Smashed Review of the Restaurant Reviews #50

The UK restaurant scene digested

The reviews

Chitra Ramaswamy, The Times Alba magazine (Scotland only)
Sub Rosa Pizza, Glasgow (9 for food)

Something has gone terribly wrong at Alba, the Scotland-only Times Saturday supplement. The magazine’s restaurant critic isn’t related to the royal family, or a member of the minor aristocracy. They don’t have a jazz band/touring theatre show/podcast/TV career they are more interested in. They are not the paper’s political correspondent. They are not fatally compromised by owning or investing in restaurants. They are not a wise-cracking smart arse. Who hired this person?

I didn’t know Chitra Ramaswamy reviewed restaurants until two weeks ago when I read ‘In conversation with The Times’ Chitra Ramaswamy’ in Vittles. In my defence, Vittles supremo Jonathan Nunn admitted in the piece that he didn’t find out until 2022 when Ramaswamy was already two years into the job (Alba launched in 2020). Marshall Manson’s otherwise very comprehensive restaurant review round up in his Professional Lunch newsletter hasn’t so far included her reviews. Nevertheless, my bad.

But what a joy to read her work and have so much to catch up on. Like the national critics (Ramaswamy’s patch is Scotland only), she does have other strings to her bow including being the award-winning author of Homelands: The History of a Friendship and Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy. She also has other journalism gigs as a features writer and TV critic for The Guardian and broadcasts for BBC Radio Scotland. The crucial difference is that she writes restaurant reviews as though it’s her only job.

Ramaswamy put the restaurants she’s writing about (and the Scottish restaurant scene in general) front and centre. The reviews are not about her, they are not an excuse to crack a load of gags, they are not predicated on tangential news stories or about restaurants that were handy for her to visit due to other work commitments. ‘In Scotland, we don't go in for that lazy criticism, not even in an ironic way. I don't write like that, and nor do I read other writers writing like that,’ she told Nunn. ‘Scottish food writers tend to be focused on Scottish produce, place, questions around land ownership and privatisation, whatever window you're looking through to talk about food.’

Generally speaking, Ramaswamy concentrates her efforts on new openings or places with a sensible topical hook such as a newly awarded accolade. Sometimes, as with Parveen’s Canteen in Glasgow, she is simply getting around to somewhere that’s been on her radar for a while. Sometimes she picks well-established places like The Creel in Dunbar because of their location (the ‘foodie hotspot’ of East Lothian in the case of The Creel). In other words, Ramaswamy works her beat.

And she goes out of her way to work her beat if her review of Sub Rosa is anything to go by. On a tip off that she would find the best pizza in Glasgow, Ramaswamy headed to an industrial estate in Castlemilk, a peripheral housing estate far south of the city centre, on a Sunday evening. There she found ‘Glasgow’s grimmest strip-lit corridor’ that led to ‘a very small, very fine-smelling pizza shop, with ironic gingham tablecloths on the tables, banging tunes playing and underground Berlin vibes’.

I’m not saying I would follow in her footsteps, but if I lived in Glasgow and liked pizza a lot more than I actually do, I would be cock-a-hoop to read about self-taught chef Dom Morton and his Neo-Neapolitan and Detroit style pies. ‘It’s all so gleefully at odds with the hard-as-nails exterior, like stumbling upon the best viennoiserie in a Shell service station,’ writes Ramaswamy. It’s a great story; true, Ramaswamy’s review was not the first published, but the place only opened in December so she obviously has her finger on the pulse.

Ramaswamy says that, as ‘a middle-aged Indian woman’ she is ‘the only restaurant critic, pretty much in UK history, who is like me’ which gives her a unique perspective. She also says that ‘the job of turning around 800 words a week about a single restaurant has validity to me’. Ramaswamy is a breath of fresh air in the world of restaurant reviewing (albeit an already well established one, at least in Scotland) which is going to make it extremely difficult for me to take the standard Smashed approach with her reviews. Nevermind, I’m sure I’ll find plenty of the ammunition elsewhere. Giles, what have you got?

Giles Coren, The Times
Voyage with Adam Simmonds, London (2/10)

And right on cue, Coren has delivered one of the most scathing Posh White Metropolitan Elite Bloke reviews for years. You can tell he was just throwing a tantrum and should have been ignored until he’d calmed down from his description of the dining room: ‘hellish to look at: a huge, empty space painted completely black — black paintwork, black pipes, black picture frames, black tables, black leather. Like the terrifying subterranean cave Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne fell into as a child’. It’s nothing of the sort. Coren has left out the smart grey upholstered chairs and stools, the parquet floor, the Art Deco wall lights, decorative wood panelling, and most importantly, the fucking gigantic windows letting in light everywhere you look (Coren went at lunchtime). Subterranean cave my arse.

The interior of Voyage, not looking particularly crepuscular

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