The London Drinker Beer and Cider Festival, nr King's Cross

Most people who have shared a drink with me will know that I have an ambivalent attitude towards CAMRA, something that inhabits a bizarre psychic territory somewhere between a classic love/hate relationship and a blatant case of biting the hand that feeds. Frequently deriding those who help enable you to obtain something you desire – a quality pint - is contradictory at best and a bit mean, not to mention arrogant, at worst.  Perhaps it’s the fact that the real ale ultras are so opposed to keg beer, or maybe it’s just that my frequently sozzled mind needs on-going sources of light-hearted amusement. Much like Hackney’s hipster contingent (if they’re so offensive, why exactly did I move to East London again?), the CAMRA crew are a good bunch to poke fun at, especially when you moonlight as a bartender at a reputable pub specialising in cask beer. 

But whatever easy jokes and bold statements I make at their expense need always be mitigated by two admissions. Firstly, that they a thing or two about good beer, a beverage I am quite partial to. I have never been served a dud pint at a CAMRA endorsed or frequented establishment and I don’t believe I will anytime soon. And B, that it is entirely likely my beer belly will have one of their membership cards or t-shirts glued to in the next twenty years. A third indisputable statement is that they put on bloody good drinking events. 

The Great British Beer Festival is one of the highlights of any beer enthusiasts’ calendar, whatever stance they take on the Great Carbonation Debate. The selection of rare American bottles alone is enough to keep me going back year in, year out. Now, I don’t know whether the London Drinker Beer & Cider Festival is a long-standing occurrence or a new invention and frankly I don’t care. But what must be said is that it’s as comprehensive a selection of top-quality ales as the capital is likely to see until SW5 in August and a must visit for all crusaders of the pint.

Granted, when CAMRA members congregate in such large numbers, the atmosphere often makes me wish I was locked inside an abattoir with a mentally unstable, pissed up pig farmer. And the venue itself, like the Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre, isn’t exactly character personified. In fact, if Earl’s Court resembles an abandoned sweatshop, then the Camden Centre is somewhere between a dilapidated masonic lodge and a slightly grand AA venue. But the epic selection of beer enables me to happily relax in this otherwise unremarkable environment.

Camden Town Brewery Bar

Along with the venerable Brew Dog, Camden Town Brewery is one of the leading ambassadors for Britain’s burgeoning craft beer scene, their wares now commonly stocked in good London boozers. Fortunately for the capital’s microbrew fanboys, a full range of their beers will soon be available straight from the vat when they launch an on-site bar later this month. Saturday they opened their doors to offer a taster of what is to come, and while it was evident that a few finishing touches were needed here and there, the space and concept itself seemed well thought out. For one, they had gone through the trouble of recruiting the inimitable Big Apple Hot Dogs to sling stomach liners on the day, something that you cannot help but hope becomes a regular feature.

The outdoor space under the arches near Kentish Town West is hardly scenic, but it’s got bags of potential on a pleasant day, which Saturday was. There’s something reassuringly simple about supping a fresh brew seated on top of a keg near DIY wheelbarrow fires, the basic set up inviting you to focus on your drink rather than what pretentious song choice the Skins wannabe behind the bar is contemplating. Of course, the centrepiece of the day was the beers and, more specifically, their new limited release USA Hells. We managed to get through nearly everything on offer, from their supercharged Ink stout to their beautifully cloudy and floral Gentleman’s Wit by way of the perfectly refreshing American-style pale ale. Yet it was the USA Hells that I kept coming back to. Unfiltered and unpasteurized, it bore about as much relation to commercial lagers as Russia does to a democratic nation.

The lack of meddling, along with the juicy American hops, meant it almost resembles a kind of strange pale ale, wheat beer hybrid – tropical fruit flavours, especially grapefruit, were dominant and complimented amply by the subtly spicy hops, with a hint of bitterness on the finish reminding you that, yes, keg beer can be real beer. There’s little question that Camden Town favours more approachable styles of beer and this isn’t at all a bad thing. Not least, it encourages a more egalitarian drinking experience: more women tipped up to enjoy a bevvy in the early afternoon than probably pass through the Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre during the entire four days of the (totally awesome) Great British Beer Festival.  

That’s not to say that cask ale is or should be the sole preserve of obese middle age men - just that more where traditional methods and styles dominate, said demographic tend to congregate in especially large numbers, flocking to the dark mild end of the bar like paedophiles to playgrounds. Nor is the fairer sex inherently put off by the cask. Indeed, there's some great, forward-thinking real ale coming out of Britain at the moment, with Dark Star consistently good and Redemption a new favourite. But there's also a lot of lazy choices being made by brewers, publicans, and punters alike. So the growing diversity of the craft brewing scene can only be a positive omen as more and more drinkers - male and female - will be lured away from the tight grip of Carling. People can get hung up about technical distinctions between different kinds of beer and methods of brewing, but it really is as simple as good beer is real and real beer is good - presence or lack of carbonation is largely irrelevant.

Similarly, the range and inventiveness of somewhere like Brew Dog is pretty mind boggling, especially when you consume more than a couple of them. But sometimes you just want a tasty, easy-drinking beer – a lager even - that isn’t going to leave you knocking over chairs at your local and thinking that the rather special bottle of Icelandic porter you bought is a great match for a chicken doner. Camden Town Brewery fills this niche in style, their combination of classic German and more modern American influences proving an inspired synergy. Their new bar looks set to be a stellar addition to London’s reinvention as something of a discerning beer drinkers’ paradise.

Citrus and herb panko crusted red tilapia with bastardised nasi goreng

Weekends are a special time for culinary fanatics. Without the hustle and bustle of the working week to distract us, we are able to dig deep into the larder to eat something special or try something new. It’s when we whip out the liquid smoke, fire up the blow torch, and share our passion for food with those closest to us. In the Scavenger Gourmet kitchen, there’s inevitably a bit of tug-of-war that goes on: I crave fry-ups, steaks, and game stews, while Al usually wants something along the lines of poached seaweed with an air jus. Our efforts to compromise and maintain a relative amount of domestic harmony – as well as our passable environmental awareness – means that I find myself cooking a lot more fish these days.

Now, I’ve never been one of those people who always seems to fall back on the tested but tired routine of salmon with new potatoes and rocket salad: mackerel, sardines, monkfish, cod, swordfish, mussels, prawns, and scallops are all well within my comfort zone, and I like to think that I’ve got an especially deft hand when it comes to tuna. Even beleaguered salmon has its place as a quick mid-week supper – it is fantastic perched on top of some nice and light, primavera-style pasta and also works very well with couscous. But the fact that my at-home diet now almost resembles pescetarianism means that my weekend exploits are typically a matter of finding new ways to pervert the simple pleasure of fresh fish.

This weekend I wanted to distance myself from the usual suspects. A fun but gastronomically atrocious meal at Huong Viet in Dalston as part of the annual JT staff lash-up the weekend before left my mind flirting with exotic ideas. While I didn’t know exactly where this would lead me, a quick Google turned up a good guide for nasi goring, or Indonesian fried rice. Now, all I had to do was totally bastardize it.

As much as this post is largely driven by the fact that I was quite pleased with the relative success of my culinary exploits, it’s completely dependent on the Fin and Flounder fishmonger in Broadway Market, one of the jewels in Hackney’s gastronomic crown. It is the best urban fishmonger I have ever set in foot in by an Irish mile: the crustaceans are still moving, the fish have that awesome ‘I’ve just been whacked’ look in their eyes, and staff are effortlessly helpful as well as knowledgeable.

My aquatic local, The Fishery on Stoke Newington High Street, is highly commendable and great to have down the road. But comparing it to Fin and Flounder is like equating Huong Viet with Viet Grill. The Fishery isn’t nearly as bad as Huong Viet, of course, but the gap between the two is comparable. If you haven’t been, you owe it to yourself and whoever you’re frying Blinky up for to make the trip to London Fields. They’re open most of the week so you don’t even have to run the risk of being blinded by a hipster’s beard at the weekend. If these words of praise don’t convince you, then the following picture certainly should…

The Bell and Brisket, Soho

I'm not trying to make a habit out of it, honest, yet I can’t help but notice that my blogs frequently extend beyond the boundaries of linguistic decency. Two thousand words might be fitting for an obituary to Marie Colvin but possibly not for a post that can essentially be summarised as “Pitt Cue Co good” or “Newpub in East London bad.” In the end, it turns out that there are things in life more important than eating, even if people like me are generally loathe to admit it. So in the interest of not punishing reader’s attention spans – and the fact that a ‘waste liquid removal’ is presently encamped next to me outside The Euston Tap – here’s an exercise in marginal brevity.

The Bell and Brisket is a new salt beef pop-up run out of the The Queen’s Head in Soho and it is very good indeed. At £7.50 for a sandwich or around a tenner including chips, it’s not the cheapest sandwich in town, but it is one of the best and a reasonable price for a sit-down lunch: an overly generous pile of juicy, well-seasoned brisket spilling out of one of the UK’s better attempts at rye, topped with liberal amounts of gherkin and an ample spreading of English mustard. American mustard, of course, would have been preferable as it is mild enough to be applied in industrial quantities, but after the first bite I honestly forgot about my lone compositional quibble. 

The pub itself was a more than ample venue for London’s latest great pop-up: a small but well-kept establishment that featured a very good guest ale and a decent take on the capital’s latest drinks craze, the pickleback. Not quite up to the standard of Pitt Cue’s dangerously moreish beetroot brine version, but nevertheless a thoroughly enjoyable if potentially inappropriate lunchtime digestif. Of course, it should really have been a bourbon rather than Jamesons, but possessing the shamrock streak that I do, I’m hardly one to complain.

There's no doubt that I'll be back. Not only is the simple concept of a proper sandwich in a proper pub such a rarity on these shores, but salt beef is an especially hard number to master, especially if New York delis are used as your benchmark. Perhaps pop-up formulas are the remedy because these guys got it seriously right. The last eye-opening meat-and-bread combination I got in a pub was at The Jeremy Bentham, one of my former employers, where the Kiwi landlady knocks out an audacious meatloaf, mustard, and beetroot number. Thankfully, it looks like she’s finally got some real competition in the centre of town. Here's to hoping there's more to come from intrepid sandwich artists like The Bell and Brisket this year.

The Hunter S.: Fear and Loathing in De Beauvoir Town

There’s been a lot of excited Tweeting lately about the opening of a new pub, The Hunter S., in De Beauvoir Town, so as I was heading down that way to check out the new Honey Drizzle cooking school in Hoxton, it seemed natural to pay a visit. Given the concept, I was expecting to love it: Hunter Thompson was one of the first literary voices I connected with, his work helping to instil in me the idea that journalism was about more than just reporting three-car pile-ups. While I’ve long since given up my futile attempts at gonzo writing, I’m nevertheless instinctively pre-disposed to like a pub in his honour. What a surprise, then, that I’m writing my first negative review. It’s not just that I can’t really see what the fuss is about – I actually actively dislike the place.

Let’s start with the beers. Beer is the single most important thing about a pub. Great beer can be found in run-down establishments generally frequented by borderline sociopaths and featured on Danny Dyer programmes, while bad beer can be found, well, pretty much everywhere. To be fair, the beer at The Hunter S. wasn’t exactly bad - there just wasn’t enough of it. Not counting the myriad lagers, each one as predictable as the next, there were two cask ales available on the night and space for a third. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as having three well-kept, regularly changing ales is more than enough to satisfy the grumpy old man in me. Unfortunately, the ales were both Sharps. You know - the Cornish brewery that was alright way back when but then got bought out by Molson Coors and started appearing as the token ale in every second-rate boozer in the south of England? 

Having a contract with a multi-national brewer (or the distributor for a multi-national brewer) means that these two hand-pulls are unlikely to come up for air very often and, given the close proximity of breweries like Redemption and East London Brewing Co, it’s hard to fathom why they haven’t opted to go a more local route. Likewise, having imported lager isn’t deplorable in and of itself, but how many trendy Asian and continental imports do you really need? A couple would suffice and free up space for more interesting concoctions like those emanating at an alarming rate from Aberdeenshire.

That said, my Doom Bar was OK. Fairly bland as usual but it seemed to have been kept reasonably well and didn’t offend. Still, it’s a lazy ale choice and what’s even more unforgivable than underestimating the curiosity of the punter’s palate is overcharging them. In this, The Hunter S. seems to be aspiring to new heights. £1.90 is a lot for a half of ale. Doing the maths, that would beg the question as to whether they are charging £3.80 for one of the most bog-standard, samey cask options on the market. Maybe not, as many pubs inflate half-pint prices, a practice the government might want to look at the next time they’re having a whinge about the Great British Binge. It’s not just mean, it’s irresponsible to penalise people who are trying to take a more responsible approach to drinking.

Chula Fused Foods, London

So-called fusion food rarely impresses me. Partly, this is because it’s a label that is abused nearly as badly as the gastropub designation: liberally distribute sweet chili sauce, coconut milk, and harissa across your menu and apparently you’re serving up a culinary revolution. Yet at its best, fusion really can work and is capable of elevating food to new heights. One of my most memorable dining experiences in London was at The Providores, while probably the best restaurant meal I can remember (admittedly, there are some I can’t) was at Paris’s Ze Kitchen Gallerie.

Balancing flavours that don’t normally happily co-habit the same kitchen, let alone plate, is a delicate art. As a result, it’s something that you’d think is ill-suited to the rough and ready street food scene. Yet anyone who has sampled a Korean-style slider at Kimchi Cult will tell you that this is not an iron rule. Sticking to the basics and doing the simple things very well, anything is possible anywhere. If ever this conviction needed validation, then my experience last Saturday at a slightly bitty new churchyard market on a mind-numbingly miserable afternoon provided it in droves.

Like burgers, I have a bit of a fetish for burritos. And like the market for beef patties, London’s burrito scene is getting increasingly saturated. That’s not at all a bad thing – I’d honestly like it so saturated that there was a Burger & Lobster or Lucky Chip on every corner. But it does mean that the excitement value that came with, say, the brief appearance of #Meateasy in New Cross is slightly diminished. So while I’m itching to get me a Mother Flipper down in Brockley, too many more bright young burgers and I won’t be able to make the most of finally having Ben Denner’s creations on my doorstop. So too with the great Tex-Mex export. On the street, it’s pretty much neck and neck between Luardos and Daddy Donkey; in the bricks and mortar realm, there’s a plethora of options, with Chilango and Benito’s Hat being particularly memorable, and Tortilla especially bad, of late.

I don’t eat as many burritos as I do burgers, so I’m less assertive when it comes to declaring what kitchen produces London’s best. At the same time, my wet-socked Saturday afternoon jaunt through the new Hackney Homemade FOOD market and, more specifically, my munch at Chula Fused Foods may just have provided me with the answer, or at least an opinion on the matter. For sure, Vinod Patel, Chula’s head honcho, makes a mean-ass burrito. It showcases both his Indian roots and his appreciation of the form, which he developed in San Francisco and honed during a stint at Chipotle in London. More than that, it’s a thoroughly well-developed concept. If you think about it, there’s no reason why the burrito, when you strip it down – rice, beans, and slow-cooked meat in a tortilla – wouldn’t translate perfectly to an Indian reinterpretation, as all the ingredients are staples of (or closely related to staples of) the sub-continental dinner table.

Pitt Cue Co, Soho

One of the problems with being an aspiring food and drink writer is that you devote so much of your time to food and drink. Of course, this sounds both hypocritical and contrarian – surely that’s the bloody point, isn’t it? Let me explain. Writer A may know a bit about food. He may have eaten at some great restaurants in his time. He may be able to impress his less gastronomically-inclined friends at dinner parties. His opinion, therefore, on matters culinary may be considered mildly educated, even occasionally fit for consumption by the general public. The problem arises when you realise that you are so into food that you no longer eat at bad restaurants. You read so many blogs, reviews, restaurant guides, and Top Ten/Best Of lists that going out to lunch or dinner on a whim seems, well, very 90s.

So until the time comes when you are respected enough to be invited to review a restaurant – which in my case is likely to be somewhere between a cold day in hell and the end of the world – why would you gamble a sizeable chunk of change on an unknown entity? Partly, this is a by-product of having an obsession with food. Partly, it’s also basic recession economics – we eat out less, so we take more care when we do so. Of course, you can still have a bad experience at what is considered a good restaurant – Burger & Lobster dramatically overcooked my burger, for instance, and in retrospect I am less than enamoured with the downstairs restaurant at Roti Chai. Still, it has become increasingly apparent that my gastro-obsessive nature often unwittingly compromises the vitality of my critical streak. Sorry – ‘Writer A’s’ critical streak.

Why is such a preamble necessary? Because two nights ago I went to Pitt Cue Co and a gushing review is imminent. It was everything I expected, wanted, craved and so much more. BBQ is like crack to me. Though New England is hardly the BBQ capital of the States – that would be Texas, North Carolina, or Kansas depending on who you ask and where they’re from – it’s still full of Americans and where you find Americans you inevitably find a healthy tradition of grilling and smoking various hunks of flesh. So while I’ve never travelled far enough afield to be considered a total guru on matters of the pit, my palate is still trained to detect quality smoked fare – whether it’s at a classic backyard booze-up or on a trip to a delicious dive like the Blue Ribbon BBQ in Arlington, MA.