Homemade glazed buns for Bar Boulud's Tunisienne hot dogs

Pascal Aussignac peddles his Marmite Royale, winner of festival's Best Taste award

If you wish to give this year’s Taste of London restaurant festival a miss rather than pay £24 for the right to pay top £ for small plates of food you eat standing up that’s your business. Sorry, complaints about the high admission price are now so old and tired the first ones were texted on Nokia 1100s.

This post is about what not to miss if you’re not missing Taste. The remaining sessions are this afternoon, tonight and tomorrow after.

I’m very pleased that Club Gascon’s Marmite Royale won the Best in Taste award. I hosted the world preview, if not premiere, of Pascal Aussignac’s invention at my June 11th BurgerMonday pop-up at Comptoir Gascon (photos).

Full disclosure: My four festival recommendations below are based on a limited sampling. Forget Hoovers: I’d have needed a Flymo Turbo 400 to graze all of muddy Regent’s Park.

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So how did I end up sacrificing a summer Saturday to Westfield London, “the largest in-town shopping and leisure destination in Europe” from “the world’s largest listed retail property group by equity market capitalisation“? My first inclination is to do what any man would do in a similar situation: blame my wife, who was desperate to find a pair of shoes to wear to her sister’s wedding. With 29 shoe stores at Westfield I rated her chances of finding a suitable pair as high as 15 percent.

To you I will own up to ulterior motives. First, I was curious to see what was left of the summer sales at Vans, Geox, Desigual and Habitat. Secondly, I’d heard there was an Apple store. But mostly I was eager to try the foie gras-topped duck burger at Croque Gascon, the southwest French fastfood from the creators of the upmarket Club Gascon and its bistro-class spinoff, Comptoir Gascon. At Club Gascon I had admired the culinary wit of chef Pascal Aussignac. I loved his foie gras brioche club sandwich, which delivered its crunch via bacon sliced as thin as an estate agent’s sincerity. At the Taste of London festival in Regent’s Park I’d enjoyed a mini-version of his Croque Gascon duck burger. I needed to experience the real thing, sur place, and that necessitated my entering the mother of all shopping malls and coping with the sort of challenges I thought I’d left behind. Like mustard that won’t come out of its container.

When having frites I like to ask for both mayonnaise and mustard, mix the two and, voilà, I have Dijon mayo for dipping. At Croque Gascon I tore open and squeezed one of the yellow stick sachets they served me and only a tiny dab of mustard oozed out. I opened a second sachet and a third and still did not have enough mustard for my Dijon mayo.  I was furious.

Croque Gascon sources its mustard sticks from Soreal Ilou, a French producer of condiments for the food services sector. Two days after my scene at the mall I emailed the company and asked 2 questions: How many grams of mustard were there in a stick? What was the advantage of this small dosage? Within 2 hours I had a response from Jean-Jacques Gonzalez, Directeur Commercial Restauration. He noted there were 4 grams per stick and that although their Dijon was also sold in 12-ounce sachets, it was a strong mustard and 4 grams of it were often sufficient. In closing, Monsieur Gonzalez reasoned I must be an amateur de moutarde and generously offered to send me some Dijon sticks.  Great, I thought: if he sends me 30 I’ll have enough mustard to dress a salad.

I did get around to trying the duck burger accessorised with a silky escalope of griddle-fried foie gras. At first I admired the firm, almost crunchy texture of the chopped-duck patty, as I had at Taste of London. It did not measure up to the foie gras burger pioneered by Michel Trama at L’Aubergade in Puymirol, France or the foie gras-filled sirloin and short rib burger created by Daniel Boulud for db Bistro Moderne in New York, but it was hardly their equal in cost either. The price, recently dropped from £12.50 to £10.50, was unusually accessible for so silly an extravagance.

Soon, however, my outlook darkened. The foie gras had retained its texture, despite the grill cook’s best efforts to incinerate it, but so too had the duck burger. I yearned for something soft and juicy, such as a hamburger. Admittedly, by this point I was not in the best of moods. I had just discovered a fresh mustard stain over the right pocket of my pants. Just my luck: I can only manage to squeeze out a few measly molecules of mustard from 3 sachets and all of it ends up on my lap.

“You see,” I complained to my wife, pointing to the stains. “This is why I hate shopping malls.”

I had a great time at this year’s Taste (18-21 June), if not for all the same reasons as the good people at Channel 4 sales.  They were enticed by an “upmarket, aspirational consumer event” with a “strong ABC1” audience. Fearing sensory overload I mostly ignored the high managerials and low cleavages, which you can find in abundance at any happy hour near Liverpool Street Station, and instead pursued body overload, with select noshes from amongst 40 of London’s better restaurants. This you cannot do – and should not attempt to do –  in the immediate vicinity of Liverpool Street Station.

Taste fulfills its promise of providing open-air access to a wide variety of dishes from acclaimed restaurants that only the A’s within Channel 4’s coveted ABC1 audience can afford to frequent with any regularity. Most impressively, the kitchen staffs perform at a high level while serving 100 covers per hour in claustrophobic conditions. The festival appears to be a big deal for the star chefs, which makes it a big deal for the public.

Glorious Regent’s Park is no level playing field for Michelin-starred cuisine. Perceptions of foods change when consumed in a standing or walking position from plastic tableware. Fussy foods lose out to finger foods. Hot soup is almost always a bad idea; chilled soup, invariably a good one (e.g. the elegant pea velouté from Jocelyn Herland, executive chef at Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester). And flaunted luxury is in all instances a plus. Having endured endless queues, the festival foragers need to see they’ve waited for something rich.

This partly explains how chef Jean-Philippe Patruno of Quo Vadis stole the show with grilled rib of 48-day Hereford beef. This was steak and this was beautiful. Though many requested slices cut from the rib eye, Patruno preferred the portion nearer the bone, protected from the blazing heat by the rib eye’s rim of fat. “The meat slowly melts,” noted Patruno, using the sort of words that win food festivals. “It’s like a confit cooking in its own fat.” Who is going to say no to that?

The foie gras burger presented by L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon proved to be the perfect festival dish: a popular barbecue sandwich with a precious main ingredient and scrumptious accessories. Served on a brioche bun, the mini-burger was seared to a delectable crisp, with verjus-marinated roast peppers and ginger glaze providing saucy notes of condimental pungency.

Croque Gascon didn’t hide foie gras directly beneath the bun of its terrific duck burger; it shrewdly served slices of it (in terrine form) directly beside it. I may have been the only person in Regent’s Park who was less distracted by the foie than the “crazy salt” sprinkled over the duck-fat frites. If Croque doesn’t begin selling that mix of Fleur de Sel de Guérande and Piment d’Espelette in jars soon I promise that I will.

Playing the conspicuous luxury card, celebrity chef Giorgio Locatelli chose to charm his adoring audience at the Refettorio booth with a hand grater and summer truffles. Rising star Francesco Mazzei of L’Anima did the same, as if he were emulating his charismatic countryman. He scattered the truffle shavings rather generously over fettuccine with wild mushrooms.

Mazzei and I somehow got to talking about linguine vongole: instinctively he identified this as one of my weaknesses. He noted how the starch from the pasta water was required to transform the vongole sauce into an emulsione with emozione. That sounded good to me.

Mazzei and I parted with this wager: If, when I visit L’Anima, his linguine vongole is not the best in London, he pays. If I concede that it is the best, I pay double.