People, noted the critic, “have gone mental for the Giaconda Dining Room in grotty old Denmark Street behind Charing Cross Road”. It’s a sign of the times that people are so interested in “a straightforward French corner bistro, using cheap cuts, packing a lot of people into a small space and smiling a lot”. The food he enjoys is sometimes a bit evocative of “the 30F menus [the critic encountered on] mid-Eighties school trips to Rouen and Le Havre”, but the whole venture is “so bonkers and unself-conscious and original that it makes perfect sense”.
NB – The Giaconda Dining Room is currently closed, due to chef Paul Merrony falling off his bike and breaking his arm. The restaurant should re-open later this month, but only for lunch, so ring ahead.
Puddings are a bit up-and-down, but otherwise the critic is full of praise for this “classy” recent Mayfair addition to the Ramsay stable, and concludes that Angela Hartnett is a “charismatic, sure-footed, sometimes awesome chef”.
The critic finds two faults with this Spitalfields newcomer: it is “slightly but discernibly overpriced (by some 20% no less), and it sits on what strikes the naked eye as an archetypal graveyard site”. Which is a shame, as at “another spot at another time, Le Bouchon Breton might well be a smash.”, not least thanks to food that’s “as outstanding as you'd expect from a former head chef at Le Gavroche”.
“Alas, alas and thrice alas, however, the brasserie experience is as much about atmosphere as food, and by the time the coffee came the room had an eighth of the bustle and merriment of a cafe on La Rue Morgue… The recommendation, then, is to give Le Bouchon Breton a go (assuming it's still there), but on no account to dither.”
(What joy, incidentally, to read in the journal known to Private Eye readers as the Grauniad a reference to that famous Parisian brasserie, La Capoule. Any relation to La Coupole, do you reckon?)
“There is no junction. They run parallel to each other.” The critic finds the non-existence of the implied NYC Lower East Side junction between Broome and Delancey streets more than a “silly, niggling point” – “it sums up the whole place”. ‘From that clumsy, misunderstood naming, through the writing of the menu to the execution of the food’, this Battersea newcomer “has ‘lost in translation’ scrawled all over it”.
Oddly though, at least to us, he then goes on to review the place as if it were trying to be a “true New York brasser[ie]”. There is, to our mind, no such thing as a New York brasserie. Well, there is, but, as the most famous ones tend to be more or less French in inspiration (as this place is), we don’t really understand his point.
Judged in whatever terms you like, though, the critic clearly finds the food pretty unsatisfactory. “All we have here is another dreary neighbourhood place, limbering up for a rollout, which has put marketing ahead of what's on the plate. I really can’t say worse.”
The critic visits the relaunched Hammersmith institution, and finds it “much the same, if a little Botoxed around the edges”, and, intriguingly, filled with “plump and glossy manipulators of art, information, entertainment, gossip and money, who all dress 10 years younger than they should, but with an expensive, déclassé shabbiness”. These, he says, are “men [who] look like they lie for fun, the women like they fart blank verse, and I’m aware that they make me bristle” – we always thought those were the sort of people who crop up as guests in Gill’s reviews!
Whatever. “[T]his place is still one of a handful of consistently five-star restaurants in London; and if that thought brings out the angry provincial chippy son of Jarrow in you, do what I do: get over yourself and have the squid with chilli.”
Bad news: yet another restaurant critic seems incapable of getting his facts straight.
This North Western restaurant is “Britain's best”, says the critic, or “so Harden's UK Restaurant Guide 2009 tells us”. The critic, though, begs to differ from our purported conclusion: “I’m really sorry, but I just don't believe any expert would describe this as Britain's best restaurant”.
So Harden’s conclusions are a load of rubbish then? Well, the problem is that we never said this was Britain’s best restaurant. What we actually said was that the restaurant’s food got the survey’s highest rating. With this – actual, rather than imagined – conclusion the critic tends precisely to agree! He finds the food “fabulous” and “excellent”, and his meat “quite unlike any lamb I have ever tried… alone worth the journey”. It’s the décor he didn’t like.
Not content with mis-stating our conclusion, however, the critic then goes on to mis-state the methodology we used to reach it. “Harden's recommendations are based on the number of letters it receives from the public extolling a particular place”, says the critic… If you [similarly] gave awards to websites based purely on the hits they attract, the winner would probably be a Prince Philip-UFO conspiracy page hosted by David Icke; that or Thai porn… It is easy to deride experts – social workers, economists, public relations gurus [and restaurant critics, presumably] – but just occasionally they are right.”
Now, you might have thought that restaurant critics might bother to acquaint themselves with the respective methodologies of the national restaurant guides – there are only four – but the fact that Harden’s conducts the UK’s only detailed annual survey of restaurant-goers across the UK has clearly passed him by. If he’d stopped to enquire, we’d have made it clear we don’t just tot up the number of positive votes (or “hits”) for each restaurant, and that, as most of our feedback comes from long-established reporters, it’s very difficult indeed for a restaurant (or its friends) to hype it.
But then the UK’s restaurant critics are, by and large, above concerns as mundane as checking their facts.
“[I]n spite of its pre-crunch prices”, this City-fringe Italian has been hard to ignore, says the critic. “Reviews have been practically evangelical, and it was recently named best new restaurant of the year in both Square Meal and the Harden's UK Restaurant Guide”. Broadly, the critic finds the guides’ conclusions vindicated. There is the occcasional quibble, “[b]ut there is no doubt that Francesco Mazzei, like Giorgio Locatelli 10 years ago at Zafferano, is a brilliant star in the making”.
17th November 2008
