Stomachs on legs are proud to present

London is a city that's hard to unravel via the internet. For every reliable price estimation on the Squaremeal website, there's a hundred conflicting comments and reviews to weigh up, and top Time Out accolades can be meaningless (especially when it comes to Lebanese food. trust me on that).

So today I'm throwing up a few culinary highlights of our 6-week work stint in London: spots that came recommended by locals or researched by friends. A reliable way to seek out delicious grub in the capital.

FISH N CHIPS

'Wile Out' crackhouse producer DJ Zinc took us to the Butler's Wharf
Chop House on the south side of the Thames - see phone-cam picture at top. The Chop House serves what's probably the best chish & fips I've ever had, with jars of tartar sauce and mushy peas, fish unfurled from a sleeve of grease proof paper, and fat rectangular chips that were not crispy at all but so yummy and potatoey when sprinkled with malt vinegar.
DJ Zinc wisely ordered sides of baby carrots and steamed spinach ("hold the butter and garlic please").
The restaurant is near the Design museum, right on the edge of the river, and we never had trouble getting a table, which is pleasing in a city where diners love to queue. Fish n chips was the cheapest main at around 16 quid.

Butlers Wharf Chop House
36e Shad Thames, London SE1 2YE



PAKISTANI FOOD

Portuguese producer J-Wow took us to his fave London restaurant, the award-winning Tayyabs. The queue is LONG (literally takes an hour) but it is really worth it. The mixed grill is essential and the naan, chana (chickpea) masala and saag were also dope. It's BYO, and open from midday to 11.30pm. Definitely take beers to drink while you queue. Cheap! And goood.

Tayyabs
83 Fieldgate Street, London E1 1JU



BRICK LANE
Another one of our colleagues, James Pants, is a well known curry aficionado, and he tested out many Indian restaurants in London. He took us to his favourite on Brick Lane, Shampan. It was most notable for not having curry hustlers outside (the ones who tell you if you come inside you get a free drink, and then the staff inside later claim no knowledge of this mysterious drink deal). I had a xacuti curry with tamarind and toasted cumin that was pretty good, but some of the thali plates looked a bit lackluster.

Shampan
79 Brick Lane
London E1 6QL





CHINATOWN & SURROUNDS
London's Chinatown is the kind of place, late at night, where you might see a drunk brit spraying air freshener on their socks in an an alleyway. But there's also quite a few decent Chinese supermarkets and a stall selling dragon's beard candy, and another stall outside a hairdresser selling really good baozi/steamed buns (it's opposite Baozi Inn on Newport Court).

Being fans of Sichuan food and also of the writing of Fuschia Dunlop, we tried out all three restaurants at which she is a consultant: Bar Shu, Ba Shan and Baozi Inn.
To be honest, they're all much of a muchness. The fanciest and most expensive one, Bar Shu, has slightly fancier furniture and the staff wear earpiece headset things, but the atmosphere is not really posh despite the prices. My advice if you eat there is to go all the way and get a whole fish or crab, because the smaller plates (though yummy) are like really, really good home cooking. It's hard to feel they warrant the price tag.

Ba Shan (photos above and below) was just slightly better value and still tasty, though the Mapo-dofu (photo below) was a bit gluggy - we prefer the one at our local in Cologne which has tons of chillies in it. The chinese cabbage in broth with goji berries was comforting. I expect Antipodeans would find the prices quite hard to stomach.

My favourite was Baozi Inn, the cheapest restaurant of the trio: despite the uncomfortable wooden stools and the waitress making us take valuables out of our coat pockets before she hung them up. The baozi were sold out, but some reviewers say they're not the best offering there. The handmade dumplings in a slick of chilli oil were yummy, as was the flower tofu with peanuts and homemade tofu hiding under more chilli oil and ground sichuan pepper, and I really loved my red-braised pork - with its stodgy, slightly overcooked white rice.. it was good for a rainy winter evening.

Baozi Inn
25 Newport Court, London WC2H 7JS



Another decent spot in Chinatown is Haozhan, where you can get a decent meal including a couple of beers for 20 -30 quid. In the couple of years since it's opened (during which time the ex-Hakkasan chef moved on), it's become more shabby than sleek. For someone who doesn't get to eat pan-asian food often though, the singapore noodles, salt & pepper squid, small bowl of egg-fried rice, and softshell crab with curry leaves will wash down very well with your Asahi beer.

Haozhan
8 Gerrard Street, London W1D 5PJ


COFFEE
If you have a bit of time up your sleeve - say two weeks - you can do as our American coffee-loving colleague Todd Osborn did, and get up early to walk to a different coffee spot on the East side of London as research. Thanks to him we know a world champion barista at Prufrock and his Swedish colleague claim to have invented the flat white, and churn them out of a clothing store which is in turn disguised as a cigarette shop in Shoreditch.

Prufrock
140 Shoreditch High St

Other notable mentions: Tina, We Salute You in Dalston, The Whitecross Coffee Cart, Monmouth Coffee at Borough Market (they don't do soy milk), Climpson & Sons, Caravan.

Coffee with breakfast:
My London-based kiwi friends Alice & John are into serious brunching, and my favourite of their haunts is The Modern Pantry in Farringdon, with its omelette with sugar-cured prawns and smoked sambal, or poached tamarillos & yoghurt w manuka honey. They also do a caramelly version of hokey pokey ice cream that's so delicious I've been known to eat it for breakfast.

JERK CHICKEN or PATTY
For a city so famous for its nightlife, a lot of the clubs in London close quite early (they often stop serving alcohol at 2am), and good post-clubbing snacks are thin on the ground. Judy's Divine in Brixton is open til 1 or 2am, and they serve a patty between two fat slices of white bread if there's no buns. It's also just down the road from a club called Plan B, which has a Funktion 1 soundsystem and some good artist line-ups.

Judy's Divine
423 Coldharbour Lane
Brixton, London SW9 8LH





BISTRO FOOD and DUCKFAT FRIES

Last but not least, Comptoir Gascon in Farringdon has really delicious meats (pork belly with parsnip puree! and little raviolis swimming in a yummy sauce that tastes like posh mushroom soup). YUM.

Comptoir Gascon
63 Charterhouse St
Ec1, EC1M 6

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These vids are part of a NZonAir-funded website called Rattle Ya Dags, where besides kumara (sweet potato) adages, you can also see food TV host Peta Matthias speaking about how determination will help you to write books (duh) and admonishing that eating cheese and wine is better than fast food, which will "turn you into trash" - well I do declare. And Hugh Sundae gives a ginger-chicken crockpot recipe.

Below Oliver Driver speaks about the guy at the dairy.

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The good people over at Shift have published an interview with Koshi Kawachi to promote his current exhibition Tasty Buddha - The Snack Age.

The title THE SNACK AGE represents as it means, and reflects how I felt: "this age is fribble, flimsy, and unhealthy, just like snacks are." Then, you can also read "AGE" as "a-ge", which I infused a meaning for audience to uplift their feelings.

Gutfeelings member Nalika comments that this refers to the verb ageru 上げる　- to uplift, as he put it. The recent colloquial Japanese speech has expression 'agaru' (feel uplifted) and 'age age' (uplifting).

An umaibo is a deep fried snack, so ageru 揚げる(deep frying) could work as a double pun.

Embalming Potato Chip:
Cracked pieces of a potato chip are "embalmed" to be restored by a traditional technique, kintsugi.

More pictures + interview.

Tasty Buddha - The Snack Age exhibition
April 1st - 16th, 2010
pARa:siTe Gallery
Ne 24-1 Matudera-cho, Kanazawa

White bread, black bread or even rye bread? Ask your friends and neighbours and they will tell you that toast is a first-class delicacy. It tastes good and has never been the cause of anyone losing their drivers' license. It keeps you fit and your body needs it.

While in London recently, I visited one of the UK's first major Dieter Rams retrospectives at the London Design Museum close to Tower Bridge.

The stylishly be-spectacled Dieter Rams was director of design for Braun for nearly three decades.
Attractive archaic Rams pieces include the cucumber slicer in the video below and the pretty drip coffee machines.

The Braun toaster, which was selected for inclusion at the New York Museum of Modern Art, is another fine Rams creation: but it's a design innovation which may have been lost on Rams' compatriots.

Germans are not big on toast, and most people I know would not dream of toasting brown or black bread. The only bread deemed worthy of toasting in Germany is '50s-esque miniature white bread squares for toasted sandwiches, packets of which are actually labeled specifically as 'toast'.

Dieter Rams: toast visionary?

Personally I hate vegemite. I would have used Marmite. But to Nickos credit he does use ifuckup 2.0 or better known as Vegemite Cheesybite. Oh and mild cheese and a pre made base adds to Nickos pizza which is most likey to get VPN status any day now.

From last weekend's edition of the Dominion Post here in Wellington, NZ:

In 1987, Saroun Lach was one of 50 or so Cambodian refugees on a plane from Thailand, headed for New Zealand.
Mr Lach became New Zealand's champion pie maker, several times over. The walls of his Wellington Elite Cafe and Bakery in Victoria St provide a gallery for 30 framed awards, stretching back to 2000, the year he became a pie maker.

As a boy, he had been a top scholar. In New Zealand, he became first a wool sorter and later a taxi driver. Mr Lach had a fondness for a daily pie, but was very critical of many he ate, comparing one with another, and thinking that the best were few and far between.

When a bakery shop came up for sale in Alicetown, at the urging of his mother-in-law he bought it. He won Bakel's Supreme Piemaker of New Zealand, a title he would win again, along with many others. His steak, mince and cheese pies became a rapid urban legend.

He loved music, movies and his family.

He was considered a role model of industry and good citizenship in the Buddhist community. Paying tribute to him, his brother-in-law said his love would be "the roof above our heads to shelter us from storms to come".

In other words, Mr Lach will be tending that big crimped and fluted pie top in the sky.

Generally, if you try and pull this sort of shit, they label you a survivalist - but I guess femivore is a little more genteel. The NY Times invents a new word:

Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place. Given how conscious (not to say obsessive) everyone has become about the source of their food — who these days can’t wax poetic about compost? — it also confers instant legitimacy. Rather than embodying the limits of one movement, femivores expand those of another: feeding their families clean, flavorful food; reducing their carbon footprints; producing sustainably instead of consuming rampantly. What could be more vital, more gratifying, more morally defensible?

You're only one bug out bag short of a Unabomber.

It has been two months since I landed in the frozenland.

After having lived on compromised choices of food for several days, such as:

Absolutely horrible mapo tofu at an American Chinese place, and


a tacos plate that does not taste as good as it looks...


I have started cooking in the limited kitchenette shared with several others:


No full stove.
Just two induction cooktops that use magnetic heat.
There was only one right after I arrived, and I insisted to the landlord that we need one or two more.

One of the first things I cooked was chana masala:


I get the MDH spice mix at an Indian/Latin American grocery store.

Pretty soon I started attacking the bulk section of the Whole Foods Market and a European style bakery that has French and German style bread.

Tomato-based chick pea soup with German rye bread:


Tabbouleh with green lentils:



Chana masala again, with carrots/green lentils/raisins salad:


No picture, but I have also been cooking green split pea soup, 16-bean soup, red lentil dhal, and tofu dishes.

I am having a lot of fun with beans and peas, yes.

Erik & me are currently in London working on the latest edition of the Red Bull Music Academy. This means endless cups of tea (Twinings lapsang souchon or various kinds that the English have stashed around), late nights raiding the studio kitchen (bags of crisps, toasted sandwiches, bowls of dodgy egg salad), and of course, after the night has been well and truly burnt at both ends, post-club missions to Chinatown (or for the brave, a grimy spot down the road called Chicken Sizzler - nothing to do with the reggae artist). At least, it has a nicer name than the dubious-sounding chain called Chicken Cottage.

On Thursday, DJ Mayuri (organiser of Japan's Metamorphose festival) stopped by for an unofficial visit. She didn't remember me, but I rented a room in her house for a few days, about eight years ago, on my first trip to Tokyo. I had gone to Japan with next to no money, and spent a week hanging out at Mayuri's Shibuya FM show (Ed DMX was the guest), walking all over Tokyo, eating nothing but white rice with furikake and boiled eggs. This kind of experience is the flipside to the late night feasts of the nominally music-involved. Those days when you're down to small change, so you hang out in internet cafes in order to drink the free melon soda. But in exchange for a permanent state of uncertainty, you get to have all kinds of crazy experiences.

I was just checking the website for Mayuri's festival yesterday, and found these nice pictures. These days, my life is lived much less nutritionally on the edge, but the late night snacks prevail: and 4am iced cucumber skewers and traditional festival food like roasted corn and grilled fish would be a sight for sore eyes. Literally, as I've come down with a heinous cold from the London clublife.

In Korean street-food of the week, I am feeling the wintery sweet vs savoury bomb that is Hoddeok. Basically it is a dumpling, flattened to a crunchy pancake but the star if its show is the cinnamon sugar centre. You can get 3 for 2000 WON (NZ $2). They are dangerously delicious. Here is a great recipe c/o Last Appetite


Hoddeok

Ingredients – Makes 5

1 1/4 cups plain flour
6 tbsp milk
Pinch of salt

To start the yeast:
1/4 tsp dry yeast
1/4 tsp white sugar
2 tbsp water

Stuffing
1/4 tsp cinnamon
5 tbsp brown sugar

Mix the yeast, white sugar and water and leave in a warm place to ferment for 15 minutes. Sieve the flour into a bowl, add the salt, milk and yeasty water. Mix well, cover and leave to rise for two hours. Go see a movie or something.

Mix the cinnamon and brown sugar together for stuffing. Oil up your hands (if not sufficiently oiled from movie popcorn) and take about 1/5 of the dough, flatten into a thick disk and place a tablespoon of stuffing inside. Seal like a dumpling.

Add oil to frypan and heat. Place your sugar filled dumpling into the oil. When brown, turn over and flatten the dumpling into a disk with a spatula. Cook until browned.

In other news I am obsessed with Chilsing Cider, cider here means lemonade. This is the boring english side of the can, how colonial of me.


Here is my cute kid of the week Alan.
He wears this tae kwon doe outfit 24-7 and whenever he is in trouble can charm me out of it in 5 seconds. Sitting under his desk to meditate during a test searching for answers was a definite highlight. This whole class is adorable and showers me in candy for some reason, thats a culinary post for another time.

sorry....

my sister at the bow of the boat


waiheke fish haul


and flesh


austin bush's south american inspired ceviche


Hock's english inspired fish and chips (using heston blumenthal's thrice-cooked chip recipe)


Hock's Thai-inspired deep fried snapper with mango salad


cooking paella, drinking epic


Weber grill up


my sister's garden


and produce

We just arrived back in Canberra after the most wonderful holiday in New Zealand

Canberra is a 38 degree dust bowl, with no people, and nothing to do. It's all just bogans and bad food round here.

Although Australians tend to think themselves more sophisticated and cosmopolitan than New Zealand, when its a comparison between Auckland and Canberra, I'll take Auckland thanks.

Here are some photos that substantiate my overall sentiments right now.

cheap new zealand mussels and pipis around NZD 4 a kilogram



Plentiful fresh snapper which we caught ourselves in the snapper spawning grounds that are Auckland harbours


such as here


and here


Just check out those beautiful pink gills


Home-smoked kahawai


and kahawhai sashimi



and landing on deserted beaches


and cooking on our own beach