Tag Archives: culinary tourism

Worth its salt

Posted on by under Europe, food, food producers, Northern Europe

Nick goes to Anglesey to earn his salary (sic) by seeing Halon Môn salt created and how Green & Black’s chocolate is making new use of it.

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David Lea-Wilson, co-founder

‘Every day whatever the weather I come down to the water’s edge and use this device,’ says David Lea-Wilson co-founder of the Anglesey Salt Company waving a curious kind of measuring instrument that looks rather like the thing doctors poke in people’s ears.

It is in fact a  refractometer and accurately measures how much light bends, or refracts, when it enters water. The more salt dissolved in the water, the more resistance the light will meet and the more it will bend.

This device is crucially important because the seawater here is what goes to make Halen Môn salt, widely regarded as one of the best sea salts in the UK if not the world. And it’s the salt Green & Black’s have chosen to go into their new Dark Sea Salt THIN bar.

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La Cova Fumada, Barcelona

Posted on by under Europe, food

Carrer del Baluart, 56, 08003 Barcelona, Spain

‘There’s no sign outside,’ my informant told me over a beer in the Ramblas, ‘and you’ll think that there simply can’t be anywhere good to eat in that tourist area, but honestly, it’s the bomb.’

bomba6-1Which is a bit of an in joke because the restaurant is known, by those in the know, as ‘La Bomba’ because of one particular tapas it serves that is loved by all who go to this tiny place hidden in the backstreets of Barcoloneta, the port part of Barcelona. Continue reading →

The Wilderness Festival is my kind of festival

Posted on by under chefs, Europe, food, Northern Europe

blanc2The love the mob feels for Raymond Blanc is remarkable. He emerges from the back of the Banqueting Tent at the Wilderness Festival looking, as usual, eerily like Dudley Moore but in chef whites and the crowd immediately goes bananas.

He becomes the epicentre of a horde, dare we say a swarm, of phone-toting fans keen to get selfies with the grinning Raymond. As many of horde are young girls and women scantily dressed to allow for the day’s heat, his grin becomes even wider. My wife grabs her phone and disappears into the crush as fast as anyone else and eventually emerges triumphant with her own personal memento of what has been a very memorable occasion. Continue reading →

Fraq’s Lobster Shack

Posted on by under food

55 Goodge Street, London, W1T 1TQ www.fraqslobstershack.com

2M5A8902I must be getting old, the first thing that hits me on entering Fraq is the noise; I can barely hear what the girl in charge of opening the door is saying to me. It isn’t so much the people making noise as the music, it’s club-loud. This may be a good idea in the evening when the majority of customers will probably be under 25 and on their way somewhere exciting, but at lunch it has us having second thoughts straightaway.

But undaunted we  push through a crowd of young men in beards, and young girls in those still popular ‘cute’ bobble hats, to a table somewhat larger than a napkin, We’d ordered at the cooking counter, it wasn’t a  difficult moment; Maine Lobster Roll or Calamari Club?  Fries and/or fried courgette strips?  A craft bottle beer? Continue reading →

The Gin Palace

Posted on by under Europe, food

A tour of the remarkable new Bombay Sapphire distillery in Laverstoke. It’s a place of taste and eco responsibiity and rather good gin

IMG_3607The gin isn’t actually blue. This is something I discovered much to my disappointment when I was first ordered gin in a pub. It’s just the tint of the glass bottle. But then Bombay Sapphire was always smart with its marketing.

IMG_3525Today as Bombay Sapphire’s ’Senior Brand Ambassador’ Sam Carter picks up a bottle to make a cocktail, it literally lights up electric blue ‘It’s a little gadget stuck to the bottom,’ he explains. ’You pick up the bottle and it comes on. Great for dark bars!’ Now that’s branding. Continue reading →

Avast there! Aboard Quantum of the Seas, the biggest floating food palace ever

Posted on by under cruises, Europe

If you’ve always thought a cruise was not for you then it may be time to think again, after all where else can you get to eat in 18 different restaurants only a short stroll from your bedroom? 

ARM2A stomach-boggling variety of eateries is only one of the attractions of the just launched Royal Caribbean cruise ship Quantum of the Seas, the third biggest cruise ship in the world at 347 m and one able to carry 4,000 passengers.

DODGEMS2Onboard are the first dodgems at sea, the first trapeze, the first skydive simulator – Ripcord by iFLY – the first Jamie’s Italian, the North Star – a stomach fluttering glass pod that swings out and over the ship to give you a helicopter view – and the Bionic Bar where two hyperactive robots log your order and then go into blurred motion at the optics, the ice dispenser and the mixer taps before finally giving it all a good shake and sliding your refreshing beverage towards you. 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

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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.

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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

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Meeting Marco Pierre White. The shark at sea

Posted on by under chefs, cruises, Europe

First of the rockstar chefs, rejecter of Michelin Stars and grabber of headlines, Marco Pierre White is one of P&O Cruises Food Heroes. Nick Harman catches up with him mid-voyage

IMG_2347‘’I signed around 1500 of these yesterday,’ says Marco Pierre White indicating a pile of menus in front of him, ‘there’s about another 1000 still to go.’

‘You should get a rubber stamp made up.’ I suggest tentatively, ‘that would make it a lot easier wouldn’t it?’ He turns the Marco stare on me and there’s a beat of silence. ‘But it won’t be the same will it?’ he points out, ‘the people getting it won’t know it’s fake, but I will.’

boatNo longer a Michelin 3 star chef, he eventually threw them back saying that he was sick of trying to impress people who knew less about cooking than he did, Marco is still a man who doesn’t cut corners and doesn’t let customers down. Continue reading →