Smashed #39: Fine dining matters

The UKs restaurant scene digested

The Reviews

Tim Hayward, The Financial Times
Can I fall back in love with fine dining: Le Grand Véfour, Paris
Kadeau, Copenhagen
The Ritz, London
After a month of fine dining, what have I learnt?  

The sleepless nights began in late September, right around the time I read ‘Can I fall back in love with fine dining?’ by Tim Hayward in the FT. Deep into the night, I wrestled to understand what Hayward had written, to make sense of it all. Things only got worse as each of the four-part weekly series was published. Then, in one humbling moment, suddenly everything became clear to me. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back to the start of all the trouble.

It seemed simple enough. Hayward had become disenchanted with fine dining but was prompted to revisit his feelings due to what he saw as a resurgence in the sector. In what sounded like a proposal for a podcast/radio documentary series, he wanted to ‘try to rediscover why I might ever have cared about it. And maybe learn to love it again.’ So he booked into a bistro in Paris.

Le Grand Véfour in Paris used to be a fine-dining restaurant, but in 2021, chef Guy Martin announced that, post-COVID, he’d be taking a more relaxed approach. The restaurant lost its two remaining Michelin stars (the third went back in 2008) and has now been delisted by the guide. But that’s OK because for Hayward it’s a ‘synecdoche for all the fawning servers, main-course-on-a-trolley and set-fire-to-your-dessert signifiers of the traditional dining room’. The prices on the menu alone should have been enough of a clue that Le Grand Véfour is no longer fine dining; a main course of stewed pork loin with spices, sweet potatoes purée with orange zest and fresh spinach for €36 doesn’t exactly scream haute cuisine. By comparison, the nine-course tasting menu at the city’s newest three-Michelin star restaurant Le Gabriel costs €398 (you can read Andy Hayler’s review of the place here).

Hayler rather liked it, but then he is probably numbered among what Hayward calls ‘a hermetic “special interest group” . . . . who concentrate on and celebrate fine dining’ made up of ‘unpaid enthusiasts online or anonymous restaurant inspectors.’ They are, says Hayward, ‘very different from the audiences to which national critics need to address themselves.’ Of all the national newspapers, I would imagine the FT would have the sort of readership that would frequent a fine dining spot on occasion and might even be interested in a straight review rather than the self-confessed ‘public therapy’ Hayward has indulged in.

After dismissing Le Grand Véfour (‘it’s very hard to imagine how this original, historical model of Fine Dining has any relevance to anyone any more’) Hayward headed to Copenhagen and Kadeau. Opened in 2011, it holds two Michelin stars and has never been listed in the World’s 50 Best list (it currently ranks 54). Again, the restaurant doesn’t seem the most obvious choice for a series about reconnecting with fine dining. Why not seek out the best of the new crop such as Jordnaer which recently won its third star?

With its use of Japanese, Spanish, and Italian ingredients (as well as from closer to home) it seems to have shrugged off the strictures of Nordic Cuisine first introduced by Rene Redzepi at Noma where everything served had to be sourced from within the Nordic region and represents a more modern take on Nordic fine dining. Kadeau, which admittedly does sound wonderful, adheres to the Nordic Cuisine ethos and therefore seems atavistic in its approach.

Of course, I’m nitpicking. I’m guessing Jordnaer was much trickier to book than Kadeau, although YouTubers S3 recently managed to get a table (see video linked above). But in the review, Hayward says Kadeau ‘doesn’t “feel” like fine dining, by any of the old standards . . . but it’s only available to a self-selecting set and conforms to a code that increasingly only they can experience and understand. I love it because, uniquely in my experience, it expresses the peak of cooking and the essence of hospitality.’ So when is fine dining not fine dining? When it’s fourteen courses of foraged ingredients that comprise ‘completely unique celebrations of ingredients I had never encountered, in combinations I could never have imagined’ served by ‘floor staff, individually assigned to tables’ and costs £500 a head. Sounds like fine dining to me.

But no. In his summing up feature, ‘After a month of fine dining, what have I learnt’, Hayward states that, ‘For the promise of fine dining to be met, the food ought to be faultless, but not necessarily exciting. Not innovative. Not even emotionally charged. But the “pattern” of fine dining must be recognisable, expensive, complicated and difficult to replicate. . . .When I visited Kadeau in Copenhagen a few weeks back, arguably now one of the finest restaurants on the planet, the term “fine dining” didn’t appear anywhere on its communication. I am glad.’ So, because Kadeau doesn’t proclaim itself to be fine dining, it isn’t. At least in Hayward’s eyes.

Are you following all this? I am glad.

Hayward’s final fine dining meal, for now at least, was at The Ritz. You probably haven’t heard of it, unless you read David Ellis’s recent review, or Giles Coren’s recent review or Tom Parker-Bowles's recent review or any one of nearly 50 reviews (no, I’m not kidding) on Andy Hayler’s website. FT readers don’t necessarily read the Standard or The Times or the Mail on Sunday or Andy Hayler’s website so a review of The Ritz might come as something of a novelty. The Ritz is both a startlingly obvious choice and a surprising one, given that it’s anomalous in the UK. Nowhere else to my knowledge comes close to attempting what The Ritz delivers in terms of tableside service, opulent surroundings and updated versions of French haute cuisine classics. Fine dining in the UK is pretty much anything but what you’d find at The Ritz. Hayward loved it because everyone loves it (I went, paid my own money and loved it too) but the meal seemed to confuse matters for him. ‘I’m having increasing difficulty isolating what Fine Dining actually is.’ Me too buddy, me too.

Having tarted around some of the most exclusive gaffs in Europe, what did our intrepid upwardly mobile stomach make of it all? Not much it seems. Hayward came away with more questions than when he started. So he decided to gather other opinions on the subject. The King’s son-in-law Tom Parker-Bowles isn’t posh enough for fine dining we are led to believe. Alain Ducasse made him feel ‘so depressed. So insecure. So apologetic’. There was, Hayward says ‘a strong class element to his discomfort’. I grew up in a council house in Portsmouth. I’ve met Alain Ducasse and he was utterly charming and sweet. I dined at this three-star restaurant at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris and was treated like royalty even though I’m not related to the King (as far as I know).

Jay Rayner also believes fine dining is a ‘class thing’ and for some reason drags the late great Sir Terence Conran into his argument. Something about fine dining being all about the bells and whistles and not the food and Conran being about the interior design and not the food. There may be something in that but Conran was very rarely about fine dining (The Orrery being an exception) so I’m at a loss to understand Rayner’s point. It doesn’t seem pertinent because Hayward says that for critics ‘the food is the point of the thing’ which is so far from the truth it’s laughable.

The point of the thing for critics is the story, the trend, the latest opening, the scene, the ‘vibe’ (for want of a much better word). For critics, food is rarely top of the list of their priorities. Otherwise, they’d review more fine-dining restaurants wouldn’t they,? And we know they don’t because Hayward told us so in the first part of his series.
He claims that, ‘A few years ago, most of us flounced out of an entire class of restaurants. One after the other, we wrote a piece in which we gave up on “fine dining”’. He doesn’t quote from any of the pieces or say who wrote them or exactly when. I must have missed them when they were published as I don’t recall reading any of them.

But anyway, it doesn’t matter because Hayward says, ‘if you read the critics, you’ll know we still review fine dining restaurants, though we seem to avoid using the term’. So the critics don’t review fine dining restaurants but they do review fine dining restaurants? I’ve just checked back, and in nearly a year of reviewing the reviews, just 15 of the critic’s columns have been about fine dining restaurants, and most of those were The Ritz. So they don’t review fine dining restaurants, or at least, not that often.

But what the critic do or don’t do is irrelevant because Hayward can no longer think of fine dining ‘as a meaningful category’. Why? Because in his experience and opinion, half of the restaurants that he says tout themselves as fine dining don’t actually live up to that billing. So, some fine dining restaurants are good and some are not so good. You could apply that finding to every type of restaurant in the country. Does that mean we should no longer think of bistros as a meaningful category, Thai restaurants, small plates restaurants, French restaurants are no longer meaningful categories?

Hayward sums up his podcast/TV series/Radio series that never was by saying that ‘Critics have to either hate Fine Dining or ignore it when it’s promised. It’s the only choice we have.’ That sent me back to read the series all over again so that I could try and understand what those sentences could possibly mean. I came up with nothing. I asked my much smarter wife to read ‘After a month of fine dining, what have I learnt?’ (asking her to read the entire series would have been a step too far). Her conclusion was withering. ‘You’ve spent more time trying to figure out what he meant than he spent writing it’.

At this point, you may be wondering why my wife doesn’t write this newsletter. She’s got a proper job that pays actual money and also, she also isn’t dumb enough to waste her time pondering the finer points of fine dining. Although her comment did make me feel a right Charlie for expending quite so much time and effort trying to decode Hayward, it did put an end to all those wee small hours awakenings. It also set me on the path to clarifying my own feelings about fine dining. That and watching a re-run of season 17 of Top Chef (if you’ve never seen it, it’s a sort of superior version of Masterchef: The Professionals but with masses of product placement. I’m obsessed with it).

For the finale, the chefs travelled to Italy, visiting Lucca and Parma. I’ve previously been inclined to dismiss Italian particularness about food as deriving from either snobbism or provincial insularity. I’m sure that’s the case at times, but watching the show reminded me that the country’s profound food culture has little to do with foodie-ism or connoisseurship, it’s part of the fabric of Italian life. Everyone knows and cares about food. That wasn’t the case in the 1970’s Britain, at least in my experience, growing up in a working-class household. I won’t bore you with the details (and my memories of family meal times vary substantially from my older sister’s) but my diet was more corned beef and Branston pickle sandwiches and Vesta Curries than truffles, Parma ham and Parmesan.

My understanding of food and appreciation for it only really started when I discovered the world of restaurants. Until I ate at La Tante Claire, The Restaurant Marco Pierre White, Chez Nico at Ninety, Bibendum, Aubergine and many others, I had no food culture to speak of. Fine dining filled that vacuum. As Dinkies (Dual Income No Kids) me and my wife had some spare cash for eating out, but during those formative experiences we were always the youngest, poorest most badly dressed people in the room by some stretch. But we were never made to feel unwelcome (well, maybe a few side glances from some of the waiters at Chez Nico); quite the reverse. The restaurants were the opposite of exclusive. If you knew about them, you could book them and they would happily take your money.

Hayward is correct when he says not every fine-dining restaurant hits the mark, but recent meals at Interlude in Sussex, Dilsk and Furna in Brighton, Adam’s and Wilderness in Birmingham and Restaurant Gordon Ramsay and Claude Bosi at Bibendum in London convinced me that I still love fine dining and that it will remain an important part of my acquired food culture. It’s the only choice I have.

The following is a piece of autofiction about my relationship with food and restaurants. The Soundcloud link is to a piece of music, based on ‘I Wake Up In The City’ by The Fall, arranged, played and recorded by me.

Escape Velocity

‘And what would sir like in his sandwich?’ 

A village tearoom, sometime in the early 70’s. I am six or seven. I know nothing, but I feel gravity’s pull. I don’t know how much my parents earn. I don’t know how much sandwiches cost. I don’t even know if it matters how much my parents earn or how much a sandwich costs. All I do know is that I am hungry.      

‘Chicken please’. 

‘Oh, very posh,’ replies the waiter. Looks are being exchanged around the table, between my mother and father and my older sister and brother. I don’t know what they mean, but from the way the waiter is smiling at me I think I’ve done a good thing. 

‘Do you want salt and pepper on it?’ asks the waiter.

‘Yes please’. I think that’s the right thing to say. 

The sandwich, made with sliced white bread, is very good. I wish we had chicken more often at home. My brother stares at me as I eat. Days pass, then years. One by one, my family leaves the table. I grow older. I’m sitting opposite a beautiful woman, my wife. The tearoom is now a bistro just around the corner from our flat. It’s our favourite. The waiter apologises that the t-bone steak is not as big as usual and so the chef has reduced the bill. The t-bone steak is bigger than my head; it’s the best I’ve ever eaten, the best I ever will. I look through the restaurant’s window and the street outside dissolves. The moment lasts for eternity. 

Night turns into day; lunchtime. To eat, there is risotto nero stained black with squid ink, followed by brill with mustard sauce and then a prune and Armagnac souffle. The chef is world famous. The waiter recognises my wife from another time. ‘But you were different then,’ he says, arching his hand down his belly to suggest pregnancy.  We all smile. I’m shocked he remembers us amongst the thousands of customers he’s served. He doesn’t mention the chicken sandwich, and neither do I. As the restaurant empties out, we linger over our drinks. The kitchen staff appear, dressed in whites and carrying plates of food. They sit down at the surrounding tables and talk loudly between hastily taken mouthfuls. It won’t be long before dinner. 

Everything fades and I feel like I’m floating up towards a gilded, vaulted ceiling supported on dozens of marble columns. I try to focus on the faces at the table. I’m surrounded by strangers who all seem to know each other. A handsome grey-haired man to my left glares at the young Korean man sitting opposite him and I wonder what’s behind that look of barely disguised contempt. The waiter serves me red shrimp with caviar and seafood gelée, then shaves white truffle over an artichoke. I drink rare vintage champagne and hope he won’t bring up the subject of chicken sandwiches in village tearooms. It’s getting late and I feel drunk, but I know this meal will never end. 

The sun comes up, I take a deep breath. The air feels thin and refuses to fill my lungs. I am leaving Earth’s atmosphere, but there is time for one last meal. The waiter unfolds the menu and passes it to me with a wink. He fills my water glass and retrieves the bottle of Burgundy from the ice bucket next to the table and presents it to me like a proud father. I put on my glasses and check the year printed on the label. I smile and nod approvingly. He pours a few drops. With the assurance that comes from years of practice, I place my hand on the foot of the glass, fore and middle fingers on either side of the stem and move the glass in tight, almost imperceptible circles so that the wine swirls around the bowl. I take a sniff but do not drink. I look at the waiter. ‘That’s perfect’, I say, and it’s his turn to smile and nod. He pours an inch of wine into my glass then returns the bottle to the bucket, carefully placing a clean white napkin over the neck of the bottle as though tucking it in for the night. He leaves me to sip my wine and read the menu, then returns after a few minutes. 

‘And what would sir like in his sandwich?’ 

My mother, father and older brother and sister are exchanging looks. Gravity can’t touch me now. I know everything I will ever know. 

‘Chicken please, with salt and pepper of course’.  I am moving through time and space, I don’t hear the waiter’s reply. Escape velocity achieved.