Peckham Bazaar - well worth the detour

The thing about neighbourhood restaurants is that they’re a pain to get to if you’re not a local. In general that’s not a problem. They’re nice for those who live nearby, you tell yourself, but you don’t envy them unduly. But Peckham Bazaar is another matter ...

It was on my radar already as one of my occasional contributors, ex-sommelier Donald Edwards (right), is one of the partners and had put together the winelist (more on that in a minute) And I’d read some great reports on the food so when I took up temporary residence in East Dulwich over Christmas it seemed too good an opportunity to miss.

Talking of missing things you could easily walk past. It would be an understatement to say it isn’t smart. Basically it’s a shack with an outdoor barbecue and a main room that looks more like a community centre for disaffected yoof than the deli it apparently was in its former existence. I say this not because it's not congenial (it is) but because I don’t want you to go trekking across London thinking you’re heading for some polished designer joint.

The food - billed as pan-Balkan by Albanian-born chef John Gionieka - is something else, though. We went on a Sunday night, just after Christmas, just as they were closing, which must have been the worst possible time for them. They’d run out of a couple of dishes* but that didn’t stop them serving up a feast.

Our two shared starters (the octopus was sadly off) were some irresistibly fat, juicy, smokey chicken ‘winglets’ with tsatsiki and sucuc, a spicy sausage with shakshuka, the middle-east’s answer to ratatouille.

Amazingly the mains - a let-down in so many restaurants - were even better: slow roast lamb with a punchy citrussy avgolemono sauce, a sublime beef stifado with cauliflower purée and, because they’d run out of the other mains, a hefty slice of grilled manouri with butter beans and a generous dollop of skordalia. No pretty pictures of the first two because the light was dim and stews never look that alluring. But what a relief to have food that tastes better than it looks. Give me substance over style every time.

The only disappointment was a slightly stodgy pistachio and orange cake with poached quince ice-cream. I’d venture that desserts aren’t their strong suit. If I were them I’d just stick to a selection of ice-creams which would reduce the pressure on the tiny kitchen.

Oh, and the wine. The wine list is brilliant - quirky, adventurous, full of rare treats from Greece and elsewhere in the Eastern Med (so massively on-trend). Several like the Simcic Opoka Ribolla - an orange wine from Slovenia are quite out there, others like the Greek reds, rather more mainstream. If that still makes you nervous stick to the basic Bulgarian house white and house red at a very reasonable £16.50 a bottle. Oh, and the Eduardo Miroglio Brut Zero, an amazingly classy Bulgarian sparkling wine is a great way to kick off the evening.

This is the kind of restaurant you (or rather I) wake up in the middle of the night dreaming about. The kind of place where chefs head after work and the sort of food I’d make myself if I had time, lived in Albania and had an outdoor grill. Not flash food to impress but food to feed the soul.

* apparently they normally have a longer menu - take a look at the old menus on the site. Actually take a look at them anyway. You'll want to go even more.

Peckham Bazaar is at 119 Consort Road, London SE15 3RU and is open from 6-11 Tuesday-Friday, 12.30-11 on Saturdays and 12.30-8 on Sundays. Phone number - not listed on the site but how else are you to book? - is 07875 107471. They're also on Twitter @peckhambazaar.

My son and daughter-in-law took me there so I don’t know what they paid for the three of us but I’m guessing about £25 a head for food. Ridiculously good value.

More about the delights of sarf London here.

Pigging out - literally - at Blackfoot, Exmouth Market

As soon as I heard that one of my favourite chefs (Allegra McEvedy) was involved in a restaurant dedicated to one of my favourite ingredients (pork) I knew I had to get down there pronto. And you can’t try out a restaurant much sooner than its first full day’s trading.

Blackfoot (named after the famous Spanish pata negra pig) has been set up by Tom Ward, former operations manager of the Leon group - where he also worked with Allegra.

It faces quite a challenge in being in what is already one of the foodiest thoroughfares in London (Exmouth Market) which not only houses Moro, Morito, Medcalf and Caravan but a battery of street food traders - on Friday at least.

If you’re a pork lover the choice is pretty tough. There’s charcuterie - had to be - ribs, pork steaks and salads - very good ones. Allegra, the inventor of Leon’s superfood salad, is as inspired a veggie cook as she is a meat one. The pecan slaw is exemplary and will enable you to justify munching through all that meat.

I went a bit mad given the size of the helpings and ordered rillettes (a little salty but full of flavour), a vast porchetta roll with salsa verde which they’re going to be selling from the front of the restaurant as a takeaway and - best of all - some fantastic deep-fried crisp and aromatic ribs which are apparently braised with lemongrass, ginger and lime leaves, deep-fried and scattered with a punchy topping of crisp garlic chips, chilli and spring onions. A welcome change from the smokey American-style ribs that are all over London - though they have those too.

As a friendly PR was on the next table I also managed to try the chilli crackling (ace), the Vietnamese belly salad (good but not as quite good as the ribs) and the mega-nut burger which is a properly satisfying veggie burger not an apology for one pretending to be meat. You could easily bring a vegetarian here though such a full-blooded celebration of pork is obviously not going to make some feel entirely comfortable.

I didn’t get to try the Oxford Sandy & Black gammon steak but saw one whizzing past and that looked great too.

You’d think after that lot I’d have had the decency to skip dessert but felt duty-bound to investigate the quirkly-named Like a Key Lime Pie. I’m not sure in what respect it was ‘like’ one rather than an actual one. It was vividly limey but also amazingly, fluffily light, so much so the slice almost fell apart on the plate. Allegra who had turned up at the table to say hello pronounced that it looked ‘a bit of a car crash’ and that the challenge was to get it to look as good as it tasted. I doubt if the punters will much mind if it doesn’t. Make sure you leave room for one.

Drinks? There’s a short interesting well-priced wine list including a Spanish Malvasia and a Hungarian riesling as well as a couple of house wines trendily on tap. I actually drank beer (a Paulaner and a Meantime IPA which was the special of the day). My one minor criticism is that they could do with a porter or stout.

So, great start, good value (my bill for this pig-out was £32.72), look forward to going back.

PS Blackfoot is not the only exciting thing going on in Exmouth Market this week. Round the corner the excellent Quality Chop House has opened a very posh butcher and takeaway shop with delicious bits and pieces to take home. That makes two top butchers in the area - the other being Turner & George. Lucky locals.

Blackfoot is at 46 Exmouth Market London EC1 4QE. Tel 020 7837 4384

Trattoria della Posta, Monforte d’Alba - Piemontese food at its simple best

Of all the meals we had on my 3 day visit to Piemonte this week Trattoria della Posta was the best. It’s not that the food was different (Piemontese cuisine has a limited repertoire), simply that it was perfectly executed.

There were white truffles (of course) but particularly fragrant ones scattered abundantly over a carne cruda (chopped raw veal) and the best fonduta I’ve ever tasted.

It’s a feature of carne cruda that the meat should be so good you don’t need to season it and the chef had simply put little piles of seasoning on the side for you to add to taste: some grain mustard, black pepper, pink Himalayan salt (maybe the only affectation in the meal) and grated Castelmagno, the powerful local cheese. It was great with the rich 2008 Gaja Gaia & Rey chardonnay our host Giacomo Conterno had chosen (It seems to be a convention here that you don’t drink your own wines at a meal but show off others from the region. I like that.)

The fonduta (Piedmont’s answer to the fondue) was light-as-air due apparently to using a cheese from Bra rather than the usual Fontina. It came topped with a vivid yellow egg yolk and more truffle shavings which we were urged to stir into the gooey mass. Definitely a dish to try before you die and now on my menu for my last supper.

We then switched away from truffles to tajarin (the local super-fine egg noodles) with a rich ragu, another local speciality which matched perfectly with an earthy 2009 Barbera d’Alba Codamonte from Giuseppe Mascarello, Sensible not to overdo the truffles at this point and to have a contrast of flavours, colours and textures.

The main course was a real surprise: quail stuffed with the deeply savoury piquant Bra sausage - an object lesson in preparing quail which is often cooked too quickly and therefore tough. The crispy umami-rich legs were as good as the stuffing, great foil for a magnificent 2007 Bruno Giacosoa Barbaresco Asile which was just beginning to hit its stride.

We (or rather I) didn’t really need desserts and to be honest they didn’t reach the heights of the preceding courses though I can recommend the fabulously wobbly, creamy pannacotta and a semi-freddo with an intriguing coffee and pistachio ice-cream on the side. Accompanied by a very good moscato but I can’t remember whose.

The restaurant is charmingly old-fashioned and for what it offers not expensive. There’s a set lunch for 40€ but even eating off the carta is affordable and the wines - amazingly - cheaper than you’d find them retail in the UK .

According to David Gleave of Liberty Wines who was taking us around he’d never had a better meal there but even if it was 25% less good I’d still recommend it. Go, preferably in truffle time.

I ate at Trattoria della Posta as a guest of Giacomo Conterno.

Da Cesare al Casaletto, Rome - the perfect neighbourhood trat

With trattorias on every street corner you might wonder why you need to jump on a number 8 tram and go to the end of the line to eat but Da Cesare is well worth the detour, as Michelin famously puts it.

I wouldn’t have known about it but for a couple of local bloggers Katie Parla and Hande Leimer (aka vinoroma) who we’d run into by chance at a wine fair in the Auvergne earlier this year. Both professed it was their favourite restaurant - not least because of its wine list - a big claim in a city so amply provided with places to eat.

Not all of them are up to scratch though and Da Cesare is. It looks modest enough - a large, modern white almost canteen-like room with some outside seating - there’s nothing fancy about it - but it’s rammed with a happy crowd of locals. You definitely need to book, especially for Sunday lunch Hande and her husband Theo told us.

We started with some crisp flatbread (pizzi bianchi) then - what else in Rome? - a selection of fritti. They included a paper cone of beautifully crisp fried squid, fried gnocchi with cacio e pepe (a cheese and pepper sauce that’s normally used on pasta) polpette di melanze (aubergine croquettes topped with tomato) and - best of all - polpette di bolitto, fat little fried nuggests of deeply savoury braised meat topped with pesto.

Pasta was particularly good. Hande suggested we should have spaghetti with mussels and pecorino, an unusual but delicious combination of seafood and cheese, then the owner Leonardo suggested tagliatelle with ceps and I’d set my heart on a good carbonara. It turned out to be the real deal - fabulously golden and eggy, made with guanciale (pigs cheek) and mezzi rigatoni rather than spaghetti - the best I’ve ever eaten.

We washed all this down with a couple of ‘orange’ wines from the largely organic and natural wine list: a 2010 Paski Campania Coda di Volpe and a lovely 2007 Emilia Ageno which suprisingly also went with our shared plate of grilled lamb chops - my match of the week that week. The only main course we could manage after the pasta blowout*. We also tried a characterful thirstquenching local red, the bright, briary 2011 Damiano Ciolli Silene Cesanese Olevano Romano from Lazio.

I’d have given up at that point but Hande said we must have the panna cotta. So we sighed and did and it was perfect - creamy, wobbly and bathed in a rich dark caramel.

We spent about 50€ (£42/$67) a head on this feast which for Rome is great value, particularly for food of this quality. Despite the fact that it’s been extensively written about by Parla and Leimer it’s not overrun with tourists who obviously find the thought of a tram-ride to an outlying neighbourhood daunting. But it's easy so don’t be deterred. It was the best meal we had in Rome by far.

If you want to have an experience like ours both Katie and Hande organise tailormade restaurant visits for visitors to Rome and Katie has a very useful app called Katie Parla’s Rome. Both collaborate on The Rome Digest - which highlights events in the city each week.

* You might want to leave room for one of their offal dishes which are a big feature.

Cesare al Casaletto
Via del Casaletto, 45 – 00151 Roma
Tel. +39 06536015
Closed Wednesdays and for a week at the beginning of October.

To get to Da Cesare pick up the number 8 tram heading for Casaletto (in the opposite direction from the Piazza Venezia) and sit on it until you reach the final stop - about 20 minutes from the centre. As you get off the tram look backwards over your shoulder, cross the road and you’re in Via del Casaletto. Couldn’t be easier.

You can buy tram tickets in tobacconists and magazine kiosks.