GEOFF DREAMS OF CROQUETTES

 Somebody (was it Giles Coren? AA Gill? Brillat-Savarin?) said somewhere that the ‘secret’ of a good restaurant is that the people running it know what they want to do and then they do it as well as they possibly can. Which of course means it’s no secret at all, though a lot of restaurant managements seem not to know it.

 

So if you’re a proper English pub you don’t start serving fried silk worms and duck fetus – you serve steak pies and ploughmen’s lunches.  If you’re a Bangladeshi restaurant you don’t serve steak pies and ploughmen’s lunches. And so on.  It’s not about authenticity, it’s about understanding the mission.

 

On Sunday afternoon I was in Dirty Dick’s in Spitalfields, and saw there were ox cheek croquettes on the menu, and I was slightly thrown.  In one sense that’s not standard pub fare, on the other hand pig cheeks are surely an ancient and noble British tradition, even if croquettes aren’t.  Well, I’d have taken a chance on them but they were off, so a sausage roll was had instead: that’s Bloody Mary ketchup on the side.

 

PHOTOS BY GANNON STUDIOS

And so to Taro in Walthamstow, a newish Japanese restaurant, part of a small chain that knows what it’s about and delivers as promised.  It may not be the sushi that Jiro dreamed off, but it seemed everything a small local Japanese restaurant ought to be.

 

There was sashimi of tuna, salmon, mackerel, and shrimp

 

tempura vegetables (which actually weren’t that fabulous but I think I’m coming to the conclusion that I don’t really like tempura vegetables)

 

octopus balls - takoyaki

There were Japanese pickles too but we didn’t photograph them.  And here’s the beauty part: the premises used to be an eel and pie shop, and most of the relevant features, especially the tiles, have been retained. 

 

Taro do in fact serve eel, and I might like to think that’s a nod to local culture but then any good Japanese restaurant would serve eel anyway.  So that’s a double win.

 

SCRANNING IN SHEFFIELD

I have been in Sheffield eating like a lord, and also like a Sheffielder, which in many ways is same thing.

I think I grew up in Sheffield at a very bad time for British food.  A previous generation would happily have eaten rabbit, pigeon, pigs’ trotters, maybe even venison if they were able to get it.  A later generation grew up watching fancy chefs on tv and "experimenting" with kiwi fruit. But I grew up in the days when a mother could think she was doing right by her family when she served frozen fish fillets, and steak and kidney pie out of a tin.

Consequently I don’t often get nostalgic for the food of my youth, but the roast pork sandwiches of Sheffield (and I know they’re found other places too) continue to haunt my taste buds.  This is one I ate at the weekend from Beres Pork Sandwich Shop in the city centre.  

Beres have been in business since 1961, which probably makes them newcomers in the world of the Sheffield pork sandwich – Funk’s of Hillsborough have been around since at least the 1890s.

And you know, I like the roast pork well enough, but I think it’s the extras that really move me: the stuffing, the apple sauce, the crackling, all of them present in the sandwich above.  The crackling is only “recommended for people with strong, healthy teeth” – it says so on the bag.

It surely comes as no surprise that Sheffield is the home of a good meat pie, and so no huge surprise that there’s a restaurant on Division Street called Pieminister – part of a small chain that was actually founded in Bristol.  We tried going there at about 9 o clock on Saturday night, but were told they’d sold out of everything except mashed potato, which was surely a good sign, so we returned the next night.

The two pies you see in the picture above are the Moo – “British Beef Steak and Craft Ale,” and the Deerstalker – “Wild British Venison, Bacon, Red Wine and Green Lentil.”  Gotta say I didn’t notice the green lentil, but you tend not to when there’s venison around.

I don’t suppose hotdogs are especially local to Sheffield.  I occasionally had one as a kid, but it wasn’t a meal, just something you ate when you were at the seaside or at a fun fair, kind of like candy floss.  But after eating hotdogs in Chicago last month it was impossible to resist the “Bulldog” on the menu at the Fox and Duck in Fulwood Road, Broomhill, a pub that calls itself “a lively boozer.”  And no, I have never heard the word scran used in Sheffield or anywhere else.

The Bulldog was pretty decent, and the things on the top that look like wood shavings are in fact “grilled and crispy onions" sitting right on top of the raw onions.

There was also deep fried and breaded haggis with tandoori ketchup (fusion cuisine, we got it!).  It looked like this and was “interesting” though I don’t think it would satisfy many true haggis fans:

Need I say that Japanese food didn’t feature in my family’s cuisine, or anybody else’s at the time I was growing up in Sheffield.   Just a few years back, as my Japanophilia was taking hold, I tried to find a Japanese eatery in Sheffield and could only locate one, which from the reviews sounded very dodgy indeed, so I didn’t eat there.  But now Sheffield has a significant Asian population, not many of them Japanese I’d have thought, but even so these days you can find 15 or more Japanese restaurants in town.

We settled for the Mr Miyagi Revolving Sushi Bar, again on Division Street, just a pie or gyoza’s throw from Pieminister.  Of course like many other restaurants that describe themselves as revolving, the restaurant itself doesn’t rotate, but there’s a circulating conveyor belt that delivers the food.  In this case the empty belt continued to move at eye level, even as the food came via a waitress.  

Above is a Classic Sashimi Set, and two Oyster sashimi – which were as good as you could get most places, and more than you could once possibly have hoped for in Sheffield or within a few thousand miles of it.

GEOFF DAYDREAMS OF SUSHI

I was walking in the afternoon, more or less in the neighborhood, trying to keep the Black Dog at bay, when I suddenly felt an urgent need for some supermarket sushi.  I don’t suppose it absolutely had to be from a supermarket. If there’d been a perfect ten-seater sushi restaurant nearby I’d probably have gone there, but I knew a Gelson’s supermarket was nearby, and that was my only reasonable hope.  

In fact I’ve been eating some pretty reasonable sushi of late.  This plate was at Kombu Sushi in Silverlake, and yes, some of it’s sashimi.

That’s definitely saba (Japanese mackerel) at the back – there was also Spanish mackerel on the menu and I wanted to do a compare and contrast, but they’d run out of the Spanish.  I wouldn’t want to swear what the other two were – presumably yellowtail on the left, and I suppose octopus on the right - but I wouldn't put money on it.  It was all pretty good though.

The last supermarket sushi I ate, put on as a treat by my hostess when I did a reading/event at Glendale Community College, a little while ago now, was actually not bad at all - note the veggies:

It appears to have come from the Nijaya market, a pretty reliable Japanese chain.

And so this afternoon, while out walking, I strolled into Gelson’s and bought a box of “Nigri assorted sushi” (not as assorted as all that, as you can see) and took it home with me.  It was good enough – yellowtail and salmon, I think, though the label was very confusing.  And there’s a ton of rice lurking under the fish.  Obviously you don’t have to eat if all, but just as obviously you always do.

-      And the Black Dog? Oh, he's never far away, sometimes it’s the walking that helps, sometimes it’s the sushi.  And maybe the Sapporo helped a little too, but only a little.

MORE CEPHALOPOD FUN

Well, my birthday was coming up, and being a hard man to buy for, I wandered into Pier One and saw they had a cocktail shaker with an octopus design, and I said OK, I’ll have one of those.  I might have said that even if it hadn't been my birthday.

It never looks quite as photogenic as I feel it ought to, and the octopus head does look like something from outer space, but I’m not saying it like that’s a bad thing.

And then curiously, the very same day, I was in the local Vons supermarket and I saw they had octopi for sale – they'd never had them before - so obviously I bought one.

Now, I have cooked octopus quite a few times – it has been discussed elsewhere on this very blog - how to avoid rubberiness is always the problem. We know that Jiro (the one who dreams of sushi) has his staff massage the critter for an hour or so, but I knew I wouldn't be doing that.  So instead there was marinating, and a longish boil at which point it looked like this:

And then a quick fry.  So that it came out looking like this:

It tasted pretty good.  Texture-wise it was perhaps just a little bit soft, though that’s better than being rubbery, I think.

 And then, developing a small obsession, I was in a Japanese supermarket a few days later and I saw they had two kinds of octopus for sale, both according to the label, perfect for sashimi.

The one with the small suckers seemed to be cooked already, and could have been eaten straight out of the pack.  The other one with the giant suckers (I had never seen suckers like that) was raw as raw could be and needed work, though I wasn’t sure quite what – a good boil and a deep fry is what it got.  It was OK, not rubbery but perhaps a bit chewy -  I think there’s a difference.

There is, of course, more than one way to deal with an octopus, as this image from Nobuyoshi Araki (my main man) undoubtedly proves.  I hope they ate it afterwards:

IT'S A DRY HEAT

Things are changing in the old Mojave desert, especially in Yucca Valley, but maybe we knew that already. Hell, I’ve been going there long enough that I remember when the food options were pretty much limited to a Sizzler and a gas station hot dog.  Now there’s fine, or at least hipsterish, dining. Up in Flamingo Heights there’s now La Copine Kitchen serving beignets and flax and whey English muffins but I wasn’t feeling quite strong enough for that.

Parry and Harriet’s in Pioneertown remains my idea of a good time in the desert (that's Harriet and Pappy above).  I remember the first time I went there, 20 some years ago. I saw all the pickup trucks and bikes parked outside and thought it looked kind of scary, but I braved it and went in, and of course it was just fine.   I seem to recall I had a steak sandwich and quite a few beers.  It felt good – and there was a band playing that had a kickass lead guitarist.  There often is.  This is Giant Sand with Pappy and Harriet's as a backdrop.

 Returning there this weekend for an early Saturday lunch with a couple of Anglo-Dutch pals who are driving across the States in a rented RV, there were more bikes and bikers there than I’d ever seen, and it wasn’t even noon.  I guess the boys were having their brunch-time brews before hitting the road.  Before we were settled and served, the place had emptied out.

The Pappy and Harriet menu featured, would you believe (well yes, you probably would), kale salad.  I didn’t order it, obviously.  I had the Desert Burger, which you see here. (That stuff on the plate that looks like an explosions of cheese and fries, is in fact cheese fries.)

 There was no band playing at that time of day, though there was a gently decaying taxidermy moose right above our heads:

And there is the wall of fame, photographs of musicians who’ve passed through the place at one time or another.  There’s Peaches and Robert Plant – side by side but in separate frames – something symbolic in that, no doubt.

But the most impressive change in recent years in Yucca Valley has been the arrival of the Kimi Grill, an honest to goodness good quality Japanese restaurant, attached to the Travelodge motel on the west end of town.

The sushi looked like this – the squid with caviar was my favorite:

The sashimi looked like this – the salmon was the knock out:

I think they get through a lot of flowers.  And of course you may ask yourself, how does a restaurant in the middle of the desert get sushi-grade fish?  And I suppose the answer is they get it the same way that restaurants NOT in the desert get their sushi-grade fish.  I think we all know by now that freshness is no virtue whatsoever when it comes to sushi.

Elsewhere, only the very smallest change has affected the Route 62 Diner, which is now Carla’s Route 62 Diner.  Décor and menu remain the same, the latter featuring dishes named after rock and roll stars.  I had the corned beef hash and scrambled egg – pretty standard diner fare, but I felt better for knowing it was named the Buddy Holly.

Wisest to avoid the Chubby Checker, I thought.