Restaurant review - The Port House, Strand

I am often sad that the newly arrived fashionable tapas restaurants in London tend to be poor for vegetarians - it's not that they don't have any options but those options rarely work together as a meal.  I was therefore pretty excited when we passed The Port House a while ago and took a look at the menu and found that it has plenty of tasty looking vegetarian options.

Not only that but it has a gin and tonic menu.  Seriously.  This is my awesome orange and cinnamon G&T.

Anyway - we had a really good lunch there.  The highlight for me were the aubergine tempura with hummus - tempura were just perfectly fried, crispy, not too greasy, and the hummus was flavoursome.    Honourable mention to the goats cheese salad and the picon blue that we had.  It was also - for central London - really good value for money.  We had 5 tapas between the two of us, admittedly almost all of them vegetarian, and a drink each and the bill came to about £40.   The atmosphere was also very nice - candlelit, quiet, tables spaced reasonably from each other.

The only downside was the bizarrely judgemental waitress.  When we ordered 5 tapas, she practically snatched the menus out of our hands and told us that "that would be enough".  We decided that perhaps she was trying to be helpful and let us know portion sizes.  However, while 5 was perhaps half a tapa too many, it was pretty much the size of lunch that we wanted particularly as a couple of them were mostly vegetables.  When she came back and saw that we'd finished, she gasped disapprovingly, cleared plates, then came back with dessert menus "Do you want dessert? [without pausing] No, you've had enough."  We didn't have dessert.  (Though, in fairness, we weren't planning to anyway.)  I'm not quite sure what makes anyone decide to take a job as a waitress when they are judgemental about people's eating habits.  It seems an unwise choice to me but there we have it.  

I liked the food so much, though, that I'm still planning to return - it's probably the only tapas restaurant in London where, as a vegetarian, you could go back a second time and order completely different dishes.  

Restaurant review - El Sabio, Winchester

Recently, my lovely husband and I celebrated our wedding anniversary with a day and nice meal in Winchester.  Winchester is great - much recommended.  We chose El Sabio for our anniversary meal because it's unusual to see a Spanish restaurant with a good selection of vegetarian dishes and so it's good to take advantage of that when you can.

We had a jug of nice sangria, some olives to start, and then the vegetarian paella, mushrooms in sherry and blue cheese sauce, mushroom and manchego croquettes, the "catalan-style" bread (bread toasted with garlic and crushed cherry tomatoes) and my husband had the fish stew as well.  It was all good - but the bread and the croquettes particularly so.  We also had dessert - they offer you "tapas desserts", i.e. the chance to have three small desserts rather than just one, which worked really well for us, the raspberry and white chocolate cheesecake was particularly well executed.  Plus, anywhere that serves Pedro Ximenez sherry is always a winner with us. 

The only thing I'd criticise is the service which wasn't great - e.g. we had to ask four times for water before it was brought to us.  But, as I've said before, the food is the most important thing for me so I wasn't devastated by this. 

Restaurant reviews, Newcastle upon Tyne: Blackfriars and El Coto

Was in Newcastle this week and sampled a couple of the city's many restaurants.

Newcastle is pretty

The first was Blackfriars, set in a medieval former Dominican friary, the place has a lot of atmosphere.  This always makes me a little nervous, I tend to assume that restaurants in lovely settings won't always bother going the extra mile with the food but, in this case, that fear was unjustified.  The restaurant makes a genuine effort with its vegetarian options and both of the main course options looked very tempting - one involving mushrooms and truffles and the other involving smoked fried goats cheese.*  Perhaps inevitably given my fondness for cheese, I went for the latter and it was extremely good - I've never had smoked goats cheese before and I really liked the flavours.  

The river has pretty patterns in the mud

I don't usually say this as I don't have much of a sweet tooth but the best part of the meal, though, was the pudding - sticky toffee pudding with salted caramel ice-cream and honeycomb.  Just gorgeous - the sticky toffee pudding was indulgently sweet, the salted caramel ice-cream was genuinely salty enough to provide the requisite contrast, and the honeycomb added an interesting texture on top.  To add to my enjoyment of the pudding course, unlike a lot of restaurants, Blackfriars has a decent range of pudding wines, including one that I'd not seen before - a Pineau Rouge de Charentes, a blend of grape juice and Cognac, which I enjoyed.  Overall, I'd definitely come back here if I'm ever passing through Newcastle again.

*The menu on the website seems to have changed now - presumably to their spring menu but the new vegetarian options also look nice.

And there are sands nearby and seagulls

The other restaurant that we tried was a tapas place called El Coto, which we went to largely because we both quite like Spanish food but it's rare to find one that has good vegetarian options.  The service was a tad on the surly side - we got told off for not waiting in the deserted bar area to be seated, despite there being no evidence that anyone had noticed us lurking there or would notice, the waitstaff took quite a while to take our order, etc.  But the food was pretty good. The portions were huge, in retrospect going for three tapas each, plus bread to share, was a bit too much food.  I had tomatoes drizzled with garlicky, herby, olive oil, which was lovely (and which I plan to try to recreate at home sometime), chickpea and spinach stew which they'd spiced with cloves (I think) which gave it an unusual flavour that I liked, the mushrooms in white wine were slightly disappointingly soggy (I think mushrooms are sometimes hard to get quite right), unusually for me as I'm not that into bread (apparently this is a Newcastle theme..), my favourite bit was the olive bread that they brought us, lovely and fresh and just the right consistency. 

My companion reported much the same - that two of his three tapas were really good but one was slightly disappointing.  So, overall, I'd say this one's worth going to if you really fancy tapas but, if you're only in Newcastle for one evening, I'd definitely recommend Blackfriars instead.  That said, if they ever expand to London, I'd definitely go there from time to time.