Smashed: 1st birthday special and subscription sale

The UK's restaurant scene digested

This dog is happy because he has just subscribed to Smashed. Who’s a good boy then? Yes, you are. (Photo by Joe Caione on Unsplash)

Can you believe it’s been a whole year since I launched Smashed? Me neither but, oh, what fun we’ve had. I’ve typed 54 editions of the newsletter until my fingers bled and begged you to like, comment, share and subscribe. You’ve studiously ignored me. Top bantz! OK, great japes and all that but you can stop it now. Hello?

What amazing content I’ve been creating. Who could forget Smashed #35: AI will never replace restaurant critics, but I could (maybe), Smashed #30: Critics X Tripadvisor or  Smashed #22: How to drink wine in restaurants. Have a look through the Archive there’s loads of stuff including A Smashed special edition: An Interview with chef Sally Abé and Smashed: How true to life is The Bear? (pt.1). 

But if you’re not a paid subscriber you will have missed out on some great stuff and you’ll miss out on much more of it in the future. So to try and entice you to join our merry band of Smashers (it’s taken me a year to think of that. Marketing is just not my strong suit), I’ve made a couple of newsletters previously behind a paywall free to view.

Until Sunday 24th November, you can read How restaurant PR made Gordon Ramsay world famous and Smashed #33.5: Gimme Some Truth that includes ‘London Calling’, an article that traces London’s accent to world-class dining destination over half a century of restaurant history with contributions from Michel Roux Jnr, Jason Atherton, Russell Norman and Atul Kochhar among others. In addition, I’ve published below some reviews of critics reviews that until now have only been available to paid subscribers. 

If all of that tempts you to sign up, don’t delay. Until the end of November, there’s 25% off annual and monthly subscriptions for a full year. Click the button below to take advantage of my ridiculous generosity.  

I’ve also launched a Ko-Fi account so you can bung me the price of a massively overpriced coffee if you fancy just making a one-off donation to help support my writing. Click here to be a mensch.   

Smashed is now published twice a week with a new supplement Smashed at the Weekend which includes recipes and restaurant, hotel and food and drink recommendations as well as suggestions for what to read watch and listen to. Smashed readers also get access to the Cookbook Review archive of reviews and recipes with new ones being added all the time.   

I really hope you will continue to read, enjoy and share Smashed. I’m working very hard to try and make it a sustainable success and paid subscriptions will help make that a reality. Here’s that discount link button again. Get clicking.

What you’ve been missing all this time: some previously subscriber-only content to tempt you to cough up

From Smashed #37 - William Sitwell, The Telegraph
Kolamba East, London (5 stars)

For The Telegraph, it is a changin’. The paper is on the market with the likes of Dovid Efune, owner of The New York Sun and (possibly) GB News investor Sir Paul Marshall, who recently acquired The Spectator, sniffing around. What impact a change of ownership might have on the paper is an unknown and William Sitwell is basically The Telegraph-made-flesh so I reckon he won’t have to worry about selling the family home a second time anytime in the foreseeable future.

Sitwell has reviewed the second branch of Sri Lankan restaurant Kolamba. The original opened in Soho in 2019 when Grace Dent rounded off her rave review by saying ‘They cook from scratch and want to teach you 100 new things about Sri Lanka, and they are offering big, bold lessons from a small, faraway island. You’d be daft not to take them up on it.’ Sitwell is similarly enthusiastic, and says that Kolamba East is different from the ‘vast hordes of Asian restaurants across Britain’. Vast hordes - you mean like a swarm or an invasion or an influx? I think we get the idea.

Anyway, those vast hoardes of Asian restaurants have ‘ubiquitous menus, where you can turn up for a cuzza and order the same thing you always do’. We’ve been through Sitwell’s disdain for the British curry house before in Smashed #15 so I won’t drag you through that particular quagmire again. It’s something he’s mentioned before (in his August 2023 review of Empire for example) and will no doubt return to again, but what’s really distracting me about the current iteration is his use of the word ‘cuzza’. Really? William Sitwell is 55 years old and owns the same number of pairs of red trousers. He is not, as far as I know, a 20-something YouTuber.

Sitwell obviously appreciated the fact that he wasn’t eating any old ‘cuzza’ (top bantz and high fives oh my brothers) and has taken care in his review to define exactly what made the meal so special. He started with soft shell crab. ‘Think crunch and crab,’ he says. We will William, we will. Tamarind chicken was ‘stewed in spice and other gubbins’. Can we all just take a moment to appreciate the incisiveness of that observation. The cuzza had gubbins people. A pair of lamb chops were ‘covered in the hot curry powder mix of Jaffna’ (don’t bother to find out what spices are in the mix William, we’re not even interested) and were ‘nicely pink and tender and the heat not too overpowering to enjoy the fragrant lamb’.

The idea of spices and chillies ‘overpowering’ a protien is such a white British food writer preoccupation. What does it even mean? I once had some chilli crab in Penang that was so hot I experienced inter-dimensional time travel. Were the locals sending it back complaining that the subtleties of the sweet fresh crab meat had been lost in all that heat? Were they fuck. If you want lamb cutlets with salt and pepper, go to Wiltons where you will no doubt be able to enjoy it’s full fragrance, otherwise shut up and eat your cuzza.

Best line: ‘Blossom Street is a calm alleyway in London’s Spitalfields where redeveloped 19th-century warehouses abut modern buildings and townhouses from the Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian periods. It seems a marvel of urban planning’
Worst line: ‘We had ‘dhal with spinach’, which was an understatement. The wet and soothing yellow lentils were under a pile of nuts and garlic and corn, yet such was the dextrous cooking, eating it was far from wading through a pond, more a revelatory exploration through a temple where each doorway led to a room of further riches’
Did the review make me want to book a table: ‘Why’d you always book a table at Kolamba East? (cuzza I want to, cuzza I want to)’.

From Smashed #28 - Jay Rayner, The Observer
Sam’s Montpellier, Cheltenham

Well, blow me down if Rayner hasn’t found himself at a small plates restaurant. We were just talking about those. I found myself at a small plates restaurant recently. I thought the food was outstanding but I am getting a bit tired of eating spoonfuls of beef larb tartare from the same plate that just had some maple sriracha-glazed crispy pigs trotters on it and will soon be home to a scoop of cavatelli with artichoke roasted lemon and ricotta. How does that make any sense?

In Cheltenham, Rayner enjoyed some ‘larky, excitable and very jolly cooking’ which is what small plates should be all about, probably. The problem with small plates restaurants is that there’s lots of dishes and therefore lots of description to wade through. To be honest, I gave up, but it all sounds pretty commendable stuff. Well done Sam.

Best line: ‘Fat pebbles of pig cheek are first braised until spoonable, then placed on a face-cream-soft purée of cannellini beans. There are generous dribbles of a jammy madeira sauce and, on top for crunch, fragments of puffy crackling’
Worst line: ‘The earth section gets beetroot arancini with a light grassy poke of dill. Cut through the golden exterior and you’ll find something brilliantly Hammer House crimson, like the very ground has bled for you’. Thanks for that Jay, I won’t sleep tonight.
Did the review make me want to book a table: I might have had enough small plates for a while, thanks.

From Smashed #26 - Tim Hayward, The Financial Times
The Compasses Inn, Wiltshire

Why is orzo so suddenly popular? Don’t get me wrong, I love the stuff. I make this Rick Stein recipe for meatballs with tomato and orzo quite regularly. But it’s been mentioned four times this week, twice at Oma (God. OK I’ll stop it now), Rayner ate ‘a pot of long-cooked beef in orzo’ at Arabic Flavour and now Hayward is scarfing up the ‘creepy, streamlined rice’ (that made me laugh) at a quaint country pub with ‘lumps of monkfish and some extremely creditable prawns and the broth was rich and clean, with just enough saffron and chilli’. Hayward seems to have been quite transported by his visit the The Compasses Inn, although I’ve no idea what drew him to the place. I have press releases dating back to 2022 when it was relaunched by Fay Maschler’s son Ben. Maybe Hayward filed his copy away back then and has only just got around to acting on it. Someone once told me that Hayward keeps files on lots of things, including people, but I’m sure they were pulling my leg. Weren’t they?

Best line: ‘I was immobile on the A303, looking left towards Stonehenge, when I suddenly understood the true nature of time. Zeno had it right. If it was possible for The Compasses at Chicksgrove to pause everything to stillness for a perfect instant, it seemed quite believable that motion was impossible and that I’d never get home. Weird thing is . . . I didn’t even mind’
Another best line: ‘They settled me into a nook made of high-backed settles, lit with a candle, and laid out carefully unmatched old cutlery and a glass of wine. I wasn’t sure whether to order or roll a 20-sided dice and gird myself for orc-combat’
Did the review make me want to book a table: It made me want to stop time.

From Smashed #21 - Jimi Famurewa, Evening Standard
Crispin at Studio Voltaire (4 stars)

This review is an absolute nightmare. I’ve left it to last because I was dreading having to deal with it, but I’ll do my best. I’ll tackle it paragraph by paragraph and see if I can navigate my way through its mysteries that way. I may get some of it wrong; I apologise in advance.

Jimi Famurewa and his friend went to a pub in Clapham to drink Guinness and watch football while an older man sang Mustang Sally as a half naked Australian drank hard seltzer. There are some good restaurants in Clapham, even though it’s a shit version of Brixton. Before going to the pub, Famurewa experienced a magic trick at Crispin Studio Voltaire, the latest opening from Dom Hamdy’s HAM group (of Bistro Freddy in Shoreditch fame) which cements the nimbleness of the aforementioned group. Famurewa sat in a candlelit life raft in a permanently heaving room and felt a seismic and miraculous presence. Possessed wimples took flight while mackerels lounged by a zinging pool. A lack of salt perplexed. There was more cement. And then he woke up, probably. I told you it was a nightmare.

Best line: N/A
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: You can’t book a bad dream. Or can you…

From Smashed #20 - Jimi Famurewa, Evening Standard
The Shoap, London (4 stars)

If The Shoap, a ‘hybrid cafe, food shop and bar that bills itself as “London’s first Scottish deli”’ wasn’t run by a Glaswegian it would be racist. It’s a bricks and mortar incarnation of Russ Abbot’s C U Jimmy character. For the act, Abbot (born in Chester, England) sported a ginger wig, kilt and sporran and talked fast-paced gibberish in an exaggerated Glaswegian accent while threatening to headbutt whoever was next to him on stage. It was basically a dramatic re-enactment of an average weekday morning on Sauchiehall Street.

You are probably too young to remember Russ Abbot; he was a TV comedian in the 80s who is best known for taking a cover version of Joy Division’s ‘Dead Souls’ into the top 10. His performance of the Ian Curtis dead fly dance on Top of The Pops was the stuff of tabloid headlines. Tragically, he died on stage at the London Palladium in 1990, but stormed the Glasgow Empire the following night which made up for it.

Do you want Irn-Bru? Do you want Lorne square sausage? Do you want Gordon and Durward tablet? Do you want Tennent’s from the keg? Do you want ‘finely-wrought, sturdy toques of warm pastry filled with either a vigorously peppered wodge of mutton or pacifying macaroni cheese’? Do you want ‘an East Neuk smoked salmon and mozzarella toastie’? Do you want ‘Archbold’s potato scones, heaped with punchy veggie haggis and roused by blobs of hot sauce from Edinburgh’s Leithal’? Do you want total war? Then you want The Shoap.

Best line: ‘(The Shoap) is already subject to frenzied queues, internet hysteria, and diners making long pilgrimages from as far afield as the Cotswolds. A lot of this, of course, can be attributed to the expert monetisation of homesickness’
Worst line: ‘But its irrepressible deliciousness encapsulated so much of what The Shoap is about’. Try saying ‘irrepressible deliciousness encapsulated’ three times fast in a fake Glaswegian accent.
Did the review make me want to book a table: It keeps calling me.

From Smashed #18 - Grace Dent, The Guardian
Pearly Queen,London

Dent says, ‘There is two Michelin star-level ingenuity going on’ at this fancy east London seafood joint that doesn’t have any stars in the Michelin guide. It probably will next year because this is the second restaurant from chef Tom Brown who holds a star at Cornerstone in Hackney Wick, and that’s how these things tend to go. It’s not unusual to hear people say that places without a Michelin star deserve one or that places with one star deserve two and so on, I’m guilty of it on the regular. But to say you have spotted ‘two Michelin star-level ingenuity’ is quite an unusually specific thing to claim, especially when Dent says it’s evident ‘even when they’re only slinging oysters in the deep-fat fryer or doling out bread’.

More convincingly, ‘oyster paté, which is piped back into its shell and topped with champagne jelly and purslane’ does sound like the sort of thing you might find in a Michelin two-star restaurant, but equally in a one-star. Dent further muddies the waters by stating that ‘there will be things at Pearly Queen, as at Cornerstone, that you will never have eaten elsewhere, though that’s not to say you won’t do in future, once other people shamelessly rip them off’. In a world where, all over the globe top chefs, and their customers, are posting dishes to Instagram and ideas can cross-pollinate in the blink of an eye, it’s probably not advisable to be making claims of originality on behalf of any chef, unless you are one hundred per cent certain of your facts.

Dent picks out ‘monkfish tail in a rich XO sauce that is patently deepened with shellfish’ (XO sauce is usually based on dried shrimp and scallop, so no surprise there) as memorable. Brown demonstrated the dish on his TikTok recently and it does look excellent. The combination is not unique however. I found this review of the now-closed Gem restaurant in New York from 2019 that included ‘grilled monkfish with spicy XO sauce’. That’s not to say that the two dishes are the same or that Brown copied the idea for his dish from anywhere, only that finding a genuinely unique restaurant dish is virtually impossible.

Best line: ‘if you were to try to swim the Channel after eating at this fishy establishment, you’d sink to the bottom very quickly, weighed down with paté, cream and panko crumbs – but what a way to go’
Worst line: ‘mash with Guinness and oyster gravy, in which the slightly bitter, black jus dances enticingly around silky pommes puree’. No dancing in restaurant reviews please, or balletic service. Or symphonies of flavour. At least the mash, Guinness and oysters weren’t dancing in Dent’s mouth.
Did the review make me want to book a table: I’m XO there.

From Smashed #14 - Jimi Famurewa, Evening Standard
Hainan House, London

‘Rookie restaurateur’ Sunny Wu is, according to Famurewa, illuminating ‘the gastronomic tendencies of Hainan province for no other reason than the fact that no one else is really doing it’. Did anyone ask the people of Hainan province if they wanted their tendencies illuminated? Is doing something for no other reason that no one else really is, actually a good enough reason to do it? Did that last sentence make grammatical sense? How many more questions will I ask before getting somewhere interesting with this paragraph?

None.

This is the Hainan House, we're Hainan here in the Hainan House. Oh, it's such fun, fun, fun, whoa-oh. In the Hainan House you’ll find an ‘experimental, tactile blur of slurped herbal broths and snaffled quail eggs’. I’ve read Famurewa’s review several times very closely and I’m still none the wiser what that sentence means. Touching broth is a new and unappealing idea. Is that what they get up to in Islington these days? The broth in question is the duck soup in a rice noodle dish that is ‘clogged, challengingly’ with ‘powdery strips of beef jerky’. It’s never pleasant to be challengingly clogged, beef jerky or no beef jerky.

The aforementioned quail eggs fails to make a second appearance in the review so I have no idea how or why they were snaffled. It’s a mystery Famurewa will take to his grave. I did look on the restaurant’s menu which lists ‘Tiger skin quail eggs with papaya chilli’ which sound interesting and worth writing about. The eggs are hard boiled then deep fried. Beyond that I can’t help you. They don’t appear in any other review that I can find online and not even in Hilary Armstrong’s excellent feature on the restaurant. Just like Chekhov’s gun, if you mention a quail egg in a review, there has to be a reason for it. Don’t go waving quail’s eggs in people’s faces, they just might go off.

BOOM.

Best line: ‘Set in a tiny Upper Street townhouse, it is a 24-cover, L-shaped space, tastefully put together in tones of olive green’. No, it’s not a great line, but in the context of the review, it’s a welcome slice of normcore writing.
Worst line: ‘there is a persistent, twanging bass note of deep, fermented funk’. That reminds me of the many times by my dear old, late lamented dog Lulu ate something she shouldn’t have.
Did the review make me want to book a table: It would solve the quail egg mystery if I did.

The Smashed 1st birthday party playlist

Regular Smashed readers will know that I can’t help but indulge my love for music and use YouTube videos to soundtrack the newsletters, including this one. There is usually some sort of link between text and music, but sometimes I admit it can be pretty obscure. Anyways, I hope you like them. I’m not going to stop even if you don’t. Here’s a playlist of just some of the songs that have appeared during the first year. Turn it up so you know, so you know, so you know it’s got soul, dah da-da da-da dah da.