Time for a spot of Yuletide dining

Acorn-fed Ibérico pig

This time of the year means festive lunches, and there have already been two thus far.

The first saw us back to Blacks for a third successive year, and where I’ve had issues with the food in the past. Fortunately, this was much the best visit in culinary terms.

A salad of hard boiled egg, endive and beetroot was pleasant, with a nice contrast between the richness of the egg and the bitter endive.

The game pie with red cabbage that followed was – if nothing like what you would expect of a game pie, being in a dish topped with puff pastry, and if having rather too much liquid in it – was perfectly edible and pleasantly filling.

A very slender slice of lemon tart with red berry coulis was pleasant without being overly exciting.

The second lunch of the week saw another return visit – this time, to Eyre Brothers on Leonard Street near the City of London, which describes itself as a tapas restaurant, no matter how very English the name sounds.

I started with grilled, smoked salmon, red onion, and crushed new potatoes with capers, dill and mustard.

Salmon, onion potatoes and dill

A very nice salad indeed – although from a personal perspective, probably with too much potato, since I get full very quickly. But the flavours were exceptionally nicely balanced.

After that, it was grilled fillet of acorn-fed Ibérico pig, marinated with pimentón, thyme and garlic, and served with patatas pobres – oven potatoes with green peppers, onions, garlic and white wine.

The restaurant advises that the pig (which had been feral) is grilled to medium rare, so I went with that too.

I can't say that I could taste the acorns, but that meat was a knockout – stunning flavor that packs a massive punch. Really very good indeed.

And we enjoyed caramelised, onions, roasted butternut squash and almonds, and spinach on the side.

Ginger and dark chocolate ice cream brought the meal to a close very pleasantly.

Citron tart

This was all washed down by a Lavradores de Feitoria, 2011, Douro, Portugal – a very pleasant red wine indeed: not too big, but fruity and with a lower alcohol volume than many other wines.

They don’t mess around with any ‘festive’ menus at Eyre Brothers, but continue to do what they know and what they do best.

Frankly, that alone is refreshing, when so many other eateries are going down the Christmas route.

I’d happily recommend Eyre Brothers – it’s smart, very good-quality dining, at prices that are lower than one might imagine.

Indeed, dinner on both days cost approximately the same, yet there was a substantial quality difference between the two.

That probably tells you something, although I’m not entirely sure what.

A little taste of Spain in the City

The festive season is almost upon us – so almost upon us, indeed, that the festive eating began yesterday, being entertained at Eyre Brothers in the City of London.

A very pleasant venue – which wasn’t there when I actually worked in the vicinity, but that’s beginning to seem like a very long time ago now – Eyre Brothers is dedicated to Spanish cuisine, but not, as is so trendy these days, just tapas.

As we nibbled olives and bread rolls, I ordered Brandada de bacalao (pictured left), which came with a soft-boiled egg, pimientos de piquillo, olives, capers and grilled bread, to start.

Brandade is an emulsion of salt cod and olive oil that’s also familiar in France as Brandade de Morue.

The only time I’ve eaten it previously was in a poor, touristy place in Paris, where it was only memorable for a bone piercing the roof of my mouth.

There was a single bone here too, but it was fished out in time. Otherwise, this was light and airy and a very soothing taste and texture.

The red pepper, olives and capers added a real burst of gutsy flavour and colour, while the thick piece of chargrilled bread brought texture, and the egg – cooked to perfection, with the yolk just running – seemed to bring the diner full circle to smooth, soothingness once more.

This really was a delightful and very satisfying dish.

Next up was roast Barbary duck with savoy cabbage, chesnuts and smoked pancetta.

It didn’t exactly bode well. Like an echo of last year’s pheasant at Blacks, was a leg and thigh, served in one piece, atop the cabbage mix, in a bowl.

That makes it difficult to cut – and indeed, sharper knives would also have helped.

Confit leg would work nicely like this – where the meat flaked easily away from the bone – but this was harder work although, once I managed to get to the thickest, brownest meat, it was tasty.

And the cabbage, chestnuts and bacon was very pleasant indeed, although the cabbage could possibly have been cooked a tad less.

Side dishes included broccoli – but I’m afraid that was taking the old al dente thing to the extreme of near rawness.

To finish, I opted for dulce de leche ice cream, which was pleasant and light.

Since the entire company was eating dark meat/game, we opted for a 2010 Quinta dos Roques from Portugal, which was bold and fruity and very enjoyable.

The fellow diner who also had duck was of the same opinion as me. But those who had the lamb said that it was excellent – and it certainly looked so.

It was good to see an eatery that hadn’t gone all insanely festive with the menu as soon as Advent had dawned, but was sticking with what it does normally.

Service was friendly and very pleasantly unrushed.

For all the small qualms, I’d be happy to eat at Eyre Brothers again.

'Too much' Masterchef?

It’s apparently the case that I have been watching too much Masterchef. Now I should point out, after yesterday’s lengthy tirade against the dominance of TV in family life, that this is currently one of only a very few TV programmes that I’m watching.

Okay, there’s usually a bit of football most weeks, but other than that, in terms of programmes that I myself select, on a regular basis, there might be University Challenge and very little else.

Nor do I usually follow such competitions as this, but it has been fascinating – not least because of Michel Roux Jnr. He shows respect to all the contestants, he actually knows the difference between objective and subjective opinions – and lets the former rule his judging – and his demonstrations of various classic dishes are just fascinating and incredibly educative.

But how can I have been watching ‘too much’ of this?

Wednesday saw our department Christmas lunch. After the culinary disappointments of the last two years, at gastro pub Harrisons and then Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, I was looking forward to something rather better on the food front.

This year, we were booked into Blacks, a club in the heart of London’s Soho, courtesy of a colleague who is a member being able to book us in.

It was a very pleasant setting, with a small dining room and open fire (not real, but very convincing). There was plenty to be optimistic about.

The menu wasn’t a specifically Christmas one either, which also seemed like a good thing, since that should surely mean that the chefs would be cooking dishes that they were much more familiar with.

I opted for a squid ink tagliatelle, with Cornish crab, chilli and parsley to start.

There could have been more crab and less pasta; it could have been hot, rather than a case of the pasta being barely warm (but cooked), but it was really quite pleasant.

I’d also chosen the pheasant – another chance to continue my game education by having it properly cooked for me. But it was not to be.

My half of a bird arrived in just that condition in a bowl – to look at, that was the dish: just a rather large chunk of meat in a bowl.

A little searching revealed that there was some cavolo nero, the Italian kale, and some pancetta underneath, but the presentation was distinctly lacking.

‘Hey ho,’ I though and dug in. It was woefully overcooked and, as a result, very dry.

Even I know that the biggest difficulty with cooking game birds is keeping them moist. You need it to be a little pink – this was the colour of roast chicken.

It wasn’t helped by comparison with Sunday’s partridge at Bistrot Bruno Loubet either.

By the time a colleague on our table, who was having the same thing, had walked to the kitchen to request some gravy (she’s German, incidentally, and loathe though I am to do stereotypes, they’re bloody good at taking this sort of action), I had grown tired of it and wasn’t in the mood to eat much more.

I stuck with simple caramel ice cream for dessert, which was perfectly tasty – although presented a tad poorly again, being nothing more than the ice cream in a small dish.

A short while later, the maitre d came over and was asking him how the meal had been. I said that the starter had been nice, but also that the pheasant had been overcooked, dry and poorly presented.

He apologised – and gave me an extra glass of wine to compensate a tad.

Later, I told The Other Half what had happened. It was when I got around to mentioning that I’d criticised the presentation that he said I’d been watching too much Masterchef.

Which is not entirely fair. I didn’t expect haute cuisine along Roux lines, but it didn’t take any sort of an expert to realise how poor the presentation was.

At the simplest level, it could have been helped enormously by being jointed – as my partridge had been at the weekend – leaving the cavolo nero and pancetta instantly visible.

Personally, I’d not have served it in a bowl either, but on a plate – again making it easier to see beyond the meat.

So, Masterchef or not, I’m sticking with my critique. And I'd be prepared to wager that Michel would agree with me too.