Peckham Bazaar - well worth the detour

The thing about neighbourhood restaurants is that they’re a pain to get to if you’re not a local. In general that’s not a problem. They’re nice for those who live nearby, you tell yourself, but you don’t envy them unduly. But Peckham Bazaar is another matter ...

It was on my radar already as one of my occasional contributors, ex-sommelier Donald Edwards (right), is one of the partners and had put together the winelist (more on that in a minute) And I’d read some great reports on the food so when I took up temporary residence in East Dulwich over Christmas it seemed too good an opportunity to miss.

Talking of missing things you could easily walk past. It would be an understatement to say it isn’t smart. Basically it’s a shack with an outdoor barbecue and a main room that looks more like a community centre for disaffected yoof than the deli it apparently was in its former existence. I say this not because it's not congenial (it is) but because I don’t want you to go trekking across London thinking you’re heading for some polished designer joint.

The food - billed as pan-Balkan by Albanian-born chef John Gionieka - is something else, though. We went on a Sunday night, just after Christmas, just as they were closing, which must have been the worst possible time for them. They’d run out of a couple of dishes* but that didn’t stop them serving up a feast.

Our two shared starters (the octopus was sadly off) were some irresistibly fat, juicy, smokey chicken ‘winglets’ with tsatsiki and sucuc, a spicy sausage with shakshuka, the middle-east’s answer to ratatouille.

Amazingly the mains - a let-down in so many restaurants - were even better: slow roast lamb with a punchy citrussy avgolemono sauce, a sublime beef stifado with cauliflower purée and, because they’d run out of the other mains, a hefty slice of grilled manouri with butter beans and a generous dollop of skordalia. No pretty pictures of the first two because the light was dim and stews never look that alluring. But what a relief to have food that tastes better than it looks. Give me substance over style every time.

The only disappointment was a slightly stodgy pistachio and orange cake with poached quince ice-cream. I’d venture that desserts aren’t their strong suit. If I were them I’d just stick to a selection of ice-creams which would reduce the pressure on the tiny kitchen.

Oh, and the wine. The wine list is brilliant - quirky, adventurous, full of rare treats from Greece and elsewhere in the Eastern Med (so massively on-trend). Several like the Simcic Opoka Ribolla - an orange wine from Slovenia are quite out there, others like the Greek reds, rather more mainstream. If that still makes you nervous stick to the basic Bulgarian house white and house red at a very reasonable £16.50 a bottle. Oh, and the Eduardo Miroglio Brut Zero, an amazingly classy Bulgarian sparkling wine is a great way to kick off the evening.

This is the kind of restaurant you (or rather I) wake up in the middle of the night dreaming about. The kind of place where chefs head after work and the sort of food I’d make myself if I had time, lived in Albania and had an outdoor grill. Not flash food to impress but food to feed the soul.

* apparently they normally have a longer menu - take a look at the old menus on the site. Actually take a look at them anyway. You'll want to go even more.

Peckham Bazaar is at 119 Consort Road, London SE15 3RU and is open from 6-11 Tuesday-Friday, 12.30-11 on Saturdays and 12.30-8 on Sundays. Phone number - not listed on the site but how else are you to book? - is 07875 107471. They're also on Twitter @peckhambazaar.

My son and daughter-in-law took me there so I don’t know what they paid for the three of us but I’m guessing about £25 a head for food. Ridiculously good value.

More about the delights of sarf London here.

Pigging out - literally - at Blackfoot, Exmouth Market

As soon as I heard that one of my favourite chefs (Allegra McEvedy) was involved in a restaurant dedicated to one of my favourite ingredients (pork) I knew I had to get down there pronto. And you can’t try out a restaurant much sooner than its first full day’s trading.

Blackfoot (named after the famous Spanish pata negra pig) has been set up by Tom Ward, former operations manager of the Leon group - where he also worked with Allegra.

It faces quite a challenge in being in what is already one of the foodiest thoroughfares in London (Exmouth Market) which not only houses Moro, Morito, Medcalf and Caravan but a battery of street food traders - on Friday at least.

If you’re a pork lover the choice is pretty tough. There’s charcuterie - had to be - ribs, pork steaks and salads - very good ones. Allegra, the inventor of Leon’s superfood salad, is as inspired a veggie cook as she is a meat one. The pecan slaw is exemplary and will enable you to justify munching through all that meat.

I went a bit mad given the size of the helpings and ordered rillettes (a little salty but full of flavour), a vast porchetta roll with salsa verde which they’re going to be selling from the front of the restaurant as a takeaway and - best of all - some fantastic deep-fried crisp and aromatic ribs which are apparently braised with lemongrass, ginger and lime leaves, deep-fried and scattered with a punchy topping of crisp garlic chips, chilli and spring onions. A welcome change from the smokey American-style ribs that are all over London - though they have those too.

As a friendly PR was on the next table I also managed to try the chilli crackling (ace), the Vietnamese belly salad (good but not as quite good as the ribs) and the mega-nut burger which is a properly satisfying veggie burger not an apology for one pretending to be meat. You could easily bring a vegetarian here though such a full-blooded celebration of pork is obviously not going to make some feel entirely comfortable.

I didn’t get to try the Oxford Sandy & Black gammon steak but saw one whizzing past and that looked great too.

You’d think after that lot I’d have had the decency to skip dessert but felt duty-bound to investigate the quirkly-named Like a Key Lime Pie. I’m not sure in what respect it was ‘like’ one rather than an actual one. It was vividly limey but also amazingly, fluffily light, so much so the slice almost fell apart on the plate. Allegra who had turned up at the table to say hello pronounced that it looked ‘a bit of a car crash’ and that the challenge was to get it to look as good as it tasted. I doubt if the punters will much mind if it doesn’t. Make sure you leave room for one.

Drinks? There’s a short interesting well-priced wine list including a Spanish Malvasia and a Hungarian riesling as well as a couple of house wines trendily on tap. I actually drank beer (a Paulaner and a Meantime IPA which was the special of the day). My one minor criticism is that they could do with a porter or stout.

So, great start, good value (my bill for this pig-out was £32.72), look forward to going back.

PS Blackfoot is not the only exciting thing going on in Exmouth Market this week. Round the corner the excellent Quality Chop House has opened a very posh butcher and takeaway shop with delicious bits and pieces to take home. That makes two top butchers in the area - the other being Turner & George. Lucky locals.

Blackfoot is at 46 Exmouth Market London EC1 4QE. Tel 020 7837 4384

First impressions: Merchants Tavern, Shoreditch

It’s hard to talk about Merchants Tavern without telling the story behind it. Which is that it’s a joint collaboration between Britain’s most famous female chef Angela Hartnett and her boyfriend Neil Borthwick.

Sweet, but nothing remarkable about that you might say but Borthwick, a talented chef in his own right, had a terrible accident a year ago when he fell off his bike and suffered serious head injuries. It’s nothing short of miraculous that he’s made the recovery he has and is fronting this grand project which is backed by Canteen founders, Dominic Lake and Patrick Clayton Malone. (Hartnett meanwhile has her own restaurants to mind.)

The great open room with its airy skylight and sweeping semi-circular banquettes appeals the moment you walk through the door. There’s a retro typically Shoreditch bar area in the front which has pulled off the Hawksmoor trick of looking as if it’s been there for years and a large open kitchen at the back. All very 2013.

The menu, wine list and cocktail list are all short, a sage decision by experienced restaurant manager Thomas Blythe (ex St John), the other member of the team. It makes for relaxed eating. The menu is seasonal - where isnt these days? - and sophisticated. Borthwick’s previous job was at The Square and he’s also worked for Michel Bras - an influence that shows in the freshness and simplicity of the food.

I chose well. My starter of scallops, crushed pumpkin and trompettes de la mort mushrooms was a wonderful combination of sweet and earthy and a main course of cod, ham leeks and salsify fell almost into the category of comfort food - the kind of thing I would want to eat if I were feeling poorly and wanted spoiling. It went perfectly with the gorgeous Fanny Sabre Savigny-les-Beaune my host had ordered which I later discovered was £78 a bottle. Eeek! Like the other wines on the list it’s available by the glass so try it if you get the chance.

The third member of our party - and the only one whose dishes I could reach - experimented with the set lunch which featured a tasty but slightly messy-looking starter of home-cured salmon with dill oil and a first class dish of braised pork cheeks and 'creamed potatoes'. Which reminds me, we had mash too - baked potato purée, a must-have side.

The one pudding we ordered - definitely pudding rather than dessert - a soft warm honey and walnut tart with whisky cream - was also spot on.

If I had a criticism it would be that portions - especially the scallops - are small for the price an accusation you certainly couldn’t level at the fixed price lunch which is £18 for two courses. I would guess ordering off the à la carte costs about £40 a head plus service*.

It's early days but Merchants Tavern already passes a crucial test for me. If a foodie friend was coming to London for a few days where would I recommend them to go? Merchants Tavern would definitely be among the options.

Merchants Tavern is at 36 Charlotte Road, London, EC2A 3PG (just off Great Eastern Street by the Hoxton Hotel) Tel: 020 7060 5335 Email: booking@merchantstavern.co.uk

*Although they were still charging soft opening prices when we visited. (The restaurant opened on the 8th).

Boulestin, St James’s Street: London’s latest French restaurant isn't quite there yet

You’d think London had enough in the way of new French restaurants lately but along comes Boulestin in another bid to seduce the city’s Francophiles. Does it succeed?

I have to admit I didn’t eat there in ideal circumstances, with the edge taken off my appetite by a caviar tasting (first world problems . . . ) but food wasn’t really the issue.

For a high profile opening - and a Thursday night - the room was strangely empty and lacking in atmosphere. We later spotted that there was a terrace outside where several diners had been eating on an unseasonally warm September night and a full private dining room downstairs. It’s still early days for the restaurant so maybe they didn’t take as many bookings as they might have done? Or maybe it’s just not a great site (at the bottom of St James’s Street) which could be more worrying for new owner Joel Kissin who formerly worked for Terence Conran and should therefore know his oignons.

He should also know how to train his staff. Our rather flappy and over-effusive waiter was clearly of the school that thought it strange for a couple of women to be dining on their own and therefore that we had to be incapable of choosing our wine. Which was ironic as he clearly didn’t know his own wine list, offering me a glass of St Chinin (sic) which was only available by the bottle rather than the (perfectly nice) Minervois ‘Cuvée Orlic’ above it which was listed by the glass.

Staff hovered to whisk away our plates the moment we’d set our cutlery down meaning we got through a three course meal in an hour and a quarter. Hardly relaxing.

That said, the food - or my food at least - was very good. Given the caviar episode we stuck to salads to start with: my nicely conceived artichoke salad with fennel, tomatoes and preserved lemon being way more interesting than my companion’s (the other Fiona) endive, French beans and Per Las blue cheese which was significantly short of beans.

They were frustratingly already out of the plat du jour - “chef ‘ad to send the rabbit back”, according to The Deeply Annoying Waiter but a huge hunk of dark sticky daube of beef* with mash and beautifully cooked carrots and turnips more than compensated (and was very good with the Minervois). Sorry the photograph's crap, I know. Taking pictures of braised meat in low light is never a good idea but I wanted to give you an idea of the size of it.

The other Fiona had grilled wild seabass with fennel which she thought was marginally overcooked but, being more conservative about my fish, I thought was fine.

I also fared better with my dessert, a fabulously wobbly Sauternes custard with the consistency of a crème brûlée, served with Agen prunes in armagnac. In normal (non-caviar) circumstances I’d have ordered a glass of Sauternes at a pretty reasonable £10.85 to go with that. Fi’s rather solid lemon cheesecake, an odd inclusion on a menu that also featured lemon tart, was less impressive.

There were some other appealing dishes on the menu, especially the game (wild pigeon, girolles, lardons and kale would certainly ring my bell) but if you’re not careful it would be easy to rack up a significant bill - unless you go for the well priced pre- or post-theatre prix fixe at £19.50 for 2 courses which happily includes the daube.

The main problem for Boulestin though is that there’s a lot of competition if you feel like a French meal at this level including Brasserie Chavot just off Bond Street which has just picked up a Michelin star. Despite the quality of the cooking it doesn’t have enough going for it as a restaurant experience to make me want to go back. Except possibly for that custard . . .

Boulestin is at 5 St James's Street, London SW1A 1EF. Tel: 020 7930 2030. There is also an all-day café in the front of the restaurant, Café Marcel.

London's leading critics seem divided on the restaurant. Read Jay Rayner of the Observer's review here and Nick Lander of the FT's here.

I ate at Boulestin as a guest of the restaurant.