From the ridiculous to the sublime, Chez Bruce 21st June 2010

Our last restaurant experience was nothing short of a calamity at Hix (oh it's just won Time Out's top bars...hmmmm).  This one was nothing short of culinary excellence.  We have been to Chez Bruce over the years.  My first experience must have been at least 10 years ago and more recent to that probably no closer than 5.  There now seems to be no doubt in my mind that those tried and tested restaurants that quietly get on with the business of delivering expertly cooked food with attentive service and great ambiance are 99 times out of a 100 more likely to deliver your naturally and deservedly high expectations when you go to a restaurant where you know, even with the great value lunch time offers, are going to cost in excess of £100 for two.


This was my Father's Day treat and a chance for Lisa and I to have some time together after the last few weeks.  Chez Bruce has a great lunch time offer of £19.95 for 2 courses or £25.95 for 3 - and it's a well thought through a la carte menu, not a collection of obviously cheap dishes.  It was a Monday and yet there were plenty of fish dishes (fresh not frozen!) and that's what we chose as a main course but I am getting ahead of myself.

We ordered a bottle of Portuguese white wine.  I am tightfisted at the best of times and have learnt that these wines are on the whole pretty good and undervalued.  You can be confident that if the sommelier at Chez Bruce has put a wine on the list its going to be OK.  We made a great choice, Planalto Branco Reserva 2008 Duoro - a 'cheap' wine compared to the rest of the list at £24, the cheapest Burgundy was £26.  The first bottle was corked but not even presented at the table, the sommelier had checked, we were presented with this bottle and was duly tasted (I felt i had to! - it was the perfect temperature, a delicious wine, complex with huge fruit yet dry at the same time.

It was a good start, no, it was a great start, that and being served freshly made (still hot) parmesan biscuits and freshly baked bread.  Our starters arrived.   Mine was Sliced roast pork belly with tonnato dressing, anchovies, parmesan and crackling.  What can I say, it was superbly executed, the presentation and the balance of colour and texture just proved what is stated on the website that the inspiration comes from true legends such as Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and the Dr Johnson of the culinary world, Larousse.  This is not a chef trying to impress a la Saturday Kitchen, this is proper cooking, centuries old techniques perfectly honed to produce awe inspiring food.  Lisa had an equally well thought through and perfectly executed dish Cornish crab with leek and cockle vinaigrette, warm potato salad and tartare sauce.  What a start...

We both ordered fish.  Now given my last experience and that was ordering fish on a Friday, normally a traditionally safe bet, we ordered fish on a Monday.  My dish was Fillet of sea bream with shellfish sauce, potato pancakes, shrimps and basil and could not have been fresher if the chef had literally walked in that minute straight from the dock.  The sauce was steeped in flavour combining the brown shrimps and mussels, fish stock and cream.  It was seriously delicious.  Lisa had Roast cod with olive oil mash, grilled courgette and gremolata which was equally as delicious.

I was seriously blown away by this cooking and a little depressed that so many terrible restaurants get rave reviews because of who is in the kitchen and the ability of full witted PRs to sleep walk lazy journalists into writing good reviews for piss poor performances.  Even Giles Coren has admitted getting carried away with the moment and giving good reviews where it hasn't been deserved.


On the strength of what we had eaten so far, not having a pudding would have been darned right rude and given the fact that the pudding wine list ran into over 50 wines we just had to, didn't we?!  We went for an obvious choice and boy was it divine Hot chocolate pudding with praline parfait washed down with a red pudding wine.  Suffice it to say it was similar to fireworks at the end of a great party.  It was in every way the grand finale and underpinned what was simply one of the best meals we had had in a very long time.  Oh and if that wasn't enough they came round with some shortbread which I am surprised wasn't weighed down on account of its lightness.  

Chez Bruce is another very good reason to live in South London and another good reason to continue to support restaurants that are worthy of our hard earned money.  I am done with making mistakes of going to over reviewed, over stated restaurants and remember the adage that all the glitters isn't gold.  Chez Bruce on the other hand is a real treasure.

River Test 16th June Upper Beat First Weed Cut

If you have read the previous blog entry you will know my sad news.  The funeral was yesterday and was a demonstration of just how well liked my mother was and how much she will be missed.  So today was a good day, happy memories and a feeling of calm that follows the ritual of the funeral and burial a day that was celebratory and not in anyway morose, sad yes but uplifting and joyful.

This was the first day after the end of the Mayfly which is traditionally known as Duffers Fortnight when the fishing is allegedly easy as all the activity is on the surface.  Following the Mayfly the river has a short back and sides, the verges are trimmed and the weed in the river is cut back.  In the past, and I mean the long distant past, the River Test and The Itchen were nothing more than a series of interconnected channels that went through meadows.  Over millennia man started to channel the water and hence we now have a river system.

The rivers were all controlled by a series of weirs, sluices and hatches to control the flow.  In water meadows that were controlled this way the farmers could flood the meadows in spring which would spread nutrients and raise the temperature of the soil and hence promote early growth  so cattle and sheep could be fed.  A very small part of the River Test was navigable and used in the 16th and 17th centuries unlike The River Itchen which was navigable along a large part.  I digress, the point is that the river has to be constantly managed to maintain flow.  If the river was allowed to do its own thing it would quickly become overgrown in the summer and the flow would be interrupted with large parts becoming nothing more than a spring fed marsh.

The weed cut is normally a difficult time to fish as you have to cast a fly to a fish avoiding the huge amounts of weed coming down river, that combined with the fact that the normal gin clear spring fed water has been churned up to the colour of weak tea.  However this year due to the very cold winter and the corresponding coldish spring, bar a few decent days has resulted in very little weed growth.  Large parts of the river still seemed not to have recovered from the winter and that combined with the voracious appetite of the resident swans which, whilst being nice to look at, are verging on being a pest.  A group of swans is known as a bevy, lamentation, herd or wedge.  (check this site out - I never knew there was a noun for a group of trout!!! Animal Group Names ).  This lamentation of swans (see what I did there) is a mass of adolescent swans, last years cygnets and like to use the river as an aircraft carrier.  One minute your happily fishing away, next thing you have 10 incoming teenage swans to disturb the peace and of course the fishing as I can't imagine if you were a trout that you would be happy about a 30lb bird landing on top of you...

With the wind, the colouring of the water and the trout suffering from a serious hangover following the Mayfly gorging of the last two weeks the fishing was very tough.  I managed to winkle out the only fish that I had seen rising, taken on a smallish Grey Wulff but that was the only fish I saw rise the whole length of the carrier I was on.  At times like these it's best to return to the pub and sit out the afternoon and wait for the evening.  It's no guarantee there will be a hatch but it was sunny and if the wind dropped we could be in luck.

Returning to the river at 5ish the wind was starting to drop and small hatches of sedge and olives were occurring,  By 7.30pm there were huge bunches of olives and sedges and a few, very late, Mayfly were starting to land on the water to lay eggs.  These Mayfly were in sufficient numbers to turn a few trout on to them and I hook and lost two and landed another 2 in very quick succession.  Meanwhile Guy was over on the main carrier and having great success with sedge and hooking fish after fish, quickly reaching his 4 fish limit and a number that came short, hooked and subsequently got off.  It was a spectacular hours fishing, definitely worth waiting for.  Just after 9.00pm we packed up, very content that the gamble of staying late had paid off.

The end of yet another great day on the Test.  It's also the time of year when the seasons start to change again as we move into summer.  The last of the blossom from the Elder trees signifies that spring is finally over and the wonderful array of spring greens starts to merge into one shade.  The fishing gets harder - either early in the morning or for a brief but frenetic hour or so before dusk.  As I write this we have reached the longest day, it's sad to think the days get shorter from now on.  I am going to make sure I enjoy each day before the leaves start to turn again - we have the whole of the summer to look forward to...

In memory of my mother, The River Test Middle Beat 2nd June

Anne Veronica Sowton 

1st July 1934 - 6th June 2010

It is with a very heavy heart that I write this entry.  This time last week I received a call at 3.30am to be told that my mother had been taken suddenly, very seriously ill and was not expected to last the night.  My mother was able to have the strength to enable us to say our goodbyes, she was sedated but I know in my heart she could hear us.  She was an incredibly special person.  It is with my mother that I can remember catching my first trout, just days before I was due to go to Prep School at the age of 8 while my parents went off to Malawi in 1974.  This was a public strech of the River Itchen just below the weir in the water meadows just down from the chucrh of St Mary where my mother is to be burried.  We had no idea what we were doing but a worm on a hook in the right place saw us hook and land our first.  It was no monster but it was a trout and like the fish I was hooked.  In the same place last year mum and I took Max and we caught a trout, Max's first.  


I remember my mother waking me at 4am to drive from Blantyre to Mount Zomba where I had just started to fly fish.  Again neither of us had a clue but after awhile the thrashing around was productive and a trout was snagged and landed.  Both my parents were very patient with my fishing, my father rowing me out over Lake Malawi and fly fishing on the 10,000 foot Mount Mulanjie (where we hooked and lost a monster that nearly dragged us both in and I snapped the rod!!) and I owe it to them that I am now a semi-competent fisherman.  


They both came down to the Middle Beat exactly this time last year for the Mayfly, a very happy day and one I shall never forget.  The Test is very special to me and for my mother to have seen it means a lot to me and will do every time I come to fish here...

Mum and Dad on The Test June 2009 for the Mayfly

So I owe it to my mother to make sure that I continue with this blog, she loved cooking and was an amazing cook, hostess you name it.  Someone who really lived life to the full and I can honestly say she managed more in her lifetime than most people could do in two.  I love you very much mum and I will miss you terribly as will hundreds of people but I can assure you, you will never be forgotten.


The Mayfly

This was the day we had been waiting for all year.  The conditions were perfect, warm and sunny.  Whilst we new the sun would put the fish down in the day due to the brightness, the warmth would stimulate a lot of fly activity and we weren't disappointed.  Not on;y were there prodigious numbers of Mayfly, there were huge hatches of Sedge, Olives, Pale Wateries and Black Gnats.  The air was thick with flies and under all the leaves, the Mayfly that had hatched earlier, were waiting expectantly for the mating dance that would take place in the evening.  The Mayfly spends two years of its life as a nymph and spends only a few days as an adult fly from the order, Ephemeroptera, coming from the Greek, meaning 'short-lived' - hence the name.  

For 2 weeks at the end of May and beginning of June you have an explosive number hatching and the trout go crazy for them, no wonder, they are a big meal in comparison to the usual fair of gnats and smaller insects and grubs.

The fishing 

The morning was brief, we had some good sport for the first hour and a half but by 10.30am it was already getting hot and the sun was bright pushing the fish down and making it difficult.  We persevered for another hour calling it a day at 1130 to go in to Stockbridge to top up on some more flies.  We went via The John O'Gaunt pub as they sell flies for half the price and have an excellent selection of dry fly patterns.  The most popular being a fly called a Grey Wulff which is tied in many sizes as it represents any up winged insect from the Ephemeroptera order - small patterns for Olives, large for Mayfly.  

The famous Grey Wulff

Lee Wulff, an American fisherman invented the fly and left a few for fisherman on The Test and is now the most popular fly pattern and has many variants in size and colour, a serious legacy!

We returned to the river and having brought with us , wasabi and dark soy we decided on the freshest trout sashimi for lunch.  We had a large brown trout which in hindsight was probably a bit on the old side as the fish wasn't as tender as we had hoped.

Trout for the chop

Well at least it looked good!

Well it was a good experiment but I think a younger fish than the big old gnarly leviathan would be a better bet. 

In the afternoon the boys came down to the river with Lisa, it was the first time they had been down and Lisa could see why Guy and I so look forward to coming down to the river as it is such a magical place.

Lisa and the boys with Joseph, Nick's grandson.

The fishing started in earnest around 5pm as the mayfly were now starting their mating dance and come to the river to lay their eggs.  The fly has 3 main stages as an adult - emerging, the dun (upright adult) and the spent gnat (dead, flat winged on the surface).  The fish will switch to the different stages when one is more prevalent than the other and the fisherman has to adjust accordingly.  Not only that but you have to present the fly so that it looks more appealing than the thousands of actuals on the water.  

The dance was well under way now and it was looking better than we had seen in years.  We had been lucky that the weather had been cold up and till today so the ones that had hatched previously had all been waiting under the leaves.

The air thick with Mayfly 

Guy with a very nice looking brownie (not a chocolate one!)

 The fishing was spectacular and a number were caught and reaching our 4 fish limit was a little too easy so selecting the fish to go for was important, you didn't want to waste your limit on small fish today, this is the one time of the year that the fish loose all sense of safety and just smash into these flies - manner from heaven so to speak!

I have to thank Max, my eldest who was very handy when it came to landing fish and he managed to land some pretty big fish which I was very impressed with. 

Sunset and the end of a lovely day

So the day ended having been a spectacular days sport for us all.  Earlier in the day Lisa and the boys had spent a lovely day with my mother, I take great comfort in that she enjoyed a beautiful day with my wife and my children and her last day was an earlier summer's day, having seen the best of her roses and blossom and not a horrible winter's day.  I will remember my mother in that way, a summer's day spent on The Test with my family, that's as good a way of remembering someone as I can think...

I love you mum....

Utter disappointment, Mark Hix, Brewer Street, W1

Never has the parable of The Emperor’s Clothes been more applicable than our experience of Mark Hix flagship restaurant.  Well I say restaurant, it is a restaurant if you look at the dictionary definition which is ‘a place where meals are served to the public’.  Of course this is a definition that is very simplistic and does not have any of the nuances that we imagine in our minds eye for a restaurant to be.  McDonalds is a restaurant, Wetherspoons pubs have restaurants, yet we don’t associate these establishments as being the same as what was alleged to be the new paradigm in cooking/restaurant experience.

This was our first experience of a Hix restaurant, and was our wedding anniversary so an important occasion as far as we were concerned.  We had read lots of reviews and had been given personal recommendations that this was the new Mecca for culinary greatness, is this fact or turning a blind eye to the food as it's the place to be an no one wants to be the first to say something bad?  Mark Hix, the not so new kid on the block having been kept in the shadows in the Richard Caring Empire producing popular dishes to the cognoscenti, is the current hot news.

Our first impressions of the restaurant were moulded by the couple eating each other’s faces by the front door and one of the door hosts in a hat saying ‘yeah be there in a minute’.  We were shown to our table in what we thought was the bar.  No, the bar was downstairs.  This was the restaurant.  We were offered a drink from the bar, my wife ordered a lychee martini.  Now I would have expected this to have been no problem, but fresh lychees they had not.  So it was decided on wine.  We often go for the default, good value, white burgundy, Macon which we duly ordered.  I don’t normally pretentiously try wine but just give the glass a good sniff to check that it’s not corked.  I should have checked this.  The bottle was as at room temperature and was very poor indeed.  How hard can it be, i have tried countless Macons and rarely have i found a bad one, well at last i had.

But things now go from the sublime to the ridiculous.  We ordered, just main courses which in hindsight was a very good call.  I ordered plaice and L ordered brill.  My plaice arrived, skin down on a white plate with no garnish or accoutrement.  It looked very bland, often looks are deceiving but in this case it looked like it tasted – but worse.  This fish must have been frozen; it disintegrated in to a mash.  I called the Maitre D over and showed him the blob of fish i had created by pushing the fish of the bone into what can only be described as a blob of fishy blancmange.  He admitted that this didn’t look right and took it away.  He came back to inform me that Simon, the chef said the fish was fresh and i quote ‘That’s what happens to plaice when you cook it’.  This as you can imagine was the equivalent of lighting the blue touch paper.  I was from that moment on understandably pissed off.  I was presented with another dish, the same as my wife’s which I have to say had no flavour and another disappointment. 

We were offered no apology, no attempt to  placate, in fact I was told by another member of the boy band that waltz around masquerading as Maitre D’s or management, I couldn’t tell, that other people had had this dish and they didn’t think anything was wrong.

This isn’t a credible foodie restaurant in my humble opinion and I am very surprised that a chef of that calibre would put his name to a restaurant where he doesn’t cook and employ a chef and management that has an attitude of total disdain for its customers.  I know something about fish, a lot more than the people serving me and to be treated the way we were was nothing short of a disgrace.  

I will not be going to another Hix restaurant unless I know for a fact that he is in the kitchen cooking my food.