Pinchos are traditionally seen in the north of the country, in particular the Basque region, and consist of a thin slice of bread on top of which can sit anything from a simple slice of jamon to, at the better places, some fantastically imaginative and delicious gourmet creations. The ones are Sagetxe are particularly good.

No wonder my fellow Madrilenos never seem to get too drunk, there is always a tasty snack close to hand. What a fantastic way to stay sober! If only we had something like this back in London. So many times at home, I would leave work for the pub and survive the whole evening on nothing more than a couple of bags of Walker’s crisps. Urgh.

Perhaps some creative landlord could come up with some British inspired pinchos, I am sure they would go down a bomb with tipsy punters.  They needn’t be overly fancy (although a mini yorkshire pudding, with a slice of rare roast beef and a dollop of homemade horseradish sat in the middle, would be perfect). Almost anything would be better than another bag of cheese’n’onion….

Anyway, three cheers to Sagaretxe. Keep up the good work!

Much more about Madrid in later posts, but first I want to say a quick goodbye to my old home of London. I came back from Monaco to spend a few days in the UK to say goodbye to friends. I made the most of my time there to indulge in my favourite London activity – the pubs!

First up was a rare treat. My buddy Luke, who is currently working at the houses of parliament, met me for lunch and took me for a pint in the “strangers bar”, which is a pub-like bar actually inside the parliament buildings.  It was great to sit and drink a beer where the likes of Winston Churchill had supped before me.  After a pint there I took a stroll around the area where I stumbled upon a great pub that I had never been to before. This is something that can happen all the time in London and is one of the things I love so much about the city. Anyway, The Speaker in Westminster is a pub very much of the old school.

As the beer posters on the wall state – “No music, no fruit machines, no television. Just good beer, food and a place for conversation”.  Says it all really, Heaven!

The following evening I had my “farewell to London” drinks with a bunch of friends at The Market Porter, a fantastic pub right on the doorstep of the foodie Borough Market. I love hanging out there, the place is a beer mecca – they usually have on around twelve different beers sourced from small, unusual craft breweries from all over the British Isles. On a Friday night it’s packed to the rafters and the fun spills out onto the street alongside the market. The crowd is a mixture of all ages and the atmosphere is a lot of fun.

And to top things off, right next door to the pub is the market stall of Mrs. Kings pork pies.

Pork pies have to be the ultimate pub snack, and there is no doubting that Mrs Kings’ pies are the ultimate pork pies. They are the perfect combination of rich, tasty pork, firm crunchy pastry and sweet jelly. Naturally, a recipe for pork pies can be found in Gordon Ramsay’s Great British Pub food, but I know that my own efforts wont come close to matching Mrs. King’s!

A happy night of pork pies, great beer and friends. London I will miss you!

I have just gone through the daunting task of moving out of my flat and into the lawyers. It was daunting in so much as that I hadn’t quite realised just how much crap I had accumulated over the years and it all had to be sorted, boxed and put into storage before I head off to Madrid.  Luckily, a couple of my family were able to come down for the weekend in a big rental van to help me out.

So, after a day of having Barry and Dave hump boxes for me, I wanted to take them out for a nice meal to say thank you.  I was looking for somewhere relaxed that served simple but decent man-food. Step forward The Bountiful Cow. The cow, which describes itself as a “public house devoted to beef” is a nice little boozer tucked down a backstreet in Holborn and is renowned for the quality of the meat that they serve – their burgers and steaks are just superb.

It has to be said that the cooking at the cow isn’t going to be troubling the inspectors from the Michelin guide any time soon, but you know what, good pub food doesn’t always have to. Here, the chips might be frozen, the green peppercorns sauce gloopy and not a patch on my own Gordon Ramsay’s Great British Pub Food version, but the meat is all of the highest quality, sourced from a good butcher and cooked perfectly. With a few pints of ale, it was the perfect reward after a hard days work.

If you are ever in London and need of a good, unfussy steak or burger, you could do a lot worse than giving the bountiful cow a try.

Looking for my latest recipe attempt? Check out the post: Black Country Beef Stew

The weather was fantastic, unbelievably warm and sunny for a London spring day. I received a text from the lawyer telling me that she was ahead of schedule and waiting for me in the garden with a cold Bloody Mary and a hangover (bad girl!). I’ve been to the Warrington once before, in its earlier pre-Ramsay guise, and I didn’t remember there being a garden, so the prospect of some outside beer-time came as a welcome surprise.

As it turned out, it wasn’t so much of a garden as a courtyard at the side of the pub, with a handful of wooden tables half shaded from the sun by some large, leafy trees. Still, all perfectly agreeable. After a quick hello to lawyer-chick, who was plonked outside on a prime sun drenched table, I went in to find myself a beer. The inside of the pub, it has to be said, was deserted. It’s quite a dark and moody interior, not necessarily in a bad way, but it certainly wasn’t somewhere you would want to be sat on such a fine, hot day as this (the outside benches were packed).

Bad news greeted me when I reached the beer engines. The choice of London Pride, Green King IPA and Adnams Broadside was uninspiring to say the least. This really is one of my pet hates, when a pub goes to so much trouble to present itself as foodie destination, where the provenance of the ingredients are given star billing, and the wine list has been painstakingly assembled, then why oh why do so many of these places pay so little attention to the beers that they serve!!??

While each of these choices are decent enough mainstream beers from some of the country’s largest real ale breweries, pubs like The Warrington should be doing their best to promote the legions of smaller brewers up and down the country that are producing beers that can blow the bigger boys away. And when I saw that the drinks menu described Foster’s Lager as being “Australian” and “lightly kilned malted barley gently brewed with a unique blend of hops to bring out the flavours” I knew that somebody, somewhere had had their brains removed. For god’s sake Gordon, Fosters is yellow, tasteless piss manufactured by the hectolitre in a huge factory somewhere just outside of Reading. If you must serve it, at least try not to make a virtue out of it!!!

Anyway, I went outside to beer-rant at the lawyer while we took a look at the bar menu and soaked up a few rays.

The bar menu is deliberately short, I guess to sufficiently differentiate between the experience of eating downstairs in the pub or upstairs in the more formal dining room. With a little while to go before our friends arrived, we decided to order a half pint of prawns to munch on while we waited. The prawns arrived promptly, shell on and served with a tangy mayonnaise that was laced with what I guessed was Dijon mustard.

The prawns were good and tasty, not too small and fiddly as they often are when served this way. We spent a happy half hour alternating between peeling, dunking, eating and drinking before our friends arrived and we all, somewhat reluctantly, left the sunshine and made our way upstairs to the pub’s restaurant area.

I was relieved to see that the upstairs was a much brighter and more open space, with huge sash windows that allowed in plenty of light. The large round tables and bright white tablecloths helped create a nice cheery atmosphere, distinct from the downstairs pub. The restaurant was surprisingly empty for a Saturday lunchtime (surely one of their busiest lunch servings?), with perhaps only a third of the chairs occupied. We were offered our choice of table and were quickly seated and provided with water and warm bread while we looked over the menu.

To start, I ordered the pan fried Dorset mackerel with potato salad, whilst the lawyer went for the soup of the day which was French onion ( I assured her it was a good hangover cure). The wine list was approachable with plenty of choice by the glass and most of the bottles coming in at under thirty quid – the cheapest starting at just £13.50, so top marks for that. We opted for a French rosé that was wholly fine for the price and was perfectly suited to the warm weather.

The mackerel dish was fine, without being outstanding. The balance of the two ingredients seemed somewhat at odds, with the tiny piece of mackerel being bullied from the plate by a huge mound of potato salad. Neither the fish nor the potatoes packed any great amount of flavour. Much better was the French onion soup. Served without the cheesy croutons you so often find floating on top, the soup arrived piping hot and was the perfect consistency – the slowly cooked, caramelised onions sitting in just the right amount of broth. The bowl was crammed with flavour, and I found myself fighting the lawyer for the last spoonful.

For main, I chose the roast pork belly with Bramley apple and onion puree, whilst we ordered sides for the table of green beans, chips and a simple green leaf and tomato salad. I had mixed feeling about the pork. It was obviously a decent piece of pig, the meat firm yet moist, slightly dark and packed with good porky flavours. However, it was let down by the crackling which was not even close to being crispy enough. It was difficult to cut through, very chewy and tended to cling defiantly to my teeth like a schoolboys’ penny sweet. The puree was fine, almost overly sugary from the stewed apples but it was definitely a good accompaniment to the belly meat. The sides were all faultless, especially the chips which soon disappeared.

Lawyer-chick opted for the whole Rye Bay plaice which was grilled and served with a lemon and parsley butter. There wasn’t really too much to complain or get excited about with this dish, it very much did what it said on the tin. The fish, which was a very decently sized portion, came perfectly cooked and slathered in a rich buttery sauce. Between the two of us we ate the lot!

By now we were well into the second bottle of wine and we didn’t need much encouragement from the waiter to plunge for dessert. We decided to share the Banoffee pie, which came to the table looking a treat with a caramel glazed half-banana perched proudly on top of perfectly piped whipped cream.

The taste was good, although not quite one of those magical banoffee moments I have had in the past (the pie at E&O in Notting Hill springs to mind).  I think I would have preferred a biscuit base to the chef’s blander pastry casing, but still, it was a happy enough ending to the meal.

So, what was the overall verdict? Well, I think on the downside that the restaurant and pub could have been busier. I like a boozer to have a nice buzzy atmosphere and frankly here it was pretty flat. The food should have zinged off the plate a bit more. At times the flavors seemed somewhat labored, despite what were obviously quality ingredients. I think the kitchen could have packed something more into the dishes (the exception being the onion soup, which was perfect). On the upside, the service was great. The price, at roughly thirty quid a head, was reasonable and all of the dishes were competently cooked. And happily, The Warrington still retains the feel of a real pub, albeit one maybe more suited to a dark winter’s evening than a scorching, almost summer day.

Overall we scored the experience a 6.5 out of 10, perhaps slightly disappointing, but still an enjoyable afternoon all the same. I’m certainly looking forward to trying some more of Gordon’s mini pub-empire in order to compare. It’s a tough life this cook-through lark!

Up Next from Gordon Ramsay’s Great British Pub Food:  Salad of black pudding with poached egg.

First of all there was The Oak Inn at Bank.

Now, this is a genuinely nice pub, certainly one of the better ones in the forest, but it isn’t quite a great pub. As a distant outpost of the Fuller’s empire it is a managed tied house, staffed by efficient but disinterested Eastern Europeans. The beer is well kept but fairly mundane – the usual Fuller’s fare. The pub is one big room, and at lunchtime it has the feeling of a canteen, the tables clearly laid out for dining and a whiff of chips in the air. The food was decent, but the menu impossibly huge for what must have been a tiny kitchen. As a country pub it of course offered a ploughman’s lunch and I of course couldn’t resist ordering it.

It wasn’t good. Far too much cheese, that didn’t taste of all that much, and an apple cut into little slices. Whoever thinks that, in days gone by, a hearty farmer would take his packed lunch into the fields with his apple cut into neat little pieces is, quite frankly, mad. If there is to be an apple in a ploughman’s, then it just has to be a whole apple!

Contrast this with The Royal Oak at Fritham.

This pub is the real deal, a brilliant example of what makes the perfect country pub. A independent free house, owned and managed by people with a direct stake in the local community, staffed by disinterested local youngsters and efficient ladies of a certain age. The pub is small and poky, divided up into little rooms that flow to give the feel of a real pub that lends itself to both drinking and eating. The beer on offer is fantastic, a range of six interesting and local real ales served straight from the cask. The food was spot on; simple dishes prepared using the best of local ingredients (and yes, whole apples). As a country pub, it offered almost nothing but ploughman’s, whether you are a ham & cheese, a pork-pie or a coarse country pâté type of man, there is a ploughman’s there for you. I was so taken by their menu, I couldn’t help but order three, just to try them out!

If you are ever in or around the New Forest, The Royal Oak is definitely worth checking out. A real country pub with soul.

Looking for my latest recipe attempt? See my post:  Beetroot Salad with Grapefruit and Goat’s Cheese

Of course, there are a few quirks of history. For example, Orwell describes some of the drinking vessels that were popular at the time.

“They are particular about their drinking vessels at the Moon Under Water, and never, for example, make the mistake of serving a pint of beer in a handle-less glass. Apart from glass and pewter mugs, they have some of those pleasant strawberry-pink china ones which are now seldom seen in London. China mugs went out about 30 years ago, because most people like their drink to be transparent, but in my opinion beer tastes better out of china.”

Now, I would love to see my pint of bitter served in a china mug down at my local. However, the landlord, Sean, would need to stock at least one mug for every student within a five mile radius. I can only imagine how quickly those beauties would make it to the top of the quirky-crap-you-must-steal-from-the-pub-if-you-are-a-proper-student list. It would cost him a fortune!

Orwell also has a few things to say about the food available in his perfect pub, including “those large biscuits with caraway seeds in them which only seem to exist in public-houses”. I have no idea what these biscuits could have been – they certainly aren’t seen behind the bar nowadays. Does anyone know? I would love to get hold of a recipe and recreate a bit of history.

Here is a link to the full article. It is well worth a read.

There will be no Great British Pub Food for me this weekend. I am heading off to spend a few days in Madrid, where people really know how to mix their food and drink. It’s tapas time! Hasta luego, amigos.

Whilst they have always been a great place for a pint with friends, traditionally a lot of the food served up in London pubs was something of a joke. That has changed quite a bit in recent years to the point that now it can seem like every other pub considers itself a “gastro pub”. I’m not sure why pubs can’t stay as “proper” pubs and just serve decent food, but more often than not an investment in the food offering leads to a pub losing most of its soul. Stripped wood, wonky mix ‘n’ match chairs, sprawling, open dining areas and brisk table service tend to give off a vibe more akin to a French bistro than a traditional British watering hole.

That said, there are plenty of places that do manage to get the mix of food and beer right (see my earlier post from the coach and horses as a good example). As part of my cook through project I will be visiting all three of Gordon Ramsay’s pubs in London,  not only to see how the food measures up, but also to see if Gordon has managed to keep the three pubs feeling like real boozers and not just offshoots of his Michelin starred empire. I live in hope!

Click on the links below for more details of each of the pubs I will be checking out.

The Narrow

The Warrington

The Devonshire

“The Coach” clearly styles itself in the trendy gastropub mould. Although I have mixed feelings about a lot of the so called gastropubs in London, the owner here is clearly on the right tracks. The place is serious about the food it serves yet it still manages to retain the feel of a real pub. They have hit the jackpot in recruiting Henry to lead the kitchen, this guy is REALLY passionate about what he does. It must be great to have so much zeal for your working day. Not only that, the guy is still only 21 (yes 21!) so he has his whole career ahead of him. You can see him in the picture below showing off one of his home-cured hams that we later got to taste.

As well as curing their own hams, Henry told how the kitchen bakes its own fresh bread (both sourdoughs and soda breads) on-site everyday. This is in fitting with the kitchen’s ethos of buying in as little as possible in terms of finished product (he drew the line at making mustard!) and knowing the provenance of everything that goes on the menu. A blackboard in the pub proudly shows off a list of their suppliers , no Tesco economy mystery meat burgers here.

Of Henry’s tales, my favourite was about from where they source their pork. They buy whole carcasses of rare bread lop-eared pigs from Mary Holbrook , an “old lady” and artisanal cheese maker based near Bath, who also manages to raise a few extra-special pigs at the same time (they do say that women can multi-task..) . The pork is used throughout the pub’s menu, and also in the traditional pub snacks of pork pies and scotch eggs  which are available behind the bar – better than a pack of salt and vinegar crisps any day. To keep an eye on the bottom line, Henry has to make use of every bit of the pigs (“everything but the squeak”), even brining the head before picking the meat to make a piggy head terrine. Nice!

When he is not busy in the kitchen, Henry spends his spare time out in the woods foraging for wilds foods to add to his dishes. This guy’s enthusiasm is seriously infectious, and did I mention that he is still only 21? The lucky barsteward…….

The menu in full:

• Coach and Horses sourdough and soda breads
• Devilled hand-picked Portland crab
• Roast beetroot, shallot, goats cheese, hazelnut and watercress salad
• Assiette of Lop Pork: Scotch egg, hand-raised pork pie, ale-cured ham
• Home-cured venison bresaola with pickled beetroot
• Buttermilk pudding with Yorkshire rhubarb and shortbread

Everything was delicious. The devilled crab in particular stood out, as did the ale-cured ham. The ham was pretty salty from the cure, but it was served with a beautifully sweet homemade piccalilli which went perfectly. You can see the ham below along with a pork pie and scotch egg. A perfection of piggyness!

The evening was a resounding success, and I would definitely like to call back again to taste some more of Henry’s food. To be honest, I think a lot of what he is doing there goes above and beyond what I would consider good “pub food” standard – I dont expect all pubs to go to the trouble of curing their own meats. But hey, I guess I at least have something to aim for now!

]]> http://ramsayspubfoodathome.com/a-jolly-fine-night-at-the-coach-and-horses-part-ii/feed/ 4 http://ramsayspubfoodathome.com/a-night-at-the-coach-and-horses/ http://ramsayspubfoodathome.com/a-night-at-the-coach-and-horses/#comments Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:32:49 +0000 Jon http://ramsayspubfoodathome.com/?p=93 All in the name of research, tonight I am off to the Coach and Horses pub near to Farringdon station here in London. The head chef there, Henry Herbet, is doing a special evening that will include a talk by the man himself introducing his pub’s food philosophy followed by a tasting of (hopefully) many of his (hopefully) excellent dishes.

I know the pub, having called in on a random pub crawl a few weeks ago. I didn’t eat there then (although the ale went down well), but it certainly looked like the kind of place that took its pub grub seriously. I will hopefully manage a few photos and a report tomorrow, any hangover allowing….