River Cafe Sergio Arola, St Paul's - review

Idling away the day at work, I dived into the internet and went looking for places I’d never heard of at which to eat, and to ramble on about. I’m very glad I did, too, simply because I stumbled upon this little gem. Situated overlooking the river in one of the barer parts of the City, near Mansion House and quietly perched next to the northern end of the Millennium Bridge, River Cafe Sergi Arola is a wonderful place to sit and savour an intense boatload of Iberia’s best organic produce.

The genesis of the establishment is exciting in itself. It represents the fruition of a collaboration between Arola, a Michelin-starred chef and Spanish media personality, wine merchants Bacchanalia and the Hacienda Zorita organic farm in western Spain. This fusion of separate specialists could have made an unfocused mish-mash of disciplines, but what one does end up with is a perfect synthesis of the best possible Iberian wine and food, and at a very reasonable price point, too.

We plumped for the astoundingly cheap offer currently doing the rounds on toptable, which takes the form of an embutidos platter, a platter of quesos de espana and a bottle of wine. The waiting staff were extremely knowledgeable and glad to talk us through the specifics of the plates, something that is linked to a large portion of their ingredients actually being on sale within the restaurant - I picked up a splendid and beautifully flavoured bottle of their standard olive oil, for instance.

The food is stylishly presented and evidently lovingly cared for: as a graduate of Ferran Adria’s El Bulli, one might expect molecular gastronomy from Arola, but he allows the meats and cheeses to shine all by themselves. There is variety in the platters, on a range of sensory levels – it is astonishing that the produce of one farm can range from blue to manchego-like cheese, and from lean lomo to a peppery, fatty salchichon.

The beauty of the experience is in the unobtrusiveness of the food, though. The way in which one is encouraged to bring everything on the table together in one mouthful, from the bread and olives down to the sweet jam which just avoids being too sickly, embraces the purest notions of pared-down food to share – what one eats here is a conduit to good company and good times, rather than being the event itself, and the River Cafe Sergi Arola is all the better for it.

Meat and cheese platters with bottle of wine - £20 (deal runs until April 6); usually around £40-50

9/10

Pop Bellies, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire - review

Huntingdon, in Cambridgeshire, is my home town. It is not a particularly nice one, although having grown up, been schooled and experienced the best and very, very worst of the town over the last decade or so, I have come to regard it with a patronising sort of fondness. I see it as a dim nephew, whose limitations are painfully obvious to everyone in the family but who is accommodated because he will sometimes do something hilarious, like run into a door.

What Huntingdon does have is a couple of nice places to eat, though. The Samuel Pepys bears up under new exacting standards of pub food, and the Old Bridge Hotel provides wonderful 'proper' dinners, if your wallet can stand the strain. An old favourite of Huntingdon’s younger clientele, though, is Pop Bellies, a restaurant-cum-bistro-cum-cafe which has always managed to both look nice and produce half-decent tucker at reasonable prices. It has recently undergone a revamp, which is why a few of us found ourselves wanting to sample its (hopefully) new, exciting delights.

That was where my optimism ended, though. We were shown to our table, given menus, ordered wine and placed our order – 4 main courses – all in under 10 minutes. Evidently, though, Time then decided to chuck a U-turn and put itself on hold for a while, because that is the only explanation for our main courses taking nearly an hour to arrive. For four, fairly rudimentary, main courses. You couldn't, for want of a better phrase, make it up.

After The Wait, the main courses were hit (1), and miss (3). The lamb souvlaki was very good. The beef and stilton salad, though, was missing any stilton (I didn’t have the heart to complain). A promising-sounding pepper and tiger prawn pasta was beige, in colour and taste. And as a fantastic centrepiece to the meal, the Jamaican jerk chicken was basted – honestly – with Reggae Reggae Sauce.

It all smacked of the chefs being unable to cope with what is a large and unwieldly menu, and of inadequate care and attention being paid to presentation, seasoning and all the other things one should take for granted these days. Which is a shame, but I don’t think we’ll be darkening the door of Pop Bellies again for a while.

Main courses with (lots of) wine – c. £80

4/10

La Trompette, Chiswick - review

La Trompette represented a belated Valentine’s Day dinner for me – it had been a stressful week, the complications of which meant that Tuesday the 14^th had been off limits. Happily (a secret happiness stemming from a healthy disregard for all things overly smoochy), this meant dinner on a Saturday and a better, busier atmosphere, not hopeless couples mooning at each other across a bottle of prosecco.

The happiness I felt increased slightly upon having my coat taken from me at the door – a welcome touch, and one you don’t get as often as you should. We picked an excellent bottle of Portuguese white, had some bread and oil and hung around (a little too long) for our starters.

When they arrived, though, they were more than alright – Jessie’s salmon ballotine came with buoyant globs of caviar and crème fraiche, all perched happily together on and around the centrepiece. I enjoyed immensely my tagliatelle with capocollo (little weeny drops of cured shoulder of ham) – it was dressed with purple sprouting broccoli and was neither too large, so I’m filled up, nor too small, so I’m ravenous again by my main course, a trick pasta-based starters often fail to accomplish.

When it came to the mains, it was a triumph of colour rather than taste, I think. I had roast middle pork with morteau sausage and, appropriately, trompettes (the mushroom, not the instrument, fnaar fnaar). All this made the plate a picture of fiery reds and blacks, an extremely attractive sight. In terms of flavour, however, I felt it fell a little short; the white pork and extremely dark, smoky sausage set each other off well, but the liquid on the plate was a little too sweet and the mushroom a little too bland.

The sea bass on the other side of the table was marginally lacking too, although m’colleague enjoyed it more than I. Hers was a blend of greens and whites, making our belated Valentine’s dinner a very pretty picture. (In terms of the food, I stress.) Dessert was a good fondant – wet, sticky – and several unpronounceable Swiss cheeses with quince. The restaurant, for better or worse, does a stonking trade in slipping in little details to ratchet up the price; in providing us with a separate dessert wine list with our dessert menus, they were effectively saying, “If you don’t spend another £14 now, you’ll never live it down.”

Not that it mattered – La Trompette was a solid, serviceable celebratory dinner, without ever really managing to be stratospherically good. It just does what it does, very well.

3 courses with wine – c. £120

8/10

Vapiano, Great Portland Street - review

A select number of my London-based friends have just got new jobs – one is teaching, another is doing marketing, another is banking (boo, hiss) and yet another is doing something law-related but essentially indefinable. To celebrate this fact, and revel in everyone’s taking of life by the scruff of the neck, we decided to have dinner in central London.

We picked Vapiano because, as idealistic young professionals, it is ostensibly exactly the kind of place we can afford and want to be seen in. The Vapiano website defines the chain’s raison d’etre as “defining the future of fresh casual”, which to the average customer means that one does everything oneself – you find your own table, order your drinks at the bar and your meal from the chefs, collect your meal from the chefs and pay at a central till with a snazzy Vapiano card tab. I privately hoped this would mean that the staff aimlessly wandering around would aid us in other, less-expected departments: guided toilet visits, perhaps, or carrying us out of the restaurant in sedan chairs.

This clearly wasn’t forthcoming, and the lack of assistance was shown up painfully on a Friday night, when we searched everywhere in the 2-storey building for a table to seat the 6 of us for around 20 minutes. When we sat down, though, it became clear that the “fresh casual” Vapiano experience did work in terms of the eating itself. We ordered pizzas, and were given vaguely space-age remote controls which whizzed into life, flashing and ringing, when our orders were ready.

The hipness and technology thankfully stopped at the food, though – the pizzas were lovingly cooked, my calzone being just sloppy enough on the inside to work well with the charred, bubbled exterior. Pizzas which have become high-street staples, such as the capricciosa, were dealt with nicely enough, and the oils given to us – garlic and chilli, as in Pizza Express – were zingy and played well against the bread. The house wine, however, of which we sampled both white and red, was uniformly agreed to be pretty loathsome – a couple of notches up in price should be enough.

Although the whole experience was a slightly hectic one, the positives of Vapiano outweigh the negatives by some distance. Although the restaurant seems to concentrate too much on their innovations and departures from how one conventionally dines out – one fellow diner referred to it as “the Argos of restaurants” – none of this gets in the way of the food itself being fine for young professionals (the glory! The smugness!) looking to do things a little differently.

2 courses with wine £25-30pp

6/10

The Boathouse, Putney - review

Putney Wharf on a Saturday night is not often a prospect that brings clean, confident pub food to mind; too often one is accosted by the brash noise of various Hugos and Isabellas to really enjoy any ventures at culinary sophistication. Despite being sandwiched between a rammed Carluccio’s and a relatively sedate Wetherspoon’s, though, The Boathouse, a sprawling Young’s-owned gastropub perched by the river, manages to retain some semblance of gentility. This is mainly due to its dedicated upstairs restaurant section, including a mezzanine outdoor area which separates the eaters from the drinkers and almost makes the dining environment feel secluded.

We were seated, choosing outside, and ordered the baked camembert with garlic bread and rocket salad as a sharing starter, with drinks. (At this point, I will digress: my first choice for the main course, the cod and chips, came with “peas and tartare sauce”. When I asked the personable waitress if said peas could be mushed, she said she didn’t know. I, prissily, said that if the peas could not be mushed, I would take a second option of calves’ liver – but more of that later.) The camembert came, was gooey, sloppy and magnificent, however limp and over-seasoned the accompanying salad, and quickly went again. During the course, though, the absence of natural light outside meant that, by the time our mains arrived, we were in semi-darkness with few alternatives other than to squint manfully at our food.

This was a shame, as our arriving mains seemed to look impeccable, in particular the theatrical moules mariniere, a snip at £8 for an individual portion. My cod and chips, though, were conspicuous by their absence, replaced by the liver; I felt it a real shame that the restaurant was unable to alter their basic practice of putting out resolutely un-mushed peas in even a small way, even though the liver itself was sufficiently tender to escape the often-cloying nature of the dish. Twinning it with rather mundane carrots, green beans and mash was less than inventive, however.

On the other side of the table, the mussels were an aromatic triumph, perfectly cooked and ably supported by a lively garlic and white wine sauce. The overall atmosphere, meanwhile, was aided immensely by the space between bottom and top floor – what could have been overly boisterous and stifling was in fact refreshingly busy, lending a sense of occasion missing from many pubs with aspirations towards genuinely good food.

The evening, then, while blighted by several small imperfections, was pleasant and surprisingly good value. The setting is pretty, the staff are friendly and, perhaps most importantly, this all transpires alongside the busily fraternal bar below and not despite it. The Boathouse is a comfortable pub serving comfortable food at reasonable prices, which is in itself a small treasure.

2 courses with drinks – £50

6/10