In part 3 of Steak Frites – Mastering the Cuts, Henry Harris of Racine Restaurant stresses that the rich, almost syrupy sauce in which his pepper-crusted showcase steak sits should not be likened to brandied butter or a flavoured stock. Rather, a proper filet au poivre, its peppery kick notwithstanding, is about bringing everything together in the right balance.
In the second part of steak frites – mastering the cuts, Henry Harris reveals the shalls and shall nots of onglet aux échalottes. Onglet, a butcher’s cut, may also be called skirt, hanger or, if it’s the prized onglet from O’Shea’s of Knightsbridge seen in this video, “Steak O’Shea”.
The winner, along with his or her guest, will be invited to the premiere of the youngandfoodish steak frites tasting dinners at Racine on Monday, 22nd March. Henry Harris will prepare three cuts of O’Shea beef in the styles best suited to each: onglet aux échalottes, filet au poivre, côte de boeuf with béarnaise sauce. The meat will be matched to three bistro-style reds selected by Peter Lowe of Berkmann Wine Cellars.
Of course there is no steak frites without potatoes. Not just any potatoes, but floury potatoes cut in the ideal shape for holding and dipping. As Harris explains in the first video, you never need to use a fork with frites.
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The debut of the youngandfoodish PizzaTuesday series at Datte Foco was no event for sprinters. The entrants on Tuesday night were all analytically minded marathoners of good taste who know an endurance tasting when they see one. So extraordinary was the restraint exhibited by these distance runners in the event’s earliest stages that it threatened to trample the self-confidence of pizzaiolo Herbie Leonelli. He is unaccustomed to people limiting themselves to just 2 or 3 small slices of his authentic pizza bianca romana. It must have killed him to see a sizeable pile of unclaimed pieces left behind on the tray. >>Continue reading
You don’t have to be a pizza obsessive to attend a PizzaTuesday but you do risk becoming one if you do. With this series, youngandfoodish.com elevates the pizza experience via informal tastings, demos and discussions at London’s most distinctive pizzerias. There is, however, an ulterior motive: by assembling groups of passionate eaters, no one is limited to trying 1 or 2 varieties. Pizza is best played as a team sport. >>Continue reading
These days it’s easy to pick out the Italian expats on Stoke Newington Church St. They’re the ones picking their jaws up from the pavement after having spotted the words DATTE FOCO – slang for “light yourself on fire” – spelled out in white letters on the shop window beside the Three Crowns pub. Datte Foco could be interpreted here in the baking or eating sense. But many Italians recognise it as a Roman way of telling a friend, good-naturedly, to go burn in hell. >>Continue reading
Few clichés in food criticism are as vacuous as this observation commonly applied to exotic cuisines:
Not all dishes will be to all tastes…
The last to use it was Matthew Norman of The Guardian in his Weekend magazine review of the London Szechuan restaurant My Old Place.
I challenge him or anyone else who’s ever shared this revelation to name 20 restaurants – no, make it 1 restaurant – where all dishes will in fact be to all tastes.
While many attack the Chinese for repressing human rights or restraining the value of their currency, The Guardian Weekend magazine’s Matthew Norman may be the first opinion writer for a major national newspaper to call them out en masse for undervaluing their vegetables. In his slapdash review on Saturday, 16th January of My Old Place (not the original of this London Szechuan restaurant – aka Gourmet San – on Bethnal Green Road but its spinoff near London’s Liverpool Street Station), the restaurant critic writes that “the last thing you expect from even the finest Chinese chef is the showing of respect to the veg.”
As an amateur barista who’s been through 7 home espresso machines in a dozen years I understand the appeal of a foolproof model that makes you the same beautiful espresso every day. With most semiautomatic machines you need to get the beans, grind, measure and tamping pressure just right and then hope the machine’s volatile brewing pump is not sputtering nonsense to at least have the possibility of a properly extracted espresso falling into your cup. If you’ve received one of these recalcitrant appliances for Christmas you may already be pondering the ethics of regifting the bloody thing, perhaps as a wedding present for your ex-partner who’s marrying your former best mate. >>Continue reading
Enter the why do you love #steakfrites? twitter contest to win the filet au poivre pictured above, along with Racine’s onglet aux échalottes and côte de boeuf and of course frites.
With the London launch of its 
The debut of the youngandfoodish PizzaTuesday series at 
So extraordinary was the restraint exhibited by these distance runners in the event’s earliest stages that it threatened to trample the self-confidence of pizzaiolo Herbie Leonelli. He is unaccustomed to people limiting themselves to just 2 or 3 small slices of his authentic 
Few clichés in food criticism are as vacuous as this observation commonly applied to exotic cuisines: