A Dish a Day: Polpetto’s Clams with Wild Garlic

Clams with wild garlic and crème fraiche

Today the spotlight is on the clam. Particularly the ones in the newly opened Polpetto in Soho: fiddly to get to and salty to taste, slightly sweet on the chew and enveloped in a thin coating of sauce (crème fraiche with wilted wild garlic). The fingers of focaccia are torn off to mop up the juices and collect the flecks of wild garlic flowers.

In between dishes are sips from a tumbler of a sweet bellini, softly fizzy and pink with rose and rhubarb.

The second best dish consists of slivers of cauliflower with the edges browned and wizened, a sculptural shard next to plump scallops, and hidden under the folded fat that is lardo. All on a cream-coloured purée of truffled cauliflower, which is utterly moreish.

Actually, joint second is a dish of Marinda tomatoes from Sicily which are naked bar a modest lick of oil. In short, I recommend that you visit Polpetto in Berwick Street, because it seems at home in its new home and you’ll soon feel at home there too. Especially when you've a bellini or two in hand.

The rude bottom of a Marina tomato

Polpetto 11 Berwick St, London W1F 0PL 020 7439 8627

Read my first thoughts on the original Polpetto.

A Dish a Day: The Rum Kitchen’s Jerk Fried Chicken Thighs

Ramblings from a voracious eater on the dish that made her day

The jerk chicken garnished with onion rings

Though a lapsed vegetarian’s weakness may be bacon, mine would be steak or fried chicken. And as this is a celebratory dinner (heralding one promotion, and the end of the week), we ought to eat in celebratory manner. Hence two rum sours, one classic daiquiri and a portion of fried chicken. 

Outside the Rum Kitchen are the clean lines of Carnaby Street’s Kingly Court. Inside is a holiday of Caribbean colour, tactile waitresses, reggae and rum. Diners are here for one reason only: to party. If they aren’t partying now, they will certainly be partying later. All this place needs is to do away with the tables, install a beach and a pool the colour of the ocean, and the beach shack it so aspires to be is complete. There is no standing on ceremony here, it’s fingers in as the food arrives. The chicken is crunchy with a heavy-handed deep nut-brown batter but delicately spiced - too delicately perhaps (I’d like more allspice and ginger in mine). Stacked on top are onion rings (light and crisp), pineapple slaw (where is the pineapple?), and ‘rum jerk bbq ketchup’ (satisfying, fruitily tart and scotch bonnet hot). It’s not the best jerk chicken I’ve had; I’m not sure whether my St Kitts sister-in-law would approve, but when you’re nursing that daiquiri and you know the lie of the evening land ahead, it will be the best £7.50 you have ever spent. 

The Classic Daiquiri

Rum Kitchen, 1st Floor, Kingly Court, Carnaby, Soho, W1B 5PW

A dish a day: Bocca di Lupo’s Rabbit Saltimbocca

The voracious eater on the dish that made her day

Every now and then, an evening falls into place. When you can, with half closed eyes, sit back and appreciate how right it feels and let it swim over you in that moment. Last night, London thrilled in a way I’d forgotten it could – I’d been away in dreamlike Brazil for three weeks on honeymoon; the cold rain quickly washed away any vestige of sun and samba – but wandering the streets of Soho surrounded by lights blinking and the sound of spirited drinking, I knew there was a reason this was my favourite city.

That moment last night happened in a dimly lit Bocca di Lupo, on a first date back in London with my new husband (I’m still stumbling over that word – I’m a terrible newlywed). We’d done that classic Soho thing of wandering from restaurant to restaurant after drinks, admiring yet annoyed at the queues outside each one. But of course, on the quiet of Archer Street, peering into the window of Bocca di Lupo was like looking into the warmth of your grandmother’s fireplace through a frosty window. It was irresistible. It was nostalgic. I’ll always remember my first visit here, when I ate one of the best pasta dishes of my life – rigatoni with guanciale (cured pigs cheeks); a simple dish but for some reason impossible to recreate.

To be honest, I could talk about the whole menu – the ungovernable cream of burrata (pictured) which licked the aubergine beneath, the clever clever salad of wafer thin radish and celeriac (layered with the salt tang of pecorino, bursts of sweet pomegranate, uplifted with the unmistakable whiff of truffle), the teal that was squashed open and grilled to perfection, and lay on a bed of deep red treviso.

But it was the first taste of saltimbocca that made us truly relax. We’d been frantically talking – about what Antonio Carluccio was eating (he was sitting on the next table, tucking into a treviso salad), about the future, about the crazy two weeks since coming back to work – and ate frantically to match. But when it arrived, the meal felt complete. Under a blanket of prosciutto was flattened rabbit loin – pale and glistening. Before each piece could reach our mouths, we would run it over the serving plate again, mopping all the rabbity Marsala it could; on bite - a little salty, a little sweet, a little tender, a little crisp.

After the meal, we ran over the road to Gelupo for some salted caramel and fresh mint ice cream. We huddled over a table and shared three scoops. It didn’t matter that we were in the thick of winter. This was what we were coming back for – the cold, the wet, Bocca di Lupo and a whole host of dates in the best city in the world.

Bocca di Lupo, 12 Archer Street, London, W1D 7BB, 020 7734 2223