Delano Hotel (For once, not a restaurant review)

Besides the glaring whiteness of everything, the first thing you are confronted with, when you walk into your room at the Delano hotel is a solitary Granny Smith apple on a peg.  “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” is etched beneath it.  I’m sure someone, somewhere thought it was a genius idea, original, quirky.  Here is my question though. Most rooms have two occupants right? So why only one apple? Am I supposed to eat half and Hrabi the other half? Or do we alternate, I get it on even days and he gets it on odd?  Who get’s the apple becomes a moot point by day two when several other thoughts occur to me.  Among them; that a Granny Smith is the Pamela Anderson of apples, from a distance you suck in your cheeks and inhale thinking “Wow” but up close there’s way too much plastic and cover up.  Granny Smiths always have too much wax on their skin and are impossible to date ” Are they from this season’s crop? The last one?”.  Tell me, have you ever seen one with a leaf still attached to the stem?  Which brings me to another question…apples?  In the land of citrus?  Does Starck’s design acumen not extend to other fruit?  Or is it that you have to peel them or that there isn’t some pithy (sorry) one liner that goes with oranges.

On to the room which is all white.  Lacquered white floors, white walls, white leather headboard, white table, white lights. My sister says it’s like being inside a Mac. I think it’s more like being inside a toilet cistern because of the hardness of everything.Despite decades of carpets in hotels to absorb sound, the Delano has opted out. I lie in bed and listen to the woman in the room above me clatter around in high heels. Then she drops her lipstick, thunk, clunk, roll – clippity clop, clippity clop, clippity clop; she arrives to pick it up. Read more of this post

Zuma, Izakaya Japanese, Miami

I visited Zuma in London a few times when I lived there.  Not frequently because prices were high and portions tiny.  I would end up tallying the beans and working out the price per bean.   Inevitably the value balance would tip into a zone where I just couldn’t enjoy the food any more.  A pity because it is very good food.My father met us in Miami for New Year’s and he treated a bunch of us to dinner at Zuma.  We showed up 45 minutes late for our 6:30 reservation (oooops!) and were punished by being seated at what is probably the worst table in the place, a dark corner table in between two doors across from the check in desk.  It was so dark - the waitress handed us a small flashlight so that we could see what was on the menu.

Miami style is pretty much the opposite of Berlin.  Whilst extensive tattoos and earlobe plugs (to stretch the ear lobes - ya, my thoughts exactly - why, would anyone want to stretch their ear lobes?) are de rigueur there it’s all about diamonds here.  Big diamonds.  The size of a small quail’s egg.  Ok, ok, the size of a quail yolk - which is still large.  On tanned manicured fingers.  Everyone has implants (even the men), long hair, short skirts, impossibly high shoes pose no problem because the wearers arrive by car or even better - yacht.  I keep hearing whispers of Latin America being the next big thing and looking around Zuma in Miami, I no longer find it to be such a far-fetched idea.  The only non-South Americans were the servers and us.

Wagyu beef is sold at $26 an ounce with the minimum order of 6 ounces.   That’s $156 for 170 grams.  (A packet of butter, by the way, is 250g.)  I tried to dissuade my father from ordering it to no avail only to be told that they were out of Wagyu that night (I guess if those ladies are wearing $150,000 diamond rings, they can probably afford a $200 steak.)  My father spots the lobster tempura and orders that instead.  Actually, I don’t think that lobster is suited to tempura but the presentation is arresting.

Most cold dishes at Zuma come in large stone or ceramic plates brimming with crushed ice.  The long sashimi sharing platter looks impressive, my mind is saying “Weeeeeeeeeeee - Wow!!” When I manage to focus on the actual sashimi,  I see that it’s all smoke and mirrors.  The artfully arranged wasabi, flowers and shiso leaves make everything look abundant.  However, all thoughts of stinginess dissolve the moment I bring one of those tasty morsels to my mouth.  Sashimi as it should be.  Firm, chilled from the ice - the salmon and tuna have right angles if you can believe such a thing.  Everyone should experience sashimi like that, not just Latin American oligarchs. Read more of this post

Yardbird, Southern Food, Miami

It will no doubt strike you as odd to know that more often than not, restaurant food scares me. I’ve seen what goes on behind the orderly dining room - a lot of chaos.  A lot of sub standard ingredients (skinless chicken breasts arriving from suppliers in a frozen block) prepared by people who are there because they can’t do anything else but work in madness of a restaurant kitchen.  Pests are another problem, mouse droppings on dry stores are a standard fixture (especially in London).  Personal hygiene leaves a lot to be desired.  Let’s say none of those factors are at play, you still have to contend with the richness of restaurant dishes.  Even salads are a minefield of saturated fat.An extended, hotel stay holiday poses plenty of these perils.  I physically recoil as I walk past some of the places on Lincoln Road or Espanola Way.  Large laminated menus are shoved in my face, places with generic names like ‘Oh Mexico!’ (gee, I guess that must be Mexican food.), ‘you get a free margarita cocktail’ the young woman touts pointing to something day glo served in the glass the size of Layla’s sand bucket.The good places, always a needle in a haystack, are usually very expensive and unavailable.  Yardbird is affordable but difficult le to get a reservation at.  All my attempts on Opentable were futile.  I hedged on being able to get a table for dinner if I showed up.  One look at the harassed hostess, dark rings under her eyes, told me my chances were poor.  I was right, nothing, nada, zip.  I liked Gigi so much last year, I went twice during our stay and chef owner Jeff McInnis came from Gigi so I wasn’t going to give up that easily.  I came back for a late lunch and was offered a table outside in the sun which I immediately snapped up.

Yardbird is open all day from 12 with a Brunch menu on the weekend and a Lunch then Dinner menu during the week.  The ‘Farm Fresh Salad of Flat Top Mountain tomatoes, Meyer lemon, Texas olive oil, house smoked sea salt, and Bourbon Sherry vinegar” made me swoon on the spot when I read it, before I had even laid eyes on it and when it came, cut into supersize wedges - they were so sweet.  I closed my eyes and savoured each bite.  Exceptional tomatoes rock my world, if I was stranded on a desert island - tomatoes is what I would take.  My sister ordered the famous savoury waffles and fried chicken.  I got the slow braised short rib sandwich which comes with cubes of watermelon.  Which again - heaven.   Read more of this post

Shake Shack, Burgers, Miami

Shake Shack! SHAKE SHACK! SHAKE SHACK!

dream about this place when I’m in Berlin.

The burgers are petit, similar in size to a McDonald’s burger but that is where the similarity ends.  Shake Shack burgers come on a pillowy, yellow bun, grilled on the inside.  The thin patty is freshly ground on site every day and is cooked to medium.  The standard fixings are tomatoes, onion (sliced in rings), lettuce and crinkly pickles and a slice of cheese.  The burger comes in a waxed envelope, with the Technicolor red and green of the lettuce and tomatoes beckoning at you.

It doesn’t take long to eat.  Boys should order two.  I eat one and never suffer the burger regrets, the junk food shame.  Even if I’ve shared a paper dish of crinkly cheese fries.  And gulped down a Dr. Pepper.  It’s when I venture into Shark Attack custard territory that I start to think that I am going slightly overboard.  But listen - chocolate custard, peanut butter, chocolate truffle cookie dough, Valrhona chocolate pearls, and chocolate sprinkles - I mean? Who out there can resist a roll call like that?  I certainly can’t!

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The Best Shawarma in Jordan, gelatinous Mulukhiya and celebrating sumac with Musakhan

I wonder if DNA has memories? Besides being responsible for the color of my eyes, is there an imprint of my origin? Birds know to migrate south for the winter, salmon swim upstream to spawn. It’s conceivable isn’t it?  I ask because despite living in large cities like Athens, Paris, London and now Berlin for the past 20 years – when I go to Jordan I feel…there is really no other way to put this…I feel at home?The dusty city of Amman is teeming with cars and colorful trucks. Except for the road to the airport, most don’t have any white lines to delineate lanes. I initially attribute the drunken weaving of the cars to their absence. Until I notice that most cars are hampered by other considerations: like drivers that are simultaneously on two mobile phones or little vans so stuffed with people, they have their arms around each other’s shoulders. When a car in front veers perilously close to another, the car horn is lightly tapped, so a faint teet-teet can be heard (nothing like the way they lean on the horn in Berlin when some imperceptible offence has been committed, sometimes I think the driver has expired on the steering wheel, it’s that bad.)To me, one thing is unique in Jordan, the twinkle in people’s eye, the ready smile, the teasing that starts within moments of meeting someone. There is something childlike, a cheeky inquisitiveness. They seem capable of enjoying my enjoyment and wonderment as if it was their own.

I see this most the last day, when the perpetually barefoot Egyptian gardener brings up a plate of 3 Poussin, a bowl of Mulukhiya and a big pot of glistening rice with dark vermicelli noodles scattered throughout. (My father had mentioned that I liked it when I was a child.) There is an almost audible hum of pleasure emanating from the small man as I exclaim my hapiness.“Hadda min tahat” he grins, swiping his index finger across his throat in a rapid motion. It means: “These are from down there.” ‘These’ being the chickens. I don’t mourn them; I reach in and begin tearing into the small birds. There is no trace of the exaggerated rubber skin that is the standard in Europe (even in organic birds). The skin literally shatters. There are secret pockets where I know the most succulent meat will be: behind the shoulder blades, the oysters, the leg meat is the color of bark. Mulukhiya is a dark green soup made from the serrated leaf of  Corchorus olitorius or Jew’s Mallow (Very interesting post about the journey of Mulukhiya from Africa to Egypt’s national dish on the blog Food Bridge).  It has slimy properties, which are augmented when you add lemon. And you always add lemon. Then the soup takes on the property of raw egg whites, when you scoop your spoon through it, the entire contents of the bowl try to come with it. I’m not sure why I love it so much when things like creamed spinach, which I would think, is similar but nowhere near as pronounced, make me gag. (Maybe it’s the DNA thing again?)  I get through 4 bowls.

Even though only a couple of hours before I had been driven to the Christian city of Salt (the one from the bible) to have a chicken shawarma from the rather oddly named Golden Meal TM.Take everything you believe to be true about shawarma.
Got it?
Good.
Now scrunch it up and, with flourish, throw it out the window.
We are going to start again. Read more of this post

Cardamom Burnt Creams with Coffee Ice Cream (+ a short visit to Jordan)

Do you know what you are looking at? Banana fields through a mosquito mesh from my trip to Jordan last week.

We spent a lot of time at a private farm close to the Dead Sea, which to me is the most magical place on earth: 330 days of sunlight a year, low humidity, dry air, 1,200 feet below sea level - it all adds up to making it unique, I would go as far as to call it otherworldly. The light is tinged with copper and it makes everything look rich. Things that shimmer should, the pool for example but also things that shouldn’t. A stretch of date trees, looking like a bunch of fat ladies wearing overlapped necklaces of dates. Sometimes the farm hands put nets around the dates, to prevent the birds from getting at them and to keep the dates from falling to the ground. The fecundity of the land astounds me, eggplants that have been dried by the sun litter the fields, the pickers unable to keep up with the squat bushes production. There is more fruit in the citrus trees than there are leaves. I eat a pomelo a day, every day, for four days. I borrow from the Vietnamese and pick some searingly hot chiles, dice them up, toss them with salt and dip the pomelo segments into it. I set out to convert every person I meet and succeed. My suitcase back to Berlin is brimming with pomelos, as well as seedless pomegranates, chile peppers, cardamom pods, a quarter kilo of sumac, oh - and pine kernels in the shell from Afghanistan.These pine kernels, no relation at all to the soft, almost rancid specimens around here.  They are sweet, nutty with a good snap to them.  You can toast them sure but there is no need to.  If you know me, pester me to give you some of these, they are outstanding!

We spent one day at a house in ‘Ruman’ district (which translates as the ‘pomegranate’ district - don’t you love that?).  Everyone seemed to be dithering so I decided to make myself useful and pick the ripe olives, my father had said that if I collected enough, he would take me to a local press to turn them into olive oil. 2 hours of dedicated picking, yielded about 2 shopping bags full.  You don’t make a trip to the press unless you’ve got sackfuls, about 5.  My father comes out and sees me gingerly picking one olive at a time and starts laughing.  I instantly understand why olive picking is a group activity, that takes all day long and is treated like a celebration.  ”You know olive picking days are where the most romantic matches are made.” my father tells me.  ”Why? Because all the girls are bending over?” I joke.  He rolls his eyes at me and smiles, at this point he’s used to my humor I guess.We go to the press anyway.  It’s a heady mix of motor oil and olive oil.  The machines make a terrible racket. Read more of this post

Fresh Fig Cheesecake with Greek Yogurt, Almonds & Honey (& Greece for rent)

It’s hard to believe the changes that have taken place in Athens since my last visit in June.  The whole city is for rent, prices of soft commodities are 3 times what they are in other countries (6 organic eggs €4.60 versus €1.55 in Berlin).  Tax after tax is thought up and levied, the newest one - a 4 per square meter property tax paid yearly, if your flat is 100 sqm, you pay 400.  That is on top of car taxes, pool taxes, VAT of 23%.  I’m even at a loss for my fictitious “if I lived here, I would open a…” scenarios.  Right now, there is nothing I can imagine opening.  Sure, every other shop is for rent but let’s say I opened a cake shop, a Victoria Sponge would cost me about €8 euros to make, if I were to then apply the industry standard mark up of 3x, I would have to sell it for €24.I invited my girlfriends over for lunch, like I always do.  The mood was sober, these are young, talented, intelligent women who went to the same international school as I did.  They were not / are not trying to cheat the system, a simplistic retort that people like to throw around in tandem with “Well, whatchadya expect?”, but they don’t have a single opportunity.  To the point that one even closed her Etsy shop because she couldn’t afford to pay the taxes, on her Etsy shop!  The mind boggles.

In the once boisterous coffee shops, people talk in hushed voices, even the motorcycles are quieter, it’s eerie.  I find the Greeks themselves softer, like they’ve spent an extended period of time being rolled back and forth in the waves until their sharp edges have been filed down to smooth curves, like a sea glass you want to run your fingers over.It’s only at the beach that the mood lightens up.  Avlaki beach, the same beach I’ve been going to since I was a little girl.  With a mountain range that looks like a reclining dog, minus its head.  Not a thing has changed in 25 years (except for the prices and that people now smoke rollies instead of Marlboro or Camels), they still sell greasy cheese pies and Frappés so strong they give me heart palpitations.  There are fat, thick legged children building sand castles as best as they can with the impediment of arm floaties.  Whole families show up, grandmothers with epic breasts and backsides and, if they’ve survived 50 years of hen picking, their usually emaciated husbands, a few sprightly hairs dancing around on their otherwise bald heads.  This is the Greece I remember growing up in.

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Dinings, Sushi & Japanese Tapas, London

My sister and I were reading on Avlaki beach in Athens the other day when she looked up and said, “I’m trying to figure out if I’m a fox or a hedgehog?” ” Heh? What’s that now?” “Well,” she continued “the ancient Greek poet Archilochus said ‘the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing’ Isaiah Berlin (his real name, not making it up) expanded on the idea in an essay.”

“Well I’m definitely a fox!” I declared.  I’d already penciled my character into this column when I had read Sasasunakku’s recipe for Toffee & Pear Spice Cake which referred to Sarah Wilson’s blog post on ‘scanners’.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in my choice of reading material, the magazines I’ve brought along on this trip include: Apartamento, Bon Appétit, Oh Comely and the FT Magazines.  The books I have read this summer are King Abdullah’s, Our Last Best ChanceThe Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh and on to Michael Caine’s, An Elephant in Hollywood.  (There’s a point to all this, I promise.)

I was reading that Michael Caine is an avid gardener who loves the British countryside. But he can’t stand the long damp winters. Solution: he has a sprawling country home in Britain and winters with his family in Miami. Ping! Went the light bulb over my head, that would be perfect!  That way, I could opt out of 6 months of snow and sorrows in Berlin and the lack of dim sum, sushi and good cheap eats and love it instead for what it does have, turning a blind eye to what it doesn’t do for me.  (Hmmm, I’ve just realised this is probably what French men think as they build up their pyramid of wife, mistress & alternative sexpot - managing to love the first two simultaneously!)

Here is how those first 3 paragraphs relate to Dinings.  When in Berlin, Dinings (followed by Yauatcha and Barrafina) is probably the restaurant I miss the most.  And nothing, nothing, nothing even comes close to it.  To the point that I find sashimi in Berlin so lackluster that I don’t bother.  (Yes I know about Sasaya in Prenzlauerberg and yes, the people who work there are indeed ‘really Japanese’ and the quality is good but it’s too traditional for my taste.)
I love Dinings because:

1. They make stuff I can’t. I will never get the quality of fish they have or be able to prepare it as well as they do.
2. It’s simple stuff and that is the hardest food of all to pull off because you can’t masque imperfections
3. It’s a most plain, un-embellished place. The restaurant is in a basement on a residential street behind Edgeware road. There is nothing on the walls, the seating is wooden, the tables are small, and the ceiling is low. One side has a small window where you can see people’s feet as they walk by. And it doesn’t matter at all because the food is so captivating.
4. This one is kind of a sub-point to 3. It’s not a reverential place; you don’t go there to genuflect at the altar fine dining. It’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to how I feel when I eat at home, except I’ve got no washing up to do.
5. They have flavor combinations that I love, relying a lot on sour whether through lime, lemon, yuzu or even vinegar and mostly doing away with perennial (and much too salty) soy and the neon wasabi. Read more of this post

Melrose and Morgan, Awakening Number 3

Food and I didn’t start out as fast friends. Far from it. I was a pernickity eater as a child. I only ate eggs, fried; chicken, breadcrumbed and panned; fries, hand cut – obviously and no thicker than 5 mm. If those things were not available then no amount of bartering or pleading would induce me to eat. I simply abstained. It goes without saying that I was a very skinny, very annoying child.

By my teenage years I discovered junk food. Things like frozen French fries doused in so much thousand island dressing that they sagged on the plastic fork like limp spaghetti. At home a meal that featured quite a lot was pasta with butter and feta cheese. Every now and then the posh supermarket at the end of our road would import some American cake mixes. My sister and I would make them together and marvel at how good they tasted.  That was one of the highlights in our sleepy Athens suburb. I can’t boast about eating in Michelin starred restaurant as a wee tot like Jay Rayner or mastering a perfect victoria sponge by age 7 like Nigel SlaterAll this to say that the foodie I am today is the result of a slow evolution, a meandering path through some questionable tastes with 3 pivotal food awakenings.The first was moving to Paris when I was 17 and discovering a complex and fascinating world of food, of do’s and don’t’s. Do eat cheese after a meal, never for breakfast.

The second was that after squandering my twenties trying to fit into a variety of moulds I thought would be suitable for me and acceptable for my family and friends I decided to literally screw it and try something radically different. A hobby I had been nurturing furtively which seemed to make me happy but also seemed to be rather frivolous.Enter Leiths. I originally enrolled for just one term, then the second and finally the third. I was convinced that this was it, I had discovered what truly animated me. My enthusiasm got me through many restaurant doors but my lack of skills constantly sabotaged me. It all went pear shaped after a 4 daylong stint at Ottolenghi, where I was moved from salads, to pastry and back to salads again. Like a hot potato that no one wanted to hold for too long. Even before the talk with Yotam, I knew it was not going well.

This is a 5 year old picture

Maybe it speaks of a good life for which I should be grateful but that rejection confounded me. How could it be that after 10 directionless years, I had found something I truly loved and adored and it just… Well it just didn’t love me back? I had no idea how to process that reality. Read more of this post

Hedone, Produce Led Food, Chiswick, London

Timeout London has this stamp sized rubrique that I love entitled “Lies to Tell Tourists“. This week it’s: “Hyde Park only has one corner, making it a mathematical phenomenon.” Submitted by@TomGoodliffe through Twitter.  Even without Timeout, there are some pitfalls to navigate for tourists as many of them trying to get to ‘Liechester Square‘ (Leicester pronounced Lester) will know.  Or take this restaurant in ChisWICK, pronounced Chisik.  It’s called Hedone, from the Greek word meaning pleasure.  I know how to pronounce Hedonistic but Hedone? Is the e silent or not?

My good friend Andrew of the blog LDNEATSNYC is always asking me why I go to Michelin restaurants?  The answer is, because eating at a good one is a bit like getting a front row seat at a catwalk show. Sure, no one bar Lady Gaga wears that stuff but it’s the pinnacle of food fashion.I enjoy eating in them on occasion. The good ones, like Aqua last weekend, in particular. However the food venue (I don’t want to say restaurant because that format doesn’t appeal to me)  that I have been building up in my imagination over the years is the polar opposite of a 3 starred Michelin place. In fact, it’s a lot more like Hedone.

It relies on exemplary produce and traditional preparation and cooking techniques.  An idea and ideal that Mikael Jonsson explains very well on his Gastroville webpage.

Hedone has only been open since July but already a positive write-up in the Financial Times and one by Guy Dimond for Timeout have made it difficult to get a reservation.  Even out in Chiswick.

I was astounded by our first starter; a small fillet of mackerel and 3 raw cauliflower florets, blindingly white, dressed in a little lemon and olive oil.  Daring.  Ha! I had seen nothing yet.  Next starter, a quarter of an onion that has A.O.P denomination from Cévennes in France (from which it takes its name), one paper-thin slice of pear-collapsed over itself and a puddle of dressing.  A quarter of an onion? In a menu of 4 courses for £50.  What a statement.  It would have been awkward if that onion couldn’t stand up to the hype, if it wilted in the spotlight. But it didn’t, it shined and was all the more incredible imbued with the confidence of a chef who saw its star potential.

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