Smashed #36

The UK restaurant scene digested

The UK’s restaurant critics doing a super job, as usual.

You’ll remember in Smashed #35, all those (two) weeks ago, I was pondering who or what would replace restaurant critics when they are finally let go by cash-strapped newspapers. I said ‘Will you miss the critics when they inevitably go (it might be a while yet so don’t worry too much)’. Well, I was wrong. It’s started to happen already.

On 29 August Jimi Famurewa posted on his Instagram account ‘Last week, I was told that my column with the Evening Standard would be ending in late September.’ The future is now. The ES is stopping its daily publication and going weekly. Who cares, it’s only been in print since 1859 so we’re only talking about 165 years of history. How long the weekly edition will last no one knows and it also remains to be seen whether it will have restaurant reviews at all. In any case, I hope Jimi gets another reviewing gig. This newsletter won’t be the same without him.

In the meantime, let’s soldier on. While they are still around, the national restaurant critics form a virtual team of crack journalists; gastronomic superheroes who venture out each week and discover what’s happening in the UK dining scene. It’s not unreasonable then to expect them to be able to answer a few basic questions between them. This week I had hoped to find out the following: What are the current dining trends? What are the UK’s dining hot spots? Which cuisine is going to be the next big thing? What ingredients are in vogue? Who is going to be the next big-name chef to look out for?

Unfortunately, we’ve got a real rag bag of reviews from the last couple of weeks so we might get precisely nowhere in our search for answers. Grace Dent has gone to Folkestone to eat in a hotel dining room that’s been there since the mid-19th century, and a trendy London steak house. Charlotte Ivers has gone to a Polish place that opened in South Kensington in 1947 and a ‘celebrity’ chef’s pub up north. Giles Coren has reviewed a 20-year-old Spanish restaurant in Cardiff and a motorway service station in Cornwall, Jay Rayner has gone to a two-year-old Sichuan restaurant in Harrow and a dumpling joint in Stoke. Tom Parker Bowles has filed from his hols in Paxos and gone to a dodgy-looking Portuguese bar in Notting Hill, and Tim Hayward has gone to a place in Aldeburgh that everyone else reviewed ages ago.

In the dying Standard, David Ellis has reviewed a new restaurant, but it’s from a well-established London team with a chef that has held a Michelin star for donkey’s years and Jimi Famurewa has gone to Brockley (is that where the vegetable comes from?) for some Caribbean food. William Sitwell has been to Agora in Borough Market, somewhere that has been reviewed numerous times already including by Jimi Famurewa, and a new fine diner in the countryside.

If nothing else, it does demonstrate the diversity of the UK scene, albeit in a deeply unscientific and accidental way. Let’s see what we come up with by way of answers to those burning questions. You never know what we might glean from our brave foodie Avengers.

(NB: I haven’t reviewed every review mentioned above, just a random sample)

The reviews

Tom Parker Bowles, Mail on Sunday
Sporting Clube de Londres (4 stars)

You’ll never guess where I went. No one has ever heard of it apart from in-the-know foodies. It’s this amazing Portuguese place behind Westbourne Park tube. Well, yeah, The Infatution did review it in July 2023, but apart from that, no one knows about it. It’s a horrible dump in what is basically an industrial estate. It’s one step up from Arthur Daley’s lockup in Minder, so, yeah, it’s really cool. You can get a plate of grilled sardines for like, nothing, it's brilliant.

Yes, it is the one that Josh Barrie wrote about in April but the only people that go there are the Portuguese ex-pats that the place was opened for. I know I could afford to go to any decent Portuguese place in London and order the entire menu twice over without blinking and not invade a space aimed at a local community but that wouldn’t be hip and down with the kids would it? The food’s not that good and the service is terrible but that’s nothing compared to the experience of being somewhere literally no one has ever heard of. So yeah, cool.

Best line: ‘Dinner at Sporting Clube de Londres is not so much a meal as a Super Bock-fuelled blast; an all-singing, slow-dancing fiesta where food plays second string to the raucous pursuit of pleasure’
Worst line: ‘we sit outside, beneath the cheap white awning, desperately trying to catch the waitress’s eye. At first she seems brusque, barking out the specials with weary ennui. . . .Once the order has been scrawled, though, and the wine plonked down, her features soften, her true warmth revealed.’
Did the review make me want to book a table: I was thinking I might leave it to the locals. Seems like the right thing to do.

Giles Coren, The Times
Asador 44, Cardiff (8.33)

It’s not entirely clear why Giles Coren chose right about now to go to Cardiff to eat beef, but he did. Whatever the reason, it’s given him the opportunity to provide a handy bluffer’s guide to retired dairy cows. It’s what we’ve all been waiting for.

Coren says that beef in the UK was killed relatively young until 2013 when post-BSE cattle culling restrictions were eased. Meanwhile, in northern Spain, Rubia Gallega or Galician Blond breeds graze for 16 or 17 years before slaughter which makes them fatty and complex, a bit like your beloved correspondent. These breeds were popularised in London by Kitty Fishers and Lurra around 2013 but the supply soon dwindled as the meat takes so long to grow. Demand was instead met by ‘retired dairy cattle’ from the Basque country. Now, you can eat retired Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire dairy cows which is what drew Coren to Cardiff. Coren doesn’t say how long the meat has been on sale for, hence my confusion over what prompted the review, but he went so let’s find out what he thought of it.

Coren didn’t like his beef tartare because it wasn’t cooked. ‘You have to cook beef, and cook it properly, to caramelise the fats and bring out those sticky post-Maillard reaction flavours.’ I think it’s safe to assume that Coren knew what beef tartare was before he ordered it so the mystery is why he bothered in the first place, especially as he had some of the cooked stuff coming his way. Sadly his 1kg bone-in ribeye ‘sliced tagliata-style’ wasn’t cooked enough for him but then some ox cheek with beef rice was.

Coren wistfully waxed lyrical about Welsh-born, London-based chef Tomos Parry’s way with a retired dairy cow. It sounds like he should have just gone to Parry’s restaurant Mountain where he could have got some 8-year-old Friesian cooked to his liking, except he went in August last year, although the only dairy cow he ate was cured and not cooked. Coren does indeed move in mysterious ways.

Best line: ‘In America, beef has always been reared fast, on grain and antibiotics, to be killed as young as possible with a soft, buttery flesh as close to the condition of chocolate mousse as can be achieved, to cater both for the American diner’s more childish palate and his ineptitude with cutlery.’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I had retired dairy cow at Kitty Fisher’s and Mountain. It didn’t rock my world.

Grace Dent, The Guardian
Ibai, London

Old Spanish meat is the ingredient du jour. Grace Dent has gone to a new Basque-style steak house where the aforementioned Galician Blond is the speciality at a very special £115 per kay gee. And what did she think of it? Well, apart from listing the menu descriptions, she doesn’t say. Guardian expenses wouldn’t cover it? Maybe. The critics’ end is nigh remember.

She did have the beef tartar starter which she says was ‘uniquely, well, bright red, made vivid by espelette pepper’. And that’s all she said, so maybe she didn’t actually order it but just saw it. She doesn’t say a great deal at all about the food. Octopus comes as a ‘rich, smoky spin on marmitako, a Basque tuna stew, mated with pipérade’ and is ‘a dark red pot of tentacles, alliums and yielding sweet peppers in a sauce that’s made to be scooped up with baguette’. A dish titled ‘Tender sweetcorn with black truffle’ is ‘a buttery, truffley Galician chowder that will live long in the memory’ and a gateau Basque is ‘slightly wobbly’. Compelling stuff.

Another ingredient I keep seeing everywhere is carabineros (red prawns) which were much in evidence at Oma (and being vigorously upsold by the front of house staff) and here are served in a “croque Ibai” sandwich ‘with boudin noir’ and ‘melted tomme de brebis cheese’. What’s it like? Well, it’s ‘not for the meek’. So now you know.

Best line: ‘It’s sort-of industrial, sort-of fancy pirate ship and definitely striking, a mood helped very much by the fact that our Spanish server had a resplendent Salvador Dalí moustache and took our orders in the manner of Terry Gilliam in Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition.’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: Ibai has had several rave reviews. I have decided to steer clear of raved-about London restaurants for the foreseeable future as I’m beginning to think our critics are suffering from a recurrent collective delusion about some of them.

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