Interview with Pascal Barbot of L'Astrance by Bruce Palling

                                            Pascal performing at the Flemish Primitives Food Conference in Ostend

If you ask haut-foodies who their favourite chef is, they usually reply either Pascal Barbot or Alain Passard. Barbot is the most unconventional three-star Michelin chef in France. L’Astrance, his tiny restaurant in the Sixteenth, seats 25 diners and is only open four days a week, serving a no choice set menu. He is probably the most internationally aware famous French chef, having worked in the South Pacific and Australia for several years before returning to Paris more than a decade ago. He shuns the use of salt and pepper in favour of spices that he has picked up during his travels and also finds sauces redundant. Instead, he often utilises Asian ingredients. It is the polar opposite to most other Three Stars.

 I spoke to him at the Flemish Primitives Food Festival in Belgium, where he was one of the main attractions, along with Magnus Nilsson of Faviken and Michel Bras. It was a well run conference but despite this was quite frustrating. 

                                                    Not a lot to do in Ostend at the weekend 

The problem was that it took place over the weekend and Monday, mainly because chefs can get away during this time with less impact on their business. However, Ostend is not exactly brimming with interesting restaurants or close to other ones, so there were no opportunities to get away and find out what the local cuisine was like. The beachfront too, was one of the most depressing ones I have seen anywhere and this from someone who has been to Albania during its nadir.

There is also a limit as to how much you can take in when all of the action takes place on a stage and you merely watch like a voyeur from the sidelines. Nonetheless, Pascal was a charming person to interview. He is quite animated and full of energy and enthusiasm and speaks with utter conviction.

Where were you from originally?

I was born in Vichy, in the middle of France. I came from a very simple, modest family – my mother worked in a factory. Until I was 14 years old, no one in my family worked in a restaurant or as a butcher or pastry chef, so I had no idea of what it was like to work in a restaurant. It was at that age I wanted to cook and become a chef. I really don’t know what inspired me – my parents had a garden with fresh raspberries, strawberries, beans, and rabbits from the farm, so perhaps it was from experiencing good produce, but I really don’t know. So, I don’t have one of those “Grandmother influences” or any other strange story. I just wanted to be a chef and that was that.

What was your first move to become a chef?

Well, at the age of 14, I went to a cooking school as an apprentice for two years rotating between school and a restaurant. I didn’t go straight into a restaurant because I didn’t know any to choose. Then I did a number of stages, firstly at a one star in Clermont St Ferrand, then another place near where Michel Bras came from I worked at a Moulin in the Auvergne we used smoked bacon and cabbage, so I basically learned how to cook classic French food. At this point, a chef was leaving for London to open Les Saveurs in Mayfair so I said OK, but I didn’t mind whether or not it was London or Paris – it was all the same to me as long as it was a major restaurant in a big city. It was a great experience as Joël Antunes (who has just opened a new bistro in London) used to work in Bangkok before, so I was introduced to a whole lot of new ingredients like scallops, oysters, and langoustines. I learned a lot, using crayfish from Scotland, excellent fish and of course, other ingredients like foie gras and truffles from the Rungis market in Paris. It was the first chic restaurant I had ever worked in and of course I was very happy.

Why did you end up leaving?

I had to spend two years in the French military doing my national service and spent one year in New Caledonia and all over the South Pacific with the French Navy. I was the head chef of the Admiral of the Fleet, so this was very important for my development as a chef because at the same time I was improving my classic French dishes, I was also using entirely new products like mango, coconuts, and palm sugar. I suppose these would be considered exotic in France but for me in the South Pacific, they were just my normal daily ingredients. When that was over, I went back to Paris and spent five years at L’Arpège first as a commis, chef de partie and then as a sous chef, from 1993 until 1998.

What was the first restaurant that you ran yourself?

Well, I spent two years in Sydney, running a restaurant owned by Tony Bilson, called Ampersand. This was my first job as a head chef and it completely changed my life – it taught me how to look at ingredients without any inhibitions or complexes. In Australia, you don’t care either where someone comes from or where the ingredients are from either. I don’t care about fusion food. Nobody cared where you came from or where the products originated. If wanted to use Greek Yoghurt on a French dish, that was fine as there were no rules or complexes about what you did. It was also because I had travelled a lot and seen different ways of using ingredients. It was very liberating. If I had a piece of pork and wanted to use ricotta or cabbage, it was up to me. However, I left after two years because it was 

becoming too big for me.

What other influences were there on your cooking style?

I also travelled a lot, from Australia to Indonesia and Mexico, if I wanted to use chilli in a Chinese way, I would – it didn’t matter that I was not Chinese. But this did not mean I didn’t respect the main product – that was always the goal - if I was cooking mackerel and cabbage I would strive to cook each item perfectly, but not necessarily from the same school of cuisine – after all, it was my life to travel a lot, so I could chose which style would be the best for that particular product, whether it was Mexican, Chinese or French. I loved Australia but two years was enough because in some ways the life was too easy – the beach, the products the lifestyle and many other famous chef would visit. One day, Christophe Rohat, a former maître’d from L’Arpège contacted me as he wanted to start a new restaurant called Lapérouse and they needed a chef – would I be interested?

Christophe Rohat asked me if I would like to work with him at the historical restaurant Lapérouse, so we worked there but only for a few months as there were financial problems amongst the management, so we left together before we decided to start our own smaller place in the Sixteenth in 2000 called L’Astrance after a flower that grows in the Auvergne. We only wanted two or three people in the kitchen and 20 seats. It was product based, no real menu except for two or three starters and main courses. It is not just the food that makes a restaurant but also the service – I believe it is a fifty fifty ratio of importance. We must have done something right because we got our first Michelin Star in three months. Our second star was four years later and then the third came in 2007. We are not a typical Three Star though – we don’t have fancy cutlery or décor or even a menu. We are more like a small bistro than a grand restaurant.

Have you expanded with success?

No! We don’t have a PR, or chef de cuisine, anybody to hand out the menus – we only have a total staff of 14 people, including the stagiers (apprentices), dishwashers and not even one specialist pastry chef.

You cannot choose the dishes in my restaurant, which is very unusual for a Three Star. I love the freedom to be able to change at the last minute. And we are too small to offer a great deal of choice, but we have so many inconveniences to face, that this makes life far easier. We are only open four days a week and I never miss a service – I am always in the kitchen.

What do you think of the new Neo-Bistro movement in France – do you think it is a sign of a more adventurous approach to cuisine?

Well, the French have always absorbed influences from abroad. Escoffier’s classic Canard a l’Orange did not originate in France but the Middle East via Spain. Caviar too, came from Russia after our chefs cooked with the Tsar. Potatoes and tomatoes too, came from elsewhere. So French cuisine has always absorbed influences from abroad for centuries.

So do you think there is a Crisis of Identity in French cuisine?

No, not at all. Perhaps a few people are getting bored with the same things but it is good that there are new developments, such as Modernist Cuisine, or New Nordic Cuisine. We all need movement and change -it is nice. Whenever there is a revolution, such as nouvelle cuisine in the Seventies or Molecular Cuisine in the Nineties, there are inevitably good and bad things but after a few years, only the good things remain. Take the machine for cooking in waterbaths (sous-vide). It was new in the Sixties but nobody talks about it any more as it is taken for granted by everyone – just like Microwaves.

Who are the chefs you admire the most?

Alain Passard at L’Arpège but mostly, it is unknown chefs on the street. Whenever I travel, whether it is Indonesia, Thailand, Nepal or Brazil, I learn so much from street vendors. They cook amazing dishes from virtually nothing, so these are the people I truly respect. And India has the best vegetable dishes in the world -I would love to spend a while year there rather than just a month.

And what about you own plans for the future - would you like to have a bigger restaurant?

Well, I am thinking of perhaps finding a space with four or five more seats than present, but that is all. I would never want to run a chain of restaurants or even a very large one – it is hard enough to do what I do now without making more problems for myself.

ENDS

L’Astrance

4, rue Beethoven

Paris 16

+33 140 50 84 40
No Web site

FAVIKEN - whats happening in Northern Sweden? by Bruce Palling

                                                               Magnus on a stroll with his dog

How should a food writer approach a meal prepared by a talented chef outside their own kitchen? I suppose there are certain things that are absolutes, such as the ingredients must be fresh and the concept strong enough to be comprehensible, regardless of any flaws apparent on the plate. It becomes a real dilemma, especially because of the way that leading chefs are expected to attend food festivals or special events hundreds if not thousands of miles away from their stomping ground.

I didn’t attend the Thomas Keller Harrods extravaganza, mainly because I couldn’t afford the £250 plus plus price per person. I wasn’t too bothered though, as my friends who went were underwhelmed and my last encounter with the French Laundry was not entirely satisfactory. I turned up on the door one afternoon last Summer and asked if I could speak to the sommelier about a wine story I was working on – back came a superior flunkey to tell me that I should address any such request to their Public Relations firm in New York. Life’s too short for such behaviour.

                                                                  A Faviken leg in London

Despite my reluctance to judge a chef outside of their environment, I happily attended one such event at the Loft Project last year for Magnus Nilsson, the chef of Faviken, the world’s most remote (and perhaps smallest) great restaurant.

                                                       Faviken HQ

The food world is riddled with one-upmanship and insider knowledge being paraded at strategic moments in order to belittle the outsider. Early last year, just about the coolest thing a food writer could say was how much they enjoyed the food at Faviken. Faviken? “Oh you know, the place with only 12 covers up near the Artic Circle that sits on a 20,000 acre hunting estate.”

It may be small and obscure, but the management have their head screwed on – they have an excellent website, so even if you can’t find anyone who has been there, it is pretty easy to get the idea of what they are on about. So off I went to the dinner in London at the Loft project. Magnus Nilsson had made a special effort to bring as much of the produce as he could fit into his car, which he drove virtually non stop for three days to get here.

                                                         Faviken in the Loft Project

The meal itself had some interesting highlights but was basically not a success as the absolute freshness was lacking and as Magnus had never cooked in this particular kitchen before, it was a struggle to get everything right on the night.

I really felt for him though, as it was pretty obviously even so that this was an extraordinarily perceptive chef doing potentially great things. We spoke about it later and he agreed that he too was upset abut the impact of the dishes and vowed to never try again to replicate his dishes away from his own kitchen. I am sure that he has ameliorated this view since then and from what I hear, his meals in Sydney recently were a huge success.

                                                            Rene at work in Noma

The term New Nordic Cuisine is synonymous with René Redzepi and his Copenhagen restaurant Noma, but Magnus Nilsson is creating equally stunning dishes in rural Sweden. (New Nordic Cuisine is the Foodie’s Next Big Thing – culinary shorthand for food that is foraged, sourced locally and quite often raw rather than cooked – in other words, virtuous food.) Fortunately, I totally get the point of the New Natural Food movement and think its influence will quickly replace that of Modernist/Molecular. I wish I could be equally enthuiasitc about the “Natural” Wine movement, which is especially strong in Scandinavia, but it basically leaves me cold as far too many of the offerings taste like sour vintage cider.

                                                   Nothing wrong with the food at Bastards though

There was one interesting place I went to in Malmo called Bastards which was completely ruined by the ghastly expensive unnatural wines they insisted on serving.

                                                           The Eighteenth Century granary cum restaurant

Magnus Nilsson, 28, trained in two of the greatest Parisian restaurants (Pascal Barbot’s L’Astrance and
Alain Passard’s L'Arpège), and is now running Faviken Magasinet (www.faviken.com), located in a centuries-old barn overlooking a lake.

                                                           Faviken's backyard in High Summer

This improbable destination is in the under-populated region of Jämtland, which adjoins Lapland. An elegant safe haven, it is enveloped by pristine wilderness and snow capped mountains, nearly 500 miles north west of Stockholm. It is arguably the most isolated serious restaurant on the planet. Bears roam around the estate but are rarely observed while occasionally a stray wolf turns up in the surrounding forests. More to the point, there is an extraordinary abundance of readily available wild produce, ranging from trout, eels, moose, hares and black grouse plus a tantalising range of mushrooms, wild herbs and vegetables all grown locally. They shoot about 20 moose annually and probably consume at least one in its entirely each year.

They have their own slaughterhouse where they dry age their beef for months rather than weeks. Nearby, an island off Trondheim in Norway provides oversized scallops and langoustines, while further north Scottish diver Roderick Sloan provides some of the best sea urchins on the planet.

On the edge of the estate, “Mr Duck” provides the poultry

including these delightful ducklings which should soon be ready for the table.

There are upwards of 100 other suppliers who offer delicious items to this abundant larder. In less than three years, Faviken has made its mark on the world food scene, even entering the Pellegrino World’s Top 100 restaurants in 2011 at a respectable number 71 and will probably break into the Top Fifty this Spring.

Magnus Nilsson concedes that if it were located in Stockholm, such acclaim may have been gained in less than a year. However, such is its growing renown, that parties of up to a dozen fly in on private jets both to savour the cuisine and spend time either fishing or hunting the elusive Capercaillie (wood grouse) or simply exploring the surrounding forests. “To shoot Capercaillie in France you have to participate in a lottery. We have approximately 5000 here and we are allowed to shoot up to 100 annually. Grouse are only shot in rough shooting and they live higher up in the mountains and we only shoot about 20 roe deer a year.”

                                                                               Real Food - the welcoming snack at Faviken

There is nothing austere or minimalist about the cuisine at Faviken, and the only imported produce is sugar, salt and vinegar plus an impressive selection of fine wines and coffee. Magnus calls it Rektún or real Food. He concedes that “many people expect something like Noma, but there are very few similarities although we are probably even more focussed on finding superior local produce than they are. One benefit we have over larger restaurants is that suppliers can keep us happy with far smaller amounts than a normal sized restaurant requires so if there are only 15 great scallops or langoustines, they come to us first.

For me the most important process is finding superior produce – the cooking is of course very important but only equal to the produce itself, our cooking is very simple but precise - it is almost like a ritual. Nothing is prepared in advance – we do everything on the night as opposed to many modern restaurants that vacuum pack their meats and keep them circulating until they need them. Here we put our meat on a grill over direct heat and that is the only way we cook our meat. I don’t think it would be appropriate in a restaurant with only 12 covers and four chefs working in the kitchen. I prefer to take a greater risk and most of the time, achieving a greater result.

A major reason why the food is different from Noma is that the kitchen here only has about four people working at any one time (compared with 30 plus in Noma) though I have just heard that

the excellent Sam Miller, currently at Noma, will be joining then quite soon as sous chef and there is talk of expanding the covers from 12 to 16.

Although the sense of isolation here does focus the mind and heighten the sense of anticipation, what makes the journey worthwhile is the boldness of his dishes and their utter simplicity.

If you can’t afford a private jet or arrange your travel on the local aircraft, the express train is superb and only takes just over four hours from Stockholm. It is then a 40 mile drive through forests until you cross a bridge and then drive about five miles along a dirt road until you see the estate buildings.

Upon arrival at the small complex of traditional buildings and barns, you are offered what is virtually a dream picnic - a whole smoked trout, robust local pate and cheese, homemade jams, freshly made bread and butter

and a bowl full of gulls eggs. This is the equivalent of nursery food compared with what followed, but it puts you in the right mind frame – excellent natural produce presented in a straightforward yet memorable way. We then went off for a walk with Magnus and his dog. The surrounding mountains are snow-capped even in High Summer and there is a frosty look to the surroundings even though the sun is shining. The whole estate was picked up for a bargain price a few years back by Patrik Brummer, one of the first successful hedge fund Managers in Sweden. He co-owns the restaurant with Magnus and his front of house manager Johan Agrell.

Magnus forages for between one and two hours in the peak season, which is early summer. Recently he has started using Fiddlehead ferns after a Japanese couple pointed them out in a nearby forest. Later in the season, their market garden provides an abundance of fresh vegetables. In the winter months, they rely on pickled and preserved vegetables plus the wide variety of game, including black grouse and woodcock.

                                                                                            Bloody Trout Roe

The handful of starters for the evening’s main event are briskly served on polished granite slabs in the ground floor of an elaborate eighteenth century grain store: wild trout roe resting in a tiny cylinder of dried pigs blood which looks like parchment;

a variety of crispy lichens,

lip-smacking slices of cured pig’s belly

and to cap it off, a cross section of fried thrush heads which you eat in their entirety except for the beaks.

                                                                           Kitchen acessories at Faviken


After this, you negotiate a steep staircase to the dining hall above and are immersed in a vanished world, with dried fish, legs of pork, various mould-encrusted sausages and bunches of herbs dangling from the rafters while eerie jaunty folk music plays in the background.

The food is equally otherworldy, starting with scallops baked over a barbeque in their own juices and served on a bed of birch and juniper twigs. This has become Magnus’s signature dish and is gloriously decadent.

 Then, those huge langoustines arrive, along with toasted grains, shavings of local cheese and a blackcurrant infused burnt cream, which has a pleasant caramel flavour.

                                                             My idea of Natural wine - Chassagne from  Ramonet

The drinking options are either a local fermented beer or superb wines from the most sought after regions of Burgundy.

There are about 250 wines on the list because they don’t have a huge cellar. 95% of the clients just take the wine pairing option. The cellar is a treat for wine lovers as they only add E60 to the net price of the fine wines.

He is quite well informed about wine as this was what first brought him to Faviken. “When I returned to Sweden I stopped cooking because I was very disappointed in what I was doing so I started working instead with wine. To begin with, I started working here as a sommelier. Sometimes when I see photos of my food I can see the direct link to what Pascal does but it doesn’t bother me any more.”

On reflection, the next two dishes sound bizarre if not downright challenging, but no diners failed to complete them both with obvious satisfaction.

                                                                 Put some heart into it

The first was cubes of raw cows heart with freshly grated carrot which was accompanied by perfectly cooked bone marrow, theatrically extracted from cricket stump sized bones which were hacked apart at the table.

Then there was rare goats liver with neck meat that had been marinated in mead and served with morels and thyme. I admit that this might sound like some wild fantasy from an out of control slaughterhouse, but that is not the case.

One of the onions that Magnus had been preparing in the kitchen popped up too.

The puddings included a cake of pine tree bark with frozen butter that was created in front of us in an old wooden churner and a whipped ducks egg with raspberry compote.

As this occurred during the Summer, when we retired to bed well after midnight, it was still completely light, which adds to the delight of the entire experience.

He is sanguine about the lasting interest in New Nordic Cuisine and doesn’t think it will have the same impact as Modernist Cuisine, as practiced by Heston Blumenthal at Britain’s Fat Duck or Ferran Adria and his taste sensations at his former Spanish restaurant, elBulli.

“I think there is going to be a big focus on it for a year or two and then it will fade away…people will soon tire of the novelty, which is bad, but for the moment we are benefitting from the publicity. However, I will still be cooking like this after it stops being trendy as it is the only way I know how to cook.”

                                                          The farewell breakfast

Be prepared to wait if you try and book for a weekend as in the past few months, the word has got out that this is perhaps the most thrilling place to eat in Northern Europe. “We have some English-based clients who have been here seven times in six months. Of course we want new clients too but it is very heartening to have such loyal clients who really appreciate what you do.”

www.faviken.com

A shorter version of this story appeared in Newsweek

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/09/magnus-nilsson-sweden-s-youngest-and-most-remote-chef.html

Valvona & Crolla – Best Italian Deli north of the Alps? by Bruce Palling

My first visit to Valvona & Crolla was 30 years ago, after I spent far too much money at the equally iconic McNaughtan’s bookshop (www.mcnaughtansbookshop.com) opposite in Leith Walk. (I purchased an immaculate set of William Hone’s brilliant Victorian books about popular culture – the Wikipedia of their day).

Nothing quite prepares you for the olfactory assault as you enter Valvona’s – coffee, sweet lard, olive oil – the whole Italian works. There is nothing as inviting as this interior anywhere else in the Kingdom – and out the back, there is the best retail collection of fine Italian wines in the country. Not only that, you can purchase a decent Brunello or Barolo for £40 or £50 and then consume it in their trattoria for nominal corkage – what’s not to like?

My recent meal at Valvonas was a treat – Prosciutto E Melone, with the melon imported from Milan followed by a couple of slices of belly pork with perfect roast potatoes and some candied fruit plus a mixed green salad. Then there were three Italian cheeses in excellent condition.

The wine was a relatively modern Brunello 04 from Pinino, which hadn’t quite the reached the age of consent. There is a good range of other quality Italian reds to choose from – Philip Contini was awarded Decanters wine list of the year some time back and only this week won International Wine Challenge Scottish Merchant Award for 2011-12. They find that customers either want stuff under £8 a bottle or more than £20 – there is no real middle ground. Like a lot of Italian specialists they used to stock the full range of Gajas but these days are wary of the astronomical prices, especially when for less, the greatest Barolos are available.“We don’t want Gaja sitting on our shelves like statues in a church – we will never sell it these days at the prices they ask,” Philip explained.

But how did it begin? In my ignorance, I had always thought that it must have been founded by Italian POWs who went native and married local girls after the end of the Second World War, but this was ridiculously wide of the mark. It origins go back to the 1860s but the big wave of Italian immigration to Edinburgh was at the turn of the Twentieth Century.

Philip Contini, who is a direct descent of the founding families, explained that his ancestors “left poverty in the late nineteenth century in the Apennine Mountains between Rome and Naples. They were shepherds living between 600 and 1000 metres – and made cheese, wool and went down to the coast for salted cod to eat during the winter.

They had to leave the land, so they first went to neighbouring regions, then Paris, the USA, Australia and beyond (ED: is there a beyond beyond Australia – Antarctica, Nauru?).

When they got to Dover there were already Italians living there, and the same thing happened when they went to London, so they would move onto the next town, which is how my grandfather Alfonso Crolla ended up in Edinburgh in the 1890s.”

Before the war, there were only 3,500 Italians in Edinburgh – they brought ice cream and fish and chips shops here too but the first Italian store was Valvonas.” The Crollas merged with them in the mid-Thirties but the relationship only lasted two years before the Crollas bought them out. (At the beginning of the war, in July 1940, more than 400 Italian internees from Britain perished when a U-Boat torpedoed the SS Arandora Star while it was en route to Canada. Many of these were important figures in the Edinburgh Italian community, including one of Philip's grandfathers and the loss had a major impact for years to come, though many people of Philip's generation never heard their parents even mention it.)

But what about comparable Italian Delis around the globe?  To find their equivalent cornucopia, you would have to go to either Volpetti in Rome (www.volpetti.com) or of course Dean & Deluca in Manhattan (www.deananddeluca.com). Funnily enough, the Continis are not great fans of the latter.

“Dean & Deluca is soulless but they do have a huge range – it is very elegant to look at, and sleek like something out of Milan, but we prefer the rougher edges of Zabars, the original Jewish delicatessen on the Upper West Side (www.zabars.com). It is like a slightly older version of Valvonas – manky with big buckets of salt cod, it’s a wonderful place, with people arguing about prices.”

You can read my Wall Street Journal Europe piece for more background on Valvonas.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904716604576546231167850582.html?mod=WSJ_EUROPE_LnS_FoodnWine_TopLEADNewsCollection

The Ledbury: still open for business by Bruce Palling

                                                                                                                     Brett outside the Ledbury by Bruce Palling

The Ledbury is open for business after a night which saw a mob of several dozen youths storm in at the end of service and rob their customers. Head Chef Brett Graham wasn't actually working last night - he was home with his father who had just arrived from Australia. The kitchen called him within minutes of the trouble flaring and he came straight in from Richmond, staying until three, returning home to sleep and then back again at six this morning to supervise the clean up.

The best account of what happened last night is on this blog

http://www.runawaysquirrels.com/2011/08/london-riots-comes-to-the-ledbury/comment-page-1/#comment-5059

The Ledbury isn't just my local - it is my favourite place to eat on the planet (see any number of my Ledbury blogs here). When I arrived to see the team around nine, Brett was outside reassuring some customers who had come back to pay, that it really wasn’t necessary. There were still shards of glass strewn around on the outside tables but inside all of the chairs were up on the tables and the floor was being well scrubbed. The front door was also boarded up but apart from that, the quick reaction of the kitchen staff seemed to have cleared the restaurant of the thugs in about 10 minutes. One woman had her necklace torn off her neck but no one was physically injured though many lost wallets, jewellery and mobile phones.

“The message is we are open for business as normal – I am not going to let these young kids and thugs slow my business down. We are busy for lunch and fully booked tonight and so far there haven't been any cancellations. They did enough damage last night to the safety and personal possessions of customers, damage to the restaurant and the takings were obviously lost. Only a few people had paid and those who paid in cash, we had that robbed as well. We probably lost £10,000 because I wouldn’t let people pay after what they had been through.

It started brewing around a quarter to 11, but we still had a full restaurant and only four or five tables had paid. The old tables were still on dessert while the later customers were still being served.

The thugs were smashing bottles on the floor and then threatening customers with them. Others had put bricks or stones in socks as weapons. There was a hell of a lot of screaming. Before it began, the mob started throwing rocks at the main window, so all the customer retreated to the back of the restaurant and this front section was shut off. So then they shattered the front door with bricks and steamed in.

What do I do for added security – post a guy at the front door? We already have security cameras but they all wear bandanas, hoods and scarves so you can’t identify them anyway. There aren’t enough police and fair enough, all they can do is chase them and break up the mob. There is just as much chance of this happening anywhere in central London – it could happen somewhere else tonight. We just happened to be where a bunch a kids had been drinking and thought they would cause some trouble. We were just accidentally in their field of view when they walked down Ledbury Road. It seemed to be lots of young kids with a couple of ring leaders. They also attacked a Bentley, which was parked opposite before heading towards Bayswater.

The problem is these people, these kids, don’t realise that this is my business and I and my team have worked incredibly hard to get it to where it is  - 120 hours a week for five years. They just come down, terrorise my customers and cause criminal damage,which affects my business. Londoners are pretty good at just getting up and getting on with life. Even though its only nine o clock in the morning after, a couple of dozen customer have already dropped by to ask if they can help us clearing up. There really is a community spirit here and there are a lot of angry people in the street today – normal hard working people – who knows what will happen next?”

http://www.theledbury.com/

Some wine lists in Sonoma and Napa by Bruce Palling

The ever-helpful James Dick at Mustard's

I have lots of good memories of drinking wine in California, starting in the early Eighties. The first interesting encounter was dinner in LA with Colman Andrews, who served Beaulieu Reserve 74 with a paper bag over the bottle to make it a trick as well as a treat. Then there was the Imperiale of L’Evangile 82 at a New Year’s Eve event at the Chez Panisse Café in Berkeley, served by a sommelier sporting a propeller hat who poured it by becoming a human metronome from the waist up.

My passion for wine is just as intense as it is for food, going back to the discovery of their complementary nature while still a teenager. It was cemented a few years later at a Parisian restaurant called Chez Les Anges, where a Gevrey-Chambertin 69 was virtually a new experience after every bite of a perfectly cooked Dutch calves liver. In turn, the food became more intense because of the palate cleansing characteristics of the wine.

In restaurants at least, with a bit of expertise and access to a well-trained sommelier, it should be possible to at least replicate the possibilities of such perfect union between food and wine. In Europe, restaurant’s wine cellars are rarely displayed and wine lists tend to merely group them into their regions with a sliding scale according to price. Not necessarily so in the States. One famous restaurant in Las Vegas (The Aureole) actually has a four storey wine tower in the middle of the room, with the wines positioned purely according to price. “Wine fairies” in very short skirts ascend to the top on a series of pulleys only if you order the most expensive Château Pétrus or early vintage of Screaming Eagle. What more appropriate way to show the world your taste in wine in Las Vegas.

On a recent visit to California’s wine country, I was curious to see what other useful innovations have occurred when it comes to selling wine in restaurants. Rather than beginning on the well-trodden trails in Napa Valley, we went to a more obscure and far more visually stunning region – the Russian River stretch of the Sonoma Valley, where the landscape is still dwarfed by stands of California Redwoods. Apart from the thriving wine industry, this is home to many of the earliest organic farmers, who now provide produce to the leading restaurants both in the Bay Area such as Chez Panisse and Coi plus more far-flung places like Per Se and Daniel in New York.  The local restaurants we went to like Boon in Guerneville and River’s End in Jenner, had interesting wine lists, dominated by local Pinot Noir efforts. (I really tried to find some Pinots I admired but failed, except for Ant Hill, which I drank at the Ledbury last year)

Guerneville is the village of choice along the Russian River for the Bay Area Gay population and Boon is the hip bistro of choice. It sources most of its vegetables from its own garden and had delicious dishes such as belly of pork and sautéed greens with garlic. The French fries were served with aioli and ketchup, which were both home made. The vast majority of the customers were well fed and clothed men in their Thirties and Forties but there was a sprinkling of women and children. My favourite moment when a very attractive blonde girl wandered past several tables and wiggled her hips before laughing at the futility of the gesture.

I was intrigued that many bottles on the tables were obviously not on the wine list and put it down to the relatively generous corkage policy of wine country restaurants, which rarely charge more than $15 per bottle, except at the Market Restaurant in St Helena, which has no corkage at all to Thomas Keller’s famous French Laundry, where it is a bracing $50.

The explanation for the profusion of different wines was fascinating – Sophie’s Cellars, (www.sophiescellars.com) the best local wine shop in Monte Rio, has struck a deal which allows their customers to take one bottle of wine to any of the participating local restaurants for free. John Haggard, the owner of Sophie’s Cellars, pioneered this system seven years ago, starting with River’s End, (http://ilovesunsets.com) a contemporary Californian Cuisine restaurant overlooking the Pacific at Jenner. “Once they decided it would be advantageous to get tourists coming into the area to sit down in their restaurant, all the others signed on too because they knew they would lose their reservations.” From those simple beginnings, there are now 18 restaurants that participate in this arrangement. “Not only does it save the customer $20 or so, it also helps the wine growers and keeps more business local,” John added. A man after my own heart, he said that the era of 15% plus alcohol content in wines was falling out of favour: “Food wines typically are not fruit bomb high alcohol wines – they are falling out of favour now – lower alcohol ones are really what people want. They also linger longer on the counter because high alcohol wines don’t have any stability and they seem to fall apart.”

 The other factor, which gives a boost to his cellar sales, is that he is virtually at the entrance to Bohemian Grove, the rarefied San Francisco club that attracts hundreds of the world’s male ruling elite to its summer camp in mid-July. It is not uncommon for impatient Masters of the Universe to walk out with magnums of America’s finest costing hundreds of dollars apiece. The Bohemian Grove is an all male event but members used to set up their mistresses in the surrounding hotels for occasional assignations. 

The Fourth of July on the Russian River at Monte Rio

The best local place we dined in was the Village Restaurant, which had a spectacular view of the Russian River during the Fourth of July fireworks display – also good old-fashioned place to stay.

Their roast rib was the best meat we had during the entire trip. Fifteen minutes to the west of Rio Monte, through breathtakingly exquisite hills and forest, it is difficult to believe that River’s End would ever need any incentive to lure customers.

Perched high above the Russian River Estuary, with imposing headlands and a colony of Harbour Seals basking on a spit of sand below, this is one of the most magnificent restaurant vistas anywhere on the planet.

The food at River’s End is solid contemporary Californian, with sustainable local seafood and meats that are hormone and antibiotic-free. The food was badly let down for me at least by the level of sugary/sweetness in virtually every dish. This included their summer ceviche of snapper and shrimp with cucumbers, orange, bell peppers and coriander and red onion. Unfortunately the description of the duck confit salad did not even mention the presence of copious numbers of raisins, which again, pushed the sugar levels far too high for my taste. Their wine list highlights local wines, with the only imports being Champagne, a bottle of Bandol from Provence plus a solitary Riesling from Dr Loosen in Mosel. We brought along a bottle of locally made Pinot Grigio recommended by John Haggard but unfortunately it was undrinkable.

Another view

According to Evan Anatra, the general manager, between a quarter to a third of all wine consumed at River’s End comes through this scheme, which he also operates with two other local wine merchants. I assumed that wine consumption would be high here because of its location, but interestingly, it is not so straightforward.

Sales of stratospherically high wines have fallen off because of the drop in the economy since 2008. “Before then, people would just name a label they wanted to try and not care about the price, but now the price point is around $40 or $50 for most sales,” Evan said. The other reason why consumption is tempered is more unusual: “Most of our guests have been at wine tastings all day, so by the evening, the husbands are often sick of wine and just expect their wives to have a glass while they stick to beer.”

By contrast, the most successful new restaurant arrival in the wine country is film producer Francis Ford Coppola’s Winery (http://www.franciscoppolawinery.com) in the otherwise somnolent Alexander Valley. Critics might accuse him of bringing Hollywood to an unspoilt paradise, but in fact this is a very well run operation with one of the main attractions being a vast pool with accompanying cabins that can be hired to make it a whole family day outing. This is an example of supreme marketing around not just wine (with vivid labels designed by Mr Coppola’s art director for his “Directors Cut” reserve wines) but also a considerable amount of movie memorabilia (all of his Oscars) both from his own films such as Apocalypse Now and the Godfather series but also his daughter Sofia Coppola’s film productions. There are also numerous wine tasting courses and other attractions, plus a well run moderately priced restaurant with more of those paradisiacal views across vineyards and mountains.

All in all, this is a superb example of how mass market food and wine operations can deliver not just family entertainment but good value too.

In Napa Valley itself, there are any number of first-rate restaurants with incomparable wine lists – the only two Three –Star Michelin restaurants in California are both here – The French Laundry and The Restaurant at Meadowood. Of course the predominant restaurant wines here are from the Napa Valley, but there is still a sophisticated understanding of the best that the rest of the world has to offer.

The Auberge de Soleil, a favourite of mine for 20 years, has a brilliant list, especially of French classics, with some of the very top ones under current London auction prices….

My friend Bruce Neyers, owner of the excellent Neyers Vineyards as well as being Kermit Lynch’s national sales manager told me “The French Laundry list is the greatest hands down. There is also an Italian restaurant in Yountville called Bottega which has a wonderful collection of Italian and local wines and the Go Fish list is also pretty good – it is part Sushi and the rest is fish.”

Another place I didn’t have time to try was Bouchon, owned by Thomas Keller and quite close by the French Laundry. (I pitched up at the French Laundry around 3.30pm to speak with any of their five sommeliers only to be told they didn’t deal with people at the tradesman’s entrance – I would have to go through their PR outfit in New York.) Bouchon maintain a vast database which allows them to actually purchase any wine elsewhere when requested by a customer – I suppose the same thing could be achieved by just looking up www.wine-searcher.com, but it sounds good.

There are other popular establishments such as Mustard’s Grill near Yountville, which feels like a classic diner, only Maserati’s are just as likely to be in the car park as Mack Trucks.  There are “truck stop classics” such as half-slab baby back ribs, Mongolian pork chop or grilled hanger steak with fries and watercress dip. The wine list is a large metal ring folder with “Way Too Many Wines” emblazoned on the cover. Wine Director James Dick has an extraordinary list of the very rarest Californian classics, which are usually only seen in top restaurants locally or in New York, Las Vegas or the more affluent parts of Texas. Not everyone is interested in purchasing Araujo Estate Eisele Vineyard wines for $400 a bottle or Colgin Cellars ‘Cariad’ at $600 but there are other more playful options. To mark their twenty eighth anniversary as a restaurant, they offer 28 interesting wines from all over the world at only $28 a bottle. Another innovation, which I have never seen elsewhere, are flights of three wines for $24 to encourage people to learn more about a particular style of wine or grape. At present there are three “shades of pink” plus “pinot you may not know”.

Mustard's waives corkage if the customer buys a bottle off their wine list, a common practice throughout the region. “One of our major attractions is that a lot of the stuff we sell, such as Harlan or Bond, rarely makes it out of the valley,” according to James.

“When people come to Mustard’s, they are really looking for a good experience of what Napa has to offer, so that is what we try to do – not just the wine, but also the food.” And what is the “next big thing”? “Well, I am afraid that the next big thing is the smallest thing – people here are always trying to find the most obscure tiny production wine so they are one ahead of the next guy.”

Our interview was then ended thanks to a problem diner. A waitress politely interrupted to urge James to come and sort it out because “he was all over the board with what he wants and he needs help.”

I only hope that a few more of the better informed sommeliers in California make it over to Europe – it certainly enhances the pleasure of a meal when well informed people cope with whatever the issue with such a mixture of casualness and charm.

PS: I was pleasantly surprised to discover a bottle of Pialade 07 (the “third” wine of Rayas) at Commis in Oakland – even more impressed when I later served it blind to my wife who got the grower….

ENDS