h.en, Brighton
In a world where mass-produced, miserable meat is the norm, and ethical eateries seem beyond the reach of anyone on a budget, newly hatched restaurant h.en is a long-overdue, yellow-fronted utopia. At prices barely above Nando’s, its slow-reared but speedily served chicken hails from high-welfare, genuinely free-range poulterer Brookland Farm, instead of the usual 20-chickens-per-square-metre prisons that meet the Red Tractor scheme’s “farm-assured” standard. For £7.45, I demolish a quarter of succulent bird and two sides: sweet potato fries and a beetroot, walnut and goat’s cheese salad. Eggy brunches and lip-smacking homemade sauces also impress, as do the waffles. Gluten and sugar-free, these fluffy triangles of joy – viscous with a dark and datey chocolate sauce – prove as heavenly as they are wholesome. Friendly, tasty, affordable and humane: this place is clucking marvellous.
87-88 Trafalgar Street, henrestaurant.com
CB
My food vice… Greggs cheese and onion pasty
I was probably too young to remember the first time I tasted a Greggs pasty. Around Manchester, you inherit an allegiance to one of the big bakery chains (see also, Hampsons, Greenhalgh’s), the same way you do with your football team. If that implies a narrow outlook, remember that each shop offered a whole range of baked savouries in which you could express your individuality, and, for me, it was always all about – a rather effete choice in retrospect; teenage Smiths fan, see? – the cheese and onion pasty. When I worked in Iceland (the supermarket, not the country), I ate one every Saturday for five years. Today – and particularly when hungover – that pasty remains the perfect, familiar intersection of fat and carbs. Encased in golden, buttery puff pastry, its ambrosial cheese fondant filling (of such intensity of flavour that top chefs would probably kill to emulate it), is simply a transcendent comfort food.
£1.15
TN
Joanna Fuertes-Knight on food… Suspect device
For anyone who’s ever agonised over whether to chomp down on the leftovers of a week-old chicken korma, the Peres “foodsniffer” is here to save you. The brainchild of Lithuanian inventor and food poisoning victim Augustas Alešiunas, it’s a handy “electronic nose” that claims to scan food for any noxious gasses that could leave you spasming on the toilet in a cold sweat. With a projected price of £80 (it’ll be available from March) it’s a gadget that does smack of “impulse-buy-at-Lakeside-shopping-centre”. But when you take into account the fact that Britons throw away £12bn-worth of food a year – the lion’s share being from households – for consumers this little device could be the happy medium between retailers enforcing lawsuit-avoiding Use-By dates and paranoid freakouts after eating that takeaway from last week.
