French Living

French Living - it sounds like an ex-pats estate agents for Brits seeking a bit of la vie en rose in Provence. Not a bad name for the deli and cafe which are to be found at King Street level, but hardly an evocative one for the subterranean "capsule of Frenchness" which is the restaurant below.

It really is about as French as anything gets in Nottingham. The checquered table cloths, the sexy French accents of the serving staff, the whifs of garlic and formidable camemberts - they are all the real thing. This is provincial French cusine at its hearty and traditional best, without a hint of the insufferable snootiness of Parisian restaurants.

We arrived for an early dinner at 7.15pm, half of our party of four having tickets for a gig by Alabama 3 at The Rescue Rooms. The place was quiet but gradually filled up over the course of the evening - it's nice to see that they seem to be doing OK midweek.

I went for the fish soup which was superb. Last year I had the opportunity to see how a real chef makes this while I was on a barge cruise on the Canal du Midi. First you go to the fish market and buy a kilo of soup de poissons - actually a medly of small fish. These are cooked and then ground up and forced through a kind of sieve which creates a rich, thick, intensely fishy base for the soup. French Living's version had exactly the same aromatic and authentic flavour that I recall from that idyllic trip.

We drank house red by the 1ltr carafe - nothing special but an acceptable vin de table and good value at £12/ltr. They are happy to serve you tap water rather than requiring you to buy bottled, which is good news.

After I had ordered my venison and the waiter had disappeared, I realised that he had not said anything like, "How would you like that cooked?" or "The venison comes pink, is that OK?". Instead they just went off and cooked it the way they knew it should be done - and it was perfect. Really, the best venison I have ever eaten - incredibly succulent and gamey with a rich dark sauce which was sweet enough for contrast without overwhelming the meat.

Everybody gets the same veg, a small dish of potato baked in soured cream and a sort of ratatouille of mixed vegetables - both delightful and plentiful. I tried a mouthful of the lemon sea bass which was startlingly zesty and invigorating after the autumnal richness of the venison.

The menu gastronomique (£18.50) includes a plate of 3 cheeses or a dessert. The men went for the cheeses as usual - what is the reason for this gender divide? Why don't men eat desserts? - I don't know. The cheeses were mature, warm and formidably stinky - just the way I like them.

At £108 for four people including 2ltrs of house red, 3 coffees and a couple of strange Corsican fig liquors, this was an excellent value French holiday in the heart of Nottingham.

I'll definitely be going back to French Living, perhaps to sample one of their regular Gastronomy evenings and probably to take a croissant and a grand creme in the deli.

Organic Chickens

I've been travelling and there hasn't been time to eat out much. I thought I would muse upon Organic Chickens since I have just failed to find one in Sainsbury's for about the 4th time running.

The breast meat of a broiler chicken, dry as sawdust, tastes of absolutely nothing at all. It's cheap, but the price has been paid elsewhere, by animals raised in the most horrific conditions imaginable. They are packed so densely that they can barely turn around, pumped full of anti-biotics and frequently unable to stand due to their swollen body mass. Their beaks are clipped to prevent them injuring each other due to the unnatural aggression brought on by stress. Their short lives, as short as 40 days, must be amongst the most miserable of any animals on the planet.

When I was a student I worked for a well-known food-processing company in Nottingham. At first I worked in the delivery yard, illegally driving a fork-lift truck and having a whale of a time. Unfortunately I was late for work once too often and I was transferred to "The Fridge" by way of punishment. Outside it was glorious summer but in the fridge it was so cold that we were dressed in fleece jackets and parkas. Huge container lorries full of frozen chickens would arrive daily from Norway. We would unpack them, thaw and split apart the frozen mass of birds before placing them on a conveyor belt. The chickens then passed through a device which had a sort of grid of hypodermic needles which slammed down on the chickens, injecting them with water to bulk them up and chicken flavouring to make them taste of something. I know some of those birds ended up as fresh chicken on the shelves of some of the UK's best-known supermarkets.

Ethical intentions are not the only reason to buy organic. If you've never eaten an organic chicken, then you don't know what chicken tastes like. Whereas organic veg tastes much the same as its "conventionally" grown counterparts - an organic chicken could be a completely different animal. The meat is richer and darker with an almost gamey flavour. This is the taste of a slowly matured bird, grown without antibiotics, fed on organic grains and which has lived to feel the wind in its feathers for a while. You don't need to do anything fancy with them - just do a traditional British roast (real gravy please) and you will never buy another broiler again.

Now why have Sainsbury's NEVER GOT ANY?

Cast

Cast has a website at the link above but, appropriately enough, it isn't working as I write this.

An unprecedented warm and sunny May-day morning found the EatNottingham.com household and its four weekend guests snoring in their beds and then groaning with hangovers until the early afternoon when it began to seem as though lunch (rather than death) was an immanent prospect.

We found an outdoor table at Cast, the new-ish restaurant at Nottingham Playhouse. Anish Kapoor's flawed, but nonetheless impressive, Sky Mirror sculpture was gleaming in the sunshine and a lone mallard duck was paddling happily in the water at its base. Cast does have a unique environment for alfresco dining and drinking - the peaceful and largely traffic-free island of Wellington Circus in the shadow of St Barnabus's Cathedral makes a pleasing contrast with the Grade II listed monstrosity of the Playhouse and its shiny new piece of public art.

A round of Bloody Marys restored us all to an interest in life and conversation and appetite - just as everything started to go wrong in the kitchens. Brunch is served until 4.30pm at Cast on a Sunday but it was to be be long after that before our desserts would arrive.

The seared beef carpaccio was excellent in my opinion, but one of our party thought it overdone - "that's not seared - its cooked!". It was followed by an exceedingly long intermission as the overwhelmed kitchens struggled to cope with an influx of diners and the waitresses became ever more flustered, surly and un-cooperative.

Still feeling somewhat delicate, I had ordered the safe, vegetarian, wild mushroom risotto for a main course but soon realised the magnitude of my error when everyone else's meals eventually arrived. Cast seems to be one of those places where vegetarians (even temporary ones like myself) are second-class citizens. My risotto was dwarfed by the Full English Breakfast which suddenly looked so maddeningly desirable and comforting compared to the junior portion of pallid rice and (button?) mushrooms which they had served to me for pretty much the same price.

The service difficulties then became a shambles. By 5pm the kitchens claimed to have closed so that we could not order any dessert. They had to be forcibly re-opened under protest and another long delay ensued before our puds arrived.

Cast was a fine venue for an evening meal the last time I tried them, but sunny, crowded, Sunday lunchtimes seem to give them a few problems. They put a "discretionary" 10% service charge on bills for tables of six or more - but our discretion was not invited and the credit card slips came closed.