Reviews: posh mint Viennetta at Roe and hospitality as an art form at the Boath House

Grace Dent keeps on ordering until defeated at Roe in London for The Guardian

The menu screams “crowdpleasers cooked as you’ve never seen them before”. There’s a baked potato dish that I vow to eat again and again every time I return; it’s a baked, buttery spud in a bowl of rich cheese sauce, topped with shoestring fries and dotted with sweet, brown kombu ketchup. There’s a hen of the woods burger for vegetarians, featuring a brioche bun filled with a decadent, deep-fried mushroom patty, cheese, lettuce and shallot. Pillowy flatbreads come with various toppings – posh pizzas, if you like, though these salty, oil-drizzled, slightly charred breads come with scallops and bacon butter and the rather terrifying-sounding “snail vindaloo” with mint yogurt.

Roe’s menu dances rather daintily and deftly between “pub grub”, “fever dream” and “Noma”. Octopus and sausage skewers with samphire and sea bream tartare with tiger milk sit alongside a Cornish pasty and a side of salt and pepper fries for anyone who finds haute cuisine a bit daunting. The place is kind of mad, but it’s also mass-market and, ergo, sheer bloody genius.

Right now, I really can’t think of a nicer informal lunch than Roe’s spring vegetable, ricotta and mint flatbread with a round of lemon verbena swizzles or gooseberry daiquiris off the cocktail list, and especially not if it could be taken on the outdoor terrace. For a larger table, you wouldn’t go far wrong by also ordering the very good satay chicken wing skewers, a couple of bowls of the pretty breaded mushrooms with a fierce aïoli and the house-made charcuterie plate with cornichons. We ordered a beautifully dressed sea bream tartare arranged delicately with apple and radish, that spring flatbread loaded high with asparagus, the jacket spud dish, fresh peas and ricotta, an Isle of Wight tomato salad and the mushroom burger, which eventually defeated me.

Even so, Roe’s dessert menu is, I regret to say, unavoidable. They make a posh Viennetta with mint ice-cream, chocolate and marigold, though, unlike the “bad”, factory-made Vienetta that you needed a bread knife to cut, Roe’s version is delicate, luxurious and tastes of fresh mint. It’s well worth a whirl, though personally I’d go back for the caramelised banana parfait with nutty toffee sauce. It’s a sort-of-heavenly deconstructed banoffee pie complete with a clever optical illusion, though I won’t spoil that surprise for you.

Giles Coren in The Times finds the return visits to Jincheng Alley in London just keep getting better and better

I ordered the kung pao chicken (£11.90), probably the mostly widely known and bastardised Sichuan dish that on your local high street rarely amounts to more than bland white breast cubes in black bean sauce with some peanuts and a splosh of chilli. Here it was a revelation, a zingy dish of thigh meat marinaded in shaoxing wine, stir-fried with Sichuan peppercorns and chilli, with fat, sweet spring onions, peanuts and squishy little fermented black beans. Light, complex, aromatic, divine. As with the genuine sweet and sour pork of Shenyang that I love at Noodle & Snack round the corner, this was a staple Anglo-Chinese high street filler reclaimed with joy.

The following week I returned and ordered the braised beef brisket with bamboo shoots (£19.80), a huge tureen of wobbling meat, bone and luminous fat with lashings of fresh green and red chilli, thick, rich and nutritious. Also deep-fried ibérico pork ribs with cumin and chilli powder (£19.80), the dense, sweet barbecued meat given a frazzling Nik Nak effect by the heavy dusting of red and yellow powders, along with a stack of sauté potatoes given the same treatment.

When I went back a third time, I ordered the cold boneless chicken feet (£10.80), which were not only an extraordinary feat of butchery (whole, white, three-toed, rubbery, scaly feet with no bones!), but the sort of thing I love, slippery, cartilaginous, slathered with a mala sauce of fiery heat and sweetness.

And now at last came the young pigeon and dried mushroom soup (£29.80). The pigeon was indeed young. Very young. I think it might even be the answer to the old question about why you don’t see baby pigeons. There were two of them on my small plate, which I know because when I moved a piece of parsley aside, I found their heads, decorously hidden.

The skin was thin and crispy, the meat sweet and chocolatey. Although there was not a whole lot of it attached to each tiny leg, wing and breastbone. It’s probably traditional to crunch the bones and chew and suck for marrow, but I was quite full by now. And I didn’t fancy the heads. Also the soup was not for me. It had a strong, barnyardy smell, which I guess came from a hefty pig stock. I’m not sure it was the greatest match for the weeny squabs.

So I ended on a bit of a down note with Jincheng Alley. It’s got a great name, the dining room is jolly on a good day and the punters are attractive but permanently glued to their phones. The cooking is authentic, some of which will thrill you, some of which may scare you, but almost all of which I found exquisite. And if the staff could only find it in themselves to be just a tiny bit welcoming, I would thoroughly recommend it.