Cocktail hour at Lantana

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.