Christmas highlights a strange relationship with food

Dining out in style?

It struck me yesterday, as I was mulling – not wine, but yet another poor Christmas lunch out – that I have never, on Christmas visits to Paris or Lille, seen (let alone eaten in) restaurants offering a ‘festive menu’.

As I said last week, Eyre Brothers was so good – partly precisely because it sticks to what it knows and what it does best, instead of trying to do something different for just a few weeks of the year.

Yesterday’s lunch was at a rather old and pleasant pub near Croydon, with my parents. In this case, I’m not going to name it, because the issue is wider.

We’d lunched there about six weeks ago – and it was really very pleasant. I’d enjoyed a pint of ale with an entirely edible steak and kidney pie. Proper pub grub – done, if not to the calibre of Tom Kerridge, then decently.

However, since they couldn’t get in to their favoured place this week, we returned, with optimism in our hearts.

It was sadly misplaced.

To be fair, it should have been obvious. They were doing a ‘festive’ menu alongside the normal one.

To start with, I opted for chicken and apricot terrine with pear chutney and sourdough. What can go wrong?

The terrine was pretty bland and so dry that it crumbled. The pear chutney was overly sweet and the sourdough was just a doorstep that had been cut off a loaf – I mean, come on: the least you do in these situations is toast it!

My father had a butternut squash soup that he enjoyed. My mother had the smoked salmon that came with a clumsy garnish of a few small leaves and more of the same bread.

They then both had the roasted duck leg, which was overcooked to the point of toughness.

I had a venison suet pudding, which wasn’t bad: the suet pastry was pleasantly thin; the meat was passable, but the gravy had the taste of being out of a bottle.

All were served with a celeriac mash that was lumpy and unseasoned, cabbage that was so tepid and ‘al dente’ that it was inedible, and a ‘garnish’ of a sprig of raw rosemary shoved in wherever seemed most possible.

That rosemary was perhaps the biggest indicator of there being something seriously wrong. Why would you stab in an inedible garnish like that, on a plate of food that hardly looks scintillating to start with? It’s the culinary equivalent of giving someone the finger.

All dishes were advertised as including chestnuts. In the event, these were noticeable only by their absence.

My father didn’t bother with a dessert: my mother had sticky toffee pudding that lacked on the sticky toffee bit – almost no sauce on the sponge and a couple of drizzles on the plate, plus a scoop of salted caramel ice cream.

I stuck with the ice cream alone, which was pleasant if overly rich.

My father was so peeved by the whole business that he didn’t finish his pint of cider, while my mother and I left a third of a bottle of wine. I say ‘left’, but I screwed the top on firmly, wiped down the glass with a paper napkin, walked out with it and popped in the fridge back in their kitchen.

It’s saying something when my parents – and my father in particular – are so annoyed by a meal. Neither are them are remotely ‘foodies’ and will see greater quality in meals than I can.

The root of the problems?

Putting on a seasonal menu when it’s not what you’re used to doing, and catering for far more people than you’re used to catering for.

However, on the basis not simply of yesterday, but of a number of experiences over the years, I suspect also that, in some cases, there is a feeling that people won’t really notice – not least because they’re knocking back the booze.

The increasingly shrill laughter in the room next door to us seemed to illustrate that this was probable.

And the equation works two ways.

Anecdotally, but also on the basis of comments from other people, many do not particularly expect good food – or are not looking for it – but simply want the ‘ambiance’.

As I touched on last week, you can end up paying as much for poor quality as you do for good. Yesterday’s meal was far from cheap.

But this seems to be part of the same syndrome that has Brits insisting on having sprouts with their Christmas dinner even when they dislike them.

There is also, of course, the legendary reluctance to complain, thus allowing places to get away with below-par food.

I didn’t complain yesterday simply because I had no desire to make my parents feel more awkward than they already were. And frankly, I too just wanted to get out of the place.

Just to note, the service yesterday was attentive and pleasant: the quality of the food and of the cooking was not our waitress’s fault.

So, in large numbers, we go out to dine at Christmas, apparently expecting or looking for ‘festive’ meals.

We put up with poor food and say that the ‘ambiance’ is more important, and then pay over the odds for what is put in front of us.

Businesses are thus allowed to get away with providing a below-standard product.

As I said at the top of this post: when I’ve been in France at this time of year, I have not seen ‘festive menus’ – seasonal menus, yes, but that’s something different.

Various people have claimed that the state of food in the UK has never been better.

At the top end of dining, this is absolutely true. But there’s an awful lot below that, and Christmas seems not only to emphasise the shortcomings, but also to illustrate the rather perverse relationship that Britons seem still to have with their food.

At this time of year, you might assume that people would expect the best. The reality seems to be opposite – and it seems to be acceptable.

Mind, since campaigners are still struggling to have accepted the idea of basic, national standards for hospital food, as though government doesn’t understand the link between health and what we eat, is any of this really surprising?

A taste of the '70s

It’s one way of measuring age to say that you can tell you’re getting older when things you remember from your youth become fashionable again; when what was nostalgic turns up once more, but repackaged this time as retro chic.

The weather is not the only source of deluges of late – inspired no doubt by the Diamond Jubilee, we've been swamped too with nostalgia for all things ’70s, when the last big Jubilee bash occurred.

That was a decade in which scampi was posh food. I remember day trips to Blackpool, my father desperate to go to the famous circus; my mother less so.

We did go, at least twice; in the halcyon days of the great Charlie Cairoli. I remember with enormous pleasure the mix of innocence and anarchy of his troupe of clowns (catch an example).

Stopping at souvenir shops on the promenade, my father bought my sister a Bolton Wanderers pendant and me a Manchester City one: the roundel badge in enamel on stainless steel. Very much of its time.

And we visited a restaurant where scampi came in a basket and I felt so sophisticated eating such a swanky meal.

It was the decade too of chicken Kiev: the sort of dish that you'd never have at home, and which I only remember as some sort of mythical, exotic concoction.

The Other Half used to quite enjoy a Kiev: the sort that came out of the chiller cabinet in the supermarket and was cooked on a tray in the oven. Neither of us had experienced the real deal.

And so, in this mood of nostalgia and retro chic, it occurred to me last week that it would inserting to actually make some. Within a day or two at the most, the Guardian, having clearly anticipated my mood, published a column by Felicity Cloake, testing out five recipes to find which was best Kiev.

Frankly, I was surprised at just how easy it looked. And so on Sunday, between the football, I set about the business. It's something that is made in stages, so you need to some hours beforehand.

First, make your butter. Cloake used a variety of flavourings: I settled on straightforward crushed garlic, with some chopped parsley from the garden. Once it's blended into the butter, simply roll in cling film until you've got a lengthy sausage shape, then wrap tightly and pop back into the fridge.

A hour or so later, take your chicken breasts, place them between cling film and beat out carefully. You could cut pockets. You could used the piece of meat that comes attached to the main breast flesh. Or you could do as I did and simply wrap half of the chilled utter 'sausage' in each breast, tucking in the ends. The cling film helps enormously. Get your meat nice and neat and tightly wrapped – and then pop it into the freezer for two hours.

So, what next?

Well, after about two hours, beat a couple of eggs. Make a load of breadcrumbs. Season some plain flour.

Take out your rolled chicken. Unwrap. Roll first in the flour and the in the eggs and then in the breadcrumbs. Repeat the eggs and breadcrumb bit, making sure you've got even, all-over coverage.

Pop on a plate and pop into the fridge. And this is the key that Cloake had found works best. By letting it get close to frozen, the breading is made easy. And then you simply allow it that final hour to thaw before cooking.

When you're ready, heat a large pan of oil to 160˚C – a thermometer makes this so much easier than guessing and doing the bread cube test – put the Kievs carefully into the pan and cook for eight and a half minutes.

If you have more than your pan will hold, you can put each cooked batch into a pre-heated (to 150˚C) oven while you do the rest.

And voila! You have chicken Kiev.

I let the oil get hotter than I should have (impatience) and the breadcrumb crust became very brown. But they were perfectly edible; the meat had remained decently moist - and the biggest achievement of all was that none of the butter leaked out.

I was going to serve them with a salad of orange and pickled beetroot, but since The Other Half had bitten his tongue rather nastily while listening to the radio commentary of a particularly tense Castleford Tigers match, he asked for something less sharp.

So they were served with new potatoes and asparagus, with further butter - hardly a hardship.

It wasn't to be the end of the retro food, though. Or, for that matter, the beginning.

Over the Jubilee weekend, I'd tried my hand at trifle for only the second time. Boudoir biscuits crushed at the base and mixed with raspberries, good raspberry jam and a smidgen of Banyuls that had been languishing in the fridge, were topped with raspberry jelly - The Other Half insists that jelly is essential to trifle.

Later, came homemade custard, topped eventually with whipped cream, more raspberries, grated chocolate and a few sprigs of mint. It didn’t have a very firm set, but it tasted fine.

And so to this Tuesday and a visit to my parents. They have decided, in the last year or so, that instead of my mother spending hours in the kitchen to rustle up something, they'll take me out for a meal. It means less hassle for her, and also ensures that we actually spend time as a trio together.

This time, it was to a country pub a few miles away: the Grumpy Mole at the Inn on the Green. And jolly pleasant it was too. I don't exactly get to such places very often - you really do need a car.

Unrushed, with very pleasant service, the menu was the epitome of nostalgia, with fish and chips, steak and kidney pud, liver and bacon, and various pies, together with a few nods to more ‘modern’ tastes – or put another way, curry.

I started with a very pleasant chef's pate, followed by another retro classic. Yes, you guessed it – scampi.

The peas were the frozen variety, as were the chips. But at least the scampi wasn't any of the reformed nonsense that I've had whenever I've ordered it in assorted hotel restaurants on my travels around the UK in recent years. The tartare sauce hit the spot exactly.

It’s not posh; it’s not sophisticated. But there is a place for such dishes. And it’s still a darned sight better than most of the rubbish served up as ‘fast food’ these days.

At home later, with the mood still over me, I downloaded some music from the decade too. Punk.

Unsurprisingly, given the prominence of the Sex Pistols et al at the time of Her Maj’s celebrations in 1977, there has been a swathe of programmes about that counter culture too.

I didn’t ‘do’ punk at the time. Oh, I have vague memories of it, but while the memories are vague, they’re invariably negative. I had just started my O’level music course - with no parental encouragement, I hasten to add - and was infinitely more interested in Beethoven than the Buzzcocks.

I was also a million miles from being a rebel – although to be fair, I was finding my own little ways to do just that: studying music and proclaiming a future trading the boards were my rebellion, and they took plenty of energy to maintain in the face of much objection.

Standing on a stage, even doing Shakespeare, was my punk. It was my freedom. Punk sailed over my head.

But listening to some of it now I can hear the music - and the poetry. Ian Dury and the Blockheads are a prime example of the latter.

Watching a TOTP2 special, The Other Half was voicing disappointment that so many of the artists had ‘sold out’ – or to put it more clearly, are reforming to ride the wave of the nostalgia boom.

I still have never ‘got’ the idea that people really expected musicians to somehow stay outside of so many of the norms of our time.

John Lydon advertising butter makes me laugh - not beat my head in despair.

It is, it seems to me, as inherently foolishly idealistic as those people who condemn football players for moving clubs when higher wages are on offer – and more chance of winning things, but let's forget 'career profession' for the sake of this argument.

They voice regret that ‘loyalty’ no longer exists. But in a world where staying in the same job, with the same employer, for all your working life is now derided, why do they expect anything different from footballers?

It seems as though we put vast faith in others to buck the system on our behalf.

Perhaps it’s retro and perhaps it’s not, but maybe there’s a moral in that little observation?

A tale of two restaurants

If Christmas can be the best of times, it can also be the worst of times – and not least for the culinary arts.

This has been The Week of Festive Lunches: both Tuesday and Wednesday saw us quitting our desks early for mellow afternoons of food and drink.

In a quirk of timing, Tuesday also saw me get my new teeth, so I was looking for easy-to-eat food by Wednesday when I decided to make my first proper efforts at eating with said gnashers.

On Tuesday, our small (but perfectly formed) editorial team headed to Da Mario in Covent Garden, to be wined and dined by our major external supplier.

A family-run Italian trattoria, it offers decently-priced, enjoyable, simple Italian food.

I had a starter of deep-fried goat’s cheese and roasted red pepper sauce, served with a shredded salad or raw white and red cabbage. The cheese was very mild and I half suspect – perhaps completely unfairly – that it had been bought in, ready-crumbed. But it was comforting, nicely presented and not unpleasing.

Next up for me was a dish of pappardelle, with Italian sausage, broccoli, garlic and chili. Comforting and enjoyable – although I couldn’t get any taste of garlic or chili. It was well cooked, with both the pasta and broccoli nicely done, while the thin but meaty sausage remained moist.

Dessert was a large ball of lemon ice cream, with frozen Limoncello liqueur inside, and covered in crushed meringue: it looked unspectacular compared to everyone else’s dessert (that’s The Other Half’s semifrodo in the background), but was a really zingy delight.

So, a definite success.

And so to yesterday afternoon and lunch with the full unit at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street.

If it had only been called ‘The Cheshire Cheese’, someone would have had to change ‘The’ to a ‘Ye’ and add an ‘Old’. With an ‘e’.

Now it’s fair to say that nobody (that I know, at any rate) goes to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese for the grub. You go for the atmosphere; for the knowledge that, after a previous incarnation was destroyed by the Fire of London, this place was rebuilt in 1667. That’s right – re-built. And almost 350 years ago.

Our party was in the Chop Room, where a portrait of Dr Johnson hangs over one bench, with a brass plaque stating that this was his favourite place to sit. Next to the fire – a sensible man. It’s the sort of thing to give a literary fan like me a certain frisson.

In a frame in the same room there’s a copy of a first edition of Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, which includes a scene in a pub that is clearly Ye Cheese. Dickens certainly visited more than once. And of course, while it’s a rather limited view of Yuletide tradition in the UK, the Dickensian Christmas looms large in the collective psyche.

So this, in other words, is a very big cheese amongst London pubs – and not least during this jolly season.

Which is all quite enough for me to conclude that the atmosphere alone is worth the visit.

But at what point do you then say that the standard of the food is irrelevant?

To get a private room, we’d had to guarantee 25 people. That was at £30 a head. In other words, the owners made a guaranteed (paid up front) £750 – which didn’t include any drinks at all or even coffee at the end of the meal.

There was a limited choice of four wines – two red, two white, none named specifically and none under £18.

With the need for softish food fairly high in my mind, I started with a terrine of salmon and smoked trout. It was okay, but a tad salty.

Then I went for the steak and kidney pud – a really traditional dish. The first thing I speared was a tiny piece of kidney. I nearly whooped in delight, imagining that if that was the first thing I’d found, it wouldn’t be the last piece of velvety deliciousness to pass my lips (it always irritates me that steak and kidney pies and puddings seems almost devoid of one of those essential ingredients).

But my nearly whoop had been too soon. It was the last piece of kidney I found, amid some reasonable steak, a middling gravy and a ton of slightly soggy suet. The roast potatoes were hardly the stuff of legend, while the sprouts and carrot batons were undercooked. Nothing was piping hot – and although the room had an open fire, it would have had to be roaring rather more than it was to really spread any warmth further around the room than Dr Johnson’s chosen space.

For dessert, I went for a poached pear, served with an orange marmalade ice cream. It would have helped to have a dessert fork as well as spoon for what was arguably the most successful of the courses. In Italy, they might be able to fillet a sole with a spoon, but I cannot easily eat a pear with a spoon alone.

Now our party was not full of what you’d term foodies, but even some of those for whom food would not be a major issue have since voiced their disappointment.

On the other hand, the view has also been put that: ‘Well, it’s Christmas and what else can you expect?’ as if it’s actually unfair or unreasonable to expect better.

But the more I think about it, while I certainly wouldn’t expect haute cuisine in such an establishment – it’s not what you’d want there anyway – is it really unfair to expect a better standard than what we got, particularly when we were hardly paying peanuts in the first place?

It is, I suspect, another aspect of that very English attitude of not complaining, of ‘putting up’. And perhaps it’s also that big con again – the belief that quality in food is beyond the reach of most people’s pockets, so that we have to put up with a lesser quality because it’s what we can afford.

As Da Mario showed, food doesn’t have to be over-ambitious to be good. You don’t have to over-stretch yourself just because it’s Christmas.

And steak and kidney pud isn’t called ‘steak and one bit of kidney pud’ – so put more kidney in it!

All of which brings me back to Harrison’s, the Bloomsbury gastro pub in which we had our festive lunch last year. Another team went there this time around and reports have filtered back to me.

Quite apart from whether a pineapple soup is really the best way forward for a venue that was struggling to cope with simpler fodder last year, serving a chocolate tart with Greek yogurt must be a form of blasphemy in most people’s book.

I’ve no desire to be unfair to cooks who are working damned hard to give people a good culinary experience – and cooking’s no soft-option job. But perhaps we all need to sharpen our critical muscles – and stop simply accepting and excusing food that isn’t up to what it should be and which, frankly, constitutes something of a rip off. Regardless of whether Dr Johnson held court there or Dickens felt a touch of inspiration while quaffing a tankard of porter.

Over-reaching yourselves doesn't equal good dining

Well, yesterday's department Christmas lunch was a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon – in spite of the food.

Never has it been so spectacularly illustrated that over stretching yourself is not a good idea.

Harrison's is a decent gastro pub. Last year's Christmas dinner wasn't bad, but when I've lunched there on a couple of occasions in the last 12 months, the food has been very enjoyable. The trouble starts, though, when they imagine that they can cater to something upwards of 60 people in a single afternoon, when they're clearly not used to doing so.

I'd ordered a smoked mackerel salad – but my heart sank when it arrived. The fish was clearly dyed and thus not properly smoked. It was dry too. And it had simply been slapped on a plate with a dollop of horseraddish and a handful of watercress. Which hadn't actually been washed properly, as I discovered when noticing a tiny grub slithering around on my plate. It was my very first such Victor/Victoria moment. The Other Half, who had ordered the same thing, had a bug too.

I told the staff and was promised that the price of the starter would be removed from the bill.

Several people had opted for the paté. Which turned up in small ramekins – with an almost liquid topping. It was either duck or goose fat, which melts very quickly outside a fridge. It should have been clarified butter, which gives a proper seal and allows you to lift it cleanly away from the contents beneath. And amazingly, this was served with slabs of bread that had not even been toasted.

Then came my main course. For a change, I'd been tempted away from roast meat by the offer of a risotto of chestnuts, sage and Pecorino. It was moderately alright – okay, it was hot, the rice was decently cooked and there was evidence of chestnut slivers in the dish. The sage was absent – and sage is not a herb you can hide easily. And the Pecorino was simply grated over the top. It was hugely under-seasoned, which leads me to believe that the stock it had been cooked with wasn't much cop either.

Various colleagues, eating either roast turkey or beef, seemed much happier.

And so to dessert. Thinking of my perennial struggle to consume a full three courses, I'd ordered the cheese, biscuits and fruit, thinking that I could nibble away for some time. But my plate arrived with three substantial slabs of Stilton, Red Leicester and a brie. Plus a few biscuits, but no butter. The fruit was a shock – dried apricots and not even decent ones: those quite hard, orange dyed ones. If you're going to serve preserved fruit with cheese as a dessert, at least have the decency to get good ones – in the case of apricots, undyed organic ones, which are really moist and sweet, and a lovely caramel colour.

At least the wine – a 2009 South African Merlot – was quaffable. And quaff I did. I'm not sure whether I'll go back again.

A Bloomsbury lunch

The Norfolk Arms is an old Bloomsbury gin palace, sitting on a street corner, just up from a hidden Lutheran church, and slap bang opposite the secondhand book shop that served as the Black Books shopfront of TV comedy fame.

Indeed, the exterior of the Norfolk Arms itself was seen in a couple of episodes.

It was a fairly run-down pub in those days. A few years earlier, when I had lived around the corner, it had been one of the few local boozers that I had felt no inclination to try.

But it has subsequently been reinvented as a gastro-pub, and now provides a quite regular lunch venue near work.

They’ve stripped back the walls and the floor, and gone for rather minimalist furnishing – old, cream-painted tables and the sort of chairs that probably once occupied a church somewhere, with a little shelf on the back for your hymnal.

The old bar remains in the centre of the space and food is delivered via a dumb waiter.

Today’s waiter isn’t dumb, although the service can be a tad slow sometimes – but why rush a meal? I can’t think of anywhere else, though, where I’m served by someone in hipster jeans – fortunately, the pinstripe boxers beneath appear to be in pristine condition. But Batyr is attentive without being pushy – and also sports some very nifty tattooing on his right arm.

The clientele is mixed – not quite Bohemian these days, but reflective of an area that is home to a lot of non-governmental organisations as well as more 'conventional' businesses.

Unfortunately, they’ve now scrapped the blissfully good-value two-course set lunch for a tenner deal, but it’s still better than anything else in the area – and worth paying more occasionally.

Today, I started with chicken liver paté, toast and an aubergine chutney.

The paté was excellent – beautiful texture and heaving with garlic. It made me wonder why my own efforts at paté have been too garlicky (if that’s possible). The recipe I’ve used is a Delia one and calls for raw garlic to be incorporated. But for some reason or other I found that too much. I wonder if the garlic in today’s paté has been cooked first?

Bread here is always good and the toast was no exception, while the chutney gave a nice sweetness to the course.

For my main course, I had grilled swordfish steak, accompanied by a mix of butter beans, diced carrot, mushrooms and saffron. Very pleasant, although the swordfish was close to the cusp of being overcooked.

And all washed down with a glass of nice, fruity Tempranillo.

It was a very pleasant lunch – and, as always when I eat out nowadays, I find that I learn things and can appreciate the food and the cooking more than I ever did in days of yore.

And gastro pubs are the saving grace of eating out in London these days – in many cases, providing much better value for money, and just as good a dining experience as supposedly very good restaurants.

Long live the reborn Norfolk Arms.