Addiction

Much is written about impulse and addiction in society these days, and I suppose if there was something - for me - that encapsulated this, it would be Snoggy’s South African shop in Wimbledon Station. I have be a patron of this particular store for over 10 years, spending enough money there that I should be a share holder by now! 

Whenever I get out at platform five and ascend the stairs on my way to the ticket barrier, there it is, with its signature sides of air-dried beef beckoning me to either buy a whole piece or a bag of chunks (which usually get consumed within five minutes of purchase). I think I have a problem, and an expensive one at that, but the stuff is so damn good. 

Biltong, for the uninitiated is air-dried, marinated beef; think Bresaola, but from a thinner cut and marinated in salt, coriander seeds, vinegar and other spices before being hung and air dried. I will say, it’s an acquired taste but once you get used to it, moreish in the extreme. 

Here’s a plug, the aforementioned Snoggy’s does the best in London. Correction, for me, Snoggy’s does the best in London, because I have never tasted anything like it from other vendors or the disappointing packs of the stuff (over-salted and as dry as leather) now available in pubs and off licenses across the UK. 

Snoggy’s, like a proper South African shop, sells the stuff in varying different styles. From the bone-dry, lacquer-like lean variety to the unctuous ‘wet’ and fatty. The latter is my favourite and has a flavour profile all of its own. 

Given that we’re a nation of beef lovers, I’m surprised this snacking food has not got more traction, I’m waiting to see bowls of it on the bars of smart hotels made to a house recipe. 

If you’re looking to give your jaw a good workout then this is for you. It’s beefy but with a delicate, spicy and slightly piquant taste, perfect when matched with an ice-cold lager. Coming from Wimbledon, where there’s a big South African community, there’s tonnes of the stuff available but it seems to be harder to find (in it’s fresh form) elsewhere. 

Drowoers come a close second, air-dried sausages which pleasingly snap as soon as you sink your choppers into them. Chock-full of coriander they have a savoury taste which makes them perfect as a snack to complement an afternoon in front of the box watching the rugby. 

If you haven’t tried the stuff yet, I suggest you head to Snoggy’s and queue up behind the scores of expats who are beguiled by the quality, and also the charm of the staff at who serve there. 

Go on, treat yourself to some of South Africa’s best! 

A very London Christmas - Part I

Was it only I who went into this festive season feeling that it had somewhat lost the lustre of previous Yuletide experiences? Gone, it seemed, were the butterflies that assembled in the stomach and the electricity that seemed to shiver down the spine as the first few bars of Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’ echoed around department stores and malls across the country. 

I felt somewhat indifferent, in the past I was either euphoric with joy (sugar induced perhaps?) or down in the doldrums of self pity, licking wounds... and probably drinking too much (although I think that's a theme of countless Christmases since I turned 16). This year I felt as if I went through the motions, some fantastic Christmas parties were offset with some boozy evenings with friends at some boozer or another. 

I literally tore up the town through a mist of Estrella lager and Johnny Walker on the rocks. The days were filled with sickly treats and the repetitious jingle-jangling of ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ and ‘I believe in Father Christmas’; the nights were full of oaken bars, the roar of the office party and Cafe Creme cigars punctuated by the flickering of strobe lights and the sound of clicking knees, precariously trying to negotiate the dance floors of Central London. Yes, this was probably the least highly-anticipated Christmas I have every had but, you know what, it was the best one I have ever had. 

The clock struck 12:00pm on 24th December, heralding the culmination of business (officially) at my office for 2014. With a great sense of relief the five remaining staff in the office traipsed across the road to a perennial favourite, The Queens Arms. A very agreeable lunch of roasted leg of lamb with forestiere potatoes (fine green beans and chanterelle mushrooms) and lamb sauce was seen of with a very well appointed pint of Truman’s Bold as Brass, a delicious end to a fab first six months with the company! Ahead of the trip back to Wimbledon, where I would be based throughout the holidays, I dipped into the ever wonderful Rippon Cheese, one of the best fromageries that I have ever stepped into. At this emporium, I decided that I would opt for a little tour of Northern France, purchasing: a petite Munster, a Maroilles, a Morbier and a young Mimolette.  

Partway through the painfully slow journey back from Victoria to Wimbledon Park on the District Line, I became slightly confused as to why the carriage was starting to clear around me, baffled why commuters were parting to the very corners of the carriages like the red sea and Moses. I then cast my nose downwards and was met with the rather pungent aroma of Munster and Maroilles sweating away under the heat of the train’s efficient central heating. One fellow passenger was blunt in their criticism: ‘I think someone has farted’, casting an evil glare in my direction. Desperately I tried to distance myself from this new found, if rather delicious, albatross around my neck, but to no avail. For the rest of the journey, I had to endure all manner of filthy looks cast-aside faces all in the name of gastronomy. 

I finally made it back to Wimbledon, where the cheese was quickly zip-locked into a cold bag and stored in the garage overnight. We were expecting guests that evening and after pouring myself a generous gin and tonic I set to helping my mother cutting cocktail sausages, shaping smoked salmon sandwiches and apportioning asparagus rolls. Just when we thought we had got everything ready, with Champagne in the freezer, Christmas jumpers donned and the first batch of snags in the oven we were greeted by some constructive criticism by the house’s self-appointed Nicky Haslam... my brother. 

“You cannot have a bottle of Bells on display behind the decanters, people will think that terribly naff. I think we should hide that.” I think I emitted a resounding sigh. Thankfully, the waterford spirit decanter was close to hand, and into this worthy fellow the malt liquor was decanted, a style crisis was avoided (although I am sure one reader will find a spirit decanter very retro). 

Guests arrived, guests bantered, hoovered the food, quaffed the chilled Champers and took their leave. It had been a pleasant start to the vacation and soon my brother and I were hunkered down to a few stiff G&Ts, a plate of cocktail sausages and a very unimpressive round of Scrabble, in which neither one of us did any justification to the furtherment of English language. I sadly lost in a battle to the bitter end, yet the family wordsmith manage to trump me with a tactically brilliant but totally banal piece of play! ;-) 

the wearying tides of sleep beckoned as I drifted off on the sofa, it had been a good, balance start to the season and I couldn’t wait to see what Christmas Day had in store. 

Keep your eyes peeled tomorrow for more on Christmas chez Henry Rubinstein...

A beacon of light in SW19

The Lighthouse, 75-77 Ridgway, Greater London SW19 4ST

It seemed Wimbledon was doomed to lag behind other peripheral, affluent London boroughs in terms of gastronomy. While trendy eateries were popping up all over North London and as far as Chiswick or Catford, SW19 seemed somewhat neglected.

Of course there were a number of pretenders to the culinary throne throughout the years, promising so much and yet either delivering so little or, worse, being so damn inconsistent. When I was younger Tootsies was as glamorous as it got, with its smothered chicken, crinkle-cut fries and carousel of burger relishes. Other hotspots included the vast Chinese restaurants Bayee Village and Confucius (I’m actually quite fond of the latter) and the thoroughly dated and outrageously priced San Lorenzo Fouriporta (said to be a favourite of Boris Becker – he’s obviously never been to Riva in Barnes). It is fair to say that the borough was a plethora of Young’s pubs and, if not a desert, a very dry savannah in terms of restaurants.

           

Such was the sorry case, and in my mind a rather puzzling one. Wimbledon has always been a well-off area (especially around the village and the top end of the broadway) and one would think that a restaurateur would have seen the potential of setting up a great local restaurant in the style of Chez Bruce. Perhaps it’s to do with the overheads, or maybe the palettes of the local clientele are just not that sophisticated, who knows. It’s certainly not hard to find artisan and luxury goods, with purveyors like Bayley & Sage, Vallebona and Wimbledon Wine Cellar catering to high-end buyers with a very high credit limit – The platinum AMEX or Coutts card is the weapon of choice in these places, brandished with deadly efficiency like a Japanese shuriken.

I am being both a little indulgent and equally unfair. In the last few years, a couple of places, such as the Lawn Bistro and the Fox & Grapes have popped up. The latter has become a local institution and I have given it a good review on this blog, however it has three distinct problems: inconsistency in cooking, almost Michelin-level prices and it lacks atmosphere. I have eaten very well there but I have also eaten very badly. Sometimes its sloppiness, sometimes it’s over-ambition, occasionally just a little of both. It leaves one thinking that there is nowhere in the neighbourhood in which one can regularly get great plates of food on a daily basis… of course, this would be wrong.

The Lighthouse is a restaurant located on a busy thoroughfare known as the Ridgeway, which leads from Wimbledon Village through the vale, down to the A3. It has been going for quite a few years now and is the unsung hero of the local restaurant scene. I am personally surprised that I do not see it more in critics’ reviews or the local Archant/Zest Media glossies.

The cooking is modern European, very accurate and quite often excellent. To my mind it is the best restaurant in SW19. My most recent meal there? a couple of weeks ago, and I think that the menu that evening (on which I celebrated my 27^th year on this planet) was testament to the sterling work that is going on in their kitchen and the quality of the ingredients that they use.

I started with very clean plate of their homemade gravadlax, very fresh and delicate with a slightly mustard sauce, a perfect calling card and not to overpowering. With a cold, crisp glass of viognier, a few pieces of this and this starter was a welcome introduction ahead of the more gutsy main courses.

I chose the rump of lamb, three thick, medium-rare slices of meaty heaven with a beautifully caramelised top, producing a wonderfully meat flavour. This was paired with a smooth potato and pea puree and some lightly cooked cos lettuce and a lamb jus. I cleaned my plate!

To finish a surprisingly light, no frills treacle tart with citrus undertones and a generous dollop of cold, clotted cream. I’ve not got a big sweet tooth but this was an exception. I paired it with a glass of grappa which, the pure alcohol cutting through the sweetness perfectly.

Rounding off the meal with a cup of well made coffee, something so rare to find, I thought to myself that it would be nice if we could have more places to eat like this: full of creativity but without the pretention.

If you find yourself in Wimbledon and feeling peckish, you could do far worse than come to this lovely restaurant. 

The end of an affair… the last doner

‘Everything ends badly, otherwise it wouldn’t end’ - Cocktail, 1988

Profound words I am sure you’ll agree, and the very essence of ‘Coughlan’s Law’ put into practice. Apologies for those who have not had the sheer pleasure of enjoying the flawed genius of the 1988 blockbuster Cocktail, but I feel the above quote is apt for this post. 

This affair, if you can call it that, dates back to the winter of 2001 where a 13-year old schoolboy (me) enjoyed his fist taste of a doner kebab. At the time it was a revelation. The slightly chewy, greasy savouriness and stale cumin aroma of the shaved meat atop crisp fries drenched in degraded vegetable oil and accompanied with the clean bitterness of white onion, limp, shredded lettuce, fiery pickled chilli and lashings of garlic sauce was a veritable feast! On the £10-a-week allowance it was a real Sunday lunchtime treat, appealing to that taste for junk food that all young people seem to have. Sitting on the steps outside the bustling ‘Charcoal Grill’, I was in an MSG, fat-laden heaven, tucking into a mountain of sub-prime meat and ersatz chips. So a long-term relationship was born with this icon of unhealthiness. 

A taste for the dish was developed throughout the years and in my time I sampled many a different take on this fast food classic, call it a wrap or a gyros, it was still the same thing.  However, it was at my alma mater, The University of Leeds where I became something of a connoisseur. Quality varied of course, but for the most part I was either hungry enough or drunk enough to chow down on some very suspect foodstuff, I don’t think the suppliers of the meat will be winning any Red Tractor awards any time soon. The garlic sauce, I believe, played a big part in masking the taste of low-grade alsatian definitely past its best - the further addition of punchy chilli sauce was also something of a panacea to the slightly putrid flavours playing havoc on the tastebuds.

There also seemed to be something of a ritual behind the consumption of the kebab. The pub crawl or heavy night clubbing, the 2:00am stagger home, the blinking signs of 1,001 different takeaways (all with a varying success rate in the hygiene stakes), the smell of rancid fat bubbling away in the deep fat fryer, the shouts of other sozzled revellers trying to place their orders in stilted drunken-ese... I am sure that many of you, dear readers, will remember remember this scene well. 

A request garbled whilst trying to hold down a booze-soaked conversation with other kebab shop pilgrims. The offending article then bagged and tagged, plastic fork stuck in the top of the polystyrene box. Home, TV on and the ritual of eating the meat and chips, indulgence in something that screamed naughtiness. You knew you’d feel bad the next day but the thrill of the quick fix was too much, worth the guilt and remorse you’d feel as the last, dried out chips stared back at you the next morning, reminding a person of their debauchery the previous night. 

It went on like this for many years, the cheap thrill of the doner kebab with its seedy lure was very appealing after a night out on the tiles, but it all came crashing down around me when I had the unfortunate luck to go to the ‘The New Grill’ (Formerly Kebab Delight) on Leopold Road, Wimbledon. It wasn’t even that late but I was coming back from some drinks and I couldn’t be bothered to cook - passing the shop I got something of a craving for poor-quality, low-grade meat. I entered, slightly concerned that they were shutting up shop at 10:30pm way before the the industry’s big trading hours. Seemingly I had stumbled into the only ‘small town’ kebab shop, something that Carson mcCullers might have written about, ‘Ballad to the sad kebab shop’. 

The staff were sullen and despondent, only emphasised by the unnatural glare of powerful fluorescent lighting. The fruit machine that had once been there was gone, replaced by a depressed looking palm tree that one felt was hankering for the dry heat of the French Riviera - it was its lot in life to be stuck in a South London fast food joint, having its leaves spattered with grease and receiving abuse from drunken punters pouring cans of Fanta into its bone dry soil. 

I was distracted from my musings on the plight of this palm by the cheery but slightly weary proprietor who informed me that all they had left on the menu was Doner and Chips. ‘Fine’ I thought, ‘that’s what I wanted anyway.’ 

So without further ado, I ordered usual topped off with lashings of garlic sauce. I had a couple of cold Stellas in the fridge and, in homage to Gary Strang of Men Behaving Badly fame I decided I would indulge in the above whilst watching some late night dross on TV. Of course I wasn’t disappointed, a double bill of ‘Don’t try this at home’ followed by  a repeat of ‘Stars in their Eyes’ on Challenge. The rest of the night was set and I was looking forward to a few chilled brews and my delicious kebab. I could’t have been more wrong. 

It had been a good six months since I had eaten my last doner and chips, and looking back a couple of weeks ago I can see why. It was just filthy, fond memories of slurping up slivers of shaved meat were wiped away in seconds as I bit into the semi congealed mess on top of chips that definitely could have done with some more time out of the freezer and in the fryer. To top it all off, the garlic sauce had so much sugar in it that it rendered the who sorry mess inedible... I came to realise that this truly was the end of an affair. My night was ruined (perhaps a little far-fetched but I am sure you will allow me some embellishment for the sake of entertaining prose)

Like the narrator in A E Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad I was reminded of those ‘happy highways whence I roamed, and cannot come again’. Such it was with the kebab, a sordid and longtime love but one which I must leave behind to the mists of misspent youth and the chip shops of West Yorkshire. 

The January Man

A new year should be all about new resolutions and January is the time to start acting upon these, a time of remorse and self-pity where everyone feels compelled to tell everyone else that they are ‘detoxing’ and ‘being good’... until February! How sanctimonious!  That is why I have taken the opportunity this month to shun convention and carry on as normal... and what fun I have had. So while these ‘holier-than-thou’ carrot munchers quaff their wheatgrass smoothies and pop their cod liver oil tablets, I declare ‘boo-ya-sucks-to-you’ in this joyous post focusing on some of the hedonistic highlights of this month. 

Nothing is more comforting on a chill winters evening than a quiet pint of tepid bitter in an old fashioned boozer, and while such establishments are few and far between in South London, there are a small few that still offer a very convivial and warm setting for a civilised drink. The Alexandra (or the ‘Ally’ as it is known locally) is one such place, a large but friendly pub fifty metres from Wimbledon Station with a killer selection of bitter which includes my favourites: Young’s Special, Winter Warmer, Wandle and Junction as well as a few craft ales from the Meantime Stable along with the ubiquitous selections of commercial lager. Okay it might not be the gastropub that so many now crave but it served a lovely, frothing pint in a jolly atmosphere which is helped by great staff. 

For those looking to step back in time even further, I recommend a seedy, scummy little pub in the grand surroundings of Duke Street St. James, Chequers. A regular haunt of mine this pub is perfectly positioned being a five minute walk from Green Park Station, JJ Fox and Dukes Hotel’s legendary bar. Only last Friday you would have found me there under the searing blaze of their outdoor heaters indulging in a fine cigar, a NUB Sungrown. The stogie was full bodied and rich smoke with a thick plume of smoke wrapped and filled with some very fine Nicaraguan tobacco, well worth the £13.00 it cost. I coupled this with a very reliable pint of London Pride and a little nip of brandy to warm to cockles of me heart with, of course, some great banter. Inside it is somewhat dated with beer stained carpets, badly kept urinals, gin and tonic served in goblets and no room to swing a cat. Hear of ‘Tavern’ brand crisps? Neither have I and, after sampling them I cannot say i will be recommending them to anyone! 

Looking a little later into the evening London in January offers no end of entertainment, a veritable mix of iniquitous dens where one can dance and drink the nice away. Bart’s Bar is one such place, a ‘speakeasy’ on Sloane Avenue it is a room in an apartment complex decked out in weird objet d’art and hunting memorabilia. Potent cocktails and spirits on the rocks are the order of the day at this late-night watering hole as well as the presence of many uber-chic glamour pusses. Far too cool for me but sometime riff-raff like me are allowed to make an appearance.The same could not be said of Sugar Cane on Lavender Hill, a far from salubrious place, in which the smell of stale mojitos mingles uneasily with an atmosphere of passive violence and cracking knuckles, not the place for a drunken, shrinking violet like myself! After too too many badly made cocktail it was difficult to remember much of the decor, and indeed some of my more riotous and dangerous dance floor moves, but needless to say it was like a Tiki bar designed by someone devoid of all sense of taste! But then again, what do you expect of a place by three AM in the morning? 

Well that’s your lot for this week, but if you, like me, have decided to stick two fingers up at the broccoli brigade then please feel free to comment below and tell me about some of the places that you have been this January, I am always on the lookout for recommendations!