In November 2018 a new restaurant called Pompette opened its doors on the northern outskirts of Oxford. It quickly gained a reputation for being a welcome addition to the city’s food scene.
The terrace at Pompette
Pompette translates as tipsy, tiddly or squiffy – not drunk in an unseemly sort of way, but the rather charming state of a maiden aunt who has enjoyed an unaccustomed glass of champagne.
The restaurant looks and feels authentically French, but this is no slavish pastiche of a Paris bistro. The menu features Italian as well as French influences.
Most impressive is the eye for detail in what emerges from the kitchen; French bread can so often be a let-down. The Pompette Baguette & Burgundy butter is a thing of simple, crusty, sourdough beauty.
The charming waiting staff are friendly and efficient. You can tell they’re smiling behind their masks.
Friendly & efficient staff
We started with a salad of Roquefort, gem lettuce, celery & apple, perked up by spiced walnuts, and a flûte of Crémant d’Alsace.
Roquefort & spicy walnut salad
I chose Burrata & caponata with a glass of Vouvray, which trod a balance between richness and acidity that worked with the discreetly sweet and savoury notes of the aubergine dish and the luxuriously creamy cheese.
Burrata & caponata
For mains, Courgette, pea & broad bean risotto, mascarpone, lemon, pine nuts & mint was a comforting taste of summer on an unseasonably grey day.
Courgette, pea & broad bean risotto
I wouldn’t usually order beef at lunchtime, but this was to be my main meal of the day. Roast sirloin of Hereford beef was a thick slice, cooked to perfect rosy pink tenderness.
‘Duck fat potatoes’ were sliced wafer-thin, then moulded into thick ingots, fried or roasted to lovely softness, with a crisp golden crust. Watercress, shallots and a generous bowl of glorious Béarnaise completed the plate.
Roast sirloin, Bearnaise & duck fat potatoes
I asked for a carafe of Austrian Blaufrankisch to go with the beef, and was impressed that my order was taken without having to repeat it, or point out the wine on the list.
Blaufrankisch, Weingut Judith Beck, 2019
The set lunch is very good value, 2 courses for £26 or 3 for £32.
The wine selection is inventive, and with around 25 wines offered by the glass or carafe, you can afford to be adventurous.
Parking on the street outside is free for up to two hours; there’s also parking for a dozen cars behind the restaurant. It’s through a narrow archway which you might find challenging to negotiate after lunch, especially if you’re ‘un peu Pompette’.
A seriously good cup of coffee is one of life’s great pleasures for me, and they don’t get much better than at Robert’s Coffee, in the Saluhall market, Stockholm.
The cinnamon buns are a bonus. (They take cards only, not cash, so you won’t even have to bother buying kronor).
Osteria al Ponte del Diavolo on the island of Torcello; all the better for being unexpected.
Torcello is about an hour from Venice; you can reach it on a scheduled service, changing at Burano, using your vaporetto pass.
Osteria al Ponte del Diavolo, Torcello
The ancient basilica on Torcello predates the city of Venice. To reach it from the quay, you walk along the side of a canal. The most famous restaurant on the island is the Locanda Cipriani nearby, but you pass three others on the way.
We weren’t looking for a grand lunch, but something to fortify us for the basilica.
The first place looked fun, but was packed with families queuing for pizza.
The second was a fairly standard Trattoria. We walked on.
The third had a big dining room with a covered terrace at the back, opening onto a garden. The menu looked as if we could find something suitable, so we went in and were greeted with smiles and shown to a table.
It was a good decision, even the bread basket was exceptional. We had a pretty antipasto of colourful steamed vegetables, all tasting intensely of themselves, served warm to bring out the fruitiness of the olive oil dressing.
Then black squid ink pasta, with crab, samphire and rosemary; orecchiette with turbot and cherry tomatoes.
We drank Arneis, a white from Piemonte.
After lunch we wandered round the garden and may have dropped off on a bench in the pergola. Just for a moment….
Osteria al Ponte del Diavolo is open for lunch Tuesday to Sunday, and dinner on Friday and Saturday.
Honourable mention for the Sweetbreads at Frenchie’s Wine Bar, Paris.
So good, I ate them twice.
https://wp.me/p7AW4i-Kh
‘Everything, I want to eat everything’
Caffé Toscanini in Amsterdamfor the whole experience of food and hospitality; a perfect aperitif followed by an accomplished Italian meal, delivered with good humour and expertise.
https://wp.me/p7AW4i-Kh
The bar at Caffe Toscanini, Amserdam
The prize goes to A.G. for the best steak of 2019.I’ll be lucky to find one as good in 2020.
Most of the tables were occupied by groups of men sharing massive steaks.
There were also a few couples on date nights, sharing massive steaks.
‘Vegetarians, look away now’.
https://wp.me/p7AW4i-Oh
A.G. – ‘vegetarians, look away now’
TV Show: Remarkable places to eat, Episode 1, in which chef Angela Hartnett takes Maitre d’ Fred Siriex to her favourites in Venice.
It’s a full hour of television, so they have time to show you the dedication and hard work that goes into delivering the best ingredients and food experiences in the city. These are not cynical tourist traps. Nothing is done without effort: wading chest deep in the lagoon to harvest seafood; delivering vegetables by boat and trolley to Bruno Gavagnin, the quietly spoken but demanding chef at Alle Testiere; walking half a kilometre over bridges carrying boxes of perfect patisserie to Caffe Florian, from their production kitchen to Piazza San Marco – several times throughout the day.
At the time of writing it’s not available on BBC iPlayer, but it’s sure to turn up on your TV sooner or later.
Frenchie Restaurant in Paris opened on rue du Nil in 2015, and quickly became a hot ticket. We tried to book a table for dinner in May this year, but they still fill the restaurant months ahead.
Frenchie Wine Bar opposite doesn’t take reservations; it opens at 6.30pm, and the advice is to turn up early. We were first in line when the door opened. ‘Table for two?’
There are two small rooms, one with a view of the kitchen, the other of the bar. You sit on bar stools at shared tables.
We elected to sit right next to the glass partition looking into the kitchen, where we could watch every dish being prepared. It’s a tiny space, ruthlessly organised, where five staff were producing all the food: one male chef at the stove, two girls meticulously assembling cold mains and desserts, a female chef on the pass, and a washer-up.
‘Everything. I want to eat everything’
The friendly, helpful and informative waiting staff wear T shirts printed with the legend ‘Everything. I want to eat everything’, and reading the menu I began to see what they meant. Dishes are served when they’re ready, so we started by sharing three cold dishes.
Frenchie Wine Bar
An assembly of home made Ricotta, crumbled with confit Meyer lemon, fresh fava beans and peas, buckwheat for crunch and earthiness, and chive flowers, was a beautiful celebration of early summer – outstanding, one of the best dishes I’ve eaten this year (so far).
Ricotta, AKA summer in a bowl
Green lentil falafel came with smoky harissa, and pickled cucumber for sharpness and texture.
Green lentil falafel
A gutsy terrine with piccalilli and mustard seeds balanced textures and flavours, with sharp accents from the pickle. (It was so good, I failed to take a picture. Oh, the pressure).
Garnishing is precise, pretty and delicate; the chefs each carry tweezers clipped to their aprons, which they use to place herbs on each plate.
The sommelier wore a similar shirt to the waiters:
‘Everything, I want to drink everything’
Wines by the glass are poured at the table. We chose a petillant Montlouis from the Loire as an aperitif; gentle bubbles, golden colour.
A Cotes Catalanes rosé was a good match for our first dishes, with strawberry fruit and fresh acidity.
Then we went our separate ways. Pappardelle pasta for her, with lamb ragout, Kalamata olives and lemon confit. And another glass of rosé.
I picked crispy sweetbread nuggets with gribiche sauce. Two juicy morsels of moist tender veal arrived in a thick coat of crunchy batter perfection. Gribiche is a mayonnaise-style emulsion of hard-boiled egg yolks and mustard, finished with chopped cornichons, capers and herbs.
Crispy sweetbread nuggets, sauce gribiche
And a glass of red Saumur Champigny 2017, poured from a magnum; unusually intense and dark for the Appellation, a ‘fruit bomb’ of berries and herbs.
Be careful what you wish for
The owner and head chef is Gregory Marchand, the eponymous Frenchie. He earned the nickname working in the kitchen at Jamie Oliver’s restaurant Fifteen in London.
The London influence shows, there’s English wine on the list, and cheeses are from Neal’s Yard Dairy.
Gregory dropped in to observe the chefs at work and chat to them. I asked the waiter if I could say hello, if he wasn’t too busy – I met him last year at a panel discussion in London, where he has a restaurant in Covent Garden – and he came over to our table.
The sweetbreads were so good, I said I could eat another portion for dessert….
(I was joking).
A few minutes later, the waiter reappeared at the table with another plateful; he nodded towards the window behind me. There was Gregory outside, grinning, with his thumbs up to check I approved.
They were just as amazing the second time.
Frenchie
We resolved to go back next year and book ahead for the restaurant, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the wine bar is more fun, where you can arrive at 6.30 and stay as long as you want. There are clearly two sittings in the restaurant: 6.30 and 9.
Frenchie Restaurant
Playlist in the wine bar: high energy hip-hop, cool, funky and fun, much like Frenchie’s. It’s just on the right side of loud on arrival. As the evening progresses they either turn it down, or the clientele drown it out as the wine bar fills up.
Rue du Nil is a tiny street. As well as the restaurant and wine bar, there’s Frenchie To Go, and Frenchie’s wine shop.
Marchand’s energy has attracted a community of small and perfectly formed retailers to the street: a butcher, a fishmonger, a bakery, a greengrocer, a coffee roaster. A ‘bean to bar’ chocolate shop will open shortly.
“Deep prep” in the kitchen; Anthony Bourdain on the mise en place:
“Your mise en place, your ‘meez’, is an obsession, one’s sword and shield, the only thing standing between you and chaos”…. “It’s your first principle, your belief system, your religion.”
The Les Halles Cookbook, says Bourdain, “is not a cookbook. Not really.” He addresses you as he would a new recruit to his kitchen brigade:
“If, from time to time, I refer to you as a ‘useless screwhead’, I will expect you to understand – and to not take it personally.” I didn’t, and I still look to him for advice.
It’s one of the well-thumbed volumes in my kitchen that I read for pleasure.
The Executive Chef, Les Halles, NYC
There are some recipes I like to make at least once a year, when the star ingredients are in season. There are the definitive (to me) recipes, but I like to mix and match authors too.
Alastair Little’s Home-dried tomatoes from Keep it Simple, and Skye Gyngell’s addictive Tomato & chilli jam from A Year in my Kitchen.
Caponata. The erudite Mary Taylor Simeti defined this fragrant sweet-and-sour aubergine dish in her authoritative Sicilian Food. Giorgio Locatelli describes four interesting variations in Made in Sicily, one for each season.
For Paté de Campagne, I look to Jane Grigson’s classic Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery. I also tore out Rowley Leigh’s recipe from the FT – the step-by-step strip cartoon makes the process easy to follow.
And at least once a year, I go back to refer to Anthony Bourdain’s recipe for veal demiglace.
It’s more than a recipe, it’s an exercise in planning and preparation, a process from start to finish, and a basis for many useful sauces.
As I read, I can hear him at my shoulder, murmuring, yelling, occasionally swearing . . . .
“Some dishes know when you’re afraid. They sense it, like horses, and will ‘misbehave’. . . Do not be afraid”.
“Let me stress again: DO NOT EVER BOIL YOUR STOCK!”
“Your butter for finishing a saucewill be ready and on station. It will be f**king SOFT”.
Bourdain on the therapeutic process of making veal demiglace:
“Let’s do dark stock first…. This stuff you just made is the mother, the source for all other sauces down the line… You can freeze this stuff in batches, large or small. I like the Julia Child idea of filling ice cube trays with the stuff, so that you can later pop out a cube at a time for small meals or for jacking anaemic sauces or stews with flavor, color, and texture.”
This demiglace is my secret weapon in the freezer. I’ve taken to using beef bones and oxtail for even more intensity. The bones and root vegetables are roasted separately before being simmered down into stock, and finally “dump in red wine” and a few shallots and reduce, reduce, reduce.
I just drop a cube or two into anything that needs the meaty depth of its wine reduction, and often add a knob of butter to make it glossy.
Anthony Bourdain in the kitchen at Les Halles
Anthony Bourdain, (that’s Th as in although, Dain as in disdain.)
I was saddened to hear of his tragic death in June 2018. I never met him; like most of us, I first came across him through his first book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, and got to know his funny, scatological, honest, entertaining style through his books and TV.
Honest? In the acknowledgements of The Les Halles Cookbook, he paid tribute to his photographer, Robert Discalfani : “No food stylist came anywhere near this project. Every plate of food you see in a photo was eaten.”
In New York, I ate Oeufs Meurette for the first time, at a brunch in Les Halles, Midtown. (Eggs perfectly poached in a red wine reduction, probably enriched with a cube of demiglace and glossy with softened butter. I still smack my lips at the memory.)
Also in New York I ate at Yasuda, his sushi restaurant of choice. I was looking for his description that took me there when I was writing about sushi recently.
I found the reference this week in his book The Nasty Bits(it was in the wrong place on the shelf) in the chapter My Manhattan.
An Adventurer in the Culinary Underbelly
Here it is. I make no apology for quoting him at length:
“When I’ve been home for a while and I need to treat myself to an expensive spirit-lifting experience, I always think sushi. And Yasuda on East Forty-third Street is the place to go for old-school Edo-style sushi and sashimi, the fish served – as it should be – near room temperature, the rice still warm and crumbly. I always book the omakase (the tasting menu, literally, “you decide”) on a day when Yasuda serves up sublime, tasty bits of screamingly fresh, rare, hard-to-get, flawlessly executed seafood. I can spend a whole afternoon there, eating whatever comes my way, working my way through every available option: mounds of sea urchin roe; top-drawer fatty otoro tuna; sea eel; yellowtail; mackerel – and the occasional surprise. On a recent visit I was served some Copper River salmon roe, before season, from the chef’s personal stash.”
“If I find myself in the neighborhood late at night, just across the street, through an anonymous office building lobby, down a flight of fire stairs to a cellar and through a plain door, is Sakagura, a huge, nearly all-Asian late-night joint with a mammoth selection of sakes and accompanying snacks. Guaranteed to inspire exclamations of “How did you find this place?!” among your envious friends.”
Anthony Bourdain, The Nasty Bits
I didn’t know about Sakagura when I first read this passage. Now I’ve been to the London restaurant of the same name, it makes perfect sense.
My wife went to his book signing for No Reservations, Around the World on an Empty Stomach when she was living and working in NYC, and brought home a signed copy.
My signed copy
His interviewer asked him about giving up his Marlboro habit after the birth of his child. The audience applauded, to which he immediately responded:
I’d read about Aragosta alla Catalana, a Sardinian casserole of rock lobster with tomatoes.
This is my free interpretation of chef Francesco Mazzei’s recipe, which I found in The Telegraph. He claims it as Calabrian. His version is an elegant, summery salad, which calls for coriander and fennel seeds in the dressing, along with Worcestershire and Tabasco sauces. I left these out, but used an Asian Sriracha chilli sauce, which gave a background warmth.
I find it satisfying to construct a salad like this in layers, it makes an attractive centrepiece with the main ingredient on top.
Lobster Catalana
Lobster Catalana
Half a cooked, dressed lobster per person. (You could substitute prawns, or a mixture of both.)
For the salad:
Mixed salad leaves.
Fresh Herbs: a handful each of basil, chopped dill, parsley, chives.
A few very thin slices of red onion, marinated in red wine vinegar. (This makes them crisper, and the taste of raw onion milder. Discard the vinegar when ready to use).
A handful of thinly sliced fennel.
Small new or waxy potatoes, boiled.
Tomatoes; I used oven dried, which were juicy and sweet (recipes in Alastair Little’s classsic Keep it Simple – “taste one, eat the tray, and start again” – or A Year in my KItchen by Skye Gyngell). You could use good fresh tomatoes instead.
Chegworth Valley cooking tomatoes, Twickenham Farmers Market
Assemble the dressing:
(I didn’t write down quantities, but these are estimates to serve 6)
A tablespoon of good mayonnaise.
A dessertspoon of sherry vinegar, or your favourite wine vinegar.
A splash of extra virgin olive oil.
The juice and zest of half a lemon, or more to taste.
A dash (half teaspoon) of Sriracha Thai chilli sauce, or Tabasco or similar.
A pinch of salt if you think it needs it.
Whisk together.
Assemble the salad:
Arrange the salad leaves and sliced onion and fennel on a platter, then scatter the potatoes and tomatoes on top. Spoon over the dressing; it can be distributed thoroughly when you come to serve.
The salad under construction
Arrange the lobster halves and claws on top to serve; you could take the meat out of the shells if you prefer.
And to drink?
A Sardinian Vermentino would be the most appropriate white; a Roero Arneis from Piemonte would also work well, or your favourite rosé.
Recommended reading:
I enjoyed the chapter on Lobster Thermidor in Tim Hayward’s The D.I.Y. Cook, and his recipe for Lobster Bisque came in very handy the following day . . . .
