Here is London, giddy of London, home of the brash, outrageous and free. But is it worthy of 90 per cent of this week’s restaurant reviews? Since I began publishing this newsletter last November, 66 per cent of reviews have been of London restaurants. Of the remaining reviews, 11 per cent were in the south, 13 per cent in the north, 8 per cent in Scotland and 1 per cent in Northern Ireland. Nothing for poor old Wales. Giles Coren was the most-London centric critic with a whopping 9 out of 12 reviews in the capital, while Jay Rayner and William Sitwell tied for most road miles with just 4 London reviews each.
There is no question that London has the most dynamic restaurant scene in the country. Barely a week goes by without something or other that is reasonably interesting opening. For a London-based restaurant critic, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. A fair bit of the time, critics are justified in focusing on London restaurants, even if it is just out of laziness. But for every noteworthy Kolae or Akara there’s a forgettable Daroco or Origin City. So just maybe some of the 55 columns given over to London since the launch of Smashed might have been more usefully allocated elsewhere.
There’s no shortage of hints for critics to take. This week, the Good Food Guide gave their Drinks List of the Year award to Furna in Brighton, a restaurant yet to be reviewed by any national critic. The newly announced Michelin Guide Bib Gourmands (new Michelin stars will follow next week) included Dill in Lewes, The Mulberry in Falmouth, The Reindeer in Hoveringham, The Three Horseshoes in Fordham, Touring Club in Penarth and Home in Belfast, none of which, to my knowledge, have received a visit from a national critic.
Does this mean the critics are being derelict in their duties? Well, not really. From the paper’s point of view, the main requirement from a critic is paragraphs to fill up the spaces between the photos. As long as the words match the pictures, who cares if the restaurant in question is in Newark or Neasden? No one, except readers. And restaurant owners. And history.
My own recent dining experiences have mainly been in London, and I have a few more lined up for next week, so I suppose I’m in no position to point fingers. But then if I stopped pointing fingers I wouldn’t have a newsletter, so I’m stuck with being a walking contradiction. A birthday meal at Trinity in Clapham was a proper gastronomic treat that included truffles, foie gras, woodcock complete with spliced head and creamy brains and a tarte Tatin for the ages.
The following day, I was lucky enough to be invited to lunch at Mauro Colagreco at Raffles London at The OWO (just trips off the tongue doesn’t it?). I first had Colagreco’s food at his Michelin starred restaurant Mirazur in Menton back in 2009 when I interviewed him for this cover feature for The Caterer. It was a great trip, he was very charming but I wasn’t wowed by the food; it was a little too subtle for my tastes. I don’t know what’s happened in the intervening years, but our lunch was just one big smack of flavour after the other; not what I was expecting at all. The sauces were a particular high point and belied the idea that classical French techniques are dying out (as did our entire meal at Trinity).
The best thing we ate was a lettuce from Elephant and Castle, albeit a lettuce interlaced with beautifully poached smoked haddock and a superlative vermouth sauce. I also loved the rustic bread, made to Colagreco’s grandmother’s recipe (I think) and with Gilchesters flour. It was a simple homely bread, unlike any other I’ve been served in a posh restaurant and made a very welcome change from the often challengingly crisp and chewy sourdough that they have these days. Sourdough was also served later in the meal but had great flavour and texture so they are excused.
So, how many of the London restaurants reviewed this week earned their position ahead of their provincial competitors? There’s only one way to find out. Let’s dive in.
The Reviews
Jimi Famurewa, Evening Standard
Sune, London (Four stars)
Grace Dent, The Guardian
Sune, London
Here’s something of a gift; one restaurant reviewed by two different critics in the same week. It’s a golden opportunity to not only compare and contrast writing styles but also to evaluate just how subjective the art of restaurant criticism really is.
There is obviously some crossover between the reviews. Both Dent and Famurewa inform us that Sune is a new restaurant in Broadway Market run by Honey Spencer (who sounds like a character from a Bond film), Charlie Sims (who doesn’t) and chef Michael Robins, and that it’s pronounced ‘sooner’, although Dent says the restaurant is named after a mentor of Spencer’s while Famurewa claims that Sune ‘comes from the Old Nordic word for son’. They’re both right, I’m sure (pronounced ‘soorer’, I suppose).
Spencer and Sims’s CVs are discussed; Famurewa cites Noma, Lyle’s and Mãos while Dent also includes Robins and plumps for Noma, Lyle’s, the Palomar, the Barbary, the Midland Grand Dining Room and Akoko. Either way, you get the idea. The threesome has got about a bit. Dent calls Sune ‘a cool new restaurant’ while Famurewa says it’s a ‘wine-led sharing-plates restaurant’.
Whatever it is, both critics appear to believe that Sune might irritate their readers. Famurewa says a wine led sharing plate restaurant ‘can cause even the most determinedly optimistic of diners to emit a low groan and pinch the bridge of their noses like weary TV detectives. Because you can see it all already, can’t you? You can see the little dish of Gordal olives and the neat shoal of Cantabrian anchovies adrift in a pool of golden oil’. Dent seems to think the list of natural wines a menu made up of a single sheet of about 10 ever-changing dishes has the potential to annoy.
Both ordered the dairy beef tartare croque monsieur. Of course they did. The dish might as well be titled ‘Hello Newspaper Restaurant Critic, We Made This Especially For You’. Each had characteristically different takes. In his typically baroque, curlicued, arabesque, filigreed, Ossianic, magniloquent style (see, I can rack up the descriptors too, but I choose not to do), Famurewa says the sarnie is ‘a decorous miniature ham toastie, enrobed in a golden spill of melted cheese, piled with a glistening, thick-chunked heaping of raw meat and packing a delirious, messy tussle of bovine funk, piercing brine and mellowing, lactic sweetness’. Fuck. Me. Dent is mercifully brief in her summing up: ‘a crisp, cheesy, sticky and stinky toastie with a roof rack of roughly diced, deftly seasoned raw beef’, which she judges to be ‘wonderful’.
Apart from matters of writing style, where two critics really diverge is on their overall opinion of Sune. For Famurewa, Sune is ‘truly noteworthy’ with ‘rigorous, gently clairvoyant service principles’ (with what now?) ‘ambitious thoughtfulness’, food of ‘studious intensity’ that will ‘sink its hooks into you’ and is ‘built upon diligence, enlivening novelty and the sort of vivid flavours that make you want to howl in delight.’
Dent is less enthused. Difficult not to be really. She could be soiling her pants with glee while cartwheeling down Broadway Market and playing the bagpipes and she’s still come across less enthusiastic than Famurewa. Sune, she says, ‘opens just a few evenings a week’, offers a ‘hotchpotch of sharing plates’, that are less ‘“a proper dinner”’ and ‘more a rumination on fine produce, memories, influences, restaurants worked in and countries travelled to’. While some things are excellent, like the ‘homemade flatbread so hot from the oven that we needed to wait to tackle it and scoop it through a bowl of pleasingly brutal whipped horseradish topped generously with vivid orange salmon roe’ others are less impressive, including strozzapreti pasta with corra linn cheese that ‘while satisfying, was hardly a showstopper.’ Sune combines ‘some amazing destination cooking’ with ‘a few completely forgettable dishes’, it’s ‘warmly staffed, determined and still finding its feet, menu-wise in the most public of ways.’ Dent doesn’t award stars but that sounds like three out of five to me.
The disparity of views can’t be blamed on drink being taken as both critics were sober while reviewing, Famurewa because of a dry January prompted by ‘drinking a harbour’s worth of local beer on a recent trip to Sydney’ and Dent because she’s now teetotal. Both were impressed with the non-alcoholic offerings: Famurewa by an ‘effervescent, kombucha-ish number from Danish “nolo” distiller Muri was both much appreciated and spoke to Sune’s general willingness to go the extra mile’ and Dent by ‘the weird and wonderful world of experimental, low-intervention, funky, kombucha-style brews – cloudy, whiffy things that taste like distilled elderflower marsh fog with a slight hint of feet and voles’ tears, which I don’t mean in any pejorative sense.’ Vole’s tears are never pejorative in my experience.
So there we have it, two very similar experiences that left two very different impressions. If I’d only read Famurewa’s review, and wasn’t familiar with his tendency towards hyperbole, I might book Sune expecting truly great things. If I’d only read Dent’s review, I would still book in (I mean, look at that menu), but would have more realistic expectations of what I might find. After all, Spencer, Sims and Robins (when you say it like that, they sound like a jazz trio. I can just imagine them at Ronnie Scott’s playing selections from their new album Bibimbap Bop with special guest Archie Thomas on soprano sax and flute) are only human and it’s just some food. And the reviews are just someone’s obviously very subjective opinions.
Jimi’s Best line: ‘the rows of irreverently labelled skin-contact wines called things like Juicy Bastard’
Jimi’s Worst line: ‘Sune deals in measured hits of palate-jolting unexpectedness; it proffers the sexy, tactile thrill of miniature sandwiches, spilled martinis and slatternly sauces dribbled onto eager fingers’.
Did Jimi’s review make me want to book a table: It made me want to soil my pants with glee while cartwheeling down Broadway Market playing the bagpipes.
Grace’s Best Line: ‘I adore the word “foodie”, because it makes foodies themselves shudder’
Grace’s Worst line: N/A
Did Grace’s review make me want to book a table: S’pose.
The Rest
Giles Coren, The Times
Rayulea, London (Food and drink 9/10)
Coren goes into quite a lot of detail about his correspondence with the owners of this new Spanish restaurant in Ealing for some reason, I suppose to set up the fact that the review was not done anonymously.
There’s a Columbian influence from the chef so there’s ‘little warm soft tacos piled with leftovers from the weekend’s whole roast suckling pig in a dark, treacly stock reduction’ but otherwise the food sounds pretty much down the line Spanish and includes jamón Iberico, croquetas de jamón, ‘very good patatas bravas, soft, orange, aromatic, but also crispy under their slashes of salsa and aïoli’ and some pluma that was ‘soft and juicy and grilled crisp at the edges, with slender young carrots and a strafing of guava on the top which was (chef) Andrés’s Colombification of the dish’.
Coren make’s owner Miguel sound like an extremely genial host. Did all the fawning affect Coren’s highly enthusiastic words and scores? We will never know.
Best line: ‘The meat was red-brown like an English apple, and the fat did that thing of clinging to your mouth when you chew, as the cells of the happy, acorn-fed animal try fleetingly to become joined with your own.’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: It’s on the Elizabeth line which makes it doable from Brighton so it’s a yes from me.
Jay Rayner, The Observer
Bali Satay House, London
Rayner takes a journey to New Barnet ‘which would be worthy of Odysseus if he owned an Oyster card’ for some satay and ‘galangal-rich beef rendang’. It used to be possible to play a food TV show drinking game; take a shot every time the presenter says ‘galangal, a type of ginger’. Sadly, everyone is so sophisticated these days that they bloody well know that galangal is a type of ginger and no one ever says it any more. Happily, loads of people are still shameless enough to come out with the hoary old cliches ‘cuts through the richness’ and ‘melts in the mouth’ on the regular, so I suspect the food TV drinking game will be safe for a good few years to come yet. Bali Satay House sounds fine BTW.
Best line: ‘a brightly lit, white-walled dining room, clad in intricate toffee-coloured Balinese textiles. The chairs are dressed in the same material right down to the wood-effect tiled floor as are the tables so that, once seated, it fills my field of vision. I fantasise for a moment about getting a suit made from a bolt of this gorgeous cloth. I could sit here and disappear from view, like a lion in the Serengeti’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: We’ve got the Bali Brasserie in Brighton, thanks.
Charlotte Ivers, The Sunday Times
Pedro’s Wine Bar, London
‘Pedro’s is a Portuguese wine bar and tapas restaurant in Bermondsey that serves “up and coming” Portuguese wine’. Ivers has been going there for years. She loves it, she wants to have her wedding there. But will Times wine columnist Will Lyons love it too? God, the suspense.
He does! He’s grinning. She’s grinning. I’m grinning. I’m not actually. Does anyone grin in real life, or just in newspaper columns and novels? They are grinning because there’s ‘world class’ wine and ‘grilled octopus with thyme and sweet potatoes; feijoada pork stew; bifanas —pork marinated in white wine and spices, then fried and served in a toasted bun, here topped with cheese and straw potato crisps to merit its “especial” label’.
It sounds alright. I’m not sure what the story is though. You’ll remember from Ivers’s debut column that ‘Restaurants tell us a story about ourselves: how we got to where we are and how we live now. This is what I want to do with this column: to find places that tell those stories and bring them to you’. Maybe it’s the story of the well-paid twenty something Londoner who can afford to be a regular at a nice wine bar in Bermondsey. See, it’s even got a happy ending.
Best line: N/A
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: Best left to the local regulars I suspect.
Tom Parker Bowles, Mail on Sunday
Master Wei, London
TPB visits the ‘fag end’ (was a revolting turn of phrase) of Hammersmith to visit ‘Guirong ‘Master’ Wei, the Holborn queen of noodles with her home-made beef biang biang, her hand-pulled Qishan pork, her Xi’an liangpi in sesame sauce.’ He hasn’t been so excited since, well, Shikumen opened a decade ago. You remember that, don’t you? Even though you live in Upton Snodsbury and visit London once a year at most. All those crazy, crazy nights at Shikumen. What do you mean, you’ve never been to Shikumen, that you’ve never even heard of Shikumen before now? Wow, obviously not one of us then are you? Why are you even reading this review?
The Xi’an cuisine on offer has ‘Persian, Mongolian (a neighbour to the north), Sichuan (to the southwest), or Hui Muslim’ influences, ‘lamb is a staple and many dishes have a soft cumin burr’. Can you have a soft burr, and if you did, would it do you any good?
It all sounds delicious actually and exactly the sort of thing a restaurant critic would get excited about.
I’ll never go.
Best line: ‘one final word of advice. Dress down. This is oil-splattered, exuberantly messy food, real ten-paper-napkins stuff. My T-shirt, by the end, resembles one of Pollock’s lesser-known works. I wear my stains with pride’
Worst lines: ‘Master Wei really knows her dough. In wontons, stuffed with pork and dried shrimp, bobbing in a mellow, almost medicinal chicken broth, the wrapper as delicate as a whim. Or the pork and seaweed potsticker dumplings, the dough rolled tissue-paper thin, the base fried to a crisp crust.’ I don’t think those are actual sentences, are they?
Did the review make me want to book a table: See above.
Tim Hayward, The Financial Times
Cafe Kitty, London
A theatre restaurant in Soho from the makers of Kitty Fisher’s and Cora Pearl that Rayner reviewed a couple of weeks ago. It still sounds very good: ‘a beautiful room overlooking (Walkers) Court. . . decorated in that boudoirish dark teal/dusty pink/gilt combo’ with ‘alarmingly professional’ staff serving devilled eggs and a ‘mound of Buffalo chicken pieces, at least twice-fried with a pervy little undercurrent of nam pla and stilton dressing’. You can’t beat a pervy little undercurrent can you, especially when there’s nam pla involved.
Best line: ‘a pulled pork doughnut. This was a gorgeous piece of work. I mean, proper craft skills in the kitchen. Evenly bronzed, a light sweet glaze, micro-minced chives with sesame seeds bestrewing its gentle rotund swell. The pork was a bit under-seasoned’
Worst line: ‘I sat in the corner and let them run a wet sponge over me and stitch the cuts before I reeled back in for round two’.
Did the review make me want to book a table: I like the idea of it and some of the food, but realistically, there are so many other places ahead of it in the queue that I doubt I’ll ever actually get there.
William Sitwell, The Telegraph
Tipo, Edinburgh (5 stars)
For the third time since I started writing Smashed, Sitwell is in Edinburgh. He seems to like the place, unless he did three or possibly more restaurants in one hit and is eking them out across his columns. Who knows. I like Edinburgh, I mean, who doesn’t, but other Scottish cities are available.
Tipo sounds like a blast and serves ‘lamb fritte’ which are ‘literally the sort of snacks that I would run naked, bare feet on cobbled stones, through a howling gale with lashing rain, just to get my chops around’. Don’t worry folks, he doesn’t literally mean ‘literally’ literally. At least I hope not. Jesus. Imagine that. No, don’t. I just did and it’s put me right off my Sunday night lamb balti takeaway.
Best line: N/A
Worst line: ‘lamb fritte. . . .They are temptress, seducer, caresser and comforter’
Did the review make me want to book a table: Something something naked, something something cobbled stones, howling gale something something lashing rain.
For Old Dine’s Sake
1 year ago Grace Dent reviewed The Woolpack in Slad, Gloucestershire which is still trading.
’The Woolpack is well worth driving out of your way for, not least because it would delight any visitor to Britain to whom you wanted to prove that we’re delightfully weird and wonderful. And you’ll get fed until you can barely walk back to your car. Life can be complex, but this was all too easy.’
5 years ago Jay Rayner reviewed Olle, London which is still trading.
’I’ve walked past (Korean barbecue) Olle’s brightly lit picture windows countless times over the past year, and the view has always been intoxicating: diners at broad communal tables, hunched over electric grill plates, tending to sizzling pieces of meat, fish and vegetables as if they were holy relics. It’s dinner with a floor show.’
10 years ago Marina O’Loughlin reviewed Blanca, New York which is still trading.
’There are (I think) 24 dishes in all: each a couple of mouthfuls, each gobstopping in its simple complexity. They tell a tale of chef Carlo Mirarchi's Italian background by way of Japan and the veg plot. Many are meat-free: Marcona almond puree, salsify, lovage, satsuma and lemon zest, a pastel palette of shy flavours that add up to a startlingly vivid whole.’