Ponte Nuovo, Crystal Palace

We're not short of places to eat on the Triangle. And most of them are blessedly good, but we've never had a half-decent Italian, in my humble opinion. Lorenzo's is quite bog-standard but always startlingly busy; Il Ponte (as was) tried to be slightly more upmarket and only managed to be marginally more bog-standard. So to see Il Ponte become Ponte Nuovo meant a dinner out was on the cards.

The new owners have either scaled down the size of the restaurant inside or decorated it to make it look more intimate in cool slate tones; either way it works. The menu has undergone a complete renovation too. Think bottarga alongside calamari fritti, melanzane Parmigiana and that curiously beloved insalata tricolore (which I've never really understood the appeal of, especially in any month outside July and August). There's a good but not overwhelming choice of soups, pasta and risotto dishes which can be had as a primo piatto or secondo, a really excellent choice of fish and meat dishes and a tempting list of side orders. Looking good so far.

Our starters consisted of the calamari fritti, a generous portion, although to my mind the batter wasn't delicate enough and might even have been frozen; that insalata tricolore which looked fine but where the tomatoes had come from is anyone's guess; and the melanzane which came in a perfect-sized portion, bubbling hot, non-greasy and rich without being just too much.

Mains were more successful: my linguine with clams was again a well-judged portion, swimming in clams and a sharp-sweet cherry tomato sauce. The risotto marinara was full to bursting with a variety of seafood with rice just al dente and not too soupy, but the triumph belonged to the gamberoni with chilli garlic butter. As the plate was put down, I have to admit I genuinely thought they'd given' Joey' (for our purposes here he shall henceforth be known as Joey) a small lobster, also on the menu but a good tenner dearer. No, they were indeed 2 large succulent langoustines with a firework chilli dressing, butterflied and chargrilled for maximum flavour. The sides weren't the least of it either - chips (why do boys feel chips are de rigeur at every single meal?) were crisp, golden and moreish; buttered spinach was not reduced to a puddle of slime, but fresh and green and the zucchini fritti were fresh out the fryer in a tremulous batter that barely veiled their modesty but crunched pleasantly between the teeth.

Desserts were what you might expect. We were quite full but MCD and I, ever the troupers, had a creme brulee between us. The brulee was fine, but the creme was fridge-cold which is never particularly pleasant; I like mine to retain a vestige of warmth from the cooking. The wine list was reasonably comprehensive and well-priced - nothing outrageous and all good value. The bill in total for 3 of us, including a beer, bottle of wine, sparkling water and a glass of white came to just under £100 which we felt was ok value, considering it had barely been open a week and yet managed to deliver on both food and service.

NB: Next door Pizza Fresca has become Fresco, a pizzeria-cum-takeaway. I saw a sign last week advertising breakfast, but there's no hint of it on the menu. Reports come back that the pizza remains as good as ever, although the eat-in menu isn't as long as the take-out menu, but other dishes are disappointingly average and they're threatening to do Sunday roasts for which, my informant tells me, they were chastised for trying to do too much not well enough by one engaged customer.

It's not what I expected... Part V

I am alone behind the till. The BookSeller is out back, ostensibly checking the Reading Recovery books but I know he's just bought his son's Beano and the comic is not with me behind the till. A woman enters - purposefully strides through the door - reminding me faintly and perhaps not entirely pleasantly of Nancy dell' Oily.

'I want a book' she says. I wait breathlessly. 'It's a book I've read and I want it for a present. It's called Death in Venice, Lost in Iraq. Or something like that. Something that's alliterative.'

I type venice and iraq into the Bertrams search engine and surprisingly - or not - come up with zilch. So I say 'Any idea of the author?'

'No. It's by a journalist and it's a travel book. It's got Venice and Iraq in the title. Is Jon here? He recommended it and he would know.'

By now her attitude is slightly starting to piss me off and I get stubborn and say - oh foolish me - that he's unavailable but I'm sure I can help. I surreptitiously google it - she wants Jeff in Venice, Death in Varansi by Geoff Dyer. Of course. We have a copy in stock in Fiction. I go and fetch it for her.

She lets me get back behind the counter, fixes me with a challenging sort of stare from behind the completely unnecessary sunglasses and says 'I want a hardback copy of Birchwood by John Banville.' I point out it's unlikely we'd have the hardback in but the paperback is. 'Oh, but it's a present.' I duly fetch it for her and she accedes. This time I ca' canny, because I sense she and I have not finished this slightly tedious game of How can I annoy the shop assistant, hand the book to her and say 'Anything else?'

She is clearly a master at this. She shakes her head and continues browsing new titles. I go back behind the counter and she opens her mouth and says 'I want the book about pandas. It's for...' and she says it in a peculiarly strained, emphatic, meaningful way, 'My Husband's Best Friend for his 50th.'

This time I do know what she's talking about - 100 facts about Pandas, a witty amusing little jokey fact book, none of it true and perhaps not entirely amusing for that fact alone. It came in only the other day and I am only too pleased to once again traipse to the end of the shop and fetch it for her.

This is clearly the end of the spree; she gathers them into a pile and then asks me to permanent marker over all the prices. I make sure I do this in front of her - something tells me this is risky as the pen might slip and I might accidentally permanent marker her face, but I do it anyway. I put the books through the till - again stupid, as she then turns away for wrapping paper and birthday cards. Meanwhile the 3 ladies who've been hanging out in the bookshop after their morning coffee next door approximately 5 years ago come to the till with a grand total of £18.98 to show for their browsing. I have to over-ring 'Nancy's' order.

She deigns to come back to the till and this time I manage to get actual money out of her. The sunglasses are still in place. She leaves, barely acknowledging my strained and perhaps snarled Goodbye. Later I find out The Husband's Best Friend is actually Rod Liddle. Good luck to him.

It's not what I expected... Part III

We're in the bookshop; it's fairly quiet, just a few people milling around wondering whether to get involved in the whole Stieg Larsson thing, or just to move quietly on to the scary New Titles. The silence is shattered as a woman manhandles a 4x4 all-weather buggy through the perhaps slightly-deliberately-difficult-to-negotiate entrance. We watch her for a few minutes as she clips the card spinner and the anti-theft device. She manoevres the buggy into position, conveniently blocking both egress and entry to all other customers. She asks 'Do you sell lunchboxes?'

'Nuff said.

Yak & Yeti, Crystal Palace

We're not short of an Indian restaurant or two in the Palace and most of them aren't too bad either. Viva Goa stands out for its concentration on regional cuisine - the surest cure for the winter blues I know of.

But, folks, we have a new contender for Best Indian Restaurant in the Palace. I give you Yak & Yeti on Church Road, featuring Nepalese and Indian cuisine. I have eaten in and taken out and both times, it's been wondrous. Let me expound.

Tha Papri Chat - that tangy tamarind-laced starter with potatoes and crisp breads and chillies is enough the stimulate the appetite - and the Momo dumplings (vegetarian on our visit), a Kathmandu Valley delicacy, are delicately spiced and not overly heavy.

Kukhura Palak is chicken cooked with spinach, a mild creamy dish with enough interest in the spicing to stop you falling asleep. Achari Gosht was a rich tangy lamb dish, cooked in yoghurt with pickling spices - there was no one spice dominating, just a gentle harmony of the whole. I managed to sneak a spoonful of Seafood Mismas - prawns, scallops and shrimps cooked with ginger, garlic, lemon, cumin and coconut milk - The Pescatarian had trouble holding on to the rest of it. Lamb Nepal, barbecued and cooked with mango was sweet without being sickly and suprisingly butch in its delivery.

Naans are uber-fresh and taste it; the standard paneer dish is lifted to new heights with fenugreeek leaves and leave room to scoop up the Baigan Bharta - smoked aubergine pulp - with any naan you've got left.

The house wine is reasonable value and food-match at around £11 and dishes come in at around £2-£4 for a starter and £6-£7.25 for a generous main. I would also just add at the point that both times I dined under the influence of ongoing virus/tonsilitis and that I could still taste and revel in the flavours on offer was a small miracle in itself.

Not many venture to this end of the Triangle, most choosing to stay within reach of Gurkha Cottage. But for my money, once you've made it to the White Hart for a mulled cider, why go back down Westow St to the old when you could hop over the road and embrace the new?

It's not what I expected...

Working in the bookshop is a constant education. As I mentioned in my last post, I am accompanied by a near-constant sense of panic when I look at all these books and how did I ever let myself get so out of touch. Although, when The Bookseller said portentously 'We've sold Bleach', it is a mark of the steep curve of my education that the first thought in my mind was not in fact Domestos.

There are other highlights: The Actor who comes in to give helpful hints on how to start a riot at the Crystal Palace cinema campaign; The Sci-Fi Drunk who farted loudly and wetly during the umpteenth discussion on whether we would take his (non-existent?) water-damaged collection (ummm... no.); The bizarre quantity of books we stock by the local rock 'n' roll, band-playing author-vicar; the discount on good coffee at La Bruschetta next door; the mysterious and sometimes frankly weird music we play (I got most excited yesterday that I recognised the songs playing for a whole 43 minutes - it was Crowded House. Customers ask me 'What's the music?' I reply 'No idea - it's on the IPod' as if this is a proper answer.)

A little rant about Farmers Markets

http://blog.thetransmitter.co.uk/2009/11/issue-9-est-arrive.html

My piece in Crystal Palace Transmitter magazine - P9 Death of a Farmers Market

Death of a Farmers Market; or do some research first

Sad news, Palace residents. Penge Farmers Market is no more. After a 6 month trial the organisers have discovered that Penge - try as it might - is not actually home to 'AB1' residents (what - just what - is that supposed to mean? Does anyone apart from weird marketeers use this term to describe human beings?), unlike Dulwich where they also have a market going, and so the good honest hard-working people of Penge will not - and cannot - support a farmers market. To be honest, Penge isn't that short of reasonable shops - they have a great butchers and there's a very large Sainsburys at the end of the high street, so realistically speaking, they're not going to want to pay upwards of £7 for 2 loaves of fancy-schmancy bread and £4 for a bottle of apple juice. Frankly, not many people would.

So what does it take for a farmers market to work? According to the market organiser when I spoke to him earlier in the year, Penge was a plum spot for a market, lacking as it does independent grocers, a fishmongers, bakery etc and being (apparently although not in actuality) the habitat of relatively high earners. According to Murray Bros, the butchers, a market was never going to work for the reasons mentioned above - people in the locality simply don't have that money to throw around. They don't necessarily seek out higher-welfare meat and organic veg - it's not their priority; cost, on the other hand, is. That's why the supermarket and its BOGOF deals thrives.

So surely the demographic research was at fault. Or maybe people get too stuck in their ways. Yes, I could go and buy some gorgeous chicken liver pate and some nice heritage potatoes, but if you can't pick up everything for your weekly shop, and have to go elsewhere, it starts to make little sense.

I maintain Crystal Palace, which is marginally better-off as an area, and which really doesn't have a single independent food retailer to its name 9and a bloody Sainsburys to boot) really could sustain a farmers market. If it can sustain the French market that trundles along once every 3 weeks, the least it could do is host a market twice a month. But I could be being hopelessly romantic and idealistic and living-in-the-clouds. Maybe the reason there are no food shops in Palace is because we're all lazy shoppers who prefer to just trudge around the supermarket of a weekend, rather than care about where our food comes from; maybe Palace isn't as rich as I think it is. But then, the restaurant scene in Palace not only survives but positively thrives, so clearly there's interest in good food...

Meanwhile, while I live in unquenchable hope, I visited Brixton Farmers Market, newly opened in September. And there's another apparent contradiction: Brixton sure as hell ain't rich and it has an enormous Saturday market. Yet, Sunday morning the market - a large one by LFM standards - was buzzing and people were clearly buying, a fact backed up by the fact that when I went back just before closing, I was struggling to get the produce I'd eyed up on the way in. So how does that work? While I struggle to fathom this mystery, I shall now be visiting Brixton every Sunday - never say I'm not dedicated.

A Little Local Colour...

Ok, off with the slough of despond and on with life.

I did mention Tandoori roasted chicken and pickled green beans in my last post (not to be eaten together, if you've any sense) and I will post the recipes later this week, promise. In the meantime, I thought I'd start an occasional series on where I live in Crystal Palace in South East London.

Actually, intriguingly enough Crystal Palace doesn't exist as a place. Although it has a train station thus called, the area of Upper Norwood - its rightful title - was simply nicknamed after the Victorian Crystal Palace and the name stuck.

One of the nicest things about Palace is the village feel. There are more diverse restaurants (good ones, thank God) than you can think of, an excellent bookshop, nice cafes for coffee, a little bakery, boutiques and antiques and even a sex shop - no village is complete without one. One of the more contentious battles right now is the war between the community and the church in the hostile takeover of the bingo hall. Originally an art-deco cinema, there are plans to re-open it as such, which would be an enormous boost to the area and it would be nice not to have to go all the way to flipping Croydon for a film. However the church believes that what our ethnically-diverse community needs is yet another place of worship and goodness, they're being sneaky about it. Anyway, the battle rages on: you can sign up to the petition for the cinema here.

Another little-known fact, and one strictly for the Durrell (Gerald or Lawrence) fans, is that before the epic move to Corfu before the war, the Durrells lived in a little flat in the gardens of the Queens Hotel on Church Road and after Corfu they lived briefly again, whereabouts unrecorded, in Norwood before moving more centrally. This may mean little to the rest of you, but for me it's kismet, fate, meant-t0-be.... (MCD is quite aware it's only an accident of fate and birth and timing, goddamnit, that I didn't marry G Durrell first - lucky lucky man, the both of them....)

There are a few things missing in the Palace. A farmers market would be no.1 on my wish list. At the moment I go to Penge, which isn't far at all, but it would be nice to have one in Palace itself. There is a market every 3rd weekend, but it's that terribly tired formula of cynically-expensive French cheeses, olives, bread and salami, which is all well and good but not terribly useful when you're still forced to Sainsburys to complete the weekly shop. Hopefully it will grow and diversify, but the space in Victoria Place is a little limited, so who knows....

Apparently there used to be independent butchers, greengrocers et al, but with the reasonably recent opening of Sainsburys, they've gone. It's hard to believe, but there's not a single retail outlet selling fresh fruit and vegetables apart from Budgens (limited in the extreme) and the supermarket. Again, Penge has a remarkable butchers in Murray Bros, so this combined with the farmers market offers a decent spread. However, the farmers market is struggling slightly with lack of footfall - please, please, please my reader(s), support your local farmers market if you have one. Once it's gone, the council won't bring it back.

For a slice of life at the top of the hill, then, I'll be posting restaurant reviews, thoughts, events, anything going on really, as I get wind of it. Anything I've missed, chuck it over and I'll blog about it.

Sunny - Outside and In

When the weather's gloomy as all hell we all need a touch of sunshine. Check out Island Fusion in Crystal Palace for a bask in the warm rays of Caribbean hospitality. And a glorious sunset painted along the back wall for extra good-mood vibes. Four of us has a starter platter with jerk wings, ackee fritters, grilled plantain, callaloo and dipping sauces; then curried lobster, a deeply savoury oxtail with rice and peas, jerk pork and chicken, bammy (cassava crumbed and fried) - a feast and a spicy, savoury kick up summer's backside.

Saturday was pizza night - we'll gloss. I made the dough to prove in the breadmaker - (did it in my old breadmaker before and it worked a treat). Came out curiously half-cooked, so we leapt into action and kneaded together another load of dough to prove for an hour, before rolling it out and leaving it to prove for another 30-45 mins. The tomato sauce was simple - garlic, basil and our own cherry tomatoes cooked down with olive oil and left chunky (laziness rather than purity winning the upper hand there). My favourite topping combination at the moment is aubergines, cubed and roasted in olive oil with oregano, then adding them to the pizza and topping with fresh chilli. Bake it off, then top with cold ricotta and fresh basil and a drizzle of olive oil.

And Sunday saw a Portuguese steak sandwich: marinade the steak in bay leaf, oregano, a couple of tbsp red wine, olive oil, crushed dried chilli flakes, onion and garlic for a couple of hours. Drain the marinade and reduce to a tough, punchy little sauce. Griddle the steaks and slap in split and toasted ciabatta with rocket and the sauce dribbled over... Add potato wedges and it's a feast for a sultry Sunday night in the garden with a South American red...