Watercress
Dad had a bit of a night out in Soho last week. Not jazz, not slinky dancing, but to the Soho Hotel, a ritzy modern temple to Soho’s position as a global media production centre.
From a ghastly `60s car park, inappropriately dumped on Wardour Street and redundant now that no-one drives into Soho, has been carved a really rather large and very modern hotel. Is it nice? Not a bad place, but it is shocking to find so much hotel in the middle of cramped and charming Soho. Dad never noticed it before, which is odd because it must be seven years old. A friend Dad bumped into, who manages a members’ club – literary – nearby, preferred the car park.
The event was the opening of a bag of salad. It is said that some folk will, if invited, go to the opening of an envelope, and there was something of this about the occasion. But the presentation, and the meal displaying the salad to best advantage, was accompanied by the lithe and smiling Thomasina Myers, currently undergoing refurbishment as Tommi Miers, and was an ennobilisation of salad. That gets dad’s vote, every time.
The selling point of the new salads on display in Soho is that they are grown in open air here in the UK, and harvested young, so are tender, succulent and tasty. Steve’s Leaves – a subsidiary of watercress and salad giant VitaCress – succeeds only partially in their aim. The leaves are very pretty, small , tender, and grown naturally using the Conservation Grade system – delightfully, they are washed only in fresh stream water from the legendary River Test in Hampshire, where the washing and packing plant is to be found.
Rocket
Dad’s children have all come round to salads; now they will all three sit happily around a table, munching their way through vast bowls of leaves like so many happy guinea pigs. I added my baby leaf samples to a regular lettuce salad at home to to add interest, as usual, to a meal of grilled chicken and potatoes. The problem is that the small size at harvest, despite the hopes and claims of Steve and his leafmen, does compromise the intensity of flavour. The mini cress is certainly less stringy than regular cress, but is not really comparable in the heat department to the flappy bunches of the usual. The same goes for the rocket, which does not live up to its claim to be wasabe-hot.
Great products, four different mixes, and Dad recommends them. You can buy them now at Harvey Nichols in Knightsbridge and Whole Foods Market across London.
Click here to see other locations where you can buy Steve’s Leaves across the south of the UK.
