Dear Daniel,

Can you recommend a Michelin-multistarred restaurant in tune with what’s exciting in the world of contemporary gastronomy? The cuisine must be ingenious to the extent it becomes impossible for the servers to recall and recite the elements of every dish. Food that’s also very enjoyable to eat isn’t essential but that would be a plus. Lastly, there must be a set lunch no higher than £35.

Howard H. Higginshauser Jr, Vancouver

Howard

The Ledbury‘s Brett Graham is a singular Australian chef flourishing in a British context.

* * *

Dude,

I love dried salted pig’s liver but most of what you’re served is dry and salty. Whatever. Our group of 16 carnivores wants to eat like a pig – to be specific, one suckling pig – at a British restaurant that does nose-to-tail cooking with guts and passion. Its house-baked sourdough must be as good as the bread we had at Moro the last time we visited London. Any ideas?

Wade, Miami

Wade,

St John wrote the book on nose to tail eating.

* * *

Help Young and Foodish,

If you think Howard H. Higginshauser Jr is demanding wait until you hear about Murray and Dorris. Murray likes nothing better than eating chargrilled beef and pan-roasted duck in vegetarian restaurants. Worldly Southern Mediterranean with Californian accents and chocolate hazelnut brownies is his preferred ethnic food. Doris won’t order anything without seeing it first. Presentation is paramount. Unable to made decisions she ends up ordering one of everything. She’s as flaky as a buttery croissant, lost in a make-believe world of Technicolor salad landscapes and meringue clouds.  Me, I prefer the simple life: Give me orange and fennel poached mackerel with beetroot and honey yoghurt salad and pistachio relish and I’ll marry you.

Sincerely,
Desperate in Seattle

Dez,

Ottolenghi is not so much a restaurant, deli or patisserie as a parallel fantasy universe of beautiful salads and pastries imagined by Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi. Everyone eats happy in Ottolenghiland.

* * *

From: marty@harrassyourass.com
Re: visit to London
20 July 2012 15:31:50 GMT+01:00
To: info@youngandfoodish.com

I prefer casual restaurants that don’t take their food casually at all, like New York’s Union Square Cafe and San Francisco’s Zuni Cafe. Is there anything like that in London, maybe Spanish, with open-fire roasting and without any fetichism for meat slicers. Its house-baked sourdough must be as good as the bread we had at St John the last time we visited London.

Marty, Philadelphia

Marty,

At one-of-kind Moro chefs Sam and Sam Clark draw inspiration from Spain under Muslim occupation. The wood-roasted meats, chargrilled fish and nearly everything that goes with them are Moorish and moreish.

* * *

Dan,

This will be my first time in London and having heard of your dining renaissance I desire nothing less than a knowing, world-class contemporary British concept restaurant with an outstanding chef, impeccable sourcing and a dessert bar. I expect to see dishes completed table-side, too, in the elegant manner of the Hotel de France in Nantua. Can you recommend five such restaurants?

Sebastien Sansepoir, Nantua

Seb,

At Pollen Street Social the incomparable chef Jason Atherton wants the finishing touches of clever dishes revealed before your eyes. The man is a magician: Who else could charge £29.50 for roasted sea bass yet still call his restaurant a ‘bistro’?

* * *

Dear Daniel Youngandfoodish,

We are oyster-and-caviar sophisticates who covet ‘traditional’ fish pie not made with ye olde fish scraps from a week ago Tuesday. Know of any timelessly stylish fish brasseries in London theatreland?

All the best,
Franz Pesky (no address)

Franz,

The restaurant and oyster bar J Sheekey is never a bad first option.

* * *

Dan the Man,

Gastropubs are all the rage back home but I suspect most if not all are operated by uninformed phonies exploiting the latest trend for financial gain. (I’m sure you don’t have profiteering restaurateurs like that in London.) Can you turn me on to two tried-and-true gastropubs – one near the Tate Modern; the other, close to Covent Garden. If the choice is between quantity and quality I’ll settle for both.

Thank you.
Elmer Tuttle, Los Angeles and San Francisco

Dear Elmer,

Anchor and Hope, near Tate Modern, and Great Queen Street, its West End sibling

* * *

Mr. Foodish,

I won’t bother you with a long wish list. I have but two requirements:

1. I’d like the restaurant be within walking distance of my hotel room at the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge.
2. I’d like my daughter Louise’s visage to be illuminated by porcelain wall sconces in the shape of antique jelly moulds.

Any chef with the stature of a Heston Blumenthal will do, providing his team can produce a great performance as much as a great dinner.  I only hope they don’t try to push salamugundy on us.

Sincerely,
Mrs I. M. Undemanding, Geneva, Cayman and Dubai

Mrs Undemanding,

Would Dinner by Heston suit? Its executive chef is an equal to Heston Blumenthal by any measure. Yes, the set menu does feature salamugundy as a starter, but you can have a ragoo of pigs ears as an alternative.

* * *

Daniel,

The only thing better than eating great cheap eats is waiting for great cheap eats with cool attractive people in a long line. Like I always say to Gino: Gino, why wait for 10 minutes and eat in an hour when you can do the reverse? Is there such a place in London? A BYOB maybe? With Punjabi food?

Mia Maso, Turin

Mia,

At the wildly popular Tayyabs in the Whitechapel district of fashionable East London the queue moves in reverse, like an up escalator going down. You gradually edge further away from the front of the queue the longer you stand in it. Every 17 seconds you are tortured by a server parading yet another sizzling platter of incredibly succulent grilled lamb chops past your nose. The fragrant fumes are so intense it will make your eyes water. And just when they’ve handed you a menu and you’re convinced you finally will be the next to get a table the host admits and seats a group of 40 ahead of you.

It got worse. They didn’t only bring memories of Italy with them; they carried spoils, too: Bottarga di tonno rosso from Marzamemi, Gerardo di Nola long spaghetti from Gragnano, Poggio di Bortolone extra virgin olive oil from the Chiramonte Gulfi winery of the same name.  The first thing one of our house guests did after setting down his bags was commandeer our kitchen and toss together a large bowl of spaghetti alla bottarga con limone e prezzemolo.

As I ate his maddeningly impeccable pasta I chewed over my London EATinerary:

St. John Bread and Wine
Present (coffee from World Barista Champion Gwilym Davies)
Monmouth Coffee (Borough Market)
Kappacasein (toasted cheese sandwich)
Tayyabs
De Gustibus Borough Market (salt beef)
Dock Kitchen
Petersham Nurseries

Each outing began with a steep climb from our temporary home in Crouch End to the Highgate tube station. Charming as this leafy stretch may be in its autumnal splendor, the 20-minute hike was no stroll through the Piedmontese vineyards. If my friends wanted to burn their quadriceps and destroy their knees I’m sure they would have chosen to do so while in the bucolic hills of Langhe and Monferrato. The white truffles of Alba do wonders for ruptured tendons. Moreover, it was difficult for them to enjoy their walks in this deceptively calm area of North London given the clear and present danger of being run off the pavement at any moment by a Bugaboo buggy or a Micro kick scooter.

They made it safely to the first 4 stops on my food tour without incident. Their luck changed at Tayyabs, where the queue inside the dining room moved at the pace of a glacier – that is to say, a glacier prior to the era of global warming. A more benevolent Tayyabs would hand out naan noshes and toothpick-skewered sheekh kebabs to ease the long wait. Instead they torture you for 90 minutes by parading sizzling platters of succulent kebabs and lamb chops within inches of your nostrils at 10-second intervals. The dizzying aroma from the Punjabi spice mix is so potent it could be used in place of smelling salts to revive any Tayyabs waiters knocked unconscious by the fists of the victims left to starve on the endless queue.

The Friday night journey to Dock Kitchen, beside the Grand Union Canal in Ladbroke Grove, took 1 hour 50 minutes – over 30 minutes longer than the London Journey Planner estimate. Suffice to say that if you are going to travel nearly two hours to a Grand Canal you want it to be the one in Venice. That schlep, however, was no more bothersome than a November breeze when compared to our Saturday expedition to Richmond’s Petersham Nurseries. We left the house at 11am for a 12:30 lunch booking and arrived at 1:40pm. Royal Mail would have delivered us to our destination more quickly than the District line.

Steven Biondolillo is a respected marketing consultant who should be famous for his radius restaurant-rating system. Instead of using stars or point scales to evaluate restaurants he scores them according to the distance you would be willing to travel to dine there. Under his radius system, elBulli might rate a 5,000 to indicate a radius of 5,000 miles within which the restaurant would be worth a detour. A sympathetic critic might award Subway sandwich shop a score of 0.00000013.

For London purposes the Biondolillo radius system needs to be revised. The journey from front door to first course must be measured in minutes, not miles. And so, if Petersham Farms, described by these two ultimately delighted Californians as “Chez Panisse in the English countryside”, merits a journey of 160 minutes, then award it a rating of 160.

Judged solely by my friends’ comments I have critiqued the London food tour as follows:

St. John Bread and Wine – 90 minutes
Present – 30 minutes
Monmouth – 30 minutes
Kappacasein – 40 minutes
Tayyabs – 60 minutes
De Gustibus – 20 minutes
Dock Kitchen – 30 minutes
Petersham Nurseries – 160 minutes

Of course it’s possible we appreciate things more when we experience great difficulties beforehand. The French have an expression for it: après l’effort le réconfort – “after effort comes comfort.” Sounds to me like a great poster slogan for Transport for London.