Food: Curio x Ta Ta - Haggerston

It's a little too much when the new food craze is to suggest that rice must be eaten with the dishes served. What a revelation.  The curiously named Curio x Ta Ta is the collective brainchild of Zijun Meng and Ana Gonçalves (ex-Viajante and Chiltern Firehouse).  For three nights a week, they transform the small space at the Curio Cabal cafe in Haggerston into a capsule kitchen where the chefs entertain and delight with an interesting blend of Portuguese and Chinese dishes.  

What I loved about the meal was the non-ironic charging of £2.50 for a bowl of rice with 'house dressing' (aka soy sauce) but at least it served as a good vehicle to soak up the delicious smokey juices of the braised aubergine dish (not pictured as devoured too quickly).  

The "day catch" of white fish in a light dressing was perfectly delicious, consumed in between large mouthfuls of slightly sticky Japanese white rice.

Judicious use of micro herbs and flowers give an instant visual appeal to pork and black bean sauce.

Congee, is treated as comfort food in Chinese cuisine: it is the porridge, the chicken soup, mum's home cooking dish.  Boil rice, add water, cook to sloopy gruel like consistency.  Add ingredients, and in this case, an authentic blend of chicken stock, ginger, crunchy Chinese 'doughnut' (or croutons, I suppose), and with an inventive Ta-Ta style twist, crispy chicken skin and herby goodness. I could have eaten several bowls (because the bowls were really quite small).

What was less successful was the tofu dish. A big hunk of firm tofu needs a firm understanding of the beast itself.  Keeping it simple is fine, but it needs lashings of something, whether it be sauce, grill, smoke, braise, to give it either flavour or texture to lift it out of its cold, bland, original state.  

On the plus side, the coffee ice-cream with mascarpone and brown butter was served in a classic 1980s style dessert glass.  Better still it had the surprising element of tapioca balls ordinary found swimming at the base of bubble tea drinks.  As a topping on the espresso flavoured ice-cream, this is a stroke of minor genius.

Curio + Tata

258 Kingsland Road

E8 4DG

Open for dinner Thursday to Saturday

Eat: Taberna do Mercado - Spitalfields, London

We really wanted to love the new restaurant, "Taberna do Mercado" by Nuno Mendes (former head chef of the beloved Viajante at Bethnal Green Town Hall where he first made his name).  Nuno, riding high on his new-found celebrity chef status, left to set up camp at the Chiltern Firehouse in Marylebone, thus making it out of reach for us simple Eastenders, given that it quickly established itself as the celebrity haunt for the likes of I dunno, Harry Styles, Lindsay Lohan et al.

So when Taverna Do Mercado opened a few weeks ago in Spitalfields, we whooped for joy at welcoming Nuno back to what I feel he must call his spiritual home in East London. Things were promising when my friend announced via text that "OMG Keira Knightley is here and sitting on the next table!". Sadly, we were wrong. Look, I've read Fay Faschler's review in the Evening Standard. I suppose this blog doesn't quite get the same circulation figures, so I guess it will be safe to say without pissing off anyone that we thought it was all a bit crap.  Between us, our group of four ordered nine dishes to share and were still famished by the end. If it were the case that the food was delicious we would have happily ordered more but instead we decided to cut our losses and head over to Ottolenghi (also new in the Spitalfields area) for a reliable portion of salads and cakes.

Interiors at Taberna Do Mercado. OK so the photo is a little fuzzy but it is definitely Keira Knightley.

Espadarta and picadio Algavio £14

Whilst the food was served on a series of delicately mismatching blue china plates, it didn't quite compensate for the inadequate portion sizes, even taking into account the small-plates eating style that we are well accustomed to. The above is a dish of swordfish with a light tomato and cucumber salsa which frankly wasn't quite spicy or piquant enough to generate any lasting memories or merit commendation.

Wild Garlic, asparagus and fennel migos £8

For £8 I dare you to try a mouthful of what transpired to be soggy breadcrumbs infused with a meaty garlic aroma, skilfully hidden under a mass of shaved fennel. Sorry, when the menu says 'asparagus' I take that to mean more than just the one sliver of asparagus hiding under the dill sprig.  Again, Fay Maschler exhorts the values of soggy bread  ("wet bread achieves iconic status"?!) but it really did not add up for us.  The soggy bread did not hold as a base for any interesting flavours and the shaved fennel on top seemed to exist solely to look pretty and/or apologise for what horrors were lurking underneath.

Peas, broad beans and egg yolk £8

It wasn't until I re-read the menu did I realise that this dish is supposed to contain egg yolk. In fact it was a dish of broad beans, peas, and some crunchy bread crumbs on top.

Tinned fish: Monkfish £7

Portugal is famous for the quality of their tinned fish and as a result the restaurant does its own take on it, with options including tinned mackerel, cod, and scallops.  We went with the monkfish, and as shown above it was served in what is clearly a green sauce but aside from that, lacked any distinct flavour.

We also had the runner beans, which were oily, and one of the cheese plates which although was perfectly serviceable one couldn't really classify it as requiring any culinary skill given it was just melted cheese and bread.  At some stage, the waiter came over to our table, holding yet another side plate with what I thought would be our next dish. It turned out that he had cleared the table next to us and was holding a plate bearing half a lemon.  The situation had clearly become so bad that I had come to expect our dining experience to include a dish comprising of a lemon garnish.  Nuno, we are simply bereft. We loved you for such a long time. Tell me I'm wrong, tell my three friends that we have misunderstood your genius.