Igor Clark

Goose fat. That's the secret, lashings of goose fat. And when you've par-boiled the potatoes, swing 'em around in a colander so they scuff up niiice. Medium oven for an hour, regular turns, lightly steam the veg - then: stuff the whole lot in your head, quick as you can. No-one'll ever know it was there.

I've been to Soho Japan three times now, and had this rather unusual dish on two of those occasions. Both times the Japanese waitresses have felt it necessary to make sure that we know what we're doing, as this is clearly viewed as somewhat unpalatable to Western tastes. It's definitely strong - raw baby squid tentacles in a sauce made out of the rest of the squid, pulped with salt and spice - but I enjoyed it so much the second time that I left a sufficiently empty dish for the waitress to look really quite surprised.

An excellent eating venue: Soho Japan. An uninspiring pub transformed by the seemingly anomalous transplanting into the bar of a Japanese kitchen and staff, on this occasion providing not only rather wonderful starters and sumiyaki selection but this sashimi moriawase with some of the best, freshest toro sashimi I've ever eaten. Very good Beaujolais complemented the menu and the lack of human swarms lent a decidedly relaxed atmosphere. A new favourite, I wonder?

I mean, I suppose that does look like quite a lot, I guess, but it reduces down when you cook it, doesn't it? What if it all boils away? What's that? Light steaming is never going to make anything boil away, you say? But that fish is going in the oven for half an hour, and once you've soaked the rice for a similar time it's all water anyway, right?

WRONG

Still quite pricey, but this time it was well worth it - the food came twenty minutes earlier than expected, its taste was exactly the taste I wanted to be tasting at exactly that unexpectedly-twenty-minute-premature moment, and even the delivery guy was friendly and polysyllabic. Fisherman's pie, yeah.

Saw this new place a couple of weeks ago, walking past on the way home from the Easton, near Exmouth Market, and having just enjoyed a good meal there, felt inspired to check this out at the next opportunity. Unfortunately, it was quite a let-down. For a start, the pace was extremely rushed, to the point where I had to tell the waiter that we needed a bit of time to digest even slightly before choosing a pudding. Secondly, though my starter of ham hock with jalapeños and nuts was good, the rest of the food really just wasn’t up to much. The steak was fine, but if you can buy in decent meat, which they obviously had, then you really ought not to be running a restaurant if you can’t serve it decently; the roasted cassava chips accompanying it were a tasteless waste of space; the cheesecake was too cold and hence also fairly tasteless, insufficiently crunchy for something advertised as containing hazelnuts, and generally uninspiring. A decent Malbec went well with the steak, perking things up a little, but the pudding wine which the waiter recommended to go with the cheesecake (out of a choice of only two served by the glass from the seven or eight on the menu) was too sharp, mismatched with what taste I could elicit from the pudding itself, and so merely constituted yet another disappointment. In summary: great location, nice décor, could be good, but seriously, don’t bother until they’ve had a few critical slatings and consequently got their act together.

I very rarely order liver in restaurants because frankly it’s just so easy to fuck up. However having eaten some extremely good steak at Unico in Epping before, it struck me during today’s visit that their chef might well know if not his actual onions then at least his offal. While it certainly could have been a little rarer, it certainly wasn’t ruined, and the choice of cure on the bacon, though I don’t know what it was, complemented the strong liver flavour very nicely. In summary: not bad.

Kulu Kulu on Brewer Street - owned by the same people who run Ten Ten Tei a few doors down. Munched through a huge pile of plates with a pal and suddenly thought "oh shit, 16 plates, bill pain" - but, including 2 beers, it came to £53 between us. In your face, recession.

There was a seriously cadaverous feel to this onglet I had from the usual place last week. Something about the texture, the sinewy, raw viscerality of it, spoke to me of torture, death and decay. Bloody tasty, though.