Roka, Charlotte St.

To the provincial eye, London seems excessively stocked with Japanese restaurants; what is it about Londoners and Japanese food? At least in the centre, there seems to be a Japanese restaurant on every street. No doubt there are some gems (I can vouch for Café Japan in Golders Green) as well as some establishments better left untried, but Roka is clearly one of the capital’s most special. It comes in two flavours, Charlotte St and Canary Wharf; I can only vouch for Charlotte St, having been there twice now. Apart from sheer high quality, what makes Roka different from the average Japanese restaurant is the Robata grill. In Charlotte St, the grill dominates the room, and if you get a (non-reservable) seat at the bar, and prevent your drinks from falling over on the not quite flat, very deliberately rustic wood finish, you will get a great view of the chefs at work – at the price of the occasional odd smell or puff of smoke coming your way.

A study of the menu suggested that a lot of the things we most wanted to try were not on the tasting menu, so we set about assembling our own bit-by-bit, for slightly less money. Salad first: Sake No Miso Zake Salada is a miso cured salmon with a konbu daikon (kelp prepared with Japanese radish) and nama nori (a variety of the edible seaweed used to wrap sushi). The salmon is beautifully cured; apparently the dish has sweet vinegar in it, but there is no acid edge. The dish feels like Japanese gravadlax. Kaiso Salada is also from the salad menu; a mix of seaweed, cucumber, gem lettuce off the Robata, umeboshi (pickled plum) served with a shiso (or perilla, a minty, slightly soapy tasting herb) dressing. The saline quality of the seaweed cheated my palate into thinking small pieces of marinated melon were seafood.

The first of our Robata grill dishes was Ko Nasa, eggplant in mirin (sweet rice wine), ginger and soy. As well as the nutty flavour of slightly burnt eggplant, the dish has some chilli supplying heat. Then we had the lovely Kobuta No Ribs Yawaraka Nikowi, baby back ribs with a honey glaze, all sprinkled with cashew nuts and spring onions. Gin Tara No Saikyo-Yaki - black cod marinated in yuzu miso - had a citric edge that cuts against the cod and the flavour of burnt, black sesame. Atsuage No Mugi Miso-Yaki is flame-grilled tofu. I’m used to tofu as a soft, quickly disintegrating substance, but this is a solid log, crisp on the outside, with the rubbery texture of preserved scallops. However, it is no less bland than normal tofu, the strong flavour of the dish coming from ginger and pepper.

For dessert, we shared a dish of iced coffee and black sesame crumble, a rather lovely meeting of east and west, made up of a coffee parfait, a savoury sesame crumble – looking like instant coffee granules – yamazaki whisky balls, and mandarin. The meeting of mandarin and sesame is a particularly lovely combination, with a shiso leaf on the side offering bitter, soapy contrast.

Sake is a particular attraction for us, and Roka has one of the most interesting sake lists we’ve found in London (Nobu is also very good). These sakes - a mix of guest and regulars – are among the most interesting I’ve ever had.

Daishinsyu “Teppai” Junmai Daiginjo Muroka

Very much like fruit salad on the nose, but with herby notes I associated with coriander; it varied through the evening from being especially pear to melon-like. By the end of the evening, the herby notes had moved on to be replaced by a slightly spicy, yeasty quality. This sake went particularly well with the salmon.

All Koji 2009

A very dark amber colour, clearly a different beast from the Teppai, both savoury and sweet on the palate. It has an interesting mouthfeel, going heavy – light – heavy again as it moves across the palate. There are fruit notes, but they are subservient to the toasty yeastiness. By the end of the evening, it is like marmalade with black beans.

Nanbubjin “Oke No Tami”

Pale and comparatively light, but nonetheless complex, the bouquet offers milk, cod liver oil and a clarifying minty note that becomes more eucalyptus-like as the evening progresses, before disappearing altogether, ending the evening tasting of sesame.

Pommier Chablis

Isabelle et Denis POMMIER Chablis 1er Cru 2006 Côte de Léchet

Chardonnay is a grape variety we tend to associate with oak aging; from beautiful toasty Burgundies to blowsy Californians and perma-toasted Australians, a well-made, oaky Chardonnay can be a thing of joy. Although in New World wine-making it is now common to make unoaked Chardonnays – as a reaction against the overoaked but under-performing wines that were common in the 1990s – Chablis is the one fine wine area where Chardonnay is not automatically given some contact with oak. Some Chablis makers use nothing but stainless steel to make their wines, believing this gives the purest expression of the Chablis terroir; an austere, mineral quality often described as “gunflint”. Other makers will use oak barrels to age their Chablis, arguing that the slow process of oxygenation that results from barrel-aging imparts an extra level of complexity to the wine. These will always be old barrels, so that the oak character never becomes dominant.

The Pommier Chablis, it turns out, belongs to this second class. Quite pale, even for a Chablis, there is just a wispy hint of oak on the nose along with a gentle but discernable tropical fruit note; guava, followed by cooked apple. Fine, light on the palate and slightly oily, not quite as steely as a more classic Chablis would be. Elegant, although it doesn’t show a great deal of development.

Barry Smith talk and tasting

This tasting was the practical coda to a talk given by Dr. Barry Smith, oenophile extraordinaire and Director of the Institute of Philosophy, on the philosophy of taste (Edinburgh University, Fri 18/2/11).

Barry’s position, as I understood it, was to set a limit on how far we can consider taste a subjective experience. His starting gripe was with some wine critics who, on the one hand, insist that the taste of a wine is a subjective, individual experience (we are often told at wine tastings that we must define the taste of a wine in terms which are meaningful to us and which may be very different from those used by others) but who then go on to give a categorical recommendation (and a score out of 100!) to individual wines. Surely there is an inherent contradiction here?

We can contrast phenomena such as lighting and our mood, which may subconsciously influence our evaluation of a wine, with criteria such as acid, tannin, sugar, sulphur and carbon dioxide, all of which are scientifically measureable components. A tannic wine will produce a classic “mouth-puckering”, drying sensation, which we should all recognize. Is this sensation not telling us something objective about the wine?

80% of what we perceive as flavour is in fact smell. This can be easily observed by taking a swig of wine while your nostrils are clamped firmly shut, and this phenomenon has interesting implications for what we describe as the taste and the aftertaste of a wine. During inhalation – orthonasal olfaction – we are able to perceive some 630 different characteristics. However, during retronasal olfaction – when we release air through our mouth – we can only perceive some 300 different characteristics. Since what we perceive as flavour is the result of retronasal olfaction, the more limited retronasal scent box leads us to perceive a different flavour profile from when we are merely nosing the wine.

WHITE

Les Champs Blancs - Chablis 2009 – Pascal Bouchard

A fairly classic, if relatively simple, Chablis nose; a moderate if not clearly defined fruit character that approximates pear and lime, with a note of lanolin.  

Vaillons Millésime – Chablis Premier Cru 2007 – Simonnet-Febvre

Notably darker and more viscous than the Champs Blancs, the slightly Brie-like cheesiness gives this wine away as corked. It’s not so egregious as to hide the basic character of the wine, though, which has an interesting flavour profile (a.k.a. development of the wine as it moves across the tongue, as Barry so eloquently explained). After the initial fruit character (masked by the cork taint), there is that classic sheepy Chablis lanolin note, and a hint of oak. (Some Chablis makers eschew contact with oak entirely, while others, as here, use it only with moderation). It finishes with notes of acacia honey – a rather unexpectedly sweet note for the normally more flinty, austere Chablis.

Joseph Faively – Puligny-Montrachet Premier Cru 2008 – Les Folatières

An exquisite, complex nose, blending over-ripe mandarins with coconut. (“Over-ripe” mandarins may sound unappealing, but one of the curiosities of wine is how one can find smells that in other contexts would be unappealing – diesel in aged German Riesling, manure (“farmyard” is the polite euphemism) in red Burgundy, or glue in some very oaky Portuguese reds – and nevertheless find them attractive.) The coconut is a facet of this wine’s stay in oak, since we have moved out of Chablis and into the commune of Puligny-Montrachet in the Côte de Beaune, where the winemakers do not shy away from oak aging. This wine is similarly elegant on the palate, creamily blending fruit (again those mandarins, but also with lime beneath) and oak. Good length, and would age very well – though also a delight to drink now.

RED

Pirie Estate – Tasmania – 2007

The one joker in the pack, the point of this, the only non-Burgundian wine of the evening, is to make a stylistic contrast between Old and New World Pinot Noir. The rather undistinguished fruit on the nose leads on to a quickly-disappearing attack of fruit on the palate, which is rather stemmy and drying. A bit too tannic for what it has to offer in terms of fruit and acid.

Dureuil-Janthial – Bourgogne Rouge – 2005

One doesn’t tend to get particularly good value-for-money buying Burgundy (unless perhaps buying directly from the producer) and as this came in cheaper than the Pirie (£12 compared to £15) I didn’t have great expectations for it. In fact, however, it turned out rather well. The nose has more defined fruit notes of plum and cherry, and the spices too are similarly well-defined: cloves and cinnamon. (Not infrequently in wine tasting one can say “fruity” or “spicy” without it being obvious exactly which fruit or spice; but better wines tend to be more clearly defined). There is also a characteristically Burgundian note of wet earth. A definite winner over the Pirie.

Les Lavières - Louis Camus-Bruchon –  Savigny-lès-Beaune 2003

2003 was a scorching summer across Europe, and many wine regions suffered for it – if the winemakers did not respond adroitly, they ended up with heavily overbaked wines which smell of jam more than fruit. This wine certainly has a slightly jammy quality – fruit compote – but is in no way unattractive. Beginning with strawberries (a classic Pinot Noir note) it goes on to offer cocoa and vanilla, closing with some rather burnt fruit. Showing its upfront vintage character, it seems rather blowsy in comparison to more elegant 2000 to follow. However, we had some of the 2003 left the next day, and it had evolved some beautifully savoury notes; granite, wet dog hair, and very pointedly, ribs with barbeque sauce.

Les Lavières - Louis Camus-Bruchon –  Savigny-lès-Beaune 2000

2000 was also a hot year, but nowhere near as hot as 2003, and it shows in this comparison of the same wines from the two vintages. The 2000 has a lovely, classically Burgundian mix of fragrant and more meaty smells, notes of red fruit, saddle leather and game. It has higher acidity than the 2003, and a certain density of fruit on the finish making it port-like. On the evening, this seemed to me the far nicer of the two; I wish I’d had some of this the next day to see how it developed. It felt as if both needed more time, but this one especially – ironic, given it is already three years older.

Les Perrières - Jean Chauvenet – Nuits St.Georges 2002

2002 was a wonderful year – “If you couldn’t make good wine in 2002, then give up”. This wine is very dark for a Pinot, almost opaque. Similarly, the nose offers notes I’d expect more from the much more heavily-bodied Cabernet Sauvignon grape; green leaf, blackcurrants, leather, mint. On the palate, it doesn’t (yet) taste as good as it smells; the acid is very pronounced, and is probably needs some years in bottle to come out of itself and into balance. There is a pencil lead note that reminds me of Bordeaux – that Cabernet note again. As the evening closes, it has become noticeably better – one for the cellar.

Ghislaine Barthod – Chambolle Musigny – 1998

This wine has a lovely, faded colour, with a browning rim which betrays its age. It is a deliciously complex mix of aromas that span truffle, soy sauce, Demerara, liquorice and mint, keeping a sweet fruit element to the finish, which is long. 1998 was not a good year, but this is a beautiful wine drinking beautifully now. Extremely harmonious.

Pied à Terre

Nestling snugly on lovely Charlotte St., just down from Roka, Pied à Terre follows the well-established rules of the formal gastronomic experience, from amuse-bouches to slightly starchy service, to offer a two Michelin-starred meal. We went for lunch, when one tends to assume that the restaurant is taking it easy, offering the lite version, auto-piloting learners down the starter pistes; but we felt treated to the full Michelin experience for a fraction of the usual cost.

The most innovative of the amuse-bouches was the 3 forms of carrot; mousse, purée, and powder, rather irrelevantly topped by a shrimp, but deliciously matched with a crispy sage leaf. Here be virtuosity, intoned the dish. A deliberately burnt, salty poppy-seed crisp sandwiched a dollop of foie cream (boo, hiss, poor goose, but yeah, I ate it) and a parmesan gnocchi was, well, a small dumpling tasting of parmesan.

Bread was the next staging post, and despite the danger of getting too full too soon (with a family pre-theatre dinner looming only a few hours away), the oily bacon bread was too good to resist. Guinness and star anise bread sounded lovely, but I couldn’t tease out those constituent ingredients from the final-result brown bread we had. I think I forgot to eat the semolina bread.

For starters, surf ‘n’ turf first; pork belly with baby squid, glued together with a garlic purée. A little sideshow on the plate was the great taste combination of pine nuts and mushrooms. Then, salmon and horseradish had a suggestion of shiso leaf about it, and there was a slightly saline jelly accompaniment that may have been based on seawater; either way, a lovely dish.

It was pre-Christmas when we went, and turkey was an inevitable mains choice, served with stuffing, cranberry sauce and chestnut purée. The cranberry, with fermented red cabbage, did a lot for the turkey, a meat that can veer towards the bland and rubbery. The other main dish on the set menu was brill, served with capers, thin slices of turnip, and a white butter sauce with paprika – O, white fish and paprika! One of food’s more sublime combinations.

And so to dessert, where Pied à Terre subtly tries to lure cost-canny lunchers, now jovial and relaxed, away from the straight and narrow of the menu du jour, which has one £6 dessert on it, to the luscious, pricier minefields of the à la carte, where a series of £14 desserts flash tempting flanks.

Crumble came as a pre-dessert, a pleasant glassful of apple mousse and vanilla custard with a grainy topping. Then came our (set menu) pink praline, the rather humdrum praline itself much elevated by the accompaniments, a charming roundel composed of assorted citrus and a salty white chocolate crisp, with a tarragon leaf adding one more off-sweet touch. It’s a pleasure when desserts are refreshing, rather than cloying, however un-Christmas-like that sentiment may be.

Good job our guests Messrs. Pham and Jackson ordered infusions, otherwise we would have missed the petit fours. While I tend to think that petit fours are a rather unecessary bit of frippery, these were the best I’ve ever had (at least if the sweet-shop takeaway bag at the Fat Duck doesn’t count), and were highly enjoyable. There was a sugar puff (which rather reminded me of the “Tell them about the honey, Mummy” cereal), a Szechuan pepper ganache, a lovely cherry jelly, a little Seville orange, a black cherry marshmallow, a blackened, burnt sugar “volcano” filled with a soft, bready pastry, a burnt honey crisp and a nutty chocolate about which we never agreed. (Peanut? Sesame?)

Service was very good too, managing the marriage of discretion and amiability that falls like a cloaking device over the inherent, occasionally irritating formality required of Michelin star holders. The sommelier took our indecision and our preferences in hand and came up with an excellent choice in

Nußerg Alte Reben Weiner Wien

Promised the wine for free if we could identify grape and country, we struggled manfully (personfully); the mid-yellow colour (no hint of green) eliminated Sauvignon Blanc from the running immediately, and the notes of white flowers and stonefruit suggested Southern French Viognier. Equally, however, the bitter almond on the finish reminded me of Hungarian Furmint, and, geographically at least, that turned out to be not too far off. This is an Austrian field blend made from no less than 9 different grape varieties – presumably what they happen to have left at the end of the harvest. And why not? It worked well, and by the end of the evening had moved on to notes of mango.

With the set lunch costing £23.50, Pied à Terre claims to offer the best value lunch in its class in London. I wouldn’t dispute that.

Pied à Terre, 34 Charlotte St.

http://www.pied-a-terre.co.uk/

St.John

I’ve had more meals at St.John than at any other sit-down restaurant except Edinburgh’s Yum Yum HK Diner – going for lunch at St.John Bread and Wine, the Spitalfields alter ego of the Smithfield mother ship St.John, has become something of a Sunday ritual before the 4 o’clock from King’s Cross to Edinburgh. The point of St.John and its offshoot is to evoke the British table of yesteryear, or, it often seems, yestercentury, to return to popular consumption some of the tastiest nuggets of bygone British produce. The mother ship itself currently sits at number 43 in the San Pellegrino list of the world’s top 50 restaurants, and must surely be the most reasonably priced establishment anywhere on that list. The fact it has fallen 29 points in the rankings on last year is not, I am sure, because of any inherent decrease in quality, but as a result of the changing mores of fashion and competition. We tend to prefer Bread and Wine on account of the light, informal dining room and the more morsel-based menu that rather obviates the starter-main dichotomy. Against that, though, there is one delicacy that we never see on the menu at Bread and Wine; the joyous, gelatinous, exceedingly messy bone marrow.

We’re getting familiar with many of the dishes that come and go at Bread and Wine, but there were a number of novelties on our Yuletide visit. Our guest Professor Corner thought that the oxtail and potato pie did not rise above the level of a simple cottage pie, leaving the singular attraction of oxtail rather obscured. I confess I have had a great oxtail experience, but this was not it. (My great oxtail experience was Paula Wolfert’s Stop-and-Go Braised Oxtails with Oyster Mushrooms - from the Slow Mediterranean Cookbook - as cooked by N1.) Far more exciting, and the highlight of the meal for me, was the blood cake and duck egg; the blood cake was a black pudding with fibres of pork meat through it, one of the tastiest things I’ve ever had at St.John. I thought I didn’t like duck eggs, but that may be a function of the very particular ducks my parents kept; the poached egg on the blood cake was perfectly unobjectionable. The smoked mackerel had a lovely skin that made it look like it had been hammered out of bronze, and the flavour was straight out of an Arbroath smokehouse; the horseradish it came with was a perfect foil to the smoky flavour. Potted widgeon was a lovely piece of salted duck with vinegary pickles on the side.

In search of unread Proust (the sections we skipped to get to the end), we ordered madeleines, which came after the advertised 15-minute wait, warm from the oven, lovely, spongy, and ready to evoke associations of lost time. A slice of parsnip cake, made with cinnamon and walnuts, was like a rather superior carrot cake, served with a very rich Jersey cream. Bread pudding, seeded with mincemeat fruits and served with butterscotch sauce, was very Christmassy.

We drank:

St.Maurice 2007, Domaine de Deurre, Vinsobres, Côtes du Rhône Villages                                             

…but it was rather disappointing. There was fruit (raspberries, blackcherries) but this soft, lightly tannic wine was simple and unstructured.

A glass of

Seduction 2007, Château de Jurque, Jurançon

was had for dessert, sweet wine from the south of France. Attractive, balanced, it smelt of passionfruit with an intensity more characteristic of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.

Meyer-Näkel Spätburgunder 2008

German red wine is a relatively unknown quantity in the UK, which is probably why we were able to acquire a few bottles of this fine Spätburgunder fairly cheaply from a restaurant which may have been having trouble offloading them from its wine list. In terms of restaurant wine lists, going off-road to relatively unfamiliar regions and countries can be a good strategy, improving your odds of finding a relative bargain. Wine lists can be intimidating things for many people, and restaurants know that many people who have a passing familiarity with wine will order by grapes, makers and areas they recognise, which is why the more well-known names are always liable to command a certain premium. If the odder sorts of wine have made it onto those lists, that is usually a sign in their favour. So a punt on a German red wine in a UK restaurant might be quite a good one - less so in a German restaurant, where it would just be whatever was available locally.

Spätburgunder is German Pinot Noir. With young, fairly intense fruit on the nose, I’d probably have guessed that the Meyer-Näkel was a New World, and I wouldn’t have hit on Pinot Noir. The vanilla notes that evidence oak aging are also slightly dusty, suggesting a stay in French rather than American barrels. It is rather fleshy on the palate, tasting – in classic Italian style – of morello cherries and, showing up in the slightly bitter aftertaste, their stalks.

When we first tasted the wine in its infancy a year ago, there was none of that bitterness, and it tasted more simply of a New World Pinot Noir. The difference this time led me to speculate that the wine had no future, that it was destined to hollow out as the fruit disappeared, leaving only dry, bitter notes. However, when we returned to this bottle the following day, the bitterness had gone, along with some of the fruit, to be replaced by attractive dark chocolately notes, and hints of Christmas spice. Delicious.

Supermarket wines

Written by N1

Christmas in Oxford, snow turning treacherously to ice, so we decided to try to get the wine for Christmas dinner from the closest store possible, which was Tesco. Luckily we opened the bottles ahead of time and, to pre-empt my review, discovered that they were very entry-level wines at above entry-level prices. So off to Oddbins.

I have heard it claimed that supermarkets can get great deals on wine, due to their buying power. But I have never been the beneficiary of one of these. (Although we did get some wonderful bargains in Pittsburgh, as recommended by Ron Dreshman of the East Liberty wine and spirits store, apparently courtesy of the buying power of the Pennsylvannia Liquor Control Board – the cost of these bargains being a mark-up on the rest of the rather limited wine selection.) I am more convinced by the argument that most good wine is made by small producers, who cannot satisfy the volume that supermarkets demand, so good wine is, in general, not to be found in supermarkets.

Tesco’s champagne was much more fairly priced. But beware the fiction of “half price” deals. Supermarkets make the vast majority of their champagne sales at Christmas and Easter so, by over-pricing their champagnes at other times of year when they don’t expect to sell much anyway, they can claim to offer cut price deals at Christmas. If you pay “full price” for these wines you will be disappointed.

Tesco Finest Châteauneuf-du-Pape, 2008 (Tesco, £14.99 reduced to £9.99)

This had been in an outside shed all afternoon so, when opened, was far too cold. There was a strong back of acid and not much else. As it warmed up, there were aromas of spices and baked fruits; on the palate baked apples with vanilla, cinnamon and a bit of ginger. A conundrum of a wine: a bit too sweet for food but a bit too much acid to enjoy comfortably in its absence. Returned to the next day, it had developed more juicy black fruit, as well as the spices, and felt much better balanced – but not worth the pre-reduction £14.99, nor is it the “finest” wine you could get for £9.99.

Prestige de Calvet, Bordeaux Rouge, 2009 (Tesco, £9.99)

Most Bordeaux is either mainly Merlot, if it’s from the Right Bank, or mainly Cabernet Sauvignon, if it’s from the Left. If it weren’t for the fact that Merlot appeared first on the label, I would have presumed this wine was predominantly Cabernet. Very juicy black fruits, a touch of mint at the end and quite a whack of tannin – enough for one person round the table to actively dislike it, although opinion was split on which wine was the nicer of the two Tesco reds. But even in Bordeaux, where entry-level wine costs more than elsewhere, I would expect better than this for £10.

Chateau Guibeau, Puisseguin Saint-Emilion, 2006 (Oddbins, £14.99)

Smells of blackberries, leather and liquorice. In the mouth it is still leather and liquorice but now red berries, especially raspberry. Rich and very juicy, with grippy tannins. With a little time, it softens out and cherries, wood, and chocolate come into the mix. Universally agreed to be better than the two Tesco reds, this was a wine that was worth its price.

André Carpentier Champagne (Tesco, half price at £9.99)

Victoria Moore wrote in the Guardian that this is “the best party champagne”. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/dec/13/victoria-moore-reviews-best-champagne)

As good liberal Guardian readers and aspiring champagne socialists, we took a bottle to a Christmas Eve party. Slightly yeasty on the nose, sharp apples on the palate. I can concur with Moore’s assessment, if “party champagne” implies simple, easy drinking and not worthy of too much attention. It was dry, and I appreciated that. A bit unfair of Jane MacQuitty in the less liberal Times to describe it as one of the “thin, tart, evil little paint strippers”.

(http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/article3010069.ece)

 But maybe she needs to drink it amongst more diverting company.

Heidsieck & Co. Monopole Blue Top Champagne Brut (Tesco, half price at £12.99)

Stern and unyielding on opening, with more bubbles than a can of soda. Once it had calmed down, there were toasty aromas, pear and grapefruit on the palate, and a frizzante mouthfeel. Definitely worth the extra three pounds on the Carpentier: a second bottle of the Carpentier, drunk on Christmas Day following the Heidsieck Monopole, suffered by the comparison.