When I saw the news about the passing of Russell Norman last week, I was so shocked that I let out an involuntary yelp . I didn’t know Russell well but we had met a couple of times. He was one of those rare individuals that you meet once and the forever think fondly of them. He had great charm and movie-star levels of charisma. In 2021, I interviewed him about his involvement in the relaunch of Joe Allen, overseeing the drinks programme while simultaneously getting Brutto open. He didn’t seem phased by the two projects colliding, due to some delays with the Brutto site if I recall correctly, and was relaxed, happy to chat and tell some theatreland-related anecdotes. It as a slightly unusual interview as I had to speak to the owners and chef at the same time so I felt a bit like Graham Norton hosting a chat show. Russell was of course the star guest.
A few years earlier he’d been kind enough to present an award at the restaurant awards I help organise in Brighton which coincided with the opening of a branch of Polpo in the city. It was a very informal affair in a bar and he was sitting close to the stage. Our MC, Euan, was giving him the big build up and showed some photos of Russell from a James Bond-themed shoot he’d done for an Observer feature. Russell leapt off his seat and tried to shut Euan’s laptop off, I suppose out of modesty. It was a memorable moment in what was a fairy chaotic night all round.
The level of affection for Russell in the industry was evident in the flood of photos and tributes on social media. There have been numerous press articles, the best of which include David Ellis’s tribute in the Evening Standard and this from his friend and former restaurant critic Richard Vines in City A.M. Although he leaves behind a tangible legacy with Brutto and his cookbooks, his intangible legacy in the form of his influence on his fellow restaurateurs and the memory of the exceptional hospitality he extended to his guests will endure just as long.
The Reviews
William Sitwell, The Telegraph
Straker’s, London (5 stars)
Like Brando in the 70s, chef Thomas Straker is set to become synonymous with butter. His forthcoming ‘All Things Butter’ range, which excitingly includes ‘salted’ and ‘unsalted’ flavours, is organic and twice churned. It’s also twice the price of the bog standard stuff, so you probably won’t want to be as extravagant with it as Brando was, although you might feel a bit like Maria Schneider if you actually pay that much for it (is anyone following this analogy? It’s a bit of a stretch isn’t it?). Once the cartoon-packaged premium diary product is on the shelves, it might help people forget the other thing Thomas Straker is synonymous with, which is being white. It’s political correctness gone mad I tell you. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you’ll find this article helpful.
Straker is TikTok famous with 4.2million followers on the platform and 5.7million views for his video about fish and chips alone. The 55 second clip features a hoody-wearing Straker, who looks like he’s about to erect some scaffolding outside a mock Tudor semi in Basildon, triple cooking potatoes in his garden while Sympathy For The Devil plays in the background. People will watch any old shit these days won’t they? To be fair, the finished dish looks pretty tasty, although Straker doesn’t supply a recipe or give detailed enough instructions for anyone to be able to replicate it at home, so what’s the point? Of anything?
As well as butter and cos-playing casual labourers on social media for the entertainment of millions, Straker is also famous for his restaurant which, imaginatively enough, is called Straker’s. Salted butter. Unsalted butter. A restaurant named after himself. Where does he get his crazy ideas from?
As you’ll have guessed from the five star rating, Sitwell loves the place, even though he was gagging to hate it because Straker has the audacity to be a ‘YouTuber, for God’s sake’. Straker is on YouTube but only has a relatively piddling 287k followers, so I can only assume Sitwell has focused on that particular platform rather than TikTok so he can quip that YouTuber ‘sounds like a malevolent growth or a strange potato’ which is certainly joke-adjacent. Or he may never have even heard of TikTok, he is member of the nobility after all.
Hilariously, because Sitwell was unable to get a table for two at a time that suited him, he just went ahead and booked a table for three and then turned up as a party of two on the day. This is called a ‘short show’ and restaurants think it’s both top bantz and a jolly wheeze as you’ll see from this article by Stosie Madie of The Parkers Arms. Great example setting there Mr Sitwell, good job all round.
Yet another thing Straker is famous for is his flatbread. No, really. They’ve probably got their own TikTok account by now. They do have their own restaurant in Battersea; see if you can guess what it’s called. Flat Bread by Thomas Straker. Genius! Why flatbread is ‘flat bread’, I couldn’t say, as flatbread is ‘flatbread’ at Straker’s. Very confusing. Anyway, it’s ‘bulging and lightly charred, a vessel for mussels sitting in a little butter with a bite of chilli; a gorgeous, warming, wholesome dish’ according to Sitwell, who then makes short shrift of the rest of his meal by saying, ‘this sort of generous, rustic confidence, with faultless cooking, continues with a rich girolles tagliolini, dreamy slices of pork chop subtly sweetened with burnt peach, a green leaf salad, crunchy, crisp, heavenly potato galettes and a dark chocolate mousse.’
Poor old chocolate mousse. Sitwell throws extravagant adjectives at everything and anything that’s come near his mouth at Straker’s and the only thing he’s got to say about the mousse is that it’s ‘dark’. I mean, come on Sitwell, play the white man can’t you? On second thoughts, best not. Look at the trouble it got Thomas Straker into.
Best line: N/A
Worst line: ‘I study this place of light textures and wooden tables, comfy green-backed chairs, long banquettes, pale walls and clean modern art.’ I study this sentence and think…well, probably best not to say, eh?
Did the review make me want to book a table: No
Charlotte Ivers, Sunday Times
Oak, Bath (2 stars)
In her damning review of this vegetarian small plates restaurant, Charlotte Ivers argues that its award of a Michelin Green Star is ‘a little like winning the Booker prize for the best cover: good for you, but it’s not actually what we are here for, is it?’. That would be a zinger, except there isn’t a Booker prize for best cover (he mansplained). There is the Academy of British Cover Design Best Book Designs of the Year Awards, and the Page Turner Awards for Best Book Cover among others, but they specifically recognise the work of designers rather than authors so it’s two entirely separate things.
Michelin Green Stars on the other hand are awarded to restaurants that ‘offer dining experiences that combine culinary excellence with outstanding eco-friendly commitments’ so it’s not completely different from a vanilla Michelin star and is actually kind of exactly what someone might be at a vegetarian restaurant for.
But according to Ivers, Oak offered nothing like culinary excellence, and was in fact so bad that she punched a polar bear on her way home. That either means she has a house in the artic or possibly lives close to the Yorkshire Wildlife park where they have eight of the white furry killers. Before her wildlife bashing detour, Ivers consumed a lot of white food including cannellini beans, celeriac, leeks, apples, ricotta and lots of white-ish pine nuts and cream (why is everything white this week?). Her verdict is that it all tastes the same and singled out undercooked leeks for particular disapproval.
She also singled out ‘that bastard Coren from the daily rag’ for having the audacity to have already reviewed the Beckford Canteen which had been recommended to her by a friend. Shame that friend hadn’t also recommended Upstairs at Landrace which so far has only been reviewed by Tim Hayward and Tom Parker Bowles and is, in my experience, the best restaurant in the city. I should know, I’ve been a regular visitor for more than 30 years, despite it’s generally mediocre food scene. It’s what I like to call ‘my beloved Bath’.
Coren referred to Ivers as ‘a filly of enormous promise’ in last week’s Grand national themed The Devonshire review, so are we witnessing some form of inter-columnual flirtation? What’s next, a joint review? Divorce? Stay tuned.
Best line: ‘Nose to tail, zero waste, we’re turning the potato peelings into suzette.’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I’m too busy whipping up a batch of bechamel, blancmange and rice pudding to leave the house.
Tom Parker Bowles, The Sunday Mail
Kolae, London
At last, some welcome diversity among all this whiteness in the form of a Thai restaurant. Sounds like doozy too, serving a specific regional cuisine. TPB tells us that the restaurant is named after ‘a southern cooking style involving marinating meat, fish or vegetables in a curry-like coconut paste and cooking over coals.’ Sounds brilliant, dead authentic. Let’s see who runs it. Mark Dobbie and Andy Oliver. Oh. Well, at least one of them has lived and worked in Thailand and, as TPB points out, ‘Dobbie and Oliver (like David Thompson or Luke Farrell) are not Thai. Yet they have an inherent respect for this great cuisine, a deep, enduring love that can be tasted in every dish.’
And just what is ‘deep enduring love’ like? It’s ‘hot, fishy and stained yellow with turmeric’ apparently. Keep that in mind for when Valentine’s Day rolls around next year. Careful though, or all those ‘whole tiny bird’s eye chillies, bright as traffic lights and horribly addictive’ might send you into a ‘sweaty capsaicin trance’, the worst of all the trances. Luckily, here comes some ‘mellow, creamy and elegant minced prawn curry that soothes and cossets’. Kolae sounds like a proper rollercoaster ride doesn’t it? I’ll be finding out for myself before the end of the year when I too hope to ingest something hot, fishy and stained yellow with turmeric.
Best line: N/A
Worst line: ‘And so Kolae joins Plaza Khao Gaeng (as well as parts of Thai 101 and Singburi) as a southern Thai restaurant to make the tastebuds tumescent and the gut giddy with sun-drenched joy.’
Did the review make me want to book a table: If I hadn’t done so already, I would have been straight on the booking widget.
Giles Coren, The Times
Acme Fire Cult, and Dim Sum Terrace, both in London (Cooking 7/10 for both)
This is a slightly strange one. Rayner reviewed Acme Fire Cult back in May 2022 when, what Coren calls ‘post-hipster, fermenting, pickling, burning and natural wine joints in Dalston’ were more of a thing. However, Coren says he ate very well there and ‘thought it better to sound the Times klaxon late than never.’ Fair do’s.
Coren says he wrote these reviews while on a train to Darlington and, to be brutally honest, it reads like it. There’s some funny stuff about AFC being like a garden centre, ‘indoor-outdoor with concrete floors and ad hoc, lean-to spaces’ where you expect to see ‘middle-aged ladies with trolleyfuls of begonias to come wheeling through ahead of brown-trousered husbands buckling under 100 litres of John Innes No. 3’, but it’s mostly a pretty detailed recitation of the meal. I know, that’s what restaurant reviews are supposed to be; just not ones written by Giles Coren.
So there’s ‘leek kimchee of magnificent depth and complexity’, ‘quarters of beet roasted direct on the coals…which come away with amazing gradations of colour in the flesh: purple/pink strata like a red rainbow’ and pork that is ‘smooth and dense, lifted with spice and sour and studded with chopped onion and chive, then smoothed out with the warm bean puree underneath. Historic’. It’s like he’s turned into a bloody food writer or something.
More fun is an anecdote about Coren working as an elf in Santa’s grotto in Harrods which introduces a brief review of the department store’s Dim Sum Terrace that’s located in a ‘crazy balcony…that runs round the outer wall of the building…where you can eat really top-notch dim sum, kind of perched under the eaves like a pigeon, looking out over Knightsbridge (though sadly not shitting on it)’. That’s more like it.
All you really need to know is that ‘it’s a great menu and the food came in good time’ and that it’s ‘a notch up from Royal China, but down from Royal China Club. Only the prices stuck in the craw, with everything perhaps 20 per cent above current West End standard pricing, and 30 per cent above good suburban alternatives.’
Let’s hope for more fireworks next week.
Best line: ‘I believe it is not actually Marmite, but some other yeast extract — probably a by-product of brewing or baking or just an infection of some sort’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I think I may be over fermentation and flames, and I’ve never been a fan of overpriced dim sum.
Jimi Famurewa, Evening Standard
Saltine, London (4 stars)
Do you like beguiling thrums? Or wonderfully-composed sneak-attack neighbourhood hits? Do you like transfigured shells of old chicken shops and crackers that appear routinely? Are occasional abbreviating yelps and surplus chipboard turned into sculptural aesthetic features your thing? Then you’ll love Saltine, the Highbury restaurant from Mat Appleton and Jess Blackstone of north London coffee shop mini-empire, Fink’s fame (no, me neither).
Prepare for ‘a piercing tangle of pickled fennel and a fatty fish mayo’ to ‘shudder through the body’ while ‘a targeted dart of umami’ remixes ‘the experience of eating a croquette’. That’s mackerel toasts and breaded mozzarella respectively in case you were wondering.
Brace yourself for ‘an invigorating, open-palmed slap to the face’ from some salsa verde and (*sound of screeching breaks*) ‘slightly dried-out pork loin and chips with a weedy “gravy”’. I think I’ve got whiplash from that sudden handbrake turn of critical opinion. Is the thrum now less beguiling, the sneak attack less wonderfully composed? And exactly what is that shuddering through my body?
But never fear, because here comes the ‘deep, soul-cuddling joy’ of ‘an impossibly squidgy, rich and molasses-dark slice of the best sticky toffee pudding currently available in the city…with the leavening sharpness of a parapet of caramelised, only faintly sweet apples’. If you are anything like Famurewa, you will ‘set your spoon down, look up towards the heavens, and realise, with a smile, that you’re going to have to come back to experience it all over again.’
If I ever set my spoon down in a restaurant, looked up towards the heavens and started smiling, my wife would probably think I was suffering a mild stroke and never let me near a bowl of sticky toffee pudding again. But they do things differently in Highbury don’t they?
Best line: ‘Sticky toffee apple cake sounds like the kind of thing to make a blood glucose monitor instantly combust on your arm.’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I don’t think I could manage all that slapping and shuddering and darting at my age.
Jay Rayner, The Observer
Domo, Sheffield
Next week’s Kitchen Cabinet, hosted by Jay Rayner is from Sheffield, hence this week’s review is in the city. Better the Observer pays Rayner’s expenses than the licence-fee payer I guess. Domo is ‘a very jolly Sardinian restaurant’ which opened about four years ago and seems to have been generally well reviewed (rated ‘Good’ by the Good Food Guide for example) although Rayner appears to be the first national critic to stress-test their chairs.
I’m not convinced that a pizza topped with hotdogs and chips can possibly be ‘very good’ despite a ‘rugged crust’ that is ‘bubbled and blistered and chewy in all the right ways’. I’m no pizza snob by the way; every year a make one topped with Christmas dinner leftovers (it’s technically a pizza bianco because I use bread sauce in place of tomato) which goes down a storm in our house, but even I would stop short at shoving oven chips and tinned hotdogs on my lovingly made dough. It is apparently a thing in Naples, so that’s alright then, just as long as its authentically awful, which is more than you can say for a carbonara made with tuna, swordfish and a dollop of caviar. It’s enough to trigger as second Roman invasion.
Rayner (and I assume his pals from the radio show) eat various other bits of this and that which all sound fine and then it’s job done and the caravan rolls onto the next town. Ho hum.
Best lines: ‘The fattest of prawns, with pieces of squid, swordfish and tuna, have all been treated with due care and respect. They bob in a sauce of Booker prize-winning depth and profundity.’ (Second outing for the Booker prize. By coincidence, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch won it just last week).
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I’ve got oven chips and tinned hotdogs at home thanks.
Tim Hayward, Financial Times
Baudry Greene, London
Quite some time ago now, I had the idea of writing restaurant reviews as pastiches of my favourite writers. I reviewed The Harwood Arms in the style of David Simon, and St Alban, Corbyn and King’s late and not so lamented restaurant in Lower Regent Street in the style of Pinter, using his play Celebration as a basis. Jeremy King emailed me to say how much he’d enjoyed the review, particularly because the character of Richard in the play was based on him. I had no idea.
I only mention this because there appears to be an element of pastiche in Tim Hayward’s review this week, although I’m not entirely sure of what. This is entirely my fault. The reason I only wrote two pastiche reviews is that, apart from being a lot of work for something hardly anyone read, I quickly realised that I wasn’t quite as literate as I thought I was and there was a huge stack of books in my future if I wanted to continue the series.
It’s really only Hayward’s closing line, which reads, ‘I went out the front door. I pulled up the collar of my coat against the cold, lit a cigarette which briefly illuminated by enigmatic smile and disappeared into the sewer network as if I’d never existed’ that has the air of pastiche about it. It sounds quite Chandleresque, and I know Hayward is a fellow fan. However, earlier in the review he likened Baudry Greene’s ‘square room, on a corner, so glazed on two sides’ to an Edward Hopper painting, which locates us in New York. Chandler wrote about Los Angeles, so maybe that’s not it. At any rate, it’s a bravura ending for a restaurant review. ( Subsequent to writing this post, Andrew Stevenson on Threads pointed out that it is almost certainly a reference to The Third Man. This makes sense, as, in the review, Hayward also likens the restaurant to a ‘mittel-European cafe’ which would line up with the film’s Vienna setting and of course the extremely famous sewer chase scene. I am an idiot.)
The rest is a wordy rappinghood of a write up, set in a ‘darkling evening’ where the bar is ‘promiscuously laden with tinctures’, and ‘looks like it was trucked over from a bankrupt brothel in Trieste’ (let’s not ponder how Hayward knows what a bar in a Trieste brothel looks like). A warm pretzel with taramasalata is an example of ‘endearingly insouciant multiculturalism’ and ‘weird miscegenation’.
Hayward’s meal, which seemed to mostly consist of baked items and various meats, made him think ‘this is how I want to eat now’ which puts him in good company with the millions that love a Gregg’s sausage roll.
Best line: ‘I suppose gougères are always intended as a gateway drug’
Worst line: ‘The martini was spectacularly on target. Pre-mixed and held in the freezer as they damn well should be’. I’m just a little confused by this; is it ever a good thing for cocktails to be pre-mixed?
Did the review make me want to book a table: It made me want a Gregg’s sausage roll.
Grace Dent, The Guardian
Claridge’s, London
I have no excuse, but I am a dedicated viewer of I’m A Celebrity and have wasted many hours over the last 20 years watching the stupid thing. I therefore saw Grace Dent’s face shortly before she left the show due to medical reasons and she looked so low that I really have no appetite at all right now to kick her when she’s down by parsing her latest review for cheap laughs. Not that she’ll see this of course. I hope she feels better soon.
But for the sake of completeness, and to take advantage of the fact that we actually have a full house of reviews this week, here’s a swift precis of what she had to say about the latest in what feels like a long line of incumbents at august London hotel Claridges.
As Dent points out, it was previously Daniel Humm’s Davis and Brook. I ate the best duck dish of my entire life there and I took it as a personal affront when Humm decided to go entirely plant-based. My reaction on hearing the news was similar to Charles Heston’s at the end of Plant of The Apes, which alarmed a number of passers by on Brighton Beach that day and frightened the horse too. Although it might just have been the loincloth; not the wisest of sartorial choices, as the nice policeman pointed out later on at the station.
The restaurant now is ‘straightforward…with a low-key chef and serves breakfast, lunch and dinner’ with a menu ‘full of unchallenging yet pleasing terms such as steak au poivre, baked Alaska, chocolate souffle tart and roasted Norfolk chicken.’ Although that might sound underwhelming, Dent says that in fact it’s ‘jocund, elegant time’ and an antidote to the ‘groundbreaking, puzzling, horizon-expanding dining experiences’ in London that ‘keep you there for so long, while forcing you to eat 16 courses, that you feel imprisoned’. Sounds like just the place to recover from an Ant and Dec related trauma.
Best lines: ‘here you’re whisked back in time and across the mosaic floor while savouring art deco flourishes and fabulous pendant lamps. Coo at the Calacatta violet marble and the antique brass, perch your bottom on a leather banquette, then order a leek and watercress velouté with a mini parker house loaf that comes with a small pat of Claridge’s embossed butter, because of course it does – it’s Claridge’s.
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: Good God, yes.
What did we learn this week
With seven out of the nine restaurants reviewed this week all located in London, there wasn’t a great deal to learn about the UK-wide scene, other than be careful where you book if you are going to venture outside the capital. If you want a good write up from a critic theses days, it seems as though you need to give them something fairly basic and recognisable - bread, grilled meat, something on toast maybe. I’ll be interested to see how the next tasting menu restaurant to open goes down with them, if they bother to review it at all.
For old dine’s sake
1 year ago Jay Rayner reviewed The Black Bull in at Sedbergh which is still open.
‘The Black Bull might come across as a rather fancy pub. Certainly it has a very good chef in the kitchen. But what’s important is that it knows how to please not just one crowd, but a number of them. It has properly fed and watered all of us today.’
5 years ago Jimi Fumarewa reviewed Gridiron, London which is now closed
‘In many ways, the financial velvet rope here may be the one continued link to the Met Bar. Only, rather than access to a gilded hotel bar and a chance to possibly stand near one of the Appleton sisters, nowadays £200 gets you buttery cuts of griddled meat and cleverly rehabilitated 1970s canapés and — oh, God — that delectable, dunk-me-in-a-pool-of-it chicken butter sauce.’
10 years ago Giles Coren reviewed The Star In The City, York which is still open.
‘At night, it's like the approach to a fairy castle, the city's beauty creating the kind of ambience designers can only dream of. Justin chases us out the door when we leave: "Well," he barks, "did you like it?" It's fabulous, I gush. And I mean it, Justin, I do.’