Fried oysters with harissa and a Virgin Mary

There were some good, if familiar, wine pairings last week - including Muscadet with moules and clams marinières at The Pony at Chew Valley in Somerset (good to be reminded how reliable a match that is). But the one I’m going for is this combination of crispy fried oysters with harissa and coriander and a Virgin Mary which, as I’m sure you know, is an alcohol-free version of a Bloody Mary which I had at brunch at No. 1 York Place in Clifton, Bristol.

Spicy harissa with spicy tomato juice - is that too much? Turns out not. The tomato juice was really well spiced so echoed rather than being overwhelmed by the harissa. It just seemed like an extra dimension of chilli rather than being overwhelmingly hot.

If you want to try this for yourself there’s a recipe for fried oysters on the Great British Chefs website and a recipe for a Virgin Mary here.

You could obviously sneak in a shot of vodka!

PS I reckon the pairing would also work with freshly shucked oysters served with Tabasco.

For other oyster matches see The best wine (and other) pairings with oysters

Pork and chicken pie and English sparkling rosé

You might think of pork pie as pub food, best accompanied by a pint of beer or cider and it’s true that both make excellent pairings.

But at Fortnum & Mason’s English wine tasting last week I tried a glass of their own label English sparkling rosé with their excellent pork and chicken pie and it also worked brilliantly.

The wine, which is made by top English producer Gusbourne, is quite ldelicate so actually benefited from having a bit of fatty, slightly salty pork to accentuate its fruit. (When I say fatty I don’t mean unpleasantly so, obviously, just that a pork pie by definition includes some pork fat. As does a sausage.)

Anyway I thought it would be a perfect combination to take along to a grand summer picnic like Glyndebourne - or even a not-so-grand one. 

(The Co-op does a rather good English sparkling rosé called Eight Acres in their ‘Irresistible’ range if you can’t run to the Fortnums one. Or to pink champagne which would be the other, more costly, alternative.)

Pomerol and gravy

This might sound a bit of a weird pairing - what about the meat the gravy goes with? The answer is there wasn’t any.

The gravy - and what gravy- was served with a small potato sourdough loaf at chef Stevie Parle’s new restaurant, Town, the (brilliant) idea being you dunk the warm bread in the gravy, a bit like a French dip.

The gravy, referred to as Town house gravy (I love the idea of a restaurant having a ‘house gravy’) was satisfyingly dark and meaty with more than a hint of bone marrow, the sort of sauce, I thought, would show off a good Bordeaux, maybe a Pomerol …

Fortunately there was one available by the glass on the wine list - a 2019 Clos René and you know what? It was absolutely perfect - one of those rare pairings where the whole is better than the sum of the parts.

You can find that vintage online at Four Walls Wine Co for £29.95 among other stockists but other vintages are quite widely available. Justerini & Brooks has the 2017 for example.

For other Pomerol pairings see Which foods pair best with merlot 

Smoked jollof rice and pu’erh tea

I not only had one of the best meals I’ve had this year at Ikoyi last week but some of the most fascinating drinks pairings.

Two were with tea - a dish of turbot, crab salad and tonnato which went brilliantly with the Ali Shan, High Mountain Oolong from Taiwan and - better still - a dish with smoked jollof rice with an 8582 raw Pu Erh from Yunnan in China.

Both elements probably need explaining.

Jollof rice is a classic West African dish of spiced rice with tomatoes and peppers. (There’s a classic recipe by Yewande Komolafe in the New York Times which points out that it’s often prepared over an open fire so the smokiness in the Ikoyi version makes sense

Obviously it’s much more elaborate:

“We first barbeque vegetables covered in spices then we make a tea from this that we use to cook the rice” explains chef Jeremy Chan. “Then we fry it in a pan together with garlic, ginger and spring onion and top it with a lobster & scotch bonnet custard. It is then smoked with hickory and opened at the table.”

“There are layers of different types of heat to this dish, the intense spices in the tea that cooks the rice, the ginger the rice is fried with and the scotch bonnets used in the lobster custard. This leads to a crescendo of flavours and spices that while extremely spicy, has a certain comfort.”

Pu-erh is an aged fermented tea with an intensely earthy taste which in this case almost felt like smelling a forest floor after a rainstorm. That might not sound that appealing but it’s one of the headiest teas I’ve ever tasted and went stunningly well with the rice (though interestingly not quite as well with the beef rib that it accompanied which was better with a more conventional Julien Cecillon Saint-Pierre Cornas).

(8582 refers to the recipe, leaf size and factory the tea comes from.  All pu’erh comes from Yunnan. There’s an interesting piece about it on Serious Eats.)

With a tasting menu at £350* Ikoyi is pretty well as expensive as restaurants get in London (though I was lucky enough to be taken there) but given its totally original menu and two Michelin stars (I reckon it should have three) it’s a restaurant right at the top of its game. 

STOP PRESS: Ikoyi won the Highest Climber award in the World’s 50 Best awards this week coming in at no 15.

*there’s a shorter lunch menu for £150.

Apologies for rubbish photograph. We were in a relatively dark room under overhead lights. At least that’s my excuse.