Smashed #31

The UK restaurant scene digested

Photo by Ian Stauffer on Unsplash

When I Ruled the World

I am in an unusually good mood today so I’m going to try and be positive in my review of the reviews this week. I feel like I don’t say enough good things about all the hard work the critics put in on our behalf, week in, week out so this time I’m going to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive and e-lim-i-nate the negative.

I have no idea why I’m in this odd Monday morning mood as my weekend was quite the rollercoaster. On the downside, a theatre trip and several very nice meals (Midland Grand Dining Room and Som Saa) had to be cancelled at short notice due to illness (not mine). I also managed to ruin Sunday night’s dinner by not tasting the stock left over from cooking a ham hock before making what turned out to be an inedibly salty risotto with it which really pissed me off.

On the plus side, the opening two stages of the Tour de France were absolute bangers (talking of Le Tour, have you sponsored chef Phil Howard yet? He’s riding the entire route a week ahead of the professional riders for charity. He is 58 and is spending around 10 hours a day in the saddle. I’m not sure he’s right in the head but his heart appears to be in the right place. Go on, follow this link and chuck him a few quid on behalf of Cure Leukaemia).

Glastonbury on BBC iPlayer was also a ton of fun including a fearless Kevin Rowland and Dexy’s ending their short set with the 12-minute ‘This Is What She’s Like’ (the single version made no. 78 in the charts in 1985 so not exactly a guaranteed crowd pleaser), Confidence Man fronted by Nigella Lawson (well, it looked like Nigella but I could be wrong), The Breeders looking like they’d come straight from a PTA meeting and Coldplay playing an absolute blinder.

I think Chris Martin’s depthless positivity and childlike wonder have somehow infected me. On Sunday afternoon, I was even inspired to write and record a new song, ‘Like a Knife’. I don’t know what it’s called that, it’s an instrumental so there’s no lyrics. The whole thing came to me in about 10 minutes (I wish this newsletter took 10 minutes to write). Shame you’ll never hear it. It’s nothing like Coldplay I should add, more Breeders meets Naked Raygun. Anyway, let’s see how long the sky remains full of stars for me. I think I can get to the end of this newsletter at least, but let’s start with Jimi, just to be on the safe side.

The Reviews

Jimi Famurewa, Evening Standard
Akira Back, London (2 stars)

Well, good evening everybody, thank you so much for being here. I look around and I just see amazing wonderful people all over the place and that’s what makes Substack the greatest online publishing platform on earth in my opinion. This is my favourite thing to do on earth, thank you for letting me do it here.

Famurewa has very kindly taken one for the team and dined in an expensive new London hotel where a renowned overseas chef is in charge of all the F&B (that’s an industry term meaning Food and Beverage. You’re welcome. Beverage is a funny old word. I’ve been saying it over and over in my head for about 10 minutes now. I might form a group and name it Cold Beverage. Our first album will be Out of The Cooler or Drink This or something even more hip).

You will of course know chef Akira Back, for it is he, from his world-famous Yellowtail Japanese Restaurant and Lounge at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. You’ve also probably enjoyed his cuisine at some of his other places in Boise, Bali or Bangkok. Now he’s in London, at last. Back used to be a professional snowboarder which shows how versatile and talented he must be to achieve in two such different arenas. Akira Back: The Restaurant is bound to be a huge success just like all the other restaurants opened by world-famous chefs in very expensive hotels in London that add so much to the city’s dining culture.

Famurewa seems to agree, saying that ‘its conceptual lodestar is nothing so much as the safe, cosseting Anywheresville of international luxury culture’. We all love a ‘safe, cosseting’ meal. Great start! Things only get better with an interior design with ‘the taupe, stone and timber colour palette of an especially grand Apple Store’. Apple Stores are so unique, you can’t even buy anything in them which is what makes them so much fun.

Luckily for Famurewa ‘there were no headline moments of disaster’ which means the meal was a success. High five Jimi! It certainly sounds entertaining; ‘a puny boat of cross-hatched eggplant, sickly sweet on the palate and bearing a rubbery lid of melted mozzarella which flipped up and down like a bad toupée’. Food with an inbuilt sight gag. I’m not sure how things could get any better, but then Famurewa says, ‘Five pieces of serviceable nigiri might as well have been an edible screensaver’. An edible screensaver! Where do they get their zany ideas from?

Two weeks after opening his first London venture, chef Akira Back was already off on his next adventure somewhere else in the world. ‘I cannot say that I blame him,’ says Famurewa. A nice touch from our critic, wishing the chef well at the end of his review. What a great read. I’m sure we all wish chef Back success and are looking forward to Famurewa’s next review with baited breath. Great job everyone.

Best line: ‘there was something about the cumulative impact of it all, something about its inert flavours, haphazard execution and forgettable bloodlessness, that exemplified all that is especially tedious and overly dominant in our city’s food scene. This is the 24th outpost of a global empire that’s more about pacifying high-net-worth travellers than it is about enriching a local food culture’
Worst line: Uh-uh, not this week.
Did the review make me want to book a table: Ever heard of Yolo? There’s your answer!!

Giles Coren, The Times
Julie’s, London (8)

Giles! He’s my favourite. I don’t think I’ve ever said that in this newsletter before. Well, the cat’s out of the bag now as they like to say. Hope the others don’t feel jealous. It’s important to give praise when you have the opportunity. I might be knocked down by a bus on the way home tonight and then I’d be kicking myself if I died and had never said Giles Coren was my favourite restaurant critic (is this what it’s like inside Chris Martin’s head all the time? Christ, it…it must be great to be him!)

Coren has been to Julie’s which I reviewed, sort of, a month ago in Smashed #27. I loved it. Turns out Coren went with Tracey MacLeod who, come to think of it is actually my favourite restaurant critic. I have a load of her reviews in a ring binder in my garden office. That sounds a bit stalker-ish. It’s not a Tracey MacLeod shrine, honest. I have lots of pre-internet food and drink-related newspaper and magazine clippings in ring binders and MacLeod’s work just happens to be among them. Maybe they could play a role in this newsletter. We’ll see. She’s also the best Masterchef guest judge. It’s a shame she doesn’t still write restaurant reviews but I think she’s a bit busy doing other things.

There’s some sex talk in the review. No, what I mean is that there’s some talk about sex in the review, mostly in a historical sense, and it involves the restaurant rather than the critics. You should probably just read the review. Coren had the duck liver schnitzel with shallot marmalade and quail’s egg because the dish is critic bait. He enjoyed it as much as I did by the sounds of things, describing it as ‘cute and delicious’. I need to go back for the lobster souffle which Coren says ‘a beautiful eggy cloud, free floating on a black iron skillet of the most compelling fricassée, rich with gruyère, sleek and peppery with leeks, bustling with chunky lobster’. If that’s not para-para-paradise, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh on a plate I don’t know what is. Borrowing the late Michael Winner’s restaurant writing catchphrase (Winner lived locally to Julie’s), Coren ends by saying ‘it was all utterly historic’. Just like your review Giles, just like your review.

Best line: ‘moules frites for £15 sounds like Belgo 20 years ago. But it’s not, it’s Julie’s, now. Sure, it’s not a vast bucket of moules and they are smallish ones, but how many “front-bottoms of the sea” do you really want to eat’
Worst line: I should delete this line, it’s not going to get used this week.
Did the review make me want to book a table: Try and stop me.

Jay Rayner, The Observer
The Hero, London

Up next, it’s Mr Jay Rayner, our most senior and respected critic. He’s back from the pub but he’s still standing. What’s he got to say for himself? Let’s find out. Firstly, he has some fascinating insights into the tribes of London. The subject will be of particular interest to readers who live outside the capital and who spend most of their waking hours pondering the differences between the people of Peckham, Mayfair and west London because they literally have nothing better to do, not being Londoners and everything. Rayner even spent part of his evening in a toilet cubicle in The Hero in Maida Vale spying on two blokes taking a piss so he could better inform his readers of exactly what west Londoners are like. That, my friends, is true journalism.

I was very dismissive of The Hero in Smashed #28 when it was reviewed by David Ellis of the Standard, but now I’m in full Chris Martin positivity mode, I’m ready to take a closer look. Rayner says that the owners, who we know from Ellis’s review are Phil Winser, James Gummer and Olivier van Themsche of The Bull in Charlbury and The Pelican in Notting Hill fame, ‘haven’t met a wood panel they couldn’t sand, a wall they couldn’t rag roll’. The pub is a real beauty, have a look at their website, but it’s also ‘bedlam’ according to Rayner. But it’s bedlam with cocktail sausages and a scotch egg which makes everything OK. The yolk of that egg was ‘at an ideal gooey state where it could be spreadable on toast like jam’ and was ‘deeply orange’ and not all yellow which would have been much better for the theme of this newsletter, but let’s roll with it.

Rayner ate various other things that he liked so, good for him. He was most impressed however by a lemon tart which he says is as good as the one he ate at Heston Blumenthal’s Riverside Brasserie in the early 00s. I had the best pork belly I’ve ever eaten there, it had been cooked for 48 hours in a water bath and was as tender as a Chris Martin lyric. It’s good to see that Rayner has equally as good menu recall as me, as well as similar reference points. We could be friends, except for…OK, lets not go into that, it’ll spoil the upbeat mood.

Best line: ‘There’s also a whole roast quail which is a pleasing redefinition of the word “snack”. Would you like a nibble? Oh yes please, I’ll have a whole game bird, but just a small one’
Worst line: 404 not found
Did the review make me want to book a table: It sounds like it would be the adventure of a lifetime.

Charlotte Ivers, The Sunday Times
Borscht N Tears, London (4 stars)

I love it when critics go to old obscure London restaurants that no one is really interested in and aren’t very good. You know the kind; they’re the ones people who don’t really eat out that much and don’t have an interest in food would recommened to you. It’s so much fun to read about them because they are a right laugh, and who doesn’t like to laugh?

Borscht N Tears, a Russian restaurant in a dark ‘luxurious basement’ in Knightsbrdge that originally opened in 1965 was virtually empty when Charlotte Ivers visited. Strange, as her friends who suggested it for a review ‘had stumbled in accidentally one night and found the atmosphere uproariously fun, the staff amusingly blunt, the whole place fascinating.’ I’m mainly in search of uproarious fun when I go out for a meal so Borscht N Tears sounds right up my street, especially while I’m still basking in my post-BBC iPlayer Glastonbury glow.

Ivers sips horseradish vodka that ‘you can taste behind your eyes’ and eats potatoes, pickles and dill and lamb plov that’s like ‘a softly cuminy biryani’ which must be difficult to say after a few shots. Everyone gets pissed and passes out or doesn’t make it home. It sounds like the toppermost bantz on the planet and I’m here for it. Nostrovia! Or more correctly, as I’ve just discovered by Googling it, За здоровье!

Best line: ‘An old hand in this industry gave me a piece of advice. If you go to a restaurant and either you or your guests get unconscionably drunk, you’d better give that restaurant a good review, otherwise they might dob you in’. Bantzilla!!
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I’m totally Russian to get there.

Grace Dent, The Guardian
Cloth, London

I’m going to Cloth in a couple of weeks so I’m very interested to find out what our Gracie has to say about it, even though Tim Hayward has already reviewed it (see Smashed #28). Imagine me, on the edge of my seat staring intently at my screen, hanging on every single word. It really happened.

Cloth, we learn, has a good website because it lists the restaurant’s opening times. That may sound like a simple thing but I am with Dent here all the way when she rants that ‘I spend far less time eating out than I do barking at my laptop about this trend to be cagey, opaque and mostly shut’ and modern restaurant websites that offer ‘page after online page of TS Eliot-style tracts about the chef’s culinary journey and the restaurant’s attitudes to biodiverse composting, with no mention at all of what point in the week they switch on the stoves’. I spend an in ordinate amount of time looking at restaurant websites, for business and pleasure, and it’s astonishing how many of them are shit suboptimal (must keep the Martin mindset). Hey ho, that’s life isn’t it, worse things happen at sea and all that (is Chris Martin on drugs? No one is really like this are they? It’s such hard work).

The ‘interesting, hearty, ever-changing menu’ of ‘comfort food’ at Cloth is heavy on the ‘oil, the cream, the butter and the sweet syrup’ but not all in one dish. Phew. The food sounds a bit odd to be honest: ‘Buffalo mozzarella with white peach, pine nuts and mint’ and ‘bull’s heart tomato in a silky, pale, stonkingly good tonnato sauce’ don’t sound that amazing. For Dent, the fact that Cloth opens on a Monday, that there’s ‘a table’, ‘a great glass or two of wine’ and ‘the highest standards of modern British cooking’ is more than enough. I’ll soon find out if I agree.

Best line: ‘You eat in a Grade II-listed building, behind a black-painted, olde worlde shop frontage in which one could imagine Bagpuss sitting waiting for Emily’
Worst line: I’m tempted so I’ll just repeat mymantra until the urge goes away *be more Martin, be more Martin, be more Martin*. That’s better.
Did the review make me want to book a table: It’s already been booked for me.

William Sitwell, The Telegraph
Skof, Manchester (5 stars)

If being Martinesque was a competition, William Sitwell would win hands down. His review of the new Manchester restaurant from Tom Barnes (Simon Rogan’s former right-hand-man) is so beatific, so soaringly euphoric that all it would need is a thumping beat from Coldplay drummer Will Champion and he could be headlining Glastonbury 2025 with it. It’s quite taken the wind out of my sails and I’m not sure I can retain my postive frame of mind in the face of the terrifyingly winsome two headed Sitwell-Martin beast. I’ll try, it’s nearly the end, and after all, nobody said it was easy.

So what so bloody great about Skof you may ask? You may also ask, is Skof a nordic word for something or other, or is it just a really naff play on the word ‘scoff’. If it’s the latter, it should be a sandwhich shop with bright green, yellow and red cardboard stars Blu Tacked in the window with things like ‘sausage and egg bap, £5’ written in sharpie on them. The only worse name in the history of hospitality is Squat and Gobble, a cafe on Charlotte Street in London which is now closed for some reason. At least it’s not called Restaurant Tom Barnes I suppose.

Skof is actually a rather handsome space in a converted warehouse in NOMA (NOrth MAnchester. Nothing to do with Rene Redzepi who, by the by, makes a fleeting cameo appearance in the first episode of series three of The Bear, which is great. I may discuss it more next week when I’ll have seen the whole thing and I’ll have more space, as long as I can figure out a way of relating it to the UK scene). Here are some of the things Sitwell has to say about Skof’s 12 course tasting menu:
‘a slam-dunk reason . . . .to love and admire Manchester, that city of energy, grandeur, cool and trams’
‘‘BBQ lobster’ . . . . quite remarkable slices of lobster draped in a thin layer of beef fat. This was the pinnacle of surf and turf – sweet lobster, becoming angelic in the melting fat’
‘the bread. . . a breathtaking layered sort of croissant; literally baking genius, all butter and crunch, as seismic a creation as the Grand Canyon’
‘Skof is the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids. A monument of pure, victorious conviction’
‘I hear Jerusalem bells a-ringing, Roman Cavalry choirs are singing’

That last one was actually Chris Martin. Bet you could hardly tell the difference. Oh-oh-oh, oh-oh, oh (sung to the tune of Viva La Vida).

Best line: ‘Scallops come in a limpid, room-temperature broth with a touch of oil (think pre-breakfast dip in a calm ocean); a set custard is light and sweet and enriched by hen of the woods mushrooms – the taste of forest before dawn’. It could have gone either way with this one if I’m honest.
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: As long as I can get hold of whatever Sitwell was on when he ate there.

Lilly Subbotin, The Independent
Café Britaly, London (3 stars)

I’ve got a terrible headache, like I’ve been drinking horseradish vodka all night. It must the Martin effect wearing off. Someone’s going to get it now, but there’s only Lilly Subbotin left. She’s alright. She’s also been to Café Britaly and Jimi Famurewa only just did that one last week in Smashed #30 so I’m not sure I’ve got the energy to go through it all again.

However, I didn’t pick up on the Bocca di Lupo connection last time (Café Britaly’s owners used to work there) so let’s start with that and see where it leads us. Subbotin describes ‘the grease from the fryers escaping the open kitchen and cloaking the room in a familiar smokeyness’. I’ve only eaten at Bocca di Lupo once and my main memory of it was that everything seemed to be deep fried. People love the place, maybe I should give it another go, but then I remember the terrible acoustics, and sitting in a corner facing a wall and I’m not sure I can be bothered.

Back at Café Britaly, they’re serving up fish fingers sandwiches (do people still do that?) and a green lasagna made with ‘green pasta, courgette, a broccoli ragu and a cheddar white sauce’ which sounds rather lovely. Then there’s ‘a deep fried margarita pizza’ and ‘a fried fish and fried potato-heavy main’ and ‘a full English that comes with fried pizza dough’ and I’m getting BdL flashbacks (I’ve just looked at the menu. Only some of it is fried. Perhaps we just ordered badly).

Subbotin says she enjoyed ‘a rather charming meal’. I enjoyed her rather charming review. I'm going back to the start.

Best line: ‘maritozzo – an Italian cream bun covered with fresh British strawberries and strawberry coulis. A beautiful marriage of something quintessentially English and classically Italian’
Worst line: ‘I’ll happily add this place to my list of cafes to go to when I’m feeling a little worse for wear and need something to blow off the cobwebs’. Damned with faint praise.
Did the review make me want to book a table: Just let me get over the post-Martin comedown and I’ll think about it.