Smashed #40: A review of this week's restaurant reviews

The UK's restaurant scene digested

Eating a burger at a table in the rain

The Reviews

Grace Dent, The Guardian
The Devonshire, London

The Devonshire? Haven’t we been through all this already? It’s only a year old. Too late and too soon to review. And so I wondered…

What's it all about Gracie
Is it just for The Devonshire we live

What's it all about
When you gad about, Gracie
Is it Nigella and Margot Robbie and mousse
Or is it Guinness and puds?

And if the bread rolls are plump, Gracie
Then I guess one day we will be too
And if the ribeyes are butchered in-house, Gracie
Who’ll want the pea and ham soup?

As sure as I believe Oisín’s a God
Gracie, I know Palmer-Watts is much more
And Carroll, even non-believers can believe in

Pass the mash and leeks, Gracie
Without beef chops we just exist, Gracie
Until you find the sauce you've missed
You're nothing, Gracie

When you eat let your tum lead the way

And you'll find comfort any day Gracie, Gracie

(With apologies to Hal David)

Best line: ‘Landlord Oisín Rogers, Charlie Carroll, founder of the Flat Iron chain, and chef Ashley Palmer-Watts, ex of the Fat Duck and Dinner, are not reinventing the art of hostelry; instead, they’re leaning heavily on a yesteryear type of fun that wraps around punters like a comfort blanket.’
Second best line: ‘the main bar is usually so packed with testosterone-fuelled, braying men in gilets, all necking Guinness like there’s no tomorrow, that you may not wish to linger there long, or even at all’
Did the review make me want to book a table: Jon Bon Jovi wanted my spot.

Giles Coren, The Times
Sael, London

When will Coren shut up about being seated at the worst table in a restaurant? He banged on about it last week in his review of Oriole and now he’s at it again in his dual review of Donia and Sael. It’s not that I don’t agree with him, a bad table completely ruins my night, spoilt man-child that I am.

I wish I was more like Marco Pierre White. No, not a wild-haired sociopath, but a good restaurant customer. He wrote (somewhere, I can’t find the exact quote) that when he visits a restaurant, he sits at the table he’s given, eats his food, doesn’t complain, pays his bill, tips and leaves. I wish I was that stoical. I’m not a bad customer, but if things don’t go exactly as I would like, I can’t just swallow it as Marco appears to. I may or may not complain at the time, but what is definite is that I am never, ever coming back to your restaurant (I’ve crossed quite a few off my list this year). Man child; told you.

The problem with Coren complaining two weeks on the trot about where he is seated in a restaurant has all the hallmarks of one of his ‘campaigns’. You know the sort of thing - giving a restaurant a score for how eco-friendly their bottled water is, quizzing the waiter on exactly where the tip will end up, going vegetarian and tee-total, eating his dinner standing up, only speaking to front of house staff in Latin, dressing as a cowboy on Thursdays. Eventually, they all just fizzle out and you wonder what all the fuss was about.

Nevertheless, Coren makes some excellent points. ‘Restaurants always try to seat you at the worst table . . . .if you don’t complain, that’s the worst table in the house sorted out, and they can move on to selling the next worst table. . . .the dream is to be completely full at all times apart from the two or three best tables in the house, which they can look forward to bestowing upon their best customers. . . . Which is why I generally do make a big stink. It’s not because being offered a bum table makes me feel slighted or scorned or insulted or small or insignificant in any way. It’s just because I want to sit at a good table. Because if not me, then who?’

This happened to me at Din Tai Fung in Centrepoint earlier this year. Me and the missus turned up for our 12.15pm reservation and were shown to a table in what was effectively a completely empty corridor adjacent to the main seating area. The entire place was about a third full. We asked to sit with everyone else and were immediately given a nice table and everything was lovely from then on in. About five minutes later, I noticed another couple had been seated and the table we had refused. The place was still only about a third full. It remained that way for the entire 45 minutes or so that our (very delicious) lunch took. What, we wondered, could possibly have been the point of that, other than to fuck with the tourists. And why is there that shit dining room Siberia in the first place?

I was surprised to see that one of the many new Jason Atherton gaffs Sael was in Coren’s seating nightmare firing line. I popped in last week for the historically great Strawberry jam Roly Poly, Jersey custard and smoked butter (I’d had my starter and main elsewhere, they were not historically great hence I bailed and sought to finish lunch somewhere better) and didn’t think there was a bad seat in the house.

It turns out that Coren agrees, describing it with typical hyperbole as ‘one of London’s great eating rooms, a modern grand brasserie à la Jeremy King, creating nooky leather corners and taking advantage of the potentially rather scary quantities of light and air’. I wouldn’t go that far but it’s very nice, although the tables are very, very close together. Luckily, at 2.30pm on a Monday afternoon, the place was virtually empty, but if the next table had been occupied there would have been no way to avoid giving them a close-up view of my Roly Roly enhanced, planet-sized arse as a struggled to squeeze my way out to visit the loo.

Roly Poly pud at Sael, London. I could hardly move after polishing this off.

Coren also had the pud and said it was ‘hot and sticky with a not unwelcome smokiness to the custard’ which seems a rather lacklustre response to such a delightful dish. At least he wasn’t mortifyingly pompous and dismissive which apparently describes the rumoured behaviour of one of the other national critics at another of Atherton’s recently opened restaurants. Obviously, I can’t say who it was or where it was or who told me, but I will say it came from a very reliable source and that they were still fuming about the incident.

It wasn’t Sael that was the target of Coren’s table tantrums, but Filipino restaurant Donia in Kingly Court which according to him is like ‘eating in a skip’. There’s ‘a wall of red velvet banquettes with strip underlighting behind them, faced by a phalanx of clackety melamine tables and then awful scrapy, wobbly, uncovered bentwood chairs. There are a couple of floaty fours in the middle of the room that are round (the worst shape for a table) and surrounded by more cushionless bentwood torture devices that people are constantly banging into’. The food is ‘fantastic’ but we already know that from Smashed #9 and Jimi Famurewa’s 5 star review.

Best line: ‘like eating on a pulldown stool in the galley area of an easyJet to Wroclaw’
Worst line: ‘dobo mushroom croquetas (£7 for two) are a good canapé: big crispy croquettes full of bosky squish’. Wasn’t Bosky Squish the lead singer of 80s electro-pop duo Danse Moderne?
Did the review make me want to book a table: Yes and no.

Jay Rayner, The Observer
1 York Place, Bristol

Rayner ran in the rain, from cab to restaurant in Bristol. The pavement isn’t very wide outside 1 York Place, chef Freddy Bird’s most recently opened restaurant. I don’t imagine Rayner could have worked up much of a head of steam. Maybe it was busy and the cab had to park down the road. It doesn't look from Google Earth like a very busy neighbourhood though, and there are yellow lines outside the place so you’d think a cab could drop off right outside without much problem. Nevertheless, Rayner ran. He spent the first 144 words of his 1242 word review talking about it. That’s what happens when you’ve got a double-page spread to fill.

But it sets up 1 York Place (opened just over a year ago and already reviewed by William Sitwell and Tom Parker Bowles in Smashed #13) as a place of refuge and Rayner has his theme that he can return to at the end of the review to tie things up neatly. And what did ‘fugee Rayner find inside? Some knobbly doughnuts that he discovered after he’d ‘excavate(d). . . .an the avalanche of freshly grated parmesan’. He couldn’t just eat it could he, this is a restaurant review after all.

Rayner says his squash and ricotta starter was similar to a dish Bird cooked 20 years ago when he was head chef of Lido in Bristol. ‘I like a cook who cleaves to his own good ideas.’ Like Bird, Rayner cleaves to his own ideas (in his case, they’re about what he thinks good writing is) and throws together some signature short sentences for our delectation: ‘The crackling crunched. The meat was soft. Underneath was a heap of nutty lentils.’ If you read that it a low gritty voice (just do an impression of Christian Bale in Batman Begins) it sounds exactly like a bad 1940s noir novel. ‘The dame could cook. I knew she was trouble from the first bite’, you know the sort of thing.

There’s lots and lots more about the food. It just seems to go on (I know, I should talk with my 5,000 word newsletters. But at least I’m funny). It sounds alright. Rayner and his guest were the only people in the place at lunchtime on an unspecified day of the week, but given the restaurant is in a residential nightbourhood, that’s not too surprising. They’re all out at work at Aarman Animations or dealing drugs. That’s the two main things people in Bristol do.

Just to round things off nicely, it starts raining again. ‘The director appears to have called action and once more it is sloshing down,’ says Rayner who appears to think he’s staring in a TV crime show. Such main character energy. ‘It’s as if the weather is telling us to stay put. If only we could.’ Ahh, how wistful. It’s raining here too now (it’s not). I wonder if there’ll be a rainbow?

Best line: ‘a determination to fill the plate to the very edge without recourse to daintiness or understatement’
Worst line: ‘a rustling heap of moon-shaped squash fritters, in a shattering batter’. What a bloody mouthful.
Did the review make me want to book a table: Not if it’s raining.

Jimi Famurewa, Seconds (Substack)
Canteen, London

Famurewa is back. That’s a good thing. The bad news is that he’s on Substack. Smashed is a digest of the UK restaurant scene, but it also serves to poke gentle fun at the privileged few with their expense accounts and national platforms. I don’t know if Famurewa is paying his own way at the restaurant he’s reviewing, if he has a rich backer or is accepting comps, but in any case he’s a fellow Substacker and therefore not really fair game. I’ll monitor the situation and see how I feel about this in a few weeks time. He’s one of a recent influx of well known names to Substack and it remains to see if he’s going to stick with it or get distracted as soon as he lands a better paying gig. But at least you know he’s here.

Subscribe to keep reading this week’s Smashed with my reviews of Ivers, Ellis, Parker Bowles, Hayward and Sitwell.