Smashed #41: A review of this week's restaurant reviews 5/11/24

The UK's restaurant scene digested

Our critics are obsessed with trains this week for some unknown reason (Photo by Denis Chick on Unsplash)

The reviews

Tom Parker Bowles, Mail on Sunday
Caviar Kaspia (4 stars)

TPB has fallen for the oldest trick in the book: the improbably priced mundane food item. It’s a £1500 burger, but it’s covered in gold leaf. It’s a £5k cocktail, but it comes with a semi-precious stone. It’s a £10k packet of Frazzles but Taylor Swift has wept on them. TPB’s obvious bit of clickbait isn’t even that interesting. It’s a £150 baked potato but it’s got caviar on it. It’s the SpudULike until you see the price (do you remember when it was called SpudULike by James Martin? No, me neither.) It’s £150 of caviar with a spud thrown in for free.

Caviar Kaspia is in a former members club on a Mayfair backstreet. I was walking along a Mayfair backstreet after midnight a couple of weeks ago (if you can call Berkeley Street a backstreet) and I was approached by no less than four different very dodgy-looking men who wondered if I was in the mood for some female company. It was in the vicinity of Novikov Restaurant and Bar, although I’m sure that was just a massive coincidence. I was pretty insulted, to be honest. Four of them. Did I look that desperate? I was wearing a three-piece suit so maybe it looked like I could afford some female company, although I would have been keener on a £150 baked spud with caviar at that point in the evening. I’d drunk a lot of free champagne.

No female company was offered to TPB, despite there being ‘two young South Korean women of pale, luminescent beauty, clad in diaphanous couture’ among his fellow diners. All he got was ‘crepuscular gloom’ and some ‘gilded ennui’, the best ennui of all. That spud? ‘There are few better dishes on earth’. I bet James Martin would have something to say about that, he wrote the book on potatoes. Well, a book on potatoes. It wasn’t very good apparently. And SpudULike by James Martin doesn’t exist anymore. Actually, let’s leave James Martin out of this.

Best line: ‘Baked potatoes, skin as crisp as parchment, insides whipped savagely hard with butter and sour cream, are a study in tuber art. A cool jet-black splodge of oscietra caviar, gently saline, raises them to the sublime’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I’m holding out for those Frazzles.

Tim Hayward, The Financial Times 
Trivet, London

Tim Hayward says that Trivet restaurant in London’s glittering Bermondsey is a mere 94 minutes from his home in glittering Cambridge. A five minute walk to Cambridge Station, 85 minutes on the train and 4 minutes from London Bridge Station to the restaurant. That would mean he’d have to leave his desk precisely five minutes before the train was due to depart from Cambridge Station (let’s assume he’s already bought his ticket online) and could make it from the platform at London Bridge to the restaurant in four minutes.

I think he’s being a bit optimistic. Train journey times actually vary from between 81 and 93mins and you’d want to leave yourself more than five minutes to get to the station unless you lived literally next door. London Bridge is big so getting down from the platform to the station exit is going to take at least a few minutes. Personally, I’d allow two hours just to be safe.

At this point you might be thinking ‘I don’t give a flying fuck how far Trivet is from Tim Hayward’s house, who gives a shit about his travel arrangements?’

Subscribe to keep reading Smashed’s review of the reviews including Giles Coren, Jay Rayner, Grace Dent, David Ellis, William Sitwell and Charlotte Ivers. Plus find out where the critics were eating 1, 5 and 10 years ago in For Old Dine’s Sake.