Smashed #44: Reviewing the UK's restaurant critics

The UK restaurant scene digested

A Bootsy Collins impersonator eating bibimbap in Bristol yesterday.

Giles Coren, The Times
Fonda Restaurant, London (7.67)

Giles Coren claims he has written his last restaurant review outside of the capital. His journey to dine in two Chinese restaurants in Sheffield (one good that he didn’t know the name of but was ‘on Matilda Street between the oriental supermarket and Mighty Bites’ and one not so good) will be his ‘last ever trip out of London’. Coren’s decision is based on Times readership metrics data that he has recently had sight of that shows his ‘three least successful reviews this year for “subscriber satisfaction” were of restaurants in Chester, Sheffield and Oxfordshire.’

Somehow I doubt Coren will be true to his word. As I’ve noted before, he is given to enthusiasms and has publically sworn off booze for life among other things that didn’t last as long as it took him to type them. The metrics can probably be explained by the majority of Times subscribers being London-based, but surely Londoners are interested in weekend trips where they can offload some of their metropolitan cash? I can understand Chester and Sheffield not being attractive options, but half of Oxfordshire must be given over to Londoner’s second homes, so something doesn’t quite add up. In any case, Coren will have forgotten all about this by the time the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Day so let’s not concern ourselves with the matter any longer.

The review isn’t even of the two Chinese restaurants in Sheffield, but a Mexican restaurant in London called Fonda. Named after Jane, the concept combines workout classes with tacos. Of course it doesn’t, that would be as stupid as committing in writing to never reviewing a restaurant outside of London again. As we discovered in David Ellis’s 4-star review of the place in Smashed #40, it’s a more casual restaurant sibling to the Michelin-starred Kol from celebrated chef Santiago Lastra who cooks Mexican food with mostly British ingredients.

Coren declares it ‘fancy as f***.’with ‘mellow earth tones and smooth curves’ that remind him of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid although it’s not entirely clear why. Barbarella would have been more appropriate. Speaking of Jane Fonda, one of my greatest regrets is refusing a phone interview with her while editing (and sometimes writing) the Metro’s daily 60-Second Interview feature. The PR was offering a five-minute slot and I couldn’t see that filling the available space, fool that I was. I could have, should have made it work.

I’m less rueful about turning down Selena Gomez. She was in the kid’s show Wizards of Waverly Place at the time and I thought she’d be too young for the Metro’s readership. I think I was right. Also, the journalist pitching her was just too insistent and she pissed me off by repeatedly offering Gomez after I’d already said no several times. Bear in mind that, even though the feature ran five days a week, there was an almost infinite choice of interview subjects so Selena Gomez was neither here nor there. I’d say yes now of course, given Only Murders in the Building, I’m not stupid but I’m not doing the job any more. Maybe I ought to launch a celebrity interview Substack and make Selena the top of my list.

I’m sorry, what were we talking about? I know, British Mexican. Brexican. Mexish. Whatever it’s called. There’s no lime or avocados on Fonda’s menu because they don’t grow in the UK, so the guac is made of mashed-up nuts and seeds. ‘The execution was incredible, the skill levels insane, the space awesome, the vibes delightful.’ So why does it only rate 7.67? Because Coren failed to ‘feel the slap around the chops I always hope to get from this sort of cooking, the sharpness and fire that strafes me out of my fine-dining complacency and makes me yearn for Oaxaca’. At least he didn’t have to go all the way to Sheffield to be mildly disappointed.

Best line: N/A
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I’d go on a dinner date with Jane.

Charlotte Ivers, The Sunday Times
Herb, Leamington Spa (4 stars)

Charlotte Ivers evidently hasn’t got hold of the same Times readership metrics data as Giles Coren because she’s determined to demonstrate that ‘In modern Britain . . . .you can barely move for fantastic cooking from all over the world’ and she’s eaten in the second-best Keralan restaurant in Leamington Spa to prove it.

Do you want to go to Leamington Spa to eat Keralan food? Would anyone who doesn’t live there go to Leamington Spa just to eat Keralan food? You’d probably eat Keralan food if you happened to be in Leamington Spa, but then you’d need a reason to go to Leamington Spa in the first place, and what reason could that possibly be?

According to royal-leamington-spa.co.uk, the main reason would be to leave it and go to nearby Warwick Castle, Kenilworth Castle and Stratford-Upon-Avon. There are no Leamington Spa restaurants listed in the Michelin Guide or Good Food Guide, although there is one on the AA’s ratedtrips.com website and a couple listed in the Harden’s Guide. To be fair, it does look like a handsome sort of town in a very Cheltenham sort of way (which does have some great restaurants) and, most importantly, it does have the decency not to be Coventry.

Ivers went because she wants to be free to do what she wants to do, she wants to be free to ride her machine without being hassled by the man and she wants to get loaded with Keralan food in Leamington Spa. After sharing some Wiki-harvested Keralan facts, Ives reveals that the interior design is ‘odd’ and the all-vegetarian menu is ‘frustratingly long’. She ate ‘semi-sweet, slightly sticky paneer and coconut milk curry, steamed in a banana leaf’, ‘green papaya stew, in a sauce of mustard, curry leaves and coconut’, ‘kadala curry, a mildly spicy affair of firm black chickpeas and, you guessed it, coconut’ and ‘paneer fried with peppers’. Worth a trip to Leamington Spa? Apparently so.

Best line: N/A
Worst line: ‘Adair wanted to tell me about a new place called Herb. “It’s probably not the best restaurant in Leamington Spa,” he wrote, which struck me as reminiscent of the apocryphal John Lennon claim that “Ringo isn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles”’. Seriously, don’t even go there. Also, Ringo’s solo albums knock spots off of Lennon’s which are complete pants apart from one or two great songs, and no, I’m not talking about ‘Imagine’.
Did the review make me want to book a table: I don’t want nobody telling me what to do, I don’t want nobody pushing me around. (You’re probably wondering what all these quotes from The Wild Angels have to do with anything. So am I. It’s nearly the end of 2024, it’s been a long year. Just go with it, it will all be OK).

Jay Rayner, The Observer
Claro, London

Jay Rayner is a small businessman. Let me rephrase that. Jay Rayner runs a small business. That’s better. His products are books, live spoken word events and live jazz performances. You can find out about them all at jayrayner.co.uk. He also constantly uses his social media accounts to promote his business. If you follow him you can be absolutely certain that you will not miss an opportunity to buy a book or attend a show. I imagine that , like any small business, he relies on repeat business and is therefore keen to nurture his audience and keep them coming back for more. As of 16/12, of his last dozen posts on X, six were regarding his book or public appearances, three were links to his journalism, two were related to his radio show The Kitchen Cabinet and one was a sort of joke about olive oil and erections. Nice. He’s not going to get the Masterchef gig is he?

Although Claro has a sister restaurant in Tel Aviv, it could also be described as a small business and one that, like Rayner Ltd, is probably keen to nurture an audience that could supply it with repeat business. Claro uses social media to promote the restaurant and its various offers. It also uses email to do the same. For some reason, Rayner is deeply, deeply unhappy about this and spends 313 of his 1119 available words - nearly a third of his review - explaining exactly why. This serves to demonstate two things: firstly, Rayner’s word count at the Observer is far too generous (hopefully that will be corrected at the FT) and secondly, he’s a moany old c*** so and so who doesn’t practice what he preaches.

Rayner says he ‘thrilled to some of the best dishes I have eaten this year’ but then the extremely well-remunerated critic who claims expenses for all his review meals had to endure an ‘onslaught’ of ‘six emails in all’ (six!) from Claro including one that had the temerity to ask him for feedback. Imagine. How awful for Rayner that he hasn’t yet worked out how to block an email address.

Rayner doesn’t reveal an awful lot more about the place than Charlotte Ivers did a few weeks ago (Smashed #42) so I’m not going to spend any more time on the review. Besides, I’ve got more important things to do like booking my tickets for Jazz up the 80s with The Jay Rayner Sextet at Woolwich Works on 3 April next year. Do you think he’d like my feedback after the gig? Perhaps he’ll email me.

Best line: ‘The highlight of the night, however, takes pumpkin and turns it into a tap-dancing, high-kicking Broadway star . . . . When you start shouting “encore” at your emptied plate, you know something serious has happened’. Something serious like a brain haemorrhage perhaps?
Worst line: ‘note that the tower-block high windows are hung with both curtains and blinds which, in a space where neither are necessary, is quite the design feature, and not cheap’. Really? God, that’s fascinating.
Did the review make me want to book a table: Yes. No. Oh, I don’t know.

Tom Parker Bowles, Mail on Sunday
The Blue Stoops, London (4 stars)

If you went to this west London boozer with a friend and both ordered the cuttlefish stew with pink fir potatoes and aioli, you could have two soups at The Blue Stoops. Are you old enough to understand the reference? Is your mind free enough to accept that cuttlefish stew is basically a fish soup and that therefore the joke works? Whatever. It’s Christmastime, mistletoe and wine, children singing Christian rhyme, so give me, and you, a break. Two Soups at The Blue Stoops could be the long-awaited sequel to Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. I must work up a treatment.

TPB doesn’t bother to explain the derivation of the pub name The Blue Stoops which in 45 years of boozing (I started early) I’ve never come across before. I Googled it and found this on welcometosheffield.co.uk (there’s a Blue Stoops in Dronfield which is a Sheffield adjacent town): ‘It is believed that the name originates from the custom of painting the doorposts blue to indicate an inn.’ So now you know, or maybe you already did. Pub names are fascinating, maybe I should start a Substack newsletter about them.

The Blue Stoops in Notting Hill is owned by Jamie Allsopp, the seven times great grandson of Samuel who founded Allsopp’s brewery in Burton-on-Trent in 1730. More importantly, he’s a mate of TPB’s. I want you to try and guess if this is a positive review or not. I’ll give you a couple of minutes. Go and make a cup of tea and have a think about it. The four stars gave it away didn’t they? ‘This is not only an exceptional pub’ declares TPB ‘it’s a damn fine restaurant, too.’ Quelle surprise.

Duck-liver pâté was ‘splendidly boozy’, while an ‘autumnal broth’ (there was soup after all!) ‘filled with borlotti beans and mellow fruitfulness’ was ‘restorative and subtle’. ‘Slow-braised Hereford beef’ was ‘slopped on top of a thick puddle of buttery polenta’. Slopped? Record scratch. What is TPB’s old friend Jamie Allsopp going to think about that? Don’t panic, it must have been slopped in a good way because TPB says the dish was ‘spoon food at its finest’. Isn’t ‘spoon food’ a horrible phrase? I can imagine it turning up as a menu heading at some awful chain restaurant that thinks it’s trendier than it is.

We’re quickly back on track with a chicken, leek and black trompette pie with ‘pastry crisp and burnished, the filling as heavenly as it is hearty’. TPB (and his sister Laura Lopes who was dining there when Giles Coren reviewed the pub a few weeks ago) can be assured of a warm welcome back to The Blue Stoops. Next time they’re both in, maybe they should order two soups.

Best line: ‘attention to detail is magnificent: the handsome bar with its elegant blue porcelain frontage; the red-and-black chequered floor; and the metal-topped table stamped with DD (Double Diamond being one of Allsopp’s most successful brews)’
Worst line: ‘Anchovy fillets, softly rich, sit upon lustily buttered toast, buried beneath a sharply dressed tangle of shallot and parsley’. If I have to explain to you why that is a horrible bit of Food Writing™ then you probably shouldn’t be reading this newsletter.
Did the review make me want to book a table: I’m going to book in, eat soup and work on my film script.

William Sitwell, The Telegraph
Sael, London (3 stars)

I knew the British restaurant critic community was a bolthole of white privilege but I hadn’t realised quite how incestuous the whole thing was. I’ve just discovered that William Sitwell’s second wife Emily Lopes (daughter of the late Devonshire racehorse breeder the 3rd Lord Roborough) is the cousin of Harry Lopes who is married to the aforementioned Laura Parker Bowles, sister of TPB. Maybe they should all get together for Four Soups at The Blue Stoops sometime. Maybe they already have. Maybe I should launch a Substack newsletter about it. Hold on, I already have.

Sitwell was spotted by Jason Atherton while reviewing Sael, one of four restaurants the chef has launched in London recently (Hot Dogs by Three Darlings at Harrods, Three Darlings in Chelsea and Row on 5 on Savile Row being the other three). Atherton appears to have rather shot himself in the foot by sending Sitwell out a lot of freebie courses that he didn’t want and comping his wine, which seems a waste of time as Sitwell would have claimed it back anyway.

Reading his review, I’m not entirely sure William Sitwell likes food that much or is even that interested in it. He dismisses an Orkney scallop as ‘a fat thing sitting under some reddish shavings in a soupy broth of clams and leeks’. I discovered from David Ellis’s review that the ‘reddish shavings’ were in fact ‘shavings of its own roe’ but I doubt many Telegraph readers will be cross-referencing reviews to get the full picture. Couldn’t Sitwell have asked Atherton, who apparently came to his table?

He also refused to touch a ‘lamb “doner” kebab’ which he described as ‘a heaving baked thing in a shower of grated cheese’ and ‘an anchor of doom dragging me to a deep abyss of night-time restlessness’. After a snail and oxtail lasagne that he says was ‘a mess’ (although he failed to pass comment on its flavour or anything else about it) Sitwell left Sael ‘exhausted’. Perhaps he’s in the wrong job.

Best line: ‘Jason Atherton fled the clutches of Gordon Ramsay Holdings in 2010, leaving him free of Gordon but riddled with the bug of restaurateuritis. It’s an all-consuming malady. Wherever he goes, he just can’t stop opening restaurants’. This doesn’t quite work as a joke- you’ve got ‘restaurateuritis’ in the set up which anticipates ‘restaurants’ in the punch line thereby lessening the impact, but this is Sitwell we’re talking about so it’ll do.
Worst line: ‘Out came Marmite tart and brioche, which was like a lavish breakfast or a heavy pudding. The tart contained custard, with a dollop of caviar, rich and fabulous; the brioche, dripping in buttery flakiness. Great pastry skills but it left me feeling for my tummy and veins’. Don’t say ‘tummy’ William, you are a 55-year-old man.
Did the review make me want to book a table: No, but I do want to go (again).

Tim Hayward, The Financial Times
Dongnae, Bristol

Tim Hayward would like to lecture you on matters of funk. That makes about as much sense as Bootsy Collins holding forth on the subject of sobriety, so let’s give the opening paragraph of this review a swerve and get down (pun intended) to the meat of the thing. But before we do, a further warning - don’t let Hayward lecture you on matters of geography either, at least when it comes to Bristol neighbourhoods. He believes Dongnae is in Cotham when the website address clearly states Redland. I checked it on Google Maps too, just to make sure. You can do that these days.

I first read about Dongnae (the second restaurant from wife and husband team Kyu Jeong Jeon and Duncan Robertson who also run Bokman) in The Bristol Sauce which is where I usually find out about Bristol restaurants. Hayward was so ahead of the curve that he ate the couple’s food as takeaway in a camper van hired especially for the occasion during Covid. Good for him.

Hayward enjoyed some samgyeopsal (pork belly) that he wrapped in a castelfranco leaf and then added some fermented sardine pickle. He claims that we know he’s ‘a sucker for self-assembly food’. I didn’t. Perhaps I’m not concentrating on his reviews hard enough. I wonder if Hayward refers to himself in the third person. Did he announce to the table at Dongnae: ‘You know Tim Hayward is a sucker for self-assembly food’. It doesn’t seem totally beyond the realms of possibility. If I start assuming anyone apart from my wife and family knows anything at all about me, please feel free to send me a message and tell me to stop being so fucking egotistical. But, you know me, it’s never going to happen.

Hayward’s bibimbap had nurungji but Meg’s from The Bristol Sauce had none. At least Meg knew the proper word for ‘the Korean equivalent of socarrat or tahdig’. If Hayward does, he’s not telling. He also didn't mind the fact that his 5-year doenjang jjigae stew with local tofu and courgette didn’t come with rice. In her Instagram post about Dongnae, Lia Kelly (@koreankitchencardiff) said: ‘how are you meant to eat a jjigae without rice?! It’s like bolognese without pasta. They go together’. However, she did point out that ‘my expectations for Korean food is different to a lot of people. I grew up with it and I cook it at home’ and Hayward admits that ‘it feels like each time I walk into a restaurant, I’m learning anew’ so he can be forgiven, I guess.

koreankitchencardiff

A post shared by @koreankitchencardiff

Hayward enjoyed his stew with ‘a few tiny pieces of meat and many large cubes of tofu, lurking malevolent ’neath the surface like a school of hippie sharks’ so much that he ‘seriously considered giving up cleaning my teeth’. He really is trying to make his readers boak isn’t he? (For further evidence see ‘Worst line’ below).

Hayward’s closing paragraph is oddly confusing. ‘Appreciation of other cuisines was historically led by now derided “expert voices”, such as Marcella Hazan, Richard Olney, David Thompson or Claudia Roden. Brilliant writers in our own language, with enough love to learn and champion another culture.’ I suppose that’s true of Olney, Thompson and Roden, but Hazan was Italian, wrote about Italian food and was translated into English. And has anyone actually derided any of those writers? He then highlights Su Scott and Jordan Bourke as UK evangelists of Korean food, I assume in contrast to those historical ‘expert voices’ who were championing another culture, except Bourke is Irish, so isn’t that the same thing? And what’s it all got to do with Hayward anyway? God, it’s too late in the year to try and make sense of it all. Merry Christmas.

Best line: ‘Korean table etiquette favours metal chopsticks which, to my shame, I handle about as well as a baboon crocheting a doily’
Worst line: ‘What could be better than slapping this sort of stuff into leafy parcels and posting it down the little red lane?’ I can’t decide if this is worse than the mortadella thing at Juliet in Stroud (Smashed #42): ‘Folding great sheets of it like silk handkerchiefs and posting them past my teeth’. Whatever, we really don’t need any further details about the actual act of eating, mastication and digestion (or excretion if you were considering it) thanks very much.
Did the review make me want to book a table: It made me want to clean my teeth. Twice.