Review: Kingston Arms (Cambridge)

This is one of several great pubs scattered over the small streets either side of Mill Road. While the selection of ales here is good, it’s not quite as good as either the Cambridge Blue or Live and Let Live, so it’s the food that’d bring you here.

This is rooted in the style of pub food – not overly fancy dishes served in hearty portions to eat with a few beers. But there’s a wider range of dishes here and a care of preparation that takes it closer to gastropub territory than your average local.

A permanent fixture of the menu are a range of different types of sausages sourced from the nearby butcher.  These are proper sausages, with high quality meat blended with just the right amount of herb, giving them a much more distinctive flavour than the vaguely papery-ness of most supermarket bought sausages. They’re served with a proper homemade gravy on top of a big helping of soft mash with nice deeply flavoured red cabbage beneath it. [Sadly the last time I went my whole dish suffered from being slightly luke-warm, but I’m willing to forgive that for now as a one off lapse]

The grilled seabass wasn’t trying to be anything extravagant or smothered in one of those sauces that can so often go wrong. Instead it was just a nice plump fresh fish, cooked to perfection so the skin was charred and the flesh soft and springy.  In contrast the chicken demonstrated a little more the chef’s talents, livening up the chicken’s soft and often considered bland taste with the stronger flavours of oyster mushrooms and herbs.

Its dishes like this one that really add to The Kingston Arm’s menu and probably are what helped it win an Observer food award a few years back. I’ve also had really great venison pie here in the past and have hear that the pan-fried ostrich steak is interesting. With such diverse options on offer, it seems a bit boring to get a standard roast dinner here, but they do also offer these most Sundays and they are fairly close to home cooking.

The prices are around the same as other ‘gastropubs’ I’ve visited, with mains around £10. Not the cheapest in town, but not terrible either. Plus, they now have a cheaper ‘recession menu’ to try to soften the blow a little – with dishes for as little as a fiver.

There’s a nice little beer garden out the back for when it’s sunny, newspapers available for you to read, a couple of computers to surf the internet and free wi-fi. This is definitely a pub where it would be easy to spend the whole afternoon. 

Directions

Kingston Arms

Review: Beigel Bake

I may as well add my review to the others raving about this place, because it is great. With the explosion of more flashy eating options around here, Beigel Bake and the virtually identical shop next door are two of a very limited number of places where you can eat cheap. 

Get a bagel or roll with one of their wide range fillings - salmon, cream cheese, tuna, herring, egg - and it’ll cost you around £1.50 in both places. Of the two, I think the one on the left has slightly more choice, offering nutella, peanut butter and bacon bagels, but there’s people I know who insist the one on the right is better without really saying why. 

The salt beef bagels at both places are what everybody talks about most. They understandably cost a bit more, at around three pounds, but it’s worth the extra for a bagel stuffed with warm slices of full flavoured meat. Both places also do sausage rolls, pasties and some great cakes, with homely tasting chocolate brownies smeared in sugary icing and big crumbly muffins (Around 60p). 

They remind me a bit of the small high street bakers which are harder to find these days, where you can stop in and pick up a few freshly baked snacks without feeling like your wallet’s been raped.  The bread and cakes at these two places don’t always taste like they’ve come straight from the oven, but they are definitely fresh enough. 

Service and décor are basic, but that adds to the atmosphere of the places. There’s nowhere to sit inside, but a few plastic chairs outside the door.

Directions:
159 Brick Ln
London E1 6SB
020 7729 0616

Review: Nude Espresso

I’m a bit divided about this place. The coffee is really good - well made espresso using proper beans, and lattes and cappuccinos that have just the right amount of milk and froth and still taste strong. They’re all around £2, about the same price as most places in this area. 

They also have an enticing choice of cakes and sandwiches laid out. The cookie I had (£1.20) was big and tasted like it’d just been baked - all crisp on the outside and soft and doughy inside. The paninis looked well made, with good quality bread and filling ingredients nicely balanced. 

But on the down side these sandwiches are close to five pounds, taking the total bill for lunch up to near a tenner.  To me, this seems like a bit too much to be paying for lunch on a regular basis and would put me off coming here more often. I’d rather go somewhere that had slightly more basic food but at a lower price. 

The décor is stylish and would appeal to a lot of design conscious brick lane types. But everything feels a bit clinical and the hard, slightly cramped seating doesn’t really invite you to lounge around for long. I’d prefer somewhere a bit less fashionable, but with more individual character and a sense of cosiness. Brick Lane Coffee springs to mind. 

So overall, I’d say it’s good for grabbing a quick coffee but bad if you want to eat or hang out for a while in comfort.

Directions
26 Hanbury St
London E1 6QR
07804 223590

Las Iguanas (Southwark)

About

Recently, a friend and I went to one of the Las Iguanas chain restaurants on the Southbank. Iguanas calls itself a Latin American restaurant, but it’s a vague kind of Latinness that’s closer to foreigners ideas of what the Americas should be than anything real and refuses to pin itself to the culture of any one country. I often wonder why oriental and continental chains insist on embracing the diverse cultures of such huge landmasses when this only diminishes everything they touch.

The one aspect of Latin culture that Iguana had got down was casualness. After a good ten minutes gazing round like lost cows for a waitress, we realised that nobody would come. Eventually, I got up and went to catch a waitress to ask her if I could maybe have a menu. “Oh, right, here,” she said as though I’d stopped her in the street to beg for change.

The A3 sized cardboard menu reminded me of a broadsheet newspaper, crammed with enough dishes and drinks to keep me reading all evening. The person responsible for putting it together clearly chose to forgo selecting good items to bombard diners with as much choice as possible.

A special offer for Tapas stuck out until I realised that the seven o’clock cut off had already passed. Instead, I settled for just two tapas dishes and a pint. I got up again, stopping another waitress to order. “You need to go to the bar,” she said with a friendly smile  and a shake of her head. “We don’t take any orders from outside.”  With a grim kind of reducto ad absurdum, I wondered how far this might go. Would need to go and collect my food from the kitchen as well?

Anyway, with the food ordered and a pint in hand I went back to the table. Beer does wonderful things for your appetite and I eagerly awaited the orgy of cream and salsa and crispy nachos that was coming my way. But not since my first kiss teenage has anticipation so far outstripped the outcome.

Instead of the expected heap, there were a few chips scattered loosely across the wide white plate. If you’re going to serve a wartime ration of food then at least put it on a small plate so that there’s a chance people might be fooled into thinking they’re getting a decent helping. Pizza Express had the sense to do this when their bases mysteriously shrunk in the wash one night a few years ago. But this sparse spread of chips was just pitiful.

Nachos aren’t sushi or goats cheese toasts, and so you can’t really defend a miniscule portion of them by calling it high cuisine. But these were the other end of the spectrum. The nachos themselves tasted dry and papery. Some were covered in a thick layer of cheese that had the texture of dried glue and didn’t really taste of anything at all. In the middle of plate was a pot where watery canned tomato seeped together with cream and a vague green paste that would be difficult to call guacamole. 

As we were enjoying this, the waiter brought out the plate of Calamari. These turned out to be four or five small squid which just about covered a (thankfully) smaller plate but still seemed to be taunting our hunger with how few they were. I stared at them bleakly, my stomach restlessly indicating that I was going to have to spend more money in an hour or so to give it something real to eat.  Maybe they would at least taste good though.

Sadly, not so. They shared the nachos overwhelming impression of being turned in a microwave until they were warm and slightly soggy. The squid itself was overly chewy so that it stretched out and tasted much like an elastic band when you tried to bite into it. In keeping with their seaside origin they had been rolled around in what tasted like sand – small, grainy breadcrumbs that didn’t add any crispness. Only by rolling them around until they were covered in the mayonnaise could you get them to taste of anything at all. 

Directions

Royal Festival Hall, Festival Terrace, Southbank Centre, Belveder Road, London

Tel

020 7620 1328

Kathmandu

About

I was excited to spot this place hidden in the back streets below the hulk of The Belchers. Hong Kong has so few Nepalese places that it’s always good to have another one, plus the humble front of this place made me optimistic it might be reasonably authentic.

But things quickly began to disappoint.  First, I noticed they offered Spanish Tapas alongside Nepalese food in what I could only take as an attempt to cash in on two markets. Then, the menu felt disappointingly limited. Instead of offering something distinctly Nepalese, most of the dishes resembled those served in India restaurants across town, and the more standard dishes offered by these places at that. There were korma and jal-frezi curries, a few tandori dishes, but nothing much else.

We went for a Kathmandu fish curry with mustard seeds, which looked like one of the more unusual things on the menu.  It shared a problem suffered by most of the fish curries I’ve had, the delicate taste of the soft white fish becoming completely lost in the sauce. Instead of cheap white fish, it would be nice to see curries made with something slightly meatier. The curry’s sauce wasn’t bad, tasting convincingly rich and thick, with the mustard seeds adding a nice hint. However it lacked the subtle hints of spice and feeling of balance that have made curries I’ve had before really stand out. The small metal dish of curry we were given also felt very small, especially considering that it cost around HK$80.

The mixed tandoori was also distinguished primarily by its size. It was about half as big as similar dishes offered in other restaurants and really felt insubstantial considering the HK$100 price tag. The small pieces of sausage tasted good, with mixed lamb nicely blended with herbs, but their flavour didn’t really compensate for their measly size. The ostrich meat, the one slightly more unusual part of this mix, was very tough and uninspiring. Better Tandoori can definitely be found at some of the restaurants in Chungking.

The samosas we had to try and supplement these shrunken portions were also on the small side. They tasted very dry – as though frozen or made a long time ago – and had been reheated quickly (maybe microwaved) so that the insides were still lukewarm. They were a depressingly long way from the crisp, slightly flaky-shelled, Samosas that you can get just fried on the streets of India. You can also pick up much better samosas for about a third of the price just by wandering around Chungking mansions.

We also had some Nepalese Ghurka beer (HK32), which came in small bottles and was very watery and lacking in flavour.  I switched across to something else after my first glass.

My biggest complaint about Kathmandu is the price of the dishes, which mostly sat between HK$80 and $100. This might be justified if these are for huge, or even normal sized, portions, but for the shrunken serving we seemed to get it felt too much. Equally, it might be okay if the restaurant was producing some really outstanding cooking. I will happily pay for tiny servings of really great Japanese food, for example. But the food here was largely very mediocre. I don’t think I will return.

Directions

G/F. Shop 1A, Woo Hop St, South Lane, Kennedy Town (At the back of The Belcher’s)

Raku-En

About

I’m writing this quite a while after going to Raku-en and am not able to remember too much detail about the separate dishes we had. But the quality of the Okinawan food offered here made me want to write at least a short listing to be updated on a second visit.

Hidden away at the top of a tower, this place specialising in Okinawa style Japanese food felt authentic the moment we stepped in. Japanese magazines and other items crowded the front counter, sake bottles lined the walls, and all the tables were already filled by excited groups of young Japanese.  It’s one of several Causeway Bay based hideaways for Hong Kong’s Japanese community.

The menu had a massive range of small plate dishes ranging from about HK$40 to 70. I am fairly new to Okinawan food, so was fairly bewildered a choice of dishes that stretched from stuffed fried chicken wings all the way to snapper carpaccio.

The pork belly in miso had beautifully soft pieces of meat which melted in your mouth, their small layers of fat adding a richer buttery hint to the taste. Each spongy piece has soaked up the sauces stronger flavours and let these drift sumptuously out as you chewed.

Fried chicken sunk into a pile of crumbled bread and garlic and chilli also tasted great. Each crisp piece of chicken would gather up so of this pile to add to the crisp flavour of the skin. Both this, and the skewers, were ‘snack style’ dishes prepared excellently and with extra elements.

The stuffed chicken wings were another example of this. With the bones taken from the middle of the meat, little fleshy white pockets were filled with a pasty stuffing. This was sealed in a wonderfully crisp skin that was perfectly fried to fill it with taste whilst keeping it from being to charred or oily.

Almost all of the other dishes we had followed a similar trend – full of flavour and with meticulous attention to detail. The cod showcased as well as anywhere I have been in Hong Kong the Japanese ability to prepare fish in a very simple way that brings out all of its flavours.

Overall, Ruku-en is a great place to go to explore Okinawan cuisine and to try a wide range of different dishes. I felt confident that the things I was eating were genuine and that whatever I ordered it would be well prepared and offer something interesting.

Directions

12 F Circle Tower, 28 Tung Lung Street, Causeway Bay

Website

http://www.rakuen.com.hk/

Cost

About $40 to $80 per dish.

The Flying Pan (Wan Chai Branch)

About

Lunch in The Flying Pan was depressing. I had looked at the menu in Central before, but decided it was too expensive and headed elsewhere. I should have done the same this time. But needing a quick meal, I decided to stick things out.

Sunk in one of the leather chairs, I scrolled through the menu and was struck again by how expensive everything was. Even the most basic omelettes were over sixty dollars. Surely frying a couple of eggs in a pan couldn’t produce anything that amazing that it warranted this kind of price? The fried breakfasts were even more, mostly topping the hundred mark and reaching up to the same kind of prices you’d pay for finely cooked French food elsewhere.

I was loathe to spend more than about fifty dollars on lunch and I really needed a coffee as well, so I searched onwards, determined to find something cheaper. A burger for HK$37 looked promising, but then I realised I’d need to order a whole load of extra ingredients to make it even vaguely interesting. Finally I settled reluctantly for a breakfast burrito. At big wrap stuffed with beans and rice and cheese could be pretty good, I naively persuaded myself.

“The breakfast burrito is just eggs and beans,” the Filipino waitress said when I ordered. “You want to get some bacon or something to go with that?”

It’s always a bad sign when the waitress is telling you openly about the limitations of the restaurant’s food. I should probably have backed out at this point. But a little like George Bush in Afghanistan, I was strangely determined to press recklessly onwards without heeding how much damage I was doing.

Coffee has been the main reason I came here, so I hoped this would at least be decent. But the only variety on offer was a ‘bottomless’ pot of drip coffee. At $30, this cost more than the best coffee in most of Hong Kong’s other cafes. Basically I was going to pay extra for the chance to drink unlimited amounts of coffee that would probably turn out to be so watery and weak I’d only want half a cup. I ordered it and felt my heart sinking.

The burrito came quickly. I’d love to say this was testament to the chef’s dexterity for Mexican cooking, but more likely it was credit to the power of the microwave. It was barely bigger than a Mars bar. Its wrap was reasonably crisp, but inside there was just a mixed up past of canned beans, rubbery egg and plastic cheese which stretched with each bite. None of it really tasted of anything much at all. It arguably had more flavour than the coffee, though, which tasted like somebody had taken a regular cup of instant coffee and just diluted it five or six times. There was none of that bracing, bitter taste of really strong dark coffee that I had been craving all morning.

I grimaced and sat back in my chair, feeling truly miserable as I listened to the hardcore club music pounding out of the restaurants many speakers. Staffed entirely by Fillipino’s, filled with lost looking gwei-los, and blaring these tunes, The Flying Pan feels very like the different Wan Chai nightclubs that surround it. But in the middle of the day on a Saturday, this might not be what you’re really looking for while you eat lunch.

There are reasons to go to The Flying Pan. If you’re a tourist who gets lost if you stray more than a hundred yards from your hotel, or if you’re desperate for something to eat at five in the morning after stumbling out of the bars in Wan Chai, then perhaps you’d consider it. In these situations, you won’t mind paying stupidly high prices for plastic food and impotent coffee. Otherwise its probably best to stay away.

Shanghai Lane

About 

I was a bit uncertain about Shanghai Lane as we walked in. The large black and white photos of Old Shanghai, the neat soy sauce pots on each table, and the smartly uniformed waiters all felt very packaged. I imagined other identical restaurants being set up by the company across the city and feared the food would taste equally indistinct. Overall though, while not that remarkable, the restaurant offered solid Shanghai food at lower prices.

The ‘braised pork belly with bean curd knots’ (HK$50) had fatty cubes of meat that were pleasingly tender, but didn’t melt sumptuously in your mouth like the best braised pork can. The meat was soaked in a sauce which felt a little thin, potent with Chinese rice wine but lacking more subtle flavours. In comparison the dark sauce of Xiao Nan Guo’s ‘red braised pork’ is thicker and loaded with hints of liquorish and cinnamon that it has absorbed through the long cooking process and make it really exciting to eat. The dish is twice the price at Xiao Nan Guo, but I’d probably rather pay the extra for these more stimulating flavours that really enhance the meat.

I was hesitant to pay HK$68 for fried noodles when some you can get them for half the price elsewhere. Shanghai Lane’s ‘fried noodles with shrimp, chicken and ham’ warranted the higher price though, reminding me more of pasta dishes in finer Italian restaurants than the oily ‘chau mihn’ of a lot of local cha chaan tengs. The noodles were just lightly brushed with oil, which enhanced rather than smothered their own fresh, slightly floury taste. The shrimp and chicken had also been handled delicately so the frying just lightly cooked them and brought out the strong seafood and tender white meats flavours. Together the noodles and shrimp offered really soft, yet enticing tones that were very enjoyable.

The siu lung bau (dumplings with pork and soup inside) followed the trend of being good whilst not really blowing me away. The dumpling wrapper was thin and tasted fairly freshly made, free from that chewy, micro-waved texture that often marks cheap dumplings. But the wrapper still didn’t have the homemade texture of the best dumplings, and the soup inside was a little bland, lacking those soothing brothy flavours which explode out of the best siu lung bao. Again, Xia Nan Guo offers better dumplings, as do many of the higher end dim sum places in Hong Kong.

If you’re hungry and looking for decent Shanghai food at a low price then Shanghai Lane is definitely worth a visit. Some of the more special braised dishes like the ‘sea cucumber’ or ‘pigs trotter’ might also offer something a bit more special, though I’m yet to try these. If you want more stimulating Shanghai food though, it’s probably worth paying a little bit more to head over to Xiao Nan Guo or somewhere else.

Directions

35-37 Gough Street, Central, Hong Kong Tel: 2850 7788

Notes

Open from 11:30 a.m. until 11 p.m.

Cost

Around HK$50 a dish, Dumplings HK$15-35 with some ‘chef’s recommendations’ for up to $200