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Restaurant review: Thali @ Oxford - 'Authentic taste of India in cool ...
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To the uninitiated, a thali is a platter ubiquitous everywhere from Kathmandu to Kerala, served on a shiny metal plate, divided into sections for rice, pickles, dhal and other staples of life on the Subcontinent, and accompanied by a curry.
The menu is refreshingly small and revolves around the central theme of the thali: dhal, veg subji (varying greens of the day), yoghurt, a fresh salad and basmati rice.
There is a choice of five curries to accompany (ranging from a very reasonable £9.50 to £11.50, including your thali) and our party of four choose all five (we were hungry).
A Goan fish curry consisted of a meaty piece of pollack in a spiced tomato gravy.
It was also a little sweet, though the coconut was offset by powerfully fragrant curry leaf.
Plaquemine Lock, London N1, restaurant review: Chevys, levées ...
A confession: having just about survived the culinary equivalent of a one-night stand, in a different time zone with a sexy stranger who doesn’t speak your language and doesn’t care, it must be said that the two occasions in my life when I have been the most postprandially miserable – literally keening and weeping for 24 hours alone in an Italian hotel room and then, weirdly, in a French hotel room a few weeks later, also alone – came about as a direct result of interaction with langoustines.
Occasions when any short-term gains (the beauty of that balmy al fresco Italian evening; the fun we had at that sprauncy Parisian hotspot) were permanently cancelled out by “The Horror”.
As a result, I shellfishly decided that life was too short to ever be quite so miserable (especially in a hotel room) again.
Restaurant review: Dinner by Heston Blumenthal | Life and style ...
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Does it matter that elements of the roast scallop with cucumber ketchup dish are drawn from a recipe published in the 1826 book The Cook and Housewife's Manual Mistress by Meg Dodds, given that none of us has ever tasted that original dish?
But for all this culinary footnoting to matter, one thing has to be in place, and that's the food.
This one item – it is barely a dish – is destined to become a culinary icon.
It is there in a salamagundi – which doesn't mean much more than a whole bunch of things on a plate – containing smoked chicken, nuggets of slippery bone marrow and an acidulated horseradish cream, and in a stand-out dish of roast turbot with cockles that shows off these glorious native molluscs to their best advantage.
None of these dishes is the exercise in miniaturism that Blumenthal practises at the Fat Duck in Bray.