Smashed

UK restaurant reviews digested

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Writing the first edition of this newsletter was easy. Driven by professional jealousy, incoherent rage and blind envy, it poured out of me like the food writing equivalent of an all time great debut album. It was my Unknown Pleasures, my College Dropout my Whenever You Need Somebody. Now it’s time for Smashed 2. Will I suffer from the notorious ‘difficult second newsletter syndrome’? Was the first one my definitive statement? Is it all downhill from here? Or can I pull a Nevermind, a Bends, a Hold Me In Your Arms out of the bag? There’s only one way to find out…

The Reviews

Giles Coren, The Times
Notto, London 

Coren is in London for the second week running. Good, that’s where all the best restaurants are anyway. I never understand why people get so upset about critics mostly writing about London restaurants. If you do go to somewhere like Middlesbrough, as Charlotte Ivers did last week, virtually no one reading the review will be inspired to go there; maybe someone on business that is forced to stay over and is looking for somewhere to eat, maybe. And if you live in Middlesbrough, you probably know about all the decent places to eat already, so what’s the point?

Every time I write a restaurant round-up article for The Times in particular (my latest on where some of the UKs top chefs go for their Sunday lunch is here)  and do my absolute best to get the widest possible geographical spread, going as far as plotting out the restaurants on a google map to see where the gaps are, I get BTL comments saying either ‘Oh, couldn’t find anywhere in Acaster Malbis then? Typical lazy London journo’ or ‘So relieved he didn’t find the best restaurant in Acaster Malbis, we don’t want a bunch of Londoners booking the place up’. You simply cannot win.  

So, anyway, here we are in London, again. Coren has toddled along to Michelin-starred chef Phil Howard’s casual pasta restaurant Notto in Piccadilly. It’s a sensible move as Phil Howard makes the best pasta in London. Well, it’s either him or Theo Randall. I’ll never forget Howard’s gratin of lobster and hand rolled macaroni at The Square, or Randall’s cappelletti di vitello at his eponymous restaurant in Park Lane (I really must go back); talk about celestial carbs.  Everyone knows middle aged, middle class Brits make the best pasta in the world and that the best Italian restaurant food is served in London. I’ve travelled around Italy for work purposes and have never been tempted to go back for a holiday because I’ve never had a decent enough meal there. Apart from the last time I went to Rome and that was bloody fantastic. I’ve been meaning to go back with the missus ever since. We’ll get there.

If you are up on these things you may well be wondering why on earth Coren didn’t wait a week or two and review the second branch of Notto that’s just opened in Covent Garden. Well, apparently he was in a rush after half term, needed somewhere to review and rationalised the decision by saying, ‘I thought I’d book the old one and then if it was good, you could book the new one while there was still space’. Fair enough. 

It turned out to be an excellent decision as it brought him face to face with an old nemesis chef which allows Coren to tell several ripping yarns. That’s handy as he ate the three course set lunch menu (a bargain £17.50) and only gives it a few sentences, although they are all positive: ‘stellar focaccia, high and fluffy, crisp on top and oily, with flecks of rosemary and tomato, and with it a mellow chestnut soup with a lively chilli bounce to it and three little smoked parmesan dumplings, creamy, tarry, perfectly in synch with the bowlful.’ A capsule review then, but you get the idea. 

Best line: ‘There was the sommelier who leapt out at me from behind a bush at the Taste London trade fair in Regent’s Park in 2009, holding a big stick and shouting, “This ends now”’.
Worst line: ‘I began to drool with anticipation of such seasonally sensitive delights’
Did the review make me want to book a table: Yes

Grace Dent, The Guardian 
Bonsai Plant Kitchen, Brighton

Dent is on my manor this week at the dinky Bonsai Plant Kitchen, so I’ll know all about it of course. Well I sort of do because it’s currently at number 20 on the Brighton’s Best Restaurants list, an award that I co-founded in 2015. However, I’ve never actually been to the restaurant which is very much my bad and something I intend to rectify soon if this review doesn’t mean the place is booked out until kingdom come. 

What I can tell you is that it’s a bit outside the city centre on a side street off the less-than-salubrious London Road, an area that most visitors to Brighton would probably never think to visit unless they felt the need to visit a Cash Convertors or a dodgy nail bar. She kindly describes the restaurant as occupying ‘a cool, elegant, black building’ which is frankly a bit of a stretch but it does look very nice inside. 

Dent is basically cock-a-hoop for the plant-based menu, finding no fault at all and describing the restaurant as ‘definitely remarkable and unusual’. ‘Pork’ spring rolls made with fruit, egg-less cream and deep-fried rice paper is ‘a cacophony of non-sentient items styled into a punchy, umami hit. It’s absolutely bloody delicious, too’ and kimchi is a ‘really good, crisp, funky kimchi that’s sweet and astringent in all the right places’. The service is equally as good, saying that Bonsai’s  ‘secret weapon is its staff, especially front-of-house Amy Bennett.’

I’m all for rave reviews; you want to read about a restaurant you’d love to go to rather than one you’d avoid like the plague. But I’m now ten reviews in, including last week’s crop and am yet to read anything even vaguely critical. Is it just an amazing run of good luck for all our critics, or are they going soft? Time will tell. 

Best line: ‘I already regard anyone who books a 9.30pm table for dinner as the perpetrator of an open act of aggression’
Worst line: ‘The greatest joy here, however, is the sheer attention to detail’.  ‘Sheer’ is a word you see a lot in Amazon or Letterboxd reviews. I’m pretty sure I’m guilty of using it myself. I always hear it in Adam Buxton’s Bugged YouTube comments voice. Removing it from the sentence doesn’t change the meaning, just makes it sound less nobby.   
Did the review make me want to book a table: Yes

Jay Rayner, The Observer
The Small Canteen, Newcastle

If rumours about Jay Rayner’s potency are to be believed (as a restaurant critic I mean. Why, what have you heard?) then chef Sam Betts might regret sending a letter to Rayner asking him to come and review his 15 seat restaurant. Yes, it’s yet another rave review that will probably send Betts’s email inbox into meltdown.  

A restaurant PR recently told me that a bad review from Rayner virtually cleared out a restaurant’s reservation book for the foreseeable future the day it was published. Goodness only knows what an unalloyed rave that compares a double-cooked cheddar soufflé to the ‘heart-stopping soufflé suissesse at Le Gavroche’ and describes a confit pork terrine as ‘a slab the thickness of a big Stephen King novel…the edible equivalent of a major page-turner’ will do for The Small Canteen, but hopefully they are prepared for it. 

While Rayner does point out that the former sandwich shop restaurant is as good as its name with ‘room for 15, in a way which some might call intimate, others an invasion of privacy’ and that you have to go outside and round the corner to go to the loo, he doesn’t really have a bad word to say about the place. Big potions, small prices and ‘a huge heart’, what, as they say, is not to love? 

Best line: ‘here come the main courses, like aircraft carriers cresting the horizon’
Worst line: ‘And it is, of course, all bloody marvellous’. I only single this line out because it’s not clear up to this early point in the review why it’s bloody marvellous ‘of course’. Why ‘of course’ is not overtly stated (it’s my newsletter, I’ll be pedantic if I want to).
Am I inspired to follow in their footsteps: Yes

William Sitwell, The Telegraph
Heron, Edinburgh

It’s yet another positive write up; a four out of five review. Give me strength. Is the national press turning into Instagram where everything is wonderful all the time? Be careful you don’t trigger anyone with your negativity, think of the clicks.

But it’s hardly surprising that Heron was to Sitwell’s taste. It was awarded a Michelin star earlier this year and has previously received rave reviews in The Times (two years ago) and in The Scotsman (also, two years ago). I’m not saying Sitwell is late to the party here, actually I am saying that, but Telegraph readers probably don’t read The Times or the Scotsman and almost certainly don’t follow a restaurant guide run by the bloody French, so he’s on safe ground. Cutting edge, ‘graph readers reckon. 

‘I sauntered down the long avenue of Leith Walk, dinner in prospect, the Edinburgh skyline of spires, chimneys, domes and clocks striking against the clear sky of dusk. The flapping, hammering din of car tyres on cobbles subsides as the intermittent, familiar clanking bell of the trams rings through the cool evening air.’ That’s the opening two lines of the review. I was waiting for a punchline. It never came. At least it wasn’t a dark and stormy night. Moving swiftly on.

The food is pretty much as you’d expect of a Michelin star restaurant with langoustine, scallops, caviar and venison done this way and that (Sitwell doesn’t go into a huge amount of detail). Special praise is reserved for what Sitwell describes as an ‘intercoursal dish’ of hasselback potato ‘the only thing I think to come out of Sweden besides Abba and Ikea’ (I mean, what have the Swedes ever given us apart from Bergman, Strindberg, Larsson, Mankell…) which he says are ‘a most marvellous vessel’ for ‘Cumbrae oyster, whipped with crème fraîche and poured around the potato, with a green swirl of dill oil and further crunch from some crisps inserted in the gaps of the Hasselback. It was intense, sweet, smooth and glorious.’

Not so glorious is an overcooked piece of seabass, which is what I assume he knocked that star off for (hurrah, some criticism!). Sitwell concludes by comparing the restaurant to Dan, the uni-days chum he’s having dinner with, who was apparently ‘confident, charming and extremely decent’ when he was in the pulpit of the pub opposite Canterbury West train station where he and Sitwell spent ‘days, months, years even’. It’s never explained why there was a pulpit in a pub or what Dan was doing in it. To be fair, it doesn’t sound like an easy thing to explain. 

Best line: N/A 
Worst line: Dan guzzled two strips of partridge with a smooth cherry sauce, which kept him happy.
Am I inspired to follow in their footsteps: No. Didn’t get a clear enough idea of the food from the review. Poor me.

Tom Parker Bowles, Sunday Mail
Sea Salt + Sole

‘The best chippie in Britain?’ asks the headline to Parker Bowles’ review of this Aberdeenshire fish and chip shop. Of course not, that’s my local in Brighton which does enormous bits of cod, freshly battered and fried with excellent chips and all served by lovely people. It’s also your local where they do enormous bits of cod, etc, etc. We all love our chippies and God bless and save them in the current climate. This recent piece in the Guardian makes for sobering reading.

In his typically wildly enthusiastic way (‘This dinner is, quite simply, one of the finest things I’ve eaten for years’), Parker Bowles makes this railway fish and chip shop sound worth a special journey, even if you do have to sit on a bench on the platform to eat and watch ‘trains slide in and out, disgorging their punters before us’ (has Parker Bowles been to the same creative writing class as Sitwell?). But it’s not a problem for Parker Bowles who, eating with his fingers, scoffed down a haddock supper, a battered smoked sausage AND A PIE in four minutes flat, the greedy fecker. He did have help, but he doesn’t make clear just how many people ‘we’ refers to. I mean, as it’s Parker Bowles it could easily be the royal we, couldn’t it?

Parker Bowles claims that the haddock was ‘incandescently fresh, still scented with the sea’, which made me wonder what the sea actually smells like, how that aroma might have penetrated the haddock and how it might have survived a 191°C oil bath.  According to this BBC article, salt water itself smells of nothing, but it gets a ‘stale, sulphury smell’ from ‘dimethyl sulphide, produced by bacteria as they digest dead phytoplankton’ and at low tide, you’ll smell ‘chemicals called dictyopterenes, which are sex pheromones produced by seaweed eggs to attract the sperm’. The ‘iodine’ smell of the sea, ‘is actually the bromophenols produced by marine worms and algae.’ So, yum. 

Best line: N/A
Worst line: ‘chips, lots of them, soaked in salt and vinegar, fat, with just the right ratio of crunch and squelch’. 
Am I inspired to follow in their footsteps: I’ll stick to my local, thanks. 

Charlotte Ivers, Sunday Times 
The Pineapple Pub, London 

As you’ll remember from last week, Ivers is a storyteller and this time the story the former political correspondent of Times Radio is going to tell is all about the leader of the opposition’s favourite pub. Unlike stupid restaurants, politics is a proper subject for serious journalists so I’m glad there’s finally some meat on the bones of this week’s reviews. 

Unfortunately, The Pineapple Pub serves up a menu of Thai food that sounds from Ivers’ description like it could have been delivered by a food service van, so it’s possibly not the best subject matter for a restaurant review column after all. It’s a flawed conceit too. As far as I can find out, Keir Starmer has only ever said in interviews that he goes for a pint in the pub and has never mentioned the food, but we won’t let that spoil the fun.

Ivers (28) who, fortunately for her, will never age, has to ‘awkwardly negotiate (her) way through a group of old boys who have been sitting there since 2pm, and indeed since 1975’. Imagine that, makes you shudder doesn’t it? She bravely finds a table and is soon joined by some fellow political journalists because that’s who you need when you are writing a restaurant review. Anyone who remembers Michael Deacon’s stint as a critic will confirm the veracity of that statement.      

The whole affair is utterly unremarkable and unworthy of either space in a national newspaper or your time so I’m going to refrain from further comment. So far, Ivers has failed to pique my interest with any of her reviews but I will keep my fingers crossed. She can write, she just needs to find something interesting to write about. 

Best line: fishcakes…the texture of an omelette left sweating in the sun
Worst line: N/A
Am I inspired to follow in their footsteps: Yes, for a pint. 

Jimi Famurewa, The Evening Standard
Kolae, London

Would you like to have a guess whether the final review this week (nothing from Tim Hayward for some reason apart from a column about hamburgers which needn’t detain us here) is a drubbing or a rave? Do you need five minutes? No thought not.

I think in future I’m going to move Famurewa’s reviews to the top of this newsletter as they take the most effort for me to read and understand. I am nearly twenty years older than Famurewa, who writes like someone twenty years younger than he actually is, so there is quite a gap in terms of references and writing style to bridge. Famurewa appears to treat every review like an academic assignment so there is usually quite a lot of social, historical and cultural contextualising going on as well as his dense, adjective-rich style to cope with. This week is no different.  

Take the Famurewa’s opening salvo, ‘The promise of “authentic Thai food” has long been an especially elastic and problematic one; an ever-moving target shaped by time, context and whatever level of regional fidelity the cautious masses deem tolerable.’ I think that means people want something a bit more than a pad Thai these days but I’m probably over simplifying.   

If they go to Kolae, the second restaurant from the team behind the acclaimed Som Saa, it sounds as if they are going to get it. Specifically, grilled food from Thailand’s Malay-influenced southern borders lands that’s ‘repeatedly daubed in a rugged, clingy coconut milk-enriched marinade’. Chicken is ‘bubbled and burnished on the grill’ and ‘in possession of a kind of liberally-sauced and almost laksa-ish depth and dynamism’, while ‘crispy rice cakes piled with a zapping chicken and peanut salad’ is a ‘giddy blur’. I think I need a bit of a sit down after all that excitement. 

Best line: ‘the resounding mic-drop of a Grinch-hued pandan sticky rice and coconut sorbet’
Worst line: ‘kolae mussels: hefty, shelled brutes, steamed to a meaty, tumescent plumpness, and practically dancing in the fragrant tang and rounded sweetness of an orange curry glaze’. I’m sorry but there’s just something unappetising about ‘meaty, tumescent plumpness’, and ‘dancing’ is what food does on Gregg Wallace’s tongue. You never want to invoke Gregg Wallace in a restaurant review.   
Am I inspired to follow in their footsteps: Yes, sounds amazing.

What did we learn this week?

It is, there seems, nothing British chefs and restaurateurs can’t do. You want some stonking pasta? Peerless fish and chips? Hyper regional Thai cuisine? Huge portions of French comfort food? Creative vegan cooking? A bit of Michelin-style magic? Completed it mate. 

I am only partially joking when I say I’d like to see some more critical reviews. Ivers’ 3 out 5 review this week doesn’t really count. A boozer that has set out to serve its local community with some passable grub almost certainly wasn’t looking to be reviewed in the national press and nor should it have been. If dining in a restaurant genuinely makes you feel uplifted then of course you should communicate that as clearly as you can in a review. But a little more evenhandedness would make all these unalloyed raves easier to swallow. 

I hope we’re all braced for the tsunami of The Devonshire reviews coming our way. As mentioned last week, Coren and Parker Bowles have already been in together so I imagine we can expect reviews from the pair of them fairly soon, unless one was just the other’s plus one. I can’t see Dent avoiding it, given that the publication she writes for is edited by a good friend of one of the owners, consequently Rayner may give it a swerve. He used to have an informal agreement with Marina O’Loughlin when she was the Guardian’s critic to avoid duplicating reviews but I don’t know if that still stands with Dent. I would have thought it would have be irresistible to both Hayward and Sitwell and ideal for their readership. I’m not sure about Famurewa as the Evening Standard has published a two page feature on the pub in the Reveller section of the paper already, but we’ll see.