Smashed #33.5: Gimme Some Truth
The UKs restaurant scene digested
Giles Coren, The Times
Cloth, London (9.167)
Coren’s review of Cloth was published a couple of weeks ago but I wanted to wait to comment on it until after my own visit to the restaurant, which happened earlier this week. I wouldn’t usually bother, but Coren’s review was so extreme that it seemed worthwhile to have my own experience to compare to his before steaming in.
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in writing this newsletter it’s never to take anything Giles Coren writes seriously. As I’ve previously noted, Coren treats the job of restaurant critic with the contempt it deserves and is utterly capricious with his praise and scorn. He creates and destroys the world around him with language on a moment-by-moment basis and is therefore not to be trusted.
His columns are a convoluted game which he always contrives to win. You thought he was being serious when he said Catch in Weymouth was the best restaurant in the world (see Smashed #17)? Are you stupid? Let Coren explain: ‘Saying, “This is the best restaurant in the world,” after a meal is like saying, “I love you,” after sex. It’s a hormone rush. It feels true at the time; it’s an honest feeling. But it doesn’t mean you’re not going to be saying it to someone else next week.’ He recently said that the Horse and Groom in Bourton-on-the-Hill was ‘almost certainly the best pub in England’ and then immediately added the caveat that ‘Terms and conditions apply, experiences can go up as well as down, you might not like it, no, I haven’t been to your local, frankly it’s just the sort of thing I say’.
So now you understand the ground rules, you’ll know what to make of the following paragraph that appeared in his Cloth review: ‘I haven’t written a bad review in years. I used to write them all the time, of course. Because, and this is the point, restaurants in this country used to be very bad. All of them. Even the good ones. That’s why Jonathan Meades and Michael Winner and AA Gill wrote the way they did. Not because they were especially angry or spoilt or mean-minded men. But because they had certain, quite modest standards and practically nowhere on the godforsaken British restaurant scene of the 1980s and 1990s, bleeding into the 2000s, was able to meet them.’
That is of course utterly unsupportable horseshit, counjoured from the top of his head at 9am just before he stopped for his first coffee. He carries on: ‘two restaurants out of every three that one went to, even in London, were utterly bloody stinking. The cheap ones were poisonous, the expensive ones were deluding themselves and everywhere in between was deceitful, ersatz and sad. The produce was rotten, the cooking was filthy and the staff were absolutely vile.’
All this to set up the assertion that things started to change mid 2010’s and now ‘almost all new restaurants, especially in London, are incredible’. Just a reminder at this point that he didn’t mean a word of it and will have forgotten he’d even written it by the time he rocked up for his next review lunch that same day. It doesn’t matter. It’s not even really an opinion, it’s just some words. It’s all in the game and Coren is winning, somehow.
I am nevertheless going to address Coren’s argument in two ways: one for non-subscribers and one for subscribers only. But before we get to that, let’s deal with Cloth where Coren was, of course, ‘quite beside myself’. He says it’s what restaurants of the ‘hipster food movement around 2007/8’ were trying to be. It’s ‘another cracker’ because all new restaurants are incredible, remember. And why is it a ‘cracker’? Well, salt cod fritters were ‘superhot, supercrisp’, crab tagliarini made ‘gorgeous textures in the mouth’, a rabbit and bacon terrine that was ‘fine’ and ‘firm’ and the tonnato dressing for some chopped bull’s heart tomatoes was ‘tangy’. All of those things were no doubt impossible for a restaurant to achieve before 2013.
I enjoyed Cloth, although the acoustics are equally as bad as those at Mountain, both of which were a nightmare for poor little old hearing-impaired me (coincidentally, the very next day I got new hearing aids fitted which would have come in handy for what was a very sonically challenging lunch.) I was tagging along on a PR-provided review lunch and so we got special attention from co-owner Ben Butterworth who is a joyful presence in the cosy, atmospheric dining room. The food was good to very good and not too overpriced, although I imagine it’s Gross-Profit-Margin-High-Fives all round in the kitchen whenever someone orders the £22 plate of tagliatelle with girolles, Parmesan and lemon. It was very nice pasta and I wasn’t paying (phew), but still.
Then we ate some other stuff (see below), drank a barrelful of lovely wines, none of which I can remember and then I walked five miles across London for dinner at a place I can’t tell you about because I was there undercover. Cloth was fine but I left whistling the crockery (Coren made particular play about it too) rather than thinking I’d had a memorable meal. Although I don’t think Coren’s liberal use of hyperbole and playing fast and loose with the truth is actively damaging (that sort of behaviour is only a real problem if your name is Trump), it did give me high expectations of the place and at the same time made me extremely sceptical about how good Cloth could possibly be. That did colour my judgement of the place. It would probably have been better for everyone involved if I hadn’t read the review before dining.
I almost certainly won’t return to Cloth, not because I didn’t think it was good or recommendable, but because I’m not a Londoner and I need a very good reason to return to a restaurant rather than go somewhere new or that I already know and love. The same is true of Mountain, voted the second-best restaurant in the country in the recent National Restaurant Awards which it simply is not (nothing against the awards themselves by the way). It’s a very busy, very slick, very noisy, fun sort of place where you’ll easily rack up a bill of £150 for some stuff on plates and some modest wine. The best thing I ate was some mutton chops for £26 which weren’t as good as the mechoui lamb chops I’d grilled for dinner a few nights before and served with chopped salad, spiced labneh and homemade flatbreads, all made to a recipe in the wonderful Morito cookbook.
Because of the rising overheads associated with being a restaurateur in 2024, cost and value in the minds of their customers are always on the brink of being irreconcilable. At the moment I am struggling to make it work for me. If I’m going to drop £100-£200 a head on a restaurant meal, it better be a fucking good one, and that just isn’t happening with as much regularity as I’d like at the moment. It’s probably an age thing but increasingly, my experience is that, while the general standard of restaurants is improving it’s hard to find somewhere really outstanding. Maybe I’m just haunted by memories of all the great meals I had when I first started eating out in the 90s that will never be bettered because they were formative experiences. And anyway, I must be wrong because all new restaurants are incredible; Giles Coren says so.
Back to Coren’s assertion that ‘restaurants in this country used to be very bad. All of them. Even the good ones.’ I was planning to write a terribly po-faced riposte full of facts and evidence that proved Coren wrong, and then I realised that would make me look like a dullard country mouse and Coren the clever-clever couldn’t care less town mouse and he would ‘win’. So I write a song instead.
Well, re-wrote the lyrics to a song. I would be embarrassed to tell you how long I spent on this, matching restaurant and chef names syllable by syllable to Billy Joel’s original lyrics to ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’, and keeping them in some sort of chronological order by decade to mimic Joel’s structure. But it was fun and I hope you enjoy it. You can, just about, sing along to the tune but I’ve had to make some compromises in the lyric pattern in some places so please don’t write in and complain, I did my best. You’ll also note that my version has only seven verses compared to Joel’s nine. What can I say, I have a life to lead, wine to drink and a mind to break.
For subscribers, after the paywall, I am re-publishing an article I wrote for The Caterer in 2017 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 which proves beyond doubt what a crock Coren’s statement is. Although it’s somewhat dated, it covers the period in question nicely and makes an informative and interesting read. Please let me know what you think.
Cloth Didn’t Start The Fire
(sung to the tune of ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ by Billy Joel)
Horn of Plenty, Miller Howe, Perry-Smith, Sharrow Bay
Castle Taunton, Tontine Inn, Robert Carrier
Francis Coulson, Brian Turner, Richard Shepherd, David Wilson
Le Manoir, Savoy Hotel, Langan’s Brasserie
Waterside, Little, Sally Clarke, L’Ortolan
Adlard’s, The Capital, Rowley Leigh and Mosimann
River Cafe, KP, Molyeneux and Tom Jaine
Michel Bourdin, Worrall Thompson, Albert, Michel, Nico
Cloth didn’t start the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
Cloth didn't start the fire
No, they didn't light it, but they’re trying to stoke it
Terence Conran, Le Gavroche, Harveys and Kensington Place
Veeraswamy, Brian Turner, Anton Edelmann
Koffmann, Tante Claire, Stephen Bull at Litchfield’s
Ivy Caprice, MPW
Fat Duck, Aubergine, Petrus and Criteron
Wagamama, Gary Rhodes, Henry Harris, Merchant House
St John, Fulham Road, Chutney Mary, Rick Stein
Pied a Terre, Peyton’s Place, Jean Christophe Novelli
Coren tried to start the fire
But it was always burning, since the world's been turning
Coren tried to start the fire
No, he didn't light it, but he thinks he might have
Chez Bruce, Atlantic, English Garden, A-Z
The Square, Quaglinos, Chez Nico at 90
Granita, Euphorium, Le Champignon Sauvage
Martin Lam, Ransome’s Dock, Interlude de Chavot
Marcus Wareing, L’Enclume, High Holborn, Hakkasan
Tamarind, Zaika, Atul at Benares
Boxwood, Foliage, Locatelli and Bentley’s
Russel Norman, Polpo, Harnett at Murano
Nathan Outlaw, Hedone, Galvin brothers back again
Pollen Street, Mark Hix, Corrigan, Young Turks
Nopi, Dabbous, Morito, Dinner by Heston Blumenthal
Bruno Loubet, Zucca Brawn, Medlar at The World’s End
No one knows who started the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it, but we’re glad we found it
London Calling
Over the last half-century, London’s restaurant scene has evolved into one of the most diverse and dynamic on the planet. As the Restaurant Association of Great Britain celebrates its 50th anniversary, Andy Lynes looks back over the decades to discover how London became the food capital of the world.
In 2017, London firmly established itself as the world’s most exciting restaurant scene. With 17,000 restaurants, it may not have as many as Paris (40,000) or New York (45,000) but with a current rate of about 200 new non-chain openings a year, London’s dynamism, depth, breadth and diversity are unmatched. Authentic takes on every cuisine from Senegalese to Szechuan are available in the capital; some of the finest chefs in the world, both homegrown and from abroad, ply their trade in London and concepts created in the city have been exported around the globe.
‘Fifty years ago, Britain was the laughing stock when it came to food. People would come and visit London, come and see a show, go to the Tower of London and the Horse Guards Parade and then scarper because the food was just awful. Now people are coming to London for a dining experience,’ says Michel Roux Jnr.
And he should know. He has run the world-famous Le Gavroche from 1991 when he took over the reins from his father Albert who established the restaurant in 1967 with his brother Michel Roux Snr. The impact of Le Gavroche on the London (and UK) scene has been immense. As well as being the first restaurant in London and the UK to win three Michelin stars, such significant figures as Rowley Leigh, Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay to name but a few have passed through Le Gavroche’s kitchens. It has continued to help shape the dining scene with a steady stream of ex-employees going on to open their own successful restaurants including former sous chef Monica Galetti who launched Mere in Fitzrovia in 2017.
‘Training chefs and front of house is a very important part of the legacy that my father and uncle started. But also produce; inspiring and encouraging farmers and smallholders to concentrate on quality and just push that bar up of British produce. In the 60’s and 70’s it definitely wasn’t at the level it is now,’ says Roux.
A decade after Le Gavroche revolutionised fine dining in London, Peter Langan and actor Michael Caine, in partnership with Richard Shepherd (who, in 1975 while working at the Capital Hotel in Knightsbridge, became the first British chef to win a Michelin star) opened Langan’s brasserie and laid the foundations for the democratisation of restaurants that has become a major aspect of today’s scene.
‘The whole idea of Langan’s was to try and bring a café society into London and bridge the gap between formality and informality. We wanted to create an environment where the two could mix, where you could have a party at one table in black tie celebrating something next to a table dressed casually and it didn’t look stupid,’ says Shepherd whose menus included English classics such as cod and chips and bangers and mash was to prove highly influential. ‘I tried to apply the principle that there was nothing wrong with English food, only that it had been prepared badly. I tried to use a French philosophy of giving it the respect it deserved and doing it properly.’
London’s reimagining of British food by chefs in the 80’s and 90’s such as Anton Mosimann who served bread and butter pudding at The Dorchester, Gary Rhodes menus at The Greenhouse that included faggots, fish cakes and braised oxtail and Fergus Henderson’s groundbreaking ‘nose to tail’ cuisine of bone marrows and spleen helped fuel the gastropub revolution exemplified by the Anchor and Hope (see ‘The Gastropub Revolution’ below).
Where Langan’s led, others followed including Chris Corbyn and Jeremy King who launched Le Caprice in Piccadilly in 1981 and went on to reinvent The Ivy and make modern London restaurant history with The Wolseley. ‘Our working title for Le Caprice was ‘Joe Langan’s’ denoting a fusion of Joe Allen and Langan’s Brasserie,’ says King who worked at Joe Allen, the famous theatreland bistro, while Corbyn learnt his trade at Langan’s. ‘We changed the norm, offering dishes as starters or mains was unheard of and whilst we upped the service levels by numbering seats for unobtrusive service. We were operating in a very modern idiom that was bewildering for many a Brit. It is where we started our ethos of giving the opportunity to spend but not making it mandatory’.
London’s next great leap forward came in 1985 with the opening of Alastair Little’s eponymous Soho restaurant. Two years later saw the arrival of Sir Terence Conran and Simon Hopkinson’s Bibendum, Marco Pierre White and Nigel Platts Martin’s Harveys, Ruth Rogers’s and Rose Gray’s River Café and Rowley Leigh’s Kensington Place.
‘It was Alastair Little and his ilk who started reinventing British food and reclaiming it from the genuflection towards France,’ says Guy Dimond, former Food & Drink Editor of Time Out. ‘Little was the most prominent, but he was part of a movement that I coined ‘Modern European’ (the same year, the Good Food Guide called it 'Modern British’) using British seasonal produce, but informed by Italian and other approaches. It gradually became the dominant style over the next decade, adopted even by the Francophile Terence Conran in his spate of high profile restaurants’.
And it was Conran who dominated the 90’s with a string of audacious, era-defining projects beginning with his ‘Gastrodome’ in Shad Thames in 1991 that included French fine diner Le Pont de la Tour, British brasserie Butlers Wharf Chophouse, Italian Cantina del Ponte and the Blueprint Café. Conran’s wildly successful revival of fashionable 1930’s restaurant Quaglino’s in 1993 with an unprecedented-for-London 450-seat capacity was a turning point in London’s restaurant history, signalling a mass audience for quality dining for the first time.
‘It undoubtedly was a departure, and I had butterflies,’ Conran told Vanity Fair in 1997 for their famous ‘London Swings Again’ feature. ‘But the fact that we were absolutely packed from day one made me think, Wow!’ The cavernous 700-seater Mezzo in Wardour Street, headed up by a young John Torode and a second ‘Gastrodome’ at Bluebird in Chelsea confirmed Conran’s place at the head of the London restaurant table for pioneering work that has helped make London’s restaurant scene what it is today.
Opened in 1994, Oliver Peyton’s Art Deco restaurant-come nightclub the Atlantic Bar and Grill was the cooler, hipper version of Conran’s oversized vision, perhaps remembered more for its celebration of all things sybaritic than for its culinary contribution to the capital. Peyton’s greatest contribution of the 90’s (he since gone on to revolutionise public catering at National Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Imperial War Museum, the ICA and the Wallace Collection with Peyton and Byrne) has turned out to be Coast, the futuristic Mayfair restaurant where chef Stephen Terry’s brigade included a young Jason Atherton, Ben Tish and Mark Sargeant, all of whom have gone on to do great things in London and beyond.
In 1992, Hong Kong-born restaurateur Alan Yau opened Wagamama, popularizing Japanese noodles and anticipating the ramen craze of the last few years by several decades and launching a career that has seen him create such influential and internationally successful brands as Hakkasan and Yauatcha.
The 90’s also saw the role London’s great hotels in the restaurant scene begin to change. They had long been the home to some of the city’s finest chefs including Eugene Koffler and Anton Mosimann at the Dorchester, Silvano Trompetto and Anton Edleman at the Savoy, Bernard Gaume at the Carlton Tower, Peter Kromberg at the InterContinental and Michel Bourdain at The Connaught.
But Nico Ladenis opening Chez Nico at Ninety at the Grosvenor House Hotel in 1992, Marco Pierre White’s move a year later from Harveys to The Restaurant at The Hyde Park Hotel (now the Mandarin Oriental) and Pierre Koffmann relocating La Tante Claire from Royal Hospital Road to The Berkeley in 1998 paved the way for Gordon Ramsay’s reinvention of grand hotel dining in the 2000’s.
Having already won two Michelin stars at Claudio Pulze’s Aubergine in Chelsea (opened in 1993) and three stars at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, the chef routed the old hotel guard beginning with Claridges in 2001 installing Mark Sargeant as head chef, taking over The Connaught the following year with Angela Hartnett. In 2003, he appointed Marcus Wareing head chef of The Grill at The Savoy and relocated Petrus from St James’s Street to The Berkeley where he also opened The Boxtree with Stuart Gillies (who went on to become CEO of the Gordon Ramsay Group). Bravely eschewing the French classical cooking that had dominated grand hotel cooking, Ramsay’s celebrity-chef allure paved the way for Heston Blumenthal to open Dinner at the Mandarin Oriental and Simon Rogan to launch Fera at Claridges.
The most influential opening of 2009 came not from a chef but former operations director of Caprice Holdings, Russell Norman. ‘I wanted Polpo to be a casual, scruffy, inexpensive, no-reservations neighbourhood joint where you could enjoy Venetian small-plates, classic cocktails, and young Italian wines while having fun and not breaking the bank. I was fed up with stuffy restaurants where you had to book weeks in advance in order to be condescended to by the sommelier. We had no idea it would be as popular as it was, nor did we realise it would start a trend for similar outfits offering a high quality, casual experience’.
Since 2011, street food has helped shape the London dining scene, keeping it relevant and at the global forefront. Jonathan Downey has been a key player, with initiatives such as Merchant’s Yard in Haggerston with chef Ben Spalding and more recently Street Feast that has given birth to the likes of Breddos tacos that now has restaurants in Soho and Clerkenwell. Other brands to emerge from the scene include Pizza Pilgrims, Meat Liquor and Pitt Cue.
In the same year, Jason Atherton reimagined the notion of the celebrity chef when he opened Pollen Street Social and started to create The Social Company, a 17-strong international restaurant group with nine outlets in London. ‘The Social Company has made Michelin-starred dining accessible to everyone. For example, The Social Eating House offers a very informal and social setting with a vibrant Soho bar upstairs, but still serves out-standing Michelin food,’ says Atherton who says that London has been crucial to establishing an international presence. ‘London is recognised all the over the world, therefore having well-known restaurants in the capital really helps to get your foot in the door overseas’.
There is no question that, in 2017, London is a thrilling place in which to dine, but with numerous high-profile closures over the last 12 months including Dabbous, Les Deux Salon, Grain Store, L’Autre Pied, Foxlow, Dock Kitchen and Modern Pantry (Finsbury Square), the question remains, can it last?
‘I’m very concerned that London is on a precipice,’ says Shepherd. ‘There are so many factors that come into play like overheads, rents, rates, staffing levels, wages and food and drink costs. There are too many restaurants and it's becoming increasingly more difficult now to make money’.
The dreaded ‘B’ for Brexit word can’t be ignored. Atherton admits that it’s ‘definitely a concern and has stopped us progressing with a couple of new projects we had planned’. King says it can’t be ignored: ‘Myopic, jingoistic, self-damaging and plain bonkers. Is London the world food capital? I suppose so, but we still need to bolster it with a greater general understanding of food rather than pure execution capability. I worry that many will start to flounder and suffer unless we can give security and a welcome to international workers who have always underpinned the restaurant business.’
But for Michel Roux Jnr, Brexit is just one more barrier for Le Gavroche and the London restaurant scene to hurdle. ‘Gavroche has been through recession, depression, the Winter of Discontent and the three-day week when the lights were being switched off and the IRA bombing campaign and we’re still here. Sadly there will be casualties but the strong carry on and survive’.
While some commentators have rushed to write London’s restaurant scene’s epitaph, there is much room for optimism. Soho House will soon re-open Soho landmark Kettners; Robin Gill, one of London’s most exciting and innovative young restaurateurs will relaunch The Manor in Clapham as Sorella in January with a central London opening hot on its heels and the much-lauded Kitty Fishers will open sister restaurant Cora Pearl in Covent Garden next spring.
‘The next phase has started, hasn’t it?’, says Norman. ‘Look to James Ramsden (Magpie), Will Lander and Merlin Johnson (Portland), Mark Jarvis (Anglo), Elizabeth Allen (Shibui), Erchen Chang (Bao) to name just a few. I also hope we will see a lot more from those established names still doing great things just below the neophile radar; Stevie Parle, Tim Siadatan (Trullo), Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich (Honey and Co) and James Lowe (Lyles).’
With London-based brands such as Zuma, The Ivy and Hawksmoor (due to open at New York’s World Trade Centre in 2019) being exported internationally and a constant flow of top chefs from around the globe including Martha Ortiz from Mexico and Manish Mehrotra from India attracted to the city, it seems London is still calling loud and clear. Here’s to the next half century.
The Gastropub Revolution
In January 1991, London helped change the face of dining across the country when David Eyre and Mike Belben took lease of the dilapidated Eagle pub on Farringdon Road in Clerkenwell. Their simple formula of serving Mediterranean-inspired dishes freshly cooked in the tiny open kitchen behind the bar proved revolutionary, launching the gastropub movement (a term coined by critic Charles Campion in his Evening Standard review of The Eagle).
Inevitably, employees left to open their own establishments, starting with Amanda Pritchett at The Landsdowne in Primrose Hill in 1992 and Margot Henderson, who set up the French House Dining Room in Soho with husband Fergus (a precursor to his world-famous St. John restaurant in Smithfield Market) soon after. More recently, Harry Lester opened the acclaimed and influential Anchor & Hope in Waterloo, former Eagle head chef Tom Norrington-Davis moved on to Great Queen Street, and Trish Hilferty invented the foie gras toastie at the Canton Arms in Stockwell.
A Passage to India
Although London has championed cuisine from all over the globe, it has a special relationship with Indian food and has helped to elevate and develop the cuisine in a restaurant context. From as early as 1982, when Camellia Panjabi opened Bombay Brasserie, London restaurants have redefined the idea of Indian restaurants, something she continued with her sister Namita and her husband Ranjit Mathrani’s MW Eat Group that includes Veerswamy (originally opened in 1926), Chutney Mary (1989), Masala Zone restaurants (2001) and Amaya (2004). More recently, the JKS restaurant group that includes Trishna, Gymkhana and Hoppers have made regional Indian cuisine accessible to a new generation of London diners.
‘It’s easy to say that London has always lead the rise of Indian Food before India itself did for its own cuisine,’ says Atul Kochhar who holds a Michelin star at Benares in Mayfair and who, in 2001 become the first Indian chef to win a star at Tamarind along with Vineet Bhatia at Zaika in South Kensington. ‘London being a global place has helped propel not only the cuisine but also the people involved with it. London will continue to lead the way for the evolution of Indian cuisine contrary to what some of the leading Indian journalists think. London has made Indian cuisine a Gourmet Cuisine’.
Kenneth Bell at Thornberry Castle? Was around at the same time as The Hole in the Wall in Bath.