Last week, I wasted a morning entering this newsletter for a couple of awards. It won’t win but it made me feel better about myself. It wasn’t a complete waste of time however as reading back through every edition of Smashed so far proved instructive. It allowed me to consider what has worked and what hasn’t and to think about the direction I might go with the newsletter in the future. More importantly, I discovered that Smashed has been riddled with typos since day one, for which I must apologise. I have corrected the three editions that I have submitted to competition and will get around to the rest in due course. Going forward I will do my utmost to avoid stupid mistakes, but please bear with me if anything slips by unnoticed. Enough of the hand wringing, let’s get into it.
The Reviews
Giles Coren, The Times
The Bull, Charlbury, Oxfordshire (9/10 Food)
Coren gets all bucolic on our asses, repurposing late 19th/early 20th century poet Edward Thomas’s rather lovely poem ‘Adlestrop’ for his introduction. Confusingly, the pub under review (‘it’s been two weeks since I reviewed a Cotswolds pub called the Bull, so I thought it was about time’) is 10 miles from Adlestrop in Charlbury. But we do get to hear about a Coren family country walk in Adlestrop and the fact that Coren Jr had to memorise the poem for a school competition, which is all important stuff when you’re reviewing a restaurant.
Actually, I quite enjoyed the familial detour as it at least delayed having to read about yet another country pub. It probably says more about the number of high quality gastropubs there are now (the new Top 50 Gastropubs list has just been announced with The Unruly Pig topping the lot) than The Bull’s offering, but not even Coren’s madly enthusiastic paean to The Bull’s pie - ‘a round, raised, hot water pastry pie, glossy as new brown brogues on the top, flowering up off the plate like a meaty rose in bloom, the thick, short, crumbling, buttery pastry filled — but properly stuffed till it could take no more — with a savoury braise of sweet pheasant breast meat and chunky ham in a rich, shiny gravy’ - really roused my interest. Or maybe, because it seems that every other Coren review is a country pub that they all just merge into one great anonymous mass of St John-like rustic grub.
I was alarmed however to see that a side dish of ‘cheesy leeks with Lincolnshire Poacher’ cost an incredible £12, a price that would be more suitable to The Pelican in Notting Hill, which is under the same ownership as The Bull. However, on checking the pub’s website, it seems they are actually a far more reasonable £4.50, so that’s alright. I think. Some people would probably expect an entire lunch at a country pub to cost £4.50.
I lost all sense of perspective on the cost of eating out years ago, at least in advance of the fact. It all seems good value when you’re hungry and looking forward to a decent meal. It’s a bit different when you’re full and the bill arrives. I’m exactly the same with farmer’s markets or posh food halls. The price per kg, which I always closely scrutinise in a supermarket, hardly registers, especially if I’m abroad. I just get carried away by the whole gourmet-ness (not an actual word) of it all. And that’s OK because it’s all part of the experience. Value for money in a restaurant is a difficult thing to assess because so much of it is about the intangibles - the thought and effort put into the cooking, the care and attention from the front of house - that mean you get so much more in return for handing over your cash than just a full belly. And how do you put a price on that?
Best line: ‘I don’t want any grief from you about, “It’s not a proper pub unless it sells only one beer, no food, smells of piss and everyone hates you,” because that’s not the world we live in any more. Without restaurants in pubs, there would be no pubs at all in the countryside now. Just like there are no goddam railway stations’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: Remind me, which pub this is again?
Tom Parker Bowles, Mail on Sunday
Mexican Bites, London
Back at the end of last November in Smashed #4 I mused, ‘If you want a good write up from a critic theses days, it seems as though you need to give them something fairly basic and recognisable - bread, grilled meat, something on toast maybe. I’ll be interested to see how the next tasting menu restaurant to open goes down with them, if they bother to review it at all.’ That has turned out to be somewhat prophetic, with TPB saying during his appearance on Saturday Kitchen on 20 January, ‘I can’t do tasting menus any more. . . .the tyranny of the tasting menu. When you’re stuck and, oh no, not another course. I try to avoid them on the whole. That’s a bit rude. If you’re given one you have to eat it I suppose, but your heart sinks when ‘a little present’ comes from the chef. ’
Fuck me. The utter privilege of the man. Only a restaurant critic could get away with this sort of spoilt-Victorian-child behaviour. Imagine if Susannah Clapp, the Observer’s Theatre critic said, ‘I can’t do Shakespeare any more. . . .the tyranny of The Bard. When you’re stuck and, oh no, not another monologue. I try to avoid them on the whole. That’s a bit rude. If you’re given one you have to watch it I suppose, but your heart sinks when ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ comes from the lead character.’ Oddly enough, that’s not what she said about the third production of Macbeth she reviewed last year, instead describing it as, ‘Max Webster’s gimlet production of Macbeth. . . . excitingly fuses tremendous acting from David Tennant and Cush Jumbo with Gareth Fry’s cutting-edge binaural sound’.
That was professional of her, wasn’t it? She didn’t say, ‘Oh Christ if I have to sit through another Macbeth this year I’ll stab Duncan myself’. It’s almost as if she understands that she’s paid good money by a national newspaper to go and see all the theatre productions that their readers might be interested in and give her highly experienced and knowledgeable opinion on them, regardless of her personal preferences. And it’s almost as if she understands that her column provides a useful service to both prospective punters deciding how to spend their hard earned theatre-quids, and to the theatre community as a whole, who are no doubt grateful for the carefully considered exposure.
The phrase ‘I can’t do tasting menus any more’ is the foodie Masonic handshake, the Bat-signal of the true gourmand that says, ‘Meet me at Otto’s for the canard à la presse where we’ll lap raw duck blood out of bowls on the floor, then on to St John where we’ll kneel in front of a raw carrot.’ It’s the sort of inverted food snobbery that sneers at the less jaded diner who might only fancy a tasting menu once a year on a special occasion and so never has the opportunity to be tired of them, pathetic provincial jokers that they are. It’s about projecting a certain image to your peers rather than providing a useful service to your readers, which should form at least part of the job of a critic.
With apparently no such considerations to get in the way of his enjoyment, which is the most important thing of course, TPB successfully avoided those nasty awful tasting menu things and instead found a Mexican on the Kings Road in Chelsea that suits him. The only good restaurant ever to open on the Kings Road is the truly marvellous Medlar, so it’s no surprise that Mexican Bites sounds like an absolute horror show, where ‘the bass pounds, the lights are low and the sleek and glossy young folk wear their confidence like expensive eau de cologne. I half-expect a smoke machine to belch into action as the throbbing Euro house reaches its crescendo, and dancing girls emerge from the floor’.
But it’s all fine because TPB and his chum can throw ‘a couple of Tommy’s margaritas’ down their throats and tuck into some grub that is ‘a cut above your usual half-baked Mexican mediocrity’. Yeah, all those bloody mediocre Mexicans, I mean, what can you expect? Mexico was never even part of the Empire was it? The Yucatán Peninsula ‘where the habaneros are hot and fruity’, a bit like TPB’s prose, is the inspiration for the menu that includes crab tostada that TPB judges to be, ‘excellent, the white meat freshly picked, the salsa macha possessing just the right amount of nutty heat’, which you might expect from a salsa made with, er, nuts and chilli.
It all sounds fine I suppose. A pork belly taco ‘blends good handmade tortilla with well brought-up pig’ and braised short rib comes in a ‘smoky, spicy adobo sauce’. As long as you’re not stuck with a tasting menu, you’re golden aren’t you?
Best line: N/A
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: Sorry, got an appointment with a tasting menu.
William Sitwell, The Telegraph
Sexy Fish, Manchester (4 stars)
An excellent piece from Sitwell, who completely nails the point of the madly over-the-top Manchester branch of Richard Caring’s Sexy Fish and reviews it within the parameters of its own context, hence the four stars. He doesn’t punish Sexy Fish for not being Bouchon Racine, but praises it for knowing its target audience and delivering what it wants, in spades. ‘It’s disco food, as adjunct to the place as the music, fish art and fishy customers. So I judge it as such. Context is everything, darling.’ Yes Mr. Sitwell, bloody well said.
The food is honestly not worth going into in any detail about, although I wish Sitwell had ordered the wagyu, foie gras and truffle gyoza (£34.8) which sounds precision engineered to part a fool from their money in double-quick time. His summing up is perfect though, saying that Sexy Fish ‘knows what it wants, needs and cares for, and in this business that’s all that counts.’
Best line: ‘If plastic surgery was a religion, Sexy Fish Manchester would be the blissful ecstasy of afterlife. Plump up your lips, augment your breasts, tuck your tummies and all this will be yours: a vast paradise of glowing pink onyx, glass, mosaics and fish’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I really don’t think they’d want me to. It’s OK, I can take a hint.
The Rest
Jimi Famurewa, Evening Standard
Kebhouze, London (1 star)
The first one star review since the launch of this newsletter if I recall correctly. That’s got to be worth writing about, surely? Nope. Famurewa gets mildly angry about the new Oxford Street branch of an Italian-owned chain of kebab shops. Tik Tok and Squid Games are evoked but he just ends up sounding like a grumpy old man. You can leave that particular schtick to me Jimi if you don’t mind.
Best line: ‘The main entrance area is a cluster-headache of cherry-red corrugated metal, throbbing neon signage, and hip hop cranked to sternum-juddering volume’
Worst line: ‘a cudgel of warm, decently seasoned shawarma meat that worked despite those chaotic panini fixings and a flatbread prone to disintegration’. There is something profoundly and peculiarly wrong with using the word ‘cudgel’ in a culinary context.
Did the review make me want to book a table: Nah, too busy waiting for the new Khaby Lame to drop (do Tik Tok videos ‘drop’? Are they even called videos on Tik Tok? Someone help me, please).
Jay Rayner, The Observer
Fenix, Manchester
Rayner ventures to Manchester’s St John development, a ‘new neighbourhood’ which comes with its own strapline ‘Enterprise Culture Living’. According to the website, St John is ‘a place that stimulates the senses. A sanctuary, an oasis, a home in the city – the place that enlivens you’. It all sounds like hard work to be honest, which brings us neatly around to Fenix, a modern Greek with an Asian twist that ‘looks like the cantina from the original Star Wars, only with added hummus’. Are we absolutely sure the Star Wars cantina didn’t serve hummus? Someone must know.
Despite reservations about the frankly bizarre concept which also includes greeters ‘dressed as Grecian priestesses in flowing blue gowns with brass chains at the hip’, Rayner judges the food at Fenix to be ‘delightful’ ‘delicious’ and ‘thoroughly comforting’. Moussaka is ‘a fat, slumping piece of slow-roasted aubergine underneath, topped by tangles of braised beef short rib. On top of that is a duvet of cheesy béchamel and, alongside, discs of fried potato. It’s all the flavours and textures of moussaka, not so much deconstructed as reupholstered.’ Sounds pretty good actually.
Best line: ‘Every item of rugged crockery, every piece of brass-effect cutlery, every single shimmering glass and cup and napkin ring, has been chosen to make you weigh it in your hand and feel special just for holding it’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I’ll be busy flying the Millennium Falcon to Mos Eisley in search of hummus.
Charlotte Ivers, Sunday Times
Dear Jackie, London
It’s safe to say that Ivers’s didn’t enjoy upmarket Italian hotel restaurant Dear Jackie a fraction as much as Tim Hayward did last week. I’m not going to go through it all again but suffice to say it was too rich for Ivers’s blood, ‘This is food for people with so much money that they don’t need a 36-quid main to be really good; for whom a 36-quid main equates to a Pret sandwich at their desk.’
Best line: ‘For some reason, the places now patronised by the definitely rich and debatably glamorous resemble the boudoir of a minor colonial governor’s daughter, if she had also raided your granny’s curtain collection. Annabel’s, 5 Hertford Street — anywhere frequented by sad hedge-funders strung out on cocaine, and sadder girlfriends stringing out their credit cards.’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: Despite a ‘regrettably faecal’ chocolate mousse log, I do still fancy it. I’m not sure what that says about me. Let’s not dwell.
Grace Dent, The Guardian
Akara, London
Have you heard? West African cuisine is in. No, it is. That’s why you subscribe to this newsletter, to get all the news about the hottest new food trends. Well, you heard it here first. The fact that Akoko was featured on ITV last Saturday night (Big Zuu's 12 Dishes in 12 Hours. The best food travelogue show on TV, bar none. Well, at least until the new series of Somebody Feed Phil appears) is neither here nor there.
As we know from Smashed #5, Jimi Famurewa spilled his adjectival guts telling us how wonderful the place was, so does Dent agree? Of course she does, in a respectful, serious, I’ve done my West African cookery homework sort of way. Well, this is The Guardian after all.
(On) Best (behaviour) line: ‘Actual akara are, of course, on the menu, too. They could, roughly speaking, be called fritters, though I’d compare them more to fried fairy cakes – spongey, golden, almost resembling financiers, although in truth these particular buns, which inspired the Brazilian street-food snack, the acarajé, are made from loved and much-laboured-over black-eye beans. The beans are soaked, shelled, whisked, pulverised and transformed into a light batter before being deep-fried until golden. In the wrong hands (namely, my clumsy shovels), akara would be a disaster, but here they are plump, voluptuous and stuffed with the likes of sweet, spiced barbecued tiger prawns, soft, yielding braised ox cheek, barbecued wild mushrooms or a seared hand-dived Orkney scallop’. Imagine the research. Phew.
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: Go on then, you’ve convinced me.
The Articles
Clare Finney, The Independent
The art of eating
In this article about the relationship between art and food and restaurants in galleries, we discover that Richard Corrigan had a bacon sandwich after seeing a Frances Bacon exhibition, ‘the obvious symmetry of bacon and Bacon’. The reason? ‘After being mentally gorged, he needed to be physically restored; to recover from Bacon’s assault on the senses Art’.
For food writer Gurdeep Loyal, ‘a post-art meal plays a crucial role in helping him understand and process an exhibition. “The experience of going through a gallery is personal and intimate; what I want from the food and wine is something that externalises and socialises that – that brings out the internal experience I just had.” After an hour or so of being cerebrally present with the artist’s mind, he looks to food to bring him back to a more social and physical present.’
I don’t know about you, but after I’ve been on my feet for an hour or so staring at Post-Impressionist landscapes, I see the gallery restaurant of café as the ideal place for a nice sit down and a cup of tea. You see now why this newsletter won’t win any awards don’t you?
More often than not, the café or restaurant is the first place me and the missus end up in when we go to a gallery as we’ll usually have had a journey to get there. That apparently cocks up the ‘dialectic’ between art and food completely. However, it didn’t prevent us enjoying a fabulous blood orange and rhubarb choux pastry at the Garden Museum Café in London before taking in the amazing Frank Walter exhibition last week. Indulging in champagne and fried chicken at The Bar Room at MOMA in New York before the Ed Ruscha retrospective Now Then last autumn didn’t spoil it one bit either.
My point is that art is like food, you eat the ideas with your mind, just as food is like art, except if you look at it for too long it goes cold, and eventually mouldy. To sum up, never lick a painting or try to hang bangers and mash on your wall, you’ll be sorry either way.
(What does any of this even mean? I’m beginning to think this newsletter needs a good editor.)
Tim Hayward, Financial Times
Want to feel young again? Eat out in central London
I’m not really sure I’ve really grasped the central argument of this piece, but I think the general drift is that young people are no longer going to restaurants or opening them. ‘We are certainly seeing a great draining of youth from restaurants in urban centres,’ states Hayward. It’s not clear what that statement, or anything else in the article, is based on as no other authorities are cited, so I have to assume it’s Hayward’s personal observation as a critic and hospitality business owner.
My personal observations, as a regular diner, restaurant writer and commentator on the UK restaurant scene are somewhat different. I live in an urban centre (it’s actually a seaside town of 250,000 people, but Brighton and Hove was granted city status by The Crown in 2001, so who am I to argue with the late Queen Liz?) and last night went for dinner with my 20-something daughter and her 20-something partner to Anakuma, a new Asian small plates restaurant run by a pair of 20-something likely lads. They also own and run a very good Mexican restaurant called Halisco. Last year, 30-something chef Tom Stephens and his partner Madeleine Riches opened fine dining restaurant Dilsk on Brighton’s seafront. Elsewhere, former Core sous chef Ben Watson and his wife Priya, both in their early 30s, recently took over The Golden Ball just outside Henley (admittedly not an urban centre).
That’s just a handful of examples. I’m sure there are many more if I looked for them (Omar Shah and Florence Mae Maglanoc, the couple behind Donia in London are a pretty good example, albeit with an established family business behind them). Does that constitute a convincing counter argument that young people are flocking too and thriving in the hospitality industry? Maybe not, but at least it’s a bit of light to balance the rather dark possibilities posited by Hayward.
For Old Dine’s Sake
1 year ago Grace Dent reviewed Restaurant St Barts, London which is still trading.
‘St Barts is one of London’s most notable new openings, a place to take the food obsessive in your life for a special occasion and watch them get severely het up about the minute honey and lavender ice-cream cone that arrives before the main dessert event, which, on the evening we went, was a sort of celeriac and praline pastry stack that by no means convinced me that celeriac is a replacement for apple or pear, but this isn’t the sort of evening to rest on one’s laurels about likes or dislikes. This is a fancy, multi-course tasting menu with pre-paid tickets, and you will end up on whatever flight of fancy the chef desires and be very grateful for it afterwards.’
5 years ago Jay Rayner reviewed Pucci, London which is now closed
‘If the past is a foreign country, its embassy is currently located at the corner of Maddox and Mill Streets in London’s Mayfair. This, I think, is intentional. Pucci is presenting itself as the direct descendant of a place on the King’s Road in Chelsea called Pucci Pizza, which was once the haunt of famous people with terrifying haircuts. Rod Stewart, Brian Ferry and Diana Ross went there, as did George Best if he could ever drag himself away from the pub.’
10 years ago Giles Coren reviewed Lost and Found, Birmingham
‘I also ordered a “minted lamb hanging skewer” because I had seen one passing by and been intrigued by it. “There’s a Brazilian place doing these down the road,” said my terrific waiter. “So they’ve sort of caught on round here.”
Alas, the meat had been thoroughly carbonised again, but this time some hours previously, so that it was corpse-cold, with some truly horrifying, spongy, bitter chunks of aubergine alternating with the carrion.’
‘...if I have to sit through another Macbeth this year I’ll stab Duncan myself’ is the funniest thing I’ve read so far this year.