La Trompette in Chiswick

Sometime’s we all need a little treat - and what better occasion than a birthday! To be specific, two birthdays, as both my and Blai’s birthdays fall in the month of July. I’d been wanting to try La Trompette for a while after reading such marvellous reviews online, and the fact that they were recently awarded their first Michelin star didn’t hurt either, and so I booked a table for the two of us last Sunday at 7pm. We turned out to be the second couple in the restaurant, following close at the heels of the first couple. The restaurant did fill up throughout the night with many groups coming in at about 8pm.

After ordering, the bread basket made its way to our table and we were presented with a choice of three breads; there was a walnut bread flecked with bits of raisin, a heavily speckled black olive bread, and a white bread heavy with olive oil. Needless to say, throughout the course of our meal, we managed to try all three. All three were extremely delicious and perhaps we ate more than we should have. Upon inquiring, we were told that they baked all the bread daily on the premises.

I started with the Confit sea trout, crab and cucumber salad, crab croquettes, vichyssoise and pea shoots:

There were two generous slices of soft, melting fish sat in a bit of vichyssoise, acting more as a sauce than a soup. Inside the lettuce parcel was the crab and cucumber salad - just lots of crab meat with a bit of diced cucumber in a mayonnaise dressing. While the salad contained white crab meat, the crunchy crab croquettes were made of brown meat. I loved this dish.

Blai had the Soft polenta, English asparagus, cured ham, poached egg, black truffle and olive dressing:

While everything on the plate was very well cooked and delicious, Blai did not feel that all the ingredients worked altogether as a single dish. This was the only minor thing we could quibble about. Of the bits I did try, I very much liked the truffle and olive dressing and thought it worked well with the egg and polenta. I can understand though - I feel that some hams can be too assertive when combined with other ingredients.

For my main, I chose the Breast of duck, pastilla of confit leg, hot foie gras, cherry compote and caramelized endive:

The breast was cooked as I requested (pink inside) and sat on a bed of spinach. It was incredibly meaty and the cherry compote was beautiful with it. I never would have thought of caramelizing endive as they had here but its bitterness combined with just about everything on the plate, especially the foie gras and compote. A gorgeous dish.

After much deliberation, Blai settled with the Braised legs of poulet noir, with potato gnocchi, leek hearts, vin jaune and tarragon:

I tried a bit of everything off his plate and I can vouch that that chicken was as soft as it looks. It just fell off the bone and the sauce that went with it….mmmmm. We ended up having a discussion about what “yellow wine” was and we thought it was perhaps a typo and should be vin jeune, a young, not aged wine. However, it turns out that there is a vin jaune that is similar to sherry. Whatever it was, it made that sauce so wonderful! The gnocchi was chewy and potatoey and reminiscent of a German potato dumpling.

All the desserts sounded good but I chose the one that really stood out for me. This was the Fresh citrus fruits, banana sorbet, passion fruit jelly, Earl Grey tea, financiers:

Rarely does a dessert make me sit up and say, “Wow!”, and this one did. The photo doesn’t do this dessert justice - it doesn’t show that underneath that Earl Grey tea granité was a layer of citrus fruit segments, and under that was a scoop of banana sorbet, and under that was the passion fruit jelly. While all the ingredients sound disparate, together they blend together: the creaminess of the banana, the citrus note of the fruits and the tea, the zing of the passion fruit. Gorgeous. The financiers were equally fabulous, but I knew they would be after the quality of the bread!

Blai opted for another dessert that sounded just as refreshing, the Iced coconut parfait with lime granité, tropical fruits and lychee sorbet:

With the creamy coconut parfait sitting on a pastry base, his dessert was more substantial than mine but still very light and summery. I again only tried a bit of it and it was very good and judging by the way Blai cleaned his plate, I would say that he adored it too!

After dessert, I had an espresso, while they offered some hot water steeped with lemon to Blai as a refreshing alternative. Or as my brother so eloquently put it - “it sounds like you kinda drank a finger bowl”. But honestly, it was nice and really helped us relax and it possibly aided digestion; who knows? Alongside came these chocolate truffles:

Looking at these photos again is killing me; I cannot wait to return to La Trompette! Of course, this is unlikely to be very soon as all this deliciousness comes at a price; I would never try to convince anyone that this place is a budget restaurant! Two three course menus, 1 bottle of sparkling water, 1 glass of a red Bordeaux, 1 espresso, 1 hot water with lemon (no charge!) - this all came to £100 for the two of us.

La Trompette
5-7 Devonshire Road
Chiswick
London W4 2EU

 

Korean Food Festival 2008

When I heard that this year’s Korean Food Festival was scheduled for this past weekend (thank you, London Korean Links!), I cleared my calendar, called my brother who came down for the weekend and took along a couple more friends for an afternoon of eating. We arrived at about 12:30, and by the time we wove our way through the high street, filled with loads more stalls in the same kind of New Malden Day as last year, the garden of the Fountain Pub was absolutely packed. I believe it was much busier than last year - word has spread! Children’s shouts came from the presentation area as they went though the paces of their tae kwon do demonstrations but we ignored all these presentations for a good two hours as we plonked ourselves on a table on the other side of the garden and just started eating.

And boy, did we eat. Two orders of the Korean snack food of ddeokboggi, thick chewy rice cakes mixed with thin fish cakes and a spicy gochujang based sauce. This was very good, with some shredded carrots and onions mixed in and the sweet and slightly spicy sauce bringing it all together.

Smoke was wafting from the many charcoal grills and we followed our noses to a galbi so nice we had it twice. Actually, we had it three times but the second order had a disappointing marinade and so we had another order from the first stall. That marinade was so tasty it had us all gnawing away at the bones and licking our fingers.

We had some crossed wires between us which resulted in two different orders of spicy fried chicken but we took opportunities such as that to sample the fried chicken from various stalls. Shame the last one wasn’t as good as the first. Compare and contrast the colour of the first two examples with the last. The last was more like a sweet and sour sauce - not right. The best was the first as the sauce was the richest and had the addition of ground peanuts.

We also ate kimbap (always good),

and lots of chicken skewers (yummy!),

and fried vegetable fritters (just ok),

and extremely heavy, fried rice cakes that looked like marshmallows on a stick (too heavy! so sticky!).

We ate so much that we barely had any dinner later that evening. We did stick around to watch some of the tae kwon do demonstrations. Some of the kids were obviously very talented; I wouldn’t want to meet some of them in a dark alley. Rather luckily, we were just in time to watch this guy break a whole lot of marble sheets (I think that’s what the kids said). Very impressive! Will eating lots of grilled meat and kimchi make me this strong?

All my photos (and gosh, we ate a lot) can be seen in this Flickr photoset.

 

An Italian Influenced Teatime at Amato

When we’re in the Soho area and looking for a nice teatime spot, one of the spots we gravitate towards is Amato on Old Compton Street. It’s a little less crowded than the slightly more famous Maison Bertaux but that doesn’t mean that their goodies are any less delicious!

Upon entering, you’re led to the back where there are a number of tables - it was almost empty when we went that day but it’s been chock-a-block at other times we’ve visited. You’ll be walking past a long display case of cakes and typical Viennoiserie and some Italian pastries too.

From the menu, we both chose iced tea to drink - just right to quench our thirsts. Hey, I just realised that I’ve been drinking a lot of iced tea this past year. Time to make some myself at home!

To eat (for one must have a little nibble at teatime) I chose this decadent looking confection from the pastry display case.

The waiter called it a cannoli but it looked more like cannoncini, according to their website. Whatever it’s called, it’s a spirally cylinder of puff pastry filled with a crema pasticciera. Only it turned out not to be any old pastry cream - this was chocolate pastry cream! Oh, it was light, and yet not light, if you know what I mean!

Until that trip, I had no idea that Amato also served meals; we saw two girls tucking into bowls of spaghetti, one of the daily specials. Definitely going to have to go back for that! Oh, and our tea for two (with the nibble) set us back about £8.

Amato
14 Old Compton Street
London W1D 4TH

 

Wahaca

I love Mexican food and take every opportunity to eat it when I’m in North America. When I heard about a cheap new Mexican place opening in London, I wanted to visit but it took me a while to finally try it.

I’d tried once before to get into Wahaca for dinner but a 45 minute wait put me off. We decided to come instead one weekend for lunch, when it was considerably emptier. We descended slowly down the stairs to the basement restaurant, taking in these new surroundings. The host waved us down huge arm-sweeping gestures and when we finally got to his stand, he proceeded to stick his nose up in the air, pretended to write furiously with his feathered quill-pen, and then pompously stated, with a big grin, that he was writing a sonnet. Many words to describe him came to my mind, none of them appropriate for me to put here. This was not a good sign.

We were promptly seated and the whole menu was explained to us after we’d answered in the negative to their question of whether we’d been there before. We’d already decided on the mixed platter for two upstairs from the menu by the door and so selected our drinks - two homemade hibiscus waters. We were also upsold the frijoles, but hey, I’m a sucker for refried beans. The entire time the waiter acted like our “mate”, our cooler-than-thou buddy. I hate that.

He promptly delivered our salsas. The red was a chipotle salsa and it did pack some heat. The green was a mixture of green tomatillos and herbs and chilies and was the milder of the two.

It was after we received our drinks (which were very nice and at a very nice price) that I noticed that the dishes on the menu at our table were not the same as those listed on the menu outside. The mixed platter also had different dishes and I wouldn’t be able to try huitlacoche for the first time. This, of course, annoyed me no end when after dinner I realised that they just hadn’t changed the menu outside. Not good. Even the menu online hasn’t been updated.

A waitress came over to our table with the tiny bowl of black beans in her hand, dropped it, and then walked away without another word. Weird. Luckily, the beans weren’t strange; they were actually quite delicious and topped with some crumbled cheese. Crumbled cheese?! What’s crumbled cheese? I mean, other than just taking cheese and crumbling it.

The platter arrived looking quite delicious.

Let’s take a look around, shall we?

Quesadillas were chorizo and summer broad bean and both were pretty good.

Tacos were steak

and espinacas (spinach). The tacos were minuscule and strangely greasy. The tortillas looked as if they’d been dipped in oil before being filled. Apart from the greasiness, they were tasty enough. Better with a bit of salsa.

Chicken taquitos were greasy, of course, but that’s to be expected from deep fried food! Nothing very special - just chicken in tortillas and the whole thing was deep fried. They were topped with a pico de gallo, lettuce, sour cream and that crumbled cheese again.

Rounding off the platter were the spicy slaw, guacamole and totopos. Totopos were as one would expect - freshly fried tortilla chips. I just wish there were more on the platter. The spicy slaw was actually very nice - this was definitely a surprise to me, a coleslaw disliker. There was a bit of spice and something tangy in the mayo dressing and the cabbage and carrot shreds weren’t overloaded in the creamy sauce. Guacamole was average; I thought it needed more lime.

A friend who visited soon after they opened felt that she was force fed the information that Wahaca was the restaurant of a Masterchef winner. Is that really necessary? I found the service a bit vulgar - call me old-fashioned but I don’t like it when the waiter is my “friend”. I doubt I’ll visit again and this is solely based on the service there - the food seemed promising and I would have given them another chance and maybe I will if I get a craving for Mexican food that can be sated no other way. But if I want mates, no thanks, I’ll turn to my own.

Wahaca
66 Chandos Place
Covent Garden
London WC2N 4HG

 

When I Go to Southall…

When I go to Southall, I make sure I have a nice meal there. This time, it was chole bhatura, a North Indian combination of spicy chickpeas (chole) with fried soft flatbreads (bhatura), at Rita’s Samosa House. I love the spicy tamarind sauce that comes alongside.

I also like to buy nibbles to eat at home, like these pakoras. There were pakoras of potato, onion, aubergine, cauliflower, and stuffed whole chilies. These were purchased from Ambala Foods.

Also for home are a boxful of mangoes. It’s the season for the king of mangoes - Alphonso mangoes. They were so delicious - sweet and heavily perfumed. I can’t imagine using them in any recipe; they’re perfect just as they are!

Sure, it’s a bit of a trek from central London but it’s a fun place to visit for the day!

Rita’s Samosa House
112 The Broadway
Southall, Middlesex
UB1 1QF