Smashed #9.5 - Special edition: Critical condition

The UK restaurant scene digested

Photo by Amr Serag on Unsplash

I love the smell of a walk-in fridge. It was one of the reasons I used to stage in restaurant kitchens. That, and all the industry gossip I heard while picking boxes of spinach and cracking crabs. You know, all the shitty jobs you give to a stagiaire. It could have been worse. An English chef once told me that, when he staged in three star Michelin kitchen in France, the first job he was given was to peel a box of langoustines, the sharp shells inevitably cutting up his hands, and the second was to squeeze a box of lemons so that the juice got into the cuts. Gotta love that Gallic humour.

So, anyway, I jumped at the chance of a tour of the butchery at The Devonshire, courtesy of the pub’s co-founder, chef Ashley Palmer Watts after I had lunch there earlier this week . The aroma of lamb chops, whole Iberico pig carcasses from double Michelin-starred chef Brett Graham’s farm, and sirloins, deep purple and creamy white with age, was so intense it pervaded the building’s lower floors. The Devonshire is not a pub for vegans.

As I was playing the part of ‘dining companion’ in someone else’s future review, I’m not going to bang on about the meal too much here. I won’t mention which two Michelin-star chef was in for lunch that day (it wasn’t Brett Graham) or go on about what a difference the aged malt vinegar from Cornwall (this stuff, I think) made to the already-famous scallop and bacon dish. But I will say that it was every bit as good, and probably better, than the glowing, ecstatic reviews that I’ve parsed in previous editions of this newsletter indicated it might be.

I was a bit pissed on Pouilly Fuissé 2019 (hints of butterscotch) by the time the astonishingly good lamb chops with green sauce arrived. That might partly explain why I compared them to a lamb main course at a gala dinner at a food festival in California some years ago, cooked by Alain Passard and Daniel Boulud (and I mean actually cooked by them at the stove, they weren’t just tarting about sipping champagne and posing for photos, although I’m sure some of that happened too). I can’t honestly say that I remember the details of that dish but I do remember thinking at the time that it was the best lamb I had ever eaten, and I had a similar thought at lunch on Monday.

What I do vividly remember from that food and drink festival is Passard and Boulud on the dance floor at the gala dinner’s afterparty, ‘getting down’ (there’s no other word for it) to Gold Digger while forming the bread of a Michelin-starred sandwich that was filled by the future wife of another Michelin starred chef, also in attendance. It was all good, clean innocent fun of course, I’m not insinuating anything, but it was, well, just a teeny bit incongruous.

As well as getting a hit of walk-in fridge, I got a good blast of (unrepeatable) industry gossip and I didn’t even have to pick a box of spinach to get it. Result. I arrived at 11.50am and enjoyed a quiet pint of Guinness in the mostly deserted bar (and yes, the Guinness is as good as they say it is) and finally left the place at just after 6pm when the same bar was a heaving mass of humanity that resembled the mosh pit at a Slipknot gig. It’s not the longest time I’ve ever been in a restaurant, that honour goes to Manresa in Los Gatos, California where I clocked in about seven and a half hours, although that did include interviewing the chef after dinner. But I’m hard pressed to think of a better way to spend half a day.

(Actual footage of queuing for a pint in The Devonshire, any day of the week after 4pm.)

This is a special edition of Smashed with an example of the sort of content I’ll be offering in future to subscribers only. Edition 10, with the usual review-of-the-reviews will be published this Friday, 19 January.

Special feature: Critical Condition

How much power do restaurant critics actually wield?

At a recent lunch, I mention to a fellow food writer that I had launched this newsletter. ‘No one reads the newspaper restaurant critics nowadays do they?,’ was his withering retort. Apart from thinking, well, that’s quite rude, I also thought, oh shit, he might have a point. You only have to look at the Press Gazette's monthly analysis of ABC national newspaper circulation figures to see the continuing general decline in readers. The Sun, Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Observer have kept their ABCs private for several years, so the full picture is far from clear, although it’s unlikely that they are bucking the trend given that only the i avoided month-on-month print circulation decline in November 2023, the latest figures available at the time of writing.

But of course, print circulation is only part of the story. The Press Gazette’s figures for the top 50 UK news websites appear to fluctuate quite a bit month on month and year on year, but currently the Mail Online receives over 517 million pages views a month, The Guardian 250 million and The Telegraph 135 million. It’s safe to assume some of those views are accounted for by restaurant reviews. So maybe the critics aren’t so irrelevant after all.

There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to support that view. Although I am not a critic, I know from the feedback I get from chefs and restaurateurs that articles I’ve written (in The Times in particular) can have a noticeable effect on a restaurant’s bookings. That is doubly true for the critics.

‘Whenever we've had a great review, it has made a difference,’ says Brendan Padfield, owner of The Unruly Pig in Woodbridge, Suffolk, currently number 2 in the Top 50 Gastropub list and the recipient of five stars from William Sitwell in The Telegraph in October 2020. ‘He gave us a glorious review, it said, this is why restaurants exist. It's why hospitality needs to be saved. This is the new standard-bearer for restaurants going forward. He said all sorts of glorious and lovely things. Not only were we really pleased to receive it, but by God did we notice the difference. We were jammed and people travelled from as far aways as Leeds. It made a real difference to us at a very difficult time. And so God bless him, really.’

It’s a similar story at The Pack Horse in Hayfield in the Peak District (by coincidence another gastropub, although no conclusions should be drawn from that other than gastropubs are generally speaking a very good thing), but this time the year is 2021, the paper is The Times and the critic is Marina O’Loughlin.

‘I was absolutely over the moon with that when we got it, and it was so unexpected as Marina's got a bit of a fierce reputation, and I think she quite famously prior to visiting us, wasn't particularly keen on the idea of pubs, so it was lovely that she enjoyed it so much,’ says chef and owner Luke Payne, who admits the review didn’t exactly come as a surprise. ‘We were given a very kind heads up by Tom Hetherington that she was popping in. Obviously nobody really knows what she actually looks like until you've met her, so I'm now part of that weird little club that knows what Marina looks like.’

Although Payne says he didn’t ‘go massively out of his way’ for O’Loughlin, he does admit that he put more effort into the menu the day before, going as far as adding a main course to increase variety. That extra effort paid off. The review was a rave and the response to it according to Payne was overwhelming. ‘We noticed immediately that bookings went absolutely through the roof and it was really good timing for us because the review came out at the end of October, so for November we were basically full every lunch and every dinner again all the way through December and up until about March. Coming so close off the back of Covid, I would say the review saved us.’

The increase in bookings driven by the review provided the business with a financial buffer, allowed Payne to pay off a significant amount of covid debt and enabled the pub to operate properly again almost immediately. Payne says that to this day, new customers visit The Pack Horse because of the review.

O’Loughlin’s review of The Pack Horse is also a good illustration of the sort of knock on effects a good review can have, both good and bad. ‘The year before, we made it into the long list of the Top 50 Gastropubs where I think we were 76, but after Marina's review, we were in the Top 50. It made the rest of the industry stand up and take notice a little bit. That was in the February after the review which was also when we had a Michelin Guide visit, so I do think there is definitely a connection with all of that. And then we also had Tim Hayward come in from the FT who also wrote a really lovely review about us.’

Although Hayward’s review didn’t quite have the same effect as O’Loughlin, everything was coming up roses in Hayfield it seemed. But there was some surprising fall out from all that success. ‘It's really hard to get hold of chefs because we're so rural. We're relying on a very small catchment area for chefs who are able to actually work for us. And because we were so busy because of the reviews, our very small kitchen team just got burnt out. Between April and May 22, just about every chef that I employed left for one reason or another. There was a point for about three months after that where it was just me in the kitchen again. I think a lot of it was down to the fact that we were so relentlessly busy all the time, so that made us adjust our offer a little bit and strip things back.’

Bad reviews from critics can have disastrous consequences and are not easily forgotten, as veteran chef Ian McAndrew can attest. ‘If Jonathan Meades was ever to cross the road in front of me, I would have no hesitation in running him over,’ says McAndrew who, back in late August 1989 opened Restaurant 116 in Knightsbridge.

‘We were fairly high profile when we opened and had a good number of celebrities, big name chefs and reviewers come in the first few months. Towards the end of the year The Times ran a piece in their Sunday supplement of people to watch in the 90’s and only two chefs were named, myself and Marco. I was being tipped to gain two Michelin stars, my second cookbook Poultry and Game had just been published and was doing well and I was also featured in Kit Chapman’s just published book Great British Chefs.

‘Meades visited in October. We had to pour him and his friend into a cab when they left, they were in a shocking state. He wrote about us the following week and had little of interest to say as far as I remember. He then apparently came back for dinner between Christmas and New Year 1989, but he had not booked, he just turned up. We were closed for the Christmas break, but because at the time the economy had started to tank and interest rates were rising uncontrollably he took the view that as we were closed, we had obviously gone bust. He didn’t pick up the phone or come back after the holiday and knock on the door to check, he just assumed we had folded.’

According to McAndrew, Meades went ahead and wrote a piece in The Times citing 116 Knightsbridge as the first high profile restaurant to suffer as a result of the economic downturn. Customers cancelled, despite McAndrew informing them that the story wasn’t true, and the restaurant limped into 1990 with just 20 customers instead of the expected 80.

‘We tried to sue him but me against the might of the Times, no chance! He did eventually relent and issued an apology, three or four lines at the end of his column about 4 weeks later but by then the damage had been done, there was no way back, the apology was too little too late and we closed our doors for good around the end of March with massive losses and interest rates up around the 16% mark and broke.’

Although in McAndrew’s case, it appears to be bad reporting by a critic rather than a bad review that had such a negative impact, it might still given the current crop of critics pause for thought before they take a publish-and-be-damned stance.

A few years back, I was at a dinner and a national critic, who shall remain nameless, was seated on the same table. They told us that one time they had just come back from a holiday, hadn’t written their column for a few weeks and were just raring to go and felt the need to get a really nasty review out of their system, regardless of how good or bad the restaurant might be.

They did so, submitted their copy and then, a few days later regretted their decision and tried to recall their copy. Too late. The review was published as written. Whether that restaurant is still open, I don’t know as they refused to reveal which place the review was about. I’m not saying this has ever happened more than once, but I do know from personal experience that it can be easy to get carried away when writing a review, slipping into hyperbole, positive or negative. The last thing anyone wants is a boring middle-of-the-road review, but maybe sometimes the truth is more important than entertainment.

‘I understand why a lot of people find bad reviews quite interesting and fun, but I think we also have to look at it from a very human perspective,’ says Payne. ‘This is somebody's life and it's their business. The power that critics have to dictate people's futures is quite dangerous. Maybe they should focus negative reviews on big chains that are pretty crap and can probably take the hit from a negative review. For indie businesses, it just doesn't really sit right with me. They're probably all hyped up and ready to deliver and do their best and it might just not be very good. I think it's just a little bit unfair on them that they then have that plastered all over the national press.’