The Peas Family Reunion: Part One, Arbutus

I come from a widely spread family, dearest reader. Father Peas resides in an island in the Med, Sister Peas and the Pea-Sprouts in the convivial Welsh climate. There are other branches to this legume-inous family tree, scattered around, but by and large I am a Pea without a Pod.

Imagine my joy, then, when the paternal Pea decided to visit. Finally! There could be a familial Forty for Forty! I plotted and planned and in the end came up with two marvellous meals: Arbutus with Father Peas (or Rasputin as he shall hereafter be called) on the evening of his arrival on our shores, and The Purple Poppadum with as many family members as I could cram round a table.  

They were, I have to confess, both amazing meals.

Arbutus is one of my favourite places to eat in London, but I usually go for the pre-theatre menu. This time we chose from the a la carte, and I am so very glad we did.

From the starters of a silky pearl barley risotto, topped with a melting poached egg, and a square of deep fried pig’s head, savoury and crunchy and paired perfectly with a smooth potato puree and some translucently thin slices of pickled turnip that provided a sharp-sweet foil to the richness of the meat, Rasputin was won over.

“This doesn’t look like I imagined,” he said, tucking in with gusto. “I expected to see the pig’s face. Do you think the trotters will be on the bone?”

Having grown up to the educational sight of my father tucking into trotters he’d boiled himself, and tripe he had boiled with onions in milk, I didn’t like to tell him the Pieds et Paquets he’d ordered would arrive looking pretty and refined. This is a man who thinks the poshest thing one can do to a trotter is to singe the bristles off, and possibly to trim the toenail.

I feared for disappointment, for harsh words said to our charming and oh-so-patient waiter – but my fears were groundless.

The dish arrived (over two stages, a sliver of toast topped with minced trotters followed the heaped dish of lamb’s tripe and shoulder. Readers of discrimination will be pleased to hear the tripe was unctuous and savoury and hadn’t seen a pot of boiling milk at any stage of its preparation) and Rasputin signified his approval by tucking in.

“It’s a good thing I’m getting my trousers let out,” he said. “I’m going to the embassy for St Patrick’s day and they won’t fit after this.”

Mr Green and I were facing a similar problem. We had both plumped for the saddle of rabbit, served with carrots, and accompanied by a slow-cooked cottage pie, and oh. It was all perfectly executed, though the star of the show for me was the cottage pie. Comfort food at it’s finest.

Because our waiter, besides being patient and friendly, was a minx, we had pre-ordered the Tarte Tatin for the table. That man knew how to sell, but since the table next to us missed out by dint of being too slow, I cannot find it in my heart to blame him. Especially not given how buttery and wonderful it was, or how obligingly the minx packed up the leftover portion for my sister.

The most pleasant surprise of the evening, however, was the bill. Dinner for three, including a cocktail, beers, a very nice bottle of wine, and service came to £158. Given that I’ve paid more per head in some inferior chain pubs, this really drives home how brilliantly arbutus performs – not just on the food and service, but on value for money.

Arbutus, 
63-64 Frith Street,
London,
W1D 3JW, 020 7734 4545, www.arbutusrestaurant.co.uk

Trishna

Indian food in England is something of a thing. The first dedicated curry house (as opposed to the coffee shops that merely served curry) opened in London in 1809, and there are now over 10,000 Indian restaurants serving us £3.2 billion pounds of food a year. Indeed, two thirds of meals eaten out are said to be curry, and many pundits describe Chicken Tikka Massala as our national dish.

Things have come a long way since The Forme of Cury was written in the 1390s, and even if it is a dark story, of fashion and imperialism, you can’t deny that Indian food is an important part of English identity.

That said, how often do you think of curry as being a part of fine dining? Not often, I would hazard a guess, and you would not be alone. But nonetheless there are several Michelin starred Indian restaurants and it seemed about time that I got my act together and visited one.

Thus when darling Julian suggested we visited Trishna for my birthday this year, I jumped at the chance.

All the signs were promising. Based in Marylebone (close to L’Autre Pied, the venue for last year’s birthday meal, and didn’t that cause déjà vu) it is a lovely environment. We arrived slightly early and went for a wander around the Wallace Collection before lunch.

Purely coincidentally, it was Diwali, so we chose the Diwali Feast Menu (with wine for Julian and myself), and sipped at Bloody Indians while we pondered if the pretty yet forgetful waiter we’d been assigned would last through the meal.

Our fears seemed groundless at first. Okay, they brought three lots of wine instead of two with the first course, but the fried flakiness and savoury warmth of the chana bhatura drove that from our minds. It was, we were told, a special Diwali treat, and it was lovely; savoury and slightly decadent, as are all the best things in life.

The next course – hariyali bream – was, without doubt, the best thing I have ever eaten. Nestled in a vivid green blanket of marinade the fish managed to be at once slightly charred in all the best ways and meltingly, moistly perfect. The wine (a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc) was intense and fruity and wonderful, and the course was one of the most pleasurable I have ever eaten.

This was followed by tandoori grouse – a bird which I have a deep fondness for and which was shown to full advantage. The spices complemented the earthy ripeness of the game, and it wasn’t overcooked in the least, leaving it soft and yielding. Unfortunately, it was at this stage that the waiting staff lost interest in us. It may have been for any number of reasons – it was busy, it was a holiday day, there was a shift change – whatever. We sat for around 25 minutes, the remnants of the grouse in front of us and our glasses empty until the table next to us had a dish delivered and our lamb chops were rushed out to our still plated table.

The lamb, sadly, wasn’t worth the wait. Plonked down with no ceremony or comment by the waiter, it was lukewarm and slightly flabby. They’d removed the fat leaving bland meat, with no trace of char to enliven the marinade that coated it. I could see what they were going for, and if they had executed it as well as they did the bream it would have been suburb. Sadly it was a missed opportunity, although the mustard mooli was fantastic (and something I will try to recreate at home) and the 2009 Chateau du Cedre went amazingly with the lamb.

We had chosen different main courses in order to try everything. I had plumped for the malwani jhinga curry, with Julian and Mr Peas (the non-drinking designated driver) making the better choice of the South Indian coast lamb curry. Unfortunately this caused confusion with the wine, despite the waiters making careful notes at the start of the meal, though they fixed the problem with good grace. I have to admit that the side dishes of hyderabadi dal, spinach corn, and nan were the best part of this course. On paper the coconut prawn curry should have been my ideal, but although my prawns were cooked perfectly the sauce was over-salted and had a strange aftertaste, while the lamb was tough and uninteresting despite being in a beautifully flavoured sauce.

By now we had been there for a good three hours and my thoughts were turning fondly to relaxoslacks and dozing off somewhere warm (it had been a late night the night before. IT WAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MY AGE) and the wait until dessert felt far too long, although this is probably highly subjective.

Desert itself was shahi tukra (a bread based pudding that was a symphony of syrup and custard) for Mr Peas and me, and cardamom kheer for Julian. This time I had chosen correctly – my feelings about cold rice pudding are many and varied and none of them are altogether positive. Julian enjoyed it, however, and I should remember that it takes all sorts to make up the world. It wasn’t as sweet as he’d been warned, he reported and the mix of nuts and the sweet white juicy sultanas was good for me. He found the bread pudding a bit too sweet for his taste, but I love him so I will let this pass.

We declined coffee, to the consternation of the waiting staff, and struggled somewhat to get the bill, which was a tad confusing. If you want a table to leave, bringing them the bill and the card machine promptly is probably a better way to achieve it than ignoring them completely – but it was a Sunday afternoon so maybe none of us was reasoning clearly by that stage.

A note deserves to be said about the wine – it was all perfectly chosen, and Mr Peas commented that he’d never understood until then how wine could complement food that way. He’d always suspected it was a load of poppycock sprayed round by those who had a pretentious desire to lord it over him. The wine choices with this meal proved him wrong, and moreover were amazingly prudent – especially for the range of wines we tried.

So, conclusions. Would I go there again? Yes. In a second. I hope the issue with service was more to do with the fact that we were on a late lunch service starting at 1:30 and they were starting the afternoon service in the other half the restaurant than with any bigger problem, and the set lunch with beer would prove a very prudent solution to Sunday lunch.

 15-17 Blandford Street,
Marylebone,
London
W1U 3DG,
020 7935 5624, www.trishnalondon.com

Forty for forty

There comes a time in every lady’s life when she approaches a birthday with a zero in it. Social convention dictates you should shy away from this, laughingly claim to be 21 again, resort to makeovers and lies to hide the shocking fact of your age.

I am forced to admit, darling reader, that when I started to think of my forthcoming birthday I felt mostly shame. Shame at being so old in a culture that prizes youth. Shame.

This lasted all of about twenty minutes until I worked out what I was feeling and why, whereupon it transformed to something a lot more rageful.

Why should I feel shame because of my age? I have survived a lot to get here and I am proud of who I am now. More importantly, I like the person I am now.

So, I have no shame in saying: I turned 39 this week, and am already plotting for when I turn 40 next year.

Of course, accepting this gives rise to the question: how should one celebrate such a momentous event? I mean, given the number of times over the years I thought I would never get here, the event deserves a damn fine celebration.

I could have a party, of course. Hire a venue and collect my friends around me. But I have no particular fondness for large social gatherings. I would much rather have dinner with friends – and there are so many places that I am longing to eat at.

And this thought, my dears, gave rise to the idea: to eat at forty notable restaurants in the year to either side of my birthday, and to do so with my friends and the people I love most in the world.

I’ve already made a start – even if I cheated slightly and started a little early. I have been to Story, Dinner, and Trishna, and I will review those over the next few days, and I have a list of 26 or so more places I want to go. However, this leaves another 14 spaces, so I will throw this out there. Is there anywhere you think I should go? Where would you go if you had the chance? And who would you go with? And do you prefer to celebrate birthdays? Or do you hide from the aging process?

Noms and the City: A belated review of Gauthier

There are many problems with having a day job. For a start it constrains my artistic bent, limiting my writing to the hours of darkness (which some would argue is strangely appropriate). For a second, I have to pretend to the world to be a demure and serious business woman and hide the fact that I am, in fact, an eighteenth century harlot, which can come as a shock to the system on occasion. One major benefit, however, are the executive junkets, which at best give me the chance to meet up with young Julian, and at least let me travel the country scouting for pretty and noms.

Thus is was that some months ago (for I am a busy woman my dears, and time simply rushes away from me, like a cheeseboy on roller-skates) we ended up in the bustling heart of Soho in the salubrious establishment that is Gauthier. Such a beautiful environment – flowers and pictures and clean white lines in a lovely old townhouse. The welcome was warm and, well welcoming.  The restaurant itself was spread over three floors, making me feel like a hedonistic Victorian lady, immersed in a society of polite manners and cheap doxies.