Monkfish and Meursault - and Muscadet, come to that

One of the best restaurants to enjoy well thought out food and drink pairings is Trivet in London which comes as no great surprise when you learn that the two partners - Jonny Lake and Isa Bal - worked at one of the UK’s most famous restaurants, The Fat Duck.

The other day I was interviewing them for a feature and got a run-through of their menu into the bargain including a dish of monkfish, girolles and roast chicken beurre blanc which was described as ‘the best friend of white burgundy’. As indeed it was, paired with a glass of Domaine Buisson Battault’s 2018 Meursault 1er cru Les Gouttes d’Or (which you can buy from Four Walls Wine for £57.50.) A sumptuously rich dish with a sumptuously rich wine.

Interestingly I’d also had monkfish a couple of days previously at The French House where it had been served in a lighter, more summery style with a mussel vinaigrette which went perfectly with the simple but delicious muscadet I was drinking.

You can of course also pair monkfish with red wine as you can see here.

It underlines, yet again, that it’s not so much a question of the base ingredient you're dealing with as the way you cook it and in this case, the sauce you serve with it. Always pay attention to that!

I ate at Trivet as a guest of the restaurant

Roast pork with an alcohol-free IPA

One of the hardest things if you’re not drinking for any reason is finding a grown-up drink that will work in a restaurant without leaving you feeling that you’re not having as good a time as everyone else. And as I’ve said before beer is much better in this respect than wine.

When I went for Sunday lunch at The Blaise Inn in Bristol yesterday I would normally have had a glass or two of wine but as I was driving I was happy to find that they had a choice of alcohol-free beers on their list including the excellent Clear Head from the Bristol Beer Factory which I’ve recommended before on this site

It tastes very much like a conventional IPA so was the perfect partner for my main dish of roast pork belly with apple sauce. I really didn’t feel I had missed out at all. (And the lunch was excellent by the way. A great place for a Sunday roast.)

And if you can drink there are some other good choices for pork belly here

Sauvignon blanc and salsa verde

Sauvignon blanc might not strike you as the obvious wine to pair with lamb but when it’s accompanied by a salsa verde, as it was in this dish we made at a cookery class at the Square Food Foundation* last week it can work really well.

That makes sense as sauvignon blanc has a real affinity with herbs. Salsa verde is an Italian sauce made from chopped herbs such as mint, parsley, and basil along with garlic, capers, anchovies and mustard - so it’s really quite punchy. This is Jamie Oliver’s version which is pretty classic.

Red wine -especially Chianti, as you can see from this previous pairing - works really well but we were tasting a new range of wines called Spoke from New Zealand winemaker Ben Glover which includes three sauvignon blancs. I particularly liked the more complex, textured ‘Brink’ sauvignon-semillon and oaked ‘Resolute’ wines with it which will be available shortly from Red & White. Guessing white Bordeaux and sauvignon/semillon blends from Australia's Margaret River region would work too.

For other sauvignon blanc pairings click here

*Square Food Foundation is a Bristol-based charity that offers free cooking sessions and chef training for disadvantaged adults and community groups alongside private and corporate cooking classes.

Spicy beef and Barbera d'Asti

Barbera wouldn’t have been the wine I’d have generally turned to with a beef dish that came accompanied by a spicy Thai relish but it worked surprisingly well.

The dish, you might be suprised to learn, was not in Shoreditch or Hackney but at a pub called The Black Bull in a picturesque small town called Sedbergh on the edge of the Lake district and the Yorkshire dales.

The kitchen is run by Nina Matsunaga who was born to Japanese parents but brings influences from all over Asia into her cooking. Intriguingly much of this is based on local native cattle breeds

The beef in this dish was Hereford beef sirloin from Howgill and had a rich flavour of its own but came with a spicy nam prik noom, a roasted green chilli dip from northern Thailand.

Nina's husband James, who is responsible for the really excellent wine list, suggested a vivid, juicy 2018 Barbera d’Asti called Bandita* from a natural Piedmontese producer called Cascina Tavijn. It was absolutely delicious - great with the beef and able to stand up to the spicy relish (though Nina had cleverly offset that with soy beans which did a similar job to rice in mitigating the heat.

Unfortunately it seems to be sold out in the UK but you could try a similar unoaked barbera or an orange wine which I think would also work well.

For other barbera matches see Top food pairings with barbera

I ate at the restaurant as a guest of the Black Bull.