Harters

A lunchtime revisit in the company of Mrs H and we managed to gorge ourselves for fifteen quid (inc. tip, flatbreads and a couple of soft drinks). Tabbouleh - lovely lemony dressing on the parsley. Hummus - not bad, although probably bought in. Came topped with chickpeas and a nice drizzle of olive oil. Mixed pickles - out of a jar, as always, but a good mix of cabbage, green tomato, pepper and cornichons. Falafel wrap - generous portion of falafel, bound together with tahini. Lamb sharwama - posh doner kebab, but with good flakes of identifiable tasty meat (a bit fatty as expected). Very generous portion. Came with rice, a different set of mixed pickles and some salad. Do give it a try if you're in the area - a far better experience than most of the Bangla curry houses on The Mile.

That's a disappointing report, Martin. We havnt been to Linthwaite for a couple of years but have enjoyed it before. That said, I think we've enjoyed the hotel side of things more than the food (which has been perfectly fine albeit playing safe. Hotel breakfasts are one of life's joys for me and, like you, I wasnt thrilled by the offering. You're being far to polite in describing it as "petite". John

An old thread, but we're heading off to Paphos for a couple of weeks in April. Yes, I know it's touristy (that's why we're going). But we'd like to get in some good meals in the immediate area if possible. We know of 7 St Georges as mentioned above by John, as an exponent of organic food which they serve up as meze. But anywhere else in that part of the island? TIA

Absolutely. I'm looking forward to enjoying Marc's "poncy" food in a couple of weeks. It will be a joy - of that I'm sure. And I was also looking forward to eating Nigel Haworth's hotpot last summer. It was a joy. Two very different experiences. But you wouldnt say one was better than t'other.

I'm staying at a hotel on Hagley Road, B16, next month for a night, prior to a conference the next day. I've no idea of the local geography - am I on the plot for some decent, but not posh, Indian food (within walking distance) TIA

Never eaten there, but I assume Wings , on Brazennose Street in the city centre, is as good as the original Cheadle Hulme branch (which is nearer for me than the schlep into town - perhaps I should start a Cheshire thread). No particular stand-outs, just a reasonably good allround Cantonese.

I've mentioned the Bingham recently. Ate there in May 2008 on a TopTable bargain offer. It'd have been excellent value even without the 50% discount. Although not in the last 12 months, I've had decent meals at Saffron, smack in the town centre. Persian - my notes indicate that the fesenjan was OK but needed a bit more oomph. Would be good to hear some current recommendations. I visit the area for a few days once or twice a year (researching at the National Archives)and am always looking for decent food in places welcoming to the solo diner.I think I've just about exhausted places I know in the Richmond/Kew/Brentford strip.

Me too. I'd raised the question a couple of times (latterly after the Ramsey programme) and PhilD "challenged" me to go and try for myself. Fair point, I thought. So I did. Fucking place doesnt open for lunch any more - long schlep back to Central Library. I'll gladly give another vote for Glamorous - my current fave Cantonese. Last time I was there for lunch, it was packed (200 covers, easily?) - I was the only non-Chinese. In the evening, more Anglos but still very popular with Chinese folk. BTW, how are we defining "Manchester" for this thread? City centre only - as the "Manchester City Center - is there anything good" thread? The city boundary?

TANGAWIZI, RICHMOND My thanks to PhilD for the heads-up on this place on another board. Since he mentioned it months ago, I see it's now got a Cooking 2 in the Good Food Guide. The dark walls of this otherwise very modern looking restaurant almost remind you of the flock wallpaper of Indian places of 30+ years ago. And it’s not just the walls that are dark – the whole place is dark. Seriously dark. Making it difficult to properly see your food – aren’t you supposed to first eat with your eyes? Staff are plentiful and attentive. Perhaps a tad over-attentive – lurking near your table ready to remove a glass or a plate the moment you’re finished. The two owners/managers had good customer skills – making sure that they chatted with the single diner (maybe I look like a Good Food Guide inspector). But the above are niggles. The menu is a good reader – not your run of the mill Bangla curry house, although some dishes will be familiar. I sipped an excellent mango lassi while I looked it over. Fresh mint tikki sounded like a good starter but it proved underwhelming. The potato patties were a good texture but there was no great taste of mint or, indeed, other spicing. It should have been lifted by tamarind chutney. However, whilst it cheffily decorated the plate in blobs and drizzles, it lack the sour kick. The main of Lamb Saagwala was spot on – tender tasty meat and good spicing, I’m more used to seeing gosht saag a quite dry dish but this had quite a bit of spinach sauce. It made the side order of dhal makhani a bit unnecessary. But I’m glad I’d ordered it as it was the best thing I ate here. Again, it was well spiced with cumin and the addition of beans (it was too dark to see exactly what they might have been) gave it more texture than usual. Rice and roti helped it all down. It’s just lost its Michelin Bib Gourmand due to an increase in prices (the owner telling me the inspectors ate lobster – and then said the restaurant couldn’t do three courses for £28!). But it’s not expensive – the bill including a bottle of water and a tip came to £30. It was a pretty good meal but not an outstander. I see Andy Haylor also reviews it on his website declaring the best Indian food in London. I hope he's wrong.

LEOPARD, BISHOPS TACHBROOK, WARWICKSHIRE Another trip "down south". Another pub lunch find through fiveminutesaway.com. A heavily modernised pub, owned by a small chain, just a few minutes from the M40, Junction 13. There’s a stylish bar area with sofas, where you can eat casually or, as I did, in the more formal dining room. Perhaps I made a mistake there as it was almost as bitterly cold in the room as it was outside. There’s snacky things to eat, like the almost ubiquitous fish finger sandwich or a “posh hotdog”, involving pork sausages and a ciabatta roll. But there’s a reasonably full menu as well. I started with haddock goujons. Good fish and lovely crisp batter. Homemade tartare sauce was OK but nothing to write home about. The main of chicken breast in a garlic cream sauce was pretty much as you’d expect. A perfectly fine, unchallenging pleasant plate of food. It was just what you want when you breaking up a long car journey and won’t have time to walk off the effects of lunch. It came with sauté potatoes, leeks, broccoli and mangetout.

LA BUVETTE, RICHMOND The casual visitor to the area would probably completely miss this place located, as it is, on an alley beside the church. But it’s worth seeking out. I noted it down for future reference when I spotted on the doshermanos blog about a year ago and I see it’s now Good Food Guide listed (a cooking 3). On offer is a short fixed price menu – half a dozen choices at each course – at £17.75 for two courses, a couple of quid more for three. There’s also the three course bistro menu – no choice at starter or main; creme brulee or cheese for “afters”. It costs £23.50 and the owner tells me it’s so popular it’s pretty much unchanging. Fish soup was suitably rich and came with roiulle, croutons and grated Gruyere. The main is onglet, chips and a big handful of well-dressed lambs’ lettuce and shallot salad. “It’ll be on the menu as long as we’re in business”. I finished with a good sized portion of Brie. Not as ripe as you’d hope for – but at least they’d taken it out of the fridge in good time. This was damn fine value for an enjoyable solitary dinner. The 12.5% service charge and a bottle of water brought the bill to just on £30.

I'm not sure you've sold this enough to warrant a schlep from North Cheshire just yet.

Well worth a shopping trip. Not only Pike End but a couple of other good meat sellers (another local farm just doing lamb and some folk from Anglesey who do a range of good stuff). And don't forget the cheese - Bourne's Cheshire & Sharrocks Lancashire.

Pike End Farm sell at my local farmers market at Ashton under Lyne. 'Tis truly great tasting meat.

You'll find reports of my recentish meals at 60 Hope Street, Spire and London Carriage Works down the listings somewhere. Hope Street (last week) was good. Carriage Works (months ago) was OK. Spire (a few weeks back) had more negatives than I care to have when I've driven 45 minutes to get there.

We're now pretty much sorted. Sportsman's tasting menu was the first thing to get booked. We've also booked Read's - the menu looks just our sort of food. So, with Fraiche the week before, that'll be three Michelin meals in 7 days. Life is hard. We'd thought about the Whitstable Oyster Fishery place for our third night but were unable to make any contact by phone and there's also been no response to an email. While I was Googling, I came across an online review by Jasper Gerard slating it - in one of the reader comments mention was made of the Petit Poisson at Herne Bay, which sounds like a really nice small casual place specialising in seafood, so we've booked there. Dos Hermanos does indeed mention a seafood restaurant/chippy at Ramsgate, which sounds bang on for lunch. Can't go to the seaside and not have fish & chips. Wot with me being a northerner.

Fair points, CJ. I take it back. BTW, any news on the new Marco Pierre White place down your way? I gather, from a post on another board, that the great man celebrated the opening of his new pub near Ormskirk by not putting in an appearance. Name over the door the extent of his involvement?

Lunch in Manchester. Braised pork belly with preserved cabbage. Mountain of tasty, slithery, fatty piggy. The cabbage in with the small amount of clingy sauce giving a savoury/salty note. Some briefly cooked choi sum providing crunch. Absolutely lovely. As an aside, I was gobsmacked at the amount of food being tackled by the various young thin Chinese couples also lunching. Vast. Simply vast.

Let me get the one serious niggle out of the way right at the beginning. We didn’t like the room one bit. Stripped down with bare floodboards and painted walls, every sound just reverberated around. It made having a conversation across the table at normal voice levels impossible. Other than that, it was a really good evening. The menu features around six choices at each course, supplemented by another four on the “daily specials” menu. Service is bang on – they know who has ordered what dish and are on hand to top up your glass if you seem to have lost the strength to do it for yourself. This is a place that knows exactly what it’s doing – and it’s doing it well. Bread was offered almost before we’d sat down and continued to be offered until the main courses were finished. Always a good sign in our book. A starter of scallops with celeriac puree brought three lovely scallops, perfectly seared on the outside, only just cooked through on the inside. The celeriac puree complemented the sweetness and the saffron vinaigrette was, presumably, intended to provide a sharp contrast but didn’t really hit the mark. Some shreds of deep fried celeriac gave a good textural change. This was followed by a fillet of Cumbrian beef, together with a mini-casserole of braised shin with herb dumplings and a single Carlingford oyster. Two good beef dishes on one plate, the braise being the clear winner on taste. The other starter also featured Cumbrian produce - in this case game. A bit indeterminate in flavour, it found its way into two cannelloni which were surrounded by a fab tomato sauce. I continued the game theme into the main with an absolutely delicious venison loin. It was wrapped in Serrano ham and sat on a bed of choucroute. So far, this worked wonderfully. A haggis fritter was a bit pointless as it was balnd and could have been almost a crisp “anything”. The juniper flavoured jus needed to be in greater quantity and have more punch. We had side orders of new potatoes and mixed veg. And so to desserts, which were not the total stars of the show. One described as “rhubarb jelly, panna cotta, rhubarb granita” was not the expected three mini-presentations on a plate but was a tumbler filled with layers of the first two, topped with the third. It was a very solid affair – not claggy, but too solid.Flavours were damned powerful though. I couldn’t resist the description of mine – “Deep fried jam sandwich with Carnation Milk ice cream”. Oh yes, I thought, I having some of that. And it was good. Brioche stuffed with jam and thinly sliced strawberry and, yes, deep fried. The ice cream wonderfully rich. A few raspberries. I could have done with a side order of Gavascon, but this was worth it. Coffee was fine. The bill came to £117, including for a drink before, half bottle of cab. Sauv and water. Most enjoyable three courser we’ve had in months.

Eight years on and I suspect Mrs Woman would probably repeat her comment about Chester almost word for word

Well, we're finally schlepping down from Cheshire and have booked the tasting menu for dinner on 24/3. That's a week after we're at Fraiche. This retirement lark is pretty good! We're going to have a couple of days. Probably one round Canterbury and another pottering round the coast. So, I'm still in need of a couple of dinner and lunches. I've a wider Kent thread and would still welcome any recommendations here

I think you may be right, Phil. These were sliced about 1cm wide strips and, as I say, not at all pleasant to eat. They weren't really hot either. Since I posted, I'm reminded that you get a similar thing in some dishes in Mallorca - there's one of the villages that's very big on sun-drying chilli which then go in without being rehydated.

Lunch at the Manchester branch. I was knackered by the time I'd climbed the stairs but it's quite a nice modern room when you get up there. The only other punters were a group of young, presumably Chinese, folk getting heavily stuck into one of the stainless steel bubbling cauldron dishes that David mentions. The menu is a bit odd but also strangely reassuring to those of us not confident with Chinese food - big posh book thingy of laminated pages of photographs and name of the dish (but no description of what it might be). Normally, I'd shout "beware" of any place that has food photos as a menu but here it worked. The cucumber starter dish mentioned by Thom must be no more. It appears in the online menu but not the book. Question put to the waiter got a blank look except for being pointed at chicken and cucumber dish. Gung Bao chicken is a Sichuan dish I like and I regard it as a good dish for comparision of different places. This was generally OK. I preferred the overall flavour to that I had a few weeks ago at the Atherton branch of Red Chilli. Here the heat is quite pronounced and the sweetness just a backnote. Red Chilli's version was a bit too sweet - but I'm nit-picking. What I didnt particularly like were the big pieces of dried and fried red chili. They were plastic-y and unpleasantly chewy to try and eat and difficult to disentangle from the food to avoid eating(if you're as cack-handed with chopsticks as I am). Bloody big portion which I managed to just about clear as I was in "greedy bastard" mode - but it's easily have served two.

Just back from Tenerife and am currently skint, so wasnt able to make the booking. Looking forward to being back in funds for visiting Oxton in March. See you then, Marc, and good luck in the Big City. J

Had a scorchingly good meal there in May 2008. Found it by chance on TopTable when they were trying to establish the restaurant and get punters through the door with a 50% discount. It would have been scorchingly good at full whack and I'm chuffed to see Shay get a star so quickly.