Life is full of decisions we would rather not make. Do the dishes or eat off paper plates indefinitely? Devise a long term career plan or just make it into work each morning and hope for the best? Accept my mother’s friend invite on Facebook or actively avoid the issue?
None more so than the daily dilemma of what to eat that evening. Whether at home and faced with the meagre offerings from the tail end of the week’s shop, or in a restaurant toying between the duck or pork whilst tagging the tweet about your plight with #firstworldproblems (please don’t), deciding what to eat can be a challenge.
Take this fickle element out of the equation and I am thrown back to the simpler days of my childhood; ‘you will eat what I give you and you will finish it’. Thankfully, my parent’s cooking was and still is great, so I always did. When a restaurant plays mum for the evening (albeit one that lets me drink a lot more wine), I am both grateful and drawn to it. ‘Finish it!’, you say? ‘Enjoy it!’, you demand? Well, MAYBE I WILL.
Both of which happened at The Quality Chop House on Farringdon Road, where the chefs write three menus each day based on the produce delivered that morning. In the evening you’ll find a set menu in the Dining Room for £35 with four starters, a main and a dessert, all for the table to share. There is no picking, no choosing - you receive it all and you ultimately enjoy it all.
It’s full of old-world charm and that type of shabby chic floral bijoux crockery that in the hands of the wrong host and along with a room full of kitsch chintz can be utterly nauseating. But against the stalwart-Grandad masculinity of dark wood panelling, a handsome check floor and the creaking booths of a Grade-II listed establishment in its 145th year (opened in 1869), it is thoroughly charming.
Great textures were found in the smooth, delicate mounds of goat curd on bitter chicory, topped with toasted hazelnuts and a drizzle of fruity oil. Smoked salmon, horseradish crème fraîche and dense rye linked pinkies and promised to be best friends forever. Soft and gamey slow-cooked partridge leg meat was re-shaped and breaded around the bone into pleasing spheres.
A bed of salty smoked cod’s roe expertly seasoned the purple sprouting broccoli, still with good resistance between the teeth. And the plate of earthy wild mushrooms with an effortlessly glossy chicken liver parfait had a few sails of crisp chicken skin at the centre and tasted even better than that reads.
A huge platter of silverside and smoked brisket, celeriac purée and golden beetroot, breaded bone marrow and roasted carrots flounced its way onto our table, all showy and attention seeking, with a great sense of celebration and sharing that family Sunday lunches do so well (even though it was Wednesday). The meat was either pink or flakey, both desirable adjectives for beef. The side of kale was vibrant and well seasoned. And the plates were cleared in their entirety.
Tart rhubarb with meringue, flaked almonds and ice cream was the sort of dessert you could have three of. The cheeses were bold and British, seducing with their first whiff and crumbly oatcake comrades; that day Tunworth, Montgomery, Colston, Innes Brick. Petit fours were dark chocolate covered honeycomb bites, essentially high-end Crunchie and what the hell is not to love about that.
For those who prefer to exercise their freedom of choice, the Wine Bar (the room next door) has a daily-changing a la carte of which I hear very good things. Next door to that is their Food Shop and Butchers selling all manner of stock from British cheeses and charcuterie to their own produce; think conserves, preserves, smoked fish, terrines, parfait, pies, sweet treats, a daily roast meat sandwich or hot sausage roll, and more.
The Quality Chop House is a rare breed: self-assured and unfussed cooking without pretence, showcasing quality ingredients and with good wine. It’s the sort of reliable, honest food you can imagine eating every day, if you had a larger bank balance and higher metabolism. It's just as well I don’t live any closer.
Liked lots: interiors, wholesome hearty food, wonderful warm welcome, relaxed atmosphere, the illusion I could quite easily eat this stuff every day; value for money, kindly substituting two portions of rhubarb for cheese and including it as part of the menu, the wine
Liked less: the kale was a little too seasoned but who the hell cares, we finished it
Good for: everyday eating, unfussy great food, buying produce
My rating: 4/5
Find the menu on Zomato
Afiyet olsun.
Hakkasan is the long-serving establishment that did the slick-lined, low-lit, subterranean celebrity haunt thing before most others. Since 2001 it has served as a dining vestibule for evenings often ending in whichever night-life hotspot is currently most impenetrable.
It certainly lends itself to this clientèle. The interiors are dimly lit enough for wisp thin socialites of the evening crowd to avoid interacting with the food without attracting too much attention to the fact. There’s a lot of black leather, dark wood and deep pockets.
And it’s probably one of the only restaurants in London (other than The Ritz) to exercise a desire for certain attire: ‘Our dress code is smart casual. No sportswear. Jeans are permitted as long as they are worn smartly with shoes and a collared shirt. Please do not wear hats inside Hakkasan.’ I’m not sure the girls blinding waiters with full body sequins were planning to do so whilst wearing their Converse.
In an attempt to broaden their customer base beyond tourists, business men and debutantes, Dim Sum Sundays launched in the tucked away Hanway Place branch in September this year. The menu available each week from 12-6pm is a rather good excuse to get sloshed during daylight (but in the dark) whilst eating good food to the backdrop of beats chosen by the lounge DJ (thankfully proving to be nothing more than elevator music).
There are two set menu options with the main difference being the volume of alcohol involved. If you were hoping for a dry lunch, hope some more; at a minimum you will be drinking two (strong) cocktails. At a maximum add to that half a bottle of Perrier-Jouët Blason Brut Rosé Champagne (blimey). Unless you opt for the non-alcoholic drinks, of course. Witness any good intent to boycott the booze dissipate as the desire to get your money’s worth overrides.
The atmosphere was freer and less self-obsessed than I recall in my last visit on a Friday night some years ago when the corridor to the ladies acted as a makeshift catwalk runway. But one would hope so, at 1pm on a Sunday afternoon.
Pre-lunch cocktails were quickly followed by a crispy duck salad with well textured nuggets of meat slightly sweetened from a glaze, lifted by fresh segments of pomelo and sprightly salad leaves.
From the option of seven steamed dim sum, we selected smooth and transparent har gau bonnets filled with firm little shrimp with bite, Chinese chive dumplings with prawn and crab meat topped with goo and a goji berry, spicy seafood sauce and scallop rounds with Thai asparagus and lingzhi mushrooms, and morel mushroom and lemon sole mouthfuls - the superior and most discernible of the four.
Then there was the fried, baked and grilled course and while the same swathe of golden glow adorned all four of our choices, shapes and designs were interesting enough for us to wonder out loud how they were achieved.
A light and crisp pumpkin puffball encasing a smooth middle of the gourd flesh itself along with the (apparent but undetected) presence of smoked duck, creamy lobster meat rolled in ultra thin rice noodles and fried into something lighter than air, Shanghai dumplings with ground pork, and poofed up pear and taro (starchy root vegetable) balls with another beautiful centre, and in the shape of pears!
From the small eats we swapped out the two available options in exchange for the salt and pepper squid from the alternative menu at the cost of a decent course.
It came heavily battered and fried; an unwanted vision after previous plates of the same vein. Bereft of the levels of (white) pepper needed to satisfy the two present of Chinese and Taiwanese heritage, it was not befitting of its label; "this has been made for the western palate and is not at all authentic". It was a plate of slightly better than bog-standard calamari and was an effort to entertain.
For mains, a luminescent grilled hunk of Chillean seabass made a vibrant orange from something I don’t believe we ever identified. The Chinese honey coating rendered it too sweet for my palate after a couple of forkfuls, but the flesh was cooked so precisely that despite the sugary mouth, I was unable to leave it alone. Soft and smooth, just the right side of opaque, breaking away in meaty flakes with a slither of crisp fatty skin full of flavour. Really very good.
To accompany the bass, pak choi with al dente whites and wilted tops cooked with Shaoxing wine and garlic (I could eat barrels of this), and a wad of sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaf, punctuated with nuggets of sweet Chinese sausage and grainy salted egg yolk.
To conclude, a choice of three desserts, the best of which I selected. A smooth and fudgy dark chocolate bar shot through with a very cherry sauce along the length of its centre, with a sweet and tart cherry sorbet imparting the sensation of submerging my head into a bucket of them freshly picked from the tree.
Also of note was the elderflower sorbet with the strawberry panna cotta, chantilly cream and elderflower jelly - one lick of the spoon left a ringing of the tak-tak sound of sourness as the tips of our tongues smacked the roof of our mouths. The macaroons were ok, mostly with indistinguishable flavours.
With the meals came endless pots of freshly brewed loose leaf Taiwanese tea; delicate, cleansing, refreshing and altogether more preferable to the cocktails, the post-lunch ones of which remained mostly untouched.
I was duly impressed with all courses, particularly my dessert but excluding the squid. And should one's lunch desires involve a good saucing on a Sunday afternoon, the value is of note when considering the drinks involved; the menu described above is £48 and the one including the champagne is £58. Quite reasonable for an establishment that has retained it’s Michelin star since 2003.
The praises from the Taiwanese and Chinese were a little muted. Whilst they enjoyed it, proclaims of ‘but I have had better’ followed any accolades. The day I too eat truly authentic dim sum in China or Taiwan itself is the day I suspect I may mirror their sentiments. Until then, I'll settle - in the loosest sense of the word - for Hakkasan.
My rating: 3.5/5
Afiyet olsun.
