Smashed #46: Review of the restaurant reviews
The UK restaurant scene digested
This week, you find me in a dark place. It’s overcast and the lighting is terrible in my garden office. In addition, at the end of this week, I turn 60 and I’m not feeling great about it. My thoughts naturally turn to matters of mortality, of the short time left to me and the things I’ve yet to do, like cleaning the grouting above the sink, submitting my tax return, reversing the rise of fascism (Sieg Heil to you too Elon) and getting my time machine to work.
I’m also considering things I’ve committed to continue doing, like this newsletter. Don’t get me wrong, I love writing Smashed and will do so until Substack gets shut down by the Illuminati for being subversive, but some weeks, taking the piss out of the national restaurant critics just seems like way too much hard work.
I’m beginning to feel like a performing monkey, even worse, a performing monkey that is everyone’s dirty little secret. Smashed is the note with a rude joke that’s passed around at the back of the class and then eaten when the teacher approaches. God forbid that anyone publically recognises it as worth reading or as good writing (there are exceptions. Thank you. You know who you are). The Smashed review of the reviews is turning into my Freebird, my Shake It Off, my Angels, my Hamburger Lady; the hit song a performer has to play but has grown to despise. And I particularly despise it this week because, well, look what I’ve got to work with.
William Sitwell has awarded 5 stars to The River Cafe Cafe in his review in the Telegraph which means I’ve got to go to all the effort of comparing Sitwell’s rave (‘Such is The River Cafe Cafe and such is its charm and serious quality‘) to the drubbing handed out by Hester van Hensbergen in a recent edition of Vittles (she was met with ‘tolerance through indifference’ and wondered ‘what has gone awry with the River Café’s once muscular grammar of restaurant-making’) and I just don’t think I’ve got it in me. I’d also have to point out that Sitwell is correct in saying that The River Cafe and The River Cafe Cafe ‘don’t use the accent’ yet Vittles used it throughout their review which would be so mind-numbingly pedantic that I’d have to stop writing, make a coffee to wake myself up again and tinker with my time machine to get back on track.
That’s better. It’s still not working but I think I know what’s wrong. The coffee, Banka Natural from Yunnan Province in China from Skylark Coffee (not an affiliate link), freshly ground and prepared in a Clever Dripper (an affiliate link) was delicious in case you were wondering. The varietal is catimor which, according to my own personal coffee Jesus, James Hoffmann is ‘a disease resistant variety that is generally of much lower quality’ but Skylark seemed to have tracked down some of the good stuff and roasted it nicely. They say it tastes of ‘chocolate, Nutella and cherry’ and who am I to disagree?
So where were we? Charlotte Ivers has declared in The Sunday Times that Joséphine Bouchon ‘delivers on the fantasy’ of ‘our shared cultural memory of the French bistro’ even though it’s a Lyonnaise bouchon. The clue is in the name. She has managed to make that judgement hungover on vodka, drinking only coke and eating roast chicken, salad, potatoes and green beans. Fuck the wine list and the sweetbreads then. It doesn’t matter because everyone including me got to Joséphine Bouchon at least six months before Ivers and declared it the best thing since sliced foie gras.
Over at The Ironic Review, Simon Jartvic writes about why eating at McDonald’s is a good thing, not bad like you thought (watch the YouTube clip below now if you’ve no idea what I’m on about otherwise you’ll just be wondering. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. Finished? Good, let’s crack on.) No, hold on, it’s Tim Hayward in the Financial Times writing about McDonald’s but he’s not being ironic and he doesn’t think McDonald’s is a guilty pleasure like you thought he would. Aaah!
What Hayward has done is repeat a version of the lie that McDonald’s is the most consistent food on the planet. He claims to have been secretly reviewing them since 2014 (and I mean actually writing reviews that he hasn’t published anywhere. Christ, and I thought I was weird) and in that time says that ‘The Big Mac never changed’. Either he hasn’t been paying proper attention or has never ordered a Big Mac at one o’clock in the morning at the McDonalds on York Way by Kings Cross station. That’s when you find out that a Big Mac can be as dry, stale and under-sauced as an episode of Emmerdale. The upshot is that, after McDonald’s messed up some of his orders, Hayward has changed allegiance to Greggs’ Steak Slices, which is a good thing and not bad like you thought. Aaah!
I think the time machine’s temporal containment reflector needs replacing. There’s one in the garage, I’ll go and get it in a minute. Tom Parker Bowles in the Mail On Sunday has reviewed somewhere on a Kenyan island so he can write off his winter holiday against tax, probably, so I’m not wasting my ever-more precious time on that. In the Observer, Jay Rayner has reviewed the Two Stoops and I used up all my hilarious Two Stoops/two soups gags in Smashed #44.
David Ellis has gone to The Regency Cafe (which also doesn’t use the accent and neither does Ellis) for his last review for The Standard. I’m joking of course. It’s not his last review, but who knows when the Saudis will pull the plug. The cafe, Ellis tells us, has been featured in films such as ‘Layer Cake, Rocketman, Pride, others’ none of which are exactly recent blockbusters. I mean, The Others came out in 2001, although I don’t remember the cafe scene. The actual topical hook is that the cafe is on the market, a fact that has generated a lot of news stories and therefore the phrase ‘The Regency Cafe’ is good for a few clicks. I recently watched the YouTube review linked below because …. actually I don’t know why I watched it but it looked bloody awful as an experience although the food didn’t look too bad. If I told you Ellis’s review is very well written that would be both boring and unfunny and this edition is in desperate need of a few good gags, so I won’t.
Right, back from the garage. The reflector is a bit rusty so I’m going to give it a clean while I read Giles Coren’s review in The Times of a Chinese restaurant in a Park Hyatt in Blackfriars. It’s as dull as you might imagine, but Coren was desperate for somewhere to review between Christmas and New Year and that’s where he ended up. He ate food that was ‘bland, generic, loveless and tasted to me as if it had been frozen’.
He visited Chinese Cricket Club (a name that reeks of brainstorming sessions - ‘there’s no bad ideas guys, just go for it!’) on 28 December, a time, Coren says, when ‘you just can’t look at another roast potato, stuffing sandwich or anything remotely resembling the heavy European winter fare with which you have just gone 15 rounds and lost by technical knockout.’ Instead of ‘European winter fare’ and risking ending up somewhere like Chinese Cricket Club, my wife and I skipped Christmas entirely this year and instead headed to Amsterdam where pretty much everywhere is open on Christmas Day as usual. Our lunch at the Michelin-starred RIJKS was outstanding, full of unexpected combinations and intense, zesty flavours. Shame I came down with Norovirus the next day.
Not a vintage week for restaurant reviews then. But when was a vintage time for restaurant reviews? The 90s? It’s still early in the year I suppose, we should give it time. Speaking of which, let’s just pop the old temporal containment reflector back in the machine. I should confess at this point that I’ve never actually got the thing working before but what the hell, if I just press the start button and pull down this lever it should….
To be continued
Happy Birthday! Please keep bringing us the laughs over here
For some reason I'm reminded of the old upper class twit of a restaurant reviewer as played by Adrian Edmonson in an episode of Absolutely Fabulous. Can't think why....