Lunch at Bibigo

When the Korean healthy restaurant chain Bibigo opened in London last year, critics slated it but mainly for the very high prices they were charging. I had crossed it off my list a while ago but someone recently said that they had had a good meal there and it was enough to pique my curiosity again. I see now that they’ve addressed the price issue with a £9 lunch special (the “lunch club menu”) and a £12 early dinner set menu in addition to the usual expensive a la carte options. We tried the latter one recent Saturday afternoon (yes, also available on weekends!) and were pleasantly surprised.

For £9, you get a starter and a main course. Of the starters, there was a red chicken (I suspect crispy chicken pieces in a gochujang hot sauce) and a seafood pajeon; I chose the latter. To my disbelief, this appears to be a full sized order! I really enjoyed this pajeon; unlike many heavy greasy ones I’ve had in the past, this was light and crispy.

My friend chose the third available starter – the Tomatofu, a salad made up of soft tofu, tomatoes and rocket leaves. From the way she cleared her bowl, I’d say she liked it!

For our main course, we both went with the Traditional bibimbap with beef bulgogi. The healthy outlook of the restaurant meant that it wasn’t topped with a fried egg (boo!) but it was still tasty with their accompanying ‘Kohot’ sauce (like the traditional gochujang based sauce). I liked that other sauces were also available – some were mild and would suit those fearful of heat.

Other main courses available in the set menu were the bulgogi, bo-ssam, baby chicken, grilled scallops or the jjigae of the day (that day, it was a pork and kimchi jjigae). I notice online now that it was supposed to include a tea or coffee but we forgot to get ours!

Overall, the food at Bibigo was pretty good – sure it’s not perhaps the most authentic take on Korean food but I don’t then that matters so long as it’s delicious. The lunch set is a great deal with very generous portions and I’d certainly recommend that. The only catch is that you’ve got to sign up for their “VIP club” but this does get you a card that also gives you 20% off their a la carte menu.

Bibigo
58-59 Great Marlborough Street
London W1F 7JY

 

Christmas Feasting

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas! We’re not religious at all but I’ve embraced the whole idea of Christmas and the fact that we get an enforced break from work and well, all of that eating, of course! Our feasting started Christmas Eve with a big Chinese meal for the three of us (Blai joined us this year for his first Christmas in London).

My brother had brought over a roast duck from Four Seasons (our usual duck of choice comes from Gold Mine but they had closed early the day before!) and I added a steamed fish, wontons in chilli oil, kai lan with oyster sauce and mapo tofu (I added some pork to that last recipe).

A couple of the recipes came from Fuchsia Dunlop’s book Every Grain of Rice – and I highly recommend this book! I feel I ought to be cooking more Chinese food and I’ll certainly be using her recipes often.

Afterwards, there were slices of Heston’s Black Forest Buche (bought at Waitrose) for dessert. We’re still eating our way along the length of this excellent chocolatey buche.

On Christmas Day, we rose late and started with a breakfast of smoked salmon and crème fraîche on blinis along with scrambled eggs.

Soon after breakfast, I set out a few bites while the main course was cooking. A bit of cheese, A bit of charcuterie, a bit more salmon. It’s what the Catalans call pica pica, all these little bites.

And the main course? Well, we can’t go wrong with another slab of pork belly – it always goes down well in this family. This year, I roasted it with apples and onions and I loved the sweetness and slight tang the apples gave. For a recipe, start with this one and instead of fennel, use a couple of sliced onions and a couple of sliced, peeled green apples and a bit of dried or fresh thyme.

Very buttery mashed potatoes, pigs in blankets, sauteed sprouts, roasted carrots and parsnips and, of course, that pork and there’s my first plate made.

And now it’s Boxing Day and that’s all about using up the leftovers… but first, I’d like to hear what you’ve been eating this Christmas! Have you tried new recipes this year or is this a time for sticking to tradition?

 

Lunch at Roganic

While everyone else is already talking about the latest and hottest restaurants in London, I’m still making my way slowly through my list of must-try restaurants. Roganic was one of these on the list. An inability to plan ahead meant I’d still not eaten there but my super-organised friend did manage to make a booking one recent Saturday lunchtime. Thanks, KK, for arranging it!

If you’re not familiar with the name, Roganic is the two year temporary London restaurant of Simon Rogan and the sister restaurant to Rogan’s highly acclaimed L’Enclume in the Lake District. Roganic is located in Marylebone and looks relatively sleek and finished for a temporary place. It’s a lot smaller than I imagined with just a handful of tables, all well spaced apart. I liked it and I liked our cozy table in the corner.

Before we even had a chance to see the menus though, amuses had been set down in front of us. What looked like a cracker turned out to be dehydrated mushroom with a topping of cream cheese, mint powder, cornflowers and something olive. The delicious fried morsel was pigs head topped with violet mustard and an edible flower. It was a good beginning to the meal.

After we selected the three course lunch from the menu, a tray of warm bread rolls was brought to our table: these were (from left to right) whole wheat and ale, pumpernickel and rye, and onion and thyme. We scarfed them down with the whipped butter provided and used them to mop up sauces in the next few dishes.

With each dish, our waiter would come over and rattle off the most impressive sounding list of ingredients – it was almost impossible to keep track of them! For this next bite, we heard pea mousse, slow cooked beef tongue, split peas, calamint oil, aniseed powder, peashoots, pea flower. I’m sure I’ve missed something. It was delicious with the peas and mint going together very well – imagine an upmarket pea soup.

Our three courses then started proper. First was Keen’s dumplings, cream of onion, nasturtiums and liquorice powder. The dumplings had been made of Keen’s cheddar and they sat in the most beautiful cream of onion soup. There was some grilled baby courgette in there as well.

Reg’s duck breast with beans, sweetbreads, sage and corn was excellent, especially those battered sweetbreads. I can imagine food cynics scoffing at the use of foams and powders and whatnot on the dishes but each encapsulated the flavour of one particular ingredient and truly did add to the composition of the dish.

Dessert was Douglas fir, cherries, goat’s milk and pennyroyal. It’s a cliche but I can safely say that this dessert was certainly greater than the sum of its parts. The douglas fir flavour was in the white foam and I could have eaten a bucketful of it. It was served with a cherry cake, a goat’s milk caramel and the pennyroyal leaves. This really was an absolute stunner of a dish.

A little pot of what looked like mustard came after. This turned out to be greengage cream, mead jelly, and natural yoghurt hidden at the bottom. This went down smooth and easy…but wow, was that mead jelly strong!

A little treat came along with our coffees – Homemade Jammie Dodgers! The two buttery crumbly layers were barely held together by its filling of fresh raspberry coulis.

The three course lunch costs £29 or £35 with 2 glasses of wine; also available are menus of 6 or 10 courses and I’m dying to return to go all out with one of those. Service was very friendly and open and extremely knowledgeable. We asked what would happen after the two years was over and was told that Simon Rogan was in talks with a number of people with quite a few potential locations being discussed. I’m very much looking forward to seeing his next restaurant step.

Roganic
19 Blandford St
London W1U 3DH

 

A Birthday Lunch at Min Jiang

One of my closest friends has been in London this past year and she very kindly took me for lunch at Min Jiang on my birthday a couple weeks back. With its location on the 10th floor of the Royal Garden Hotel (a hotel whose interior is certainly much nicer than its blocky grey exterior), its views over Kensington Gardens were brilliant; if only the weather that day matched it.

I’d never felt so much like a tai tai (think lady who lunches) that afternoon (leaving work for a long lunch at a swanky restaurant will do that). And as you’d expect in a restaurant like Min Jiang, service was impeccable throughout our lunch.

For our meal, we chose a selection of dim sum and some noodles for the whole birthday thing (their length represents longevity) – their famous Beijing duck would have to wait for another visit. Our first dish, their signature xiao long bao, was excellent. Thin skins gave way to lots of meaty broth and a lovely pork filling; we think they’d coated the base of the steamer with something so that the dumplings wouldn’t stick. With a dab or two of vinegar and ginger, these went down quickly.

The deep-fried yam croquette with seafood was their delicate version of wu kok. These very dainty bites were delicious but I still think I prefer the more usual robust flavours of a meat filling.

Har kow had a good prawn filling but the skins were ever so slightly mushy. Roxanne taught me to look out for a good springiness to the har kow wrappers.

The stir-fried turnip cake with XO sauce had a surprising amount of heat and was utterly delicious. Soft chunks of steamed daikon cake had been fried together with the XO sauce and the addition of beansprouts added a great crunchy contrast.

While we were eating, a waiter snuck up behind us, announced the Sichuan dan dan noodles with minced pork and then deposited this on our table.

…

…

You could have heard a pin drop.

He then proceeded to giggle at our disbelief and announced that he’d already plated up our noodles and then placed these in front of us. Oh, ha!

They were very good – more of a light, nutty, sesame laced dan dan noodle dish than the original spicy, oily Sichuan version. They went down easily and were the perfect birthday noodles.

Of course we saved room for dessert. A proper lady who lunches would probably be watching her figure but well, we were just play-acting that day. My fresh mango cream with sago pearls and pomelo was just sweet enough and certainly more mangoey than any mango/pomelo dessert I’ve had in the past. My only quibble would be that more pomelo was needed.

Roxanne’s fried and steamed black sesame paste dumplings with black sesame ice cream came looking incredibly delicate. Everything was incredibly full of black sesame flavour. Of the two dumplings, the classic steamed dumpling was much better than fried. I loved the steamed dumpling’s soft mochi like texture and its lava-hot black sesame filling.

Was it the best dim sum in London? No, I don’t think so though it was very good and very refined but, gosh, that refinement came with a hefty price. One observation: the strength of the more northern dishes (xiao long bao, dan dan noodles) did lead us to suspect a more northern hand in the kitchen rather than a pure Cantonese one – nothing wrong with that. Overall, our meal there was great – hooray for lovely company and fantastic service and feeling like a tai tai for one afternoon. Thanks very much, Roxanne!

Min Jiang
Royal Garden Hotel
2-24 Kensington High Street
London W8 4PT

 

Sunday Lunch at The Mall Tavern

A few weeks ago, Cathy the Gastronomer was in London for a short stop before her big trip to France with her husband and mother and we arranged to meet at Maltby Street for St John’s vanilla custard filled doughnuts. We also arranged to meet the next day for lunch at The Mall Tavern – it was a Sunday and I convinced them that they needed a proper roast lunch! It would be a first visit to this pub for all of us.

We were seated in the bar area – every table available had been booked up. Our waitress was efficient but quite gruff while we were ordering. We refused to let this ruin our meal though and started cooing over the cute tea towel napkins at each place.

The slightly disturbingly named Cow Pie (£14.50) came out looking glorious. Crisp golden brown pastry topped an excellent beef and ale filling. And in the centre of that pie was a big marrow bone whose marrow had been scooped out, mixed with garlicky, herby breadcrumbs and then stuffed back in – it was fabulous.

A Chicken Kyiv (£14.50) came out looking marvellously spherical and sat on top of a potato rosti and some slaw. And yes, as expected, a lot of delicious garlic butter came gooshing out when we cut into it – I’m such a sucker for a good chicken kiev.

The roast dinners were very good but to me, still not a patch on the two previous dishes. The Roast Beef (£15.00) was flavourful and was a generous serving (4-5 good slices) with lots of potatoes, carrots, cabbage and a good Yorkshire pudding.

The Roast Pork Loin (£15.00) had come recommended by our waitress and the loin was indeed tender. It was very good and was perhaps even better than the beef that day. Both roast dinners came with the appropriate sauces (horseradish and apple for our two roasts) and plenty of gravy.

Our waitress very kindly packed up the leftovers for us and we set to sharing just one dessert between us (we couldn’t handle any more). It had to be the restaurant’s signature Arctic Rolls (£6.50) – slices of ice cream covered in a thin layer of sponge cake – and we could choose three flavours of the ones available. We chose the Mango Lassi, Original and Tart Lemonade Tart. Mango tasted very much of alphonso mangoes, the original was vanilla ice cream with raspberry jam, and tart lemonade tart was full of the flavour of delicious bitter peel.

Not sure why but by the end of the meal, our waitress seemed to have warmed to us and we even got a bit of a smile. And phew, I’m glad that Cathy did enjoy the meal! Bookings are essential on a Sunday afternoon.

The Mall Tavern
71-73 Palace Gardens Terrace
Notting Hill Gate
London W8 4RU