Following our adventures on Avery Island I went down to New Orleans to do a couple of gigs at the American Food Writers’ Conference. It was strangely liberating to eat out in a variety of places without the need to write anything specific. However, old habits die hard, and here are some of my notes regarding the various restaurants visited. In keeping with the spirit of the times I shall list them in reverse order and save the best for last.

Prejean’s in Lafayette, “Cajun Dining” a.k.a. vast tourist trap. Soggy fried everything. Gloopy gumbo. A deep fried cheesecake (a slice wrapped in a pancake and then crisped up in old oil). A jolly place with dire food and hen parties.

Poking fun at Brennan’s (one of the oldest and best thought of restaurants in New Orleans) is rather like saying something horrid about the late Queen Mother. It’s full of happy, smiley customers all dressed up and out for a treat. The chef is a charming, gentle fellow who has worked there for 46 years. The food is nudging its way out of 1960s into the early 1970s. There is a dish on the menu called “fillet Stanley” which teams fillet steak with a white sauce made from horseradish with plenty of cream, and then they garnish with fried bananas! In all but the finest Louisiana restaurants the predominant flavour note is sweetness. This dish was very unpleasant.

Ruth's Chris Steak House in Lafayette is rather like an upmarket Angus steak house. The steaks are good, but strangely lacking in taste. The beef is US Prime and maybe the feed lot system (they grow the steers in large pens feeding them barley) accounts for the end product – very tender almost flabby meat that is low on flavour. Nothing on the menu could touch grass grown, properly aged British beef.

Upperline is an idiosyncratic and notably popular restaurant run by an enthusiastic middle-aged lady called JoAnn Clevenger. The cooking is steady, but once again there is sugar and more sugar. Perhaps that’s what the New Orleanians want? “Tom Cowman’s roast duck” came to table as half a roast duck that had been mercilessly over-cooked and then plonked onto a mound of unadvertised sweet potato mash. Few gastropubs would have sent this plateful out.

One of my regrets is that I never got to eat at Susan Spicer’s restaurant Bayona, I did give the canapés an exhaustive trial at a reception held in the pretty garden, and suspect that had I managed to eat there properly it would probably have merited a high ranking.

GW Fins is a large, slick and buzzy fish restaurant. The chef used to be a development chef for the Ruth’s Chris organisation but the food here is a great leap forward. Stand outs were the Louisiana baby conch (that’s what you have to call whelks in the US to have any hope of selling them!)they came roast, sizzling with snail butter; the seafood gumbo; and the tuna sashimi. From the mains the Chilean sea bass (aka Patagonian Toothfish) was magnificent – a large lump first grilled and then served in a seafood nage. The stone crab claws were good. The wood grilled lemonfish (ling) was good and came with jumbo lump crab, asparagus, mashed potatoes and roast corn butter. Every restaurant in Louisiana seems to serve bread pudding – I tried half a dozen variants (avoid b-pud at Prejean’s; Ruth’s Chris; Upperline but order it at GW Fins and Mother’s).

Mother’s is an astonishing place. Yes, they have the American “over-facing” syndrome in spades – a single “po’ boy” sandwich would feed a family of four, but the food is honest and authentic. Try some “debris” – the leftover bits of beef, shreds really – implausibly delicious. Try the seafood gumbo it’s great. The ham (modestly billed as the “world’s best baked ham” since 1938) is pink and amazingly tender, rather on the sweet side. The fried chicken was a revelation – very crisp and dry outside, very tender within. A good, cheap place to eat as attested by the lengthy queue.

Both Cochon and Herbsaint are the brainchild of a very capable chef called Donald Link. At Cochon his partner is another chef called Stephen Stryjewski. The food here may be based on local dishes and hail from the Bayou but there is a sophisticated hand at work. You know that you’ll be happy when you see a menu with Jalapeno spoonbread with stewed okra; fried rabbit livers with pepper jelly toast; fried boudin with pickled peppers; fried pigs’ ears with spicy honey mustard; hen and andouille gumbo soup. Mains are good too, rabbit and dumplings; smoked beef brisket with horseradish potato salad. Good cooking and all in a light bright airy room with friendly waiting staff. This is the kind of genuine, unpretentious food you long for when in foreign parts.

Jaques-imo’s is a loud, brawling, cheap, jolly, busy, frantic place. The food is amazingly good for the price and the sixty other people in the dining room know it. Smothered chicken with biscuits; crab cakes; duck and andouille sausage gumbo; crawfish etouffee; bronzed veal chop with red flannel hash; pan fried drum (a fresh fish from the bay) with a pecan meunière sauce. Decent local beer, but the highest praise of all must be reserved for the simplest thing… as you sit down they pop a basket of hot, slightly sweet cornbread muffins onto the table – mind-bogglingly, greed-provokingly good, very crisp outside (doubtless baked on a tray crusted with lard) tender middle. Afterwards you can step down the street to the Maple Leaf, a particularly seedy bar where there are strong drinks and a live rock band. Charles Campion

Gazetteer – in the right order!

Jaques-imo’s. 8324 Oak Street, New Orleans (504) 861 0886) www.jaquesimoscafe.com Maple Leaf bar, 8316 Oak Street New Orleans (504) 866 9359) www.mapleleafbar.com

Cochon, 930 Tchoupitoulas Street, New Orleans, (504 588 2123) www.cochonrestaurant.com & Herbsaint, 701 Saint Charles Avenue, New Orleans, (504) 524 4114) www.herbsaint.com

Mother’s 401 Poydras, New Orleans (504) 523 9656) www.mothersrestaurant.net

GW Fins, 808 Bienville Street, New Orleans (504) 581 3467) www.gwfins.com

Bayona, 430 Dauphine Street, New Orleans, (504) 525 4455) www.bayona.com

Upperline, 1413 Upperline Street, New Orleans (504) 891 9822) www.upperline.com

Ruth's Chris Steak House, 620 West Pinhook Road, Lafayette (337) 237 6123) www.ruthschris.com

Brennan's Restaurant, 417 Royal St, New Orleans (504) 525 9711) www.brennansneworleans.com

Prejean’s, 3480 I-49 North, Lafayette, (337) 896 3247) www.prejeans.com

Please forgive the short intermission caused by a mission to Louisiana. I arrived safely back at Heathrow but unfortunately my suitcase did not, it’s enough to make you doubt the joys of air-travel. A couple of days later and according to the mighty computer the suitcase has landed, perhaps one day soon I will get my clothes back. To start our attack on the deep south we spent two days on Avery Island near Lafayette, which is home to Tabasco® pepper sauce and the McIlhenny dynasty – it’s an amazing place, ancient trees draped with Spanish Moss; a prosperous salt mine;  elegantly decorated wood-panelled mansions with fine Turkey carpets; huge sheds with towering stacks of oak barrels each filled with crushed peppers and salt – maturing for three years, an implausibly long time for a mass market product.

The recipe for Tabasco sauce is deceptively simple, it contains peppers, salt and vinegar, with two crucial added ingredients time and the skill. Every day another 700,000 bottles of sauce roll off the production line. What is more impressive is that this is a 200 year old family business. The saying “clogs to clogs in two generations” is often proved correct in Britain where each successive generation tends to squander the fortune accumulated by the one before. In contrast the McIlhenny clan have been making sauce for a dozen generations, and each has handed on the business in a stronger position. Some serious wealth has been accumulated and all from a single product, because despite the introduction of line extensions like the Habanero; Chipotle; and Pepper & Garlic sauces the original  little red bottle still rules the roost.

Each year a member of the family evaluates the 40 acres of peppers grown on Avery Island to select elite plants that will provide the seeds for the growers around the world – predominantly in Mexico and South America, but the McIlhenny’s are running trials as far away as South Africa. The peppers are picked by hand when each is perfectly ripe (an important bit of quality control) then they are mashed and packed into old, oak, whiskey barrels with salt and allowed to ferment before being sealed up for the long maturation process. After about three years it’s time to taste the mash, the top is knocked off the barrel and a teaspoonful extracted. The tasting etiquette is bizarre – you pop the chilli paste on your tongue and after about 5 seconds spit it out, by then (for all but the most hardened chilli-heads) the fire will have made the snot shoot out of your nose and your tear ducts go into overdrive. When the man with the iron tongue and the experience judges the paste to be ready it’s simply a matter of adding vinegar and stirring for 28 days before straining off the seeds and bottling the sauce. Tabasco sauce is a triumphant example of doing a simple thing very well, as is so often the case consistency is everything.

Charles Campion

Last week saw the final episode of a Cook’s Tour of Spain.… and before you start to mumble about “yet more gastro-travelogue”, and “must be great for the film crew” it should be noted that this series was surprisingly good. When Thomasina Miers and her sidekick Guy Grieve made their earlier programme “Wild Gourmets” for Channel Four the whole elaborate “living off the land” concept rather fell apart, foraging is a very seasonal business and you would need a couple of years to make such programmes without cheating.

The Spanish venture was much more successful. For once the researchers had managed to find some real and authentic cooks, food producers and fishermen. The elements of the programme shot in Spain were charming and informative. The other side to the format – cooking dems shot in a British kitchen – was also well done. At no point was anything dumbed down to the level of frozen mashed potato. Guy had a different role this time out, he was to be on hand at all times in case anything needed shooting and in the last episode he dutifully nailed a chamois. The animal made its way to the grill after we had seen both the kill and the gralloching in the open air – and to think that Jamie agonised over whether to show a sheep being killed!

All the recipes featured seemed accessible and interesting whether it was the light fluffy meatballs made by the matriarch of a saffron growing family or the technique for cooking beans over an open fire by stringing the whole pods on a wire, (something I shall certainly be trying this autumn). A dish of baked onions – cut a cross in the top of each and add slivers of garlic; splosh on plenty of oil; add some jamon and some blue cheese; bake in a hot oven – looked simple, honest, authentic and appetising. You could almost catch the  smell of it wafting from the screen. Thomasina has good Spanish and the happy knack of seeming interested in the local cooking techniques and styles – that enthusiasm brought the best out of the Spaniards and made the series most enjoyable. Cook’s Tour proved that cookery programmes do not have to be either gimmick laden or hardcore reality television. Sometimes they can succeed by being well made, informative and entertaining.

Charles Campion

While writing April’s monthly ingredients piece for the Evening Standard I ended up chatting with an amiable fishmonger in Barnes and the topic was wild salmon. The Scottish wild fish are becoming more numerous as the season progresses and he was saying that the price had moved from £55 per kilo to £50 and back to £55 in the last fortnight. To the home cook that means wild salmon will cost about £12 a head for a decent sized hunk and for the margin conscious restaurateur that translates as a price to the punter of £30 plus vat – over £35 a portion. Can a piece of fish ever be worth that kind of money? Surprisingly the answer is yes. When compared with the lean, toned flesh of a wild salmon the farmed variety is very much second best and how expensive something is depends very much on your viewpoint. By chance a rugby trip to the South West of France over Easter meant that I found myself wandering around the covered market in Biarritz. There were several fishmongers with magnificent displays and all proudly showing off wild Atlantic salmon from the nearby river Adour. And the price? 120€ per kilo – which by my maths means the French shoppers were paying around £100 a kilo for wild salmon. What struck me most keenly was a pang of jealousy, I wished that Britain had the kind of food culture where cooks would happily pay a king’s ransom for something that was truly excellent. You have to speculate that most Londoners would think the Barnes Fish Shop £55 a kilo for a piece of fish a bridge to far, so whatever would they would make of the £100 a kilo Biarritz price tag?

Some chefs have the culinary equivalent of perfect pitch, and often it is not the manner of their cooking so much as the way they put a menu together that makes for delighted diners. The skills on show at Theo Randall’s restaurant in the Intercontinental Hotel are exemplary but his menu planning is even better. Randall’s was the venue for the most recent meeting of the Tabasco Club – a loose association of hardened trouble makers that recruits its members from the restaurant business and the wine trade. It was the perfect Spring lunch:

Insalata di granchio – fresh Devon crab with Florence fennel, mixed Italian leaves, Tabasco aioli and bruschetta, very fresh crab, a perfect match with the crunchy slivers of fennel.

Cappelletti di vitello – delicate egg-yellow pasta with a rich veal and pancetta stuffing sauced with nothing more complicated than melted butter – delicious.

Costata di agnello – subtitled “wood roast spring rack of lamb with slow cooked peas, broad beans, mint and violet artichokes. Salsa d’erbe” Two double lamb chops perfectly cooked, pink and tender atop a splendid mound of peas, beans and artichokes (all the veg fresh and flown in from Puglia) with a chopped herb and mint salsa. I cannot wait until we have fresh English broad beans and peas, then I shall recreate this dish myself.

Amalfi Lemon tart - this was absolutely jaw-dropping, delicate pastry and a bright orange, quivering, lemony bit. Judging by the colour the filling must have been made using eggs with particularly orange yolks. It tasted remarkable – the perfect balance between sweet and sharp. A candidate for “Best-ever” status, which is all the more impressive as there are a great many magnificent lemon tarts out there.

Charles Campion

Barnes Fish Shop, 18 Barnes High Street, SW13 (020 8876 1297)

Theo Randall, Intercontinental,1 Hamilton Place, W1 (020 7409 3131)

It was 7.30pm on a Monday night but we still had to queue for the best part of an hour before getting fed at Gourmet San. Keeping pace with London’s ever-expanding portfolio of restaurants is an on-going challenge and it is always great to hear about somewhere interesting. In this instance the Chinese fishmonger at a chain of restaurants had praised Gourmet San to his boss, and he in turn recommended it to me. On the face of it the Bethnal Green Road would not be your first port of call when looking for a Chinese restaurant serving interesting dishes at bargain prices, but when you arrive you can see that Gourmet San is something special. This resto opened about a year ago, it’s small, crowded and 80% of the customers are Chinese – you have to make a special plea to get one of the three or four copies of the menu that is printed in English.

The food is magnificent, fresh, with amazing tastes and textures, lots of unusual items. The house speciality is "xingjiang style lamb on skewer" - very good indeed, dry marinated lamb kebabs - take the deal offering 12 skewers for £10. The bbq squid is good - great texture. The bbq rabbit leg is also good. Then how about "lamb and fish soup" - a well-flavoured citrussy broth with chunks of sea bass and slices of lamb, an unlikely combo but one that works terrifically well. There's lots of offal:  £6 gets you a platter with 8 or 9 braised pigs' feet - gluey and unctuous, very rich, very tender; or pork stomach with green pepper; there’s tongue; tripe; pork intestines with salt and garlic. You can order that Sichuan favourite – “sea bass boiled in spicy water” a fish is cooked in oil on top of which floats a two inch layer of dried chillies. Or there's a stellar dish of cumin fried fish - perfectly cooked sea bass. Another of the more charming dishes is one of the simplest - stir fried green beans with chillies, very crunchy, with an impressive depth of flavour and small slivers of pigs’ ear adding to the minimal, but rich, sauce. This place is open from 4.30pm until midnight with the main rush being between 7 and 9pm, so if you want to avoid the queue try very early or very late. Alternatively you could just revel in the queue you get to inspect a wide range of dishes as the waitresses wriggle their way through the crowds.

Charles Campion

Gourmet San, 261 Bethnal Green Road, E2(020 7729 8388)

Todiwala does sherry

It was no easy brief – “Let’s have an evening where we match fine sherries to Indian food”, but forty or so diners sat down to a four course dinner at Café Spice Namaste and each course was paired with a sherry from Gonzalez Byass. Cyrus Todiwala is a very cerebral chef and the menu was carefully considered:

To start pomfret mappas on Oriental coleslaw was matched with chilled Tio Pepe – surprisingly the strong flavours (sour tamarind, chilli heat, crushed peppercorns, palm vinegar) enhanced the steely crisp qualities of the Tio Pepe.

Then cinnamon and clove smoked magret of Barbary duck with a chilli cheese on toast was matched with Alfonso - a magnificent dry Oloroso. In this instance the sherry worked particularly well with the duck (many diners remarked on the affinity between the duck and Spanish jamon) but the cheese toast was a flavour too far.

The main course kari murghi nay masala na papeta was an honest Parsee chicken curry served with an elegant pulau rice made with cumin and shallots. This dish worked well with Vina AB  the single estate dry Amontillado had enough backbone to refresh the palate after the richness of the curry.

Finally it was on to the dessert course and time for Nectar to strut its stuff – we had moved from the driest wine in the world – Tio Pepe – to the sweetest Nectar is made from Pedro Ximenez grapes and has a whopping 400g per litre residual sugar. The Nectar fell into the arms of the kulfi and almond rice pudding like a long lost relative.

Charles Campion

Café Spice Namaste, 16 Prescot Street, EC1 (020 7488 9242)

www.cafespice.co.uk

www.gonzalezbyassuk.com 

Number 40 Chalcot Road is an address with “history” - at least so far as the restaurant business is concerned. It’s a corner site in agreeably affluent Primrose Hill and has been home to various endeavours from the “Pukka Bar” (accessible, modernist curry) to “Black Truffle” (one of a colour coded chain of neighbourhood restaurants). So far no one has been able to make it fly. The latest incumbent is Jean-Christophe Slowik who used to work in Marco’s Empire as front of house and he has called his restaurant L’Absinthe. As far as the décor goes he has made only one major change – filling in the large “hole” on the ground floor to make room for some more tables. The food is very sound – French bistro cooking. Think French onion soup; salad Lyonnaise; Bayonne ham with celeriac remoulade leading on to mains like duck confit with Savoy cabbage; steak frites; sea bream en papillotte; pork chop charcutiere. Good potato gratin. (Starters  £4.25-£6.95, mains £8.95-£14.50, puds £4.15).

But pleasant though it is, the menu is not the reason that L’Absinthe is so busy. Jean-Christophe is a wine lover and he has chanced his arm and done away with the usual restaurant wine pricing model. Rather than just trebling the price of everything and hoping for the best, he has divided his wine list into four categories and added a variable corkage charge to the “shop” price of each wine. You add £6 to the retail price of cheapies; £8 to middle-weights; £10 to smart wines; and there’s no corkage on anything grand cru – a reward for your good taste. In practice this means you can sit down to Bayonne ham followed by steak frites and drink a bottle of Vosne Romanee, domaine Daniel Rion & Fils 2001 that costs just £38.10. This makes for a very good dinner. We all know that we should drink less and drink better, the trouble is finding a way to finance such a strategy. Here are some of the bargains to be had at L’Absinthe:

Saint Veran, domaine Guegnon-Remond, 2006 £18.45

Puilly-Fuisse “vielles vignes”, domaine Jeandeau 2005 £27.70

Meursault “les Vereuils” domain Dupont-Fahn 2005 £35.45

Puligny-Montrachet Noyers Brets domaine Jean-Marc Pillot 2005 £38.35

Pena Roble, Bodegas Resalte, Ribera del Duero, 2005 £18.25

Chateau Bornac, cru Bourgeois Medoc 2001 £23.50

Chateau Cantenac-Brown, Margaux 1996 £55.00

Chateau Pichon-Baron, Pauillac 1996 £85.00

At last a real incentive to drink good wine. Fortunately the good folk of Primrose Hill seem knowlegeable and appreciative so when they see Margaux at £55 a bottle they pounce on the bargain rather than merely thinking “£55 is rather expensive for six glass of wine”. They also respond to Jean-Christophe’s obvious passion. We could do with more restaurants like this.

Charles Campion

L'Absinthe, 40 Chalcot Road, NW1 (020 7483 4848)

Having gone on at some length about the menu-writing skills of Rowley Leigh and the part they played in the runaway success of newcomer Le Café Anglais it’s a pleasure to see that he is not alone. Mark Hix is the latest chef to take on the challenge that is the Grill at Brown's Hotel on Albemarle Street, he is “a consultant” which seems to mean that he directs matters, creates the menu, recommends the suppliers, and appoints a new chef – in this instance the talented Lee Streeton with whom he worked in his previous incarnation as chef director of Caprice Holdings. You can always tell when a menu is a real whizzer, that’s when, as you read it, every item seems to scream “eat-me”.

Try deciding which of these starters to have: fried monkfish cheeks with caper mayonnaise; potted Morecambe Bay shrimps; treacle-cured salmon with pickled fennel and cucumber; Romney Marsh beetroot salad with Golden Cross goats’ cheese; chicken livers on toast with chanterelles; or baked razor clams? There is nothing listed that doesn’t appeal.

The rest of the menu is littered with dishes that combine simplicity with carefully sourced ingredients and hearty Britishness – rabbit braised in cider with wild garlic; pan-fried Burford Brown egg with baby squid and black pudding; Blackface mutton and turnip pie; lamb cutlets with kidney and bubble and squeak; skate wing with brown butter, capers and brown shrimps.

I haven’t eaten at the Grill during a regular service, but I did have lunch there at a long table with various suppliers including the man behind Cornish Sea Salt (well packaged, tastes salty, sustainably produced – since you ask). The overall standard of cooking was excellent and Lee Streeton looks like being a man to watch. One dish was exceptional – delicious, contrasting textures, elegant and simple. It was a slightly salted chunk of cod with mashed potato. Mark Hix makes no bones about stealing the idea for the dish from a Michelin spangled Frenchman but it has been refined and perfected. You take a thick fillet of cod and then pack it in salt for half an hour, this pulls some of the water out of the flesh so that when you cook it the flesh becomes meaty and flaky (to get the best flakes it must be a thick fillet), the potato (which could be more accurately described as butter with some potato added) is very sloppy and acts as both sauce and seasoning. The charm of the dish lies in the contrast between firm flakes of fish and ultra smooth purée. When it is plated the hunk of cod sits atop some buttered sea vegetables. A truly outstanding fish dish.

Charles Campion

The Grill at Brown's Hotel, 33-34 Albemarle Street, W1 (020 7493 6020) www.brownshotel.com

There is  continuing debate about defining the “right” moment to visit a new restaurant, one school of thought has it that the moment the doors are open (and often sometimes before the paint is dry) restaurants are ready for review. The writers and editors in this camp always say that as soon as a resto is charging full price the it is fair game. The opposing argument runs along the lines of “give them a chance to settle in” and mirrors a tried and tested strategy – who wants to be the first person to use new computer software or operating systems? XP will do very nicely for another year or two  yet while boffins work out any unforeseen glitches in Vista. But while waiting a while before visiting may get you better service and a better dinner, it too presents problems because you cannot help read what everyone else has written about a new restaurant before forming your own opinion.

And so it was with Urban Turban, Vineet Bhatia’s new establishment on Westbourne Grove. I start from a standpoint of admiration – Vineet has always been a terrific cook the food was good at the Star of India, then at Zayka and currently his chic Chelsea Michelin spangled kitchen Rasoi. That’s a pretty convincing C.V. and many splendid meals.  However it has taken me until now to get in to see the Urban Turban and I did so burdened with the knowledge that others had found the service very poor, the waiters rude, the portions small and “un-authentic” (whatever authentic means) and the prices high.

The room is large and dominated by an island bar, the seating at the round tables around the periphery is a combination of banquettes (comfortable) and stools (less so). The service seemed fine and considering the complexity of some dishes the food arrived in good time. As for authenticity – you would expect the street food of Mumbai to undergo a few tweaks on its journey to London W2. The menu leads with “desi tapas” A.K.A. the starters – sample a few and then move on to a curry. A good option is the “platter” which serves two people and costs £12 a head. It’s not a platter. It’s a perspex stand and the six different dishes are presented in cones of paper. Don’t worry, Vineet has form for extravagant presentation (at Rasoi a soup used to come to table in a china cup that appeared to defy gravity due to being secured on a vertical saucer by a magnet).

The paper cones are quirky but not offensive. The contents are delicious – machli Amritsari – goujons of white fish in spiced batter - well judged; lamb seekh kebab – a little dry, but well spiced; chicken lollipos – delicious, crisp and tender; chilli chicken – agreeably hot; khandvi – rolled pancakes, interesting texture; and potato chat – like moody potato salad. Good flavours and textures. Good fun. Set aside the aberration that is the “volcanic rock grill platter – cook scallop, prawn, swordfish, lamb rolls, chicken tikka on a hot volcanic stone at your table”. What this means is you get to warm up chicken tikka etcetera, unless they bring a tandoor to the table you will never be able to cook these dishes yourself. Cooking on hot stones was a fine gimmick in country pubs during the early 1980’s and that’s where it should have stayed. The “mains” at Urban include a very decent lamb biryani with crust – very good raita; a spicy Punjabi chicken masala that is indeed suitably spicy; and a smoked aubergine and pea masala that manages to be very light. The breads are fine, if on the small side. It is a pleasure to eat dishes where the spicing has not been toned down and messed about with, at the Urban Turban what should be chilli hot is chilli hot.

Overall, (and as is evident from a packed restaurant on a Tuesday night) Vineet is getting it right, even if the presentation of dishes can sometimes get too involved. The food is good, and at about £35 per head in W2 it is neither cheap nor expensive, the service seems sound and the room had an agreeable buzz to it. All of which makes you wonder if that is what this restaurant was like during those first frantic days when the reviewers piled in.

Charles Campion

Urban Turban, 98 Westbourne Grove, W2 (020 7243 4200)

Perhaps, (as touched on by this blog last November) the future of the gastropub lies in them morphing into neighbourhood restaurants? If so the Carpenters Arms in W6, and Paradise by way of Kensal Green in W10, have got things right. These two establishments serve very good food, they may have contrasting styles and differing décor but then they reflect different locales. What they do have in common is that they both offer very accomplished cooking. The kitchen at the Carpenters is home to Paul Adams who used to be in charge at the Pig’s Ear in Chelsea. And should you get to Paradise you’ll find that Tim Payne is cooking there – he served time with Marco.

The Carpenters Arms still looks like a pub. The dining area is small and the kitchen is tucked away. It’s a comfortable, friendly, informal place. You may end up choosing between chickpea soup with dandelion; a beetroot, squash, goats' cheese and walnut combination; rock oysters; crab, Savoy cabbage, red onion soft boiled egg and toast - sparkling fresh crab, the brown meat spread on toast. Or  a very respectable plate of Spanish cured meats. Mains range from a well made tomato risotto; to a couple of chunky wild boar chops with kale; or a pair of roast quail served with chips. Grilled calves' liver, hispi cabbage and cauliflower is a simple dish done well. A large slab of pollack comes with potted shrimps and lentils - very delicious. Puds are modernist but appealing - affogato al caffe or a bitter chocolate tart.

At Paradise you walk through the pubby bit into a very stylish dining room, the atmosphere is genuinely shabby-elegant - splendid glass chandeliers, swagged curtains, random tables and chairs. But the level of cooking here lofts it into the upper branches of the gastropub tree. Dishes benefit from cheffy touches - a starter like Jerusalem artichoke soup is lifted by adding some trompette mushrooms. The charcuterie work is very accomplished - a parfait of foie gras and chicken livers is just about parfait and potted ham hock and parsley with mustard dressing is unreservedly delicious. From the mains, roast rump of Swaledale lamb comes with clams and Dauphinoise potatoes; confit pork belly comes with roast langoustines and creamed potatoes. Or how about wild halibut with chanterelles and confit garlic? A side order of cauliflower cheese nearly steals the show - good cheese makes all the difference. Puds are top notch - a splendid crème brulée; and a dark chocolate mousse with salted caramel swirl vie for your attention.

Both places feature friendly rather than slick service and both fall into the same price bracket. Roughly speaking starters are between £4 and £9, mains are between £12 and £17, with puds £5 to £8.50 (but that’s for cheese). Both wine lists combine good middleweights with some cheaper options. But what stands out at both the Carpenters and Paradise is that the standard of cooking is very high indeed, and in the end good cooking is not so commonplace that we need not make a special effort to support it.

Charles Campion

The Carpenters Arms, 91 Black Lion Lane, W6 (020 8741 8366)

Paradise by way of Kensal Green, 19 Kilburn Lane, W10 (020 8969 0098) www.theparadise.co.uk

It was a sad day when Udit Sarkhel shut up shop at his rather good restaurant on Replingham Road SW18 and moved to Brighton in pursuit of a new life as a painter. In twenty years spent cheffing Sarkhel had an influential and lengthy spell in the kitchens of the Bombay Brasserie, before going on to set up his own place - Sarkhel’s – a restaurant where he proved once and for all that Indian cooking does not have to be dumbed down to do well in the suburbs.

Now he’s back. Hurrah! He’s a little more harassed than he used to be (smaller kitchen and much less help) but since the Autumn of 2007 he has returned to the stoves. This time it’s in the kitchen of a small neighbourhood restaurant in Sheen called Mango & Silk. Once again we are talking very sophisticated cooking and spicing but in pleasantly informal surroundings. It is a real treat to get food as good as this, (and at prices as reasonable as this) in what is a local restaurant.

Several of the starters are worthy of mention, the Hyderabadi Chicken Sixers is a long established Udit special. There’s a complicated and possibly spurious tale of cricket games and hitting sixes that is supposed to explain the name but this dish is made from chicken wings, trimmed so that when the meat shrinks it almost looks like a drumstick. The balance of meat to skin means that they taste very juicy and they come with a magnificent hot and sharp sauce. Simple stuff like the lamb samosas are very good indeed, crisp pastry, well spiced filling. Or there’s a stunning Goan prawn balchao - large prawns and a rich sauce served with bread. What impresses most about these dishes is the integrity of the spicing, they are not dumbed-down in any way and the "hot" dishes are gratifyingly hot. Mains continue the theme  there's jardaloo ma gosht - a Parsee dish of lamb and apricots; a wonderful prawn patia - king prawns in rich gravy with chunks of aubergine and red pumpkin; kozhi vartha kosambu - a South Indian chicken curry made with coconut. Or a Mangalorean fish curry – Udit is good with fish and seafood. The breads are particularly fresh and praiseworthy. Great food and reasonable prices (as a rule of thumb the starters don’t often exceed £6 and the mains stay around the £7 mark). Welcome back Mr Sarkhel.

Charles Campion

Bombay Brasserie, Courtfield Close,SW3 (020 7370 4040)

Mango & Silk, 199 Upper Richmond Road West, SW14 (020 8876 6220)