The Ritz
Giles Coren, The Times (Rating: 6/10)
We’ve been following the Ritz restaurant for nearly 20 years, and people are perenially proclaiming that the cooking is – finally – living up to the room. Thus, The Times’s man finds himself going to check out their new spring menu, which “everyone is raving about”. Needless to say it turns out that this is Yet Another False Dawn.
Hix Oyster and Chop House
Giles Coren, The Times (Rating: 9/10)
Dissatisfed with his meal at the Ritz, the critic moves on to another look-how-famous-my-friends-are review – with David Baddiel – of Mark Hix’s new Farringdon chophouse. Needless to say – see other reviews passim, as Private Eye would say – he finds it “an absolute triumph… I cannot think of a place I’d rather eat just now”.
Tom Ilic
AA Gill, The Sunday Times (Rating: 3/5 stars)
”There are plenty of critics who rave about this [Battersea] dining room”, notes the critic, but he is not among them. Ilic’s food, he finds, is “precise, well sourced, prettily offered [, has] an honest goodness, and it bored me to tears”. This is a “karaoke menu”, he proclaims, full of “really good cover versions of popular hits”.
Cha Cha Moon
John Walsh, The Independent (Rating: 2/5 stars)
“I've heard of fast food, but this is ridiculous”, says the critic. Alan Yau’s much acclaimed newcomer seems to be “in a tearing hurry to sit you down, stick a napkin down your neck, take your order, ladle some won ton or ho fun down your throat, tap their feet and drum their fingers while you try to digest it, then bustle you out of the place so they can hurl two other people into your vacant spot on the bench”. He finds the operation “hip, super-efficient and almost entirely soulless”.
Brasserie St Jacques
Nicholas Lander, Financial Times
Unusually, the FT’s man is first with the news of this just-opened Gallic brasserie in St James’s. Unfortunately, however, his meal “was not only extremely disappointing in terms of food, wine and ambience but also expensive not just in comparison with bistros in Paris but also to any meal at Arbutus, Galvin, Racine or Wild Honey, which have collectively raised the bar for this style of cooking in London”.
Helen Darroze at the Connaught (Preview)
In a long piece (not a review), the Indie’s man considers “Why Helene Darroze is set to become Britain's leading female chef”. A brave prognostication. If he’s right, the home-grown girls – such as Angela Hartnett, and Clare Smyth (at Gordon Ramsay) – aren’t going to like it one little bit.
Mr Chu China Palace, Hull
Matthew Norman, The Guardian (Rating: 3/10)
Will the good people at the Guardian never learn that, as Wilde observed, no good deed goes unpunished? They keep trying to show they’re not capital-centric, and to find good provincial restaurants, and what happens? They end up in places like this “absolute shocker” (which John Prescott has apparently described as “my favourite Chinese restaurant in the world”). All very laudable of course, but just how interested are the readers in an account of a place with “the values of a fifth-rate Pekingese restaurant circa 1974”?
Even the critic seems to recognise the error of his ways: “I've bleedin' had it with this New Labour-Chinese restaurant lark, and no mistake”, he concludes. A momentous shift is clearly under way.
The Garrick's Head, Bath
Like its stablemate the Guardian, the Observer does – laudibly – try to get out from the capital. And similarly it often finds its journey wasted. “And so to dinner at the Garrick's Head in Bath, a food pub by the Theatre Royal, run by really sweet people who couldn't do more to make sure you were having a good time, apart from give you nice things to eat” (emphasis added). This may be “a solid, reassuring space of wood-panelled walls and wooden floors and nicely positioned tables, but with the first dish the critic encounters, “everything floated into itself until it was one of those weird German compound nouns”. It was, as his companion observed, “the kind of thing your dear friend who can sort of cook would serve their vegetarian mates at a dinner party if they were really trying”. The meal, sadly, “was a succession of such events”.
And it’s not as if Mr Rayner hadn’t done his research: “I chose the Garrick's Head carefully. It's the second pub from a bunch of people who have built a reputation at the nearby King William. And yet it was such a miss”. He concludes, as we often do, by finding Bath “baffling”: “[i]t is an obviously wealthy town with a self-conscious interest in the surface of things… That should be an indicator of a thriving restaurant sector - but the truth is, it's not.” Next week, we imagine, he’ll try to find somewhere to eat in Oxford, upon which very similar observations could be made.
Auberge du Lac at Brocket Hall, Welwyn
Jasper Gerard, Sunday Telegraph (Rating: 7/10)
The critic finds this grand lakeside restaurant is “run with meticulous care”, but he also notes that it “ain’t cheap”. We’d like to summarise the rest of the review, but it’s so wrapped up in its own metaphors that that’s not really possible.
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