Scrambling Eggs

Let them eat cake

2011-11-28T08:58:00.000-08:00

Unemployment rising. TICK

Global food prices soaring. TICK

Consumer spending on goods and services remaining low. TICK

Britain likely to enter a double recession. TICK

Ideal time to open another cafe.

People often ask me whether the credit crunch has affected our business. Its impossible for me to answer because this is the only economic environment Lantana has known. Opening in September 2008, Lantana arrived on the crest of the wave that was, and still is, the global financial crisis.

I remember the day before we opened flicking through a newspaper filled with stories of the long deep recession we were facing. As the knot in my stomach grew tighter and tighter I said to my business partner “I think we might be the most stupid people on earth”.

We bravely soldiered on and three years later not only is Lantana still in business, it is now one of many independent cafes in London that are not just surviving, but thriving. I’m amazed and delighted that barely a month goes by when I don’t hear about a new café opening that I want to go and check out. Two have opened just recently, metres from where I live.

Salt on Great Queen St, Covent Garden, the day before opening

and just around the corner in Wellington St Covent Garden, Notes recently opened their second cafe.

“Let them eat cake” is famously attributed to Marie Antoinette when told that the starving peasants had no bread to eat. While this expression has been used to demonstrate her frivolity and callousness, maybe she has been wrongly maligned. I suspect that she was actually showing great empathy for the peasants, understanding that in times of extreme economic hardship it is the small luxuries that help us survive.

On a bleak Monday afternoon while sitting in one of my favourite local cafes

I sipped a silky smooth flatwhite with a slice of carrot cake and pondered why cafes seem to be defying the economic slump. On cue, two city types popped their heads in and one said to the other:

“This place looks nice. Is it expensive?”
“£2.20 for a coffee. That’s cheap” the other replied, and in they came.
Since when did suits become sensitive to the price of a cup of coffee?

That's when it struck me. Independent cafes are no longer the third place. They have become the credit crunch place. With their reclaimed furniture and lack of frills or pretention, they are the affordable luxury that we can still enjoy in a gloomy world of austerity cuts and meagre budgets. The fact that independent cafes are usually staffed by young scruffy hipsters is the icing on our cake, making us feel we are doing our bit for youth unemployment.

So with shaky hand about to sign the lease for a second café, I can read the newspaper with less fear than I might when economists are describing our grim economic future and quibbling over whether the recovery will be shaped like a 'V' 'W’ or 'U'. Perhaps it will be an 'L' shape (long-term slump with no recovery) which in years to come will be taught in high school economic classes as the ‘Latte’ recovery.

Rodeo Mike

2011-11-17T11:04:00.000-08:00

Hi there! My name’s Mike and I work at Lantana. If you pop down to Lantana this month you will recognise me as the one grooming my very own charity Mo for Movember, in support of Prostate cancer and Testicular cancer. So far it is going well and a bushy tash is forming beautifully, if not very gingerly!

Lantana has kindly offered to match whatever I raise, just because they are that nice, so donations are very welcome. If you would like to donate to this amazing cause visit my site. Better yet, come down to Lantana and check out my Mo for yourself and donate in person. Any amount is a generous one.

See you soon :{)

PS- Let's hope Mike has better success than the LanMowers who last year only managed to raise £70.41 and brought great shame and embarasment to us all, but mostly to themselves. S x

The Lantana Q&A

2011-09-15T13:48:00.000-07:00

Any resemblance to the Guardian’s Q&A is entirely intentional and done without their knowledge or permission.

Tim Dorman, Head Chef at Lantana since January 2011, grew up in a small town in New Zealand with nine siblings in a Brady Bunchesque family.

Tim is the Bobby (second from left) in the Dorman Bunch. NB. This is not Tim's actual family photo.

After a brief stint as a rousie* in a shearing gang, Tim suspected that crutching sheep had limited career prospects and decided to follow his brother into the kitchen. His first job was as a dishy in the restaurant where his brother was head chef. From those humble beginnings he worked his way up the kitchen larder via numerous fine establishments including the gunshop cafe, an award winning restaurant in my home town, Brisbane. But the bright lights of bigger cities beckoned. Tim came to London to seek out fame and fortune and found...Lantana.

What is your earliest food memory?
My mum counting down from 10 to make me eat swede and carrot mash.

Which person has had the greatest influence on the way you cook?
Good friend and former head chef at the Merthyr Bowls Club, Andrew Dale. He was my first proper teacher...the first person who really inspired me in the kitchen.

Aside from knives, what is the most expensive piece of kitchen equipment that you’ve bought for yourself?
My bright red Kitchen Aid with an array of mincing, juicing and mixing attachments. The first thing I made with it was pancakes the morning after my birthday - not really utilising its full potential. It’s now sitting in a box underneath my house in Brisbane.

What’s the worst thing a chef has ever said to you?
Too numerous and inappropriate to mention. A four year apprenticeship means you learn to deal with a lot.

What trait do you most deplore in other chefs?
Gordon Ramsay style tantrums. I’ve seen chefs make apprentices cry and then expect to have a beer and be mates after service. Wankers.

Who would play you in the movie of your life?
Will Ferrell.

What would your superpower be?
Invisibility.

Is it better to cook or be cooked for?
To cook. I like showing off.

What is your guiltiest food pleasure?
Does wine count? (No) Then cold baked beans from the tin. But they have to be Watties, not those crappy English ones.

What is the greatest crime committed against cuisine?
The 3am kebab.

Strangest food request you’ve had from a customer?
Raw steak. We had a regular at the Merthyr Bowls Club in Brisbane who used to come in and say he’d been out in the bush hunting and needed to eat raw meat. One of the many colourful New Farm nutters.

Cheese or chocolate?
Cheese please.

Closest you've come to death?
Crashing my car into a semi trailer when I looked down to change the radio station and crossed onto the wrong side of the freeway. I left black tyre marks down the side of the truck and ended up in hospital. The first of many car crashes. That's what you happens when you learn to drive in small town New Zealand.

What would your last meal on earth be?
BBQ rib with a cold beer on a hot sunny arvo’

If you could ask anyone, alive or dead, to dinner, who would you invite?
Goose and Maverick

Tell us a joke
A Scotsman walks into a bakery and points to a cake, “Is that a doughnut or a meringue?”

The baker says, “No you’re right. It’s a doughnut.”

*rouseabout (often abbreviated to 'rousie'), is commonly used in Australia and New Zealand to refer to shedhands who pick up wool after it has been taken from the sheep's back during shearing operations.

Seeing the amber light

2011-06-13T11:42:00.000-07:00

Something unexpected has happened to me since I’ve been living in England. I’ve become a beer snob. Really, no one could be more surprised than me.

I grew up believing that the measure of a good beer is how cold it is. The colder, the better because we were indoctrinated with the slogan ‘a hard earned thirst needs a big cold beer’. Pub selections were always based on which one served the coldest beer (chilled glasses scored highly) rather than the type they actually kept.

When I arrived in the UK and was served tepid, flat beer, helpfully labelled ‘bitter', initially I was perplexed. How could the beer stay cold when poured by the pint rather than the pot? Clearly the poms weren't working up much of a thirst.

I'm not sure exactly when or how it happened but at some point over the last 4 years I had a beer epiphany. Its like discovering iberico after being raised on spam or drinking a proper espresso after making do with instant coffee. Suddenly the penny drops.

Just as I learned that the taste of coffee differs enormously depending on the origin of the bean and how its roasted and brewed, I came to appreciate that beer is a similarly complex beast. The hops, the malt, the alcohol content and the brewing recipe all add up to a smorgasbord of styles from porter and stout to lager, pale ale and yep, good old bitter, a far cry from Victoria Bitter, which I now recognise as a pretty piss poor lager.

As my exposure to different beers has widened, so too has my beer vocabulary from 'mmm its cold' to it's 'biscuity' 'floral', 'citrusy', 'grassy' or 'treacly'. To drink generic bottled lager now seems completely uninspiring, even if its a frosty cold one. Its hard to go back to instant coffee once you’ve had a flat white.

Having seen the amber light I'm thirsty for knowledge and eager to research.

You'll find me arriving with beer instead of wine when invited for dinner;

Meantime's Porter goes down a treat at a barbeque

I spend my days off visiting micro brewerys like The Kernel,

The Kernel Brewery in Bermondsey

where they hand label every bottle;

a labour of love that few could appreciate.

Angelle stamping Lantana takeaway cups

I seek out pubs based on the range of beer they serve rather then its temperature;

The Jerusalem Tavern in Clerkenwell

The Charles Lamb in Islington

And of course, I look for opportunities to incorporate beer into my cooking.

Beef and Stout Pie- recipe below

Like a true evangelist, I want to share my new love so Lantana is now stocking some interesting craft beers. Come in and enjoy a cold frosty, metaphorically speaking.

Beef and Stout Pie

(serves 4)

750g stewing beef such as skirt, chuck or shin
4 tbsp plain flour seasoned with salt and pepper
4 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp tomato purée
500ml Stout

350g shallots, peeled

1 tablespoon muscovado sugar

1 teaspoon soy sauce

Few sprigs of thyme
2 bay leaves
2 garlic cloves, peeled

200g chestnut mushrooms, thickly sliced
500g puff pastry
1 egg lightly beaten

Dice the beef into 2.5cm cubes and toss it in the seasoned flour to coat.

Heat the oil in a large pan and fry the beef until golden brown. Add the tomato purée and cook for 1 minute, stirring well. Pour in the stout and add the sugar, soy sauce, shallot, thyme, bay leaf and garlic. Season with salt and pepper. Cover and simmer for 1.5 hours. Half an hour before the end of the cooking time, add the mushrooms. Once cooked, remove the bay leaf and discard. Allow the mixture to cool.

Preheat the oven to 200C/Gas 6.

Transfer the meat to a 20cm pie dish.

Roll out the pastry and cover the pie. Scrunch the pastry to the edge of the dish and trim around the edge, leaving 1-2cm overhanging. Brush the top with the egg.

Bake for 15-20 minutes.

Baking for Britain

2011-04-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

Nothing says Australian summer to me quite like a pavlova; crisp meringue with a soft marshmallowy centre, smothered with whipped cream, masses of luscious berries, and juicy passionfruit.

It’s bright and bold, generous, unrefined, and utterly satisfying. Always a crowd pleaser. Always a show stopper.

Last weekend I went away with some English friends to a small village on the banks of the river Severn in Gloucestershire. With the weather forecast promising clear blue skies and temperatures in the mid 20s there was talk of barbecues, sunbathing and walks along the beach. Feeling firmly in my comfort zone, I volunteered to make desert for the Saturday night barbie. Bring on the Aussie pav.

But as we meandered along picturesque country lanes through fields of daffodils and spotted pigs,

and along the banks of the Severn where people unhurriedly fished in the soft afternoon sunlight

I started to waver on my decision for desert. I suddenly saw the pavlova in a new light. It seemed too brash, too showy, too…Aussie? What this tranquil setting called for was a desert with subtlety and restraint. Something quintessentially British.

I remembered Oliver Peyton’s article in the Times' weekend magazine a few weeks ago where he wrote that “baking is the heart and soul of British cooking… Sifting, kneading, folding or whisking- these things are comforting and communal, old fashioned and timeless”.

A quick google search saved me from making a cultural faux pav. Instead I made a Bakewell Tart;

A delicious sweet tart in which the berries hide their brightness under a bushel of buttery frangipane and flaked almonds. Served with a modest dollop of creme fraiche.

It was a triumph for the barbecue and for Britain.

Bakewell Tart
(10-12 modest serves)

For the shortcrust pastry
115g cold unsalted butter cut into dice
25g castor sugar
200g plain flour
zest of half a lemon
1 egg yolk
1 tablespoon iced water

Mix flour, sugar and zest together. Incorporate the butter into the flour mix using your finger tips until the mixture resembles bread crumbs. Add the egg yolk and the water and bring the dough together with a metal knife as quickly as possible. (Important not to overwork pastry as it will become tough). Shape the pastry into a disc, cover with cling film and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

On a lightly floured surface, roll out the pastry to 2mm thickness and line a 28cm tart tin with a depth of 2cm. Prick the base with a fork and put case in freezer for an hour. Heat the oven to 180C.

Line the pastry case with baking parchment and fill with weights (scrunched up tin foil will work if you are in a country cottage with no pastry weights). Cook for about 15 minutes until the pastry is a pale golden colour. Take out the parchment paper and brush the inside of the pastry case with a little egg white. Cool. Reduce oven to 170C.

For the filling
200g unsalted butter (melted)
200g castor sugar
200g ground almonds
3 eggs (lightly beaten)
50g self raising flour
100g good quality raspberry jam
100g fresh raspberries lightly crushed
50g flaked almonds

Mix flour and ground almonds in a large bowl. Add the melted butter and eggs and gently fold into the dry mix until just incorporated.

Spread base of the cooked pastry case with jam. Scatter crushed berries over the jam and pour in the almond mixture. Smooth the surface and scatter the flaked almonds on top.

Bake for 30 minutes then cover with tin foil to stop it browning further. Bake another 10 minutes until filling is just set. Serve with creme fraiche.

Pavlova
(6-8 immodest serves)

6 free-range egg whites at room temperature
375g caster sugar
3 tsp cornflour
1.5 tsp white wine vinegar
½ tsp vanilla extract

For the topping
300ml cream whipped until soft peaks form
5 passion fruit
3 punnets mixed berries

Preheat the oven to 180C.
Line a baking sheet with baking paper and draw a rough 25cm circle onto it. In a dry bowl, whisk the egg whites until soft peaks form when the whisk is removed, then whisk in the sugar, one third at a time, until stiff and shiny. Sprinkle the cornflour, vinegar and vanilla extract over the egg white, and fold in lightly with a metal spoon. Spoon the meringue onto the baking parchment within the marked circle and, using a spatula, flatten the top and smooth the sides. Place into the oven and immediately reduce the heat to 150C. Cook for an hour and 1/4, then turn off the oven and leave to cool completely. (I usally cook it the day before and leave it in the oven overnight).

When you are ready to assemble the pavlova, invert it onto a plate and peel off the baking parchment. Spoon the cream onto the meringue base, then pile on the berries and passionfruit.

Freestyle surfing

2011-03-14T12:30:00.000-07:00

What do you get when you cross a grown man in a bib with a coffee bong and a micro roastery? The third wave of coffee. Or is it the fourth wave now? I don't know, I’m still on my boogie board surfing the second espresso wave...dude.

I hadn’t been home to Australia in the 4 years I’ve been living in London so thought it was time for a trip back to check out what has been happening in my absence.

If you thought London was starting to get seriously geeky about coffee, you ain’t seen nothing yet if Australia is any indication of where it’s all heading.

There seems to have been an explosion of micro- roasters, single origin coffees, lighter roasting, drip brewing, hi-tech gadgetry and perhaps most inexplicably, baristas wearing bib aprons.

Never one to leave cafe exploration to chance, I went armed with a long list of ‘the best’ cafes to try in Melbourne. First stop, Proud Mary: the Fat Duck of the Melbourne café scene.

Located down a side street in Collingwood, (what used to be a pretty dingy part of Melbourne but now home to all the hot new cafes, bars and restaurants in town) Proud Mary is a modern and airy warehouse conversion that epitomises the pointy end of the coffee revolution in Melbourne.

There’s an impressive array of coffee paraphenalia on display to provide customers with a choice of extraction methods: syphon, filter, clover, cold drip, or if you’re old school, an espresso based coffee made with the world’s first custom built 6 group Hydra Synesso machine which allows the baristas to adjust the temperature of each group head to suit particular single origin or blended coffees. Each day they offer 3 different single origins as well as 2 blends for their espresso based coffee drinks. And that's just the espresso.

It was here that I had one of the most amazing coffees I’ve ever tasted.

60mls of cold drip single origin Sumatran coffee extracted over 12 hours, served on ice. The taste was indescribable – so sweet, clean and smooth, it was like a fine liqueur.

From there I visited the cafes set up by the Seven Seeds coffee roasters:


Brother Baba Budan in Little Bourke Street (Photo courtesy of Breakfast Out)

De Clieu in Gertrude St, Collingwood

The original, Seven Seeds in Carlton. Note men in bibs.

The East Brunswick Project in Nicholson St who roast their own coffee called Padre.

St Ali in South Melbourne

The Sensory Lab in David Jones in the city,

More men wearing bibs.

And the Auction Rooms, who roast Small Batch coffee, in Errol St, North Melbourne

As I went down my ‘best of’ list I was starting to feel a little bemused and alienated, and not dissimilar to how I felt during the Summernats car festival when I was living in Canberra. There seemed to be lots of boys revving their engines and admiring their reflections in big shiny machines, speaking a language I didn't understand.

This new wave of coffee does provide some good entertainment (as does Summernats) but what I really wanted was a welcoming space to catch up with friends. What had happened to the little unpretentious and quirky cafes that I loved about Melbourne and where were all the chicks? Fear not, as they are also there in abundance, going about their business, serving fantastic food and coffee but without quite so much noise or petrol fumes.

At Bell Jar in Smith Street Collingwood,

Photo courtesy of Melbourne Gastronome

Milkwood in Nicholson St, Brunswick East

Mitte in Michael Street, North Fitzroy

Pope Joan in Nicholson Street, Brunswick East

Amsterdam in Richmond

Photo courtesy of Melbourne Gastronome

Cornershop in Yarraville

and North in Rathdowne St North Carlton

When someone asked me on my return what was the one thing I wanted to steal from Melbourne cafes for Lantana, I had to think long and hard. The cafes where I had the most enjoyable experience were not necessarily the cafes where I’d drunk the best coffee, seen the most impressive barista theatre, eaten the best food or seen the most stylish fitout. My favourite cafes were the ones where I felt the warmth, individuality and personality of the staff and the owner. They were the cafes that felt like they weren’t copying someone else’s style or following the latest trends just for the sake of it.

I read a comment on twitter recently by a visitor to London who wrote “I am left with a feeling I've visited the same coffee shop on different sides of town. Are the London third wave independents a new chain?”

It has been something that has been nagging me recently too as I see some of the new cafes opening in London that seem to be copying other cafes or following fads and lacking in individuality.

When I read that twitter comment I knew what I wanted to hold onto from my trip back home. A commitment to individuality. 'Independent' is an ethos, not a brand. I'm going to surf my own wave.

‘Let’s Twitter’. Without a doubt, the lightest, cheapest and most up to date travel guide to take away with you on holiday.

2011-01-24T09:24:00.000-08:00

As someone who struggles to get organised but hates feeling that they’re missing out on the best places to eat and drink in a new city, I used to feel torn when I went away for a short weekend break. Should I leave my restaurant choices to chance and to the hotel staff who disinterestedly direct you to the touristy, expensive options (or their uncle’s restaurant)? Or should I instead, invest in a travel guide that will already be out of date by the time it is printed and on my return home will sit on a book shelf until the next time I travel to that country, by which time it will be so out of date the currency and national borders may have changed, let alone the best places to eat?

But now that I’ve embraced my technology alter ego, I’ve discovered that there’s another option. The twitter guide; an easily accessible repository of recommendations from on-the-ground food and coffee enthusiasts who share their opinions freely and fearlessly.

The first time I relied on twitter recommendations I was a little coy about naming my source to travel companions. As we trekked through a city, passing countless restaurants or cafes, I would reassure them that the place we were going to had been recommended and the effort would be worth it. It was only afterwards when we were, more often than not, eating a fantastic meal or sipping a good coffee that I would come clean. Incredulously they'd ask; “So we just walked for an hour because someone you’ve never met and know nothing about recommended this place to you on twitter?”

“Correct. Problema?”

I know I could travel with an up to date online guide written by reputable reviewers but there is something about following a twitter recommendation that seems more exciting when it pays off because of the leap of faith involved.

Last weekend in Barcelona I relied on my twitter guide once again and was rewarded with these gastronomic delights from faceless, random tweeters.

Saturday lunch at one of the tapas bars inside Mercat de la Boqueria as recommended by @thefoodplace

Delicious espresso at Federal Cafe, a new Australian owned cafe in Sant Antoni recommended by @Hudsoncakes...

who also suggested the insanely busy Jai-Ca in Barceloneta where we were jostled by locals having Sunday lunch and tried in vain to work out what the system was to get a table.

Giving up, we ate standing at the bar and watched in wonder as the staff calmly managed to serve plates of beautifully fresh and simple seafood tapas amidst the chaos.

Thanks also @Camdencoffee for recommending Cerveceria Catalana, 236 Mallorca where we had our final meal (by which time my camera's battery had died).

Movember: From boys to pubescence

2010-12-05T04:52:00.000-08:00

Tom Selleck, patron saint of the tash.

As men put razor blades to their upper lips once more and the organisers of Movember* expect a record breaking fundraising year, I’m proud to announce that Lantana customers have contributed £70.41 to that figure.

Perhaps I was unrealistically ambitious with the target I set, not only for the customers with the size of our donation jar,

but more importantly, for the “LanMowers” themselves. One month for Zak, Sean, Jonno, Chris, George and Lloyd to grow moustaches on their smooth boyish faces.

Even at the end of November most customers didn’t realise that the shadows under their noses, were actually mature mo’s. Next year I'm going for a more achievaeable goal: boyband entry on x factor. One Direction, you got nothing on the LanMowers.

*Movember is a fundraising event where participants sculpt their facial hair into moustaches to raise awareness about men’s health issues such as prostate cancer.

Corngate: The Corn Salsa File

2010-10-18T06:25:00.000-07:00

Maybe Australians can’t take credit for inventing corn fritters, but they feel as quintessentially Australian as avocado and vegemite on toast.

My love affair with corn fritters started in Melbourne where some of my favourite cafes did excellent versions of this Australian café classic;

Small Block Cafe in East Brunswick

Mart 130 Cafe on the tram line in Middle Park

When I opened Lantana it went without saying that corn fritters were going on the menu and we did a lot of experimenting to find the perfect fritter recipe- spicy, crispy edges, not too fluffy, and of course, lots of fresh corn.

In the early days some of our English customers needed a little gentle encouragement (along the lines of ‘for God’s sake try something instead of the bacon sandwich’) but once they tried corn fritters, they were hooked. So much so that I seem to have created an international scandal when I did the unthinkable recently and CHANGED THE MENU without proper public consultation.

I didn’t do anything as drastic as remove corn fritters from the menu. All I did was change the topping from corn salsa and lime aioli to sweet chilli jam and crème fraiche. Little did I know that Matt, one of our most loyal (English) regulars, sees little point in living if he can’t have corn salsa on his corn fritters. He has almost boycotted Lantana since the controversial ‘menu change’ but comes in every now and again to see whether I’ve changed the menu back. When I tell him no, he leaves crestfallen with a takeaway slice of banana bread. This is a man who took a year to be weened off bacon sandwiches in the first place but hard as I try, I can’t convince him to try the new corn fritter dish.....yet.

As a concession to Matt I promised to release the corn salsa file so that he doesn’t have to break into Lantana overnight, as threatened, to steal it.

Fresh corn salsa (No longer on Lantana's menu)

6 Corn cobs with outer husks removed
1 medium red onion, finely diced
2 red chillies, deseeded and finely chopped
zest and juice of 2 limes
1 bunch of corriander (washed and chopped)

Cook the corn on a lightly oiled chargrill or frypan to get some colour and then transfer to a 200C oven for 15 minutes.

Once cool enough to handle cut the corn off the cobs. Mix the corn with all the other ingredients.

A bus ride to nowhere in particular

2010-08-30T10:34:00.000-07:00

The London Particular

I’ve often thought it would be nice to hop on any old commuter bus and sit on it for the entire route to see where it takes me around London. Sort of like going on a London Big Bus tour but without the tourists and the bad jokes.

A few weeks ago my friend Becky (former part time chef at Lantana) opened a café in deepest darkest south east London. The only thing that stopped me visiting as soon as it opened was the location. How the hell do you get to New Cross from west London? And then a serendipitous thing happened. I noticed that the bus that literally passes the end of my street has the words New Cross Gate on the front. I didn’t even have to bother with the route planner on TFL. Two birds. One bus.

So on a rainy Monday morning I sat myself on the No. 36 tour bus and took in the sights of Paddington, Victoria, Vauxhall, Camberwell and Peckham before arriving at the end of the route, New Cross Gate. After walking along a grim stretch of New Cross Rd from the bus stop I found a small cosy space filled with the aromas of baking and coffee, people chatting around a communal table, and at the centre of it all, Becky pulling a tray of blueberry brioche out of the oven.

‘London Particular’ was the name given to thick pea and ham soup in Dickensian times when London was famous for its heavy fogs, or 'peasoupers'. If you could create a hearty bowl of pea and ham soup in the form of a cafe, that cafe is The London Particular: warm, comforting, unpretentious and nourishing.

Becky graduated from the Royal College of Music and worked in that field for a couple of years before listening to her culinary calling and pursuing a career as a chef. Largely self taught, Becky’s love of food and her creativity shines through in the flavours, colours and textures of the food she cooks.

She decided to go with a bowl food concept for the café in order to keep the menu simple, informal and reliant on the quality of the ingredients. Its also simple by necessity as Becky is cooking everything served in the café herself in a space not much bigger than a shower cubicle.

It was a difficult choice but I went for the special of the day which was a courgette, rocket and feta salad served with a beetroot and white bean dip, toasted rye bread and chorizo (optional extra).

My friend had home baked beans with mushrooms

and the couple across from us had a pretty amazing looking sandwich with grilled haloumi, bacon, tomato and garlic mayo. I finished off with a lovely creamy flatwhite made by Jen (who Lantana customers might also recognise) and one of Becky’s buttery light freshly made brioche. All delicious.

There’s been no gentle easing in period for Becky and Jen who thought they’d have a quiet August to test the menu and put the finishing touches on the café. From the moment they opened the door, punters and reviewers have been steadily pouring in and Bex and Jen have barely had time to eat lunch. More proof that London is crying out for more cafes, good ones in particular. Well done Bex and Jen.

The London Particular: 399 New Cross Rd, SE14 6LA

Holidays on a fork

2010-08-08T06:43:00.000-07:00

Why do the calming, positive effects of holidays wear off so quickly? When our regulars saunter in for a takeaway coffee after returning from holiday all relaxed, suntanned and smiling it only seems to take a couple of days before their eyes are glued to their blackberries again and they are rushing in and out, stressing about work.

It also didn’t take long for my holiday freckles and ‘perche no’ attitude to fade after a trip to Italy a few weeks ago.

Photographs are a poor substitute for the actual experience of sitting in my gin and tonic chair

pulling vegetables for dinner from my friend’s garden

and walking through Italian villages post siesta

But one of the wonderful things about cooking, is that I can hold on to the smells and taste of Italy in a more satisfying way. With the daylight hours starting to get shorter in London and my next holiday a small dot on a distant horizon, I’m feeling in need of a forkful of Italy.

Of all the meals I ate in Italy these stood out for their classic Italian-ness; good quality ingredients, simple flavour combinations, served without fuss.

A rocket and pecorino salad with toasted walnuts and honey

And polenta served in a way I’ve never seen before – almost like a pasta dish.

Baked polenta with tomato sauce

Baked polenta (6 serves)

200g instant polenta

1 tsp salt

1 litre water

1 tbls oil

75g grated parmesan cheese

Preheat the oven to 200C. Oil and line a baking tray with greaseproof paper. In a small pan bring the water and salt to the boil. Pour in the polenta gradually, stirring continuously with a wooden spoon to prevent large lumps forming. Reduce the heat and keep stirring for about 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the oil and two thirds of the parmesan. Taste and adjust the seasoning.

Spread the polenta mix evenly across the prepared baking tray so you get a layer 1.5cm to 2cm deep. Leave to cool.

Once it has cooled, tip the set polenta onto a board and cut into triangles then cut a third of the triangles into smaller bite sized pieces. Use the other half two thirds for other recipes- like the mushroom one below.

Tomato sauce (enough for 2 serves)

400g can plum tomatoes

olive oil

1 fat clove of garlic sliced thinly

little dried chilli

basil leaves

pecorino cheese

Fry garlic in olive oil over a gentle heat until it just starts to colour (don’t let it brown or it will become bitter). Add tomatoes, chilli and salt and pepper. Break up tomatoes with a wooden spoon. Turn heat right down, put a lid on the pan and leave sauce to cook for 30minutes to an hour until it is nice and thick. Add a good handful of torn basil leaves.

Put the polenta pieces on a baking tray and drizzle with olive oil. Place in a preheated oven for about 10 minutes to heat through.

To serve, spoon the sauce over the polenta in bowls and top with grated pecorino.

Polenta with sauteed mushrooms and goat’s cheese (2 serves)

500g mushrooms

1 tbls butter

1 tbls olive oil

good splash of verjuice

parsley

goats cheese

Slice mushrooms. Heat oil and butter in pan. Add mushrooms and toss over high heat until they brown lightly. Add verjuice and remove from the heat. Stir through parsley. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Heat fry pan with a tablespoon of olive oil until it gets quite hot. Fry polenta triangles in batches for a couple of minutes each side until golden brown. Place polenta on a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper. Spoon some of the mushroom mixture over each triangle then crumble some goat's cheese over the top. Bake in the oven for a couple of minutes until cheese melts.

Bon appetito.

Onwards and Outwards

2010-06-20T09:53:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago one of our customers came to me with a worried look and asked “Do you know who is taking the shop next door?”

“We are.” I replied

“Oh that’s a relief”, he said. “When I saw the wood battening going on the front I thought someone was ripping you off”.

We’ve had our eye on 14 Charlotte Place, the shop beside Lantana, since the beginning as it was also for lease when we were looking for a site. At the time it seemed a bit ambitious to take on two sites so we moved into 13 Charlotte Place and watched next door with interest as others went in….

and out again.

When we heard it was back on the market late last year it seemed fated that we should take it as Lantana had become slightly chaotic at busy times with staff, eat in and takeaway customers bumping into each other as they tried to navigate a small narrow cafe. Here was an opportunity to create two separate spaces for eat in and takeaway customers and let everyone breathe more easily.

Taking our cue from the Naval and Military Club (known as The In and Out Club) which had lettering on the gate posts of its old home on Piccadilly to guide London cabbies in and out of the club driveway,

we’ve sign posted Lantana to guide customers in and out of the two parts of the cafe.

The entry for customers who want to dine in (or outside)

The entry for customers taking out their coffee, cakes, salads, tarts, sandwiches

And for those who can't decide whether they're an innie or an outtie, there's even a spot where you can stop and have a think about it.

Thanks to Etienne (Lantana customer) and Suzi (Lantana waitress) for many of the photos (the good ones) on this blog post.

Madrid

2010-06-06T12:33:00.000-07:00

The city that opens its arms

and never closes them.

The Lantana Cup of Excellence

2010-05-16T11:05:00.000-07:00

Before I opened Lantana I spent many months researching coffee suppliers; meeting with different roasters, sampling their various single origin coffees and blends, and testing how they tasted in different types of drinks. The challenge was to find a coffee that tasted as good as an espresso as it did in a milky drink like a latte so that I could satisfy as many customers as possible. The challenge, with that much caffeine coursing through my blood stream, was to stop my brain exploding and stay focused enough to make rational decisions.

I went on field trips to warehouses and cafes across London and met the entire spectrum of coffee suppliers from artisan micro roasters to large scale distributors. But the company I found myself benchmarking all others against was the one I eventually chose as our supplier - Monmouth.

It wasn’t just the taste of the coffee that I loved, it was the whole ethos of the company and particularly, the company’s founder, Anita le Roy, that impressed me. Anita is one of the pioneers of the UK coffee industry who started roasting coffee in the basement of a small shop in Covent Garden in the seventies. She had a vision to provide ethically produced high quality coffee to the UK market and the stamina and determination to keep doing it for 30 years. After all this time she is still very hands on in the day to day running of the business and as committed as ever to the principles on which Monmouth was founded. She seems to have achieved the impossible by successfully growing and building a company while keeping it ‘small’.

Time will tell whether I have her stamina but I know I share her determination to continually improve the coffee we offer our customers. So after 18 months of using Monmouth’s Espresso blend, I wanted to see if we couldn’t tweak it slightly to create the perfect Lantana Espresso blend; one that tastes sweet and smooth when drunk as an espresso but with enough richness and body to retain a strong character when its made into a milk based coffee.

Under the guidance of Monmouth's coffee buyer, AJ Kinnell, we experimented with ratios of various single origin coffees and came up with a few different blends to compete in the Lantana Cup of Excellence*. As I couldn’t get the CoE's official international jurors (of which Anita is one) to judge the results, I called on Lantana's esteemed and opinionated baristas to form the judging panel.

Sean, Colleen and Brooke sample the blends

After much deliberation, the recipe for our Lantana Espresso blend (and label colour) was chosen; a blend of Ethiopian Cabey Yirgacheffe, Guatemalan Finca La Perla and Brazilian Fazenda Rainha.

We’ve been using our bespoke blend for about a month in the café and the feedback we’re getting from espresso and latte drinkers alike is positive so hopefully we’re on the path to creating the Lantana Cup of Excellence.

*Cup of Excellence are national competitions to find single-estate coffees that can be set aside from the commodity coffee market, where prices have been dropping due to over-production in some regions. The competition is run every year in nine coffee-producing countries from Colombia to El Salvador and Rwanda, and the winning coffee is chosen by a select group of national and international cuppers. The Cup of Excellence beans are considered the peak of coffee production and are sold to the highest bidder during an internet auction.

Frequently asked questions #3: When is Lantana expanding?

2010-03-21T07:38:00.000-07:00

Gardening Australia Fact Sheet

Weed Alert: Lantana

Given the right conditions, it spreads quickly. Lantana is a lalopathic, releasing chemicals into the surrounding soil to prevent seed germination, notably of the native flora, so that it eventually takes over native bushland.

Like its floral namesake, an Australian weed of national significance, Lantana Café is showing signs of an invasive spread in Charlotte Place, London.

Watch this soil…

Amuse yeux

2010-02-15T14:31:00.000-08:00

There is little that can amuse me at 6.45am on these cold dark wintry mornings as I crawl from my warm bed, wrap myself in multiple layers of clothing, grit my teeth and pedal furiously along the icy roads to get to work and back indoors as quickly as possible. 25 minutes later with numb fingers, my nose and eyes streaming, I lock my bike to the rail in Goodge Place and peak out from a gap in my woollies to check the window of one of the buildings on the laneway.

Every few weeks the office of Freestate changes the photographic collage displayed in their front window. There has been a gold plated Bob the Builder

swimmers on diving blocks

flags with dates showing when Father's Day is celebrated around the world

and countless others that I have only recorded in my mind’s eye.

In those early hours of the morning when the streets are gloomy and deserted, the window welcomes me like an amuse bouche*. It is a bite sized visual titillation that teases my brain and often puts a smile on my face before I cross the road and step inside the café.

Imagine my surprise the other morning when I glanced up to see a larger than life Lantana latte in the Freestate window to amuse my eyes.

That did make me smile.

*amuse bouche def: \a-'myuz bush\ [Fr. amuse the mouth] 1: a small bite before the meal begins . 2: greeting of the Chef de cuisine.

Robinson Crusoe

2010-01-06T04:38:00.000-08:00

My father had an expression for when mum was pulling her hair out, fed up with the drudge of raising four young children or when one of us was struggling with exams or a broken heart. He'd say “You’re not Robinson Crusoe”. It became one of those well worn expressions that I didn’t really give much thought to at the time but had a vague sense that Dad was trying to be comforting, telling us that we weren’t the only person experiencing whatever difficulties we were going through. We weren’t castaways like Robinson Crusoe, alone on an island.

Dad's words popped into my head again as I read Emily Kerrigan’s article in this month’s Olive Magazine about six people (including me) who have changed careers and started up food related businesses.
Before the interview, we were all asked to think of five things that we wished someone had told us before we started our businesses- what we’d learned, mistakes we’d made along the way. I was the last person Emily interviewed and as we spoke she commented on the fact that there were many similarities in what we had each told her: be patient and remain positive through the times when business is slow; be prepared to be flexible and adapt if things don’t work; trust your instincts and keep faith in what you are doing; and learn from the mistakes you make.

Last night as I read through the stories in the article I felt incredibly comforted that, even though I didn't know it at the time, I had not been alone. While I was getting Lantana started, there were many others experiencing the same doubts, frustrations, long hours, and highs and lows that I was.

So I’m adding one more piece of advice to anyone who is starting up their own business:
Don't feel that you are going through this alone. You're not Robinson Crusoe.

The blogger leading the blogger

2009-12-14T09:12:00.000-08:00

Food bloggers are usually elusive creatures. They come into the café, sit quietly, intently observe their surroundings, take photos of everything that is put in front of them, then retreat to their computers where they blog about their experience, letting their opinions be known to the entire world under some clever nom de plume (like say, Scrambling Eggs). The first I learn of their visit is when I stumble across their blog (if googling “Lantana cafe review” constitutes stumbling) by which time they are long gone and I unsuccessfully try to put a face to the blogger based on what they have written. You can guarantee if you forget someone’s side of bacon, or sit them on a wobbly chair, they will be a god damn food blogger.

Herein lies the frustration for restaurateurs. Unlike many well established restaurant reviewers like Fay Maschler, Giles Coren, AA Gill and Jay Rayner, who can be spotted immediately thanks to the photographs published beside their reviews, food bloggers are able to preserve their anonymity with the best disguises in the world. They look like IT programmers, graphic designers, students and accountants because often this is what they are from 9 to 5. By night and on the weekend they are bloggers, finding a creative outlet through the keyboard and connecting with other people who share their passion for food.

While food bloggers may not have the culinary expertise or writing skills of professional food critics, their ability to dine anonymously and receive non-sycophantic treatment gives their experience as an average diner an authenticity that well known restaurant reviewers have lost. Ruth Reichel, when she was the restaurant reviewer for the New York Times, famously wrote 2 reviews of a well known French Restaurant in New York. One was how she was treated when they did recognise her and the other when they didn’t because she was in disguise. The difference was enormous and demonstrated that restaurant reviewers’ experience of a restaurant is not necessarily authentic or useful to the average punter who is not going to receive special treatment.

So I was quite surprised the other day when one food blogger, known only to me as Catty, asked to do a video interview with me for her blog.

What? In the open? Face to face? At last, I got to meet one of these bloggers who will never be able to dine anonymously at Lantana again.

Funnily enough, since Catty posted this video on her blog I can now spot food bloggers more easily because they’re the ones ordering and photographing baked eggs.

Photo courtesy of Tummyrumble.

Cafe's: Dens of innovation OR Starbucks: where it went wrong

2009-11-11T02:33:00.000-08:00

The other night I went to hear Brian Eno and Steven Johnson give a talk at the ICA about technical innovation. Of all the things I thought I would learn that night, I did not expect to discover that I am in fact facilitating innovation. I am providing the environment and the drug for new ideas to flourish.

The legacy of coffee houses as connective hubs and incubators of innovation goes back to the 17^th century. After the Great Fire of 1666 while the Royal Exchange was being rebuilt, coffee houses became de facto trading houses (one of which became Lloyds of London). People from all walks of life would sit at communal tables and talk, sharing ideas and engaging in political and intellectual debate. And unlike taverns, which for centuries had been the place to socialise and do business, the drug being abused at coffee houses was a stimulant rather than a depressant - much more conducive to innovation.

When I worked on innovation policy in my public service days it always felt a bit trite to suggest that putting a café in the foyer of shared office spaces would encourage entrepreneurs from different disciplines to meet, exchange ideas, collaborate and innovate.

But now I see it first hand everyday with our regulars and customers at Lantana. From the organised meetings like Cwoffee (a changing collection of planners and ad people who meet fortnightly), to the freelancers and start ups who use Lantana as a temporary office space (hey Moolis), to the workers in the areas (predominantly in creative industries like advertising, media, restaurants and design) who come to Lantana for a coffee or lunch break, there is constant networking, animated conversation and information exchange. Customers discuss bands and the news with the staff and strangers start talking to each other in the queue as they wait for takeaway coffee or as they sit together at communal tables. There’s a creative buzz - fuelled by caffeine.

And this leads me to Starbucks. Which is what I originally wanted to write a blog post about as for some time I’ve been thinking about it’s ‘demise’ and what it means for cafes in general. It is easy to say that Starbucks is suffering because it serves crap coffee and isn’t cool. But there has to be more to it than that. Doesn’t there? There is plenty of crap served in this town in uncool places and they are still doing business as usual.

What is interesting is that over the past year or so while Starbucks has been feeling the squeeze, London has seen a number of new independent cafes emerge and prosper.

Two of the three ‘underperforming’ Starbucks stores that have closed in London are in very close proximity to two of these independent cafes – Taylor St Baristas near Spitalfield Markets and us, Lantana in Fitzrovia.

Sure, this could be a coincidence but even Starbucks is not so quick to dismiss their small indie competitors with plans to ‘debrand’ some of the Starbucks stores to make them feel less homogenous and bland.

This proliferation of independent cafes is being labelled the third wave of coffee, which, as Gwilym Davies, current World Barista Champion is quoted as saying, is ”all very uncorporate”. Its about passion, freshness, sourcing the best coffee beans and extracting the best flavour.

I agree, it is about the coffee, but more importantly, its about the coffee house culture that independents create. With their eclectic furnishings, unpolished finish and other idiosyncracies they provide environments which are creative, quirky and unique. They reflect the peculiarities and passions of the owner and the local community.

Taste of Bitter Love near Columbia Rd Flower Market

Tina We Salute You in Dalston keep track of their loyal customers on their cafe wall

This is why it all went wrong for Starbucks. They reduced coffee to a commodity and forgot about their customers and the coffee house culture. Carloyn Steel said it well in her book Hungry City “Starbucks outlets are stage sets, designed by marketing executives thousands of miles away to appeal to our fantasy metro-chic lifestyles. Add a mouse with big ears, and you might as well be drinking in Disneyland.”

Long live good coffee and the dens of innovation.

The international language of gastronomy

2009-10-22T06:16:00.000-07:00

Ah C'est bon vacance en France.

How could it not be? Cocooned in a tiny medieval village in the Perigord region of Southwest France, it was 6 days of eating and sleeping, a castle here, a glass of vin de Cahors there, eating, sleeping, eating, eating, eating, sleeping, eating, eating, eating...

With such amazing gastronomic inspiration surrounding me in the boucheries

boulangeries

fromageries
and even on the roadsideries

I couldn't resist spending some of my holiday doing a little cooking too.

Buying ingredients at the markets and in the shops was fairly unproblematic (and entertaining for the locals) using my basic French with lots of pointing and miming - flapping my arms and slapping my bottom for various cuts of meat. But one day my charades a francais failed me and a request for speck was met with a blank look from the butcher.

How do you say speck in french? "Jambon fume?" "Jambon avec sel?" Apparently not. I was starting to get a little stressed as a queue of customers was forming behind me so in a desperate plea I said "pour coq au vin!"

"Ahhhh lardons!" was the relieved chorus from the other customers as the butcher produced a magnificent slab of fatty bacon. The woman behind me then proceeded to instruct me to cut thick slices: "epais- non fine pour coq au vin". I was patted on the back and wished "bonne chance" as I left the shop. I hope I did the residents of Monpazier proud with my 3 course menu a la Perigord.

Grilled goat's cheese with honeyed walnuts for entree

Coq au vin (avec lardons) for plat principal

and Monpazier Mess for dessert

One thing I won't miss about France is the coffee.

Quelle merde. An opportunity for La Lantana en Perigord?

Recipe for Coq au Vin (Serves 6)

6 chicken pieces (leg and breast pieces)
200g speck cut into thick slices
2 cloves garlic crushed
50ml brandy or cognac
1/4 cup plain flour
200g eschalots
1 tablespoons castor sugar
50g butter
1+1/2 tablespoons vegetable oil
450g button mushrooms

Marinade
2 x 750ml bottles shiraz or burgandy
2 carrots sliced
1 onion sliced
3 cloves garlic crushed
12 black peppercorns
2 bay leaves
8 sprigs thyme

Combine all marinade ingredients, add chicken, cover and marinate in fridge overnight.

Remove chicken from marinade, pat dry with paper towels.

Strain marinade into saucepan (reserve marinade), bring to boil, then strain.
Heat large casserole over medium heat, add speck and cook for 8 minutes until speck is golden. Drain on paper towels. In same pan, brown chicken in batches. Remove from pan.

Add reserved solids and crushed garlic to pan and stir ocassionally for 8 minutes. Add brandy and ignite with a match, then stir in flour. Gradually add marinade, return chicken to pan and bring to a simmer. Reduce heat to low, cover and cook for 1 and a half hours until chicken is very tender.

Meanwhile place eschalots in a pan with castor sugar, 20g butter, 125ml water and a large pinch of salt. Bring to boil over high heat, then reduce to low and simmer until liquid is nearly all evaporated and syrupy and onions are lightly golden. Heat remaining 30g butter and oil in large fry pan, dd mushrooms and cook, tossing for 3 minutes until golden. Season.

To serve, stir speck, onions, mushrooms and steamed baby carrots into coq au vin and scatter with parsley.

Head Chef Lisa's story: From little crumbs, big crumbs grow

2009-09-27T09:02:00.000-07:00

A week ago Shelagh, our manager, boss, and part owner asked me to write a chef profile about myself. How indulgent I thought. So here goes, my wonderful five minutes of fame.

Firstly let me introduce myself. My name is Lisa Creigh, a chef from Newcastle N.S.W. Australia. I have been cooking professionally for 12 years now. I am 29 and love it as much as I did that first day. My days in the kitchen however go right back...

Lisa's early days in the kitchen crumbing fish. She's never lost her love of crumbing.

Since the age of four I have been in the kitchen, under my mum’s feet. I was the youngest of six and never went to play group. Instead, my mum (who was a stay at home mother spending many hours in the kitchen, aka domestic goddess) and I would spend many hours together cooking up a storm to impress my father and elder brothers and sisters. I would crush cookies, crumb fish, whisk eggs, and sift flour (the way you used to by putting the flour in the can and cranking the handle). If ever I was in the way, flour and warm water would be mixed together in a bowl to form a dough by my mother and I would happily sit at the table and play quietly until I would be needed again. Mum would tell me stories of my Nan being a great cook, how she could do all of her baking “by feel”, in other words a squeeze of the dough, a flick of the wrist, a pinch of this and a dash of that and it would all come together beautifully. All I remember is Nan’s amazing roast dinner on the farm.

Growing up, food was always a part of me. I tried my first oyster mornay at the age of eight. It made my older brother squirm. I loved it. My dad and I would go out fishing on his boat and we would have it fresh for dinner that night. I was ordering three courses from a very early age whenever we went out for a meal. It usually went something like deep fried Camembert with cranberry sauce, chicken breast stuffed and wrapped in proscuitto, and can you believe, chocolate fudge cake for dessert. Yum! Now can someone please roll me out the door.

This love of being in the heart of the kitchen (the place were everyone gathers to share stories, indulge, and create) has carried right through my schooling to a professional level. Studying Hospitality in my senior years during high school pushed me forward towards the all powerful chef certificate, or should I say chef ticket (insert cheesy grin). A ticket to experiencing great food and wine, cultures, people, and places. The biggest influence in my training came from a Melbourne Chef, Robert Brown, working for him in Newcastle. His training was hard discipline, but with a great understanding of ingredients, flavours, and a creativity ahead of others in my hometown. At the time it was modern Australian, (predominately seafood with Asian influences). It was privilege to train under Robert.

At the age of 20 I had my qualifications, got a working visa and went to Canada, to the mountain-tops of Whistler B.C. I worked at a Golf Club with Gerry Brandon (a brilliant chef) for the summer, and at La Rua restaurant (no. two for fine dining in Whistler that year) for the winter. I was in charge of the Garde manger section, preparing and serving delicious duck confit and cranberry parcels, Foie gras with chanterelle mushrooms, and other delicate morsels of goodness. After my part was done I would go over and volunteer with the friendly pastry chefs, learning all of their amazing dessert tricks. I would do the kitchen’s fish mongering as well, sometimes filleting Halibut almost as big as myself. Serving 350 covers a night fine dinning, while snowboarding in to work. Yes life was amazing. Since I was 14 it was my goal to be a chef in Canada by the time I was 21. I did it.

After that I landed back in Sydney starting afresh again, staying in fine dining a little while, then made a move to Riminis cafe and bar; an establishment with a very creative Head chef, Alec Bird, who had a few awards under his belt, best café etc. It was here that the next level of Sous chef came along for me. In the kitchen you are many things, sometimes teacher, counselor, creative cook, health and safety chief, caffeine addict. From that point food took me to Brisbane, Q.L.D, back to Newcastle, fine dining, shelling 3kg of fresh crab for hand made linguini to delicious breakfasts at amazing cafes.

Then the opportunity came for me to be Head chef at a soon to be Gastro Style pub called the Albion Hotel. Finally the chance for it to be mine! Well this job at the Albion Hotel was the chance of a life time. I was able to experience a kitchen from scratch, from plumbing, 3 faze power plugs, buying equipment and crockery, to a menu that was all mine. Mind you, we had inherited a lot of old grease so I scrubbed the place for three days solid to remove the grease before one lovely vegetable was allowed to come into the kitchen. Within six months the establishment was booming. We found it hard to keep up, but keep up we did with a few more recruits.

This gave me the opportunity to come to London and to Europe and its wonderful produce. When I read Shelagh’s ad on Gumtree for the position to start up Lantana as Head chef, I was so excited. Shelagh is a dedicated food lover and epicurist just like me. She has established a place that prides itself on great coffee, fresh seasonal produce, making everything in house and being as eco- friendly as possible including all of our suppliers. I knew this was the job for me.

First of all I love breakfast, always have. It’s the start of a new day and we want that start to be the best it can be. The toast all buttery soft and hot, the eggs warm and sexy, running all over the place (of course that is if you like it like that), and the smell and taste of English bacon, one of my top loves of England. Thank you H.G Walters which was my local butcher, and now Lantana’s. La Fromagerie’s incredible cheeses...and let’s not forget the coffee… amazing. There is so much to love about this great little café.

But my role could not be performed with out my team in the kitchen Megan Noonan ( Sous Chef aka Baking Goddess), Becky Davy, and Slimane. Thanks for all your endless hard work.

Lisa and sous chef Megan, Lantana's own Statler and Waldorf.

Winners are grinners

2009-09-15T13:40:00.001-07:00

Thank you to everyone who helped us become TimeOut's

Slightly skew wiff victory shot using the self timer

Coffee Out: Copenhagen

2009-09-08T10:07:00.000-07:00

When I went to Copenhagen a couple of weekends ago it seemed I’d arrived in a magical land where everything runs efficiently, people are happy and suntanned, the footpaths are paved with bicycles instead of dog turd,

the architecture is stunning,

and a handsome Prince turned an Australian called Mary into a Princess.

What would the coffee be like in this fairy tale kingdom?

The first thing that struck me after London was the absence of the big coffee chains. For some reason Starbucks has not made it further than the airport in Copenhagen. Baresso looks like the Danish equivalent but they are far outnumbered by independent cafes.

I was expecting great things but unfortunately a good coffee isn't as easy to find as ridiculously friendly people are in Copenhagen. I did manage to track down a couple of little café gems thanks to recommendations on this website and the trusty Wallpaper City Guide.

Sweet Treat, Sankt Annæ Gade 3A

Sweet Treat serves a macchiato in a designer crinkled porcelain cup- love the Danish.

Estate Coffee, Gammel Kongevej 1, which feels a bit like a coffee chain

with its pictures of coffee plants on the wall,

but actually serves a really good coffee.

Estate's piccolo

Saving the best until last, Granola, Værnedamsvej 5

where I drooled over the 1930s industrial furniture and the beautiful spacious shop counter... but not granola which they don't have on the menu. Odd. Obviously I need to be a bit more lateral.

Granola's double macchiato

Part 3 Lantanalicious: The CafeCommons initiative

2009-09-02T13:06:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the final in a series of three posts looking at how Lantana can explicitly and implicitly share some of the information Shelagh gathered while researching and setting up the cafe. Otherwise known as the CafeCommons initiative.

Since starting this short series I* have come across GreenXchange; a similar initiative from Nike and Best Buy. GreenXchange is, at this stage, an intention from these companies to release into the public domain data, documents and practices that can help companies operate more sustainably. They are making them available to the world to use by releasing them under a ScienceCommons license (a derivation of the very interesting CreativeCommons).

While cynics may view Nike’s involvement as a self interested PR exercise, as with XBRL that I mentioned in post one, I think GreenXchange is a harbinger of the move towards transparency that the recent financial fiasco and the ongoing environmental debacle is going to force organizations to embrace.

The last post was an example of explicit sharing; we asked Shelagh a series of questions on the issue of food sourcing with the benefit being that the answers to the same three questions could be compared across a number of interview subjects. In this post we introduce you to the Lantana Online database of useful web sites, or our Delicious bookmarks.

(Note to the uninitiated: Delicious is a social bookmarking service. The bookmarking bit: you can bookmark sites that are of interest to you and tag them with your own usefully descriptive words that will help you to find them later. The social bit: these bookmarks can be searched by every Delicious user and users can subscribe to each others’ bookmark collections. There are a few other social elements to the service but go and try it to get the real deal on it.

So please take a look and if you like what you see, join our network.

The author's Delicious bookmarks can be found here.

*Leo Ryan works as a digital planner, helping businesses to optimise their use of social media technologies. He is also known as big red vis a vis me, little red.

Part 2 Lantanalicious: The three good food questions

2009-08-30T00:11:00.000-07:00

This is the second in a series of three posts in which we* try to share some of the information that has been gathered as a part of the research to establish Lantana.

In this post, Shelagh answers three questions regarding sourcing 'good' food for Lantana. The idea is that by asking three questions in a repeatable format we can ask others the same questions and so build up a set of answers that can be compared and contrasted. Hopefully this information will be of use to others attempting to set up independent food businesses.

1. What is your good food philosophy?

Shelagh pointed out that there are a number of very good reasons for embracing a 'good food' approach to running a cafe; for the customers, for your conscience, for the planet. But there are so many variables that, if you're going to consistently adhere to an approach, you actually need an underlying philosophy that can guide you through the myriad suppliers, environmental considerations and customer demands.

Shelagh's main concern is to provide food which tastes as delicious as it possibly can. For her this means sourcing food which is in season and, depending on the particular ingredient, free range, and organic. Her secondary concern is the general ethics surrounding the production and procurement of the food. This then demands decisions to be made. For example, should she use organic produce if that also means high food miles or should she prefer the local but non organic produce?

The end result is that Shelagh tends to favour local, fair trade, free range and high welfare produce and is less concerned with whether it is organic, or certified 'organic'. Having said that, for certain items such as milk, Shelagh insists on organic because she believes it tastes so much better than non-organic.

London Dairies doing the morning milk run with their electric van.

2. What has informed that philosophy?

Shelagh joined the London Food Link's Ethical Eats group and through them went to some talks, met like minded operators and actually met some primary producers including farmers, bakers and butchers.

Some of the members of the Ethical Eats group on a farm visit

In meeting these producers and suppliers Shelagh got to see exactly how they work, the quality of their produce and their methods of production. She also got an understanding of their business values and was then able to make decisions about using specific suppliers. For instance, she chose a butcher who sources meat from small farmers who practice traditional, high welfare farming methods. While the animals are organically fed and naturally reared, the meat is not always certified ‘organic’ as many small producers are not able to meet the high costs and standards involved in the organic certification process. Some of the compromises the farmers have to make may disqualify their meat from being labeled organic, however, it doesn't compromise the quality of the product as far as Shelagh is concerned.

3. Why do you follow that philosophy?

The aim of Lantana is to differentiate on quality. Shelagh believes that using local, seasonal, naturally reared and free range produce results in better tasting and more interesting food in that you have to be inventive, working with what ingredients are in season. Also, as a small independent business owner herself, she wants to support other small specialist businesses who share the same values, are passionate about their product and give a personalised service.

Next week we're going to take a look at some of the links that Shelagh recorded as apart of her research and that have been collected on the Lantana delicious bookmarks page.

*This post is written by Leo Ryan who works as a digital planner, helping businesses to optimise their use of social media technologies.

Part 1 Lantanalicious: Its nice to share

2009-08-27T14:07:00.001-07:00

Shelagh has asked me* to write a guest blog on something that interests me and that will be of interest to you, her readers. So I'm going to attempt a small experiment to do with explicit and implicit data. No wait...bear with me; food data.

In the wake of all of the financial and environment shenanigans of the recent past we have seen the development of a number of innovations in information transparency. I'm particularly interested in the development of XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) which essentially allows for the easy extraction of vital financial information from enormous and dense financial documents by 'tagging' key pieces of data. If you're still awake and interested in reading more; there's a very tidy overview here.

If the XBRL tags were applied universally to all financial documents, say all SEC filings, then anyone would be able to search across all of the annual reports of every listed company for a specific piece of information. So the process of tracking down quite detailed and specific information from thousands of companies buried deep inside complex documents becomes as simple as using Google search.

To think about the potential of this initiative just imagine that Parliamentarians' expenses were all released in a tagged and easily searchable format. In seconds any member of the public could see what was claimed for in any category: search: "Moat". Or more usefully :"Maintenance"

But that's looking at ways of making available information that perhaps the owners are reluctant to share. What about the reverse; when we have information that we think is useful, important and that we actively want to share? What kinds of ways can we use systems such as tagging to make our information more available?

And so my experiment.

Watching Shelagh develop the idea and the reality of Lantana it is obvious that she has done a lot of research. And in particular she has done lots of research around the area of good food: ethically and sustainably produced, organic and locally sourced, fair trade, delicious food. Quite a quagmire to navigate and perhaps one that, now she has invested her time, she can help others to understand.

So in the interests of promoting good food we're going to make that research available in two formats.

1. Explicit: I'm going to ask her for her top 3 things she's learnt about sourcing 'good' food for a small independent cafe, in the hope that the information will be of use to others attempting the same. We'll just put these in a blog post here. But the clever thing we're going to do here is to start a regular format, sort like the Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire. So next time we interview someone form the world of good food for Scrambling Eggs we can use the same format and then start to compare and contrast the answers. Fun, no?

2. Implicit: we're going to share the Lanatana del.icio.us page for useful links. These can be found here.

For those of you who haven't used Delicious its simply an online bookmarking service, but at its most rich and useful, its a directory of what people find interesting (online). The user saves a page they want to retrieve later (yes I know that's bookmarking) but the user can also add a series of tags to make it easier to find the page and to group it with other pages that are similar in some way. Because your bookmarks can be made public, Delicious can show you not just the pages that you have saved and tagged as 'recipes', 'cajun', shrimp', but also all of the other pages that other users have saved with these same tags.

To be continued...

*Leo Ryan works as a digital planner, helping businesses to optimise their use of social media technologies. He is also my big brother.

We're in it!

2009-08-23T12:46:00.000-07:00

Now help us win it and VOTE.

Fused and confused

2009-08-03T08:06:00.000-07:00

Last week we decided it was time to acknowledge the season the English refer to as summer and introduce some new dishes onto the menu.

English people often ask me whether Lantana’s menu is Australian and I don’t really know how to answer them. I am Australian, our chef is Australian and the food on our menu is very typical of the food you find in cafes in Australia. But what is Australian cuisine?

In countries like Italy, France, India and China, cooking is a cultural institution where recipes are passed down from generation to generation and remain authentic and virtually unaltered for hundreds of years. This is not the case in Australia, or at least not in my family, where I was fed a varied diet of spaghetti bolognese, stir fries, and curries as my mother and father experimented with new recipes that they were learning from cookbooks and magazines rather than their mothers.

The Australian diet has constantly evolved in response to the arrival of different migrant groups: the British followed by the Chinese, Italians, Vietnamese, Greeks, Turkish, Indians, Thais and so on. The cuisines of our migrants met the same fate as the migrants themselves; thrown into the soup pot called Australian multiculturalism and confidently blended together. One of the legacies of this assimilation immigration policy is Australian cuisine.

Today, breakfast at a café in Australia could include miso porridge, a scrambled egg burrito, french toast with labne and orange blossom syrup or toasted pide with vegemite. Chefs and food writers created the label ‘fusion cuisine’ to describe this eclectic approach to cooking which, while well intended, can sometimes be more confused than fused.

The finest exemplar of Australia’s confusion cuisine is the chiko roll where we took a centuries old dish, the Chinese egg roll, and gave it the assimilation treatment. The result?

A greasy deep-fried chewy spring roll filled with mushy vegetables and mutton that has become a national icon; immortalized in the movie Puberty Blues where a surfer tells his girlfriend to “Get me a chiko roll…and don’t take any bites on the way back”.

Which brings me back to the summer menu at Lantana. I think the best way to describe it is Australian multicultural confusion cuisine at its most delicious.

eg:

Brioche french toast w caramelised plums and berries served w pistachio ricotta

Grilled haloumi, mushrooms with herb pesto, poached egg, sautéed spinach, and roast tomatoes served w sourdough toast

Thai beef salad

But perhaps the most quintessentially Australian item on the menu is the steak sandwich with sliced beetroot. I don’t know whether you’d call that fusion cuisine or just pure genius.

The curious incident of the fiddleheads that arrived frozen in a bag

2009-07-05T14:52:00.000-07:00

The other day one of our regulars, a French Canadian who had just returned from a holiday in Quebec, came to the counter and propositioned me with a bag of fiddleheads.

Qu'est que c’est?

Fiddleheads or têtes de violon: the unfurled heads of Ostrich ferns which grow in the forests of Quebec and the Maritime Provinces.

These strange looking edible fronds are not cultivated so are only available for a short time in early spring when they are picked over a period of two weeks after which time they unfurl and become inedible. Foragers must only take three of the five to nine fronds produced by each plant as harvesting more than three can kill the plant.

I surmised that fiddleheads are a highly prized delicacy and I felt honoured to be offered a small bag of them which had been bought at an organic food market in Quebec, blanched, then vacuum sealed and frozen before being flown back to London and delivered into my novice hands.

After researching how to cook fiddleheads, noting nervously that cooking them incorrectly can result in food poisoning, I put the frozen bag into boiling water for about 7 minutes then sauteed them in butter and finished them with a squeeze of lemon juice.

The verdict? They tasted like a cross between asparagus and spinach and were much more palatable than the real fiddle I tortured my neighbours with for years.

Frequently asked questions #2. What’s in a Hummingbird cake?

2009-06-21T04:19:00.000-07:00

“Banana, pineapple, cinnamon, walnuts with a cream cheese icing” has become a mantra for staff at Lantana as it is our automated response to the 2nd question most frequently asked by customers (after "what's the difference between a latte and a flat white").

While these cakes may look sweet and innocent, they are the most misunderstood, lusted after and fought over item on the Lantana counter.

Misunderstood, because people think they are cakes that we’ve bought from the Hummingbird Bakery. I'm tempted to rename them Lantana cakes.

Lusted after, because you know that amount of icing can not be good for you so you deny yourself the indulgence of eating one every day.

Fought over because our chefs can’t bake and ice them as fast as we can sell them and I have seen grown men argue with each other over who should have the last cake.

The reason I put them on the menu is because they remind me of my childhood growing up in Queensland in the 70s/80s when tinned pineapple was a dietary staple, appearing on pizzas, in burgers, salads and in Mrs Fogarty's incredible trifle.

I always thought hummingbird cake was an Australian invention but after looking at some spurious websites have found that Americans claim it as their own.

According to ‘food historians’, in 1978, Mrs. L.H. Wiggins of Greensboro, North Carolina submitted the recipe to Southern Living magazine, the "Southern belle bible of gracious hostessing", and the cake became renowned. "It is still our most requested recipe," says Donna, one of the writers for the magazine.

No one seems to be sure of the derivation of the name 'Hummingbird'. One theory is that people hum when they eat the cake. Another is that it refers to what these small south American birds like to eat as they are attracted to intensely sweet food. But I’d like to think that it is related to the ancient Aztecs who apparently wore Hummingbird talismans to draw sexual potency, energy and vigor. Imagine what happens when you eat one.

This is Mrs Wiggin's recipe. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet but see if you think it beats ours.

Mrs Wiggin's Hummingbird cake
3 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3 eggs, beaten
1 1/2 cups salad oil
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 (8 ounce) can crushed pineapple, undrained
2 cups chopped pecans or walnuts, divided
2 cups chopped bananas

Combine dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl; add eggs and salad oil, stirring until dry ingredients are moistened. Do not beat. Stir in vanilla, pineapple, 1 cup chopped pecans, and bananas. Spoon batter into 3 well-greased and floured 9-inch cakepans. Bake at 350 degrees F. For 25 to 30 minutes; remove from pans, and cool immediately. Spread frosting between layers and on top and sides of cake. Sprinkle with 1 cup chopped pecans. Yield: one 9-inch layer cake.

Cream cheese icing
2 (8-ounce) packages cream cheese, softened
1 cup butter or margarine, softened
2 (16 ounce) packages powdered sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Combine cream cheese and butter; cream until smooth. Add powdered sugar, beating until light and fluffy. Stir in vanilla. Yield: enough for a 3 layer cake.

Mrs. L.H. Wiggins, Greesnboro, North Carolina
"Making the most of bananas," Southern Living, February 1978 (p. 206)

Aussie snubs Mayor

2009-06-11T14:02:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday saw the rainy return of the Charlotte Street Festival after an 8 year sabbatical.

We were in the middle of our mid morning rush at Lantana when Jim Murray, organiser of the Festival, came in to tell me that he had the Mayor outside and asked me whether I wanted a photo with him while he was doing his rounds meeting and greeting the local business owners.

“Boris is outside?” I asked excitedly.

No, Omar Faruque Ansari, the Mayor of Camden.

"Oh. Can he come back a little later? I’ve just got to clear a couple of tables, take some orders, seat these people…."

Jim rolled his eyes and muttered “Australians” to a woman standing at the front of the line waiting for a table. She was a Kiwi so nodded in agreement.

Fearful that the next edition of the Fitzrovia News might carry the headline “Aussie snubs Mayor” I decided the customers could wait and invited the Mayor in for a photo.

The first for our coffee machine of fame.

In Vogue

2009-06-03T10:19:00.001-07:00

While some women may secretly fantasise about having their face on the cover of Vogue

I've always dreamed about having a cafe in Australia’s Vogue Entertaining and Travel.

Go on and pinch me because if I'm not dreaming that's Lantana striking a pose in the June/July 2009 edition of VE&T*.

*If you don't have a sister in Australia to post you a copy (thanks Helly) you can buy VE&T from some newsagents in London that specialise in international publications, like Rococo in Nottinghill.

A national treasure

2009-05-24T11:32:00.000-07:00

They say you should never meet your heroes as they will only disappoint. But when I met Maggie Beer at an event at Australia House last week she was everything I imagined her to be; passionate, inspiring, warm, and extremely down to earth. The Agent General for South Australia, Bill Muirhead, introduced her as a national treasure, and a treasure she is.

She was so approachable that I didn’t mind elbowing a few journalists and publishers out of my way to monopolise her in conversation as much as I could. There were many questions I wanted to ask her, (what does she really think of Simon her co-presenter on the ABC’s Cook and the Chef series?, was she offended when he snubbed her singing group's Christmas carol sing-a-long?) but most importantly, how had her career in food developed? She told me about the restaurant she and her husband had run for 15 years- an experience she said nearly killed her because it was so exhausting but, in true Maggie half-glass-full style, said she didn’t regret for a second as it has given her a launching pad for the rest of her career.

I took great comfort in Maggie’s words and in the food I cooked from her book. It doesn’t get much more comforting than chicken pie and baked apples.

By the way, she loves Simon.

Chicken, grape and champagne pie
(serves 4)

40g unsalted butter
3-4 chicken thigh fillets (770g)
2 leeks, white parts only, thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic finely chopped
1 cup champagne
¼ cup plain flour
11/2 cups chicken stock
1 ½ tablespoons finely chopped tarragon
1 ½ tablespoons finely chopped thyme
½ preserved lemon, flesh removed, rind rinsed and finely chopped
2 tablespoons verjuice
1 cup seedless green grapes

Heat butter in large frying pan until nut brown then add a splash of olive oil. Season chicken with salt then sauté in batches until lightly coloured. Remove from pan and set aside.

Add leeks and garlic to pan and cook over low heat for 5 minutes until soft. Increase heat to high, then deglaze pan with champagne and cook over medium heat until wine has reduced by half. Sprinkle in flour and whisk to combine then add stock and bring to simmer. Add chicken, herbs and preserved lemon and combine, then cook 4-5 minutes. Add verjuice and simmer another 2-3 minutes. Remove chicken from heat, then add grapes and leave mixture to cool completely.

Sour cream pastry
250g plain flour
200g chilled unsalted butter
120ml sour cream

Process flour and butter in food processor until it resembles fine bread crumbs. Gradually add two thirds of the sour cream then enough of the remaining sour cream to help pastry come together to form a ball. Refrigerate at least 20 minutes.

Cut in 2 and roll each piece to 3mm thickness. Line pie tin with one piece. Spoon cooled chicken mixture into pie and top with remaining rolled pastry. Brush with lightly beaten egg. Place pie in fridge to chill before baking for 30 minutes in preheated 220 degree oven.

Baked apples
(Recipe below is for 4)

50g unsalted butter
1/3 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons roughly chopped almonds
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
4 clusters dried muscatels
4 granny smith apples
2-4 tablespoons verjuice

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Process butter, sugar, almonds, cinnamon, lemon zest and half muscatels in a food processor until well blended. Transfer to a bowl and stir in remaining muscatels.

Use an apple corer to remove apple cores and create a cavity but don’t push through to base of apples. Use a teaspoon to scoop out any remaining cores and to create a good sized cavity for stuffing. Divide butter mixture between apples then place in baking dish. Pour verjuice over apples then bake 1 hour or until apples are soft. Serve with cream.

Dragged kicking and tweeting into the technolgy age

2009-05-11T04:36:00.000-07:00

Two years ago I was one of the 34 people in the world who didn’t have a mobile phone. It was partly a social experiment to see how long I could go without one and partly because I am not that interested (or proficient) in technology.

I’ve come a long way in 2 years. Now I can adjust the settings on my mobile phone, I can blog, I can facebook, I can zip music, I have even stored my mobile phone contacts on a website in case I ever lose my phone. But the frustrating thing about technology for me is that just as I pat myself on the back for having mastered a device or application, something new comes along which seems to change (confuse) everything again.

Enter twitter. A bit like email, but not, a bit like texting, but not, a bit like blogging but not, a bit like instant messaging, but not. So what is it and what is the point? I can’t really tell yet but I have been persuaded to try it out.

About a month ago my technology embracing sister and brother registered Lantana cafe on twitter, printed a sign to display at the café, and sat me down for a lesson:

I can tweet about anything as long as it is less than 140 characters.

Following isn't stalking.

I can follow anyone and anyone can follow me.

If someone does follow me it is polite to thank them and follow them back.

I have to beware of twitter spammers ‘twammers’ who follow everyone. I don’t need to thank them or follow them- in fact I should block twammers so that they can't follow me.

I nodded and promised to try and get excited about twitter.

Since then I have felt the weight of expectation descend on me every time I am alerted via email that ‘x is now following you’ on twitter. I need to justify their decision to follow me. I need to tweet about something.

The only thing that will make me tweet more is if I start identifying as a tweeter and put myself out there in the tweeting community. So on Saturday I took the sign that has been sitting on my desk and stuck it up on the coffee machine for all to see.

right alongside Doonesbury's Roland Hedley who has set the tweeting benchmark high.

Cocktail hour at Lantana

2009-04-27T13:32:00.000-07:00

All those thirsty people in Fitzrovia, including me, who don't want to sit on the footpath outside the rammed pubs on a summer evening will be pleased to hear that Lantana is now keeping its doors open until 9pm on Thursday and Fridays for drinks and bar food.

When I said to Megan, our new the sous chef, that I wanted her to create a supper menu for the evenings and suggested small tasting plates with olives, dips and terrines she told me that terrines are her thing. Really? Yes really. Terrines and pyrotechnics. An unusual combination of interests you may be thinking but wait until you taste Megan's terrines, they really are the bomb.

Megan's chicken, mushroom, cranberry and pistachio terrine.

A Busman's holiday

2009-04-17T13:36:00.000-07:00

A friend recently said to me that he hoped my time off over the Easter weekend wasn’t too much of a busman’s holiday.

It wasn't a phrase I’d heard before but was told it means doing on your days off what you do at work eg. someone who drives a bus for a living spending their holiday travelling somewhere on a bus.

As someone who spends their working day with food, cooking on my days off might seem like a busman’s holiday, but for me it feels like a real holiday. Since I've opened the café, I very rarely have time to cook any more so when I do, I get very excited. I bet bus drivers get excited about going on bus trips too.

Thought I’d share a few snaps from the holiday album.

Fish pie
Serves 4

800g mixture of skinless white fish fillet, skinless smoked haddock fillet, skinless salmon fillet
500ml milk
good dash of white wine
1 onion roughly chopped
4 cloves
2 bay leaves
1 tablespoon English mustard
1 tablespoon Worstershire sauce
small bunch flat leaf parsley
50g butter
50g plain flour
1kg floury potatoes peeled cooked and mashed

Put 500ml of the milk, dash of wine, chopped onion, cloves and bay leaves in a large frypan with the fish. Bring the milk just to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer until fish is just cooked- around 5- 8 mins. Lift the fish onto a plate and strain the milk into a jug to cool. Flake the fish into large pieces.

To make the white sauce, melt the butter in a pan, stir in the flour and cook for 1 min over moderate heat. Gradually add the poaching liquid, stirring well until it has all been added and you have a smooth sauce. Bring to the boil and cook for 10 mins, stirring continually, until it coats the back of a spoon. Remove from the heat, stir in the mustard and Worstershire sauce and season with salt and pepper. Leave to cool.

Gently fold the cooked fish and the parsley into the sauce and spoon into a large pie dish. Mix 50g of butter into mashed potato, season and add enough of the remaining milk so that the mash is quite soft. Spoon mash over top of fish and then grate a bit of parmesan cheese on top.

Bake in 180C oven for 30 minutes until top is golden.

Pear tarte tartin
Serves 8

8 beurre bosc pears
80 grams unsalted butter
150grams brown sugar plus 2 extra tablespoons
juice of 2 limes

Peel, halve and core the pears. Slice pear halves keeping each half connected at the stalk. Melt the butter in a large 28cm non-stick and oven proof fry pan and sprinkle the sugar on top. Place the pear halves (flat side up) on top of the sugar, packing tightly as the fruit will shrink as it cooks. Sprinkle the juice of the limes and the brown sugar over the mixture and cook on low heat until most of the liquid has evaporated and the syrup is deep golden brown. Depending on the ripeness of the pears this can take a couple of hours. Allow to cool.

Roll out the pastry to fit the frypan with a 2cm overhang, and lay the pastry over the cool fruit mixture. Tuck the pastry edges down around the fruit and bake at 220C for 35 minutes, or until golden brown. Remove from the oven and allow to stop bubbling then invert over a large plate.

Duck legs braised in red wine with caramelised eschalots
Serves 4

1/2 onion roughly chopped
1 carrot roughly chopped
1 celery stalk roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic roughly chopped
1 cup red wine (pinot or grenache)
150ml port
zest and juice 2 oranges
2 bay leaves
4 duck legs (attached to thigh)
1 tbls olive oil
1 cup chicken stock
1 tablespoon red currant jelly
8 eschalots peeled
20g unsalted butter
1 tbls caster sugar

Place onion, carrot, celery and garlic in heavy based saucepan with wine, port, orange zest and juice and bay leaves. Bring to the biol, then remove from heat and set aside to cool. Pour over duck legs in a bowl and leave in fridge overnight.

Preheat oven to 150C. Drain duck legs. Reserve marinade and vegetables. Pat duck dry. Heat oil in large oven proof frypan- fry legs until golden. Remove duck and drain all but 1 tablespoon of oil from pan.

Place reserved vegetables in fry pan and cook 5-10minutes until golden. Add reserved marinade and stock and bring to the boil. Add duck legs and cover with round piece of baking paper then cover with lid or foil. Place in oven and cook for 2 hours until duck is tender. Remove from pan and strain cooking liquid through a sieve into saucepan. Place liquid over medium heat and simmer until mixture has reduced to a thick sauce. Add redcurrant jelly to taste.
Cook eschalots in saucepan of salted water over medium heat until tender. Drain and pat dry. Heat butter in saucepan, add eschalots and swirl to coat in butter. Sprinkle with sugar and cook 3-5 minutes until golden. Serve with the duck and sweet potato mash.

Rhubarb tart
Serves 8

500g shortcrust pastry
1kg rhubarb
200g caster sugar
250ml creme fraiche
125ml double cream
3 egg yolks

Trim rhubarb, cut across the stalks into 1cm slices. Mix the rhubarb with 150g of the sugar and leave at room temperature for a couple of hours.

Roll out the pastry to 5mm thickness and line a 25cm pie dish or loose bottomed tart tin. Let the surplus pastry hang over the edges. Prick the pastry case with a fork and leave to rest in the fridge or freezer for at least an hour.

Preheat oven to 170C and blind bake the pastry case (line the case with baking paper and fill with uncooked rice, chickpeas etc and bake for 20 minutes. Remove the paper, brush the case with an egg wash and bake a further 5 minutes)

Tip rhubarb into a sieve and let the liquid drain, pressing the rhubarb with your hands to extract as much moisture as possible.

Increase oven to 180C. Trim surplus pastry from edges of tart. Mix remaining filling ingredients together with the remaining 50g of caster sugar. Pile the rhubarb in the cooked tart case and pour in the filling. Bake for 20-25 minutes until the filling is just set.

Frequently asked questions #1. What is the difference between a latte and a flat white?

2009-04-05T03:58:00.000-07:00

The answer will depend on who you ask but if you ask me, and customers frequently do, a latte, flat white, café au lait, café con leche, etc etc are essentially the same drink in different languages and on different continents: espresso coffee with hot milk.

The difference really comes down to what they are served in and the person making the coffee. At Lantana, flat whites are served in ceramic cups and lattes in tumbler glasses. Both have two shots of coffee but we make the latte on a shorter double shot (a ristretto) which means flat whites are stronger, and, as the name suggests, are made with less foam than a latte. If you want to get a more technical answer from people who know what they are talking about look at toomuchcoffee.

Tim Dunn (ex proprietor of Pushka in Melbourne and now barista in residence at Lantana) shows the difference between Lantana's lattes

and flat whites

Milestones

2009-03-29T00:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Lantana turned 6 months old.

In our opening week, someone who had run a couple of restaurants told me that the next 6 months would be the weirdest time of my life.

Although I don’t have first hand knowledge of having a baby, I sense that starting a new business is a bit like being a first time mother. All the books you read and the advice you receive can’t prepare you for the actual experience of the birth and the first few months of their life; the emotional highs and lows, the physical exhaustion, the heightened sensitivity to any criticism or suggestion that you are doing things wrong or are a bad mother, the reluctance to leave your baby in anyone else’s care and the remnants of food and milk that you constantly find on your clothes.

Looking at Lantana on Saturday morning, I felt incredibly pleased and relieved that we have reached a milestone and survived the first six months.

The cafe is a living, breathing reality which no longer has the fragility and vulnerability of a new born, and I have much more confidence in what I am doing.

Now I need to find that man again to ask him, what happens after 6 months?

According to this parenting guide, "separation and stranger anxiety may begin". Begin?

Loyalty has its rewards

2009-03-22T00:08:00.000-07:00

For six months I have resisted doing a ‘loyalty card’ because it felt too gimmicky. My argument has been that people will keep returning to Lantana if we do what we do well. I am loyal to cafes that I like and won’t keep going to a place that serves crap coffee just because they stamp a little card and promise to give me some of their crap coffee for free on my tenth visit.

But I realise that loyalty cards are also a way to say thankyou to the customers who walk past all the other places serving takeaway coffee and return to Lantana because they like what we do.

So here it is, the Lantana stamp book: a collectors item.

Every time you buy a hot drink to takeaway, you can collect a stamp. The more stamps you collect, the better the reward.

Collect 8 stamps for a takeaway coffee

Collect 12 stamps for a glass of prosecco

Collect 16 stamps for an eat-in breakfast of your choice.

Corn fritters with crispy bacon, slow roast tomatoes, rocket and aioli

Our first loyalty card recipient is already halfway to a free coffee- doing the office coffee run also has its rewards.

Familiarity breeds contentment

2009-03-15T11:36:00.000-07:00

In my previous workplace I sat in an open plan office with the same people day in and day out for many years. We could spend hours deconstructing a film we had seen or discussing the significance of being a middle child as opposed to a youngest or eldest child (policy advisors like to practise their analytical thinking). I came to know those people almost better than I knew my siblings. Now, I see loads of different faces every day and the conversations we have are fleeting and rarely more meaningful than ‘do you take sugar’ or ‘would you like a bag for that’? I share my workspace with customers who don’t have names or personalities to me.

Over the weeks and months I’ve started to see the same faces returning again and again. I now remember what they have each day – middle aged American man has poached eggs on toast and a single espresso, the Australian girl with the quirky brooches has a small decaf flat white to takeaway, the English man with the leather jacket has porridge and a long black and the tall woman with the fur coat and straight fringe has a large skinny latte.

Most of the time that’s all I learn about them, but sometimes we start to engage and I discover that the large flat white is called Tom and is expecting his first baby and the double chocolate brownie is Ann who has a just been made redundant. The customer becomes a name with a personality.

One of my favourite regulars is a Spanish man with a large collection of scarves who has a latte with two sugars and a small orange juice.

Over the course of his daily visits the ‘latte and orange juice’ has become Alberto, co-founder of Webjam, digital artist, musician, surfer and admirer of brutalist architecture.

Alberto with his business partner, and another Lantana regular, Marcus

Alberto told me he was first drawn to Lantana because he heard we were using Monmouth coffee which he used to drink all the time when he lived near the Monmouth coffee store at Borough Market. He says that once he finds somewhere he likes he goes there again and again because it makes the city feel smaller; ‘to feel the warmth of people who recognise you, know your name and know what coffee you drink’.

Touche. It’s the small gestures of friendliness and familiarity from regulars (like Alberto letting me know that my blog had been named by Timeout as one of London's best food blogs) that make me feel that I also have a personality and am not just a nameless face behind a counter serving coffee. Maybe this is important to me because I’m a youngest child…

Coffee out

2009-03-01T08:01:00.000-08:00

After spending Mondays to Saturdays serving people in the café, on Sundays I get immense pleasure from sitting in someone else’s café, reading the paper and drinking coffee. It really doesn’t take much to make me happy.

Unfortunately, it also doesn’t take much to send me into a blind rage. Bad coffee will do it.

I have discovered through bitter, and watery, experience that there can be no accidental good coffee finds in London. You need to know where you are going as the odds of walking into a random café and finding decent coffee are about 16 (listed below) in 1000.

The other weekend I was heading to the Tate Britain in Pimlico and wanted to stop somewhere en-cycle for my Sunday ritual. I sat at the computer googling ‘good coffee’ and the names of the areas I would pass through but after about half an hour decided to chance the coffee at the Tate Britain rather than waste the entire morning at home.

The café at the top of the Tate Modern actually does decent coffee – in a pretty amazing setting.
At the Tate Britain on the other side of the Thames, the café and the espresso bar are in the bowels of the building with no views to distract you. Straight away I knew my coffee was going to be a huge disappointment as I saw the disinterested, grumpy man behind the coffee machine ignoring the most basic coffee making rules - not wiping the basket clean of the old grinds, not tamping properly, not flushing between shots, scalding the milk…

My anger (why hadn’t someone taught this guy how to make coffee) and frustration (I was now dying for a coffee with no alternatives nearby) grew as I waited in the queue, desperately wanting to give him some tips before he made my coffee but knowing that I couldn’t as it would make me the most annoying person on the planet.

So instead I stood there quietly and seethed on the inside, hoping that by some miracle he would fluke a good coffee. Unfortunately this book could be judged by the cover: frothy over heated milk covering watery coffee. The final insult is that they charge £2.5 for the disappointment.

What I need, what London needs, is a map of all the places where you can get good coffee – something along the lines of Breakfastout, a website which lists only the best places for breakfast/brunch in Melbourne and Sydney.

I have developed a mental map of where to go for coffee but London is a big city and this list leaves a lot of soil unchartered, for instance, the Pimlico area.

My coffee out list so far:

Barbican: Dose Espresso
Bloomsbury: Bea’s of Bloomsbury, London Review of Books
Borough Market: Monmouth
Broadway Market: Climpson and Sons
Covent Garden: Monmouth
Fitzrovia: LANTANA
Marylebone: The Providores
Nottinghill: Coffee Plant, The Electric (both are a bit hit and miss these days)
Soho: flat white, Milkbar, Fernandez and Wells
Spitalfields: Taylor St Baristas, Nude Espresso, Market Coffee House

Does anyone know of other places doing good coffee in London?

Thanks Charmaine for letting me know that such a list already exists. Nice work.

You’re terrible Muriel

2009-02-20T13:33:00.000-08:00

But you mural, you’re lovely.

When a friend suggested that his sister draw a mural for one of the walls of the café I tried to look interested and force a smile as I imagined scenes of rain forests, leaping dolphins, palm trees and sunsets.

Then I saw some of his sister's beautiful and stylish illustrations and realised that her mural would have little in common with Muriel Hesslop from Porpoise spit.

Kat Macleod is the talented Melbourne artist who created the whimsical scene on the back wall of the cafe. It makes me feel happy every time I look at it as I'm transported into the serene, lush landscape that Kat has created. The first time I saw it I could almost hear the sound of crickets and feel the Australian humidity.

My favourite seat in the café is the corner nook where I can sit by myself under the skylight, unnoticed amongst the foliage.

It seems strange that someone I have never met and who has never even been to Lantana is such an integral part of the café. Hopefully one day Kat and I will have a face to face conversation over breakfast at Lantana, but until then we’ll have to settle for a cyber conversation over the keyboard.

Have you always wanted to be an illustrator?

Kat: I have loved drawing for as long as I can remember, and probably wanted to be an illustrator as soon as I knew what one was. I always wanted to be a graphic designer too, which is cool because now I do both! I co-run a graphic design company called Ortolan with my two business partners Chloe Quigley and Simone Elder. And we are very proud to have designed the identity and graphics for Lantana. It was a very fun job, and so nice to work on both the graphic design components and the illustration.

Which artists do you most admire?

Kat: I have so many favourites. My top three are Julie Verhoeven, Rene Gruau and Aubrey Beardsley. I love them because they are masters at drawing the human form, and have their own beautiful and inimitable styles.

What was your inspiration for the Lantana mural?

Kat: We loved when you told us that your cafe was going to be called Lantana, named after the striking, noxious weed which is a pest in the Australian countryside. I wanted to illustrate the beautiful invasive plant growing wild like they do in Aussie back-yards, giving a sense of taking over the cafe, but in a beautiful way. We thought the super-scale would work really well, and I included lots of details so that when you walk downstairs you discover a wonderful detailed weedy-world full of gigantic birds, beetles crawling among the foliage. My favourite part is the giant magpie peeking out the stairs.

Was it an enjoyable project to work on?

Kat: Yes! I had so much fun researching all kinds of Australian flora and fauna, and I loved working in the all-black palette. I used fineliners, ink, gouache and black watercolour to create the piece. The original drawing is very big, it’s made of two large poster-sheets, it took over two desks in the studio. It had to be scanned on a flat bed scanner in many seperate parts, and pieced together at full resolution in Photoshop. The final product on the wall instore is about ten times the size of the original.

The mural gets pieced together in London

What is your favourite cafe?

Kat: We are spoiled for choice in Melbourne. There are so many interesting, eclectic cafes with great food and friendly staff, especially on the North-side of the river which is where we live. I have so many favourite places, but the best would have to be The Breakfast Club in Northcote. All their dishes are named after characters and actors from the movie. The food is amazing. Some other favourite local places include Julio’s in North Fitzroy, A Minor Place in Brunswick, and Mixed Business in Clifton Hill. They all make amazing food and excellent coffee, and are very interesting places with lots of personality.

What is your favourite breakfast?

Kat: On the weekend I love any kind of interesting vegetarian breakfast concoction, and a soy latte. During the week I am boring and just get a take away soy latte on the run from Tre Bicchieri in Carlton. They make great breakfasts too but there’s no time to stop and eat because I am usually running late for work.

Some of the other customers at Tre Bicchierri who are clearly not rushing to get to work.

More on Kat Macleod...

The face of adversity

2009-02-08T13:56:00.000-08:00

Monday the 2nd of February 2009 will be remembered by me as the day that 'adverse weather conditions' became the latest weasle words to be accepted into the vernacular as have ‘the war on terror’, ‘credit crunch’, and ‘the journey’ that every X-Factor contestant blubs about.

6.30am Monday morning Lisa, Lantana’s head chef, rang me tell me that she didn’t think it would be worth opening as no one could get to work. I opened the curtains and was amazed by the whiteness and the silence. Snow everywhere and not a car or bus on the road.

I thought I should still go into Lantana for a couple of hours to catchup on some paperwork so I went on to the Transport for London website to see what public transport was running. I smiled when I read that no buses were running and many tube lines were suspended due to “adverse weather conditions”. I love obtuse government speak. But as I proceeded on my journey to the café (a physical one, not a metaphorical one), I discovered that this expression had gained widespread adoption as the new word for snow. Shops displayed signs saying they were shut “due to adverse weather conditions”, every five minutes an announcement was made in tube stations about delays caused by “the adverse weather conditions” and the next day the newspapers told of school closures, losses to small businesses and numbers of people unable to get to work due to the “adverse weather conditions”.

I didn’t get to do any paperwork or play in the snow because I ended up making coffee for a steady stream of regulars who came into Lantana throughout the day. So for me, the best part about the adverse weather conditions is that it gave everyone an opportunity to talk and read about something other than the ‘global financial crisis’.

To the victor go the spoils...

2009-02-01T13:49:00.000-08:00

of toasted banana bread with date and pecan butter.

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Jenny won Lantana’s mintie competition.

The entries
The judging
The longest mintie wrapper in London

The other entrants may take some consolation in knowing that this is not the first time that Jenny has taken first prize in a mintie wrapper tearing competition. At primary school Jenny won a packet of musk sticks for creating the longest unbroken mintie wrapper chain. She claims that her breakfast of choice at Lantana was a much better first prize. Note, champions eat bananas, not pancakes or fried eggs and bacon.

Going the full mintie on Australia Day

2009-01-25T09:18:00.000-08:00

Step 1. Unwrap a mintie

Step 2. Eat the mintie

Step 3. While sucking on the mintie, tear its wrapper into a long unbroken strip

Tomorrow, lucky customers (and everyone is lucky at Lantana) will get a mintie. The person who produces the longest unbroken chain from their mintie wrapper will:

1. Have a long piece of paper

2. Have some explaining to do as to why they were away from the office for so long getting a coffee

3. Win a free breakfast at Lantana!

In with the new

2009-01-11T12:50:00.000-08:00

New table
New customers

New menu

New Zealander

aka Geoff [Jiff]. But we love him anyway.

The good and the greater pub guide

2009-01-03T10:04:00.000-08:00

My grandmother used to tell me that pleasures are often greatest in anticipation.

Take the welcoming sign of a country pub as you walk towards it on a cold winter’s day after a long muddy walk.

You close your eyes and can almost taste that first sip of bitter sweet ale as you settle in beside a warm, crackling open fire. Then you walk inside to an empty, soulless pub, hear Phil Collins playing on the radio, see a bar heater sitting in the fireplace and are offered Fosters and Becks on tap.

Anticipation > Pleasure.

On rare occasions, however, you walk through the door of the pub and the fire is blazing, you are met by a wall of laughter and lively conversation, offered a choice of local ales and are allowed, even encouraged, to order pudding and another bottle of wine long after the kitchen has closed and last orders have been called.

Anticipation ≤ Pleasure.

That is a very great thing indeed and was how I spent new year's day 2009; tucked inside the Compasses Inn at Lower Chicksgrove, Wiltshire .

According to the Good Pub Guide 2008 the acid test for a good pub is that it has some special quality that would make strangers enjoy visiting it. That might be “good value food”, “out of the ordinary drinks”, “lovely surroundings” or “extraordinary collections of bric-a-brac”. Above all, the Guide informs:

What makes the good pub is its atmosphere. You should be able to feel at home there, and feel not just that you’re glad you’ve come but they’re glad you’ve come. It follows from this that a great many ordinary locals, perfectly good in their own right, don’t earn a place in the Guide. What makes them attractive to their regular customers (an almost clubby chumminess) may even make strangers feel rather out of place.

I'm after something better than just good. I want to discover those rare pubs that provide greater pleasure than I could possibly anticipate.

After a week of field research I have begun devising an acid test for the Greater Pub Guide 2009. I would be very interested to learn about any pubs that have all of the following indicators of greatness:

A fireplace

Local ales on tap

A characterful publican

Friendly staff

A local permanently perched at the bar

A varied clientele covering a range of social demographics and ages

Good, hearty food inspired by the local produce

...preferably including some intriguing British pub classics eg. steak and kidney stew in Yorkshire pudding

And most importantly, a passion or theme of some sort displayed in the furnishings and décorations.

Farming tools at The Horseshoe Inn, Ebbesbourne Wake, Salisbury, Wiltshire

Photographs of transport at the Three Horseshoes, Burbage, Marlborough, Wiltshire

Hunting at The Museum Inn, in Farnham, Dorset.

Here’s to 2009 being the year of discovering greatness in all its pleasurable forms.

Lantana is on Holiday

2008-12-23T14:04:00.000-08:00

Reopening 8am Monday 5 January

Until then, be nice to your family, remember to hydrate and make a resolution to have lots of good food and coffee at Lantana in 2009.

I was going to post a photo of this sign I put on the door of Lantana tonight but as I went to take the photo my camera said "change battery pack" so I tried to take one with my phone but it said "memory card full".

Yes indeed.

This customer is a cut above

2008-12-21T11:48:00.000-08:00

Since opening our doors three months ago, Lantana has built up a small band of regulars who incorporate us into their daily routine.

One of these regulars is Steven, an Australian hairdresser from Sydney who is the manager of a hairdressing salon around the corner from Lantana which, I was delighted to discover, is called Clipso; upholding the great tradition of bad punnery which hairdressing salons (and bloggers) are renowned for.

Steven comes in on his way to work each day for a takeaway flat white and a porridge topped with toasted muesli, maple syrup and hot milk.

If he can manage to get away from the salon during the day, he returns to feed his three coffee a day habit and usually polishes off a friand or piece of banana bread as he stands chatting to us at the counter.

I didn’t realise until recently that its actually Steven I have to thank for finding the site for Lantana on Charlotte Place. Steven has lived in London for 7 years and, like many Australians, lamented the scarcity of good coffee and cafes. He says he used to walk down Charlotte Place on his way to work and "visualise a cool, quirky Australian type café” which served great food and not “shitty toasted sandwiches”. Voila! Lantana opened. That is some powerful positive visualisation.

Steven, you'll always have a special place in our heart at Lantana - a friand in need is a friand indeed.

Not blagging, baking. Honest gov’nor.

2008-12-15T11:58:00.000-08:00

The other night I had a dream that two uniformed policemen came to the café to question me about my blag. "Do you mean my blog", I asked? "No, it’s your blag we are interested in. We’ve heard from various sources that you’re a blagger".

I kept insisting that I have been blogging, not blagging, but they wouldn’t believe me and as they threatened to close down the café I awoke in a sweat. True story. What is my subconscious trying to tell me?

This week there is to be no blagging, barely any blogging, just a bit of baking: a less offensive use of hot air.

Orange and Cranberry Torte (serves 10)
From the December 2008 issue of delicious. (Thanks for the magazine freebies and this damn fine recipe which is definitely going to become part of my repetoire).

350g ground almonds
350g castor sugar
3 teaspoons cinnamon
3 teaspoons baking powder
8 large free range eggs lightly beaten
400ml sunflower oil
Finely grated zest of 1 lemon and 2 oranges
200g dried cranberries
3 cloves

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C

In a bowl, combine ground almonds, 300g of castor sugar, 2 teaspoons of cinnamon and the baking powder. Make a well in the centre and add the eggs and oil. Mix together then add the dried cranberries and zest. Combine.

Pour into greased and lined springform cake tin and bake for 50 minutes to an hour- until skewer comes out clean.

Meanwhile gently heat the citrus juices in a pan with the remaining 50g sugar, cloves and remaining cinnamon until sugar dissolves. Increase heat an simmer for 3 minutes.
Remove cake from oven an pierce a few times with a skewer. Drizzle cake with the syrup and leave for an hour to soak in. Transfer cake to wire rack and decorate with extra cranberries.

I have a dream

2008-12-07T02:44:00.000-08:00

"Australian proprietress Shelagh Ryan is determined to make London a better place by serving quality, no-nonsense food and proper coffees to the people.”

Well its not world peace, but it’s something. This week Lantana was featured in Timeout as one of the best places in London for coffee, thanks, in part, to the ‘coffee super-couple’ of Monmouth coffee and our La Marzocco espresso machine.

But while ‘LaMouth’ receive most of the attention and the accolades, they would be nothing without their team of personal assistants, otherwise known as baristas: Rachel Mary, Geoff, and Kirbie (who is currently on tour).

The barista supercouple; RM and Geoff.

RM throwing some shapes on the coffee machine...and on the coffee.

I am honoured that Lantana has been recognised for its good deeds towards coffee; helping to make the world a safer place for coffee drinkers.

According to RM and Geoff, the top five crimes against coffee committed throughout the developed world are: screaming milk, syrups, bucket cups, mugachinos and towers of froth.

And crimes against baristas? RM cited a customer who ordered a half caf / half decaf semi skim cap with soy froth. Thankfully not a Lantana customer.

Geoff, RM and Kirbie, thankyou for ensuring that I never have to go far for a fantastic coffee.

T is for team

2008-11-30T08:08:00.000-08:00

It has been nine weeks since opening and having received some really positive reviews, especially about the food, I have a humbling admission to make to myself. There is no ‘I’ in LanTana.

While I may be the chirpy proprietor steering the ship, below deck there is a formidable team beavering away in the kitchen and propelling us forward.

All of the awesome food we serve at our stunning café, from the properly scrambled eggs, the super salads and sunny breakfasts offerings, to the irresistible home baking is made at Lantana by a small dedicated team who arrive in the dark early hours of the morning and leave in the dark hours of the late afternoon, rarely surfacing from the basement kitchen to see daylight.

There’s Lisa, our calm, unflappable head chef from Newcastle Australia who handles a squeeze bottle like a sheriff handles a pistol;

Pete, our sous chef, who left the poorly paid, shallow world of advertising to pursue a more glamorous life as a chef, knowing he looked his best in white;

Slimane, our multilingual French Moroccan kitchen assistant who never loses his cool or his sense of humour, no matter how high the dirty dishes stack;

and Becky our part time chef, who is to vegetables what Gok Wan is to women- the makeover queen.
They spend their days sating the appetites of people they don’t know and rarely even see, so if they could have any meal prepared for them, what would it be and who would they want it prepared by?

For Lisa it’s a Lebanese feast with homemade chapattis, tabouleh, hummus and kibbeh made by her flatmate Candy. Pete requested roast swan or peacock prepared (posthumously) by Auguste Escoffier the grand-pere of French cuisine. Slimane misses the cous cous that only his mother can make, and Becky wants to re-experience the 14 course vegetarian dinner she had in a 12 seater restaurant in Japan, made by a chef called Mr Michi.

For me, it would be roast chicken made by my dad....but this is not about me.

Lisa, Pete, Becky and Slimane, thank you - from the bottom of my stomach.

Everybody loves Lucy

2008-11-23T06:56:00.000-08:00

When Lantana was still a building site and I was surrounded by debris, dust and builders I would often look up to see a curious pair of eyes peering through the glass front door. That was how I met Lucy, oldest resident, matriarch and unofficial Mayor of Charlotte Place.

Lucy and her husband Dave moved into their small first floor flat above what is now Lantana in 1950 when rent was 7 shillings and sixpence.

I imagine it was a very different looking street in the 1950s than it is today.

Dave was the morning postman for 34 years, starting on a wage of £5 a week, and together they raised four children with no bathroom and only one bedroom to share between the six of them. Their children and grandchildren have now scattered across the globe to New Zealand, Sweden, Australia and Switzerland but Dave and Lucy have always been happy in Charlotte Place and say they will never leave, despite still having to walk down the street to a neighbour's to have a shower.

True to her Irish roots, Lucy is utterly charming and has the gift of the gab. I used to look forward to her daily visits when she would tell me about the various residents and businesses in Charlotte Place and see how our building works were progressing. Lucy’s oft repeated phrase, which did little to assuage my own concerns was, ‘You’re spending a lot of money dear, I do hope you do well’.

Everyone in the neighbourhood knows and loves Lucy. At lunch time she can be seen taking a stroll along the street, chatting to her subjects, receiving kisses and settling any disputes.

When one of the neighbours stopped to complain about my sign being too far out on the pavement, Lucy had a quiet word to her and the woman was on her way.

Once we were up and running I managed to convince Lucy to take me up on my offer of afternoon tea at Lantana. She came with Veronica, who has also lived in Charlotte Place for over 30 years, and after dismissing my suggestion of tea, ordered lattes and tried our banana bread which Lucy had never heard of ; “I’m a daft ol buggar”.

They were soon chatting to customers at the tables either side and told them that they were going to try to find me a husband- one with some money as "You don't want a husband with empty pockets".

I think Lucy’s a lucky ol buggar to be so well loved and content at the age of 84.

Today we're feeling...

2008-11-16T09:40:00.001-08:00

Last week I had a phone call from the marketing department of Timeout Magazine to tell me the exciting news that Lantana is to be included in their Cheap Eats Special.

First thing on Wednesday morning I was at the newsagent to pick up a copy of Timeout, eager to read what they had written about the cafe.

While I don’t want to sound ungrateful for any free publicity, I admit, my brow did furrow and heart sank a little when I read the opening sentence: "This new Antipodean-style eatery is run by chirpy proprietor Shelagh Ryan."

Chirpy? Clowns are chirpy. Couldn’t I have been described as charming, charismatic or even good humoured? Chirpy just sounds annoying.

I thought I may have misunderstood the meaning so I looked up the definition of ‘chirpy’ and my heart sank further as I read some of the useage examples.

"He's driving me mad, he's so chirpy and chatty I want to kill him".

"Reese Witherspoon came on set about noon and seemed chirpy".

Suspicions confirmed. Chirpy people are annoying.

So if I seem a little mysterious and aloof when you next come to Lantana, don’t take it personally, I’m hoping its not too late to re-invent myself.

Soup cup alley

2008-11-09T13:46:00.000-08:00

In an effort to let people know that we are not just an eat-in cafe but also do takeaway food and coffee I came up with the ingenious plan of setting up a soup urn with sandwiches and tarts on the outside table at lunchtime. The day before I planned to start the outside sales, I discovered that the butcher shop next door had the same bright idea and had also set up a soup urn in front of their shop.

I consulted with Simon, one of the owners of Blackfoot Butchers, and we agreed that this alley was big enough for two soup urns and that together we could make soup in Charlotte Place what music is to Tin Pan Alley.

Feeling slightly like amateurs trying to sell lemonade, Ulrika waits patiently for the punters to start queuing...

which the English are famed for.

Unfortunately this queue is for the burrito shop opposite us and our queue was a little more modest,

but appreciated.

Americans get the vote

2008-11-02T10:15:00.001-08:00

On Wednesday the 5th of November we will wake to news of the American election results. Whatever your nationality or political affiliation, it has been hard not to become engaged in what has become one of the more compelling US soap operas with guest stars such as Bristol Palin and Joe the Plumber stealing the show.

My involvement has been largely through watching The Daily Show which, I suspect, has given me a slightly skewed perspective on the presidential candidates.

Whoever the American people choose as our President of the United States, Lantana will be celebrating the end of one of the longest running election campaigns with a £12 breakfast special for both the winners:

Prosseco with ricotta pancakes, crispy bacon and maple syrup

and the losers;

Bloody Mary with ricotta pancakes, crispy bacon and maple syrup

(Vegetarians can have poached fruit with their pancakes but that would be very unAmerican).

Come and join us.

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter". Winston Churchill.

The city that sleeps

2008-10-26T11:18:00.000-07:00

For a city as crowded, fast-paced and intense as London, early mornings are almost eerily quiet and still.

I love being up at this time of the day, cycling to the café along near empty streets, hearing sounds other than sirens and buses, watching the city slowly come to life as it prepares for the thousands of workers, shoppers and tourists who pour into it each day.

The most glorious morning is Sunday - when the city wakes without me.

God's waiting room

2008-10-19T12:48:00.000-07:00

Last Monday one of our regulars came in for a late breakfast. “How is your day going?” I asked. “Well I’ve just been reading your latest rant about British food on your blog. Seems I’m to blame.”

Oops. If this Australian has offended it is without malice or intent. As Russell Davies so politely put it, I’m simply trying to understand “Britain's peculiar food culture”.

I have discovered that British peculiarities can also be lovely.

For the last few months I have been cycling past a curious green hut in the middle of Kensington Park Road in West London.

I could never work out what it was but assumed it was some sort of council shed used to store street cleaning equipment and road signs. It was when I was watching Marco Pierre White’s Great British Feast that I learned that it is in fact a café for cab drivers called a Cabman’s Shelter.

These huts were built in the 1800s with funding from philanthropists to enable cab drivers to park their cabs on the public highway and have a hot meal and a cup of tea without having to pay for parking or for someone to watch their cab. 13 of the 61 built are still operating as cafes but getting to see one in operation is no easy feat, especially if you are not a cab driver and therefore don’t have The Knowledge which presumably includes the locations and opening hours of these exclusive members’ clubs.

I am too early on my way to work, and there are no signs of life on my way home.

I asked one of the locals walking her dog one night whether she knew when I could find it open. “Sorry, I’m not a cab driver”. So next time I was in a cab I asked the driver but he said he didn't know anything about them either.

"I never go there. It’s really just for the old guys.”

"How do you manage to grab a meal while you are on duty?"

"I eat at The Wolseley. There’s a cab rank right outside".

Finally I got my timing right when I managed to get away from the café just before lunchtime and was allowed a glimpse into the secret world of the cabman’s shelter on Russell Square .

What I saw was one of the finest displays of camaraderie around a shared table that I have seen.

8 cab drivers squeezed along narrow benches talking about the football, having a meal and a cup of tea and a rest from the chaos of London traffic. I got the impression that this was the highlight of their day - a ritual they have been following for years with familiar faces coming and going.

A sign that was erected after a period when the drivers were "dropping like flies".

Maureen, who has been cooking meals for the drivers in the tiny galley kitchen for 32 years, tells me that most of them order a fry up which costs £4.25 and comes with a cup of tea and two slices of white bread.

They were interested to hear about my café but when I told them that poached eggs on toast cost £5 they roared with laughter. “Time for prices to go up boys!” Maureen shouted.

I made a quick exit before I was lynched.

Every crunch has a silver lining

2008-10-12T14:22:00.000-07:00

There is nothing more soul destroying than watching people file past the café as they quickly make their way back to their offices holding a chain store coffee or sandwich.

If only they took the time to look at what they are walking past.

I never could understand why Britain, a country surrounded by such gastronomic meccas as Italy, Spain and France, managed to develop such a chain store food culture. It seems bizarre that anyone could find it acceptable, even preferable, to eat highly processed, pre packaged food and patronise bland formulaic food and coffee chains.

Chains exist in Australia too but they are largely confined to the lower end of the market, shopping malls and airports and are overshadowed by a multitude of independents that offer a better product and a unique experience.

A couple of months ago, on a grim, rainy Friday night I went to hear Carolyn Steel, architect, academic and author of the book Hungry City, talk about how the production and consumption of food has shaped London. As I listened to her talk, I wanted to leap out of my seat and hug her. Finally, someone was offering an explanation as to why chain stores are so dominant in Britain and why many people actually prefer processed and tinned food to fresh.

Steel argues that, unlike France and Italy where local food traditions and cooking are an integral part of life and fiercely protected if ever threatened (the opening of the first McDonald’s in Rome sparked a global Slow Food Movement), Britain underwent rapid mass urbanisation that severed British cooking from its roots. From very early on, the majority of the population became reliant on imported processed food and disconnected from the processes involved in food production.

Most urban dwellers have no knowledge, and no desire to know, where their food comes from: how it is reared, grown, slaughtered, harvested, transported, cooked, packaged and disposed of. It simply appears, as if by magic, on supermarket shelves and on restaurant plates. The legacy of this disconnected and industrialised food culture, Steel argues, is that “food is not valued or understood and is therefore open to abuse”.

You can see this as you walk down any high street.

Mass market supermarkets and restaurants are continually reinforcing the message that food is plentiful and cheap, consistent and quick, something to grab, reheat and eat, often alone. The impact that this fast and cheap food culture has on farmers, producers and the environment is conveniently ignored and invisible.

Could the credit crunch be what we need to make people reconnect with food? Eat less, eat local and put a higher value on what and how we eat. I heard on the radio this morning that growing vegetables at home and in allotments is becoming increasingly popular as people try to save money. With more and more people losing their jobs, maybe they’ll also have the time to sit down and share food at a table with friends.

It's for real

2008-10-05T12:23:00.000-07:00

“Are these all real people?” Geoff asked suspiciously as he arrived for his shift at 11.30 on Saturday morning. So far its been mainly friends and family coming to Lantana but on Saturday morning the café was nearly full of people that none of us knew. It was brilliant - especially considering that we were worried that Saturdays would be quiet without all the office workers around.

The locals came to try us out and, at the risk of this blog becoming a shameless PR tool, the feedback was incredibly positive. “Best breakfast I’ve ever eaten by a country mile”, was one customer’s verdict and the plates I took down to the kitchen were virtually licked clean.

I didn’t want scare off the customers by photographing them so I took some of the food on our counter instead.

Breakfast
Lunch

Desert

OK there were still a few family members lurking around.

The word is also starting to spread about our coffee which might have something to do with the fact that Lantana has become the latest hangout for the coffee super couple…

Here's looking up your address

2008-10-02T11:53:00.000-07:00

Sorry, it may help people to come and try Lantana if I tell you where it is.

13 Charlotte Place, W1T1SN

The full menu

2008-10-01T13:53:00.000-07:00

Breakfast 8-12 (All day Saturday)

Toasted muesli w banana, yoghurt and honey 4.5

Bircher muesli w apple and berries 4.5

Poached fruit w greek yoghurt + pistachios 4

Fresh fruit salad w mint and sweet ginger dressing 4.5

Toasted banana bread w date and pecan butter 4

Sourdough toast w vegemite or jam 2.5

Lantana baked beans w crumbled feta, sautéed spinach and sausages on sourdough toast 8.5

Field mushrooms sauteed w parsley and garlic served with
grated parmesan on sour dough toast 7.6

Pancakes w greek yoghurt and baked fruit 7

Poached eggs on toast 5

Scrambled eggs w smoked salmon on brioche w
fresh tomato salad 8

Corn fritters w crispy bacon, rocket, oven roasted tomatoes and
lime aioli 8

Baked eggs w buttered baby spinach and mushrooms served w tomato and red pepper chutney toasted sourdough 8

Sides
Bacon 2.4
Lantana baked beans 2
Slow roast tomatoes 2
HG Walter’s sausages 3
Sautéed spinach 2
Mushrooms 2

Lunch from 12pm

Open sandwich w bacon, rocket, sliced tomato, & fried egg w aioli 6.5

Corn fritters w layers of crisp bacon, rocket, oven roasted tomatoes, drizzled w roast garlic & lime aioli 8.5

Tart of the day served w choice of two salads from the counter 8

Salad plate of your choice of three from the counter 7.8

Steak sandwich w rocket, fresh tomato, caramelised onion relish and horseradish crème friache 8.5

Moroccan lamb skewers w flat bread and mint yoghurt served w bulgur, walnut, celery and pomegranate salad 8.7

Lemon & coriander infused chicken skewers served w served with salad from the salad bar and tomato and red pepper chutney 8.7

Sharing plate w bruschetta, olives, dips and prosciutto (for 2) 10

To Drink

Non-Alcoholic

Fresh orange juice
Virgin mary
Belu Still (750ml)
Belu Sparkling (750ml)
San Peligrino Limonato, Orangina
Bundaberg ginger beer

Alcoholic
Bloody Mary
Di Valdo bbiadene Proseco

Wine
St Roch grenache blanc
Bird in Hand sauvignon blanc
Camplazens rose
St Roch merlot
Bird in Hand shiraz

Beer
Coopers pale ale
Coopers sparkling ale
Menabrea

Coffee (extra shot 30p, Soy milk 50p)
Latte
Flatwhite
Capuccino
Long black
Mocha
Espresso
Machiatto
Hot Chocolate
Pot of Tea: English breakfast/Earl grey/Rooibos/Chai/Peppermint/Green

She's only gone and done it

2008-09-28T10:11:00.000-07:00

Open for business at last. Hurrah.

As I opened the door at 8am on Friday morning, our first customer walked in, ordered a coffee and poached eggs, sat down and read the paper in the morning sunshine. Brilliant. This is going to be easy.

Unfortunately our beginners luck didn’t continue and we had a very slow morning

Thankfully, a respectable amount of people came for lunch. A couple of them weren’t even related to me.

I had a strange feeling as I cycled home after our first day. It was similar to the feeling I used to get when I’d finish exams. Instead of feeling euphoric and relieved, I felt a bit lost and empty. Suddenly, the goal I have been working towards for so many months has been achieved. I’ve opened a café.

While part of me wants to curl into a little ball and sleep for a few months, I know that the hard part is ahead: getting people to know that we exist and understand what we are.

Here are a couple of the dine in items on the menu which have already been receiving rave reviews from the punters.

Home baked beans with feta, sautéed spinach and sausages on sourdough toast

Scrambled eggs w smoked salmon on brioche w fresh tomato salad

Corn fritters with layers of crisp bacon, rocket, oven roasted tomatoes, drizzled with roast garlic & lime aioli

Steak sandwich with rocket, fresh tomato, caramelised onion relish and horseradish crème friache

Moroccan lamb skewers with flat bread and mint yoghurt served with bulgur, walnut, celery and pomegranate salad

We also do fantastic salads, tarts, sandwiches, brownies, muffins etc for takeaway.

So come on peeps- come and try us out.

Race to the finish line

2008-09-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

Its all hands on the wallpaper as we hurtle towards opening THIS FRIDAY!

The enormity and excitement of what I am about to embark on really hit me tonight as I locked the door after an exhausting day of cleaning, prepping, crying, screaming and finally smiling as the "building site" began to look like a cafe.

Thank you to all the kind souls who have helped me and my lovely neighbours who have dropped by to wish me luck.

Naming rights

2008-09-17T11:15:00.000-07:00

Call me egotistical but I always assumed that if I went to all this effort in setting up a café, I’d be rewarded with naming rights as were Gustave Eiffel, Conrad Hilton and Donald Trump.

My business partners, however, had other ideas which is just as well as some other shelia with a sandwich bar beat me to it.

Instead, we are naming the café Lantana, a hardy, invasive, but beautiful weed that was introduced into Australia and has taken hold, becoming an iconic Australian plant - a “weed of national significance”.

The awning is up to announce that Lantana is now on British soil, ready to invade...in only a few days time.