Restaurant Review - The Ambrette, Canterbury

Originally published in The Kent Food & Drink Guide

“Indian food has graduated beyond Chicken Tikka Masala,” head chef Dev Biswal tells me after one of the most outstanding meals I’ve had. “But a lot of restaurants don’t show that.”

The menu, like his CV, takes south-east Asia as a starting point and heads west to Kent. A key stop on the way is Dubai, where Dev worked in top hotels cooking classical French cuisine. What he does with The Ambrette is take a generous portion of Kentish ingredients ­– 70% of the menu is locally sourced – add a handful of Indian-inspired spices and garnish with top-tier presentation and five-star service.

Other than the food, the relaxed feel is one of the best things about The Ambrette. The waiting staff are attentive without being in your face; the tables are generously spaced, giving plenty of privacy; and you can linger for hours without being hounded out to clear the table. I tried the ten-part tasting menu, which opens, like all the meals, with a mouthful-sized portion of something seasonal, in this case, pork with pea chutney and sea spinach. Packed full of flavours, it raises my expectations for the starters, my favourite being clove-smoked wood pigeon with rosemary and cinnamon-poached peach. The peach, like the mushroom samosa my partner tries, breaks so many rules yet creates something that’s so right. This really is like tasting the world anew.

Before the mains, everyone gets an espresso cup of soup of the day. My partner finds it tricky to pick a main, but goes for grilled mutton with pickled carrots and masala potatoes, and isn’t disappointed – it almost melts on the tongue. 

My tasting menu gives me two mains, hake with South Indian spices, then venison loin with spiced beetroot and pickled pears. It’s tough to pick between them, but the mung lentil kedgeree with the hake is divine, while I could happily have eaten a whole plate of the spiced beetroot.

After a shot of popping candy grenita, the desserts arrive and are just as outstanding, particularly the mango and vanilla creme brulee. I don’t need breakfast the next day, and I know when it comes to dinner, whatever I have isn’t going to get close to The Ambrette. It’s rare such quality comes at such a reasonable price, even on wine, with bottles under £20. Not to be missed.

FoodCycle’s Green & Pleasant Land dinner

Originally published on The Financial Times: How To Spend It on 05/03/16

Michelin-starred chefs get together to raise money for charity

Whoever came up with the proverb “too many cooks spoil the broth” was clearly unacquainted with the charity FoodCycle – and its Michelin-starred gala events.

Launched in May 2009, the group campaigns against food waste by collecting unwanted supermarket stock – mislabelled, damaged, over-ordered and almost-expired produce – and using it to prepare three-course meals for people who struggle to afford to feed themselves. With 29 volunteer-run projects across the UK, it has already provided more than 125,000 free meals, and is now running its second gala event to help fund its work.

The Green & Pleasant Land dinner at London’s Guildhall on April 21 will bring together seven chefs – including Giorgio Locatelli, Angela Hartnett, Shay Cooper and Cyrus Todiwala – to create a course each, and all proceeds from the £350 tickets will go to the charity. Menus are still being finalised, but the feast will include sambar masala-marinated fish with coconut-fondant potatoes, created by The Modern Pantry’s Anna Hansen, and Gloucester Old Spot porchetta with a Jersey Royal gratin courtesy of Salt Yard’s Ben Tish.

“FoodCycle is so important right now,” says Tish. “In our indulgent, careless times, it is making us understand our food wastage, then using this to help others. It couldn’t be more relevant.”

Hosted by food critic and broadcaster Jay Rayner, whose jazz band, the Jay Rayner Quartet – featuring Rayner on piano and his wife on vocals – will play live on the night, there will also be a silent auction, before the menu is rounded off with Australian chef Skye Gyngell’s almond tart with plum blossom ice cream and honeycomb.

In this case, maybe too many chefs will spoil the guests.

A twist in the tale

A review of “Blackadder’s Christmas Carol”, originally published in Swissair Inflight Magazine, December 2014

Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” is arguably the most familiar festive story in the world. However, over 150 years after he put pen to paper, some of what would become the most familiar names in TV and cinema took his tale and told it their own way. “Blackadder’s Christmas Carol”, co-written in 1988 by future romcom king Richard Curtis – creator of films including “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Love Actually” – stars Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry and “Harry Potter” star Robbie Coltrane.

Atkinson plays Ebenezer Blackadder, who, like Dickens’ Scrooge, is visited by a ghost, but ends up undergoing a rather different change of character after seeing that “bad guys have all the fun”. Laurie appears in two visions the ghost presents to Blackadder, first as a slow-witted upper-class prince – a far cry from the medical genius he’d later portray in “House” – then, with Fry, as an attendant to a futuristic queen. As for the ghost, that’s played by Coltrane, who seems to have kept hold of the costume for his role as Hagrid in “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”, which is also playing on board.