Okan: good hash man

Cheap, delicious Japanese street food

Occasionally I get cocky and call myself a food critic, and it's always greeted with the same derision - that food critics never write about the food.

It's true that the great food critics of our day - AA Gill, Giles Coren, Jay Rayner Marina O'Loughlin etc - tend to spend more time on the set up than the pay off. But often, the food is the least important bit - if every restaurant served the same food, some would still be better than others. The most memorable meal I have ever had, which you can read about here, involved some very average food indeed. Great food does not necessarily make a great restaurant, and Marina writes exactly that sentiment here. The joy of eating out is the experience and, as any writer will tell you, explaining the uniqueness that is a moment in time is almost impossible. Most of the time it takes most of the time; it takes words, it takes space, it takes thought. It takes a paragraph that seems completely at odds with the purpose of the review (ahem), but it always has a point in the end.

But then you go to somewhere like Okan in Brixton village, where the food is so central to the experience that you want to tear up all those first paragraphs and punch some sense into AA Gill, with particular reference to the one in which he shoots a baboon.

But it's easier to focus on the food when your restaurant is four foot square, mostly kitchen and serving pancakes. Walking in from the harshly lit concrete streets of Brixton village, you suddenly feel like you've crashed a home kitchen, where a very accommodating Japanese family are trying to buy into Shrove Tuesday. If this was the case, from now on I'm doing it their way.

Okan is one of the few places in London that you can eat Okonomiyaki. Most websites will tell you this is a kind of Japanese pancake. Bollocks I say - if you tried tossing one of these you'd be finding cabbage around your kitchen for weeks. It has a lot more in common with a hash. It's hotchpotch of vegetables and noodles, seasoned, spiced and fried together, bound by one lonely egg. So far, so simple. But it's the toppings (or boppings, seeing as they are on the bottom). I ordered the Okan Special, which is bopped with prawns, squid and delicious kimchi, a tangy mess of fermented vegetables that really sang out next to the fried veg. But what really makes these hashes even more special is the sauces. They're drizzled with a thin satay sauce and special Okonomiyaki sauce, a slightly sweet and much thicker version of our own venerable Worcestershire sauce.

It's a wonderful plate of textures and tastes, varying from salty to sweet and crunchy to slimy. It's delicious, trashy and cheap. If I didn't live so far north, it would be my new hangover stop. In Japan it's very much considered fast food - if only we could have one of these on every high street, then we'd all be talking about the food.

Unit 39, Brixton Village, Brixton

Tayyabs: currying no favour

Don't believe the hype.

Tayyabs has an almost mythical status in London. "Should have gone to Tayyabs" is a well-known refrain to people who make the frequent mistake of having a curry on Brick Lane. I always do it when slightly worse for wear out east on a weekend. I stumble from "London's best curry house 2008" to "London's best curry house 2009", entering full of promise and cumin-inspired excitement and leaving wondering if Craig Charles awarded the restaurants their dubious titles.

Tayyabs is different to most Indian restaurants. For a start, it's got an android app when most curry houses opt for about 3 phone numbers instead. More importantly, it's Pakistani, specifically Punjabi. Pakistan is much like Britain in the way it has developed its cuisine, borrowing from other nations to create their own fusions and ideas. Although the menu may not look that different from your local takeaway, the differences are mostly tucked away in the kitchen and subtly into the food.

Having said that, you're unlikely to order lamb chops to start at most curry houses, as we did at Tayyabs. Apparently it's their signature dish, and it certainly sizzles cockily on the hotplate. But they were the Victoria Beckhams of lamb chops - nicely spiced but possibly anaemic. Two per person was definitely not enough; four might have just been an appetiser; and perhaps ten would make a main. It left my companion and me fighting over the poppadoms like dogs as we waited slightly too long for our mains.

Which is the best time to best time to air my greatest gripe with Tayyabs - it's size. I like my curry houses small, intimate and usually on the verge of closure. I want the waiters to be delighted to see me, I want to dine almost alone and have them hover awkwardly just to the side because there is no one else to wait on. That's how I dine in north London. But Tayyabs is massive and heaving with customers. It feels a bit like a slightly shitty City bar, with tacky decor, harsh lighting and a lot of men in suits with gelled hair. In a similar vein, it also felt like a meat factory. The high turnover means the queue constantly moves, giving the impression of the diners being on a conveyor belt. You sit down, get fed and go out with the steady stream of other former-diners. The impersonal feel of this is exacerbated by the fact that it's so loud you can hardly hear yourself think, and this means the waiters have given up trying to talk. Instead, they mutely point at tables, mouth instructions at you and, more often than not, ignore your wildly waving arms and very British attempts at catching their eye. After all, we are only wallets on conveyor belts.

Luckily for them, the chefs in the open kitchens do seem to know what they are doing, even if the food suffers from being cooked in such high volume. My korahi chicken - a Pakistani dish cooked in great big saucepans from which it gets the dish takes name - was excellent. It differs from a north Indian curry because the meat is cooked in spices, and the sauce is added right at the end. This gives the meat much more texture and the slightly burnt spices really shine through. The addition of crispy onions to the top was a simple but clever addition for a nice dish.

Sadly the Wednesday special, a Mughlai Korma, was overcooked. The description, rather blandly, said the "rich sauce generously covers succulent pieces of meat". I have two problems with this statement. First, if the best thing you can say about a dish is that there is enough sauce, the dish is on its way to disaster. Second, it came with virtually no sauce at all. It had been cooked dry so the main texture was oil and, although it was flavourful, some of the lamb was very tough indeed. I only really ordered this dish out of morbid curiosity at the terrible descriptor, and in a desperate attempt to make my dining experience in any way unique from the hundreds of other diners.

After this error, we decided not to cave in to curiosity again with the puddings, deliciously misspelt as "deserts". We paid our extraordinarily low bill (karma where it's due), which also kept the tip mercifully low, and squeezed our way past the salivating queues of people.

I have to say I was left wondering what all the fuss was about. There can't be many curry houses serving such unique curries, or indeed such a wide range, but the lamb chops weren't actually that good, nor was the restaurant itself, and the staff certainly weren't. If you're stuck in Whitechapel and need a meal, you could do considerably worse (you could go to Brick Lane for starters), but as I waved goodbye to one of my dearest friends, who was disappearing abroad for a month, I couldn't help but think: "Shouldn't have gone to Tayyabs".

83-89 Fieldgate St


Tower Hamlets, UK E1 1JU
http://www.tayyabs.co.uk/


   

O'Connors: a bream come true

If you're in South Ireland, make theirs the dish of the (holi)day.

We knew it was going to be the last good meal we'd eat for a while. We were moored in Bantry, West Cork, and a storm was coming. Once we had got the tender back to the yacht it was going to be 24 hours of board games at 45 degree angles in storm force winds.

At 8.30pm it was still hot and humid, and though there was no one on the streets, the restaurants were packed as we searched for our last meal. Being so isolated and coastal, every restaurant was offering fresh fish - some undoubtedly more accurately than others. We chose the one with the most specials and, most importantly, the one with the most specials crossed out, so we knew the menu changed daily and was almost by definition no more than a day old.

So O'Connors won the battle - sadly with most people in the town, and we had to wait in the bar of the nearby hotel while some unfortunate diners were hounded and harried during their coffees. This didn't take long, and we were seated by a waitress that couldn't have been older than five, but turned out to be brilliant. She helped us choose the wine, she laughed at my father for ordering fish and chips in a posh restaurant, and explained that the only reason she carried the starter platters one at a time was that the slates cost £40 a pop and that was her night's wages if she dropped them. These economics aside, I had already decided to tip well.

The whole family decided to go for the seafood platters. Designed for two they came with a teacup of delicious salty seafood broth, delicious garlic and breadcrumb topped mussels and the crispiest, and deep-fried calamari so oily is was like the squid was still alive and trying to entwine your fingers. Unfortunately it also came with a salmon mousse that had more in common with lemon-zest Mr Sheen than any starter should. Perhaps they'd run out of lemons in the kitchen.

The main course, however, was faultless. A crispy skinned, moist sea bream, surrounded by a circle of balsamic and topped with samphire and roast tomatoes. People often say less is more, and more often than not are talking bollocks, but here is was the key to the dish. The soft, acidic sweetness from the tomatoes and balsamic was obviously going to bring the fish to life, but it was the samphire that really made it. It literally smelt and tasted like a sea breeze - filling my nostrils and the back of my mouth with fresh, salty air before the earthy, grassy flavour of the fibres cut across. It was just perfect.

I couldn't even open up my pudding stomach by the end. I was sated. Never before has a restaurant's special been so emphatically... special, and as I played endless games of Scrabble back on board the next day, as the wind howled and sent the mast reaching for the sea, even as my stomach churned and my sea legs gave out, that sea bream was still all I could think of.

http://www.oconnorseafood.com/
O'Connors Seafood Restaurant,
Wolfe Tone Square Bantry,
Co. Cork.
Tel: +353 (0)27 55664

Koya: chewing the duck fat

To be honest, I'd go to Wagamama.

Frith Street glistened with new fallen rain, and I stood hunched and hooded. There was no shelter as the sky spat at us again, and again, and again. It had no right to rain. It was August. Any showers should at least be followed by that baking hot sun that breaks through, like when you open the oven door without knowing it was on. The people around me huddled under foldable umbrellas too small for one, let alone two.

She was late, but it didn't matter. We would have to wait anyway, because it had happened again. I was queuing for my dinner.

I shouldn't moan. We queue in McDonald's and no one moans, so why moan when a better meal is in the offing? When it comes to Koya, that comparison isn't that unfair. It's a noodle restaurant. In Japan it's fast food. It's everywhere. Whether it's as good as Koya I don't know, but I hope it is because I wasn't that impressed. If every Japanese street had a Koya on it, I think the questions I left the restaurant asking myself might be answered quite quickly. And that could only spell trouble.

The most pressing question I had, and this would be a pressing question in any restaurant, was what the hell did I just eat? I definitely ordered the duck udon, and definitely got charged for the duck udon, but the meat that came wasn't definitely anything. It tasted like duck, felt like more noodles and looked like pork. So goodness knows what they gave me. In some ways I hope it was a miscommunication in the kitchen, because that's a better excuse than the rather bizarre idea that they may have poached the duck. Poaching duck is fine, particularly in the delicious stock that made the broth. However, poaching duck fat is disgusting. What is usually the wonderful crispy skin, which drips and droops with flavour, became sodden, waterlogged and bland – like a breaded turkey escalope left to soak in water overnight. It felt like overcooked noodle in my mouth, accentuated by the pleasantly al dente udon noodles and crunchy spring onions the dish came with.


Another question I left asking was, despite being a beer lover and aspiring alcoholic, had I been tricked into drinking Carling? I gave my Kirin Ichiban an artisanal sniff only to recoil as all my teenage memories of warm Carling rushed through my brain. That week malty smell, that metallic tang, trying to convince a down-and-out balding man in his late twenties that you really are 18.

To be fair, the beer actually tasted quite good. It was light and refreshing, so died horribly next to a duck soup, but up to that point was a decent lager, save the smell that almost ruined it.

Chain comparisons are probably the mark of an inexperience reviewer, but I have to say that had I gone to Wagamama's I'd have had just as good a bowl of soup for a good few quid less. In fact, if I had gone to Wagamama's I wouldn't have had soup, I'd have had the Katsu curry – but there's always someone who branches out and regrets it. So they would have had just as good a soup.

It's a shame because Koya has a trendy, understated feel about it. Sure I'd gone on a strong recommendation by a friend, but I was all ready to declare that I had found an undiscovered gem. Sadly I can't say that. Before the meal, as I waited in the rain for my late friend, an American lady wearing more Olympic branding than the Velodrome approached to ask why I was queuing and what was so great about Koya. I replied that I didn't know yet.

I still don't.

   

Sam's Brasserie and Bar: given a roasting

There are better roasts out there.

I must be an alcoholic. Recently, I seem to walk out of every restaurant thinking about the wine rather than the food.

I'd love to live in a world where, instead of three square meals a day, we all had three half-hour drinking sessions. Having a big breakfast really would define whether you get through the day; the Weetabix Driving Instructor advert would become instantly more interesting, hopefully fatal; and this article would have even more entertaining typos.

Sadly, this world is awash with health implications and funding shortages as it is, so my idea will never catch on - save in Scotland. Instead, I will have to satisfy myself by saying that the bottle of Portuguese Quinta da Falorca 2007 I quaffed at Sam's was utterly brilliant - light, fruity, moorish and well priced (£24) - and then move on to the food.

I don't know exactly why I didn't like Sam's Brasserie and Bar (what a start to a review). It's a lovely place to be on a showery Sunday afternoon. When the sun shines it bathes the whole restaurant  in white light, and when it rains the windows can the rain, like a force field keeping you safe. And the service is excellent - homely, bright-eyed and smiling - something even AA Gill noted on his visit. He also wrote about the food, which is usually a good sign.

But it just wasn't that good. My starter was no more than a sum of its parts - mozzarella, mint, rocket, broad beans and chilli, drizzle with just a little too much olive oil but desperately under-seasoned, so much so that even the mozzarella seemed to lack flavour, despite the lumps being the size of a child's fist.

Being Sunday I had selected the roast, something I rarely do in restaurants for reasons that will become clear. To be fair, the roast pork was considerably more refined and thought out than the starter. Usually the word tower is not one I like to associate with food, despite Michelin chasers' obsessions with defying gravity. If they could invent soup towers they would. But here it worked. The gravy was evidently poured over the meat and veg before topping it with crackling, which meant the meat and cabbage was drowned gloriously in gravy, but with the crispy skin was still dry and crunchy. The creamed cabbage in particular was delicious, with a sweet tang that stopped the meal becoming a bland mess of stock and meat.

Unfortunately the potatoes was sub carvery-pub standard, and the meat a little too fatty. No doubt the pig led a good life, but I would guess that he rather took advantage of it. I see him supping cognac and debating politics like the end of Animal Farm, rather than rolling in mud and sleeping in a metal half-barrel.

London seems obsessed by the perfect roast. Time Out wastes a whole issue on it each year, and the main problem is that roasts need to be cooked with care, attention and, most importantly, lots of time - something commercial kitchens can rarely afford. Great roast potatoes are not hard to achieve when cooking for four, but cooking for 100 and they become nigh-on impossible. So a busy brasserie on a slightly chilly Sunday is not the time to go, and not when you are charged £15.50 for the privilege.

Something British restaurants really can do is a stick toffee pudding, and I can't help but order it whenever I see it. Partly because it's such a comforting bit of cooking, but also because it's like pizza. Even when it's awful, it's still pizza. It's still awesome. This one needed that comparison. It was hardly heated, and the ice cream on top, which should have been cream within moments, was still perky on top as I neared the end. But it was sticky, it was sweet, and it was delicious. It was everything you'd ask of a pudding. Except hot.


Ending a review when you are so undecided is impossible. It's one of those places where you could go and, if you ordered a different dish, have an entirely different experience. Maybe worse, probably better. All I can really say is, get the Portuguese wine. And get me some help.

   

The Chequers: Back to the past

A beautiful village pub. Perfect for a night's stay.

Do you remember the days when pubs were called "inns" and you could leave your horse in the stables? Do you remember how every "inn" used to have a spitting can at the bar and a drunk local with his head in a trough? Of course you don't, that's mix Lord of the Rings and Back to the Future III.

And even though that sounds like heaven, there aren't many cliched inns in this world any more. In fact, until two weeks ago I wasn't even sure there were any. Then, I tried to cycle to Brighton.

We left it a bit late. In fact, by 3.30pm we were still within the M25, stood at an ESSO garage eating flapjacks and nursing cramp. But we couldn't turn back. Not before we'd left the city we started in. So we saddled up and rode off into the already slightly setting sun. By 7.30pm the cramp was almost unbearable. We were still 17 miles from Brighton, the temperature had dropped and the rain had begun to fall.

Then, out of the gloom appeared this warm orange glow. Rising like Hotel California out of the Surrey countryside came the Chequers. From the open door poured gentle acoustic jazz and the sound of warm, friendly folk chatting, and the clink jugs on worn wooden tables. You could practically see the stable, hear the horses' hooves and the drunk man gurgling from the trough.

From the moment we stepped into the Chequers the cold, rain and tiredness seem to drip of us. There was a warm fire, a grand piano, sofas and books and old clocks. There were locals and couples, parties and quiet drinks. I walked up to the bar and uttered a line I had always wanted to say:

"Good evening barkeep, I was wondering whether you had a room spare for the night? It's awful cold outside and the horses need feeding"

Or rather:

"Alright mate, have you got any rooms spare. Also, where can we lock our bikes?"

His reply was affirmative, although the sheen was slightly tarnished by the fact that my housemate and I would have to share a double bed. Suddenly it all got a bit more Brokeback Mountain than Back the to Future but given how stiff I was (leave it) we had little choice.

After a quick shower we headed back downstairs and chose a table by the fire. Our matronly waitress brought us a hearty ale each, disappointingly in standard pint glasses. But that was where the disappointments ended. The Chequers, by all accounts, is a brilliant place and a beacon of hope for foodies. The starters were nothing to write home about - a decent Stilton and broccoli soup and scallops, but my friend had an excellent rib-eye steak with hand-cut (by which they mean knife-cut, unless Bruce Lee faked his death and now works in a Surrey pub) chips. But it was my main, billed as "posh ham and eggs" that was truly amazing. Expecting some nice cured ham in a honey and mustard glaze, what I actually got was a glorious, enormous slow-roasted leg of pork with a perfectly sweet sauce and a poached egg on the side. I would have the preferred the yolk more runny, but I was so engrossed by prodding the pork and watching the moist meat almost drip off the bone, that I hardly gave it a second's thought.

I was truly, utterly and brilliantly stuffed and, after the exertions of the day, very drunk on the rioja we'd bought. But, just as I was considering bed, I spotted the homemade sticky toffee pudding. Now, I have a real hate of anything claiming to be homemade. For a start, it's rarely homemade. It's made in the restaurant isn't it? Sure, it;s shorthand for "not pre-packaged", but often it says something about a restaurant that it has to make that distinction clear. But I am never a man to turn down a sticky toffee pudding in a pub. And I was right to risk a stomach rupture. It did all the things a good sticky toffee pudding should - burn your mouth, stick to your teeth and touch your soul. And with that I headed upstairs.

Sated I fell into bed with Alien playing on our room's flatscreen TV. Strange dreams plagued me that night: of legs of pork bursting out of my stomach while John Hurt cycled round and round drinking rioja from a jug. I have lost count of the number of times that I have googled "country pub London". They never come close to my idyll. The Spaniard's Inn comes close, so does the White Horse. But they are nothing to the Chequers, to the real thing, which joyfully hit every cliche at each time of asking (except the horses). This pub is worth the quick train, especially on the way to Brighton. 

Middle England was fun. I hope to join it one day.

http://www.the-chequers.com/

Made in Camden: Made in Heaven

Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant.

Playing at the Roundhouse at the moment is the brilliant "Oh Fuck Moment".

I had my own moment downstairs in the venue's café, Made in Camden. It may sound like a desperate channel 5 ploy to cash in on the pretense and stupidity of Made in Chelsea, but there are no cameras and certainly no egos. The food, presented as a global take on tapas, is often experimental, but never in a smoke-and-mirrors Heston way.

You can tell the chefs were once students of Yotam Ottelenghi. The list of ingredients is dizzying, the fusion of cuisines baffling and the range on offer intimidating. But it's all layered expertly. The complex-sounding and delicate-looking dishes are so punchy, so satisfying, so perfect, that they left me speechless. I was a baby eating solids for the first time; I was kid eating chocolate money; I was reliving the first Double Decker I ever ate. Some dishes were so moorish that I might as well have been eating Walkers Thai Sweet Chilli Sensations.  If you ever have ambitions to be obese, this is surely the way to do it. Made in Camden's food is simply addictive.

My friends and I couldn't communicate. Like cavemen and women we moaned and grunted at each other, reached out to grab fistfuls of food, unable to articulate thanks or graces. I floundered and stuttered, pointlessly trying to explain to my all-to-aware guests just how good the food was. And so the random swearing started. I think it was the endive and sweet potato crumble with slow-roasted tomato salsa that did it. It started with satisfying crunch, then a wash of creamy sweet potato, then a slap of salty endive and was finished by the mouthwatering zing of the salsa. 

Or maybe it was the calamari, deep fried in what looked like diamonds, dunked in chilli aioli then smothered with pumpkin jam. It was alternately sweet, then spicy, then salty; soft, then springy, then crunchy. I mopped up the aioli with the squid like it was just bread and soup. 

Of course, it could also have been the crispy, oily hake tempura, served with a sweet and sour Kaffir lime sauce and grilled broccoli. I know it's tapas and the portions are meant to be small, but goddamnit I wanted more Hake.

That's not to say the portions are stingy - the only dishes on the menu not meant to be shared (apart from the soup surely, because that's just silly) are the desserts. And those portions are by no means mean. My chocolate mousse was like a decadent sweet brick on the plate, and came with a coffee and mascarpone tart. I felt somewhat cheated by the term tart, as really it was a scoop of coffee flavoured cheese in slightly stale pastry, but oh my days the mousse was effing fantastic.

In fact, my dinner at Made in Camden was a litany of expletives. I was like an excitable (slightly bearded) child with tourettes. Sadly it wasn't all for the right reasons. Given how empty the restaurant was, the service was pathetic. Unless they were hiding a rowdy and demanding party in the back room, three cocktails should not take 20 minutes to make – and if they are missing an ingredient for one, they should tell the diner immediately, not after delivering the first two. Given how few orders must have been put through the till, they shouldn't have added a glass of wine and half a wheat beer to our tab. More importantly, when we questioned this, they should have been a little more trusting of a party that has just spent £120 on dinner.

But nothing could spoil the work of the chefs. To turn three educated people into dribbling wrecks, without plying them with alcohol, is no mean feat, and I for one was speechless at how wonderful the food was. When you have tasted good food, you realise it is more addictive than the additives that are meant to hook us. It's proof that psychological addiction is stronger than chemical.

www.madeincamden.com