October, 2010

Soon, very soon….

Walworth Road makes me shudder. The Elephant and Castle bristles with angst, disaffection, and a vague feeling of threat and impending violence. No matter.

The Dragon Castle lurches out of the gloom in what looks like a council tower block. Colourful fishes greet you in the foyer pond as you walk in – the threat subsides.

Gaudy room, bling chandelier, looming ceiling, it all looks cheap and tacky on first glance. The Dragon reveals its treasures soon enough.

Dim Sum. Come here for dim sum. It’s up there with the best in London, alongside Royal China, Pearl Liang, Min Jiang, and when you factor in the prices, it trumps Hakkasan and Yauatcha for unbridled dim sum euphoria. The rest of the sprawling Cantonese menu scattered with Szechuan and Beijing style, I never even touch on previous visits either. It may well be brilliant. I don’t care.

We hit it hard, fast, then pull out.

Har Gau - The simple test, no room for error. Fat, generous king prawn in a perfectly translucent rice flour casing. When the prawns are this good, I want to cry. When they get the Har Gau this good, you know you’re onto a winner. Makes the China Tang offerings look like withered rejects from Ping Pong.

Prawn and Chive - Spectacular. Gossamer thin casing perfectly steamed, bursting with sweet prawn, chive, water chestnut, a lick of sesame oil an interesting touch.

Char Siu Baau – Wheat flour buns with a light sugar glaze, addictively flaky, barbecued roast pork inside. These are as good as you’ll find in London.

Xiao Long Bao - Shanghai pork dumplings steamed in wheat flour. These don’t have much of the broth within that can scald you wickedly if you’re unprepared, and are decent without hitting the heights. Cute canapé style of this Shanghai classic.

Roast Pork Cheung Fun - The long, slippery rice-flour take on ravioli. When you’re chasing the juice these puppies are sitting on around the plate, you know you’re having a good time. Haunting note of star anise, that great roast pork again.

Prawn Toast - Really? Who would order this? So we did, and it is as good as Yauatcha. So it’s über prawn toast, riotously juicy, laced with spring onion and water chestnut. Hangover food that delivers instant relief faster than Paracetamol.

The chilli oil delivered is crammed with sweet dried shrimp and tastes of something, unlike some of the burnt oil travesties you’ll encounter in Chinatown.

That really is it. This cures every dim sum craving you may have. From £2.10 a pop. The website opening is hilarious.

Brave the wilds of Elephant and Castle, skip past the monolithic roundabout, spend 20 minutes trying to find it – the Dragon will deliver.

Dragon Castle

100 Walworth Road

SE17 1JL

A grill. This is all the place is based on. Every flavour, every nuance, centres around the manipulation of wood, fire, and ultimately smoke. It is a fanatical manifesto that renders all other incarnations of the oldest form of cooking redundant. Etxebarri, the last word on grilling.

We arrive on a spankingly hot day in the tiny village of Axpe, an hour drive from San Sebastián, set amongst a stunning backdrop of the Basque mountains.The main square of Plaza St Juan greets us, just a church and a restaurant in a stone building – that’s pretty much it. It feels suitably rural, we’re up in the hills, and we begin to feel a calm descend.

Victor Arguinzoniz is the maniacal mind behind this altar to the grill, or “la brasa” as it’s locally known, running the kitchen with just one other chef, Lennox Hastie who has been there for five years and gives us the inside track later on. Everything cooked here comes from a fearsome looking grill that looks like a torture chamber, a system of winches that varies the height of each grill to the coals. A furnace opposite glows with menacing white heat where the charcoal is made.

Each wood used varies according to ingredient, apple wood for the gentle business of the caviar, orange wood for the mussels – this is attention to intricacies of grilling taken to almost perverse levels. They salt their own anchovies, keep prawns in deep sea water out the back, their own salt cod is de-salted in a careful way that draws gelatine from the spine, fat content that is needed for the fish to withstand the heat of the grill – our minds start to spin.

We sit down:

Handmade smoked butter - Yes, even the butter is smoked on the grill. A bon-bon of smoky butter, quite remarkable, excellent bread with the crunchiest carapace I’ve encountered since Noma. A square of smoked goat cheese sits on what looks like toasted bread shavings. “The best butter I’ve ever tasted”, says Tom.

Salted Anchovy - Simply a halved anchovy, skin on, sitting on top of toasted white bread drizzled with olive oil. Dense, delicately salted, Grand Cru anchovy, behaving in such a meaty way that it thinks it’s a sardine. Immense.

Grilled Palamos Prawn – Ridiculous. Ridiculously good. Two orange/fluorescent buggers gleaming like beacons, and looking vaguely like they are “spooning” in bed. The simplicity and perfection of execution is unnerving. No char at all from the grill, just sweet sweet meat, so soft you wonder if it cooked at all, the head bursting with juices that only Poseidon himself could have delivered into your mouth (120 metre deep prawns whose brains implode on contact with the surface, we are told, a prawn equivalent of The Bends), and we begin to realise that possibly only this restaurant in the world could have delivered this prawn to the plate. Paloma prawns famous for being deep sea off the east coast. Seasoned perfectly, we are left sucking the heads that explode with juice, and eating the edible shell and legs. It feels like essence of the sea has been smoked and delivered on a plate. A revelation.

Grilled Sea Cucumber - We’re told later this is in fact Sea Cucumber tripe. Who would have thought that? No matter, two cute curls of squid-like texture sitting atop white beans, diced shallots and parsley, a flower of wild garlic frolicking amongst it all. Simple presentation, good tasting-course size, tasting like a squid that went to finishing school and got an education. Flavours lingered for a good ten minutes while waiting for the next dish.

Grilled Oyster – One massive oyster, and that is it. Dense, meaty, smoky, the shell still hot and retaining heat for what seemed like forever. Unique, and delicately smoked.

Grilled Mussels - Cutesy presentation in a tin, we are warned not to rip it off with the ring pull, it’s already open. Ok thanks for that, I wasn’t about to try. Shelled mussels bathing in a carrot broth, flecked with paprika. An attenuated carrot sits like a shrivelled little pup outside the box, forlorn. One bite reveals it’s a little carrot packing serious heat in the flavour stakes.

Grilled Baby Squid - If this is the baby, the mother-ship must be a very scary madam. Massive slab of purple-hued squid, again no char from the grill, and delivering the sweetest and most yielding flesh. Smoke love reaches it’s zenith here, sweet squid, sweet smoke, showing the subtle mastery of smoke to great effect. A slick of squid ink is an unnecessary cheffy flourish, but it must keep the tourists happy. Onion chutney on the side is welcome, and a great little grilled spring onion. Show-stopping dish.

Grilled Salt Cod - Slab of cod, flakes like huge bricks, intense boom of a chive flower, a grilled pepper, a grilled cucumber, courgette flower. It was all a bit too much for us at this point, and the dish is probably best served alone rather than part of a grand tasting menu. The plate was super tarty as well, black and red, like a hookers boudoir.

Grilled Beef on the bone - Back in the room. This is why a grill exists. Fifteen year old animal, hung for 3-4 weeks, grilled and charred to perfection, the fat rendered into a wobbling wave, rare as anything inside. We gnaw the bone. We like.

Grilled Suckling Kid - An extra they sprung on us mid-meal, which we had to re-adjust to prepare for. Three months old we are told later, and yet there is tasty and delicate pale meat here, enough fat for flavour. We see a tiny leg which gives the lie to the animals age. This is “pretty much foetal” Tom says, which makes us stop for a second. But only a second.

Wild Fruit Infusion, Fresh cheese Ice-cream - I switch off at this point. The meal is done, and I don’t need more.  The ice-cream is quite brilliant, silky with no grains at all, tasting vaguely like Mozzarella.

Apple tart, smoked milk Ice-cream - I’m beaten here, I don’t need tart, fruit, more cream, but I would have jumped at another plate of prawns, anchovy, squid, beef, oyster….caviar if they had it that day.

Just seven services a week, six lunches and one dinner, keep the focus of a very singular cooking vision. Service was surly and moody at times, and I wondered if they were happy. The sparse room with huge linen covered tables, and slightly stilted atmosphere seemed at odds with the simple essence of what was coming out of the kitchen. If these are the only holes we could pick at, as we reflected later we realised that we had just experienced a very special and unique meal.

Sous -Chef Lennox gave us a look behind the scenes after lunch, and gave an impassioned speech on everything they were trying to achieve with each plate. Integrity of ingredients, simplicity of cooking method. I warmed to him when as we left I asked what the caviar is like when they have it:

“It’s emotional, man”.

Etxebarri

Axpe near Atxondo, Spain

www.asadoretxebarri.com

Two nights. Two heady nights, and still there is Txakoli wine, the green spritzy wine of the Basque country, coursing through our system. A blizzard of Pintxos, a grill to end all grills, more of that sherbert-laden fizzing liquid, ceps, foie, jamón, and an entry into the inner circle of San Sebastián – a decadent weekend from which we are still recovering.

More details will emerge shortly, for now all we can muster the energy to report is that Etxebarri is indeed the remarkable grill that we hoped it would be, beautifully combined with some of the surliest, reluctant, and downright moody service we have ever encountered.

When you are presented with the best prawn you have ever tasted, somehow this doesn’t matter any more.

The Inner Circle of San Sebastián (Donostia to the Basques) was achieved at Ganbara, where the wiley eyed Amaya sent a flurry of dishes careering out of the kitchen to us, each one off menu, each one a surprise and a delight.

For now, we just need to sit very still for a while.

We descend on the Basque country for Pintxo’s, Foie, Iberico, lip-smacking Txakoli wine, and a very special Grill. Grilled Oysters? Caviar? This is what we hear…

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