The Quality Chop House: a very well-connected wine bar

From the outside, the re-opened Quality Chop House in Farringdon may look like yet another retro restaurant revival but the big draw is the wine list put together by its well-connected young proprietors.

They’re not making a big deal about it but Will Lander is the son of top wine writer Jancis Robinson and restaurant critic Nick Lander and his business partner Josie Stead (formerly general manager of Heston Blumenthal’s Dinner) the niece of Stephen Browett of Farr Vintners. As a result they’ve managed to get their mitts on some impressively rare bottles and vintages which you can both drink in the bar or restaurant or take away (of which more below). At the time of writing, for example, they have 1950 Banyuls by the glass.

The wines are by no means all expensive, though. The list is scattered with really interesting well-priced buys in the £20 to £40 price bracket including the Colet Vins Vatua, a delciously rich, peachy Cava-like sparkler (a bargain at £5 a glass) I kicked off with which just about managed to penetrate a heavy cold.

We also ordered a white garnacha (Verd Albera from Marti Fabra, a bargain at £21) which was given the thumbs up by my snot-free companion and rich, plummy (I think) glass of Les Clos Perdus Corbières that came with the £13 'chop and a glass' offer. (The chop was a choice of Middle White pork or a Barnsley chop and mash. Smart idea.)

The sensibly short menu - at lunchtime at least - is typical gastropub fare as befits the establishment's Chophouse roots but is not a million miles either from that of Green Man French Horn where Josie’s boyfriend Ed Wilson is consultant chef (I imagine there were some battles over divvying up the charmingly retro French plates that appear at both establishments).

We shared a nice fresh piece of mackerel and beetroot relish (at least my companion said it was nice) and a chunky game terrine followed by the chop and a wholesome plate of roast shoulder of Middle White pork and stuffing. (They apparently also do sandwiches to take away based on the weekday menu).

In the evening they have a more ambitious but well-priced four course set menu for £35 and, according to the website, ‘open a few magnums’ so you can have a glass of something decent while you decide what to drink.

The all-day (from 11am) bar offers charcuterie, cheese (from Neal’s Yard) and cake and would be an immensely civilised place to hang out for a couple of hours if you were in the area.

The only problem? The shop. Well, not really a shop but a line of seductively presented bottles along a shelf which you can buy, Parisian-style, to take away. Very, very tempting if you’ve just discovered a wine you enjoyed and fancy another bottle to drink back at home. But they’re only £5 less than the restaurant price which makes them, for the most part, considerably more expensive than they'd be elsewhere, retail*.

A magnum of 2007 Chateau Rauzan-Segla Cuvée Segla Margaux for example is £90 to take away yet you could buy it for £59 a bottle from, say, The Old Bridge Wine Company. On the other hand you can buy a bottle of 2000 Ornellaia from the ‘Collector’s List’ for £130 (or £125 to take away) instead of £148.75 a bottle at Lay & Wheeler or £365 at L'Anima only a mile or so away in the City. Many of these wines you wouldn’t easily be able to get hold of at all.

So, in summary, a great hangout for winelovers, great value if you drink in, just don't go mad with the takeout in a boozy post-meal spree. As I probably would have done if I hadn’t had that dratted cold . . .

Quality Chop House is at 92–94 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3EA. Tel: 020 7278 1452 and on Twitter @QualityChop

*The restaurant (I'm guessing Will) has just posted this about their wine pricing on their Tumblr blog. Interesting to see how people react.

 

Simon Rogan at The Cube

It’s a complete indictment of my lazy southerner mentality that I’ve never made it up to Simon Rogan’s restaurant L’Enclume despite glowing reviews that would have had me charging half way across France for a similar experience.

But I was sufficiently impressed by my meal at his London outpost Roganic a couple of years ago to jump at the chance of eating at his recent pop-up at The Electrolux Cube.

It’s a weird venue - what feels like an Anglian conservatory perched on top of the Festival Hall, reached by some rather dodgy looking back stairs and a black grass carpet.. Fortunately it was a stunningly beautiful day which made for a jaw-dropping view over London and the afternoon sun poured onto our table for the duration of our seven-course lunch.

Rogan’s food is admirably light, elegant and colourful so every plate was a visual treat, kicking off with a spectacular irridescent ‘cod yolk’ - an egg yolk shaped salt cod mousse encased in saffron jelly served with kale, sorrel and squid ink.

The pairing for that was a 2011 Hunters Marlborough riesling which I thought was a shade too sweet. It was also paired with the next dish - a broth of turnip (Baldrick eat your heart out), the most fantastically light, delicious Westcombe cheddar dumplings, English truffle and apple marigold, one of many ingredients on the menu that were grown at L’Enclume or foraged from the surrounding countryside.

The cryptically named Aynsome’s Autumn Offerings (below) turned out to be an exquisite little plate of local root vegetables with flowers and herbs served with fresh curds and pork skin. That was matched with an accommodating Satzen Gruner Veltliner, Kremstal from Weingut Manfred Felsner - probably my favourite style of wine for this fresh-tasting kind of vegetable dish.

An intensely buttery dish of plaice poached in brown butter with red russian, mussels and oxalis root proved the best match of the lunch with a Domaine Roche Bellene 2010 Montagny 1er cru - no surprise there: white burgundy loves creamy, buttery sauces.

We then had the one red of the meal, a Domaine Serge Lafoue Sancerre Rouge 2010 with the only meat dish, ‘Reg’s Guinea Hen', leeks and offal, pennyroyal and Cowmire cider - which althrough it was cooked in Rogan’s elegant register was still too robust for such a delicate wine. (I’d have gone for a red burgundy with a bit of bottle age.)

Finally two desserts a rather strange, blackcurrant and stout concoction topped with a lozenge of sea buckthorn cream (that egg yolk shape again) paired with Quady’s Elysium Black Muscat and a dramatic-looking crunchy assemblage of pear, lemon verbena and hazelnut which was matched with a Paul Cluver Noble Late Harvest riesling. I’m not sure that desserts are Rogan’s strongest suit - they were pretty but not quite sweet or indulgent enough - or it made have just been I was suffering from sensory overload by this stage.

All in all though, a truly dazzling meal in an amazing location - as it needs to be given the prices they’re charging though I have to say I’ve paid more for less accomplished meals in a Michelin 3-starred restaurant.

And it does make me want to go to L'Enclume which I guess is the object of the exercise for Rogan at least. Harder to see quite what Electrolux gets out of it though. Would you buy a fridge or a dishwasher on the strength of a slap-up meal? I'm not sure I would.

I ate at The Cube as a guest of Electrolux.

Simon Rogan is back at the Cube from December 27th to 31st. Other chefs being featured include Tom Kerridge of the Hand and Flowers, Johnray and Peter Sanchez-Inglesias of Casamia in Bristol, Claude Bosi of Hibiscus, Atul Kochhar of Benares, and Daniel Clifford of Midsummer House. Bookings are taken for lunch at 12:00 for £175 a head and dinner at 19:00 for £215 (prices includes champagne reception, a minimum 6 course tasting menu and matched wines). Check the website for who's on when and call +44 (0) 207 288 6450 to book.

* It’s interesting how white wines dominate the pairings for this kind of cooking. But is that what you’d order if you went out for a meal that cost this amount?

 

Lima, London: a splash of colour in Fitzrovia

It’s unusual these days to come across a menu that’s totally unfamiliar. You can almost predict it. Pork belly? Check. Steak? Check. Sticky toffee pudding? Check. But the recently opened Lima, which specialises in modern Peruvian food, is so startlingly original that it feels like taking a two hour trip to Peru.

The food is wildly colourful too which makes you realise how used you are to plates of brown, white and green. Lima’s finely sliced scallops tiradito sit in a irridescent - and fiery - yellow aji (chile) emulsion. Having been to Chile and not to Peru I didn’t expect the food to be as punchy. Salmon tiradito comes with a neon orange dressing made from rocoto pepper. Braised octopus with purplish-pink 'botija olive bubbles'. It’s exactly what you need on a grey London day.

The flavours too are wonderful. Sea bream ceviche skips over your palate, all bright and citrussy, topped with crunchy corn kernels. There’s lots of corn, as you’d expect. The cancha corn parfait that accompanies the halibut like an outsize fish finger is to die for.

It was the potatoes however that I was looking forward to (Peru reputedly has over 3000 varieties) and there I was slightly disappointed. The subtleties of an exotic-sounding 'huayro potato 4000 metres' got rather lost in a mishmash of corn and crab (about the only dish that wasn’t stunningly presented). And in a dessert of chocolate with mango and blue potato crystals (below) they perched on top of little chocolate towers from which cascaded some kind of Shrek-green goo I wasn’t totally mad about. Maybe I need to be initiated into the delights of Peruvian desserts.

But the only meat dish we had: confit of suckling pig, with roasted Amazonian cashew, lentils and pear was totally delicious.

We drank pisco sours - of course. Very good pisco sours then a Chilean gewurztraminer from Matetic (which worked very well with the spicy and zingy citrus flavours of the starters) and a Chilean Carmenère from Perez Cruz (our charming waiter was Chilean and very proud of his country’s wines). I found that a bit heavy for the main courses. There are also some pretty expensive bottles in the upper echelons of the list - you can drink Tignanello with your eco dried potato stew (one dish I didn’t try) if you want but I’m not sure I’d advise it.

The other slight downside is that the room is quite small and a little cramped for the prices that are being charged though more than fair for the quality of ingredients and cooking. Expect to pay about £50 a head with wine though there’s a fixed price lunch or pre-theatre menu for £17.50 and £20 for two and three courses respectively.

Still, a lot cheaper than a trip to Peru . . .

Lima is at 31, Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia (the area just north of Soho, the other side of Oxford Street), London W1T 1JH.

Tramontana: ‘Brindisa lite’

I’ve been a huge fan of Brindisa, the Spanish food importer who was probably more responsible than anyone for putting chorizo on our culinary map. They have a great shop in Borough Market and a number of convivial tapas bars so it seemed good news when they announced they were opening Tramontana, a restaurant based on 'speciality dishes from the Spanish Mediterranean'.

Sadly a recent visit proved a let down not least for the toppy prices they’re charging.

Take the (admittedly tasty) Hamburguesa Blanco y Negro, a ‘mini-burger’ of white butifarra sausage and morcilla (black pudding). Now I’ve no idea what the wholesale price of butifarra is - maybe it’s a fortune - but £5 for what is basically a slider is ridiculous.

Rice is supposed to be the big draw but even single estate bomba from a “family owned farm” doesn’t justify £14 per person (minimum 2 people - i.e. £28) for a paella dish of bomba rice with iberico pork ribs and black pudding so heavily crusted at the bottom that at least a quarter of the volume had been lost. And I’m sure the mangetout perched on the top weren’t particularly Spanish. The rice dish with lobster our neighbours were having cost £20 a head. £40! You can order a generous portion of risotto at the River Café for £16-18.

Other dishes were more in the conventional tapas mould - jamon, croquetas, grilled lamb cutlets - all fine but the patatas tramontana, a baked potato stuffed with sobrasada (soft spicy sausage, cheese and duck egg) could have come from Spud-u-like way back in the 80s. And a lurid pink beetroot and hake ensaladilla tasted like mushed-up leftovers.

Somewhat discouraged the four of us shared just one pudding - a perfectly nice arroz con leche (rice pudding) with a sprinkling of cinnamon, a really good match with a glass of orangey moscatel Castadiva ‘Cosecha Miel’ from Alicante. The wine list in fact is great with a good choice of cavas, sherries and lesser known Spanish wines like the crisp, citrussy Verdil our waiter suggested.

But you wonder quite who they’re aiming at. The atmosphere is very different from the standard Brindisa, with a large bar and pumping soundtrack which doesn’t sit easily with the ambitious and slightly obscure regional food.

Maybe they’re trying to roll-out a more popular high-street brand, envisaging Tramontana as a Brindisa Ibiza or Brindisa Lite? If so they need to sort out their pricing as I wouldn't have thought that clientele wants to pay upwards of £50 a head for a casual night out.

For the time being if you want a good Spanish restaurant in London you can’t beat Jose Pizarro’s eponymous Pizarro in Bermondsey Street (maybe an unfortunate comparison as I've just been reminded he used to be executive chef of Brindisa!). And Donostia has had some good reviews. Or even one of Brindisa's own tapas bars but this one needs a rethink.

Tramontana is at 152 Curtain Road, London EC2A 3AT. Tel: 020 7749 9961.

* We were offered the wine on a complimentary basis