Yumminess at Made in Camden

Last night, in celebration of the first day of our holidays, we went to eat at Made in Camden, Josh Katz's restaurant at the Roundhouse in North London.  The menu is right up my street.  Lots of small plates to share and wonderful Middle-Eastern influences all over the place with a hugely seasonal feel to it with ingredients like Jerusalem artichokes, sweet potato, venison and pomegranates starring alongside well-sourced fish and meat.  We started with aubergine, which I can never resist (ok, its not in season, but when it is roast with garlic yoghurt, chilli and mint I am always won over, this is very similar to one of my favourite Moro recipes from their first book).

It was absolutely delicious.  The aubergine was soft, sweet and succulent, the yoghurt beautifully garlicky with slithers of toasted garlic on top.  We polished it off in seconds, hence why you only see a couple of slices left on this plate.

Next came the mackerel, grilled to perfection served on a bed of kisir, a type of cous-cous that was beautifully seasoned, light and a perfect foil for the oily fish.  The whole thing was topped with a smoky aioli with a touch of heat from some chermoula.  It was a sensational plate of food.  Not too many ingredients, but enough to give you such a wonderful, complex play of flavours in your mouth.  And the mackerel was beautifully cooked too.

Then the seabass.  Again beautifully cooked, served on a flatbread with a wonderfully earthy tahini sauce which was studded with sweet pieces of orange, pomegranate and sharon fruit and a few pine nuts for good measure.  Mark loved this so much...

 After this we had an outrageously good, impeccably cooked rare, rare pigeon breast seasoned with ras-el-hanout and a sumac labneh.  The grilled onglet was medium rare and went beautifully with its sweet balsamic red onion and fresh horseradish cream and the spiced calamari...

was delightfully spicy on its own, quite apart from the chilli jam underneath.  Mark's one criticism was that there was a lot of sweetness used in the dishes which he always thinks is cheating.  There was a lot of sugar in the various jams and syrups and at one point I thought that a sharp, green salad would have been a welcome break from it, but overall I thought that the cooking was brilliant and combined a lovely mix of flavours which cleverly didn't go overboard with too many ingredients on each plate.  Josh spent quite a lot of time in Australia and his lovely take on fusion really shows this off with all his aiolis, flavoured labnehs, yoghurts and tahinis.  Yet he shows a restraint and a great balance with his food.

The only sadness was that the restaurant was so dark that we could barely make out the food.  The only time we caught a glimpse of the dishes was from the flash of Mark's telephone.  I don't always want to snap away at dishes as I sometimes think it can be rude to the chef and I like to be in the moment loving the food rather than worrying about picutres but these plates were so lovely to look at that my lovely husband took some for me.  I am sad that we were deprived of looking at them by the gloom around us.  Once they had some light on them they dazzled and shone.

The staff were lovely, the menu had some great British wines and beers on it and overall I was hugely impressed.  Thanks so much Made in Camden for a delicious, spoiling night...

tommi x