Fields: Mediterranean flight of fancy in Hackney Central

he beauty of London is that here we have things that would never happen elsewhere. A combination of cultural lassez-faire attitudes, somewhat questionable excess of money, and diverse and dynamic populations snowballs into a milieu conducive to craziest, fanciest, most daring ideas and enterprises. 

Fields, an ostensibly unassuming restaurant in Hackney Central I visited the other day, is a shiny example of that. A brainchild of a Turkish Marxist historian passionate about food, it boasts a Mediterranean fusion menu craftily executed by a Maltese chef and a French sous-chef, and expeditiously delivered by a charming Spanish waitress. The effortlessly exquisite and refreshingly affordable wine list contains the best of all continents, save Antarctica. As I went through it, I noticed Argentina's vertiginously fragrant Torrontés, Chile's unwaveringly reliable Chilean Sauvignon Blanc as well as the best of Entre Deux Mer's whites and reds. Apparently, it was put together by another academic foodie, a Croatian/Bosnian lecturer from SOAS. Great food does take an intellectual effort.

A tableful of meze/tapas we shared between us proved a dinner in its own right:

• smoked fish platter: salmon and swordfish;
• smoked salmon stuffed with ricotta;
• beef carpaccio with sliced artichokes and herbs.

The mains included:

• whole chargrilled seabass marinated and stuffed with mint, fresh tomato, olive oil & lemon;
  
• what they claimed to be Salade Niçoise turned out to be a huge chargrilled fresh tuna steak on a bed of French beans, fresh tomatoes, olives, peppers, new potatoes, lettuce, red onions and boiled egg with wholegrain mustard vinaigrette;
  
• whole grilled sea bream arrived blanketed with stir-fried peeled shrimp and underscored with the chef's own creation, strawberry-and-mint sauce.

Surprisingly, these seeming culinary acrobatics yielded a very wholesomely delectable fare, with no whiff of Nouvelle Cuisine's studied trickery. The portions were generous and it took us an extra effort and extended time to tuck it all in. All fish dishes came with copious  amounts of  fresh lemons, nice  touch. Just when we thought we were about to meet Mr. Creosote's fate, a dessert sampler platter arrived, probably to illustrate the owner's leftist persuasion with an example of duped masses perishing from excesses of consumerism. How very decadently thoughtful!

Strada@London: new menu

 don't need really any particular luring to dine at Strada. That's where I go when I'm in the mood for consistently enjoyable no-nonsense Italian classics. So when I was offered to taste their new menu with whomever I cared to come with, I jumped at the opportunity. In return I was asked to write an honest review. So here's the breakdown:

The starter, large green Castelvetrano olives were meaty and flavourful but the portion was on the skimpy side.

Antipasti platter - Parma ham, Napoli salami, speck ham from Trentino, buffalo mozzarella from Campania, vine-ripened tomatoes, olive tapenade and bruschetta pomodoro - was nice, same as usual, not enough for three men though. We were not allowed to order more.

I never order a bruschetta for a starter, to me it's a glorified sandwich and so did it turn out: grilled bread with some chopped tomatoes on top.

Risotto is easily the most abused Italian dish. The opportunity was not missed this time either: boring and watery, risotto verdure tasted like buttery rice porridge. It reminded me of my worst vegetarian days.

Rigatoni speck with bits of ham and broccoli reminded me of the lunch fare in my short time at kindergarten. Über-meh.

Orata al forno, whole grilled sea bream though was sublime: very fresh tasting and cooked to perfection, with scrumptious crunchy skin with just a sprinkle of salt and thyme and delicate juicy flesh. A side of exquisitely steamed vegetables and boiled potatoes kept it good company.

The dolci were run-off-the-mill forgettable factory-made pistaccio ice-cream and chocolate mousse. Nothing horrible but nothing to write home about either. Just something you can buy frozen in Lidl.

Overall, I was not impressed with the new menu. As a paying customer I would only order the grilled fish. However, I will keep coming to Strada for my regular favourites. And also for cacciuco, a Sicilian fish soup that was new but not on the tasting menu.  

I thank Strada for the opportunity, however, for the next time I would advise them to put their best, not the mediocre, on their tasting menu. Perhaps, just what they serve daily anyway?

Khao Sarn Thai restaurant@Brixton, London (review)

This year was the year of Brixton's avalanche-like gentrification. The ruNice restaurants and even a barber shop for white peeps have sprouted all over like mushrooms after rain. I reckon we have a few years to relish the bliss of the BoBo (bourgeois-bohemien) limbo before the 'yuppie suits' cotton on this and make this a new Chelsea, Clapham. The once grimy and forlorn Brixton Market is now teeming with 20 and 30-somethings hanging out in organic bakeries, ethnic restaurants and sunlit terraces.

One of such cool hangouts is Khao Sarn. Having lived 6 years in Bangkok, I'm very wary of Thai restaurants outside Thailand. Now this one I can recommend. If this was French outfit, it would be a brasserie: it churns out classic (some may say "same ole") Thai dishes consistent quality at reasonable prices.

We had a correctly cooked and served, with lime and green onions, phad Thai (somewhat on the smallish side) and the Isarn staple: grilled chicken leg with sticky rice and somtam (papaya salad).

Feijão do Luis@Brixton london review

here used to be a permanently empty Nigerian caff a new Brazilian joint is plying a busy trade on top of a Brazilian butcher shop. I bought from them some linguica de porco (pork sausage) quite a while ago and it turned out very flavourful, if a tad salty.

But for the restaurant I was waiting for Floyd to come to London, knowing how much he loves all things Brazilian.

• Coração de Galinha - chicken hearts stewed tender
• Feijoada Completa - smokey and clearly home-made (the menu claims it takes 24 hours to cook, it does taste like that, smooth and silky)
• Picanha Grelhada - the piece of beef cut called "butcher's cut",
  

The interior may be very caffish but what matters is that the food tastes like made just for you.

Feijão do Luis
Brazilian Point
Market Row Brixton
London SW9 8LD

Hare & Tortoise@Bloomsbury, London (review)

his month my stereotypes have taken a nice battering. Another blow was was delivered just yesterday to my prejudice against chain restaurants, particularly peddling the so-called "pan-Asian cuisine" (although the toe-twirlingly atrocious N1 Kitchin@King's Cross may be the actual reason why king is cross!). It is hard enough to quality-control a decent Thai or Japanese menu, with all the fresh ingredients and tricky cooking timings. Juggling the gastronomy of the entire Pacific Rim on your kitchen counter is a super-human task. And to do it persuasively across a range of branches? Hmm, I doubt that really seriously.

I would have never made it to Hare & Tortoise but for my fellow anthropologist Patrizia. I would hardly trust anyone to drag me to a "cheap Asian resto for some nice grub" but her. She's extremely fastidious about food and that is just one small dot of the vast common ground that we share.

The place is immensely popular: it took us half an hour of queuing to finally plop around our table and get down to ordering. We shared a salmon box (sushi/sashimi set, £9.50): very fresh neta (fish toppings), expertly prepared rice with just the right degree of sourishness and chewiness and impeccable presentation featuring faux lacquerware and a shiso leaf.

My Singaporean curry laksa (£6.75) was a sumptuous bowl so huge it never seemed to end. It instantly transported me into the sultry streets of the self-proclaimed culinary capital of Asia, infused with aromas of freshly cooked food. Nice touches included delicately sliced chicken breast, cooked-just-right shrimp and squid, slices of toasted garlic and a lingering kaffir lime leaf. Apprently cooked from scratch, with no typical silly substitutes for true South-East Asian ingredients, it made for a deeply satisfying dinner.

Pro's: Highly consistent quality and authenticity.
Con's: Queues and noise around lunch and dinner time, the price of popularity. Cramped seating.
In a nutshell: Great value for your money with no quality compromise.

Hare & Tortoise
11-13 The Brunswick
London WC1N 1AF

Sen Viet Vietnamese restaurant London review

en Viet - a Vietnamese restaurant in London's King's Cross area is by far the best value place to gorge on Vietnamese poetry in food. My peeps from the Japanese Anthropology department hipped me to it and I trust those folks' taste buds (almost) like mine!

Between the three of us we had (it actually looked much more appetizing than Sarah's mobile could capture!):

• Caramel Pork Spring Rolls - a delicious variety of lovely textures wrapped in rice paper;
• Beef Rolls on Garlic Cloves: paper thin sheets of most tender and juicy beef wrapped around garlic cloves and grilled, served on a bed of salad with a zingy dressing;
• Catfish Stew - turned out the piece de resistance of our dinner, full of black pepper, ginger and chilli flavours, it stole the show from the rest of the dishes, which is itself was quite a feat;
• Duck Curry - unctuous and perfectly balanced to complement duck's gamey flavour, the only other good way to cook duck apart from Peking duck (kao ya)
• Rice - the plain steamed variety, as good as you expect it to be;
• Vermicelli - plain rice noodles to soak up all the nice juices;
• Baguette - very good for that purpose too, although I had crunchier and fluffier in France.

That set us back mere 31 pounds + tip -- very well deserved as the service is on par with Cathay Pacific's business class. The place has just opened since a month or so ago, it's squeaky clean, nicely appointed in your classic London hip urban style, although the exterior does not give that away at all. They also have a 10% student discount - no need to show an ID, just mere saying "SOAS" does the trick.

Sen Viet Vietnamese Restaurant
119 King's Cross Road, London
WC1X 9NH

Beirut Express: great dinner for under 10 quid in London

remember what a major letdown was Time Out's Cheap Eats in London guidebook: a random list of fast food grease joints and places that cost 15-20 pounds a pop. Since then I discovered that London is, indeed, chock-a-block with places where you can eat very well under a tenner and they crop up in most unexpected places.

Take Beirut Express: it looks like your common-and-garden urban caff, if decorated in a distinct Levantine style of 80s marble and nickel surfaces. The only giveaway that you can also feed your face here, are two giant kebab "elephant legs" slowly swivelling in the corner. Luckily, I know that they have way better stuff up their sleeve. Check their menu and you will see the classic Middle Eastern lineup of starters, grilled meats and sweets.

Last time I went there with a Japanese girl friend who does not eat much anyway, it took us close to three hours to finish the gigantic platters of starters (meze) and mixed grilled meats (meshawi). This time around there were three of us to feed on those and that filled us up for the rest of the day.

As it goes with Levantine food, the variety is limited and repeated time after time again, but everything you get is utterly fresh and cooked to perfection.

Make sure to try their jellab drink - rose-flavoured date juice, intensely fragrant and sweet.

Pro's: Superlative Lebanese grub. Friendly service. Big portions. Affordable.
Con's: Tables next to the entrance are a tad drafty.
In a nutshell: Levantine cuisine at its usual best.

Beirut Express 112-114 Edgware Road London W2 2 DZ


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Heron Thai restaurant London review

I am very rarely impressed with Thai restaurants abroad. Most of them are run by people who got into cooking simply because they could not find any other job. They are also often guilty of watering down tastes to suit the local palate. And some use pre-packaged sauces to cut down the operational costs. Boo! Boo! Boo!

That said, there are lucky exceptions. I saw an advert for this place in London's Thai-language newspaper. It is normally a sure-fire sign of authentic fare.

My gut was right. North-Eastern sausages (krok Lao) were perfectly done: crunchy on the outside, juicy and spicy inside. The sticky rice was expertly cooked. And the yam (a kind of spicy escoveche) of raw crab was nothing short of revelation. I have never had anything like that even when I lived in Thailand.

It was hard to do it all justice though, as the waiters refused to turn down the blaring karaoke, despite there was no other clients in the restaurant. Cheesy tunes were echoing unobstructedly in the empty room full of garishly bright plastic tables and chairs, bouncing off the walls into our poor ears. Very soon our throats got sore from trying to outshout the electrically amplified voices of Thai pop stars and we just kept drinking water that was pushed on us at a pound a bottle against our will.

Pro's: Fantastically tasty food.
Con's: Obnoxiously noisy. Horrible interior. Rude sour service. Pricey.
In a nutshell: Thai food connoisseur's paradise if you know how to switch all your other sense but the taste.

Tea leaf eggs, pig's blood cake and candied apple on a stick! - Taiwanese Food Fête, London 2010 - 第十四屆臺灣迎新小吃節 (英國倫敦)

can't remember much what I ate in Taiwan, it was such a long time ago. I remember stinky tofu (臭豆腐， chou doufu) we bought somewhere in the mountains. It was delightfully flavourful, nothing stinky at all. I also remember the spicy steamboat (火鍋, huǒ guō ) we had in Taoyuan. Precious little, in other words. So it was about time I had refreshed my memories, when this Taiwanese Food Fête cropped up in my scheduler.

A long journey to W2, so away from my hunting grounds. I don't even know what the area is called. Somewhere-in-the-West. The top floor of a council-run community centre looks like a big student canteen, only today there's no bangers and mash on the menu. Instead, I am starting with "tea leaf eggs" (茶葉蛋, cha ye tan): eggs boiled with tea leaves, aniseed, cinnamon, fennel seeds, cloves and Szechuan peppercorns. Sound better than your scrambled eggs? It tastes better too!

It's about 12PM now, just the right time for some gyoza or jiao-zi as they are properly called in Chinese. See, normally it's a lunch kind of food, part of the dim sum family. This particular kind is called 煎餃, jian jiao, stuffed with dog's meat. Not! Just yanking your chain. It's just your common-or-garden fried dumplings with chicken and veg.

You-fan (油飯 ), "oil rice" is a Taiwanese specialty. It is steamed glutinous rice with mushrooms and chicken, flavoured with five-spice and soya soy sauce.

Pig's blood cake (豬血糕, zhu xie gao) sounds gorier than it actually is. From a distance, it resembles a chocolate ice cream on a stick. The main ingredient is glutinous rice, which helps keep its shape. It is coated with crushed peanuts and chopped coriander leaves immediately before consumption.

Candied fruit （拔丝水果， basi shuiguo) is a traditional Chinese treat sold from street stalls. A pretty healthy snack, unless you are one of the white-sugar-hating brigade.

Now, 'tis time to retreat to my den and digest all these Taiwanese goodness before my kundalini-yoga class starts.

Las Iguanas: how cheaper can you go?

e all know that London is one of the most expensive cities in the world. But make Kirill your friend and you will be introduced into the world of fine dining on a shoe-string. And that means exactly that: not eating cheap trash for next to peanuts, but having nice nosh in fancy places for a pittance.

Today we went to Las Iguanas in Soho for this very lovely lunch, all cooked to perfection:

• sopa de calabaza: mildly spicy and suprebly creamy butternut squash and coconut soup with a dollop of sour cream; the promised fresh coriander and stripes of corn bread were missing;
  
• chicken quesadilla: tortilla stuffed with spicy chicken breast, onions, peppers, cheese and salsa ;
  
• pasteles: a bit of misnomer, but this Chilean slow-braised lamb with raisin topped with creamed sweetcorn peculiarly explained in the menu as "a sort of cottage pie" is utterly delish!
• sweet potato fishcakes: flaked white fish and crayfish in corn crumbs served with aïoli;
• curly patatas fritas and salad, well lettuce doused with red wine vinegar, really.
  

Now for the bill: £8,87 for two, including tax and tip. Now you too want Kirill for a friend, don't you?

Pro's: You can't beat this price, can you? All entries can be ordered gluten-free.
Con's: Without Kirill's know-how, this place will cost you a pretty penny. Most mains are in the 12-15-quid ballpark.
In a nutshell: Perhaps the best to discover the greatness of South American cuisine outside South America.

El Rancho de Lalo@ Brixton, London review

Just when I was about to mourn the demise of Coma y Punto, my favourite Colombian joint in Brixton Market, in its ashes arose another one, El Rancho de Lalo.

They still serve the same good reliable Columbian fare. My all-time favourite bandeja paisa, a huge platter of meats and carbs is just as perfectly cooked and plentiful as at Coma y Punto and costs the same 9.50. The way they make the pig belly crunchy on the outside and juicy inside is inimitable.

They have spruced up the interior and exterior (it was rather shaby before). The maitre-d' swaggers around in the Colombian national costume. The lunch deal: one main + one drink for 6 quid fills up even a glutton like me. I had once their oxtail stew and another time their sancocho,which I succesfully tried to replicate later. Can find no fault with either.

Pro's: Super friendly service. Consistently good food. Great location for Brixton people-watching.
Con's: Slightly cramped seating.
In a nutshell: God bless South America for its food!

El Rancho de Lalo
94-95 Granville Arcade
Brixton Market
London SW9 8PS

Fire & Stone@London: a Mad Pizza Party

here is a good reason why classic recipes never age. Because the perfect combination once found, does not need to change, stupid! You can't possibly add anything to bechamel without spoiling it.

You may try to enhance the original combination of flavours with a bit of well-intended trickery, like I often do, using, for example, fish sauce instead of salt. Or underscore it with what the Japanese call kakushiaji - a background taste that contrasts and emphasizes the leitmotif taste. That is how a hint of Scotch bonnet pepper brings out the best in puttanesca. But some chefs truly deserve to be pilloried, tarred and feathered for their far-fetched concoctions.

Many a pizza at London's Fire and Stone qualify for that kind of treatment. The USP here is a "global menu" with pizza toppings from all the continents, purportedly intending to represent the best of world's culinary traditions. In reality, under a guise of cosmopolitan originality you are served a good old classic mixed with some highly incongruous companions on a sheet of, granted, nicely baked dough. See for yourself:

• "Sydney": roasted bacon+egg+ham = full English! (Looking forward to addition of spam!)
• "Peking": shredded duck+Hoi Sin sauce+spring onions = Peking duck! (What on earth were they thinking topping this with mozzarella cheese?)
• "Acapulco": chilli beef+jalapenos,+mozzarella+sour cream = flat fajita! (Nothing wrong with that, but don't call it a pizza!)
• "Lombok": grilled prawns+roasted red peppers+syrupy sweet Thai green curry sauce = well, Thai green curry! (Served on bread, for Pete's sake!)
• "Cape Town": beef mince+tomato sauce+chillies = arrabiata! (Beef mince on a pizza, ho-hum, it tastes just like it sounds!)

The menu also features classic Italian and New York favourites that, in all likelihood, simply must be brilliant, but we were after the quirky and we sure got a huge slab of it that evening.

Pro's: Extremely friendly and efficient service.
Con's: Truly weird pizzas. LOUD inside.
In a nutshell: Multi-culti gone wrong.

Yorkshire roast beef wrap @ The Prince Albert, Brixton

If you know where to go - and it's no rocket science - you can eat extremely well in London for under a tenner. A good example is my local pub, The Prince Albert in Brixton's Coldharbour Lane. Despite its kinky name it churns out perfectly conventional English fare cooked to perfection. I am probably the last person to exalt the virtues of French fries but I find them a treat at The Prince Albert.

Or take this Yorkshire roast beef wrap. I am not quite sure it is really typical British as I have never encountered it anywhere else but it's a beatifully presented and expertly prepared dish. If the picture and my (rarely awoken) enthusiasm were not convincing enough, here's the last one that will sure get you: it's only 5 quid!

Sunday (Up)Market World Food Fair

unday Up-Market World Food Festival for me is perhaps what a brothel is for a sex addict. From Brazilian to Tibetan and from Greek to Ethiopian, every weekend an indoor parking space in Brick Lane turns into a fiesta of world cuisine at affordable prices. I could wallow my way through the rows of steaming pans and drown myself in a pot of Thai curry, like Duke of Clarence in a barrel of Malmsey wine.

 

Pro's: Choice. Price.
Con's: No sitting facilities. Open only on weekends until 5PM.
In a nutshell: All authentic local foods of the world in one place.

Address: The Old Truman Brewery, 91 Brick Lanee, E1 6QL 

Rodizio Rico: Brazilian churrascaria@Islington

ne of the most overused words in food writing is succulent. As protein-based life, we enjoy putting in us everything that approximates our inherent water content of 80%, hence the everlasting appeal of juicy cocks and sappy strawbs. The deepest layers of our ancestral collective memory dating from the arid Rift Valley's hominids compel us to crave anything evoking moisture.

It is no wonder then that Rodizio Rico, an all-you-can-eat Brazilian churrascaria (grill) restaurant on Islington Upper Street rides on this bandwagon too. Succulent is how they describe their fare. Unfortunately, what its passadors (meat carvers plying between the tables with skewerfuls of grilled animal pieces) offer has little backing to this claim. For £22.50 a head, it sure is hard to offer no-time-limit all-you-can-eat rib-eye steaks to everyone, so what you get is silverside (primarily used for corned beef Down Under), rump cover and chicken gizzards.

I am quite used to ordering my steak medium rare to have it medium but here there was no chance to employ that trick: the best I could get was half a notch before well done. Whether it could be down to the Health and Safety tyranny or something else I will never know.

The salad buffet is very New World, being large and colourful. It features deep-fried Middle Eastern pieces, bean-based Brazilian starters and stews, generic "international" salads and a lot of French fries. All of those had that unmistakeable imprint of the contempt a hard-nosed carnivore has for plant-based food. Dry falafels, sour olives, bland couscous, mayonnaise-heavy coleslaw, etc.: I made the effort to try them all but there was none that I would have another helping of.

I may sound pissy but you have to go there to believe the queues. We had to wait at the bar long enough to polish off a whole bottle of wine despite we had a reservation. My American friends were naturally outraged at this manifestation of the tempo brasileiro spirit. As always, I was the one who insisted on waiting patiently and giving the place a chance but this time around I was wrong.

Pro's: Easy to order as there's no menu.
Con's: Even a reservation won't save you from queueing. Airfield noise levels.
In a nutshell: Good place for a major protein re-fuel if you are not awfully fussy about your meat.

Rodizio Rico
77-78 Islington Upper Street
London N1 0NU

Bamboula@Brixton: Jamaican restaurant review

What are you taking pictures of?!!

An enraged Jamaican man pounces on us as I'm taking snapshots of our long-awaited dinner. The proprietor, as it turns out, works himself in a scary frenzy as the private party he is entertaining across the room from us are apparently nervous about any photographic euqipment deployed anywhere close to them. Perhaps, balacalvas would be a good solution for their phobia.

In the meantime, our dinner keeps arriving, one dish at a time.


We have long meant to visit this restaurant located right in front of the favourite haunt of Brixton's feral teenagers, across the road from the Lambeth Town Hall, but some other chow-hound opportunity would have always turned up.

About an hour before the closing time, warnings started coming, like in a vintage sci-fi movie where a mechanic female voice advises everyone to evacuate before the explosion. Never mind the

As one for the road, we get not even a sorry when the perfectly coiffed cashier chick shortchanges us of 20 quid. Like, big deal, mon.

Pro's: Good-tasting food, some less known Jamaican dishes.
Con's: Smallish portions. Rude-boi style customer service. Waitresses seemingly unaware of the fact of their gainful employment, while totally engrossed in "keeping it real" and working on their "street credibility".
In a nutshell: With so many other alternatives for West Indian fare in Brixton, give it a miss.

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.

Mimino revisited: never enter the same river twice

here is a golden Buddhist rule: never try to recreate the same sensation. You are bound for disappointment because you can never enter the same river twice. I thought I knew better but I did let exactly that happen with Mimino, a Georgian restaurant in London's swanky Kensington. My initial visit was enveloped in warm glow and scintillating sparkle that Olga puts on everything with her magic touch. After a schmooze party at the RBCC we only had time - and available stomach capacity - for sampling a platter of starters and, boy, were they not utterly scrumptious! For months on I was longing to go back. My imagination pictured feasting on the gifts of the Caucasus mountains, full of herbs and charcoal flavours, and washing them down with treacly Georgian wines.

And finally the blessed moment arrived on a chilly December evening. Hot and noisy Mimino packed to the rafters with Russian Londoners and a sprinkling of their local friends, Kirill and Sasha waiting up for us over a bottle of Tarkhun, a tarragon-flavoured soda drink from the Soviet days. As we tuck in the salads platter (სალათები, £15), the frosty chill outside swiftly fades away from our minds: we are in the land of the Golden Fleece, Queen Tamara, the Knight in the Panther's Skin and One Million Scarlet Roses. Certainly a line of associations that speaks more to a Russian than a Westerner.

Sprinkled with ruby-like pomegranate arils exploding in your mouth with sour-sweet juice, this assorted goodness proffers:

• Badrijani - grilled aubergine rolls with creamy walnut sauce;
• Espanakhi - a ball of minced spinach delicately flavoured with herbs so that they do not overpower the strong grassy note of fresh spinach;
  
• Adjapsandali - a ratatouille-esque sauté, served cold, with the accent on the aubergines that really taste grilled;
  
• Pkhali - a leek-and-walnuts ball with a heady fragrance of aromatic herbs;
• Lobio - stewed red beans with walnut sauce, fresh coriander and dried herbs;
• Imeruli khachapuri - fragrant thin-dough flat-bread stuffed with piping hot cheese.

The thick and spicy kharcho (ხარჩო, £7) soup made from lamb, rice and finely chopped vegetables has a nice kick and a good tomato-based flavour. It is certainly one of the most known Georgian gastronomic exports to Russia, a staple of many a factory canteen and street corner café. Our demure and taciturn waitress Elena adds to kharcho a few pieces of delicious home-made rye bread that is not on the menu.That's because Sasha and Kirill are friends with her.

With the arrival of the mains, however, all this culinary exuberance turns into a culinary non-event. A huge flop, to put it straight. Floyd who's never quick to criticize food murmurs that the mains have no flavour at all. No, nothing is bad enough to send back to the kitchen but nothing is a match to the divine starters. I cannot believe they came from the same kitchen.

Tsyplyonok tabaka (წიწილა ტაბაკა, £12) is another Georgian dish probably more popular in Russia than in its country of origin. It comes in the shape of a quail-sized chicken generously salted, flattened and fried accompanied by a heap of deep-fried matchstick potatoes, the ideal shape to absorb grease. No wonder they taste like starch ampoules bursting in your mouth with the unmistakably smelling mini-fountains of frying oil.

Kalmakhi (კალმახი, £12), a battered trout, salty as the Black Sea that licks the balmy shores of Georgia, arrives with a tablespoonful of mashed potatoes and an equal quantity of sliced cucumbers and tomatoes. All as bland as a roll of toilet paper.

Mtsvadi (ქაბაბი, £15), is the Georgian shish kebab gently flavoured with liberal amounts of salt. I start suspecting that all this salt abundance could very well be management's ploy to trick us into ordering more drinks. Who knows. Georgian barbequed meat is famous in Russia as shashlyk, the most popular weekend picnic fare. Here it tastes just slightly better than if it were made by a bunch of not very sober Moscow office workers at a weekend corporativchik (a company-sponsored team-building event involving colleagues in a countryside setting). The sides of pickled cabbage, fried potato wedges and a tablespoonful of salad are just as forgettable.

The only animating feature that, to a very slight degree, redeems the lacklustre mains is classic Georgian tkemali (ტყემალი), a dip made from tart cherry plums alycha: refreshingly sweetish-sour but invariably same for chicken, fish and meat. Unknown parties seem to have strongly impressed upon the owners that customers might very much enjoy their conversations completely drowned out by some seriously loud noise. So half an hour into our dinner, a keyboard-and-crooner duo starts churning out Russian pop hits and criminal ballads adding a note of demi-monde decadence to the already deafening din of voices and clanking cutlery. We have made sure to ask for a table "as far away from the band as possible" but in Mimino's petite dining hall there's no escape from this post-Soviet cultural ambassador. Back in Russia this obligatory song-and-dance routine used to annoy the bejesus out of me, but these days I have learnt to laugh it off as a quirky and mildly entertaining post-Soviet "ethnographic" flavour.

Kinzdmarauli, a saccharine red wine made from the endemic Georgian Saperavi variety was allegedly Stalin's libation of choice. It used to be a big hit in the former Soviet republics, sold in Russian supermarkets in 5-litre boxes at quite a premium price - until a spate of hostility between Russia and Georgia found Georgian wine imports halted. Its syrupy mellowness with not a wee hint of tannin is quite a departure from your regular European-style red, owing to grapes for Kindzmarauli being harvested later than for any other wine, when they are fully ripe and, perhaps, even frost-bitten. I imagine that it probably tasted the same when the Argonauts visited Colchis, an ancient Georgian kingdom in their search of the Golden Fleece, so here it is really part of the 'authentic experience'.


Pro's: Splendiferous starters.
Con's: Highly disappointing mains. Noise levels on busy nights. Great place to replenish your salt levels.
In a nutshell: Come on a weekday when there is no minimum charge per table and no band to torture your ears. Order the salatobi platter, you won't regret it. Skip the rest.