I dreamed I was young again; a week, a month, a year, ten years younger. I was running along a blackened street. I was running alone and eventually came to a place where a man was eating Chinese food. He had always been in that restaurant, on that seat, at that table, or in a restaurant just like it, on a seat just like it, at a table just like it. The man turned and smiled at me. Something told me to keep moving.
On I ran as the city devoured itself one steak, one skewer, one plate of crab mayonnaise at a time. The only sound was chewing, chewing, chewing. A giant tortoise moved like a tank through the Herne Hill night and Jay Rayner woke in fright. On Bermondsey Street, Jimi Famurewa sat and wept. I quenched my thirst, like a butterfly drinking a turtle's tears. Then I opened my eyes and everything was real. I was running along a blackened street. In the distance, the soft glow from a restaurant window. It all began again.
(with slight apologies to Dark Passage by David Goodis and Deep Dark Truthful Mirror by Elvis Costello)
The Reviews
Charlotte Ivers, The Sunday Times
The Sea Horse, Dartmouth (4 stars)
I’ve got nothing against Mitch Tonks, owner of The Sea Horse in Dartmouth. True, he did blank me at the National Restaurant Awards a few years ago when I tried to have a chat with him, but I’m not one to hold grudges. So I don’t resent The Sea Horse being reviewed in the national press, I’m just a little bemused by the fact.
The Sea Horse opened in 2008. That’s 16 years ago. It’s in all the guide books. It’s currently No. 98 in the aforementioned National Restaurant Awards Top 100 list. Everyone who has even a passing interest in the British dining scene knows about it. If you Google ‘restaurants in Dartmouth’ it’s the first place that comes up. Giles Coren reviewed it in 2009. Tom Parker Bowles reviewed it in 2015. There are 1390 review of the place on Tripadvisor. Enough already.
But Ivers has a very good reason to review The Sea Horse; she has friends in Dartmouth who moved there in the pandemic. Trip to the seaside on expenses. Boom. Or at least a tax deductable trip to see some mates. She had a lovely time by the sounds of it but I’m not going to endorse her obvious freeloading by going into too much detail. I will however use the review as an opportunity to wheel out my Gordon Ramsay annecdote.
Back in the early 2000’s, I attended the launch party of olive magazine. It was held at Ramsay’s Petrus restaurant which at the time was in The Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge and Marcus Waring was the head chef. Waring had catered the event and Ramsay was tarting about in his chef’s whites, chatting up the women. I seem to remember he was particularly taken with one female food writer and TV presenter who was a former profesional chef. ‘Imagine having her in the kichen, you’d have a boner all day long,’ he said loudly to a group of people that included the female food writer. Charming.
While Ramsay was tasting the various canapés he exclaimed, ‘Lovely beef’ to which one of Wareing’s brigade replied witheringly, ‘That’s tuna chef’. I don’t recall Ramsay having any comeback to that. I thought at the time, wow, that’s embarrassing, but Iver’s recent experience at The Sea Horse belatedly exhonerates him.
A waitress explained to the critic that a customer had ordered the restaurant’s £52 plate of tuna collar and ‘was convinced — convinced — that the tuna was in fact a beef steak’. She followed suit, ordered the tuna and ‘it arrives, on the bone; sprig of rosemary. Brown, oozing, looking incontrovertibly … well, incontrovertibly like steak. I take a bite and swear loudly. The tuna . . . . is meaty, tender, rich and marbled with fat, as you’d expect from a good wagyu. It tastes like beef. Fatty, buttery beef.’
Iver’s does go on to say that the eventually, the ‘tuna taste starts to seep in’ but Ramsay only had one chunk of the fish so no chance of taste seepage for him.
Three Michelin-star reputation untarnished as far as I am concerned. It was a busy night that olive magazine launch night. I discussed another matter of mistaken food identity with Wareing which had some repercussions for me, but that’s a story for another time.
Best line: ‘Yards from the restaurant, little children are dangling nets into the harbour. It’s appalling, really, how wholesome it all is. Those children should be skulking round the Edgware Road menacing adults for cigarettes’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: It did actually. I fancy a couple days, maybe staying over in one of The Angel of Dartmouth’s apartments and doing The Angel one night and The Sea Horse the other. Thanks Charlotte.
Tim Hayward, The Financial Times
Sweetings, London
Tim Hayward has well and truly trumped Charlotte Ivers in the bleeding obvious stakes this week. As part of The FT Magazine’s Guide to the Business Lunch issue, Hayward has headed to the well known city fish restaurant Sweetings that opened in 1889, reviewed countless times over the years and most recently by Joanna Taylor less than a year ago in the Evening Standard.
Hayward develops a man crush on dining companion and fellow FT journo Paul Murphy who is ‘the real deal’, ‘a highly experienced Proper Journalist with a string of awards’ who he expected to ‘look like Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee’ but is actually ‘hard to describe’. Is that enough about Paul Murphy do you think? No, it’s not apparently. Sweetings, as an enclave of the influential is ‘Murphy’s natural habitat. Moving invisible, among the powerful. Observing, recording, analysing’. Get. A. Room.
Hayward returns for a second meal at the bar with his editor, who he doesn’t seem quite so in awe of; guess it sucks to be her, or maybe she’s relieved. Having a conversation with her requires ‘what yoga practitioners call an Asana’, a position which makes his ‘L4-6 vertebrae feel like hot cobbles in a sweat sock’. As he leaves Sweetings for the second time, he notices Murphy at a window table who acknowledges Hayward ‘with a tiny, professional nod. My God. Is this it? He did it with such subtlety that I can’t be 100 per cent sure, but I think I might have finally arrived among the movers and shakers.’ In between all this homo-erotic bromancing some seafood was partaken of. It was good. But that’s not the point is it?
Best line: ‘I take a seat at the bar this time — my favourite way to eat. . . . As a bloke, I’m happy to sit like this, shoulder-to-shoulder facing front like Spartans. The way men conduct their most intimate conversations, like you would at a workbench or in the cockpit of a bomber’. I don’t want to make any assumptions - you’re just asking for trouble these days if you do - but my guess is that Hayward’s pronouns are ‘he/him’.
Did the review make me want to book a table: I’ve known about Sweetings for more than 30 years and haven’t made it there yet. I’m not sure that Hayward’s review will chnage that.
Jimi Famurewa, Evening Standard
Lolo, London (3 stars)
For the Evening Standard, it is a-changin’. Later this week, the first weekly edition of the Russian and Saudi owned rag will be published. It will be called the London Standard and Jimi Faurewa will not be writing for it. The only UK restaurant critic of colour is out of a job, for now at least, and has been replaced by a middle class white man.
I have nothing against David Ellis, he writes very well, is funny and knows about restaurants. He has worked for the Standard for some years and is the obvious and deserving candidate for the job. You can read all about him in his introductory essay. You have to assume that Famurewa was the more expensive option and therefore got the boot. The optics are however undeniably awful, especially for a metropolitan publication. One can only hope that the newspaper will somehow seek to promote a more diverse range of food writing voices.
In the meantime we have Famurewa’s final review for the Standard to consider. Lolo is the new restaurant from acclaimed Spanish chef José Pizarro. It’s next door to his oldest restaurant José and down the road from his second oldest Pizzaro. Lolo is an affection form of his middle name Manuel, so that’s his entire monkier used up. He’ll have to start using his dog’s names for future openings. Conchi would be good, Pie possibly confusing, unless it was actually a pie shop.
As it’s Famuwera’s curtain call, we can forgive the feverish crush of language. It’s as if he’s crammed every carefully honed turn of phrase he had been saving up for a rainy day into one everything-must-go pop of puce prose. So in Famurewa’s last chance saloon an omelette topped with ham, onion and crisps is ‘transgressive in its wanton deliciousness’ and also ‘chaotic and inebriated’. The restaurant is a ‘soft-lit daydream of playful, punchy drinking snacks and burstingly fresh, high-glamour sharing dishes’ and also ‘a low-slung womb of dusky pink walls’. The customers are ‘a cacophonous, Thirsty Thursday blur of deep chateau tans’ and what they eat suffers from ‘discordant formlessness’.
My head is still spinning from all that word play so I’ve no idea what Famurewa actually thought of the place, although those three stars are a good indication. I went recently, enjoyed it and would give it four stars. It delivered an enjoyable sharing plates experience in much the same way as other raved-about new London restaurants, but for a far more affordable price. I think that’s important.
Famurewa was allowed a farewell to his readers, saying, ‘I will still be out there. Laughing and raging, delighting at the unexpected presence of crisps, and savouring every last scrap of what this mad, brilliant city still has to offer.’ We’ll be thinking of you and those unexpected crisps Jimi; so long and thanks for all the quips.
Best line: ‘We finished with the oddly nostalgic, unequivocal high of natillas — a chilled, luxuriantly rich Andalusian custard, embellished by a zinging tickle of lemon and a buttery shortbread biscuit’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: Been and would go back if I was in the area.
Jay Rayner, The Observer
Goldies, London
For the The Observer, it is a-changin’. Last week Tortoise Media announced it had entered ‘formal and exclusive negotiations’ with Guardian Media Group to buy The Observer. The Telegraph reported that many of The Observer’s staff are deeply unhappy about the move. If I were the paper’s restaurant critic, I think I’d be unhappy too.
According to the BBC ‘the business made an operating loss of £4.6m in 2022, the latest year for which accounts are available, with a turnover of £6.2m’ and ‘print circulation had been in steadily falling until 2021, when it stopped publishing audited figures. At that point it was selling around 136,000 copies a week’. Although Tortoise is backed by a bunch of billionaires and have £25million to invest over the next five years, you don’t get rich by throwing your money around willy nilly. It’s not unreasonable to assume that, should the sale go through, the new owners will look to make savings where ever they can and one place to start would be with the paper’s highest paid writers.
Food and drink doesn’t appear to be high on Tortoise’s list of priorities. Instead, they concentrate on ‘slow news’. According to their website, ‘We don’t do breaking news, but what’s driving the news. We don’t cover every story, but reveal a few. We take the time to see the fuller picture, to make sense of the forces shaping our future, to investigate what’s unseen’.
I can’t find any food and drink content on its website, unless it’s business related. However, Rayner recently claimed that ‘restaurant reviewing is a cheap way to get readers. . . . hundreds of thousands of people read my reviews on a Sunday – there is engagement, and that’s good for advertisers. I’m well paid but I work out as good value.’ It remains to be seen if he can convince Tortoise that a restaurant review, which inherently has a narrow scope somehow tallies with their ‘fuller picture’ ethos.
In the meantime Rayner continues to eat and continues to write about what he ate. This week he went to Goldies, a restaurant in Carnaby Street that specialises in retrievers cooked over open fire. Of course it doesn’t, that was a joke for all you Blue Peter fans of a certain age. I sort of wish it did though because Goldies (named after its chips according to Rayner, although they are simply listed ‘Hand Cut Frites Cooked Twice’ on the restaurant’s boring old menu) as it all sounds so unbearably familiar, so identikit 2020s. It’s all skewers and barbecues. And everything comes with mayonniase-based sauces or compound butters or, the-worst-of-all-the sauces, chimichurri (do want some some greasy grass cuttings to go with your lamb? Oh yes fucking please!) because they are all a piece of piss to make and you don’t need actual chefs to make them because there are no actual chefs any more.
Rayner loves it though. Laps it up. There are ‘curling batons of corn cob. . . .singed and spice-pelted, and thickly brushed with a green speckled parsley butter that pools beneath’ and ‘chunks of beef short-rib, tender enough to be carved with a spoon, but with a crisp char from that grill, alongside a fat whorl of a smoked onion mayo’. You get the idea. I couldn’t care less. Could you?
Best line: ‘And so it came to pass that any kitchen worth its pink Himalayan salt fitted a microgauged live fire grill, bought good things to cook on it and then charged the earth for doing so’
Worst line: ‘Fat prawns complete with their heads are skewered with hunks of taut-skinned chorizo and grilled until smoky, so that their various bodily juices combine’. Oh, please! Did Jackie Collins write this review?
Did the review make me want to book a table: I nearly choked on my chimichurri at the very idea.
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