Chez Liline: pelagic perfection, London restaurant review

Good seafood restaurants are hard to to come by in the cities: the supply lines need to be quick to maintain freshness, the paramount attribute of this delicate product. But imagine if a fishmonger was also a seafood restaurant proprietor. Someone who deals in fish would also cook it and serve it. And if that someone was from a tropical island amidst the Indian Ocean, with a passion for flavours and fine cuisine.

Such a place does exist in London in, of all places, Finsbury Park. Chez Liline is a Mauritian restaurant, serving food from that peculiar place where such diverse cultures as French, African, Indian and Chinese blend into something quite delectable. Imagine black beans, chillis and fresh basil adorning one dish: yummm, indeed!

Every time we go there with my friends Dusko and Mack, we get the Chef's Menu, the FRench version of the Japanese omakase, where you let the chef decide what is good for you and what is best today.

Everything comes freshly cooked from the kitchen, sizzling ina cloud of aromatic vapours. The variation is not large, it's samish combinations and ingredients every time, what matters is the perfection to which everything is cooked!

The starters are different kind of seafood - mussels, scallops, baby squid and shrimp stir-fried with sauce: spicy blackbean, butter.

Kale, a.k.a. boerenkool or grunkohlessen: back to roots!

Kale is one of the classic European staple vegetables that Northern European peasants used to sustain on before potatoes and tomatoes and other exotic lovelies became normal.

It is experiencing a sort of nostalgia-driven fad revival in Holland and Germany, when city dwellers have become removed enough from the realities of rustic life to long for the good ole days of hearty healthy food when "things were simple and straightforward".

Kale is indeed a very wholesome one, apparently full of calcium and fibre. The basic recipe is to steam it, chop it and fold into mash potatoes. This is what is sold in Holland as the cheapest one in Albert Heijn's range of infamously insipid steamed lunch packs.

Fini ratluk: Serbian hand-made Turkish delight

A vestige of the Turkish rule in Serbia: hand-made Turkish delight, pistachio flavoured. A nice souvenir straight from Belgrade for a curious foodie like your truly.

And luxury for all: Marks & Spencer venison sausages

have had more venison sausages since I moved to London in 2008 than in my entire life. First I saw them at the enlightened Slow Food Festival on the Southbank: aimed at the kind of crowd that regularly hangs out at the Royal Festival Hall, with prices to match. Now the commoditification of luxury products has brought game meat to the shelves of Marks & Spencer. Mind you, marked down! Four quid fifty for two boxes, 12 venison sausages. Is the right spelling surely not Marx and Spencer? Granted, working classes don't shop at Marks and Sparks but wealth-trickling needs to starts somewhere. Now it is down to persuading the masses to stop buying the similarly priced frozen toilet-paper-and-emulsifiers Cumberland sausages and switch to game, Argentine red and silver cutlery. Next logical step perhaps would be licensing the denizens of Woolwich for fox-hunt.

Serving suggestion: grilled, with garden salad and finocchio alla griglia. If you have the patience, sauté chopped shallots in the sausage juices, add a few juniper berries and red wine, simmer until alcohol evaporates.

Bitter gourd, goya, cerasee, karela: it's all actually one thing

ruly omnivorous that I am, there are very few restrictions when it comes to food, as long as it is nicely cooked. All edible carbon matter on this planet is a gift from God not to be taken for granted. My very few no-no's cover probably just steaks from cute animals like koalas and guinea pigs . Otherwise nothing else is barred. Bitter melon, however, is something I don't suffer gladly. I force myself to eat it because it is supposed to be so good for health (like most other health foods). The ridiculously long average life span on Okinawa, which beats even that in mainland Japan, is routinely attributed to the high consumption levels of goya, as it is known in Japanese.

The most common way to cook it is to remove the scathingly bitter peel and seeds and stuff the remaining flesh with mince, tofu and rice. This brings down the bitterness to a more tolerable level but it still tastes like somebody has accidentally spilt a pack of quinine into the pot.

As if to try to make life in the Caribbean less sweet, Jamaicans make tea out of cerasee. With every sip you need to remind yourself of its alleged health benefits, de-pimpling the skin being one of them.

Ras el-hanout: the head of the shop

ayer upon layer of ground spices get scooped up and mixed to zhush up tagines, the ubiquitous, and otherwise not that exciting, North African meat-and-veg stews. Apparently, there is no set recipe and each shop and housewife make their own mix. So, basically, it's just all spices you could get hold of, arranged aesthetically.

Hochar Pére et Fils, Lebanese wine

he Lebanese stand out among their neighbours like a sore thumb. Or rather like a rich dowager's manicured and bejewelled thumb. When the ancient Hebrews were still camelbacking the arid expanses of the biblical desert, the Phoenicians from whom the modern Lebanese directly descend were already conducting a busy trade as far afield as Britain and India.

Four thousand years ago they were already good peddling wine to the less mobile Mediterraneans. You can fathom the reasons of such wide-reaching popularity, if you taste any wine from the Hochar vineyards in Lebanon's Bekaa valley. Rich, lush, delicately balanced and decidedly French in style they are nothing that you would expect from such a war-torn land. During the civil war, the Hochars would keep on picking grapes and making wine in the midst of Israeli shelling and bombardments. Phoenicians have outlived pharaonic Egyptians, Alexander the Great, Romans, Byzantines, Arab conquests, Mongols, Turks, and the French. Centuries from now, they will also most likely be the first to start interstellar wine trade.

How to cook salsify

alsify is one of those "forgotten" vegetables that used to be on everybody's plate before the more alluring tomatoes, potatoes, corn and the ilk hit the Old World's shores and took everybody's fancy for centuries to come.

Although biologically not related, salsify reminds of the Japanese gobou both in shape, taste and texture: long and thin, earthy and crunchy. Both need to be cooked well to become chewable and both have that unmistakable earthy flavour of a root vegetable. The best way to enjoy gobou is kimpira gobou.



Salsify just needs that flavour to be underlined. The recipe could not be simpler:

1. Pick a couple of perky, not flabby, roots, peel them, removing occasional brown bits.
   
2. Cut into 2-inch chunks and immerse into slightly acidic water to prevent discolouration.
3. Boil 15-20 minutes in plain water with a bit of saltuntil it becomes soft-ish, but well before it starts falling apart.
4. Sauté in butter with sliced shiitake. Add salt, pepper and a splash of single cream towards the end.
   

The shiitake meshes well with salsify's flavour. Here it is shown served with chicken burgers, coconut rice and avocado.