What’s going on
When I launched Smashed last November, it was with the simple idea of using a review of all the national newspaper restaurant reviews to survey the current state of the UK dining scene. It was also designed as an outlet for the sort of writing I would never be commissioned to do; free-flowing, highly opinionated, a bit silly and, to a degree, self-indulgent, although always striving to be entertaining, informative and highly readable at the same time. I will continue to do that, and this edition will be in the format the newsletter launched with.
However, I am also increasingly interested in writing other features for Smashed like ‘The Smashed guide to drinking wine in restaurants’ that appeared in #22. I am currently working on two pieces I think you will love and a third will be under way next week. I am aiming to publish the first of them later this week. They take a bit of time so it will be a matter of balancing the special features with the regular content to ensure one doesn’t suffer because of the other. That is one reason I haven’t done a full review of the reviews since Smashed #31 was published on 3 July. I suppose what I am saying is, please bear with me as I sort my shit out.
Anyway, let’s see what our critical chums have been up to since the last time we checked in on them. I’m not going to include every review I’ve missed as a fair few of them are of restaurants already reviewed by other critics, so I’ve only included the ones that will add to the sum of our collective knowledge.
Review of the reviews
Jimi Famurewa, Evening Standard
Lucia’s, London (4 stars)
According to Famurewa, London food nerds are currently shitting their pants (I’m paraphrasing. Sorry, this edition is quite sweary but it’s just the mood I’m in) about CDMX Tacos. It looks corporate-cosplaying-indie as fuck and ripe and ready to be rolled out as a chain. It’s founder is Billy Sengupta, formerly Global Head of Luxury Tequila at Diageo and before that Northern Europe Senior Brand Manager, Herbal Esseces and Aussie Haircare for Proctor and Gamble. So that’s what the hip kids are into.
But that’s not what Famurewa want’s to tell us about. He’s found somewhere else even more hip and cool in the middle of nowhere (near the Olympic Park in E9. Same thing.) Lucia is owned by Jo Kurdi who also runs the nearby Cafe Mai and hasn’t worked for Proctor and Gamble, at least as far as I can tell. Lucia seems mostly to be of interest because it doesn’t have an Instagram account. Good for them. I have an Instagram account but no one looks at it which means I must be hip too. The only difference between us is that Lucia ‘thrums with cool, craft and an invigorating purity of purpose’ and I’ve never thrummed with anything in my life and no one has ever decribed me as ‘invogorating’. Still, there’s time.
Famurewa says there are too many pine nuts at Lucia. If they carry on that way they’ll be out of business before you can say ‘crackling-edged, gorgeously rare-cooked bone-in pork chop, orbited by vibrant salsas’. Have you seen the price of pine nuts? They’re £37.50 a kilo at Tesco. Mental. I made a red pesto last night and instead of pine nuts used the toasted seeds from a butternut squash which were effectively free. Talk about a thrifty kitchen. I’ve got a feeling I might have mentioned pine nuts before in this newsletter, if so I apologise. I’m not obsessed about them or anything. But I mean, HAVE YOU SEEN THE PRICE OF THEM!
Do you want to go to Hackney Wick to eat some tacos, which ‘wanted for some pliability and moreishness’? You might be tempted when I tell you that ‘saucers of mellow mezcal were dispatched in the pummelling sunshine’ although that does sound like they were putting out strong spirits for the local cats to lap up. I’m not sure I understand what’s going on any more, especially in Hackney Wick. I feel like the cat who acidently ate the mezcal worm in the hot sun and now all the mice are 10 feet tall and chasing me down the canal. Help…meow….
Best Line: The crowd at CDMX Tacos is ‘inevitably, heavy on food influencers pushing their dripping al pastor quesadillas right up towards the camera and gesticulating with all the subtlety of CBeebies presenters’
Worst line: ‘On a sweltering, hard-won jewel of a summer’s evening, canal-side Hackney Wick — all shimmering water, spray-painted surfaces, and a half-dressed parade of tattoos, moustaches and Teva sandals — felt a little like a fevered combination of Kreuzberg, Glastonbury and Venice’. Someone, somewhere knows what this means. I’m just a simple lad from Pompey so this might as well be written in Latin for all the sense it makes to me
Did the review make me want to book a table: Just fill up my saucer of milk and break out the Sheba.
Tom Parker Bowles, Mail on Sunday
Bistrot at Wild Honey (3 stars)
What the fuck is a ‘bistrot’? It sounds like it should be a challenge on Strictly: ‘Dancing the Bistrot, a no-mark soap star and her professional partner, the Marquis de Sade (that’s what we call him behind his back anyway)’. A bistrot is a bistro. There is no difference. There appears to be no definitive answer as to where the term originated; if bistrot or bistro is the original spelling, or why bistro is the VHS of restaurant terminology and bistrot is the Betamax. If you’ve got a clearer idea about all of this I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
I would say that calling your restaurant a Bistrot as opposed to a Bistro is a bit pretentious. However, the first chefs in the UK I can recall doing so were the Galvin brothers at their much-missed Galvin Bistrot Deluxe in Baker Street and they are two of the nicest, most unpretentious people you could ever wish to meet. Similarly, chef Anthony Demetre, the man behind Bistrot at Wild Honey is a London restaurant legend and doesn’t piss about. So let’s put aside etymological concerns and see if TPB is hot to trot at Demetre’s bistrot.
Not so much. Not because of the food, which he says is ‘very good indeed’. Grilled red prawns we are told in an oh-so-poetic turn of phrase are ‘as sweet as a mermaid’s sigh’ and ‘ham croquettes are immaculately fried orbs of gently oozing beauty’ (I always prefer beauty when it’s gently oozing, like pus from a pimple). The main problem is that, on the night TPB ate, the room which ‘feels like a hotel lobby’ is ‘all but empty’ and in TPBs opinion, ‘a room like this needs filling, a seasoning every bit as essential as salt.’ And there in a nutshell you have one of the problems with the British style of restaurant criticism. One and done. What if TPB had dined, not on a Tuesday night, which is when he went, but on a Friday night when the place might have been rammed - what then? Four stars, five stars? Who knows.
As deeply flawed as the British approach may be, I’m not sure that I would advocate the New York Times policy of visiting a restaurant on multiple occasions and ordering the entire menu before publishing a review, especially after reading outgoing critic Pete Wells’s sign-off essay this week. After 12 years in the role, Wells leaves with a terrible medical report: ‘My scores were bad across the board; my cholesterol, blood sugar and hypertension were worse than I’d expected even in my doomiest moments. The terms pre-diabetes, fatty liver disease and metabolic syndrome were thrown around. I was technically obese.’
It’s hardly surprising when you learn that, ‘virtually all of my 500 or so reviews were the result of eating three meals in the place I was writing about. Typically, I’d bring three people with me and ask each to order an appetizer, main course and dessert. That’s 36 dishes I’d try before writing a word.’ Wells is also the man who volunteered to put together the paper’s ‘100 Best Restaurants’ list (his editors had asked for 50) which necessitated visiting everyone one of them plus ‘reference meals’ to ensure the restaurants he included in that list were ‘at least arguably, the best in the city’.
It’s an admirable approach to the work and I took Wells’s list as gospel when organising my last trip to New York, but it’s also a form of madness. It is just a review, a recommendation. After a decade in the job, you could have just trusted your distended gut, Pete. Your readers would have trusted you. ‘Here’s 100 restaurants that I’ve been to that I really liked and would commend to you,’ you could have said. That’s enough. It’s not worth killing yourself for.
Best line: N/A
Worst line: ‘A beautiful pâté en croute of chicken, pork and duck, the pastry soft and golden, the jelly luscious and wobbling’
Did the review make me want to book a table: I might book in for a Tuesday, other people are annoying.
Giles Coren, The Times
The Park, London (9/10)
Let’s be honest, the menus at Jeremy King’s restaurants are boring. They are always the least interesting thing about anywhere he opens. There’s lots of nice stuff you’d want to eat, but nothing that, by itself, would be enough to prompt you to actually get off your arse and into a cab or onto a tube or train to eat there. It’s all about the whole package with King; the design, the service, the way he can create a place that people want to be in. He never fails at that. I’ve yet to make it to The Park, but when I do go, it will be as much for the beautiful wood-panelled interior as the chopped cobb salad.
As we will see when I tackle his review of Cloth (I am having lunch there myself next week so I’m waiting until I can compare my own experience with Coren’s before including it in this newsletter) Coren will literally write any old shit that comes into his head. As I’ll explain, it’s one of the things I most admire about him. What he will never write however is a bad review of a Jeremy King restaurant. No one will, not even me (see my review of Colbert for example). Coren’s review is as predictable as a Jeremy King menu, it’s the chicken Milanese of the genre. But who doesn’t love a chicken Milanese?
When I say that Coren will never write a bad review of a Jeremy King restaurant, what I meant to say was that he will never write another bad review of a Jeremy King restaurant. Because Coren takes great pains to remind us that he did in fact give The Wolseley an absolute stinker (5.67 out of 10) when it opened back in 2003. ‘Jeremy certainly mentions it every time I see him. And I see him a lot,’ says Coren, who attended Kings’ 70th birthday party at The Park last month.
If Coren initially hated The Wolseley (he learned to love it but now hates it again because King doesn’t own it any more. Are you keeping up with all this?) he fucking loves the ‘American Wolseley’ which is what he calls The Park. The parquet floor is ‘awesome’, the polished wood ceiling is ‘divine’, the light ‘beatific’. And the food? He went for brunch. Oh.
The eggs benedict were ‘great’ despite ‘rather firm muffins’ but Jeremy is working on them we are told. The grilled onglet was ‘rare and juicy’ and served with ‘sensational’ latkes and the coffee was ‘excellent’. As for the all-day menu, well, he didn’t eat any of that but did give a handy run down of what it includes, but you might as well look at the full menu for yourself and find out. It’s riveting stuff.
Best line: ‘the vibe is mid-century California drawing room chic worked onto a New York diner. That Hopper Nighthawks painting place, but dressed by the set designer of Mad Men. Indeed, the deep tan upholstery on the chairs and capacious banquettes could have been peeled directly from Don Draper’s face’
Worst line: ‘In fact, everyone will love everything. Betcha’
Did the review make me want to book a table: It didn’t make me not want to book.
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