Smashed #8

The UK's restaurant scene digested

Photo by Crazy nana on Unsplash

So, where was I going with all of this back in 2023? It seems like a lifetime ago. Please excuse me while I get back into the Smashed groove, whatever that might turn out to be. Watching Luke Humphries play the 16-year-old wunderkind Luke Littler in the PDC final earlier this week reminded me how similar writing is to playing darts, which probably explains all those broken laptops piling up under the Winmau Diamond Plus that hangs in my conservatory.

Writers, like darts players, are in a constant psychic battle with themselves, desperately clinging on to the confidence that helped them hit the one hundred and eighty of wordsmithery, the perfectly composed paragraph. Then the screen strikes back with its endless supply of spirit-sucking blankness, it’s very own two double tops and a bullseye outshot, and it’s game over, at least until the next leg. The only difference is that I’m not typing this in front of three and a half thousand people at Ally Pally and no one’s going to hand me the coveted Sid Waddell trophy and a cheque for £500K when I eventually emerge triumphant at the end of this newsletter. So bear with me through this edition’s twenty sixes and numerous missed double eights and hold on for the nine dart (word) finish.

The end of 2023 was punctuated with the very sad news of the passing of Bill Granger. In her obituary for The Guardian, Bee Wilson wrote that ‘Any time you find yourself in any big city and you go to an independent cafe that serves flat whites and healthy juices and fluffy pancakes, and eggs cooked in interesting ways served at big communal wooden tables, you are imbibing a little of the home that Granger created.’ I was fortunate enough to interview him a couple of times and attend a couple of meals hosted by him. He was such a positive presence, generous with his time and attention and just an all round lovely bloke.

His books are a constant source of inspiration and really helped change the way I cook at home. Prior to discovering his recipes, I’d tended toward ‘serious’ cheffy cookbooks and trying to replicate restaurant dishes at home. Granger’s recipes we’re like the sun breaking through a cloudy sky; vibrant, bursting with flavour but simple to make. They were the first ‘quick and easy’ style recipes that felt credible to the snooty home cook I used to be. Cheers, Bill I’ll be whipping up some of your signature scrambled eggs and avocado on toast for breakfast this weekend in your honour.

The Reviews

I was expecting to start 2024 with a light load. I imagined that all the festive-themed newspaper content would mean a paucity of reviews, but not a bit of it. Not only are there multiple columns from some of the critics to catch up on, but some end-of-year round ups and a couple of other features relevant to this newsletter. I’ll mention them all in passing but rather than take each one in turn as I usually do, I’m going to group them together and tackle them under themed headings. Oh, and I’ve also discovered that Lilly Subbotin is The Independent’s restaurant critic. With so much stuff to cover already, I’m going to leave her until the next newsletter but you can read her here and here. So, let’s crack on shall we.

Should restaurant critics be able to cook?

I’ve spent years tasting dishes on MasterChef. Now it’s my turn to put on the apron by Jay Rayner

I swapped my role in MasterChef from judge to competitor in Battle of the Critics by William Sitwell

Did you see it? I thought I was going to have to hide behind the sofa and cower in fright, like I used to when The Crazy World of Arthur Brown appeared on Top of The Pops (imagine being three years old and that comes on the telly. It still gives me the willies to this day). But, apart from having to watch a grown man cry because he had to cook four rabbit legs, Masterchef: Battle of The Critics wasn’t as traumatic as I’d anticipated.

With his professional-looking seafood fregola, Jay Rayner was a worthy winner, but Sitwell, Famurewa, Dent and Leyla Kazim (who doesn’t feature in this newsletter because as far as I am aware she isn’t and never has been a restaurant critic) all acquitted themselves well enough.

There was however a surprising amount of what appeared to be genuine stress and tears before bedtime in the kitchen. I don’t like to brag, but when I reached the semi-finals of the amateur competition back in the 90s (I don’t like talking about it, but you dragged it out of me) I had an absolute ball. The competition was admittedly a little more straightforward back then - two and half hours to cook a three-course meal of your choosing - but the standard of cooking was high and it was filmed in real-time, so it certainly wasn’t without its pressures.

But at the time, cooking was all I wanted to do and I felt at ease in a kitchen, even one in a TV studio in Maidstone. Up until entering the competition, I was planning to switch careers and work as a chef. I’d staged in various kitchens including a week at Jean Christophe Novelli’s Michelin-starred place at the Four Seasons, a day at The Merchant House with Shaun Hill (who ended up being on the judging panel for my Masterchef semi-final) and a few Saturdays at Le Pont de la Tour and the Fifth Floor at Harvey Nichols, where Henry Harris had offered me a job. For various reasons, the move from Brighton to London didn’t happen and I eventually parlayed my passion for restaurants into a freelance career writing about them.

Bearing in mind that background, if you’d asked me twenty years ago if it was important for restaurant critics to be able to cook, I would have told you it was crucial. How else, I would have argued, could they judge the food in front of them unless they understood the technicalities of how it had been prepared? I realised some time ago that of course that is utter bollocks. A restaurant critic doesn’t need to be an expert cook, they need to be an expert customer. A lack of interest in kitchens could even be a bonus - the less you’re cooking the more likely you are to be in a restaurant eating.

More importantly, a restaurant critic’s main expertise needs to be writing engaging copy to a given word count and to deadline. You don’t develop that ability by cooking your way through Modernist Cuisine. Food is of course just one part of the experience; a really good review will put the reader right there in the restaurant, seeing, hearing, tasting and smelling what the critic has (including the waiters cigarette breath if they’ve nipped out for a crafty mid-service fag - something I experienced as an unwanted extra with my dessert at a London two-star recently. Naughty naughty).

That said, some of my favourite reviews are by veteran chef Ian McAndrew. Now retired from running restaurants, he has more than 40 years of experience in the business to draw on and his culinary knowledge is second to none. He is also delightfully forthright in his opinions. I love nothing more than a dish being forensically ripped apart by someone who really knows his onions (this one is a doozy), but, as I’m sure Ian would admit, it’s not the stuff of a national newspaper column which by definition is aimed at the general reader.

The truth is that, in the context of reviews, restaurants are simply grist for the national newspaper mill, they are but a content engine for overpaid columnists. But chefs and restaurateurs should count themselves lucky, it could be much, much worse. I mean, have you all forgotten Gary Barlow’s Table Talk? (I’d provide a link but the columns appear to have been scrubbed from the internet. I wonder why?).

End of year round ups

What I Ate in 2023 by Jay Rayner

Restaurants of the year 2023 by Jimi Famurewa

‘Where chefs let their freak flag fly’: Grace Dent’s favourite restaurants of 2023 | Restaurants | The Guardian

The news from the restaurant world over the last few weeks has been so unremittingly bad that you wonder if there’s going to be anywhere left for the critics to round up come next December. James Allcock closed The Pig and Whistle in Beverley, Yorkshire, Tony Rodd shuttered Copper and Ink in Blackheath and Simon Rimmer called time on Greens in Didsbury after a 33-year run.

As I’m writing this, Kindle in Cardiff have also announced their closure. The two Michelin-starred Raby Hunt will also closed later this might but it seems for a positive reason as chef and owners James and Maria Close will move to Rockcliffe Hall to become culinary director and head of development respectively. I’ve been talking to several2 chefs for an article I’ve been researching, and, while it seems there is a general feeling of trepidation about what 2024 might bring to say the least, I was heartened to speak to a Scottish chef with a small restaurant group who told me all his places were busy and making a profit. There are also plenty of new openings on the horizon too including busy bee Claude Bosi’s Lyonnaise-style bouchon Josephine in Chelsea and Ruth Hansom’s eponymous restaurant in Yorkshire.

Rayner spends a lengthy paragraph mourning losses that happened earlier in the year including D&D closing six restaurants but is soon waxing lyrical about his face-stuffing adventures. His restaurant of the year was Lark in Bury St Edmunds where a ‘rabbit and black pudding pie encased in an ornate glazed-pastry case so shiny, so golden, you could wave at your own reflection in it’ made him ‘swoon’. Apart from that, he doesn’t really draw many conclusions from his racing about from West Bromwich to Plymouth and Salford to Glasgow. Along the way there’s some arse rubbing and we discover that, apparently, Henry Harris of Bouchon Racine has ripe armpits. How Rayner has discovered this, I dread to think. There’s also mention of wobbly rich things which either means Rayner and Harris or some calves’ brains. I should probably re-read that bit but it’s late and I’ve got to get this bloody newsletter published at some point today.

Famurewa is a bit more forthcoming on the summing up front, calling 2023 ‘a year defined by nostalgia, repetition and the collective embrace of a kind of lulling, uncomplicated familiarity. Sequels, spin-offs and empire-expansion projects from anointed international chefs have reigned supreme.’ He then goes on to list a ton of restaurants he visited that don’t conform to that description thereby proving my previously stated proposition that ‘everything exists in time and space simultaneously together and therefore so do all trends. It just comes down to how you edit reality’ (‘Bit soon to be recycling your own material, isn’t it? - Ed). He calls the truly marvellous Kolae ‘probably my new restaurant of the year’. I agree.

Dent returns from the jungle, all guns blazing, saying that ‘2023 seemed set to be the year that London’s restaurant scene lost its edge. Outside the M25, I was eating far better . . . . In many London restaurants, portions have become hysterically small, with the term “prawns” often meaning “one prawn, sliced multiple ways”, pasta served by the tablespoon and £50 lobster dishes that turn out to be a taste of the tail on a lacklustre waffle.’ You can tell she’s a Northerner, can’t you?

’Costs, Covid and other calamities have made London a less easy place to experiment’, she claims. I’d claim that there is a very strong argument to say that London has never welcomed experimental restaurants, that it has always been inherently conservative in its culinary tastes and that is why you find places like The Fat Duck and L’Enclume outside of it, but let’s go with the premise anyway. Oh, hold on, ‘Tomos Parry’s Mountain is a buzzing, experimental rollercoaster of flavour’. OK, whatever. Shall we just agree that end-of-year roundups are pretty much a waste of time and move on?

Jay Rayner, The Observer
Café Kitty, London

What is it?: A new Soho theatre small plates restaurant from the owners of Kitty Fishers and Coral Pearl serving ‘crispy potatoes, devilled eggs and a proper Caesar salad’.
Best lines: ‘Some people find these parades of small things unsatisfying, disjointed and a little random, because it’s too much like the rest of life.’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I’ve eaten at both Kitty Fishers and Coral Pearl and enjoyed them a lot so I’d give it a go.

Giles Coren, The Times
Pearly Queen, London

What is it?: Oyster forward (my description) second restaurant from London seafood maestro Tom Brown. Expect modish fin-to-tail cooking including oyster pate and hake ham.
Best lines: ‘a really slutty crispy buffalo oyster that had been flour-dredged and deep-fried, slathered in that vinegary cayenne sauce and then slashed with a zigzag of ranch dressing. It is a terrible thing to do to an oyster, but a wonderful thing to do to a mouth.’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: It actually sounds amazing. I’m in.

Charlotte Ivers, The Sunday Times
The Star Inn, Harome

What is it?: Do I really need to tell you? I mean, you have heard of one of the most famous and well-established Michelin-starred gastropubs in the country haven’t you?
Best lines: ‘a chunky raviolo of pulled ham hock with a truffled cheesy sauce, shavings of walnut and rings of pickled onion. A couple of bites in, I’m having a decent time. How far wrong can you go with meat, cheese and carbs? Then my spoon hits the bottom of the dish and the next bite makes me burst out laughing. The raviolo is sitting on a little heap of cubes of sweet apple. Of course it is. Ploughman’s. And it works so well — silly and joyful’
Worst line: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table: I’ve never been. I should have.

Tim Hayward, Financial Times
La Famiglia, London

What is it?: Old school Italian.
Best lines: ‘The menu was the same, but of course I had changed. Decades of experience and a thick crust of cynicism meant that dishes that had once been exotic wonders were now quotidian. And yet part of me still felt the old thrill.’
Worst line: ‘I was outside a bar called Bix in San Francisco working on my second martini’. Only people in Raymond Chandler novels ‘work’ on a drink.
Did the review make me want to book a table: No, grazie.

Il Gattopardo, London

What is it?: ‘A stylish new Italian on Albemarle Street . . . .by the same owners as Zuma, Roka, Amazónico, COYA and Bar des Prés’ (press releases are so handy, aren’t they?).
Best lines: ‘A tomahawk is beef ribeye with a foot or so of rib left intact. It has the proportions of a badminton racquet and has no other purpose than looking good on Instagram.’
Worst line: ‘When I think of Italy in the stylish ’60s it is less of Visconti’s sumptuous, historical “Il Gattopardo” than Antonioni’s austere L’Avventura (1960), an existential study of the vacuity and ennui of privileged young Italians, utterly beautiful and totally lost, funnily enough, in Sicily and the Southern isles.’ There’s actually nothing wrong with that line. I just wanted you to read it.
Did the review make me want to book a table: No, grazie.

Tom Parker Bowles, Mail On Sunday
Squisito in East Sussex

What is it?: A small but perfectly formed Italian. Who wouldn’t travel to Sussex for one of those?
Best lines: ‘As the rain pours down outside, we delve deep into Olly’s ‘bottle burrow’’. You can get away with anything in Lewes, apparently.
Worst line: ‘Then a plumply fatty home-made Italian sausage, gently spiced’. These days, if you write ‘plumply fatty’ they throw you in jail.
Did the review make me want to book a table: I might book just to witness ‘rich, eggy emulsion’ clinging ‘concupiscently’ to ‘pert fresh linguine’. That’s still legal in Lewes, as long as it’s consensual.

Faber in London's Hammersmith

What is it?: A new sustainable seafood restaurant. Woo, and further more, hoo.
Best lines: ‘so the view is more drab concrete crawl than glitteringly limpid seas’
Worst line: ‘Cod-cheek skewers are an inspired dish, great chunks of succulent jowl, beautifully cooked over coals and served with a swaggeringly sharp tartare sauce’. Minus points for the use of ‘succulent’. NOT. NECESSARY.
Did the review make me want to book a table: It really didn’t. It’d be a different story if I lived in Hammersmith but nothing about the review made me want to make the trek out west.

For Old Dine’s Sake

…will return next week

What did we learn this week?

Turn it up, so you know it’s got soul.

(I told you I’d end on a nine dart (word) finish. There is a (tenuous) connection between Van The Man and the game of darts. Dexy’s Midnight Runners covered Morrison’s song Jackie Wilson Said. When they performed it on Top of The Pops, the backdrop photo was not of the titular soul singer but darts legend Jocky Wilson.)