The Reviews
I’m playing catch-up after last week’s special edition of the newsletter with a backlog of 17 reviews to wade through. That means cherry-picking the good ones or going all in and seeing if there are any fascinating insights into the state of UK dining to be mined from the collective efforts of our fine band of critics. Frankly, I don’t hold out a great deal of hope, but let’s see where the second option gets us.
Location
All bar four of the reviews were of city-centre restaurants; nine in London, two in Oxford and one each for Birmingham and Manchester. There were three coastal restaurants: Deal in Kent, Weymouth in Dorset and Whitley Bay in North Tyneside.
No surprises there really, you’d expect the UK’s major cities to have decent places to eat, ditto coastal locations that attract at least some tourists. The well-to-do North Yorkshire town of Harrogate was the outlier of the fortnight. It has always been oddly underserved for good restaurants with just one entry in the Michelin Guide, which, well blow me down, happens to be Paradise Cafe, the very same place that Jay Rayner has reviewed. Dorset is one of the less exciting counties for dining (it boasts just one Michelin Bib Gourmand for The Green in Sherbourne) so it’s good to see Weymouth get some column inches.
Restaurant types
When did restaurants get so variegated, so complicated? Some of the 17 are attractively simple propositions: rustic Italian food in a cosy and characterful pub (Tiella at The Compton Arms, Islington); sustainable seafood (Catch in Weymouth) or a provincial French bistro (Camille). You, the restaurant obsessive could easily explain to your less interested guest(s) why you think they might be worth a punt. Plant-based fine dining (Gauthier Soho) isn’t too much of a stretch for most people to understand, as both terms are bandied about often enough, although admittedly not so often in the same sentence.
But what the actual fuck are the vast majority of people going to make of a ‘wine-driven bistro’ (Wilding, Oxford)? Who has ever turned to their partners or friends and said, ‘What do you fancy tonight? Curry? Steak? Wine-driven bistro?’. ‘Wine-driven’ infers the restaurant doesn’t care so much about the food. That was certainly the case when I had the misfortune to eat at Wilding back in 2021. Things don’t appear to have improved that much if Coren’s score of 6/10 for cooking is anything to go by.
To be fair to Wilding, ‘wine-driven bistro’ is Coren’s term, not theirs, but the restaurant’s website does proudly state on its homepage that ‘Founder & Wine Director of Wilding Kent Barker’s first passion is wine’. It doesn’t sound like his staff share his passion: ‘I asked the waiter to recommend (a wine) for me. He suggested a Bordeaux. I asked, “Where in Bordeaux?” and he said, “Just Bordeaux.” I asked what vintage and he said, “I don’t think it has a vintage,” adding, “Sorry, the wine person isn’t here today.”’.
The fact that there is apparently only one ‘wine person’ at Wilding could be explained by the fact that Generation Z, who make up a large proportion of restaurant staff in the UK, are widely reported to be drinking far less than the Gen X and Millennials they are likely to be serving and therefore less interested in learning about the stuff. ‘Wine-centric’ may therefore not be the wisest USP for a restaurant in 2024. But Wilding is not alone in making that choice. William Sitwell has unearthed Climat, Manchester, a self proclaimed ‘wine-led rooftop restaurant’, sister to Covino in Chester, yet another wine-led restaurant.
Sitwell had a better time at Climat than Coren did at Wilding: ‘one quickly realises that this place is making a very cogent argument that God invented food so that man could drink.’ It all sounds fine, but the review leaves the very strong impression that Sitwell loved it so much because, basically, he was pissed: ‘Through the jungle of wine we swung between Spanish malvasia and Greek assyrtiko, then from Portuguese arinto to Spanish bobal, back and forth until we had swung so much (especially at the end dipping into their mighty list of eaux de vie) that my walk to the railway station had a similar balletic flow.’
To my knowledge, no one has ever promoted their restaurant as ‘food-led’, mainly because it would be as ridiculous as a dentist saying their clinic was ‘teeth-led’. You also might reasonably assume that a food-led restaurant had a shit wine list. Unless you are running a wine bar, it seems obvious that food and drink should be of roughly equal importance to restaurateurs; you can bet that your customers will be of that view.
White folks cooking Asian food
The seemingly relentless trend of white-folks-cooking-Asian-food was found to be alive and well by Grace Dent at The Blue Pelican, Deal and Jay Rayner at Omni Cafe, Whitley Bay. Neither critic gives even a passing mention to the notion of culinary cultural appropriation. It was all the rage back in 2019 when I wrote ‘Pale imitation: when does a culinary tribute become a patronising pastiche?’ for The Caterer. It’s ironic of course that the commission went to a white bloke, but nevertheless, I spoke to some interesting people for the piece.
I wrote that, ‘in 2019, it’s increasingly unacceptable for chefs and restaurateurs to play fast and loose with influences from cultures that are not their own. ‘There’s a real power dynamic in this that can’t be ignored,’ says food writer, academic and hospitality consultant Anna Sulan Masing. For Masing, it’s not what a chef cooks, but how they place themselves in the narrative of a particular dish or cuisine rather than making bold claims upon it. ‘It’s completely OK to say, ‘I went to this place once and tried this amazing flavour and for me it was a revelation’ but acknowledge that other people have been doing it for a long time and ensure that there’s no language around discovery or ‘I’m introducing London or the UK to this flavour’. Explain that ‘it made me think of X and I’m pairing it with Y’ so that you're mapping out the connections in the narrative and not making a sweeping statement. You can then have a discussion and it’s not negative because you’ve placed yourself within the story’.
Does anyone care about all of that sort of thing any more? Maybe the debate has been understood and assimilated. Maybe people just don’t want to read about it in their weekend paper. Maybe they don’t want to read about it in their restaurant scene newsletter. So let’s concentrate on the food, which sounds great. Dent says that chef Luke Green is ‘a real talent’, ‘clearly excited and influenced by the Tokyo dining scene’ and his cooking ‘is one hefty poke after another of sake, mirin, soy, cumin, bergamot and whiffy, aged things. There are sides of pickles and ferments, bowls of cucumber and seaweed salad, and one quite unforgettable offering of utterly heavenly roast pink fir potatoes with walnut miso and cavolo nero’.
Rayner tells us that Omni Cafe is run by ‘chef Corrie Thomas and her husband Lou’ who ‘spent years living in Vietnam and travelling around south-east Asia’, so they’ve done their research, no Ramsay-esque Lucky Cat-style dilettantism here. Rayner ate 12-hour beef shin and peanut curry which he describes as ‘a luscious kind of poetry. . . .a stupidly soothing coconut-based stew, full of friendly caramel tones, but with an added slap of chilli at the end.’
The Real Thing
Conversely, Jimi Famurewa is less impressed by native Singaporean Ellen Chew’s food at Singapulah, recently opened in London’s glittering West End. He finds ‘a Wes Andersonian mix of Sixties-era pastels, wood-panelled booths, mismatched auntycore photos and Lego-grade dioramas of Singaporean market scenes’ and ‘Beef Rib Rendang that’s ‘billed on the menu as “fork-tender”’ but ‘ is in fact, so unyielding that the spoon it is pointedly presented with is useless.’ Famurewa notes that ‘what seemed clear, as Chew and her team scrambled to cope with a mobbed Thursday night service, was that things had gone awry in the flailing rush to open.’ I had a similar experience at a launch event last month where only the prawn laksa and a very pungent durian ice cream made any sort of lasting impact. In fact, I think I’m going to be tasting that that ice cream for some time to come.
Charlotte Ivers hit the jackpot at Liu Xiaomian, London with hyper regional Chinese noodles from Chongqing cooked by two ex-pats of the city, Charlene Liu and Linda Liu. I mean, you’re not still eating bowls of ramen are you? Ha! I bet you love Wagamama. Me and my foodie mates are off for some Chongqing xiaomian. They are, says Ivers, ‘perhaps the best noodles I have had in my life.’ She is not overly forthcoming on why that might be but from what I can make out there was minced pork, chickpeas and ‘two types of red Sichuan pepper. . . . crunchy dried black soy beans and chillies imported directly from Chongqing’. One thing for sure is that it’s hot. Ivers has eaten there three times and is planning a fourth trip. I suppose that’s all we need to know.
Hot Spots
As predicted in Smashed #15, the ‘Devonshiring’ of Morchella, London has begun. Famurewa is first out of the traps with a four star rave (he’s not known as ‘Jimi Four Stars’ for nothing) for the second restaurant from Ben Marks and Matt Emmerson of Perilla fame. I say fame. They could walk up and down Oxford Street all day and say ‘Hello, we are Ben Marks and Matt Emmerson of Perilla in Newington Green and the recently opened Morchella in Exmouth Market’ and 99 percent of people would still have literally no idea who they are. The restaurant industry has a bloody good idea though. As Famurewa notes, ‘after just a week of hot-ticket soft launch meals, was the creeping feeling that I’d apparently been scooped by half the restaurant-obsessives in London.’
So what’s everyone getting so damp about? Spanakopita that is ‘a two-bite log of spinach and feta, a thin scrim of shattering pastry, and an ephemeral surge of twanging garlic and lactic acidity’, salt cod churros that are ‘nubby spears of fryer-darkened batter in a textured spill of romesco’ (didn’t Nubby Spears play midfield for Manchester United in the 60s?) and ‘supple, horseradish-laced monkfish on a gothic mound of ink-black cuttlefish ragu’. So just to recap, if you’re looking for ephemeral surges, textured spills and supple monkfish, make a beeline to Exmouth Market.
Unusually, The Devonshire itself is still in the process of being ‘Devonshired’ courtesy of a rather tardy review from Sitwell. Hot spots burn very brightly for a few short weeks and then you’ll never hear about them again, at least restaurant review wise, but Oisin Rogers and his chums have got a second bite at the cherry. Not that they need it, the place appears to be packed with the only online availability at stupid o’clock for the foreseeable future.
With a wood fire oven that is ‘the largest such weapon I have ever seen’ (and you can imagine Sitwell has seen a lot of weapons in his time) Rogers et al could have called The Devonshire an ‘open fire-led pub’. But then everyone would have thought they were the weapons. Instead, they’ve kept things simple and relatable: ‘And what is the visionary, jaw-dropping, groundbreaking menu concept enticing everyone in? Here’s the £29 set menu on the day I went: prawn and langoustine cocktail; sirloin steak, chips and béarnaise sauce; and sticky toffee pudding. Which, doubtless, would leave a thousand pub landlords scratching their heads and wondering why their pub with the same menu is about to slip into receivership. Well, as with jokes, it’s the way you tell ’em’.
Conclusion
What have we learnt from this panoply of eateries, where wine-driven, hyper regional noodles boil furiously over a massive wood fire, where we are poked with whiffy aged things and monkfish have recently finished their pilates class? It was something along those lines anyway. We have learned not to read 17 restaurant reviews in quick succession because we just get confused. We have also learned that restaurants can be a lot of very specific and conceptualised things, but give people a bowl of sticky toffee pudding and they are deliriously happy.
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