Formal Hall and Guest Night Dinner at New College, Oxford

New College, Oxford, is one of those big, old, academically excellent, and understandably arrogant colleges. Well, not arrogant, but New students certainly understand their place in the pecking order.



Bits of Harry Potter were filmed here, and it is probably one of the few places in the world to be described as new, whilst being over five centuries old.

Formal Hall, in Oxford colleges, tend to mean a served meal, where students are required to dress in academic gowns, and the food is slightly better than usual. In the newer colleges (it's all relative), Formal Hall occurs once a week, and is, indeed, a three course meal a cut above the usual hall servery. In the older colleges, of which New is definitely one, a canteen style meal is served around 630, and a second, formal, sitting at 730. Although this is a served three course meal, the food is identical to the previous sitting, and has had the benefit of being kept warm for an hour longer. Yum.

The entree of carrot and coriander soup was replaced with potato and leek at short notice, apparently, because they ran out. A great start.

Mains were: lamb cassoulet, three bean stack for vegetarians, served with new potatoes and carrots.



The lamb was cooked decently, being tender and still flavourful, but it wasn't cassoulet. It was simply stewed in tomato sauce, with very little depth in flavour, and tasting of little other than tomato. It was quite nice a tomato sauce, mind you, being full of fruit and not at all acidic. The menu had read creamed potatoes, but apparently that had run out as well.



Choux with cream and chocolate.



There was a New and Christ Church crew date on, that night. What that is takes a whole different post to explain. A taster is that we left them as one of the fine young gentlemen swigged lager from his shoe. Public schoolboys, eh?


Guest Night



The following Friday saw us at the New College Guest Night, which is an opportunity for students to invite friends and show off what the college chefs can do. It also coincided with Halloween, and a 'bop' after dinner. The price is also higher, at £10 per head, rather than the usual £4-5 for formal hall dinners.



The menu was promising, although, what on earth is 'foie gras mash'?? Chunks of liver in my mashed potato? Why? Truffles, yum. Almost any spice or herb, yum. Lumps of liver? how does that add taste or texture contrasts that would accentuate the creaminess of the mash?



Dinner began well: the smoked salmon was delicious. Silky, smooth, not at all salty, and refreshingly matched with the cucumber parpadelle, and a very tasty salsa-verde/pesto. The blini was a very odd texture. Not bad, per se, but with no bite at all, it was too mushy for my liking.

The vegetarian entree was half an artichoke, and some sort of mushroom. Our vegetarian friend, HW, didn't like the mushroom, and didn't even realised that the artichoke was indeed that, and merely played with it.



The filet mignon was a devastating disappointment. Being the avid steak lovers that A and I both are, being served boiled meat is a cruel stab in the gut. Even in the dim candle lit great hall, we could see that the meat was at best flaccid and grey, and a quick prod confirmed that they were well-done, killing any appeal that filet mignon might have had.



Parsnip chips were soft and chewy, not a good description for anything listed as a 'chip'. The foie gras mash was, as expected, extremely confusing. My (very very dry) mash had a lump of liver in it, as did A's. I am fairly certain that it was exactly that - liver - not the creamy, buttery goodness that is foie gras. Tasteless, chewy, and an unappetising grey, it failed to impress. The mash itself not only failed because of its dryness, but was also cooling rapidly due to the difficulties in serving 150 steaks simultaneously.

The vegetarian stack, I am told, was fine. What would you expect from a vegetarian?



The dessert was interesting. Tasty, but so oddly executed. The iced lemon parfait tasted beautiful, but was frozen so solid that the entire table was casually guarding plates with their left hand, and surreptitiously prodding gently with their right. Apparent on everybody's faces was the understanding that pushing too hard with a spoon would mean an airborne parfait, showers of raspberry, and certain ignominy.

Good company, flowing wine, silly costumes and the promise of a long party downstairs certainly perked up the evening.



On the way home, we came across the new kebab van to take residence outside the Taylorian entrance to the University Museum, the Ashmoleon. Owned by he same guy who has the healthy meals place in the covered market, this is an attempt at a 'gourmet' burger. More expensive than the usual kebab followed by a good puke, at approximately £3 per burger it was still an affordable deal.



Bah, so many pansy, fruity, vegetarian choices. Tofu steak? That's not a steak! If it didn't suffer, then I'm not eating it. Or something like that.

I had a cheese burger, with gruyere. A chose the steak burger, also served with cheese. My beefburger was unceremoniously smacked on to the hotplate as a ball, and smooshed down by the cook. A very asymmetric patty was formed, and I was certain that it would fall apart. What resulted was a floury bap sandwiched around a delicious beef patty, made from beef!, topped with salad (not brown lettuce), guacamole, salsa, and grilled gruyere. Delicious. Not enough red meat for me, but absolutely delicious.

A's steak burger was made up of very thinly sliced strips of a cheap cut of beef (probably, at best, topside), marinaded in soy sauce and other flavours (possibly worcester sauce, and something sweet). With a selection of sauces, it tasted divine.



If you're in Oxford, and end up turfed out of your favourite local, hunt down this little gem and enjoy a fabulous burger. Just don't get taken in by that vegetarian stuff.

Portobello Road and Borough Market

Having lived in England now for close to 5 years, and visited London times uncountable, I'd never been to the famous Portobello Road market. Growing up watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks meant that I'd always associated the market with spontaneous song and perfectly choreographed dance, an inherent mistrust of Angela Lansbury, and the firm knowledge that Bruce Forsythe was never young.

Wanting an early start (so that we could move gluttonously on to Cafe East), we tooted off from Oxford at the skull-rattling hour of 9am on a Saturday. This meant leaving a bit earlier, and stopping off at McDonalds first. I'm ashamed to say that despite knowing better, the refrain of "It's going to be a... lovely day! repeat x3, McDonalds for breakfast it's going to be a... loveeeelly daaaaay!" still haunts me from my childhood. Positive association is a terrible thing.

A sausage and egg McMuffin and hashbrown later, both A and I were regretting the G&Ts we'd had the evening before, and the grease+salt we'd recently consumed to keep the G&Ts company.


So tempting before you see it, but so nasty when you do. Truly the work of the Devil?




Yes kids, the nutritional guide says that this is 7% of your daily calorie intake. The rest of the nutritional information is in helpfully indecipherable hieroglyphs, to avoid scaring you with those nasty nasty health considerations.

A short train ride and very efficient tube hop later, and we were in Notting Hill and at the start of the winding market. Nowhere will I mention the movie Notting Hill, nor Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. Oh, damn. Well, anyway, we weren't sightseeing; we weren't tourists; we were there for the antiques and hopefully a spot of good eats.



20 paces in, a man passes with a meat pie. Fighting off the McMuffin insurgents who were making another spirited bid for freedom, I knew that it would be foolish to assauge my pie-lust. Foolish, but tasty. Nowhere in this heathen country have I yet found a decent fluffy pastry-encrusted mess of deliciousness, and I am always on the lookout, always ready, ever vigilent of what might turn out to be the One.

To give a little perspective: I grew up eating pies. I was a pie eater. We are a nation of pie eaters. My primary school sold lunches of pies (4 kinds - mince and cheese, potato top, steak, steak and cheese), battered sausages on a stick (which is what we call hotdogs), and apple turnovers. Deep fried goodness. I'm sure food in NZ schools has become more nutritious, but luckily heart-stopping pies are still available everywhere. On every street corner there is a purveyor of baked-goods filled with cream, and golden orbs of pastry perfection. There's nothing like looking forward to a piping hot mince and cheese pie, the crust perfectly fluffy and oh-so-crisp - shattering beautifully as you bite, without flaking into dust - and hitting that last layer of pastry resting soggily on that beautiful savoury filling: no other food compares. The pastry having absorbed all the flavours of savoury mince, which flows like magma into your childishly expectant gob, that moment of burning when you realise that magma is quite an apt comparison, and you wish that you hadn't been so greedy after all. But you take another mouthful anyway. Having been deprived for half a decade now, the next time I bite into one of Mr Bun's pies, I will, undoubtedly, lose several layers of skin. But I look forward to it.

Anyway, we soon found the origin of the disc of joy - Humble Pie.



With a stunning array of culinary creations, they seemed to be at the gourmet end of the spectrum, with an eclectic menu offering up "Lamb in Shiraz", "Chicken, Avocado and Brie", "Chicken with Mango", and "Humble English Breakfast". Humble Pie aims to be posh-nosh in pastry, rather than what I was really looking for.



However, two items caught my eye: Aussie Minced Beef, and Chunky Steak Pie. To order something labeled Aussie would be a travesty, so I voted with my dollar (or £3.50 in this case) and was soon the proud owner of a Chunky Steak pie. Actually, for £4.50 I got the pie with a drink of my choice, which in this case was A's choice of organic pressed pomegranate and apple, which was very nice and well worth the £1 extra.



The pie was disappointing. I choked back bitter tears of disappointment as I stuffed my gob with substandard pie. The salty droplets of my sadness didn't improve the flavour as I had secretly hoped.



To its credit, the pie was well shaped, and sat in a small wooden case reminiscent of a brie box, which was incredibly helpful for walking and eating. No tops were ruined in the making of this article. You may think that I jest, but I've ruined a suede jacket this way, by failing to contain all of the magma flowing out of a pastry case. Perhaps I have an eating problem.

Unfortunately, the pastry was rock hard, and took serious stabbing, sawing and prodding to make a dent, and without the wooden pallet it sat in, the pie would have been reduced to mushy goo on my hand. The filling was tasty. Very nice with whole green peppercorns occasionally exploding on the tongue, to combine nicely with the beefy gravy. The chunks of steak were large, and plentiful - the pie having been filled with a layer of steak then topped with gravy - however the meat was tough and impossible to swallow. Hey-ho The search goes ever on.

Further up the market we arrive at the fruit and vege stalls. Beautiful, and very reasonably priced, fresh fruit and veges, fish, meat and hot foods stretched as far as the eye can see.



We couldn't resist the beautifully ripe persimmons (also called sharon fruit here, for some reason), a bargain in the UK at 4 for £1. Choosing two overripe fruit for immediate consumption, and two hardier specimins for transportion home, we dug in with messy, sticky gusto.





Yum.

More than replete, and more akin to lumbering whales on land than I'd care to ever be again, we rolled on through spice shops, clothing stalls, and bric-a-brack. Locals must shop here too, as the vege prices are lower than Oxford, and the halal butchers, displaying gorgeous looking beef shanks and whole rib roasts, had cuts for less than 2/3 what I would usually pay. Obviously not just a tourist destination.

The market is well worth a trip, and very interesting to walk through. By 1pm, when we left, it was heaving with people. Mostly small groups with insta-cameras asking stupid questions in loud voices: "is this an antique? is it over 100 years old? how do you know how old it is? I'm not going to buy it if it's not 100 years old".

Intermission at Cafe East.

After our adventures in pho, we arrived rather hurriedly and out of breath, hoping to catch Borough Market before it closed. Arriving at 3.15pm before a 4pm close was cutting it pretty fine, but we quickly armed ourselves with glasses of pink prosecco and jostled our way to one of the three oyster stands dotted around the market.



This one always has a selection of native and rock oysters, and a long line of customers waiting to be served. By the time we arrived, they only had a few Duchy of Cornwall, and small and regular rock oysters left. Two each of the Duchy and rock oysters for each of us went nicely with our bubbly. The native oysters were much tastier, with a beautiful texture, while the rock oysters had a less subtle flavour, and just slightly chewier. Yes, you have to chew oysters - just letting them slide down your throat is cheating.


Look at the size of that beast in the bottom left!

Unfortunately we couldn't find the kina (sea urchin) stand, that usually hides across from the prosecco, ready to abduct unwary foodies with their alluring wares cut to order.

One benefit of arriving so late, which I hadn't considered before, is that stall keepers are trying to move their wares to save on repacking. The nice lady at Wild Beef flirted and enticed by showing me her vast range of beautiful steaks and roasts. The beef are native breeds, mostly Welsh Black and Devons, grazed on grass outdoors, and killed locally rather than at one of the massive commercial abattoirs. The meat is hung for 21-28 days, and promises to be far more flavoursome than bog-standard, bright-pink supermarket cardboard. We'll see. Still reeling from the awesome pho, I scored a large brisket joint for just over a third of the usual price, because it was closing time. Methinks it will shortly be turned into corned beef (or, dare I dream it, pastrami), and pho.

The cake stand that had earlier caught A's eye had run out of jumbo chocolate brownies, so she settled instead for a slice of rich dark chocolate cake and a slice of white chocolate cheese cake. A steal anywhere at £3 for both (again, because of closing time), but especially good here because they were both so well made. Much gorging was had by all, on the train back to Oxford.

Cafe East

24 Evelyn Street
Depford
London
SE8 5DG

Monday-Saturday 11am-2pm 5pm-10.30pm
Tuesday Closed
Sunday noon-10pm

Closest tube stop: Canada Water (approximately 15 minutes walk).

After much extensive research, it seemed that the most lauded location for pho in London is at Cafe East, in Depford.

Having craved pho, in all its forms, and being sadly deprived in Oxford, we took the opportunity of a day in London to hunt out this little gem of a place.

After a morning in Portabello Road market, A and I were already stuffed from our culinary adventures in Kensington. Trekking from Kensington to Surry Quays would mean a journey most of the way through the London tube system, plus a bit of a walk at the end. At least it'll work off the hideous 'breakfast' plus all that other rubbish we'd accumulated.

Cafe East is, apparently, run by a Korean man from Australia. It turned out to be a small hole-in-the-wall place, in the corner of a small suburb, completely unremarkable from the outside. It looks like any number of small, local, run down Chinese takeaways, with peeling paint and drab decor.

Oh, no. With all my childish enthusiasm, I had dragged A to this unknown corner of London, where, had it not been close to noon, we would probably have been mugged for our shoes. Gushing unsubstantiated rumours of a culinary utopia to a slightly skeptical A - who at best was humouring my greedy whims, and at worst might leave me to defend my honour with an umbrella, if the pho wasn't sublime - I sincerely hoped that all would turn out right.

Despite the (lack of) decor, the place was packed. Packed full of happy people slurping away at huge bowls of steaming noodle-soup. Yum! The place seats no more than 20 people. Even at 2pm, there was a queue of around 15-20 outside waiting their turn. Wow, this place had better be good!



Waiting in the howling wind wasn't pleasant, but our anticipation and the sunny, if slightly cold, weather more than made up for it. A table of 4 leaves, and the next in line are a couple of middle aged guys out for lunch. We ask if we can share their table, and get bumped up the queue. The others waiting are larger groups, so we don't feel too bad.

The two sitting across from us are regulars; Simon is from Hong Kong, and confides that while there are many decent Vietnamese restaurants in London, this place is exceptional.

The menu is not extensive. There is a selection of around 9 starter/side dishes, and a similar number of pho alternatives.



Simon and his Malaysia friend order a cheung fen like starter, and rare beef pho. Their starter looked great. It's very similar to cheung fen that you'd find as a dim sum: Rice starch sheets that have been steamed, and wrapped around a meat-based filling - in this case pork.



We went for the summer roll option (£4), not because it was unknown and exciting, but because it seemed like an obvious staple to sample.



Compactly wrapped with a sweet and slightly tangy dipping sauce topped with roasted peanuts, the rolls were refreshing, but slightly disappointing. Filled with bean threads, lettuce, a prawn and a thick slice of poached pork, from the cut it was obvious that the lettuce had been shredded a while ago, and starting to brown. The prawns were firm, but not terribly flavoursome, and the pork (wrapped opposite the prawns) was very light and tasty, but too delicate to carry the porcine fragrance for the whole roll. The serving was quite sizeable for two, and would probably be more sensibly shared between three.

A ordered the rare and slow-cooked beef pho (£6.50) and I opted for spicy beef (£6), just to be different.



Wow. The broth was so clean and full of beefy flavour. Unlike western beef stock, the broth didn't taste sharply of animal. Instead, it was mildly sweet with caramalised onion, slight anise tones and rich, complex and unmistakably beef. Delicious. The two bowls had, suprisingly, slightly different broth. A's was more anisey, and mine was, obviously, spicy, but also less herbal. The noodles were also slightly different. My spicy beef came with round rice noodles, like chinese mi fen - similar in thickness to spaghetti. A's rare and slow-cooked beef came with a narrow and flat noodle, similar to a tagiatelli. The servings were generous with delicious beef and plentiful noodles. The amazing broth was more than enough to satisfy our cravings.

I slightly regretted my choice, as A's rare beef was so tender and flavourful, while mine only had the single texture of slow-cooked shank. Nice, but I was still jealous. The heat of my broth was mild at first, but grew on the palate. After adding a spoonful of the chopped red chillies, I realised the folly of my actions. Soon both A and I were having trouble breathing. Quite adept at spice, I was beginning to go supernova. We suddenly wished for another helping of summer roll, to help mute the spice.



The pho was served with a side of bean sprouts, thai basil, chopped red chilies, and another unidentified herb that tasted... leafy. There were no condiments on the table, but that was no problem as it would have been a shame to adulterate the flavour of such a beautiful stock.

A big serving of summer roll, followed by two massive bowls of beautiful pho, plus two servings of green tea came to £17.50.