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

Jeremy Challender and Gwilym Davies do not, as a general rule, wear £200 jeans but they seem to like pulling espressos in shops that sell them. The baristas behind Prufrock Coffee have parked an espresso machine just inside the shop window of Woodhouse, a designer menswear boutique at 189 Westbourne Grove in Notting Hill, West London (see map).  Their other in-store espresso bar is in East London at the Shoreditch designer menswear boutique Present.

Challender, who for now is resident barista-in-the-Woodhouse, is using a seasonal blend from Square Mile Coffee Roasters for his espressos but may switch to a single origin espresso, as he and Davies have already done at Present. Only at Woodhouse is he preparing sublime lattes with Daylesford Organic whole milk poured from biodegradable bag packs. Very neat.

This isn’t a stand-alone, full-time coffee shop, but for (great) coffee-deprived West London it’s a start: The Prufrock espresso bar at Woodhouse is open Thursday, Friday & Saturday 10:30am-5pm; Sunday noon-4:30pm. By an amazing coincidence these are the exact times I told the Woodhouse store manager I would be available to work when, only this morning, I submitted my application for the position of sales assistant.

In my sometimes uphill search for great London chippies, George’s Portobello Fish Bar in Notting Hill had the appearance of a dead cert.

First, Jamie Oliver had named it “best fish and chips” for the Observer Food Monthly, praising its “flaky cod with a lovely golden batter”. A photo of Jamie taken at George’s was proudly displayed in the fish bar. The famous chef had reciprocated by proudly displaying a photo of George’s fish and chips in one of his cookbooks.

Secondly, the chips, which I sampled first as a possible indicator of overall quality, were outstanding. Made from Maris Pipers, these were packed with potatoey flavour and blessed with an invisible sealant-like coating that provided a light but sure crispness.

Finally, there was the reassuring presence of George Periccos, the affable Greek-Cypriot who opened the fish bar in 1961. When I asked George for details of his provenance as well as that of his fish, potatoes and oil he eagerly whisked me to the back of the busy shop to show off dozens of beautifully fresh fillets neatly arranged in the stacked drawers of a stainless-steel refrigerator. The fisherman who caught these cods could not have been prouder of them than George was.

I was desperate to try the cod and had only to wait for the chatty proprietor to take a rare breath between sentences to escape the storage kitchen. When at last he paused I rushed back to the fish bar to request and pay for a £6 order of cod and take it over to the eating counter. George soon followed. The fillet was rather thin, with unappetizing pleats on one end (see left side of photo below).

It was as if the batter had folded over itself to create greasy wrinkles devoid of fish. Ugh.

Beneath its golden coating, the cod was dry. With a proper batter to protect it from direct contact with the frying oil, a fish fillet isn’t so much fried as steamed. Had this one sat too long out of its hot oil bath and dried out as a result? I waited for George to take another rare breath between paragraphs and uttered three words: Dry. No steam. George nodded. “The problem,” he said, “is that he gave you the wrong one.” The wrong one? Not very encouraging.

George rushed to the fish bar and brought me another cod fillet. This one was thicker than the first one and had no Issey Miyake-like pleats in its robe. But the fish, once cut open, was dry. No steam.

George again blamed the cooks, his son – the one in the photo with Jamie Oliver – among them. He held his staff responsible for his delayed retirement, too. They couldn’t be trusted. He had to come in every day and keep an eye open. But given that George was physically present in his fish bar when I was served the disappointing fillets, it was hard to take his frustrations seriously. His words, like his fish, just didn’t hold water