Farewell Eugene

The series of farewell dinners was so long and varied that it's quite a shock to the system now that he's actually gone. It was a bit too cold to cry when I finally said goodbye to him, but the sentiment is still there. I will of course miss him for his insatiable appetite and disturbingly similar food tastes to mine, but he was also instrumental in helping me through all the recent changes in my life. *stops pukingly sentimental posting*

Somehow along the way, he has never been to Latium, despite all my evangelical rantings about the place, so it was an obviously place to have a final final dinner. Unsurprisingly Eugene became a big fan of the place afterwards, and once again I am plotting to maybe have my birthday dinner in their new(ish) private dining area.

The only slight disappointment is that they have changed their amuse bouches! I can't even remember when I started coming to Latium (2004ish?), but they have always welcomed their guests with a plate of arancini, mini pizzas and mini calzone. Now it seems to have been replaced with a series of crostini-type things. Very nice they are (cured salmon, wild mushrooms, and salami), but somehow it does take away from the magic of the place.

Given it was Eugene's first visit, we stuck to the classics. Both of us started with Latium's version of steak tartare (yes, my second tartare of the week, no wonder I am expanding again), which includes parmasan in the tartare itself, and is topped with some impossibly cute poached quail eggs:

Both of us also had the fish ravioli, which I will not bore you about again, and very competently done fish dishes (monkfish with pumpkin sauce for me, similar to the one at the bottom of this post I had a while back, and scallops for Eugene), and somehow we still had enough reserves for pudding. Now, I have never come to Latium for their desserts, and I rarely rarely order any. But as I've said before, I'm having a funny turn recently, and keep ordering desserts.

And very glad I was too! The rum baba with pistachio ice cream and marsala sabayon is something I would actually consider skipping one of the savoury courses at Latium to have again. Shocking, I know. It is huge (and again, I quite like the fact that Latium's presentation is never quite dainty), but I had no trouble shoving it all into my mouth:

Eugene then declared that their tiramisu is one of the best in London, having told me a story of when he spent an entire day sampling tiramisu's all over a few years ago. How is this boy not fat??!!

So yes, birthday dinner at Latium in the works. Who wants an invite?

Boundary

It is no longer a surprise that very very good restaurants are starting to pop up within walking distance from my house in East London. Even BA's High Life magazine has declared Tower Hamlets as the place to be, I am told, so it is all official. What is more of a surprise I guess is that Terence Conran is behind one of these, in what seems to be some kind of renaissance for him in 2009. Critics far and wide have loved Boundary in Shoreditch, a small complex including a hotel and a rooftop restaurant. Much praise has also been lavished at Lutyens on Fleet Street, another 2009 Conran opening, and the good experience we had at Boundary means that a visit to Lutyens is pretty imminent.

Let's start with the not-so-good stuff though. The space Boundary occupies is awkward to the extreme. The main restaurant is in the basement, with diners having to navigate some quite industrial looking stairs to get there. They have done their best to paint the space with celestial inspired murals, a theme which continues into the restaurant itself, but it is simply not a nice welcome.

And it also leads me to my second main complaint, and that is the toilets. You walk past them on the aforementioned stairs to get to the restaurant, and the smell wafting through made the welcome even worse. What's more is the fact that all the loos are unisex, which I don't get given that there is no shortage of space, and there was a very suspect puddle on the floor on both my visits. Yuk and ick. Loos should never be unisex if there is space available.

It is just as well then that the food and service was so good that I can get over the ickiness. The menu reminded me of Le Cafe Anglais: British classics with a hint of Frenchiness, I would be happy to eat almost anything off the menu. Most pleasing is that they don't call dessert 'dessert', they call it 'pudding'. Love love love!

I started with a steak tartare, more because I had been craving one than because of the selection on offer. I liked that it was served with a little side of gherkiny stuff, but still needed a little more kick:


Their salads were interesting, and I should have had one of these in retrospect. Lindsay had the Perigourdine, which translates into a salad with lovely ducky bits, including gizzards and fois gras:

A recovering Fil was definitely not ill anymore if he was ordering artichoke and truffle salads:


But starters were quickly rendered irrelevant when our main course came. They have roast special everyday, and we were so lucky that it is suckling pig on a Monday. 3 of us had it, potentially some of the best pig I've ever eaten (sorry Mum). Impossibly soft, although the crackling wasn't quite that crackly. The potatoes they served with it was also very lovely and nutty, like a wintery Jersey Royal:

And onto the very lovely puddings. I have had a bit of a weird turn lately, eating lots of sweet things, and I had real trouble deciding on puddings, the menu for which included Pear Belle Helene and Mandarin souffle. Again, reminiscent of Le Cafe Anglais, I was just pleased to see some stewed fruit on the menu, and shared some warm cherries with pain d'epices with Lindsay:

We also tried their white chocolate tarte du jour, very good in that they got the sweetness just right, not at all cloying, even I would have happily eaten it despite my dislike of white chocolate. Mark declared that it looked like a 'very Conran' dessert when I showed him the picture at work, haha!:

What I also really liked was they had a few surprises for us too, including some candied orange to go with our teas and coffees, nice to see they put a bit of thought into this 'petit four':

And because it is Christmas, they came round with a basket of clementines and nuts to round off the meal. This. however, turned into a bit of a nasty personal surprise. I tried some of their almonds and hazelnuts, and soon after discovered my lips and throat were very swollen, to the extent I had difficulty breathing and swallowing for the rest of the night. Now, I love nuts, never had any reaction before, and this episode really scared me, not for health implications, but because I may not be able to eat nuts again!! I have eaten nuts again since then (probably dangerous, but I wasn't paying attention), with reactions ranging from none at all to slightly swollen lips again. I knew things were going a bit too well lately, a newly developed nut allergy is dampening my spirits a little. I've just made some brownies with nuts in, they just came out the oven. So someone please come and check on me if it's all quiet on the blog front after this :)

New Soho favourite

Friends and media have been raving on about Bocca di Lupo so much recently, to the extent that I was chatting to a complete stranger about it in a coffee shop the other day (I know, these sorts of things are not supposed to happen in London) but I still haven't managed to go. To be honest, I'm not sure about the concept of Italian tapas. I am a greedy person, and I want big plates of food all to myself!

A friend of Meghana's mentioned though that there was a good new place called Polpo on Beak Street, very good and cosy, the sort of place where the proprietor is in a jumper and jeans and will sit you personally himself. I keep walking past this place recently, and to be honest, it looks very non-descript and unexciting on the outside. But I realised they must be doing something right when I walked in on a Monday evening and it was absolutely packed.

And for once, I quite like the non booking system here, it feels like it fits this sort of place, and turnover is quick enough that we waited for only a few minutes. The place inside is tiny, tables so packed together there is barely an inch between them, but again, I thought it just added to the charm of the place.

Like Bocca di Lupo, it is Italian tapas, and if you read the website, apparently it is based on a Venetian style of eating. I'd actually already eaten staff dinner only a few hours before, so it was actually good to have 'picky' food. And everything was pretty unfamiliar. We had a sausage made of pig's trotters, the name of which escapes me, which was quite reminiscent of spam, but served with pickled cabbage and mustard worked really well. Next to it was some not very exciting but well executed spinach with garlic and chilli:

The dish that worked really well was the cuttlefish in its own ink with gremolata, definitely the dish that jumps out at you from the menu, and very very good. Next to it was again an unexciting but well done pumpkin risotto:

I am finding it hard to convey how lovely this place is though. Lots of little touches that make you really warm to it, for example, wines served in individual carafes that are different on every table (and at £9 or £10 for 500mls, quite a bargain). I was also a little disturbed that they seemed to have stolen my ipod for their music here, everything they played I loved, including PJ Harvey, early Bjork, The Doves, Portishead, glad to see someone else is still living in 1990's Britpop era. I imagine I will come here lots and fall in love with the proprietor very soon.

Hix

Thanks to bad cookery programmes, I now equate Mark Hix with stargazey pie and silly jelly puddings, and that equation obviously meant that we had to go to newish Hix on Brewer Street as part of Eugene's leaving London eating marathon. And it all started off very well, the bar is very nice (although perhaps the £11.50 price tag on the Hix Fix champagne cocktail which went flat very quickly was not quite so nice), and I liked that serving pork scratchings is now in vogue:

The starter list was inventive, the sort of list that made you want to eat everything. The star of the show for me was the cod tongues with girolles, very flavoursome, very light, I should have had this really:

Eugene's monkfish starter was basically posh fish without the chips, but so well done. Big chunks of monkfish on a bed of just right tartare sauce:

The most intriguing starter was perhaps the 'heaven and earth', no explanation on the menu itself, turned out to be homemade black pudding on bubble and squeak. Very very earthy, but not quite as exciting as the name implies:

For me, I actually had the thought that sticking with simplicity might be the way to go at a place like this. Unfortunately it didn't quite work out. The smoked salmon was the most expensive starter (about £12 IIRC), which signalled that it had to be good. And when it came, you do feel a bit underwhelmed by the four naked slices:

And unfortunately, the taste was also a little underwhelming. I was expecting some taste explosions, but not even a sparkler happened here. And it all went a bit downhill from here really. The stargazy pie has to be ordered in advance, so I plumped for the oyster and beef pie. You gotta have pie! in a place like Hix:

First time I had oysters in a pie, despite the tradition, and what a good addition they are too, but there were far too few, and not well distributed amongst the pie, so you are left with quite a monotonous mount of beef under the pastry, with not even a bit of onion or carrot to balance it out.

But my main gripe was the very liberal use of salt in the main. We ordered a few side vegetables, so heavily salted that you could pick out salt crystals from the spinach and broccoli. My tongue was actually hurting, and I committed the restaurant crime of not finishing my main course. That never happens.

Nevertheless, they had some excellent special potatoes that evening, in the form of battered potatoes. The picture is a bit dark, but they were oh so amazing:

It also worries me when the best course in a restaurant is a dessert. I am not a sweet person, I just don't have the sweet tooth to appreciate desserts. But the desserts were fabulous here, mainly with the inclusion of jelly on the menu, and served in a little shot glass, is just what you need after a heavy meal:

But the winner of the evening was the buttermilk sorbet that came with it (in the lovely metall goblet as above). They laced it with little bits of what I'm guessing is grapefruit or lemon rind, it was sour and bitter, gorgeous gorgeous, my kind of dessert.

Toilets were very nice, no carpets making for a very noisy dining room. I must say I'm not rushing to go back.