British Pie Awards 2016

Saint Mary's Church, Melton Mowbray

I’m a broken record when it comes to leaving London for the day. The feeling is always the same: the early start, the taste of sleep and bitter coffee, the gentle rock of the carriage, the warm, stale air, and the rain racing across the window. The train, ploughing that same furrow, yet again, twists from the grip of its suburban shackles, breaking into a straight run through seas of green and the occasional burst of grey. With each passing minute, the line narrows and the passengers thin. London becomes the distant past; that great, glowing centre of the universe, eclipsed by drystone walls, corrugated distribution centres, an inability to make good coffee, and sofas left in the rain.

And out here, beneath the dark, leaking sky, lies Melton Mowbray. A town sat on the thinnest of thin railway lines, where the rails merge seamlessly with the land on either side, nibbled by sheep, scratched by the hardiest of shrubs, and tickled by branches. It’s a town synonymous with a different time and a different existence. A chocolate box of memories, with the picture-perfect trinity of church, park, and tumbledown mews engraved on the lid. A town to excite every tourist and inspire every Englander; a place to meet the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker; and the home - both spiritually and literally - of pies.

Melton has it’s own pie shops; Melton has it’s own pie; Melton hosts, each and every year, the British Pie Awards. This is a town that eats, sleeps, and breathes pie. To some, this might seem a terrible curse. Pie is the food of fun, ridicule, and the perfect portrayal of an awful diet. Who ate all the pies? We all did and we all do. England is a country that has, does, and will forever love pies. Obesity be damned; the magic sparkle of bright, golden glazed pastry that delivers a satisfyingly crisp crunch beneath a knife, and the ooze of a sweet, salty, stewed filling, more than compensates for a bloodstream laden with cholesterol.

But, just how satisfying is that crunch? How golden the glaze? How sweet, salty, or otherwise, the bubbling ooze? At the British Pie Awards, we - the judges - gather to answer these questions (and more) in our search for the best pie. Gathered beneath the high, vaulted ceiling of St. Mary’s church, the wheat is removed from the chaff. Looking, cutting, prodding, poking, and tasting, the glaze, the pastry, the filling, all placed beneath the microscope. Look, touch, slice, taste, and repeat. Always repeat.

For many entries, pie is clearly a labour of love; care, craft, and thought neatly brought together and encased within a perfect pastry. For others, pie is a chore; a weak, wet millimetre of pastry, collapsing before the knife's touch, revealing a thin paste of filling not fit for a fork. These are surprisingly frequent and the bins overflow with a mound of disappointingly bad entries. It’s fine though, competition breeds creativity, innovation, and an attempt at betterment. The best pies rise to the top, scoring ever higher than the failures consigned to the skip outside.

Eventually, there’s a winner - or three, to be precise. Three fruit pies, stacked on the podium, from beautiful gold, so-so silver, and shameful bronze. Each demonstrated an almost edible visual appeal, with minimal flaws; each served up a perfectly even, firm, cooked pastry; each managed to deliver a balanced flavour, that met their description; each was so stuffed with filling, that a single slice was a meal in itself. Each was a pie worthy of its place and a reassurance, once again, that Britain knows how to cook the best pies, as well as eat them.

Visiting Oxford

Oxford

Paddington Station after 7.00am is a luxury. Mind clear of sleep and caffeine, eyes alert, feet no longer bounding on auto-pilot, dashing for the three minute coffee and the slam of the closing train door. Flashes of the past through the window cause a shudder, but it's a calmer journey, sat still and patient, rooted to the seat, with no change at Reading.

Visiting Oxford is like staring through a series of mirrors. Everything is familiar, yet twisted to a different angle. Sights bring memories and signs point in redundant directions home. Reality hangs out-of-reach only by inches, blocked by the floating bubble of perspex.

Change is slow in a city almost older than time. An old shoe hugs a familiar foot closely. Edamame, that hidden gem of a Japanese broom cupboard, still maintains opening hours determined by the mule and his spinning wheel. Healthy, nourishing seaweed, pickles, and beans counter the brain-addling qualities of near-frozen beer. Pork, breaded and soaked in a curried sauce, sweet with rice and soup. £15 is daylight robbery, with the customer holding the gun.

Yawning, belly-slapping, and belching from a duck and a pint under the Autumn-stained eaves of The Turf Tavern. Caffeine, hooked to the vein, drip-fed through the tangle of tourist and student chain-gangs marching the flagstone floor of King Edward. Cake, the other ubiquity of Oxford follows closely behind.

It's getting close to that time. The anxiety, the day of work, the week of work, the life of work, the tired mind draws to alcohol like a buffalo to a watering-hole. Etiquette and education left at the door, four wooden chairs, three lumps of cold coal, two imported lagers, and one pie, with chips and salad, carrying as many flavours as memories.

One last walk along the wall, one last peer through the iron gates, one last cigarette (she claims). Raoul's is a hot as it ever was. Drinkers drip off every wall, staring in awe at the dancing flames behind the bar. A drink from memory taken from the menu, placed back in the glass for one last time. Feet shuffle home, the chattering teeth warmed by the blanket.

Ghosts rise early. Scrubbed, cleaned, and out into the fog, back behind the glass sipping coffee, back behind the glass watching a world chased by winter. An hour and we are home. Drinks steady, not spilt. Heads clean, not dirty. Bananas peeled, not uneaten. Here's to the next trip, whenever that may be.

Pieminister - South Bank

Gabriels Wharf, 56 Upper Ground, London SE1 9PP

A walk along South Bank is the best way to see London. It's crowded and lined with expensive attractions and equally overpriced food and drink, but the views can't be beaten. From the Houses of Parliament to St Paul's, almost every iconic image on the London skyline can be glimpsed or stared straight in the eye. The bridges let you criss-cross the river to see other less obvious sites - including the bridges themselves - and when the sun is beating down on the white flagstone promenade and endless foreign voices fill the air, it seems positively European. It's Nigel Farage's Inferno.

On a Friday things are a little different. Groups of drunken idiots stagger their way from one poor pub to another. Swaying, laughing, shouting, and generally being jovial or obnoxious, depending on which way you look at it. Don't worry, the story ends well: one of us doesn't get served later on, and rightly so. On the surface, this really isn't the place to come for food or indeed drink - for the aforementioned reasons - however, there are a few gems hidden to the left or right, depending on which way you look at it. The Hayward Gallery rooftop, hidden amongst the tomatoes, is a great place for an afternoon drink; Canteen, at Royal Festival Hall, always offers up good food at a fair price; and then there's Pieminister.

My love affair with Pieminister began when I moved to Oxford. On an occasional lunch, when I wasn't scoffing buritto, I'd hop across the road to the Covered Market and push my way past the next Dave Snooty and his pals to get a seat. Freezing in the winter, boiling in the summer, struggling to breathe after eating regardless of the season. Now, however many years later, my eyes having deteriorated to see things only in sepia, I sometimes get nostalgic for those days, so seek out the original Pieminister experience. And boy, does South Bank provide that on a plate. A tiny wooden shed, filled with hot pies, hot potato, hot peas, hot gravy, and two women who must have asbestos for skin. Tucked behind two tourist honey traps, probably selling God-awful pizza slices at £7 a pop, the seats are all outside, so victim to every front of the English weather. For the memory of Oxford, it's better than the sound of a wheezing chubby-cheeked Tory on a bike. For the needs of my stomach, it's better than a hundred roast dinners.

I still love Pieminister. Plain and simple. Their pies could be served from a dustbin, by the gap-toothed, fingerless glove wearing, imported Nigerian Guinness (RRP: 98p a can) drinking man who talks to the fenceposts outside the flat until three o'clock in the morning. I wouldn't care. I'd gladly hand over my money and eat one, smothered in gravy, covered in peas, balanced atop a mound of mashed potato, and sprinkled with fried shallots. God, I want to eat one now and I just ate dinner. It really is an un-reviewable pie - akin to reviewing a member of your family. Well, not my family. A decent family (joke!). Impossible to judge; and I should know, I've judged pies for Britain.

So next time you visit the South Bank, ignore the overpriced pizza, stop trying to hear the tour guides spout their nonsense about 'The Ladies' Bridge' for free, and pay Pieminister a visit. It'll be the best pie you've eaten for a long while and if you don't like it, I really don't care.

Newman Arms - Fitzrovia, London

23 Rathbone St, London, W1T 1NG

The most obvious pubs in Central London tend to be tourists traps, luring the Germans, the Japanese, and day-trippers in for pints creeping every closer to the £6.00 mark and food rejected by Findus. There are some hidden gems though, tucked away along alleyways off the main thoroughfares, they sell a relatively-reasonably priced pint from a brewery other than Samuel Smith. Finding them is tough, unless you're a 'local'.

The Newman Arms on Rathbone Street is one such pub. To get there from Oxford Street requires a map, a compass, good boots, and traversing one or two narrow Dickensian passageways lifted straight from the pages of a Hollywood script. The pub itself has an equally narrow door - a sliver of a thing that bars most American tourists from entering - opening in to a single roomed bar, featuring a range of different ales on tap, and that classic of all London pubs: the dank basement toilet. 

While a good drinking hole, the real beauty of this pub lies upstairs. In a small but ornate room, ten tables sit arm-rubbingly close to one another, surrounded on every wall by china bowls, collections of cigarette cards, and memorabilia from the Crimean War - the last one that is. Here, they sell pie and pudding. The pie wouldn't pass the test of the Pierateers: a ceramic bowl of stew topped with a puff pasty lid is always a poor excuse for a pie. The choice of the real connoisseur is the pudding: a lump of suet surrounding boiling hot and delicious chicken and leek innards. Accompanied with crushed potatoes and various vegetables, this could be a contender for healthiest pie served in London. A second pudding to follow is a must. This time in the non-traditional sense of the word, the pudding is a no-nonsense bowl of sticky toffee pudding - a mound of sponge and sugar - drowned like a cat in either cream, ice-cream, or custard.

After two courses and a pint, all for under £20, to leave via the front door is tricky and the alleyway back to Oxford Street feels even narrower.

The Red Lion - Barnes, London

2 Castelnau, London, SW13 9RU

We were good in the Olympics, Team GB. Had pie eating been an event, I'm sure we'd have been even better. Although fears of glorifying obesity have seen the World Pie Eating Championship in Wigan reduced from volume to speed, pies are still as popular as ever and their stock is surely rising. Always synonymous with fatness - 'who ate all the pies', a popular taunt toward the overweight - everything can be consumed in moderation and a pie every so often is easily countered by a good jog. One everyday, on the other hand, requires some serious worn rubber on the Asics.

Mind you, shoes with no soles aside, I really am a rank amateur. There are some out there whose consumption of pies dwarfs mine by a factor of ten or more: The Pierateers. These guys are anonymous pros and my visit to The Red Lion in Barnes was not only to try a pie from South London, but to say hello to The Pierateers and marvel at the masters as they work.

The Red Lion may sit out on a National Rail limb, flanked by proper countryside of fields, trees, and the Wetland Centre in the suburb of Barnes, but it's not far from Putney by train or Hammersmith by bus. The pub is a large square box, painted a strange shade of green, with Fuller's on tap, and huge Sunday dinners delivered in a roasting tray. Pies, however, aren't on the menu on a Sunday. No-one says no to these pie aficionados though and three special slices of a tray baked chicken and leek pie arrived for us, sitting on a bed of (possibly) tarragon mash - it was green anyway. There was definitely some difficulty in telling where the mash ended and the pale innards of the pie began; not a problem for taste, perhaps an issue if you're attempting a meticulous dissection for the purposes of a fair rating. These guys prodded, probed, chewed, and with limited discussion ("Is that a false side?") set to work scoring marks against their own seven criteria. Their consumption of the pie took minutes; mine was gone in seconds - a sure sign of a pie amateur.

I'll be interested to read their final rating. Mine was seven thumbs up. A flavourful pie, strong pastry, with a healthy does of mash on the side, the only improvement being some form of green included. You have to balance all of that belt-popping pastry with some healthy vegetables once in a while.

Mother Mash - Ganton Street

26 Ganton St, London, W1F 7QZ

I don't know when it happened, but it did. No more the giddy schoolboy from 6-months ago, relishing the trip to central London, neck craned toward the sky, tie wrapped around my head, sliding on knees across the highly polished floor of Trafalgar Square. Now, the west of Zone 1 only exists below ground. A place where tube lines connect and 'Way Out' signs are presumably someone's idea of a joke. The nuclear apocalypse realised, albeit one that only did surface damage.

Apparently, life does exist above ground, but it's an odd existence. Hundreds of feet drag themselves along Oxford Street, trying to buy their own reflection, before slumping into a red booth at one of the neon-light straddled steak houses. Best to stick to the back streets - they're far safer. Here you'll find such delights as Patty and Bun, MeatLiquor, Bodean's, and, presumably wedged between another palace of burgers and another meat emporium, Mother Mash. I'm a busy man, so I didn't have time to look.

Mother Mash, as the name suggests, specialises in mash served with sausages, pies, and gravy. Presumable a former alleyway or Dickensian hovel, the booths, benches, white tiles, and skylights give a smart finish to the decor, something many wouldn't associated with such standard fare, but it's about time pie 'n' mash was recognised for the trendy gastro-treat it is. Service was quick and as the menu was quite short - a definite plus - it matched my decision. Colcannon mash, steak pie, and traditional gravy. The mash was a winner, the gravy as described, although I knew when I ordered that I should have had the farmer's gravy. Farmers are never wrong. Bacon, wine, onions, and mushrooms, flavourful and one of your five-a-day.

Now for the pie. As the name suggests, Mother Mash focuses on mash, so perhaps here we have our excuse, but regardless I was still disappointed with the pie. Great pastry. Flaky, crisp with no burnt bits, and not overly salty. The meat, though, was dry. Dry, dry, dry. Even with the abundance of gravy, this still required most of my London Pride (4.7%) to finish off. Such a shame.

"The turkey's a little dry!
Oh, foe, what demon from the depths of hell created thee!"

- Homer, The Simpsons Halloween Special 2

I still hadn't quite had my fill of pies for the evening though. I was willing to give Mother Mash a second chance, enter the apple and blackberry pie. A sad looking thing, a sunken pie drowned beneath a small pond of custard. Underneath the collapsed roof, four or five blackberries sat alone: the apple had clearly left the building, as had the flavour. On a blind taste-test I defy anyone to tell me that this pie had ever been introduced to, let alone contained, fruit.

As scathing as my review may be, Mother Mash is worth a visit, saved by the beauty of pies - the fact that, aside from the common factor of being incased in pastry, different pies are hugely different. While one can be a failure, another can be a success. With a 6.4 on the Pierate scale perhaps the steak and ale needs sampling next time...

Canteen - London

Dodging through the rain in South London on the only day this year close to being 'April', I meant to visit Brixton Village after spending the afternoon drinking a few Doom Bar (4.0%) in The Bedford. Diverted to Canteen under the Royal Festival Hall, I found a surprisingly empty (for a Saturday evening) restaurant sitting behind a drenched and, therefore, deserted cheese and wine market.

Canteen modern, clean, light, glass, wooden, etc. It served pie and mash, which seemed an unlikely option. A squat pie, aside a small portion of greens and scoop of mash. Again, clean.

The one let down? The pudding. A small (a theme here) apple crumble served in a ceramic pot. A bowl would be so much better. I know it doesn't fit the image, but it cools the pudding down in time for you to eat it. Burning the roof of my mouth was an overly sweet crumble topping, a purée of apple, and a flavourless custard.

It's not a good choice for a modern restaurant - homely puddings. Crumble should be the epitome of rustic. Uneven chunks of apple beneath a bobbling surface of crumble. No vanilla custard, nothing fancy. It's one item I just don't think a chef can do better than I could at home.

Eat the pie; go home for the crumble.

The Sanctuary House - London

If only someone could make a Spotify-style app for eating out - a service which took your likes and preferences and suggested similar venues.

Sure, it would sap the fun out of discovering new places under your own steam, but it would save a huge amount of wasted time and reduce the number of 'well that's one meal I ain't getting back'.

Of course, this time I could have used my intuition and read the signs. The grey-haired patrons clinking their cutlery in rhyme. The elderly just don't know a bad pub when they see it.

It's difficult to know where to start with The Sanctuary House - a pub and hotel owned by Fuller's brewery. The disinterested bar staff and the spelling mistake riddled menu (substainable fish fingers?) would be a good place. The pie though - advertised in large letters on the door - was incredibly bad. On the table so fast I could still hear the ring of the ping from the microwave. A hideously salty and jaw-strainingly chewy beef an ale filling, accompanied by cold chips and undercooked vegetables.

And that's where I'll finish. Next time I'm caught out somewhere unfamiliar, I'll go home for toast.