Things have been unusually positive and free from torrents of florid invective on this site recently. Since most readers I have met claim to prefer articles in which I am rude I’m a tad discomposed to report this is going to be another eulogistic one.

Those who prefer ungracious bluntness will be saddened to learn that when last in London the editor and I visited Banh Mi Bay and had the best sandwiches of our lives. They transcended the ubiquitous, and all-to-often indistinguishable from baby-food-in-bread experience that they generally provide and so deserve exposition. I tell you what; to soften the blow of niceness I’ll write a bit of really offensive abuse at the end about the sandwiches of incalculable vileness I had at the local CAMRA-rated boozer a week ago.

Obviously, you all know what sandwiches are: 11 billion of them are made and consumed in the UK each year. Banh mi have probably ceased to be the coolest of sandwiches by now and may even be considered reasonably commonplace by many even if they are not readers of Elitistreview and avoid mentions of food in the media. However, someone from Peterborough might read this so I had better describe them.

Banh mi are Vietnamese sandwiches: baguettes made with some rice flour (to increase their crispiness) as well as wheat stuffed with such diverse fillings as pate, pork roll, satay chicken grilled pork and others generally accompanied by mayonnaise, pickled, grated carrot and giant radish, cucumber fingers, coriander leaves and some crushed chilli. They are seasoned with salt and pepper and generally Maggi seasoning sauce, although some die-hards still mix their own umami-brew. Baguettes may sound odd coming from Vietnam, but when I remind you that it used to be a French colony you can imagine that the Vietnamese incorporated some of that food culture into their own.

As with all things, some are better than others, but generally one hopes for a degree of complexity in both flavour and texture of that make them not mere sandwiches but into the zone of quite interesting food. Banh Mi Bay’s three offerings we tried far exceeded even this level: they were masterful fine-dining creations served in wicker baskets.

The Bay Special was stuffed with a few fillings usually served individually: Vietnamese pate with slices of pork roll and spiced pork. Vietnamese pate can be a tad greasy and slimy but this had not been pulped to pap and had just the right fat/meat balance to make it throbbing with sensual flavours. The meatiness was given additional complexity thanks to the distinct but complimentary flavours of pork roll and spiced pork which were of far higher quality than we’ve experienced elsewhere. The additional richness imparted by amazingly characterful mayonnaise was noticeably improving. Minor variations on this sandwich are served at many banh mi establishments; comparatively speaking they seem like trying to eat the wreckage resulting from a boiled cabbage and aerosol cheese delivery van smashing into a warehouse full of mirrors.

Our other two sandwiches had hot fillings. First to hit my sensory papillae was the grilled pork. Meltingly tender strips of pork, with a suggestion of char on the outside, had been judiciously dosed with a subtly spiced sauce making this so tasty I’m sure it that a single bite would make even Ayatollah Khamenei weep with shame for having ordered people to avoid the noble hog all his life. The sandwich moved me beyond grins and chortles to grunts and groans of manifest carnality. Definitely an experience of visceral delights but also had much to engage my more refined sensibilities.

Last, but far from least, was the grilled beef. Before it was grilled the beef seemed to have been marinated in some quality chilli sauce. During cooking the sauce became caramelised and augmented the already fantastic flavours of the beef to quite mind-blowing levels. The beef itself had plenty of meat loveliness and was drooling-provokingly tender. Cat’s arse good, man!

All these three had some common features worth relating. The Vietnamese baguettes themselves were brilliant; crisp and crunchy on the outside with a super-fluffy inner. The bread had a great flavour, something all too lacking in most sarnies and, indeed, most bread in the UK. The shredded carrot had been lightly pickled so was pleasingly restrained and was, as were the cucumber fingers and coriander leaves, not dripping with water that less perfectionist creators would have not purged from the vegetables.

Indeed, this dryness was a perceptible and definitely gratifying property of the banh mi in general. With small bits of tender meat, pate, sauce and vegetables inside the baguettes it could be quite easy for them to become moist and limp. I detest water-soaked bread almost as I much as I am disgusted by anointing the stuff with a tight-fisted amount of low-calorie ‘spread’ as an odious attempt to hide the fact that you are too devoid of passion and interest to use something as nice as decent butter. Whilst they did not require massive Saigon beer consumption in order to wash them down, these banh mi were quite dry and we both remarked on what a super squirrel character this was. The balance in all the sandwiches was perfectly judged to retain palatable tenderness without becoming repulsively wet.

These banh mi hit all the pleasure points one wants stimulating. There was the raw carbohydrate rush from the easy-to-metabolise bread whilst the combinations of flavours from that and the fillings stimulated both basic biological urges and sophisticated critical faculties. Quite, quite brilliant and they cost £3.80 each. Good, eh?

Contact details:
Banh Mi Bay, 4-6 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8PN

Now, as promised, some abuse! As soon as I approached the CAMRA-recommended pub The Black Prince in Woodstock the twisted bunch of pleasure-hating deviants who run the place went out of their way to make some things clear. The main entrance of the pub was locked with no sign of how to access the interior, suggesting the business of attracting customers was just either beneath or beyond the ability of the owners. Once I went the longest possible route they could have made the entrance from the main road there was a poorly-signposted, generally-concealed, head-bruisingly low door next to the kitchen windows and extractor-fan vents. The emetic range of rancid grease aromas these belched out, foretold eating there would result in feeling more unwell than when I spent two weeks projectile vomiting after some dodgy oysters and also that the collection of slack-jawed food warming staff waving huge knives at each other probably wanted to push me to suicide if I wasn’t poisoned by their grease toxins.

Gaining entrance in was beyond this is horror. The pub’s interior was decorated like a medieval torture chamber and when looking at the appalling beers and stomach churning array of twisted weirdness they served in place of food my incomprehension at why I had not yet run away screaming was beyond my understanding. When I heard myself ordering a sandwich I realised some unconscious part of my mind wanted to punish me for a long-passed crime and was going to do so in a terrifyingly cruel and unusual manner. I managed not to sob uncontrollably whilst waiting in the grim chamber convinced I could hear the screams from diners of previous generations echoing with the lobotomised laughter of sadistic food staff. I was promised a roast beef and melted stilton sandwich. There must have been some problem with the grill they usually employed to melt the cheese as its appearance, consistency and taste suggested one hadn’t been near one; rather it seemed like the cheese had been ingested by a member of staff who then regurgitated onto the bread. The beef was so dry and hard Australian mining firms would be confident of a pretty penny selling it to the Chinese to run their power-stations. The bread was three-dimensional, had a small amount of mass and in every other imaginable way was utterly devoid of character. I left and ran as fast as possible to the most distant bus-stop in the village.

Related posts:

• Riding that cool banh mi wave
• Viet Baguette: most of the ingredients, none of the flavour
• Mundane banh mi at Cafe Bay

This was published on Elitistreview

I want to warn you about an unutterably odious food travesty I have been unfortunate enough to experience. The Nduja sold by the company Unearthed is a phenomenally wretched, deplorable and generally half-arsed facsimile of the real product. Indeed, so repulsive is it that I fear it will not only menace but actually exterminate any possibility of the comestible acquiring the enthusiastic reputation it undoubtedly deserves.

Long-time readers will recall the glowing report of my first experience with Nduja; for those who don’t it is a spreadable Calabrian salami made from pig’s cheeks, lard and belly with 25-30% flakes of local chilli. All of these constituents are important and make it a characterful, if not unique, food to sample. Consequently, when Editor Daniel and I saw Unearthed’s offering on the shelves of Waitrose we thought ourselves in for a quality meal. Our hopes were categorically annihilated.

We thought we would be prepare it with pasta, the simple yet gratifying dish I expounded upon in the first article, and so scored some spiffy pasta from the supermarket as well. A few days later we were boiling this up (remember the instruction about salt in the pasta water, terribly important) and opened our two packets of Nduja – the horror. It looked like a nondescript paste of tedious redness perhaps containing meat that had been pulverised and homogenised to vapid uniformity – no morsels of pig fat or flakes of chilli could be discerned. When it came to mixing it with the pasta it was confirmed that it was just pulped slop rather than something of compelling texture. Furthermore, as we mixed the lack of lard was evident as no fatty goodness melted to coat the pasta. Portents for a quality dinner were beyond ominous.

Sheer hunger dictated we continue on to eating our dinner; alas after a few distressing mouthfuls we gave up and consigned Unearthed’s flagitious offering to the land-fill bin. This pretence at Nduja had only the lacklustre flavour of chilli powder, not the heroic personality of powerful chilli flakes. Its meatiness was vague and insipid, certainly not suffused with the savour of interesting cuts of pig’s face and fat. This was inedibly repellent, we were truly dejected having sampled it. Such woeful dross should be avoided and I cannot suggest strongly enough that you boycott this contemptible counterfeit of a great and noble food.

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• Nduja with pasta? Yes, I do
• There is a new star in the sausage firmament
• Brunch

This was published on Elitistreview

Dear reader, you may recall ‘Non-Stinky’ Jeff’s glowing review of Sunday lunch at the Dial Arch pub in Woolwich. Having been there for lunch today I can only imagine he was talking about a different Dial Arch pub. This is because the vile filth masquerading as food they had the temerity to serve us could only be described positively if it were being force-fed to someone you utterly despise. It was so stunningly bad I was almost impressed by their ability to turn ingredients into egregious concoctions of horrifically repulsive foulness.

I am fully aware that roasting meat to be served over an extended period of time is a difficult thing to manage. Some restaurants manage it admirably, but it seems that the Dial Arch’s strategy is to place the meat under the rocket exhausts of the Space Shuttle until all character apart from that of leather has been incinerated out of it. Take the beef I ordered (left). I was served two slices of ludicrously overdone meat which had more in common with the material scuba-divers’ flippers are made from rather than tasty bits of animal. They were so tough chewing them was a strain. Their maltreatment in the kitchen also left them disgustingly dried out and lacking any discernible flavour. I couldn’t finish them.

Daniel’s lamb was of a similarly cooked to oblivion so there was not the slightest hint of pink to be found. He also reported that the texture was somewhere between Spontex wipes and chamois leather and so scored highly on the ‘repugnant’ scale. How depressing to treat meat with so little care and attention; those animals that gave their all so that we might have a decent lunch had their efforts thrown away thanks to the Dial Arches’ loathsome kitchen activities.

All of these tear-jerkingly abominable bits of what was once meat were soaked in a frankly distressing mud-brown gravy which had the gelatinous texture of snot but was nowhere near as tasty. If I ever take up smoking to such an extent that my phlegm goes brown I’d venture I could make a few quid selling brown mucus to the Dial Arch to stretch their gravy. It truly was a loathsome fluid of detestably powerful emetic value.

Then came the horrors of what were their roast potatoes (right). I’m sure a boozer cannot afford to cook all of their roast potatoes in goose fat, but with these any form of cooking would be an improvement. They were so under-done that not only had they failed to colour but also the soft, pliable outside was astronomical units removed from the crunchy crust that makes the roast potato experience a delight. No fluffy inner to them either, they were dense and heavy all the way through. Simply barely-cooked potatoes, it seemed, rather than anything one might extract pleasure from eating.

I suppose I rarely get served such foulness these days, but I didn’t welcome the experience. Indeed, I am staggered that someone can cook and sell meals so actively nasty with not the slightest hint of embarrassment or shame. Could it be that the Dial Arches’ kitchen is used as the venue for Woolwich’s coprophiliacs’s Sunday afternoon get-together? This food was undoubtedly shit.

Contact details: The Dial Arch, Major Draper Street, Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, SE18 6GH. Telephone 020 3130 0700.

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• Sunday lunch at the Dial Arch pub
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This was published on Elitistreview

Now that the really quite good Turkish restaurant Tike has bitten the dust I’ve been eager to find a replacement. I had heard good things about Haz Premier Place so thought it worth a try. Alas the food turned out to be anodyne industrial slop of the most mind-warpingly lacklustre variety. If it were not for the excellent company, in the form of reader Dan Richardson, I would have been reduced to stabbing my eyes with a fork just so that food-induced sensory deprivation did not drive me even more insane. Let me be clear on this point, the food wasn’t bad but rather stunningly soporific, banal and vapid. Since being tedious is more offensive than being offensive by the end of the meal I had come to execrate and loathe those responsible for this woeful display of staggering dullness.

When I walked in I was encouraged by the serious looking fellows sweating over the charcoal grill – a charcoal grill can make tasty food. I noticed that most of the tables were arranged to accommodate huge parties but I failed to draw the conclusion that this could well result in the food being churned out institutional-style to cater for large numbers of undiscerning diners, with no love or care being shown to any dish. If I’d paid enough attention to this I’d have legged it immediately.

I sat down and perused the menu and as I read I became charged with a sense of despondency. Turkish food is, or rather can be, vibrant and exciting yet this menu had nothing on it which sounded even remotely engaging, it was simply a bland list of food. Dan turned up at this point and told me he’d never tried serious Turkish food before; I was mortified that I had bought him to such a drab, soulless venue for his first taste of what was clearly going to be a pale shadow of the fine food of that country.

By this early point in the proceedings I had decided the only way of getting any interest out of the meal was to get outrageously drunk and so was downing the beers as quickly as I could manage. Sadly I am not a great beer drinker, I find the volume of the stuff is just too great to drink impressively vast quantities very quickly. Consequently, I was not drunk enough to misbehave and have fun, instead I had to face the meal largely un-medicated. First of all we shared some meze (little plates of starters):

They don’t look bad do they? But then again, they also don’t look even remotely interesting. I ploughed through the dried out falafel, insipid houmous and lifeless salad affairs with grim determination, hoping at the very least that there might be something actively vile that I could make a scene about and so be able to storm out of the restaurant in a fury, but it was all so ponderously pedestrian.

When plodding through my turgid main course I felt torn between sinking to the floor in tears or going to the grill and slapping the cooks, just so they had an experience with more character than the wearisome, woeful food they made. I recall from my time at Oxford that the kofte kebabs from Ahmed’s ‘bab van which parked outside University college at night were stratospherically more interesting than this. Moreover, the food poisoning that regularly followed dinner at Ahmed’s was probably more enjoyable than this neutral, tedious attempt at food – at least you know you are alive and having an experience when your guts are tying themselves in knots.

Then, by way of light relief, there was Dan’s main course. We are told the first bite is with the eye so those of us puerile enough to find bodily functions hilarious will no doubt be sniggering when looking at this which, lets face it, looks like a pool of congealed vomit. Dan manfully struggled through it in one of the most profound displays of politeness I have ever seen.

There is no one on Earth who deserves to eat such pant-wettingly prosaic food. I feel personally offended that Haz Premier Place not only had the gall to place such tiresome food in front of me but then had the bare-faced cheek to demand some of my extremely limited funds for doing so. I really did not think it was possible for Turkish food to be so stunningly lumbering, so I suppose Haz deserve some kudos for opening my eyes to new horizons of boredom. That seems a poor target to be aiming for, so bad show Haz. All that remains for me to do say about this meal of amazing tedium is that I am terribly sorry, Dan, I really did not have any idea it could be so eye-wateringly uninteresting.

Contact details: Haz Premier Place, 9 Cutler Street, E1 7DJ Telephone: 020 7929 7923.

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• Tike max – high quality Turkish action
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This was published on Elitistreview

My sister sent me three novelty types from Australian jerky. It seemed only reasonable to compare and contrast them all together in one session. The pictures show each packet with a few pieces of jerky on top. These are all described as ‘the great Australian taste’; just how great it is we shall see…

Kangaroo jerky

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When opening this the slight aroma of rotting cardboard was released, which did not inspire confidence. This aroma was also coming from each piece of jerky; this did not make me want to put any in my mouth. But I did, and by arse did I wish I had not. It had the texture of wax-soaked cardboard and the flavour was much the same but with a strong character of decay. Chewing it was hard enough as it kept releasing more of the filthy flavour and as I was in company I didn’t feel I could spit it out. By arse, I swallowed something this grim; I felt sullied.

Emu jerky

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This smelled even worse, not just rotting cardboard but also a quite pronounced decomposing meat character. This went beyond ‘well hung’ in terms of its off flavours to reach the awful heights of ‘horribly decayed’. With my stomach still churning from the filth kangaroo jerky putting a piece of this malodorous vileness in my mouth would be a challengingly nauseating experience. By freaking arse, the taste of this thrashed the kangaroo offering in terms of ghastly favours of total horrifying severity. My to my chagrin it was quite strongly flavoured; more than a tad irksome as the mouldy meat flavour was making my stomach churn with every second I had this terribleness in my mouth. I closed my eyes, pinched my nose, thought of England and swallowed

Crocodile jerky

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There is no nice way of putting this, but it looked and smelled like congealed vomit. Congealed vomit that has gone more than a little rancid. I really didn’t want to taste this, not only because I didn’t want to hurl but also because I thought I lacked the necessary skills in derogatory language to accurately slag it off. However, I thought if I described it I may be able to prevent someone else from making the mistake of putting some in their mouth so I broke of a tiny piece and began chewing. By all that is repulsive and abhorrent the rotten taste of sick this possessed challenged the imagination with its revolting character. I’ve eaten some really horrible food in my time, that visit to the Quick burger joint is a good example, or anything from the Woolwich loony bin, but for as long as I have my faculties I shall avoid crocodile jerky like a dose of particularly colourful dysentery.

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• Wine with turkey
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• Nduja with pasta? Yes, I do

This was published on Elitistreview