere else. If it hadn’t been for its nomination in this year’s Harden’s London Restaurant Awards I doubt I would ever have heard of it at all, even though I live 20 minutes’ walk away.

I was assured by Ben, who spotted it, that being supplied by Lake District Farmers – who are so elite among butchers that they have to choose which London restaurants they supply from a select lottery – was a very good sign. And, after a booking process that seemed to imply a place in high demand, showing up to an empty restaurant at 7pm things felt a little strange.

But still, the early signs were good. Two bread rolls came hot from the oven with bone marrow butter, one brown with sesame seeds and one a salty, savoury rosemary and anchovy focaccia that I could have happily eaten more and more of until I was full. Very nice – and then a second plate of free welcome food came out, five golf ball-sized Yorkshire puddings with a little pot of gravy. The puds were crispy and chewy, just the way you want them.

Our heritage tomato starter (£6.50), served with basil, peach and bits of burrata cheese, did the job well. The peach was somewhat superfluous but every forkful of cheese, tomato, basil, olive oil and salt felt like the last day of summer, with tomatoes as flavoursome as you can get in England. But the real star was the oxtail with shallot puree, spring greens and stilton croquette (£7.50). Every part of this worked perfectly, with the savoury, sinewy meat of the oxtail being balanced by the sweetness of the shallots, and punched through with the stilton cheese. We more or less licked the plate clean so we didn’t miss a single drop of puree or meat.

Beef dripping chips (£4.50) were so enormous that calling them chips is a little misleading, but they were perfectly crunchy, fatty, salty and potatoey all the same. The perfect dip for chips, in my view, is bearnaise sauce, and Knife’s was freshly-made and pleasantly subtly flavoured. The one major misfire in the whole meal was the Stinking Bishop mac and cheese (£4.50), which I should have known would be disappointing (like buffalo wings, British restaurants cannot do mac and cheese for some reason) but really was a bit of a drag. We left most of it – it was just not creamy enough and too underpowered for a dish made with Stinking Bishop cheese. My suggestion to Knife and everyone else: stop trying to go for a crust by baking the mac and cheese, which if made in advance means the moisture is all absorbed by the macaroni, and make something like this instead.

But the star, of course, was the steak. The rib eye (£25.00) was cooked with astonishing skill, rare in the middle but utterly crisp and rendered on the edges. The interior meat was succulent and intensely flavoured, and barely needed any sauce to go alongside it. Still, the spinach, garlic, caper & anchovy puree served with the steaks was a marvellously sharp, umami accompaniment that brought out the flavours of the steak.

The £16.50 Holstein bavette steak (from former dairy cows, unusually) was less stunningly delicious but far better than almost any other steak you’d get almost anywhere else; it’s not quite priced to compete with Flat Iron but for a small amount more the quality was in another league. Both managed to be tender but maintain a bit of chew, which is just what I want from a steak. One minor complaint was that our steak was served rare, not medium rare as we asked. This wasn’t a huge problem for me, because I like it both ways, but the people beside us seemed to have a similar problem. It’s not a major crime, and they did re-do our neighbours’ steak when they asked, but it’s a bad habit for a steak restaurant to get into, even if you think serving the meat rare is best.

But never mind that. By the time we settled up, the restaurant was full and buzzing with people. At £86 for two, including drinks and service, for high quality ingredients, so skilfully made, Knife is something special.

Rating: Two medals.

I’ve written before about how Brixton sits a little uncomfortably when it comes to food and drink. It’s really not great considering how many options there are – it does the basics fine but it has none of the variety or spark of Dalston or the homeliness of Tooting. It’s miles ahead of Clapham, but I tend to think that people try to imagine that Brixton is something more than it truly is.

Pop Brixton, a container park that opened around the same time I moved here in 2015, has improved things quite a bit. I raved about Kricket when it was based there (and which is even better at its new home in Piccadilly), Koi Ramen is for my money the best ramen I’ve had outside of Asia and jaw-droppingly cheap at £6.50 for a bowl of tonkotsu, and I’m told the Ghanaian and Basque restaurants are very good too.

Smoke and Salt has moved in to Kricket’s old container and pitches itself as doing modern British food using ancient techniques – pickling, curing, smoking and roasting. After our run-in with failing chef Neil Rankin, some of Smoke and Salt’s fans suggested we try them out for a more generously portioned meal.

The whole place is crammed into a single shipping container, kitchen and all, and on a rainy day could only seat about eighteen people until the sun came out. As ever, I appreciated the bottles of tap water already set out at the tables. Drinks were priced reasonably (cocktails £7.50, beers and wine £4.50-5) and our Boston sours (whiskey sours with extra egg white) were well flavoured.

Whipped miso-infused butter was salty and savoury, if slightly underportioned for the five large slices of warm sourdough we were served (£2.50). The bread was decent but denser than I like – probably not left to rise for long enough prior to baking. But the fried plantain (£4) was the first real sign that this meal would be a treat. Crispy spears were sprinkled with chili flakes and salt, which offset the sweetness of the fruit, and served with an onion jam for dipping that wasn’t far off a sweetened, condensed French onion soup in flavour. Little leaves of fresh oregano gave the dish a wonderful smell and showed an admirable attention to detail.

We went for the beef heart slices supplement to the the new potatoes with chimichurri and gorgonzola (£4 plus £3 for the beef). This heaping mound of fried potato, meat, cheese sauce and herbs was the size of some main courses I’ve had recently. The potatoes had the earthy, creamy flavour of good Jersey Royals, and combining a sharp chimichurri with a rich blue cheese sauce balanced the flavours perfectly. Beef heart is not to everyone’s taste – it’s slightly rubbery and easily overcooked – but this was sliced thinly enough that small bits added meatiness to each mouthful. This might have been a summer dish but on a cold, rainy evening it was the ideal comfort food.

Cold grilled courgettes (£6), served with a thick dressing and sprinkled with seeds and walnuts, did not work as well. Texturally it was interesting enough, but after the flavours of the first two dishes, it fell short.

Never mind – the charred coley (£8) afterwards made up for it. This was slow-cooked in olive oil and done to perfection – to just the point of being cooked, without losing any moisture or firmness at all. This came with a crust of toasted hazelnuts and in a thin green sauce, which I guess from the menu was made from toasted garlic, but was indeterminately flavoured to me. Well-cooked fish is ridiculously hard to find, and I savoured every little bite. And it was a pretty decent sized bit of fish for eight quid too!

Miso and honey glazed lamb belly (£10) was, again, cooked perfectly with melting fat and falling-apart meat that was cut through by the sharp lemony pea salad served alongside. In some ways this summed up the meal – delicately-cooked meat with carefully-balanced flavours that complimented each other without being boring or unoriginal. The one misfire of the meal was the grilled hispi cabbage (£6) which came with a ‘smoky tofu dressing’ that more resembled Hellmann’s mayonnaise, and dominated all the other Asian-inflected elements of the dish, even the tasty little pickled peanuts.

By that point, though, both my companion and I were full anyway. And I don’t mind at all a weird, experimental dish that doesn’t work out if it only adds six pounds to the bill. How could you, in a place like Smoke and Salt? It’s innovative, generously-portioned food that manages to win on flavour and treats good ingredients with the careful cooking they deserve. And at £65 for two, including cocktails and service, it makes Smoke and Salt an immediate favourite of mine, and a jewel in Brixton’s restaurant scene.

Rating: Two medals.

If you ever find yourself in New Malden in South West London, a little town in between Wimbledon and Kingston, there are two things you should do. One, go to one of the gigantic Korean supermarkets and stock up on Asian food supplies – they have frozen chopped Filipino pig intestines, fresh kaffir lime leaves, and more space devoted to ramen than most Tescos give to breakfast cereal. Two, have some Korean barbecue.

The area is as close to a ‘Koreatown’ as London gets, and lots of shops have bilingual store fronts. Because it’s out in the suburbs the prices are as low as you’re going to get for grilled steak cuts, and it’s always enjoyable eating in a restaurant where you feel like a bit of a tourist.

I don’t know if Butcher BBQ is the best in New Malden but it’s the one that people tell you to go to. From the outside it looks closed, and it’s easy to miss as you walk down the high street. Inside it’s a utilitarian space with only about half a dozen tables and benches to eat at.

The menu is pretty big, but we’re only there for barbecue. If you haven’t had it before, Korean barbecue is cooked at your table, by yourself if you like or, if you’re like me, by the restaurant owner who gets frustrated at your ineptitude.

You can order item-by-item but a combo with brisket, bavette steak and rib-eye (£50 for two) seemed fine to me. Bowls of side-dishes come out – home-made kimchi, onions in a sweet vinegar (surprisingly delicious), radish in chilli sauce, and shredded spring onions with chilli, which we ordered separately.

With Korean barbecue the trick, apparently, is to make yourself little lettuce wraps with meat, soy bean paste and whatever else you fancy.

You don’t get an enormous amount of meat. The photo above is a little misleading, because the folded up brisket at the front is sliced wafer-thin. But it’s good meat, well-marbled, and barbecues well once the grill’s been heated and oiled a bit with a piece of pork fat.

My wraps are mostly a success.

The soy bean paste, in particular, is extremely moreish. It’s umami with some sweetness and adds some extra flavour to what is otherwise just a bit of meat, and especially for the chewier, stronger-tasting bavette steak it gives a bit of balance to the tastes. It can be a little awkward trying to bite off a chunk of the meat with your teeth, but eating with your hands is fun overall.

You’re never going to want Korean barbecue more than once a year, I suspect. It tastes pretty good, but there just isn’t that much to it. That said, the fun and novelty of grilling your food at your table while drinking Korean beer is just very pleasant. For tourism value alone, Butcher BBQ and New Malden are worth your time.

Rating: One medal.

Victoria has been on a quiet rise lately, with more and more good places opening up to capture some of that civil service dollar. Where a few good spots on Wilton Road like A Wong and About Thyme used to compete with the likes of Loco Mexicano and an all-you-can-eat Brazilian meat place (terrible, but my secret shame), now the likes of Bleecker Street Burger, Shake Shack and Bone Daddies are opening to turn the area into a pretty decent place to eat.

The main downside is that these are all chains, and for some diminishing returns seem to be setting in so that each new restaurant seems a little worse than the last – that means you, Franco Manca.

Enter The Other Naughty Piglet. Branch two of Brixton’s The Naughty Piglet, located upstairs at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s theatre The Other Palace, it has the air of any upmarket theatre cafe or restaurant – airy, open and bright with tables squeezed just a little bit too close together for comfort, and a seasonal ‘modern European’ menu.

Small plates come one-by-one for sharing and give the feel of a tasting menu with fewer airs and graces. Our ham croquettes (£2/each) were hot and gooey, with (I think) manchego cheese mixed in with a bechamel and nibbly bits of ham. I wished I’d ordered more than one each.

Datterini tomatoes (£6) came with a generous topping of feta cheese and a japanese dried chili powder, and though I couldn’t really taste the chili, the tomatoes were sweet and fragrant and a good match for quite a mild feta. Each bite was a little burst of summery flavour, helped along by a little coriander included in the greens on top.

Burrata (like mozzarella with a creamy cottage cheese-style centre) with confit onions (£9) was a smart pairing, with gently fried onions giving each mouthful three or four different textures at once. Both the onions and the burrata came in generous portions, even between two people, and the soft creaminess of dish gave it the feel of a summery comfort food.

The real highlight of the meal was Cornish mackerel with gooseberries, cherries and English mustard (£8), served in a sweet juice that I presume was from the gooseberries. The mackerel was tip-top: firm, moist without being too oily, with a powerfully mackerelly flavour that still avoided being too pungent. The mustard was a nice touch but the sweet juice and gooseberries were the real stars; this sweet/sour pairing with mackerel is really hard to beat. The whole menu is clearly built around creating food pairings, and in some cases like this one it works spectacularly well.

Black pudding with grilled nectarine (£9) came topped with chewy, fibrous greens (bean casings, apparently) that nevertheless gave some toughness and texture to two other squishy ingredients. This kind of upmarket black pudding that contains minimal barley is not my favourite, but the flavour was good and the pairing with warm nectarine was clever, balancing the black pudding’s strong savouriness. The plating (off to one side of a large plate, as above) was a little silly but hey – the dish itself packed a flavour and texture punch and, once again, created a brilliant combination that I haven’t ever tasted before.

Our last dish took some time to arrive and was somewhat underwhelming. Barbecued pork belly with hispi cabbage (£11) was served with quite an interesting Korean-style gochujang chili sauce, but was overall a bit of a let down – not bad by any means but boring compared to the rest of the food, and not quite substantial enough to justify its price tag. Still, the pork was cooked well and it tasted nice – it’s just that in the context of the rest of the meal, it felt less innovative than usual.

The bill was over £100 for a fairly boozy meal, but the food only came to £53 in total for two, including service. For food of this quality and prepared this well, that’s a steal. The one fly in the ointment is the wine list, whose cheapest bottle was £29 – apparently it is all ‘natural wine’, which I couldn’t care less about and don’t really appreciate having to spend an extra ten pounds over a normal bottle on.

It’s hard to find superb ingredients paired together creatively and with such boldness. Food that is both delicious and interesting is rare enough anywhere. And in the somewhat one-track Victoria, as much as it has improved lately, The Other Naughty Piglet stands apart.

Rating: Two medals.

You reviewed us on our soft launch with a 50% discount ? You massive, massive prick. The point of a soft launch is to iron out problems, hence the discount. Please go fuck yourself you unprofessional tosser.

Update: Temper’s owner disagreed with our review, and had the above to say. I stand by the review, and think it’s clear that the price/portion offering is not affected by the fact that it was a soft launch. As I said, if the dishes were significantly larger, or significantly cheaper, I would recommend the place. You can decide for yourself.

My dinner at the original Temper, in Soho, was probably my favourite meal of 2016—and I told founder Neil Rankin as much over the bar as he went about chopping and smoking large bits of goat in the restaurant’s shiny and beautiful central kitchen.

But I was not impressed with its new sister restaurant Temper City, and not for any quirks to do with the fact I went during a soft launch. The staff were friendly and efficient, and if some of them were still working on their knowledge of the menu then who cares, that’s what you expect. The kitchen got everything right, I’m sure, and when they didn’t they told us in advance that they were redoing our dishes. These sorts of growing pains are why they charge you half price and even if they didn’t they would hardly bother me.

No, it was the approach in general that didn’t quite come off. It certainly wasn’t bad, but had I paid full price I would have felt a little bit ripped off.

To begin with, I was surprised they had gone for a curry-based concept. I so confidently assumed that it’d be a rerun of the huge-smoked-pieces-of-quality-meat concept in the Soho original that I didn’t follow any of the news around the opening; I just booked as soon as booking lines were opened, and slavered away happily in anticipation. Actually, the curry-ness of the place can be overstated. There’s still a huge smoker and extractor fan in the middle, and they still offer substantial meat chunks with deep smoky flavours.

It was the price-to-portion ratio that confused me most.

These “crab beignet” puff pastries were delicate, expert, and came with a lovely sweet jam and sour cream, or maybe mayo, but they were £8.50! This is for something with almost no substance and the size of a man’s thumb.

The “Korean haggis”—a mix of coarsely minced or finely chopped duck offal with gochuchang, radishes and chillies, was more substantial, and was delicious and fun to eat wrapped in baby gem as well. But it was £12 for two or three solid mouthfuls! Come on!

The curry plates boasted an array of ingredients, and array they did have, but most of them were pointless. The tomatoes were a bit sad, the potatoes were a bit bland, and while the crunchy sweet nutty salad was lovely, I’m not sure how it combined with the others. The paratha was unbelievably pillowy, but there was barely a handful of (really excellent) goat, and we started with little idea of how to combine the ingredients together in more lettuce wraps, hidden under the mint. Plus it was £17. Is this supposed to be a main that fills you up? I think you’d need two of them, making a meal here an incredible indulgence.

The lamb skewers with kimchi were great, but—I know, I’m a broken record—they were £15. One of them was minced lamb (cheap), and while the other had two substantial cubes of lovely meat, it also had two big pieces of kidney (dirt cheap). Is it really unfeasible to offer a third? I can’t deny the loveliness of the sauce, where kimchi was balanced against a mild mayonnaise or some other creamy base.

We opted for peach, condensed milk, and roti for dessert. It’s a good combo, but I’m not sure they’re quite ready with their roti—these seem like the kind of thing that might get better. It was a bit flat; it didn’t have the bouncy life of a (much cheaper, much bigger) one I had at Roti King just weeks ago.

I hate to criticise Temper because I am a huge huge fan of the approach in so many ways. And I even kinda hope this one does well—maybe prices have to be higher in the City. But I won’t be going along at full price. I’ll be going for Sunday lunch at the original spot. (No medals.)