Smashed #53 Review of the Restaurant Reviews

The UK restaurant scene digested

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The Reviews

I hope that this newsletter doesn’t read like it’s written by a career contrarian. It’s not my intention to disagree with everyone and everything just for the hell of it, although sometimes I do take that position for comic effect. But yet again I find myself in slightly bewildered opposition, this time to an article by Hannah Twiggs in the Independent titled ‘Is it time to call last orders on the gastropub?’. I’m not sure what prompted its publication. The most recent Top 50 Gastropub list was published over two months ago, and I’m at a loss to find any other recent notable gastropub-related news stories that might have had readers pondering whether there should be a ban on them.

The two main arguments for calling time on gastropubs debated in the piece will be extremely familiar to anyone who has even a passing interest in the subject: is it a pub or is it actually a restaurant, and gastropubs have become too pricey. The article isn’t conclusive on either point. It’s a pub if you can still get a pint, and everything is more expensive these days seems to be the sum total of the argument.

You might have thought the extraordinary runaway success of The Devonshire, which sells the GDP of a small Eastern European country in Guinness every week and offers a £29 set menu, would have killed the gastropub debate (if there is still such a thing) stone dead once and for all. But The Devonshire, which might well have supplanted The Hand and Flowers as the most famous gastropub in the country, if not the world (Phil Rosenthal of Netflix hit series Somebody Feed Phil recently had lunch there with Voldemort @eatingwithtod. There is evidence of this on YouTube, but I refuse to sully this newsletter by including a link) doesn’t get a mention in the Independent’s story. Instead, there’s good old Andrew Pern of The Star Inn, two of Tom Kerridge’s head chefs - Tom de Keyser (Hand and Flowers) and Sarah Hayward (The Coach) - and Dave Wall, owner of The Unruly Pig, currently the number one gastropub in the country.

All are, of course, experts in their field and all worthy of being quoted, but I missed the voices of some of the numerous less well-established operators that could have helped illustrate that no one is about to call time on gastropubs. People like Peter Creed and Tom Noest of Publican Pubs in the Cotswolds, James Gummer, Phil Winser and Olivier van Themsche of The Pelican and The Hero in London and The Bull in Charlbury, or Angus Davies of The Swan Inn, Fittleworth.

Twiggs rounded off her piece by saying that ‘the best gastropubs are doing something quite remarkable: being both a local and a destination. . . .The point isn’t whether the gastropub has peaked. The point is that they’ve kept the pub alive – pint, pie and all.’ It’s difficult to disagree with the sentiment, but also not easy to understand why the article began by posing the question, ‘have we reached peak gastropub?’ in the first place. The evidence that it is not the case is readily at hand. For example, a third of the national restaurant critics’ reviews were of gastropubs. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Chitra Ramaswamy, The Times Alba magazine (Scotland only)
The Clarence, Glasgow

Are gastropubs pricey, as Twiggs’ claims? She wrote that, ‘the backlash to pub pricing has been especially vocal in recent years, with pints closer to £7, Sunday roasts north of £30 and fish and chips approaching fine dining territory’. However, Ramaswamy found The Clarence, owned by the team behind the Michelin-starred Cail Bruich, to be ‘all about accessibility and value: oyster happy hour, a lunch and early evening menu for £35’.

Ramaswamy reviewed the three-course Sunday lunch for £37 and ate a large and ‘glorious’ portion of handmade linguine, Arbroath smokie and cacio e pepe, then ‘chateaubriand, a decadent French cut of tenderloin cooked over fire and sliced thin to showcase its soft, pink, buttery self’ with trimmings galore, and finally shared a tarte tatin for a £5 supplement, the greedy mare.

I would imagine that the denizens of the ‘old-moneyed’ Glasgow suburb of Hyndland where the pub is located, can hardly believe their luck. If you don’t fancy a roast, you can have sole Grenobloise ‘cooked whole on the bone and doused in nutty brown butter, capers, parsley and loads of lemon’. That’s a whole sole, not a poxy bit of coley, brined so it tastes of something. For £37 as part of a three-course menu. I think I’m moving to Glasgow.

Best line: ‘The Clarence is the sort of hospitable, happiness-inducing restaurant that makes you want to say yes to everything. And you will be glad you did.’ Restaurant?! (It bills itself as ‘Dining Room/Pub’. That’s good enough for me.)
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: Book a table? I’m moving house.

Tom Parker Bowles, Mail on Sunday
The Prince Arthur, London (4 stars)

The gastropub is the Christine Sizemore of the hospitality world; a split personality, one moment comforting you with roasties, the next brandishing Txanguro Crab with Turbot Dripping Potatoes. It’s only Basque country food in a Belgravia pub - lawks, what will they think of next? We’ve been here before, of course, once with Grace Dent (Smashed #51) and once with Charlotte Ivers (Smashed #50), so let’s not linger too long with Tom.

The Prince Arthur is an ‘old-fashioned’ pub because there’s ‘football playing on a television in the corner and a decent selection of proper ales’. Let’s ignore the selection of ‘In-house’ caviar that costs up to £280 for 125g, shall we? Just pretend they’re scampi fries or something. I love a good old boozer, me.

Just like all those old-fashioned pubs you remember, there’s that old classic ‘sea urchin with confit egg yolk’ which TPB says could be his dish of the year so far. Well, is it? I mean, you’ve eaten all the dishes so far that you’re going to eat, just make a bloody decision. It is, declares TPB ‘a golden, lavishly lascivious mouthful that teeters between the voluptuous and the utterly debased. Presented in the cleaned-out carapace, those fierce black spines offer striking contrast to the smooth, silken symphony within.’ You’re not in Soho now TPB. Pull yourself together man.

Best line: ‘flavours move from the soft and subtle to the strutting and swaggeringly macho’
Worst line: ‘Lobster rice mixes sweet, expertly cooked flesh with a wonderfully intense tomato and shellfish stock-swelled rice’.
shellfish stock-swelled
swellfish shock-stelled
stellswish-sock-selled
sellfist-stuck-shelled
(oh, you get the idea…)
Did the review make me want to book a table:

Jay Rayner, The Financial Times
The Harcourt Pub, Manchester

Jay Rayner has travelled to Manchester to prove that gastropubs don’t have to mean Sunday roast. You can get a pint of Cloud­wa­ter Hazy IPA at The Harcourt, but you can also get prawn toast with salted egg yolk. And ‘typhoon shel­ter-style deep-fried chicken wings, under drifts of deep-fried crushed gar­lic and chilli, breezy with five spice’. There’s sea­food and curry chicken rice grat­in, char siu pork and fried egg with rice (a dish made famous by the 1990s film The God of Cookery, according to Fuchsia Dunlop, as quoted by Rayer) and Hawthorn fruit sweet and sour chicken.

Is The Harcourt run by a 20-something white bloke who spent his gap year in Hong Kong? Of course not. Every 20-something white bloke spends their gap year in Thailand, where the drugs and sex are cheaper and easier to get hold of. Probably. I literally have no idea.

The Harcourt is actually run by Priscilla and Brian Hung who moved to Altrin­cham from Hong Kong in 2001. The pub, Rayner tells us, ‘takes its name from Hong Kong’s Har­court Road which, between Septem­ber and Decem­ber 2014, was occu­pied by the pro-demo­cracy Umbrella Revolu­tion’. So it’s dead authentic, which is important to British restaurant critics, although Rayner passes no judgment on the matter in The Harcourt’s case. Maybe he’s never been to Hong Kong. I haven’t.

I think Rayner liked it, it’s hard to tell. The piece reads more like a report on the Hong Kong diaspora in the UK than a restaurant review, and of course, there’s no score - that would be so gauche, darling. Rayner describes the food, but then often stops short of giving an opinion about it. For example, he says that there’s ‘braised beef with extra wobbly ten­don for those with a taste for the gelat­in­ous. Although it sits on a mound of steam­ing white rice, there’s something curi­ously site-spe­cific about the dish. It recalls those tra­di­tional Brit­ish braises, such as scouse’ but then fails to say whether that’s a good or bad thing, as though he’s worried about offending someone. I mean, you can take an educated guess I suppose, but that’s really not our job.

The Harcourt says that it’s a ‘Hong Kong Inspired Gastropub’ but looks suspiciously like a local boozer. What is a gastropub anyway? Maybe someone should call time on them.

Best line: ‘this food. It’s not refined. It’s not del­ic­ate. It’s solid and com­fort­ing; cook­ing that makes a damp and dif­fi­cult day so much easier. It’s pre­ci­sion engin­eered to go with a pint, or after you’ve acci­dent­ally downed six of them and for­got­ten to eat’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I’m really not sure.

And that’s your lot this week, other than to say that last week I predicted that Katy Wix would be reviewing Govanni’s in Cardiff because ‘I bet she knows the owner or manager of Giovanni’s, or she celebrated her 18th birthday or her parents’ wedding anniversary there. It’s been open for 40 years. It’s bound to be something like that.’ Well, it turns out:

‘It’s where, in a training bra and polyester dress, I’d come to celebrate family birthdays and exam results. It’s where men with cigarette breath would ask me to do a twirl, as my mum looked on proudly. It’s where I first saw my dad drunk – we had come to collect him after a work do, because he was too pissed to get home. At the door, as I watched Mum help him stand up, I felt like Lisa in The Simpsons looking into Moe’s.’

Katy Wix, The Observer
Giovanni’s, Cardiff

Best line: ‘The same smell of wine and hot tomatoes. The same sound of dressed-up families ignoring each other. And the same laminated menus. I last held this menu with small fingers and now, with older hands, I think of my younger self and all the things that hadn’t happened to me yet, that I didn’t know were coming. Back then, I thought my parents would live forever. I’d do anything to have one more dinner together, ignoring them.’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: No, no, no, no, no.