This week, I took my own advice and went to lunch at Furna in Brighton, one of the places I’ve included in my eating and drinking guide to the city in the current edition of olive magazine. You can read it here. When it opened in November 2022, Furna offered a tasting menu only. Recently, like many high-end restaurants around the country, they have introduced more accessible options starting with a reduced-size tasting menu and now an a la carte. It’s full of irresistible stuff like the signature bread course, a pillow-soft Parker House mini tear-and-share loaf with tarama, house-made pickles, cultured butter and chicken tuile.
But the star of the show was the fire-roasted lobster rice; a Selsey lobster cooked separately in its constituent parts - tail, claw, knuckle - so that each had the perfect degree of doneness. It was served with paella rice enriched with Sussex sobrasada from Curing Rebels and a lobster bisque. I was slightly merry on a glass of The Trouble With Dreams fizz from my favourite English winery Sugrue and half a bottle of excellent Nivarius white Rioja (I’m having a white Rioja moment, partly inspired by M&S Paco Real White Rioja which is a proper bargain at £7) when I told chef Dave Mothersill that I thought it was the best lobster dish I could remember eating and that he needed to open a chain of Lobster Rice restaurants. Having sobered up, I still stand by my comments.
Pastry chef Jessica Elliot’s desserts are also worthy of special mention. Her strawberry, white chocolate and woodruff ice cream creation was top-drawer stuff and the epitome of what a modern restaurant dessert should be; beautifully presented, imaginative, balanced flavours and not too sweet (the ice cream had a slightly savoury edge to it that worked brilliantly with the other elements on the plate). She also bakes that amazing bread.
At that point, we probably should have called it a day, but instead, we went for drinks at The Regency, the campest pub on the planet that looks like it was last decorated by Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen in 1996, and then onto No No Please, another place I included in my olive guide. I am addicted to their Supagrass cocktail made with tequila, vermouth, lemongrass and salted coconut. I also had a jeli beer (lager blended with ice, lime and ginger) for the road. To paraphrase Lou Reed, my weekend beats your month, probably.
The Reviews
Marina O’Loughlin, Noble Rot
Chez Bruce, London
Marina O’Loughlin is unusual among ‘career’ restaurant critics in that she has retired; her last review for the Sunday Times was published on 27 October 2022 (Gordon Ramsay’s Street Burger, as witty and acerbic as you could hope for). Instead of jumping ship to another national title for more dosh, she bowed out, Tweeting at the time that ‘said I’d do 5 years. And astonishingly that’s five years. Couple of months hiatus till next gig - so looking fwd to being even *more* of a backroom gal - which I plan to fill with restaurants for the sheer hell of ‘em’.
The Sunday Times didn’t even bother trying to find a worthy successor, instead handing the pages over to India Knight who wrote a food column called ‘In The Kitchen’ until she didn’t any more. In October 2023, Charlotte Ivers made her debut as the new Sunday Times restaurant critic. And we wonder, we wonder if the thunder is ever really going to begin.
O’Loughlin’s ‘next gig’ appears to be the one she had already, contributing to Noble Rot magazine (she is a shareholder in Nobel Rot Ltd). I have to admit I am not a regular reader of the magazine. I mostly associate the brand with natural wine which I don’t drink as a rule so why would I spend £12 on a 100-odd-page publication dedicated to it? There is of course more to it than that so I’ve probably been missing out, but I’ll just have to live with that. I was prompted to buy issue 35, which has a terrible photo of Gary Lineker on the cover and an even worse one inside, because O’Loughlin had reviewed Chez Bruce in her ‘Unhyped’ column that celebrates ‘off-radar, old school and classic restaurants’.
I’m far from alone in numbering Chez Bruce among my favourite restaurants or thinking long-standing head chef Matt Christmas is a culinary genius. If you don’t follow his Instagram feed matt christmas77, you really must. I have a personal connection with the place as I first met owner Bruce Poole in 2000 when I was chosen to represent the UK at The Sofitel 19th Annual Amateurs Chefs Contest and Bruce was my chef/mentor for the competition. The Independent sent food writer Sybil Kapoor to cover the event and you can read her piece here. My version of events differs somewhat from hers; you can read it here.
The reason I mention all this is because in O’Loughlin’s review she mentions how publicity-shy both Poole and his business partner Nigel Platts-Martin are, saying ‘Platts-Martin is, if anything, even more shadowy; “the quiet man” he was called by a trade magazine the last time he did much publicity - and that was 2006’. The trade publication was The Caterer and I wrote the interview which was something of a scoop at the time. I also wrote that headline. It’s unusual for a publication to go with a journalist’s idea for a headline. It’s so rare that I stopped suggesting them years ago. It wasn’t inspired by the John Wayne film as you might imagine, but by a song by Ultravox from the John Foxx era when they were still good.
You can read the piece here (I am not credited for some reason, but I did write it, honest). It was the most unusual interview I have ever undertaken. Platts-Martin was extremely wary of the whole process. I can’t recall if I proposed the idea of a profile to PR Maureen Mills who was representing Platts-Martin at the time or she suggested it to me, but either way it took months from the initial idea to finally submitting the copy. In that time, I had numerous phone calls with Platts-Martin, some of which would last for well over an hour. The last time I’d spent that long on the phone was when I first met my future wife. We never got to the ‘no, you hang up’ stage but it was close. None of the conversations were formal interviews and nothing from them eneded up in the piece, it was just endless discussions about food, restaurants and especially wine, Platts-Martin’s true passion.
We finally arranged a date for the actual interview which took place face to face in the private dining room of The Square in Bruton Place which Platts-Martin owned at the time with Phil Howard. It lasted several hours. Every so often, Platts-Martin would gesture towards my cassette recorder (this was 2006 remember) that lay on the table between us indicating that he wanted to go off record. I would turn it off and Platts-Martin would tell me something completely unprintable, and on one occasion something really quite disturbing, about some famous hospitality figure or other. It was a highly entertaining morning and Platts-Martin told me those stories because he saw me as a ‘true believer’ in the world of restaurants and that I would be personally interested in them, and he was right.
What was printable made for an interesting read and Platts-Martin was so pleased with it that we had a celebratory dinner at The Ledbury following the cover story’s publication. We continued to keep in touch and Platts-Martin joined me on several review meals when I was writing for the Metro (I was O’Loughlin’s holiday cover at the time). Then we just lost touch.
There was an incident in 2009 when I wrote something about Brett Graham opening The Harwood Arms pub with Mike Robinson, a venture that didn’t include Platts-Martin. An error had crept in to the copy and it said that Graham was leaving The Ledbury in order to open the pub which of course wasn’t true. I remember Platts-Martin was very unhappy about it to put it mildly, but somehow it got sorted and we did have further coridal correspondence afterwards.
The last time I emailed him was back in 2015 when I suggested he check out a chef who I thought was doing amazing things but wasn’t getting the attention that I thought he deserved. Maybe Platts-Martin might want to open a restaurant with him? I never heard back. The chef has since gone on to get Michelin recognition, but I do wonder where he might be now if Platts-Martin had taken up my suggestion.
But what of O’Loughlin’s review. If you think I’m going to parse Marina’s work, think again. She’s one of the most respected writers on the subject of restaurants for a reason. One thing that did make me laugh however was her comment that, ‘The most obsessive restaurnt fan might not make it here because Chez Bruce is in deepest Wandsworth’. It’s literally a two minute walk from Wandsworth Common railway station, which is one stop from Clapham Common. That said, I remember deciding to wait until Marco Pierre White moved from Harveys (which is now Chez Bruce) and opened The Restaurant, Hyde Park Hotel (now the Mandarin Oriental) in 1993 because I couldn’t figure out how to get to Wandsworth from Brighton. Bear in mind this was pre-internet and all I had to go on were printed railway timetables and a London A-Z street map. Although I do regret the decision, by that point Harveys was past it’s prime so I’d probably missed the boat anyway.
O’Loughlin’s main objection however appears not to be the ‘schlep, the swingeing cab fare, the tube changes’ (next time, get the train Marina) but that ‘Wandsworth is the least cool and destination worthy of ‘burbs’. . . .I’d go to Paris for lunch like a shot, SW17 not so much.’ That sort of postcode snobbery is completely alien to me as a life-long non-Londoner. It pretty much takes me two hours door to door to get from Brighton to anywhere in London so I am happy to go where ever there is decent scran to be had. The only exception to that rule is Crouch End which just takes forever and too many changes of transport and therefore rules out Les 2 Garcons, at least so far. What’s your least favourite London postcode? Let me know in the comments.
My only other quibble with O’Loughlin is her assertion that ‘harrisa, burrata with praline, and miso glazed items. . . .are just distractions from the house accent, which is firmly French’. I’ve been dining at Chez Bruce regularly for nearly 25 years and from day one the menus have been resolutely ‘Modern British’ with influences from Spain, Italy and Asia. The Turkish aubergine dish of imam bayildi was an early staple, and to my knowledge, miso-glazed aubergine with ginger, puffed rice, sesame, shiso and soy hasn’t left the menu since it was first served a couple of years ago. The current menu lists gazpacho Andaluz; ox cheek rendang; rare-grilled tuna with black beans, corn and guacamole; Arista Toscana, roast rump of veal with polpetta, soft polenta and salsa verde as well as plenty of French-derived dishes of course.
At any rate, it was pleasure to read O’Loughlin’s writing again (she also has a great piece on those two best buds Top Jaw and other online restaurant content creators in the same issue) and especially about a restaurant that I am particularly fond of. Maybe I should drop Nigel an email and let him know.