People imagine my job consists of wall-to-wall outings to glamorous restaurants and parties.
Mostly, it’s not, but this week has been spectacular with three consecutive days of fantastic food.
I kicked off on Tuesday evening breaking (a delicious selection of amazing) bread at the very new Chris Kitch in Hoxton. This is a second outing for Christian Honor, an Australian chef with amazing talent for surprising flavour combinations. His first café — in Muswell Hill — is a favourite with North West London foodies and he’s a popular demonstrator on the synagogue charity event circuit.
Muswell Hill is a very casual, almost ramshackle affair; huge bowls of colourful salads and temptingly squidgy cakes and tarts are displayed on the counter with a short menu and a higgledy piggledy range of chairs and tables. Hoxton is a far more grown up venue — all sleek surfaces, glass walls and dark walls — sitting on a small pedestrian square between Old Street tube and Hoxton Square. Honor plied me and my journo friend with a stream of amazing creations, starting with some canapés which included popped rice and cheese ‘lollipops’ and amazing deconstructed spring rolls.
The food — in particular our starters of tuna tartare with avocado, chives and chilli and a very green but spectacularly tasty broccoli, green pea mousse with goat’s cheese, soft poached egg yolk and rye bread - were both good enough to generate a series of ‘oooh’s’ and ‘aaaah’s’. Get your passport ready for a trip to the East End.
With the taste of my dinner still memorable, Wednesday saw me waltzing into the French Salon at Claridges. The hotel — the Grande Dame of London hotels — is looking sparklingly glam and the food we were served by the outstanding kosher caterer Food Story did not let the venue down.
Food Story is the phoenix from Carol Sobell’s catering company’s ashes. I, and a range of journalists and bloggers, had been invited to get a flavour of what they do. We were not disappointed. From the canapés served with champagne or a refreshing, non-alchoholic sumac lemonade to the closing petits fours, it was a masterclass in kosher catering.
I’ve long been of the view that kosher caterers are in a league of their own and this was borne out in what we were presented with.
Four courses were modern, delicious and beautifully presented. Sole with a sauce vierge was followed by a meltingly tender lamb cutlet with the now requisite Middle Eastern flavours of aubergine, tahini and lemon; a second fish dish of sea bass with Israeli couscous, sweet lemon gel and mint and the ‘final act’ (as they termed it) was a plate of the USA treat S’mores with banana, and a rich, chocolate mousse.
Seamless service was like a well-oiled machine and I left bearing goodie bags — as excited as a four-year-old leaving a birthday party.
My last outing was Thursday lunch at The Barbary — another newbie with an older sibling, in this case, The Palomar. It was love at first sight — the tiny 24 seater venue is tucked away in Neal’s Yard, Covent Garden and buzzes with life.
Diners sit around a horseshoe bar within which the impossibly young-looking Head Chef Eyal Jagermann (former sous chef at The Palomar) oversees his team. Food is ordered over the bar and passed across by the team of gorgeous waiters and waitresses. It’s noisy, but that’s part of the charm. The menu is short and peppered with Middle Eastern foodie terms which our waiter, David, was only too happy to translate for us. He advised five to eight of the smallplates which are designed for sharing.
A special of char-grilled watermelon with topped with feta, black olive and mint was delicious and it just got better and better. Naan e Barbari was a piping hot, olive oil coated bread straight from the oven; roasted aubergine ‘Sharabik’ was blackened from the oven and drizzled with date syrup and garnished with raspberries. It just worked. Salmon tartare – another special — was given crunch with flecks of crispy bulghur wheat and a fresh yoghurt-y tang in the dressing.
The puddings — under the title ‘Heaven’ on the menu — were stunning. Strawberry ice cream totally punched above its weight, topped as it was with salty flaked almonds, olive oil and honey; Hashcake — so-named as ‘it’s so good it should be illegal’ — was fudgy in texture, green with pistachios and over too soon.
I could do it all again — but I’d need to buy clothes a size bigger. Thank goodness my diary isn't always this full.
Victoria Prever is food editor at the JC
