Match of the week

Mezze and a Palestinian white wine
Finding a Palestinian restaurant in London is unusual enough but discovering a Palestinian wine to go with the food is beyond all expectations
However at Akub in Notting Hill which bills itself as a modern Palestinian restaurant they have both.
The wine I particularly liked was called Nadim and comes from the Tabeh winery. It’s made from the local Zeini grape and is deliciously dry, nutty and slightly herby - the perfect counterpoint to the selection of dishes we ordered.
They included some labneh balls rolled in sumac, zaatar, turmeric and Aleppo pepper, a watermelon, black olive and mint salad, a chopped tomato salad with chillies and Mafghoussa, a dish of courgettes with smashed courgettes, garlic yogurt, pine nuts and mint. Oh, and an amazing collection of breads but they didn’t really need matching.
I imagine unless you go there you won't come across a Palestinian white but there are some quite similar Lebanese whites or try a Greek Malagousia.
I ate at Akub as a guest of the restaurant.

Txakoli and practically everything on the Palomar menu
I think Txakoli may be my new favourite restaurant wine - or at least it is this summer. It’s a unique, sharp, very slightly fizzy white wine from the Basque region of Spain. The one we were drinking - at the Palomar in Soho - was the Agerra Txakoli which comes from the designated origin of Getariako
It went quite brilliantly with The Palomar’s food which I guess can best be described as modern Israeli but to which they give their own unique twist. It’s full of vivid and delicious flavours but the element that I think went best was the dairy one - dishes like the burnt courgette tzatziki, and beetroot carpaccio with burnt goat’s cheese (needless to say, fashionably singed not burnt to a cinder).
It was also great with the Kubaneh (Yemeni pot baked bread served with tahini & ‘velvet tomatoes’ a luxuriant fresh tomato dip that tasted a bit like gazpacho. Oh and the mysteriously but seductively spiced fish felafel
You can buy the Agerra for £13.95 from Whitmore and White in the Wirral, Cheshire. I also very much like the Flysch txacoli I recommended in my Guardian column this week.
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