I can’t believe this is the fifth edition of this newsletter already. Many thanks for subscribing and, hopefully, reading. I get a lot of enjoyment out of writing Smashed but I do wonder if it’s just too long for people to bother with. I may in future select a couple of the most interesting reviews of the week to pick apart and include a wider variety of content which I am already working on. Would that be a good or bad thing in your opinion? Please let me know.
You may get the impression that I just sit at home in my trackie bottoms and post-punk band T-shirts sneering at other people’s hard work. Nothing could be further from the truth, although as I write, I am sporting this excellent Nick Cave as Elvis shirt. I get out to eat as often as I can and my meals in November included being a plus one for Douglas Blyde’s review of Alex Dilling at Hotel Cafe Royal for drinksbusiness.com to which I make a couple of small, but I feel very important contributions. A new dish since my first visit earlier this year, cannon of Devon skate wing with a Madeira and Port sauce, was one of the highlights of the meal and is pictured below. I post most, if not all my meals onto Instagram so if you want to know where else I’ve been eating follow me on @lynesandrew.
I’ve been talking to some chefs and restaurateurs about how they’ve been impacted by a good or bad review. The stories have been quite eyebrow raising and I hope to have them worked up into a feature in time for next week’s newsletter. Until, then, let’s get stuck into this week’s crop of columns.
The Reviews
Charlotte Ivers, Sunday Times
Pret Christmas Sandwich(2 stars)
So I dialled up Charlotte Ivers on the old laptop, and when her latest column came up I was like, ‘WHAT!!?? Shurely shome mishtake!’. She’s only gone and reviewed a flipping sandwich! So I sent her an email. ‘Dear Madam, it has come to my attention that you have mis-used your privilege as a national restaurant critic and, instead of reviewing The Devonshire, which would have been the right and proper thing to do, you have instead wasted your readers time on a retail luncheon snack, and not a very good one at that. I only hope normal service will be resumed immediately or I will be forced to cancel my subscription and look elsewhere for my dining guidance.’ Course, she played along and replied straight away, said she knew who I was and if she saw me lurking outside The Times offices again she was going to call the police. Brilliant bantz! And anyway, The Times offices are right by London Bridge station, I was getting a train. All three times.
There are of course numerous precedents for this sort of ‘subversion’ of the restaurant review column. Who could forget when TPB reviewed Little Chef or Jay Rayner went to an Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse? The man who literally wrote the book on this sort of post modern, ironic sodding about is Will Self. Self was the Observer restaurant critic between 1995 and 1997, post John Lanchester, pre-Jay Rayner. His columns are collected in Feeding Frenzy and are well worth reading. They are a masterclass in treating the restaurant review column with the complete and utter contempt it probably deserves. They are extremely well written and highly entertaining, the only downside being that the restaurants usually get treated with complete and utter contempt too, which probably wasn’t much fun for the chefs and owners.
He kicked off his Observer tenure with a review of the Charing Cross Road branch of the London-based high street chain Garfunkel’s. It went into liquidation in 2022 but at least outlasted Self’s restaurant critic career by some years. Self manages to incorporate the poll-tax riots, dirty protests, 2001:A Space Odyssey, mutilation by melon baller and the German philosopher Heidegger into his review. He also mentions the food, which consists of ‘tasteless yet inoffensive’ potato skins, penne pasta that was ‘a tad on the rigid side’ and a ‘quaffable’ wine that could have been ‘a slush of all the wines in the world’.
In 2009, Self spun-off the idea of reviewing ‘Real Meals’ into a column for the New Statesman. ‘Instead of commentating on where and what people would ideally like to eat I would consider where and what they actually did: the ready meals, buffet snacks and - most importantly - the fast food that millions of Britons chomp upon’, he wrote in the introduction to The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker which compiles all the reviews. It’s a must read for any restaurant critic tempted into similar territory.
One of the columns is about the EAT chain of sandwich shops (closed in 2020, despite being acquired the previous year by Pret. Wheels within wheels) which, by coincidence mentions both Pret and a Christmas sandwich, although the latter was not served in the former. Self ate the bizarre combo of chicken laksa soup, a Wensleydale and apricot chutney sandwich and a bottle of apple juice, about which he says nothing other than they cost £7.90 and that he consumed them ‘thoughtlessly’. Instead, Self imagines city ‘traders, quants and wonks’ in a private room at the Savoy drinking vintage Kristal and snorting cocaine ‘from the navels of Balinese lady-boys’ and works in references to Wallace and Gromit, Gordon Gekko, Alex Cox’s film Repo Man, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, boxer David Haye, mangel-wurzels and Domestos. Genius.
Ivers’ bill this week is £11.74. In previous weeks she spent 37.80 at The Pineapple Pub and £65 at Salam. True, she did drop a cool £330.52 at Chishuru, but it does make you wonder if the Sunday Times is still recovering from the cost of employing Marina O’Loughlin at £RumouredAmount a year.
Oh, and that Christmas sarnie was about as good as you’d expect it to be.
Best line: ‘If you’re in a restaurant at Christmas something has gone wrong.’
Worst line: N/A (although the idea of ‘Ham Hock & Festive Sprouts Macaroni Cheese’ did turn my stomach, but that’s hardly Ivers’ fault.)
Did the review make me want to book a table: N/A
Tom Parker Bowles, The Sunday Mail
Kopitiam, Oxford
Pret rears its head again in TPB’s review this week. He’s at ‘Kopitiam – a small, unassuming Malaysian café, just off North Oxford’s Banbury Road’ which is ‘named after the coffee shops found everywhere from South Thailand and Singapore through Malaysia and Indonesia and where the ‘selection of teh tariks (pulled tea) and kopi (coffee)’ is ‘seemingly endless’. I assume the inclusion of hot drinks on the menu is the reason why TPB feels it’s reasonable to compare Kopitiam to Pret. ‘The fact that you can lunch here, on serious Malaysian food, for just over £15 a head, makes me very happy indeed. So forget Pret. And come to where the real flavour is.’
Far be it from me to defend a high street chain against an independent operator, but you’d have to be a seriously greedy git to drop over £15 a head on lunch at Pret. Although the two cafes are geographically close, I’m not entirely sure Char Keaw Teau (spelling Kopitiam’s own) is the obvious substitute for a Posh Cheddar and Pickle Baguette. Nevertheless, I’m with TPB in spirit, I’d rather have ‘laksas and ho funs, hokkien mee and roti canai’ than a Humous and Chipotle wrap any day.
It all sound very delicious, although I’d be wary of the ‘deep crustacean grunt’ of Nanyang noodles which, from that description, sounds like they’re made of prawn farts. I’d probably also give a wide berth to roti canai that are ‘chewy and delicate as silk handkerchiefs’. Firstly, why has TPB been chewing on silk handkerchiefs and, secondly, wouldn’t they stick in your throat somewhat?
Of more importance for Mail on Sunday readers I imagine is that Kopitiam is ‘clean’. It’s the sort of comment you find in TripAdvisor reviews, especially for places like, well, you know, Malaysian cafes. Oddly enough, TPB didn’t refer to the cleanliness of The Ritz or Richard Corrigan’s Portrait restaurant when he reviewed them recently, but it would be odd if he did, wouldn’t it?
Best line: N/A
Worst line: ‘Flat, slippery rice noodles jostle for space with the mildly rubbery bounce (it’s a texture thing) of the fish balls.’ This is just a personal thing but I can’t bear food to be described as ‘slippery’.
Did the review make me want to book a table: It’s Malaysian food, you basically can’t go wrong.
William Sitwell, The Telegraph
Woven, Berkshire (4 stars)
I ate at Woven earlier this year. I was invited by the PR to a meal in the private dining room with some fellow food writer types. It was one of the longest nights of my life. Don’t get me wrong, the surroundings were beautiful and comfortable, the service impeccable and food was spectacular. Chef Adam Smith worked at The Ritz and there is a hugely appealing and extremely well executed classicism to his cooking. A dish of turbot, lobster, truffle and baby leeks (pictured below) is one of the best things I’ve eaten all year.
The problem was that I was sat next to one of the loudest Americans I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. I am stone deaf in my right ear due to a vestibular schwannoma (a non-cancerous brain tumour - the one thing I share in common with comedian Jim Moir) and therefore very careful about preserving the hearing I have left. It would have been less damaging for me to stick my head into the Rolls Royce Trent 7000 engine of an Airbus A330 for four hours than to have eaten at Woven. Put it this way, I suffered less ringing in my ears after a Swans gig than in the days following my visit to Ascot. All night, he was the loud America (loud American, loud American, he was the loud American).
William Sitwell chose better company for his meal; his three year old son. Throughout the review, Sitwell insists on referring to his progeny as the ‘Wee Mop’ (we had one of those when we were house training our German Shorthaired Pointer puppy) and says that his son ate some of the food but ‘was was more interested in the colouring-in the staff kindly provided’. I wonder if loud Americans can be distracted by colouring-in too?
Sitwell is also distracted, not by colouring-in (although I bet he was fighting the Wee Mop for his crayons) but by the restaurant’s ‘Storytelling on a plate’ strapline. The idea makes him apoplectic. ‘Adam, one learns, is weaving his personal history around the ingredients on the plate. Really? I mean, does he have to? Must we know? Are we in for an afternoon groaning with explanations of every snack, every dish, every morsel dispensed from the kitchen?’
We never find out. All Sitwell says is, ‘I decided we’d completely ignore the Woven guff and just have lunch’ and that’s the end of that. Quite how that played out in the restaurant, I have no clue. Did the waiters attempt to relate Smith’s personal history and Sitwell just stuck his fingers in his ears and shouted ‘blah, blah, blah, can’t hear you’ until they stopped? Did Smith chase Sitwell around the dining room, brandishing his journal yelling, ‘I wanna tell you a story’ like some modern day culinary Max Bygraves? We’ll never know. To my best recollection, storytelling wasn’t part of the Woven experience when I went, but even if it had been I wouldn’t have been able to hear a fucking word of it over the relentless roar of my chum from over the pond, so I’m not a reliable source on the matter.
What we do know for sure is that Sitwell enjoyed the bread. ‘Then there was the bread. Oh the bread, the bread. Sourdough, mini loaves, crispbreads and croissant.’ The opening salvo of snacks also got the unequivocal thumbs up, ‘Smith showed an almost visionary touch with dazzling versions of muntjac, jellied eels and Coronation chicken’. It’s enough for Sitwell to forgive the storytelling schtick, ‘In a room of Japanese minimalism and sleek spot lighting, Smith surpasses his prose and through his food has woven a fine fairy tale.’ And they all lived happily ever after, although one of them was a bit more deaf than in the beginning.
Best line: N/A
Worst line: ‘I worked through a perfect mini pie of grouse, with a dark gravy of outrageously fun largesse containing a reduction of foie gras, and a fabulous rectangle of turbot, topped with lobster and caviar’. So the gravy had foie gras, turbot, lobster and caviar in it? Might have been safer to go with two sentences there, for the sake of clarity.
Did the review make me want to book a table: I’ve got some ear defenders on order for my next visit, just in case.
Jimi Famurewa, Evening Standard
Akara, London (4 stars)
Who can we spy, there among the ‘chic, exposed-brick gloom of Akara — a new West African spot in the redeveloped outer rim of Borough Market’. Why, it’s none other than Evening Standard restaurant critic Jimi Famurewa who’s here to tell us all about stylish restaurateur Aji Akokomi’s latest venture following on from the success of his debut, Akoko. (NB That opening paragraph should be read in the gently ironic, sing-song voice of art critic Matthew Collings. If you don’t know who that is, try this on for size. It’s normal from here on in, so you can just read it in your own voice, or what you imagine mine to be like. Do you even hear a voice in your head when you read?).
How do you always know when someone’s written a ‘research-intensive book about African diaspora culture’? Because they tell you. In order to insert this piece of information into his review (the book is called Settlers and it looks very interesting. And that’s an Amazon affiliate link by the way), Famurewa first confesses to ‘an unforgivable bit of menu-splaining’ when he tells the waitress that the cool thing about the restaurant’s namesake black-eyed bean fritters is ‘that the same dish from Nigeria is basically reinvented in the Caribbean as accra, the saltfish fritter. And then, in Brazil, as acaraje’. God, imagine his embarrassment at his encyclopaedic gastronomic knowledge! If he’s not careful he’s going to get another book commissioned and then he’ll be sorry.
But just as Famurewa is flexing his food writing muscles, the review appears to be prematurely curtailed because ‘this is food with a magnificence and flavour dynamism that completely speaks for itself’. Right, that’s it everyone, pack up your things, time to move on to the next review…but no! False alarm. The food speaks for itself, apart from the other 447 words that Famurewa has to say about it. As you were.
The aforementioned ‘magnificence’ doesn’t extend to the braised ox cheek that fills one of the two ‘puffy fists of fryer-bronzed dough’ that are the akara that Famurewa was showing off about at the start of his review. The meat comes as ‘thin, leathern strips’ but apparently that doesn’t matter as ‘the thing about Akokomi’s akara is that each is more about the vehicle than the cargo’ which is letting it off very lightly. Famurewa also found an ‘ex-dairy sirloin suya’ lacking in the dish’s ‘trademark, barrelling intensity and the succulence afforded by a fattier cut (bavette, say)’. Lucky he didn’t let the food completely speak for itself or it might have misled us about its actual magnificence and flavour dynamism.
However ‘fluffed, coconut-infused Efik rice (a kind of moreish, tomato-less, jollof from Nigeria’s Cross River region)’ and ‘griddled poussin, painted in a bright, fiery, sunburst of a Senegalese hot sauce’ hit the mark, as did ‘an alluring pick and mix of plantain and tender chunks of octopus’ which had ‘bold, palate-igniting savour’ to spare.
Depsite being ‘imperfect’, Famuerwa urges us to ‘savour every unforgettable morsel’ at Akara. I imagine he’ll be savouring those ‘thin, leathern strips’ of ox cheek for some time to come.
Best line: ‘Akara is an imperfect but swaggering step forward for contemporary West African dining; a testament to deep- pocketed meticulousness, dogged artistry and a culturally meaningful urge to do something different.’
Worst line: ‘To bite into the heady, texturally springy warmth of (an akara), rich with spice and a faint, elusive sourness, is to be thrilled and sated in a manner more readily associated with rucked bedsheets and the lighting of a cigarette.’ Eww.
Did the review make me want to book a table: To be serious for a moment, I found it difficult to reconcile the four stars awarded by Famuerwa to some of the details of his review. In addition to the criticisms of some of the dishes, he says that ‘service, though attentive, can feel a little brisk and impersonal’ all of which makes Akara sound closer to three stars. I’m not sure I want to pay £80 a head for what, reading between the hyperbolic lines, might not be a stellar experience.
Jay Rayner, The Observer
Merchants 1688, Lancaster
If I owned Merchants 1688, I’d be keeping a very, very close eye on my chef Will Graham after this review. ‘You’re happy here aren’t you Will? We’re all one big family really aren’t we, and families stick together, don’t they? Here, have some money. Have some more money. I’m just popping out to the cashpoint, don’t go anywhere. You’re not going anywhere, are you Will?’
Rayner has literally nothing bad to say about Graham’s food, of which he says, ‘it’s cheek-slapping, belly-pleasing stuff from first to last, which cheerfully demonstrates lashings of professional technique while never losing sight of the imperative of appetite’. It doesn’t get better than that from Mr Rayner. Except it does. He was served ‘one of the best presentations of venison I’ve eaten in many years. Three generous slabs of haunch…crisply seared and an arterial red at the heart…a grainy venison “sausage” made with all the more diverse and offaly bits of the animals’ and ‘a fabulous meaty jus, sweetened with elderberry and given the lightest lift by the addition of a certain smokiness.’
Rayner is far less enthusiastic about many other aspects of Merchants 1688, ‘a trio of ancient, brick-lined arched cellars’, which he describes as ‘a lovely painting in a terrible frame’. It’s ‘a space that feels like the kind of pub where the chips arrive in a mini chip-pan fryer and the gravy starts as a powder’ and ‘there’s a musty smell in the arches’. There’s an ‘eye-achingly awful website’ and most, ominously, Rayner notes that ‘There’s just a strong sense that the management have no idea how good a restaurant they could have.’
Landlord Tim Tomlinson also owns the nearby White Cross pub which also has a very decent sounding menu, but in this interview his main focus appears to be real ale. Graham has won awards locally but hasn’t been on the radar of the guides or other national critics. That will almost certainly change after this review. Watch this space.
Best line: ‘Among the starters for £9 is a generous puck of long-braised beef, in a friable tempura batter overcoat, which quickly breaks down into its luscious strands’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I might just bide my time and see if and when Will Graham pops up elsewhere.
Giles Coren, The Times
DN1 Delicatessen & Dining, Doncaster (Cooking 7.5/10)
Rayner in Lancaster, Coren in Doncaster. And people will still moan that restaurant critics never leave London. I mean, do you want to go to Lancaster or Doncaster? Well, shut up then. Coren apparently risked life and limb, crossing a multi-lane highway and having to ‘dodge across four lanes to the other side’ to get to his lunch. I’ve just looked on Google Maps and as far as I can see there’s a pedestrian crossing he could have used. Never mind, he made it in one piece.
The location, a ‘glass office building’ beneath a Premier Inn ‘by the big car park’ is the most unusual for a fine dining establishment since Tom Sellers opened Restaurant Story in a public toilet on a traffic island in Bermondsey in 2013 (Sellers is set to relaunch Story early next year after a £2.5million makeover. The building I mean, not the chef. William Sitwell better brace himself; Tom Sellers invented storytelling on a plate, although I wasn’t overly impressed when I went in the restaurant’s early days. You can read my review here).
Coren is confronted by the welcome sight of ‘a very chi-chi-looking deli’ and ‘a lovely bright little room with soft, comfy seating for 12-14 covers’. Apart from a chicken liver parfait macaron snack which, for Coren, was ‘sugary at a time in the meal when I’m just looking for salt and savoury to go with my drink’ and a ‘dessert of chocolate mushroom cake with ice cream and ginger that really did taste, very strongly, of mushrooms’ that was ‘without question, one of the most unusual desserts I’ve ever eaten’ (I’m going to guess that it was as horrible as it sounds but Coren is not to be drawn), everything otherwise is judged to be spot on.
Coren ends effusively by saying, ‘DN1 is a wonderful endeavour, a brilliant delicatessen, a hub of local enthusiasm and generosity, a showcase for genuinely remarkable local cooking talent and the very epitome of straightforward British hospitality. Surely, before long, they will hear the screech of tyres…’.
In case you’re thinking, well, that doesn’t sound much like the Coren we know and love, he’s actually paying serious attention to the food and surroundings, you’ll be pleased to know he spends the first 400 words or so talking about how easy it is to rile him. ‘Take a deep breath and count to ten? Not me, mate, wrong geezer. Rise to the bait? Pal, if I see a worm on a hook I’m flipping ’aving it. Thin-skinned? Bro, if you filled me with water and screwed me up tight for a trek across the desert I’d have bled out into your rucksack before you were bored with the sight of sand.’ There’s the Coren we know and love.
Best lines: ‘But the best things I eat are the next two dishes: a beautifully caramelised, fresh, fat little scallop on a sticky, delicious red Thai curry jus with tomato — savoury, tight, what food ponces used to call “accurate” — and then a fantastic little piece of halibut, artfully bronzed, surrounded with a shimmering parsley sauce and helped along with a generous blob of smoked avruga caviar and a couple of smoked mussels.’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I’d hate to deprive a local of a seat.
What did we learn this week
Fine dining’s not dead? West Africa is the new Peru/Northern Thai/cooking over flames/whatever the hell that last London dining trend was? Malaysian food still hasn’t made the major impact on the British palate that it should have done years ago (where’s the Malaysian equivalent of Giggling Squid for example, not that you’d ever want such a thing)? Pret’s a bit shit? Landlords don’t necessarily make great restaurateurs?
It’s a bit tricky drawing any conclusions from such a disparate bunch of dining experiences other than to say there’s a disparate and wide range of eating out options in the UK these days. But you could probably have said that 10 or even 20 years ago to some extent. I’m just glad there’s still some restaurants left open to review.
For old dine’s sake
1 year ago Jay Rayner reviewed Pascor in London which is still trading. ‘Knocking out Middle Eastern-accented dishes full of vigour and intent…Pascor is the Latin for to feast or devour…it certainly describes what we did.’
5 years ago Fay Maschler reviewed Hicce in London which will close this month but may reappear in another location at some point in the future. ‘gluten-free bread, fermented vegetables in jars, Japanese condiments, wood-fired heat source, a version of skewers entitled #hiccehotsticks, cheeses you are unlikely to have heard of, an exhortation to share and…celeriac as a hero ingredient’ (3 stars)
10 years ago Giles Coren review Zest at JW3 in London, now closed. ‘Zest, the big breezy café of JW3, the new Jewish cultural and community centre on Finchley Road. We ate gleaming Sephardic starters of sweet, soft, marinated aubergine with crushed walnuts and coriander; crunchy fried cauliflower with zingy tahini and rich, treacly pomegranate molasses; crushed butter beans beaten smooth with sweet potato and green chilli oil; and labneh, that Arab cream cheese, infused with saffron and served with fat olives and roasted tomatoes.’ (Cooking 9/10)