Afters Dessert Parlour, South Croydon

delicious ice cream - so the pot says

Afters has been in production for quite some time. This used to be Cypriani’s Greek Restaurant before Cypriani’s upped sticks and shacked up with Aqua up the road. They formed some kind of bizarre modern european/souvlaki fusion menu and ramped up the prices to put me off what as otherwise a perfectly reliable local restaurant.

I was really excited. I love ice cream parlours. George and Davis is one of my favourite place to go before during or after a night out in Oxford, I have been known on occasion to even be their first customer, popping in after an extended post-club walk home. G&D’s make their own ice creams on site, serve them with great brownies, they even toast a good bagel. Fresian cow prints, quizzes, suggestion box -very cool.

Afters on the other hand has bright pink banquet seating, big mirrors and big televisions. The televisions run videos of the pictures on the menu.  At the back of the room there is a glass cabinet containing garishly coloured ice creams and an assortment of cakes. Even though everything is on display we are encouraged to sit down. We get table service, posh.

Afters Dessert Parlour - Chocolate Fudge Cake

Afters is from the Iceland school of local organic sourcing and the Waitrose school of pricing. Afters sells frozen things for as much profit as possible. The menu is half 90′s bowling alley/half 1980′s french campsite – thoroughly depressing.

Afters Dessert Parlour - Waffle with chocolate sauce

I ordered a waffle with chocolate sauce in the hope that it wouldn’t arrive with a blue raspberry sauce or a fucking sparkler in the top. The former blonde had a chocolate fudge cake with a free sauce if you paid an extra 50p. Both were edible in the same way that frankfurters, spam and polystyrene are edible. It will all go down if you hold your nose and chew hard enough.

As this is an ice cream parlour I felt it unfair to review without trying something that was still frozen. Mango Sorbet was perfectly OK, with good texture and a nice Mango flavour.

The place was quite busy – families and over excited teenagers mainly – the music was loud, and everyone else seemed to be enjoying themselves. If there is a market for this sort of thing in 2011, if this is what the people of Croydon want, if this is going to survive longer than 6 months, if this IS THE STATE OF FOOD IN CROYDON then I am glad to buggery and back that I am moving elsewhere.

The only tasty thing in Afters was our waitress, even the former blonde agrees.

The nitty-gritty:

We had a waffle a piece of ‘cake’ and a ball of sorbet. £7.95. Other desserts range from £8 for a banana split to £30 for a 28 scoops of glacial sugar vomit. Service isn’t included, which is a shame, as it was one of the only things worth paying for.

Oh, and they don’t take card, which is about as dodgy as their cakes.

The Bank (Fuller’s Pub), Clapham Junction – Northcote road

Tesco make really bad sandwiches. The Bank made a really good one.

I had very low expectations for The Bank because:

1.  It’s menu was all over the place
2. It looked like a school hall
3. Bar snacks were uniformly a ball busting £4.95

The Bank surpassed expectations because:

1. The food was actually very good
2. The clientelle had some very amusing outfits
3. Our waitress was both hot and French

It was sandwiches all round. The ladies opted for fish fingers, served in thick grainy bread. The boys had burgers with proper meat and decent buns and an afterthought of onion relish (delivered late, in masterchef style, by the chef to the table).

I had a heritage tomato open sandwich - it was very fine. The tomatoes were excellent, a picture of british summer. They were served on a thick slab of not quite toast with some too-neatly sliced mozzarella and a drizzle of marjoram. It needed more  olive oil, otherwise faultless. A dollop of slaw was equally stellar, fresh, crunchy, light, zippy, no mayonnaise required. Some parsnip crisps were pointless.

Chips (£3) were fat and piled high but bought in. Nothing special.

Our waitress removed our plates before everyone had finished, which is fine in America but not in Clapham.

The menu really does jump around: From India to China to France. There is a good selection of beers.

Grab seat outside on Northcote road, soak up the sun, put up with the service - this is  not a bad spot for lunch.

The nitty gritty:

Distance from croydon: 12 minutes from EC

It was about £12 a head for a sandwich a drink and a fat pile of chips.

Tesco Strawberry and clotted cream sandwich: available nationwide

What is this? This is wrong.
Is this lunch? Or is this pudding?

Why have Tesco done this?

I need to try this.

Oh, I really wish I hadn’t.

FYI Tesco bread is not a good substitute for a scone, just like a plate is not a good substitute for a mug for my tea.

There is less than a single whole strawberry in the whole sloppy sandwich. The clotted cream is corrupted with icing sugar. The whole thing stinks of bad strawberry jam. Like the worse half of an unbuttered cheese and tomato sandwich the bread here is damp and soggy. A yeasty sponge unfit for cleaning dishes.

Tesco should give up. They are going to end up like Jane Norman or Habitat or HMV if they carry on like this.

Strawberries are for puddings and cakes – leave them there.

How would Tesco like it if I put tuna in their rice pudding?

Perverts.

Asmara, Cold Harbour Lane – Brixton

A cubist impression of an Eritrean feast: Not by Piet Mondrian.

You probably haven’t realised that I have been neglecting the blog a bit lately, but I have. I have also started a new job, started to have a social life, and started to drink far too much. The consequent vicious cycle of memory loss, financial instability, and weight gain has much more to do with post 6pm activities than office hours, but it is the regularity of a ‘proper job’ that has initiated this worrying slide. Damn you, very exciting new career.

Because of this dinner on Saturday night is pretty difficult to remember with much clarity.  I can remember this: the whole evening revolved around ingesting different shades of brown in different states of solidity.

We hadn’t intended to go to an Eritrean restaurant. None of us knew where Eritrea was, worrying considering Ben has a geography degree, Hons (OXON) M.A. A helpful wooden map on the wall suggested Eritrea was somewhere near Ethiopia, and amazingly one of us did know something about Ethiopian cuisine.

You see, Ceri went to a funny school in Cornwall where they tought boys to do lady things like cooking, cleaning, and menstruating (probably). His teachers called it home economics, and Ceri had to rustle up an Ethiopian banquet for an NVQ or something equally acronymious.

“A pancake and a pile of runny brown mince” was how he described it. And he wasn’t far wrong, except at Asmara you get about four pancakes, very sour, cold and fermented, like big flat, floppy, freak-show crumpets that were told to fuck off by an aggressive little toaster. You also get lots of different kinds of runny brown mince, or runny brown lentils if you’re that way inclined.

Our order, decided on by the ‘point at happy people and let the waiter do the rest’ method was for a traditional feast with ceremonial coffee for dessert. The feast was served on big metal platters covered with injeera — the miserable crumpets from earlier have a name — and consisted of five different types of brown mince, some bits lumpier than others, but mincey all the same. Oh, and there was an egg in the middle. It was a whole spectrum of moderately spiced brown.

Sheffield is a shitting long way from Asmara (I mean the capital of Eritrea here, Sheffield is not THAT far from Brixton) and consequently Eritreans didn’t know what cutlery was for a very long time, and it never really caught on. So you eat with your hands using the injeera as a claw. It is very satisfying, and very filling, it also gets very messy if you are as dim as us and start eating your mince from the inside out. Thankfully Asmara (the restaurant this time) are used to stupid people and kindly give you some spare pancakes to scoop up the left-over bready slop.

I must point out at this point that quite a lot of the brown stuff was actually quite tasty. Some tender little lamb cubes undoubtedly the highlight. Everything was very edible.

A coffee ceremony followed. This was slightly darker brown and slightly more liquid than the rest of the meal, but still brown. I thought the coffee tasted like cardamom, but the others thought cinnamon. Maybe a bit of both. We had been in Asmara nearly 90minutes, I just wanted something that wasn’t brown.

Is popcorn brown? We got some of that too.

I moved on to the Bavarian Beer House near Old Street where they also serve lots of brown food and even more brown fizzy liquid in very large glasses. I didn’t eat anything, I just drank plenty. The waitresses were very friendly but the bastard management keep their tips if you pay by card. Something really rather shitty, especially when most of your customers pay when trolleyed, and haven’t got a clue what the poor girls are trying to explain.

The nitty-gritty:

Distance from Croydon: About 3,290miles less far than going to the actual Asmara, in Eritrea.

Asmara is kind of fun, but the service is let down by an inability to communicate anything. Something the lovely hollow-legs also experienced on her visit way back. I would go again and order differently, maybe, but probably not. For Pictures of what we ate visit Happy Valley Cook.

We paid £20 a head with 2 beers each.

Chinese style pork buns recipe

Once upon a time before facebook, and America, and school dinners, there was a boy called Jamie who rode a moped and spoke like a twat. Jamie was a nice boy and he had lots of nice, funny, good looking friends who enjoyed coming round to dinner in his funky mezzanined flat. Before Jamie there was Delia, Brian Turner, Rick Stein, Anthony Worral-Thompson, and Gary Fucking Rhodes. Of course MarcoPierre White popped up occasionally, usually to throw a risotto about or de-bone an ortolan, as entertaining as that was, it was no use to me.

Jamie couldn’t just cook, he made food fun. He wasn’t old (Delia) or smug (Gary) or northern (Turner)  or small, hairy and disgusting (AWT). He was from Essex and he liked brit-pop and he tossed off with olive oil.

Then he met Jules and had some kids and gave them some shit aspirational middle class names that the Daily Mail love. He got all sentimental and decided to save the world and turned into a MASSIVE WET DONKEY.

In between being a hero and being the laughing stock of America Jamie wrote some of the most exciting cookbooks of the naughties. He made me want to eat tomatoes when I hated tomatoes.He hit drums and sang about goat curry- I wanted to bang drums and sing about goat curry too – and I LOVED HIM and I am not ashamed.

(I realise now that I have missed out huge chunks of Jamie’s work: Setting up fifteen and all that other stuff – but I hate overly long blog posts and I also hate sounding like I lick JO’s rim. It isn’t good for my virtual street cred.)

Anyway,  I digress.

Not being able to bear visiting Mr Peking Tasty at the MSG capital of Croydon, but in desperate need of a saturday night Chinese fix, I turned to the oracle on Chinese cookery, Mr Jamie Oliver. Chinese style pork buns, Chinese style chicken in cabbage leaves, and some steamed aubergine thing, all magicked up inside the bamboo steamer, all very easy.

Here is the recipe

Steamed Pork Buns Chinese style
For the Filling:
Olive oil
2x 200g/7oz Pork chops
Salt and pepper
1 tbsp five spice
3 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
1 inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and sliced
2 dried chillies, crumbled
1 wineglass of fresh orange juice
6tbsp hoi-sin sauce
1 tbsp sesame oil
1tbsp sweet chilli sauce
one handful fresh lime leaves (these are to line the steamer so you can sub in some greaseproof paper if you want. The lime leaves smell good though.)

For the buns:
1x 7g individual sachet of dried yeast
200ml/7oz tepid water
250g/9oz plain flour
100g/ 3&1/2 oz cornflour
1tsp salt
50g/ 1&3/4 oz butter

to serve – soy sauce and sweet chilli sauce

For the filling:
Dress the chops up with some salt and pepper and five spice and flap ‘em about a bit so they’re nice and covered. Fry in the olive oil, not moving them around too much just flip after 5 minutes and heat until they look brown and cooked through. Add the chopped up garlic, ginger and chilli, and continue to fry for a minute, tossing the  spices around  bit so the kitchen starts smelling like a foreign country. Add the orange juice, squeeze it through your fingers and catch the pips like a man, and let it bubble away until it has reduced by half. Empty into a bowl and let it cool. When cooled remove one pork chop and put all the other crap into a food processor and blitz it up. Chop the other chop into bits as rough as you like, I like it rough like Whitney Dean, I imagine you’ll like it more refined. Lob everything into a bowl with the hoi-sin, sesame oil and chili sauce. Stir it all about.

For the buns:
Put the yeast in a bowl with half the water. In another bowl mix your flour and salt and rub in the butter (make sure it’s room temperature when it goes in, it makes life easier). When the yeast looks a bit like a scummy section of the thames pour in the rest of the water, add this to the flour and butter and use your hands to mix the lot into a soft dough – if it is far too dry add a teeny drop of water and try again. Cover your bowl with cling film and leave it in a warm place until it doubles in size.

When its gone massive you want to take your dough and rip off bits the size of a racket-ball. If you don’t know how big a racket-ball is then think of a big lime, or a small lemon – that size. squash the ball down into a little squashy cup shape, like a red blood cell from GCSE Biology. Slap a teaspoon of your pork mix in the middle and fold the edges back up to make it look like a racket-ball again. Do this with the rest of the dough. You should have about 12 buns and probably a hit load of pork mix left over, it’s ok you can eat this with a teaspoon later, or for breakfast tomorrow.

Now you hav made your balls you need to cook them. Put your lime leaves across the bottom of your steamer then sit your balls on top, leaving space between the buns to allow them to expand – they almost double in size. Whack the steamer over boiling water and in 10minutes they are done.

Serve them in the bamboo steamer with some soy or some sweet chilli – they look good, they taste good, they are guaranteed to make girls fancy you.

Recipe borrowed from Jamie’s Kitchen. Other great dishes from the book are shown below.

Chinese chicken parcels and steamed aubergine (with added Chinese leaf heart)

The Mall Tavern, Notting Hill

The Mall Tavern is a pub in Notting Hill. It is very close to the bus stop for the Oxford Tube, which is handy when most of the table live that way. It’s not that close to Croydon though, and my 2 hour journey home wasn’t particularly fun. I can’t really blame The Mall Tavern for that though, I’ll have to rant at Southern Rail.

The chef is Jesse Dunford Wood, he has worked at some pretty fancy places like the 2* Gidleigh Park in Devon with Michael Caines. Jesse has also been on telly on MasterChef’s poorer cousin, Celebrity MasterChef. Probably a worthwhile gig if he got to meet Lisa Faulkner. You can watch him on you-tube making the Mall Tavern’s signature chicken kiev.

We arrived early and had a drink in the pub half of the room; ale is served in jugs, which is currently very trendy/wanky (delete as appropriate depending on which side of the receptacle fence you sit on).

We ordered a couple of bar snacks as we passed around the solitary menu that had been left on our table. Pork crackling was crisp and not too salty, which can often be the case. These devilishly moreish twigs of crispy skin were further improved by a little stir in a smooth bramley apple sauce. A bar snack of the highest order.

Two loaves of soda bread arrived on a wooden board with a quenelle of soft butter, hoorah for not serving it out of the fridge (cold butter criminals take note).  The bread is made on site daily and arrived warm, dense and malty on a wooden board. The father did the honours of cutting and breaking the loaf in four, very ceremonial, very sociable, very 2011 Great British Menu.

We shared four of the other ‘Great British bar snacks’ as starters. Five slices of ‘PGT Village’ smoked salmon, smoked on the roof of the Mall Tavern we are told, came with another loaf of soda bread. A small coracle of lemon floated proudly on the fishy waves.  The salmon was excellent, the flavour of the fish prominent despite the relatively strong smoke.

Brawn with radishes (£5) was also served atop a board. I found the mustard and caper dressing a little too acidic and preferred to eat the pig face with just a bit of radish.

Both the chicken liver pate with pickled red onions and parsley and mushroom and chestnut pate were both served with a generous pile of soda bread crisps, which worked well with the earthy, chunky mushroom and chestnut but rather overwhelmed the excellent chicken liver pate. Both were fine examples of their kind. All the dishes in the ‘Great British bar snacks’ section were perhaps a little large for one person to eat as a starter, I would recommend ordering a few and sharing them to kick off a meal, or with the bread a hearty lunch.

The main course of Cow Pie (£13) has been described as the best value plate in Britain, which is probably fair. It could feed a family of four, for a week.  A thick chimney of bone, like a gastronomic Didcot power station, spewed parsley stuffing and endless rich bone marrow over the top of a golden pastry crust. The filling was rich and meaty; first mushrooms and onions, then large chunks of beef. It was a beautiful hot summer’s day and arguably the wrong occasion to be attacking a pie so dense and comforting.

The silver vixen enjoyed a much more summery dish of mackerel and gooseberry, which was fresh, vibrant and not at all oily, while the sister chomped through more smoked salmon, this time in a fishcake. She said it was good; I paid little attention – far too deep in Cow Pie.

We shared The Arctic Roll selection to finish, as a bit of fun more than anything. A revamped take on the 80’s classic we were to select three different flavours: Muscavado was good, Gooseberry fool was pleasant but underwhelming, strawberry and rose was plain wrong – the rose dominating any strawberry flavour for a mouthful of Lush bath-bomb.  The ice cream middles were a little hard and crumbly and the sponge too reminiscent of wet cardboard. Some homemade Rolos’s redeemed things, dirty little nuggets of soft caramel in a crisp chocolate shell with a bitter cocoa powder covering. The bitterness, the crunch and then the oozy caramel – almost as good as the heaven sent and much underappreciated After Eight Munchies.

The service is attentive and the staff have a sense of humour (you’d have to if you are going to wear box fresh basketball shoes to work), we were treated like kings – or like a customer who has been seen taking photos of the food – so they’re savvy too!  The ever reliable Andy Hayler recently gave the Mall Tavern a great review, and this was a key reason why I decided to visit – the power of the blogger in action.

A happy family then, not least when the bill arrived, The Mall Tavern is, considering both quality and location, exceptionally well priced. A bargain even, making a very happy Yorkshire man of my Dad.

The nitty-gritty:

Distance from Croydon: Not too difficult if the transport system is working as it should be, and pretty shitting awkward if it is not, as I found out. Closest station is Notting Hill Gate.

It will cost you different amounts depending on how much you eat and drink.  Starters at around £5, mains at about £13, wine list starts at £16. Expect to pay a fiver for a pint of cold fizzy piss lager, ale is about £3.50.

da Polpo, Maiden Lane – Covent Garden

Bacaro number three from the Norman and Beatty juggernaught follows right behind Polpo and Polpetto in serving food you really want to eat on small plates at reasonable prices. Yet again urban brick-chic wins the day, all cagey lights and wooden chairs, A big skylight floods the room in a warm glow and the sun reflects off a shiny red meat slicer on the bar.

A classic shirley temple came complete with glacee cherry, top marks. Wine is served in caraffes and drunk from thimbles.

The menu is laid out the same as at Polpo/Polpetto/Spuntino on a paper place mat and here the food is divided into little things, pizza things, sidey things, bally things, platey things and then sweet things. The bally things and the pizza things are the more exciting and unique things, there is some crossover of  dishes from the other places. 

Ciccheti - potato and parmesan, fishy and fennel

We had a couple of the small things each and at £2ish each a bite they are the most extravagant thing on the menu, and if you are a penny pincher you’d be best avoiding them. A potato and parmesan croccheta was well seasoned and just slightly cheesy, nice but unremarkable. A grilled hunk of fennel and anchovy worked very well, the char bringing out a sweetness in the fennel that complimented the salty anchovy.

Pizzete Bianco

A pizetta bianco was crisp and light and boldly seasoned. Strong molten cheese  held thyme and garlic and onion in place. An intensely moreish six inches.

Asparagus, egg and parmesan

Asparagus with egg and parmesan was a generous portion of fluffy egg on a pile of perfectly roasted spears, finished with plenty of cheese. It could have done with a little more salt and a few twists of pepper. A solid, simple and effective plate of food that dissappeared fast.

Prawns with chilli and garlic (and a squeeze of lemon)

Prawns with chilli and garlic were served on a bed of rocket slowly wilting in the flavoured oil.  It was once again perfectly good food, the prawns heads kindly left in the bowl for those among us who appreciate the flavour of shrimp brain.

Classic meatballs

Classic meatballs were just classic but still better than any other meatball I have had recently. Big and round and meaty, a bit tight on the sauce, it’s really nice and I wanted more.

Not meat - chickpea, spinach and ricotta balls.

Amazingly the spinach, chick pea and risotto balls - ordered for the non meat eating blonde – were excellent. Well balanced, well seasoned and livened up with a gentle finish of lemon. These had more tomato sauce dolloped on top. I would have ordered more but by this time it was 8pm and I fancied getting home to Croydon before midnight.

Cheese, toast, and peas -meh

Deserts seem to be a bit of an afterthought, which is fine by me, the blonde had a vanilla gelato cone which was served in a cone in a glass. I had cheese, something goaty from Neal’s Yard. It was a little bit cold but the accompanying peas in pods were a fun little way to finish.

As mentioned earlier the whole thing took a little bit too long and dishes came a little bit too randomly. We ate on the last night of the soft opening so these little things will I am sure be easily ironed out over the next couple of days.

If you have been to either Polpo or Polpetto then the food at da Polpo will be neither surprising nor remarkable, it is just as good and delivers exactly what the menu suggests. Compared to the other offerings on Maiden Lane, Rules excepted, da Polpo really is the balls.

The nitty-gritty:

Distance from Croydon: 12 miles, a quick cycle really.

A decent feed a large glass of wine and a soft drink set us back £35 but this was a soft opening. Paying full prices you’d be looking at £30 a head. 

No bookings in the evening but you can reserve a spot for lunch.