From simple picnics of bread and cheese on park benches to Michelin-lauded establishments of the culinary elite, my mother and I ate our way across both the city and the countryside. Through well-laid plans as well as happy coincidences, our meals were shared with old friends from all over the world either living in Paris or happening to travel through the region at the same time.

One of the amazing things about Paris is how easy it is to find incredible food on every corner, from boulangeries to patisseries to shops teeming with foie gras or artisan chocolates.  We started one day at Sainte-Chappelle on Ile de la Cite, a popular tourist destination that was completely worth the wait…

and then proceeded to visit another the spectacular sight of Paris – the fromagerie.

This shop, on Ile-St-Louis, featured a front window display teeming with chevre of all shapes and sizes.  Some looked like moldy grey logs, others like newly hatched dinosaur eggs, others like petrified stones or lumpy balls of grout scraped off your shower tiles.  But the inside…smooth and creamy and bursting with earthy, grassy flavour.

That’s some French chevre, up close and personal. Best to be eaten in a small park behind Notre Dame with some paté from the bucherie, a fresh baguette from the boulangerie, and rhubarb nectar from the gourmet shop round the corner.

Our massive picnic on the Seine unfortunately left us too full to sample the wares of the street market behind the Hotel de Ville. But next time I’m definitely going back for these potatoes, which are probably fried in goose fat or sausage lard or something equally naughty and French.

To contrast with the steaming hot, oil-splattering grease bombs above were gorgeously speckled beans…

…thick stalks of white asparagus and tiny bitty shoots of what I think is wild baby asparagus on the right, like something you’d find in a field and mistake for a weed rather than a perfect little bite of springtime.

I was curious as to how it would taste, and was lucky enough to get a chance to eat some later that evening, at one of the best meals of my life…

More France to come!

Only in Athens can you have your moussaka with a colorful rainbow-bright salad of shiny purple olives, green peppers, and red tomatoes,  a side plate of olive oil and herb-dusted grilled bread and an accompanying view of the Parthenon.

You can also visit one of the most hardcore, badass, no-yuppie-bullsh*t central markets I’ve ever had the pleasure (and underlying sense of intimidation) of wandering through. This ain’t no Mercado de San Miguel in Madrid , lushly teeming with expensive port and tapas with caviar and design nerd tea towels.  This is a serial killer basement of unidentified animal dismemberment. If you’re squeamish, I’d just stop right now…

Okay. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. And I’m doing it again.

Now, imagine your local butcher shop (which may not exist as a concept if you live in the States) and multiply it by about fifty. Then fill it with dozens of men in bloody aprons carrying brutishly large knives who all will approach you as you walk through (admittedly, somewhat unprepared in a tank top and short-ish skirt) and very loudly proclaim in Greek and broken English and attempted Chinese that they very much want to…be your friend. Or something like that. Unfortunately, I  don’t speak Greek.

It was a serious gauntlet of dead animal parts and aggressively friendly butchers.  Here’s what it looked like.

It’s obviously not the kind of market where you go to, say, buy a snack.  Unless you like eating…what are these, dinosaur heads?

Sorry.  I tried to warn you. I have absolutely no idea what animal those came from.  It was as far away from sanitized, styrofoam-and-plastic-wrapped, this-only-differs-from-a-steak-in-that-it-needs-a-few-minutes-on-the-grill, supermarket meat as I’ve ever been.  You can’t pretend that these don’t come from an animal when the entire skinned body is hanging in front of you.

A few of the stalls appeared to exist only in order to showcase the parts of the animal you never knew existed.  The parts that really should remain hidden inside a body cavity and never viewed by anyone except a trained professional. I’m partially fascinated to know if these items can ever be transformed through the magic of cooking into something fantastically delicious, and partially quite sure I never want anything of that texture to get anywhere near my mouth.

I wonder what this little girl is thinking about the enormous buckets of animal intestines in front of her.

After extricating myself from the clutches of several enthusiastically chatty men wielding cleavers…

I made my way into the seafood section. It felt like wandering into a black market aquarium back room, with  seawater an inch deep sloshing over my sandals.  You could buy just about every conceivable fish, ranging from the smallest of sea creatures…

to what might possibly be some sort of bisected shark body.

The beast above looked much bigger in person than it does in the photo. It was most assuredly the largest diameter of fish body I have personally ever seen for sale in one piece.

You could also purchase nearly every possible variation of bottom-dwelling crustacean, mollusk, or bivalve…

small fresh fish, I think sardines, by the shovelful…

…and what looked to be their delicious cured counterparts packed in salt.

Since I was flying back to London that evening and didn’t want to be seen as:

A) a crazy person bringing raw fish on a plane by my thoroughly disgusted fellow passengers, or

B) an absolute psychopath by a poor airport employee encountering a severed and skinned animal head during a routine security check

I refrained from purchasing anything in the main section of the market.

I did, however, continue to wander around the outskirts in search of exciting Greek edibles and more snack-friendly fare and found a few tiny little storefronts full of herbs and nuts and dried fruit. I bought almonds and figs and honey and tasted dried cherries from a nice elderly Greek couple.

I love the endless displays of dried, harvested, cured, and otherwise well-preserved food…

huge vats of raisins and enormous boxes of nuts of all varieties…

and a great wall of herbs and spices of all colors.

We’ll end with my favorite daily snack of my altogether too short trip to Athens: the ubiquitous seeded circle of bready deliciousness, available on nearly every street corner of the city.

Okay, actually, we have to end by coming back to where we started. From far off in the distance with a table of Greek food or up close and personal under the construction scaffolding, the Parthenon is an incredible sight…

I always wish I had access to a table large enough to seat 20 of my best friends around it for an epic dinner party. I still haven’t managed to acquire such a table or a room large enough to put it in, but I got a taste of what it might be like at a great event last night called the Hub Feast.  It’s a potluck and a dinner party,  a chance to meet great people and talk about all sorts of cool food things, and an opportunity to make an unnecessary amount of insanely indulgent peanut butter cream cheese-frosted cupcakes.  What more could you ask for?

The event took place at one of the Hubs:  a network of beautifully designed office/event/social spaces for members and their guests to work, meet, connect,  innovate, and more, located as close as Islington (the first one) and as far as Bombay and Sao Paulo. I’ve visited the gorgeous wood-beamed and exposed brick-walled Hub King’s Cross a few times to meet with our friends at Hide & Seek and so was excited to return for one of their monthly community feasts, described as follows:

The programme of Feasts for 2010 is well under way now and this month, we’ll be looking at Guerilla Food. Across London, there are people running underground restaurants, growing things in weird and wonderful places, cooking in unpredictable locations and using food in ways previously not explored. If you want to meet these people and find out a bit more about what they’re up to, we invite you to come along.

As always, you can expect to sit next to people who love food, cooking it, talking about it and most of all, eating it. So bring both an open mind and a dish to share to eat with people that love all things food. An informal evening with a very loose agenda, we hope to create a feast where conversation about food, life, love and everything in between, can flow freely.

We’ve been chatting with the lovely Hub folks including Holly, Alex, Lucy, and Eleanor about doing some events, so they invited us down to chat about Rambling Restaurant and underground supper clubs and all things delicious and exciting.  It all sounded like  pretty much like my ideal evening, so Sarah, foodrambler and I baked up a storm of lemon curd meringue roulades and several batches of the most insanely deliciously orgasmic Banana Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Cream Cheese Frosting.

A quick aside on these cupcakes: I’d recommend you don’t click that recipe. In all seriousness…it will haunt your dreams. The banana cupcakes are very good; the peanut butter cream cheese frosting will bring you to your knees in pure tastebud joy.  The sublime happiness is only slightly marred by the guilty knowledge that the peanut butter (fat) plus cream cheese (fat) plus salted butter (fat) plus icing sugar in this frosting  is probably at work hardening your arteries as soon as the  cupcake crosses your lips and the smile crosses your face.  However,  keep in mind that all this tasty fat and sugar are calories that humans are genetically hardwired to love. This means it is not my fault when I eat gargantuan mounds of the frosting piped onto cupcakes (dangerous), slathered onto apples (healthy!), spread onto bananas (still good!), licked off of several kitchen tools (not so much) and then, finally, by the unabashedly deliberate spoonful.  I guarantee you will do the same. Blame biology.

But back to the feasting – it was a lovely evening of meeting, chatting, and of course, lots of eating. We went around the table and introduced ourselves so everyone got to see who was there and their cool projects and organizations and affiliations. I had great conversations about cooking and food spaces with Holly from Food Stuff and talked sustainable food development with some great people from Forum for the Future and saw but didn’t get enough time to chat with Chris from the Real Bread Campaign.  Meanwhile I ate fresh bread, hummous, spicy ginger carrot beetroot salad, Spanish omelette, flapjacks, apple crumble, spinach and strawberry salad, couscous, roasted vegetables, and so much more.  One of my favorite dishes was an amazing wait-a-minute-this-is-vegan?-you-must-be-joking leek pie made by a really nice guy named Alessio, whom I tackled after dinner to express my delight in his dish and ask his secret. Apparently, it’s soy cream. Don’t worry, it’s not actually a secret.

It was a wonderful occasion to meet a lot of creative, friendly, interesting people, all equally in love with food and cooking and community and eating.  I’m excited for the next one.  You can come along too, but only if you promise to take home some cupcakes so I don’t have to.  I still have some leftover frosting in the fridge and it is calling to me to come eat it with a big spoon…

]]> http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/04/29/community-feasting-and-the-best-cupcake-frosting-you-may-ever-put-in-your-mouth/feed/ 3 http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/04/29/a-night-of-moulin-rouge-at-the-rambling-restaurant/ http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/04/29/a-night-of-moulin-rouge-at-the-rambling-restaurant/#comments Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:43:16 +0000 mei http://eatfamilystyles.com/?p=3229

Welcome to the Moulin Rouge Ramble, a dimly lit den of cabaret, cake  & corsets that popped up on Great Windmill Street a few weeks ago.  Hosted by the amazing word-of-mouth agency 1000heads, decorated by the creative visionary Ali O’Malley, and captured on film by the fantastically talented Mark, it was quite the evening to remember…as long as you didn’t down too many absinthe cocktails.

Come check out Mark’s amazing photos of our ephemeral Parisian creation filled with candlelit erotic poetry, beef bourguignon,  fishnet stockings and freeflowing champagne…

I tell you no lies when I mention the freeflowing champagne, generously supplied by the astonishingly accommodating, friendly, and up-for-anything folks at 1000heads.  Lined up in the soaring foyer of their Soho office building were dozens of champagne flutes, ready to welcome our diners who had solved mysterious clues of translation and location to turn up cabaret-clad in front of the Windmill Club for a night of adventure.

More meals should involve top hats and feathers.

All that week, we’d cooked and cleaned and baked and transported and decorated, up to the very last minute. Below, we add last-minute touches while the dancers practice their burlesque routines.

Thankfully, our dedicated team had everything looking spectacular by the time everyone arrived.

The Rambling Restaurant was lucky to have the most dedicated and gorgeous team of corseted and feathered servers from 1000heads, including the wonderful Lauren, Lisa, Donna, Gemma, Nicola, Sam, and even more who pitched in to hang curtains, wash dishes, move tables and boxes and abandon their desk and office space to our bizarre activities.  Below, Lauren and Lisa begin to take the cornichons and carrot salad out to be served with crusty baguettes & butter and foodrambler’s delicious pork rillettes.

The large flatscreen television gives away our boardroom-as-kitchen, from which we served and stewed our three course meal.

Here foodrambler and I spoon up slow-cooked beef stew with parsley cream sauce. While I loved the earthy combination of wine and spices in the bourguignon, it doesn’t make for the prettiest presentation.  That was one of the many lessons we learned while serving 140 eaters over 2 nights, as well as very important ones on keeping food hot and timely for people.  Just as foodrambler flambéed about 25  saucepans of beef that made her kitchen erupt in flames, we jumped straight into the fire for this dining challenge and learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t as we went along that will be valuable for future events.  Most useful information learned: how to rock a corset-apron combination.  So much wisdom gained over this experience.

Back in the satin-draped dining room, people showed off their masks and moustaches…

and displayed their amazing handmade Moulin Rouge themed hats (well done Ailbhe)…

and talked and ate and admired the decorations…

…and participated in a fancy dress competition led by the deliciously scandalous poet Abi Palmer…

…and even found love at the Moulin Rouge.

But mostly, I think, they drank….

and drank…

…and drank.

We certainly contributed by handing out a very strong absinthe cocktail that we called the Drunken Fairy, but is generally known as Death In The Afternoon. Judging by the feedback from some aching heads the next day, it’s pretty apparent why.

I acknowledge I had quite a strong hand with the absinthe from Liqueurs de France …

but it’s much more fun to blame it all on Nicola the Green Fairy.

Some of my favorite photos of the evenings are of the favorite people I met, including the shot of this laughing lady…

and this adorable photo of our sexy dancers, the Chitty Chitty Bang Bangs. I only wish I had been hardcore enough to go out dancing with them till 6am like some impressive people I know.

Even if you don’t go clubbing with dancers in fishnets, you at least need to fit in a photo shoot in front of the Windmill Club.

Before our late night marathon dancing and cleaning sessions, we ended with a very sticky Moulin Rouge Velvet cake. I loved foodrambler’s chocolate fishnet stockings, threatening to slide off the tilting cake into a pool of buttery frosting madness.  I cut the red velvet cake into shocking scarlet slices that looked insane but tasted damn good.

And of course, everything tastes better with birthday candles.

Thanks a million to everyone involved. For more on the event, check out blog posts by foodrambler and 1000heads.

All photos copyright by Mark, except the last one from 1000heads.

This image is courtesy of Hyperbole and a Half, a blog that had our office on its knees in paroxysms of laughter for a good portion of the workday. Thanks, H+1/2, for destroying our productivity like a 7000% deadly shark-sloth.

Anyway, those links. Here’s some cool stuff we’ve been reading when not stuffing our faces with defenseless chocolate creatures.

Eat-onomics: The Ten Most Inspiring People in Sustainable Food [Fast Company]

Q&A with Chef Dan Barber: Can Organic Farming Feed The World? [TED Blog]

People Who Photograph Food and Post the Pictures Online [New York Times] Who are these freaks?

Jamie Oliver’s TED Wish: Teach Every Child About Food [TED]

20 Fascinating Lectures for Serious Foodies [Online Universities] Lots of our faves here, from Malcolm Gladwell to Dan Barber to Jennifer 8.  Lee to a ‘renegade lunch lady.’

How To Make Perfect Pork Crackling [Guardian] Finally, a decent reason to buy a hair dryer.

Q & A: Oscar Week: Food Inc. Director Robert Kenner [TIME] Yeah….this was from a long time ago.

I love salmon nigiri, I love cucumber maki, I really love shrimp tempura and avocado hand rolls and, as the mini button says, I love Yelp.  Thanks to the brilliant folks on the Yelp team here in London, I got to attend a sushi-making class at the brand new location of the paper crane-bedecked, double-fried soy garlic ginger chicken-producing Tsuru Sushi.  In case you’re wondering, I also love paper cranes and all things double-fried.

Two things I discovered about sushi last night:

1) It’s really fun to get your hands (and face and sweater and hair and that of nearby friends) sticky with rice, play with your own sushi roller, ogle trays of shrimp tempura, squirt massive amounts of mayonnaise, and generally get all up in a sushi-making mess.  And even though I’ve always been in awe of the many years  of training to make sushi and even just to correctly prepare the rice, it gave me a newfound respect for sushi chefs and their immaculate, aesthetically perfect (not to mention delicious) creations when compared to our overstuffed rice bombs.

2) Writing about sushi leads to a lot of really entertainingly terrible puns. I’ll treat you to the best of the worst, stolen straight from my Yelp review of this fantastic Elite Event.

Having recently been to a Jameson and Guinness-drenched St. Patrick’s Day Party and a sparkly off-the-shoulder and neon pink leggings-rocking bowling party, I can tell you that Yelp is totally on a roll with the Elite events. I, however, am about to rock your brain with puns so terrible you’re going to roe-ll in your grave. And you’ll be ig-nori-ing these delicious pictures to run for cover from the ridiculousness. But seriously, this Elite event raw-ked.

Sushi maki-ng was so much fun – my favorite was the shrimp tempura hand roll, which starts with a rectangle of nori in the left hand and a small golf- or large ping pong- or indeterminately testicle-sized ball with the right.  Smoosh your ball into a square of rice on the left side of the seaweed rectangle and make a tiny button of rice on the bottom right corner for later sealing. 

You then squizzle on a fatty stripe of mayonnaise (and a rogue perpendicular cross of wasabi and sesame seeds, just because you feel like it).

And then comes the bristling deep fried magic wand of crunchy battered prawn accompanied by its trusty green avocado sidekick. Hello my lovelies.

Fold, roll, press, seal, stuff into mouth awkwardly because the massive cone of awesome is too large for one bite.  Mmm.  Emma, one of the friendly, knowledgable, welcoming, Prosecco-pouring owners, told us about the restaurant history, chatted about their as-much-local-and-sustainable-as-possible mission, and handed out magically addictive bites of  crunchy soy ginger garlic double-fried chicken. Which is great because anything double-fried makes miso very happy. She also sliced our cucumber maki into smoothly sheared little cylinders with a worryingly sharp knife. I’ve always had trouble with cutting aesthetically pleasing slices when rolling sushi at home, and that is apparently because my knives are not sharp enough to slice open the jugular vein of an armoured rhinocerous with a casual swipe. Point taken.

We got to make salmon nigiri from beautiful slices of Scottish salmon.

That enormous fatty striped piece of buttery melting perfection became this only moderately malformed little mound of nigiri.

We also got to wear aprons! Fun! Here are Chris and Abi in sexy plastic gear feasting on our handmade masterpieces.

The food just kept coming. Besides our own rather unattractive yet tasty creations, we ate eggplant skewers and prawn crackers and wasabi peas and pork gyoza and more sushi with crab and salmon and prawn tempura and stuffed ourselves to the point of nori-turn. All in all, it was a uni-quely awesome event in a great restaurant filled with lovely people. Get yourself to Tsuru prawn-to. Make sure you eat the Chicken Kara Age.

Enough puns, you say? Shoyu can’t take it anymore? Are you bento-ver in pain?

I am soy soy sorry.

I spent what might be the ideal local/urban/farming/foodie Saturday in San Francisco during my visit last month.  Ferry Building Farmers Market + Alemany Farm + dinner with friends to feast on all our accumulated goods = serious eating happy times.

It started at one of my favorite places of porkaliciousness on the planet, the San Francisco Ferry Building Farmers Market…

Where you can buy color-drenched stalks of rainbow chard ranging from pale banana yellow to deep red wine burgundy…

…and stuff your mouth with bountiful free samples of the brightest, most vibrant, flavor-bursting oranges.

But it’s so much more than just a farmers market – it’s a prepared food/street cart/mobile restaurant festival of serious quality meals on disposable plates as well.  All sorts of new snacks have appeared since I last visited the market a year ago, including an array of porkaliciousness from 4505 Meats (photo at top) like maple breakfast sausage rolled and baked in brioche or a muffaletta sandwich (Salami, smoked mortadella, terrine, Gruyère, and olive salad on a poppy-seed bun) or their famous chicharrones.

I’d already eaten a smoked salmon – meyer lemon – homemade cream cheese on sourdough bread sandwich from Holy Smoke, the stall I used to work at with the fabulous Sally and Cap’n Mike, so sadly I could only fit in a tiny snack from another newcomer since I last visited the market, Namu. I’d been wanting to try their ‘Asian-inspired new California cuisine’ for ages, and never made it up to their restaurant in the Richmond before moving. So I was excited to visit their stall at the Ferry Building, offering everything from kimchee fried rice to yuzu French toast to okonomiyaki.

I ended up with a fantastic little bite of meaty happiness known as the real Korean ‘taco’: a ssam-style ‘taco’ with seasoned rice, kalbi short ribs, daikon and kimchee salsa, kimchee remoulade, and homemade teriyaki wrapped in Korean and Japanese toasted seaweed. Brilliant.

I loved it – inventive and playful, with a rich, punchy undercurrent of teriyaki sweet and salty soy flavor from the short ribs topped with a layer of pickly freshness from the daikon kimchee salsa, all bundled in a toasty blanket of chewy yet crackly seaweed.

I only wish I had room in my stomach for cookies from Miette…

…or a fried egg panino with pancetta and provolone, or slow-scrambled eggs with crostini and crescenza, or broken farro porridge with raisins and almonds from another new (to me, at least) addition Il Cano Rosso.

I’ll just have to come back again soon. And drink Blue Bottle coffee and eat Kika’s Treats caramelised chocolate graham crackers from La Cocina with a bag of oysters and sausage on a stick in the sunshine by the Bay Bridge.

But I couldn’t eat a week’s worth of meals at the Ferry Building, although I’d like to (every day). It was farm time, so off I went to San Francisco’s amazing Alemany Farm. Until next time, Ferry Building!

Up next -  fava bean leaves, collard greens, and massive piles of horse shit at the farm…

]]> http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/04/18/san-francisco-eating-happy-times-at-the-ferry-building-farmers-market/feed/ 0 http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/04/15/almost-99-bottles-of-wine-on-the-wall-and-nearly-99-courses-to-follow/ http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/04/15/almost-99-bottles-of-wine-on-the-wall-and-nearly-99-courses-to-follow/#comments Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:52:47 +0000 mei http://eatfamilystyles.com/?p=3118

Imagine a world where your bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich comes in one surprising multitextured bite of  Essence of BLT. Where Death of Elvis is a completely bizarre and completely delectable mouthful of  solid yet somehow softly melting banana, peanut butter, nutella and jam.  Where the cheese never seems to end and where the wine flows like the water dripping from the ceiling…

It sounds like Wonderland, but don’t be fooled by the 7 foot tall cross-dressing Alice in spectacularly tall heels opening the door. It’s 99, a pop-up restaurant run by friends Whetham and Dave, who have combined their impressive and inventive artistic, hosting, and culinary talents to create a spectacular and stomach-busting evening of performance, gastronomy and often a topsy-turvy combination of the two.

I was honored to be invited along to help out in the kitchen on the final night of 99’s first run. Donning pristine chef’s whites in the kitchen of their Victorian mansion in Hackney, I joined chefs Dave and Hugo to whip, dip, bread,  layer, chop, and see the magic happen behind the scenes.

I sailed into the kitchen late in the afternoon with much of the prep and difficult work already done so I jumped straight in  helping to prepare some venison scotch eggs. Dave had already made a venison sausage mixture and soft-boiled eggs and my job was to dip and encase in bread crumbs, dip and encase. All the better to deep fry with. Mmm. I’m quite excited to make these on my own sometime soon.

Here’s a glimpse of Hugo’s pop art plated version, with a shockingly green wild garlic sauce, sliced radishes, and some sort of tasty mayonnaise.

And now sliced open to reveal the precisely timed, perfectly joyfully oozy soft-boiled egg within…

I also did a bit of whipping. Specifically, I beat some cream into shape and talked some sense into some egg whites as well for a gorgeous layered syllabub of rhubarb essence, ginger biscuit, chocolate shavings, and other colorful delights.  A saucy dessert combined with a saucy faced waiter, post-Alice costume change.

Some amazing dishes I had absolutely nothing to do with – the aforementioned Essence of BLT, made up of a stack of secret ingredients in all sorts of flavors and textures.  I’ll give you a hint: there was lots of bacon fat involved. The pictures just don’t do this surprising mouthful justice, so we’ll move onto the third dish (after the BLT amuse bouche and the meal-in-itself Scotch egg)  the sweetcorn veloute with chorizo foam: a steaming hot shot of creaminess with a rich meaty plop of chorizo infusion on top.

Lest you think the diners were anywhere close to done, up next came the squid ink risotto made from a deep reddish and minerally seafood stock, stirred lovingly by Hugo…

…and served up with a smile by a mysterious man clad in pink and green.

He wasn’t the only one waiter in a fabulous outfit – I enjoyed chatting with the stunningly talented costumier Nicholas Immaculate in pink puffs and pads and pleats below.

Things got a little unexpected with the next dish: a cold celery sorbet topped with a spritz of walnut foam. Being a bit of a celery detester, I figured I wouldn’t particularly like a cold mouthful of celery flavor, but tried it anyway out of curiousity. Verdict: icy cold celery is only marginally better than regular terrible celery. But even my least favorite vegetable is improved with a blanket of walnut foam and a pretty tile to rest upon.

As if everyone wasn’t already stuffed full of food, then came…the main course. I’m not even kidding. Smoked breast of pigeon, a square of sinfully rich celeriac dauphinoise, and black salt-sprinkled, butter-bathed baby turnips with a stripe of red wine reduction and an accompanying squeeze of garlic sauce.

The twenty-odd diners all seemed ecstatically happy, although I’m surprised they could even move out of their chairs. I didn’t take this picture, but I think it captures the general celebratory atmosphere of the 99 dining room, deluged with a gastronomic tidal wave. 

Of course, this epicurean adventure (with matched wines!) wouldn’t be complete without sweets. And not just one, or two, but THREE desserts were to be had, including the lovely layered syllabubs from the beginning and the homemade Jaffa cakes below.

And then came the insanely addictive little morsels of mini heart attacks on a plate – Dave’s Death of Elvis creation featuring an unidentified powder that isn’t an illegal addictive substance but might as well be.  Here he is holding a tray of his dangerous weapons of culinary delight, a single bite of structurally composed banana, nutella, peanut butter, and jam. I do honestly think he might have been trying to kill everyone with the gluttonous orgy of food.

Because then…then came the cheese. Not just any cheese. A theatrically displayed, rope-and-pulley-raised, antique cupboard-housed, ceremonially lowered array of Neal’s Yard masterpieces including some of the most enormous hunks of Colston Bassett Stilton, Montgomery Cheddar, Stichelton, and Waterloo I’ve ever seen outside a cheese shop.  One might call these cheeses the pride of Britain and rightly so.

Somehow the diners remained upright and chatting rather than bursting at the seams. I’m not quite sure how, given the mammoth proportions of food served at 99 that evening. And in fact, something did in fact burst at the seams – the kitchen ceiling at about 3am in the morning, due to a bit of a watery incident from earlier in the day. Thank god it didn’t happen during service. But I do think it’s only appropriate, and yes it has to be said – it’s one of the few home-cooked meals I’ve ever eaten that actually deserved to bring the house down. Congrats Dave, Whetham, and Hugo on a job well done.

For more information, visit the 99delights website.

]]> http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/04/15/almost-99-bottles-of-wine-on-the-wall-and-nearly-99-courses-to-follow/feed/ 3 http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/04/01/tartine-bread-and-cowgirl-creamery-food-porn/ http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/04/01/tartine-bread-and-cowgirl-creamery-food-porn/#comments Thu, 01 Apr 2010 23:13:01 +0000 mei http://eatfamilystyles.com/?p=3106

It might just be the best bread in the world.  A warm, soft, tantalizingly nutty sesame loaf, fresh from the ovens just after 5pm…

…or one of THREE enormous olive loaves purchased in one go later that weekend.  I want to go olive spelunking in caverns and crevasses of doughiness.

Phenomenal with a large splosh of fresh ricotta cheese, liberally doused with several large gloops of good olive oil, a spritz of freshly ground pepper and a HIYAAAA of kosher salt.

Spectacular with an assortment of cheeses from Cowgirl Creamery…a punchy, saucy blue, the ever-orgasmic ash-striped Humboldt Fog, and a half moon of triple cream.  Because double cream isn’t good enough and single cream is just preposterous.

I can think of fewer recipes for happiness than Tartine bread + Cowgirl Creamery cheese + good friends + bottles of wine.

Just don’t expect to eat any of your delicious dinner afterwards.  Way to go on the triple olive bread and the triple cream, Steph and Lex. The Lawrence sisters, like the Li sisters, most definitely how to eat.

Beautiful Thing #1: The view of the River Tyne, including the Tyne Bridge and the Millenium Bridge, from the Viewing Box of the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art.

And the reverse view of the BALTIC, an old flour mill, from the Millenium Bridge. If you happen to be anywhere near Newcastle, go see Damien Hirst’s fascinating exhibition Pharmacy and marvel at the view.

Beautiful Thing #2: The plum tart from the charming and brand new six-week-old BUEE Cafe and Bistro at Side Cinema.  I actually didn’t eat it; we went for the pecan pie and the raspberry cheesecake baked by the chef-husband of the proprietor-wife instead – more on that in a bit – but it’s a thing of beauty all the same.

Beautiful Thing #3: The goat cheese and roasted vegetable pizzaiola from Cafe Royal, a gem of a cafe amidst the shops of the city centre featuring artisanal bread from their own bakery.

So much to see in Newcastle and so much to eat! Let’s take a closer look at our two exciting foodie finds…

I say it all the time – one of my favorite things about traveling is the opportunity to search out unique or local or independent or just plain good places to eat.  Sometimes it requires Googling or Yelp searches or asking locals for recommendations or wandering around in hungry desperation.  Other times you just get lucky.  Chris and I arrived in Newcastle mid-morning, dropped off our bags at the hotel, headed up to what seemed like the busiest area full of high street shops and chain stores and shopping malls, bypassed a few Prets and Subways and McDonalds, and then just got lucky.

Any time I stumble onto a place with an award-winning bread display like this, I consider myself in luck.

I wish I had written down some of the surprising and unusual flavors – I recall a loaf with lemon and one with raisins and something else intriguing – but more so, I wish I had bought a loaf (or five) to bring home with me.

Since I didn’t have an army or family to feed, I got only the veggie pizzaiola, piled high with roasted peppers, eggplant, squash, caramelized onions, and even a large slice of fennel, as well as the most enormous slice of goat cheese topped with a twist of black pepper. I almost thought it might be too much goat cheese for me to eat at once. Obviously, it wasn’t. Who am I kidding sometimes?

The cafe was bright and airy, adorned with stacks of jewel-toned jam and jelly jars, sugar-sprinkled pastries, and shelves of cute ceramics I would like to own, including an adorable mug that says ’silly sausage.’ I am having severe non-buyer’s regret at the moment.

After a fast and furious day and night and following day of game designing and game running, we celebrated with a walk around the city, venturing over the Tyne to the BALTIC and back over the Millennium Bridge. I dragged Chris back to BUEE Cafe, which we had noticed just around the corner from our hotel.  Having passed by what seemed like an endless supply of nearly identical chain restaurants, I was drawn by the cozy and casual vibe of the small storefront despite the fluorescent gleam of the kebab shop-style refrigerated display.

The menu left us with some difficult choices. Cumberland sausage and mash or pork belly? Gnocchi with basil sauce or Northumbrian steak? We decided to start with potatoes and raclette. Crispy potatoes smothered in a blanket of good cheese will never fail.

I ended up going for the coq au vin with mushrooms, roasted vegetables, and bacon and also ended up eating some of Chris’s excellent steak with onions in red wine sauce.

I loved the illustrations of Newcastle on the walls, the old school ceiling fixtures, the local beer, the charming waitress,  and the effusively friendly Canadian owner. We didn’t get to meet her husband, but we did get to meet his raspberry cheesecake and his pecan praline tart. Enough of an introduction for me to think we could be great friends.  I also loved my cute and comfy window seat in the corner.

If you happen to find yourself in Newcastle any time soon, go to the BALTIC, the cafe, and the bistro.  And buy me a silly sausage mug.  And while you’re at it, a loaf of bread. And a slice of plum tart. Pretty please?

Cafe Royal
8 Nelson Street
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 5AW
+44 (0191) 231 3000

Cafe-Bistro Buee
1-3 Side
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 3JE, UK
+44 (0191) 231 4080