Detour: Lisbon – Part II

As fantastic as Belcanto was, it’s not the sort of thing you can, or would even want to, have for every meal. Lisbon’s reputation for impeccable seafood is one of its biggest draws, in tandem with the permanent sunshine and those little 20cl beers that make your morning drinking feel that little bit classier.

The extreme indulgence of a posh restaurant must sit on the other side of the scales to your serviceable hotspots, the places you keep going back to. In Belém there’s a little stretch of road, between the tram lines and the Jardim Vasco de Gama, which hosts six restaurants, all with large outdoor dining areas, and representatives imploring you to eat there, like jewellers in a souq.

You’re not asking for much here, somewhere to kid yourself into having a ‘light lunch’. You scan past the salads, well meaning, but your eye is on the buttery prawns, the grilled sardines, the cod cakes, the warm bread, the lager. It’s difficult to commit to a ‘light lunch’ at all, really: you’re on a timer in these beautiful places, and every meal is an edible countdown.

The prawns at O Carvoeir, while overcooked and slightly hard, were notable for their buttery lemon sauce, the buzz of citrus has me mopping up every last bead. We returned here in the middle of our trip and ordered poorly, me some tasteless chicken with chips and her some frozen calamari, but the lemony prawns fostered enough good will.

Next door at Bembelém however is a different story. The food, which was absolutely fine, was marred by terrible service. A surly, short-arse old man told us that his card machine ‘only takes Portuguese cards’ when we attempted to pay, something I’ve never heard before, likely because it’s a total load of horse shit. We had to go to a cashpoint to get a fiver out to complete the €55 bill. We should have done a runner.

Cervejaria Ramiro is, along with legendary bakery Pasteis de Belém, a must visit, according to everyone who’s ever visited Lisbon. Every food vlogger worth their salt goes there, Bourdain’s been there – it’s one of those places. A three-floored restaurant in a pretty drab neighbourhood, Ramiro is known internationally for its exceptional seafood, a Mecca for fans of the crustacean.

There are temperature and blood oxygen checks at the door, a rigour that was not present at either the airport on the way or the way back. It was a reassuring health checkpoint, with masks and sanitiser and assorted gadgets to make sure you don’t accidentally murder another diner. It’s also probably wholly necessary for the most popular restaurant in the city.

It’s hard to say anything about Ramiro other than ‘it just works.’ The prawns cooked in garlic and butter with a salty tang and hint of chilli were immaculate, as was the warm buttery bread used to soak it all up. A dour old woman sat next to us hand cracking a whole crab and enticing every last flake of meat from it, which looked very laborious. We opted for the pre-prepped dressed crab instead, another perfectly delicious, chilled toast topper.

The stars of the show were the tiger prawns. Again, slathered in butter, the juices from the head trickling down its bifurcated meaty torso. It makes you close your eyes and consider renting a flat next door. The little chilled 20cls of Sagres, dutifully and  nonconsensually refilled by the army of attentive middle-aged waiters, are perfect partners for this.

As the trip neared its end we wanted one more semi-expensive blow out, and came across Tapisco in the search. A mesh of Portuguese and Spanish tapas, it’s a restaurant by Henrique Sá Pessoa, the mastermind behind Alma, the only other two star Michelin place in Lisbon. Both Belcanto’s José Avillez and Sá Pessoa have mini empires in the capital, as any self respecting celebrity chef must. Tapisco is the latter’s mid-range option.

Tapisco’s interior is like a tasteful diner, with bright red bench seating along one edge and marble counter seating on the other. The menu, even in English, is a little confusing, and the waiter’s suggestion of only getting three things even more so. I’m on holiday, for fuck’s sake, I want it all.

The meal ended up having a slightly low middle act – perhaps because of my own poor ordering – bookended by a spectacular opener and closer. Tuna tartare to start, soft and melty, with avocado, pickled radish and wasabi caviar pearls was radiant. A disappointing cuttlefish tempura was next, quite flavourless fish with very flavourless batter. The patatas bravas were good, criss-crossed with mayo and a smoky tomato sauce, a bit like an okonomiyaki, but not really enough of it to justify the amount of potato.

Just when things were looking down, along came the arroz de polvo, or octopus rice stew. Deep red, spicy, rich in tomato, with perfectly cooked octopus, the rice having just enough bite, steeped with delicious fresh coriander. It flooded my mind with images of centurions swilling it from wooden bowls in a recently pillaged village, or an explorer’s deckhand wearily heading home after years on a and evil colonial ship, plunging into a vat of it to soothe the soul. It tasted like history, and was my favourite thing, by some distance, from the entire trip. I’m fairly sure I creeped out the waiter with my pissed waxing about it. It’s all part of the fun.

Lisbon exposed huge gaps in my knowledge. I’ve rarely interacted with the food culture of the small Portuguese population in London, I had no preconceptions, no comparison points. Maybe it’s best to go in blind. What I found was so much simplicity, so much allowance for the produce to speak for itself. A bit of acid here, some butter there, but mainly just good cooking, with an emphasis on the best ingredients.

The problem with city breaks is you can never discover it all in one go. Lisbon is on my short list of hopeful return journeys, if only to have that stew just one more time.

@joe_bish

Detour: Lisbon – Part I

I’m sure the 17 people signed up to the mailout for this blog are absolutely champing at the bit to hear me tear into a Streatham restaurant again. Some poor local Italian, begging on its knees for me to like their arancini balls, staff baptising themselves in hand sanitiser while chefs craft bamboo traps at the door to keep the landlords at bay. I’m still uh-ming and ah-ing about it. I feel like it’s unfair to potentially have to give a bad review to a place that’s almost certainly in financial dire straits due to the virus, as the High Road is hardly a somewhere people are desperate to return to. We’ll see how the next few weeks go. I could Eat Out to Help Out (monetarily), and then Write Blog to Shaft Them (spiritually).

Until then though, here’s a placeholder. In June my dad showed me an article in the Times of a powerfully smug woman who was imploring everyone to go to the now seemingly empty nation of Portugal. She and her Portuguese husband had ‘business’ to take care of (murder?), and so turned it into a small holiday, albeit with the mental caveat that an unenforceable quarantine awaits when they return. Bars and restaurants are open, but there are no tourists, just locals creeping back outside, as if emerging from the basement after a hurricane to assess the damage and clear the rubble.

‘No tourists’ (read: Brits) was enough for me to instantly book a flight and a flat in Belém, a district of Lisbon that serves as a kind of giant riverside museum. Its main attractions, including the Tower of Belém and the Jerónimos Monastery, are beautiful Manueline structures, joyfully busy in their design, bubbled and aquatic, as if they’ve emerged from the bottom of the sea, covered in coral and limpets.

The first night my partner and I had dinner at the end of our street at O Frade (The Friar), a small and clean place with bar seating serving Portuguese tapas with a couple of showstoppers. O Frade was the name of an old taberna that the co-owner Sérgio Frade’s family owned in the Alentejo region, and that his gifted grandmother cooked at. With his cousin and head chef, the annoyingly handsome Carlos Afonso, they opened up a refined dedication here.

We weren’t allowed inside, as it was fully booked, but made do with an incredibly rickety couple of stools outside, which was at times like eating on the chair of a horah at a Jewish wedding.  

Vertigo aside, the food was immaculate. Roasted peppers stuffed with bacalhau and topped with crispy onions, melt-in-your-mouth Iberico ham, cubed chorizo with creamy eggs all bring a tear of joy to the eye, but none more than the octopus ceviche. The tentacles are soft, the oil has a perfect tartness and the meaty tomatoes are a depressing reminder of home, and how our tomatoes are incomprehensible bullshit in comparison. The evening was capped with a ridiculous chocolate mousse, covered in walnuts, vanilla foam and wild mint. The Tagus was just visible down the hill.

Before arriving I knew I wanted to have a kind of ‘Hollywood’ dinner somewhere expensive and silly, commit a bit of wallet seppuku. After some research on posh websites I landed on Belcanto, the two star Michelin child of Portuguese celebrity chef José Avillez. It was the first restaurant in the country to earn two stars.

While I had dipped my toes in one star places in London, with mostly excellent but intermittently disappointing results, something about a two star restaurant struck the fear of god into me slightly. Much has been written about the relevance of stars, the biases, the effect they have on restaurants and the psychotic chefs who work in them, endlessly striving for the approval of Some French Guy, so they may have the honour of a plaque with an asterisk or three on their front door. If you want to write about food in 2020, to be in the thrall of stars and rosettes is extremely passé. Still, I was scared.

We went for the Merry-Go-Round tasting menu, after the best negroni and kir royale either of us had ever had. The Merry-Go-Round is 14 dishes of the chefs newer creations, amuse-bouches, little tiny things, slightly bigger things, fried things, puréed things, and (mercifully few) items served on things that aren’t plates. They were almost all completely sublime.

The first thing cementing Belcanto as truly a cut above was, ironically, on a menu and in a restaurant with its laser-focus on traditional seafood, a carrot dish. ‘Carrot done three ways’ is usually what you see some sweaty beardo on Masterchef attempt, only to elicit a look of confusion and disappointment on the face of Monica Galetti. This, though, was beautiful. Smooth carrot pureé and baby carrots in a light cashew milk with a hint of curry running through it, and a crisp tempura carrot branch.

Nut milk features again with coastal prawn and caviar, this time pine nut. The first half of the meal features a few of these incongruous little soups, none more startling and intimidating than goose barnacles in a cherry gazpacho, slices of cherry and tomato snow, a bizarre mindfuck of a dish that should really be style over substance, but works on strange levels that remain an exciting mystery to me.

The only real letdown of the meal was the giant red shrimp, which was served in an unappealing black maize porridge slop, and did nothing at all for me. It was a regular plate of fancy food that I feel is slightly beneath the kitchen that was producing all this alchemy. Immediately after we were back on track with seabass and squash purée ‘scales’, with razor clams in a clam dashi.

By the time the last main course of squab with pak choy mille-fuille came, we were both absolutely stuffed and extremely pissed, and so only managed a few mouthfuls. “Not your favourite?” the maître d sadly whispered. We protested, it was our fault! We’re just greedy booze pigs, honest!

I imagine it’s the service in places like this that tips the scales from one to two stars and beyond. Our waiter was softly spoken, attentive, knowledgeable, smiley, and faultless. I will say, though, that the only time the service became cloying was with the wine refills. You have a sip or two and someone is there to dribble it back up to where it was. But I’m an alcoholic, I don’t want a demure little drip, I want you to plonk the bottle upside down and watch it slosh around the brim of the glass, like an Orc in a meadery. Maybe I’m not meant to be here after all.

The evening closes with typically delicious and not-what-it-first-seems desserts; cherries that aren’t cherries but nutella, a peach pit that isn’t a peach pit but an almond praline. The fun silliness almost turns to unnecessary mawkishness when we’re served a child’s sleeve to wipe our mouths with, to evoke the chefs memory of chocolatey cuffs as a youth. It’s a little odd, and is more the sort of thing you’d find at the site of an exploded school than a restaurant table, but we chose to see the funny side. Besides, a bit of whimsy is acceptable when you’re this exuberantly satisfied.

Belcanto offers up a bit of a philosophical question; how much better can it really get? What in God’s name does a three star restaurant look like? Is it just an unachievable goal reserved only for Parisian institutions, an ascension to the culinary House of Lords after years of playing the right cards? Part of me thinks the only real distinction is the extra £200 on the bill at the end of the night. Whatever nebulous requirements get you this accolade, I sense Belcanto have them in spades.

@joe_bish

Losing Taste

I learned about Sod’s Law from my parents, whenever I dropped a piece of toast butter side down, which was shockingly often. Its true definition is that ‘anything that can go wrong, will go wrong’, but I always took it to mean that if something goes wrong, it will always go wrong in the worst possible way. Maybe they’re the same thing.

I started this blog about three years too late. I always had it as an idea, but it was a bit of a flight of fancy, even though it was incredibly achievable. I wasn’t trying to teach myself how to fly a B52, I was reviewing restaurants a stones throw from my house. There’s a terminal laziness in my blood, that’s why I never started. But being lazy leads to being bored, so a cycle of getting up, doing something, giving up and lying back down begins. This time, though, I was determined not to let it become another failed project, and not to let views and clicks dictate the worth, as I had let them with essentially everything I’d done before.

It’s unlikely, now, that it will ever be ‘finished’, at least in the way it was intended. If the high street was once an old but proud steed being put gently out to pasture, it is now a screaming racehorse, legs broken at the foot of a hedge, in a tent with a vet and a big needle.

People have been scolded for focusing on closing restaurants and bars when such a huge loss of life is occurring, mainly for the complainants who can’t go to them to get pissed and have fun. But if you’ll allow me to be galaxy-brain pretentious for a moment, ‘loss of life’ is a multi-faceted term.

I’m unsure if I could describe what I’m experiencing right now as ‘a life’. The days merely zip from one end to the other. I do nothing aside from eat and sleep, and am more like a house cat than I am a person. I’ve started thinking about this period in terms of an illness, or a coma, a year or so that didn’t happen. But it was worse a month and a half ago.

After stupidly having a ‘big weekend’ before a self-imposed lockdown began, which involved various pub and restaurant visits, I felt very unwell. The following Monday, mid way through a particularly confusing episode of Westworld, something was deeply wrong. My hands and feet were ice cold, but my stomach felt like a forge. I spent the rest of the day and night alternately shivering, hallucinating, groaning in pain, having a sip of water, sweating it out, lying diagonally – trying anything to make it stop. Eventually I took a cocktail of sleeping tablets and knocked myself out.

The next day, and the days that followed, it got better. I didn’t have the cough, I needed no ventilator, I wasn’t about to become a statistic read out on the daily lockdown update. But I began to lose my sense of taste and smell. After a couple of days, it was gone completely.

I’d lost my sense of taste before, like most people, with a shitty cold. This felt different though. It felt as if something in my brain had gone wrong, like when people take a knock on the head and wake up talking in a Jamaican accent.

In the Pasolini film Salò, when the tortured teens and their captors are eating their own shit, one sadistic libertine muses that ‘Nothing’s worse than a breath without odour.’ Though its application is different in my case, there’s truth to it. I imagine the idea is that scent, even faeca-on-the-breath scent, is a signal of humanity, of being alive. By not being able to taste or smell anything, for such an extended period of time, I began to feel like an animal. I couldn’t smell garlic or onions or flowers or wine or perfume, but I also couldn’t smell body odour, flatulence, shit, burning. A bloated, sunburnt corpse could crawl past me on a conveyor belt and I, blindfolded, would not know it from a bouquet of lilies.

So my sense of self began to erode. Stuck inside, unable to taste or smell, eating without pleasure, sleeping to waste time – I was human paint drying. Nothing could be enjoyed anymore. I starting thinking ludicrous things like I would sacrifice my hearing to taste a piece of toast. It started to feel permanent. Other people had only had it for a few days. I was on week three.

And then I could faintly smell wine again, if I stuck my nose right in the glass. It almost brought me to tears. All of a sudden drinking and eating wasn’t a robotic function, it had the potential to mean something again. It would be another three weeks of annoying meals that were almost nice but not quite until it would return completely to ‘normal’ (though I think my capacity for enjoying English mustard may have permanently been erased – it now only tastes of chemicals, what I imagine tear gas is like).

I didn’t learn any grand lesson from this stint as an anosmic, only the realisation that in a time and space where such heavy restrictions are in place, removal of such simple things is tantamount to torture. A piece of the thousand-piece lockdown puzzle is missing, and the blank space stares at you mockingly. To go back to the melodrama at the beginning of this blog, any more of it and I think I’d begin to envy the dead.

@joe_bish

Talay Thai

The state of the local restaurant in 2020 can essentially be summed up in my visit to Talay Thai. A picturesque little spot with lovely décor and crockery that is populated exclusively by myself, the staff and a brigade of DeliverooberJustEat drivers.

At the time I was there, admittedly 7PM on a torrid, rainy Tuesday, hardly a prime slot for even the most popping places, there were a couple of guys drilling a bit of folkish wooden artwork to the wall. We were warned of a noise, but it wasn’t a disturbance in the least. What was a disturbance were the on-their-knees ceiling speakers, whose hollow thud gave me horrifying flashbacks to being in the Fabric smoking area, just out of earshot of a humming MetalHeadz set.

If the rest of the interior is part of this in-progress redesign, then they’re doing a good job. Flowers and multi-coloured paper umbrellas hang from the ceiling. It certainly seems to be the result of a woman’s touch, that woman being the manager who served us, cropped hair and smiling, along with an extremely old man who she called ‘uncle’.

I’ve been dreading writing this a bit because it’s hard to really say much about Talay Thai past that. The starters were a little strange, a few rubbery fish cakes with a normal sweet chilli sauce, and some pretty dry minced chicken dim sum with a frankly bizarre sauce that was somewhere between sweet soy and petrol.

Again with the mains, a good green curry that was perhaps a little sweet and a prawn jungle curry that I’m assured by my dining partner was decent but to me just tasted like spicy seawater.

But then came the morning glory, or pad pak bung fai daeng, which was stir fried with chilli, garlic and oyster sauce. On the menu it says vegetarian oyster sauce, so thank Christ my other half made the amendment to the evil version. This dish was by far the best thing eaten all night, not a mind-blowing achievement considering what came before, but that shouldn’t take away from it. A smoky, strong, spicy sauce and a fresh crunch, it uplifted everything around it – the curries, before just plainly acceptable, were now in harmony with this lifesaver of a dish. It should have a halo.

You could argue that one item shouldn’t have to rally the rest of the gunk to be made pleasurable, and you’d be right, smart arse. But with the presentation, the service and the surroundings I just couldn’t bring myself to be harsh on Talay Thai. It’s pretty clear where the loyalties lie on its website, a giant banner advertising delivery service owning the whole webpage (today is, apparently, ‘Monday Madness’). But for a local Thai place it’s doing nothing wrong. Sure, it doesn’t inflame the senses with the omniscient fragrance of Chiang Mai or whatever, but we’re in Streatham, and to have a dish as good as this morning glory, which I could honestly eat a bucketful of, is good enough for me.

I think you should come to Talay Thai, even if seemingly no one else can be bothered with it, and the restaurant itself certainly seems to encourage you not to. There’s a certain beauty in a passable restaurant that has that one thing, that one dish, you can’t stop thinking about.

Or you could just order it to your front door and not have to stand in the rain waiting for bus after paying service charge. That’s probably a better shout to be honest.

@joe_bish

El Chico’s

I really didn’t want it to be this way. El Chico’s, which opened in 1998, is a Streatham institution. It is perhaps rivalled only by Mrs. Wongs Chinese restaurant, further down the High Road, as the longest serving member of the Streatham culinary community. As every misguided, poorly named, poorly executed new eatery crumbles to ash after a year, El Chico’s stands proudly, blue neon sign burning the air, watching history flurry past.

How is it, then, that it is so impossibly bad?

Valentines Day is a funny time for me to return to El Chico’s. The last time I was here was as a teenager. My then-girlfriend, a year my senior and legally allowed to drink, wanted to order a cocktail. For some bizarre, puritanical reason, I was against it. Probably jealously, probably a pathetic exertion of control, thinking hormonally that this was normal behaviour. It (rightly) led to her shouting expletives at me in the street and storming off, leaving me stood alone on the pavement, tail firmly pinned on the donkey.

Ten years later and my current partner arrives with a box. Naturally, it isn’t for me. It was thrust at her by a drunkard on her way here. “Alright sexy?” he said, “Here. Happy Valentines Day,” and off he wandered. The box, as you can see, is filled with strawberry and cream cupcakes, sour strawberry cables and a mini bottle of Blossom Hill. It was the Ark of Heartbreak, a face-melting container of romantic pathos. Stood up? Said the wrong thing? Allergic to strawberries? We’ll never know.

I arrived before my date and was sat at the back of the restaurant, at a cramped table that had not been dressed. A couple next to me ordered six double tequila shots, either in celebration or a bid to Eternal Sunshine what they just ate from their minds. There’s a few young parents here too – people for whom Valentines used to be a pointless preamble to drunken shagging, and is now spent wet-wiping enchilada juice off a toddler’s sticky claws.

El Chico’s is, and has always been, a family restaurant, a birthday party venue. To expect an authentic Latin American experience here is to expect wine and cheese at the GG Allin show. In my head it’s always been Streatham’s answer to Holborn’s Ciao Bella; passable food in a glorified bar, a safe space for getting wrecked. But the food is not passable, not even close.

After moving to a different table out of the darkness (a wall light bulb had died) we made our order. A ‘Cancun street food burrito’, which is a more demure size than the regular one, each, plus a sharing platter for two with all the Tex-Mex usual suspects, and two barbacoa beef tacos.

We waited for these items for almost an hour. A complimentary tortilla chips and guacamole came from an apologetic and saturnine senior staff member. My partner was impressed with the guacamole. I was not sold. It was inoffensive. It also proved to be the nicest thing we were served all night.

The starters and mains arrived all at once. The burrito, filled with flat, dry paella rice and flat, dry pork was a tired old thing. The platter contained a fair enough beef chilli, some Odeon-quality nachos, frozen mozzarella sticks that disintegrated in your hands like wet candy floss, and two chicken wings. The wings are the first, and hopefully last, things on this High Road voyage that I can describe as inedible. One bite of wet, gooey skin and flavourless flesh is enough to put me off landfowl for life.

Though not the most unpleasant thing on the table, the tacos were perhaps the biggest piss take. They did not contain barbacoa beef, they contained the exact same chilli that sat a foot away on the platter. I had to Google ‘barbacoa beef’ to make sure I hadn’t lost my fucking mind, and that this was as much of a conceptual middle finger as it appeared. There was also a piece of paper packaging in my partner’s burrito. I’d have taken it over those wings no questions asked.

After all this was politely made clear to the manager, he kindly wiped the bill clean and gave us two tequila shots for our trouble. As we were leaving he hovered by the door, a look of crestfallen shame on his face, a thousand apologies spraying forth as he took my hand for a conciliatory shake. “See you again,” he mewled. This isn’t the first time this has happened, and won’t be the last.

It honestly gives me no pleasure to write this review, in this way. This isn’t some eye-wateringly over priced sub-Michelin-style ego trip from a ‘top chef’ who loves the smell of their own truffle-oiled farts. I went to this place when I was a child, as a horrible teen. There are a million memories for thousands of people tied up here. It makes me wonder whether there’s even any point in reviewing it. Maybe there isn’t. Twenty-two years deep and Streatham seems content with it. Even so, El Chico’s should honour decades of patronage with some desperately needed overhauls. For many, Valentines Day is a rare night out, a special occasion, and those people deserve better than the loveless spread on offer here.

@joe_bish

Cattle Grid @ Exhibit B

Firstly, I’d like to briefly mention the rubbish terrorist attack that happened on the High Road last week. It really was shit. Its ineffectuality and poor execution is almost the most significant thing about it, aside from being on fucking Streatham High Road of all places. Not that any one place is more or less deserving of a random knife attack but come on, Streatham High Road? Even the term ‘terrorist attack’ gives it a kind of unearned gravitas. What a dickhead.

Secondly, the ribs at Cattle Grid @ Exhibit B are the best I’ve had in a very long time, and the least I’ve paid for them. They were shockingly good.

Cattle Grid is another in a long list of restaurants I shamefully ignored until they died. It used to be sat opposite Balham station, a place I have been to over 1000 times, but I never went in, and then one day it wasn’t there any more. It had been replaced by something called Heidi, which, again, I’ll probably never visit.

It’s now the resident restaurant at Exhibit B, which is an offshoot of The Exhibit, another Balham staple. The Balham branch is a cinema-cum-nightclub that serves god-awful braying Balham blokes espresso martinis, which they pair with keys of coke in the toilets, turning them into supercharged ultra-cunts. The Streatham High Road version, though, has a sweeter touch, more of a date venue vibe. It isn’t very ‘BBQ’, however. The exposed concrete ceiling and smattering of plants are more evocative of a new media office space than the Missouri State Fair.

There’s of course no table service here, so orders are made at the bar. For me, baby back ribs and chips (£10, as part of ‘Rib Tuesday’ (there’s also ‘Wing Wednesday’)), for my dining partner the bacon burger, with some shared Buffalo wings and coleslaw. So far, so Bodeans.

The burger is a little over cooked, but is good and frankly is what it is. I’m not one to get emotional about burgers (has anyone else noticed the weird amount of media Gordon Ramsey does about burgers? You’d think he’d hate them). The wings are far better, a luminescent orange yet without the regular sickly tang, and just the right amount of heat. Even the accompanying blue cheese sauce, usually one excess too far, is rather demure.

The ribs, though, are the star of the show. Falling off the bone, with a perfectly balanced barbeque sauce glaze, and an endearingly superfluous drizzle of fresh parsley. Taking the first bite gives me a frown of confusion: ‘how are these so nice?’ The glutton in me couldn’t deny an up-sold home made blueberry cheesecake to finish. Very nice, but entirely unnecessary. Got to stop doing this to myself.

The only real let down is the coleslaw, which is flat and tastes suspiciously extremely similar to one you’d get in Sainsbury’s. To put poise and care into everything else and not with the simplest, cheapest part raises alarm bells. Is it all too good to be true?

I have no idea where the kitchen for this culinary refugee is inside Exhibit B. On the day I went, the sign for the venue had been painted over, and was just a plain white block in the middle of the street, totally anonymous. Eating there made me sad I never saw the original place in its heyday; spit and sawdust, probably some kind of rockabilly playlist, the normal trappings of the British ribs ‘n’ wings experience. I hope they’re keeping the spirit alive in the kitchen, maybe a mechanical bull sadly gyrates in the middle of the pass, knocking over plates and opening cupboard doors.

Perhaps I will give Heidi a try after all.

Total bill was £40 without drinks.

@joe_bish

Pizza Express

Reviewing Pizza Express is a little bit like reviewing Disneyland Paris; it’s been around for so long nothing new is capable of being said about it. It’s full of children, has a couple of new features, though not enough to write home about. It’s empty during term time. Expensive. Cheesy. Staffed by dour Europeans. 

I won’t bore you with too many details about the actual meal, which was of course as serviceable as it always is. The pizza tastes exactly – exactly – the same as it has since I was nine. The Peroni is still crisp, the salad dressing is still pleasantly cloying and sour, and the bill still requires smelling salts to recover from. You know the drill. 

Instead I shall bore you by talking about myself. 

This branch of Pizza Express used to have a revolving door. It was, and perhaps remains, the only restaurant I’ve ever been in with a revolving door, a strangely officious barrier for a pizza place. The revolving door is now gone, and in its place a revolving-door-shaped cavern and a big heavy slab of glass that requires two hands to open. It’s like Pizza Express doesn’t want you to come in, turning itself into some Indiana-Jonesian ancient puzzle. 

Across the road from this Pizza Express was another restaurant called Little Italy. It was a dark little hovel, with raised seating platforms either side of a gangway leading to the kitchen, which was staffed by Hondurans. The pizzas were pretty much exactly the same, as was the rest of the menu, save for one dish: the barbeque ribs. These ribs came in the saltiest sauce I have ever had in my life, and were inedibly hot every time. You’d burn your tongue, and then the salt would burn the roof of your mouth. It was an impossibly masochistic dish, and we ordered it every time, because it was fucking delicious. 

I split my most of my childhood between these two pizza restaurants, Pizza Express the faceless entity and Little Italy the place where I’d see the waiter taking his kids to the same swimming lessons as me. My dad affectionately calls him a ‘bastard’; he was terribly good looking. He, like Little Italy and, more broadly, the family restaurant experience, disappeared off the face of the earth, and now only exists in memory. 

On a recent trip to Japan I discovered a slightly incongruous reverence for chain restaurants. In a typically offensive and Orientalist way, I assumed that the CoCo/ GoGo Curry Houses and Sutadonyas and Yoshinoyas occupied a more necessary part of the culinary landscape than a sentimental one: something late night, something quick and, more to the point, something solitary. But speaking to several friends there you see that they hold a very special place, and that the solitude is part of the charm- enjoying something alone in soppy drunken reflection. They’re always open, ubiquitous comforting features of otherwise empty stretches of road. And it’s always exactly the same.

I only ever really go to Pizza Express with my dad now, and in many ways that’s always how it’s been. Pre-football, post-cinema, me and him, shooting the shit. He always gets the same thing (as do I), a La Reine with pepperoni. I think we both find the familiarity and, in a lot of ways, monotony, quite comforting. Our chats have changed a lot over the years, pleasantly I’ve stopped talking about school and he talks about his job, which is phenomenally more complicated and involves exponentially more juggling than mine. Pizza Express turns into a bit of a Masonic Lodge, a little room of secret ritual not mentioned outside, though the ‘secret ritual’ is actually just blokes getting pissed talking shite, maybe a complaint about how long the conservatory is taking to build.

In the last five or so times we’ve come here something has gone wrong. On one visit we were certain the kitchen was on fire, part of some Fawlty-Towers-esque farce. But he keeps suggesting it, and we keep coming back. ‘It’s good pizza though, isn’t it?’ he said tonight after another string of complaints. Perhaps he likes it for the same reason I do: the Pavlovian sensation of a lifetime of bonding. I hope so, anyway. 

@joe_bish

Italian Bistro

I might be showing my pathetic inexperience and naïveté here, but as far as I can tell it’s uncommon to come across a properly decent local Italian restaurant in London. The gulf between what is served in the trattorias of Campania and what is served in basically anywhere outside of an EC post code is staggering. It seems bizarrely difficult to get right, let alone impress. Maybe it’s too much to expect from a local Italian, a country whose food has been homogenised and anglicised into oblivion the last 50 years. 

It’s very quiet in Italian Bistro, a name that thuds into your brain with all the grace of Klan wizard in a monster truck, at 7:15PM. Quiet even for Streatham High Road. My entrance was met with the stares of three men waiting for their dinner partners to arrive, sitting in the hot silence. I was the Meadow Soprano to their expectant Tony. Hopefully it won’t end the same way. 

It really was very hot in there. Too hot. So hot that at the end of the meal, the owner-waiter asked of us: ‘Guys… Is it too hot in here?’, like he simply couldn’t tell and was having to crowdsource the temperature. Sticky were my pits and sticky was the table, as if it had been rubbed down with the goo from an ergonomic mouse mat. You know the ones I mean, right? 

Sorry. The heat. 

I thought the heat was coming from a wood fire pizza oven in the back, but that was an optical illusion – it was just a serving window. While it was temping to order one of their crispy pies, I decided against it, purely because it is so hard to fuck up a pizza. Even shit pizzas are basically decent. It’s too easy. 

‘Easy’ is an accusation that could be levelled at the starters that me and my dining partner had, though only one really did its job. The bruschetta – though, shall we say, original in its presentation – was well seasoned with plump, juicy bifurcated cherry tomatoes. The fried mozzarella did not please in the same way. A fairly tasteless ball of whatever with some pizza sauce and a decaying rocket salad. 

The starter plates had yet to be cleared when the mains arrived, but this kind of ‘what do you want from me?’ service has its place in the world, and is charming depending on your mood. Two large wines in it was fine by me. My dish, a gargantuan plate of sweet sausage and tomato penne, my partners’ a sea bass fillet with potatoes and olives. 

The quarry of al dente penne hid a lot of the Italian sausage, and as a result there was a lot of sifting. It didn’t quite elicit a bellissimo, but it was hearty and filling, drenched in cheese and enjoyable while swilling a nice Puglian red.

The sea bass, on the other hand, was quite something. Aside from the skin which needed a good old fashioned crisping, it was beautifully light, with crispy rustic potatoes and tart cherry tomatoes. It was a real bit of Lady and the Tramp duality, the fine fish and the mound of sausage pasta. 

Both the starters and the mains were like dishes from different restaurants, performances pieces from two separate Masterchef contestants. I watched the owner-waiter suppress a sigh as someone inexplicably asked for parmesan to be shaved onto their mussels provencal, and wondered if he just couldn’t be arsed with it today. It was too hot. 

While it wasn’t a completely edifying experience I won’t hold it against Italian Bistro. They clearly know what they’re doing, though perhaps they need a reminder as to why they’re doing it. I would return, though I might give the pizza a go. Maybe a sea bass pizza, with as much parmesan as you can give me, garçon! 

Dinner for two including drinks was £37.

@joe_bish

Perfect Blend

I’m not sure if, two restaurants in, I can claim to be noticing a trend, but trend is the only way I can describe this. The Hamlet, which I can see across the road through the fairy-lit windows of Perfect Blend, is a place that isn’t 100% sure exactly what it is. With The Hamlet, this added to the overall charm. It was a bit of a mishmash, but it was nice, an enjoyable space to spend a couple of hours. Perfect Blend, on the other hand, doesn’t quite get away with it. 

I theorise that maybe because of the geographical hostility of Streatham High Road, businesses think that they have to diversify to the nth degree. This means it has to be a bar, a restaurant, a cafe, a changing room, a gallery, an office, a blacksmiths, a chiropodists. At all times of the day it must don a different mask and be something else. What it sacrifices in identity it, I guess, makes up in broad appeal. In the case of Perfect Blend, its appeal is surely anything but the food. 

Perfect Blend has an all day menu in the truest sense. Its breakfast fare, from full English to eggs Florentine, runs from opening to 4PM, alongside its lunch menu. The interior is a mini maze of big, thick pleather armchairs, the sort you see in all chain coffee places, and cubed stools at long communal tables. Straight ahead is a counter with cakes. To the left is a bar with draught beers. 

I arrive in the purgatory period between breakfast and lunch (blunch? Leakfast? Is there a word for this?) service and dinner, so waited with a beer and some tooth-chipping mixed nuts. I got the ‘St. Reatham’ lager from the local Inkspot Brewery.

Here’s a problem I have with myself: beer, and the extended ale universe, makes me feel like a real peasant. I like to think that, in most other spheres of my life, there exists at least a dribble of refinement of taste. But not with beer. Beer, I like it sugary, tasting like poisons, like a drinkable cigarette. I will plough through a keg of Stella before I’ll ever order even a thimble of Proper Job or Gamma Ray or, god forbid, some beardy fat man dreamcatcher called The Hog’s Piglet or Avalon’s Revenge or whatever. So when I say I don’t like this Inkspot beer, I fully accept that this is most likely a deficiency of mine. I’m a hoppy philistine, an idiot, uncultured. Back to the potato patch with my can of Red Stripe.

There were a slew of strange characters coming in and out of the place as well. One very shifty looking man with a bag-for-life filled with nightmares sat outside chain smoking cigarettes. Another, a large, bear-like man with a gigantic gaping and exposed wound on his knee rallying round for a pound on his Oyster. This has nothing to do with Perfect Blend, but it made the Inkspot go down like a pint of mercury. 

Fate had decided it wasn’t their day, so maybe the food would come to the rescue. Sadly it wasn’t to be. The starter of jerk wings tasted like they had been constructed, seasoned and cooked by a white person – maybe the whitest person ever to have lived, a real indigenous Bri’ish. It was imbued with a fundamental misunderstand of what jerk is. Dry meat, with a salad so vinegary it elicited a face on me like that of a baby gnawing its first lemon slice.

I asked the waitress (both who served me were working their first ever shifts, and they did a top job, asking the right questions and giving the right answers) what she recommends. The 12-hour slow cooked cajun pork tacos catch my eye, but the ‘Perfect Burger’, I’m told, is the flagship dish, so I opt for that and a mixed salad. The salad is the most acceptable part of the whole experience. The burger, from top to bottom, is quite a sad thing. Overcooked dry patty, soggy bun, a strange mayonnaise that tastes like something has gone very wrong at some stage of its creation, and some anaemic fries. It wasn’t totally disgusting, if I was hungry enough I’d have eaten it, but I wouldn’t have been happy about it, not one bit. 

This seems to be a problem when your place of business is a juggling act. I don’t doubt that, after 10 years of being open, Perfect Blend do a banging coffee, maybe the cakes are first class, and the beer, to a more refined palate, is something to behold. Maybe the breakfasts are great too – the bacon on the burger was by far the best bit, meaty and salty. Based on what I had, however, perhaps dinner is a spoke they should remove from their wheelhouse. 

@joe_bish

The Hamlet

Is it Hamlet the play or hamlet the place? The antiquated gas lamps and scrawled-from-a-feather-quill sign design on the exterior would suggest the former, but inside, the cosiness, the leather-upholstered chairs, the piano, say the latter. It looks a bit like you asked a cider-addled Breton antiques dealer to design a B@1.

The Hamlet, on the precipice of Streatham Hill, is right next door to a newly opened florist called Luxe Petals. Judging by the amount of flora in the place, including a jar of roses for sale (£4 a pop), you suspect they’re in cahoots.

There’s an all things to all men situation here. It’s a cocktail bar, it’s a restaurant, it’s a venue, it has a DJ every Friday and has the vibe of a hothouse crossed with a bric-à-brac shop. A beaming owner welcomes me in while a cackling pissed woman in the corner, martini glass in hand, implores her husband to not “come the cunt”, a level of enjoyment not matched by the giant table of workmates, solemnly and respectfully trying to enjoy each other’s company.

The menu at The Hamlet is, to put it politely, old school. Ratatouille, chicken supreme (which I’m not sure has been on any menu since 1989) and an assortment of giant sharing plates, with an incongruous focus on middle eastern fare. There’s a hummus starter, a fattoush salad, merguez hiding somewhere amongst the platters. It’s a basic menu, through and through, and so trying the basics seemed fair.

I had a morbid fascination with what ‘king prawns pili pili’ could be, and got some calamari for a variety of surf. Much to my glee, the calamari were not ornately assorted rubber bands, but creamy, with a well seasoned batter, the tartate with an appropriate zing. The most shocking thing about the prawns was the rocket and sweet bell peppers being lifted with a drizzle of olive oil, something an ungodly amount of places forgo on their drab, dry afterthought salads. The prawns were delightful, in a lightly spicy sauce, whose kick could have done with a slightly bigger boot.

I was told before I ordered that it was steak night. The normal £18.50 for an 8oz rib-eye was reduced to £12.50, and in my quest for standard fare how could I say no? It was cooked perfectly to order, melty, well seasoned, but the meat itself was nothing to write home about. I’ve had very similar, if less adept (read: stood beneath a smoke alarm waving a tea towel), experiences with a Taste the Difference cut at home. The chips, thick cut and slightly colourless, were too hot to eat, so I had to keep road testing them for temperature with every bite. It was washed down with a fittingly light Argentine Malbec.

That being said, I don’t want to be unduly harsh. This was a good meal, but its discount price is closer to the mark. It’s worth paying for, but not quite £18.50 worth it.

The (presumable) owner and the lone chef had a great Kitchen Nightmares vibe; the owner, with a grinning if slightly manic attentiveness, and the chef, goateed, confined to his cooking cave, peering through the doorway every now and then. You could imagine the former tearfully imploring Gordon to sort out his cantankerous chef/ brother-in-law before the place closes and the inheritance turns to ash.

But the food is good, so that’s of no concern. It’s solid cooking. A lack of imagination is forgiven when tasting these dishes, because they’re done properly, and with heart. The service is great – I was given a water with my main that remained untouched (as a waiter once said to me and my dad, ‘not for me, I’m allergic’), but was nonetheless appreciated.

A New York cheesecake rounds off this venture into customary dishes and it does it with aplomb. An almost comedy sized globe of vanilla ice cream sits on the slice, plastering my mouth in sugary gunk, which is a textural joy to chip away with wine.

The bill comes with a complimentary grappa, which I’m advised not to shoot. I sip and quickly realise why, and am careful not to spill in case it erodes the varnish on the table. At £52, even with the steak deficit, it sends a mild, arthritic shooting pain to my wallet.

Ultimately, though, I’m not in the least bit fussed. I feel welcome, the food is good, the people are nice and I’m surrounded by roses. There’s also a sense that this food is just one notch on a big belt of things The Hamlet does well, and seemingly has been for over a decade. Aneka’s Japanese Boy plays me out. If there’s one sure way to my heart other than a spicy, juicy prawn, it’s a problematic playlist. 

@joe_bish