Smashed #48: Kings of convenience - a critical review of the week's restaurant reviews

The UK restaurant scene digested

Tom Parker Bowles, Mail on Sunday
Upstairs at The Grill, Chester (3 stars)

Upstairs at The Grill? In Chester? Again? Can someone please tell me what the hell is going on? I should explain. Last May, in Smashed #26 I questioned why Jay Rayner had reviewed the more than 20-year-old steakhouse ‘with little national profile, no accolades from the restaurant guides, that is not run by a named chef and doesn’t have a well-known owner, serves a standard steak house menu, is not celebrating a significant anniversary and has no topical hook due to it’s offering or geographical location (it’s not the world first vegan steakhouse and no one is saying Chester is the new foodie hotspot for example).’

And now, here we are again but it’s TPB instead of JR. At least TPB has the decency to fess up to why he’s there (JR never reveals that he is reviewing a place because it’s the location of a taping of one of his unlistenable radio shows). He was on a book signing trip with Matt Tebbutt. They got hungry on the A483 travelling from Shropshire to the Wirral. They wanted to eat at the Sticky Walnut but as it was the middle of the afternoon it wasn’t open, so they ended up at Upstairs at The Grill, which was open.

It was an average meal and TPB awarded it three stars. There are lots of things that irked me about the review (see below for a couple of examples) but the greater issue is that a national restaurant critic is once again using their column to cover their travelling expenses while doing other business and writing about somewhere out of convenience.

It would be fair enough if TPB had stumbled across somewhere noteworthy on his travels and felt compelled to review it. That would be doing the job properly. Upstairs at The Grill is undoubtedly a dependable local favourite, but when there are so many deserving restaurants around the UK that would kill for a review in a national paper, (especially right now when trading conditions are so hard that many are teetering on the brink of closure), it’s verging on the criminal for a critic to waste a column on somewhere that doesn’t need the exposure and is of no particular interest.

I have always argued that a restaurant critic’s first responsibility is to their editor - to submit clean copy on time and to word count; their second responsibility is to their readers to inform and entertain, and their third responsibility is to the restaurants, to write accurately and honestly about them. I would now add a fourth responsibility to that list - to reflect the UK restaurant scene as equitably as possible.

A review in a national publication is the best publicity money can’t buy (at least, I don’t think it can be bought but who knows) and critics should be cognizant of the power they wield. That doesn’t mean pulling punches in the review but doing some research and making the effort to seek out the best and most interesting places to eat to try and ensure everyone, readers and restaurateurs alike, gets a fair crack of the whip. Writing about the restaurant you rocked up at mid-afternoon because you were famished after flogging your book about on your relative’s dining habits (you’ll have to Google the title because I’m not going to give it any free publicity) doesn’t really cut it.

Worst line: ‘an eminently respectable French onion soup, searing hot, where sweet allium meets bosky broth’. What exactly was in the French onion soup that made it comparable to a wood?
Another worst line: ‘Matt’s bone-in sirloin is far superior, with depth and heft and grunt.’ Just no.
Did the review make me want to book a table: It made me want to punch my laptop.

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