Green & Red Bar and Cantina, 51 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 (020 7749 9670)
Meal for two, including drinks and service, £60-£90
My friend Simon has started his own food blog, which now means he never visits a restaurant without his digital camera. This fetish among diehard restaurant-goers for the photographing of their dinner - have a look at www.egullet.com or Simon's blog at http://majbros.blogspot.com to see what I mean - has become so prevalent that I would be minded to ridicule it mercilessly, were it not for the fact that I have someone to photograph my dinner for me. Still, I think there's a clear difference between the artful food photography on these pages and eating a meal to the constant whirr and flash of a cheap piece of kit from Dixons. Food porn has clearly come of age; it has moved into the DIY phase.
Recently, Simon has been photographing dishes at Green & Red Cantina, a newish Mexican place in Bethnal Green, in London's East End. He has also been eating them, too, and wrote a glowing enough report on his blog to justify another trip, even with the threat of photography.
A constant refrain, among a certain type of British belly tourist, is that this country lacks authentic Mexican restaurants which do justice to that country's noble culinary traditions. Green & Red, I was told, was authentic. By now you will know how suspicious I am of the 'A' word. The deep-fried Mars bar has enough years on the clock to justify being called authentically Scottish, but that doesn't make it good. And chicken feet in the traditional Cantonese style are the stuff of nightmares. Still, I am interested in nice food, and if I am told that true Mexican is a lot more complex than strips of dried-out chicken, drowning in industrial strength barbecue sauce and wrapped up in flat bread with the texture of wallpaper, then I'm there.
On the outside, Green & Red is an anonymous, even drab-looking place on an equally drab-looking stretch of east London street facing a railway siding. Inside, it's a far more pleasing proposition. The walls are lined in rustic wood planks. There are bare wood tables and a hefty-looking wooden bar, behind which is stacked a dangerous looking collection of tequilas. Music plays. Young people slug beer from the bottle. Lighting is low, unless Simon is there photographing the food, which this evening he was, often. Not that this is pretty stuff: it's basic and solid, but very pleasing for all that.
From the small dishes to start, all priced around £4.50, we liked a large ancho chilli, long roasted and stuffed with ewe's milk cheese, which delivered soft smoky flavours before the hit of heat at the end. A ceviche of sea bass with pomegranate seeds was sharp and refreshing, and chunks of chorizo came with darkly caramelised shallots and coriander. Chargrilled shrimps were overwhelmed by the tomato salsa that had been dumped over them, though the classic refried beans - soft, unctuous, comforting - were more encouraging.
We tried three of the main courses between us, which came with sides of shredded cabbage, some more refried beans and a pile of small, dense tortillas. According to my chief expert on food matters - Mr Google - carnitas is meant to be a dish of pork which is first braised, then shredded and roasted or fried until crisp. The carnitas here didn't appear to have been through that process - it was just a good piece of roast pork - but we liked the separate piece of crackling and the small rack of ribs that came with it. Birria brought a lamb shank braised until it could be carved off the bone with a spoon, in a rich meaty broth with the light heat from ancho chilli.
We also tried a whole sea bream roasted in banana leaves, which Simon dismissed as 'girls' food' and, gender wars aside, it did struggle to fight its corner against the butchness of the other dishes. We finished with a very good burnt custard and - its second appearance here in just three weeks - churros with melted chocolate. I have eaten churros before, mostly in Spain, where they are sold from vans and delivered into your hand practically straight from the deep-fat fryer. My two experiences in recent weeks suggest that this is the best way to eat them; that the restaurant environment just takes away that vital freshness. Still: deep-fried dough, sugar, chocolate. What's not to like?
We drank poky margaritas and various beers, among them a kind of Bloody Mary in which a bottle of Sol took the place of the tomato juice, and Simon fell in love with our Brazilian waitress, which is just sad. He is a bald man with braces on his teeth and only a distant memory of how he celebrated his 40th birthday. Mind you, I may just be taking my revenge; the democracy of the web allows scandalous bloggers to make unjustified allegations including, in Simon's case, that I have grown my hair so long I now have a mullet. This is a lie and he knows it. He's right about the food, though; it's fresh, boisterous and satisfying. That's what really matters.
