Dishpatch, at home

Dishpatch (The Coach by Tom Kerridge), at home (££)

So - technically, this one isn’t strictly London. Well, it sort of is—it’s wherever you live. Enter the room, Dishpatch. Dishpatch lives in the centre of a three-way Venn diagram of going out to eat, getting takeaway, and making dinner yourself. Sourced from some of the best restaurants and chefs across the UK, Dishpatch offers menus from top kitchens shipped to your house, with all the difficult steps taken care of and only the actual cooking of the food left for you to do. As a result of the lockdown, Dishpatch saw an opportunity to get restaurant-quality food across the UK, somewhat removing the geographical limits that limited us to our locals.

Tonight, I am Tom Kerridge. Renowned celebrity and Michelin starred chef, bastion of British cooking, The Coach by Tom Kerridge the source of our meal today… my hopes, therefore, are high. Moreover, his classic (and dare I say, simple?) style should transfer nicely to a home cook like myself. Dishpatch is not just confined to Kerridge, or British classics (St John - I see your pies…), but a wide range of cuisines and restaurants - some known and some more un-known. The menu tonight isn’t new or different, unlike some menus they offer (e.g., Sri Lankan grills or Catalonian feasts), but comfort food done well and at a high-quality.

And on the menu, from The Coach by Tom Kerridge? Ham hock-infused butter, sourdough; Slow-cooked côte de boeuf, English mustard mash, Hispi cabbage, herb dressing; and Date and toffee pudding, clotted cream. Our dinner arrives on Friday, with our plan to eat it on Sunday, in an iced-cooled box. Inside, we receive our menu, cooking instructions (all helpfully identifying items by numbers), and then the food itself (with the helpful stickers linking the food to the cooking instruction—helpful to differentiate sauces!).

For our starters, we had sourdough and ham-hock butter. Easy to cook, we simply warmed the sourdough in the oven with a sprinkle of water and then, when warmed through, simply served it with the butter. The sourdough was tasty, with a great crust as you’d expect on the outside and a soft inside with different-sized air pockets dotted nicely. When reading the description for the ham-hock butter, I assumed a smooth, creamy butter with a strong, infused flavour; I was half correct. With a strong ham-hock flavour that was earthy and, at bites, salty and acidic, the butter was closer to a pate than butter. Chunky, the ham-hock butter was full of wonderful proof of its infusion and was excellent to spoon onto the bread. While at times not the easiest of bites, the sourdough and ham-hock butter were full of flavour and texture, not stealing the show from the main course it knew was coming. Furthermore, because it's easy to cook, you’ve got a great starter that allows you to concentrate on cooking your main course.

My one qualm with a service like this is that, unlike a restaurant or takeaway, if you mess up the cooking, you are all to blame, and unless you order two boxes, there’s no real starting from scratch if it all goes Pete Tong. For the majority of the mains, it is all fairly straightforward: the hispi cabbage gets a drizzle of oil and sits in the oven, and the mash gets warmed through over the hob. It is the côte de boeuf, rather unsurprisingly, that is a little more dread-inducing. The beef, coming vacuum-sealed, is to start off at a surprisingly low 80 degrees centigrade in the oven for an hour. The next part is the most frightening. The recipe calls for searing the steak for 4-5 minutes on both sides, ideally to get that golden, knife-scrapingly good crust. Basting in the juices and herbs from the pouch it cooked in the oven in, it ended up perfectly cooked (both internally and on the outside).

Crisis averted.

With all the other sides cooked exactly to the time on the recipe, which resulted in them all being fairly perfectly cooked, it was ready to serve. Apparently, at 800g (I failed to weigh it), the steak just fed two of us; if I were with any hungrier friends, then we might have been a little bit in trouble. Fairly fatty in places (although, as is fairly expected with this cut), the steak wasn’t too difficult to carve up, and we did have presentable slices. The flavour was, at least, all worth it. The steak had a deep, meaty flavour that was complimented by the herbal tones that had nicely seeped in from cooking. The crust on the outside of the steak added a welcome crunch, in addition to holding a salty-buttery punch. The mash had a distinct mustard base to it and was, as you’d expect from a Kerridge establishment, silky smooth. However, the hispi cabbage felt somewhat confused; maybe if done under a proper restaurant grill, it would have captured the herb dressing better, but otherwise, it just felt a little off. It didn’t taste bad, and the dressing added a needed acidic note, but texturally, it had the potential to really wow.

Brilliantly drenched over the top of the main, however, was a red wine jus, one I unashamedly spiked with some of the cooking juices post-sear. Rich and bold, it did what any jus or gravy should do—just elevate it that little bit. The other beauty of having an at-home meal is that it is truly a BYOB experience. The red wine jus was not the only red wine at the table, and it was nice to enjoy a bottle over such a meal that didn’t have a ridiculous markup or a steep corkage.

If the meal wasn’t rich enough already, however, the final course was sure to hit that mark for you. A delightfully sweet, but by no means misplaced, date and toffee pudding was our final cooking task of the evening. Simple to cook, it was like the majority of the meal was simply a case of placing it in the oven, forgetting about it, and then returning. As mentioned, the pudding was sweet and texturally soft, especially when doused in the toffee sauce. My only problem with this dash, and probably the only element that I would actively leave out if I ordered it again, was the clotted cream. Maybe I’m too used to sweetened cream, but the clotted cream here was just a tad sour, not as sweet as I expected. When mixed with the pudding and sauce, it contrasted nicely, the hot and cold and the soft and thick, but in terms of flavour, it just felt like it missed the mark. A shame, but the pudding got finished nonetheless.

What is the purpose of a service like this, then? Is it to replace cooking or to replace a takeaway? Both? Neither? I guess the answer is that there isn’t one. It’s fun and something different, and the fact that you end up with good food should satisfy anyone on the fence. For myself, who really enjoys cooking, this was fun and an opportunity to get close to chefs and kitchens you may not otherwise have a chance of experiencing. The cost of a meal like this may be a little higher than a takeaway or a reasonably priced restaurant, but it’s by no means absurd. The fact that I actively look forward to receiving emails on which chefs are producing menus is, if nothing else, an answer for myself: did I enjoy it? yes. Will I order it again? I have no doubt I will.