Two of my favourite things in the world, together in one neat little bundle (an order of three is £4). And who says dreams don’t really come true?

Meter is a pop-up pizza bar so naturally there is a pizza, too: Neapolitan-style pizza (read: thin and soft in the middle, puffy rim) stretched out by Naples pizzaiolo Valentino and portioned and priced (from £7-£12) by the quarter-metre. Val’s Margherita benefits from quality tomatoes, plenty of fresh (uncooked) basil and supremely melty fior di latte (cow’s milk mozzarella); the Melanzane, from the addition of sweet aubergines, Parmesan and delightful dabs of ricotta. Nice! [slider_pro id=”3″]

Charred in a pizza oven fired with gas and not wood, the cornicione (rim) needs more air pockets offering greater compression to the chew. It’s a tad too doughy. This is nevertheless real good pizza that makes Meter matter for City-to-Shoreditch stopovers and Clerkenwell-to-Hoxton layovers. The comfy lounge bar space was known as The Camp. Many still call it that. Years from now, long after The Camp name is forgotten and the Meter has sadly popped down there will be a blue plaque on the building’s facade:

70-74 City Road, London EC1Y 2BJ (map), @MeterLDN

Only a fool tries to upstage Marcel Wanders by out-smiling, out-dressing, out-tanning, out-hairing or out-flirting the tall, dark and handsome Dutch designer. But were you to tie your hair in a bun, as Josh Pollen did, or hide your intense gaze behind protective goggles, as Mike Knowlden did, you might find it relatively easy to out-geek Wanders. These ingeniously inventive – and skinny – young chefs managed just that at the London launch for Flos of the beautiful Wanders Can-Can Lamp at the Galleria Illy pop-up this October.

Josh Pollen and Mike Knowlden

The co-founders, with Amy Houston, of Blanch & Shock Food Design managed this feat not with smoke and mirrors but rather with smoking styrofoam boxes of liquid nitrogen, iSi siphons loaded with CO2 cartridges and four ingeniously experimental ephemeral edibles flavoured with illy espresso:

• Pain au Chocolat Nitro Ice Cream with Illy espresso
• Nitro Cappuccino
• Malt Coffee ‘Grounds’ in Filters with Cobnut Milk
• Nitro-Aerated Coffee Microwave Sponge with Brown Butter Sauce and Powder

Possessing the taste if not mouth feel of a buttery croissant marbled with the finest dark chocolate and medium espresso, the pain au chocolat ice cream was as much the day’s design revelation as the Wanders lights. Even so, it was the cone-shaped paper filters filled with malt espresso nibs that stole the show. Knowlden and Pollen prominently displayed their filters on a table beside the staircase, near the gallery entrance, and no one could resist them. It appeared as though the fabulously fashionable folks who’d filled the Galleria space beyond capacity were pouring individual containers of cream over coarsely ground illy coffee and eating the stuff with a spoon. They were delighted to discover that the coffee grinds were actually snacky nibbles and the cream, cobnut milk. Blanch & Shock’s imaginative food pun was a big hit.

Message to Marcel Wanders: Never try to out-cobnut Mike Knowlden or Josh Pollen.

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On the night of 28 November Knowlden, Pollen and Houston, three fast rising stars of the London food scene, made hay at my BurgerMonday pop-up. I mean that literally: They developed hay burger buns made with hay-infused roasted flour and reduced hay stock and slathered with smoked hay mayonnaise.

Admit it, London: There is no hope of any celebrity chef upstaging a geek in goggles, especially one whose sidekick has his hair in a bun, if smoked hay mayonnaise is part of the equation.

The reasonably safe premise behind my CoffeeSaturday pop-up series was that there would be a correlation between the quality of the coffee and that of the conversation. Nothing new there: For centuries coffee shops have cultivated an open exchange of ideas, knowledge and opinions both meaningful and meaningless. I nevertheless chose to sweeten the equation with a third element: the cookie.

 For the first CoffeeSaturday pop-up at Prufrock in May I organised a speculoos bake-off and tasting. For the 3 September pop-up at the enchanting new location of the London coffee shop Tapped & Packed I invited my talented friends Thomas Bonasera and Ian James to join me in a biscotti bake-off.  Tapped & Packed managing director Richard Lilley made it a four-way competition: Richard’s cranberry almond honey biscotti vs Tom’s spelt almond biscotti vs Ian’s pistachio cranberry almond biscotti vs my chocolate hazelnut biscotti.

To complement the cookies T&P baristas Sang Ho Park and Rob Dunne brewed El Salvador San Rafael Bourbon beans from the outstanding UK roaster Has Bean for cups of filter coffee, espressos or flat whites. The San Rafael’s chocolate and hazelnut notes seemed a good match for nutty biscotti and a perfect one for my chocolate hazelnut variety.

Or maybe not. My #ChocHazel biscotti finished last in the bake-off. Ian’s #PistCranOrange biscotti won the competition and Tom’s #SpeltAlmond biscotti were a close second. From these results it seems clear that CoffeeSaturday voters drew one of two conclusions: Either harmonious flavours work better than matching ones when pairing coffee and cookies or Ian, Tom and Richard’s biscotti were just better the mine.

Lionel Lévy, the Michelin-starred chef at Une Table, au Sud in Marseille, loves to revisit the classics. The protégé of Gérard Garrigues and Alain Ducasse has made a name for himself with his bouillabaisse milkshake and other signature (re)inventions. He added another to his repertoire as guest chef at my BurgerMonday pop-up on the 23rd of May at Andrew’s Gray’s Inn greasy spoon in London. He merged two American standards, the burger and the BLT sandwich, replacing their customary condiments with the Provençal accessories he prepared at his restaurant, packed in sous-vide bags and stashed with ice packs inside his hand luggage for the flight from Marseille to London.

When just 15 minutes before service Lévy showed me the very first version ever of his stunning pop-up burger BLT I was startled. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, or how to eat it. As you can see in the video above many diners had the same initial reaction, if varied answers to the question: Which end is ‘wich?

Why did jaws drop throughout Andrew’s Gray’s Inn greasy spoon when London chef John Cadieux of Goodman steakhouses and butcher Darragh O’Shea of O’Shea’s of Knightsbridge revealed their BurgerMonday pop-up burger? Were diners expressing astonishment at the unreasonable height and drippiness of this bacon cheeseburger? Or was it more the reflexive action of carnivores stretching and shaping their mouths for the imminent entrance of that brioche bun and all the beef, special sauce and accoutrements John stacked beneath his homemade, egg-polished, sesame-seeded dome?

You decide. Analyse the pics in the event slideshow below by photographer Paul Winch-Furness. When you feel the lower portion of your mouth falling the first thing you must do is pick your jaw off the floor. Then ask yourself if this involuntary movement was triggered by intense feelings of astonishment or practicality.

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slideshow photos by Paul Winch-Furness

slideshow photos by Paul Winch-Furness

Great fan though I am of Polpo, Polpetto and their new sibling sensation Spuntino, Wednesday the 13th of April was probably not the best night to be dining at any of these madly popular restaurants in London’s Soho. That’s because Spuntino head chef Rachel O’Sullivan and group chef Tom Oldroyd took that afternoon and night off to prepare 350+ meatballs for my SpagWednesday meatballs and spaghetti pop-up dinner (see photos above by food photographer Paul-Winch Furness) at the Gray’s Inn greasy spoon Andrew’s.

Rachel and Tom sent out heaping plates of spaghetti and meatballs with wedges of focaccia to 66 SpagWednesday twirling slurpers who did with it what SpagWednesday twirling slurpers do: They ate like kids and dined like princes.

Although some Italian purists insist you shouldn’t serve bread with pasta, piling starch upon starch, the Spuntino chefs concluded that the far greater crime would have been to leave a roomful of urbane Londoners with traces of homemade tomato sauce on their plates but no bread with which to mop it up. The only viable alternative would have been for diners to use their fingers, which, though hardly unheard of at young&foodish pop-ups, is perhaps not the preferred medium.

Don’t miss out on the fun at my next pop-up. Join the young&foodish community now and as a member you’ll receive email alerts about upcoming SpagWednesday and BurgerMonday pop-ups as well as advance booking privileges.

For my inaugural SpagWednesday pop-up on February 23rd I lured Francesco Mazzei out of his comfort zone in the state-of-the-art kitchen at L’Anima, his posh Italian restaurant in the City of London, to prepare spaghetti alle vongole (with clams) at Andrews, a 1950s greasy spoon.
The environment for Francesco’s version of the spaghetti classic was dramatically altered but not the emulsione with emozione that clings to it. With colleagues Lello Favuzzi and Claudio Milani he created a creamy, buttery emulsion not with cream or butter, as some disbelieving diners assumed, given the evidence before them, but rather by tossing the pasta with some of its starchy cooking water as well as garlicky clam juices and extra virgin olive oil from his native Calabria.

The Formica-clad informality didn’t change Francesco’s vongole but it did foster the unselfconsious manner in which the spaghetti was twirled, slurped and relished. The lack of starch in the air, as opposed to that in the emulsified sauce, freed all 64 diners to accept my invitation to

eat like a kid. dine like a prince.

Within the pop-up video is an homage to a classic American TV commercial from 1969 for Prince Spaghetti and its 12-year old Bostonian hero, Anthony Martignetti. For the 2011 Londonian version, Francesco, Lello and Claudio brought out the 12-year-old prince in all of us.

To receive email alerts about upcoming SpagWednesday and BurgerMonday pop-up dates as well as advance booking privileges, join the young&foodish community or like the y&f facebook page.

Three weeks shy of 30 and three months from running his own kitchen for the first time at autumn arrival Elliot’s Borough Market the Glaswegian has already held positions at Tom Aikens and The Ledbury in London, Marque in Sydney, Momofuku Ssam Bar in New York and, most opportunely, Noma in Copenhagen, named World’s Best Restaurant in April.

I am nevertheless impressed by McHale’s fleeting experiences abroad, first of all because he’s so up front about their laughably limited scope but, more significantly, from the multiple ways in which he’s been stimulated by them.

Only when you examine the timelines does McHale’s luminous work history begin to lose wattage. His spell at Noma under Rene Redzepi lasted only 3 weeks; his tutelage in the shadow of Momofuko’s David Chang, all of one day. Furthermore, his duties at those acclaimed restaurants were hardly challenging. When he wasn’t prepping cauliflower at Noma he was inside the refrigerator, scraping granita. Ah, the glamorous life of the kitchen temp.

It’s an oddity of apprenticeships: one protégé can spend 20 years working closely with a maestro and then accomplish little on his own, whereas another can stick around just long enough for a cup of coffee yet be nudged onto the path of true greatness. I think of the short but momentous few months Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi worked as an assistant in the Paris studio of Roumanian Constantin Brancusi.

McHale took stock of his backstage glimpse of Noma, even if he himself didn’t prepare any. He pushed himself to the front of the kitchen to help dress plates and marvelled at the organic, casual and deceptively simple look of dishes painstakingly composed to Redzepi’s exacting templates. He observed how the kitchen learned the nationality of every guest and sent out a chef who could explain various dishes to each diner in his native language. He felt the full force of Redzepi’s fervor for local sourcing and foraging. Out of faith, opportunism or a combination of both he now practices a religion where non-indigenous mangoes and coconuts are the forbidden fruits.

Normal people pull out their mobiles to show you recent snaps of their baby. McHale hands you his HTC Legend do show you up-to-date snaps of his baby radishes. A seed geek keen to revive vanished varieties of British heritage vegetables and fruit, McHale and Elliot’s have forged a partnership with Chegworth Valley Farm in Kent. That award-winning juice company will cultivate rarely harvested seeds for McHale and he’ll use their yield at Elliot’s, which is to source directly from Borough Market traders such as Chegworth. At the Pavilion pop-up he buried Chegworth radishes in an edible compost of black sesame seeds, a homage to or theft from –  take your pick – Noma and its signature Radiser amuse of radishes in a pot of soil.

Momofuko reinforced McHale’s appreciation for exceptional dining without the comforts traditionally associated with it. Not content just to have a casual restaurant with topless tables (no naperie) on both levels McHale wants the six seats and bar that will face Elliot’s open-kitchen downstairs to be set at the precisely the right heights to promote easy interaction between cooks and diners. He scouted the restaurants of New York with a tape measure in his pocket and regards the height of the chairs at Momofuko as a trade secret nearly as valuable as its recipe for fried chicken.

photo by Brian Jones

So will Isaac McHale be the next big thing? Hard to say. He cooked alongside Brett Graham at The Ledbury for 5 years and says it took that enormously talented chef almost as long to advance from cooking in the style of what he calls “London chefs doing French food” to one all his own. McHale will have to prove he can do the same, progressing from Noma themes, Ledbury riffs or Momofuko melodies. He must also learn to circumvent inevitable kitchen disasters such as the one last Friday that led to a main course of Old Spot pork shoulder as dry and tough as any in London.

photo by Brian Jones

Still I would not dare miss one of his Friday pop-up dinners, which are nearly sold out for the entire summer. The setting is spectacular; the wines are well chosen and much of the food, from chicken oysters in pine salt to Cornish mackeral with celtic mustard, is exquisitely conceived and prepared. Besides, if McHale does make it big you will want to be able to tell your grandchildren that you knew his beautiful radishes, carrots, spring onions and cucumbers back when they were still babies.
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