london restaurants

is the chicken free-range, or at least 'free-range'

It can be done to an excellent standard but probably not if you're just aping KFC. Although I will freely admit to liking bog standard dirty fried chicken, it is the king of fast foods, but paying twice the price for basically the same food in nicer surroundings is just stupid. If the seasoning is exceptional or up there with the best American stuff then fair enough but this doesn't seem to be case here?

if people want to sell boutique fried chicken then whatever, the kitschy presentation is gauche as fuck though

It can be done to an excellent standard but probably not if you're just aping KFC. Although I will freely admit to liking bog standard dirty fried chicken, it is the king of fast foods, but paying twice the price for basically the same food in nicer surroundings is just stupid.

how do you know it's "basically the same food". you've never eaten there and you're arguing a filthy chicken shop is as good. just start an "i hate hipsters" thread and deposit this stuff there.

if it hasn't been marinated in buttermilk overnight i don't wanna know.

Won't someone please think of the poor misunderstood hipsters, weeping all the way to their £12 recreation of a Soviet bread queue.

1/10. Must try harder.

There is no semblance of provenance (being communicated clearly at least) here – no-one is telling you about the farm or the ingredients or the culinary process.

no, then

I don't have particularly strong feelings about these places one way or the other (I went to the meateasy chicken place in Brixton and the food was delicious in parts and not-so-much in others; the place wasn't really aimed at the likes of me, I like somewhere comfy to sit and I like to be able to talk to the person I'm with without shouting, it was a mixed kind of experience) but they do seem to have the knack of exploiting the bits of the internet I'm in touch with to do their publicity. As a result it seems they're making a disproportionate amount of noise about what is a pretty standard kind of product, albeit slightly gussied-up.

an ersatz kfc in a pub in kentish town is 'hipster' in the diffusion line sense of plebs with twitter bios describing themselves as 'foodies'

There is no semblance of provenance in Lucky Chip either but their meat is well-sourced. Maybe they just don't feel the need.

xpost

they do seem to have the knack of exploiting the bits of the internet I'm in touch with to do their publicity. As a result it seems they're making a disproportionate amount of noise about what is a pretty standard kind of product, albeit slightly gussied-up.

they're all over twitter. more fool people who tweet a lot but can't see outside the rage-inducing bubble of whoever they follow.

if you can prove to me their meat is well-sourced then I shan't stir the cauldron

lg you seem to be doing the marcello carlin 'ilx hates young people and can't deal with their hip ways' things in maybe the least apposite case

I know for the burgers it is, I don't know for sure about the new place. But for their burger restaurant they don't mention it on their menu but it was Ginger Pig and is now latterly some less well known farm but I've seen it mentioned in reviews.

xpost not ILX at all, I just think there is a repeated kneejerk anti-hipster thing on this thread.

It's not just the sourcing though, Lucky Chip is obviously way better than the standard burger and chips you get most of London. I'm choosing to believe the reviewer when they say the chicken here is no great improvement on standard fried chicken, and if that's true then they *are* ripping off their audience, even if it's one that's happy to be ripped off.

I'm choosing to believe the reviewer

exactly. because you already know what you think.

he's not even anywhere near as vehement as you are btw.

You haven't eaten there either, so I don't really get what prompts this passionate defence of it (or the hipsters that no one was talking about before you mentioned them).

I think the opprobrium in today's posts far outweighs any coincidental anti-hipster agenda on a thread largely employed for the sourcing of location-specific recommendations and the recounting of experiences.

You haven't eaten there either, so I don't really get what prompts this passionate defence of it (or the hipsters that no one was talking about before you mentioned them).

I'm defending it against criticisms by somebody who has never been there. I don't know if it's good or not but I refute the criticisms on that basis.

And actually Matt you tweeted about hipsters.

Is that sub judice?

This is apropos of nothing but I my major way of hearing about new restaurants on the internet is by following food blogs and I guess the key with those is to stop following the ones which begin to get recognised - they're the ones which will sooner rather than later start to be smothered with coverage of the free meals / holidays / gifts they're given by PR people in search of coverage.

That's only tangentially relevant here, obv. I really want to find blogs which work hard at covering dead good neighbourhood restaurants rather than the cutting edge of fashion. Must be hard for bloggers to turn down free food and not ot talk abotu what's in fashion, though, I totally get why they get so irrelevant to me so quickly.

BUT THE BANTZ. It was glorious. Crisp spicy repartee, giving way to unbelievably juicy slurs, all the way down to the bone.

xp otm

That's only tangentially relevant here, obv. I really want to find blogs which work hard at covering dead good neighbourhood restaurants rather than the cutting edge of fashion. Must be hard for bloggers to turn down free food and not ot talk abotu what's in fashion, though, I totally get why they get so irrelevant to me so quickly.

I think even beyond this there's so much noise on the internet that every restaurant retweets some hypey review (which is why I don't place any more stock in that negative Lucky Fried Chicken one above.) The amount of shit places I've been to and then seen people tweeting about enthusiastically for months after is kind of depressing. But there's plenty backlash too and that's just part of the same process and just as wisely ignored.

Trust no one apart from whomever you trust I suppose.

And actually Matt you tweeted about hipsters

True, but 140 characters was insufficient for the level of nuance I've been able to convey here.

haha

anyway enough of this shite. has anyone been to quality chop house yet?

what is an example of a good restaurant blog? although by posting it here you run the risk of turning it into a thing, and thus into something bad

Haven't. Heard it was pretty good, but that might have been from precisely the internet I was mildly disparaging above.

Tell you where is good though: Delhi Grill on Chapel Market. I go there a bit because I'm usually in the area on a Sunday evening and it seems to volunteer itself. I thought it went off the boil a bit when it changed its name a few years back, but the last few times I've been, it's been really very good indeed.

I quite liked Marina O'Loughlin's restaurant reviews in the Metro before I stopped reading the free papers (hipster)

xp there aren't any I totally love at the moment, I've become a bit bored of all the ones I follow. Still quite fond of Food Stories http://helengraves.co.uk/ , though goodness knows that is as prone to covering freebies as anyone and these days I think I prefer her sandwich blog: http://londonreviewofsandwiches.wordpress.com/ which gets close to doing what I really want a food blog to be doing, seeking out the good non-obvious stuff. That she lives near me does it no harm either, obv.

i went to "500" to celebrate living in archway for a year the other day. it was quite good!

if i happen to be in that pub will probably give the fried chicken thing a go but fried chicken should really only be consumed when you're down and sad and hungry, and/or drunk. Making a special trip to eat fried chicken would feel weird for me and that would probably ruin it for me from the off.

otoh it's sad that I still haven't eaten buffalo wings done well (i.e. better than when i make them) while out as that should be something that is eaten in pubs and bars. so if any of you have encountered it please let me know. i didn't enjoy the ones at #meateasy very much dunno if meat liquor still do it.

Orange Buffalo, permanent trailer off Brick Lane, is good, I'd wait till summer tho.

That Food Stories link has cleared up the long-standing mystery of what goes on at the Pasha Hotel on the Old Kent Road, something I've often wondered about for five seconds while in a taxi at 1am. The discovery that it contains a Kazakh and Kyrgyz restaurant with a fairy-lit bridge in the middle of it has delighted me.

cheers i will check that out! they should consider a residency at a pub (if good)

Think the difference between pop-up fried chicken and Chicken Cottage dirrrrrrrrty chicken is the former type places use free-range/organic birds and the chicken-shop places use the Tesco Value Chicken, or similar.

Following food fads is no longer 'hipster', you guys, so cut it out - the correct description is 'trendy' (the hipster's boring elder sibling).

We should all probably have an extensive discussion about the semantics of this.

if this fried chicken place were to make fried chicken as delicious as the fried chicken i had in texas last year then £12 would be fine as it was amazing.

if that fried chicken place served up dried and cardboardy disgusto-chook like the fried chicken i had at chicks on west green road a few weeks back (i live within the nexus of chicken shops) then it would suck to pay £12 for it.

in short - there is a vast spectrum of quality within the world of chicken.

When we went to the Meateasy chicken place in Brixton the food was pretty good when it arrived, but it was hands down the worst service we've had in London in about the last three years.

Finally got to Roti Chai this week and it was marvellous. Possibly even slightly better than the Delhi Grill on Chapel Market, which was also excellent.

To celebrate my lovely wife getting through a particularly arduous project last week, we went out to Bistro Bruno Loubet in that Clerkenwell. This was chosen more-or-less at random (we vaguely remembered having heard good things; the menu looked interesting; it was close to the excellent Zetter Town House where we could go for pre-meal cocktails) and it was a genuinely excellent choice - just genuinely fine food. Modern European: winning dishes were a snail and meatball starter which was rich and smoky, and a braised beef Indochine which (you might guess from its name) was effectively a daube but with beautfully-judged Vietnamese spicing. Plus they were super-nice. Not cheap but not grievously expensive (mains £16-18 kind of touch).

I love that place, we went there for dinner the year before last and it was probably the most enjoyable meal I had in London that year. Missed out on the Zetter Townhouse though.

I love Zetter. If you need to wow a date...

Was at Mr Buckleys on Hackney Road on Saturday night. The whole "small plates" thing is cute and all but in some places it basically is an excuse to charge you a tenner for a starter. I was with a few mates, guys and girls, and we paid about 25 or 30 a head for a couple of drinks and maybe two small plates each, everyone was hungry afterwards. that's the second time i've felt that way about the place, I prob wouldn't have gone back but it wasn't my suggestion this time. shame, cos the food is excellent.

Hm. Frustrating. I find it's really hard to understand what you're going to get in a small plates place (like, how much is going to arrive) - it rarely seems to relate to price or description. I guess the trick is to talk to the server about it, but that's not easy to do if you're with a group of any size.

Yeah and it's a combo problem of the price and the amount, it would really just be overpriced if you got "enough" so their proportion is wrong. It wasn't just guys either on the night, pretty much everyone was left a bit hungry.

If you got three plates each you could be talking 30 or 32 quid or whatever a head, which to me puts them in competition with places that are far, far better. I also just compare it to Barrafina or somewhere where I've never left hungry, and the prices are probably a little lower if memory serves.

On the plus side, it's open till 2am and and you can sit in and get a quiet beer after hours and have a chat, a total rarity in this city.

i feel i really need to trust a waiter before asking, as it's often the case that you'll end up with way more than you need. some restaurants are really bad at that. went to a szechuan place recently and there was easily three/four times the amount of food that could feasibly have been consumed. ridiculous.

i went to a szechuan place (chilli cool) that ended up with three/four times the amount of food that could feasibly be consumed although that was my fault for wanting to eat everything (including a bowl of chilli fish that could maybe feed 6 people rather than 2) and luckily they weren't adverse to me asking for a doggy bag!

(and it helped that it was fairly cheap anyway!)