Awana Malaysian Satay Bar - Awana Eat Somewhere Else

"Oh Dear!" I thought as I opened the wine list and saw that the cheapest bottle in the "monthly promotions" was £27. Then I looked at the next page and my eyes spotted the £480 Chateau Mouton Rothschild. Wow, I thought. This place must really be something to have a wine list where 80% of the bottles are over £50. Maybe I'm just out of touch since I eat in budget places like Polpo and Koya and have rarely seen a wine list of this calibre outside of an enoteca where the wine list is the size of a bible and caters for every budget or a truly exceptional restaurant of the Michelin variety.

Nevermind, I thought, clutching my Toptable 50% off food offer - the cuisine here is going to knock my socks off so it is deserving of a great wine to go with it. Then I (happily!) found the £19 bottle of Argentinian Malbec at the very back of the wine menu. The waiter comes around and it is too warm. We ask him for a bucket to cool it a couple of degrees. He nods, then pours out a glass for everyone ignoring our request then leaves looking vaguely bewildered. We never see him again.

So far, we have staff with a ridiculous wine list and no clue how to serve wine.

The menu is tantalising, lots of great authentic dishes, a good handful of street food dishes - satay skewers, grilled meats, roti etc. Mains average about £10-£20 which makes the exorbitant wine list all the more baffling. Then the food arrives.

Our three starters are unremarkable. Spring rolls with very bland flavour, zinged up a bit by sweet chilli sauce. Ayam Cincang Wonton (little crispy parcels of chicken) are a touch greasy, not too crispy and taste of... bland chicken (a recurring theme, despite its "corn fed" status paraded all over the menu. Perhaps the corn was of a particularly crap vintage that year?) again zinged up by the sweet chilli sauce. My daging kerabu - strips of beef marinated in oyster sauce and palm sugar mixed with salad and sambal sauce was the most exciting of the three, nice smooth flavours, a little kick, but so far I hadn't been bowled over by anything. The sneaking suspicion that the quality of the food was probably lower than Busaba eathai (which is a third cheaper) was beginning to grow.




Four mains later and I was less and less thrilled. My tiger prawn stuffed corn-fed chicken with sambal belacan and stir fried pak choi came with no pak choi, but two tiny strands of baby broccoli, non-existant sambal belacan, the ever present sweet chilli sauce and zero flavour. I couldn't distinguish the prawn from the chicken, nor could you tell the meat had been anywhere near a chargrill (perhaps if I'd smoked a cigarette first or licked a lump of coal it might have improved things). Kung Fu noodles looked like a Mr. Wu £5 eat-all-you-like buffet noodle dish and tasted like one too, but cost £18. The other two might well have been the same dish except one came in a pineapple and one had a vague element of chilli which imparted some sort of flavour. Hooray! An achievement!

Thank god for the second bottle of Argentinian Malbec, so far my favourite dish of the evening.

The saving grace was the desert. I had a scoop of lemongrass and chilli sorbet which oozed delicate flavours and was cool and refreshing, sweet then tangy. Dadar coconut filled pancakes were incredibly morish and Kec Kakang chocolate cake was gobbled up so fast I didn't actually get to taste any.

With 50% off, four of us ate for £104. Decent, but when I think it would have cost £208 otherwise to eat something I could have picked up in Wagamama - but more flavourful, I balked.

Awana needs to buck up on its spices or introduce a decent affordable wine list as well as reduce its prices, right now it looks, feels and tastes a bit Hong Kong Phooey.

Cracking good time at Prix Fixe bistrot.

Meandering through the wierd and not so wonderful world of the post-break up, heart still a touch battered and appetite on a whirlwind of ups and downs, I decided to amuse myself by exploring a little light-hearted internet dating.

Call it part social experiment, part desperate attempt to move on, part insanity.

So, blind date number one (and this is in no way meant to sound like there's hundreds of them lined up!), let's call him "A" to preserve the poor guy's anonymity, was at Prix Fixe Brasserie which is only appropriate as my date was French (anyone seeing a trend here?) and, thank heavens, not vegetarian.

Last time I ate here I don't think I'd ever even earned a pay check, although not much has changed, except they now serve Atlantic Rock Oysters (hurrah!) of which I ate five as my starter. Plump, sweet, large, perfectly good and not horrendously overpriced.

A opted for roasted foie gras (you can keep 40 virgins and God, when I die I want a bathful of this stuff) on toast. Actually, since we were too busy discussing my traumatic friday (neighbour jumping off roof, coma, police etc. average Brixton night) I never actually asked to taste it, but since he finished the lot, and hey, its roasted foie gras, I'll make a stab at it and say it was very good.

Mains were slow-roasted pork belly for me, with sauerkraut and apple relish. The slab of belly was humungous and the crispy skin so thick I nearly swerved it off my plate a few times, but quite scrumptious, although a smaller portion might have made me feel less like a hog myself.

A. had simple entrecote and frites on recommendation of the waiter who seemed to snub the filet. Again, yakking away as I do when I'm nervous, I totally missed the food exchange opportunity. So... probably a decent steak...

The fun came at the cheese course, where for almost ten pounds I got served a wedge of cheese small enough to mistake for a postage stamp but accompanied by enough cheese crackers to build a second leaning tower of Pisa. How I was supposed to divide my teeny cheese wedge onto so many crackers was beyond me, and I could see A. (scientist) eagerly making calculations in his head, but the mathematical conundrum that this cheese to cracker ratio presented was beyond all of us. It did provide quite a few laughs though, and the cheese, though small, was very good.

I won't bother telling you what A. had for pudding because AGAIN I failed to try any. Poor show on the Itinerant Epicure's behalf I must say...

But anyhow, the lot was washed down with a rather good New Zealand Jibe 2006 Pinot Noir and conversation flowed very nicely and we both have problems with mice in our houses and an inevitable Strasbourg connection (small world, getting smaller by the minute). So all in all a pleasant evening.

Which is good since I'm heading to Prix Fixe next week for my birthday dinner, which means I can try the steak and the foie gras and the dessert and actually report back properly as a good food blogger should and even take annoying photos of my dishes!

Now, must go and read that article on French Basque cuisine in the Guardian... the mind tries to move on but the heart doesn't so quickly...


PRIX FIXE
39 Dean StreetLondon
W1D 4PU
020 7734 5976

The Celtic Connection - La P'tite Folie in Edinburgh

I may be a distant descendant of the Pictish warriors that made up Clan Gunn, and my mother might hail from the more insalubrious districts of Glasgow, but this couldn't stop the Jamieson family venturing as far as Scotland's capital only to wind up lunching in a Breton restaurant. There we were, falling over ourselves to impress the waiter with our gutteral "r" rolling, making those knowledgable grunts of satisfaction only fine connoisseurs can muster as we perused the wine list and freezing our backsides off as we'd been placed by the front door.

La P'tite Folie on Frederick Street is a small, intimate affair, but its airy high-ceilinged room means you don't feel you're sitting on your neighbour's lap. It bears enough gallic memorabilia on its walls to appear genuine rather than those "buy in a box" rustic Provençal places where you can barely take a step without bashing your head against a hanging empty wine flagon or low-flying Bayonne ham.

Dad ordered le steak frites, cooked "medium" - shudder! The meat was tasty and tender, despite being far too brown much for my liking (if it ain't still mooing, don't bring it to my table). The frites were nothing to write home about, but crispy and freshly made and overall perfectly satisfying.

I started with a mini steak tartare, topped with a quail's egg. It felt for a moment as if the sole purpose of a quail's existence on Earth was to provide eggs conveniently small enough to top miniature versions of this bistro classic. The meat was of excellent quality, with just enough chopped cornichons to add a bite but not overwhelm. The egg was just enough to soften the consistency and not transform the meat into beef mayonnaise.

I continued with haddock poached in white wine au beurre blanc. This was frankly a tad disappointing as the fish was clearly right off the boat that morning, but had been slightly overdone giving a rubbery quality that didn't match the smooth sauce. It was full of flavour however and well matched with the lemoniness of the beurre blanc. Potatoes and mange-tout accompanied the lot.

Mum got the pick of the bunch with her confit de canard poached in red wine, the meat was falling off the bones before she even picked up the fork and the punch of the wine enhanced the sweetness of the duck. The mussels she started with would have been more exciting with the garlic butter and toasty breadcrumbs they were supposed to come with, but that's what Weight watchers will do to you, make you deny the joyous sins of BEURRE in all its forms - mum shunned the garlicky normandy butter salé and the result was a bowl of acceptable, but tame Moules Marinières.

We washed the whole lot down with a bottle of Chilean Cabernet Sauvigon then proceeded to dessert. I had crème brulée which was good, but not more. Dad had a dubious looking mint sponge which I admit to not trying (funny how that damn small quail's egg tipped me over the edge of the cream/dairy/egg content of the day).

All in all the meal was proper french food the way I remember it, with not a whiff of phoniness, of trying too hard or with dodgy wall stencils of men in berets wheeling baguettes about on bicycles.

They also have a branch in the West End at Tudor House, with a slightly tweaked menu and an expansive wine bar for the pre-theatre crowd.

La P'tite Folie

0131 225 7983

61 Frederick Street

Edinburgh

0131 225 8678

Tudor House, 9 Randolph Place

Edinburgh