Category Archives: food

The names James, Le Saint James

Posted on by under Europe, food, Northern Europe

High on a hill, Le Saint James Hotel in Bordeaux offers unique style, fantastic views, superb food and a cookery school as well. 

IMG_3154We started calling it the ‘Le Saint James Bond’ moment, the moment after waking up that I pressed the button to raise the blind at the end of our bed.

With a cheerful whirr all four meters or so of blind would creep upward to slowly reveal a 180 degree view of Bordeaux spread out to the west below. The early light shining onto the taller buildings the cars with their headlights on, blue lights of emergency services silently and purposefully charging down the autoroutes. Magical.

IMG_3350The room, like all the rooms at the Le Saint James Hotel, is designed around the bed and the bed is designed around the view. Up here in the village of Bouliac, known unsurprisingly as the Balcony of Bordeaux, everyone gets a good view but lucky guests in their beds have the best view of all. Continue reading →

The fat of the land

Posted on by under Europe, food

Pigs and parmesan aren’t enough for the people of Emilia Romagna, Italy, they want to have their art and eat it too. Nick Harman heads out to sample a bit of both.IMG_2912‘I’m going to London tomorrow.’ enthuses the Italian man at Due Platani , a trattoria in the countryside just outside Parma, ‘I’ve got a reservation at Chiltern Firehouse after three months’ wait!’ Well you don’t want to be a downer on anyone do you, but I had to bite back a ‘why bother?’ I mean I had just eaten a superb meal of local, seasonal produce such as pumpkin ravioli, so good other chefs come for miles to eat them, in a room joyfully filled with people of all ages and with not a WAG or scenester in sight.

IMG_3086It was followed by pasta ribbons mixed with a perfect balance of duck ragu, enough to add flavour to the fresh pasta but not swamp it, then some guinea fowl with spicy sweet mostarda, and had ended with my being invited to see a huge mound of fresh ice cream come surging out of an ancient gelato machine before it was rushed to eagerly waiting tables. You don’t get that in West London. Continue reading →

Don’t save it for Sunday

Posted on by under Europe, food, sherry

Jetting into Jerez to taste a lot of sherry and to put aside some prejudices

IMG_2597

The dark interior the of sherry bodega in Jerez stretches away to what seems like infinity. On each side black painted barrels are stacked in Goth splendour three barrels high. Outside, even in September, the sky is a brilliant blue and the temperature is enough to make pedestrians hug the shady side of the street and drivers turn up the aircon full blast.

IMG_2616

Inside it smells musty and mouldy and of sherry. It’s an aroma redolent of Christmas and Sunday dinners, and for anyone of a certain age it’sHarveys Bristol Cream that immediately springs to mind. Which is apt, as this is where it comes from Continue reading →

Pepper Big

Posted on by under Europe, food, Northern Europe

Down in ‘Fannet’ food has taken a space age turn. Nick Harman visits the UK’s biggest greenhouse complex to find how our red, yellow and green peppers are produced.

pepmainI can’t get rid of it; ‘This is Planet Earth’ by Duran Duran keeps looping around my brain as we wait for security clearance to enter the world of Thanet Earth. Damn those catchy 80s popsters and their irresistible ‘hooks’.

I soon lose the beat though as we round a corner and I get my first sight of the massive greenhouses covering the rough equivalent of four Heathrow terminals, or 40 football pitches if that helps. Very, very big, is perhaps the best way of putting it.

IMG_2437Before the greenhouses fell to earth all this land in Thanet, the bit of the UK that includes Margate, Ramsgate and Broadstairs, grew brassicas – cauliflowers mostly -which apparently ‘smelt a fair bit.’

Now four clean, bright and odour-free greenhouses occupy the space instead. They stand on compacted earth with as little concrete as possible used in their construction. This is what modern farming looks like; efficient, virtually waste-free, ecologically as sound as possible and with no mud or muck about. Continue reading →

The world’s biggest buffet

Posted on by under Europe, food, Southern Europe, wine

Eat for England.  Les Grands Buffets, Narbonne, France

Remorseless eating machines | The world’s biggest buffet

I agreed to it for a laugh, really. “The world’s biggest buffet”? Well that surely had to be a barn-door target for some snarky reviewing.

At first we couldn’t get to the place to even mock it from the outside. Instead we sped with increasing impatience up and down the fast two-lane on the industrial outskirts of Narbonne, trying to find a way in. Massive signs advertised furniture stores,car exhaust fitters and flooring warehouses, but the only way to access the area seemed to be to drive the wrong way around a roundabout and then floor it down a one-way street against oncoming Renault Twingos.

So we did that and made our way on foot across an airfield’s worth of tarmac to an enormous building that also seemed to house an ice-rink or a roller-rink. It was hard to tell: it was closed and dark, just like every other “grand surface” in the area.

Les Grands Buffets

Continue reading →