Smashed #59: Review of the restaurant reviews

The UK restaurant scene digested

The Reviews

Before we get into it this week, I want to mention that I won’t be including the Observer until they jettison their roster of celeb critics. I don’t enjoy the reviews; they are usually about restaurants that have already been covered or are just the celeb’s favourite local and of no interest to anyone but them. They don’t add to the sum of UK restaurant knowledge and so are a waste of time in the context of this newsletter. I assume the paper is on the hunt for a permanent replacement for Jay Rayner, but maybe the celebs are happy to write the reviews for less than Rayner, or a Rayner type, and are in it mainly for the free meal and the chance to pimp their latest book, so who the hell knows what’s going to happen.

William Sitwell, The Telegraph
Dongnae, Bristol (4 stars)

This week, Reform Party member number 225,156 is in Bristol eating Korean food. What would his fellow party members make of that? For example, would Ivan Dabbs, Reform UK’s new councillor for Deanshanger and Paulerspury in West Northamptonshire, who regularly reposts content from Britain First on his socials, approve?

According to Wikipedia, Britain First is ‘a far-right, British fascist and neo-fascist political party and hate group formed in 2011 by former members of the British National Party (BNP).’ The third principle of Britain First, as stated on their website, is that ‘Britain First is committed to preserving our British cultural heritage, traditions, customs and values. We oppose the increasing colonisation of our homeland through uncontrolled, mass immigration.’

The Reform Party’s manifesto ‘Our Contract With You’ states that ‘Reform UK will stand up for British culture, identity and values’. Have they been reading the Britain First website? By reviewing a Korean restaurant, is Sitwell standing up for British culture, identity and values? I think he’s got some explaining to do to The Leader Farage. But for the moment, it appears Sitwell can have his baechu kimchi and eat it.

Sitwell has assumed his readers will be fascinated by his gustatory history with cabbage, given the number of words he’s allocated to the subject. Trust me, we are not. It’s just another version of that hoary old cliche, ‘I used to dislike ingredient X, then I ate it at restaurant Y and now I can’t get enough of the stuff’. Kolour Sitwell Kimchi Krazee. He is not, however, a convert to jellyfish: ‘Frankly, if you must know, I’d rather have been stung by it.’ That’s quite a good line, for a Reform Party member.

Basically, he loved Dongnae. If you want to know more about the restaurant, read my analysis of Tim Hayward’s review from December last year in Smashed #44, which also contained a link to Meg Houghton-Gilmour’s review in The Bristol Sauce newsletter, which is the one you really need to read.

Best line: N/A
Worst line: ‘The beef caressed the palate before melting’. I mean, just no. *shudders*
Did the review make me want to book a table: I very nearly went a couple of weeks ago when I was in Bristol. I was there to interview Jan Ostle and Mary Wilson of Wilson’s restaurant, which is a couple of doors down from Dongnae on Chandos Road. I ate at Wilson’s on the Wednesday night, then returned the following morning for the interview, which will appear in a special edition of Smashed in a couple of weeks. Chandos Road was a bit of a schlep from my hotel, and the idea of making the journey a third time in less than 24 hours to dine at Dongnae was just too much. I ended up, after much deliberation, at Caper and Cure, about which I posted the following on Instagram:

Clockwise from top left: Somerset pork tomahawk, pomme puree, sobrasada sauce; warm crab and crayfish butter, soft herbs, house bread; crispy pork belly, sauce gribiche and the menu

‘Banging dinner at an absolutely rammed @caperandcure in Bristol last night. Simple dishes, beautifully cooked. Somerset pork tomahawk with sobrasada sauce and the creamiest pomme puree I've eaten since my last visit to a Joel Robuchon restaurant was the star of the show, but everything was a slam dunk.

I couldn't resist going double pork and ordering the crispy belly as a snack, mainly because it came with gribiche, and who can resist a well-made gribiche, which this certainly was. The warm crab and crayfish butter turned out to be a ton of crab claw meat and diced crayfish in a beurre blanc sauce, served in a crab shell. It was sublime.

I somehow managed to resist a rhum baba with Cheddar strawberries (that's strawberries from Cheddar, no cheese involved) because I am usually duty-bound to order a baba if it’s on the menu, but Caper and Cure portions are generous and I was happily defeated.

Service could not have been more sweetly attentive, despite, I was told, the team having to deal with a less-than-smooth changeover in reservations systems that day. They were the definition of grace under pressure. They even decanted my carafe of chardonnay into a bottle so that it would fit into a cooler (I like my whites more chilled than most restaurants are used to serving them because I am a heathen).

Caper and Cure is the neighbourhood restaurant of your dreams, unless you live in St Pauls Bristol, of course and then it's the neighbourhood restaurant of your reality and you are living the dream. Anyway, I liked it, can you tell? (I paid my own bill BTW).’

I don’t want to gloat, but dinner at Wilson’s, then dinner at Caper and Cure the following night, is living the restaurant goer’s dream. In some ways, they are very different places. Wilson’s serves a highly creative tasting menu based on local produce, some from their own small holding. Caper and Cure also serves local produce, but offers an a la carte menu of what might be described as rustic and robust cooking. Wilson’s has a Michelin star, Caper and Cure isn’t even listed in the guide, which is a shocking oversight. At least the Good Food Guide got it right by awarding Caper and Cure a rating of ‘Very Good’.

They are both ploughing their own furrows, and therefore, perhaps it’s unfair to compare them, except that I left both restaurants with an almost identical feeling: maximum joy. The experience has left me pondering how it’s possible to rate one restaurant above another in any meaningful way. If you can evoke feelings of delight in your diners, do the details of how you achieve that really matter? It comes down to caring about the ingredients you use and how you prepare them, caring about your customers and their enjoyment, and just being really bloody good at what you do. If all of that is in place, as it was at Wilson’s and Caper and Cure, then it seems invidious to try and pick a ‘winner’.

Don’t get me wrong, dinner at Wilson’s was mind-blowingly good. Jan Ostle is an exceptional chef and the food at the restaurant is incredible (as you’ll read in the interview, Ostle is keen to share credit with his brigade for creating the ever-changing menu; I’ll be going into much more detail about the meal in the Wilson’s feature). At £73, it’s also probably the best value Michelin-starred menu in the country. But, as you will have noticed from my Instagram write-up, I also really appreciated Matty Grove’s cooking at Caper and Cure.

I’ve been reviewing restaurants for long enough, I know the drill. I could award a score to Wilson’s and a score to Caper and Cure based on the usual criteria, and they wouldn't be the same. But if I were awarding points for sheer joy, they’d both get 10 out of 10.

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

Don’t you want to go to Town? Have you seen the menu? Do you care? Look at that interior. You’ll leave whistling the ‘lava stone countertops, lacquered green kitchen and illuminated coffered ceiling’ (I’m quoting from the press release. Not the whistling bit, the description). It’s by North End Design, who are also responsible for various other arresting spaces including Bibi, Lina Stores, Ambassodors Clubhouse and Gymkhana. A very talented bunch of people, then.

Town is unquestionably the restaurant of the moment. There’s already been coverage from Good Food Guide (‘Sourdough with gravy . . . . is, at least until the next cult dish turns up, just about the most talked about dish in London’) and Hot Dinners (‘we can see this sexy dining room drawing in the crowds. If we had a quibble, it would be that it's a little all over the place in terms of identity and concept’) and there are reviews on the way from Giles Coren and Tom Parker Bowles.

It’s only been open a matter of weeks, but I’m already wondering how long its moment in the sun will last.