Dinner with vodka and wine: £47.00

I think it’s generally safe to say that when you start the evening with vodka and pickles that you are going to have a good time.

Vodka and Pickles

That being said I was a little hesitant about Samarqand.  The restaurant specializes in food from Central Asia – countries like Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and most importantly Kyrgyzstan.  My dad lived in Kyrgyzstan for over a decade and when I went to visit I was unfortunately less than impressed with a good deal of the food.

When we ate typical Kyrgyz food – plov, pilmeni, etc it was usually quite good.  But I just remember that there was an endless parade of the worst kind of Russian cuisine.  I usually eat red meat 3 or 4 times a month.  Near lake Issyk-Kul, a resort area, I was subjected to an onslaught of mutton 3 times a day at a Russian style spa that left me wishing for a quick death. Even worse was the “fruit juice” which is called compote.  Google that one – it’s a horror show.

So as you can imagine I needed the vodka and pickles to work up my courage.  Turns out my misgivings were misplaced.  But I’m still glad I had the vodka and pickles.

The interior of Samarqand is all slick black marble and very contemporary takes on traditional Central Asian crafts.  It’s a bit much, and the giant horse lamp is the very definition of tacky.  But that tackiness kind of enhances the whole experience.

More Pickles!

After the pickles came more pickles (Soleniya).  They were all quite good. The tomatoes were definitely my favorite.  I probably could just have eaten a bucket of these and been perfectly happy.  There were also some very tasty pumpkin samsa – a little bun of flaky pastry filled with pumpkin.  Delish.

Russian herring with boiled potatoes

Really what would a vaguely Russian meal be without some sort of pickled herring? It was ok, but nothing special really.  For the best pickled herring you’re really better off getting it from a Jewish deli.

Manty

One of the dishes I never got to try while visiting Kyrgyzstan were manty.  I ate pelmeni (a similar smaller dumpling) on several occasions and liked those.  I am lover of dumplings.  Imagine me bouncing around in my seat when this platter of big pillowy steamy GIANT dumplings was placed in front of me.  Definite food joy.  The dumplings themselves are not overly spiced but the chili relish they serve with them really lifts the dish.  I am pretty sure this is not even remotely authentic as spicy is not something the region is known for but it works really well.

I definitely recommend this place if you want to pretend you’re an Oligarch for an evening.

Samarqand
18 Thayer Street
London W1U 3JY

Dinner for two with cocktails and wine: £150

There’s a style of Italian restaurant in my hometown of New York City that I just love.  Relaxed yet polished atmosphere, authentic food and great service.  NYC is positively infested with these little gems. My favorite – Lunetta in Brooklyn was walking distance from my flat and I make sure to eat there every time I am home for a visit.

This kind of place is hard to find in London.  Cheep and cheerful is easy to find.  Fine dining in a stiff, formal setting abounds.  But modern fine dining where you can show up in jeans and trainers and still get white tablecloth service is harder to come by.  I’d heard about Bocca di Lupo but just assumed it would be overpriced and fussy.  But my friend Ian had raved about it and he’s got a rather trustworthy palette and does not suffer poor service well, so I went with it.

We showed up around 7pm midweek without a booking.  I was expecting to be politely turned away but they have a great bar that runs the length of the front of the restaurant where punters can overlook the action in the open kitchen and get great wine suggestions from the charming barmen.  It’s a fun place to sit if there’s just two of you.

Artichoke a la giudia

First off we had a couple of negronis and some items from the Fritti section of the menu.  Olives stuffed with minced pork and veal – perfect with a gin based drink really.  And one of my favorite things from the Jewish quarter of Rome – deep fried artichoke.

Next we had a small plate of treviso risotto.  It’s always risky ordering a small plate of risotto.  What was the likelihood that they were going to make this tiny portion fresh for us?  You can always tell when a restaurant has made the risotto mostly in advance and then finishes off portions as they are ordered. Or worse if they’ve just reheated it.  It’s usually a mushy, pasty affair.  Bocca di Lupo either makes every small serving on it’s own or they have perfected a method for reheating or finishing pre-cooked risotto because it was delicious.  The rice was cooked just the right amount – and the dish was not overly starchy or stodgy.

Treviso Risotto

It was at this point that I dropped my fork.  I swear that the waitress had a new fork at my place before the dropped one hit the floor. I didn’t have to crane my neck to try to get anyone’s attention while my food went cold.  I didn’t have to worry about a thing.  Now that my friends is service.

Next up was Buristo – which is Italian blood sausage.  I love blood sausage but it clearly completely freaked Ian out.  More for me!  Sicillian sardines with raisins and breadcrumbs – another excellent dish.  And a great big dish of sauteed chanterelles which I seriously made sure sat on my right side so Ian had a hard time getting to them.

Rustic pork & foie gras sausage with farro & porcini mushrooms

Ian’s favorite of the evening – and I have to agree it was divine – was the rustic pork and foie gras sausage with farro & porcini mushrooms.  I mean just reread that.  How is that not going to be delicious?

Desert was something chocolatey.  I’m not really a chocolate person so I can barely remember it but it was nice. What I do remember was the grappa - Gioiello Chesnut Honey grappa to be precise.  Great way to end a fantastic dinner.

I really enjoyed this meal.  The food was excellent and the level of service and attention to detail just really made the whole experience.  I’d come here for a business dinner, a date, or with a group of friends.  Most exciting for me however is that the bar makes this a perfect place to come on your own when you really don’t want to share your mushrooms or sausage with anyone.

Bocca di Lupo
12 Archer St.
London, W1D 7BB

Dinner for 6 people with poor impulse control and plenty of beer: £180

There is no need for 6 people to order 14 dishes at a Chinese restaurant.  Tapas maybe, but Chinese no. But this is what happens when my friends give Jenelle and I permission to order for everyone.  Never ever a safe move for those who wish to be able to breathe at the end of a meal.

Sichuan is a small, unimpressive looking restaurant on a fairly generic side street in a pretty boring part of London (Acton).  I am surprised we even found it or that anyone thought to recommend it. If you do manage to make it out there and of you also happen to show up with a lot of people, don’t fret, the basement has a nice big table with a very 80s lazy susan in the middle that is great for a group.

Sichuan restaurants are not all that common in London for some reason and if you love the food (as Jenelle and I do) then it’s very hard to resist the temptation to order one (or in some cases two) of all of your favorites.  I wondered why the waiter was giving us funny looks when we ordered.  Then I looked through the tally.

We ordered:

If I described every dish in detail you’d get bored and fall asleep.  And to be honest there’s no way I could remember how all of them were.  So I’ll stick with the highlights.  The sour and spicy potato threads (threadlike on the menu) were good.  The ma po tofu was just so so (I make it better at home).  The kung pao was pretty damn good but for some odd reason only came with cashews (I prefer it with peanuts).

Eggplant Dragon

The sweet and sour eggplant dragon – which we ordered simply because of the name – was fabulous.  It was an entire eggplant sliced, battered and deep fried with a sauce of minced pork, chilis, spring onions and other good things.  It was ludicrous to look at but absolutely delicious.

Hot and pepper Sichuan fish

My other favorite is a dish that is just so excessive that I will probably never attempt to make it at home. It requires about a gallon of oil and a few tons of dried chilis and Sichuan peppercorns to make a braising broth.  It’s not as spicey as you might expect given all of the ingredients.  The fish has a mellow smokey flavor.  One of my favorites.  The last time I had it was at Bar Shu where it was just as delicious but also nearly 4 times the price.

And here we come to why you should come here.  Yes it’s in the middle of nowhere, yes it has little atmosphere to speak of.  But the staff are lovely, the food is very good and even if you go with friends who seriously over order you won’t go bankrupt eating here.

Sichuan
116 Churchfield Rd
Acton, W3 6

It has been pointed out that there are two entries for it on Urbanspoon!

Dinner for four with some very expensive wine which was ordered by the wine snob without asking anyone if they really wanted to spend that much on wine: £345

Well here is a post that is well past due.  Over the summer some foodie friends and I decided to have a “budget” Heston Blumenthal experience by traveling to Bray to eat at his pub The Hinds Head.  Just a few doors down from the Fat Duck the pub is a chock full of character 15th century building with comically low ceilings and wonky everything.  This pub is so ye olde times that I actually hit my head on a cross beam going through the door to the ladies toilets.  I am 5 feet 2 inches tall – I have never before hit my head on a door frame.

The front part of the pub feels rather convincingly like a pub.  You can order beer and crisps and more importantly bar snacks.  We all knew going in that this was not going to be an evening of polite restraint and we all agreed that we should go in guns blazing and sample the bar snacks before we went to our table for starters.

Scotch Egg

First up was the Scotch egg.  Now I know many are shivering at the thought of one of these horrible little dry fried beasties – but of course there was none of that here.  Look at that egg.  The sausage is crisp and the yolk is still nice and soft.  Definitely the best one of these you’re likely to be served.

Pork pie

Next up a pork pie.  I have what verges on a problem with pork pies. I love them.  I don’t even need to tell you that this pie was as good as it looks.  It was also just darn cute to look at.  We also had some “devils on horseback” which is a fancy way of saying you wrapped a date with some bacon.  Very nice but nothing earth shattering.

Salad of Confit Beet

It is at this point that we sat down to our meal.  Starters included a salad of confit beet which was sublime.  Definitely a different take on a standard combination of flavors (beets, nuts, goat cheese).  There was also a delicious salad of raw beef, a Welsh Rarebit and something else which I didn’t photograph or write down and now 5 months later cannot remember of course.

Welsh Rarebit

For mains a couple of us had the cheeseburger (myself included) and one ordered a steak with bone marrow sauce.   Bone marrow sauce sounds a tad excessive (which it was) – and it was heavenly.

Steak with bone marrow sauce

Three courses and two very very expensive bottles of wine later desert was of course an absolute must.  It is a testament to how much we’d overindulged already that at this point my photos become embarrassingly dark and fuzzy.  So my description will have to suffice.

I ordered what was described on the menu as simply “Strawberry Trifle”.  Since all of the food up to this point had been – though exquisite – fairly straightforward I expected a strawberry trifle.  When the waiter served it to me he hovered  at a close but polite distance to watch me take my first few bites.

There were layers of flavors some of which were easy for us to identify – green tea, rose water.  Then there were also some delicious but thoroughly unidentifiable ones as well.  The waiter bounced over gleefully to ask if we’d like to have the trifle explained. When has a waiter ever asked you if you wanted your trifle explained?

It was comprised of the following:

• Sponge infused with green tea
• Strawberries soused in lemongrass and rose water
• Safron custard
• Sherry and cider syllabub
• Thin layer of olive tapenade

Olive tapenade? Could you repeat that please? Really? Really.  It was so unexpected and bizarre but that little hint of salt in the trifle just made the whole dish.  It was of the most enjoyable and fun deserts I’ve ever had.  I suggest you do save room for desert.

The Fat Duck it is not but that is not what it is trying to be.  Is it a place to go for a quick cheep and cheerful pub meal? Absolutely not.  But if you don’t let you’re friend the wine snob order the wine you and maybe if you don’t have a 400 course meal as we did you can eat here for a much more reasonable sum.

Get on the train and go eat here.

Hinds Head
High St
Bray, SL6 2AB

Dinner for 4 BYOB: No idea because Lee paid – but certainly worth every penny

Not surprisingly my friends are always recommending restaurants to me.  I could probably write this blog based upon these restaurants to me alone.  Often these places are really good, sometimes they’re pretty mediocre. Every once in a while they are really special.

My good friend Lee has been telling me about his favorite Thai restaurant for a while now and last Friday night we finally made the trek out to visit it in Leytenstone of all places.  Leytenstone in East London is not an area renowned as a culinary destination.  The insane number of fried chicken places packed into the area gave me a real sense of the options available to most area residents.  It was no surprise then really that Singburi was full of diners – both local and visitors on a Friday night.

A small family restaurant with mom running the front of house and dad in the kitchen Singburi does not at first seem like a restaurant worth mounting an expedition to get to.  But a quick look and sniff around the dining room at the other punter’s meals was encouraging.

Som Tam

I started with Som Tam – papaya salad.  For some reason you can’t see the generous pieces of chilli or dried shrimp in the salad, but believe me they are there.  I like my food hot – seriously hot – and this salad was eye melting.  It was also absolutely delicious and refreshing.  I was wide awake after eating it.

Pork belly with chilli and basil

We ordered a ludicrous amount of food – all of it spectacular.  My favorites were the pork belly with chilli and basil. This was just so so good.  Salty, porky, spicy and fragrant.  I was unable to finish it and I have to admit that I woke up the next morning and finished the leftovers for breakfast.  It was one of the specials but if we’re lucky it will wind up on the regular menu.

Chuchi fish

Another favorite was the chuchi fish.  We liked it so much we oredered it a second time.  There was also a yummy squid dish, stir fried morning glory and all manner of other utterly scrumptious dishes.

Singburi is cooking authentic Thai food without watering down the flavors or heat for a western palette.  If it it had a more accessible location I am sure that every food mag would have it on its best cheap eats list.  I am already planning another expedition to the far reaches of Leytenstone to try their curries which I am sure are going to be marvelous.

Practical notes: You’ll probably need to grab a taxi or bust to get there and back.  There is a mini-cab company just a few doors down to get you back to the station (if you’re coming into Stratford) .  Also bring your booze with you as it is BYOB.

Singburi
593 Leytenstone High Road
London, E11 4PA