Ribstock

Ribstock happened on Saturday in Soho.

It was great.

From midday till 4 I grazed on ribs of all kinds. At the end I got to vote for my favourite. The best I had were Lucky Chip’s. Redhook won.

I drank lots of beer and bourbon and cocktails. I got to use my hip flask too, which made me happy.

It was wet, but no one cared. It was like a festival. There were lots of different cooking methods. A Primo BBQ is now high up on my unrealistic want list.

There was a hot sauce competition. Chillango provided excellent chips and there were 6 bottles of fiery chilli to dip them in. A table covered in hot is my idea of fun. Tom Parker Bowle’s won. 

At the end I grabbed a box of chips and @NoshableAdam swiped a winning no.4 sauce. We passed the carboard box around #teamburger and squirted too much sauce on each other’s chips.  Then the bottle got in my pocket.

Later we went to the after-party at Century club for some more drinks. It had lovely mid-century modern furniture but an odd policy towards service charges and structured debate.  It is not my kind of place, but the beer was £2 for Ribstockers. 

It was a food love-in, a festival of eating. It was a great day.

Oh and then a large portion of Twitter got menstrual and invented the tag #saucegate to debate whether no.4 was actually the Ribman’s amazing Holy Fuck and NOT Tom parker Bowle’s personal hot stuff as per official publications because none of the other sauces looked at all like Holy Fuck and how can that be??! and yes we all fucking love Holy Fuck, but no.4 was also really REALLY nice - hence I nicked it in the first place and I wasn’t even embarassed about that but then @Tweat_Up absolved me anyway because they’re nice and because I shared photos of both No.4 and HF which they thought would shut-up all the mentals but actually it just made it worse and even though I didn’t really care about #saucegate I somehow got caught up in the middle when really I just wanted to pour the stuff all over my pizza and THEN @Tweat_Up swore at someone which made me feel a bit funny but I hope now we’re all cool and in love again.

Oh and then I picked up loads of followers which just goes to show something.

x

MEATmarket

I experienced a stressful 15 minutes last Friday night when I thought I might never find MEATmarket. Turns out that a) I was being a moron and b) @faerietalefoody gives enigmatic directions. Although she did give me a plus-1 to this preview evening, so a BIG thank you there. 

MEATmarket is the new sister restaurant to MEATliquor. And it’s bloody marvellous. It’s very different in concept to MEATliquor and all the better for it. As much as I love ML’s food I don’t really agree with its setup, the restauranty vibe, the waiting (see previous post if you care). MM, however, seems spot on. In fact it’s pretty much what I always wanted: FAST FOOD.

The restaurant takes up a narrow mezzanine above Covent Garden Jubilee Market, the one just south of the piazza full of proper market stalls selling t-shirts and tat. You enter from Tavistock Street, up a modern staircase and into the narrow mezzanine. 3 metres away to your left is the view over the market, noisy with people packing up; to your right, the tills for ordering, menu above written in magnetic letters. It’s like walking drunk into a late-night dirty fast food joint only to find they serve some of the best burgers in London. 

The layout is linear so you order at the till, shuffle along to grab food further down the bar, then move onto the seating area with its tall tables and high stools, and finally exit at the other end of the mezannine. It’s quite standard fast-food joint method. No table service. Chefs constantly cooking. It’s hard to be sure because it was a preview, but I think it’s going to work beautifully. 

And of course the food! The new Black Palace burger is another winner; double-stack, plenty of cheese, steamed and wet and with so many fried onions. I inhaled this thing. Oh, but what’s this? Poppaz you say? Yes, hot burgerette, I will have one. Habanero peppers chopped up with cheese, breadcrumbed, deep-fried, the resultant object a spicy, melty, crispy parcel of awesome. These may have changed my Life. 

Bonus: @FredSmith_ instantly reckoned he could improve on these. Crikey. 

Booze came in the form of Vedett beers and Miami Vice cocktails, a double swirl of Slush-Puppy pina colada and strawberry daquiri. They were filthy, but great. I heard talk of there being an alcoholic milkshake once they’re fully open, sort of a Mr.Whippy with Jaegermeister. 

Oh and there are some great-looking hot dogs which appear to be served Danish-style covered in pickles and whatnot. And a philly cheesesteak too. And did I mention the poppaz? Changed my life….

If it’s not obvious I bloody loved this place. Same great food, but much better setup. So many people rightly love their food and therefore there’ll still be queues, but the setup is so much more efficient I really think it’ll move along quickly. There’s no waiting for a waitress, nothing really making you want to stay longer than you need to. 

Go now, before everyone and their mum hears about it.

@MeatMarketUK 

Unit 1A, The Mezannine, Jubilee Market Hall, Tavistock Street, London WC2E 8BE

(entrance on Tavistock Street)

Patty & Bun

Right, this is a bit of an emergency last-minute blog post as it’s 11pm on Thursday night and I simply must get this done by Friday. Because that’s the only day of the week when Patty & Bun team up with Street Kitchen to host a pop-up at Doodlebar. And if you didn’t know that already it’s fairly likely you weren’t planning to go tomorrow. And that would be terrible, because if you don’t go, you can’t eat one of their burgers.

AND IT IS VERY IMPORTANT YOU EAT ONE OF THEIR BURGERS.

Last Friday Nick (from www.hamburger-me.com) and I hit Patty & Bun as the second leg of a two-burger evening, the first being Honest in Brixton Village. I won’t go into details because he’ll do that far better than I in due course, but I will say that, despite being properly full from Honest, the P&B burger was a star. I imagine I will like it even more when I am actually hungry.

We arrived at an outside space behind Doodlebar - sort of a cross between a small hangar and a car park, with a ‘The Long Table’ vibe i.e. lots of attractive people drinking, eating, and talking about drinking and eating. I was hollered at almost instantly by P&B’s main man, Joe. Literally bouncing around, Joe is passionate and lively and generally seems a top bloke. Along with Street Kitchen’s proper chefs (Mark Jankel was there getting greasy too) he’s got the burger production-line nailed. Oh the burger: sloppy and meaty, smoky and saucy, encased in a perfect demi-brioche. I’d probably stick another slice of cheese in there and temper the sauce a bit, but these are details dammit. It’s one of the best. AND THE CHIPS! Once blanched, twice fried, permanently crisp. Great. 

Get the idea? Get involved. 

Some great photos here courtesy of Tuck & Vine, who was also there last week.

Nick will likely have a better blog post soon, so check www.hamburger-me.com 


Friday evenings at Doodlebar, hopefully for another few weeks…

33 Parkgate Road, London SW11 4NP, 0207 223 7115

Follow Joe from Patty & Bun  - @pattyandbunjoe

Princi

I bloody love Princi. SInce my first visit in its opening week (2 years ago? more?) I’ve been back many, many times. 

If you’ve not been, it’s hard to describe: ‘bakery/deli/late-night food-hole with noodle-bar-seating in a glamourous hotel-lobby-esque setting’ is close. It is open every day, most of them from 8am to midnight (I hear in Milan it’s 24hr). It is ALWAYS busy, but you never wait long for a seat or space at an Italian-style lean’n’nosh post. I think it’s one of the best ‘no-book’ restaurants in London, and it works so well because it is perfectly set up to be what it is meant to be.

The food counter is the length of the restaurant and is kept stocked with fresh bread, cakes, pizza slices, sandwiches, arancini, salads, pasta dishes as well as bigger meals like melanzana parmagiana or stew. The food (and I have tried much of it) is excellent. You need to be bold to flag an authentically blase Italian server, but once you do he’ll quickly slip a slice of gorgonzola and salami pizza in the little desktop oven whilst your date hovers for a seat. She’ll have one by the time you’re at the bar collecting your beer.

Other times you’ll leave the pub and pop in at 11pm, have a slice of cake and a prosecco, sit and chat loudly at the bar. I’ve never been asked to leave to make space, but I have scooched and made friends.  

Let’s contrast the above with MEATliquor. It’s fast becoming a truism to say ‘I love MEATliquor’s burgers’; similarly, ‘I hate MEATliquor’s queue’. But what annoys me is how confused the place is.

I always hoped ML would be a riotous bar packed with people knocking back jars of cocktails whilst burgers were cooked non-stop and passed over heads from the bar. In reality they’ve no licence for standing around and drinking and the whole setup is quite restauranty, but with relatively few tables for such a large space. The turnaround of covers is slow as people make up for the hour lost in the queue by enjoying every drink on the list (read a great blog about it by BurgerAnarchy). Ok, I am a hypocritical pedant because I STILL BLOODY LOVE THE PLACE, but I do hope their new MEATmarket is better resolved. 

I suppose it bugs me because I know that no-book can work. Burger & Lobster have done a good job, packing their Mayfair space with smaller tables whose placement and aesthetic makes you want to keep the visit short, letting you leave your name with FOH and head to the pub. And I’ve high hopes for LuckyChip’s forthcoming SliderBar.

In any case, I shall remain very much in love with Princi. No one expects to book, no one has to walk away. Perfect.

Princi.co.uk

135 Wardour Street, London, W1F 0UT

@PrinciUK

Roast Dinner, Superette

Roast dinner. Probably the greatest home-cooked meal there is. Any decent cook with a quality piece of beef and a bag of spuds can knock up a great roast, and it’s for that reason I find having Sunday lunch out is inherently less impressive than, say, having udon at Koya; theirs is food I cannot replicate at home.

For me, a Sunday lunch out is more about spending time with friends without having to cook or clear up, with the added bonus of a waitress to flirt with.

A month or so ago I made plans to meet some of my favourite people for such an outing. After the standard 800 reply-all emails we settled on the 19th February; thoughtfully Superette chose the same day for their next pop-up, ‘The Roast Dinner’. Some say it’s ridiculous that tables were application only, but despite being over-subscribed I managed to get one. I think the system faultless.

Fast forward to Sunday 19th. Sun’s out. I’m still full from the previous night’s burger at the Ad Cod. I roused the troops early (for them) for the journey over to Dalston and at midday we found ourselves in an innocuous section of Stoke Newington Road. Fortunately they’d put up a lovely vintage cinema sign so it wasn’t hard to find (but it was mis-spelled…).

The place is owned by Castle Gibson and I believe it’s normally used as a ‘location’ (Dan points out that technically everywhere is a location…). It is beautiful: characterful, with exposed brick and iron-work, natural light and mid-century furniture. Good venue for a wedding.

The dining room was cold, but the sourdough ‘presents’ soon took my mind off that - perfectly soft, airy bread with crisp crust, wrapped in greaseproof paper and tied with string. Staff took our orders quickly, although a few seemed like they’d had a big one the night before. 3 of 5 had starters in front of them….

waitress - “How many more soups?”

us -“2 please”

waitress - “Ok. 2 soups, and a beef”

us - “? There are only 2 missing starters, both soups. There’s no need for beef. There’s not even a beef starter on the menu”

waitress - ‘Oh ok. 2 soups. And who’s having the beef?’

My starter was great. Generously sliced gin-cured salmon with beetroot jelly and earl grey bread. Really great combination, all the flavours coming through. I normally find that starters requiring bread come with too little; this came with too much. Jez’s pig’s head terrine was decent, but not life-changing and the bread was all wrong. Bean soup had the borlotti texture without being dry or grainy, little flecks of crispy parmesan setting it off (and staying crisp).

The others shared the lamb shoulder for 4, served whole for you to carve and in a dish with all the trimmings. It was a little overcooked, but decent meat considering my expectations are low. My beef was well cooked, tasty, with good trimmings. Presentation was lovely but it made the potatoes soggy (CRIME) and whilst the horseradish was delicious, filling the yorkshire with it wasn’t practical. Oh and there was some dessert but who cares about that (although I should note that stinking bishop stilton was served as an enormous wedge - win)

ANYWAY, moving on from the detail of the nosh, the experiece was great. Lovely venue, lovely people, and the build-up on Twitter just added to the fun. We left at 230 ish for a wander around Colombia Road, but the bar was open into the evening and it would’ve been fun to have a few drinks and make friends.

I’m looking forward to another, if I get a table….