This is still my stuff.

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?

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.

It’s about 2 years since I’ve partaken of this traditional Serbian dish. Though I’ve happily added the experience to my ever-growing collection of gustatory anecdotes, the unfamiliarity of the circumstances in which I found myself at the time of that first indulgence meant that my memories of the actual dish and its eating are now hazy at best, so I was pleased to be able to give it another bash last Saturday night.

The apparently equally traditional highlight of my meal at the relatively recently-opened Елемент (Element) restaurant a few short streets away from Trg Republike (Republic Square) in Beograd — a beef steak stuffed with thick smoked bacon and strong yellow Serbian cheese — safely out of the way and the subsequent myocardial episode booked in at the city hospital, this delicacy was brought with minimal ceremony to the table and despite my already significantly distended belly, I made sure to take a sample. Purely for research purposes, you understand.

As far as I can tell, the good bits of the calf’s head (presumably mainly the cheeks) are stripped off and fried up with some onions, at which point vegetables and various herbs and spices are added, and the whole thing is left to reduce down, leaving behind after some unspecified length of time a casserole of medium to light consistency.

The overall impression was surprisingly subtle, certainly not as overpowering as offal-avoiders may fear, and the onion seemed to have caramelised somewhat, adding a pleasant, slightly sweet nuance to the overall concoction. The meat itself was tender, as can only reasonably be expected from a casserole, and had kidney-ish textural overtones, though on balance it remained firmly on the “meaty” side of the entrail divide.

In summary: I ate baby cow’s head. It was good.

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