“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.