Igor Clark

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.

I know I’m always going on about meat, but, well, that’s because it’s so great. When it’s good, that is — and when you buy it from the Ginger Pig’s new Hackney branch, that’s exactly what it is.

The shop itself is nicely understated; no airs and graces, just a clean, fresh, white room with lots of light, a blond wood floor and, by way of an entirely natural, unassuming, and gently confident assertion of pedigree, a glass door through to the meat store. The huge variety of wares on display is beautifully presented and incredibly tempting; when the lady serving me and I had sorted out our bacon business and she asked if there was anything else I wanted, I had to restrain myself from embarking on a pork–belly and fore–rib spree.

Instead I contented myself with this prime fillet steak, by comparison with other purveyors of meat hardly a snip at around £8, but boy, was it worth it. I wouldn’t have expected myself to describe a fillet as “buttery”, but that’s what it was, in texture and even in taste; the blandness to whose acceptance we’ve become inured in seeking tenderness elsewhere was replaced by a soft, round and, yes, buttery flavour in the front of the mouth, reinforced on further rumination by a big, broad beef bouquet of the type one normally associates with a large joint.

Fantastic stuff, but I couldn’t help but be a little saddened by the thought that this is really what we should get everywhere. Without wanting to take anything whatsoever away from the Ginger Pig’s wonderful produce or principles, it’s a sad indictment of the current state of affairs that this should stand so far ahead of the rest of the processed, packaged, sanitized dross that we as a society have learned to expect, simply by virtue of practicing the sort of artisan husbandry that can only derive from a passion for providing the very best.

I’ve recently been trying to buy more food from small local shops. The menu thus obtained has until recently consisted most notably of vegetables, chilis and the like, as there are a couple of independent everything-sellers near enough to where I live; not having a butcher in the same local strip, I’d been leaving the supply of meat to Sainsbury’s.

Last week, in a fit of vague dissatisfaction with the quality, taste and price of said supply, I walked straight past the entrance to the Kingsland shopping centre in whose bowels the supermarket lurks, and straight into a halal butcher a few paces further along the road, where I bought 2 huge fillets of halal chicken for the princely sum of £1.75.

On converting this poultry acquisition into an extremely hot Thai red curry with the addition of the biggest Scotch bonnet I could find (my current culinary flame), I discovered, to my mild surprise, that the chicken was by my reckonings at least ten times better than that sold under the “Taste the difference” or “Organic” marques in Lord Sainsbury’s automated emporium. Not only much more tender, but tastier, and if I could tell that even through the swathes of spice, I mused, perhaps I was onto something.

So yesterday I went back and bought half a kilo of beef mince (again £1.75) and this steak, the latter priced at £3.19. You can't really get a decent sense of scale from the photo, but to give some idea, those who know me will know that I like a decent-sized steak, and even after cutting this one in two, it was still almost too much. (Obviously I wasn’t going to let a simple piece of cow beat me, but you get the picture.)

It wasn't the best steak I’ve eaten (though to be fair, it’s up against some stiff competition), and it wasn’t as significantly better than its supermarket counterpart as last week’s chicken - but it was very good, and it cost around a third of the price of my previous supplier's (see how easy that was?) equivalent wares. The mince is currently stewing in a slow chili con carne, so I don’t yet know how well that compares, but preliminary tastings seem good, even if the recipe was probably originally devised to cover up the shortcomings of less-than-perfect meat.

So, given that the motivation behind trying out this new meat channel was in large part to get away from the pre-packaged, plasticised, depersonalised and conveyor-belted “produce” purveyed by the Tescos and the Sainsbury’s and the Waitroses of the world, and that it incorporated an admittedly slightly uncertainly-targeted but nonetheless present and intended nod towards better provenance and husbandry, am I, in buying halal meat, whose actual level cruelty in preparation I’ve been unable realistically to ascertain from writings on Internet (SHOCK), merely rubbing my own snout further in a mire of hypocrisy? In addition, does the method of slaughter actually have any beneficial effect on the taste, or was the improved quality merely down to less mechanically or factory-farmed animals used by this particular butcher?

Fucked if I know.

I paid £6 for these, from Deliverance. They took 90 minutes to arrive, along with the Thai green chicken curry, and when they arrived I was so hungry that I felt completely ripped off by these few little bits of chicken in a box. I felt different by the time I’d finished the meal, certainly, but 14 quid for satay and green curry, with no rice, seems like a lot, particularly when you realise that the same choice, admittedly in a slightly smaller portion, costs you 9 quid in Yelo in Hoxton Square - especially as the latter have something of a location overhead.

So, being a geek, I filled in the feedback form on their website saying "good food, but expensive and slow". To my surprise, I got a personal email back today (I had the food on Friday eve) explaining about how the pricing had gone up because of supplier costs and the like. Nice personal touch, but still, 14 quid for not that much food seems like a lot to me.

Black pepper sauce, Chez Gérard Brasserie, Chiswick High Road. You don’t see »onglet« steaks that often in the UK, it’s a cut you find more often in France (though it seems they’re called “hanger” steaks in the USA, because they’re cut from the part of the diaphragm that hangs between the last rib and the loin) - but they’re worth a chew when you do, ’cos they’re very tasty. It’s the marbling, y’see.

The Brasserie isn’t elaborate - don’t get me wrong, I like it; it’s just not in the league of other nearby establishments like La Trompette (and doesn't claim or intend to be) - but it has a good selection of beef on the menu, and the people working there appear pretty reliably to know how to source and cook a very decent bloody steak. This one, with peppercorn sauce and frites, is about 12 of your English quid, which really isn’t bad, considering its tastiness index of 17.6.

Generally, I don’t really get hangovers. Sure, I feel a bit vague, but I don’t seem to experience any of the “blinding headache”/“feeling sick”/“can’t move” business which other humans engaged in the drinking business frequently report, and so I just get on with it. As I therefore normally have to push the boat almost out of sight of land in order to achieve so impressive an effect on my seemingly cement-mixer-styled metabolism, I tend to assume a fairly cavalier attitude towards the Demon Drink and its consumption, insisting always on nights out that “it’ll be fine”; however, as a matter of public record, I can confirm that my friend Steph’s wedding reception broke me. Well OK, I broke me. Well OK, the cachaça-based caipirinhas I seem to have made me go berserk on broke me. Anyway.

I only vaguely remember leaving the pub in which the reception had been held, stumbling around and texting other friends whom I thought might still be up and about in the mistaken belief that further fun might be a good idea, finding (fortunately) that none would respond to the call of the goon, hence having to satisfy the Hyde-like alter ego of my sozzled self by merely stuffing its face with Cadbury’s Bournville (mmm, gunge; the street-skag of the dark chocolate world) and then waking suddenly at 7am to find myself fully clothed - by which I mean still wearing even hat and shoes - lying horizontally across the foot of my bed, my brain stuck together with glue and someone apparently banging a shovel against the inside of my skull. I haven’t got myself into that kind of condition for a good while, and I’ve missed it not one jot.

Consequently on realising several hours later that fuelling my recovery with food was becoming imperative, and that the energy provided by the banana I’d eaten on a previous foray into the realms of concsciousness had dwindled utterly, and on subsequently discovering that even a Firezza delivery pizza (mmmmmmmm, pizza) was going to take seventy minutes to arrive due to the Sunday-lunchtime-ness of my predicament, I emerged “Creature from the Black Lagoon”-like from my pit, bent over like a haggard and wizened old cove, blinking against the light, in search of sustenance, only to discover that, due to the physical manifestations (or lack thereof) of my recent contempt for self-catering and the utterly ludicrous nature of the notion of my making it, in my current condition, as far as the shop barely a hundred yards from my flat, the only foodstuff of any substance which might serve to alleviate my suffering (oh! the torment) would have to be cooked, by me (oh! the indignity), and would have to be fashioned from the sole ingredients to hand, namely: some brown rice (organic, of course); a tin of dolphin-friendly tuna (oh! how friendly to the dolphins I picture those trawlermen, no doubt lovingly disentangling the crushed and lacerated creatures from the steel-bar-based nets, nurturing them back to good health in the on-board dolphin treatment departments before releasing them, once more glorious, to their natural habitat, wiping away specks of sentiment from those trawler’s eyes, eyes hardened by the harsh realities of a life at sea, yet still sensitive to the dolphin’s lonely plight); and some vegetable stock cubes.

The present fragility of my physiology dictated that no strong spices or hefty herb helpings be included ingredients, ensuring that the outcome of my efforts was nothing short of edible. It worked, though - I commend it to Internet.