Smashed #62 Review of the restaurant reviews: Why do critics hate creativity?

The UK restaurant scene digested

Photo by Sebastian Coman Photography on Unsplash

William Sitwell, The Telegraph
Upstairs at Landrace, Bath (5 stars)

William Sitwell, The Telegraph
Josephine Bistro, London (5 stars)

Here comes William Sitwell,
with meat, ale and guns,
and a clickbait piece,
he's gonna do another striptease

Only kidding, he's going to do another review. Well, two reviews, actually. At Upstairs at Landrace in Bath, he saw the ‘un-Instagrammable’ fettuccine with sausage and porcini ragu as an antidote to ‘a tasting menu where various clean-looking but lonely bits of protein and veg stand to attention on a plate before a sauce is introduced in an attempt at unity’ and an example of ‘how we need to eat’. Lunching on a classic French fish soup, snails, shoulder of lamb with flageolet beans and chocolate mousse at Joséphine in Marylebone confirmed his ‘long-held disparagement of tasting menus’. He saw the meal as ‘a clarion call: put down your tweezers, chefs, this is what food is, or should be, in 2025.’

We’ve been here before. In Smashed #11, I interrogated Tom Parker Bowles’ declaration about ‘the tyranny of the tasting menu’, calling it ‘the sort of inverted food snobbery that sneers at the less jaded diner who might only fancy a tasting menu once a year on a special occasion and so never has the opportunity to be tired of them’. As far back as Smashed #4, in November 2023, I commented:

‘If you want a good write up from a critic theses days, it seems as though you need to give them something fairly basic and recognisable - bread, grilled meat, something on toast maybe. I’ll be interested to see how the next tasting menu restaurant to open goes down with them, if they bother to review it at all.’