Luxe
Zoe Williams, The Telegraph (Rating: 7/10)
Some of the meaty dishes can seem a bit of a challenge, but the best dishes at John Torode’s Smithfield newcomer are of “standing-ovation standard” (even if some are “too rich”).
“I would recommend [this restaurant] with my whole (fat-busted) heart to a gang of gourmands who don’t just want to eat, but to eat and discuss what they’re eating, and maybe argue about it a bit. But I’m not sure I’d recommend it to a person who just wanted to have fun. Maybe, people, the clue is in the name.”
Vincent Rooms Brasserie
The critic visits the “public face of Westminster Kingsway Catering College (located five minutes’ walk from St James’s Park tube). He finds a “handsome” dining room where “hints of amateurishness were kept to a startling minimum”. Overall, “this is a highly impressive restaurant in its own right”. “[T]he food, cooked by students under supervision, this was pretty good by any standards, remarkably so for the money.”
Chez Bruce
AA Gill, The Sunday Times (Rating: 2/5 stars)
For once, the critic devotes his review to a restaurant, and its area (Wandsworth)! He finds the restaurant – most-nominated by Harden’s reporters as their Londonwide ‘favourite’ in recent years – to offer an “uninspiring” menu: “Frenchish and uses a lot of high-end, expensive ingredients… This is an old-fashioned kitchen… It’s all a bit too brown and overreduced. The flavours are tiredly overfamiliar and all too similar.” Service was “dreadfully slow and inattentive” too. “I got the impression this is probably a room where the wine is more important than the food.”
L'Enclume, Cartmel
Jasper Gerard, The Telegraph (Rating: 5/5)
“It is with a heavy heart I award this restaurant five out of five. You see, the editor has banned me from giving it six, muttering something about my mathematical illiteracy. But how else can I convey that L'Enclume is, by some distance, Britain's most exciting restaurant? Simon Rogan, chef-patron, combines a technical virtuosity that would impress Heston Blumenthal with a passion for growing, and garrotting that would have Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall loading both barrels in jealousy.” Gosh. “Could the world's greatest restaurant actually be L'Enclume?”
New Angel, Dartmouth
Giles Coren, The Times (Rating: 6)
Too many supposedly independent guidebooks have in recent years become ever more craven in the face of the celebrity bandwagon, and bizarrely few critics (or other food writers) ever seem to realise this systemic failure. It’s therefore refreshing to see the Times’s man – not in our pay, so far as we can recall – validate precisely the criticisms which our own guides have repeatedly made of TV chef John Burton-Race’s seaside restaurant, and of Michelin for over-praising it: they rushed to give it a ‘star’ on opening, and it has been maintained ever since.
The critic finds that the “odd” service makes him feel “uncomfortable”, and the room was “shabbily appointed”, with “dreadful” lighting, and loos “like an old pub lavvy”.
As the critic seems to imply, the whole style of this place is so obviously at odds with what Michelin claims to stand for that you really do find yourself wondering when it was actually inspected. (And worse, if it was inspected in living memory, what does that tell you about the inspectors?)
The highpoint turns out to be the food, but even that is not “good enough to make the place ‘vaut le détour’”… from anywhere much further than Totnes.
Allium, Fairford
John Walsh, The Independent (Rating: Food 1/5 stars, Ambience 2/5 stars, Service 3/5 stars)
Guides seem to be in the news at the moment, and the critic visits the “Readers’ Restaurant of the Year for south-west England” in the “current” Good Food Guide 2009. (Most people would say it was the 2010 guide which is now ‘current’, but, for the record, the new edition is pretty upbeat too.)
The critic is not uplifted by the “hushed” dining room, which “felt unloved and neglected”, but service is “sweet” and “anxious”. The dismally erratic cuisine though, leaves him wondering: “[w]hat in God's name had gone on in the kitchen that morning? … Perhaps things would have been better if Erica Graham, the co-owner with a reputation as a front-of-house Queen of the Revels, had been around”.
Harveys of Ramsgate, Ramsgate
The critic is not impressed by the latest spin-off venture of TV chef John Burton-Race.
Caprice and Monkey Bar, New York
The ever-gallivanting critic brings us news on the two recent London-interest openings in the Big Apple. He proclaims Le Caprice, at the Pierre, to be an establishment which “exudes elegance and comfort”, and gets everything else right too.
No such praise for the self-consiously ‘sceney’ Monkey Bar, in which our own Wolseley team have a one-third share: the critic seems to think that the $120/head spent on dinner there was pretty much wasted.
Is it generally known, incidentally, that the 'best' tables in NYC are the most obvious ones, whereas in London they are usually the more discreet ones? Says a lot, doesn’t it?
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