The Hide Bar is one of my favourite bars. They take drink seriously here, i.e., they do not do any old wines, beers or spirits. They focus on the “good stuff” and design a lot of their own cocktails. They also do regular wine, beer and spirit tastings in the back room.
We popped in for a quick drink at Halloween:-.
Pumpkin Ale
Ruby Shoes
They have a pretty basic food menu, and serve some food during the tasting events (normally selected to match the beverages, e.g., Oysters and Champagne, Beer and Sausages, Armagnac and Cheese). The food can be a bit hit and miss – occasionally very good, but more often fairly ordinary.
Marks out of 10
Food 5
Drink 8
Service 7 (Bar service and waiter/waitress service)
The Delfina Restaurant is rarely open to the public in the evenings or at the weekends. It’s focus is breakfasts and lunches during the week and event hires in the evening. So it was good to get the opportunity to visit on a Saturday night, only this night was Halloween and they were doing a special menu.
The room is designed to be gallery space and lit accordingly, making it rather difficult to change to a spooky environment for Halloween. Even the tables and chairs are white. The staff dressed up though and there was the odd giant spider and some very effective light projections of witches and bats. I must admit it was disconcerting being served by Dracula and when the waiter spilt some red wine on the white table I almost did not want him to clean it up, as it looked like drips of blood adding to the atmosphere, which needed a lot of help.
The dining space is quite large and all the guests had been seated at the back of the room which meant that you always seemed to be looking out at an empty restaurant. They really are not geared up for evening dinning, they actually turned away two walk ins at 9:45 and removed the rather small sign on the curtained doors advertising the Hal loween opening shortly after. This is a real shame as the area could easily support another “full time” restaurant.
The menu was imaginative and it was surprising just how many of my favorite ingredients it included.
We started with what I assumed was locally baked bread, i.e., too nice to be store bought, with olive oil. For my first course I had the scallops and blood pudding, this consisted of 3 large juicy scallops and a few pieces of thinly sliced oatie black pudding, which I really enjoyed. Next was a fig sorbet to clean our palettes. Then for the main course I had the pork belly, it consisted of two flavoursome pieces of pork belly (both huge). We had also ordered a side order of chips which was totally unnecessary as the pork came with mash. For dessert I had the pumpkin pie. We had a couple of glasses of Prosecco and a bottle of rather mediocre wine. The total cost including service charge came to less than £50 a head, which is very reasonable for the area and for the quality/amount of food.
I also could not resist taking a picture of the very generous cheese course left on the next table, it looked great when it arrived and you can see from the picture just how much of it was left.
The service was very quick, if it had not been for the wine, I suspect we would have been finished in less than an hour, as it was we finished early enough to pop across the road to one of my favorite bars, the Hide Bar for drinks.
In the Summer Delfina also use their outside space for BBQs.
We started in the bar area with some delicious canapes and a glass of the house champagne then moved to our table where we had the dilemma, do we go for the tasting menu or do we go À la carte? Tough one.
There were so many lovely sounding starters on the À la carte, we were pushed in that direction. Which was actually a mistake, as we have effectively trained ourselves to appreciate the smaller portions and broader taste range of tasting menus. So the larger portions for the mains were a bit of a struggle. The other plus for going the tasting menu route is if one course is not so great then it’s not such a big deal, as it effectively gets lost in the crowd.
Two of us made main course choices that really showed off The Squares cuisine. I had the Roast Saddle of Lincolnshire Hare with a Tarte Fine of Celeriac and Pear which was amazing and one of my companions had the Fillet of Aged Ayrshire Beef with Autumn Truffle, Smoked Bone Marrow and Red Wine, again stunning but too large a portion. My other companion choose the Caramelised Pork Belly with Glazed Trotter, Savoy Cabbage, Langoustine Claws and Lentils and was very disappointed, as the Pork Belly was very fatty. Which was such as shame as up until that point everything had been sublime.
The pre dessert was a rather nice doughnut and rhubarb/raspberry concoction. Then for dessert I had a very boozy Rum and Raisin Soufflé with Gingerbread Ice Cream – stunning. To finish we then had coffee and some Armagnac. This was served with a nicely balanced selection of petits fours that consisted of some chocolate/nutty/Carmel truffles and a range of lollipop style sweets. We finished them all. Only to have a second set delivered later.
The Square like Hibiscus has 2 Michelin stars and 4 AA Rosettes, but from the point of view of imagination and food quality based on our visits to both these restaurants, the Square is streets ahead of Hibiscus. However when we directly compared it to Tom Aikens which has 1 Michelin star and 5 AA Rosettes, the conclusion was that Tom Aikens pipped The Square at the post.
In celebration of chocolate week, Almeida has joined forces with chocolatier Paul A Young to create a unique three course “chocolate” menu. Each dish being combined with a complementary chocolate. So basically instead of wine matching, it’s chocolate matching!.
The whole concept of a chocolate menu seemed a bit of a gimmick, so I was pleasantly surprised just how serious this food was.
The meal began well with a very nice goats cheese appetizer/canapé. Then I had a stunning foie gras dish (described as pan fried foie gras, chocolate and orange – 64% Dominican Republic chocolate with a balance of sweetness and a delicate nutty, smoky taste.) I thought this dish was very subtle with great flavour combinations.
For my next course I went with the pork (braised suckling pig, creamed savoy – with Paul A Young’s Ras el hanout spiced chocolate), again it was a dish that was beautifully complimented by the almost savory chocolate sauce. We even asked the waiter for the recipe and to his credit he went out of his way to get it for us.
One of my chocoholic companions decided to forgo the main course and have two desserts instead. No problem, they just provided him with a “jumbo” sized dessert as the main course. For the rest of us, there was a choice between two desserts. A chocolate souffle that was not so well received and a stunning dessert called Chocolate 3 ways, which included some lovely fudge.
Normal Size Dessert – Chocolate 3 waysJumbo sized dessert
On the wine front to match the chocolate theme, we went for a rather nice Portuguese red.
2006 Duas Quintas Branco, Ram os Pinto, Douro, Portugal
The only low mark here related to the wine service where the waitress kept overfilling glasses, which meant that the wine was not evenly distributed and forced us to get a second bottle to make up the short fall. (We would have gone for a second bottle anyway, but would have preferred to do it in our own time).
We then finished the meal with coffee and petits fours.
The layout is very well designed with a distinct bar area and a dinning area that consists almost entirely of round tables. I love round tables in a restaurant, they work so well for both groups of two (both dinners can face into the room) and groups of 6 (much more sociable as you can have cross table conversations with everyone). The acoustics were also very good, we could not hear anything from the neighbouring tables.
The bar is worth a visit on it’s own, we mainly indulged in yummy Chocolate Martinis, but there are some other cocktails on the menu that are worth trying. One of the champagne cocktails, “The Morgan” (Morgan’s Spiced rum, gomme syrup, cranberry juice and champagne) was very nice too.
Chocolate Martini at the Almeida
The restaurant has 2 AA Rosettes, which it certainly merits. It is also off course an ideal pre-theatre venue for the Almeida Theatre. I certainly plan to return, even without Chocolate week.
We spend a couple of hours at this event, sampling the wares of a few interesting chocolatiers. There was a display of chocolate art and a number of stands. The exhibitors ranged from the lower end of the scale, i.e., high street brands like Thorntons and Hotel Chocolat, right up to the high end bespoke chocolatiers like Paul A Young.
Chocolates can be a bit like wine, once you have tasted the really good stuff there is no going back, or to quote Michel Roux “Once you have discovered the pleasure, richness, complexity and taste sensations of fine chocolate, you will never look at chocolate in the same way”. So sorry Thorntons we walked right passed your stand.
From what we could see, there were two real standouts, they were both relative newcomers in the field.
The first was Paul Wayne Gregory a former sous chef who also gave one of the talks, he is definitely going places with 9 of the chocolates in his selection being award winners. PWG is at the top of his game, he currently provides chocolates to Michelin star chef Gary Rhodes, and his latest addition a rum chocolate is stunning.
Update: I have just tried another one of his chocolates – called “Space Dust”, superb!.
PWGs slogan – Indulgence is everything
The other standout was based in Leeds of all places, they were Lauden Chocolates who presented their selection in very simple but elegant transparent boxes. However the presentation alone would not have sold me on them, if they had not got the taste right. Like PWG, they are all about intense flavours, that really work with the chocolate.
As part of my chocolate indulgence weekend I also managed to squeeze in a chocolate martini at 5th View.
Went to Galvin at Windows for lunch. We tried the set menu at £39.50 (now £45) for 3 courses including coffee, water and half a bottle of wine per person, which was an excellent deal.
Started with a rather lovely mackerel tartar, amusingly presented in a tin. Followed this with Partridge and sweet corn pasta. So far so good. Alas the standards dropped dramatically at dessert – My companion had the Clafoutis which was soggy, she sent it back. My dessert was also not very good, however on the plus side they quickly replaced the soggy dessert with a cheese course and provided two plates so we could share it. This finished of the meal nicely.
So for somewhere a bit special, that does not break the bank, I would recommend the set lunch option here. The views not bad either. The restaurant has 3 AA Rosettes.
UPDATE: March 2010 – Galvin at Windows award 1 Michelin Star
