Jonathan Day

I wonder whether we've drifted a bit from the original post in this thread. My guess is that Hallie was looking for that small place that serves honest food at reasonable prices, where you can get a starter, main and pud from the carte for something under £20, and where drinkable if not elegant wines are available at around £10. The kind of place you could afford to eat in regularly, and that was small enough and stable enough that you could become a regular. Le Pigalle (RIP) had some of that feeling. With the exception of some Chinese places, Soho no longer has many restaurants like this. But neither does anywhere in Central London. The economics are against it.

Is it that much worse than any other tourist-thronged part of London? There are some horrid places in Covent Garden, as well, and in the Knightsbridge/South Ken area. I haven't found Soho completely devoid of good places. Le Pigalle (though I haven't been there in awhile) was honest and good for what it was; Alastair Little's restaurant had decent food; L'Odeon could produce good food. There are decent places in and around Chinatown e.g. Joy King Lau on Leicester Street. If you're prepared to walk south into St James's or west just a bit there's the Wolesley, Greens (Duke St St James's), Alloro (Dover St), the Mint Leaf (lower Regent St), etc. These places are more expensive, though. The economics of running a small restaurant in Central London are truly daunting. I find it amazing that most of these places stay in business at all.

Raymond Oliver's La Cuisine recommends a different approach for making filled omelettes: he makes a plain omelette, cuts a slash in the finished product, and puts the filling into the slash. The result is a cleaner-looking, neater omelette. The downside of this approach is that when you want a flavour to permeate the whole omelette (truffles, fines herbes, etc.), the slash-and-fill method doesn't work as well. FG, any thoughts on this?

There are writers who teach technique -- how to cook, rather than what recipes to make. This is the knowledge that pays off: how to hold the knife, which kinds of meat will take well to roasting and which to braising, how to fold the flour into a cake that is leavened with egg whites rather than chemicals. At a certain point, you need no more than a few words to remind you that an egg Bruxelloise is served on a tartlet, filled with braised chicory (endive) and finished with a glazed cream sauce.* You can't easily do ingredient-driven foraging or treasure hunting until you know something about how to cook. A few cookbooks try to impart this knowledge: Julia Child, of course, and Jacques Pepin. So, more recently does John Campbell with his very useful Forumlas for Flavour. Delia Smith does as well. And there is always Larousse, La Repertoire de la Cuisine, etc. * example from Jack Lang's marvellous eGCI piece on eggs, here

We had a pleasant lunch late last year at Le Clos St Pierre, in Le Rouret, which has gained its first star. A very limited menu and a fairly informal setting, but the menu changes every day "according to the market". The food was prepared with a degree of care and attention that I found pleasantly surprising. Well worth a visit if you are in the area.

Tarka, the cheeseboard at Chez Bruce is of very high quality, far better than I've had in many West End restaurants. The sommelier is also good, and the wine list is lengthy. Bruce isn't quite a nose-to-tail cook a la Fergus Henderson, but there's a strong element of that in his cooking. Offal is treated with care and respect, whether in salads or in a main dish. Poached chicken arrives ever-so-slightly pink -- the waiters warn you when you order this dish -- and therefore wonderfully tender. Fish dishes are good, but his meat preparations are outstanding. So I would bias a bit toward meaty, offally dishes, and be sure to order the cheeseboard.

A couple of interesting things on this site, which I agree is nicely put together. First, they are going totally non-smoking as of March. This will be a huge improvement! Second, in the "team" section: Perhaps we can recruit some of Bruce's staff members for eGullet -- what better way to discuss the London restaurant 'scene'? I was surprised that the site doesn't mention that the menu is redone daily -- not every dish changes, but enough do that each dining experience at CB is different.

All of these winter greens were popular a few years ago, in part I think because people had forgotten that bitter flavours can be delicious and refreshing, in small amounts and in the right setting. Then, thanks in part to the River Cafe, cavolo nero, purple sprouting broccoli, etc., all started to appear everywhere, sometimes twice or three times in a meal. I was once invited to a dinner where we had a rocket salad followed by a dish of pasta with sauteed cavolo nero. Too much. I still enjoy these greens, though on a low-carb regime it is no longer possible to serve them with pastas. And once in awhile only, not every week!

Moby, I wonder whether we are discussing two different things here. I don't have any problem with the critic bringing a concept of the good to a work; in any event we all turn up at the theatre, gallery, concert hall or restaurant with some idea of good art, whether or not this is explicit. What bothers me is a critic arriving at a restaurant obviously predisposed to dislike it, and apparently not open to the possibility that the prior concept she held might be limited, or limiting. I've had friends and family come to fine restaurants in France and -- even before the menu is brought to the table -- begin to complain about how formal the place is, how the waiters look intimidating, how the people at the next table aren't speaking English. Then the menu arrives and -- ohmigod -- it includes liver and sweetbreads. Can't they make a burger and fries? I'd be surprised if the Telegraph were to accept a review written by someone who started from that perspective. Switching some of the details around, is Jan Moir's review all that different?

Jack's initial comment about the texture not being quite right in his first attempt at Atkins fishcakes reminded me of experiments with different ways of making brandade de morue. Some French authors insist that potato appears in classic recipes only as an economy measure. If I recall Raymond Oliver's method, he used no potato but insisted that the skin of the salt cod be incorporated, and that the resulting mixture be very, very thoroughly pureed. I did this with a food processor rather than a mortar and tamis, but let the machine run for a long, long time, until the mixture was very smooth and forced it through a sieve afterward. The result was creamy and unctuous. So for the fishcakes or quenelles, very thorough processing could be important. If the fishcakes are very lightly breaded, how many crumbs (and hence forbidden carbs) does that contribute? On the "sensible Atkins" regime I am using, which avoids most starchy carbohydrates but does allow the occasional apple or bite of wholemeal bread or potato, I would think that a few grams of breadcrumbs would be OK.

Just go to RecipeGullet, the eGullet recipe archive -- there's a button to take you there at the top left hand side of your screen, just below the adverts, and search under "cauliflower". You'll find the recipe there. As this has become a well beloved item in the eG repertoire, you might also want to use the main eGullet search engine, which will take you to several threads discussing roasted cauliflower.

I doubt you mean that Heston Blumenthal personally can't stand the taste of a lot of the things he makes, but dishes them up anyway because he knows they will appeal to a certain segment of foodies, including Derek Brown and the Michelin inspectors. My sense from a brief chat with Blumenthal, from reading his writing and from dining at the Fat Duck is that Blumenthal enjoys good (delicious) food, its intellectual sophistication aside. He himself hardly seems an esoteric scholar: he's a somewhat blokeish family man who enjoys his Sunday roast surrounded by roast potatoes. He may have cooked the joint in a 60C oven and done a brown crust with a blowtorch, but so what? Any highly ambitious chef "plays to the Michelin inspectors", if nothing else by ensuring fancy tablecloths and tableware, high standards of service and the like. The Fat Duck's offer is innovative, "molecular gastronomy" cuisine. A positive spin on dishes like the beetroot and orange combination mentioned by Jan Moir is that Blumenthal, like Adria, is trying to shock us into tasting these things anew, rediscovering what they really taste like. But why not write a review without bringing either a negative or positive attitude to the table, before the first dish arrives? Why not just write about how you, as a critic, enjoyed the food at The Fat Duck?

In this case, Andy, I disagree. Whilst I ordinarily enjoy Jan Moir's columns, this one seemed to be driven by an agenda rather than by any real experience of the restaurant. The nonsense about "the fat profit", the continuous attribution of sinister motives to the chef and the staff, and the silly digs -- none of which actually describe the experience, but rather the reviewer's attitude -- all these make this a less than insightful review.It's fine to dislike the Fat Duck. I don't like every one of Blumenthal's dishes. Some find his cooking generally obnoxious. But given the strong public interest in the place after its third star, people deserve to know something about the place as it actually is. Jan Moir can do better than this, and usually does. This was a weak, self-indulgent review.

Problem solved. And it was a problem. A search on Coffeegeek turned up a "forums" entry explaining how to open up the Pavoni. You remove the bar that connects the lever to the piston; you can then (gently but firmly) push the piston further down into the machine, forcing out the grouphead gasket, the dispersion screen and the piston behind that. When the bar is in place, the piston won't descend far enough to push out the gasket. As far as I could tell, all the gaskets were in good shape. The base of the piston, however, was covered with coffee gunge, as was the dispersion screen. I washed and brushed everything (no soap!) until it was all clean. The piston went back in, and following Owen's suggestion I used a flathead screwdriver to ease the grouphead gasket back in place. The machine now seems to work fine. As far as I can tell, there is plenty of pressure on the grouphead -- as there was before I cleaned it. The post-cleaning shots had a better taste, though the crema I get remains tan rather than the brown-red that shows up in some of the photos in this forum. But I suspect that this is because of the beans I am using. Thanks for the referral to EspressoParts.com -- very useful!

The milk we have in the house is semi-skimmed, so that's what I've always used for the Keller version. The richness and mouthfeel are such that you would think it had been made with double cream -- in fact we have had guests worry about it being bad for their health. I personally would keep the recipe as simple as possible. Milk works for the cauliflower, in part because it keeps the result creamy white. For his carrot soup, Keller simmers the sliced carrots in carrot juice -- count the carrots, juice half of them, slice the other half very thin, simmer the sliced carrots in the juice, puree, serve. As with the cauliflower soup, a few drops of lemon juice if you need to bring up the acidity, and salt of course. Some shallots if you want added flavour tones, but it isn't strictly necessary. I would definitely avoid faux anything: I Can't Believe it's not Butter, pseudo half-and-half, etc. etc. -- something like this is too good to mess up with petrochemicals.

Linda, I prepared the roasted cauliflower as usual: sliced, on a sheet pan with olive oil and a sprinkling of coarse salt. Hot oven. When it was nicely browned, I cut the cores out of the slices (this step may have been unnecessary, because they were very tasty, but Keller does say to get rid of the cores), broke the rest into very small pieces, and proceeded as above. Keller doesn't call for yogurt or lemon juice; I find that a little acid adds lightness to the standard soup. I sometimes add a small amount of Dijon mustard to the Keller version. In this case, the yogurt was helpful, but it didn't need anything else. No mustard. Nothing but a bit of salt. Instead of roasting the shallots, it might have been as well to sweat them in a bit of butter, then add the cauliflower and milk to that.

Roasted cauliflower (recipe here) has become a regular item in our house, especially when large cauliflowers are available in the market. For dinner, from time to time, I make cauliflower soup, a Thomas Keller technique where you simmer a raw cauliflower in milk and then puree it. The result is a smooth, white cream, tasting much richer than it is. It is delicious on its own, or garnished with caviar, bottarga, truffles... This evening we combined the two techniques. I roasted a large cauliflower à la eGullet. I then cut away (and ate) most of the centre core, broke the florets into small pieces, put them into a saucepan, barely covered them with milk and simmered this until the cauliflower was very, very tender and the milk had picked up some colour from the roasted bits. I had roasted a couple of chopped shallots at the same time as the cauliflower (though they didn't take as long to cook) and these went into the simmering liquid. It took less than an hour -- I didn't time it -- but it was noticeably less than the time usually needed to make a raw cauliflower ready to puree. I cooled this a bit then blitzed it with a stick blender. I added a dollop of plain yogurt, just to bring the acid up a bit, and some Maldon salt. The result was wonderful: light brown in colour, with the same smooth richness that normal cauliflower soup has but with an added roundness and depth of flavour. It needed no garnish. Keller has you strain the puree several times; I didn't do that with this soup, since it wasn't being served to guests. Even unstrained, it was very good.

Damned eGullet. Reading this forum led me to "CoffeeGeek.com" and I realised that the "grouphead" on the Pavoni machine I've been using for many years had never been properly cleaned. I remove the entire pump assembly from the machine from time to time and wash it out, removing coffee grunge from the rubber gasket that surrounds the dispersion screen. But how to remove the dispersion screen itself? The entire grouphead seems to be one seamless piece of metal. Or is this one of those problems that I didn't know I had until I read about it here? The espresso the machine makes is good. Would value any guidance from owners of a Pavoni pump machine. I don't know what model mine is -- it's old.

I'm in the same situation, Moby -- there's a big bowl of Sevilles sitting on the counter now, shouting "do something with us before it's too late." I have made some very good Seville orange sorbet in years past. It's "adult sorbet" -- refreshing rather than sweet. It's nice in that you can add enough sugar (e.g. taking it to 18 degrees Baumé or more) to give it real body and mouthfeel without it becoming cloyingly sweet or forcing you to add acid to balance the sweetness. Seville orange marmalade is also useful for more than putting on toast. It can be added to sauces, for example, or turned into a dessert sauce, or put into or onto a creme brulee -- or even converted into a sorbet. Adam's Persian ideas are also good. Some people advise that they should be soaked in water for 24 hours before using. I bought mine at a fruit vendor on Northcote Road. No "do not eat uncooked" sign! I suspect that this is because an uncooked (more precisely, unsugared) Seville orange has a somewhat bitter taste. I don't think that the uncooked fruit is in any way poisonous. Or is it?

Tomatoes: yes. In season. Life is too short not to eat good tomatoes. Yogurt: to avoid the hassle of "Atkins constipation" I have, with breakfast, a small dish of raw rolled oats, a few spoons of cracked linseeds, a bit of Splenda for sweetness, all moistened with plain yogurt, perhaps 3 tablespoons. Sounds terrible, but it actually tastes good and it seems to work. The rest of breakfast is fish, meat or eggs.

I had dinner at the Wolseley the week before last. I had expected the large space, which was once a car showroom, then became a branch of Barclays Bank and then a Chinese restuarant, to be unpleasant and noisy. Surprisingly, it wasn't, even though the restaurant was full. We had a table somewhat off to the side: probably not a "good" table, but perfect for a quiet business discussion. I can only describe the menu as a hodgepodge. There were Viennese dishes, Jewish dishes, French dishes, oysters and other shellfish, grills, American dishes (burgers!). A daily specials list had cassoulet, Irish Stew, and, for the day we were there, suckling pig. Although the menu is long, the wine list is very short. We had an Italian red -- a Barolo, I think. The service was friendly and accommodating. My food wasn't bad. Dressed crab was fresh and well presented with crisp toasts. I had the suckling pig; the meat was flavourful, though a bit overdone and accompanied by pieces of skin that were as tough as old leather. Cheese for pudding -- no selection, but what they served was acceptable. "Not bad" is about the best I can say for this place, after one visit. The prices were more than reasonable, especially for this location and the service was very good. Worth a repeat visit, just to try a few more of the dishes on the far-ranging menu.

I'm no expert on the cucurbita but I have found pumpkins similar to those offered as "potirons" in France and "zucca" in Italy, for sale in the Northcote Road market in London and also at Borough Market. These are not the smooth-skinned, yellowish American pumpkins for jack o'lanterns; they are a deep orange, with vertical ridges that would make them difficult to carve for Halloween. The flesh is thick (again, making them almost impossible to carve for lanterns) and the squash itself very large. I buy it by the slice -- the vendor wields a fearsome looking sabre, and cuts off as thick a slice as you want. The slices are then priced by weight. One slice (perhaps an eighth) of one of these pumpkins makes enough filling for a lot of ravioli, or for incorporating in gnocchi.

I suspect one reason butternut squashes are so popular is that they keep practically forever -- something I'm sure endears them to supermarket buyers. Like those tomatoes that are perpetually rock-hard and flavourless, levels of stock loss must be sharply reduced. I've tried steaming and roasting butternut, but as Moby says the flavour is always a bit thin. Last time I made pumpkin ravioli, the pumpkin didn't turn up because of a family shopping SNAFU, but there were two butternut squash in the house. I finely chopped some sweet onions, sweated them for a long time and let them caramelise a bit. Roasted the squash, pureed squash and onions together, then spread the puree on a sheet pan and let it dry out in a very low oven for an hour or so, then put the whole through a sieve. It wasn't bad, but next time I will buy a slice of real pumpkin!

Also try: La Bovida 49 rte Grenoble 06200 Nice Tel 04 93 21 00 90

For real old-style butchery, growly service and all, try Dove & Son, on Northcote Road SW11. They will give bones to a regular customer (you become one of these after roughly 5 years of steady custom) -- otherwise, they turn their bones into stock, which they freeze and sell. More expensive than a supermarket, but the products are first rate. Very good game in season as well. Moen's, on The Pavement, is also good, though I haven't asked them for bones.