22 Rivington Street, London EC2A 3DY. Mostly no reservations, except for large parties who can book online (santoremedio.co.uk). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £60
All too often in the food world, the war of expertise becomes a lumbering battle between the Real Thing and the Good Stuff. The Real Thingers have knowledge and experience on their side. They’ve eaten dishes in their place of origin, when you have not. By contrast, all the Good Stuffers have is enthusiasm. They don’t care whether these Korean chicken wings are as they would be in downtown Seoul. All that matters is that they taste good. Imagine the naked wrestling scene between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates in the movie Women in Love. Only with the combatants arguing over the correct use of quinoa.
Instinctively I’m a Good Stuff man. Of course the Real Thing interests me. I am intrigued by how certain dishes evolved in response to economic circumstance. For example, many fermented food items – the stinky Baltic herring surströmming, or the more mundane sauerkraut – exist because salt was too expensive to allow for its liberal use. Instead a little salt was used to flavour a fermentation.
But the idea of an absolute in food, of the correct way to do anything, is fragile. A lobscouse is a stew, local to Liverpool, made with cheap cuts of lamb or beef. After that it gets a bit hazy. The recipe can differ from home to home and cook to cook. And the variations can be so broad it’s hard to know where a lobscouse ends and, say, a Lancashire hotpot begins. In these circumstances it’s better to ask yourself only: “Does it taste nice?”
Sometimes the Real Thing and the Good Stuff collide. The first time I ate spare ribs cooked according to the rules of American barbecue – low and slow over smoke for hours – I realised just how much better they were than the oven-roasted variety I was used to in the UK, slicked in a sticky glaze that was one part tomato ketchup, one part honey, three parts creosote.
After a meal at Santo Remedio in London’s Shoreditch, full of lightness and brightness, colour, punch and enthusiasm, I am willing to acknowledge that the same applies to Mexican food – that right and good are the same. For years I have been told that the Mexican culinary tradition is a unique thing full of depth and wonder. The only problem was access to ingredients, and really, if you can’t make it to Mexico itself, you have to try the third taco truck along at the junction of South Fairfax Ave and Adams Boulevard in Los Angeles. Man, the things they do with pig tripe and ancho chillies. And so on. I dutifully traipsed from one Mexican place in Britain to the next, only to be met by claggy refried beans the colour of something conscientious dog walkers clear up in the park.
And then there’s Santo Remedio, which means Holy Remedy, food being seen as a universal panacea in Mexico. It’s run by Mexicans Edson Diaz-Fuentes and his wife Natalie, and is a simple blue space of cluttered shelves, coloured tiling and bare wooden tables. There’s a bar upstairs where you can drown yourself in the good tequila, and both a fixed menu and a blackboard of specials at modest prices. They use both British ingredients and things that have to be imported from Mexico. The beer has made the trip and can be served with a depth charge of hot and sour clear salsa in a glass with a salt-crusted rim. It’s the wake-me-up of a Bloody Mary without the cloying viscosity of the tomato juice. Chicharrones, the puffed-up pig-skin bit of a pork scratching, come with Valentina. In Mexico it’s a bog-standard, if much-loved, brand of hot sauce; here it’s a burst of exotica, full of citrus flavours followed by a whack of heat.
Guacamole is freshly chopped, full of the crunch of fresh onions, chillies and lime and topped with deep-fried grasshoppers. The latter are a novelty which taste of very little but offer texture. There are the various dipping salsas with corn chips: a salsa verde the colour of a newly mown bowling green with lots of high acidic notes, and the sultry come-hither salsa roja, which is smoky and rich. Rings of red onion come in a pickling liquor, flavoured with habaneras, which makes the eyes widen.
From the specials we get the prawn aguachile, a form of ceviche which, with the fishy flavours in its depths, the burst of heat and the liberal application of lime, recalls the brighter seafood dishes of Thailand. The tangled meat in their pork tacos, dainty things the size of coffee-table coasters, have been simmered in orange juice and Coke before being shredded and piled with salsa verde. The trip through the corner-shop drinks counter gives the pork sweetness and depth. The bought-in tacos have a little bite. The beef version has been braised for six hours and is smeared with more of the salsa roja. Both roll up to become tiny parcels of joy.
Chicken wings are baked in an Oaxacan mole. They are the colour of coal and a little odd. Mole, as explained to me by the American Mexican food expert Rick Bayless, is an extraordinary thing: part sauce, part condiment, a testament to the controlled burning of multiple ingredients to produce a flavour which is both many things and only itself. There are toasted notes and bitter notes of the darkest chocolate. It is both floral and earthy. The one here is sweet and, having been dried out in the oven, has lost its lusciousness. But I can’t complain too much because we dispatch the wings quickly. A quesadilla is an exotic name for a folded corn tortilla cheese sandwich but given added thrills by being made with stringy, mellow cheese from the Gringa Dairy in Peckham. Throw on liberal amounts of salsa verde and it rocks.
There’s only one dessert: freshly made churros with a bowl of dulce con leche. So that’s deep-fried and sugared dough with toffee. And a Merry Christmas to you, too. While specials can hit the giddy heights of £12, most of the dishes are £7 or less. Santo Remedio, I am led to believe, is the Real Thing. I’ll take their word for it. I can, however, assure you it’s most certainly the Good Stuff.
Jay’s news bites
■ A couple of weeks ago I took part in a terrific fundraising event for Action Against Hunger, in which food writers enter the kitchen and cook for chefs and restaurateurs. This year it was held at Ceviche Old Street, which is both not far from Santo Remedio, and also offers up a modern take on the food of another part of Latin America, in this case Peru. Martin Morales’s brilliant way with raw fish and so-called tiger’s milk – lots of lime and chilli - is a glorious thing. Make sure to have a pisco sour (cevicheuk.com).
■ Look out for rising fish prices. A mixture of environmental issues – toxic algae bloom in Chile, an outbreak of lice in Norway, cold weather restricting growth – has resulted in a major shortage of salmon.
■ There’s money in tabbouleh. Comptoir Libanais, the reliable midmarket Levantine chain started by Tony Kitous, who arrived in the UK in 1988 with £70 in his pocket, has just floated on AIM. It is now valued at £50m (comptoirlibanais.com).
Jay Rayner’s new book, The Ten (Food) Commandments, is out now (Penguin, £6). To order a copy for £5.10, go to bookshop.theguardian.com
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
