“Spawn of Squid” - Souxou Mouxou Mantalakia - Nicosia

Sometimes you just see a dish on a restaurant menu and think “I need to eat that”. Sometimes you don’t even know what the dish will be, but it just sounds, well intriguing. 

“Spawn of Squid” 

And there I was. Hook line and sinker. Table booked, back at 8pm. 

Souxou Mouxou Mantalakia is a charming Greek restaurant on the cobbled streets just off Ledra Street, the white washed facade and the rustic furniture could have been stolen right out of Mama Mia’s props truck. 

Service was great, a Greek, who sounded Scandinavian and spoke very good English. A bit of an oxymoron but with the patience of a Greek saint answering every question posed of the menu with consummate ease, knowledge and without the slightest hint of irritation. 

Spawn of squid it turns out were tiny squid, Puntillitas to the Spanish, floured and fried till crisp but eventually it was that old chestnut of “I’ll have what he’s having” as we watching in awe the slow roast shank of pork being shredded with forks at a neighbouring table. 

The wine list was pretty uninspiring, all Greek with only the house south of €20 but it was well chilled with good fruit as a dip of creamed chickpeas with caramelised onions arrived with bread, shortly followed by croquettes of goat cheese and feta with cumin and orange. 

Croquettes – Another word when seen on a menu that just needs to be eaten. These were as good as they sounded but not as good as the salad that didn’t sound that great, but was recommended and was simply the one of the greatest collection of leaves I have ever eaten. 

I’ll pinch a Jamie Oliver – the king of salads line here and call the seasonal green salad with walnuts, grapes and grape vinaigrette “punchy”. Punchy because every mouthful had flavour, punchy because it somehow managed to outshine a plate of deep fried cheese balls and punchy because the overall dish punched way above the weight of its humble ingredients. 

The waiter told us people travel from all over Nicosia for their pork shank. Even now, weeks later I’m considering travel from the other side of the island.  This beast of a shank had been slow roasted for what could have been days, maybe months, possibly even a year. The crackling skin needed a firm heavy hand to break and once inside the unctuous meat just melted at the sight of a spoon. 

With food of this quality and of course being in Cyprus, this quantity, you don’t need desserts which is good because Souxou Mouxou Mantalakia doesn’t do them well. A mahalebi sponge was a waste of calories, but when you roast pork that well, who really cares? 

Fishers - Bristol - 2010

Cast your mind back to a time when gastro-pubs were cool, the walkman cutting edge and Victoria Beckham still called posh spice. Was it deemed necessary to be on first name terms with the chap catching your supper? Why would you need to know the specific stretch of canal said supper called home or how many Tesco trolleys were “line-caught” before the inevitable demise of Billy the bass.

Today anything that passes our lips must either be hand-reared by Hugh, sustainably caught by Rick, locally sourced by Gordon or at least once in its life have had the pleasure of Jamie wiping its derriere with organically grown hemp leaves.

Perhaps I am somewhat missing the point, but is animal cruelty any less rife on your door step than it is in say, Huddersfield? Would a herring given the choice, choose to die alone on the line of a rusty old sea dog or with thousands of shawl friends in the nets of the good ship aquatic euthanasia.   

Now before you assemble the local lynch mob and start burning effigies of Bernard Matthews outside my front door, you can relax. I’m all for sustainability. Just ask my mother. I was eating worms straight out of the ground and goldfish from the funfair years before Captain Birdseye became carbon-neutral. Even as a toddler I was conscious of my food miles and now I exclusively shop at Sainsbury’s, it’s only 150 yards from my kitchen door so even my lemons are locally sourced.    

It’s refreshing to see in these times of identikit restaurants where the moral led lead the moral less and chefs settle turf wars by adding more fishermen’s friends on facebook, that some are prepared to make a stand. To be proud to fly fish from Madagascar because it sounds more exotic than Grimsby and to laugh in the face of EU fishing quotas by serving rare, endangered and blooming tasty cod and chips.

Fisher’s in Clifton village is one of those restaurants, although more Margate than Marbella. Think lobster pots on the walls, portholes in the doors and rope where the banisters should be. A nautical theme restaurant in the style that I presumed on the brink of extinction, a dying species inhabited only during wet summer months by the endangered blue rinse and the greater spotted urbanite.

The menu is international and proud, sticking two fingers up to ethical sourcing, global warming and every celebrity chef now aboard the zero emission gravy train. Canadian lobsters, Portuguese sardines, tiger prawns and yellow fin tuna stage their very own world war food fight with Cornish scallops, Brixham skate, Scottish mussels and Irish oysters.       

The wife ate Taramasalata, smooth, pale and delightfully fishy. Calamari was soggy, tough and smelt like Kerry Katona. Probably from Somerfield’s freezer department eight doors up the road. But hell, at least it’s locally sourced.

Fish and chips were more beaten than battered. So overcooked it oozed like garlic butter from a concrete chicken Kiev. The Canadian lobster thermidor, was unavailable, probably still jet lagged from its Vancouver connection so a pan-fried Brixham skate wing was just that. Good fish, simply cooked with pre-requisite caper butter.      

Service was polite and cutesy. Mostly pretty young girls who didn’t really need the job but Daddy thought it a good idea to earn their own Bacardi breezers.

Fishers isn’t a bad restaurant, it’s just not very good. Technical skill in the kitchen is nothing without good sourcing, and there little trace of either here. The decor and menu are like a trip to Morrison’s. Familiar and homely but lacking the Marks & Sparks sex appeal.  

Casamia - Bristol - May 2009

We were always going to be setting ourselves up for a fall but Casamia was the last great restaurant left in Bristol that we had been putting off for that special occasion. The best in Bristol, a Michelin star restaurant on our doorsteps, what a perfect place for a 30th birthday!

Six months ago I walked past the entrance to Casamia at 9.30pm on a Friday night and they were closing up, it’s amazing what a little press and a picture of a fat man made of white tyres on your door can do for trade.

Upon arrival we were first told that there was no booking in our name, then told that our table had been sold on due to us being late, despite the fact we were still 10 minutes early.

After a pleasant little stay in the entrance and a £20 bottle of wine which I bought in Tesco for £6 last week, we were asked for our menu choices which I thought was perhaps a little premature considering that we were still wearing our coats and sat next to the front doors. Anyhow this must be how the other side lives I commented to the wife as I wondered if Elton John had his very own little VIP table next to the coat stand at Claridges.

As it was a special occasion we all decided to eat from the 10 course tasting menu for £45 with two of us taking the wine flight for an extra £35 each.

The food was predictably minuscule served on incredibly oversized plates looking like they had been attacked by Pablo Picasso with a brand new box of crayola.

As the plates got larger and the bowls got deeper the Ukrainian mafia serving took turns to practice their English by explaining what constitutes a deconstructed Caesar salad, a deconstructed tiramisu or a poor man’s truffle. What is it with chefs nowadays? Why don’t they construct anything? Perhaps they are too busy playing art attack with Pablo and his crayola.

A poor man’s truffle I was reliably informed by Dolph Lundgrens not so cheery sister was a turnip risotto with apple foam. What she neglected to tell me was that for true authenticity it was actually made using bits of a poor man, ala Sweeny Todd and Mrs Lovett’s pies. The poor man in question, Gandhi and his well travelled flip flop. A little bout of nausea followed that particularly interesting course but half the toilets were covered up with black bags and engulfed in a stench akin to Mrs Lovett’s cellar.

As the tenth and final course probably consisting of deconstructed foreign language student winged its way to our now departed table we were in the back of a cab, 350 quid lighter but safe in the knowledge that the only reason to return to Westbury-On-Trym would be for a visit to the Westbury Raj. 

Celebrity Chef Supermarket Sweep

Tweedies, Kissonerga, Paphos

It has become a bit of a bug barer of recent times. Picture the scene. There you are, sat comfortably in the restaurant of your choosing. G&T in hand, happily contemplating the menu in front of you when the waitress comes over and drops the bombshell;

“Have you been here before, do you know how the menu works?”

“Do I know how it works, you ask yourself?” I always thought I had a good idea.

My modus operandi to date relied heavily upon choosing restaurants on hearsay, vague internet rants or eavesdropped conversations. Booking said restaurant, showing up as close to the agreed time as family allow, ordering the best or sometimes the worst sounding dishes on the menu, eating, drinking, paying, going home, sleeping and writing about it all the next day.

Unless of course too much drinking happened, in which case there may be a little sleep before paying, sometimes a little trying not to pay (apologies Pizza Hut, Tottenham Court Road circa 98), and when I wake from my comatose state, the whole night will be a blackout, in which case I’ll just make something up, which I hope you’ll find mildly amusing and promise not to drink too much, again.

“Our menu is new every day; the chef goes to market, buys his produce and cooks his menus around what is good that day” carries on the waitress.

It’s a statement I have heard many times over the years albeit not often enough in Cyprus and each time I do so I picture a bronzed Dale Winton hosting a celebrity chef supermarket sweep special around the isles of Tesco on the Old Kent Road.

Gordon Ramsey and Jamie Oliver drawing bread sticks over the claim to ticket number seventy two in the deli queue. Heston Blumenthal calculating weather apples or pears will earn him the most club card points and Ainsley Harriot stocking up on tomatoes and peppers in the best before yesterday section.

I tried to find a fresh food market in Paphos once. You know? The sort of place that Rick Stein stumbles upon during his travels around the Mediterranean, huge temples to gastronomy where they do a thousand things with pig, and sell most of the shellfish landed in British waters.

All I found was a half built shop by the bus stops in the old town with three women dressed in black wailing about melons.

Tweedie’s is a small room with art and ornaments from a primary school craft fair. The menu is reassuringly short and from it we ate smoked haddock, leeks, a perfectly poached egg and peas, let down only by undercooked/ overcooked/ never been cooked dried peas.  Vegetable tempura was crisp and dry with on vogue teriyaki emulsion.

Fillet steak was well cooked but poorly sourced, lacking in any flavour. Most of the fillet steak served on the island seems to be imported from New Zealand which has all the character of an under hung frozen piece of meat, flown halfway around the world. It’s going to take a butcher with cahones to buy Cypriot beef and hang it for a good two to three weeks until most of the profit margin has drained out of it before we get anywhere near a good piece of steak on this rock.

Crispy skin duckling was nice idea, taken off the bone with a spiced pear sauce but the cooking of both breast and leg together brought out the worst in both cuts. Slow cooked at too high a temperature to leave any pink in the breast but not for long enough to render the leg tender.

Great wedges, proper chips with skins on that had been boiled and then roughed up before frying to a golden, crisp, crunch somewhat saved the day along with a bottle of Angelos Tsangarides superb Ayios Efrem, served slightly chilled as recommended by the waitress and owner Hillary.

Credit should also go to Tweedies for supporting a number of Paphos wineries on their list which is one of the more extensive around. Particularly for true local wine with Vasilikon, Kolios, Sterna and the forever seems to be closed when I go out there, Ezousa all represented.

Desserts were an almost great lemon tart and strawberries in balsamic which just seemed to be a crime against strawberries having been cooked in the balsamic and served in a mushy puddle with panna cotta and shortbread on the side.

A great idea lacking in execution would sum up the whole Tweedies experience. If I lived in Kissonerga, this would be the perfect neighbourhood restaurant. A family run, friendly and reasonably priced restaurant, with enough ambition to try something new, without rocking the boat of their large and faithful following.

Let’s be honest it’s still one of the better ones around but would I boot up and travel for it again, not on this showing.

Jade Palace, 24 Laxion, Coral Bay

China gave the world woven silk, fireworks, playing cards, pasta, fishing reels, whisky, poison gas, paper, wood block printing, lacquer, the compass and the wheelbarrow. They invented the umbrella, the seismograph, phosphorescent paint, the spinning wheel, sliding callipers, porcelain, magic lanterns and the stink bomb (one recipe called for 15 pounds of human shit, as well as arsenic, wolfsbane and cantharides beetles). 

It is claimed that Chinese mathematicians invented the decimal point and developed the concept of zero. They introduced it to the Hindus who introduced it to the Arabs who in turn passed it on to Europe in a sort of inter-continental game of Chinese whispers (did they invent those too?).

I always admire inventions, especially those usually born of near catastrophic mistakes.

Penicillin is one of the more commonly known mistakes, creating the most widely prescribed antibiotic in the world but did you know that coca cola was originally invented as a medicinal cure for headaches or that the potato crisp was born out of anger by an American chef.

So mad that a disagreeing customer repeatedly returned his French fries for being too thick, prankster cum Chef George Crum set about slicing his potatoes so thin and cooking them to such a crisp that the demanding patron wouldn’t be able to use his fork in trying to eat them.

But the joke backfired, the awkward customer loved the chips so much that he ordered more and before you know it, there’s a $6 billion dollar industry and 10% of kids in the world are obese.

Who’s laughing now?

Chinese food has four distinct cooking styles. Cantonese, Szechuan, Peking, Shanghai.

Cantonese is the most popular regional Chinese cuisine throughout the world, mainly because most of the original emigrants were from the Canton region and the West quickly fell in love with dim sum and their subtle use of sauce and spicing in a variety of stir fries, roasts and seafood steams.

Szechuan has been gaining in popularity over recent years with restaurants characterised by their abundant use of feisty Indian spices and red hot chillies, flavours passed on by Buddhist missionaries and Silk route traders throughout the centuries.

Peking cookery not surprisingly involves duck and pancakes, more than its fair share of steamed dumplings and it’s the only part of China where wheat outranks rice as the main starch of choice.

And finely Shanghai encompasses the cooking from all local districts and is distinct for its liberal uses of rice wine vinegar, sugar and soy sauce. Cooking here tends to be much slower and meat is often braised in rich soy based stocks to give it flavour and deep ruby colouring.

This is just a brief overview of simple Chinese cooking, it can be broken down again and again into eight, nine, ten different styles of regional cooking but I waste a tree to highlight a point. With this much choice, this much heritage and this much tradition, why is it that inside every faux Chinese temple on every high street, every laughing Buddha greasy takeaway in Basildon and every year of the dog, duck, monkey and snake all-you-can-eat buffet around the world do you get the same uncle Ben’s black bean curd, any old iron plum varnish or Dyno-rod sweet & sour special sauce dishes. 

Jade Palace on the frog and toad complex in Coral Bay is one such example. It’s taller than Trump towers, a full four floors of stir fried crab claws and at capacity it could probably seat more overweight, sunburnt day-trippers than a Barry Manilow concert at Caesars Palace.

We took the Hill’s and kids on a wet and windy Robbie Burns night, when luckily capacity was more Steve Brookstein on a P&O ferry to Portsmouth but the food was equally depressing.

From a set menu, chicken & sweet corn soup was so gelatinous it wobbled like a badly set jelly and contained enough salt to bring down a baby rhino. Every porcelain spoonful I knew would shorten my life expectancy but like a crack whore craving a hit I just couldn’t put it down, I didn’t care that it didn’t even taste like chicken or that the corn kernels were suspended mid soup like golden nuggets in a glue factory. I just needed more.

I now fully understood Harry the mosquito from a bug’s life when he’s flying towards the bug zapper and the other mosquito is pleading “Harry no - don’t look at the light” but entranced Harry just carries on “I-can’t-help-it. It’s-so-beautiful” ZAP ZZZZZZZZZZZ. “Woo hoo”

Spring rolls ordered from the appetisers were a golden crisp, grease free and plump, full of shredded vegetables but spring rolls from the mixed appetisers within the set menu were small anaemic, lifeless pockets of dirty oil, runts of the spring roll litter, punishment for ordering set menus when there was a more expensive option available.

Everything else was ok, close your eyes and it all tasted the same. Beef in black beans with peppers, sweet & sour pork, special fried rice........the list goes on, a roll call of generic Westernised dishes. Comforting and familiar for many but far removed from their heritage and history.

Dragon carvings on the doors, carp swimming in ponds by the loos, somehow these symbols of Chinese stereotypes are supposed to recreate the spirit of a eating in Shanghai, Beijing or Hong Kong.  But the real spirit, the backbone, the very essence of Chinese food and culture is in its inventiveness, its individuality, its understanding and expression of ingredients and without it, the likes of Jade Palace are soulless, purveyors of ghosts, an illegitimate and perverted perception of Chinese chow.

Ocean basket review

The Germans are famed for their reliability, that and their lack of humour and their early morning sun bed snatching, and their wall and their wars and their reliability. Did I mention reliability already?

Funny old thing is reliability. It’s like knowing what to expect is somehow...... well, naff. In the restaurant world a brand is the key word for reliability. Companies spend millions trying to create a brand, a place for yummy mummies and first time dates to impress. A place that will neither shock nor inspire, a place that will do exactly what it says on the tin, a sterile, pre-fabricated in Slough, middle class sperm bank that will both satisfy and create the board.

Antonio Carluccio is the man responsible for one of the most popular brands in recent times; his Neal Street restaurant in Covent Garden served everyone from Prince Charles to Mick Jagger. Both Jamie Oliver and Gennaldo Contaldo worked under Carluccio and the great man is often credited with popularising Italian food to a nation whose previous notions of pasta stopped with paving slabs of lasagne.

In 2005 with 23 restaurant serving over 60,000 meals per week, Carluccio and his then wife, Presilla Conran sold their share in his eponymous chain of restaurants for a reported £11 million, and with it a piece of his sole. As the brand grew, the resultant quality dropped and to the general public, the friendly faced, bushy browed, outsized Italian ambassador had sold himself down the river. The brand that bore his name was now bigger than the man himself.

As the corporate money machine steamrolled high streets up and down the country, Carluccio was powerless to stop it and in 2008 while slicing a loaf of bread after a lot of whisky he plunge a knife into his own chest. 

I’ve eaten at Carluccio’s, one of the new ones with Formica tables and a shiny red Vespa in reception and its bad, but not that bad. 

Ocean basket is a brand straight out of sub Sarharan Africa, a country whose entire population seem to eat only in back yards or shopping centres. Like a kind of open prison for gastronomes.

Their latest offering is Kato Paphos, the Avanti Holiday village piazza, a defunct shopping centre cum outdoor food hall with a tiny car park and a three kilometre round trip if you miss the nonexistent signage and the faint waft of chip fat.

Inside resembles a Borstal common room. Black painted walls, graffitied with daily fish prices in a dialect spoken only in Peckham and Camberwell comprehensives.

Think “da best feeshing spot in da world, we’ll put our feesh on da block, in da pan”.

The menu is big and fishy with lots of platters and combinations of the same food. They have a sushi bar which sells amongst other things a sushi fashion sandwich, now also available in the Roy Keane hospitality suite at Old Trafford.

Admittedly I wasn’t brave enough to try the sushi. As a general rule I don’t eat fish unless I can at least smell the sea it once lived in, and to my knowledge salmon hasn’t been landed off the Paphos pier for some years so I stuck to da ship mates platter for one, with some prince prawns, mussels fried fish and two types of calamari.

Complementary bread and dips were true to their Cypriot origins and service was straight off the brand production line, script perfect but lacking any personality with the “I need the money but don’t intend of being here very long” characterless swagger.

Da platter came with a choice of chips, rice or a healthy side salad, enough for da whale! And it all came in a large stainless steel, animal friendly, feeding frenzy trough, encouraging you to ditch the cutlery, roll up your sleeves and get it all into the mix.

Individually all of the constituent parts of the platter were above your run of mill brand average standard. River Nile perch was liberally seasoned and grilled to the point of cooked rather than the cook it to rubber, just to be on the safe side usual brand manifesto. Prince prawns were split in half, slathered in butter and blasted with fire to their moreish, suck the heads dry best. New Zealand green lip mussel plump but watery, befitting of frozen shellfish flown halfway around the world and calamari tubes were more bicycle inner tubes so it was left to the criminally underused calamari tentacles, the herb encrusted, crunchy, crispy jewels in the finding Nemo offal crown to save da day.

So the fish tasted good, the seafood well enough cooked and true to their word, there was enough for da whale. It’s not perfect – the pool of congealed fat and tetra-pack beurre blanc swimming around in the platter could have been leftovers from a liposuction slumber party, but so what?

It’s not trying to be perfect. What it is trying to do is serve reasonable food at a reasonable price and for the most part, feedback has been positive – positive enough that number three is about to roll off the conveyor belt sometime soon in Nicosia.

Let’s hope in the meantime it stays off the whisky and continues to be da beest brand in da town.

Goosefat & Garlic review

We had been in Cyprus for over a week and still hadn’t been out to lunch when I finally cracked. Driving around Kato Pafos looking for an Ocean Basket will do that to any food loving human being. Quite what a supposed food lover, let alone a human being was doing looking for an Ocean Basket is best left to the jury although in my defence – the passenger was, and in fact still is a patriotic South African with way beyond reason pregnancy cravings.

At least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Goosefat & garlic had been sold to us as the place to eat in Pegeia. Situated roadside on the Coral Bay road it certainly looks the part. Linen tablecloths, quality crockery and a sensibly sized menu which read like a gastro pub classic hits list. All of the usual suspects were here from carrot soup and toad in hole, right down to pie & mash, two types of lasagne, ham, egg & chips and the obligatory mushroom risotto.

It wasn’t as restaurant-ish as I had been led to believe but still, any oasis in a desert and all that, so with a good bottle of Argentinean malbec for comfort, we dived straight in.

I didn’t, and to be honest I still don’t know if wild boar is indigenous to Cyprus. Pork obviously rears well on Cypriot soil and there is plenty of forest for boar to roam but our friendly waiter didn’t seem to know much about it. Or if he did he certainly wasn’t giving anything away.

The wild boar terrine was a good hearty chunk but the comprising meat was dull in both colour and flavour. Parts hinted at spice, a faint waft of juniper trying to escape, but whatever flavour there may have been was trumped by an eternal dryness. Wild boar, the free roaming, pillaging, Viking related cousin of pork is lean by nature. It’s the beauty of the beast – literally. A scavenger of the forest floor, acorn, pine and wild vegetation its loot, boar should taste of its terroir. A gamey, masculine, testosterone driven carnivores wet dream. This was like dry humping a tin of pedigree chum.   

Good bread was served with the starters and breaded halloumi was just that. A tourist all time favourite of fried cheese with that unmistakable creamed sheep milk squeak to the teeth. A citrus dressing with just enough tang to combat the oil and some uninspiring salad for good measure.

Mushrooms featured heavily in the main courses but to my knowledge mushrooms grow best in dark, damp, featureless places, like sheds beneath the M25 or Poland, so I asked our waiter what type went into the mushroom risotto or the chicken and mushroom pie and he told me the small ones. Pushed at which dish he would recommend, he told me both, so with those little pearls of wisdom I took the gluttons option and went with the pie.

But my-oh pie what a pie. A proper slice like my Nan used to make with short crust pastry all around and a mahogany glazed top. None of this stew in a bowl with a puff pastry lid lark. The chicken was moist, the mushrooms small and the sauce just a little too thick in the perfect glue to hold it all together kind of way. This was though, as good as it was going to get. Mashed potato had never seen salt and pepper, let alone butter or cream. Runner beans had seen nothing but the inside of a freezer for quite a while and the last thing the gravy saw was Mr. Bisto waving goodbye from the factory gates.

Mr. Bisto to Marco Pierre White is a tenuous link even considering six degrees of separation but the forefather of modern cooking once said any chef worth his salt has a lemon tart recipe up his sleeve. The self proclaimed rock star chef would use nine eggs, the juice and zest of seven Amalfi coast lemons and half a pint of cream to make the tarte au citron that was a permanent menu fixture throughout his groundbreaking career. This most classic of desserts would be baked just minutes before service and then sliced to order. Warm, rich and smooth, the ultimate in lemon decadence. 

This nostalgic trip down lemony memory lane comes with the territory. Cyprus has a lemon tree on every corner, none of those waxed to make them appear fresher for longer jobbies, but real life, proper, fresh lemons with leaves and twigs and sweet and sour nectar that could only be ripened in the Mediterranean sun. Quite how it is then that anybody could conspire to ruin this most beautiful of natural resource is beyond me. Two forks of this classic lemon tart enough. The pastry was savoury, the filling a congealed mass of gelatine and cream flavoured with janitors lemon Jif. More like Marco Polo than Pierre White.

Goose Fat & Garlic has the right idea. The menu is small enough to be fresh, the restaurant looks classy and the service slick and polite even if lacking a little in knowledge. This was after all the middle of January, the time in Paphos when most restaurateurs batten down the hatches and take a well earned break, so the fact that they were open at all has to be commended. The bill for two with a good bottle of wine and service was €60 so it’s not expensive by any stretch of the imagination. I would like to think that as the season gets going and the kitchen gets back into full swing so the standards will rise in line with the reputation it has gained in previous years.