Thai tapas in Paris at Le Mary Celeste - updated March 2015

Eating Thai tapas in a city like Paris represents everything I dislike about eating out - a mish-mash of cooking styles, food you can eat anywhere - and yet I loved it. (Apparently the chef has moved on. See my update below from a subsequent visit in March 2015)

My husband, the master planner of the trip but not normally a Thai food fan was insistent we should go back to Le Mary Celeste, a restaurant we'd only managed to have a drink and a couple of oysters in on our last trip.

His meticulous researches (see How to plan a food trip to Paris) had revealed that it was now the scene in the Marais where we’re staying. It would be convenient, he argued, on the first night.

When I saw the menu I thought ‘Ha! He’ll hate it’ - apart from the natural wine list. There was next to no meat and far too many vegetables for a red-blooded Welshman. Of course I was proved wrong.

Apart from the oysters which are the speciality of the place dishes are in fact slightly bigger than tapas - more like raciones - but still designed for sharing as our very sweet waitress explained. (The service is unusually friendly for Paris.) The tables are so small they have to be served one by one.

The first dish - roast cauliflower with some chilli-infused fish sauce, hazelnuts and herbs (coriander) was unlikely but a real winner, the sort of dish you want to work out how to make at home. ‘Thai tacos’ (below) with a larb-style pork patty and pickles and chilli mayo was a dribblingly messy sandwich of a dish I’d happily go back for. Oeufs du diable, a spicy riff on egg mayonnaise was a spicy mouthful of bright fresh ginger, onions and crunchy fried rice. Gorgeous. Only some rather strange slabs of rice cake with a fiery radish dressing didn’t quite come off. My other half chomped his way contentedly through the meal admiring the chef’s boldness with seasoning. Wonders will never cease.

The wine we drank - a Tête de Gondole, a crisp blend of chenin and sauvignon from Domaine Chahut et Prodiges, frankly struggled to keep up with the onslaught. We’d have probably done better to order a cocktail which was obviously what most of the young clientele were going for. I was particularly tempted by the Koh Garden (Aalborg aquavit, homemade kaffir lime leaf and galangal syrup and lime) though it might have possibly been an overload with all that punchy food. And they cost 12€ (£9.88/$13.63) which would have undoubtedly bumped up the cost of our otherwise very reasonable €59 (£48.57) meal though remember French bills include service.

The menu changes daily so we might even go again during our stay. If we can get in, that is. It gets rammed so you need to book during the limited time they take bookings - or be prepared to queue.

Update from a subsequent visit in March 2015

Returning to the Mary Celeste a year later I’m not quite sure why I dubbed it Thai. Sure there are Asian inflections but not specifically Thai ones.* Only the oysters and oeufs du diable still remain on the menu and are as good as ever - the rest was a bit of a mixed bag.

A chickpea salad with beetroot, feta and mint was fresh and tasty as was a plate of panisse with chimichurri sauce but an ‘assiette de broccolis’ was tough and undercooked with barely a smear of the advertised smoked haddock purée.

The wine list is more extensive than on earlier visits - we drank a delicious pet nat (petillant sparkling wine) called X bulles from Muscadet producer Vincent Caillé which suited the food perfectly.

Mary Celeste is noisy and cramped but it has an incredible buzz. Think of it more as a bar to have a drink and a couple of snacks than a restaurant and you won’t be disappointed. Our bill was a reasonable €76.20 (£54) for two but we could have spent less.

*I've since learnt the chef has moved on.

Le Mary Celeste is at 1 rue Commines, 75003 Paris 09 80 72 98 83. They open at 2pm but don’t start serving food till 7pm and you can’t book after 7.30pm.

First Impressions: Ember Yard, Berwick Street

As the fourth restaurant in the Salt Yard Group which specialises in Spanish and italian food Ember Yard has a fine pedigree but does it live up to its stablemates?

Certainly first impressions suggest the group is after a rather different customer from its normal hispanophile clientele. It’s expensively kitted out in a smooth international traveller kind of way - the brightly coloured rough-painted mural of vineyards could come from any 5 star hotel while the pre-Christmas the office parties (hopefully now firmly back in their offices) gave it a vibe that felt very different from the group's other bars.

The food is, as always, good - in the case of some dishes excellent. The menu is similar to their other joints (why change a winning formula?) - platters of charcuterie and cheese and more substantial small plates of 'modern tapas' but, as the name of the restaurant suggests, there’s a greater emphasis on grilling.

There’s a discrepancy between the size of the portions that makes it a little hard to order. I resented sharing my rather delicious smoked bream carpaccio but the generous portion of chargrilled chicory with vin cotto would have served up to four. Veggies are also priced at not much less than dishes with more expensive ingredients. As is generally the case with this style of eating it’s easy to run up a sizeable bill particularly if you cut loose on the excellent wine list.

Given they make a feature of sourcing and sustainability I was surprised to see courgette flowers on the menu in December but otherwise what we ate - some wickedly good quince glazed iberico pork with celeriac purée, parsnip chips with manchego (now why has no-one thought of that before?) and an intensely rich chocolate ganacha with salted caramel ice cream felt spot on for the time of year. Oh, and don't miss the flatbread!

I suspect the best way to use Ember Yard - as with other restaurants in the group - is as a glass-and-a-dish-or-two tapas bar. As a well-placed refuge from the steaming hell of Oxford Street, I liked it more than enough to give it another go but suspect my favourite restaurant of the group will remain the rather cosier Opera Tavern (in Covent Garden).

Ember Yard is at 60-61 Berwick Street, London W1F 8SU. Tel: 020 7439 8057. The website is emberyard.co.uk though at the time of writing it’s not yet fully operational. Their other restaurants are Salt Yard and Dehesa.

I ate at Ember Yard as a guest of the Salt Yard group.

Tramontana: ‘Brindisa lite’

I’ve been a huge fan of Brindisa, the Spanish food importer who was probably more responsible than anyone for putting chorizo on our culinary map. They have a great shop in Borough Market and a number of convivial tapas bars so it seemed good news when they announced they were opening Tramontana, a restaurant based on 'speciality dishes from the Spanish Mediterranean'.

Sadly a recent visit proved a let down not least for the toppy prices they’re charging.

Take the (admittedly tasty) Hamburguesa Blanco y Negro, a ‘mini-burger’ of white butifarra sausage and morcilla (black pudding). Now I’ve no idea what the wholesale price of butifarra is - maybe it’s a fortune - but £5 for what is basically a slider is ridiculous.

Rice is supposed to be the big draw but even single estate bomba from a “family owned farm” doesn’t justify £14 per person (minimum 2 people - i.e. £28) for a paella dish of bomba rice with iberico pork ribs and black pudding so heavily crusted at the bottom that at least a quarter of the volume had been lost. And I’m sure the mangetout perched on the top weren’t particularly Spanish. The rice dish with lobster our neighbours were having cost £20 a head. £40! You can order a generous portion of risotto at the River Café for £16-18.

Other dishes were more in the conventional tapas mould - jamon, croquetas, grilled lamb cutlets - all fine but the patatas tramontana, a baked potato stuffed with sobrasada (soft spicy sausage, cheese and duck egg) could have come from Spud-u-like way back in the 80s. And a lurid pink beetroot and hake ensaladilla tasted like mushed-up leftovers.

Somewhat discouraged the four of us shared just one pudding - a perfectly nice arroz con leche (rice pudding) with a sprinkling of cinnamon, a really good match with a glass of orangey moscatel Castadiva ‘Cosecha Miel’ from Alicante. The wine list in fact is great with a good choice of cavas, sherries and lesser known Spanish wines like the crisp, citrussy Verdil our waiter suggested.

But you wonder quite who they’re aiming at. The atmosphere is very different from the standard Brindisa, with a large bar and pumping soundtrack which doesn’t sit easily with the ambitious and slightly obscure regional food.

Maybe they’re trying to roll-out a more popular high-street brand, envisaging Tramontana as a Brindisa Ibiza or Brindisa Lite? If so they need to sort out their pricing as I wouldn't have thought that clientele wants to pay upwards of £50 a head for a casual night out.

For the time being if you want a good Spanish restaurant in London you can’t beat Jose Pizarro’s eponymous Pizarro in Bermondsey Street (maybe an unfortunate comparison as I've just been reminded he used to be executive chef of Brindisa!). And Donostia has had some good reviews. Or even one of Brindisa's own tapas bars but this one needs a rethink.

Tramontana is at 152 Curtain Road, London EC2A 3AT. Tel: 020 7749 9961.

* We were offered the wine on a complimentary basis