There’s no restaurant review roundup this week. I’ve been a bit under the weather and have fallen behind on my restaurant review reading, so rather than delay publication further I’ve decided to go with an interim special edition with some alternative restaurant content. Hope you enjoy it.
When exactly did restaurants start being a bit shit?
It was when I read on Hot Dinners about the opening of a restaurant that only served 21 types of lasagne back in 2016 that I realised the golden age of dining was over. Since then, Hot Dinners has continued to do a brilliant job of listing all the new restaurants in London I would never be seen dead in. Fish and Bubbles ‘features paninis with seafood fillings and lots of prosecco’, Yum Bug will be ‘introducing Londoners to dishes made from edible crickets’ and Clap offers ‘"Sensory" Japanese dining’, whatever the fuck that means.
The Evening Standard recently provided an excellent round up of restaurants any right thinking person would avoid. We are living in a world of smash burgers, pimped-up fries and tedious low-rent New York-style Italian-American ‘red sauce’ joints. A world where the hideous hybrid of Mexican-Japanese food is so popular there’s going to be a second branch of Los Mochis where you can eat such Frankenstein creations as chipotle miso soup and follow spicy hiramasa maki with a Trailer Park chicken taco on the frankly batshit tasting menu that also includes some Peruvian-style salmon tiradito for good measure.
The truth is, none of these restaurants are aimed at me. I am a 59-year-old miserabilist who wouldn’t know a good time if it shook its arse in my face. I’m an old school diner; ideally I want great ingredients prepared with care and imagination served in comfortable surroundings. If pressed, I’ll settle for the first two criteria. Whoop-whoop, let’s go crazy.
What I all-too-often forget is that restaurants are first and foremost businesses. To be truly successful, they don’t need to please me, a critic or a guide, or meet any set of abstract aesthetic standards. They need to serve the least amount of food they can (and still be perceived as offering good value), using the least amount of resources as possible to the highest number of customers possible. That model applies whether you are McDonalds or Alain Ducasse (there are a number of restaurants that don’t need to turn a profit, that are rich people’s playthings, and where you can still enjoy a great meal, but that’s a subject for another column).
For a branch of McDonalds, that means a sliver of meat in a cheap bun, prepared by a skeleton kitchen crew served hundreds of times a day and sold at rock bottom prices (£1.59 for a hamburger). For Ducasse’s Monaco restaurant, it’s multiple courses of fine ingredients prepared by a large brigade of chefs, served a few times a day and sold at some of the highest prices achievable by any restaurant in the world (€195 for a starter of marinated gamberoni from San Remo with saffron rock fish gelée and gold caviar). They may be radically different restaurants, but you can bet your bottom dollar that neither are offering more than they need to for the money they charge, or using more resources than they need to in order to deliver it.
Extract the maximum amount of money per head using the minimum amount of time, people and overheads and you have a successful restaurant. If you can do all that, and use great ingredients and apply creativity and imagination you might have what some people would say is a great restaurant. But if Los Mochis can get enough people to swallow their rag bag of (deep breath) edamame, jalapeno, truffle, kombu, teriyaki, burrata, togarashi, hoisin, tartare, ceviche, tiradito, sashimi, tataki, maki, taco, gochujang and guacamole, turn a profit doing it and keep going long enough that everyone involved sees a return on their investment, then it’s mission accomplished. Just don’t expect to spot me tucking into one of their purple yam panna cottas.
Where I have been eating
The good news is that not all restaurants are shit. It’s only mid-March and I have already had any number of great meals this year with more booked up for the coming weeks that will include etch and The Little Fish Market in Brighton, Pied a Terre in London, and Holm and The Barrington Boar, both in Somerset.
Most recently, I ventured to Harpenden to The Silver Cup for their collaborative dinner with Dylan’s at the Kings Arms in St Albans. Chef Matt Reeder at The Silver Cup is a hugely talented chef and the stand out dish of the night was his nori-wrapped Cornish cod stuffed with crevette prawn and served with Champagne sauce. I can’t recall better fish cookery anywhere.
I had another memorable gastropub meal at The Golden Ball in Lower Assendon just outside Henley-on-Thames. I first read about the place in The Good Food Guide (the same goes for The Silver Cup). The menu, run by ex-Core sous chef Ben Watson and his wife Priya (ex-numerous top London restaurants including Gymkhana) sounded so great I pitched a feature to the Caterer magazine, which in turn led to me booking a table. Having got the inside story from Ben - ingredients at the pub range from quince from his aunt's garden in Henley to spices sent from India by Priya's family - I had high expectations. Reader, they were more than met.
Highlights included the signature braised oxtail with garam masala, bone marrow emulsion and dal makhani and squid with peanut and almond satay. Mains of venison with a stunning peppered swede puree and duck and an equally amazing confit (I think) celeriac were just as impressive. Portions were so generous that if they were served in central London, they'd cost three times the price and be billed as 'for two to share'.
The simple but elegant dining room and the personal nature of the enterprise put me in mind of Shaun Hill's seminal Merchant House (Shaun is also partial to a bit of Indian spicing), the cooking was on a par too. I can't recommend the place highly enough. A memorable meal. Go before everyone finds out about it and you can't get a table.
Finally, a return to an old stager in Brighton, The Coal Shed. The restaurant opened over a decade ago and helped kickstart the city’s vibrant restaurant scene as it is today. It might primarily be a steak restaurant (and an extremely good one at that, I would put the sirloin I had there in the same class as Goodman’s and the steaks at The Devonshire) but the whole menu is knock out. Grilled wild prawns with smoked coconut dressing and peanut XO was one of the most delicious things I’ve eaten so far this year. I could say that there was a compelling complexity to the combination of the two sauces that encompassed heat, umami, smoke and a soothing richness but then I’d sound like one of those wanky food writers so let’s just settle on ‘bloody lovely’. The Coal Shed is relocating later this spring to a more prominent site on North Street that will see the restaurant nearly triple in size which will no doubt draw some press attention. It will be deserved.
A potentially career-limiting conversation with…Tom Fahey
Introducing a planned series of rambling but hopefully fascinating conversations with outspoken UK restaurant-scene personalities. I have to admit that the ‘career limiting’ title is more wishful thinking than reality at this point. The idea is to try and make public the sort of entertaining conversations I have in private with my chums in the restaurant world. There are limits though; I don’t want to be sued for libel. So it’s going to be a matter of feeling my way into this, and not dropping anyone in it. I think we’re safe, for this week at least…
Tom Fahey is the co-proprietor (with his wife Ashley) of The Terrace Rooms and Wine in Ventnor and is also a partner in The Terrace restaurant in Yarmouth, both on the Isle of Wight. He is a prodigiously talented and ambitious self-taught chef and has an impressive knowledge of wine. If you follow his highly entertaining X account (@EaterWriter), you’ll know that he is an outspoken proponent of the UK’s hospitality industry and a voluble critic of the current government’s lack of support for it. All of this is even more remarkable when you learn that he is a former managing director of a Talent and HR Business Consulting firm (and former part time restaurant inspector) who only started running restaurants in 2020 at the age of 43. If you want to read more about his career, I wrote this profile for The Caterer last year.
What follows are the (highly edited) highlights of a long and rambling discussion about restaurants, wine and the hospitality industry. There is so much more we could have discussed so hopefully I can persuade Tom to do a part two in the not too distant future.
Andy Lynes: Thanks for speaking to me today. I launched Smashed partly as a way for me to re-engage more fully with the modern UK restaurant scene. I’d got out of the habit of reading the restaurant critics on a weekly basis, something that I used to do religiously when I first started dining out in the 90s and now I have to do it in order to write this newsletter. Are restaurant reviews something you read regularly?
Tom Fahey: I haven't read as many restaurant reviews as I used to because I was much more active in inspecting then and now I have my own businesses to run. I've heard conversations between critics and their guests at the tables next to me because probably about 10 to 15 years ago now when I was out everywhere, the critics would often be in the restaurants I was in. I think they're very much punters. They're not insiders. The conversations that you would hear were nothing really to do with the restaurant or the food. They were just there having a laugh, enjoying it, chatting and doing what diners do. It might sound boring, but when I eat out I, tend to talk a lot about the restaurant and the trade and the food I'm having and the wine list and all that sort of thing.
I shouldn't be surprised by it because restaurant reviewers are representing the diner, not the restaurant. That's who they're there for. But in some ways I found it a bit odd that, as a person who has the ability to recommend restaurants, they wouldn’t want to know more about how those restaurants function and talk more about that in order to better recommend restaurants. They're very much approaching it from the point of view of, ‘I am a punter, I'm here as a punter and I assume the same knowledge level and the same interest level as the average guest and that's how I should approach whatever story I'm going to wring out of this restaurant’. The restaurants are a pivot for writing, more than they are a thing to be recommended or not recommended. They're a pivot point for an entertaining story or an entertaining anecdote. They’re restaurant critics, but they're writers first.
AL: Do you have a current favourite UK restaurant?
TF: Do you know where I go most in London? I go to Kiln, I go to the 10 Cases. Whenever me and Ashley go in for wine tastings, we end up there. They're just good and they're still affordable and they've both got different wine lists, but there's always something interesting on those wine lists. I think a lot of 10 Cases must be stocks that they're cellering themselves somewhere, but they're fantastic and you can get very good value stuff. I like those restaurants a lot.
But I eat out most in France and Spain now. I am trying my best to go to as many wine regions as I can so that I can be more real about talking about wine; I’ve actually been there, seen it and can talk in a more real way. Over Christmas we did the Loire Valley, Chablis and Bordeaux and so obviously that’s a lot of eating out. Going into Spain and France, I can still eat in the type of restaurants that I like and do it sustainably.
AL: How does the dining scene in Europe compare to the UK?
TF: It was difficult in France to find really good places to eat. We found nice places to eat consistently, but it wasn't easy to find really good places. I think there were three meals out of probably 16 that we had that were really, really good. But those meals at those prices could not be offered in the UK. Those wine lists at those prices could not be offered in the UK. That just wouldn't exist here, no restaurant could deliver them because of the conditions of trading here. Conditions of trading are more favourable at the moment in France and Spain because they're all at 10 per cent VAT.
I look back to the UK 10 years ago, which I always think that's the boom time. There were so many exciting openings, so many of the big name chefs doing things for the first time, a really interesting time and I ate out a ton. I haven't really got that much difference in income now, but I do think that I almost feel priced out of the market in many ways. Going out for dinner in the UK is something I couldn't necessarily afford to do very often. The idea now of doing what I used to do, travelling around the UK and eating in really nice places, is almost financially prohibitive.
Now you’re looking at about £200 for a lot of tasting menus at the top end and pretty much everywhere that's good has got main courses that are going to be above £30 or round that amount. There's a lack of value, particularly on wine lists. There's a huge lack of value now compared to the continent. It's very expensive and I almost feel like it's not for me as much as I used to feel it was. I'm not slagging off the dining scene because I'm sure it's good, but I feel quite outside it. I don't say that from the point of view that restaurants should be cheaper, that’s completely wrong, but I do think that the government don't do much to help them be affordable
AL: Do you think there is anything that the UK or London in particular excels at?
When we go abroad to countries that have very distinctive cuisines, like Thailand and Morocco, and I come back to places in London like Kiln and Smoking Goat I honestly think that the level of quality of food in those places is as good as anything I've ever had in Thailand, if not better. I think what London does very, very well is it takes an idea of those national cuisines and it makes them very delicious and very accessible, and I do think that London does that better than anywhere else. The quality of Italian food you get in London is probably better than the quality of Italian food you get in Italy. I might be generalising, I don't spend huge amounts of time in Italy, but whenever I've gone there, I'm invariably disappointed.
Do I think the quality of tapas in London is better than the quality of tapas in Spain? I think yeah, generally it's really fricking good. But if I went to a provincial tapas bar in a random town in the UK, would that be better than a random provincial tapas bar in Spain? Probably not. So because I know the top end and the good places in London and the UK, that's where I tend to eat. Whereas in Spain and France, I can research them, I can find them but a lot of the time I am eating blind. I do find overall, the thing that really draws me to those restaurants is that it feels like where the UK was 15 years ago when eating out in good places was equitable and it was for everybody and you could afford to do it with regularity. And I think on the continent you still can.
AL: I think we are quite lucky in Brighton. There are a lot of restaurants that do small plates, so you could just go in for a couple of plates and a drink or they'll do a little tasting menu for 35 quid or something, so there are lots of places that are affordable. But then also there's an increasing number of fine dining places where it's a hundred quid a head. That's actually a bargain compared to a lot of London places but if you want to have an enjoyable night and relax and not be counting the pennies, you're looking at 300 quid for two at least.
TF: …and the wine now is going to start at around the £30 mark if you're lucky and that's probably not going to be a bottle that I’m that bothered about drinking. London is really hard in that respect.
AL : That reminds me of something Shaun Hill used to say years ago, because his wine list at The Merchant House was that incredible value. He said something along the lines of, I'm cooking really good food and I want people to be able to afford to drink really good wine with it so he didn't mind taking the hit. I've probably drunk some of the best wine I ever had at his restaurant. But you can't do that these days.
TF: Well you can, because I’m doing it in Ventnor. I couldn’t do it in Yarmouth, the restaurant would go bust if I tried to offer the same value that we're doing here. That's because we're supplementing a business through rooms. Wine isn't the basis of the business, it's the attraction, it's the destination element of the business. So our drink-in prices are probably 25 to 30 percent under what you would find for most wines in most restaurants. If we fill the rooms, overall it doesn't make much difference to the business plan whether I sell the wines at a 70 percent markup, which would be a bit more traditional, or a 50 percent markup, which is somewhere about where we are at the moment, although obviously it would make us a bit more money.
So we can afford to do it because I don't see us as a restaurant per se. Whereas in Yarmouth there's no rooms. The menu has got to try and be affordable and therefore you've got to do your wine at a 70-75 percent margin. I remember when we first opened, I swore we would never have a house wine over £20; those house wines are now £22.50 and that's squeezing it. That's not down to me making more money, I'm making less. It's down to the price increases, which are really nothing to do with the suppliers. It is to do with import costs and duty.
Take for example Terre dei Buth Frizzante. It’s an organic, biodynamic frizzante made from Glera grapes, I think it's actually declassified prosecco. That bottle of wine from the vineyard costs about two €2.20, but by the time it's made its way through the £2.40, the transport costs getting it here, once the VAT has been added on, the amount of costs that are being added because we are in the UK is extreme. In Italy, were a local restaurant to stock that (and I'm not sure they make it for the local market, I think they probably make a different one), they can sell that wine for less than half of what we can sell it for. That's not us making more money. That's the government taking that money. So it is so much easier to sell things at fair prices for consumers on the continent because the trading conditions here are, in my view, actively hostile.
AL: There’s a lot of talk on my X feed about how people who go to restaurants don’t understand how they work, the overheads, the ins-and-outs of service charge and tipping etc and I always think, well, why the fuck should they. They don’t understand their car mechanic’s business model, why should they know or care about a chef’s commercial headaches?
TF: I’ll tell you why. I want everyone who comes to my places to have the best possible time. I want them to really enjoy themselves. If they understood how a restaurant operates, they would be able to take a little bit more proactive ownership of their experience. Hospitality is doing things for people, it's looking after them, it's being hospitable, it's making sure they don't have to raise a finger, they don't have to do anything. But at what point does that start and what level of responsibility does a guest have for ensuring that they get the most out of their visit?
For example, it might require a degree of effort on the part of the diner to go to my website about the Terrace Ventnor and read that the menu I offer is a seven course menu with everybody served concurrently at the same time in a room together, almost like a supper club. It's all on there and it's all detailed, but that would require effort to read it. In the mind of some people, they shouldn't have to do that. The restaurant should deliver what they want.
And you can take that further and say, if I book a restaurant, why should I have to read the menu before I go? It's their job to make me happy. It's their job to make me enjoy myself. But there are certain things you are going to enjoy and certain things you are not going to enjoy. So as a guest, it makes sense to check the menu before you go to make sure that it's the right sort of place for you and also for your guests. And then to have a dialogue with the restaurant that allows you to get the most out of it.
That sounds simple and it sounds like an obvious thing, but I think that many people who are not in the industry would be surprised how many guests don't do that. And I don't even think that's a conscious decision. I think it's just subconscious in people's minds. It's the restaurant's job to make me enjoy myself. If I go and I want something and they don't offer it, I want something similar to that. I expect it to be there. And that sounds like it would be very few and far between. That's not the case. I would say 25 percent of diners have that thought process in the back of their mind.
AL: What’s your idea of a nightmare customer?
The worst days for a restaurateur are the days when the infrequent diners come out - Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, Christmas as well. They are the ones who know least about restaurants and have an expectation that it is the restaurant's job just to do the right thing for them, every other customer in the building is not relevant, it's just the restaurant's job to make them happy. When you have that combination of a lack of knowledge or awareness and the high expectation because they don't eat out very much. Probably one of the reasons they don't eat out is they feel they're going to get ripped off or exploited.
I think some guests are quite suspicious of restaurants, so a greater understanding of how they operate allows a more equitable relationship. This is the guest, this is what the guest can do to make their visit more pleasurable or more right for them. And this is the restaurant and this is what they're responsible for and here are the limitations on that. The more knowledge somebody has of something, the more benefit they can get from it.
If you approach restaurants from the point of view that it is their job to ensure you enjoy yourself, you probably aren't going to get as much out of the restaurant as somebody who approaches it from the point of view that this restaurant is here to make me feel good, to make me feel happy, but it's my job to pick the right restaurant. It's my job to give them information about myself that allows them to give me the experience I will enjoy.
Thanks Andy. I really enjoyed the interview part too, looks like a great idea . Living in Brighton too, well is it just me that’s over “small plates” now? 😊