Bavette at the Loose Box
A most welcome dish has been added to the menu of the Loose Box in Horseferry Road, Westminster. It’s a Hereford bavette steak, served with skin-on fries, roasted tomato and rocket garnish, and a peppercorn sauce. It’s very nicely done, served in thick slices and medium rare, as I...
Mixed fried seafood
One thing they do very well in Nice is fritto misto, a mixture of seafood lightly deep fried. This one had lots of squid, prawns, sardines, and some unidentifiable small fish. Most of it was served whole, leaving the delicate job of extracting the bits you don’t want to...
Ivy Market Grill
The Ivy Market Grill is a fairly recent discovery for me. It’s very close to Covent Garden and has outside tables for warm days. The menu is actually closer in style to the nearby Delaunay than to its parent Ivy, but it’s very good. And the bar is spectacularly...
Just desserts
I was at a Vice-Chancellor’s Circle reception and tour at Cambridge’s Botanic Garden and Sainsbury Laboratory. We saw some of Darwin’s specimens from his Galapagos trip. Afterwards there was a champagne buffet lunch of sandwiches, plus some mini desserts, great looking and great tasting…...
Chassagne-Montrachet
The meal included Brussels paté, lemon & basil crusted cod fillet and strawberry & stem ginger Eton mess, and the wine went with it very well. It was Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru Chenevottes, 2006, a white Burgundy. Depending on exchange rates, it currently costs about £55 a bottle in the...
What a friend we have in cheeses
The menu for High Table at Jesus College featured quite a good deal of cheese. There was goat’s cheese to start with, cheesecake for dessert, then a cheese board. Even the steak was originally going to be served with a blue cheese sauce, but someone must have thought “too...
A rather nice frittata
I made a frittata to share at lunch with my guest, a pescatarian. So no meat or poultry, but there were king prawns, plus pre-par-cooked potatoes, green peppers, onions, tomatoes & courgettes. I whipped up four and a half eggs with two spoons of creme fraiche, two of Greek-style...
Snacks on a plane
This was the first course on Aegean Airlines. It featured smoked salmon trout, stuffed peppers & octopus salad on eggplant mousse, and a glass of Le Vigneron Grec 2016 (Assyrtiko with a touch of Muscat)...
Greek finger food
I was at a conference in Delphi, where they served a buffet lunch. There was a selection of Greek dishes. I chose a ham and cheese crepe, a spinach and ricotta puff pastry, herb infused chicken on a skewer, and pieces of sheep’s milk cheese. It wasn’t actually finger...
Roast potatoes and toast
The latest food scare is about overcooked roast potatoes and burnt toast. The Food Standards Agency warn that acrylamide produced by such foods could increase cancer risks in humans, although mice rather than humans were studied in the research David Spiegelhalter, Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at...