eat great food. meet great people.
A burger ordered rare at John Torode's The Luxe
JUDGING THE JUDGE: Food enthusiasts attending the burgermonday meatup at The Luxe got the opportunity to taste and critique the burger of chef-patron – and MasterChef judge – John Torode. [Read more...]
Invited by MasterChef‘s John Torode to try the house burger at his new bar and grill on behalf of burgermonday I sunk into this two-hander with hope and hunger. The LUXE burger proved to be an irresistible hunk oozing beefy, cheesy, yolky juices with every bite. Lucious and lushish!
The only bummer was the bun. [Read more...]
Two dear colleagues would be visiting from LA and I had to plan the meals and coffee breaks for their London stopover. The pressure I felt was considerable: Were these demanding food obsessives coming directly from California and not via Italy my task would have been difficult enough. But knowing they would be arriving with the incomparable flavours of Sicily and Piedmont fresh in their minds made my challenge all the more daunting. [Read more...]
The Patisserie Valerie gelaterias at Spitalfields in East London and Duke of York Square in Chelsea feature a flavour called banana blue. You can’t miss it, but you might want to give it a pass. As someone familiar with blue corn, berries and potatoes but not yet bananas I wanted to know what made the gelato blue before deciding for myself. I asked someone at Valerie, who inspected the package and identified the bluing ingredient as E133 – Brilliant Blue FCF. [Read more...]
In his pedestrian review of Le Bouchon Breton’s new sibling at Spitalfields, The Independent’s Terry Durack begins with the observation that “an honest waiter is hard to find”. This ostensibly explains why he was both surprised and impressed by the candour of François Bertrand, the brasserie’s restaurant manager:
Tell him you are dithering between the steak frites and the moules frites, and he will tell you the steak frites is good, but no better or worse than any other steak frites around town. The moules, on the other hand, he says, are done better at only one or two other places.
It’s odd that Durack would single out Bertrand as that rarity, an honest waiter, when he identifies Bertrand as the restaurant manager. And even if, as Durack might argue, Bertrand was assuming the responsibilities and posture of an honest head waiter, he might have been doing so only because he recognized the critic and thought it advisable to take charge of his table and do whatever was necessary to prevent him from ordering and ultimately slamming the mediocre steak frites. [Read more...]
