Cafe Review - Vanilla Pod

This week, I decided it was time I did another eatery review so I visited Brighton and Hove’s Vanilla Pod.

Located on the western end of Western Road, it is surprisingly easy to miss. No glass-fronted modern café, it is a white-painted building with speaks of an older, gentler age.

The inside is bright and airy. Decorated with duck-egg blue walls and spotlessly clean varnished wood flooring and furniture, the morning light streams into a space which feels cosily old-fashioned and stylishly modern.

Vanilla Pod describes itself as a café and tea room but this rather undersells the range of food it offers.

Alongside tea, coffee and cakes, it offers a wide variety of savoury options. Of course, there are the normal sandwiches but there is also a selection of sausage rolls and puff pastry turnovers.

Breakfast, as far as Vanilla Pod is concerned, is a style of food not a time of day. A mighty range of dishes, from porridge to full English (via pancakes and eggs benedict) is available all day.

The sweet selection is modern British. Sponge cakes, brownies and flapjacks adorn the counter in a variety of original and classic flavours.

To start, I ordered the chocolate and orange cake and a cappuccino.

The cake was full of flavour and exquisitely presented. A large portion came to me, elegantly standing on end with a side serving of berries and a spring of mint.

The proportion of icing to sponge was well managed and both parts contained chocolate and orange.

In a playful gesture, a piece of Terry’s Chocolate Orange crowned the cake but somehow the classic sweet was more than decoration and contributed to the overall experience.

The same can be said for the side serving of berries and mint. More than plate-dressing, they allowed for fun flavour experimentation with the sponge.

My only complaint was that the texture at the very bottom of the sponge was a little clumpy, like the edible version of a bean bag. I must stress only the very bottom was clumpy and the rest was beautifully soft and smooth.

The cappuccino was good but no more. The milk had been competently stretched but the beans were not the finest. They lacked complexity and depth of flavour but were very pleasant for all that.

Once more, the presentation was superb. My coffee arrived in a beautiful cup and was served with a little round of shortbread.

Later, I ordered a leek, potato and Stilton cheese turnover.

This was perfect. The pastry was crisp and golden and contained plenty of filling. And what filling!

Sweet, buttery leeks were expertly balanced with salty, earthy Stilton and fluffy potato prevented the mix from being overpoweringly strong. Pumpkin seeds pressed to the top added a twist of something special to lift the turnover from delicious to sensational.

The prices at Vanilla Pod veer towards expensive. My cake cost £3.95 and the coffee and turnover where £2.45 and £2.95 respectively. These prices are not outrageous but neither are they bargain of the month.

The extra cost is probably because everything is home-made and Vanilla Pod is a family-run business. Prices inevitably go up.

Still, the experience left me not minding paying a little extra as the décor, service and atmosphere were perfect.

The staff are friendly, everything is spotlessly clean and the ambiance is extremely relaxing. Because the windows, though large, do not take up the whole shop front, it is a cosy space in both summer and winter, victim to neither the searing sun nor howling gale.

Compared to the hustle and bustle of many cafés and tearooms, complete with barely comfortable furniture at a variety of stages on the way to shabby, Vanilla Pod is a paradise.

Vanilla Pod is a wonderful place to eat, drink and relax. A hidden gem with homely, yet skilfully flavoursome, sweet and savoury dishes, it is marginally let down by high prices and unremarkable coffee beans.

Overall * * * * - Great food served in a relaxing atmosphere.

Food and Drink * * * * - The food is divine, bursting with flavour and wonderfully presented, though the coffee is average.

Atmosphere * * * * * - Clean and relaxing, homely and welcoming, the atmosphere is fantastic.

Service * * * * * - Prompt and very friendly. Faultless.

Price * * * - Not cheap but not extortionate.

Would I Go Here Again? - Yes.

Food Feature - Street Food

Smoked meats and spicy sauces fill Little Blue Smokehouse's buns

The gardens are filled with sizzling, chatting, polystyrene boxes, plumes of steam and sticky fingers – it can only be another busy day of street food trading, the culinary phenomenon sweeping the UK. But what makes street food so popular?

To find out, I visited Street Diner, Brighton’s first street food market and a great example of street food’s popularity. It celebrates its second birthday this May and is going from strength to strength with plans to expand into Hove.

Co-founders Christina Angus and Kate O’Sullivan say: “Brighton needed a street food market. There wasn’t one in the city and we couldn’t work out why. We wanted to create a market that could be a vibrant public platform for new and seasoned street food traders.”

Great pans of yellow wonder from Crocus Paella

Perhaps this is part of street food’s appeal, the vibrancy. There is a great energy around the market, informal and buzzing with cooking. It is a pleasant change from the slightly sterile restaurant experience. Here, the table is your hands, the waiter cooks your food in front of you and serves it straight away and there is no dance around “gratuities” – a smile and a thank you are enough.

There is also an accessible feel to street food. There is no need to book a table and one can rely on being fed whenever the market is open, which is often. Street Diner trades all year round, setting up every Friday from 11am-3pm in Brighthelm Gardens, just behind Brighthelm Church and Community Centre.

Angus and O’Sullivan add: “We trade at all types of major events. Brighton Marathon for the past two years with a view to continuing.”

They say: “We are about to work with the Brighton Fringe Festival for a month long residency at The Warren outside St Peter's Church.”

Who said vegetables were boring?

The stalls themselves cover a vast range of food types. This adds an element of the unexpected when compared to restaurant menus, which specialise in specific cuisines. If I go into a Chinese restaurant, I know what will be served. Chinese food…or at least a European approximation of it. Still worse from this perspective is the fish and chip shop. But street food offers the diner a whole world in a field and the chance of adventure, the chance to taste something new and unexpected.

At Street Diner, meat-lovers can revel in the experience offered by Troll’s Pantry’s burgers and Little Blue Smokehouse’s meat-filled buns. Vegetarians and vegans are catered for by such stalls as the Indian vegetarian Ahimsa, Beelzebab’s vegan kebab and Sultans Delight’s Middle Eastern food. Those looking for something sweet can buzz off to Honeycomb Cakes while those in search of exotic flavour shores can explore a range of world cuisines including food from Spain, India, Portugal, Mexico, Hungary and the Middle East. Maria Romero of Tostón Tolón sells the exotic-sounding arepas , cornmeal patties from her Venezuelan homeland.

She says: “We open them and stuff them with either veal, pork or chicken and people can add cheese, beans and plantain.”

Looks like lunch has just been sorted for someone

Another difference between street food and many restaurants is that many of the stalls make a point of the locality and ethics of their food. Perhaps I am the only one but, if I order a steak, I often wonder what kind of life the animal has had. Certainly, it makes me think twice about ordering the chicken. Yet, with street food there is an easy rapport with the stall holders. They will answer questions and quite often there seems to be a deep caring for the quality and locality of their products.

Martyn Cotton of Little Blue Smokehouse, winner of the People's Choice award at the British Street Food Awards 2014, says: “We go out of our way to source as much local produce, as much seasonal produce, as possible.”

He says: “We make all our own sauces, we make all our own pickles. All our meat is sourced from farms within Sussex.”

Paul Clark, aka “The Troll”, of Troll’s Pantry does much the same, even foraging for some of his ingredients such as the wild garlic and sorrel which go into his woodland burgers.

He says: “We just try and, basically, make everything from scratch and create something that’s truly unique and different to all the other burger offerings out there.”

Life is sweet when there is cake about

As well as being local, many stress the ethical side of their produce. Rebecca Letchford of Honeycomb Cakes focuses on the purity of her ingredients. This includes using her mother’s fruit and vegetables to make her cakes. She also uses the jams her mother makes using the same home-grown produce.

She says: “It’s about making something that tastes as it should. So if it’s meant to be a strawberry cake, it tastes like a strawberry cake, not chemicals and a strawberry cake.”

Forgotten Cuts tackles a different side of ethical eating.

Ellie Ledden, who runs the stall, says: “It’s kind of nose to tail philosophy and a waste free ethos.”

The idea started when Ledden and a farmer she was working with at the time decided to open a street food stall.

Ledden says: “Originally we were going to do a steak sandwich and then we just thought that felt ethically very wrong.

“So I said to him what do you have left over at the end of the week?”

The meat she sells includes both farmed and wild animals and the selection is always open to change in keeping with Forgotten Cuts’s ethics. They started by selling a lot of ox cheek but, when it started to become trendy, they stopped.

Who is for Mexican?

Of course, sometimes a high-end restaurant is just what you want. You want to go in, relax, get treated like a king (at least that’s the idea) and eat a dependable meal in a civilised fashion. Likewise the takeaway. Sometimes your body, tired and stressed after a hard day’s work, seeks solace in familiar comfort food. Certainly, there seems to be no great drop in restaurant numbers or the flow of people tucking into fish and chips.

Yet, judging by Street Diner, street food offers something fresh, something exciting, something vibrant. Who can say no to a whole world of food, cooked in front of you and served so convivially you can talk to the cook about their passionately held culinary ethics? Perhaps this is the secret. In a world ever more conscious of what it is eating and what flavours are out there to be experienced, street food offers a culinary adventure and a new bond of trust between the seller and the diner.

Customers sitting upon the grass, enjoying a hot lunch on a hot afternoon

Cafe Review - Real Patisserie on Western Road

Anyone who knows me will tell you I love anything baked. From cake to cookies, buns to bread I go absolutely crazy for it. So, I took myself off down to Real Patisserie. Well, I say Real Patisserie but there are in fact four branches of the Brighton-based business. I went to my nearest, in Western Road, Hove.

Real Patisserie is not technically a cafe, it is primarily a patisserie and bakery. They sell an enormous selection of French pastries and bread, though the bread is brought in from one of the other Real Patisserie shops as the Western Road premises specilises in the pastries.

However, the shop does have limited cafe facilities. I ordered a chocolate religieuse and a cappuccino. The religieue was a fresh, uplifiting delight. It was made from two choux buns filled with light and smooth chocolate creme patissiere. The two buns were held together with cream and an intense chocolate sauce. Everything married perfectly and no element was remotely substandard. This was patisserie of the highest standard.

The coffee was good. So often, when ordering a cappuccino I'm served a bizarre concoction, a thin milky soup topped with a wig of bubbles. Fortunately, this was not the case here and the air was well amalgamated into milk. The beans themselves were good quality too, ground on the spot.

The service was most satisfactory. Although handling customers buying goods to take home, they nevertheless provided a friendly and effeicient service. The only problem I had was that I ordered a large coffee and received a small one. However, I was not charged for the large and I'm sure if I had complained my small coffee would have been replaced.

I was a little dissappointed in the serving materials. My coffee was served in a takeaway cup and I received my pastry on a polystyrene plate. The plastic knife and fork provided were almost useless and I would definately recommend taking your own metal tools in if you dine here.

Certainly, when compared to Patisserie Valerie over the road, the serving of the food is inferior in every way. The seats are hard jump seats compared to Valerie's squashy leather chairs and Valerie serves slightly superior coffee in china and provides metal cutlery.

Real Patisserie wins on price and range. I bought my pastry and coffee for £4.10 - the cost of one of Valerie's tarte au framboise. Also, while Valerie's cakes are heavenly, they are drawn from a reasonably limited range. Real Patisserie is groaning under the weight of the choice available. And, as an added bonus, Real Patisserie bakes its pastries on the premises so they are as fresh as can be.

All in all, my dining experience at Real Patisserie was fantastic. Although the facilities were a little below par, everything else was superb and the price is unbeatable considering the quality being served.

Overall * * * * - Great food but average facilites.

Food and Drink * * * * * - Simply sublime product.

Atmosphere * * * - The shop was buzzing but the seating was not the most comfortable and the disposable serving equipment was disappointing.

Service * * * * * - Really friendly.

Price * * * * * - Almost unbelievable, very cheap considering the quality of the product.

Would I Go Here Again? - Yes.