2012 round-up

Best new Brixton opening

There have been a few recent arrivals in Brixton which have garnered considerable press.  By contrast, the chocolatier Paul Wayne Gregory, trained in Paris and maker of the Queen’s 80^th birthday truffles, just turned up one day in a little sliver of a shop in Market Row. There are beautiful desserts, highly credible salted caramels and some superlative passion fruit ganache, all a five minute walk from our door.

Favourite new products

Following in the wake of the hipsters, I’ve been dutifully tromping through the optimistically named “Bermondsey Spa” most Saturday mornings, finding a new way to get turned around each time, but also discovering both some great new vendors, and outposts of Borough favourites (particularly Neals Yard Dairy and Mons Cheese) which are far less crowded than the originals. Three highlights:

Heather honey from the London Honey Company

Lots of India Pale Ales at the Kernel Brewery

Chicken from Fosse Meadows at The Butchery

Most enjoyable read

Notes from Madras, Colonel Wyvern (1878). Wyvern wrote for Englishwomen abroad and their native cooks, explaining how to prepare both Anglo-Indian and European foods.

Greatest recipe

Lamb pizza from Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s Jerusalem. This may be no better than the fish cakes in spicy tomato sauce, or the hummus or stuffed peppers—all superlative. It gets the nod for perfectly recreating the soft, pliable dough of the lahmacun I ate in Istanbul last winter, and pairing it with a topping that is at once sweet with caramelised meat, crunchy with fresh herbs and sharp with pomegranate.

Best eating moment

A breakfast of chilaquiles—eggs, refried beans and tortilla chips covered with a cooked red salsa, garnished with sour cream, cotija cheese, avocado and coriander (cilantro)—at San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Market, while watching the fog clear over the Bay Bridge.

Most memorable drink

Ruinart champagne at the Royal Opera House, just moments after receiving my engagement ring.

Sleeper hit

A custom mix of Formosa Lapsang Souchong and Higgins Breakfast tea from HR Higgins. We’ve been drinking their Creole Blend coffee for years; this is fast becoming the house tea: smoky, smooth and mouth-filling without being tannic.

Best evening out

A “Shambolic Sherry Tasting” put on by our local wine shop and held in a freezing upstairs room at the Dogstar pub. There were half a dozen non-sherry pours from natural wine importers, Les Caves de Pyrene, including a Savennières and a Jura chardonnay made in a vin jaune style, and quality nibbles aplenty. The sherries came thick and fast, and ranged from the merely very, very good to the absolutely exceptional (in the form of a rare Palo Cortado). We met a wine consultant working in Kazakhstan too, and heard all the gossip on the Brixton restaurant scene. And all for £7.50.

Jerk chicken

While Brixton, the neighbourhood in which I’ve lived for 7 of the last 10 years, is home to Poles, Columbians, Portuguese and Anglophone Africans, its largest minority, and certainly its most prominent one—in both historic and culinary terms—is from the English-speaking Caribbean—the West Indies, Trinidad, Guyana and Jamaica. The main square is named for the Windrush, the boat that brought Jamaicans to British shores in 1948. (The new arrivals were sent to temporary homes set up on Clapham Common, and came to nearby Brixton to utilise the Labour Exchange.) Dozens of green grocers and corner shops sell the staple ingredients of Caribbean food: scotch bonnet chillies, thyme, pumpkins of all shapes and sizes, coconut milk, curry powders and rice, while fishmongers have tall piles of red snapper and other tropical varietals and the butchers do a good trade in mutton and slow-cook cuts. There are some modest take-away joints, selling chicken stews, rice and beans and such unpromisingly named dishes as mannish water and hard food, and on dry, mild days, charcoal-filled oil drums let off a fug of jerk chicken-scented smoke.

Yet despite this proximity and abundance, we very rarely cook or eat any Caribbean food, nor, if I’m perfectly honest, have we expressed particular curiosity about learning more about its ingredients, variations found from island to island or which Brixton joints serve up the best versions of classic dishes. I don’t expect that this is all about to change, but some conversations with the owner of a new Brixton joint, Brian Danclair, about what he finds exciting about the food of the islands, prompted us to see what we could do, sans oil drum, to make a credible jerk chicken.

We picked up some pale ales from Market Row Wines (less authentic than Red Stripe, but arguably tastier too), chicken wings from the farmers’ market and got to work on the marinade. The next evening, we made coconut rice dotted with a mix of gungo peas, black eyed peas and kidney beans, sautéed some greens and put the chicken under the grill until it was well-browned and reasonably crispy. The result? Complex, spicy and a lot of fun to eat, all for very little cooking or shopping effort.

Next up? Brown stew chicken or, should Ginger Pig get back its supply of cubed goat, curry goat.

Jerk Chicken

Adapted from Food Stories

Total time: 25 hours; Active time: 30 minutes

Serves 3-4

Special equipment: plastic gloves; food processor

If you have a proper barbeque, by all means use it, referring to Food Stories or another good source for guidance. I relied on the grill in my oven, starting on a lowish temperature (say 150C), with the rack half-way down to get the meat cooking through, then raising both the rack and the temperature to get the skin crisp, and to encourage caramelisation. Particularly with larger cuts of chicken, you could also try roasting, then finishing off under the grill.

1 kg chicken thighs or meaty wings

4 garlic cloves

1 tablespoon thyme leaves

5-6 spring onions

3 scotch bonnet chillies

100g dark packed brown sugar

1.5 tablespoons allspice

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

Juice of 2 large limes

1 tsp salt

Black pepper

Rinse the chicken, pat dry and place in a large Ziploc bag. Peel and roughly chop the garlic cloves. Strip the thyme from its branches. Cut the spring onions into large pieces, removing the bottom core. Place these in the food processor.

Wearing plastic gloves, cut open the scotch bonnets and remove seeds. Place the chillies in the food processor. Add the sugar, spices, lime, salt and pepper. Mix to a smooth paste, scraping down sides as necessary. Pour into the bag with the chicken, seal and shake well to coat.

Refrigerate for 24 hours.

When you’re ready to cook, allow the meat to come to room temperature.  If using a grill, preheat to 150C and remove the rack.

Shake or brush off the excess marinade from the chicken and place on foil or a foil-lined tray on the rack.  Position the chicken in the middle of the oven and grill gently for about 10 minutes, until the chicken is somewhat cooked and the skin beginning to turn colour. Over the following 10-12 minutes, raise the temperature and rack height to finish. Good caramelisation is desirable, but watch carefully as the sugar in the marinade will make it susceptible to burning. Check that the juices run clear before removing.

Serve immediately with rice or rice and beans, and sautéed greens. Leftovers can be stripped from the bone and served cold.

Wine shop comes to Brixton

For as long as I can remember, the only places to buy wine in Brixton have been the supermarkets and off-licenses more accustomed to selling cheap vodka and malt liquor. The House of Bottles has historically been better than some, particularly when it had for a few months some merchandise that bore a striking resemblance to the stock sold by Virgin Wines. But its staff was still not sure to do with well-dressed friends of ours who, on the way to supper at our apartment, stopped in and asked the bemused sales clerk if he could recommend a nice chardonnay.

But now, after many years, a wine shop is coming to Brixton. The storefront is inside the main Brixton market (the one with Franco Manca and Wild Caper), further down that aisle in the direction of the Atlantic Road entrance. There’s not much inside yet except a few (fancy) wine crates and a sign proclaiming the imminent arrival of an independent wine merchant selling interesting parcels. The window sports an alcohol license application, with objections due in by early April.

After my little jig of delight, I’ve started to wonder whether local custom can sustain a (hopefully) gently-priced, but not completely mainstream, offering. There’s also the all-important question of whether our neighbours—and indeed the owner—like the same sort of wine that we do. Here’s hoping for lots of stinky reds, with southern France well represented, and whites with a passing familiarity at most with the inside of an oak barrel.

Any wariness aside, this could be a very good thing.

March odds and ends

Today’s lunch was spaetzle with wild garlic pesto. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few garlic leaves find their way into tomorrow morning’s scrambled eggs, while on Monday they’ll be the finishing touch to a soup/stew made with some leftovers from tonight’s roast chicken. I’m hoping that over the next few weeks they’ll also be a play on a watercress-potato soup and lots of leaves to be mixed with soft, spreadable goats cheese. And if the spring lamb prices don’t get too silly, that pesto would be great alongside some chops.

Planning for this summer’s vegetable and herb garden has resulted in a (too) long list of things I’d like to grow—tomatoes again, more of all the usual herbs, plus maybe chervil, lettuces, peas, broad beans and courgettes. I’m toying with the idea of a cold frame or mini greenhouse (really more of an outside bookcase with a heavy plastic cover) that would allow me to start seedlings somewhere other than the bedroom floor and perhaps concentrate light and speed up growth enough to make it worth attempting some larger tomato varieties.

I’ve been rereading Julian Barnes’ Pedant in the Kitchen this week. It’s probably an unusual way into the work of a Booker Prize-winning author, but I’ve again enjoyed the wit and lightness of touch with both literary references and anecdotes. Plus it’s reminded me that I really should try to cook from Elizabeth David.

It seems that Franco Manca is offering pizza master classes on the first Thursday of every month. I assume this doesn’t include lessons on how to build a pizza oven.

Also in Brixton, the Heritage Deli has opened in Granville Arcade. The Canadian, Italian and Greek and Maltese by way of the Antipodes crew are serving up artisanal salume and all sorts of savoury pies. I’m partial to the feta and pumpkin combination, as well as any of the spicy ones, as they use some of the excellent red pepper flakes I brought back from Turkey last month (exchanged for some very tasty filled pizza with mushroom and truffle oil and a little crimped pie of rabbit and peas).

We cooked goat, which was nothing like mutton (far leaner and gentler in flavour) and absolutely delicious. (The Ginger Pig is occasionally bringing it over from France along with some poulet noir and other birds. It’s claimed that lots of what’s sold in this country as goat is actually hogget or mutton.) Madhur Jaffrey’s Curry Easy yielded up a dish of Pakistani origin which was rich with (homemade) garam masala, cinnamon and cardamom and fantastically succulent after 3-4 hours of gentle cooking.

Best of 2011

Ingredients of the year: corn tortillas and kalamansi limes

Tacos have made it into the bi-weekly dinner repertoire. Fillings vary: there has occasionally been spiced-up leftover brisket or shoulder of lamb, more often some beans. A cabbage salad is a new and popular addition to the table. Whatever the individual components, this is always fun to eat, its quality underpinned by proper tacos (ordinarily from here, though there are some being made in Brixton now too).

Amongst the many foolish things that the European Commission has done is to forbid the importation of these limes, far more intense and aromatic than anything I’ve come across. Bottled concentrates bring back at least some memory of drinking sweet-sour lime sodas across Malaysia, but I remain on the lookout for contraband.

Method: curing

When I lived in France, I would have no more made confit de canard from scratch than I would have baked my own croissants. But measured by an input-output ratio, this delivers an astonishing amount for very little effort: one pan, about 15 minutes of active time and a bonus jar of duck fat at the end.

Most exciting Brixton opening: Lab G

Our local maestro di gelato is a generous soul, a creative genius and a perfectionist, particularly when it comes to his exceptional pistachio and salted caramel flavours. This is the place we take people when we want them to appreciate just how astonishing the Brixton food scene is.

Best meal (London): Pied á Terre

I was lucky enough to eat at this Michelin 2-star twice in 2011. The food was beautiful to look at, and the kitchen is creative while still turning out plates that are hugely enjoyable to eat. The service was a surprise too: well-informed, generous and far from starchy. At lunchtime, it's not even shockingly expensive.

Best meal (everywhere else): Tek Sen

One of the few disappointing moments of our trip to Penang was finding this restaurant closed (some kind of temple festival) when we tried to make a return visit. This was revelatory food: astonishingly fresh yet amazingly complex in flavour. If there’s a single reason why we’re cooking and eating so much more Asian food now, it must lie in the effort to recapture what was on those plates.

Most-used cookbook: Madhur Jaffrey’s Curry Easy

We had this out from the library on and off for the last 6 months; our permanent copy should be arriving in time for the beginning of Hanukkah. It’s yielded crispy, spicy chickpeas which are perfect with a G&T, our first proper dhal and introduced us to curry leaves. But the biggest game changer has been making our own chapattis, far simpler and tastier than I would have imagined possible.

Most enjoyable food shop: A & C Co Continental Grocers

I’m spending more time in the local Asian grocery these days, and I still make a trip to Borough Market most weekends. But this is the place that I stop into nearly 6 days a week, whether for some olives or nuts to start off dinner, to top-up store cupboard basics or for the things that no one else sells locally, like quinces or fresh bay leaves. These are the people who’ve held onto my extra keys, make me laugh at the end of a rotten day and are eager to have taste me the new cheese that’s just come in. I don’t think most people have a shop like this; I’m very lucky that I do.

Best experiment: growing tomatoes

Flowers and shrubbery may still hold very limited interest, but I’m now beginning to understand why people like to garden. I’m not sure that in the midst of the root rot saga of August and September, or when I was hauling home 40 litres of potting soil on the bus, that I wholly appreciated how satisfying it could be to grow my own food. But it gave me occasion to talk to my neighbours, and was a far better use of time than more Internet surfing. And I learned that even basic cherry tomatoes taste great when picked as the table is being set for dinner.

October Round-up

Dosa n Chutney

Revisiting our London favourite for dosa and uttapam this weekend, I was relieved to discover that it measured up even post-Malaysia. The chutneys were fantastically fresh and sprightly in the mouth, the rava dosa—extra-lacy and crispy around the edges—was a great new find, and the service was as friendly as ever.

Rowley Leigh's Financial Times column

Intelligent food porn.

Muscat grapes

Oddly, these are a plummy, dusky purple, not green, as muscats are meant to be, but the tiny French grapes at Tony Booth’s greengrocers (formerly at Borough Market, now happily resettled at Maltby Street) are nonetheless delicious. I’m tempted by Amanda Hesser’s recipe for adding them to a foccaccia-like bread dough, and by this suggestion of roasting them with thyme, but that would leave fewer to just eat now.

Jamie Oliver’s new food programme

I know the man became ubiquitous a long time ago, but his new show on British food is both winning and informative. The producers have clearly employed some good researchers—hence the visit to the burger pop-up which was a big hit on Chowhound, and the accurate explanation of fish and chips’ origins with Jewish immigrants to London’s East End. Refreshingly, there’s no preaching, just enormous enthusiasm for British ingredients and recipes new and old. And the food looks damn tasty.

Venison

Advocates for eating more venison like to point out that it’s local, sustainable and low in fat. All true, but I think the best recommendation is the taste. We splurged on some saddle a few weeks back, which we sealed in duck fat then roasted in the oven to a rare pink. Last night we sautéed some onions, leeks and carrots, added bay, thyme, stewing meat and a bottle of brown ale and cooked in a low oven for half the afternoon, throwing in some vacuum-packed chestnuts about an hour before serving. Next up, I think, a ragu.

Brixton

According to no less an authority than the Observer’s Jay Rayner, Brixton Village is the “most exciting, radical venture on the British restaurant scene right now.” And to think I live just three minutes’ walk away.

September highlights

Six weeks on, I’m still waxing rhapsodic about my recent South East Asia trip. But there’s been lots of other shopping, cooking and eating going on. A few highlights:

Tomatoes

Some of our plants succumbed to root rot, a likely combination of months of bad weather and too few holes poked in the bottom of the industrial-size tomato tins which served as pots. But it’s still been a highly credible first crop; we should finish with upwards of 800 cherry tomatoes.

There have been salads and pizza toppings aplenty, as well as roast tomato sauces destined for the freezer. A fair number never make it out of the bowl on the table. For slightly deferred gratification, however, it’s been hard to beat slow-roasted tomatoes, sliced in half, tossed with a bit of olive oil, fresh thyme or oregano, bay leaves, salt and whole garlic cloves, and put in a low oven (100 C) for 2 hours, or until they are wrinkly but not entirely desiccated. They then go in the fridge topped up with more oil, perfect for sandwiches, pre-dinner drinks and tossing through pasta.

Pho @ Cafe East

Amongst the best bowls I’ve ever come across (the saté pho at Pho Dong-Huong in Paris’ Belleville remains a sentimental favourite, but it’s not completely echt) is served at a simple cafe situated in a Deptford parking lot, next to a bowling alley, multiplex and bingo parlour. Its unpromising location is perhaps less surprising when you learn that the surrounding area is home to lots of second-generation Vietnamese. I’m partial to the spicy broth; the rice noodle dishes are good here too.

Cafe East

100 Redriff Road

Surrey Quays Leisure Park

Tube: Surrey Quays or Canada Water

Closer to home

Just underneath the Brixton rec centre, a new meat and grocery shop has opened. Its Algerian-born owner is selling loose olives, lots of fresh North African pastries and French-branded groceries, and, most excitingly, making his own merguez. A rotisserie is set up outside, awaiting the arrival of British Gas.

And in the market(s) proper, the eating options just keep getting better. I’ve heard that a Beijing-style dumpling stand is on its way to Granville Arcade, and I’ve met the very excited British-Oaxacan family pushing to get their Market Row taqueria open by the end of the week.

Notwithstanding the rain, the stands at Sunday farmer’s market have been full of beautiful, cheap fruit and vegetables, the last few weeks of the courgettes, corn, tomatoes and berries overlapping with the arrival of apples, pears and pumpkins. And I can only imagine the weather must be good for beets, because the ones for sale right now are large enough to feed a Ukrainian family for at least a few days.

In the kitchen

It’s been simple—but good—eating around here: lots of stove-top pizza, tacos, grilled meats and salads. A notable success has been finding an aubergine dish that didn’t involve buckets of oil and was worth repeating. I’m not sure why it took me so long to look in the obvious place—one of the Moro cookbooks. This recipe began with the predictable steps of grilling and scooping out the flesh, but then called for sautéing the resultant mush with tomatoes, fresh coriander, cumin and cayenne until the water was cooked out, and the puree rich and caramelised. Perfect alongside grilled lamb kebabs, roasted peppers, flatbread and a tzatziki-like dip.

Gelato

We have no Michelin stars, very few, if any, tablecloths, and a severe shortage of bathrooms, but the Brixton food scene just gets better and better. There’s a Japanese place on the way, and today we met the eager, nervous owners of another likely June arrival, this one a burger joint featuring Ginger Pig meat. There’s a new bakery too, getting fresh and very credible baguettes every morning from a French guy a few miles away. The unassuming, but excellent Thai place, where I’ve had zingy larb-like salads and spicy stir-fried chicken with a fried egg and Thai basil, was just written up by the Guardian’s lead restaurant reviewer, Jay Rayner.

But perhaps the most exciting development took place on Wednesday, when a very serious gelato maker started churning out a product that already deserves whatever superlatives might be used to describe it. The dozen or so flavours currently on offer are classic, conservative even—hazelnut, strawberry, zuppa inglese—but are made with a perfectionist’s eye for ingredients and balance. The fruit is fresh and seasonal, the pistachio from Bronte in Sicily. Even the cones don’t taste like an afterthought.

Giovanni, the owner, server and gelato-maker, looks delighted, if a bit surprised, by the local response. And apparently Jay Rayner has already been by.

I’m guessing that I live a bit closer than Jay, just a four minute stroll up the road. All the better, as I think Giovanni and I will be seeing a lot of one another.

Lab G (Laboratorio Artigianale del Buon Gelato)

Granville Arcade, Brixton

Late morning until 17:30 Su-W; late morning until 10 pm Th-Sa

Bonnes Addresses Brixton

Coming back to London after a few days vacation in Paris was unsurprisingly difficult. Part of it, of course, was that returning home also meant returning to work, to commuting and to all the rushing and hassle that was virtually absent from our Paris stay. But I had also become re-accustomed to the convenience and proximity of things I consider important to my daily quality of life: bakeries, a butcher, vegetable stands and a cheese shop, a convivial local café, a knowledgeable wine merchant and some interesting places to eat out. In my old Paris neighborhood, which we visited again over the August Bank Holiday, each of these was represented with a choice and quality that usually made it unnecessary to venture outside a 10-minute radius.

Brixton doesn’t yet provide all of these amenities. Top-quality meat is still a tube journey away, as is a full selection of cheese and an independent wine merchant. Though there’s wonderful bread, it can’t be bought after work or on a Sunday. But, fortuitously, my return to the neighbourhood has coincided with the opening of some food-related businesses which aren’t merely local, but genuinely good. (And if you don’t believe me, the New York Times is on the trail too.)

Bellantoni

First was the pizza, now we have pasta too, another tiny, unprepossessing joint delivering seriously impressive food. Six days a week, Dario Bellantoni turns out a few pans of deceptively simple vegetable lasagnas, some homemade fruit tarts and plates of antipasti. Fresh pasta can be made to order with a few hours notice. His little brother shows up to bus tables and make coffee on Thursday evenings, the one night the market arcade stays open late. A gelato machine is on the way, due to arrive from his mother in Italy later this month. (His mother’s influence can also be seen in the frequent appearance of red cabbage, popular in Italy’s formerly Austrian and Yugoslav territories, and in an occasional, strudel, tender and flaky.)

I’d come just for the lasagna, but welcome, banter and little extras make me feel like I’m being fed by a (very talented) friend.

Federation Coffee

London’s Antipodean population has done much to raise the standards of local coffee provision, bringing with them flat whites, well-sourced beans and an admirable blend of precision and laid-back charm. The latest outpost for their talents is another daytime-only spot in Granville Arcade. Service is switched-on and friendly, cakes and homely and well-priced (the blueberry friand and anything with streusel are particularly recommended) and the coffee—small batches roasted just off Brick Lane— the best for miles around.

Lido Cafe

Brockwell Park is an easy 20-minute stroll away from the centre of Brixton. While lacking the pulling power of more famous parks north of the river, it does boast views of the City of London, a walled garden, greenhouses (on which more soon) and a rambling historic house. Its most unusual feature, though, is a 1930s outdoor swimming pool, or lido. Recent restoration work added a poolside café. It’s far better than it needs to be, with an interesting list of drinks (including grüner veltliner by the glass and a lovely Champagne-style Cornish cider) and good brunch options. On a bright day, when the sun glints off the pool, the world feels, for a moment, practically perfect.

And without forgetting:

A &C Continental Grocers

I’m embarrassed to discover that I’ve never written about this long-established favourite. It deserves at least one blog post all its own.

Wild Caper

There’s a bit of an identity crisis going on here, but the bread, particularly the rustic sourdough cafone, and the German-style seeded rye, remains unimpeachable.

Brixton Farmers’ Market

In a neighborhood where people of different ethnicity and income level often shop in separate locations, the Sunday market provides a bit of common ground. The pumpkins and apples are multiplying each week now, though the last beans and berries are still lingering on. My favourite? The orange-yolked eggs sold by a perpetually-sunburned Pole.