The month kicked off with an invitation to a wine tasting of the Louis Jadot en primeur wines from the 2003 harvest in Burgundy. Having never been to wine tasting before it was difficult to know what to expect. Quite frankly I don’t know much about wine, but ‘I know what I like’. When shopping in the supermarket I stick to a simple rule – it has to be red, it has to be 12.5% and it has to be under £3.49. So you can see I’m not exactly Oz Clarke. Oh and then there were a few openings and parties. But first..
Restaurants reviewed this month
The Bar and Grill Smithfield The burgers failed to impress our man but there wasn't much else wrong with this lively bar/restaurant. And there are some serious steaks on offer, too.
$Grills and Martinis On the corner of Exmouth Market, this warm and welcoming place does killer cocktails and a good range of well-priced 'bistro' style food. Have a meal and then boogie on downstairs .
Polygon This Clapham bar/restaurant keeps getting mixed reviews and our third visit finds that for the most part the bad reviews are a rather unfair. Always a friendly place, it just seems to be unlucky with its patrons.
May we 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.
A guide to wine tasting
How to avoid embarrassment and disgrace? I could be Jilly Goolden, it just seems to require basing all references to tastes and smell (nose) around what you might find at an English girl’s boarding school and the pony club. There was also the advice of PJ O’Rourke, no mean sniffer of the cork, who suggests simply describing someone in the room i.e. ‘ Big and voluptuous with a lingering aroma and a hearty manner’. It sounded like a plan.
Turning up at the Mandarin Oriental ballroom I was overawed to find over thirty wines laid out behind tables, each with its own rep from Louis Jadot. Already at 10:30 in the morning the sound of gurgling and spitting was worse than my student shared house back in the 80’s. Grabbing a glass, I set to.
Well what can I say? As far as I was concerned they were all delicious and it was a problem to spit and not swallow. I had a tasting pad, but after the fifth wine I thought writing ‘lovely’ wasn’t working. The pro wine writers were scribbling furiously and looking over my shoulder. So, in a flash of inspiration, I started writing 3/7/+4/c/7 and variations thereof. It didn’t mean anything but seemed to impress the pro writers who began nudging each other and jerking their chins at my pad. Maybe they weren’t impressed at all, my spitting technique had already attracted adverse comment as most of the wine kept going down my chin and not in the bin, and my ‘swirling’ to release aroma had already stained the ballroom carpet in several places. Plus, despite my best efforts I was swallowing some wine every time and was beginning to feel a pressing compulsion to break into song . I made an end by trying the Grand Cru red Burgundy which was superb (as it should be at £100 a bottle) and then I bottled it myself. Swallowing a good glassful and weaving slightly unsteadily out to dive into the generous buffet. And they call it work!
Not a load of old cockerel
Chinese New Year of the rooster and an invitation to the Mandarin Oriental (home of the excellent Foliage restaurant) again, this time for their new year’s party, a spectacular affair taking place in all the grand rooms of this very grand hotel. Very, very packed and with a ‘contemporary Shanghai theme’. In the main room champagne was flowing like water and around the perimeter were all kinds of food stalls. My first stop gave me something oddly gelatinous and something I couldn’t quite distinguish. I chewed on it, there wasn’t much meat, and I ate the jelly thing. Not very nice. A pleasant Chinese woman pointed out I was eating the ‘real’ Chinese food: a 1000 year old egg and a chicken’s foot. ‘Your food is over there,’ she said, pointedly, indicating a dim sum table, noodle bars and a section serving barbecued meats. Delicious. In other rooms they were making and serving fabulous sushi while in a large tent you could get a massage, have your fortune told and watch dragon dancers.
Grabbing some more dim sum, I turned around to find the wife chatting to someone who looked like a Madame Tussaud’s version of Alan Whicker. As it turned out it was the real Alan Whicker, who doesn’t appear to have aged a day since he was walking up that street where the house numbers made no sense (this was back in the days of black and white telly kids). Ever the old pro, he was telling my wife about his new book and, I think, its publisher and ISBN number.
Pengelley's. Pan Asian in short supply
At the Pengelley’s launch party in Sloane Street the pseudo celebs were out in force. The women wearing clothes that cost more than my car and many of the men with that dangerous look you only find amongst members of the minor aristocracy – hair swept cruelly back, mouths set in a permanently vicious snarl. The sort that only hunts foxes because hunting the outdoor servants is no longer legal (except, I’m told. in Wales). Plenty of champagne but no food. For some reason Mr Pengelley had decided to send out tiny trays containing about five items at long drawn out intervals. You had to be quick to grab anything and I failed miserably. Dai Llewellyn who was once, I believe, some kind of minor aristo star, seemed to have no problem getting fed so I suppose a baronetcy does have its uses. We left before Gordon Ramsay, who is bankrolling the whole affair, turned up to give a speech. But not before Alan Whicker appeared again. Either he is stalking me or he has a serious passion for free champagne On the strength of what I did manage to eat, the Pan Asian grub at Pengelley’s should be good, but I reckon it could also be expensive.
Cocktail master class at Mint Leaf
A last minute invitation had me scurrying through the freezing sleet to Mint Leaf, an Indian restaurant and bar close to Trafalgar Square. At 3:30 in the afternoon it was quiet and I had come to join other invitees for a cocktail making master class by their bar manager Mark Pratt. I was expecting some over the top show off but Mark turned out to be a cool and pleasant professional. His bar is enormous and has, he reckoned, about £20,000 worth of bottles behind it all racked up on a lighted staircase that shifts colours seductively. He showed us how to make a range of cocktails and then invited us behind the bar to try and do it ourselves. This did not involve Tom Cruise style glass juggling, but attention to detail and concentration. The use of fresh mint made the drinks smell fantastic and one cocktail in particular, which contained a hint of dried chilli, was quite brilliant. The recipe is here. As the bar top began to fill with mixed cocktails I decided to help out by drinking as many as I could in as fast a time as possible. My professional colleagues from the paper press demurred saying that they still had lots of work to do. Ah well all the more for me, then. The restaurant sent out some excellent canapés, which made me determined to try a meal there soon and for some reason it just didn’t seem so cold outside when I left. Mint Leaf is well worth checking out for its combination of cocktails and cool Indian food.
