A few years ago, we had dinner at a Spanish restaurant in Liverpool. It was a little disappointing, but the one thing I remember clearly was that I decided to follow the hints on the menu and ordered a glass of fino sherry instead of the usual wine. It was a complete revelation – chilled, bone-dry, [...]
Vanilla Table: The Essence of Exquisite Cooking from the World’s Best Chefs, by Natasha Macaller
I’m going to go out on a limb here – a very, very short limb, I accept – and state that French food is the best in the world. It’s the mothership of cuisines, the place that anybody with any interest whatsoever in food or eating eventually comes back to. There’s good reason for this, [...]
Dhruv Baker won Masterchef a few years ago. Now, normally at this point, I’d start reeling off a whole series of snide, unhelpful and generally smart arse comments about TV chefs, etc, etc, but I remember Baker coming across as a nice chap, and his food was astonishingly good, so much so that the relish [...]
Years ago, I used to live in a little flat on the side of a big house. It had a long set of stone stairs leading up to the front door, and the top of the stairs caught the sun for a good few hours a day, even in winter. One of the first things [...]