Andy Lynes

Well, there are dozens of restaurants in Upper Street which is not far from H&I tube, but the closet place I know of is The Barnsbury gastropub. Never been, but the menu reads nicely (veal chop for 11.50!) and if you look at the review section on the site, it appears to have got the thumbs up from the great and the good.

Six courses and a glass of champagne for £45.00? Bargain ahoy!

Guy Diamond raves about The Ledbury in this weeks Time Out (registration required).

He was long gone by the time Ramsay got there.

Two nations, common language and all that rot. Spread Eagle? Damn fine show, what!

Looks like I may have been rather precipitate in my comments as a certain Ludlow chef has not yet been approached about this and won't be for a little while to come. However, it is a cracking idea and I hope that it happens eventually.

I've now amended my report of the Roux dinner to add a few more details about the canapes and preperation of the dishes.

Phil Howard now at The Square.

A friend recently had a very good meal at The Chancery (and got half price on the food through toptable.co.uk). The White Swan has always been a safe bet, although the same friend had a disappointing meal there a week or so ago. The Paternoster Chophouse could be worth a punt, especially with other people's money.

Michael Caines at The Royal Marriot Bristol might be worth a look. I stayed at the hotel a few years before Caines took over the restaurant so I can't comment on the food, but its a lovely place and the menu reads quite nicely.

Can we assume that Bob Granleese had dinner with Jay Rayner recently?

Yes. Although I'm waiting for Martin Hadden to make good his threat to get a certain Ludlow based chef down to cook at Bailiffscourt before I complete the set.

Stunning - that pasta looks awesome. The gnocchi also look excellent. Where did you get the parmesan air recipe from?

Crab salad with roquet and cucumber: Here's a version where I tried to do a Michel Bras-type smear of roasted red pepper sauce, but made a right pigs ear of it: The salad was made from white crab meat, diced avocado, tomato concasse, shredded lettuce and spring onion bound in home-made mayo and is a highly simplified variation of a recipe that appears in Marco Pierre White's Wild Food From Land and Sea, although the original recipe may actually be Joel Robuchon's. The pepper sauce is just red peppers, roast in the oven until blackened, skinned, de-seeded and blitzed with red wine vinegar and olive oil. The cucumber garnish is nicked from Jean Christophe Novelli.

I believe I read in a review that the tables in the bar are half first-come and half for reservation-- or did I just make that up? ← The stools at the bar itself and the row of tables immeadiately behind them are unbookable, but you can reserve the rest of the tables in the room.

Thanks for the report, sounds as if the food is there or there-abouts, with only a few of the symptoms of chef's-first-menu-syndrome, mainly a surfeit of beignets. Was the lovely Ms H working last night? Not that it matters of course. I'm way more interested in the food. In fact its all I'm interested in, I don't even know why I asked the question actually.

As DOV is over, this thread is now locked. Please start another thread for reports about the Irish Heather. Please bear in mind that eGullet is a site for the discussion of food and drink not personal issues you may have with restaurateurs. Thanks.

Radio DJ Sean Rowley recently had the bright idea of collecting together songs from the 70's that many of us of a certain age remember fondly but wouldn’t be caught dead admitting to liking in public. His "Guilty Pleasures" compilation features such forbidden classics as January by Pilot, ELO's Sweet Talking Woman and Howzat by Sherbet. Despite the scandalous omission of Some Girls Do by Racey, the CD was an instant hit and has already spawned a sequel. Chef Lee William's menu of "modern classics" at The Spread Eagle in Midhurst, West Sussex contains guilty pleasures of the culinary variety. While I'm as happy to eat a bowl of snail porridge or mackerel with smoked banana as the next gourmet, give me a plate of home smoked salmon with, wait for it, Russian salad and I'm really in gastronomic heaven. There is of course an element of nostalgia to the dish - childhood memories of the Heinz version add an extra twist of delight – but fundamentally, it's just a great plate of food. Properly executed, that multi-coloured tinned gunk is transformed into a delicious mayonnaise-bound salpicon of fresh vegetables. While they won't awards for innovation, the restrained classicism of starters like twice baked stilton soufflé with bacon and walnut salad; shellfish bisque with char-grilled garlic bread and rouille; and 6 rock oysters with shallot vinegar and Tabasco sauce make them enticing propositions. Main courses on the £35.00 a head menu steer an equally mainstream path with the reassuringly familiar grilled Dover sole, chateaubriand and chicken breast all making an appearance. Unless you are in a restaurant with a salad cart, the words "onion rings" are always a welcome sight and a sure sign of humility in the kitchen; of a chef who wants to please his customers rather than indulge some misguided artistic urge. A nicely crisp stack of rings topped some deeply flavoured braised oxtail faggots which were served with a silken parsley mashed potato. Hit of the night however was the grilled pork cutlet with buttered Savoy cabbage, glazed macaroni, apple sauce and black pudding. The thick cut of meat was the right side of juicy and full of good porky flavour, the pasta gratin a richly satisfying accompaniment. All this was washed down with a nice bottle Burgundy in the shape of a St Veran Domaine des Valanges 2002 Michel Paquet, fairly priced at £30.00 A rather phallic rum baba, with its decoration of piped cream and glace cherry, seemed to have been ripped from the pages of a 1970's cookery magazine. Despite its comical looks, it was an excellent example of the dish and far better then the alcohol-sodden version I was recently served in Alain Ducasse's Aux Lyonnaise restaurant in Paris. Those British stalwarts treacle tart and apple crumble were of course present and correct, while a mango syllabub with raspberry coulis and pistachio macaroons added a little French-accented élan. Candles, original oak beams and an inglenook fireplace big enough to boil a big bad wolf in make the dining room of this 15th century coaching inn impossibly romantic. Not the ideal venue for a strategy meeting with marketing then, but perfect for weekends away with the other half, or whenever the urge to indulge in a guilty pleasure strikes you. Now, where did I put that "Best of The Rubettes" CD. Restaurant Website

They take reservations although they are not required.

Remember that these are half-entree portions for $15, and that the Bar Room serves around 500 people a day so I would imagine they could sustain those sort of prices. In London, its usual practice for prices to rise, sometimes quite steeply within 4-6 weeks of a new opening. Is that also common in NYC?

Well, in my experience, you just turn up, ask a couple of questions and off they go! You can't shut most of them up. The work is then for the journalist to make something cohesive and interesting out of all those words. Its about selecting the material, ordering it and putting in some nice links. What you've got in Off the Menu is a direct, probably completely unedited, transcription of a taped interview of around an hour or so. Its also very obvious that Bob Mullins is a generalist with no specific knowledge of restaurants and chefs and that he is reading a list of pre-preapared questions. As I recall, there's little sense of him reacting to answers. There's some interested stuff in there though. i must take another look at it.

I take you point, but even though TFD is close in style to el Bulli than Le Gavroche, they are all restaurants and all very different in style. So there's no particular reason for The Fat Duck to try and emulate el Bulli anymore than it would want to mimic Le Gav. In any style of cuisine, you are going to find chefs that bore easily and like to change stuff around all the time, and those that keep dishes on for ever. Shaun Hill is again a good case in point. He had scallops with lentils and coriander, and many other dishes, on both the menu at Gidleigh and then at Merchant House, but as far as I'm aware he was never criticised for it.

I bought that book a while ago. The Aikens interview is a classic, I'm sure he regrets saying some of those things now. Its a bit of a hack job, just straight transcriptions of rather rambling interviews with repetitious questions. But if you can pick it up cheap (I saw a copy in a Brighton North Lanes bookshop for a fiver recently) its work a look.

Is there a strong carrot theme to the current Midsummer House menu? Not quite sure what you're getting at here.

But they close for months and months every year in order to produce a new menu. That's a lot of pressure and there's a high risk that the new stuff will be a bit shit. But its just two different approaches. Why is one better than the other? You don't go to Le Gavroche expecting new dishes all the time. You don't say to yourself "Fuck me, souffle suissesse again?." So why expect Heston to be pulling rabbits out of hats every five minutes?