Reviews: Jay Rayner salivates over serious cooking at Mangal 2 in Dalston, while David Ellis is bewitched by the Sessions Art Club in Clerkenwell

The Observer's Jay Rayner salivates over “serious and inventive cooking” at Mangal 2 in London’s Dalston

 

There is hummus, but it’s an uncommonly rugged affair with a hint of cheesy funk. It arrives with a deep well, filled with a seriously peppery olive oil the colour of new leaf growth, which acts less as lubricant than condiment. With it is a round of their lightly blackened, chewy and springy flatbread, with a hot crust that demands to be torn at. From the bigger plates we have a pile of expertly cooked lamb sweetbreads. They are a textural joy, hinged between the soft and creamy inside and the crisp and taut outside, propelled by a dark sauce built around the sweet-sour kick of pomegranate molasses.

 

A restaurant like this, pulling deeply on Anatolian traditions, needs to feature more of the sheep than just its thymus gland. Sertaç Dirik makes a point of using “cull yaw” mutton from Cornwall. It comes from aged ewes. Just as beef-eaters have realised that dairy animals, with time on the clock, provide the very best steaks, so these sheep are where the flavour is. We have a single chop. It is fatty meat and powerful and rich and won’t be to everyone’s taste. It is to mine.

 

To drink there was indeed wine, of a sort. It’s a list written by fans of natural wines so ardent, so committed, they’ve probably been to all the gigs, bought the T-shirts, and then scribbled love letters to them with little hearts to dot all the ‘i’s.

 

What matters here is some serious and inventive cooking. The Dirik boys have declined to be hidebound by the traditions on their very doorstep. It’s brave and compelling. And as it happens, properly delicious.

 

 

Price: small plates, £5-£12; large plates, £14-£19; desserts, £7.50-£8.50; wines, from £28

 

The Times' Marina O’Loughlin gives ham and pineapple pizza a second chance after a visit to London pizzerias Giz ‘n’ Green and Pizzeria Mozza

 

 

So here’s Willows on the Roof, on top of John Lewis in Oxford Street, currently occupied by Giz ‘n’ Green Pizza Pies (from the beauteous and well-connected chef Gizzi Erskine and, um, rapper Professor Green).

 

It’s a short menu, and it gets even shorter. Chicken wings starters are “off” and garlic mushrooms a bit too Come Dine With Me contestant on the phone to his mum. So it’s Tater Tots “pizza bake” served with a garlicky-cheesy-tomatoey dip in a tinfoil bowl – we see these being emptied from a vast freezer bag – and the pizzas themselves. Pizzas are mostly great. Though I’m disturbed by the texture of the starred ingredient on a meatball marinara, not so much polpette as impacted sausage. But crusts are elastic and dark-blistered, belying the jokey nature of the toppings: Hawaiian complete with pineapple, ham and mushroom; and the clever Honey Trap with its kiss of honey to temper fiery ‘nduja.

 

Then to Nancy Silverton, an LA-based luminary behind a clutch of raves, including Michelin-starred Osteria Mozza. I’m not looking forward to her new London outpost, Pizzeria Mozza, as it’s in the showy Treehouse hotel where I endured a dismal dinner at its rooftop restaurant, Madera. But in this cool marble and wood-lined space – part of, but separate to the hotel – pizzas are sublime.

 

The Pizza alla Benno is another version of much-derided ham and pineapple, here reworked into a thing of evanescent beauty; the ham silky folds of smoky speck, the pineapple chiffon-thin and caramelised till it leaves only a haunting shimmer of sharp sweetness, the airy, fleetingly malty pizza dough given gentle crunch from semolina, sting from jalapeño. Beautiful.

 

Everything else works too: sweetcorn roasted till almost toffee’d and slathered with Fresno chilli butter – messy, joyful. Unimpeachable salumi. Cauliflower fritti, fried with a tempura-light hand, its dip a tingly mint-laced aïoli. Prepare to waddle home.

 

Price: Giz ‘n’ Green: meal for three, £76. Pizzeria Mozza: meal for two, £100

 

Grace Dent finds feisty cooking but service that is lacking at Pick Up Pintxos in Folkestone in The Guardian

 

Whether the culture of eating pintxos could ever translate to a sit-down restaurant in Blighty, decorated like a slightly posher Nando’s, is debatable, but on a Saturday lunchtime in August, while all Folkestone’s other dining spots were heaving, Pick Up Pintxos was serving gildas, boquerones and morcilla and membrillo balls, and was very, very quiet. It would help if they had any staff who could enthusiastically sell the concept, or indeed act as if they’d ever been to a restaurant, but instead this was an odd, disjointed experience, with cracked glasses, plates stacked up on tables or whisked off mid-course, 182-month Pyrenean beef served without a sharp knife, and so on and so forth.

 

To be fair, I’ve eaten in several other places that are so bewilderingly run, or not run, of late, not least because staffing issues are dire across the country. But it’s particularly a shame here, because there is some feisty cooking and fantastic produce going on, such as silky, silver-skinned sardines marinated in sea salt and Valdespino sherry vinegar and served in a glorious glut of Arbequina extra-virgin olive oil. The gildas are excellent, salty anchovies stuffed inside plump gordal olives and skewered with ferocious pickled chillies.

 

The place means well and is full of good ideas, but it needs some sort of a reboot. And I empathise because, at some level, don’t we all?

 

Price: about £35 a head, plus drinks and service

 

Ffion Lewis says Bacareto in Cardiff is a new experience and a vibrant addition to the city centre in Wales Online

 

We ordered all of the hot and cold cicchetti, as well as two glasses of house red wine, which came to £36.90 – reasonable, we thought, considering we had ordered almost the entire menu.

 

Firstly we tried the cured meat and tomato on bread (£2.50), Gorgonzola, nuts and honey on rye (£3) and bacala (£2.70). We soon realised this was nothing like we had tasted before – certainly not in Cardiff.

 

Both my friend and I started with the Gorgonzola – nervous as neither enjoyed blue cheese – however, we were both pleasantly surprised. The combination of the honey softened up the harshness of the cheese and made for a lovely taste. The cured meat and tomato was tasty, and perhaps the flavours we were both most familiar with, and the Bacala would also be a favourite of fish lovers.

 

Soon enough we were presented with the hot offerings – ragù of tomato arancino (£3), taleggio arancino (£3.20) and panelle (£1). We started with the panella, [which], while modest, was undoubtedly one of our favourites. The simple fritters were salty and fluffy and hearty – reminiscent of comfort food. The arancini were also great – both were large and not sparsely filled with the perfect crisp on the outside and the soft inside.

 

After over a year where so many businesses are closing and jobs are being lost, it’s so good to see a new and vibrant addition to Cardiff’s food scene and something positive emerging from the city centre.

 

David Ellis plans a second visit with more dessert at Sessions Art Club in London’s Clerkenwell in the Evening Standard

 

This dining room is all fantasy: it is a fairytale of faded Regency-era glamour, worn green paint and crumbling pink plaster, ceilings as tall as giants, great arched windows breathing light.

 

Though being run by St John co-founder and semi-professional suit collector Jon Spiteri, a delight, the headline act is Florence Knight, returning to a London kitchen after six or so years away – family had beckoned in the meantime. It is a joy to have her back.

 

[Croquettes] were beautiful little spheres, crispy and potently crabby, while a mackerel arrived deliciously sea-fresh and gently salty, the flesh sweet under a cover of Datterini tomatoes and the tang of capers. There were squishy lamb sweetbreads among a moreish marsh of lovage and lettuce; one to remember as September flickers chillily. Sea bream with fig leaf and sorrel was bright and sharp, a Kooning palette of greens and white. We smiled at them all.

 

Chocolate torte tends not to be the sort of thing to bring on the raptures, but here it was enough to cause a sly argument: a couple below us were ostensibly sharing, but the bloke kept taking bigger and bigger forkfuls. Cheeky bugger, I thought, but then my mum wasn’t keen on giving me a try, either.

 

If you’re booking off the back of this review – and do, despite the grumbles, I’m about to go back for more, I really did enjoy it – don’t tell your date about the puds, save them for yourself.

 

Price: meal for two, around £150

 

Simon Weir says Unico in Newmarket is like a “genuine taste of Italy” in the East Anglian Daily Times

 

I admit, I wasn’t sure quite what to expect of a restaurant created in what used to be an electrical shop. It’s clearly been extensively – and lavishly –made over, though my partner didn’t like the logo. “It looks more like an Italian petrol station logo,” she said before we walked in. I mention this as it’s the closest you’re going to get by way of criticism, as once we were through the doors we had an excellent evening.

 

As with the rest of the menu, the pizza offerings are focused and authentic (not a hit of pineapple...). Seven pizzas and a calzone – but I opt for the Calabrian (£14.50) topped with spicy salamy, ‘nduja (an even spicier sausage, that spreads like a paste once the skin’s removed), peppers and mozzarella. It’s not a flat and homogeneous disc, like something you’d get from a chain of delivery pizza places. This is like something you’d find in a village pizzeria in Emilia-Romano or Apulia and it’s delicious – so much cheese and such a generous amount of toppings, especially the ‘nduja. Easily the best pizza I’ve had outside Italy.

 

[Seafood linguine] is one of the largest servings I think I’ve ever seen. It’s absolutely stuffed with seafood and tastes delicious.

 

Service is attentive without being intrusive, the food is simple, well-cooked and full of flavour – a genuine taste of Italy as well as being epically generous in its portions. There’s a lovely sense of place in Unico, but it’s of Naples rather than Newmarket.