Viajante Saturday 19 February 2011

Me and the main man (Sam titled this 'Happy' - good choice!)x

Anyone reading this blog will think I have just won the lottery seeing as this is the second week running that I have been privileged to eat at two Michelin starred restaurants two weekends 11th and 19th Feb) -
on the trot. No I haven't booked one for this weekend but I will be playing the lottery. The similarity of both restaurants starts and ends with the fact that they both have Michelin stars and they serve food. Every aspect of these restaurants (Le Gavroche for those that didn't read last weeks)is entirely different. The locations speak volumes about what experience you're going to have - Mayfair - foie gras. Bethnel Green - Sea Buckthorn! The latter was a favourite of Genghis Khan who treasured it as an essential ingredient in keeping his soldiers strong. I can't say that foie gras would have done the same - what does that say about the French army?! (sorry for casting aspersions on our bravery of our Gallic (garlic) allies (although 17 to 9 in the rugby in our brave warriors favour tastes so sweet this morning!). Anyway I seem to have sailed off course with this review partly as I am unsure how to start to comment about this meal - much easier talking waffle as those close to me can attest...

Right, OK, here we go.

Having sat down and offered cocktails from the bar we are served with a glass of complimentary champagne (the benefits of going with someone of note (Sam! xx).  We are given the run down on what to expect and looking around for a sheet of paper listing the evenings promises....However we are told the menu is received AFTER the meal, a fact that may seem strange to some of you - and to us at the time. The menu, we are told  is to REMIND you what you have eaten not what you are about to eat, you just have to decide how much!. Annoyingly we forgot to take the menu home but they have kindly forwarded what we had although on closer inspection it does appear that we were treated with some slight variations to the dishes as Sam had already eaten at the restaurant a few days previously. We also had, we think 10 courses rather than 9 or 12 so the memory is a little sketchy, that and the 10 glasses of wine that accompanied the dishes can only have assisted in the memory loss.

The first step in the process is to choose between the number of courses whether it be 6, 9 or 12 (it is less at lunchtime for obvious reasons.). When you have 4 people with varying appetites this does present the first hurdle as appetites are different. We were informed however that you have a similar quantity of food in that the portion sizes are greater the fewer dishes (not the price). The other main option is wine - to opt for the wine pairing or not. With so many dishes and tastes it would not have been the right option to have gone for a bottle of white or a bottle of red and we were all very glad that we went for the paired option.

I am going to summarise the evening and the experience rather than try and remember each dish as that would not only be unreadable (OK impossible to write without a great embellishment and a tissue of whoppers!) so I have simply listed and shown some of the dishes we THINK we had.  The most memorable part of the evening was the grace - the quiet, deliberate way all the staff went about their business. From the incredibly well briefed waiting staff (there was no need of a Maitre D - if there was one I would never have guessed), each and every one knew exactly what was going on and yet how could they?  It was almost like a Victorian stage magician in that there seemed to be no dialogue between anyone and the kitchen was completely exposed and yet each dish arrived, perfectly executed and the description an exact narative on the plate in front of us, a conjurers trick surely?  We can't have been in the real world as the sommelier didn't laugh at my jokes??!!  Reality was put to the test when we were served ice cold sake paired with the langoustine and then razor clams (which aren't on the menu supplied) with what we really thought was topping up the water but in the wrong glass burst into flavour when paired with a Portugese wine the name I don't annoyingly have.

The chef, Nuno Mendes and you must look at his website Viajanate is clearly of the new school.  He hasn't quite gone the whole nine 'foraged' yards like Rene Redzepi (who I may add I have the utmost respect for...) but he is de-constructing food in a very pleasurable way and paying homage to the new culinary way of 'thinking about food' - and for that you get a star without foie gras.

The Kitchen

Note Nuno, like a conductor, getting the best out of his well rehearsed orchestra

This was a noble experience, one where you feel you have been privileged to experience a man at the beginning of a new chapter in the way we eat and the way we appreciate food.  Some of it didn't rock my world but that's why you need to experience a whole journey and not just go for starter, main course pudding.  This won't appeal to everyone and that's good as it means financially this will still be obtainable to those that don't have expense accounts to impress the impressionable and I hope that it doesn't become like El Buli, where Nuno cut his teeth, another notch in the proverbial headboard of a black Amex card because they managed to get in.  This really was exciting and I have taken away more from this experience than any other in a very long time and you know what - Nuno is a very humble man and deserves to be admired for what he does not the ratings he generates on TV or the shopping centres he opens....

I have resisted the temptation to compare this with DJ/producers but as a wannabe DJ and foodie I can see the parallel.  The establishment enshrined in the Radio One/ Tong autocracy pumping out shit versus the underground and mostly unknown likes of Oxia, Joris Vorn producing the music that most of us really get off to without even knowing...

I said bravo to Michelle Roux last week and I meant it but what I say to Nuno Mendes is simply

Thank you.

PS

Some of the dishes below - they are not in the right order and I am sorry to say in case Genghis Khan is reading (I doubt from above) I have no picture of the Sea Buckthorn with burnt meringue and yoghurt sorbet which was sensational

Thai Explosion 

Champagne

Bread and Buttter!

Scallops with carrot, mustard and watercress

Pares Balta "Blanc de Pacs" 2010, Penedès

Lobster, potato, confit egg yolk and saffron

Kooyong ‘’Clonale’’ Chardonnay 2008, Mornington Peninsula 

Roasted squab with beetroot and pistachio

Maisonneueve-Cosse “Abstémes s’Abstenir” 2008, France (Cahors)

Frozen maple pannacotta with shiso granite and green apple

Duck heart and tongue, celeriac, pine and hazelnut

Teruzzi & Puthod ‘’Carmen Puthod’’ 2009, Toscana 

Le Gavroche Friday 11 February 2011

What a great surprise when having driven and not known exactly where I was going, to turn up outside a building covered in scaffolding and seeing the illuminated sign above the door stating that this was indeed one of the finest restaurants in the world. Not only is it one of the finest restaurants in the world, it's also home to one of the finest chefs in the world and one that I have the utmost respect for. What makes Le Gavroche stand out is that every ingredient of what makes an evening great was there in spades. I won't say that the food was the best I have ever had but the combination of the food, Michelle Roux, the service, the wine, the ambiance was, all together, enough to give this restaurant, or rather the experience 10 out of 10.

Most people who were there were there for a special occasion. There were a couple of tables that looked liked they were businessmen/women but on the whole it was clearly people going out for a once in a lifetime experience. Well I am sure there are people who dine there regularly but for us mere mortals this was an experience to be cherished. Lisa had booked the table back in November and was to be my surprise Valentine's dinner. We arrived and were shown to our table. It's one of those restaurants that doesn't seem to have a bad table and I was pleased to see ours was a cut above the average. The restaurant is like a plush homely (stately one that is!) and very welcoming, the tables are adorned with silver and you really do feel special.

Amuse bouche were served along with our aperitif. I have to say I am not a big fan of these. I think more often than not they are underwhelming and to a degree pointless. These were I felt unnecessary and lacked the finesse of what was expecting to eat. As you can imagine foie gras featured heavily on the menu and it was in fact a challenge to choose a starter and a main course that didn't both contain it. In fact having decided on two courses both featuring foie gras the Maitre D suggested I change my choice of main course which had been the filet steak to the veal cutlet. My starter had to include foie gras so I opted for the hot foie gras and crispy duck pancakes. Now I am sure Mr Roux would have been very embarrassed had I shown him but my foie gras had not been de-veined and this somewhat took away from the experience. The taste of both the foie gras and the duck was sensational but I had to remove the veins before I ate it as it's difficult to have a melt in the mouth experience with rubber bands included! Lisa opted for the artichokes with truffle and foie gras and this was delicious.

The main course was a beautifully tender veal cutlet served with the richest, creamiest mash I have ever eaten (probably not a good idea to eat that more than once given the heart stopping quality of it). I have to say I think the veal cutlet I had at Quo Vadis was better but nonetheless this was a great piece of meat cooked well. Lisa had a trio of pork, a chop, pork belly and cheek and that too was excellently cooked. None of the portions were small, in fact they were huge considering the richness of the food and we struggled to finish our dishes. Annoyingly I can't remember the name of the wine we had but it was from a decent chateau in Burgundy (ours was the cheapest from that chateau at around £70!) but it was superb and complemented the food perfectly.

We had no room for pudding so opted for coffee and petit fours to have something sweet and I went for a '67 Armangnac which was seriously good. Like the portions of the food there seemed to be no holding back and I was poured the most enormous measure - generous to a fault but boy did that hurt in the morning.

To finish off the night none other than the main man came round every table and was clearly genuinely interested in his customers having the experience they came for. Unlike certain other chefs I have mentioned previously Michelle Roux deserves his 2 stars and when you're paying that kind of money (£350 for 2!!!) you want to know that you are paying for the real thing and not any old Jo in the kitchen.

All in all in was a great experience, one we won't do again in a hurry simply for financial reasons and I would say that it's something that any one who is interested in food should do once. Bravo!

Mushroom Soup

Well it does help if you like mushrooms and I LOVE mushrooms so you can't really go wrong with mushroom soup as there's not much else in it apart from mushrooms.  You can of course sex it up by adding wild mushrooms, cream and booze which is precisely what I did - all three of them - and you end up with a seriously delicious soup.

Like all soups it does help to start with a good stock and if you can be bothered and have the time (and the chicken bones!) you make your own stock and use that as the base of the soup.  Frankly it's often too much trouble and chicken stock isn't like beef stock in that it can end up pretty bland.  That said better using bland chicken stock and adding Knorr than just adding Knorr to water! Also when it comes to the mushrooms,  Sainsbury's basics were the best buy. I like the fact that they are higgledy piggledy and misshapen.  I think they taste better because of it.

What you will need

• 400g of mushrooms
• 30g dried wild mushrooms (including the water from rehydrating)
• 1 large onion
• 1 large potato (for thickening)
• 4oz or 120g of butter
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 Bay leaves
• 1 heaped tablespoon of chopped parsley
• salt and pepper
• 8fl oz of cream
• 3 tablespoons of medium sherry

You start by chopping everything and add the butter to a saucepan big enough for all the ingredients (sounds obvious but the number of times I don't get this right and have to move up a size).  Once the butter has melted add the chopped onion and garlic and simmer gently until they are cooked through avoiding any browning as this affects the taste.  

Next add the stock, the Bay leaf, parsley, stock, potato and mushrooms (don't forget you need to rehydrate the wild mushrooms and don't through the water away, add it to the pot).  This needs to simmer for about 20minutes until everything is cooked through.  At the end of this add the sherry and simmer for another couple of minutes.  

You now need to blend the soup which will turn into a semi smooth soup, but before you do that take out the Bay leaves.  You can add some of the cream and blend holding back some for garnish along with a sprig of parsley.

Serve with chunks of fresh bread....yum!

Japanese Gyoza with Soy Dipping Sauce

I love gyoza  and always order them in Japanese or Chinese restaurants.  They are dumplings that can be steamed, fried or first fried and then steamed (potstickers).  Popular in Asia , the Japanese version known as gyoza and the Chinese version known as jiaozi.  They are, as you can imagine similar but use different filling are cooked slighly differently.  They are the Asian version of the Italian's ravioli.  The version we cooked was leaning towards the Japanese but I would say that we spun it a little with flavours more associated with Thai and it really worked.

We took a traditional recipe for Japanese gyoza - minced pork and cabbage being the main ingredients.  We added spring onion, coriander, ginger, garlic, fish sauce and lime juice and grated lime peel.  The dipping sauce was a mixture of Japanese rice wine and soy sauce although next time I would use Tamari which is the Japanese equivalent but we had run out annoyingly.

We also slightly cheated in that we had some wanton pastry in the freezer and whilst wanton pastry is different in that its slightly thicker it didn't seem to make a huge amount of difference.  The most notable was the wanton skins were square and smaller and the gyoza should be made from round so you can make crescent shaped dumplings.  The difference in the pastry is wanton pastry contains egg and as I said early is thicker, the remaing ingredients is water, wheat flour and salt.  So ignoring that fact we went ahead as we wanted to make them anyway as an experiment as paying £6 for 4 dumplings in a restaurant was good motivation to perfect the making of these delicious dumplings.

Ingredients
1 small sweatheart cabbage
6 spring onions
3 cloves garlic
250g pork mince
2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 heaped tablespoon chopped coriander
1 lime grated peel
1 teaspoon lime juice
gyoza wrappers (although as I said we used wantons and they were fine)
1 egg white (to help stick the dumplings)
oil for frying

For the sauce
1 tablespoon Soy sauce
1 tablespoon Japanese rice wine

To start you need to finely chop and salt the cabbage with about 2 teaspoons of salt and really work into the cabbage.  Good old osmosis goes into action and the pile of sweatheart cabbage is stripped of all its water and, after 20 minutes, once you have given it a good squeeze in a cloth, you are left with a ball of chopped cabbage.  While this was going on you take the minced pork and add the finely chopped spring onion, chopped coriander, garlic and ginger, fish sauce and lime.

Once you have mix this up add the cabbage which will now have much of the water removed by the salt.  Mix this again so that its all mixed through and now start to fill the pastry.  With this amount of mixture you should be able to make around 40.  Each one has around two teaspoons worth of the mixture.

Once you have finished the dumplings add them to a pan and fry them until they are brown.  Some recipes say to just fry on one side - I didn't I fried both sides.  You then add about 200ml of boiling water and cover the pan so that the dumplings are cooked through.  You need to cook them until the water has evaporated and you are left with delicious gyoza.  Admittedly mine weren't going to win the shape award but they more than made up with the flavour - awesome!

Serve straight away with the dipping sauce...

Christmas 2010 (Chicken Liver Pate with Wild Mushrooms)

Flambéed Chicken Livers with Cognac

This is another really simple recipe and can be made whenever and used at your leisure.  It was always tradition with my mother to make a pate for consumption in between Christmas and New Year once the leftovers from Christmas day have been consumed and you need something to go with the last of the Stilton.  Obviously this dish can be made and used whenever as, just like dogs, it's not just for Christmas.  

Whether you buy fresh or frozen chicken livers it makes very little difference. You will need the following:

Ingredients

450g (1lb) chicken livers

5 rashes of pancetta
4 shallots
50 g of dried wild mushrooms
50ml of Cognac
1 teaspoon chopped fresh Thyme
Seasoning
40g butter
(50g butter for the top of the pate)

Finely chop the shallots, thyme and the pancetta and fry with some of the butter until cooked through but avoid browning them.  While you are doing this take the dried mushrooms and rehydrate these in boiling water.  Remove the fried shallots etc.and place in a mixing bowl.  Add the chicken livers (check them before hand there are now large veins attached) and cook these, leaving some of the pinkness in the middle and add half the Cognac and flambé.

Add the chicken livers to the mixing bowl and blend until a smooth paste.  If you want a very smooth pate then you can push through a sieve but as we are adding mushrooms to this I didn't bother.  Take the now hydrated mushrooms and take out any excessive moisture (kitchen roll will do) and add to the pan and fry with some butter and add to the blended pate and the remainder of the Cognac.

Finished Pate

Pour out the pate into a bowl of your choice or separate Ramekin dishes should you prefer and cover the top of the pate with butter (this should be clarified as this will keep longer and won't go rancid) so that none of the pate is exposed to the air.

We devoured this in between Christmas and New Year but as I said this isn't a dish for Christmas, this is very much a dish for any season or occasion.  If you want to jazz it up you could try putting a Sauternes jelly on top and serve in slices as a starter for a dinner party...

Christmas 2010 (Steak and Guinness Stew)

Well I have many good excuses for not keeping up with the blog as much as I had hoped for at the beginning of the year.  It has been a tough few months and what precious little time I have had to myself, sitting down again in front of the computer just didn't appeal.  That's not to say that I haven't been cooking as I have been cooking but not with the same sense of adventure, more about convenience cooking and tried and tested favourites.

Christmas however is a time for getting back into the kitchen.  It's a time when you have no alternative but to don that apron and start amassing the dishes necessary to make for a good Christmas.  There are several days to provide for and not just that but all the 'down-time' eating that is as essential to the Festive period as the main meals themselves.

The stew reducing on the hob

We had divided up the responsibilities for Christmas amongst the family/families.  We were having the in-laws round on Christmas Eve (Lisa's family) and due at my father's in the morning.  Christmas Eve dinner is a tricky one.  You want something that is worthy of an occasion, simple in that it doesn't take up too much time and also nor excessively rich seeing as this is the first evening in a long run of potentially heart attack inducing meals.  The obvious choice, especially with the Irish Connection, a good old fashioned Beef and Guinness stew with added puff pastry lids, served with creamy mashed potato and Savoy cabbage.

As with all good stews it has to be made the day before it's eaten.  This is a very simple recipe and requires very little in the way of skill.  Provided you can you use a knife you can make this dish.

Ingredients for 6 people
2lb of stewing steak (remove any sinews, keep the white fat)
1lb of mushrooms
1/2lb of lardons
2 heaped table spoons of tomato purée
1 bouquet garni
2 Bay leaves
1 pint of beef stock
4 large carrots in batons
2 sticks of celery batons
2 large onions cut into 1/8ths
2 cans of Guinness (2 pints roughly)
Seasoning
1 teaspoon of brown sugar

Once you have trimmed the meat and cut the vegetables up you add everything to the pot at the same time, no need to brown the meat and fry the onions.  I also added the juice left over from re-hydrating the Ceps (Porcini Mushrooms) and Slippery Jacks (which I had picked in the Autumn in Devon) which were going to be used in the pate I was going to make next.  You preheat the oven and add the dish.  This is cooked for about 3 hours on a relatively low heat of around 160 degrees.

The tomato and the lardons give this recipe a really rich finish, perhaps a little French influence to a British dish but the resulting depth of flavour is well worth it.

When it comes to eating, reheat on the hob without the lid and reduce the liquid content so you have a more intense flavour and reduce the amount of liquid to get the sauce to the right consistency.  Now you can either put in a pie dish and add a pastry lid or serve as a stew.