Tag Archives: Michelin star

The Cross at Kenilworth

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You can find wonderful little restaurants in the most obscure places. I was in Leamington Spa for a weekend in April celebrating a friend’s wedding. I always like exploring new parts of England, especially when it is somewhere I wouldn’t necessary think to visit. The morning after the wedding, feet aching and head hazy, we got up early and hopped on the local bus to Kenilworth. This little town in Warwickshire is sleepy and quaint, proud of its historic castle and Elizabethan gardens.

The Cross at Kenilworth is a darling little pub serving modern British food. The restaurant only opened 18 months ago and yet has already won a Michelin star. The dining room is a cleverly transformed pub room, with foodie relics on the walls and a warm maroon and brown colour scheme. It is the ideal spot for a hearty lunch after a long walk in the park.

Head chef Adam Bennett has previously wowed at the prestigious Bocuse D’Or, and now leads a young but talented team in the kitchen at The Cross. The a la carte menu features vibrant British recipes using seasonal ingredients, but it is the daily lunch menu that gives extraordinary value for money. Two courses from the set lunch are priced at £20 and three will cost you £25.

All the items on the menu are nicely balanced with a variety of meat, fish and vegetables. Highlights of our meal included a beautifully presented and intensely flavoured Wild Garlic Risotto with grilled chicken oysters and mushrooms. This light Italian dish was a show-stopping bright green colour and was cooked to perfection, a lovely marriage of texture and taste. From the a la carte, the Guinea Fowl was a favourite of ours, cooked with a crispy salty outer edge and accompanied by leeks, jersey potatoes and truffle. For a more exotic dish try the Duck with endive, lentils and orange sauce.

For dessert we shared the luxurious Chocolate fondant with pistachio ice-cream. Chocolate and nut is a combination that never fails – a gooey sweet cocoa cake topped with crunchy nuts and paired with a creamy light ice-cream… it was polished off in under a minute!

It’s rare to find a pub restaurant of this quality in such a quiet little town so I was delighted to discover The Cross. Reasonably priced, exciting and tasty food… if I lived nearby I’d be in here every weekend.

More information and book a table here.

Gastrologik, Stockholm

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It has taken me a long time to write up my meal at Gastrologik as it is a challenge to put an experience like this into words. This pioneering restaurant in Stockholm opened in 2011, a labour of love from young chefs Jacob Holmstrom and Anton Bjuhr. Both men have a background of working in excellent kitchens but wanted to open their own eatery to offer diners a cuisine that celebrated the qualities of seasonal Nordic ingredients.

It was a chilly night when my mum and I stepped inside the small Stockholm restaurant. Gastrologik is located on the corner of a quiet residential street in the Ostermalm district and only seats about 30 guests in the cosy dining rooms. This is a place for keen foodies to relish and enjoy the finest Swedish cooking.

The chefs work meticulously at the open kitchen counter, using various utensils to delicately dress and arrange the dishes. We sat down at the last empty table, and observed our surroundings. The restaurant is clean and minimalist with white walls, oak floor and typically Scandinavian copper light shades, which add a touch of glamour. The menu is similarly stark, open the white menu card to reveal the cheeky message: ‘Let Today’s Produce Decide’, 1295 SEK. And just like that we gave up decision rights for the night and let the kitchen choose our food fate!

We had a vegetarian menu, approximately 13 courses of beautiful, clever and flavoursome food. First campfire bread sticks and Algae broth with lovage in a tiny glass teapot. It was magically evocative of a forest encounter. Smoky bread wrapped around thick twigs and warm comforting broth. Next came a range of intriguing bites, a touch of cheesy sweetness from Goat’s cheese from Lofsta with meringue and apple, a touch of the exotic with the Quail egg marinated in the housemade pea soy sauce. It was evident with each plate that every ingredient was carefully foraged and found from the surrounding environment. Raw mushrooms arranged into flowers with a cream of toasted yeast were exquisite in looks and taste.

Freshly made hot bread was delivered in a hemp pouch with luxuriously thick butter from Kittelberget. Every course was presented in an inventive and creative way. Root celery with nettles was an eccentric pile of contrasting textures and garden tastes. Roasted carrots with onions and truffles from Gotland is a celebration of the humble carrot, the vegetable is treated with such dignity, creating a complex caramelised dish that I loved. Baked egg with ramsons and malt was a bizarre dish, the poached egg was almost jelly-like with intensely flavoured malt sponge and ramsons (a distant relative of the chive).

The sweet courses began with a glass petri dish of circular apple specimens to cleanse and refresh the palate. Smoked beets with hay was perhaps the only course we found a little too bizarre to enjoy, and I noticed our neighbouring table pushing it around the plate too. Unless you adore the distinctive flavour of beetroot this is a tricky dish, especially paired with shards of white chocolate and the hint of hay. Celery root with caramel and whey was a more tempting dessert and we enjoyed the crunchy topping combined with the smooth caramel decadence. Just before we could mourn the end of this exceptional meal, a bowl of pine arrived in which mouthfuls of pine vodka were hidden. The powerful flavours burst in our mouths, like a gasp of tingling cold forest air.

The lovely waiter brought along a wooden box of dried ingredients so we could create our very own blend of herb tea. I didn’t choose the best combination but loved the personalised process nonetheless.

Gastrologik cannot help but inspire diners, with their innovative kitchen ethics and love of produce in the purest form, every meal here is different. The chefs told me that sometimes the menu can even change halfway through the service when one item runs out. So despite reading my detailed review, you never know what will arrive in front of you. Gastrologik offers an exhilarating experience, a culinary journey that I will never forget.

More information and book a table here.

Hélène Darroze Sommelier’s Table

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I am lucky to have tasted the culinary creations of Hélène Darroze on several occasions. Her restaurant at the Connaught Hotel is renowned for its spectacular food and exemplary service. Using rich memories of her upbringing in south west France, her beautiful cuisine illustrates a love of fine ingredients and family heritage but also an imaginative spirit that means her ideas evolve as she travels more of the world.

A few weeks ago I dined at the exclusive Hélène Darroze Sommelier’s Table Supperclub, along with a group of London’s top food bloggers. Beneath the kitchens, down a discreet staircase, the chilly cellar is found. Holding an impressive collection of valuable, exceptional even, bottles of wine, this cellar is only used for the most elite meals, a special hideaway for wine connoisseurs and food lovers.

A seven course menu was designed specially by Hélène for the occasion, and master Sommelier Mirko Benzo selected unique vintages to complement each course. Sitting around the grand circular table, I felt like we had travelled back in time, a regal feast in a secret cellar. It is an enlightening experience tasting dishes with wine that balances so miraculously with every ingredient and flavour. We were invited to blind taste the wine initially, a task which I did spectacularly badly at, but one that really stirred my interest in this world.

Meanwhile Hélène’s head chef Alex Dilling was presenting plates of food that thrilled the Instagrammers round the table. Caviar with crab, radish and hass avocado looked like a dreamy garden in the bowl. Foie gras with wild strawberry, rhubarb and lemon verbena looked pretty, pink and perfect, but was complex and sophisticated in taste, the sweetest of the fruit cutting through the rich smooth foie gras. Coco bean with eel and shimeji then Lobster with asparagus, botargo and seaweed followed. The kitchen continued to wow with luxurious ingredients prepared in inventive and delicious ways.

Though I can be squeamish the Sweetbread course was a resounding success around the table, I heard whispers of ‘this is the best dish I’ve tasted all year’… which is high praise from people who eat and judge food for a living! The sweetbread was like very tender pork, paired with earthy indulgent morels, fresh seasonal asparagus and vin jaune (from the Jura region of France). It was paired with a glass of 2008 Gevry-Chambertin “Les Jeunes Rois”, Domaine Geantet-Pansiot.

For the double dessert extravaganza (courses six and seven) I had to engage my second stomach. Traditional Baba Armagnac (using the Darroze family Armagnac) was up first. A light but boozy treat accompanied by strawberries and fluffy banana cream. I imagine it would be the kind of grown-up dessert James Bond would order when out on a date. The second dessert – Chocolate with ginger and bourbon vanilla provoked childish oohs and ahhs from the team of eaters. Once all the photographic evidence of the chocolate masterpiece had been recorded, the table was silent as we consumed the delightfully indulgent pudding.

Satisfied and stunned by the array of culinary creations and magical wine journey we had experienced, we ate our final mouthfuls of French patisserie and sipped the last of the dessert wine before saying our goodbyes and stepping back into the real world upstairs.

More information on the Sommelier’s Table here, learn more about Hélène Darroze here.