For this week’s dad and daughts we were determined to break new ground and via the marvel that is London Overland we decided to head for South London. And so at 10:30 we emerged at Forest Hill bound for the Horniman museum. It’s a great museum for kids (and adults) mainly because it’s got a little bit of everything all under one roof, for free. So there’s bits and bobs worthy of the V&A, a small park and garden like a miniature Kew, and a small aquarium which at £2.50 to enter saves you nigh on £15 and the hoards of the London Aquarium. 

Rumbling tums

 After a good two hours there matters turned to sustenance, you should by now know the theme for Dad and Daughts Day, namely a venue that suitable for pater and nipper, and has food we can both enjoy. A license to serve something stronger than coffee is welcome too. Google flagged up the Dartmouth Arms as being nearby when I checked the location of the museum before leaving the house, and a look at their website revealed a nice looking place, with a simple food-in-pub menu. So after the museum we headed there. 

Are you open?

At 12:30 we were the only people in there, my spider sense was tingling, but then it was a rainy Tuesday. Bread, a carafe of wine (for me and the other Dad, Neil) Chicken sandwich and chips for the nippers and linguini with clams in chilli, garlic and white wine sauce for me. Neil opted for the baked pancakes with ratatouille and goat cheese. Getting up and having a nose around as I do, I ambled over to the chef. Now I’m a bit fussy about pasta in restaurants, here’s why. Nearly all restaurant blanch their pasta so it’s half cooked, then just finish off as the order comes in. This, at least in my experience, leads to really well cooked pasta with no bite. I asked him to cook it really al dente. ‘I’ll take it to 75% cooked’ he said. 

The food arrives

And true to his word it arrived just as I like it, the clams were plump, the sauce ok, I could have taken a touch more nip from the chilli, but no matter. Also it meant that Daughts could try some, which she did (though not quite getting that if she has some of my pasta I’m allowed one of her chips – good sharing). What followed was at standard D&D lunch, forks were dropped, drinks spilled, and food eaten. We also had a short marine biology lesson about bi-valves, and then used the empty shells as castanets, like the Zingzillas do. By now one other diner had come in. On our way out I suggested to the waitress that they should flyer the local nurseries and playgroups and let people know about the place and that it’s fine for kids. ‘We used to get more mums in, but now they go to that new coffee place up the road’ she replied. Tsk, use it or loose it primary carers of Forest Hill.

The food

A swift G&T by the bar – fire already smouldering – to whet our whistles and we were off. I opted for the foie gras on malt loaf with a rhubarb jelly, mainly because I bloody love malt loaf. On speaking to Chris afterwards he explains how he makes the rhubarb balls. First he makes a sorbet, then scoops out a small ball the size of a Malteser. This is dipped in gelatine to form a protective sphere, and the ball is kept in the fridge. On the plate you puncture the orb, rather like an egg yolk, to release a cool ooze of sharp juicy rhubarbness – nice. I rather like this little piece of theatre and interactivity. For me it sums up the place on a plate. Anyone can fry foie gras, it’s what you out with it that shows contrast, creativity and skill.

Kate chose Cornish crab with fennel, blood orange and beignets and darling daughts enjoyed the bread whilst they prepared pasta with Bolognese from the children’s menu. Main course for me was monkfish, on squid ink risotto and wild boar salami, a combination that on paper sounds strange, but on the plate worked in my opinion. Kate ordered salmon with an olive crust, quinoa, and braised baby gem, while daughts pronounced the pasta ‘nice’. Both starters and mains were washed down with a 2005 pinot noir by Charles Schleret, which was almost rose like in colour, and so balanced on the fence between sea and land perfectly. Puds were ice-cream for daughts, a pick and mix from the excellent cheese board for us parents. 

The Grounds

By now it was after one, the sun was shining strong, and the place was filling up fast. There’s only so long even the most well-behaved children can sit on a chair in a restaurant and so we decided to finish the wine and have coffee in the garden, a huge green space studded with sculptures. Some were worth a look, others more from the school of titties and bums. Best of all though; the Sir Charles Napier must be the only Michelin starred eatery with a massive outdoor trampoline, which daughts loved very much. And so after eating, we whiled away another hour just hanging out in the garden enjoying the unseasonal spring sunshine. No rushing, no turning tables, no pressure, just a really relaxing time, which is what Sunday lunch is all about non? 

Pros: Child friendly, interesting food, massive lovely garden

Cons: Art might not be to your taste, but the food will be.

Sometimes we just go to the park and keep things simple, but most Tuesdays we meet up with another couple of Dads who also care for children on Tuesdays and go and do stuff like visit museums, a city farm, play centres, or storytime at the local library.

After doing fun stuff we normally go somewhere for lunch. And so this is the first of a series of restaurant reviews from a Dad and child viewpoint, ladies and gentlemen I give you, lunch with a little ‘un, but first, a little about children and food.

Children in restaurants

In 2010 a restaurant in the US banned kids after 8pm, and as the comments our article about it show, infants in restaurants is a divisive subject. I believe that spent in a restaurant is quality ‘sitting at a table’ time for children. It teaches children manners, how to behave, and how to eat properly. Restaurants that don’t cater for children are not only loosing future custom, they’re condemning parents and our cash to the likes of Giraffe.

What’s more I’m not a huge fan of children’s menus – they’re often poor nutritionally and bland. I believe most children can eat something from the starter section, and really on the ball restaurants should offer ‘half sized portions at half the price’, particularly for slightly older pre-teen children.

Anyway, over to the Admiral Codrington.

Pre lunch venue: The National Army Museum, Chelsea.
Verdict: Great Kids Zone

Lunch: Arriving at the Admiral Codrington Daughts was having a post-assault course nap. So there was time for a little Dad R&R too. A pint of Eagle bitter, nice and light, good head, and a sensible 3.5%, was perfect lunchtime in charge of a nipper beer.

With this I went for the pork scratchings, they came with some warm apple sauce – both delish.

Dad: then had Pan-Roasted Black Leg Chicken Breast     with Lentils, Peas, Pancetta & Sage. I don’t normally go for chicken on a menu as it’s normally the most predestrian (read dullest) dish on the menu, normally ordered by haughty fussy eater types. However the accompanying ingredients peaked my interest, as I love them all. When it arrived it was done to perfection and incredibly juicy. This is either first rate chuck, or perhaps brined before hand a la Heston? Either way it was grand. The lentils were nice, but like a party that hadn’t quite got going yet the ingredients hadn’t quite bedded in and combined. The peas were lovely though, cooked just al dente and without being that funny decahedron shape that peas can sometimes go to. In all, a good dish.

Daughts: Having awoken from her nap a touch grumpy and wailing, I got a bag of crisps in to slake the beast. Daughts followed this with macaroni cheese from the sides menu. This arrived really quickly actually, so my thanks to the staff who sensed it was needed sharpish. It had had time under the grill to melt the cheese, meaning it was perhaps too hot for little mouths – no fault of the chef there I add – but soon cooled down. Daughts finished the lot. Pudding was an apple and two oranges I’d brought with us.

Verdict: Utterly excellent. Friendly staff from the moment I got in the door. The team there dialled it up to 11 when a waitress came by with a dot-to-dot dinosaur book from the Natural History Museum and a pencil for Daughts. There were some news papers laid out so I had a flick through The Times while Daughts slept. In all it was a lovely lunch with good food, and a warm friendly environment.

2 pints of Eagle Bitter          £7.20
1 Pork scratchings               £3
1 Chicken breast                  £14.50
1 St Mac Cheese                  £6
1 Crisps                                  £1.20
1 lime and soda                    90p

Total + £4.20 service           £36.90

Much like George Orwell’s ‘Moon under the water’ there exists in my mind, the perfect fish and chip experience. In this imagined eatery the chips are served just to my liking (not straight out of the fryer but ‘rested’ like the Sunday joint), the fish is – forgive me – cod, and its batter shatters like glass at the application of the knife, the mushy peas must be neon in colour and the consistency of baby food. Finally the whole ensemble must be eased down the oesophagus with many a cup of strong tea.

Four months previously in mid October…

We’d gone to Suffolk for a short break before I took up the editorship of Lovefood.com. It’s an area I know and love, a shade over two hours from North London, and far enough to escape the capital’s gravitational pull. After a lovely weekend on our final day – a Monday take note – we had a mooch around Snape Maltings and headed into Aldeburgh for a nose round the bookshops culminating in a plan to finish with fish and chips on the seafront.

We pulled into Aldeburgh just after 12:30, and noting the short queue at the Golden Galleon and thought, ‘we’ll come back in a bit’. Somewhere along that long high street time and space stretched so that by the time I looked at my watch, it was 2:05pm. The chippy closed at 2pm. A frantic 200m dash pushing a buggy ended in the ignominy of the ‘closed’ sign. Inside the scrub down was taking place, and as someone who once worked in a chip shop for a summer in his youth, I knew my cause was lost. There then followed a sprint around Aldeburgh to see if anywhere was still serving fish and chips, they weren’t.

My lovely wife, trying to make a bad situation good, popped into Lawson’s deli and bought typical deli fayre. Thus I was to be found, sat on a seafront bench in a cold October, eating cold stuffed vine leaves amongst other things instead of having my face warmed by the hot saline steam of a bag of chips. Food does have a time and a place, a terroir if you must, and the food of the out-of-season seaside town in Britain is fish and chips. I’m fully prepared to admit that what followed was a petulant ‘food sulk’ of epic proportions.

The here and now…

7am, Monday 20th February, and I’m all ready talking about ‘operation Aldeburgh’. This time there will be no mistakes, no shopping trips, no tarrying in bookshops. The ‘mission’ will not ‘creep’, there is but one objective. We pull up in Aldeburgh at 9:45am, in February it’s even colder than October and the town is snell. The municipal pond is covered with a film of ice, and the wind would I’m sure do the same to your eyeballs if you looked out to sea long enough. We explore the town tentatively: charity shops, coffee shop, bookshops, off licence, but I’m donstantly checking the time on my phone every 10minutes, but I’m worried.

The Golden Galleon

Like nearly every restaurant and eatery these days there are so many mixed reviews online for the Golden Galleon as to make imagining any experience there meaningless. The decision is whether to get a take away and go for the bench on the beach option, or to eat in the small 20ish cover restaurant above the chippy. There’s an added complication, a sign on the door reads ‘no children under 3, no pushchairs’, my daughter’s two and a half. Indeed this rule has caused much chagrin, with complaints vented online. Rules, my mother-in-law is apt to say, are for ‘little people’, so we press on. To be fare though I can see why the do it. The upstairs restaurant is tiny, and accessed by a narrow staircase, if the parents of little Oscar tried to get his 4×4 bugaboo in there, they’d have to take out a table. The loos are too small to fit any baby changing facilities, consequently the place just isn’t set up for babies.

Having locked the pushchair to the lamppost outside, we head upstairs. What follows is as closed to my ideal fish and chip experience as it’s possible to get. Firstly we’re welcomed with a big hello – how are you? From the nice lady running the room. She follows this up with ‘I’ve got a couple of cushions if your daughter would like to be a bit higher’. The lady – I never did ask her name – and I chat some more, she’s warmed-hearted and pleasant, with that sort of ephemeral affability that only comes from years – nine she tells me – experience on the job. We order, and the food arrives promptly; well cooked and well rested but not soggy chips, a big chunk of cod with ‘shatter batter’, lurid green peas, and tea. I fall upon it like a wolf on the fold.

Clearly some people have found issue with the Golden Galleon, and its sister restaurant, but then some people find issue with Le Gavroche. Your experience may vary as people are apt to say. But as someone who knows a well-done, beef-dripping-fried-chip when he eats one, these were great. The fish was also grand; light, crunchy batter and large juicy flakes of white flesh. Indeed the whole experience was a triumph, so much so I passed on their puddings, purely so I could enjoy the taste for the rest of the afternoon whenever I burped or hiccupped

Ah Valentine’s Day, possibly the most unromantic day of the year, a notion I wrote about on lovefood.com. But if you’re looking for romance (with the stress placed on the second syllable) than look no further than Babs’ The Romance of Food’. I’m not the first to blog about this tome of love, or be stunned by it’s recipes, and gobsmacked by Babs’ descriptions, bon mots, and tales. 

Ready for a surprise?
However, for me, one recipe stands out like a society debutant at the first ball of the London season, and that is ‘chicken with orange surprise’. I’m not quite sure what the ‘surprise’ is, as I don’t think you could get much more orange on that plate. Perhaps it’s ‘wow, this orange tastes of chicken!’
 

And you’ve got to love a recipe that includes bleach as an ingredient: to prepare wishbones, scrap all the meat from them then soak and wash in a mild bleach solution. Following this we get a potted history of oranges, and Barbara’s daily vitamin intake. 

In my heart of hearts though (and it is the day of love) I love books like this. Did Barbara ever set out to make the most kitsch cookery book on the planet?  Probably not, but she did. I wonder which of today’s rather soft-focus anodyne tomes will provoke a reaction in 20 years. 

A look at the presenters of food programming so far for the fag end of 2011 and 2012 reveals nothing but white chaps with names like Henry, George, and Tim. All good eggs no doubt, and let me say for a moment I don’t blame these fellas for the dire state of plurality in food programming – after all we need chaps to mess about in milk floats and indulge in sibling rivalry. But hell’s teeth we need something on the other end of the seesaw surely?  Most ‘food telly’ at the moment makes want eat badly prepared fugu and end it all rather than watch ‘Mumford & Sons do food’ nonsense. 

Where are the women, the documentaries, the experts, the intelligence, the other voices. Liam Tucker perhaps said best in his review of ‘Hugh’s Hungry Boys’ on TV Pixie.com

“The format of these shows is so predictably formulaic it's impossible to form an opinion on them. You've been so ruthlessly whacked with the hammer of this sort of gubbins, so, so many times that even responding is beyond you. You've been whacked senseless, and Channel 4 hope you'll put up with it because you've given up all hope.”

The D word

Any comment about diversity can often be misconstrued by the ignorant to look like I’m asking for blind lesbians in wheelchairs making cupcakes – I’m not. I just want a few more ages, backgrounds, accents and races to tell me interesting things about food.

Or maybe it’s the misguided belief that it’s women who are into cooking and lifestyle shows, and therefore posh chaps that are the best people to front them? The Good Food Channel are doing some interesting things with the Roux Legacy, Annabel Langbein and Ching's Kitchen. Meanwhile a look at non-repeat food programming across terrestrial TV at the moment (Masterchef, Heston, Baker Bros, Hugh’s Boys, Raymond Blanc) reveals Katy Ashworth from ‘I can cook’ on Cbeebies as the only woman doing any cooking on the box. And that folks, is a bloody disgrace.

Now Simon Cowell – having reduced the music to the very depths of vapidity – is turning his eye to food. And when it couldn’t get any worse, Laura Zilli is coming, apparently to BBC Two, dispensing such sage food advice as:

Each recipe will tell you exactly when you can leave the pans bubbling and slip off to do your make-up and change into your glamorous clothes, right down to which outfit to wear for each meal.’

 Pass the fugu, for surely we have reached the end of days. Read Luke MacKay’s excellent thoughts on this fashion/food TV first.

The thing is

I know from my readership of lovefood that people are crying out for something a bit more interesting and thought provoking that all this malarkey. Where is the Sherlock of Food, the David Attenborough of Food? Where are the docs, the dramas? Food telly is in danger of being fast food telly, and is heading towards being utterly shit for 2012. Enough with ‘lifestyle’ and faux jeopardy, there are better stories to tell, call me.

Much of my time then is spent managing a team of freelancers. So I’ve written this post because I got tired of explaining to people individually how to best structure their work so I commission them again. But more than that it serves as a broad guide to how to write for the web. So even if you’re specialism is football, philately or fashion, it’s a case of same meat, different gravy. 

I’m not really that interested in your words

Most writers – most of whom have a background in print journalism – recoil in horror when I tell them this, for them the craft of verbage is why they do the job. It’s why I wrote my book too, and pieces for Delicious and Waitrose Kitchen. To me words are like Lego, to be clipped together to make giant elegant structures. 

However this isn’t always the case for writing for the web. A better analogy would be that words are like cement, because they glue and hold other things together. Here then, is Webb’s golden rule…

Writing for Lovefood is about having a good idea, then gathering assets from around the internet to prove that idea, and sticking them together with words.

Writers do all this research on the net, then try and obfuscate that so it looks as if they know it all ready. When in actual fact, much like a maths exam (which I failed) you get points for showing your working out. People don’t just want the answer, they want to see how you got the answer. 

The ‘story’ in effect comes from these sources. So don’t just mention Mrs Beeton, don’t even just link to wikipedia's page on Mrs Beeton, go on Google books and clip out the very page that mentions the think you’re talking about for Mrs Beeton. Sauce for calf's head anyone?

All of the following can enrich articles. Tweets, Flickr images, YouTube videos, Google books, Audio Boos

Compare this piece from the early days of Lovefood, to this from a few weeks ago. One looks like a page from the Bible, the other is content for web. In the following list you can see that the actual writing forms just one task in getting an article on a website live. 

1. Write feature
2. Make sure that there are at least three link outs to internal/external articles
3. Make sure that the URL is SEO friendly
4. Check title is SEO-able
5. Add images and video
6. Add alt text to images
7. Tweet it
8. Facebook it
9. Reply to any comments/tweets

Badly formatted, un-illustrated, linkless copy with a non-seo friendly title and first paragraph waffling on about something else before getting to the point means I’ll never commission you again. By the time I've fixed all that and put it into the CMS I could have written the actual few 100 words myself. 

Naturally being a rule there are exceptions to this. If the piece is very personal, where story comes directly from your experience, you can draw the user in. But for a guide to cheese, we don’t care – just the facts ma’am. 

How to pitch 

Firstly know your subject. The lovely Katy Salter when at Waitrose Food Illustrated gave this interview to the Press Gazette in 2007, and it’s as true now as it is then. 

Don’t pitch a subject you don’t know anything about.

Food writing seems to attract a certain type of ‘gal’ and ‘chap’ – slightly posh, a touch horsey, with bright eyes, good teeth and shiny hair. They are perhaps not the best of people to write an in-depth piece on the history of halal. Good food writers who can write for the web are rare indeed. Like Katy above many is the time that I’ve been pitched ‘Tuscany on a plate’ stories. 

Cliches

A lot of food writing is lazy ‘what I had for dinner’ and it winds me up. Ingredints are toothsome and unctuous, with the ‘flavours of X cutting through the attribute Y of ingredient Z’ I’m not interested in food writing, but journalism about food. There is a difference. 

Do you pay, or is this for free?

No we pay, and for what we're asking for, it's a fair price in my opinion. Get in touch Andrew.webb -at- lovefood -dot- com for more

Golly, the lovely Bee Wilson (who's book Swindled is a great read btw) has very kindly named Food Britannia The Sunday Times' food book of the year, and what a year it was for interesting foodie books. Other contenders included some big tomes from the big names like Jamie's Great Britain, Raymond Blanc's Kitchen Secrets and Bill's Everyday Asian.

But there were also some other first time authors like me, Kerstin Rodgers' fab Supper Club, Hawksmoor at home, but Will, Huw and Richard and Lucas Hollweg's 'Good things to Eat' to name but three. 

In the FT too

If that wasn't enough plaudits, food writer (and cafe owner) Tim Hayward named checked Food Britannia in his 2011 culinary round-up in The Financial Times. He said ‘like a gluttonous contemporary William Cobbett, Webb has toured the country talking to food producers old and new. More than a good read, this may well turn out to be an important historical snapshot of the British food scene at the end of a significant decade' 

His other choices included another first time author, Signe Johansen and her lovely Secrets of Scandinavian Cooking, and the utterly brilliant Testicles: Balls in Cooking and Culture. 

What I think all of the above shows, is that while big glossy cookery books by famous and long established chefs will always be with us; there are new voices, and more importantly new styles of book, breaking through.

People will always want recipes, and books will provide them (but for how long?). But today I think they also want context, and history, and descriptions and substance. I like to think that Food Britannia provides that, because it sure as hell doesn’t provide any recipes!

Anyway, Bee and Tim – both of whom I know professionally but that is all – know what they’re talking about, so why not buy a copy of my book, and see what all the fuss is about. Thanks. 

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.  Arnold Toynbee

Just a quick one to let you know that on the 19th of October I 'got the keys' to Lovefood.com. Which as the apt URL suggests, is a website for people who love food. There’s a mix of recipes from chefs, cooks and  TV people, a guide to producers and suppliers, articles exploring various subjects, and finally opinion pieces debating current food issues. 

The site is only a year old, and has grown a loyal audience in that time. Please take a moment to register. But now it’s time to make it bigger, better, and more beautiful – so watch this space.