What the experts recommend
Ebi Sushi 59 Abbey Street, Derby (01332-265656)
It’s easy to think of sushi as little more than “rice with raw fish on it”, says Tim Hayward in the FT. This low-key restaurant in the suburbs of Derby – a city with a large Japanese population, owing to the presence here of Toyota’s UK manufacturing plant – reveals “how much more it can be”. At five to six on the night I visited, Japanese people began streaming in: “couples, families, a pair of extremely well-heeled-looking businessmen in weekend golf gear”. The sushi was a revelation: each grain of rice had a “kind of chewy pop” to it, and the fish was “salted, cured or aged” – defying the idea that it must always be “spankingly fresh”. Meanwhile, the “heartening” list of hot dishes included sake kama (collar and side fin of salmon), a “complex cross section” of differently textured nuggets. It proved so challenging to eat with chopsticks that I ended up “smeared in fish to the elbow”, making a thorough spectacle of myself. “But God it was worth it.” Dishes £5-£10.
Grain 11a North Hill, Colchester, Essex (01206-570005)
Michelin’s Bib Gourmands – awarded for good quality, good value cooking – attract far less brouhaha than the guide’s star ratings, says Keith Miller in The Daily Telegraph. Yet I’ve always found them to be a “more reliable indicator” of character. “Freshly bibbed” in the most recent guide is this modern British small plates restaurant (“Colchester’s first, they proudly claim”), located down an easy-tomiss alley and “beneath the ramparts” of a multistorey car park. Aspects of the design brief struck me as a bit “oldfashioned”: there’s a “woody theme” to Grain’s interior, with “hefty tables and lots of sawn timber”. But the cooking more than makes up for it. Roasted cauliflower, “ingeniously worked into a rectangular slab”, comes “drenched in smoked butter” and “perfumed with ras-el-hanout”; beetroot and eel is “robustly flavoured with horseradish and tarragon”.
Everything we ate indicated “good judgement and sure craft”: the ingredients liked “being on a plate with one another”. And of course, with “Bib Gourmandfriendly prices”, you can eat here fairly cheaply – provided you “don’t go to town on the wine”. Lunch for two, £90.
The Quality Chop House 88-94 Farringdon Rd, London EC1 (020-7278 1452)
I must have strolled past The Quality Chop House a thousand times without passing through its doors, said Tom Parker Bowles in The Mail on Sunday. Now I feel rather ashamed of that. For this London institution is “magnificent” – a restaurant “with true hospitality stained into its curlicued walls”. Once you get past the “Presbyterian pews”, the interior has “much to worship” – from the black-and-white chequerboard floor to the “charming waiters in their striped aprons”. The “unashamedly British” menu includes “swooningly rich” monkfish liver – rescued from indigestibility by the “sweetly ferric tang of sea aster” – and unimprovable roast grouse on the bone (for an £18 supplement). At the more proletarian end of the scale is mince on dripping toast: dry-aged beef, slowly cooked in a “lake of stock”, and “lavished on a slice of toasted sourdough, which in turn is fried in dripping”. It is “one of London’s great dishes”. Lunch, three courses for £26.