Does La Tupina live up to the hype?

Talk to anyone about the food scene in Bordeaux - and they’ll say in reverential tones - ‘Aaah, but have you been to La Tupina’. I have, twice now, and while I can understand why it stands out in a city that curiously doesn’t have the quality of restaurants to match its wine I’ve never been quite as blown away as my fellow customers seem to be.

It’s not, of course new. It was opened back in 1968 by Jean-Pierre Xiradakis at the incredibly young age of 23. The former Times restaurant critic Jonathan Meades used to rave about it. Maybe still does for all I know. So does most of the UK wine trade: the list, I admit is magnificent, particularly for minor, more interesting Bordeaux.

The food is also totally to my taste, robust, generous, flavoursome and with more substance than style. A dish of squid ‘like elvers’ with garlic and chilli looks uninteresting but is tender and sharply seasoned, a fine match for the crisp Chateau Bauduc white I’m drinking with its amiable proprietor Gavin Quinney. Sweet plump little scallops are perfectly offset by fatty, flavoursome slices of bacon (though at 24€ they’re not cheap for a starter)

Large chunks of lamb - what better partner for Bordeaux especially the 2003 we’re drinking? - come, delicately rosy, with admirably fresh haricot beans, perfectly cooked so they hold their shape but have lost their bite. A roasted rib of black pig, a traditional local breed, comes with a hefty, tasty edge of fat. The duck fat chips are perhaps a touch soggier than you might wish for but you can’t fault the flavour.

Even the dessert - baked apricots stuffed with almonds served with vanilla ice cream - is good espcially with Bauduc’s delicious 2005 Monbazillac.

Oh, and the service is impeccable. They gave us two tables and unlimited glasses. So what’s the problem?

It’s hard to put my finger on it but I think it’s the slight sense of ennui I detect in Xiradakis who was courteous enough to come over to the table to greet us but showed no real animation or passion - understandable, perhaps, after 44 years.

The feeling, that you also get at Rick Stein’s in Padstow, that you’re part of a vast commercial enterprise (Xiradakis has five more restaurants in the street - Le Bar Cave, Le Comestible, Kuzina, Cafe Tupina and the recently opened Le Maison Fredon which also has rooms) He's always been popular with visiting celebs, including French presidents - as this recent picture of him posing with Johnny Hallyday shows.

The kitschness of the place - the old pot over the fire in which the chips are cooked. If Disney were to recreate south-west French food, it would look like La Tupina. And the loud American (and other) accents which boom over the tables - there are too many tourists. But then I’m a tourist, albeit a working one too.

The locals also have reservations - too expensive and not as good as it was were criticisms that were voiced on Twitter.

Still, Bordeaux and France, could do with more of this. At a time so many French chefs are stil doing silly things with dots, drizzles, foams and Asian ingredients they don’t understand, La Tupina is a welcome beacon of honest, regional French cooking sourced from impeccably good ingredients. For which you quite reasonably pay over the odds.

As I say, Bordeaux doesn’t have much else to offer, apart from high-end fine dining experiences and a good Chinese. La Tupina wouldn’t stand out the same way in Paris, or even in London. But if you haven’t been, and you find yourself in Bordeaux, you should go.

La Tupina is at 6 Rue de la Porte de la Monnaie, 33800 Bordeaux 05 56 91 56 37

I ate at La Tupina as a guest of Chateau Bauduc.

 

Brasserie Zédel: Paris comes to Piccadilly

If you’re the kind of sad, unreconstructed Francophile (like me) who thinks French food has gone to the dogs head not for Eurostar but the newly opened Brasserie Zédel in London’s West End. Housed in the late and not-much-lamented Atlantic Bar and Grill near Piccadilly Circus, it occupies a huge subterranean space which has been decked out at eye-watering expense in full fin de siècle style.

The guys who have deep enough pockets and the sheer chutzpah to pull off this feat are Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, founders of the Caprice and the Ivy and owners of the equally glam and celebrity-frequented Wolseley and Delaunay.

So reasonable are the prices - oeufs dur mayonnaise for £2.75! - that we assumed the portions must be minuscule and ordered way too much in the way of hors d’oeuvres - an heirloom tomato salad with shallots (£2.95), superbly garlicky paté with chopped jelly and cornichons (£5.75) and some nicely tangy céleri remoulade (£2.95) almost certainly made in house rather than bought-in as it would have been in Paris. Freshly cut baguette came from what looked like a boulangerie in the corner - a slightly kitsch but effective touch.

My carnivorous colleague and I decided to tackle the choucroute Zédel ‘pour deux’ (at £14.95 per person) which could easily have served six and which was presented with much ceremony by one of the servers - the choucroutier? - who dismembered the ham hock for us and reassembled it tastefully on top of our platter. He assured us we had enough boiled potatoes but given the amount of meat and cabbage (which was perfectly seasoned with a nice nip of cloves) I’d order a few extra as a side. (Since when did you see plain pommes vapeur on a menu, let alone at £2.50?)

Our 250ml pichet of fruity Alsace riesling (2010 vintage but unnamed) was the perfect accompaniment and not unreasonable at £12.10 though the wine list is almost certainly where they make their money.

Despite being unable to finish our choucroute we plunged into the puds - almost literally so in the case of a ‘bol de mousse au chocolat’ (£5.25) which came in what looked like a small mixing bowl. 'People like to share' we were told. The eclair ‘Paris-Brest’ - a choux puff filled with praline flavoured cream was perhaps the only dish that didn’t hit the mark - quite tasty but overchilled and a shade heavy. But who's complaining at £2.75?

The only other criticism (and I’m struggling) is that they didn't spell out that our Lillet aperitif was rouge rather than blanc (we should have asked but they still replaced it) and that they brought the starters and wine minutes after, leaving us little time to sip them. But they knocked one off the bill to compensate.

There’s a cheap prix fixe lunch for £8.75 for 2 courses and £11.75 for three and a plat du jour for £12.75 which I didn’t go for because I’m not mad about blanquette de veau which was on offer that day. Other specials like poitrine de porc farcie and lapin à la moutarde look more tempting.

If you’re not in the mood for food or it's too early to face choucroute there’s a little cafe upstairs where you can drink coffee and read the papers. (There's also a separate bar.)

Brasserie Zédel, in short, is a joy. Go before they put up the prices as they almost certainly will. (Apparently not, I'm told by Jeremy King on Twitter. But go anyway.)

(Our bill for 2 was £88.99 including an aperitif, 2 250ml pichets of wine (the other was a Picpoul) and 2 coffees. You could eat for a lot less than that.)

Brasserie Zédel is at 20 Sherwood Street. 020 7734 4888. Apparently they keep several tables for walk-ins.

Hix at The Tramshed: chicken, steak and Damien Hirst

You’d think the combination of a great site in Hoxton, an installation by Damien Hirst and a steak- and chicken-based menu devised by one of London’s best known and most successful chefs, Mark Hix, would be something you’d hurtle across London for but somehow his new restaurant The Tramshed just doesn't come off.

I never thought I’d find myself saying this but the menu is simply too short, offering a no-choice slection of starters, roast chicken or steak and some classically English puds which if you’re anything like us you won’t have room for. Oh and a couple of salads though, weirdly, nothing for veggies except the small starter salad of raw asparagus with fennel and Berkswell. And I don’t even know if Berkswell is a vegetarian cheese

The problem is that if you only serve one thing it has to be fantastic and the chicken just wasn’t good enough. A fine specimen but underseasoned and slightly undercooked - not in the sense of being raw but in lacking the deeply savoury, sticky skin of a well-basted bird. (Rowley Leigh at Le Cafe Anglais accomplishes this much better and also offers a choice of breast or leg. Here you have to order the whole bird unless you go for a poussin which is unlikely to have as much flavour. Which makes it difficult for one of you to order steak as we would have been inclined to do.)

Given how fussy people are about eating these days it also seems odd to leave you to carve the very leggy bird a task fraught with difficulty given the tables are so small.

The starters were a mixed bag - Yorkshire pudding with whipped chicken livers (quite livery and too bitter) is a strange concept, admirable though it might be to use up the livers that way. But you can’t really opt out if you don’t fancy it - you pay for all three starters.

The wine list is also a disappointment, given the focus of the restaurant There were next to no light to medium-bodied reds of the kind you’d choose with chicken or which would appeal on a summer’s day. No Beaujolais for example and the cheapest red burgundy, a Nuits St Georges 1er Cru, was £201.

We ended up drinking an excellent bottle of beer, a citrussy pale ale called Hackney Hopster from London Fields Brewery and a medium-dry Burrow Hill Cider - which were great value, matched our chicken perfectly and made us wonder why we were even thinking about ordering wine.

Plus points: the building - a converted Tramshed, as the name suggests - is stunning and that Hirst installation (a stuffed bird on a stuffed cow) a dramatically eye-catching focus. The chips were good and the scrumpy-fried onions even better. The takeaway (food and wine) must be a boon for local residents and office workers (pick up a cheese and chive madeleine if you're passing by). I also like the fact that you get a doggy bag to cart off the remnants of your chicken. Another thrifty touch.

But that's still not enough to make Tramshed worth crossing London for if you’re not in the area - certainly not if you're not in the mood for chicken. If you want to experience the best of Hix I’d go to his Soho restaurant instead.

We ate at The Tramshed at soft opening rates.

Top image ©Damien Hirst 2012

Vinoteca: Soho’s newest wine bar

Even casual restaurants tend to have such good winelists these days that you might wonder whether there’s much of a market for wine bars. But from the heaving crowd at the newly opened branch of Vinoteca in Beak Street this week it looks like they’re on to a winner.

This is the third outlet from Brett Woonton and Charlie Young who bravely set up in St John Street opposite St John’s a few years ago then expanded to Seymour Place near Marble Arch, a welcome presence in an area that’s oddly devoid of good places to eat. A couple of doors up from the perennially popular Polpo, the new Beak Street branch looks another smart location.

The formula is simple and clever. A wine shop and a restaurant/bar. There’s a great list of around 300 less usual and well-priced wines around 25 of which you can buy by the glass at any one time. A few - like the deliciously vibrant Phillippe & Vincent Jaboulet Crozes Hermitage I ordered at Charlie’s suggestion - are available in bag-in-box “about £5 less than it would have been if it had been bottled” he told me proudly.

If you want to get away from the noisy Soho scrum there are bookable - and well-spaced - tables upstairs which is where we ate. The food is simple and robust, designed, I would imagine, to form an accommodating backdrop to as many wines as possible rather than aim for Michelin stars. And - hurray - each has its own wine pairing.

My favourite dish was a nicely seared fillet of mackerel on a rhubarb purée spiked with lovage - an inspired touch with added a welcome note of bitterness to what can sometimes feel like a cloying combination. And which worked really well with its accompanying glass of 2011 Arca Nova Vinho Verde. The baked garlic and Childwickbury goats curd bruschetta which my daughter tucked into with relish was also good - and perfect with a glass of Camel Valley Bacchus.

Mains were slightly less controlled. My roast rose veal, snails and salsa verde was tasty but suffered from an excess of celeriac which was piled in rather unlovely brown slabs around the dish. And my daughter’s bavette was rare even by her blood-curdling standards. It came with some excellent hand-cut chips though which she demolished with enthusiasm and glossy fresh watercress (which she didn’t).

The dessert she chose - an ultra-chocolatey brownie and ice cream - totally hit the spot though must prove a challenge for most dessert wines.

If you just want a light meal there’s a guy slicing charcuterie to order on an old fashioned slicer. I suspect, as in most wine bars, that would be a good option as would just having a couple of starters.

So - a great addition to the Soho drinking circuit, a good place for a reasonably priced meal and an excellent one to buy wine to take home if you work around there. Usefully it’s also open on a Sunday.

Vinoteca is at 53-55 Beak Street, London W1F 9SH. You can also buy wine from their website www.vinoteca.co.uk

PS London’s other high-profile wine bar 28-50 is opening a new branch next month in Marylebone Lane. Check out their website for details.

I ate at Vinoteca as a guest of the restaurant