Smashed #9

The UK's restaurant scene digested

In 2024, it’s predicted that 80 per cent of all food in restaurants will be served on skewers. Customers are shunning food not served on skewers because they can no longer be arsed to pick up a knife and fork. ‘Customers can no longer be arsed to pick up a knife and fork,’ said one chef we spoke to who wished to remain anonymous, mainly because they don’t exist. ‘It was obvious something had to change, and not serving food on skewers was that thing.’

But this sea change in restaurants isn’t only down to practical considerations, it’s addressing an emotional need too. ‘People aren’t just looking for delicious food anymore, they are looking for something more visceral but at the same time comforting,’ said one pretentious commentator. ‘When we eat with our hands, we connect to out ancestors, our heritage, our souls. We become early man, huddled around the fire in a cave, tearing the meat of a giganotosaurus from its bones with our teeth. Meat which had been first marinated in a coconut and spice mixture for 24 hours then cooked over an open fire made from sustainably sourced wood. Delicious.’

There are of course plenty of restaurants not serving food on skewers, but because last year I went to more than three that did, (pictured above from top left: a canapé (see below) at Rothay Manor in the Lake District; some fantastic satay at Bangkok Degree, Brooklyn; Sussex Venison kofta, Wild Flor, Hove; cabbage anticucho then octopus anticucho, both at the Llama Inn, London; one of the many canapés at Alex Dilling at The Café Royal; grilled mussel skewer then the chicken bamboo skewer, both at Kolae; ox heart yakitori at the always brilliant Bincho Yakitori, Brighton) I’m calling it a trend.

But will it last? Since I started writing this introduction, chefs are already turning their backs on skewered food. ‘Customers have become tired of what is basically food on a stick,’ said another imaginary chef. ‘In 2024, customers have had enough of atavistic comfort food, they want to be challenged and excited, they are once more ready to pick up their cutlery and really eat. So that’s why we’re switching to a 95 course tasting menu. It’s how people want to dine these days.’

The Reviews

Jimi Famurewa, Evening Standard
Donia, London (5 stars)

Contemporary Filipino restaurant Donia is the latest opening in Kingly Court in Soho. Famurewa says Kingly Court is ‘London’s most unexpectedly charmed site’, citing the previous successes of Darjeeling Express and Imad’s Syrian Kitchen before going on to hail Donia as more ‘impressive’ than either of them. Kingly Court’s unexpected charm failed to work for Wright Brothers, Cha Cha Moon, Whyte and Brown, Stax Diner and The Good Egg but, you know, accentuate the positive and all that.

Donia is named after a ‘Tagalog honorific meaning “madam”’. Of course, everyone knows what Tagalog is, so no need to explain that. At Donia, quenelles hum, heat swells, brightness winces and you can eat impressionist paintings (are you following this?). And, as this is Soho, you won’t be surprised to discover that there’s ‘wrinkled toques of yielding wonton’ and a ‘vigorously vinegared’ sauce. I remember the last time I was vigorously vinegared in Soho, it wasn’t a pretty sight.

For Famurewa, the ‘tell-tale profanities’ of his lunch at Donia pushed it ‘into a new stratosphere’. From what I can make out, once you make it to the outer reaches, there’s a decent lamb pie and some nice looking dumplings to be had. Worth the journey, as they say.

Best lines: ‘Donia’s outsize ambition and acuity (is) the gastronomic equivalent of a band playing a pub back room like it’s Wembley Stadium.’
Worst Lines: ‘this skewer took the form of charred nubbins of chicken heart, almost like a gathering of fire-damaged thumbs that were hard on the eye but smoky, succulent heaven on the palate’. Skewers. See, told you.
Did the review make me want to book a table?: I’ll get back to you once I’ve had the review decoded.

Tim Hayward, Financial Times
Dispatch from a restaurant writer in hibernation

Not a review from Hayward this week, but a lament about the month of January and how it’s basically rubbish for food. ‘Nobody who wasn’t certifiably deranged would open a new restaurant into a market this bleak,’ avers Hayward, who probably wouldn’t call former violent criminal and boxing champion Danny Trejo, who opens Trejo’s Tacos in Notting Hill this month, ‘certifiably deranged’ to his face. I would also advise against doing the same to burly Frenchman Claude Bosi who, as mentioned last week, will open Josephine in Chelsea at the end of the month. Restaurant Story re-opens on the 12th but Hayward is bigger than chef Tom Sellers so he’d probably be reasonably safe in insulting him mano-a-mano.

I honestly don’t think I can deal with much more negativity this month. I realise Hayward is being tongue-in-cheek, but as he is the owner of a group of cafes in Cambridge, it seems foot-shootingly counter productive to be so down in the mouth and dour about one twelfth of your annual trading time, saying that, ‘With luck, this year train strikes won’t physically keep them away from restaurants but if Januaries past are anything to go by, they’ll voluntarily stay at home anyway.’

As my birthday is later this month, I have never bought into Dry-January or Veganuary or any another of the other miserabilist, post-Christmas hairshirt-fests. Although I won’t be going to Cambridge to help shore up Hayward’s businesses, I will be splashing some cash around restaurants a bit closer to home. Not because I think I should, or to show support for the hospitality industry or, God forbid because of a ‘use it or lose it’ mentality (I abhor the idea of guilting or shaming people into parting with their money. If you’re making something people want, they’ll come and buy it. If not, maybe it’s time for a re-think) but because that’s what I enjoy doing, whatever time of year it is.

Best lines: ‘we’ve been macerating in fine booze and stuffing-rich foods for about 10 weeks. It takes a toll on the body. By New Year’s Day, my liver feels like a butter-soaked duvet’.
Worst Lines: N/A

William Sitwell, The Telegraph
eòrna, Edinburgh (4 Stars)

Look, I understand that not every Telegraph reader has their finger on the pulse of restaurant trends to the extent that subscribers of this newsletter no doubt will, but is this sentence really necessary?: ‘We enjoy some delicate and decent canapés (proving this place ain’t so cool after all, as they haven’t heard that, doon sooth, they now call these ‘snacks’).

I could be wrong about this, but I think it was Noma who first started using the term ‘snacks’ about 15 years ago. Since then, its become common parlance in the sort of fine dining restaurants that serve them, so much so that, in many cases, the word doesn’t even appear on their menus any more. Conversely, some restaurants ‘doon south’ (Scottish people love it when the English take the piss out of their accent, they really do) such as Alex Dilling at The Café Royal (see above) have proudly reclaimed the term ‘canapé’, so the idea of a restaurant referring to canapés as being a faux pas, is well, a bit of a faux pas.

Best lines: The ‘restaurant is a handsome, neat and elegant tall-ceilinged room with nothing but the open kitchen and bar at which you sit (the place can take up to 12 people) . . . . You submit to a tasting menu, of course’. There nothing particularly good about these lines, but they do sum up the restaurant, which I have singularly failed to do so far.
Worst Lines: ‘It was a rich, dry and smoky piece of salmon, almost peaty in flavour, with a dollop of caviar and some radish to help it dance across the palate.’ I’m officially announcing that the days of things dancing or partying in one’s mouth are over.
Special mention for ‘a crunch of cucumber’. Does it do anything else?
Did the review make me want to book a table?: I’ll be busy for the foreseeable future with my latest thought experiment, Sitwell’s Canapé.

Charlotte Ivers, Sunday Times
Kysty and Lake Road Kitchen (4 stars each)

On a similar note to Sitwell’s Canapé, Charlotte Ivers says of that achingly trendy, of-the-moment ingredient hispi cabbage, ‘No doubt we will all be declaring it outré by June, so enjoy it while you can’. Again, Sunday Times readers may well not be completely on top of restaurant food trends, but I’m pretty sure news of pointy cabbages has reached Tunbridge Wells by now.

Gary Usher opened a restaurant named after it in Didsbury in 2016, such was it’s ubiquity even back then. I’m not saying hispi isn’t still common on menus, chef Dave Miney was grilling some on Sunday when I ate at the aforementioned Bincho Yakitori in Brighton, but saying ‘enjoy it while you can’ is a bit like saying you need to eat chips before they’re declared old hat. Hispi has long passed its fashionable phase and is now firmly part of the standard restaurant repertoire, so why make a song and dance about it? Come to that, why am I making a song and dance about it? Equal rights for cabbages, that’s why. One day, Savoy and Hispi will stand together alongside white and, er, another variety of cabbage and be a load of brassicas. Which is what this paragraph has tuned out to be.

(BTW - Ivers didn’t have snacks or canapes at Lake Road Kitchen, but ‘amuse-bouches’. My bouche was très amused back in the 90s, not so much since. Now all we need for the full set is an amuse-gueule. Unless, you dear reader know otherwise?)

Best lines: ‘The local woodlands must be a barren husk from all the foraging. Everything has been pickled and fermented since before Theresa May was in Downing Street.’
Worst Lines: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table?: Next time I’m in the Lake District and not on a freebie, for sure. Like last week’s The Star Inn, Lake Road Kitchen is another long running, highly decorated restaurant, although one that is currently missing a Michelin star, which baffles at least two very knowledgeable diners I know. It is however rated ‘Exceptional’ by the Good Food Guide, which is, uh, exceptional.

Giles Coren, The Times
Wild at Bull, Oxfordshire (Cooking 8)

Giles’ old chum Matthew Freud (yes, that one) opened a hotel, so he popped along to review it, as a guest of ‘Matt’ of course. The Times did pay for one meal during the course of Coren’s two visits however. Whatever, Coren has taken a massive one for the team by the sounds of things, despite all those high scores (including 10 out of 10 for ‘Wow’).

Bull is like no other hotel is transpires. Instead of a TV, there’s ‘eight or ten’ fucking harmonicas in the rooms for a start. I am not making this up. Coren’s son played them until 4am and no one complained, apparently. If I had been staying at Bull, I’d have tracked ‘Matt’ down, shoved the ‘eight to ten’ harmonicas up his arse and beaten the solo of Long Train Running out of him, in several different keys. (In reality, I would have stayed in bed tutting, sighing and rolling my eyes, but that’s not very funny is it?)

Even worse, there’s communal seating in the restaurant, ‘where guests plonk down ad hoc at a long table, eat a set menu of “home-cooked” food (fish pie, boeuf bourguignon etc) and meet new people’, just like they would on their first day of prison. There are opportunities to do ‘beekeeping, acting or ceramics’, just like during your second week of prison. There’s also ‘the best modern sushi you’ll find for 5,000 miles in any direction’ just like in Ford open prison, probably.

Just reading about Bull made me anxious, but if I did find myself there, I could a least calm myself with a glass or two from a magnum of Matt’s 2012 St Émilion. Oh, sorry, my mistake, that only applies if your name’s Giles.

Best lines: ‘in the end, all posh hotels are the same. They all have the same overworked restaurant food, the same exploitative wine list, the same tired staff, the same ten quid bags of peanuts in the minibar, the same lonely Filipinas in the laundry, the same glass ceiling for staff of colour, the same German manager with a different family in each of the three tin-pot republics he has worked in for longer than four years’
Worst Lines: N/A
Did the review make me want to book a table?: You’ll never take me alive, copper.

Jay Rayner, The Observer
Gordo’s Guildford

Rayner goes to Guildford to a Mexican restaurant, run by Rafael Onate (nickname ‘Gordo’) from ‘Latin America’ where the ‘menu is built around the familiar and the classic: tacos, chimichangas, quesadillas and the like, with various braised and grilled fillings and toppings’. He likes it and concludes if his readers don’t follow in his footsteps they’d be ‘seriously missing out’. More on this story as we get it.

Best lines: ‘It’s a food adventure playground; a place to experiment and dip and dive and spread’
Worst Lines: It’s just not that sort of review really.
Did the review make me want to book a table?: I’ve been to Guildford, but I’ve never been to me.

Grace Dent, The Guardian
King Cookdaily, London

‘King Cookdaily, an inconspicuous, easy-to-miss glorified kiosk with a few seats on Hanbury Street in Shoreditch, east London, serves a mere 11 dishes with names such as “Infamous”, “Yoga Fire” and “High Grade” advertised above the till.’ Chef King Cookdaily’s ‘ vegan lao bowl’ is, we are told, ‘increasingly famous’. Do you really need to know anything else? I’m not even going to mention Dent’s Mark E Smith/The Fall reference. I can’t be bothered to go there. (What do you mean "What's it mean? What's it mean?") 

Best lines: ‘In a postcode that’s full of shouty, shiny rooms to eat in, and to be seen eating in, most of them places that overpromise and under-deliver, King Cookdaily is befuddlingly low-key, especially considering its revered status among plant-based diners.’
Worst Lines: ‘Perhaps, like Salt Bae with his salt, we’d like to see him flourishing his fresh radish.’ Dirty girl!
Did the review make me want to book a table?: I’ve just got to slaughter this pig but I’ll be right with you.

Lilly Subottin, The Independent
Saltine, London

Saltine is a ‘“modern neighbourhood restaurant” in Highbury, opened by Mat Appleton and Jess Blackstone, founders of the popular Fink’s cafes, and chef Phil Wood from St John Marylebone’ that ‘offers a daily changing, pared-backed menu.’ Subottin says that ‘a couple of the starters are genuinely superb’ but elsewhere finds some issues with the cooking. That’s about all I’m prepared to say on the matter. The truth is that I’ve sort of run out of steam at this point and there is very little about this review to get me fired up enough to try and be funny about it. Maybe next time.

Best lines: N/A
Worst Lines: ‘I’m usually a fan of such a setup, but the two large plates – the only two – didn’t scream “order me”. More on those later.’ The ‘but more on that later’ trick to keep people reading is hack and old hat. But more on that next week.
Did the review make me want to book a table?: Sorry, I think I must have dozed off there for a bit, did the what make me want to do what?

What Did We Learn This Week?

That it’s a bit early in the year to be learning anything, really. Just enjoy the ride. That’s a learning point in itself.

For old dine’s sake

1 Year ago Jimi Famurewa reviewed Bouchon Racine, London (5 Stars) which is still open.
‘At a time of brazen restaurant cynicism and fearful glances towards the future, Bouchon Racine is a sanely priced passion project that urges us to live, gloriously, in the moment. Every corner of it hums with soul, character and intention.’

5 Years ago Giles Coren reviewed Pompette/the Porterhouse, Oxford (Cooking 8 and 6) both of which are still open.
‘Please go. Oxford needs places like this. Don’t make it your fault that it has so few of them.’

10 years ago Marina O’Loughlin reviewed Peyote, London (Food 4/10) which is now closed
'Arjun Waney, the restaurateur behind Roka, Zuma and La Petite Maison, has teamed up with brand consultant Tarun Mahrotri. Perhaps, then, this restaurant is less about passion than about brainstorming. What hasn't Mayfair got? A posh Mexican!’

(NB - I am painfully aware that I have still not delivered on my promise of a feature about the power of restaurant critics. It will appear. That will teach me to make promises)