Smashed #54 Review of the restaurant reviews - Dorian and on and on

The UK restaurant scene digested

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Miquita Oliver, The Observer
Dorian, London

Tom Parker Bowles, Mail on Sunday
Dorian, London (4 stars)

Over-hyped Notting Hill restaurant Dorian, similar to The Caledonian Road Restaurant That Must Not Be Named, doesn’t need any more publicity. Only last week, Charlotte Ivers reviewed the three-year-old restaurant in the Sunday Times. She awarded it three out of five stars and summed it up as a New York wannabe restaurant where ‘tables are too close together. The wine list requires a mortgage. It’s a nightmare to get a booking and when you do have one, you worry that everyone else is only here because they want to tell people they got a booking.’ On the plus side, you can eat bistro food ‘done impeccably well’ by 28-year-old wunderkind chef Max Coen, who has worked at multi-Michelin-starred restaurants Frantzen in Stockholm and Ikoyi in London.

Ivers says that Dorian is ‘extremely cool’ because Lily Allen, Gary Lineker and the Beckhams frequent it. I’m not exactly Mr Hip, but that lineup sounds about as cool as a defrosting freezer. Nevertheless, London’s not-so-great and not-so-good are lining up to scoff one-mouthful-sized crab-topped rosti at £9.50 a pop and langoustine tostada for £21 to a soundtrack of ‘thumping drum’n’bass’. Ivers’ near £400 bill for four included a £160 ribeye. Dorain it seems should be of no interest to anyone apart from the monied Notting Hill locals, despite it’s Michelin star and fancypants young chef.

But it continues to attract attention, partly because owner Chris D’Sylva has a knack for generating column inches. D’Sylva, who is also the owner of the Notting Hill Fish Shop, attracted attention in June 2024 when he announced a £100 corkage fee with a maximum of one 750ml bottle per booking allowed and the stipulation that a similarly priced bottle be purchased from Dorian’s wine list. According to BBC News online, the average fee corkage fee currently charged in the UK is ‘about £12 to £15 per bottle of still wine opened on site’.

In an Instagram post announcing the move, he claimed the charge was necessary because he employs 54 ‘professionals’ to run Dorian and ‘Enough guests try to game the system by rolling up with multiple bottles, to extract the lowest cost experience for themselves’. Maybe if he didn’t charge £9.50 per bite of rosti, D’Dylva’s customers wouldn’t feel the need to roll up and game the system with their multiple bottles of Yellow Tail, or whatever the cool Notting Hill kids are drinking these days.

More recently, D’Sylva titillated the Daily Mail with his ‘Cockage Fee’. Or at least he would have done if he’d had the nous to call it that (to be fair to him, the phrase has only just occurred to me and the story is nearly two months old). The piece was actually about D’Sylva’s ‘sophisticated behind-the-scenes system to record guests' behaviour and rank them accordingly’. In something reminiscent of a bad Black Mirror episode, D’Sylva marks down customers for any behaviours he disapproves of, such as asking to move tables. Why you would ask to move tables in Dorian’s closely-packed dining room is beyond me, they all look as shit as each other. D’Sylva also takes great delight in chucking out his customers:

'I've bounced loads of customers before they've even eaten,' says D'Sylva with some relish. He adds: 'I've just recognised they're problematic, asked them to leave, and they're in shock, bewildered, their jaws drop. It's anyone who's rude to us. We don't do entitled. We don't do the Mayfair crowd.’

This is, of course, as hackneyed a stunt as it’s possible to pull in a restaurant. Compared to the late, great chef and restaurateur Nico Ladenis, D’Sylva is an amateur. Ladenis (a chapter of his 1987 debut cookbook is titled ‘The Customer is Not Always Right’) was notorious for his combative approach to customer service, refusing to provide salt and pepper, throwing out customers or tearing up their money in front of their eyes. ‘Many times when contemplating an empty restaurant I would turn people away who had come in without a booking,’ he wrote. How’s that for fuck you attitude. Business sense, not so much, but Ladenis was punk rock down to his almond tuiles.

Marco Pierre White, who briefly worked for Ladenis, followed suit with customers who had in some way offended him with their behaviour, and would remove everything from the diner’s table, including the tablecloth, in order to humiliate them before telling them to leave and refusing their money. In the ITV series Marco, shown in the late 80s, he said, ‘I’m cooking for people who are hopefully appreciative and ninety to ninety-five percent are very appreciative. The other five percent are incredibly rude, obnoxious, they click their fingers and I don’t want those people in my house.’

Gordon Ramsay, who has copied everything Marco has ever done, famously threw out AA Gill and his dining companion Joan Collins after Gill turned up at Ramsay’s Royal Hospital Road restaurant following the publication of a negative review of one of Ramsay’s other establishments. The incident ended up as an item on the BBC’s Watchdog consumer affairs programme. ‘I just thought, how quaintly 80’s,’ said Gill when interviewed for the Channel 4 Boiling Point documentary series about Ramsay. ‘Celebrity restaurateurs, chefs throwing people out for their restaurants seems such an incredibly old fashioned thing. It goes with spun sugar baskets and cappuccino soup.’

However time-worn and obvious D’Sylva’s unappetisingly elitist stance may be, it has worked. He has tapped into that most human of foibles - wanting what you can’t have - and in the process ensured no one can get a dinner table at a reasonable time until, well who knows when. At the time of writing, there were spots available on 21 June, but only at the counter and only at 17.30pm, 19.30pm and 21.30pm. Unless of you’re Lilly Allen, Gary Lineker, the Beckhams or someone equally as cool like Johnny Borrell and then I’m sure you can eat when you like, sit where you like and drink what you please.

None of this has troubled Miquita Oliver, who dined at Dorian with her mother Andi Oliver and who writes effusively about ‘Max Coen and his exquisite team’ who ‘present a menu of truly refined decadence’. I don’t really want to get into Oliver’s review. It’s almost certainly the first restaurant review she’s ever written. Given that she’s worked as a TV presenter since the age of 16, it’s quite possibly the first thing she’s written since leaving school. It certainly reads like it. Next week Bella Freud goes to Dove. The only question is, why?

Parker Bowles similarly makes no mention of D’Sylva’s attention seeking ways but does say that, ‘I’ve known Chris D’Sylva, the ebullient Aussie owner, for years, and I like him very much’ which means we can handily dismiss everything TPB has to say about the place. Only joking. TPB turned up two and half years late to Dorian because the first time he went was late at night and he was pisssed so couldn’t review it. However, he was recently bought at a charity auction and ‘Dorian seemed just right’. He doesn’t explain what he was bought for (is this the first thing TPB has written since leaving school too?) but I think it’s safe to assume that TPB was auctioned off as a dining companion for one lucky bidder (Anne-Maree O’Brien of The Scene YouTube foodie channel) and Dorian was a convienient spot run by a mate that was safe territory in which to dine with a stranger.

Is that a good enough reason to review a restaurant? Is it ethical to make money off the back of being auctioned for charity? Isn’t it having your rosti, ‘a crisp, gilded, pleasingly chewy square topped with a snowy pile of pristine white crab’ and your ‘grilled skewer of rabbit and squid: exalted surf and turf, where sweet bunny meets soft squid’ and eating it? Whatever, an old mate of TPB’s got a four star review and TPB has no doubt recieved a reciprocal ranking from D’Sylva. His name is now up there with the Linekers of this world. This is the modern world. How do you rate it?

Best line (Oliver): ‘Sharing food with each other is love without words and eating together creates space for conversation’
Worst line (Oliver): I’m not going there.
Best line (TPB): If only.
Worst line (TPB): ‘Head chef Max Coen is one hell of a talent, ably supported by one hell of a brigade’. Does anyone actually say the phrase ‘one hell of a’ any more? It’s like a line from a bad 1940s war movie.
Did the review make me want to book a table: I’m just perfecting my Gary Lineker disguise, then I’m going to roll up to Dorian with my good friends Messrs E and J Gallo and I’m gonna extract me some of that sweet, sweet low cost experience.

Other reviews this week (quick and dirty)

It’s a reasonably uninspiring week of reviews, or maybe I’m just feeling uninspired so I’m just doing a quick and dirty round up of all the others this time out. That Dorian piece took me for fucking ever to write so you’ve had your money’s worth, especially if you read it for free, which you most likely did, so why not buy me a coffee?

Alternatively, it would be great if you would like and subscribe to Smashed, especially a paid subscription. You can do so my clicking the button below. It will make my life worth living as I invest all of my self-worth into this stupid newsletter. Thanks in advance. Love you, yeah, see you, yeah, catch you later, bye, bye-bye, bye. Bye. (Please keep reading though, all the rest is free this week too.)

Charlotte Ivers, The Sunday Times
Pignut, Helmsley, North Yorkshire (5 stars)

Ivers is in the North Yorkshire town of Helmsely. She’s knocking on the door of a tiny converted terrace house. Because that’s where northerners live, in tiny terraced houses. What does she find there? A handful of tables and artfully minimal Scandi decor. Oasis is playing on the radiogram, because that’s what northerners play on their radiograms. That and The Clitheroe Kid. Yes, they still have radiograms up north. They were shipped up there once Londoners had no further use for them. Now it’s wall to wall Wonderwall on the radiogram. If I had a word count to hit, the repetition of the word ‘radiogram’ would make sense. I don’t. What am I playing at?

The Yorkshire food is ‘righteous yet excellent’. I wish I could say the same about Oasis. There is magical beetroot chutney, because all the magical beetroot chutney in the world comes from Yorkshire. They summon it during a midnight ceremony in the woods when Oasis plays out into the darkness. Ivers didn’t summon chef Andrew Pern during a midnight ceremony, she called him on the phone. He whispered the secrets of Yorkshire cuisine to her. The owners of Pignut wondered what the fuck Andrew Pern from off of The Star Inn at Harome was doing in their review, as did everyone else reading it. But they’d got five stars, so they just cranked up the radiogram and Liam sang ‘and after all’ into the death-black northern night.

Best line: ‘Texas is the Yorkshire of America. Both are home to vast, heart-soaring swathes of countryside and farmland. Both have a belligerent streak of cultural independence, a clear sense of who they are and an obsessive insistence on telling you about it’
Worst line: ‘It all tastes as if it was dug up moments ago’. Dug up moments ago, like a corpse by Burke and Hare.
Did the review make me want to book a table: Definately Maybe.

Chitra Ramaswamy, The Times Alba magazine (Scotland only)
Stockbridge Eating House, Edinburgh

Yet another reminder that the good people of Scotland get a ‘normal’ restaurant review service i.e. somewhere they might actually be interested in going to written about in a way that allows them to decide if they want to part with their money or not. You can make your own joke here now, but if you do, just remember you’re being a massive rascist. Finished? OK, now read on.

Stockbridge in Edinburgh is the new Shoreditch and suddenly has loads of good places to eat, including the not very subtly named Stockbridge Eating House. It’s run by the former owner of the now shuttered Gardener’s Cottage and Lookout restaurants and sounds scarily similar to The Caledonian Road Restaurant That Must Not Be Named. It’s an ‘honest French-adjacent bistro with just three communal tables (dressed in gingham tablecloths, naturellement), a small space at the front for walk-ins, a bijou selection of wines on a vintage dresser and a minimalist menu of hearty fare’.

Happily, there’s no Yellow Bittern-style fucking about here, apart from a handwritten receipt, but then I love a handwritten receipt. Ramaswamy eschews the £14.95 (!) weekday set lunch menu for some a la carte action in the form of monkfish tail for two, with fennel and wild garlic butter and ‘potatoes boiled whole, buttercup yellow and fudgey, and fennel braised to coax out its softest self’. Heaven sent.

Best line: ‘This is bold, generous European cuisine from the previous century, and the one before — beignets and smoked eel remoulade, monkfish cheeks and bone marrow on toast, roast hare saddle and a whole John Dory bathed in brown butter’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I want a standing reservation.

Giles Coren, The Times
Prince Arthur (9/10) and The Lavery (9/10), both in London

Coren has not followd Dent (Smashed #51) and Ivers (Smashed #50) to Basque-influenced gastropub Prince Arthur but instead has gone his own way to Hackney and a different Prince Arthur altogether (“A different Prince Arthur”). The reason Coren is in Hackney is so tiresome and convoluted that I won’t bore you with it - basically he’s mates with the chef’s dad, I think. I don’t know really, I fell asleep half way through the paragraph where he was explaining it all then woke in fright, hardly remembering who I was or where I’d been for the last two weeks.

He ate a ‘a procession of bold little platefuls on gorgeous granny crockery’ purchased from the gorgeous granny shop, probably. There was lots of things on top of things that need not concern us here, some bavette and one interesting sounding thing - a rhubarb “Bombe Alaska” of which Coren says nothing other than it was ‘just the thing’. Maybe you had to be there with Coren and the chef’s dad. No, the chef’s mate’s dad. Or something.

And then all of a sudden Coren is in South Ken in at The Lavery, ‘a ducal reception room in Narnia, with high windows and billowy curtains and ornate ceiling roses and mouldings’. There was another person Coren knew there, but it was no one’s dad this time. I’m not saying he isn’t a dad, just not one of consequence in Coren’s world. It was the restaurant manager. He used to work somewhere else, in another time, another place, as did the chef. Who is the chef’s dad? We don’t know. We may never know.

The gnocchi costs £20. It was ‘perfect’. Fuck me, I’d settle for ‘good’ at half the price. However, ‘a rabbit leg stuffed with Tuscan sausage and rolled in pancetta, sliced elegantly onto a bed of lentils and double-podded new broad beans, with plenty of sweet, rich cooking juices’ sounds worth £34. How does that work?

Best line: ‘It’s the sort of place I often have dreams about living in, with my lover Grace Kelly and my white Ferrari cloud carriage drawn by unicorns… And then wake up in my hovel in Kentish Town with my angry wife’
Worst line: ‘Light and dark. Dark and light. I couldn’t separate them. I need both in my life.’ That could equally be the best line. I just don’t care at this point.
Did the review make me want to book a table: No, despite Coren channelling his Mr Enthusiasm persona. Why am I so cynical? What made me this way? Ask the chef’s dad, he might know.

Grace Dent, The Guardian
Harry’s, Camber Sands

Harry’s will be mainly of interest to Londoners because the chef is Matthew Harris, brother of Henry ‘Bouchon Racine’ Harris. He should be famous in his own right as former head chef of Bibendum. He took the reins soon after Simon Hopkinson retired from the kitchen in 1995, and the in 2015 he left. Since them he’s, erm, no idea actually, but he’s fetched up in Camber Sands now, so that’s the important thing.

I’ve stayed at The Gallivant Hotel a couple of times, once about a decade ago when Matthew and Henry did a guest night there together. I met the owner Harry Cragoe who seemed like a lovely chap and who was obviously very interested in food and drink. It’s a lovely little hotel too. Unsurprisingly, Dent love the place describing it as ‘a bit like a 1950s beach shack given a Soho Farmhouse makeover’. She ate ‘a startlingly good dinner’. Everyone’s a winner baby, that’s the truth.

Best line: ‘a menu that focuses on the heartier, homelier side of classic French cookery. Terrine de campagne with pistachios, oysters with sauce mignonette, braised rabbit in riesling and St Émilion au chocolat for pudding, that kind of thing’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: And a room.

Jay Rayner, The Financial Times
Tony Page, London

Rayner has gone to the only ‘fancy kosher restaurant in central London’. How am I supposed to be funny about that without getting cancelled? Maybe next week.

Best line: ‘Out­side tonight it’s cold and dark, but in here there’s good chicken soup, great lemon meringue pie and, more import­antly, each other. That’s enough’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: A goy like me?

David Ellis, Evening Standard
Ikeda, London (4 stars)

I did consider making an Ikea joke here but I think even I’m above that. How interested are you in a Japanese restaurant opened in Mayfair the 70s and that attracts A-list celebs? It’s an immediate turn off for me. I suspect all places that boast about attracting A-list celebs of bullshitting. If you were an A-list celeb and you knew your name was going to be used on a restaurant’s website if you ate there, would you go? Would you fuck. Apparently, Ikeda has pulled in the likes of Mick Jagger, Cher, George Clooney, Steven Spielberg and Wes Anderson and diplays hand written notes from them by the toilets. Ellis doesn’t say if they were dated. I bet they are all at least 20 years old. I don’t care. The food is exactly what you’d expect it to be and costs exactly what you’d expect it to cost.

Cut. That’s a wrap.

Best line: ‘miso soup felt like a tonic to all of life’s ills, its goodness soaking into my blood but also travelling into my past and scribbling out the bad bits’
Worst line: ‘I first went with Fallow restaurateur James Robson’. Can’t wait for Ellis’s review of Robson’s next restaurant.
Did the review make me want to book a table: Me and Cher have other plans we’re not telling you about in case you put it on your bloody website.