LONDON HOUSE RESTAURANT IN WEST BYFLEET (ENGLAND)
- Name: London House
- Cusine: British, Modern Restaurant
- Adress: 30 Station Approach, West Byfleet, KT14 6NF
- Phone: +44 1932 482026
Ofering an excelent dining experience!! MasterChef semi-finalist Ben Piette cares a lot about the provenance and seasonality of their products, whether it is the meat, fish, vegetables or wine. In April 2016 "The London House" moved from Old Woking to a more modern location in West Byfleet (Station Approach). The foodies and gastronomic critics praised his new restaurant and cusine as “amazing food” and “low-key and very stylish environment”. Modern European in style, British ingredients & French at heart.
London House is based in the heart of West Byfleet in Surrey. Run by owners Ben Piette and Lornette Valentine, along with their team, they work to bring their guests the complete dining experience from start to finish. Putting up a huge amount of research, and sourcing quality ingredients is the London House ethos. They are using small vineyards for their wine list, so they can bespoke and exclusive, and they are applying the same to all their food and drinks.
Their approach to food is simple, full of flavours and modern in presentation. London House is all about provenance, seasonality and creativity. They complete the dining experience starting in their Lounge with their carefully selected drinks and hand-picked wines. As well as their dining room offering a relaxed atmosphere, they also have a chef´s table coming soon, where you can wine and dine in style and experience the theatre of the kitchen.
Run by the friendly and talented Chef Ben Piette (38-year-old owner and father-of-two) and the delightful Lornette Piette front of the house. They opened four years ago, after Ben reached the semi-finals of the BBC show MasterChef (The Professionals) in 2010 and named in the prestigious Michelin Guide within its first year. Originally was located in Old Woking, but recently London House moved to Station Approach in 2016. The atmosphere of the new restaurant is relaxed, but also formal enough to be able to carry out business, enjoy with friends, or even experience a very special, sophisticated and romantic moment.
Mr Ben Piette grew up in the south of France and moved to Woking in 2000. He worked as a chef at the McLaren headquarters before opening his own restaurant. He is an Experienced Boss with a demonstrated history of working in the restaurants industry. Skilled in Food & Beverage, Restaurant Management, Customer Service, Menu Development, and Cooking. Strong operations professional graduated from Lycee Albert Camus, Frejus, Var, France. EST in April 2011 London House restaurant was the creation of the Proprietors Ben Piette and Lornette Valentine following Ben's appearance on Masterchef Professional 2010 as a semi-finalist and his 18 years’ worth of experience. Having found an empty restaurant in this local town, Old Woking, they grabbed the opportunity to independently run their own restaurant with the help of their passionate and dedicated team of 8 individuals.
West Byfleet is a village in Surrey which grew up around its relatively minor stop on the London & South Western Railway: the station, originally Byfleet and Woodham, opened in 1887. More than 1 mile (1.6 km) from the medieval village of Byfleet, the initial concentration of a new development soon established its own economy apart from that of a dependent London commuter village and spread in most directions to its borders including to the border of the old settlement, divided by the shielded London Orbital motorway today.
The first place of worship was dedicated in 1912, the parish of West Byfleet associated with it was established in 1917. The village is bounded to the north by the Basingstoke Canal and to the east by the M25 and the Wey Navigation Canal. Forming part of the contiguous development centred on London and its 'stockbroker belt' just outside the M25 motorway, it is 8 miles from London Heathrow and equidistant between the business parks of Woking and Brooklands. In local government it forms a ward on the same basis as its parish in the Borough of Woking.
BRITISH MODERN RESTAURANTS AND NEW CUISINE
British cuisine is the specific set of cooking traditions and practices associated with the United Kingdom. British cuisine has been described as "unfussy dishes made with quality local ingredients, matched with simple sauces to accentuate flavour, rather than disguise it." However, British cuisine has absorbed the cultural influence of those who have settled in Britain, producing many hybrid dishes. French cuisine is the case of the "London House Restaurant in West Byfleet", now recognised as one of the most exciting dining outlets in the area.
The reputation for fine modern British cuisine is built around the inspired creations of Ben Piette, whose food has the critics talking. They will offer you a contemporary, intimate setting and friendly, attentive service, ideal for savouring the exquisite flavour combinations of their à la carte and set menus. Choose from their carefully compiled wine list or start your meal with one of their signature cocktails made with fresh, local ingredients.
Celtic agriculture and animal breeding produced a wide variety of foodstuffs for indigenous Celts and Britons. Anglo-Saxon England developed meat and savoury herb stewing techniques before the practice became common in Europe. The Norman conquest introduced exotic spices into England in the Middle Ages. The British Empire facilitated a knowledge of India's elaborate food tradition of "strong, penetrating spices and herbs".
Food rationing policies, put in place by the British government during wartime periods of the 20th century, are said to have been the stimulus for British cuisine's poor international reputation. It has been claimed, contrary to popular belief, that people in southern England eat more garlic per head than the people of northern France.
British cuisine has traditionally been limited in its international recognition to the full breakfast, fish and chips, and the Christmas dinner. Other British dishes include the Sunday roast, steak and kidney pie, shepherd's pie, and bangers and mash. British cuisine has many regional varieties within the broader categories of English, Scottish and Welsh cuisine. Each has developed its own regional or local dishes, many of which are geographically indicated foods such as Cornish pasties, the Yorkshire pudding, Cumberland Sausage, Arbroath Smokie, and Welsh cakes.
Today recent studies in the UK indicating that British people are becoming more adventurous and experimental in their cooking and eating habits due to the growing popularity of cooking programmes. This should challenge stereotypes of British food and encourage people to discuss their own preferences and attitudes towards food and restaurants.
Nouvelle cuisine (French, "new cuisine") is an approach to cooking and food presentation in French cuisine. In contrast to cuisine classique, an older form of haute cuisine, nouvelle cuisine is characterized by lighter, more delicate dishes and an increased emphasis on presentation. It was popularized in the 1960s by the food critics Henri Gault, who invented the phrase, and his colleagues André Gayot and Christian Millau in a new restaurant guide, the Gault-Millau, or Le Nouveau Guide.
The term "nouvelle cuisine" has been used several times in the history of French cuisine, to mark a clean break with the past. In the 1730s and 1740s, several French writers emphasized their break with tradition, calling their cooking "modern" or "new". Vincent La Chapelle's published his Cuisinier moderne in 1733–1735. The first volumes of Menon's Nouveau traité de la cuisine came out in 1739. And it was in 1742 that Menon introduced the term nouvelle cuisine as the title of the third volume of his Nouveau traité. François Marin worked in the same tradition. In the 1880s and 1890s, the cooking of Georges Auguste Escoffier was sometimes described with the term. A Jacques Lameloise (a three-star Michelin Guide chef) nouvelle cuisine presentation.
The modern usage is variously attributed to authors Henri Gault, Christian Millau, and André Gayot, who used nouvelle cuisine to describe the cooking of Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Jean and Pierre Troisgros, Michel Guérard, Roger Vergé, and Raymond Oliver, many of whom were once students of Fernand Point. Paul Bocuse claimed that Gault first used the term to describe food prepared by Bocuse and other top chefs for the maiden flight of the Concorde airliner in 1969. The style Gault and Millau wrote about was a reaction to the French cuisine classique placed into "orthodoxy" by Escoffier.
Calling for greater simplicity and elegance in creating dishes, nouvelle cuisine is not cuisine minceur ("thin cooking"), which was created by Michel Guérard as spa food. It has been speculated that the outbreak of World War II was a significant contributor to nouvelle cuisine's creation, the short supply of animal protein during the German occupation made it a natural development.
Gault and Millau "discovered the formula" contained in ten characteristics of this new style of cooking. The ten characteristics identified were:
- A rejection of excessive complication in cooking.
- Cooking times for most fish, seafood, game birds, veal, green vegetables and pâtés were greatly reduced in an attempt to preserve the natural flavors. Steaming was an important trend from this characteristic.
- The cuisine was made with the freshest possible ingredients.
- Large menus were abandoned in favor of shorter menus.
- Strong marinades for meat and game ceased to be used.
- They stopped using heavy sauces such as espagnole and béchamel in favor of seasoning their dishes with fresh herbs, high-quality butter, lemon juice, and vinegar.
- They used regional dishes for inspiration instead of cuisine classique dishes.
- New techniques were embraced and modern equipment was often used. Bocuse even used microwave ovens.
- The chefs paid close attention to the dietary needs of their guests through their dishes.
- The chefs were extremely inventive and created new combinations and pairings.
Today there is a standing debate as to whether nouvelle cuisine has been abandoned. Much of what it stood for (particularly its preference for lightly presented, fresh flavors) has been assimilated into mainstream restaurant cooking. By the mid-1980s, some food writers stated that the style of cuisine had reached exhaustion and many chefs began returning to the cuisine classique style of cooking, although much of the lighter presentations and new techniques remained.
URBINA RED WINES FROM RIOJA
Bodegas Urbina is one of the most traditional, modern, and family own wineries remaining in Spain. It was founded 1870, and even today their family members still growing their vines, produce, and export the wine they produce. But this is not the only charm of this peculiar bodega. The facilities are located in Cuzcurrita del Río Tirón, in a very beautiful medieval town. It is perhaps that balance between ancient tradition and cutting-edge technology that best characterizes Bodegas Urbina in Cuzcurrita. The recent history of this bodega started in 1975, when Pedro Benito Urbina Senior becomes in charge of the winemaking. In 1975 an ambitious renovation project takes place, with his wife Catalina Sáez and his brother Jesús Angel.
The winemaking philosophy is base in the respect for tradition, using dry-farmed, densely planted, traditionally trained vines, and plenty of artisan vineyard labour: regular pruning, green-harvesting, bunch-thining, and in the winery the perform spontaneous fermentations without adding any commercial yeast. With these methods, wines cannot lie, and any experienced taster should be capable of identifying these as Spanish Tempranillo based reds, almost certainly Rioja but not necessarily so. After all, the issue of typicity is their mayor concern, since they are dealing here with the westernmost section of Rioja, with a more continental climate and, therefore, with an area that is difficult to compare with the rest of the region.
Located south of the Cantabrian Mountains along the Ebro river, La Rioja benefits from a continental climate. The mountains help to isolate the region which has a moderating effect on the climate. They also protect the vineyards from the fierce winds and frost that are typical of northern Spain. Most of the region is situated on a plateau, a little more than 1,500 feet (460 m) above sea level. The area is subdivided into three regions (Rioja Alavesa, Rioja Alta and Rioja Baja). La Rioja Alavesa and la Rioja Alta, located closer to the mountains, are at slightly higher elevations and have a cooler climate. La Rioja Baja to the southeast is drier and warmer. Annual rainfall in the region ranges from 12 inches (300 mm) in parts of Baja to more than 20 inches (510 mm) in La Rioja Alta and Alavesa. Many of Rioja's vineyards are found along the Ebro valley.
Bodegas Urbina is located in Rioja Alta at (500 m) above the sea level. Rioja Alta is located on the western edge of the region and at higher elevations than the other areas, the Rioja Alta is known more for its "old world" style of wine. A higher elevation equates to a longer growing season, which in turn produces brighter fruit flavors and a wine that is lighter on the palate, but with a great capacity of ageing in the bottle.
One of the traits that sets Rioja Wines apart is their excellent aptitude for ageing, a quality that is exclusive to great wines. Through appropriate ageing,. in which oak wood plays a decisive role, Rioja Wine evolves, its virtues becoming more prominent and acquiring new aromas and flavours. Rioja Wines are aged in 225 litre oak casks, where the wine experiences a slow evolutionary process of micro-oxygenation and stabilisation, and eventually acquires aromas and flavours released by the tannins in the wood.
This is the traditional ageing method of great wines, a natural, more costly process than modern proposals of a more "industrial" oenology. The ageing process is completed in the bottle, where the wine continues to evolve in a reducing atmosphere until it reaches its peak. Great wines from historic vintages sleep in bottles for decades in the cellars of the bodegas until they are transformed into true oenological gems.
With Tempranillo as the main grape variety, Rioja reds are characterised by being very balanced in their alcohol content, colour and acidity, by having a body and structure offset perfectly by a gentle and elegant flavour and by being mainly fruity in nature when young and more velvety when aged. These characteristics make Rioja Wines highly versatile when combining with the most varied foods. This, together with the fact that it is a user-friendly, easy-to-drink wine, constitutes one of the keys to its success.
Rioja red wines are classified into four categories. The first, simply labeled Rioja, is the youngest, spending less than a year in an oak aging barrel. A crianza is wine aged for at least two years, at least one of which was in oak. Rioja Reserva is aged for at least three years, of which at least one year is in oak. Finally, Rioja Gran Reserva wines have been aged at least two years in oak and three years in bottle. Reserva and Gran Reserva wines are not necessarily produced each year. Also produced are wines in a semi-crianza style, those that have had a couple of months oak influence but not enough to be called a full crianza. The designation of crianza, Reserva etc. might not always appear on the front label but may appear on a neck or back label in the form of a stamp designation known as Consejo.
In Spain, wineries are commonly referred to as bodegas though this term may also refer to a wine cellar or warehouse. For quite some time, the Rioja wine industry has been dominated by local family vineyards and co-operatives that have bought the grapes and make the wine. Some bodegas would buy fermented wine from the co-ops and age the wine to sell under their own label. In recent times there has been more emphasis on securing vineyard land and making estate bottled wines from the bodegas. All the Urbina wines are made with their own vineyards, having absolute control of the natural process.