a gluttonous April and May (and my review of Pollen Street Social)

Once again, I've been a bit sloppy in updating this blog.  As I've mentioned before, I've been tutoring first year uni students in law at one of the London universities.  I've spent the last couple of months dealing with panicked students in the lead-up to exams and then was busy marking exams.  Generally the standard was satisfactory, but there were a few exceptions.  My favourite of those exceptions was the student who wrote in answer to a problem question: "If Graham [the fictional protagonist] thinks he's going to get any damages ... he's an idiot!".  Another student began a sentence by writing: "next I'm gonna..." before sensibly crossing out the word "gonna" and replacing it with "going to".  Many of the exam scripts were full of texting speak - lots of text abbreviations (FYI, BTW) and even smiley faces.  It made me feel very old and brought home the fact that the uni students of today are from a different generation to me. 

Thankfully the last couple of months haven't been all about work.  April saw our friends D and L come from Perth to London and we spent a few happy days hanging out with them.  I even persuaded D to come for a run with me to Hampstead Heath, a run that resulted in us getting completely lost but meant we had a lovely little tour of North London. 

The four of us made it to my new favourite London restaurant, Trullo.  Trullo is a terrific (and very reasonably priced) Italian restaurant in Islington.  It does not have a "concept" (unlike too many London restaurants at the moment) and the waiters don't bore you to death by explaining what the chef is trying to achieve/say by his/her food. And thank god for that.  It's just really good food at great prices in a good atmosphere.  We have been there a few times recently.  I knew I loved the place when, on our first visit shortly after they opened (with two other friends, C and L), the co-owner/front of house came to clear our plates and caught C and I dipping our fingers into the delicious leftover sauce on our plates (we'd already devoured every morsel of food).  Instead of politely ignoring our terrible table manners, he just enthused: "that's great.  That's totally what we wanted to do, to make food that leaves people wanting to scrape their plates clean".  They've also recently opened a bar downstairs, under the restaurant, with tapas sized plates of food and drinks  I can recommend that, also. 

My delicious lemon sole at Trullo (I couldn't resist and started eating it before I took the photo)

G, D, L and I along with D's sister and boyfriend (K and C) (this is starting to turn into an alphabet soup!) also had dinner at Pollen Street Social, only a couple of days after they opened.  This is the much-hyped new Jason Atherton restaurant.  The evening got off to a bad start. About half our group arrived half-an-hour early, for a drink at the bar.  The front of house staff immediately tried to show us to our table, insisting that our reservation was half an hour earlier that it in fact was.  When we insisted that was not the case, and the rest of our group were still to arrive, we were then told, very brusquely, that we would only have an hour and a half for our table (rather than the usual two hours which they apparently allocate), at which point we'd have to return it.  The warning proved unnecessary.  Despite the restaurant being apparently solidly "booked out" for weeks and weeks, with a waiting list for reservations, it was in fact half-empty throughout the time we were there.  Not that this stopped us from worrying we would be thrown out before our dinner had finished, especially given it seemed to take about half an hour for anyone to come and take our orders. 

When the entirety of our complement arrived, we were given some keys (one per couple) and told that we would receive a special gift at the end of the evening.  We were then shown to our table, all dutifully taking our keys with us.  A waiter came over to our table and said he wanted to explain the "concept" which was that there were numerous small dishes, and we should order lots and share them.   We asked how many dishes per person we should order, to ensure that we were all able to try each dish, and were told that one dish per two people would be sufficient.  So with that instruction, we busily ordered most of the menu.  When the dishes came out, they were tiny.  The scallop dish consisted of one scallop.  Small dishes (when exquisite) are not a problem, but it did surprise me that the waiter seemed to think it possible to share one scallop between two people.  None of the dishes was bad.  But only a few of them were terrific.  I think I could have eaten double of what was before me and still not been full, a complaint that I notice was echoed by some of the newspaper restaurant critics.  Apparently Pollen Street Social have now largely abandoned this "small dishes" concept, in favour of the more traditional starter, main and desert. 

A few pictures of the small plates are below.  These were cheekily taken with an iphone and without a flash, so they are not brilliant photos.  They also make the dishes look a fair bit bigger than they were.

I can't even remember what this dish was ... it obviously didn't make much of an impression

Again, I can't remember what these were.  Crab cakes or something, perhaps?  They look pretty, anyway. 

The service was also a little sloppy.  There is a dedicated sommelier but, given the restaurant was very quiet, she didn't seem to have a lot to do.  Nonetheless, she seemed determined not to come to our table.  The result was all six of us trying to attract her attention like marooned castaways trying to flag down a single rescue plane.  G is quite the wine buff, but always enjoys having a sommelier to recommend some untried and tested wine.  Unfortunately, when we finally did get the attention of the sommelier, her wine recommendations were of the very basic (and very obvious) "you will want a dry white" variety, leaving us wondering why we had spent so much time trying to attract her attention in the first place. 

Given the quality of many of the dishes, I could bear all of the above.  What I couldn't, however, stand was the response when I managed to drip some of one of the sharing dishes on the table cloth in front of me.  It left only a modest mark but the service at that point became very attentive, with our waiter rushing over with an enormous white napkin.   He lifted the napkin up, waving it in the air, causing the conversation at the table to cease as everyone wondered what he was doing with this enormous flag.  He then made a great show of placing the napkin in front of me, slowly smoothing it out over the mess.  All of this left me feeling rather embarrassed and did not encourage the "social" aspect of Pollen Street whatsoever, as for the rest of the evening I was overly cautious when spooning tiny morsels onto my plate, eager to avoid the embarrassment of the white flag for a second time. 

When we finally finished our dinner (well and truly after the 1.5 hour slot we had been given had ended) we paid and then went back to the front of house to return the keys to the woman who gave them to us (leaving us wondering why we'd had to keep hold of these keys throughout the meal in the first place).  She then exchanged them for a paper bag containing two friands and two tea bags, with a note "breakfast on us".  Cute, but it was too late to win me over. 

Pollen Street Social just isn't my sort of restaurant.  You can't compare it with Trullo - the two are aiming at completely different markets.  But I think I'll take the place where you can happily dip your finger into your leftover sauce over the fussiness of Pollen Street any day.