harrington's pie and mash, tooting - review

In the heart of Tooting in South West London, amongst the throngs of great Indian and Pakistani restaurants and market stalls, nestled in the bosom of a thriving and buzzing Indian sub-continent population, you can find a little nugget of London’s English culinary history. 

For on Selkirk Road stands the same establishment that has stood for the past 105 years and all the time remained in the hands of the same family – Harrington’s Pie & Mash shop.

As London’s pie and mash shops go, they’re a dying breed. Once the staple diet for the cockney geezer, these days they face lofty competition from the latest pop-up, new and exciting cuisines, and places that serve your drink on fire in a jam jar with a fig roll - it’s a tough old market for an establishment where both the interiors and menu have changed little in over a century. 

But there’s a lot of love for this place and for the other remaining pie and mash shops in London – the loyalty from customers who once visited with their grandparents, now grandparents themselves, gives Harrington’s a special place in people’s hearts. I suspect many of their customers would sooner keel over before eating anywhere else – there’s a lot to be said for that.

The format is as such – you order your pies (£1.50 each). One, perhaps a couple – they’re not huge. To accompany this is a standard side of mashed potato (£1.00), scooped up with a spatula and arranged on the rim of your bowl. And for lubrication, a portion of liquor (50p) – otherwise known as parsley sauce. If you’re feeling adventurous, why not sample the jellied eels. 

Whilst it wasn’t the prettiest plate I’ve ever been served, I’ll tell you what, it wasn’t half tasty. 

Home made pies are churned out from the back throughout the trading hours, delivered to the front bar in the pie trays they were cooked in and piping hot. Filled with ground mince beef and gravy, they’re fresh and tasty. The mash was a little dry for my palette, but the parsley sauce helped loosen it up. Notice the gelatinous consistency of the liquor – it’s traditionally made from the water the eels are stewed in. Embrace it.

Harrington’s is a bit like an old dear – sure the tiles are cracked, the paint is peeling and the vinegar is served in old wine bottles with pierced screw tops. But the heart of it is still beating strong and stands steadfast as a pillar in the community, serving up tasty home made pies at low prices, feeding generations that span decades. 

While we were seated at around 5pm on a Sunday, a queue began to form leading out the front door – families ordering take-out for their tea at home; an old lady ordering what seemed to be a week’s worth of pies with jugs of liquor decanted into Tupperwear; a very fragile couple sitting and eating in a comfortable silence familiar to those who have been together for decades – I like to think they’ve come here every week since they were childhood sweethearts. The lady behind the counter knows almost everyone’s name and engages with the regulars – people feel comfortable and at ease here.

If you want a chance to live out any East End cockney fantasies and visit a slice of history frozen in time, don your flat cap and make your way to Harrington’s for a taste of London’s past that hasn’t changed in for ever, and probably never will. 

The bill

Me

pie x 2 £3.00

mash £1.00

scoop of liquor £0.50

Total £4.50

My rating: 3/5

This review can also be found on the Your Local Guardian website.

arancina, notting hill - review

It’s certainly no challenge finding somewhere in London that sells a pizza for under £8. What is a challenge however, is finding a pizza that comes at least somewhere close to the authenticity and unmistakable excellence of pizzas from Italy, and specifically Naples.

I’ve been lucky enough to visit Naples, round about this time last year. I ate my way through the Amalfi coast, sampling lip-puckering lemons as big as melons from Sorrento; sucking on sweet and garlicky clams in my spaghetti vongole by the sea in Positano; drinking an espresso above the clouds at the top of Mount Vesuvius. If it’s a part of the world you haven’t yet ventured to, I strongly recommend paying it a visit for some of the best Italian food you’ll ever get your chops around. The pierce de resistance though, the plate that somehow managed to exceed the other already exceptional dishes from that trip by miles, the food that rendered Matt and I to stare at each other wide eyed in silence at first bite, dazzled and slightly confused by just how good it tasted, was the pizza we had in the city of Naples itself. A shack of an establishment fronted by a perpetual queue at every minute of every trading hour, it had simply two items on the menu – marinara and margherita, of which we ordered the latter. A plate of just four components – thin dough, tomato sauce, mozzarella and a few leaves of basil. But four components so fresh, the sauce so flavoursome with garlic and oregano, the dough so thin and crisp from the treatment it received in the wood fire oven, it was perfection in simplicity at its best. And if you want to see what the most incredible pizza in the world looks like, here it is.

pizza in Naples - other worldly

Once you’ve tasted a pizza from Naples, you will spend the rest of your life desperately trying to seek out the same experience somewhere closer to home. That, or you’ll give in to the calls of the divinely intervened dough, up sticks and move there. I bet people have done it before. Arancina has two establishments in Notting Hill and whilst it doesn’t make Naeopolitan pizzas, it serves up Sicilian pizzas; if there’s going to be anywhere in the region of Italy that has the balls to dare rival the food from Naples, Sicily is probably it. And low and behold, the pizza and the atmosphere in Arancina certainly made a decent stab at providing the next best experience to being there.

On entering, my companion Aarti and I were presented with smiling female staff and a pizza counter housing some ready made slices for those who wish to take away, along with a range of salads. We ascended up the stairs to the main seating area – a small room overlooking the main street with a few rustic wooden tables and two ladies already seated at one of them. Once we made ourselves comfortable, we soon realised the two customers already present along with the waitresses were all speaking Italian. And then another two diners entered, also conversing in Italian. As I’ve said many times before, if you find natives in a restaurant, you know  there’s a good chance it’s going to be good.

If you want to order a pizza authentic to Italy, a margherita or a marinara is the only way to go. Peppers, onions, meats, sweet corn and heaven forbid pineapple (whoever came up with that as a pizza topping should be strung and quartered) are all additions to help satiate the American palette – you certainly won’t find an Italian eating pizza with fruit on. A marinara is a base topped with just a tomato sauce and oregano – no cheese. A margherita is a marinara but with the addition of mozzarella and basil. True to the Italians, Aarti and I ordered the margherita and decided to share it so we could sample some other delights on the menu whilst still keeping within the £8 per head budget. Should you wish to just order the margherita however, you would still have £1 change (£6.95).

For a pre-pizza whetting of the appetites we ordered a portion of arancine – deep fried saffron risotto balls encasing a filling of spinach and ricotta (£2.60). I was expecting a few to be delivered, but it was in fact a single large ball. We cut it in half and happily devoured – the ricotta provided a pleasant acidic tang, the filling well seasoned and the casing crisp and light. The pizza was rectangular (14” x 8”) and presented on a wooden board. The base was wonderfully thin, and the sauce was top draw with lots of garlic and oregano as it should be. There was a little too much cheese for our liking – another trait of an authentic margherita is a small amount of cheese – and it was in fact the bits of dough with no cheese present that were the tastiest, allowing the flavours from the sauce to fully shine. Perhaps a marinara would be the way to go next time. To accompany our pizza, we had a salad of roasted vegetables with chopped lettuce, sliced black olives and tomatoes. It was dressed with a tasty vinaigrette and seasoned with more dried oregano.

The search for the pizza I had in Naples somewhere in London still continues. Perhaps I’ll search forever – it may be it just can't be replicated outside of Italy and of course, the country itself in which it is eaten is a huge part of the experience. But in the meantime, Arancina certainly isn’t a bad place to begin such a search. Grab your Italian phrase-book, pay a visit and pretend you're there.

The bill

Between two:

arancine £2.60

margherita £6.95

roast vegetable salad £5.30

Total £14.85

Alfiyet olsun.

food for thought - review

Whenever I see out-of-town families and couples alike seated in the window booths of a depressing Garfunkel’s, a desperate Angus Aberdeen Steakhouse or a dejected Frankie and Benny’s, all strategically situated in the tourist hotspots of London town to coax over-stimulated and disorientated visitors into their dull and uninspiring interiors by means of familiarity in both brand and menu, my being gives way to a full body shudder.

These faces often read despair – mine would too if I had just paid £10 for southern fried chicken strips slightly more moist than cardboard but with the same flavour. Leicester Square, Covent Garden, Charing Cross Road, Oxford Street are just a few of the areas littered with these and other equally vapid excuses for eateries – the footfall fodder of the culinary world. 

It is only the threat of police intervention that stops me from marching into these establishments, throwing Dad’s tough-as-old-boots steak to the ground, grabbing Mum by the shoulders in front of wide-eyed children frozen mid face-stuff with limp and greasy chips in their hands, screaming ‘But why? WHY are you here?! There are so many, SO many better places to eat than here. You’re in London - one of the culinary capitals of the world! Take a side street, venture into the realms of a new cuisine, an unfamiliar name above the door. You never know, you might ENJOY it’.

that most incredible aubergine dish

But I do understand that it must be hard to resist the calls from such establishments when you’ve been on your feet all day, the kids are hungry and whining, and you only have one hour before the show starts. 

There isn’t really time to wander round, working out where might be good or different that won’t blow the bank. This is central London after all - everything here must be expensive unless it’s a McDonald’s or Subway, right? Wrong. 

I introduce to you somewhere slap bang in the middle of Covent Garden, where you don’t need to book a table, where the food is both healthy and off the scale delicious, where they welcome BYO with no corkage charge (one for you Mums and Dads), and where you can fill your boots for under £8 per head. I present to you, Food for Thought.

inside Food for Thought

My regular London Cheap Eats companion (Aarti) suggested we try this place to see if it would make the grade in the form of a blog entry. It’s a place I’ve failed to notice or hear about before, yet after some research it turns out it’s been reviewed highly and has been established in the same location for around 40 years. I’m already excited.  

Food for Thought is an eatery where the focus is on fresh food and a friendly service – ‘simple decor of pine tables, stools and whitewashed walls, enlivened by original artwork’. It’s also located in an 18^th century listed building where the low seating alcoves were once used for ripening bananas, apparently. 

The menu is vegetarian (don’t wince – this is at absolutely no detriment to any flavour let me assure you), changes daily (while the prices stay the same) and is as fresh as it gets. The format is a two floored establishment – the ground floor has a few window stools and a take-away service counter while down the stairs you’ll find the main seating area, still cosy in its proportions. 

Once the stairs have been descended, you take a look at the menu and order what you fancy, pay with cash, then take a seat. You may well end up sharing a table as you cosy on up with your neighbour, but who cares. We felt it all added to the charm and atmosphere of the place.

Both myself and Aarti ordered the same hot dish out of three options (all options £5) – it was soft baked aubergine with chunky slices of fennel, courgettes, and puy lentils, coated in a wonderful yoghurt and dill sauce, topped with large croutons intense with the flavour of olives, with melted and then hardened savoury bites of cheese. 

I can’t tell you how completely gorgeous this was – all I was reading from it was the love, effort and consideration that had been put into both the design of this dish, and its execution. I am determined to replicate it at home. And I was almost certain I didn’t even like fennel – I'm not so certain now. I would take a tube ride from Clapham Common to Covent Garden after a long day at work just to eat this aubergine dish, it was that good. 

On the day of writing this up, some of the ‘hot dishes’ options include Jamaican black bean pot in a medium spicy coconut and tomato sauce, and butter bean and asparagus primavera in a yoghurt and sour cream sauce. These both read as things I would happily devour. And don’t forget this menu changes every day – what joy.

With my aubergine dish I intended to order a couple of slices of the freshly baked bread which was mushroom and sage on the day we visited, but they had alas run out. I can only imagine it was equally superb – must get there earlier next time. Instead I ordered a bowl of brown rice (£1.20) and a portion of Greek yoghurt (30p) to accompany my main. 

Interestingly enough, the yoghurt was not charged for and the rice was only charged at £1, different to what the menu stated. I of course was not complaining. Also available on the menu is the soup of the day, quiches of the day, an array of homemade salads, a daily evening special, brownies, flapjacks, desserts and scones. And the scones are certainly something to write home about. 

My companion opted for that day’s savoury scone (£1.80) to accompany her aubergine, one with rosemary and cheese. I chose to have their other scone offering as a dessert, a fresh strawberry scone (£1.80). Both were almost the size of a side plate on their own and in particular, the latter was completely sublime. Buttery but light, not too sweet, a wonderful melt-in-the-mouth texture, and punctuated with fresh strawberries.

a quite wonderful fresh strawberry scone

Glass tumblers are continuously washed and placed on a drainer by a member of staff behind a large sink and are used for both the table water already present and any BYO that may have accompanied you. 

The food is served in and on quite lovely and weighty earthenware crockery.  We arrived at about 18.15 and had to hover around the ordering counter for just a handful of minutes before a couple of stools made themselves available - tables cannot be reserved. As time moved on, the seats started to empty out further, with a little flurry of clientèle just before last orders at 20.00. 

After devouring our hearty and life-affirming meals, swiftly emptying a bottle of very drinkable Beaujolais purchased from the M&S round the corner, and enjoying great conversation, my companion and I were quite far beyond the realms of mere satiety and were positively basking in the after-glow of a fantastic meal that barely brushed past our purses. The guilt of our consciences foreseeing the imminent descent into cocktails was at least slightly abated by the goodness that lined our stomachs and with bellies full, our night was yet young.

Next time you are in town for shopping, a show, seeing the sights or simply with an agenda to meander, I strongly urge you to try out Food for Thought. I have no doubts you will thoroughly enjoy it and return for more, as will I.

Liked lots - food, atmosphere, location, clientèle, staff, price, BYO, almost everything
Liked less - they had run out of incredible sounding bread - sad face :(
Good for - couples - wait for a private corner to free up, take in a bottle of wine and get cosy; spontaneity - no need to book a table; small groups; students; catching up; vegetarians and meat-eaters alike; hippies; the gut; the wallet

The bill

Me 

aubergine & yoghurt bake £5.00

brown rice £1.20 (but was charged £1.00)

fresh strawberry scone £1.80

Total £8.00*

*NB Also ordered Greek yoghurt £0.30 (but was not charged)

Aarti
aubergine & yoghurt bake £5.00

rosemary and cheese scone £1.80

Total £6.80

Afiyet olsun.

saravana bhavan - review

A delicious three course sit-down meal, in a pleasant venue, in London, for under £8? 'Impossible!' I hear you cry. Actually very possible; allow me to share.

The list of establishments to try and test for the new 'London Cheap Eats' section of the blog has been fast growing thanks to my own contributions and that of fellow Londoners I know. The first destination on this pocket friendly journey of culinary discovery was suggest by my good friend Aarti; we were to pay a visit to Saravana Bhavan in Tooting, a vegetarian restaurant serving south Indian food. 

'You can have dinner there for £3.50', Aarti exclaimed. 

'Don't be ridiculous', said I.

kara dosa

 In order to provide a fair and objective review of the meal and to balance out Aarti's preference of legume over loin (she is herself a vegetarian), we invited along another good friend of ours, Chris. I would say Chris is happy to plunge his muzzle into the pleasures of cooked meat slightly more so than the average person, and along with my presence (firmly on the fence when it comes to my preference of a dish with meat over a dish without - I would say I enjoy both equally), the three of us provided a good snapshot of the culinary preferences of the general population.

rava masala dosa

Aarti was familiar with all of the dishes on the menu and so we entrusted her to order whatever she thought was good whilst keeping the £8 budget per head in mind. She advised we each start with a dosa and if we were still hungry, order some sides after. If we were still hungry? This was me and Chris she was dealing with - hunger post just one course consumed is almost a certainty.

A dosa is a very thin and crispy flat bread, almost crepe-like. They are served with dips and often contain a filling. Aarti ordered two rava masala dosas (made from semolina and encasing a spicy potato and onion filling) and one kara dosa (made from rice and with the same filling). These were served on large stainless still plates to accommodate the huge pancakes, along with built-in compartments filled with a range of chutneys. And these were so good, so good. The bread on its own was excellent, savoury and speckled with spices and traces of cashew in the kara dosa. Start dipping the bread in the chutneys and side curries and another layer of pleasure is added to the experience; chilli, coconut, lentils, tomatoes. Then you reach the spiced onion and potato filling of the dosas - completely delicious. Chris and I were both very pleasantly surprised at the huge amount of flavour in these dishes containing no meat. Whilst the dosas made considerable dents to our hunger pangs, we had no plans to finish yet and still had money to spend. High-rollers.

hot idly

Aarti went on to order two plates of sides to share between the two of us (three would have been too much after those large first plates) of which she assured were, like the dosas, typical of the south Indian cuisine. The first of these were two pieces of medhu vada - fried lentil flour doughnuts served with a coconut chutney and sambar (curry made of pigeon peas). While these were a little dense and dry on their own, the delightful dips still rendered them completely enjoyable. The second plate consisted of three pieces of hot idly - steamed rice and lentil patties with a wonderful texture served with the same variety of chutneys and sambar as the dosas, and a sort of chilli paste which was my favourite dip on the table. Grainy, savoury and hot.

medhu vada

To help cool off our tongues, Chris and I ordered a pistachio and malai flavoured kulfi respectively - a frozen dairy dessert served in a plastic cone and popular in the Indian sub-continent. One of the waiters noticed us struggling to extract the very cold and solid ice cream from the plastic and swiftly stepped in to assist. He popped it in the microwave for a few seconds and returned it upright on the plate. The malai flavour to me seemed to be the intense flavour of milk and was certainly the better of the two and a fantastic way to wrap up the meal. Aarti's choice for dessert was a large glass of almost luminescent passion fruit juice.

kulfi

Whilst the façade of Saravanaa Bhavan leaves quite a bit to be desired, the interiors do not reflect the same sentiment - modern, clean and slick with very accommodating waiters. The food we ate was all delicious and filling whilst being reasonably healthy - almost all dishes low in saturated fat.

I'm really pleased Aarti suggested this place because it's great. They have a few branches in London but this one is only a five minute drive from where I live and between my work and home. Handy, that. It won't be the last they see of me.

Chris and Aarti

Liked lots - the food; the obscenely low prices; close free bay parking in the evenings; food is low in fat; clean and modern interior; the staff; the chutneys
Liked less - it's close, but not outside my house - dammit
Good for - vegetarians; a healthy curry; traditional South Indian food; families and friends

The bill

Me 

rava masala dosa £3.45

medhu vada £1.45

kulfi £1.50

Total £6.40

Chris
kara dosa £3.45

hot idly £2.45

kulfi £1.50

Total £7.40

Aarti

rava masala dosa £3.45

passion fruit juice £2.75

Total £6.20

I believe that's a three course meal in London for under £8 - done.

Alfiyet olsun.