Shrimp and soft shell crab burger with vintage champagne

One of the (many) charms of champagne is how well it goes with comfort food like a shrimp burger as I discovered at London’s famous seafood restaurant J Sheekey last week

The occasion was a dinner to launch their new champagne and oyster bar and terrace which they’ve set up in partnership with Moët et Chandon. We also had oysters - obviously - dressed crab and langoustines with a dollop of gloriously glossy mayonnaise but it was the burgers which were paired with the 2013 vintage of Moët which were the standout pairing

The thing is if you have champagne this mature it can take practically anything in its stride including the slightly pokey spiced Korean mayo which was served alongside and into which I gaily dunked my chips. (This was fortunately before I went down with COVID a couple of days later when I wouldn’t have been able to taste a thing)

The burger is actually a comparatively reasonable - for the West End - £22.50 though chips would add another fiver onto that and a glass of vintage Moët no doubt another £20, assuming you could stop at one. But if you had an indulgent elderly relative who wanted to treat you - or wanted to treat your beloved to a romantic night out (it is still a wonderfully romantic restaurant) If would be perfect.

I ate at J Sheekey as a guest of the restaurant.

Beef carpaccio and chardonnay

Beef and chardonnay doesn’t sound like an obvious combo at first glance but it depends, as always, how the beef is cooked.

This was in the form of a carpaccio at a Californian Wines tasting and lunch at Smith & Wollensky just off the Strand but the key was not so much the meat as the parmesan, truffle and truffle oil which anointed it all of which are immensely chardonnay-friendly

I tried a couple of different wines with it but particularly liked the Staglin Family’s 2019 Salus estate chardonnay which had a lovely freshness about it that counterbalanced its richness and weight. Sadly at £50 a bottle (at The Champagne Company) or £58 at Oddbins it isn’t cheap - Californian chardonnay, especially from the Napa Valley ,doesn’t tend to be - but you could pull the same trick with a full-bodied chardonnay from elsewhere - and even truffle oil rather than the real thing.

I ate at the restaurant as a guest of California Wines

Thai food and orange wine

Orange wine wouldn’t have been the first pairing I’d have turned to with Thai food but what I love about this business is that there are always opportunities to revise your opinion

It was actually the theme of a tasting organised by Donald Edwards the head sommelier at La Trompette and a past contributor to this website* who convenes a monthly get together for fellow wine professionals around a food and wine theme. (You can keep track of them via the somemondaysarebetter account on instagram)

This one which took place at Smoking Goat Shoreditch really intrigued me. There wasn’t a single wine and food combination that stood out - there were a lot of wines on the table and dishes were served in rapid succession but overall I thought the lighter wines with shorter skin contact, particularly those made from aromatic grape varieties worked best with the salads and grilled dishes and the deeper coloured wines with longer skin contact went better with the meatier dishes like the smoked brisket and long pepper laab and aged beef sirloin with smoked bone marrow and galangal relish. But orange wine certainly has the personality to stand up to the hot/sweet/sour flavours of Smoking Goat’s food.

Most intriguing wine of the tasting? A 2019 Polish roter riesling from a winery called Winnica Silesian whose site is unfortunately only available in Polish. I’m trying to track it down!

* you can read Donald’s article on orange wine here and more suggestions for orange wine pairings here

Artichokes and Trebbiano

Artichokes are a notoriously tricky match with wine but don’t have to be an insuperable one as last week’s artichoke dinner at Bocca di Lupo proved.

Chef Jacob Kenedy created an amazing menu in which artichokes appeared in all kinds of guises including an American sweet artichoke pie with which he matched a moscato. (If you can’t imagine that it was surprisingly like a pumpkin pie)

The two courses that were paired with trebbiano were a fantastic salad of shaved artichokes with parmesan, anchovy and lemon (the latter ingredients definitely contributing to the match with the 2020 Trebbiano ‘Bio’ from Cantine Tolio and a creamy artichoke risotto with lemon, parsley and parmesan with a 2015 Trebbiano d’Abruzzo from Valentini, both from the Abruzzo. Again the lemon and parmesan were key elements in the success of the pairing, rather bearing out the conclusions I came to in this earlier post.

Pairing wine and artichokes

There was also an initial wine, a crisp 2020 Capolemole Bianco from Marco Carpineti made from a grape variety called Bellone which went brilliantly with the fried artichokes and sweetbreads (an artichokey riff on fritto misto) and grilled spiedini (skewers) of artichokes and langoustines. The only dish that caused it any problems were the fried artichoke alla Giudia (fried artichokes Roman style) which made the wine taste a touch sweet - the usual problem with artichokes which Jacob miraculously avoided with everything else. But not by any means a clash.

Bocca di Lupo is at 12 Archer Street, Soho, London W1D 7BB. I ate there as a guest of the restaurant