Casamia chef behind stoves of new Bristol opening

John Watson of Michelin-starred Bristol restaurant Casamia has been named as the head chef of new Bristol restaurant and bar The Gallimaufry.
Opening on the site of The Prom music bar on Gloucester Road, The Gallimaufry (apparently it means 'making the best out of what's available to you') is the latest venture from James Smailes and James Koch of The Colour Inn in Clifton.
The menu will be 'short, rustic, affordable' with main courses under £10. The bar will include local ales, wines and a small cocktail list.
Dishes include pork belly, radishes and apple; sausages with stewed lentils; neck of lamb, courgettes and mint.
John Watson said: "I want to fill people's bellies with hearty British fare, serving simple dishes that rely on the availability of local produce."
The Gallimaufry opens on March 17 at 26-28 The Promenade, Gloucester Road, Bristol.

Restaurant review: Belgreen, Exeter

There can’t be too many professional kitchens in Devon with a silver mirror disco ball hanging from the kitchen ceiling. But then Belgreen is probably unlike any café you have ever visited.

A quirky little place that doubles up as a shop selling vintage household goods and printed linens, this new venture from chef Isabel Davies and designer Teresa Green opened a couple of months ago on Magdalen Road in the desirable St Leonard’s area of Exeter.

A street that still boasts a butchers, a delicatessen, cafes and restaurants, clothes shops, a pub and a launderette (cheekily called the Dandy Dipper), Magdalen Road is a fabulous reminder that the independents are still thriving and that there is still life beyond homogenised shopping centres.

This independent spirit is certainly evident at Belgreen, which manages to be thoroughly contemporary yet retro and deliciously old-fashioned at the same time.

From the moment you step inside and hear the tinkle of the antique bell above the door, there is a sense of timelessness about the café. You half expect Margaret Rutherford or Joyce Grenfell to be pouring a cup of tea in the corner.

There are just six closely-packed tables for customers, which certainly makes for an intimate experience and booking is highly advisable.

Tables and chairs are rickety, wooden and mismatched. There are retro mirrors on one wall, a vintage ivory wall phone on another. Crockery is antique and knives and forks are the sort of bone-handled Sheffield Steel cutlery found at car boot sales and antiques fairs.

In the window, enamel colanders and whisks hang on a washing line next to co-owner Teresa’s striking linen tea towels.

Chef Isabel worked in some notable kitchens prior to opening Belgreen. She started at riverstation in Bristol before moving to London to work at Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen. Her first head chef’s position was at the celebrated London gastropub The Lansdowne and then at La Fromagerie in Marylebone.

More recently, she was sous chef at Mark Hix’s Oyster and Fish House in Lyme Regis and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Canteen in Axminster.

That’s quite a CV for a young woman barely into her third decade.

The menus change daily at Belgreen and they are chalked up on boards. Breakfast is served from 8.30am until 11.30am and might include home toasted granola or muesli with yogurt and raspberry compote; a bacon and tomato sandwich; Manx kippers, toast and butter or sauté tomatoes on toast.

And then comes lunch. With nothing more than £8.50 on the day we visited, the sub-£10 policy here is sensible, attractive and exactly right for such straitened times.

Portions are generous, too, and it would be quite possible to eat very well for around a fiver before you ordered drinks. There are half a dozen different wines available by the glass or bottle, as well as plenty of quality soft drinks and good coffee dispensed from a striking red Elektra coffee machine.

This is robust, seasonal cooking that uses as much local produce as possible and it is backed up with the best that Italy and France can offer.

My pappardelle, chicken livers, pancetta and sage (£8.50) was a generous plate of fresh pasta mixed with a tangle of precisely cooked chicken livers that were still rose pink in the middle. The pancetta added a salty crunch and the sage was used with restraint so as not to overpower the dish.

Across the table, roast pork, white beans and anchovy (£8.50) was the sort of comforting, rustic peasant dish you would expect to find in the Italian mountains, not leafy St Leonard’s. The strips of pork were surprisingly tender and the use of anchovy as a main flavour, rather than just a seasoning, was an inspired touch.

Dishes we didn’t order included watercress soup with pancetta and chilli flakes (£4.50); Provencal fish soup and rouille (£5.50); Welsh rabbit and watercress (£5); roast squash and blue cheese tart (£5.50) and Exmouth mussels with white wine, garlic and parsley (£8).

From the short dessert menu (scrawled in white chalk on a brown paper bag hanging from a wooden peg, naturally), a shared pear and almond tart (£3.50) was deep, moist and squidgy with a huge slice of tender pear in the centre.

A quirky place selling intelligently cooked seasonal food, as well as chipped enamel jugs and vintage blankets, Belgreen is certainly unique.

It may be a small café, but it has a large and generous heart. Like the silver mirror disco ball in the kitchen, this is one place where the talent really shines through.


Belgreen, 25 Magdalen Road, Exeter, EX2 4TA. Tel: 01392 271190.

The permanent 'pop-up' that may become a future model for the restaurant industry

Words: Mark Taylor
Photo: Natasha Lichodedova

There can be few food lovers who haven’t dreamed of running their own restaurant but don’t have the money to do it or can’t find the right venue.
Now, help is at hand thanks to an enterprising group of chefs who have launched a unique permanent venue where anybody can run their own food event, whether it’s the ultimate dinner party, a pop-up supper club or a full-on restaurant for the night.
Number 40 Alfred Place in Kingsdown, Bristol, has been various restaurants over the past two decades. A vegetarian restaurant in the 1990s, it was then Portuguese bistro A Cozinha for a decade before becoming the short-lived Alfred’s at the end of last year.
When the property fell empty again earlier this year, landlord Austin O’Baoighill and his business partner Rob Dennis were approached by two Bristol foodies with several years’ experience of working in some of the city’s best restaurants.
Robert Birse and Kate Hawkings came up with the idea to turn 40 Alfred Place into a permanent licensed space for people to hire out and be their own boss. Although the space is for hire for anything (“from a Scrabble night or ‘stitch and bitch’ evening to a private fine dining dinner”), the drive is to provide chefs with a pop-up platform.
Not only does the space have two floors with tables and chairs, it has a small bar and a well equipped kitchen.
And if you want to hold a dinner party or supper club and don’t want to cook, they can even supply a professional chef and bar staff for an additional cost.
There have been two successful pop-ups at 40 Alfred Place already. Last month’s successful Cavaville cava and tapas bar ran for four evenings and it was followed last weekend by the sell-out Fishstock, a fish feast organised by the 40 Alfred Place team in conjunction with Lido head chef Freddy Bird.
Rob Birse says 40 Alfred Place is a natural progression of the city’s burgeoning supper club and pop-up restaurant scene.
“It’s a matter of evolution. The whole supper club and pop-up thing has been growing and although it’s not mainstream, it’s a lot more common now.
“People have taken control of running their own places as a way of doing things affordably.
“At the same time, the economy is still dodgy and it’s very difficult to set up your own place.
“As a landlord, I would be a bit worried about putting a young talent in a place with a lease because it’s touch and go if they are going to make it in the first six months and then they have the headache of finding somebody else. This is more about landlords and budding restaurateurs and chefs meeting in the middle.”
Rob says the landlord of 40 Alfred Place has been very supportive of the venture and is now a partner in the fledgling business.
“For Austin, the rent gets paid and he stands to gain financially if it turns to profit in the end.
“But ultimately, he’s just really interested in the concept and we all hope it will become a model for a future concept in the catering industry.”
Whilst Rob accepts that pop-ups and supper clubs may only be followed by a small but committed group of foodies, he wants 40 Alfred Place to become open to a wider circle.
From August 22, the space will be used during the day as a neighbourhood café with free wi-fi access, coffee supplied by Bristol’s Extract Coffee Roasters and pastries from Hart’s Bakery.
Says Rob: “The realistic part of my brain is asking if we are constantly appealing to the same audience but when I was marketing Fishstock last week I realised there is a huge untapped foodie audience in Bristol.
“There are lots of people who have heard about pop-ups but don’t quite know what they were but think they sound exciting. Impromptu restaurants are a social thing as much as a foodie thing - you can go with a group of friends and there’s a sense of anticipation and excitement.
“Because this is not a supper club in somebody’s home, people may view it as a ‘safer’ or less intimidating option in some ways. I guess this is half way between the secret supper clubs and pop-ups and a ‘proper’ restaurant.”
There is a charge for the use of kitchen between Sunday and Thursday, which includes all the kit. On Friday and Saturday, it’s a flat fee.
The rates to hire 40 Alfred Place vary depending on the day but they start at £50 for a Monday night to £250 for a Saturday.
The basic kitchen is set up with enough kit to cook for 15 people quite easily and, for an additional sum, extra kit can be provided to enable people to cook for up to 40 guests.
Cutlery and crockery is all included, as is public liability insurance. All you have to pay is the hire fee and a refundable deposit for breakages or damage.
If you don’t want to cook, the organisers have a pool of chefs and experienced waiting staff they can pull in for the night.
As a chef, Rob says a temporary restaurant or one-off event also allows for more creativity in the kitchen.
“Chefs get complete freedom and they can do things they don’t get the opportunity to do in their usual restaurants.
“It’s a chance to earn a bit of extra money but it’s a bit of creative freedom and expression and it’s also a bit of fun.
“It doesn’t matter how creative a restaurant is, you are still stuck in the same kitchen all day every day so this allows chefs to step out of that, work in a completely different environment and cook for a different audience and that’s very exciting.”
So, is there a downside to all of this?
“Well, if it’s a terrible night and nobody turns up, the worst that can happen is that your ego might take a dent and you might lose a few quid on produce, but there’s no long lasting damage.”

For more information about 40 Alfred Place, email thespace@40alfredplace.net or call 0117 9443060

This article first appeared in the Bristol Evening Post

Interview with Simon Hopkinson

Simon Hopkinson is getting nervous about being recognised in the street when his first-ever TV series gets aired next week.
This most private of men has for years resisted TV appearances in favour of writing his best-selling cookbooks, but this is all set to change when The Good Cook appears on primetime BBC1.
“It does seem a bit silly to starting a TV career at the age of 57,” chuckles Hopkinson, who was coaxed into making a series by a production team at BBC Bristol.
The London-based food writer, who retired as a full-time chef in 1995, has spent a lot of time in Bristol over the past few months.
Although the bulk of the filming was done in London (‘on a set built to simulate my tiny, cramped kitchen at home’), a lot of the post-production work was done in Bristol.
He knows Bristol well because of his friend Stephen Markwick, who Hopkinson describes as ‘one of the very best chefs I know’.
Markwick, who runs the Culinaria restaurant in Redland, has contributed two recipes to the book that accompanies the series.
“I saw Stephen for lunch a couple of weeks ago,” Hopkinson tells me. “He took me to a lovely little restaurant called Flinty Red, which is just around the corner from the studio where I was doing the final voice-overs for the series. I spent hours in a basement just off Whiteladies Road – this is a whole new world to me.”
Although well known in foodie circles because of books such as Roast Chicken and Other Stories; The Prawn Cocktail Years and Gammon & Spinach, Hopkinson has never courted celebrity and has always been suspicious of TV.
Part of this has been down to a natural shyness, although one suspects that part of it is down to a general unease with rise of the ‘celebrity chef’.
And so it comes as something of a surprise when he says he ‘had a ball’ making The Good Cook, a series that shows us how to cook some of his favourite dishes and get the best of out of his favourite ingredients.
“It took me a long time to decide to do the series,” says Hopkinson. “There was a lot of umming and ahhing, but the BBC Bristol team were so lovely that they gently persuaded me.
“I went to the initial meeting only because I thought I had nothing to lose and I got on really well with them.
“We did a bit of filming in my kitchen at home as a tester, and that seemed to go well so I then had I somebody to teach me how to look down the black hole that is the camera.
“It took a while, and I got into a real state about it at times, but then I suddenly turned a corner and I really enjoyed it.
“I do want to emphasise how I was looked after by the crew and the producers from BBC Bristol. They really held my hand.
“It was quite a gamble for them, too, as it was my first time on TV, but they were a joy to work with.”
Hopkinson has built up a huge following for his intelligent, thoughtful writing about food and he is admired by many of his peers in the food world.
He loves food and good ingredients and he has something of a reputation for being a stickler for doing things properly in the kitchen and not taking shortcuts.
His approach to cooking is far removed from the ‘bish, bash, bosh’ school of many modern TV chefs so how does he think The Good Cook will be received by viewers?
“I suppose, I will be a new face to a lot of them, even though I’m quite well known to a small group of people who buy niche cookbooks.
“I’ve always been serious about food and cooking, I’ve always thought that it was important.
“What I’m trying to say in the programmes is enjoy your cooking and if you do it right you will reap huge rewards.
“I’m never going to say that cooking is easy because I think it’s too easy to say that.
“I have done some very easy recipes in the book and in the series – actually, rather than easy, I’d like to say simple and thoughtful.”
The series is structured around Hopkinson’s passion for ingredients and his recipes are definitive versions of classics such as coq au vin; homemade gravadlax and sticky toffee pudding. In the first of the six episodes, he makes baked pappardelle with pancetta and porcini; scallops in white butter sauce and his famous salad Nicoise.
A man who probably loses sleep worrying how to make the bacon bits stay suspended in a quiche Lorraine, rather than sink to the bottom (incidentally, the book reveals the secret of this culinary conundrum), Hopkinson has an old-fashioned tone to his instructions, although he doesn’t want to come across too headmaster-ish.
“I like things to be done properly, but I’m not too strict,” he laughs. “Let’s just say I’m quietly emphatic.
“Having said that, there is one point where I do say ‘this is how it should be’ when I refer to how a crumble should be. But then a crumble should be simple and it should be crunchy on top and soggy underneath.”
Despite the looming TV fame, Hopkinson won’t be swept away on the media wave, preferring to cook for himself and close friends at the West London flat he shares with his cat.
“I won’t do cookery demos in public and I don’t do many interviews. I can’t stand up in front of people and cook and I can’t do public speaking, it’s just not my thing.”
Whilst he is clearly proud of The Good Cook, the reality that he might be recognised on the tube after next Friday is now hitting home and he says he doesn’t like watching himself on TV.
“I am not very comfortable watching myself on TV so I’m going to my brother’s on the night it’s aired and watch it with him. We’re going to have a barbecue and cook the tandoori chicken legs from the book.
“I couldn’t possibly sit at home and watch it on my own, that would be really weird. I would have to cover my eyes with a cushion.
“I keep saying I’ll never go out again once it’s shown on TV. That’s if it takes off, of course.
“If it doesn’t, they might just ignore me and cross the street when they see me, which would be perfect.”

The Good Cook, BBC1, Friday July 8, 7.30pm. The accompanying book is published on June 30 (BBC Books, £25).

Review of Soho Food Feast

It may have been Glastonbury weekend, but the first-ever Soho Food Feast was the real place to be last Saturday.
Organised by Margot Henderson to raise money for Soho Parish Primary School, the five-hour event took place in the relatively tranquil setting of St Anne’s Church gardens in Wardour Street.
Margot and husband Fergus raided their combined address books to rally a number of high profile cheffy chums, including Jeremy Lee, Peter Gordon, Valentine Warner and Eddie Hart, all of whom cooked signature dishes or held cookery demonstrations.
Other West End establishments to serve food included Hix, Bocca di Lupo, Barrafina, Arbutus, Polpo, The Ivy and The Groucho.
Whether it was St John Hotel pig’s head sausage and faggot, Dean Street Townhouse mince and tatties or noodles from Koya, the food on offer was of the highest quality and was matched by some appropriately fortifying liquid refreshments at the bar run by The French House.
Meanwhile, St John’s Trevor Gulliver kept visitors well watered with his informal wine tastings, whilst the cake competition and cabaret kept others amused.
It was a highly enjoyable, sun-baked afternoon filled with great food, much merriment and plenty to do for all ages, especially the children.
Most importantly, it raised a phenomenal £23,000 for Soho Parish Primary School so three cheers and raise a glass of Ricard to Margot and the Soho Food Feast committee. Well done, chaps!

St John tea now on sale

Last month, I was lucky enough to receive a sample of the new St John tea created by 'Rare Tea Lady' Henrietta Lovell and it blew me away.
A blend of two different flushes of Darjeeling and a little of a very rare Chinese tea, it's subtle, complex and, more importantly utterly delicious in a reviving kind of way.
The blend was created by Henrietta, Fergus Henderson and the St John team "after much vigorous tasting, slurping and manifold cucumber sandwiches".
The small sample I had was only enough for about four pots but everybody who tried it agreed it was one of the best all-round teas they had ever tasted.
The good news is that the tea is now on sale through the St John online shop, as well as being served at the St John restaurants and hotel.
It costs £7 for a 50g tin, plus shipping costs.
www.stjohnrestaurant.com

HIX Oyster & Fish House pops-up at Selfridges in London

For one month only, the HIX Restaurant & Champagne bar at Selfridges will host a pop-up Hix Oyster & Fish House - Mark’s restaurant in Lyme Regis.
The venture coincides with Selfridges’ PROJECT OCEAN, a series of events, talks, in-store activity and installations aimed at bringing awareness to the problems of over-fishing in the world.
Selfridges has teamed up with a host of environmental organisations including The Zoological Society of London (ZSL), the Marine Conservation Society and Greenpeace to help our oceans.
PROJECT OCEAN will take place at Selfridges from May 11 to June 12 and, in addition, Val Warner, Mitch Tonks and Mark Hix will host a sustainable fish supper on Wednesday, May 25 at 7pm. Tickets are open to the public and cost £60 per person for a three-course menu and half a bottle of wine.
Mark Hix says: ‘PROJECT OCEAN is a huge undertaking, it aims to highlight the plight of endangered fish, and so Selfridges has eliminated all endangered fish stocks across the food halls and restaurants.
“For us at HIX it’s the perfect opportunity to show our commitment to sustainability and give Londoners a taste of our fish restaurant in Lyme Regis. The views from the restaurant might not be the same as Lyme Regis, but we’ll be cooking the dishes that we do in Lyme, celebrating local producers and seasonal produce from the seashore. I might even put some seaside sounds and seagulls on the ipod. We’ll add a bit of fishy drama to the event.’”
The menu will feature Mark’s signature style British cooking with an emphasis on South West seafood. Diners can enjoy whole Portland crab with mayonnaise, steamed rock mussels in Burow Hill Cider or Newlyn hake with cockles and alexanders.
Hix Oyster & Fish House at Selfridges opens on May 12 and reservation lines open on May 3. http://www.hixatselfridges.co.uk/reservations/
Tickets for the May 25 sustainable fish supper are open to the public and cost £60 per person for a 3-course menu and half a bottle of wine. Call 01689 855 390 to book.