Smashed #42: A review of the week's restaurant reviews

The UK's restaurant scene digested

Nooooodles

Before we get into the meat of this week’s newsletter (and it’s a good one) just a quick reminder that if you haven’t become a paid subscriber to Smashed yet, you can get 25% off an annual or monthly subscription until the end of November by clicking the button below. That way you’ll get to read the complete version of this and every edition of Smashed and help support my writing. I’ll also love you forever and come round your house and cook your dinner (I’m a Masterchef semi-finalist). Actually, forget that last bit. I mean, I am a Masterchef semi-finalist but I’m never coming round to your house to cook your tea. Unless you pay me. Then we can talk. Whatever, thank you for reading and I love you even if money doesn’t change hands between us.

The Reviews

Grace Dent, The Guardian
Noodle Inn, London

Eatingwithtod’s TikTok film (is that what you call them?) about the Noodle Inn titled HUNTING FOR THE BEST NOODLES IN LONDON has had 1.7m views. It’s unwatchable so don’t click the link, unless you’re desperate to see a gurning, grinning LAD shovel biang biang noodles into his gaping maw and squeeze a short rib between his thumb and forefinger. It is, to use a technical food writing term, fucking disgusting. I’d rather sit through all 116 minutes of Pasolini's Salò again than watch eatingwithtod’s 1min12sec horror show. But Tod is setting the critical agenda yet again it seems.

Following behind Jay Rayner’s eatingwithtod-alike review of Goda (Smashed #33), Dent is using the pretext of visiting a ‘viral internet sensation’ to garner the Guardian some no doubt much-needed clicks. Guardian newspapers aren’t the only ones at it; David Ellis recently reviewed Angus Steakhouse in The Standard because of a jolly web wheeze on Reddit where the site’s users have been posting over-the-top reviews of the chain to put tourists off the scent of decent places they actually want to go to. It has apparently worked, but that doesn’t mean we need to be told by Ellis in a one-star review how shit the place is. WE KNOW.

Even if I was remotely tempted to join Noodle Inn’s long, virally generated daily queue by Dent’s review, I’d soon remember that the place would be mobbed by the sort of cunts who watch eatingwithtod’s TikToks and give the place the swerve it deserves. Which is what Dent should have done.

Best line: ‘For the beleaguered staff having to deal with the daily stampede, the customer is merely a unit that needs moving through the system’
Worst line: ‘After all, anything flat is more delicious in the mouth, and biang biang are the Pringles of the noodle world’ - does ‘anything flat’ include roadkill hedgehog?
Did the review make me want to book a table: You can’t.

Giles Coren, The Times
The Yellow Bittern, London (7.33)

This is getting ridiculous. An 18-seat restaurant in a bookshop in Kings Cross serving what appears to be mediocre food and expensive natural wine continues to rack up more column inches than all the other restaurants written about this week put together. Probably, I haven’t actually counted, but it feels like it and that’s the important thing.

Chef and partner in the business Hugh Corcoran is fed up with it all too. ‘We wanted to serve simple food and good wines and sell books in our own particular way, with our rules and hoped some other people may like what we do too. Living out such a simple dream under such scrutiny is certainly increasingly tedious and stressful. And we do not merit the attention we are given,’ he wrote in an Instagram post on 23 November. A perfectly reasonable thing to write. You feel for him now, don’t you?

And then he went and spoiled it all by posting something stupid about journalists like: ‘I wonder how these people get a job critiquing others when they do their own job which such mediocrity?’. Nice way to poke the hornet’s nest Hugh. The following day, this appeared on his feed: ‘Back to the discussion on people ‘who know the price of everything and the value of nothing’. On serving natural wine in our restaurant’. He’s not going to stop is he?

He hates the limelight and just wants to get on with his job but, addicted to the constant feedback and attention, it keeps luring him back. What’s he going to do when he is finally left alone to serve boiled sausages and cidery wine to the sort of people who are free to lunch on a Monday in Kings Cross(who are they)? Run naked down the Caledonian Road shouting ‘just leave me alone why can’t you’ while swigging from a hundred-quid bottle of unfiltered chardonnay that tastes like Appletiser?

I’ve unfollowed Hugh because it’s become increasingly tedious and stressful reading his posts and this will be the last thing I ever write about him and The Yellow Bittern. As I dedicated an entire edition of Smashed to Corcoran and his ‘restaurant’, I’m not really in the mood to spend more time than necessary on Giles Coren’s review of the place.

The only information Coren adds to the already overly-detailed picture it’s possible to build up of TYB from media reports is that he was called ‘“petal” and “my love” by the person who took his phone reservation; that, according to Coren, Corcoran serves natural wine because ‘He loves the thrill of opening a bottle and not knowing if it’s going to be nice or, I suppose, utter f***ing horse piss’; that TYB doesn’t serve coffee but they will accept payment by bank transfer, which is pretty useful to know if you are planning to pay them a visit (I’m not), and that Coren approves of the place:

‘In a world of bland crap, global chains, celebrity chefs, tasting menus, online reservations, inclusive service, TopJaw, small plates and multizillion-dollar refurbs, I think a bunch of Irish kids round the back of King’s Cross saying, “Screw yous, this is how we do it,” is the most refreshing thing I’ve seen in years.’

I am so glad that’s all over. Let’s never speak of TYB again.

Best line: ‘everything about the Yellow Bittern is designed to wrong-foot and discomfort you, on the one hand, but then also to nurture and coddle you, as long as you’re one of the ones who knows exactly what they’re about and what it all means and what to do, and how’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I said, don’t ever mention it to me again.

Jay Rayner, The Observer
The Martlet, Rochdale

In the biggest shake-up in restaurant criticism since AA Gill popped his clogs, Jay Rayner is moving from The Observer to the Financial Times. I predicted his departure back in September after Tortoise Media announced its intentions to buy the Observer. In Smashed #37 I wrote: ‘The Telegraph reported that many of The Observer’s staff are deeply unhappy about the move. If I were the paper’s restaurant critic, I think I’d be unhappy too….It’s not unreasonable to assume that, should the sale go through, the new owners will look to make savings wherever they can and one place to start would be with the paper’s highest-paid writers.’

This Press Gazette article says that Rayner quit because he was told that his contract would be terminated if the Tortoise deal went through but also says that Tortoise stated that his contract would be honoured, so who the hell knows.

If Tortoise plan to replace Rayner, then one obvious candidate is former Evening Standard critic

Jimi Famurewa

. But do Tortoise want to pay a star writer or will they keep a restaurant review column in-house? I think it’s equally as likely that there will no longer be an Observer magazine restaurant review column. Watch this space.

I was surprised when Rayner recently posted on X that his reviews will continue to appear in the Observer until February given that the muck-slinging has already begun.

Subscribe to continue reading this edition of Smashed including my take on the latest reviews from Jay Rayner, Charlotte Ivers, David Ellis, Tim Hayward and William Sitwell.