Piecaramba!, 11a Parchment Street, Winchester SO23 8AT (01962 852 182). Meal for two, including service and drinks: £25 (if you really try)
Getting too analytical about our food is never a good idea. Eating is a visceral business, or at least should be. There is nothing better calculated to deaden the appetite and dry the tongue than attempting to intellectualise dinner. Then again, some culinary items can handle a little nerdy unpacking, and none more so than the pie.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary the first reference to pie in British literature was in the early 14th century. Since then it has embedded itself in the culture. Like miserable weather and poorly managed industrial decline, pies are always with us, but are also the remedy to both. The pie is a metaphor waiting to happen – surely life is nothing but an endless struggle for a big enough slice – and a willing plot point.
Food and drink have various walk-on parts in Shakespeare, but none of them is as successful as the pie in Titus Andronicus, which contains the bodies of Chiron and Demetrius, sons of Tamora, Queen of the Goths. Naturally she only learns of its contents after she has eaten it. There are the pies of Sweeney Todd, and of nursery rhymes. In the brilliant foodie novel Heartburn by Nora Ephron, the protagonist wishes that the pie she had thrown at her philandering husband was not key lime, but blueberry because that would have made so much more of a mess when it hit.
Pies are eager to please. They are sweet and savoury. They are crisp and soft. They can be a way of using up the cheapest of ingredients, stewed down and seasoned, their modesty hidden from view by a gorgeous glazed crust. They can be a luxury item, layered with the finest of game. They are portable, on to the football terraces or, in the case of a pasty – just another pie, only with more curves – down a Cornish tin mine. In a country which is meant to agonise over its fast food habit, we retain a deep, abiding affection for Greggs and its success. Why? Because it’s a pie shop, and there is a genuine democracy to one of those. Who the hell doesn’t like a pie?
If you have just muttered under your breath, “Well me, for a start,” go find something else to read. Try the instruction manual for your washing machine; that should be joyless enough. Certainly I have nothing for you. The rest can come with me to Piecaramba! in Winchester, which is a self-consciously jolly arch name for a bloody good pie shop. Knowing I had a lunch to spare in the city I did look at other places. I looked at friendly bistros, tableclothed pub restaurants and hotels which made too much of their listings in unreliable guide books. I tried very hard to think of myself as a grown-up and serious restaurant critic. The problem was I had already come across Piecaramba! Try as I might I couldn’t stop muttering the word “pie” under my breath, like some lusty adolescent with the scent of hormones in his nostrils, even as I surfed the websites of those more manicured offerings.
Naturally, Piecaramba! is also a quality comic shop; if you want a vintage copy of Fantastic Four or The Thing, they’ll sell it to you. There are Roy Lichtenstein-style blow-ups of comic strip frames on the walls and, hanging on hooks from the ends of the tables, packs of Top Trumps. Enjoy the loo with the headless Supergirl mannequin, the Batman-shaped mirror and the hand dryer hidden away inside Darth Vader’s head. It’s less been designed than assembled.
Instead, all the engineering has gone into the pies. Over the years I have received menaces from what felt like the paramilitary wing of the Pie Liberation Front for daring to refer to a casserole dish with a pastry lid as a pie. Heresy! Obviously, a pie must be fully enclosed in pastry. These are. They are wonders of golden shortcrust, cooked through from side to bottom. At £5.50 ordered at the bar and delivered to your table, they are also a fair bargain. The menu is lengthy and gathered from various suppliers. Some come from the well-known Pieminister, some from the Hampshire farmer’s market stalwart Mud Pie, with many more produced in their own stand-alone kitchen unit.
What’s impressive is the lack of repetition. A classic like the Holy Cow is filled with beef that has been slow cooked so that each piece is waiting to fall apart and bound in a gravy based on ale from Ballards Brewery. It has the necessary dark, savoury tones. The gravy is so effective I would have expected it to be used in a game pie of Hampshire partridge, pheasant and venison. Instead it utilises something altogether lighter and funkier, sweetened with redcurrant jelly and with the airy waft of bay. Another classic, the Freeranger, a take on chicken and leek, is rich in cheddar and grain mustard, as it should be.
From the extensive vegetarian and vegan list the wild mushroom, heavy on the white wine, needs the addition of a little salt to make it sing. No such issues with the chilli con carne-based Piecaramba! with a gluten-free crust. The latter is of no interest to me. Fortunately for me, I am not coeliac, and nor am I attempting to control the world around me by self-importantly claiming a gluten intolerance I do not have. But, for the record, had I not been told I would not have known the pastry was gluten-free. It crumbled in all the right places. Only a Hot Rod spiced sausage roll misses the mark. The filling is overground and dull.
Still, all the accompaniments are in order. There is creamy mash, or you can have it spun through with big spoonfuls of grain mustard. There is the offer of mushy peas, here boosted with a little chilli, but still the comforting, starchy green mess it should be. A shout out, too, for a fine onion gravy and for their old-school pie liquor, a classic parsley sauce by any other name. Order the lot – pie, mushy peas, mash and sauce – and you’ll get change from a tenner. Spend it on a pint of builder’s tea. Usually they have a cherry pie for dessert, but supplies had not arrived the day I was there. Which is a shame, but I managed the disappointment. Piecaramaba! has just celebrated its first birthday and is about to open a second branch in nearby Southampton. To which I can only say: lucky Southampton.
Jay’s new bites
Calum Franklin, executive head chef of the Holborn Dining Rooms at London’s Rosewood Hotel, has mounted a one-man campaign to big up the glazed pie. He has been rotating a series of pies on the menu, including mutton curry and a hand-raised pork pie. Rumour has it that the Rosewood will soon start selling them to take away (holborndiningroom.com).
Just one week after winning back the Michelin star he once held at his restaurant in Chelsea, Indian chef Vineet Bhatia has closed it. A spokesperson for him says they are relocating in a couple of months. Under the Michelin rules, he will be judged to have opened a different place and will not be able to carry the star over.
Good news: the 37 year-old Da Maria trattoria in Notting Hill, reviewed here a few weeks ago, has been saved. An application by the landlord of the building it shares with the Gate Cinema, which would have seen the tiny restaurant destroyed, has been rejected by the local council, after a campaign by customers and locals.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
