eating Camden

When eating out at home, 90% of the time it’s within walking distance. For my week in London I followed the same motto. After all it’s a huge city, time consuming to traverse and after a day of crawling through medical museums, art galleries and shops it’s nice to hang out with the locals.

Market 

43 Parkway, Camden, London NW1

This place is exactly what I look for in a ‘local’ - a relaxed atmosphere, unpretentious service and reliable tasty food that provokes a little bit of menu indecision.

Market, is a far cry from the grime and tat of Camden Lock. It’s a comfortable restaurant, with warm brick walls, uncluttered lines and generous serves of seasonal food. The cuisine is British with a French influence. Which really means English food, done well.

Other than side dishes there’s nothing that would sate a vegan but the seafood offerings meant I could eat rather well. There are a handful of daily specials and a small but well-formed menu. The oil based prawn linguine with a decent dash of chilli on the specials board spoke my name. As it was a very large entrée, it was lucky I was hungry as the whole fish (the type now escapes me, possibly bass), cooked simply with lemon, accompanied by a bucket of chunky chips should have been more than enough on it’s own.

My hosts ate with glee. They loved the meaty offerings. Though they left the large side order of braised greens entirely for me to devour. We drank a delightful French rose, perfect on a warm early autumn evening.

I was too full for dessert, even though the apple sorbet was tempting. From the mouthful I tasted, it was refreshing alternative to the heavier options on the menu.

Cost for three people, 2-3 courses each, plus a bottle of wine $175 (including tax and tip). They advertise 2 course meal deals for those who want to dine earlier in the evening.

It was a faultless night and my pick of places to eat in the area. Though the most amusing thing about the evening was a rather obvious first date being conducted at the next table. The poor woman was literally bored to tears as the guy, around 50, droned on and on about himself. It was so awful, at times we couldn’t help but eavesdrop. It took all my willpower to not cheer her on to walk out on the self-centred prick. 

York and Albany

127-129 Parkway, London, NW1

Away from the rabble, heading towards Regent’s Park, sits a restrained former pub. York and Albany is a boutique hotel in the Ramsay empire. There’s a relaxed front dinning room/ bar where we breakfasted. The menu offered standard options but was well done, with coffee better than average. I ate a perfectly executed eggs Florentine and the boys went for lashings of bacon and posh sausages.

The staff appeared to be have chosen on their looks and were restrained, bordering on snooty. It’s the kind of place you go when you want to impress, rather than for an outstanding dinning experience. Or perhaps if you’re a poor Antipodean who wants to sample an offshoot of Ramsay-dom, without lashing out on an expensive meal.

inSpiral Lounge

250 Camden High Street, London NW1

From the sublime to the ridiculous, this was a solo visit. Not the carnivorous hosts cup of tea at all. Camden’s hippy roots live on in the sadly shabby but not chic market district. In need of some vegan food to balance out weeks of daily fish eating, I took one of Lisa’s tips. After a lovely early morning walk down the canal I spied the open sign on the inSpiral Lounge door. Well they said they were open but only just. None the less the bloke behind the counter said that my veggie breakfast would be out in 5 minutes. Twenty-five minutes and one rather pedestrian coffee later, it arrived. What a blast from the past – veggie sausage, button mushrooms, half a barely cooked tomato, scrambled tofu and a patty of some description possibly a variation on a hash brown.

According to their site, “inSpiral specialises in gourmet optimum nutrition for connoisseurs, all freshly handmade onsite and served from our vibrant counter.”  Not sure my breakfast could be classified as gourmet or 'handmade onsite' (considering the two obviously commercially made components plus bog standard sliced brown bread) but it was exactly what I needed to counterpoint the (actual) gourmet food of the previous three weeks.

Vegan pickings are hard to find in Camden and inSpiral has plenty of raw and organic options. I enjoyed a leisurely breakfast looking out over the canal in the almost empty café. Reviews online describe it differently, noting by lunchtime it’s hectic. Many mentioned that the food is overpriced and not as good as it looks on the website. 

Like many vego establishments in the UK, inSpiral is deeply entrenched in 70's vegetarianism and neo-hippy decor. Something we've fortunately moved on from in Melbourne.

beyond Ramsay and another box of oranges

Karl Quinn, in The Age, is suggesting the Ramsay-Grimshaw stoush was a set up. Call me cynical but I get the feeling the senior writer for Fairfax is trying to create his own controversy.

What I learnt from seeing Ramsay last weekend is that most of the audience didn’t find him particularly charming or even funny but some will do almost anything to win a small appliance or have their few seconds of fame. To be in the proximity of a celebrity is what it is all about.

But it has nothing to do with cooking. The guy for all his ugliness can cook. Uncouple the dreadful banter and infamy from his demo in the celebrity theatre and just let him create good simple food. Free him of the expectation to perform as anything other than a chef and I would have been happy to pay good money for the experience. After all the bloke used tahini for goodness sake and for me I can find redemption in popularising deceptively simple, healthy food.

You see we, the viewing public, have created Ramsay. We are the ones that demand the swearing (people left the theatre actually disappointed to not hear a single f*ck from him). We are the ones getting our jollies from the fallout with the ACA host. We are the ones that have turned cooking into reality television. Yes, we are the monster that created Masterchef (tune out, let the ratings drop and we will be free of it next year, I promise you).

This week I have cooked and eaten an awful lot. There has been quinoa pilaf, a simple chickpea curry made from imagination, a hearty bean and vegetable soup, an unexpected lunch at Cookie and generally lots of shared food around the table. Not much is what I would call “blogworthy”, mainly due to it being just regular simple fare, no bells and whistles or because I have documented here on these pages before.

Everything has a season. It is June, the SE’s birthday and with it comes his family from Sydney and a box of home grown oranges and lemons. There will definitely be another jar of preserved lemons, the orange cake might even get made this year but inevitably at least half the citrus will simply be squeezed and drunk. Sure there might be an intense orange jelly set with agar. There could be the spiced lemon pickle I didn’t get around to making last year. But you know, it doesn’t matter because merely squeezing it and drinking it straight is a delicious, simple experience in itself.

I know that if I miss messing with the fruit this year, the opportunity will come around again. Everything has a season – the anticipation, the first taste of the year, the inevitable glut that turns the sort after into the every day. Round and round it goes.

Enjoy the zesty citrus, roasted chestnuts and hearty soups that make winter what it is. For now, I am loving a bowl of steaming hot porridge with a dash of maple syrup before work, almost as much as anticipating bed with a hot water bottle at the end of the day. I can wait for spring to fall in love with asparagus again and summer for my first mango of the season but for now an orange grown with love is fine with me.

GFWS 2009 -the good, the bad and the downright sexist

If you love big exhibitions, buy those supermarket-chain food magazines and watch programs like Masterchef – you will love the Good Food and Wine Show. However if the term “foodie” gives you heartburn and you find the cult of the celebrity chef distasteful this event might not be your thing.

As for me, I left the GFWS feeling a tad queasy.


The Good

Most exhibitors were generous with samples. You could more than recoup your entry fee on the wine tasting alone and after work on a Friday and that was what a fair few people seemed to be doing in the grog enclosure.

Food-wise two products stood out and both involved people doing things with real food. One exhibit did a great job of demystifying quinoa from cooking it in vegetable stock as a base for a casserole, to creating a delicious salad. The second standout was an avocado promotion. The smoothies made with pineapple, avocado, honey, orange juice and a little desiccated coconut was so good we went back for seconds.

We were given currency to use in the restaurant enclosure. Four chefs devised a simple menu with an entrée, main and dessert each. Of them, Gordon Ramsay’s simple and healthy offerings were the only ones fitting my criteria. Just as well because his salmon was a standout. It was while we were polishing off an early meal we were approached by an employee desperate to give away tickets to Ramsay’s next show in the kitchen stadium. We said no at first, neither or us a fan of the man though when we heard he’d be demonstrating how to cook the salmon we were sold.

The Bad

Product warning! Later in the year a Tasmanian company will be launching their Australian grown and canned tinned salmon. I wanted to like it but to be honest, I suspect there are cat foods on the market that taste better. I am their target market, with a stack of Wild Alaskan tinned salmon in my cupboard but the local product was so unbelievably foul I shudder just writing about it.

Speaking of cat food, as always there were far too many exhibits devoted to off theme products – pet consumerables, wash cloths, really pushy Asian massage hawkers that created a kind of visual and aural spam.

The Ugly

Gordon Ramsay doesn’t have a pretty face (even if it may or may not have been made less mobile thanks to botox). But that is not what makes him unattractive. I don’t own a single cookbook by a television celebrity and unlike the women whooping loudly in the front few rows – I am not a fan.

We rocked up to the half-full “Celebrity Theatre” just as the show was getting underway. The person seated next to us whispered they’d been sold out last year. Had Gordo lost his mojo with the GFC, infidelity and all? We endured the never ending warm up segment where audience members willingly humiliated themselves in the hope of winning show bags, until finally the man himself arrived with only moderate cheering from the audience and not a single pair of knickers thrown on stage.

Oh boy, what a big disappointment. Minute after aching minute of woman-hating rhetoric in the name of comedy spewed out of his mouth. He continually dissed Tracy Grimshaw, Susan Boyle and womankind generally to lukewarm response. For a man so keen to rub his genitals against the opposite sex, his blatant disrespect for the gender was from a different century.

With over half the allocated time now wasted he finally started cooking and attempted to redeem himself. Yes the man can cook. He knows how to dumb down a recipe for the public and what he created ticked all the boxes for simplicity, good produce and even health.

But the man himself, like the canned salmon left me feeling quite nauseous.

Disclaimer: I attended the show and ate at the restaurant courtesy of Stellar Concepts. Entry prices for Melbourne and Sydney are $27.50. The Ramsay Salmon dish with a glass of wine is available for $24.

Tickets to Gordon Ramsay ($47.50) were provided independently, by the event management on the day.