Food

‘I hope you’re hungry,’ crows a fisherman, setting down a plate piled high with freshly shucked oysters. They say you should face your worst fears head on. Well, here I am addressing mine – but I never thought it would be done in quite so idyllic a spot. I’m in Mali Ston, a small, picturesque town on Croatia’s Pelješac peninsula, about an hour’s drive from Dubrovnik. It’s 9.30 a.m. and many shops are still shuttered, but already Game of Thrones fans are out in force, taking selfies along the hillside’s 14th-century network of towers and fortresses. (The three-and-a-half-mile walls doubled as King’s Landing and the Eyrie in the fantasy drama.)

Once the preserve of only the fanciest of fancy restaurants, the tasting menu has come into its own post-pandemic. Set menus make economic sense for cost-cutting restaurateurs and their harried staff, of course – but customers benefit too, with no nasty surprises or bust-ups when the bill arrives. And for those of us who suffer from perennial food envy, tasting menus remove the gut-wrenching anxiety of having to choose between the ‘succulent hand-glazed cod’ and the ‘succulently foraged kobe beef’ – both it is. But pairing multiple dishes with distinctive wines and then placing them in some kind of coherent order takes real skill – so who does it best? For

Cakeism is offering the voters everything they desire, knowing you will never give it to them because you live in a haunted mirror in which the only thing that matters is your survival. This duplicity is important to understand, because the road from Cicero to Caesar is so short it may lack potholes. Cake is less urgent, but at least cake won’t lie to you. And here is Richoux, still filled with cake, if you can afford it. It is, for many people, marvellous and theoretical cake. Richoux was a cake shop on Piccadilly – a street I can never eat in without thinking of Alexander Litvinenko sitting, doomed, in

‘Bang! Bang! …Thud.’ It’s Friday 12 August, better known to tweedy types as the Glorious Twelfth, and the inaugural grouse on the West Allenheads estate in Northumberland has met its maker. The 26°c temperature yields a slow morning, with the moorland birds reluctant to come out of the shade and the beaters and guns mopping their brows, yearning for elevenses. After the first drive, the bagged game is slung in the back of a Defender and divvied up in the gun room. And now the real challenge begins. Imagine a sort of Beaujolais Run, except instead of getting Gamay wine from France to Fleet Street, our mission is to dispatch

In 2014, Nuno Mendes, a chef from Lisbon by way of Wolfgang Puck’s kitchens and his own Viajante in Bethnal Green, opened a restaurant at the Chiltern Firehouse hotel. This is a redbrick Edwardian castle in Marylebone, which used to be a fire station, but no longer is. This restaurant was skilful: both blessed and cursed. I thought it was Gatsby’s house, inhabited by people looking for something they would never find because it does not exist: self-acceptance through the incitement of jealousy, which is the emotional purpose of being rich. People went for the empty pleasure of being seen at the Chiltern Firehouse because the prime minister David Cameron,

It took Paddington Bear to solve the age-old mystery of what the Queen keeps in her handbag. When Her Majesty pulled out a marmalade sandwich during the pair’s sketch at the Platinum Jubilee concert this summer, it did more than just tickle the audience. It also served to remind us of our national love affair with marmalade. Long before Paddington developed a taste for it, the preserve had been a stalwart of British popular culture, from Jane Austen (where Lady Middleton applies marmalade as balm for her daughter’s scratch) to Evelyn Waugh (where, in Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder eats ‘scrambled eggs and bitter marmalade with the zest which in youth

Dipping my toes in the Irish Sea on a family holiday last week, I encountered something slimy, muddy-brown and decidedly squelchy. I managed to flick it off my foot with minimal squealing and thought no more of it. But, looking back, perhaps I missed a lucrative opportunity – or a tasty treat for the kids’ dinner. For my beach find was in fact Irish moss, also known as ‘sea moss’ or ‘carrageen moss’ – the latest cult ingredient among experimental foodies, health-conscious celebrities and social media aficionados. Devotees claim the delicacy – reddish algae which grows abundantly on rocks off the coast of Britain, Ireland and North America – is

I moved down to Sussex over 25 years ago from South London. My family viewed living by the sea as a dream goal. I still remember the day when we packed up and cavalcaded down to Worthing, a charming seaside town in West Sussex. After the amazing experience of winning MasterChef, we opened our first restaurant Pitch in 2019 serving beautiful British inspired food from both the sea and the land. There has been a significant boom of food and café culture all around Sussex, and many areas such as Brighton and Worthing have flourished into destinations for those in search of culinary delights. Our second restaurant Bayside Social has capitalised on

Sometimes this column has a guest reviewer: a dining companion. It was Liz Truss in late summer 2011, for the now long closed Bistro du Vin in Dean Street: a Hotel du Vin without a hotel, and so bereft. It had a bookshelf on which all the books were painted neon, and they flew out in lumps when you tugged at them. I wonder if Liz wanted political PR advice from this column, but I doubt it, because I think you can’t fake integrity, and I get my political PR advice from watching The West Wing. Let Truss be Truss. But Truss is Truss. Or rather Truss is Trusses: she

What makes a kebab a kebab and why do we like eating things on sticks? That is the important question I have been mulling as we hit the steamy barbecue season. The debate was inspired not by kebabs, in fact, but by yakitori, the typically refined Japanese version of kebabs that essentially involve cooking every body part of a chicken on small skewers, and which also seems to be London’s most recent Japanese love affair following sushi, ramen, udon, and so on.  Yakitori though is really the extreme of food on stick eating. Take the menu of Junsei in Marylebone (excellent, by the way), which breaks the chicken down into

Good lord, it’s hot. I mean, really, really hot. Right now, the heat is so overwhelming as to feel like it is tangible, as if you could reach out and touch it. All we’re capable of talking about is the heat; any other polite conversation is too much for our fried brains. Normally, when our annual heatwave hits, I proffer some halfway house of a recipe: a dish that only needs the hob, not the oven, or is sufficiently refreshing or brightening that it justifies the added kitchen heat. But, this year, even that compromise seems unmanageable. At this stage, it would feel disingenuous, nay cruel, to offer up a

Nothing beats a spot of decluttering – throwing things out of your wardrobe that you don’t use or need to see what you have and make space for things you do need. I am useless at it when it comes to clothes and other clutter, but cookbooks are another matter. I review cookbooks; I probably had about 150 of them, some of which have been used for just one recipe. When it came to the point when they were falling off the shelves – and they’re hefty, being mostly hardback – I had to let some go. So, which ones justified the shelf space? Most of my cookbooks don’t get

Call it nominative determinism, but a lemon drizzle cake is perfect for disappointing, drizzly weather. It’s cheering: brightly flavoured, and packed with zest, but still comforting, filling your home with a warm citrus scent as it bakes. It’s also a more enjoyable food-based activity than picnics or barbecues when winds are high. A lemon drizzle cake is really just a pound cake – equal quantities of butter, sugar, eggs and flour – that’s then spritzed up with zest and juice. But it’s a pretty glorious one, managing to be both zingy and sweet, light and sticky. The key to a superlative lemon drizzle is packing in as much citrus as