This month we went to ta lager tasting, a Portugese and New Zealand wine tasting, an Ayurvedic cooking seminar and a barbeque master class.
Restaurants reviewed this month
Deep Chelsea. We didn't go 'overboard', but we 'sank' a few aquavits and ate some superior fish at this brand new restaurant.
Blandford Street Marylebone. A well done refurb has made this friendly neighbourhood restaurant a great place for well-priced food in a good atmosphere.
Sketch Parlour. Soho . Incredible cakes that put most other patisseries to shame. Just don't dunk your digestive.
140 Park Lane West end. Redecorated but still doing the business
Abiba Notting Hill. We like it a lot, hillbillies that we are.
Bombay Palace.Marylebone. A fine Indian dining establishment that matches up to its name
Medea. Kings Road. A
North African restaurant that goes beyond the tahine
Inside Greenwich. Hello
sailor, fancy some superior rations?
Brasserie L'Auberge Fulham A French feast with something for everyone
Bentley Kempinski Gloucester Road.Very posh afternoon tea in glam surroundings
May we as usual take this opportunity to remind you that if a restaurant really gives you a bad time, please talk to them and allow them a chance to explain/make amends before you trash them on the website!
Don't mention the pink stuff
For those of us who think nothing can beat the reassuring glug, glug. glug of the Mateus Rose, the innocent looking wine that always sent Uncle Harry over the edge at family Sunday dinners back in the 70's, the Independent Wine Growers of Portugal have a message in a bottle.There are some seriously good wines out there. Invited to the Portugese Ambassador's residence, a grand detached mansion in Belgravia, we were torn between the excellent Portugese tapas courtesy of Tugga, and the beckoning tables of remarkably diverse wine styles begging to be tasted. As you may know, I'm no wine expert and neither is our marketing director, but we slurped happily enough. I stick to reds, I know what I'm looking for and there were some excellent examples here. My nice white jacket got a nice red stain down it.
Our marketing director struck up a winning relationship with one importer, Alves de Sousa, who guided us through the variations in years and then brought out a bottle of new wine as yet waiting to be mass bottled. 'Guess the alcohol,' he said. Our man took a healthy swig and his eyes lit up, '15%?' he ventured. '15.5%,' the importer replied happily, so we had a few more swigs. Hic!. Not all are available to the public but look out for the names in restaurants: Casa De Cello, Alves de Sousa, Luis Pato, Quinta do Ameal, Quinta de Covela and Quinta dos Roques. Lovely gentlemen and lovely wines.
A lovely drop of lager
A lager tasting eh? Last one of those I attended was in the middle of Camberwell Green, As I recall we all agreed that the purple tin was better value than the gold tin then we lit a fire in a dustbin and stood around singing. I’m not entirely clear about what happened next, I think we all went for a special Jamie Oliver cooked supper at Jonty’s amaaaazing new loft space in Clerkenwell before hitting a few celebrity parties. No hang on I remember, that was the dream I had before waking up to find myself covered in half-eaten kebab down an alleyway in Brixton. Ah, great times, great times.
This is an altogether swisher affair orgainsed by Coors Beer Naturally within
the ornate confines of the Peridot Room at the Bentley Hotel. Here bottles
(and tins) from around the world have been placed, without a trace of irony,
in ice
buckets and they range from the everyday
to the rather unusual. From Carling’s basic lager ‘ the taste of
Britain’, it announces on the tin with somewhat ill-judged pride, to
lagers from Africa and beyond. But look, over there behind the person of restricted
growth who seems to have set up camp at that particular table, our bestest
old
mate (so you are, you really are) Carlsberg Special Brew, the toast of Glasgow
and next to it Samichlaus from Austria weighing in at an impressive 14%. Clearly
this is a serious spectrum of lager.
The slightly surreal thing, apart from people standing around sipping lager instead of downing it in one and heading back for a refill and a fight, is the provenance. Many of these lagers come from far off countries known only to stamp collectors and have remarkable histories and fine old names, but they are let down a bit by the small print which all too often says ‘ Brewed in Burton on Trent’. It’s rather like that TV ad for pizza which shows a bucolic slice of Italian rural happiness and then puts at the bottom of the screen ‘Product made in Ireland’. `I don’t know about you but I find that rather depressing.
Wandering around with a small wine glass, and being extremely careful to
swallow and not spit, I did my best to look like a proper lager connoisseur.
After
all there were some serious wine journos there, as well as a man whose
gin-blossomed face and ill-fitting suit suggested he was the booze correspondent
from Tramps’ Weekly.
'
This
week we look at the best wheely bins to sleep in’. The accompanying
literature did a good job explaining how to sniff, slurp and generally
identify the key
tastes and aromas such as parsnips, soapy/fatty, smoked fish and something
called Mercaptan and I did my best to follow the instructions. I avoided
the chav lagers
and stuck to the unfamiliar. I thought Kasteel Cru from Alsace (available
only in bars) was rather classy, I thought Red Erik from Denmark was
a bit fruity,
I thought Harvieston Schiehallion from Scotland (Sainsbury’s) rather
excellent and I thought I could fly and started clambering out of the
window. Clearly the
swallowing and not spitting idea wasn’t working.
With the arrival of some rather fine canapés courtesy of Andrew Turner, Executive Head chef of the Bentley and its superb restaurant 1880, some equilibrium was restored. Andrew himself stood in a doorway and gazed wistfully at the lager riches displayed sumptuosly before him. ‘ I have to work,’ he explained glumly before disappearing to attend to a stupendous crash of dropped crockery somewhere back in his kitchen. I would have sympathised but I already was working. Cheers!
Tugga - pulling 'em in
Off we went to the opening of Tugga, a Portugese restaurant situated on the Kings Road. Among the Chelsea types we also had the pleasure of mixing with an extremely drunk and annoying woman who managed to break three cocktail glasses in the space of half an hour and was asked extremely politely to vacate the premises. We also met someone’s Portugese Mother? Grandmother? Out to support her family anyway and, most importantly, we met the head chef who is from Portugal, has his family in Portugal but has sacrificed such comforts to live in London and set up his dream; a Portuguese restaurant with a fine dining edge. Gone is the heavy, stodgy ‘working man's’ menu, here at Tugga you’ll find a range of tapas, bar snacks and meals to suit the Chelsea darlings. With a separate loungy bar downstairs, Tugga looks set to be high on the list of places to try.
Ayurvedic - easy for you to say
The Mela group of restaurants is offering seminars in Ayurvedic cooking and
invited the press to attend a typical seminar and cooking display (plus a little
lunch) at Mela in Shaftesbury Avenue. 
The first half, the talk, was as a friend
pointed out Death by Powerpoint, but the cooking was interesting and the food
was delicious.
