Restaurant review: ZELMAN MEATS (Soho)

If you like steak, but don't want to commit to 400g of just one type, and in doing so, restricting your choice to a rump which may or may not be cooked to your ideal condition, Zelman meats could well be the solution to your quagmire.

At Zelman Meats, there are four core beef steaks you can order (Smoked Short Rib, Chateaubriand, Sliced Picanha, “Dirty” Sirloin Steak). The former two are priced by weight, and the latter is priced in conventional restaurant manner, at £32 for 400g. The minimum order per table per given type of meat is 200g, but if you go with a friend, you can order a joint amount of 200g of several types of steaks, and share everything, so there's variety in your meal!

Also pictured above are Black Truffle and Parmesan Chips, which were a bit pricey at £8, but the conflation of truffle, chips and cheese is hard to argue with.

Restaurant review: TRUC VERT (Mayfair)

Bungled away down one of the hectic Oxford Circus sidestreets is French restaurant Truc Vert. I went last November using a LivingSocial deal but amazingly, it bucked the trend set by their rival deal site, Groupon, in that dining at Truc Vert was actually a positive experience!

Truc Vert has elegant European-style furnishings but graciously, unlike Hawksmoor, say, isn’t so over-ornate that the decorations feel ominous.

For starters, we ordered:

Restaurant review: MASSALA HUT (Euston)

Following the roaring success of Raw Spice, here was an Indian restaurant I was far less impressed with. As with the previous place, I ordered a prawn dish, as I thought I’d compare the quality between the two kitchens. It was distinctly lacking here – there was plenty of jalfrezi, but basically no prawn. 

On closer inspection of the vegetables in my dish, and I’d be extremely surprised if they weren’t past their sell-by-date, and the cooks had clearly piled in the spices thinking “Jalfrezi! Ah! That means spicy!” without any consideration for the customer’s taste buds. 

I was not happy, particularly given the menu makes it sound like they were going to be generous with the prawn quantities. The other dish, the lamb pathia was even worse. Liquidy and runny, it was basically an extremely spicy soup! Such was the consistency and the hotness; it also meant that barely any of it could be eaten. So there’s your waste of food, which only exacerbated my mood (I hate leaving leftovers).

The pilau rice was pretty uninspired, meaning that the highlight of this excuse of a meal was probably the coconut naan bread; the one item the kitchen managed not to ruin And if the bread was the best thing about the culinary experience that is dining at Massala Hut, you know it’s not going to be somewhere I’m recommending to friends.

Grade: E

Restaurant review: RAW SPICE (Hendon)

With a distinctly bar-type vibe to the place and Las Vegas-level brash lighting, Raw Spice was different from any other Indian restaurant I’d been to before. Thanks to a menu that offered a lot of range as well as my mate's Tastecard, I ate extremely well, and huge quantities (with enough to take home for the family), for just £12 covering tip! Glorious!

Between us, for mains, we ordered a lamb dish, a chicken dish, and a prawn dish. We also had two portions of rice (which as you can see in the photo, is a pretty healthy portion), two starters and some naan bread to share. They were all brilliant, and thanks to the kitchen cooking all the meat dishes on mild, they were tangy without causing my nose to run and eyes to water, which is all too common an occurrence when I eat spicy food, unfortunately.

The best dish was the prawn one, which graciously actually had prawns in them (I went to another Indian restaurant the following day and there were about three prawns in total in the plate I’d ordered; disappointing to say the least). The other two meat dishes didn't skimp on actual meat either, which was refreshing, because usually in restaurants they'll excel at a couple of dishes but sell you short on another. No such case here. 

The “chicken lollipops” which we had as one of our starters weren't, as I’d feared, undercooked or over-seasoned, but rather, totally edible as a meat-on-a-stick type thing and didn't even require any sauce, so crunchy and spicy were they on their own. 

Compared to other restaurants in London, booze was also extremely well-priced (in the range of three quid rather than four or five), and the menu boasted some fantastic cocktails and mocktails, all very-well created.

Possibly the only foible with the place was the service, which was a little pushy, a little patronising (we'd arrived before the kitchen opened, 6. We were told that fact, and we gladly said we'd have drinks in the meantime, but then they hammered the point home that the kitchen didn't open until 6, as if we were thick. C'mon now). 

I would also suggest that they could have offered us a wider range of dips to come with the poppadoms (there were two, I'm usually used to three or four in other places). But in terms of food (both palate of flavour and geneorisity of dishes), vibe, and value for money, bung a Tastecard along and you really can’t do much better than Raw Spice.

Grade: A-

For more of my restaurant reviews, click here. If you would like me to review your restaurant, drop me an email at lemon_and_lime7@hotmail.com

Restaurant review: SEATON RESTAURANT (Weston-super-Mare)

Just off the pier in a vibrant seaside town is Seaton Restaurant, an extremely hospitable and charming restaurant that I would recommend to all who visit Weston.

The menu is extremely varied, featuring famous Greek dishes, homemade burgers, as well as seaside must-haves such as fish and chips and knickerbocker glories. 

Restaurant review: LAS IGUANAS (Bath)

Channelling the vibe of Latin-American food, Las Iguanas is a very popular eatery in Bath where you can often find all age ranges - students, adults, pensioners - frequenting, whether it be to celebrate a birthday or just a pre-night out meal. 

The prices are fairly reasonable -- although they could stand to do more student offers, and, taking advantage of their 2-for-1 cocktails, we hit Las Iguanas after our last exam.

The food was, overall, well-cooked; the lamb and potato ensemble was fantastic but I felt the bread on my sandwich could have been better baked. Our choice of cocktail pitcher was this wonderful mango concoction:

And it was wonderful. It tasted so suspiciously unalcoholic that one had to wonder if there was any vodka actually in there, though I did feel somewhat tipsy after drinking it, so, there probably was. The mango blended with the rest of the ingredients fantastically.

Restaurant review: AL-DIWAN GRILL (Holloway Road)

On the walk from the Highbury & Islington Tube station to Arsenal’s football ground is Al-Diwan Grill, a restaurant offering all the classic Indian dishes for reasonable prices. 

The inside of the restaurant, as with last week’s Wonderful Patisserie, is nothing special; it feels more like a diner than a restaurant.

However, the food itself is some of the best Indian I’ve tasted. Between two people, we ordered a rice dish, two types of Naan bread, as well as Chicken Tikka Masala and Lamb Madras, and we were both sufficiently full from the quantities served. 

The chicken tikka masala was the less spicy of the two meat dishes served, and, having eaten many a CTM in my University days (usually of the microwaveable meal variety), I consider myself a bit of an authority on dish. What made the one we had here so delicious was probably the generous quantities of oil which the chicken was bathed in as that really brought out the flavour of it, but I have in the past had CTMs wherein the chicken has been woefully undercooked, and there was no danger of that here. The chicken tikka masala passed my test with flying colours.

As for the lamb madras, that too tasted good, and that too, was bathed in oil. This dish was marked with a chilli in the menu, indicating that it was spicier, and whilst the level of hotness wasn’t an issue, I had a huge blunder when I consumed one of the chillis accompanying the meat bowl, stupidly thinking it was a bean. THAT was spicy, and tears streamed down my face and I was snotting like nobody’s business; not attractive. 

Restaurant review: THE REAL GREEK (Bankside)

I’m not very well-versed in Greek cuisine, and one look over The Real Greek's menu had me realising that perhaps, on the whole, it wasn’t for me as about two-thirds of the menu contained lamb ingredients, an ingredient that I’m not hugely fond of. Nonetheless, the whole point of going to a restaurant of a particular country is to try their food, so I still ordered some lamb cutlets, which proved to let the side down as they were a bit too fatty and not all that edible.

Everything else was wonderful, though. The pitta bread was lightly buttered and heated at just the right temperature for optimal enjoyment. I ordered a standard chive dip, as well as a fishier one for experimentation, and the fish dip was sensational; I didn’t leave a drop left on the plate.