sandwich | YOUNG & FOODISH

1+1=3 at London’s new Electric Diner

dansyoung — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 13:49:01 +0000

A single cheeseburger at the Electric Diner contains two patties; a double cheeseburger, three patties.

Crispy fries “au cheval” with Mornay sauce

The George Osborne arithmetic is a Christmas gift to London from Brendan Sodikoff, chef/owner of Chicago’s Au Cheval diner. (Au cheval is French for “on horseback” or, in food parlance, “with an egg on top”.)

In late September, Matt Duckor, posting on Bon Appétit magazine’s blog, rated the single cheeseburger with two patties at Sodikoff’s year-old designer diner as the best in America.

The Soho House group of restaurants and hotels took inspiration from – and then a partnership with – Sodikoff when it transformed the Electric Brasserie, beside the historic Electric Cinema in London’s Notting Hill, into the ElectricDiner, which opened on Monday. Its unfinished walls are as rough as the transition is smooth: Stripped of their romantic associations the French café-brasserie and American diner are accessible institutions both valued for their continuous service and rough-and-ready regional cooking.

Before I tell you what I think of the burger three caveats:

1) I can’t say how Electric’s single-cheeseburger-with-two-patties stacks up against its Chicago model. All I can do is compare photos and marvel at the family resemblance.

2) As a steakburger guy who likes chubby patties north of six ounces I am not the best judge of three-ounce ones that need to be tripled up to fill even Darcy Bussell‘s tummy.

3) Asking £10 ($16) for a diner burger with six ounces of beef, fries not included, is a bit much.

And you know what? I don’t care.

Electric’s single cheeseburger, stabbed and steadied by a steak knife in the back, is sensational.

The toasted glazed bun, a beauty if ever there was one, is so good a fit I suspect it is sourced from Savile Row and not, as I was told, Millers Bakery. The soft patties, expertly fried on what looks like a chrome flattop griddle, are deep-pink throughout, their crevices oozing red globules of fatty juice. With gooey Monterey Jack, Dijon mayo and dill pickle chips as their mortar the twin patties are as one. Single cheeseburger indeed.

The Electric Diner burgers are 3,963 miles better than the prototype burger the same Soho House recently created for its Dirtyburger shack. Even so they may not be the best thing the Electric short-order guys put on a burger bun. The bologna sandwich is so exceptional it should be signposted outside the Ladbroke Grove Underground station.

For the uninitiated, bologna, pronounced “baloney”, is the USA counterpart to the Italian sausage mortadella – mortadella di bologna. Usually purchased as cheap processed cold cuts and piled between untoasted slices of processed white bread the bologna sandwich is one of the horrors of American childhood. As an experiment my mother once sent me to school with a bologna sandwich in my lunch bag. Without a single bite or second thought I binned the sandwich and grabbed myself a slice of pizza so hot and so irresistible it burned the roof of my mouth.

Electric’s bologna isn’t like that bologna. It is a homemade and it is fried, leaving a delectably crisp skin on the outer surface of sausage. The sandwich’s overloaded composition might be what you’d expect from a deli counter in Chicago, a BBQ joint in Kansas City or even a street cart in Florence. Succulent, tender folds of thinly sliced meat are laced with the crispy bits, of which there can not be too many.

The Electric Diner bologna sandwich might not yet be on a par with the Wilensky Special, the fried bologna and salami sandwich classic at Wilensky’s in Montréal, or the New York homage to it, Mile End Deli’s Ruth Wilensky.

And you know what? I don’t care.

Electric Diner, 191 Portobello Road, London W11 2ED (map) – Tel: #44 (0)20 7908 9696

An Albion breakfast bap on every London high street

dansyoung — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 06:07:35 +0000

Taking an “f” out of the caffè in his sister Priscilla and brother-in-law Antonio’s Carluccio’s chain, Sir Terence Conran announced plans to open a string of British cafes based on his successful Albion formula: “Typical British caff food, nothing challenging or complicated, just straightforward hearty ingredients and recipes.” In a word, contrived.

Knightsbridge woman walks out on pork belly sandwich

dansyoung — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:13:45 +0000

Picture a one-armed South Bank street performer juggling pumpkins while being sprayed from the Thames by a naked Duke of Edinburgh skidding by on a jet ski and you can begin to appreciate my astonishment upon seeing an elegant Knightsbridge woman walk out of O’Shea’s of Knightsbridge butcher shop without one of its incomparable pork belly sandwiches in her possession. “Is that the queue?” she whined towards the single line of 5 or 6 punters ogling the platter of fat-glistening pork belly. She was outta there within seconds, sans un sandwich au poitrine du porc.

How, I wondered later, could anyone get so close to that sandwich yet walk away empty-handed? I tried my very best to put myself in her Christian Louboutins and soon felt a great wave of sympathy wash over me: It wasn’t the 3-minute queue that put her off. Rather, it was the startling indifference of the scoundrels on it. My own misbehaviour, I would, if given the chance, assure her, was due less to bad manners than cowardice: I hated to think of the mean looks the other blokes would have shot at me had I, the first on the queue, let her pass ahead of me and therefore them, too. This was not the moment to make nice like Mr Knightley.

When the uninitiated are asked by an O’Shea’s butcher which of the available sandwich accessories – English mustard, apple sauce, rocket (arugula), etc.– they want on their pork belly they can be forgiven for thinking they actually have a choice. In reality the only thinkable option is, (D), all of the above. You would have to bring together David Crosby, Steven Stills, Art Garfunkel, Brian Wilson and Stuart Murdoch in their respective primes to record lush harmonies comparable to those in that sandwich. The condiments melt into the succulent pieces of meat within the warm embrace of the oven-fresh baguette. And lest the ensemble become too mushy there is the percussive crunch of delectable cracking cut into long, thick strips to break the melody line – and possibly your incisors, too.

Sadly the pork belly baguette is not a daily lunch affair. Darragh O’Shea rotates his sandwich meats to, as the sign says, “mix things up and keep you happy :)” Keep you happy? Apparently they are unaware of the anguish felt when walking out of this Knightsbridge butcher shop without a pork belly baguette.

11 Monpelier Street, Knightsbridge, SW7 (see map) – 020 75817771

Chucked from Borough Market, De Gustibus takes salt beef to the street

dansyoung — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:05:56 +0000

When the old hall of London’s Borough Market was shut a month ago to facilitate construction of a new Thameslink train line into London Bridge station, the baker De Gustibus was one of four traders suddenly forced to give up their stalls. That was a devastating development both for the DG employees who would likely lose their jobs as well as devotees of the salt beef sandwiches they assembled with thick, tender slices of house-brined, hand-carved brisket. At first I felt angry and disillusioned. But when, during a visit to the food market last Friday, I observed that the DG meat carvers Genti and Andrea had been thrown out on the street I no longer felt sad. Truth be told I was elated. The bakery had moved its sandwich carving table to the pavement outside its shop (see map), thereby shortening the interminable walk from the Borough High Street exit of the Underground to my beloved hot salt beef by some 25 meters. Better still, that sandwich would now be served on Saturdays as well as Fridays.

After pausing to have a sandwich and take some photos I introduced myself to Genti and Andrea and told them how pleased I was to see them braving the elements. Though it was a mild autumn day I could already imagine them as characters in a Dickensian winter streetscape, warming their frostbitten fingers over steaming briskets. Andrea (at right in photo below) is from Florence, where the most popular sandwich meat is not salt beef but rather lampredotto (boiled cow’s stomach). Andrea wanted to know what I thought of his suggestion that they offer salsa verde, the Tuscan parsley sauce used for panino di lampredotto, as a condiment for salt beef. “Hmmm,” I smiled, recalling drippy tripe sandwiches at Florence’s Mercato di San Lorenzo. “No, with salt beef it has to be mustard.”