POLPO..SOHO...UH HUH...OH YEAH

 

A time honoured, old faithful London wheeze has always been to Wander Down Olde Soho Towne on a weeknight and get metaphorically battered (...and on this night...literally) with your supercool mates. Theres always a white haawwt no-reservation speakeasy or charcuterie bar just opened, more than likely rocking a postindustrialvintagehipsterchic vibe and the ubiquitous moody lighting.

 

I love the Venetian bacaro Polpo on Beak St, tucked away in the same rickety building in which Venetian painter Canaletto used to reside. Get in! It ain't no Colony Club but its the next best thing.

 

 

 

 

 

FELL ASLEEP ON THE TRAIN, WOUND UP IN BLOODY NEASDEN

Being a certified (and certifiable) anglophile, Pete Townshend's magnum opus Quadrophenia is one of my favourite films. I was excited to discover the actual greasy spoon featured in the film where mod anti-hero Jimmy eats with his rockabilly nemesis played by the one and only Ray Winstone was only a short walk across Murder Park from my 'Big, Brilliantly Candyass' (AKA the British Buggery Corporation) west London office.

So I retired to A. Cooke's famous Pie n Mash Caff on the Goldhawk Road in Shepherd's Bush one rainy afternoon with my assistant (he of the 'Buff Ting' fame) to sample their wares and lounge resplendent in some proper filmic history. Check out my homeboy posing below. I made him do it. You can tell by his pathetically insincere smile.

Anyway, said assistant (lets call him Virgil) and I sampled the classic English fayre of pie'n'mash, not a world away from that other classic English standby and my personal meal of choice, meat'n'two veg.  

Said fayre was common or garden variety caff style...a greasy, meaty confection with a perfect sphere of delicious creamy mash all drowned in watery mint sauce and accompanied by a serving a thick mushy peas. You wouldn't want to eat it every day but its just the ticket on a rainy afternoon in Shepherds Bush as you debate the pros and cons of TOWIE vs Made In Chelsea.

The old timer sitting behind Virgil was typical of the proper salt of the earth English regulars in for their midweek scran, and the dinner ladies brooked no nonsense whatsoever at the order counter let me tell you. The cafe recently successfully fought a compulsory purchase planning application to have the premises destroyed as part of a proposed 200-flat development. Suck on that, The Man! Read more about A Cooke's noble fight against the nasty slumlords here. 

Just look at Virgil wishing he was anywhere but here, being made to pose like a tit under threat of imminent sacking. Nice oilskin jacket Virgil, ebay's finest, natch. 

HEARTY RUSSIAN FAYRE

Dumplings...my sweet little luscious Russian dumplings...better than sex, we wolfed down a number of servings on the Eastern front - delicious little parcels of hearty meat, delicately hand-made then boiled and drowned in melted butter, vinegar and sour cream. Divine. Blini with caviar, tangy, satisfying fruit pastries drenched in rich cream (below), one could truly indulge every gluttonous whim in Moscow and Petersburg and my travelling compadre and I eagerly obliged. Then theres the handsome samovar (below), the traditional tea making urn common to many a Russian household (including Tolstoy's Moscow crib) decorated with shushki, the small, mildy sweet bread rings often accompanying tea.

In Moscow we loved this restaurant below (memory and Inspector Google both failing me on the name), evoking the atmosphere of an old Soviet apartment. Admittedly a cosily decorated bourgeois number, rather than a depressing communal 1930s one inhabited by drunken poets and elderly peasant headscarf-rocking babushkas. Complete with singing canary, waitresses in cute uniforms and an inquisitive house cat stalking the diners, the ambience was charming and the authentic Ruski nosh utterly delicious. Just the ticket to load up on before sweating out the toxins at the Sanduny banya, the historic Russian baths frequented by the likes of Clinton (Bill and George)...not that I in anyway advocate doing this with a skinful of top-grade voddie coursing through the veins.

Russian food supplies in London are available at the fabulous Kalinka store on Queensway. Primrose Hill's Trojka is a favourite restaurant of mine, for its authentic, cheap traditional food, wide range of heart-stopping vodkas, vibrant crimson interiors and traditional music.

UN FUNK BLEU DANS LE NOIR

In a bit of a blue funk last week after losing my camera...alas, there'll be no posts from the post-industrial grime of Stoke-on-Trent's amazing potteries, Warwick Castle, my collage exhibition in Bethnal Green or the annual Oxford/Cambridge Thames boat race...for shame. Harrumph and fiddlesticks and a big eff off to the turnip who trousered it around the mean streets of Hammersmith on their way to see The Boat Race.

Reflecting my black temperament, I'm posting more luddite fone pics from Antony McCall's show at the Ambika P3 gallery on London's Marylebone Street. This huge space - the old construction workshop of the University of London's engineering department - was pitch black, punctuated by three shards of white light projected from the (what seemed like) storeys-high ceiling. These simple projected shapes moved gradually on the ground, creating stark, triangular forms, made visible by regular pumps from the smoke machine. Difficult to photograph and even more difficult to describe...I'll just say the work created an eerie, almost religious feeling, visitors compelled to lounge about on the floor, gazes transfixed toward heaven, like a warehouse rave for adults minus the krazy glowstix and dreaded lockjaw comedown.

After, my date and I maintained the blacker than black vibe with a visit to Dans Le Noir, the Clerkenwell restaurant staffed by blind waiters where diners eat in a completely dark room. The height of pretentious London gastronomy-wank you cry? Never fear, dear readers, the concept actually aims to allow diners some empathetic insight into the blind persons' experience and proved to be, in fact, rather an emotional ride. Being immediately disoriented the moment we were led into the dining room, hands on shoulders by our lovely Australian waiter Carl, its amazing the sense of vulnerability and helplessness that descends as you gingerly hobble along, banging knees against chairs and cracking elbows against walls as you desperately try to make sense of the strange surroundings. Very rapidly I learnt to listen hard to Carl's soothing voice and trust his direction. Eventually a sort of confidence emerged as I adapted to the pitch black room and started to enjoy the cacophony of surrounding conversation and delicious smells. A strange sense of liberation came with the realisation you are no longer subject to 'the other's gaze and can indulge in complete gluttony under cover of total anonymity - a must for all you builimics out there. Your menu remains a mystery until after the meal - heightening diners' dependence on the other senses to decipher exactly what the devil you're munching on. Its inevitable your grubby mits get deployed whats more - five consecutive forkfulls of peas and air do not a three course meal make.

Read more on the the Dans Le Noir website here.

EARL'S COURT RUMBLE

I don't go out in my local hood that often but god knows when I do, not even a broken ankles gonna stop the shenanigans...first stop (well actually there was only two) was a pretty Russian restaurant we'd been meaning to check out for ages...Nikita's. Name checking Elton John as a favourite customer on their website, the restaurant featured a veritable cacophony of beautiful, distinctive interior murals inspired by ornate  Russian houses and originally designed to brighten the long winter nights.

Nikita's food was heartily divine (see dumplings above), the vodka flowed freely, the waitresses eminated that idiosyncratic charm only Russian ladies can and when we least expected it, the crazy accordion player (below) started busting out traditional balalaika tunes...turned up to 11. According to the website he was Bibs Ekkel 'one of the top masters of the balalaika outside Russia', however he seemed to be favouring Abba tunes at our table that night in tribute to my two stunning Swedish (almost) identical twin sister dining compadres.

After Nikita's we hobbled along to my favourite London cafe - The Troubadour. I first discovered this magical place at the age of 17 and spent months trying to locate its wonderful selection of rickety teapots in the window again years later when I finally came to reside in the city.

With a chequered, bohemian history dating from its inception in the 1950s, the cafe includes a subterranean live music bar - keeping alive a tradition of folk and jazz which reputedly saw the likes of Bob Dylan play at the venue.

What I love most though are the curious interiors (below) - traditional and European in style, featuring all kinds of hanging saucepans, iron work, enormous keys and locks, wooden puppets, musical instruments and statues. The cafe also has a fertile, fairy-lit beergarden out the back, a really beautiful atmosphere in which to spend a midsumummer night's dream... 

THE UNDERGROUND RESTAURANT

I first read about the concept of private restaurants popping up in hipster New York apartments about a year ago. These were usually established by innovative Manhattan chefs over the stress of professional kitchens and wanting to create a more intimate, friendly and authentic atmosphere in which to serve up their delicious food. The idea of attending a private address to share a meal with a group of strangers seemed a terribly avant garde (darling) antidote not only to the American Psycho excesses of 80s New York but also the increasing inter-personal alienation the internet appears to have fostered in more recent times.

There are a few private supperclubs in London, Ms. Marmite Lover's Kilburn enterprise offering the most creative menus (we just missed the July 14th Bastille Day French extravaganza) within a cosy, friendly atmosphere. Upon arrival at the secret Kilburn address, we were immediately ushered out onto our vibrant host's balcony overlooking her luxuriously overgrown garden (above) for a 'Bitter Underground' bespoke gin and tonic. The balmy, candlelit evening darkened as our appetites sharpened from the inviting aromas wafting from the kitchen ('non-business end' pictured below).

First course was a succulent tortellini stuffed with fragrant cheeses in a deliciously creamy mushroom sauce. Following on from that came delicate parcels of roasted salmon individually wrapped and tied up with string, accompanying mouth-watering, slow-roasted cherry tomatoes and plump, textured, buttered and salted new potatoes. The potatoes arrived after I had finished my main, illustrating exactly the charm of the private restaurant - sometimes things are haphazard and less than perfect, making the experience all the more interesting. A generous selection of gloriously pungent cheeses then arrived (below top - personally selected by MML during her trip across the channel earlier in the week), followed by a spectacular 21 egg pavlova crumbled into the fabulously English pudding known as Eton Mess (below bottom).

Check out this post on our lovely host and chef Ms Marmite Lover's (below) blog for a full outline of the evening's menu.

Our fellow diners for the evening included a very friendly, corporate (but nice!) couple (pictured below top - working for Shell and Nestle respectively) whose names I'm afraid now escape me. Two separate groups of birthday parties full of posh young ladies and gentlemen (below bottom) made up the numbers for a full house of around 20 diners. This was the one disappointment of the evening - as the two birthday groups already had their friends around them they seemed less inclined to indulge in some good old fashioned awkward dinner party conversation with strangers, which was in one sense the point of the whole evening. In any case, who is Ms Marmite Lover to knock back block bookings...

Overall, the evening was genuinely a very enjoyable affair and certainly recommended if you're after a novel experience for your Saturday night.

At the end this little soldier was stuck with the washing up!!

SCOOTERCAFFE

Went to the hip little Scootercaffe again recently, just along Lower Marsh behind Waterloo station. Its such a great cafe with the perfect mix of esoteric interiors, brilliant obscure 80s tracks on the decks, delicious coffee (but alas, no cake), small but perfectly formed outdoor space and of course...le chat blanc.

The actual scooter repair business is now based in Bermondsey but the cafe lives on in all its well-weathered retro glory.