Giles Coren, The Times
Cloth, London (9.167)
Coren’s review of Cloth was published a couple of weeks ago but I wanted to wait to comment on it until after my own visit to the restaurant, which happened earlier this week. I wouldn’t usually bother, but Coren’s review was so extreme that it seemed worthwhile to have my own experience to compare to his before steaming in.
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in writing this newsletter it’s never to take anything Giles Coren writes seriously. As I’ve previously noted, Coren treats the job of restaurant critic with the contempt it deserves and is utterly capricious with his praise and scorn. He creates and destroys the world around him with language on a moment-by-moment basis and is therefore not to be trusted.
His columns are a convoluted game which he always contrives to win. You thought he was being serious when he said Catch in Weymouth was the best restaurant in the world (see Smashed #17)? Are you stupid? Let Coren explain: ‘Saying, “This is the best restaurant in the world,” after a meal is like saying, “I love you,” after sex. It’s a hormone rush. It feels true at the time; it’s an honest feeling. But it doesn’t mean you’re not going to be saying it to someone else next week.’ He recently said that the Horse and Groom in Bourton-on-the-Hill was ‘almost certainly the best pub in England’ and then immediately added the caveat that ‘Terms and conditions apply, experiences can go up as well as down, you might not like it, no, I haven’t been to your local, frankly it’s just the sort of thing I say’.
So now you understand the ground rules, you’ll know what to make of the following paragraph that appeared in his Cloth review: ‘I haven’t written a bad review in years. I used to write them all the time, of course. Because, and this is the point, restaurants in this country used to be very bad. All of them. Even the good ones. That’s why Jonathan Meades and Michael Winner and AA Gill wrote the way they did. Not because they were especially angry or spoilt or mean-minded men. But because they had certain, quite modest standards and practically nowhere on the godforsaken British restaurant scene of the 1980s and 1990s, bleeding into the 2000s, was able to meet them.’
That is of course utterly unsupportable horseshit, counjoured from the top of his head at 9am just before he stopped for his first coffee. He carries on: ‘two restaurants out of every three that one went to, even in London, were utterly bloody stinking. The cheap ones were poisonous, the expensive ones were deluding themselves and everywhere in between was deceitful, ersatz and sad. The produce was rotten, the cooking was filthy and the staff were absolutely vile.’
All this to set up the assertion that things started to change mid 2010’s and now ‘almost all new restaurants, especially in London, are incredible’. Just a reminder at this point that he didn’t mean a word of it and will have forgotten he’d even written it by the time he rocked up for his next review lunch that same day. It doesn’t matter. It’s not even really an opinion, it’s just some words. It’s all in the game and Coren is winning, somehow.
I am nevertheless going to address Coren’s argument in two ways: one for non-subscribers and one for subscribers only. But before we get to that, let’s deal with Cloth where Coren was, of course, ‘quite beside myself’. He says it’s what restaurants of the ‘hipster food movement around 2007/8’ were trying to be. It’s ‘another cracker’ because all new restaurants are incredible, remember. And why is it a ‘cracker’? Well, salt cod fritters were ‘superhot, supercrisp’, crab tagliarini made ‘gorgeous textures in the mouth’, a rabbit and bacon terrine that was ‘fine’ and ‘firm’ and the tonnato dressing for some chopped bull’s heart tomatoes was ‘tangy’. All of those things were no doubt impossible for a restaurant to achieve before 2013.
I enjoyed Cloth, although the acoustics are equally as bad as those at Mountain, both of which were a nightmare for poor little old hearing-impaired me (coincidentally, the very next day I got new hearing aids fitted which would have come in handy for what was a very sonically challenging lunch.) I was tagging along on a PR-provided review lunch and so we got special attention from co-owner Ben Butterworth who is a joyful presence in the cosy, atmospheric dining room. The food was good to very good and not too overpriced, although I imagine it’s Gross-Profit-Margin-High-Fives all round in the kitchen whenever someone orders the £22 plate of tagliatelle with girolles, Parmesan and lemon. It was very nice pasta and I wasn’t paying (phew), but still.
Then we ate some other stuff (see below), drank a barrelful of lovely wines, none of which I can remember and then I walked five miles across London for dinner at a place I can’t tell you about because I was there undercover. Cloth was fine but I left whistling the crockery (Coren made particular play about it too) rather than thinking I’d had a memorable meal. Although I don’t think Coren’s liberal use of hyperbole and playing fast and loose with the truth is actively damaging (that sort of behaviour is only a real problem if your name is Trump), it did give me high expectations of the place and at the same time made me extremely sceptical about how good Cloth could possibly be. That did colour my judgement of the place. It would probably have been better for everyone involved if I hadn’t read the review before dining.
I almost certainly won’t return to Cloth, not because I didn’t think it was good or recommendable, but because I’m not a Londoner and I need a very good reason to return to a restaurant rather than go somewhere new or that I already know and love. The same is true of Mountain, voted the second-best restaurant in the country in the recent National Restaurant Awards which it simply is not (nothing against the awards themselves by the way). It’s a very busy, very slick, very noisy, fun sort of place where you’ll easily rack up a bill of £150 for some stuff on plates and some modest wine. The best thing I ate was some mutton chops for £26 which weren’t as good as the mechoui lamb chops I’d grilled for dinner a few nights before and served with chopped salad, spiced labneh and homemade flatbreads, all made to a recipe in the wonderful Morito cookbook.
Because of the rising overheads associated with being a restaurateur in 2024, cost and value in the minds of their customers are always on the brink of being irreconcilable. At the moment I am struggling to make it work for me. If I’m going to drop £100-£200 a head on a restaurant meal, it better be a fucking good one, and that just isn’t happening with as much regularity as I’d like at the moment. It’s probably an age thing but increasingly, my experience is that, while the general standard of restaurants is improving it’s hard to find somewhere really outstanding. Maybe I’m just haunted by memories of all the great meals I had when I first started eating out in the 90s that will never be bettered because they were formative experiences. And anyway, I must be wrong because all new restaurants are incredible; Giles Coren says so.
Back to Coren’s assertion that ‘restaurants in this country used to be very bad. All of them. Even the good ones.’ I was planning to write a terribly po-faced riposte full of facts and evidence that proved Coren wrong, and then I realised that would make me look like a dullard country mouse and Coren the clever-clever couldn’t care less town mouse and he would ‘win’. So I write a song instead.
Well, re-wrote the lyrics to a song. I would be embarrassed to tell you how long I spent on this, matching restaurant and chef names syllable by syllable to Billy Joel’s original lyrics to ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’, and keeping them in some sort of chronological order by decade to mimic Joel’s structure. But it was fun and I hope you enjoy it. You can, just about, sing along to the tune but I’ve had to make some compromises in the lyric pattern in some places so please don’t write in and complain, I did my best. You’ll also note that my version has only seven verses compared to Joel’s nine. What can I say, I have a life to lead, wine to drink and a mind to break.
For subscribers, after the paywall, I am re-publishing an article I wrote for The Caterer in 2017 that traces London’s accent to world-class dining destination over half a century of restaurant history with contributions from Michel Roux Jnr, Jason Atherton, Russell Norman and Atul Kochhar among others which proves beyond doubt what a crock Coren’s statement is. Although it’s somewhat dated, it covers the period in question nicely and makes an informative and interesting read. Please let me know what you think.
Cloth Didn’t Start The Fire
(sung to the tune of ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ by Billy Joel)
Horn of Plenty, Miller Howe, Perry-Smith, Sharrow Bay
Castle Taunton, Tontine Inn, Robert Carrier
Francis Coulson, Brian Turner, Richard Shepherd, David Wilson
Le Manoir, Savoy Hotel, Langan’s Brasserie
Waterside, Little, Sally Clarke, L’Ortolan
Adlard’s, The Capital, Rowley Leigh and Mosimann
River Cafe, KP, Molyeneux and Tom Jaine
Michel Bourdin, Worrall Thompson, Albert, Michel, Nico
Cloth didn’t start the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
Cloth didn't start the fire
No, they didn't light it, but they’re trying to stoke it
Terence Conran, Le Gavroche, Harveys and Kensington Place
Veeraswamy, Brian Turner, Anton Edelmann
Koffmann, Tante Claire, Stephen Bull at Litchfield’s
Ivy Caprice, MPW
Fat Duck, Aubergine, Petrus and Criteron
Wagamama, Gary Rhodes, Henry Harris, Merchant House
St John, Fulham Road, Chutney Mary, Rick Stein
Pied a Terre, Peyton’s Place, Jean Christophe Novelli
Coren tried to start the fire
But it was always burning, since the world's been turning
Coren tried to start the fire
No, he didn't light it, but he thinks he might have
Chez Bruce, Atlantic, English Garden, A-Z
The Square, Quaglinos, Chez Nico at 90
Granita, Euphorium, Le Champignon Sauvage
Martin Lam, Ransome’s Dock, Interlude de Chavot
Marcus Wareing, L’Enclume, High Holborn, Hakkasan
Tamarind, Zaika, Atul at Benares
Boxwood, Foliage, Locatelli and Bentley’s
Russel Norman, Polpo, Harnett at Murano
Nathan Outlaw, Hedone, Galvin brothers back again
Pollen Street, Mark Hix, Corrigan, Young Turks
Nopi, Dabbous, Morito, Dinner by Heston Blumenthal
Bruno Loubet, Zucca Brawn, Medlar at The World’s End
No one knows who started the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it, but we’re glad we found it
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