Chelsea Ram: goat to it

Out of the way, but worth the trip.

Happiness was a warm fire and a bottle of red. This was the starting point of my time at the lovely Chelsea Ram is Fulham. We came in from a dark and stormy May (!) night to find a wooden, warmly lit pub that could be straight out of the home counties.

On a dark and stormy May (!) evening, the Chelsea Ram makes a perfect refuge. Its roaring fire, selection of board games and friendly staff implies they expect you to stay for the long haul. And there's no reason that you shouldn't. It's a long way from the tube, and its country-pub feel makes it so welcoming that you never want to leave. As I dried my gilet (!) by the fire and warmed up with a bottle of Cotes de Rhone, I took in all the lovely touches the Chelsea ram has - board games; the pickled onion Monster Munch in their crisp selection; the papers; a door disguised as a book case (!). It all feels a little forced, but almost all the more charming for trying so hard. And surely all pubs start off clean, tidy, varnished and bright, become dingy, dirty and depraved, and then come back out the other side as shabby chic. Having just been bought off Young's by the original owners, the Chelsea Ram is back at the very start of its journey, but already a little eccentric.

A lot of effort has been put into the food too. It feels like a labour of love, and there are some additions to classic pub dishes that feel less like culinary expertise and more like the guilty pleasures of a rather foolish home cook. Would I ever stew half a kilo of wild mushrooms with garlic, drizzle it with pesto and put on some bread with a poached duck egg? Hell no. Would I enjoy it if it were put in front of me? Hell yes. The same went for the fresh cherry tomatoes in my hotpot, which were unexpected and initially shocking - but you came to love it by the end. I'd never do it at home, but I'd order it again in a restaurant.

There was nothing, nothing at all wrong with the Eton mess though, which after such a wintery meal was a gust of summery air far removed from the storm that raged outside.

It's a little out of the way but, if you find yourself in Fulham and really fancy some excellent pub grub, you'll be delighted with the Chelsea Ram - good food, good wine, good prices, friendly staff and, if it starts raining, Scrabble to pass the time. Who knew happiness was within two miles of Fulham Broadway?

http://www.geronimo-inns.co.uk/thechelsearam/

   

MADD: gave me a mangover

Hey man, go!

Some of the most successsful niche markets are carved out by things we didn't even know we were missing. It's essentially how JML operates - who knew the world needed Ped Egg?

MADD in Soho falls firmly into this category. A year ago I'd have been lying if I said I thought that Soho needed an exclusively mango-based pudding and cocktail bar. But it turns out that did. London's pudding stomach has truly opened.

MADD follows on the back of those trendy, clinical-looking yoghurt shops that sprung up in London a few years ago. The idea of pudding cafes is Far Eastern in origin. In Japan, they play the role of the coffee shop: a place where you meet for a half hour to chat or seek shelter in cold weather. And that's enough to make them almost omnipresent. But MADD, being in Soho and more importantly in England, has to do make money in the evenings too, so it's also got a (mango) cocktail menu and music that is occasionally too loud.

The cocktails are decent, although they could do with a little variation and a few less sweet ingredients. But they are a side show, and with former-Yuatcha pastry chef on board some of them are exceptional. The owner was most keen for me to try the white-chocolate and mango mousse, which is coated in red semolina and looks like the miniature sandcastle - of course it tastes a little better too. It's delicious in fact.

So it turns out to be quite an indulgent place. You can get a jug of mango mojito, a ginger and mango cheese cake (my favourite) and settle in for a good long game of Uno or, better still, Jenga.

For those with a sweet tooth this is the ideal alternative to coffee and, let's face it, getting a good one can be rather trying in Soho. But I have to say, the best time I see a place like Mango working is as the next stop after dinner, when the pudding selection didn't quite tickle your fancy. Because believe me, mango fan or not, you'll love the desserts here. It could be the mojito talking, but it gave me a sugar rush.

Barbecoa butchery: making the cut

Christopher Hitchens once listed the four most overrated things in the world. I'm not going to list them, because I'm pretty sure my mother reads this blog, but Champagne was among them. If Hitchens were still alive I'd challenge him on why picnics are so rubbish, and also ask him what he thought of fillet steak.

To me, fillet is the Champagne of meat. Everyone aspires to it, everyone pays through the nose for it, and everyone is disappointed by it. There's so little flavour to it, and so little bite. You have to add sauce just to make it palatable beyond 6oz. A good steak doesn't need a dressing, just salt, pepper and a griddle as hot as the sun.

The butchers at Barbecoa would agree with me. Though they will still happily sell you a fillet, they'd much rather sell you their truly, bogglingly wonderful Apl rib-eye - aged for so long, and so perfectly that the rind produces an almost stilton-esque tang better than any steak sauce.

I should declare here that I work for the man who owns Barbecoa, which is why I will never review the restaurant. However, the things I learnt at a demonstration at the attached butchery was so eye opening that to not spread the good news to my mother and some spammers would be remiss of me. Their courses are instructional, entertaining, and educational. You also get to walk away with a truckload of free meat, and a much clearer idea of how to cook it.

So - next time you are in a restaurant, or picking a steak off the shelf in your local butchers or supermarket, remember these five key lessons, all courtesy of Barbecoa.

The flavour is in the fat
Fillet is great - its texture is to die for, but if you want flavour you need rind, you need marbling. In short, you need a bit of white in the red. The steaks Barbecoa stocks would be rejected by supermarkets, because they want as low a fat content as possible. But they lose flavour this way, and if you're buying good-quality beef from an animal that led a happy, stress-free life, the steak with still be tender and moist.

A good steak needs nothing but seasoning
If you try Barbecoa's Apl rib-eye you'll see that the flavour of well-aged, well-reared beef renders peppercorn sauce entirely redundant. Season heavily, whip it with a rosemary brush if you must, but if you've spent the money, let the meaty flavours breath.

Cooking with flames changes everything
Through writing the new Barbecoa website I have learnt that modern cooking methods are a convenience. The more natural your method, the more natural flavours you'll get. Cook it on the barbecue, in a screaming hot, smoking saucepan or griddle - if you have one, try roasting a 1kg rib-eye for 15-20mins.

All cuts are delicious if you know how to cook it
If you read the Italian (May) edition of Jamie Magazine you'll find a piece by Dario Cecchini, one of the most famous butchers in the world. While he doesn't goes as far as nose to tail eating, he believes that every piece of meat thrown away is a game lost. All cuts can be made into delicious meals if you know how to cook them. If you threw a shin of beef onto a griddle, or even straight in the oven you'd get a tough, stringy piece of meat no one wants to tackle. Stuff it full of marrow, garlic and rosemary, then roast it in a casserole dish with some wine, balsamic and shallots and in a few hours you will have one of the most beautiful roast meats nature can provide.

Butchery is an art
We watched in awe as three butchers took razor sharp knives to what was, effectively, still a cow. Within two hours was an entire butchers counter of red meat, cut, trimmed and ready to be sold. They cut through it like they were reading a map - picking the easiest roots, avoiding pitfalls and bumps in the road. They made it look so easy. Commercial butchery must feed the masses, but for a special piece of meat, your local butcher should always be your first port of call.

Artigiano: ciao Bella

Very good, very droll.

Dinner with the parents. Is there anything more pressured? Yes. Obviously. But choosing a restaurant for your parents is fraught with difficulty. So much so that I feel rather hard done by having to choose, given that it was my birthday.

But the annual celebration of my escape from the womb meant I had to once again prove my mettle. Choosing Italian took seconds, choosing the restaurant did not. In the end, I found the closest, poshest Italian place to my house and crossed my fingers. Artigiano was the lucky venue, and it turns out that we were rather lucky too.

For a start there was a table. A rather panicked balding Italian asked us if we had booked, gesturing to his almost entirely empty restaurant as if it were packed with punters fighting over the last antipasti platter. After puffing out his cheeks we got a prime spot in the delightful conservatory part of the restaurant. The delight came from the fact that it juts out into the street, so people walking by had to walk around us to go by, which kept me entertained while my parents discussed my career, housing prospects, and made pointed looks at the fact that we were sat at a four person table, but I had failed to find a fourth person.

Artigiano is very, very Belsize Park. Super posh and frighteningly privileged, but even more polite about it. The same could be said for the waiters. They were friendly but stiff; quietly assured that the food they were serving was for richer men than me and my jumper with fake leather elbow patches.

We received some on-the-house salmon bruschetta (only once we had ordered our mains, as if we might run off having had some free food), which was tasty if not freshly made. We also had bread and olive oil, which for some reason came without balsamic – by far the best bit about Italian bread.

Startled by the fact that I could get a Parmesan basket with avocado, asparagus, poached egg and mayonnaise for just £8.80, I went for the largest starter imaginable, and quaffed it down before I could even say "the mayonnaise was a bit heavy". Still, down it went, complimented by our Gavi 2010.

Still full of mayonnaise I started on my homemade gnocci with tomatoes, squid and mushrooms. The fact that it was delicious was slightly offset by the shape of the gnocci, which reminded my forcibly of earplugs. They probably would have been very effective earplugs too, judging by their delicious sticky texture.

Given how excellent the courses had been thus far, I decided to challenge the chef by ordering a chocolate fondant. So often sold, so often from a plastic pot via a microwave. Reassuringly I was told this would take 15 minutes, and to push the point I was forced to wait 20. It was well done, joyously gloopy in the middle if a little dry in the sponge, but the creamy raspberry sorbet made this a forgiveable. However, the panna cotta had the texture of raw jelly. It also had a coffee cream, which as a caffeine intolerant man is a waste of a damned fine pudding.

All told though, it was hard to complain. The food was excellent, if a little heavier than I expect from three Italian courses. No one else had a bad word to say from the other tables, and our fellow diners lent a wonderful sense of community, with chubby ladies who dyed their greyed hairs blonde and wore wacky jackets and waistcoats gossiping gently behind thick upper-class accents. They fulfilled the ideal of the upper-middle class - money earned and money spent. The right feeling for a restaurant.

The prices are reasonable (£133 for three, all eating three courses), the staff and food genuine, and the place relaxed and welcoming. And so, with a warm heart and a content feeling – things only Italian food and great romances can give you – we departed.

12A Belsize Terrace
London, NW3 4AX

   

Aquum: Thai to be nice

Flawed whatever moves it tries to pull.

Free food is not a phrase I treat lightly. No one should. But still I headed towards this review with real trepidation. Clubs should not do meals. It's not that I thought the Thai food would be bad, it was more the idea of eating in a place as soulless as a club.

However well decorated a club or bar is, during the day and early evening it lacks its most important decoration: the people. As a man who worked in pubs for several years, the dullest part of the shift was when there were no people. You see the stains on the floor and smell the stale alcohol. When you talked, the walls talked back at you. Without the context of people, most drinking venues are tacky and try-hard.

Which perfectly sums up Aquum the place, but not the food. For all its faults, we ate honest, authentic and fresh pan-Asian food. But there were a lot of faults. The dim sum pastry was soggy, the Malaysian curry  bland and under-seasoned, and the steamed bream fillet with red Thai spices too watery. We also had a duck stir-fry dish that was overcooked, and overcooked duck is a very sad thing indeed given how moist it should be. But we did get to drink fresh coconut juice straight from the coconut, and the lychee sorbet we had to finish was sweet and refreshing – probably outsourced, but still tasty. It was also nice to see that they had created a special wine and cocktail list to match the food, which shows an awareness of flavour and an aspiration to make everything work together. Which it doesn't, yet.

But it's the atmosphere on eating in a place that, just hours later, would be full of young hipsters drinking Champagne and yelling at each other over second-rate R'n'B that really grates. It's bizarre to enjoy authentic Asian food in such a overtly un-Asian surroundings. And it's not that the atmosphere is wrong, there just isn't one, and no bustling crowd to provide it. The food needs to sing, to draw people in. But Aquum's menu doesn't. The menu is so wide it would rival most Indian takeaways, assaulting you with choice and inevitably just driving you towards what you know and trust.

But what is strangest is who the menu is pitched at. A main course was between £7 and £9. Truth be told, this is a bargain. But it sits strangely next to the drinks menu, from which you can order a £3,000 bottle of Champagne. It's aimed at two completely different people, no one would ever order both.

If Aquum wants to convince some slightly drunk revellers that they don't need to run out for a kebab when the hunger strikes, they've pitched it right, although a menu of Thai finger food and platters would be better for a club. If they're are trying to be taken seriously as a restaurant they have got it wrong. Either way, the food needs to be better, the menu more concise, the drinks cheaper and the prices higher.

Byron: carefully crafted

An example of how to do a chain restaurant. Truly excellent.

Another day another Byron Burger opens up. This time on the trendy Charlotte Street, a road famous for tricking revellers into peoples houses, because the bars are so well disguised.

This blog should be renamed Fatman'sbaphands because all I seem to do it go to burger restaurants. Perhaps it's a sign I have restricted tastes, or maybe it just backs up my theory that the burger is the safety net of foods. It's borderline impossible not to enjoy a burger, however bad it is. That's why McDonald's rages on. A crap burger is still a burger.

Byron, however, do very good burgers. The buns were straight out of a burger van, but the meat is well seasoned and cooked rare and the vegetables are fresh. The Byron sauce was almost completely flavourless, but the crispy bacon gave all it had. Strangely, the gherkin was served on the side and was cut rather thickly, so when you added it to the burger it was like two railway sleepers poking out the sides. But all in all a glorious, sticky mess. But the onion rings were the stars of the meal. Crispy, oily, herby and gooey on the inside they were a real treat. You could taste the bad, feel the calories, revel in your slowly closing arteries and bloated stomach.

But even the onion rings couldn't hold my attention for long. Byron does a spectacular job of seeming personal and unique despite being an enormous, faceless chain. This Charlotte Street "offer" as they say in the business, is in a converted pub. During it's time as a boozer is musty have been quite a dingy dive. It's long and thin. It's windows hardly let any light in. You can imagine opening the door onto old men in flatclaps, who cover their eyes from the daylight, toothless mouths agape.

Now it's got white and black tiles, chrome around the bar, US-style booths and even, on the way to the loo, a walk way where you can look down on the diners. For some reason that pleases me, to see the balding patches of tubby men from an angle they never expected to have exposed.

But for all this there is one thing that makes Byron a GOOD chain, rather than just a chain. And that is the beer list - full of US and UK craft beers. Amercian IPAs, Hells lagers and porters. Whether they are matched to the food is hard to tell, but they all have high ABVs and more than coped with the strong flavours and textures of the meat. It's an exceptional touch, proof that a little thought can put you miles ahead of any competition.

It is, of course, being ahead of the competition that can send you spiralling off into faceless chain mode. But for now, Byron deserves it's success and it's crown as the best burger chain.

MeatLIQUOR: bap to basics

Stupid place, incredible burgers. I think.

The reputation that precedes Meat Liquor strongest is its queues. Miles in length the critics howled, longer than Disneyland they decreed, not worth the wait they posited.

Well we arrived on a windy, hailing, shitty excuse for an evening to find the evidence of queuing (a put-out bouncer, the obligatory concrete corner, Chinese whispers about waiting time and a pointless rope) but not much of a queue. And if I hadn't arrived 10 minutes late after approaching the restaurant from Old Street but via Notting Hill Gate (don't ask), I was assured by my companion that I would not have waited at all.

The reason behind this potentially flawed reputation is that MeatLIQUOR is trendy. It has managed the enviable trick of having the respect of East London, without actually having to be there. Decor-wise it is sat beneath a concrete block and things get even dingier inside, landing somewhere between an abbatoir and a pub toilet.

Closer inspection leads us to assume it is an attempt at a macabre US diner, arguably something we should have seen coming. After a short wait we were led through some plastic, red-paint stained curtains to a seat where the waiters would never, ever find us. So we immediately ordered their "house grog" (which they claim is so strong they only let you have two) and settled in for the long haul.

Just 10 minutes in we were both drunk and tucking into our "Dead Hippie Burgers", which essentially had all the ingredients of a Big Mac, but none of it was so limp you could eat it with a straw. However, it was so hard to eat a straw may have helped. The sauce fell out the sides, the meat fell apart and the gherkins clung to the side of your mouth like they were afraid of the dark. This is not date food. It's a dirty, dirty dinner. Hence the healthy supply of Plenty on each table. The burger was good, damned good. A little under seasoned, but also a little under-priced, which was refreshing for somewhere trendy.


Feeling cocky we also ordered a side of onion rings, which were the size of slinkies and delicious. Sadly however, half the chips were limp and went cold too quickly. I was also slightly disappointed by the presence of Mr Heinz and Mr Hellman on the table. Surely somewhere as focused on flavour and simplicity would choose to make their own sauces, or find a small artisan supplier.

The burgers don't match up to those of Hache, and only marginally beat the Diner chain. But they are cheaper and are more decadent. The cocktails were also good and the atmosphere of the place just the right side of trendy. I don't know why booking has gone out of fashion, but the only way to review a place like a this is to say how long you'd queue. We waited 10 minutes and, on a less miserable evening, I'd have probably queued for around 20.

But then, I'm still drunk from the grog.

MEATliquor | 74 WELBECK STREET | LONDON | W1G 0BA
@MEATliquor | info@MEATliquor.com | 020 7224 423