Smashed: Some random restaurant thoughts
The future of the hospitality industry, the joy of classic dishes and Giles Coren being a dick
I am sinking a lot of time and a fair amount of money into relaunching Brighton’s Best Restaurants. I want it to be the definitive guide to the city’s restaurant scene and maybe even a template for other guides around the country. I’m excited by the idea and also simultaneously utterly terrified. There seems to be a very real possibility that Brighton’s independent restaurant scene, built up over the last decade or so, could vanish in the blink of an eye. The economic pressures that everyone has been talking about for what seems to be eternity are not going to disappear overnight because Andy Burnham is moving into number 10. I wrote about this in more detail in the most recent edition of Serving Up, the newsletter of Brighton’s Best Restaurants, which you can read for free here.
But then, on the other hand, I had a terrific lunch at the brand new Vine House in Kemptown in Brighton this weekend, which looks as though it’s had some money spent on it. I’ve also had dinner at local fine-dining favourite The Set, relocated to small but swanky new omakase counter dining-style premises, and I’ll soon be dining at the about-to-be relaunched Kitgum, also in Brighton. It will continue to serves brilliant Persian, Indian and East African small plates but now in bigger, better and more central surroundings.
Further afield, I read that £500k is being invested into relaunching legendary northern restaurant The Box Tree, Edinburgh-based chef Dean Banks is converting a former Brew Dog bar into a Mediterranean-inspired restaurant and Danielle Heron and Sofie Stoermann-Naess will relaunch their Manchester restaurant Osma in new premises, with a grocer and provisions shop called Boutikk attached.
Let’s not even bother to talk about all the new restaurants due to open in London, because in London, the rules do not apply. The capital’s strange economic currents will see the opening this year of a 5000sq ft food hall at Victoria Station, an Italian restaurant by Adam Byatt in Wandsworth, a Chinese pub by Andrew Wong in Shoreditch and a Turkish restaurant by Mangal II’s Sertaç Dirik and David Carter of Oma fame. And I haven’t even mentioned the invasion of top-end American chefs led by Daniel Boulud and including Daniel Rose of Le Cou Cou, Ellia and Junghyun Park of Atomix and another restaurant from Mario Carbone’s Major Food Group.
It is the best of restaurant times, it is the worst of restaurant times. It is the spring of hope, it is the winter of despair. If you understand what the hell is going on, please comment below.
A plate of meat of some description at Mountain restaurant in London in 2024, which appeared at number 7 in this year’s National Restaurant Awards. Not the plate of meat, the restaurant. What did the National Restaurant Awards (NRAs) ever do to Giles Coren? In his review of Half Cut Market in North London, he trumpets that Bouchon Racine, a restaurant he claims to have put on the map with his ‘gushing’ review, has been named the best restaurant in the UK, but fails to name-check the NRAs. He then boasts that he’s been on three different networks to talk about the restaurant’s win, but then dismisses the awards that are the entire reason he’s appeared on the radio as ‘the annual random rotation of restaurant names by a panel of nobodies in a grotty hotel somewhere’ and a ‘farrago’.
He then has the brass neck to accuse the NRAs of perpetuating ‘the hideously outdated idea that restaurants exist to be graded and ranked in ways that only encourage terrible snobbery in guests, create unnecessary pressure on chefs and divert revenue away from the grassroots that sustain this business’. This is the same Giles Coren who grades restaurants every week of his life, who puts unnecessary pressure on chefs with snarky put downs, and diverts revenue away from the grassroots by bigging up his posh chums’ gaffs on the reg.
I don’t think for one second that the organisers of the NRAs intended to encourage snobbery, put chefs under undue pressure or divert revenue away from the grassroots. My guess is that, in addition to creating an event that could provide a stream of revenue and create publicity for restaurantonline.co.uk, they simply wanted to celebrate the industry they spend their lives reporting on. Maybe I’m being overly sensitive, as the aforementioned Brighton awards I run are partly inspired by the NRAs, but I reckon Coren owes them an apology.A random prawn cocktail from somewhere, probably not a pub. Photo by Meg von Haart on Unsplash Imagine if there was fine dining, narrative-style service at your local pub. ‘And here we have your starter. It’s inspired by one of Chef’s regular foraging trips to the freezer, where he discovered some dry-aged peeled and deveined king prawns he’d forgotten he’d ordered from Brakes. He immediately gathered the brigade around him for one of his famous spontaneous brainstorming sessions. I’ll never forget that magical moment when Sam, the sous chef, almost whispered the words ‘Marie Rose’ and the kitchen just exploded. It’s nestling in a bed of sad, drooping butterhead lettuce and finished with a sprinkling of chopped parsley that chef made about a week ago when he was feeling unexpectedly motivated (we never found out why, but he was sniffing a lot that day) and then couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Enjoy!’
It’s currently 32°C in Brighton as I write this. I can hardly think straight, let alone move. How the hell do chefs and KPs work in these conditions? I know there’s induction and air con in many places these days, nevertheless, Smashed salutes you.
As I outlined in Smashed #85 I’ve been extremely lucky with dining opportunities over the last few weeks, eating at some very nice tasting menu restaurants around the country. But to celebrate our wedding anniversary last week (well, it’s actually this week, but we celebrated last week) Mrs. Smashed and I returned to The Swan Inn at Fittlesworth and ate some beautifully roasted chicken, a ribeye steak (pictured above), some chips and a green salad. It was magnificent. There was a lot more, including a terrific dish of octopus, chorizo and peas and a superb apricot frangipane tart, but I’m not going to mention those in case we sound greedy. I’m not pitting one style of food against another, but simply noting that advances or refinements in restaurant cooking do not negate the classics, but perhaps they bring them more clearly into focus.
Time, as a wise man once said, keeps on slippin’ into the future. I’ve just been writing up my meal at AO by Daniel Rogan for the Observer Food Weekly newsletter. It will be out at some point in the future, I have no idea when. Spoiler alert, I liked it. Anyway, doing a little background research, I discovered that Daniel Rogan is 38 years old. His restaurant is named after the initials of his children’s first names. That means Simon Rogan, the trailblazing enfant terrible of British gastronomy, is a GRANDFATHER! How the fuck did that happen? If Simon Rogan is a grandfather and I am older than Simon Rogan, that must make me, well, nearly dead. Enjoy Smashed while you can. See you next week, hopefully.
Simon Rogan is the same age as me, so not THAT old!!
Regarding the boom in restaurant openings, and the boom in restaurant closings, I’m seeing it here in NYC too. I guess it’s keeping me in business so I shouldn’t complain. But sometimes I wish restaurants had to list the “investors” bankrolling openings. They are necessary I suppose, but are also responsible for most of the damage we see in dining culture. The idle rich destroy everything that makes life joyful.