A Skylight in London

Just another sunny day in East London

Wherever you may be in the world, if you have an internet connection and are reading this blog, you would no doubt have heard about the recent events in London. It's been a trying time, to say the least. Frangelico and I have been thinking and talking about almost nothing but. Yesterday evening, we expected the looting and vandalism to worsen, but in London it was mostly quiet. Sadly, the same can't be said for other parts of the UK, and worse things happened last night than shops being broken into. This morning, as has been the case over the past few mornings, I started waking up feeling unsettled and disturbed. The world was spinning, and I was struggling to find something to hold on to. In that space of time when I was surfacing from sleep into wakefulness, a few of the pieces that were swirling around my mind came together and fit alongside one another like the embryonic beginnings of a puzzle.

After running some errands in the morning, Frangelico (who was on holiday today) and I took the tube to Aldgate East. Here in East London, about 10 minutes north of the tube station and not far from Spitalfields Market, we found the Crisis Skylight Café. The blackboards behind the broad counter offered for lunch a warm soup, tempting hot dishes, and a variety of jacket potato options. On the counter itself were large white dishes with fresh salads, a feta and vegetable frittata, an egg tortilla with bacon and onions, and various cakes and pastries.

Service with a smile

Both of us went for the sweetcorn chowder to start with, followed by the roasted vegetable dal with rice and tzatziki. Having placed our orders at the counter, the food was delivered to the table. Everything came together, and Frangelico and I leapt in without hesitating.

The chowder was properly steaming and hot, unlike soups you get in most London cafés. It was full of plump and sweet kernels, which had a delightful crunch to them still. The chowder base had the perfect consistency for a summer soup: light, yet fulfilling without being creamy. There was also some chili in the mix, giving the whole flavour profile a stronger dimension. 

Roasted vegetable dal with rice and tzatziki

Next up was the dal and rice dish. Now, I know my South Asian food, and my experience of eating dal in restaurants has either been of the pretty-bland-and-stodgy variety or the over-spiced-and-swimming-in-oil type. The Crisis Skylight Café's dal knocked my socks off. I'd never tasted one as flavourful, healthful, and comfortingly homemade in a restaurant. I loved the tzatziki accompaniment, rather than the usual cucumber raita, because the tzatziki was thicker. Its texture stood up to the dal's complexity of lentils and roasted butternut squash and aubergine, whereas raitas tend to get runny because of the thinner yoghurt and the cucumber.

The ones that got away

The meal was very filling, and we didn't have space for dessert. Just check out what we missed! Triple chocolate muffins, cookies, flapjacks, pain au chocolat, pain au raisin, almond croissant, and cherry and almond croissant.

We enjoyed the ambience a great deal too. There were plenty of smooth wooden tables (with elevated seating by the window at the front), and throughout the two hours or so that we spent there, we witnessed brisk business taking place. The customers seemed to be a mix of local suits, office workers, fashion students, and retired couples. At the height of trade (at around 1.30pm), the queue was all the way to the door.

The fresh décor and comfortable interior

Union hand-roasted coffee and a sofa to enjoy it on

After lunch, I asked to speak to someone about the café, and I first met Eki, the front-of-house manager, and then Carrie-Ann, the head chef. Eki and Carrie-Ann are two of the 4 or 5 members of staff employed by the café. All of the others who work there are their trainees, who are either on the 'front-of-house journey' or the 'kitchen journey'. And who are the trainees, the most important part of the café? The trainees can come from two groups: the first is a group of young offenders working with Switchback, a charity that supports 18-24 year olds to build on skills learnt in prison kitchens; and the second is a group of people working with Crisis, a charity providing education, training and employment services to single homeless people.

Eki talked me through the front-of-house training they undertake: everything from food hygiene,  customer service, barista skills, to managing basic accounting. Each trainee spends roughly 6 months on the programme, working in the café 2 or 3 times a week. At any one time, they are working with roughly 10 to 12 trainees.

Head chef Carrie-Ann, a sparkling Scotswoman from Edinburgh, works on the kitchen training together with the sous-chef Ross. Kitchen trainees are taught everything they need to know in order to operate in a professional kitchen, and the trainees who go on to be placed successfully in employment find jobs as kitchen porters or commis chefs (responsible for basic food preparation). She told us that the dal and rice we'd enjoyed so much that afternoon had been prepared by one of the trainees working with her, Steve. He was familiar with Caribbean cuisine, and so she had given him the task of preparing the dal as a means of introducing him to a different cuisine using different spices.

I was then given the honour of being able to look around the kitchen and photograph the chefs and trainees in action! Sous-chef Ross was busy zipping around preparing some takeaway orders that were coming through, now that it was past the lunch hour. (In fact, he was moving so fast, I didn't get a single shot of him that wasn't blurred.) There was a cake-making lesson going on in the corner too, with Mary and Eric stirring demerara sugar and butter in large bowls. 

Eric, a trainee, is taken through the paces of a ginger cake by Mary

Following on from the events of the past few days, I've been thinking today of something Mahatma Gandhi said: "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." I'm not quoting this because I'm a communist, a leftist, a liberal, politically correct, or suited to any other label. I think the reason is that I'm human. And although I (as much as anyone else) find it difficult to deal with other people a lot of the time, I don't want to see parts of my human family crash and burn when it's within my power, and the power of so many others, to try to do something about it. Even if this perspective isn't for everyone, at the end of the day no man is an island, and unless the prospect of living in a self-sufficient nuclear bunker is particularly attractive, I suspect that only when all of us are doing well, will each of us individually too.

Back row: Eki (front-of-house manager), Carrie-Ann (head chef), Alana (café manager), Eric (trainee), Ross (sous-chef)

Front row: Mo (trainee) , Jo (regional manager), Steve (trainee)

To the teams at Switchback and Crisis: hats off to you guys. You're carrying out tremendous work that not all of us have the emotional strength to do, and you're out there fighting to make a difference to the city I call home and beyond. For this, I thank you and wish you all the very best for your projects.

Crisis Skylight Café
64 Commercial Street
London
E1 6LT
020 7426 3867
www.crisis.org.uk

The café is open from Mondays to Fridays, 8am to 3pm (covering breakfast, elevenses, lunch and tea). Their catering services are also available to companies and for events, and the café space may be hired for private events.

Love

Truffle

Don't read this if you're vegetarian

The Singapore Takeout lunch on the South Bank was heavily rained upon. Thankfully, the event was taking place in a marquee, so all we had to contend with were icy, blustery winds blowing in from the Thames. (If you can't stand the heat in the kitchen...) After lunch - by which point the rain had stopped - I took a walk past the Royal Festival Hall. The rain had scattered most people, so it was a pleasant walk in the cool, slightly humid environs of the South Bank.

I must have some sort of homing device that leads me straight to food. Frangelico has remarked on my uncanny ability to be walking around, guided by some indefinable inner sense, and happen upon a high-quality food phenomenon. (Another thing I can find this way is bookshops. Drop me in some unfamiliar territory, and I'll walk in a straight line to a bookshop in less than twenty minutes.)

On this occasion, walking around the Royal Festival Hall, I realised that I'd been led straight to a food market! The Real Food Market, a recent initiate to the London market scene, runs every weekend (Friday to Sunday) in the southern courtyard of the RFH. It brings together selected food and drink producers in a bid, they say, to "offer a completely different experience to soulless supermarkets".

Arancini with mayo

Bubbleology, Soho

On some nights, I wish Central London had an alternative evening-drink locale to the stinky pub (featuring sticky floors and faded upholstery) or the flashy bar (featuring ladies of the night). You know, a nice place where you can just kick back with friends, dress casually, and not be surrounded by bodies pressing into you with their lager-breath or women's voices getting screechier as the alcohol absorption increases. (Admit it, sometimes we all want an alternative to that sort of evening!)

In many Asian cities, this 'alternative' is actually a well-developed genre, and there are hosts of coffee chains, local tea shops and ice-cream parlours staying open late (even well past midnight on weekends), offering young people a relaxed, civilised place to get out of the house. One such place is the bubble tea café.

Bubble tea originated in Taiwan in the 1980s and is named for the bubbles that develop on the surface when shaken. It comes in black or fruit tea combos and can feature plump tapioca pearls at the bottom of the cup, slurped up through wide straws. For me, bubble tea means shopping in a hot tropical climate and stopping for some cool refreshment, or hanging out with friends after a movie with no one getting drunk around you.

This is why I was especially pleased to be invited to the launch of Bubbleology, a new bubble tea café in Soho. Co-founder, Assad Khan, worked in a New York City investment bank for a few years before returning to the UK. Along with that infectious NYC enthusiasm for commerce, he brought back with him the idea for a chain of bubble tea cafés. Aware of the drink's Taiwanese origins, he approached that country's representation to the UK and was soon dispatched to Taipei, where he learned how to make bubble tea from the masters and identified the best suppliers for the specialist equipment he needed. Back in London, he approached Dan Einzig, designer of the successful chain of young, fun and family-friendly Giraffe restaurants. Not having cash to give him upfront, Assad offered Dan Einzig an equity stake in the idea (the two later brought in angel investors). All in all, from putting the idea in motion to opening the first café in Soho, the process took just 10 months. I don't think anyone can fail to be impressed by that.

Koya, Soho

Sorry for the long absence, peeps. I've been working on an interesting piece, which still needs some attention. In the mean time, Frangelico and I were in Soho last night, for a press launch of a place I can't talk about yet (online press embargo until Thursday, you see). After the event-that-shall-not-be-named, we thought we'd head to nearby Koya, a Japanese restaurant that's become hugely popular in a very short space of time.

Koya's specialty is udon, which is made fresh in-store every day. You can get it atsu-atsu (hot udon with hot soup - the dashi is made fresh daily too), hiya-atsu (cold udon with hot soup on the side), or hiya-hiya (you work it out). It's very hard to find good udon in London, so I'm not surprised at how this place has taken off. The quality of the udon's texture rivals my previous best-find at Defune (although the taste at Defune remains unbeaten).

Spuntino, Soho

Spuntino is one of the newest arrivals in Soho - having opened its doors just this week - and the London foodie scene has been all abuzz about it. So, Frangelico and I thought we'd take a break from my detox and check it out.

Here in the UK, there is routinely plenty of nostalgia for days and glories past, but a new angle is a twingeing in the heart for all things Prohibition (except for, given 24-hour drinking laws, the not-actually-legal part). Speakeasy-type cocktail bars have mushroomed around the city, and it now appears that restaurants want in on the action too.

Located on Rupert Street (not far from sister restaurant, Polpo), Spuntino is very much into the subterfuge aesthetic. The restaurant's name is barely noticeable in broad daylight, with the appearance of having been thinly scratched with chalk onto tarnished metal sheets. It must be practically invisible at night.

The vibe continues inside, with jangly blues rock and a Prohibition-era-inspired cocktails list, offset by the waiter/bartenders of a heavily-tattooed rockabilly persuasion. Guests sit up high at a large counter, which curves around the main floor under a high ceiling. A wall behind the counter is covered in exposed white tiling, with blue-grey mosaic up near the ceiling. (They speculate that the building used to house a butcher's.)

The cocktails list is conveniently short and primarily one-worded, which means that the staff's knowledge thereof needs a tiny bit of improvement. Our waiter was very forthcoming and talked us through the list, but upon being asked what a couple of the cocktails contained, he had to go away and check with someone else. (I didn't mind this too much, to be honest, because he was very polite, and I wasn't in a hurry to go anywhere.) There's a mix of sweet and bitter on the list - the Negroni is a good choice if you want bitter, because the campari/vermouth/gin combo is a good prelude to the food.

To go with the drinks, we had a side of the eggplant chips with a fennel yoghurt. Very nice. The batter of the chips was appropriately thin and with a grainy texture, while the eggplant within was molten as a contrast. The yoghurt's fennel aroma came forward and filled the senses.

As with Polpo, the mains are a bit hit and miss. The truffled egg toast was a delight, with the flavours balancing artfully - a messy, yolky centre oozing over thick, wholesome toast, with truffle lifting it up, and a grated, cheesy melt keeping it grounded. This is going to be a dish everyone talks about.

The Mac & Cheese also deserves mention, for this reason: it's the closest thing I've found to real American Mac & Cheese in London. Usually, when trying to reproduce this import, the Brits will choose being true to the cheese over the authenticity of the dish, and you get a chewy brick, heavy on chewy cheese. That is what ought to be called, rightfully, a pasta bake made with macaroni-shaped pasta. A real Mac & Cheese, on the other hand, is a gentle and creamy phenomenon. This is what you get at Spuntino. I would have liked more flavour and less blandness, though, and I hope future iterations will sort that.

So, now for the misses. The baby gem salad with egg and creamed cod sauce - although fresh and given a bit of get-go by the egg and croutons - was extremely salty. It was so salty that we couldn't finish it, despite craving the contrast of the greens and vinaigrette-tang to the rest of the meal. As I've said before, London restaurants over-salt their food, and this has got to stop. (Salt Awareness Week is coming just in time.) A couple of other dishes were very plain: the calamari, chick peas and ink, which didn't feel well-conceived or executed; and the popcorn with cayenne, which didn't register at all.

The desserts list is - like the cocktails - short, but sweet. Our waiter recommended the peanut butter and jelly, and we went with it, no questions asked. It came as a pleasant surprise, therefore, that the 'toast' sandwiching the jelly was in fact peanut butter ice cream. Given that I'd had an out-of-this-world peanut butter sorbet in San Francisco recently, there was no way this ice cream was going to be able to compete. Nevertheless, peanut butter isn't something that often fails to please the taste buds, and I liked the inventiveness and attractiveness of the dish. The only thing that stopped me in my tracks was that, upon being asked, a waiter told us that the ice cream was made with Skippy peanut butter. Now, Skippy may be Skippy, but I've never seen a version of it in the UK that doesn't have hydrogenated fats (aka trans-fats) in it. Fork down, dessert unfinished.

Overall, my assessment is this: worth a try, if you're in the area and don't mind waiting with punters on a narrow Soho pavement opposite a live peep show. I won't be making Spuntino one of my favourites, and I wouldn't go out of my way to get there for just the food (and definitely no queueing), but it's a thoughtfully fitted-out place in which to feel the Soho vibe, enjoy a drink in a fun-comfy-smart setting, and try out a few tasty dishes.

Love

Truffle

Update

Because of the natural limits on how much two people can eat, we didn't get to try the Sliders (mini burgers, named either because they're so tender they slide down your throat or because they're so small they slide off the skillet). The omission had been nagging me a little, so we went back the next day to try them. (This was also a question of doing justice to the menu offering, you understand.)

The beef and bone marrow was passable - it was tender (from the marrow) and had an alluring addition of thyme, which complemented the gruyère. The lamb with pickled cucumber, though, was awesome - very flavourful and worthy of a second order. The brioche on which the sliders are served aren't anything to write home about - a little stiff and manufactured.

The zucchini pizzetta was good - with chopped mint and chilli. (Again: go easy on the salt, guys!) Next down the line was the sliced sausage with lentils and radicchio, which was ok - nothing to offend, but nothing jumping out at you either.

For dessert, if you like cheesecake, you'll have to try the brown sugar cheesecake. This was delicious. It has all the satisfying solidity of a baked cheesecake and is superbly elevated by the brown sugar. The grappa prunes and syrup, while not exactly a complement, presented a balance, rendering the next bite of cheesecake a delightful surprise all over again.

The Power of DNA

Our cousin from the Land of Oz visited us with his girlfriend last week. The last time we'd met was three years ago at my wedding. In the intervening period, while I remembered that my cousin and I shared an interest in music and guitars, I had kinda forgotten that we shared a passion for food as well! My cousin, Musical Chef (an engineer in real life), and his brother are fantastic cooks, and it turns out that his girlfriend, Foodie Doctor, is too. By a stroke of luck before their arrival, I had planned (as our first sight-seeing outing) a trip to Borough Market, one of London's famous food and produce markets. I myself hadn't been to Borough Market in more than two years, so it was great to see some of my old favourites again.

It's amazing how much looking at London with visitors can open your own eyes to it. Suddenly, I wasn’t feeling so blasé about being 20 minutes away from a sprawling market nestled under criss-crossing bridges near the Thames. We strolled amongst large iron pans with rabbit casseroles cooking over flames, steel drums of mulled wine, shelves of bottled beers and ales from around the world, elaborate displays of fresh seafood (including an octopus clinging to a rock, below a crayfish whose claws swayed from side to side), mountains of fragrant chocolate brownies and loaves of bread, wheels of cheese boasting various months of ageing, bright berries tumbling out of their punnets, extensive displays of vegetables and enormous mushrooms, frying chorizo and grilling bratwurst… all while Foodie Doctor snapped pictures of the food, the crowds and of us.

It was a heady morning. We tasted various samples on offer, and we slowly collected a feast for breakfast the next day. And thus it was that, on Saturday morning, after enjoying a few cups of tea from our wedding china, we settled down to the breakfast you see in the photo. (In our defense, I will say that we had gone to bed at 3 a.m. the night before, after a memorable jamming session with Musical Chef on acoustic guitar, me on electric guitar and my sister Rice Krispie on keyboards. So, we were hungry!) We had assembled: a 22-month aged Comté and a melting Époisses from France; slices of Parma, a large ball of Mozzarella and an Ubriaco matured in red wine from Italy; good old British sausages (curiously named ‘Boston sausages’) and a pork pie; sweet German mustard to accompany the sausages; a variety of mushrooms (which Foodie Doctor sautéed with butter, garlic and sage); and a dulce de leche from Argentina. To all of these treasures from Borough Market, we added Gentlemen’s Relish (an anchovy paste I’d picked up last week from a nearby deli), Pain de Campagne from my local French bakery, Irish breakfast tea (purchased in Dublin in the summer), and orange juice from Florida.

The Époisses is one of my favourite cheeses. It’s an unpasteurised cow’s milk cheese from Burgundy, which is washed in the local brandy (marc de Bourgogne) as it matures. This leaves it with an alluring, sharp nose, and a flavour that’s part brandy and part sweet garlic. Take it out of the fridge about half an hour before eating and spread it over toasted crusty bread. I’m also a fan of Comté, another unpasteurised cow’s milk cheese. This hard cheese is good with almost any bread, but you might go for something white, so that you can appreciate the grainy texture of the Comté. Imho, the best Comté has a firmness closer to parmesan than to edam or cheddar.

While the weekend was wonderful for all the experiences we shared, it also made me slightly sad that so much of my family lives so far away. Cases in point being Musical Chef living all the way away in Sydney and Cinnamon being in North Carolina. Just imagine the weekly cooking and jamming sessions we could all have if we lived in the same city! I was also amazed that, despite Musical Chef and my sisters and I not having met each other all that often (a few times as children and a grand total of three times as grown-ups), all of us just connect. Not least on the planes of food and music. There you have it, I thought, the power of DNA.

Love

Truffle

London boleh!

I’m trying out a modern-day media technique of showing you a photo of a pretty face (in food terms) to get you to read this post. It’s a dessert I had in Salamanca – a chocolate brownie with Incan gold (the head chef was from Peru)!

So back to my post. As you know, my most recent travels on the Continent were in Spain, where we were attending a family wedding. Now, I love many things about Spanish food (see here for evidence), but I also can’t deny that part of me that needs more than just meat for sustenance. And the Spanish don’t seem to have a very close relationship with vegetables.

This was part of the reason for my frustration during that week of travelling – everywhere we went, I had to make special requests for veggies. Often, our requests were greeted with looks that combined “Why would you want that…?” with “That’s not the way we do things here” and “I can see you two are going to be trouble…”. But I had to stick to my guns and not be afraid of looking like a weirdo as I persisted against the bureaucracy. It’s quite surprising, really, because I’ve always felt that Spain was the best country in Europe for customer service. (My husband explains the reason for this: “Spanish people, darling. They just start shouting.”)

And so, after a week of having to fight to get my greens, we flew back to London and ended up at our favourite restaurant on our first evening back. As we were seated at our usual table, I got a real craving for some fresh vegetables. You see, I’ve been reading this book on healthy eating (more on that later) that suggests asking for fresh cut vegetables instead of the bread they give you before the meal. The principle behind the eating plan is that your body will get to its ideal playing weight if you don’t get in its way with fake, processed and unhealthy stuff that upsets your body’s chemical/hormonal balance. A part of the programme is to eat lots of fresh veggies, which trains your body to want more (in the way eating lots of sugar sets it up to want more sugar) – hence my craving.

It is surprising how difficult it is to get the simplest thing on Earth that is in any restaurant kitchen. The restaurant’s duty manager looked more and more panicked as I explained that I would like some plain, cut vegetables please. Gamely, he went to the kitchen (in case Gordon Ramsay hasn’t done enough PR for his profession, I should just mention that head chefs and cuddly bunny rabbits have very little in common…). He came back and offered me a carrot soup that was on the menu. I jumped on the offer of carrots and asked if I could have just the carrots cut up. This time when he went back to the kitchen, I suspect he got thrown out.

I thought it just wasn’t going to happen, when he came back with a large oval bowl full of fresh lettuce, carrot batons, cucumber and radish. I was delighted, but he was still looking a bit sober. I realised why when he explained that the vegetables weren’t from his restaurant, but from the Lebanese place nearby.

I was impressed. People living in London often complain that things are slow here, you can’t get what you want, that service isn’t as good as in other parts of the world. However, I thought, where I had heard ‘no, no, no’ all week, I was finally back in a place where you could sometimes hear a ‘yes’. I appreciated how intelligently he had solved the problem, and I thought to myself that London could indeed do it (in Malay, London boleh!).

And just before anyone inclined to that reflex pulls out the Anglo-Saxon card from their Uno pack, I should point out that the duty manager in question was French. When I later explained to him my veggie-deprivation of the past week, he said he understood where I was coming from. In France, he said, in Michelin-starred restaurants of a bygone era, they would serve fresh, cut vegetables before the meal. The vegetables were of such good quality that they could be served on their own. And they would taste excellent. Just imagine the sweetness of those carrots and the fresh perfume of those cucumbers and lettuce leaves.

Incidentally, Cinnamon, there’s another reason you should keep going with the organic delivery!

Love

Truffle

Emerging from the Straits

So, my sister Cinnamon complained on Facebook the other day that she’s been waiting to hear about my recent trip to Singapore and all the food experiences I had there. Rewind a few weeks, and a telephone conversation between us had me telling her about my latest idea for the blog and her saying she wanted to hear all about Singaporean food instead. I mulled over this, but nothing came, and I didn’t write.

I was thinking the other morning (after seeing her Facebook post) about why it is that I don’t feel drawn to writing about my Singapore food experiences. It’s unusual for me to feel that way, because I usually see Singapore as a, to use my sister’s words, Food Mecca. Hey, I usually see it as a Mecca for almost everything. Every time I fly to Singapore on the world’s best airline, it’s as if I’m going on a pilgrimage - I go to pay respects to the origin of me, my home, my family, the food I love, the warmth... all the things that England doesn’t have and can’t give me. Rewind a little more (okay, a lot more), and we have me first coming to the UK to go to boarding school (not because my parents didn’t love me – it was my crazy idea!). I remember after one of my trips home for the Christmas break, I brought back in my schoolgirl suitcase a box of Singaporean Kleenex and I cried into it for two weeks. Yes, I really missed home.

Forward back to the present day. Things seem to have changed, and I noticed it more than ever this time around. I am one of these people who feel a permanent sense of displacement. I’ve lived my entire adult life in a country that I can’t fully call my own (much as I have wanted to, the tabloid-induced xenophobia makes it very difficult for me to feel accepted…). But when I’m in Singapore, I’m definitely not a ‘local’. My messed up accent betrays other influences and my approach to life isn’t safe enough. The country where our parents were born isn’t a candidate for a real ‘home’ either, as I’ve never lived there. Don’t get me wrong – I completely appreciate how flexible I am and how global an outlook I have thanks to my own and my family's varied experiences. But when it comes to the question of where I feel at home, I can’t put a pin on a map. Even if you gave me more than one pin, I couldn’t put two of them close enough to each other to feel good about it.

And so, in Singapore, which I used to look at as a beautiful paradise full of all things wonderful that cheered my heart, I didn’t feel the same this time. And that’s why I haven’t been able to write about the food – no longer did I feel that Singapore had the best food to offer me, or even the comfort food I wanted. Over the past year, I’ve built a system here in London that’s custom-tailored to my health needs, and I missed it. So much of the food I ate in Singapore (outside home) didn’t make me feel good anymore. It made me feel heavy, sluggish and over-stimulated. So often I had the feeling that it was oily, packed with white carbs, made from ingredients that weren’t of the best quality and thrown together really quickly. I knew then that it was over. The connection I’d clung onto since my school days had been severed. And I realized that, even if the broader British Isles don’t yet qualify for the title, this little flat here in London was maybe, just maybe, becoming home. Somewhere in the aftermath of the avalanche, a small blossom peeks out of the snow...