February Fail

I have not done well with the Cookbook Challenge this month. However, this monumental fail is not my fault. I have several excuses:

1) I have been too busy checking out other people's burgers

2) Chinese Elvis gave me nightmares and I woke up too tired to cook

3) I spent so much at Dinner, I couldn't afford ingredients

So I can't really be blamed for failing so miserably, not with all that going on.

The Big D

Byron, 33 -35 Wellington Street, WC2E 7BN

Why is is that I only ever discover new things after they are no longer cool or just before they disappear? The Big D is a case in point. Three days before the end of February, I tried my first one. Available for one short month every year, tomorrow is the last day they will be on the menu. I had a giant burger two days ago. I am not ready for another one. But if I don't eat a Big D today, I will have to wait 11 months for another or buy my own Big D at O'Shea's (the home of this meaty wonder) and get all pyromaniac on it with an old grill pan and cling film over the smoke detector. The latter might work in the short term but will leave me and the entire contents of my little flat reeking of cow for a good week.

There's only one thing for it: double burger week. Good job I am off to the US next week. It's not like they are any good at making burgers or anything...

Eat a Big D while you can. It is a meaty, juicy marvel.

Lunch at Dinner

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, 66 Knightsbridge, SW1X 7LA

Extravagant lunch for two: £240 (gulp)

Choosing Dinner as the place to celebrate our first wedding anniversary was a slight gamble. Back in December when I booked, there was eager anticipation but it was too early for hype: Giles Coren had yet to call it the best restaurant in the world, it wasn't particularly hard to get a table and no one, including me, had ever heard of meat fruit. Jump forward two months and the opposite is true. If anything, however, this made the choice of Dinner for a special occasion all the more precarious: massive expectations were raised, divorce was threatened if I tried to discuss the menu with Mr F for the fiftieth time and the chances of us getting away with my original plan of the affordable set lunch dwindled to nothing. Fortunately for our marriage, Dinner is as wonderful as we have been led to believe. Even the most hard-hearted super-foodie, determined to find fault with popular consensus would struggle to dislike it: so for mere mortals such as ourselves, it was a truly worthy treat.

Three ways with beef

East London Steak Co

Hawksmoor Seven Dials, 11 Langley St, WC2H 9JG

From time to time, I resolve to eat less flesh. This generally occurs when I read something written by a genuinely healthy person about wanting to eat sushi/salad/tofu because they feel fat from eating red meat. This triggers my deep-seated envy of people who actually want to have a well-balanced diet, forcing me to pretend that I too live that way and not, as is the reality, like some pre-historic dinosaur woman, chomping her way through meat-based meal after meat-based meal with no thought for vegetables. That said, eating my way through three different cuts of beef in one weekend was a bold move, even by my standards.

Wednesday's child is good to fry

Masters Super Fish, 191 Waterloo Road, SE1 8UX

Fish supper and beer for one: £15

Occasionally I try to resist the fact I am slowly turning into an East London stereotype: I cycle everywhere, my shoes are always flat and, if ever further confirmation were needed, I have become hooked on blogs - including my own. It is fair to say that I am a fan of the East. Which makes it all the more disappointing that, in one respect, the East End has failed to live up to my pre-Dalston conceptions: the restaurants. 

It is not that the East is lacking in the culinary department - far from it. Without a doubt, we have some of the finest Turkish, Vietnamese and Pakistani restaurants in the capital. What it lacks is the food of its more distant history. Finding good old-fashioned British food in the area is harder than it might seem. Having already established that the best fried breakfasts in London are to be found in Pimlico, it is with a small measure of sadness that I confirmed what others have already reported: the best fish and chips are in Lambeth.  

More Meat

#Meateasy, Goldsmiths Tavern, 316 New Cross Road, SE14 6AF

Bar Boulud, Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, 66 Knightsbridge, SW1X 7LA

If I were to open a new bar in London, I imagine that deciding how to set it up would be a fairly swift process: 

1) Unexpected location, preferably in something not originally intended to be a bar e.g. shoe shop, hotdog stand or pet shop? Check.

2) Cocktails in jam jars / petrol cans / anything but glasses? Check.

3) Subtle but diverting speakeasy quirks evoking downtrodden decadence of prohibition era? Check.

Even simpler would be the process of designing the menu, for what self-respecting hotspot could overlook that trendiest of food stuffs: the burger. Despite its humble associations, the burger continues to capture London's foodie imagination; with everyone from East London dive bars to the big names in grilled meat jostling for the crown of London's Best Burger. With such great variation between the offerings, comparison is almost impossible. Nonetheless, here goes my take on what makes a good burger: the big hype versus the big name.

Cookbook Challenge: January

The problem with New Year's resolutions is that they start to look jaded around the same time giving up rich food and alcohol starts to sound like not such a good idea after all. This year, it took me until lunchtime on New Year's Day to decide to head to the pub in search of beer and chips. So the prospects for my resolution were never great. Somewhat surprisingly, therefore, I managed to cook from eight of my many cookbooks in January, including three which had only ever previously been used as browsing fodder. What I have struggled with, unsurprisingly, is finding the time to chronicle my recipe-driven experiences. A change of tack is required: enter the monthly round up.

Moving on

At the ripe old age of six months, Get Forked! is moving home. We've bitten the bullet and bought the blog its own domain and given it a brief makeover in the process. 


The shiny new url is: www.getforked.co.uk


Comments, views and suggestions on the new format would be gratefully appreciated.

Breakfast with a Westminster classic

The Cinnamon Club, 30-32 Great Smith Street, SW1P 4BU

Breakfast: £13 on a special offer

Located in the former home of the Westminster Library, the Cinnamon Club has an inordinate amount of old world charm: beautiful architecture, walls lined with books and thick, white linen tablecloths. For ten years now, it has been a fixture of the Westminster culinary scene, serving up refined Indian food to journalists wooing politicians in the hope of an insight into the latest intrigue. Being neither hack nor expenses-fuelled parliamentarian, I had to wait for a Time Out special offer.