A rare – and welcome – piece from TO’s top critic, who uses his review as a platform for some rare off-piste commentary. We’re not talking Gill-style navel-gazing, though: it’s eco-musings which dominate the piece. Quite rightly, he notes that “most of London’s restaurateurs have done very little to address sustainability, animal welfare or food waste”.
Indeed, the blatant failure of too much of the hospitality industry to embrace even the most basic of green concepts is becoming striking. We suspect – witness the Evening Standard’s current campaing against bottled water in restaurants – that commentary on such issues is going to get a lot more strident.
And it can’t just be coincidence, surely, that Dimond choose now to tackle head-on the proposition that “only the affluent can afford the luxury of caring about the planet”. This school of thought – prominently advocated a few weeks ago by the Observer’s Jay Rayner, of all unlikely people, and subsequently denounced by many of the papers’ readers – is dismissed as “utter nonsense”? “Even people on low incomes”, he says, “can… pay a little bit extra for free range”.
Ms O’L is both a fan of Vineet Bhatia and one of London’s more reliable critics, so her verging-on-vitriolic full-page review of the great Indian chef’s diffusion outlet, in Bayswater, must make unhappy reading for him. The food is “decent enough”, but she feels so “patronised” and “noise-polluted” by her visit that she needs a “well-mixed Martini” – as on offer at Le Café Anglais – to console her.
Oh dear, the critics really do seem to have fallen out of love with the Sweary One. His latest mass-market outlet, a palatial Maida Vale boozer, strikes Ms M’s (regular nowadays) stand-in as a “swizz”: “you're dining with Gordon Ramsay in much the same sense that you're dining with Paul Newman when you open one of his pasta sauces”.
He may only be a stand-in – with no official under-study role, so far as we’re aware – but Mr Sexton always strikes us as writing pretty sensible reviews. He’s pretty upbeat about this City brasserie, which offers “well-prepared, generous food, at just the right level of sophistication… in an elegant setting”.
With the recent openings of both the Prince of Wales and the Normanby, opines the critic, “[Putney] locals who once yearned for good-quality cooking on their doorstep are now spoiled for choice”. The two pubs are “different enough not to tread on each other’s toes”, though, with the Normanby being the “less conventional” of the two.
27th February 2008
