A Lad's Salad : Duck Salad with Fatty Croutons

I'm going for a slightly different angle on this one. So this came out of a combination of wanting to empty out some ingredients from my fridge left-over from the lab barbecue and wanting to do a recipe post about salad as opposed to strictly meat and veg on the side. OK, as you can see from the photo above there is definitely an abundance of meat here, but I hope that there are enough greens here to keep your mum happy!

Bubbledogs - Blogging and dogging

Bubbledogs& @bubbledogsuk

40 Charlotte Street

Bubbledogs is the new venture by James Knappett, who has previously held stints at Noma and the Ledbury. With that kind of pedigree, this was always going to be somewhere that needed checking out. Together with his wife Sandia Chang (of Roganic fame), the menu features a combination of hot dogs and grower champagne. This seems a bit of a strange combination initially, but the place itself inside is a kind of classy, upmarket (although not necessarily in terms of prices) diner with bar seating and tongue-in-cheek illustrations of sausage dogs drinking champagne.

Food Over Canada Part I: Breakfast of Champions

So I spent the last week over in Toronto and Georgia Bay for my cousin's wedding, and thought I'd do a couple of posts about the food we ate. After all, what's a good wedding holiday without lots of delicious food? My first post is on the breakfast we had over at the Bluebird Meadows B&B in Midland, Ontario. Basically at this place, every morning there was a freshly cooked breakfast by the lovely lady who ran the hotel with her husband. Needless we all spent hours at night discussing what would be for breakfast the next morning. It was that good...

Santoré - Passion for pizza

Exmouth Market is a gem of a street with great independent restaurants like Caravan, Moro, and Santoré, and places to drink with Exmouth Arms and Cafe Kick. For my Birthday, I thought Santoré would be perfect, amazing pizza that can be ordered by the metre, so is great to share with a large group. I've been here before and the standard of their pizza is spot on, nearly comparable that I had on a recent work trip to Trieste, Italy. 

Slider bar - (Un)lucky Chip

SliderBar
Player Bar, 8 Broadwick St, W1F 8HN

For ages we had been looking forward to the opening of Slider Bar, the new venture of LuckyChip in Soho, to complement their Hackney residence at the Sebright Arms. Their opening seemed to be constantly put back and back, checking out their twitter feed they seemed to be beseeched with bad luck holding back their opening. But finally today was the day, announced only the day before on Twitter. With the Lucky Chip burgers consistently touted as one of the best burgers in London, I didn't want to miss out on this.

The Slider bar is on Broadwick St, just off Wardour Street, it is very discreet with the World's smallest sign, so keep your eyes peeled. We got there half an hour after opening, and managed to get a table for the 4 of us. The set up is quite strange downstairs half bar, half restaurant with the seats all bunched together round the perimeter. There couldn't have been more than 50 people seated.

Bring the beef

What's great about going to lots of different events is getting to meet different people. At the recent Burger Breakout, I bumped into Adam from noshable.co.uk who partners with @CornishGrill who supplied the meat for that event, and put me on their Cornish Food Club email list, where you can order some fantastic cornish produce. They have a stall on Maltby Street market (also another gem, I would have otherwise not known about) where you pick up your order from. Maltby street market is just around the corner from London Bridge, unfortunately when I went I did not have much time to check everything out, but I'll be back. From their stall they also have a BBQ going with amazingly priced steaks and whole lobster (incredibly fresh from Devon)

If cooking for yourself or others, above all is sourcing, if you get great meat and can cook to a good standard, it's going to stand out so much more than heavily farmed supermarket stuff. Obviously you expect to pay a bit more, but for special occasions it's well worth it. The Cornish Food Club get their meat from Philip Warren Butchers, which also supplies Michelin starred restaurants, and even Pitt Cue Co.

Tonkotsu - Another mean eat on Dean Street

Tonkotsu

63 Dean Street, London, W1D 4QG

Today I'm again reviewing a new Dean/Frith Street restaurant. I promise that there'll be some geographical variation in the future! Tonkotsu is a new Japanese restaurant, with a familiar concept of being a ramen bar with a sort of informal cafe atmosphere. However, there are a couple of factors that do set it apart. The first thing you notice are the big bubbling vats of stock preparing the broth for the next day's ramen. A very deliberate move to show people walking past where the food is coming from, breaking down the barrier between the dining room and the kitchen. This is supplemented by information on the menu as to the origin of the ingredients and the preparation of the meats. We're certainly moving towards the age where people are becoming very mindful of sourcing, and this can only be a good thing.

Ceviche - Pisco Fever

Ceviche
17 Frith Street, W1D 4RG

Spearheading the new wave of Peruvian food in Central London, Ceviche has taken up its spot in the newly invigorated (some would say gentrified) Dean and Frith Street in Soho. Every week there seems to be a new batch of mid-range venues being added as opposed to the traditionally pricier restaurants that have opened in the past 5 years. Always one of the most open-minded of areas in London, it's good to see some interesting new cuisines appearing in this dynamic quarter.

Let the FEASTivities begin

Situated in the quad of Guy's hospital, Feast capitalised on the growing street food market, to bring together an amalgamation of the best restaurants, pop-ups and street food vendors in London. With the likes of Hawksmoor, Moro, Jose Pizzaro,  Bread Street Kitchen, Barbecoa, Banhmi11 to name just a few(!), we certainly were not going to be left disappointed or hungry

Feast yourself

Dabbous - ''Congratulations, you've won the golden ticket!''

Dabbous
39 Whitfield Street, W1T 2SF

I've never heard that reply to a restaurant reservation before. But then, Dabbous is no ordinary restaurant. With a striking industrial interior housed in a former internet cafe (R.I.P. Cyberia!), Dabbous doesn't immediately strike you as the site of one of the most sought after reservations (April 2013 as of this post) in London. This may partially be down to the fact that there' only about 14 tables, which I would imagine would allow for something like 30 covers per night. Accordingly, the speed of service on the night was very impressive for food of that quality. Also, even though the food is easily Michelin star standard (it will undoubtably win one very soon), prices are very reasonable. £54 for the tasting menu (extra £25 for wine, £6 for a cheese platter), with mains running at about £15 makes for excellent value, I think.