The Sunday Times
Camilla Long fancied a change from Italian restaurants so searched out the sort of “hidden foodie place that people talk about” – in this case, the UK’s sole Appalachian restaurant. Not a good move. Appalachian cuisine – if it exists at all – is, she assured us, “mostly weeds and roadkill… basically anything you’ve lashed out of the trees or scratched out of the thin frontier soil”.
The ingredients she tasted were a little less outré than suggested – butter-brined chicken, pork neck, sausage, duck hearts – but she reckoned every dish was either badly over- or under-seasoned. Then she widened her assault, starting with the open kitchen in which she could see “every single ingredient being ghoulishly fiddled with, frotted and fingered” by staff who “look as if they’ve just crawled out of a tent somewhere near the M25”. Her fellow diners were just as bad: foodies all, each one either a “tattooed lunk in a lumberjack shirt or a perfect long-nailed child Asian grasping a phone”.
Nor did Camilla like the “strange and hasty” décor of “the first place I’ve been where the loos are nicer than the restaurant, which is cramped, cold and without personality”. Clearly she won’t be back.
Camilla Long - 2026-06-28
