I was having a conversation on Twitter yesterday about the restaurant Apsley’s. I didn’t like it. I believe I described it as ‘wanky’, ‘over-priced’ (£30-£40 a main course anyone?) and ‘over-fussed’ (I’m being kind – one starter came on 9 separate plates). This sparked off another conversation with a friend about restaurant preferences in general. He asked me, innocently, “you really wouldn’t go to these places (like Apsley’s), even out of curiosity, if money was literally no object?” I couldn’t say ‘NO’ fast enough or with enough emphasis to really sum up the strength of my feeling on the matter and let’s face it, Gmail chat isn’t the easiest medium to communicate a ‘NO’ bearing the force of splenetic juices, unhinged fury, fires of hell and vein-popping frustration. Well you know, I feel quite strongly about it.

My point is that people have different restaurant preferences, which aren’t entirely dependent on whether or not they can bloody afford it. Not everyone wants to go around ticking off the most expensive places like collecting notches on the bedpost. Every few months I go to The Ledbury. This is because it’s a brilliant restaurant; simply outstanding cooking . I fork out the money because I want to go there, as I could with any restaurant in London if I fancied it. I don’t.

The day my friend and I ate at Apsley’s, we also ate at José (Pizarro). It’s a ham and sherry bar, which is so much more up my alley I can’t begin to tell you. It’s a small space on Bermondsey Street with a bar, a few stools dotted about and a couple of chefs beavering away in an open kitchen. The chatter is loud and the laughter unrestrained. We settled in for Manzanilla and snacks.

Croquetas de jamón. I was shocked when I bit into the first. No ham?! Turns out I was just unlucky. In my second the cheesy filling wibbled around hammy jewels. Very good croquetas, although not quite on par with those I ate at Barrafina earlier in the week.

Jamón Ibérico was to die for, as ever; nutty fat slowly, slowly melting away…sigh. The carving was really quite something as you can see from the top photo. I’ve had a go at this myself at Brindisa and let me tell you, it’s not easy.

Having already packed away 3 courses we were really only after a nibble but a special of ‘Pluma Iberica‘ with piquillo pepper was so intriguing it duly got ordered. We looked at it, at each other and back at the plate, a mixture of fear and excitement brewing. Could we eat rare pork? The waiter reassured us of the quality and in we plunged. It had the plancha-charred initial taste and silken texture of rare steak then a deep pork flavour that somehow didn’t make your brain go “argh, raw pig, I’m going to die!”

So that was José; a few snacks effortlessly trumping an earlier elaborate 3 course meal. Fantastic ingredients, served simply and modestly. Of course these two places have completely different aspirations but that’s not my problem. All I have to do is decide where to spend my money. José wins every time.

José
104 Bermondsey Street
London
SE1 3UB
Tel: 0207 403 4902

I’ve just come back from a week in Puglia, specifically the Itria valley, which encompasses the provinces of Bari, Brindisi and Taranto. The area is noted for a distinctive architectural feature, the trullo; a conical shaped stone roof designed to cool in summer and insulate in winter. Our villa, Trullo Tranquillo was located just outside Ceglie Messapica in Brindisi, hidden away in a labyrinthine network of narrow dirt tracks. Being tucked away like this was not a bad thing, although it did define the way we shopped and ate while in Puglia. I thought it might be of use to others who want to visit the area if I share my experiences of shopping and eating here.

With no restaurants within walking distance of our villa and only 2 drivers among 9, all of whom harboured a desire to get drunk, opportunities to eat out were limited. Mostly we bought ingredients at local markets and cooked for ourselves. Our excursion to the town of Monopoli however, saw us busting bellies at Osteria Perricci.

There’s no menu here, an unexpected relief. Monopoli is a coastal town, so they just serve fish; “antipasti?” our host asked. We nodded. “Pasta?” Of course. “Fish? Grilled? Fried?” We ordered both.

First bruschetta, properly made. Ruby ripe tomatoes smooshed into garlic scrubbed toast. The tomatoes in Puglia are to die for.

Favourite antipasti were butterflied anchovies drenched in the ubiquitous (delicious) olive oil; meaty morsels of octopus and sweet mussels bathing in grassy pools of their own juices mixed with, you guessed it, lots of olive oil. A couple of duds didn’t spoil the fun at all; battered fish was, for me, all bready batter and little fish. Sundried tomatoes were chewy as ever, although the accompanying chunks of cucumber rocked; a sweet, round variety that tastes like a mild melon.

Huge bowls of pasta next – ‘fish’ spaghetti, predominantly octopus and squid in a tomato sauce which tasted of shellfish shells, silkily bound with cooking liquor. The second, not the Orecchiette typical of the region but similar in shape (I think Cencioni), delightfully chewy, the sauce packed with garlic and white wine, the bowl clattering with mussels and sweet clams. Chillies were added at table.

Eating was becoming more difficult. Simply grilled fish was delicious, but an effort. We picked lamely at fritto misto; I stuffed down as many tender squid rings as possible.

A refreshing lemon sorbet could not have been a more welcome finish, sitting atop sweet glazed strawberries, it saved us from passing into a food coma.

The owners don’t speak much English at Osteria Perricci but they’re very friendly and make it easy to get by with gesturing, nodding and piss poor attempts at speaking Italian. Our meal came to around €25 a head I think, including a few beers and a bottle of wine. You can walk it all off around Monopoli afterwards too; the old part of town is well worth a look.

Osteria Perricci
Via Orazio Comes, 1
70043 Monopoli Bari, Italy
080 9372208

We couldn’t visit Italy and not eat pizza. One evening 4 of us left camp to pick up some takeaway from Mamm Ce Pizza in Ceglie Messapica, reasoning that 1 pizza per person should be enough. As we sat waiting for our order it slowly dawned – they were the size of small planets. We staggered out with towering stacks, the owner following behind us; we turned to find him pointing and heartily laughing at our tiny Fiat 500. I think we made his evening. Next thing I know I’m jammed in the back, pizza boxes rammed between my face and the seat, not a millimetre to spare. Each bump in the road guffed more hot cheesy steam into the eyes. We snorted with laughter the whole journey, as did everyone who passed us.

Nice though, and cheap (€7-11 each for those monsters). The ham and ricotta was my favourite. Here’s the menu.

Mamm ce Pizz
Via Taranto, 5
Ceglie Messapica
Brindisi
334.3643145

The remainder of the time we shopped at (fairly) local food markets; some were better than others. I really hope my memory serves me correctly here because it could save you a lot of disappointment. Of the 3 we attempted to visit, only 2 were actually where they were supposed to be – those in Cisternino and Alberobello. We found stall holders at the former very friendly, at the latter a little less so, as at one point we got into a misunderstanding trying to buy figs and had to run away. Don’t let that put you off though, the majority were lovely.

I wouldn’t bother trying the market in Martina Franca; advertised in our guide book as happening ‘all day’ we failed to find anything apart from stalls selling cheap clothes and toilet rolls [Edit: see comment from Tony below; they do exist!]

All the markets carry the same stuff (seasonal, innit) and you’ll find fishmongers and butchers dotted around the towns. To find the markets, just head for the centre, it’s obvious once you arrive.

Fat, buttery green olives.

Bright pink prawns with purple heads.

Saving the shells to make pasta sauce.

Bream ready for the BBQ.

Tomato salad – one of many.

Langoustines.

Can’t beat a mooch around a foreign supermarket.

Now I’m going on a week long detox (that’s obviously a joke, I’m really making focaccia).

View Peckham Food and Drink Map in a larger map

A reader e-mailed me recently to suggest I make a Google map showing the best food shops and restaurants around Peckham (thanks Alex). I thought it would be a nice way to follow on from this post and extend it to cafes, restaurants and boozers. I may branch it out further when I have time, into Nunhead and East Dulwich but for now I expect you locals to tell me about all those places I’ve missed. Don’t let me down now.

There’s a little linky underneath the map above to take you to a fancy big one. Ooooh.

[Edit: Menu picture below updated March 2012. To see a larger version go to My Flickr]

A while back now I had some mates over and we remembered that Wuli Wuli do takeaway. I’ve been ordering one most Saturday nights since then and it’s so good I thought it might be worth a little reminder for those locals amongst you.

Remember you need to order from the Sichuan ‘B’ side of the menu, the other side is just the usual gloopy rubbish. Last night we feasted on (clockwise from top), mapo tofu; smacked cucumbers with garlic sauce; shredded potato with garlic sauce; the appetisingly named ‘saliva chicken’; monk’s vegetables and fried pork country style. Here’s a picture of the menu (below) in case it’s your first time and you don’t have one. This is the only page you need. If you’re going to order using the numbers make sure to say, “number 126-B” otherwise you’ll end up with number 126 from the A side of the menu and you’ll be faced with sweet and sour chicken balls.

The people are very friendly, the delivery super speedy (I’ve never had to wait more than 30 minutes for my food) and cheap; this lot (with 2 steamed rice) came to £30 and it fed 2 of us twice that evening and for lunch the next day. You get 2 free beers or a large soft drink with orders over £25. For me, nothing cuts through Sichuan food like an ice cold fizzy beer.

Wuli Wuli
15 Camberwell Church Street
London
SE5 8TR
Tel: 0207 708 5024
Free delivery on orders over £10
Open Mon-Sat 12-11pm and Sat-Sun 12-11.30pm; delivery time: 5-11pm.

I rarely write about restaurants these days. Eating out is still something I do several times a week but a restaurant rarely inspires me enough to want to sit down and tell you lot about it. Nopi is a perfect example. I mean yeah, it was okay but something about it feels a little uptight and damn, it’s expensive. Ottolenghi’s books, I find inspiring. His restaurants, not so much.

Anyway I am breaking my fast with Spuntino because it’s simply bloody brilliant. Nestled amongst the neon strip-lit sex shops of Soho sits Russell Norman’s latest project. It’s a small yet beautiful space, which Russell designed himself; on the first day of ownership he beat a pickaxe through the soulless MDF crust of an Indian restaurant to reveal glorious white glazed tiles and mosaics, slightly faded. Most of the seating is at the bar, the stools made in one of the UK’s oldest forgeries in Elephant, the very same which forged the lions in Trafalgar Square. Caged bulbs hang low above our heads; it’s all very basement chic.

We start ordering. It’s small plates, just like Polpo and Polpetto, all more than reasonably priced (Ottolenghi could learn a trick or two from Norman). We start with crunchy fingers of smoky aubergine plunged into fennel yoghurt. Brilliant. Then there’s just no stopping us. The modestly named ‘egg and soldiers’ is just that, but the egg is encased in a crunchy crust, golden oozy yolk ripe for the dunking. House pickles were perfect, not to sweet nor sour, the fennel the best of the bunch and something  I’ll definitely be trying at home. Lardo on toast was brilliant because it was lardo on toast (properly charred), caperberries the perfect astringent foil. A ground beef slider was seriously beefy, with that richness and depth that comes only from bone marrow. Melted cheese can never hurt, and it didn’t.

And then it came: truffled egg toast. Inspired by a dish in a New York caff with limited cooking facilities, the egg is cooked in the centre of fluffy white bread, a layer of melting Fontina in place of the ‘white’. The whole thing is infused with truffle oil. We descend on it like starving gannets, the yolk oozing from the bread with every cut. This is the food of dreams. There’s also a duck ham, pecorino and mint salad, sausage, lentils and radicchio heady with fennel and mustard and my first taste of grits: cheesy and spiked generously with paprika. Really though, it’s all about that truffled egg toast.

We still find room for dessert. Liquorice ice cream with carpaccio-ed pineapple arrives first. “It’s like eating a Black Jack!” I say to the barman who trumps me by saying it’s like eating a Black Jack and a Fruit Salad sweet at the same time, which it is. Brilliant fun. The ‘peanut butter and jam sandwich’ however is even better: the ‘bread’ is made from peanut butter ice cream, thick raspberry jam in the middle, crunchy bits and pieces sprinkled all over. Our spoons clash over the final mouthfuls.

The bar is great too. The staff are knowledgeable about both drinks and food and manage to be super trendy yet not annoying. The atmosphere is buzzing and I say more than several times that I could stay all night. In fact the only problem I can see with Spuntino is the urge to eat absolutely everything on the menu, and drink the bar dry. We spent £120 between two but we ate and drank like Kings and Queens. ‘Spuntini’ are priced at £3-£4.50; the average price of other dishes £5-£6. You can buy a shot of Dewar’s Scotch Whisky for £2 due to the ‘wafer thin margin’. Oh just go. Go, go and go again.

Spuntino
61 Rupert Street
Soho
W1D 7PW

Spuntino operates a no booking policy like Polpo and Polpetto.

On Wednesday night I worked a shift in the #MEATEASY kitchen. Not so much as a cook, they already have a team of chefs; what they really needed was a Kitchen Gimp. I embraced the role. The structure of the kitchen goes like this: you’ve got your Grill Boss who obviously manages the grill, your Fryer in charge of um, frying stuff and then your Burger Bed Prepper plus various other brilliant people in between. At the bottom of the food chain, you’ve got your Kitchen Gimp. That’s me. Turns out I was born to play the role and I fully entered The Zone.

My first task as part of General Gimping was to cut the buns. It’s an important job, people, cutting those buns evenly. Cutting your hand is optional, and to be honest I wouldn’t really recommend it. Next it was onion ring splitting – actually quite difficult and described by my teacher as “the most annoying thing in the world.” I wouldn’t go that far, as I rather got into it. Any membrane must be carefully removed because if it gets into the batter it’s a right nightmare to get out and increases the danger of the onion slipping out of the ring and sticking to your chin and burning it. Now that’s the most annoying thing in the world.

Other duties included weighing out that all important beef. The smell! The smell of the fresh meat was beautiful. I weighed, rolled into balls and stored ‘em just how Grill Boss likes ‘em, ready for him to flatten out on the grill. I made up Petra’s gorgeous chocolate fudge sundaes which consist of brownie, ice cream and hot chocolate sauce, which I once squirted over a woman’s white jeans when working in her Chocstar van. You know when things seem to happen in slow motion? The horror.

So I basically did anything everybody else didn’t have time to do, which is the whole point of being Kitchen Gimp. Washing up and fishing manky bits out of plug holes featured frequently on my list of duties. I rotated around my various gimp tasks, pausing only to take a swig from my ever present Meantime beer, drink a shot, or eat a wayward chicken wing deemed not crisp enough to leave the kitchen. Every now and then my razor sharp focus would be interrupted by a call for “MORE FORKS, GIMP!”  ’cause #MEATEASY really doesn’t have enough forks.

Working in that place is exhilarating. The energy is just so, so high. You’d have to be dead inside not to be caught up in the magic. It sounded like it was going off on the other side of the passe; I couldn’t see the customers but I sure could hear them. We saw the first contender for The Chilli Challenge: eat a chilli burger, chilli dog and chilli fries in the fastest time possible. Subsequent challengers tried and failed to beat him and I believe the record stands at somewhere around 5 minutes. The prize is to jump the food queue for as long as your name is top of the leaderboard. It’s like Man vs. Food, in New Cross.

I’ve volunteered myself for on-demand Gimping because it was just so much fun. Apparently I’ve set a trend, everyone wants to get in that kitchen. Perhaps they want to spy and steal the secrets behind the best burgers in London? Well I know some and I ain’t telling.

The atmosphere in the #MEATEASY is electric and that can only come from a bunch of people who are doing something from the heart. In a rare moment of Gimp rest I pause to look at Yianni and think back to August 2009 when I first got my gob around a Meatwagon burger in the middle of a car park in Peckham. It’s been a rocky road but look how far he’s come. I sink my teeth into a fresh Dead Hippy and wish him all the success in the world.

Read my interview with Yianni and Scott Collins from Capital Pubs here. The top photo of me gimping was taken by Chris on his iphone. The amazing pictures from that point forward were taken by the brilliant Ben Brown. Check out his #MEATEASY set here.

Goldsmiths Tavern,
316 New Cross Road,
New Cross,
London,
SE14 6AF

American Express have started a restaurant reward scheme called ‘Top Treats’ and the gist of it is that if you book through Top Table and pay with Amex, you can earn reward points and special deals at some smart restaurants. Chez Bruce is one of those restaurants. I’ve wanted to go for years despite Wandsworth being such an absolute arse to get to from Peckham. What is it with the South-East-South-West connections? Or lack of. The fastest way, no joke, is to go in to Victoria and then back out to Wandsworth. So I weaved along with the tangled web of TFL.

It’s a sweet little building really – filigrees and topiary line the front. Inside, it has a touch of the living room going on and when I arrived, it was empty but cosy. My mate was running late so they offered me a paper, which was thoughtful. It has a Michelin star, so I expected to be looked after but the gesture pleasantly surprised me. I settled in with a glass of bubbly and waited for my mate to arrive.

I started with the crab raviolo, razor clams and brown shrimps which came in an intense shellfish bisque-style sauce speckled with the allium twang of chives. A scallop was perfectly seared although without roe, which initially disappointed me until I wondered if they’d incorporated it into the sauce – in the end I didn’t feel I’d missed out on the flavour. Razor clams are so much more lovely when chopped into little pieces (I appreciate them more when I don’t have to consider their unnervingly weird shape) and brown shrimps should be used in everything where possible – end of. A brilliant little festival of shelled seafood and a really promising start to the meal.

I’m on a seafood binge at the moment so it had to be pan-fried fillet of cod with grilled (baby) squid, a piquillo pepper chutney (I suppose it was like a chutney, they probably called it something different) and salsa verde. The cod was delicious. Are we still allowed to eat cod from anywhere? Baby squid aren’t exactly encouraged either, are they? I eat both regularly because I am a bad person. Really nice though, if not hugely exciting. Everything was perfectly cooked and tasty, it just didn’t have that spark. I’d rather have sacked off the sweet piquillo pepper and had more punch from the salsa verde.

Cheese seemed like a good idea. We pounced on a fluffy and mellow goat cheese; a soft, brie-style cheese with a brilliant mushroomy rind; a classic salty crystallised Roquefort and two hard cheeses. I remember the names of none of them. Look, I’d had 2 glasses of champagne before I started and at this point was down a kir royale and a bottle of Albarino. I can tell you that they were all delicious and very well kept. What more do you want?

For dessert, a rum baba, mainly because I’d never got around to having one. It was very boozy, which pleased me,  as did a piece of sticky roasted pineapple which managed to be wintry and comforting.

The thing about Chez Bruce is that everything is really very nice – well cooked and delicious. I can see why it has a Michelin star. What I always want from my food though, is to be surprised – not necessarily challenged but, I want to have fun. It’s a real cliché now to call food ‘witty’ a la  Prue Leith on Masterchef, but to be playful with ingredients, to make guests’  hearts leap with excitement is the holy grail and I’m not just talking about fancy restaurants. Consider the excitement about street food right now. People want something personal and interactive, where they can get closer to the person behind the food. Be it watching your pimped-up burger cook whilst having a chat with the guy who’s making it, or feeling the chef’s personality come through on a Michelin-starred plate.

Chez Bruce is really a very good restaurant. No, really. It’s just a shame it didn’t give me the thrills.

The dinner menu costs £45 for 3 courses, which is excellent value.
I was a guest of Chez Bruce and Amex Top Treats

2 Bellevue Rd
Wandsworth
London
SW17 7EG
Tel: 020 8672 0114