Harry and a curry

A cemetery in deepest East London might seem like a strange place to start this post, but I do have a life outside of taking pictures of my lunch. Even if it happens to be taking pictures of gravestones en route to taking pictures of my lunch. I promise, this does get better....

The reason for ending up in Barking on a sunny Monday Morning in June goes back a few years, to my previous incarnation working in public libraries. During that time I had become involved in curating an exhibition that commemorated the centenary of the start of WW1. A fascinating and sobering project that lead me to start to research something about my own family, culminating in discovering my great-grandfather, Private Harry Roscoe MM.

Harry was born in Wigan circa 1890 although, by 1914, he had ended up in Romford, married to my great-grandmother, Florence, and with a son, Alan. My grandfather. Alan isn't around anymore, and there is no one else left to ask how or why Harry ended up in Essex but, as my colleague so succinctly put it; 'in those days, it would be for work or a woman'.

In 1915 Harry had enlisted to the West Ham Pals, aka 13th Battalion of the Essex Regiment, and by the end of the year had been sent to France to fight. The battalion were involved in many battles of the Great War, including at Vimy Ridge, Cambrai and the Battle of the Somme, and it was here that Harry won the Military Medal for gallantry. Awarded for an act of outstanding courage or devotion to duty in the presence of the enemy.

The excerpt above shows the war diary from the week Harry was recommended for his honour. A scan kindly provided to me by Elliot Taylor, who has a blog and has written a book about the Pals.

Harry died in December 1918, a month after the war had ended, most likely of his injuries. A pointless loss in a pointless war. My granddad was four. My great-grandmother remarried the following year, and Harry was never spoken of again. As my granddad never really spoke much about the past, we don't even know if he knew about Harry, or where he was interred. 

While it's a bittersweet story, I have to say I felt quite touched to finally find Harry's grave - commissioned by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission whose work ensures that men and women of the Commonwealth forces who died in the First and Second World Wars are not forgotten - and be able to give thanks for the sacrifices he, and many others, have made for our freedom.

Of course, I couldn't go all that way without thinking about what I was going to eat next and fortunately Thattukada, one of Eater's recent recommended restaurants, was just two stops away on the District Line.

Thattukada is a basic no frills Keralan restaurant - with a nod to God's own country evidenced by the pictures of vallam kali, the state's annual snake boat race, that cover the walls - that offers a selection of home cooked favourites that brings homesick Keralans to eat from all across London.

I started with a mango lassi which, in the absence of a dessert menu, also served as pudding. There's nothing more glorious to accompany food from the Indian subcontinent (ok, maybe on par with an icy cold lager). Sweet and tangy and fragrant and providing a soothing balm for the tongue after a surfeit of chilli spice.

The chicken fry or, to give it its full name, the Thattukada Special Nandan (Traditional) Chicken Fry Half (Kerala Style) 10 pieces, is becoming a bit of a signature dish. A whole (or half) chicken is expertly cleaved into bite-sized chunks on the bone, before being marinated in a lurid spice paste glowing with chilli. It's then deep fried and covered in a dreft of golden fried onions.

This tasted as excellent as it looks. Crisp, hot, salty, spicy. It was surprisingly effortless to eat ten pieces to myself. Maybe because I'm some kind of heathen, I really wanted something to dip this in. Some kind of yogurt-based dip perhaps; or just a big squirt of mayo, if I'm honest. But then I do drown my KFC in the Colonel's gravy. So what do I know.

I almost passed on ordering the appam, which would have been an error as these were the finest I have tried. Spongy and slightly sour, the plain version - they are also available filled with condensed milk or a whole egg, steamed into the centre - are particularly good for helping scoop up curry with your fingers. As evidenced by many of the patrons who were there on my visit. Luckily they took pity on me and kindly also provided a fork without asking.

The utensils were something that was in everybody's interests, as my attempts to eat the fish moilee - a deep and fragrant coconut based curry with cashew nuts and tomatoes and a the beautifully cooked kingfish steak that fell from the bone - would have been less than couth with out them. Although, in all honesty, if no one else was around I would have happily licked the bowl clean.

Oh, and for the record, the long green things were not beans, but chillies. Something that I found out when I ate a whole one. And, for the second time that day, I had a tear in my eye. Good food and family; sometimes there is nothing finer.

The New Kid - Smoking Goat, Shoreditch

There is very little as pleasurable in life as a long and boozy lunch with an old friend on a wintery Saturday afternoon. The kind of lunch that starts in the pale winter light and meanders its way through a menu of cocktails and conversation until its dark as pitch outside and you realise just how pissed you are as you try to avoid setting fire to your sleeve on the newly lit candle that’s appeared on the table as you struggle to put your coat on.

It all started off rather sedately, at Smoking Goat in Shoreditch – the new kid from the Soho stable, which also includes the much lauded Kiln – with a couple of frosty beers (I drank the excellent One Mile End Juicy 4pm) and a couple of grilled Tamworth skewers; the smoky meat interspersed with nuggets of fat and lacquered in a sweet and sticky glaze. 

The menu is a concise mix, familiar to anyone who has been to the original, that focuses on Thai drinking snacks with a few larger sharing dishes and sides. It’s also very keenly priced, meaning we could try far more of it, which is handy because I wanted to try it all. Normally that’s just because of sheer greed, but here everything sounds fantastic, from the poached Menai oyster with chilli to the drunken brisket noodles, neither of which we had the capacity to shoehorn in.

One thing I was very keen not to miss out on – partly as it’s one of my favourite Thai dishes, and partly because it comes with a chilli heat warning and I’m a masochist when it comes to preserving my taste buds - was the duck laarb. Finely chopped pieces of duck offal cooked with ground rice and indecent amounts of chilli, dried red and fresh green, seasoned with lime juice and fresh herbs. The ultimate drinking snack. Just the ultimate snack full stop.

Like most good spicy things, the burn grows from a pleasant tickle into a flicker that moves across your tongue and makes the sweat prick your brow. While poky, the heat is far from incendiary, meaning you can pick out the delicateness of each individual flavour. Unless your stealth and you eat the whole red chilli. Then the whole green one too.

From the larger plates section the d’tom yum came in a large pot - perfect for sharing -swimming with velvet crab and plump wild mussels and the addition of assorted aromatics in the form of lime, chillies, lemongrass  and ginger. Tom yum is one of my favourite soups and here the broth was perfect – clean and well-balanced between sweet, salt, and sour with a dash of heat creeping in.

The goat itself, served slow braised in a massoman curry sauce, was good, if a little lacking in sparkle after all the fireworks. By no means a bad dish - the huge hunk of tender shoulder slipped from its bone, possessing just the right ratio of meat to fat – the mild flavours were, unsparingly, somewhat muted after the slap round the chops from what had come before. I also didn’t get any spuds, which would have been entirely superfluous at that point, but I was kind of looking forward to a couple of yielding tubers to crush into the peanutty sauce.

To make up for any lost carbs – several beers were also helping with that - we also ordered the lardo fried rice (although the fluffy plates of jasmine rice being served at the table next to us smelt incredibly good), studded with chunks of crispy fatty pork, spring onion and crispy omelette and served with a dish of piquant chilli vinegar and half a lime to cut a swathe through the richness.

Desserts are a work in progress - maybe not a bad thing judging by some of the Thai sweets I’ve tried, although I do love coconut and mango sticky rice - but they do offer the perfect way for you to finish a meal in the shape of the Tray of Joy. The Tray of Joy, as the moniker suggests, being a ramshackle assortment of strange liquors – the kind that taste great in a Greek tavern after spending all day in the sun or in an Hungarian bar after several beers  – served in what appears very much like glasses straight from my Nan’s cabinet.

One important piece of research, which I’ve concluded so you don’t have to, is that the number of trays of joy consumed and feelings of joy appear inversely proportional. Although that could be something to do with the subsequent rounds of cocktails we ordered and Spurs losing 2-0 to their North London rivals in the lunchtime kick-off. Still, a well-kept pint of Hotspur at the nearby King’s Stores did a little to ameliorate the gloom.

Mason and Co.

Recently the Ewing and I found ourselves meandering down by the canal in Hackney Wick, whiling away some time before the evening session of the World Athletics Championships. While a great many of the spectators we saw amongst us were attired in athletic gear themselves, with many jogging or cycling along the water to the stadium, I saw it as the opportunity to exercise my elbow by sitting in the sun and drinking a few beers at Mason and Company.

Found at Here East - part of a campus on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park including broadcast facilities, office spaces and a state-of-the-art data centre and providing a home for the creative and digital industries – Mason and Co. is a swish - tiled and IKEA-esque Scandi wood - craft beer bar that also offers Italian-inspired food from street food traders Capish?

As it was the start of London Beer City, and Mason and Co. had hosted the opening event, it would have been remiss to not sample both of the festival's official beers.

The first, and the one I was most excited by, was Agadoo - a saison brewed with pineapple and northern hemisphere hops by a team led by Five Points. The second a Pacific Pale Ale, made with southern hemisphere hops in a collaboration led by Fourpure. In the end both were decent enough, if unspectacular, although I was a little let down by the lack of tropical fruit flavour in the former.

To eat I picked the meatball sub, which to some may sound a bit like the kind of American idea that should have remained just that. But, as I spent my teenage years eating slices of cold lasagne wedge in pieces of French stick after a night on the tiles, the idea of homemade pork and beef balls, in a rich tomato sauce and topped with taleggio definitely appealed.

I wasn’t disappointed, with the real standout in the piece being the polenta-crusted sub roll, that elevated the whole shebang to another level and also soaked up the sauce nicely, making it mercifully not as messy to eat as I first feared.

The jalapeño salsa, that comes as an optional extra with the sub, was exceptional. Ferociously, sinus-clearingly hot, yet you could still taste the sweet and fruity notes from the fresh chillies. Genuinely one of the best hot sauces I’ve tried for a long while, and I speak as someone who can barely shut my fridge without something with a slightly dodgy name and a colon clearing effect falling out.

The calco e pepe balls – orbs of deep fried spaghetti - were off the menu so I settled for a side of pickle slaw. While I love slaw as much as the next man, a little more perhaps, it is a little bit harder to get excited about shredded cabbage, especially as there are so many bad iterations out there, this, however, was very good;  crunchy and tangy and with the perfect amount of pickle-flecked dressing (although I couldn’t resist another squidge of mayo across the top #mayo4lyfe).

Despite my best attempts to get her to order the porcheta, The Ewing resisted and instead went for the beef braciole, braised steak, stuffed with garlic, parsley, pecorino and chili, then slow braised with onion and bone marrow. Served on a glazed buttermilk roll with melted Taleggio and pickled red onions.

Again, it was a pretty flawless sarnie, sweet tender beef, oozy cheese and the punch of chilli heat and pickled onions - and again it managed to maintain its structural integrity to the end, despite a decent application of rich gravy.

We also shared a helping of Italo fries that came topped with 6 hour beef shin ragu, provolone cheese sauce and pink pickled onions, which were quite as glorious as their description suggests.

Owner Ed Mason also owns Leeds legend, Whitelock’s Ale House, so they were also showcasing some of the best of the Yorkshire craft beer scene for the Beer City celebrations. Of the one we tried the Yorkshire Dale's Pale - a northern riff on Oskar Blues Dales Pale brewed in conjunction with Kirkstall - and Other PPL, a lactose IPA from Zapato Brewery, were the standouts.

Being well fed and even better lubricated made the evening an even more enjoyable one, even if the climax of the evening saw plucky Laura Muir being hustled into fourth place in the Women’s 1500m final. If only they awarded medals for beer-drinking….

Oystahs and Crystal, Y'all

In the second of a series I've titled 'take your wife somewhere she wants to eat so she won't complain about walking around a housing estate all afternoon' (the series kicking off at the Big Easy in Chelsea), we trekked back to the Kingsland Road for a visit to Pamela, erstwhile home of Southern-style specialists Decatur, for a spot of weekend brunchin'.

Named after a Street in New Orleans, Decatur was started by owner Tom Browne 'as a celebration of food I couldn’t get here'. And, after contriving to miss them both at their pop up at Mother Kelly's and their stall at Druid Street market - where an endless stream of grilled oysters populate my Instagram on a Saturday morning - I was determined to finally track them down. Auspicious timing, as it later transpired.

While the brunch menu doesn't list their Kentucky style beer cheese - disappointingly for someone who could subsist on beer and cheese (and often does) - it does feature a solid roster of classics with a Louisianan twist that include bananas foster french toast, crispy veggie hash and steak and eggs. 

They also have a whole section called 'biscuit station' (the freshly baked American type, and not related custard cream or jammy dodgers), as well as a bottomless brunch offer that includes as many mimosas and bloody Pamelas as you can manage during your meal.

Tempting as it was (nothing says Sunday, or heartburn, more than a stiff vodka and tomato juice), it was impossible to resist the charms of iced chicory coffee, served sweetened with cane syrup and a splash of milk and finished with a shot of banana infused Jamesons for good measure.

Originally used to 'stretch' the coffee, chicory root is now a common addition to a New Orleans style cuppa joe and the addition of the sweet fruity whiskey here provides the perfect foil for its bitterness. This cocktail was bananas; Gwen Stefani eat your heart out.

As I have pontificated at length on this blog many times, raw oysters don't really do it for me, but a starter of half a dozen of their famed grilled oysters to share- topped with butter, garlic, pecorino and hot sauce and served with chunks of sourdough for mopping up the briny juices - were sweet, tangy little nuggets of joy. 

While purists may baulk at the idea of not just cooking an oyster but smothering it with cheese and chilli, it's not just me who has good things to say about them - just after our visit, Time Out bestowed first place on their list of London's top 100 dishes to theses very bivalves. And after tasting them it's hard not to agree. (Timeout confirmation unrequired...I never choose cooked oysters but these were outstanding - TE).

To a Brit, biscuits and gravy – essentially scones served with a peppery béchamel sauce made with a roux of flour and pork fat and studded with odd lumps of sausagemeat - might seem like a strange concept. I was an early convert, after going to a branch of Rax on my first trip to Florida as a child and discovering the delights of the breakfast buffet piled with strange things such as corn grits and shards of crispy bacon, that I could pile up on puffy little pancakes and douse in maple syrup without a second look from the waitress; although the rest of my family looked suitable disgusted.

Here biscuits are paired with sausage gravy and fried chicken, served with a token scattering of redundant greenery that only serves to highlight the fact everything else is so gloriously saturated with butter. Thankfully, any guilty feelings are fleeting, counteracted by the effects of the banana whiskey. The chicken -  tender boneless thighs, with a carapace that shatters pleasingly as you bite into it – is pretty much on par with the glorious birds being fried by Carl Clarke a couple of doors down. Very high praise indeed.

Named after the town of Breaux Bridge - which has been named 'la capitale mondiale de l'écrevisse' or, more mundanely in English, the crawfish capital of the world, The Ewing's Eggs Pont Breaux also came on a bed of fluffy biscuits. This time they were topped with crawfish etoufee, a spicy seafood stew, accompanied by eggs with perfectly oozy yolks. Pretty much perfect brunch fare.

It wouldn't be brunch N'awlins style with out a plate of freshly fried beignets. Bought to the South in the 18th century by French colonists, these pillow-shaped yeasted fried pastries became so popular they were declared the 'official state doughnut of Louisiana' in 1986.

Traditionally served, buried under a flurry of icing sugar, these three squares of puffed up perfection provided the final gilding on the lily. And while a cafe au lait may have provided a traditional accompaniment (there are no hot drinks available, so grab your caffeine fix before you get here), I 'made do' with the wonderful Tiny Rebel Cali American pale ale.

On getting our bill, our charming waiter told us that the year long Decatur residency - after they were initially only supposed to be there for three months - was finally looking likely to come to an end. Something that has now been confirmed on the Decatur Instagram page. Not all bad news though, for all those craving that Southern fix, they are still serving at Pamela until December 23rd and there are more projects planned for 2017.

But for now, there is still time to treat yourself to an early present - a platter of fine oysters and a fine view of their wall of Pamelas. As Ms Anderson herself said; 'I'd rather be looked over than overlooked'.