Romance reviewed: Randall and Aubin

It’s takes a pretty special restaurant to make Saturday night in Soho sound like quiet country town. Randall and Aubin is one such place, but only because it’s so loud inside, that once you step to into Brewer Street your hearing has been damaged so much the noises of London’s drunken louts seem positively peaceful.

I know I sound like an old woman: “The music was so loud, when I go out I want to be able to have a conversation, not listen to pounding funky house.”

Randall and Aubin is suffering from a sense of confusion, one part cheesy gay dance club, one part romantic-as-hell couples cubby-hole. I can’t fault the food – my lobster was as sweet as nectar, the crab linguini rich and meaty, but the noise, oh my God the noise…

It was like eating in on of the clubs you’d find down the road in Leicester Square, but instead of bar snacks, I ate oysters and shellfish – soul food, date food, not stodgy, soak-up-the-alcohol nachos.

With two-seater booths around the walls, it looked like it was designed for couples, not gaggling groups of revellers to get bladdered. The wine list was thoughtful and comprehensive and it says a lot that despite, or perhaps because of, the noise the queue was still out the door at 9.30pm.

Even now, trying to define Randall and Aubin is making my head spin – is it the place to go before hitting Soho on a giant binge, if so, is ordering the prawns that good an idea?

Once it sorts out it’s identity crisis, this could be one of London’s finest restaurants.


Food: 9/10
Service: 6/10
Cost: £75, for 2 courses, including a bottle of wine

Randall and Aubin
Brewer Street
London, W1F 0SG

OH AUNTY DELIA....

Judging from the buzz going around the more food orientated corners of the interweb this morning it appears that I'm not the only one who was more than a little disappointed with Delia Smith's culinary shortcuts showcase last night.

And disappointed really is the key word for it. It would be very simple to get mad at a woman who many view as being both saint and sinner of the British Celebrity Chef world. In my eyes, Delia Smith has always stood out as being the rather staid headmistress of this rather unruly bunch, standing over the British public with wooden spoon ever ready to give us a healthy rap on the knuckles if we didn't follow her pastry making instructions just so. And unfortunately for her, if I'm looking to cook something tasty after a hard day slaving over the computer, I'm very unlikely to turn to one of her recipes-not because they've not been constructed with love and care, but mainly because to me they've always had the lingering stench of the school Home Economics kitchen hanging around over them.

So with such stiff competition from the likes of the Jamie "Fucking Hell I've got a Garden" Oliver's and cooing buxom Nigella Lawson's of this world, is it any wonder that "Delia" (eschewing her surname in favour of us referring to her on a friendlier first name basis nowadays) feels that she has to come out of self imposed retirement and return to our screens better, faster, and generally more "sexed up"? The Delia presented to us yesterday evening seemed to be a creature of two different personalities-the "Let's be 'aving you!" good time girl, who loved Norwich City and its ilk, as well as a glass or two of Sherry during a game set against a persona she undoubtedly felt much more comfortable with-the doughty little housewife, pottering around, dutifully making pies for her husband and ruling the household with an iron fist.



As for the recipes themselves....well. The overall aim of Delia is admirable-after all, she is the woman who convinced millions of people that making fresh, tasty food was not beyond their reach, even if they were incapable of boiling an egg. So why then such a fall from grace?

Now let's get one thing clear here. I am not against shortcuts per se. I was perhaps one of the few people to not manage to whip myself up into a self righteous fury over last year's Nigella Express (although this may be born out of my father referring to me recently as the "Nigella Lawson of South Manchester" a tag I am more than comfortable with, I must say). My cupboards at home are filled with tinned tomatoes, tinned chickpeas, dried herbs and vegetable bouillon powder. But are people really so strapped for time that they have to used tinned mince and frozen mashed potato? Particularly as these products undoubtedly cost more and undoubtedly lose their taste in the cooking and freezing process? For me at least, there's something soulless about this form of cookery. Instead of investing food with time love and care, it's reduced to no more than pricking the plastic cover on a ready meal.

If Delia Smith wants to invest a love of cooking in the nation, she should sit them down and explain to them how it's really done. That yes, it may take time and effort, but that the end product is infinately more satisfying-and yes, tastier too. So what if your cheese sauce turns out lumpy or your chocolate cake falls? Surely that's better than sticking in those awful hockey pucks of reconstituted Smash. Trial and Error is all part of the learning process. Unfortunately with this programme, all that Delia is doing here is making a lot of rich ready made food manufacturers a hell of a lot richer.

FROMAGE FRAIS

Perhaps it's all down to a rogue genetic construct when it comes to my appetites, or perhaps it can be blamed on a certain maturity taking hold of my tastebuds since turning 25, but recently I've been wracked with a craving for melted cheese products. This is odd for two reasons; the first being that I've hated any kind of cheese not on a lasagne for as long as I can remember and also because a hatred of cheese has been combined with an unexplainable yet pathological fear of actually touching the stuff-so much so in fact that on one notable occasion back when I was sixteen years old, I was frog marched out of my GCSE Food Technology class by the teacher because I threatened to throw a screaming fit if I was going to be forced to plunge my hand into a bag of grated cheddar.

To this day, the mere thought of grated cheddar makes me feel a mite queasy. I'm sure the person who invented this time-saving construct must have been some kind of bizarre fromage sadist. Surely I cannot be alone in believing that it holds little to no relation to its lordly cousin, the humble block of (ungrated) cheddar? A block of cheddar feels waxy and weighty and doesn't look as though it's so radioactive it's going to leap out of the bag and grab you by the throat. Grated Cheddar feels and tastes...dusty. Just writing this sensation down makes my skin crawl.

However, call it fate, call it chance, call it my insatiable craving for something obscenely savoury, but on Saturday night after a couple of jars, I returned home with the unshakeable knowledge that melting a high quality cheddar on a crumpet with a dash of Worcester Sauce would be some kind of culinary ephihany. Which indeed it was, a incident which was made even better when I woke up and remembered I hadn't burnt my house down by leaving the grill on overnight.

On Monday evening I decided to put my newfound craving to the test by attempting to make a Hommity Pie for myself and my beloved. Hommity Pie is one of those kind of recipes that's a perennial favourite in many households and certainly provides a premier amount of stodge to shoehorn into any diet on a cold Winter's night. If you're looking to make it for yourselves, the recipe goes something like this:

HOMMITY PIE-SERVES FOUR PEOPLE

Pastry
4oz Plain Wholemeal Flour
4oz Plain White Flour
4oz Margarine
Pinch Salt

Filling
2lb Potaoes
1 Medium Onion
3 or 4 Cloves Garlic
3 Tablespoons Shoyu (Soya Sauce)
Black Pepper
1 Teaspoon Dried Parsley
8oz Cheddar Cheese (Any cheese will do really-when I made it I used Gruyére which was equally as tasty)

Method
First of all mix the flour and margarine together with your fingertips until you end up with something akin to bread crumbs.
Gradually add enough cold water to form a dough.
Refrigerate for an hour.
To make the filling, start off by cubing the potatoes and cooking until very soft.
Chop the onion, crush the garlic and then fry together in a little oil.
Add the shoyu and black pepper and then mix with the potatoes, along with a little of the potato water to make the mixture nice and creamy.
Spread the mixture out in a pastry-lined baking tray.
Grate the cheese and then spread it out over the potato mixture along with the dried parsley.
Cook in a moderate oven (Gas Mark 5) for about 40 minutes.

Unfortunately, when I made this the pastry turned out a little soggy, but I think this was more down to me dishing it up too early instead of allowing the juices from the Shoyu Onions and Garlic mixture to soak into the pastry. However, I do intend to make this again, if only because it managed to sate my savoury cravings for a good four hours or so.

As a result of my various experiments, I can now resolutely hand-on-heart say I am a cheese convert. So readers, which ones do you think I should be trying out in my quest of discovery? Please bear in mind that I don't do blue cheese. I'm all for experimentation, but I'm not yet sure that my stomach lining can handle an ingestion of mould.

Romance reviewed: Mildred’s

Or...

Ms F enters a pie-eating competition…And wins!

You know that old adage, ‘your eyes are bigger than you stomach’? Well, my competitive nature is bigger than my stomach.

I was challenged to this contest by my vegetarian boyfriend who wanted to show me there was more to meat-free meals than falafel and rice. So off we trundled to Mildred’s where I was charged to eat a whole porcini pot pie, plus sides, starter and dessert.

Mildred’s is a hugely popular vegetarian restaurant in Soho, they don’t serve fish and they don’t do Quorn. But somehow what is essentially a mushroom and err, mushroom pie is extremely filling.

Encased in a few layers of light puff pastry, the mushrooms overflow, soaked in dark ale gravy. It’s so rich, it feels like I’m eating a Christmas pudding. Having lasciviously devoured my vegetable gyoza, this was going to be a challenge,

But not an unpleasant one, the minted mushy peas provided the perfect accompaniment to the pie and the sweet potato fries (swapped instead of standard potatoes).

Dessert is what proved most tricky, the apple and strawberry crumble was a too tarte, bordering on sour and the oaty, nutty crumble topping was certainly not going to make my challenge any easier.

Still, I finished, which was as much a credit to Mildred’s as it is to my ever-expanding stomach.

Food: 9/10
Service: 7/10
Cost: £56, for three courses, including three glasses of wine

Mildreds
Lexington Street
London, W1F 0LW