I am writing this post
right before lunch and as I am very hungry, I thought we could have a look at a
restaurant review…
BLIXEN, RESTAURANT REVIEW: UNBEATABLE COMFORT FOOD ON THE EDGE OF
SPITALFIELDS MARKET
65a
Brushfield Street, Spitalfields, London E1 6AA (0207 101 0093)
·
Saturday 19 March 2016 01:37
·
This will be my last-ever restaurant review for the Independent
Magazine. After a dozen years, a couple of modest awards, a plethora of
polysyllabic phrases and a near-obsession with crème brulee, I am hanging up my
spiral notepad, my monogrammed napkin and my well-thumbed copy of Alan
Davidson's Penguin Companion to Food.
When I asked where I should eat the final evaluative supper, the
Magazine bosses were clear. "You can't take chances with the last
one," they snarled, "If you hate it, your final review will be
curdled by disappointment and fury. Why not choose one of the best places about
which you have happy memories?" I cudgelled my brains to recall the
"best": the very few five-star-food places, the veteran
"classics" I was privileged to re-assess, like J Sheekey and Rules in
London, the rustic sensations, such The Harrow in Little Bedwyn, and the ones
that offered increasingly mad experiments (the maddest was a test-tube
amuse-bouche described by a Swiss-German waitress as "chloroform" –
it turned out to be clove foam but she could easily have been right).
I finally decided to choose the place where I'd feel happiest just
walking back into. So I chose Blixen.
Clive and Penny Watson and their builder-designer partner Justin Gilbert
launched Blixen only a year ago, but it stayed embedded in my memory after the
first visit: the
gorgeous converted-bank décor, the three differently-styled dining
areas, the delicious
food, ambrosial
puddings and genial
service. My second visit was last October, at a birthday lunch involving 17
people in the former vault, where our waiter sang an aria for the birthday boy
(that's what I call service). The main dining room was jumping with
Saturday-lunchtime jollity and I felt my rave review was vindicated.
This time I took my wife Angie and my three children, Sophie, Max and
Clementine – four people who have individually and collectively been my most
reliably vocal lunch and dinner "companions" over the years. Thank
goodness they liked Blixen, with its whitewashed-brick and tan-leather-booth décor,
and bar – a gold-backlit
shrine to the demon alcohol, with dangling globe lights.
The menu features irresistible
nibble-plates: in 10 minutes we'd scarfed down plates of truffle popcorn, crispy baby squid,
pickled herring crackers, chorizo bites and taramasalata like starving jackals. We had
to be jemmied from our bar seats to a table in the pergola section of the
restaurant, where foliage trails charmingly around a wooden trellis. Philippe, our French waiter, served slabs of baked bone marrow
with bagna cauda, tiny plates of pungent boquerones (anchovies with monksbeard
and artichoke pesto) and squid, chorizo and chickpea stew with saffron aioli,
a miraculous
intertwining of flavours and textures. Only the deconstructed cod brandade
disappointed: the helpings of fishy mash destined to do little more than anoint
some boring radishes.
Main courses were much as I remembered: especially a pork belly of weep-making
tenderness surmounted by salty, crunchy crackling, the whole array
parked on a bed of kale
and spaetzle, Germanic pasta cooked with pork-reduced jus, quince and brown
butter, amazingly tasty.
Seared stonebass was magically
fresh and flaky, given a double wallop of Mediterranean flavour with
punterella (endive) and green olives. Slow-cooked lamb shoulder was slitheringly, tongue-enrapturingly
gorgeous, served on a
crowded field of faro, peas, eggplant, rocket and pistachio pesto.
Only a madman would have pudding after all that, but this was my last
gig so normal service didn't apply. Blixen's warm banana and caramel pudding
with coconut sorbet deserves its fame: the combination is unearthly. I was sorry not to
see crème caramel with brandied plums, a favourite, but the pistachio ice cream
with shortbread almost made up for it. Clementine could hardly ignore the
clementine and chocolate rum cremeux, and heavenly it was, a soft ice hockey puck of
faintly citric chocolate with hazelnut ice cream. No one could stop me
ending up with a Plum Sazerac digestif, a syrupy concoction of Armagnac, Prucia plum liqueur,
absinthe and bitters that I hope to have at my deathbed.
Blixen may not be haute cuisine, but it's the highest-quality comfort food available to
mankind, in the most airily
pleasing ambience , among the most charming and obliging people, bang in the old beating heart of
London's East End.
I was so glad to be back. And to have had the good fortune to eat so
much wonderful food and visited so many temples of culinary delight. Thank you
for letting me be your food-and-drink taster over the years. Sometimes it
hasn't seemed like work at all.
Food ****
Ambience *****
Service *****
Ambience *****
Service *****
Blixen, 65a Brushfield
Street, Spitalfields, London E1 6AA (0207 101 0093). About
£33 for three courses, before cocktails, wine and service
Points for discussion
Note
the use of:
-
Similes
-
Adjectives and adverbs to express opinion
-
Extended noun phrases
-
Use of lists
The
writer has used some quite complex vocabulary – make sure that you look up any
words that you have not understood. They may come in useful to you in your own
writing!
No comments:
Post a Comment