Time to see food and eat it in Brighton

My dining partner

Time spent working away from home can be a mixed blessing, but one of the pluses (sometimes) is that it means that you’re forced to eat out.

With last week having been spent in Brighton, there were four culinary experiences worth a mention.

Next to the hotel – the Hilton Metropole – is a fairly basic chippy. Nothing is cheap in Brighton, but it’s not bad and, after arriving and setting up camp on the Saturday, I headed there for a celebratory plate of scampi, chips and mushy peas.

Wandering around outside the large open restaurant was a seagull, on the scrounge for any fodder.

I threw a chip. It was wolfed down. I threw another. That went the same way.

Some minutes later, I was outside feeding it chips by hand, which put a wide grin on my face, even as passers-by were freaking out.

And no – it didn’t peck me, but took each chip carefully. The bloke inside was tickled pink and, on other visits during the week, would tell me that “your friend” had been back.

Calamari

There followed a few days of very basic eating – mostly the same place, with steak and kidney pies substituting for the scampi on one or two occasions. By the standards of many such places, the pies – Pukka ones – were surprisingly, well, pukka. There was even actual kidney in them.

Tuesday saw my first serious diversion into a better culinary experience, with dinner with colleagues at Al Fresco, the thoroughly pleasant Italian restaurant that lives in the converted 1950s Milkmaid Pavillion that links the shore and the promenade.

To start with, I went for deep fried calamari with a smoked paprika aïoli.

It’s easy to view that as being simple in the extreme, but rarely in the UK have I had calamari so beautifully cooked – it was light as a feather, tender and as scrumptious as anything.

Ravioli

For a second course, it was ravioli of fresh langoustine and scallop, which was bound in a light fresh ginger, lemon

and mascarpone cream, and came garnished with a seared scallop and a grilled langoustine.

Naturally sweet, but with the ginger adding a very welcome zing, this was very pleasant indeed.

Having thus whetted the old appetite, Wednesday afternoon found me with the time to indulge in a serious lunch, and thus trying Riddle & Finns, a new restaurant housed in the arches on the seafront.

As I approached, the rain came down and diners seated outside plunged into the interior.

As a result, it was suddenly packed. Since time was no issue, I said that waiting would be no problem, and took up residence on a sofa, just inside.

Bread and paté

Given that I had to work again later, I declined the offer of a glass of wine and stuck with water. And I did half wonder whether they thought that this very casually-attired single woman was a serious diner for such an establishment – no, I really don’t need colcannon explaining to me.

But when it became clear that the rain had been but a shower and had departed, I took a table outside.

Having ordered a main, I was rather surprised to find a substantial basket of bread and butter, and pots of smoked mackerel paté, horseradish sauce and mayonnaise in front of me.

It was large even for an hors d’oeuvres. The waiter told me that, if I chose to eat it, then there was a cover charge of £1, but otherwise, no cost.

Now, I have to say that that is the first time I’ve ever been directly charged anything for hors d’oeuvres or an amuse bouche – and I’ve eaten at and written about some top-notch restaurants over the years – and it has a certain classlessness about it.

Lobster salad

That said, it was well worth a quid of anyone’s money. The paté was quite simply superb, while the bread was very good and the horseradish and mayo – both homemade – were also excellent.

My main was a salad of half a lobster, which came served, very elegantly, on a delightful bed of fresh, varied leaves, the bitterness of which contrasted superbly with the sweetness of the lobster meat.

It had small pieces of mango and pink grapefruit to give the dish a real lift – as well as added colour and texture – and proved to be a genuinely superior salad.

Riddle & Finns is not cheap, but when you are served such an excellent lunch, then no complaints are required.

By way of a contrast – of sorts – a lunchtime ramble along the seafront on Friday saw me finally find my way to Jack and Linda Mills’s Brighton smokery, which also resides under the arches of the promenade.

The smoke house

They smoke their own fish in a tiny black hut at the edge of the pebbled beach, and then sell it in pots or in bread.

Years ago, Rick Stein had visited and raved – I’d pledged to finally make it there myself.

They are an absolutely charming couple – and my little pot of mixed crab meat, served with fresh lemon, was lovely.

Wandering back to work along the promenade itself, I suddenly felt the urge to do something that would make it a really tradition British seaside lunch: buy an ice cream.

A little pot of crab

There I was, with a cone of the whippy, soft stuff that, in almost all other circumstance, I'd deride. But somehow, as you’re strolling down the prom, prom, prom, nothing could be more tiddely om pom pom.

Finally, just a brief note about the hotel: taking £300 out of my current account, at £50 a night, as a ‘guarantee’ against anything I might put on the room over the course of my stay, should more accurately be called ‘taking the piss’.

Fortunately, there was no sign of mould in my room, even if it was steamingly hot between mid morning to mid evening – an issue replicated in many of the rooms. The hotel management knows perfectly well about this – hence the fans sitting in most wardrobes.

Presumably they also know that opening the cupboard under the TV to find that there isn’t even a fridge – and at least some of the rooms that did have one don’t seem to have had one that worked – is also a tad annoying.

Jack Mills

Remembering last year’s stay at the Hilton in Liverpool, I checked the situation on tipping via your room tab. Don’t – it won’t find its way to the staff you want to thank. Give them cash, personally.

The staff themselves were unfailingly polite, helpful and friendly. I have no gripe with them whatsoever.

But for a supposedly four-star hotel, the owners are playing rip-off games and also allowing the building to rot, without bothering to invest in work that clearly needs doing rather seriously.

Mould on windows or in baths, as was apparently found by a number of people on check in, is simply not acceptable.

Hopefully, someone else will take it off Hilton’s hands soon – and then spend the money that needs investing to return it to its former glory.

A shortfilm about Jack and Linda Mills

Riddle & Finns

Al Fresco

Top-notch scallops and a rather sad sandwich

Scallops – but not the fish 'n' chippy sort

As the week chugged on, I nearly reached the point of singing ‘In me Liverpool Home’ – mostly because The Other Half ‘sang’ the chorus the other day, only to discover that I knew at least one of the verses.

Mind, it made a change from the semi-constant Beatles soundtrack that is in my head – probably because of walking past the entrance to The Beatles Story so regularly over the last five days.

But setting that aside, there have been a range of food experiences over the last few days that call for a little comment.

First up, Tuesday night’s dinner for our particular conference staff team.

We had been booked into the Hanover Street Social brasserie and bar. And jolly nice it proved to be.

From a very sensibly-sized menu, I started with sautéed king scallops with cauliflower purée and pomegranate, and a golden raisin and caper jus.

First, let's point out that the scallops were superbly cooked.

It was, in many ways, a very sweet dish. But this is entirely a natural sweetness and enormously pleasing. A dish full of really lovely tastes.

For my main course, I kept a theme going and opted for pan-fried duck breast with celeriac purée and a golden raisin jus. It should have come with sautéed potatoes too, but I asked them to substitute asparagus instead, which they did.

And that was when the trouble began.

There we were, waiting for our food, when our waitress came over and explained that there’d been an ‘accident’ with my dish and they were having to cook it from fresh again.

The ‘accident’, it materialised, had occurred when one of the restaurant's other diners had walked past my dish and somehow contrived to get their hand into my grub.

It then became clear that the culprit was one of our own table.

I mention no names, friends, but let’s put it like this: I was the lone Manchester City fan at the table. That criminal was the only Manchester United fan.

The prosecution rests.

Of course, it meant that my main course was somewhat delayed. But the restaurant then told me that it was on the house because of the wait.

They didn’t need to do that – it hadn’t been their fault. But it was appreciated and the sign of a good business.

Anyway, the duck was also most enjoyable. We were stuffed by the end of two courses, so nobody bothered with a dessert. But it’s fair to say that that was the meal of the week.

Wine, incidentally, was a white Cuvee Jean Paul from the Languedoc – and very pleasant it was, with notes of elderflower and grapefruit.

It’s also worth noting that, certainly when we were there, the music was at exactly the right sort of volume not to make conversation difficult.

On Monday, having pigged out at the chippy at lunch time, we’d had a bar snack in the evening, and it was much the same on Wednesday night too, having met a friend for a larger-than-usual lunch.

The Egg Café

That lunch had got us away from the conference centre, the Albert Dock and Liverpool 1, and saw us make our way to The Egg Café, a rather hippyish veggie café just off Bold Street.

To be frank, it was a relief to get away from all the immaculate steel and glass and gloss.

I had a cream cheese and leek frittata with assorted salads. And it was very enjoyable too. The Other Half said that his tomato and basis soup was very good.

The bar food in the evening was also pleasant enough – in my case, a double portion of battered prawns with chilli dipping sauce, and a (small) portion of chips. It was all I needed.

A note on other food points at the hotel: it has been excellent to have an egg station at breakfast – poached and fried eggs done fresh.

But why do hotels really not make it such a logistical test to toast a piece of bread, butter it – and then take it to get eggs or beans on top?

I have to admit to being a little sad with my efforts one morning at making a jam sandwich.

Given that I didn’t have the chance this week to go in search of the fabled jam butty mines of Knotty Ash, I thought I'd pay homage at breakfast. But it didn’t live up to the memory of childhood jam butties, even though it was thick slabs of factory bread and, of course, strawberry jam giving a thick line of red contrast between the white.

And now for a couple of slight niggles.

Everyone knows that, in a hotel, the drinks will be expensive. However, that the cost of drinks at the Hilton, Liverpool was a somewhat smaller fortune than the charges for the iBahn internet service, which advertises itself as “super fast”.

Someone should have a word with trading standards. I tried it on our first night (having paid the minimum sum for the minimum time available), and it was akin to a trip down memory lane to the days of dial-up modems.

I haven’t bothered since. £6 for an hour, £15 for a day and £75 for a week would be rip-off prices even if it was a genuinely fast service. This is simply taking the piss.

I do want to say that every single member of the hotel staff that we have come into contact with was delightfully helpful and friendly. A problem with the iron in our room that had been caused by a previous guest was sorted out quickly and in an entirely acceptable way.

The room itself was comfortable and quiet.

But I was somewhat irritated to discover that, if one is putting anything on the room bill, and one adds a tip in the section that allows for that (the box that says: 'gratuity') that tip does not go to the staff who you are actually intending to thank.

Dear hotel – that is naughty. The general understanding that people have of tipping is that it is something that they do, voluntarily, to reward specific staff for particularly good service. They do not do it for the cash to go into some sort of pot (if that is what happens) or the company profits.

But the lesson is quite simple. I will tip in actual cash in future and will not tip by adding a gratuity to the room bill, so that there is no danger of such money, given voluntarily, going where it is not intended.

And on that note, I'm back off darn sarf: never in the history of human kind has a woman so looked forward to finding herself covered in cat hairs.

Steel and spice

The Peace Gardens on a wintery night – quite magical.

Steel City, home of The Full Monty, has changed a lot in the last 30 odd years, as the industry that made it famous migrated in search of cheaper workforces.

But Sheffield, which has also been a university city since 1905, hasn't gone under, and while there are plenty of buildings that are statements of the civic pride of a successful industrial past, there are also signs of the regeneration.

Indeed, leaving the train station you walk straight into one of those – Sheaf Square, with its  enormous water feature of local steel that, on sunny days, glistens magnificently.

Winter Gardens

And talking of glistening, a vast picture of Sheffield’s own Olympic golden girl, Jessica Ennis, adorns the side of the Central Library – an apt illustration of where the city is today.

Another visible sign of the regeneration is the Winter Gardens, which opened in 2003 and is the largest, urban greenhouse in Europe. It's full of plants from around the world – although the fact that they are planted and looked after by part of Rentokill seems really rather peverse.

The Millennium Gallery leads off one side of the Winter Gardens, with a series of exhibition spaces and a shop.

There's a rather fun giraffe on display inside – steel cutlery recycled into a tall sculpture with moving parts. And I considered myself particularly fortunate that Christmas Cracker was still open for business.

One of the exhibition spaces, for the duration of the festive season and into new year it's transformed into a shop selling work by local artists and designers. And there was some wonderful stuff available.

Cutlery giraffe.

Not that it’s alone. Just inside one entrance to the Winter Gardens is the Bessemer Gallery – so named for the world’s first inexpensive method of making steel, which was, if not quite invented, then certainly brought to industrial fruition locally by one Henry Bessemer in the 1850s.

It’s a small shop that does pretty much the same thing, but all year round. Again, some lovely work was available.

I absolutely love galleries/shops like these, with work by local artists.

Elly Englefield cat brooch.

But here are special mentions to two of the designers I came across.

First, Dave Cawthorne, who makes jewelery in silver and titanium – the latter, a metal I first came across in a lovely, tiny shop in Lancaster, The Silver Tree, where I bought my very first earrings.

So it seemed entirely reasonable, therefore, to get myself a pair.

And second, Elly Englefield, who makes vintage-styled jewellery out of “found ephemera” – that’s old stuff, to you and me. There’s a playfulness to her pieces that I really like.

And given that one of the ones on display was a cat, that sort of set the seal on the matter. If nothing else, I told myself, it was a reward for not having smoked for a month.

Moving outside once more, adjacent to the nearby Sheffield Town Hall, the Peace Gardens provide a fascinatingly designed modern riff on traditional fountains that is intended to represent molten steel.

That, in essence, was what I managed to see on my trip, other than the inside of the City Hall – confusingly, this is actually a theatre – where the conference I was reporting was being held.

Dave Cawthorne earrings: '50s satellites or ancient shields?

The Novotel I’d been booked into was comfy enough and quiet, but it’s not the first time I’ve stayed somewhere that has taken a big business booking – and then not apparently arranged enough staff to do the job.

The staff themselves were friendly and as helpful as they could be, but something was just not working properly.

Breakfast was chaotic, with just a few people put into the invidious position of trying to do far too much.

On my second morning, I made sure I got down early, precisely to avoid the chaos. It was to little avail.

The absence of butter was entirely bad enough, but the irritant factor reached a peak when, instead of the requested tea, I got a pot of coffee that was so cool that, by the time milk was added, it was actually cold.

And honestly, leaving a tray of cooked eggs to congeal under a lamp, swimming in oil, may be convenient catering, but it is not conducive to a good culinary experience.

To be honest, it was hardly the greatest foodie trip.

On Friday, with snow falling and gusting around my ankles, I decided not to venture far from the hotel for dinner, but landed in the Sheffield branch of Browns, where I went down the apparently simple route of ordering fish and chips. Let's face it, I was up north.

Not my idea of proper mushy peas.

The fish was in a ‘tempura’ batter apparently. Well, it was batter – and it was a decent batter and it was decent cod.

The chips were reasonable. The mushy peas, though, were pretty much solid and cold, and came as a condiment, included in a small dish alongside ketchup and a tartare sauce.

And what’s the nonsense of serving it on a piece of paper on the plate? The merest hint of vinegar and it starts getting soggy and, before you know it, it tears as you're cutting your food.

Is it intended as a sort of postmodern homage to how our once-national dish used to be eaten out of newsprint? And while I don't generally whinge about portion size being too small, that wasn't a big plate full for £10.95.

Fast forward to Saturday afternoon and the need for a reasonably rapid lunch. I picked Patisserie Valerie on the grounds both of it being almost opposite where I was working, and because the patisserie in the window looked mouthwatering.

And once seated, I opted for a spaghetti carbonara from the winter menu. What could go wrong?

The sorriest garnish you'll ever see.

It arrived with a garnish of a solitary and rather flaccid leaf of parsley. The pasta was cooked, but the dish was far from being piping hot. And weirdest of all was the bacon. This is something that is made with lardons or pancetta, but the cook had apparently run out midway through and just chucked in some pieces of the sort of bacon you'd expect in a butty - not even having made the effort to dice it.

Looking up the menu online, it does actually specify: “Spaghetti with Bacon, Cream & Parmigiano Reggiano Cheese & Ham”. But would anyone really expect some tiny dice of ham and some pieces of sliced bacon? And besides, who reads such a description anyway when you know precisely what should be in such a classic dish?

There’s a part of me that knows that I should complain. Just to be clear, I’m not judging something like this on the basis of Michelin-standard restaurants, but for what it is. It’s a cafe – one of quite a sizeable chain. And that was poor.

I didn’t say anything, partly because it was a time-sensitive situation. This was about getting in, fuelling up and getting back to work.

And perhaps, in that case, I help to continue such a state of affairs by not readily holding them to a decent standard. It wasn’t dirt cheap at £7.99, but my own reaction was as though I didn’t really expect anything much better.

Things did improve in the evening, when we went to Butlers Balti House for a staff meal. Now I don’t eat at Indian restaurants very often, but decided to move away from my standard safety-first choice of korma.

Lamb jalfrezi.

This time it was tandoori prawns as a starter, with lamb jalfrezi to follow. The menu said that nothing was more than medium hot, but you could ask for hotter (or milder) if you wished.

Wile we waited, we had vast piles of poppadoms with assorted relishes and dips – utterly moreish.

The prawns were good – it was a quite mild dish – and the lamb was enjoyable too, although really pretty hot by my standards, although the spicing was very subtle.

The dish included perfectly cooked pepper that was delightfully sweet as well as still having just the right amount of bite.

The meat was a bit too firm for my taste, but I guess that that is a result of the rapid cooking method.

As with everywhere, though, service was friendly and helpful.

And that was Sheffield. My next trip, starting tomorrow (weather permitting), will take exoticism to new heights. Brace yourself, Scunthorpe: here I come.

Good food in Bournemouth after all these years?

It was in June 2006 that I first visited Bournemouth. It’s not difficult to remember the date because it was also the first year in which, thanks to the Catalan Dragons, I had visited France.


In fact, that trip to Perpignan (and Barcelona) had been just a few weeks before. And after experiencing the wonderful food out there, one of the things I’d been enormously looking forward to had been trying food in a seaside resort in England.
 
Expecting much, I was severely disappointed. Not only was nothing we ate even close to being in the same class as what’d we’d eaten on that holiday, it was pricier.
 
In the interests of strict accuracy, I should say that I had actually been to Bournemouth before. But that was on a family holiday – and I have no memories of food at all, apart from that we were self catering, which in my mother’s case, meant an awful lot of an awful lot of mornings were spent dragging the rest of us around supermarkets to buy food.
 
The only thing I really remember about that holiday was meeting Tom O’Connor in a TV shop.
 
But subsequent trips to Bournemouth since 2006 have seen gradual improvements in the fodder I’ve been able to get my gnashers into.
 
And in many ways, this year’s food was, in general, possibly the simplest as well as the best.
 
When you’re at the seaside, you really have to have fish and chips. At least once. We did it twice – on our first night and on third.
 
In both cases, it was at the hotel – once in the restaurant and once in the bar.
 
On both occasions, the fish was excellent and the batter top notch – crispy and light as a feather; an utter joy to eat.
 
 On the first, the chips were a hand-cut tower (apparently they like them like this in the House of Commons too) and there was a very minty streak of pea purée, plus a generous dollop of good tartare sauce.
 
As a bar dish (slightly cheaper) the chips were not so obviously hand cut – although they were served in one of those miniature frying baskets that are so popular these days and are rather fun. It came with the same minted pea purée.
 
Supposed fish ‘n’ chip specialist Harry Ramsden’s, which is just on the other side of the pier, could learn a thing or two. On the basis of my visit there, the last time that I was in town, two years ago, the hotel was not only far better quality, but also a fairer price too.
 
The Highcliffe is one of the very few hotels I’ve stayed in where the food is worth eating – and breakfast is not excluded from that equation. Okay, there might not have quite been the egg station of Brighton’s Metropole, but there was a cook on duty making fresh fried eggs.
 
And unlike some places I could mention, nothing that you served yourself from under the heaters was crozzled to death from having sat there for hours before service even started.
 
Efforts to have 'Healthy' lunches were mostly dashed by eating on the go – and the best lunch of the week came a rather a surprise.
 
It could hardly have been more simple: with only minutes to spare before going back into the conference hall to report, after my jaunt to see the Oceanarium’s otters, I grabbed a Cornish pasty from one of the conference centre snack outlets.
 
Now, I don’t know if it really was Cornish – and therefore fulfilled the EU rules on protected origin status – but my expectations were low. In the event, instead of taking just the few bites I had imagined simply to sustain me, I scoffed the lot – and was disappointed the following day to find they’d all gone before I got there.
 
But as for dinners, the treat of the week came on Monday night.
 
Slumped in the hotel lounge (that’s a posh word for a bar) after a long day, we mused on where to eat.
 
A couple of similarly working trips to Bournemouth in the past, I’d lunched at an eatery on the sea front. I couldn’t remember its name, but I did remember that I’d had plaice and that it had been very, very good.
 
Indeed, it was probably my first decent culinary experience in the town.
 
The internet had, for once, provided me with nothing that I was sure was what I remembered, but in the hope that whatever it was was still there, I suggested we wander down.
 
In the event, it was there. WestBeach is its name.
 
We secured a table without a reservation – and given the number of people who came in while we dined, that was lucky.
 
WestBeach is a slightly unconventional cross between a restaurant and a bar. For instance, some people were only coming in to sit at a booked table for a drink, and there were TVs showing that night’s football (sound off, though).
 
The décor is all blond woods and rushes, giving it a hint of the sea-washed, which is very relaxing.
 
The food is excellent.
 
 I started with rollmops: according to the menu, an appetiser, but my pair of rollmops were two fillets from a pretty substantial herring. It was delicious – and, at £3, damned good value for money.


And then came my culinary treat of the week: a whole – well, cracked – Lymington crab.


It arrived in a beautiful display; on a bed of ice, with a lime mayo that complimented the sweetness of the flaky meat quite gloriously.


There was a vast – ridiculously so – bowl of fries and another of salad.


Even after being pre-cracked, it still took some, err, cracking. But it was so, so worth the effort. Super taste and texture.


And to finish, I enjoyed three balls of Purbeck ice cream – this is, after all, the Purbeck coast.


Vanilla, chocolate and raspberry – all very, very good. But the raspberry was to die for. I wish I'd just order that.


Now, take the fries and salad out of the equation, and you have perhaps the closest I've come to a meal that is comparable in size and construction to what I so loved in Barcelona.


I am, indeed, specifically thinking of the wonderful Els Barrils, a Galcian fish restaurant, not far from Gaudí's crazy Sagrada Família, where I ate my first lobster, sandwiched between a course of padron peppers and one of sublime orange and chocolate ice cream.


And, most to the point, that is a restaurant where I have never felt overwhelmed by the amount of food served to me; where I could roundly polish off all three courses; a restaurant where the quality of the oh-so-simple food was such that I still dream about it.


Is that enough of a compliment to pay to WestBeach? Well, I do mean it.


The Other Half, having paid perhaps a greater amount of attention to Raymond Blanc's Very Hungry Frenchman series than I had, spotted a wine he'd recommended on the menu; a 2010 pinot gris reserve by Joseph Cattin of Alsace. And that was delightful too.


Nothing for the rest of the week came close.


But my faith in Bournemouth food – and in south coast English seaside food – was revived.


If you're in that town any time – try it. No. it isn't the cheapest, but when I compare it to my other culinary experiences in Bournemouth, it's no more expensive (that whole crab was under £20) and it was so, so much better.