Andy Lynes

I spoke to Henry this evening. The maximum table size in the main dining room is 6. The back room will hold 12 around a central table or 14 in a horeshoe configuration. Henry would compose a set menu for us. Minimum spend would be £1,200 (including service) as that is what the tables would make on a usual night. That would mean £100 a head if there were 12 of us or £85.00 for 14. Under these conditions, I would have to insist on taking full payment in advance. I haven't gone into further details as yet in terms of what we would get for our money, and although I know Henry quite well, I wouldn't want to make any promises about doing any deals. Henry is away the first 2 weeks of August, so the end of July would be quite a good time, or later in August. Alternatively, if holiday arrangements become a problem we could move it back to September.

Bourdain is taking over?

Apparently her drunken, impromptu renditions of "Janitor of Lunacy" at the end of every evening didn't do her any favours. If she had bowed to public pressure and sung "I'll Be Your Mirror" instead, things could have turned out very differently.

Probably 6 or 8 in the main room, more in the back room. Lets see who wants to come and when and then I can speak to Henry about it.

Didn't Nico call it the "curse of Shinfield"?

The title of this thread still applies according to the Caterer. A troubled site since the departure of John Burton Race.

someone new's just joined my team, she's egyptian and seems to have a fantastic knowledge of the food. she said this place isn't that great but recommended a place on Beauchamp Place the name of which escapes me but I will find out for tomorrow. The room looks stunning however, and apparently has great views over Green Park. Hardens gives it 3/5 for the food which is "good".

Those of you lucky enough to have reservations over the coming months at The Merchant House are in for a real treat. Although I have never had anything less than very good food there, my meal last Thursday night was outstanding. There is something very summery about the menu right now: lobster, turbot, lamb, porcini, summer vegetables, local strawberries and apricots all made an appearance. However, Shaun Hill is not religiously wedded to the idea of 100% seasonal,100% regional produce and will use the very best of what is available at any given time. For example, the chef will quite happily serve asparagus in winter if he thinks it tastes good enough and local producers are not used by default, but must prove their worth against national suppliers. There is very little room for refrigerated storage space at the restaurant and therefore Shaun is forced to write his dinner menus daily, based on what has been delivered or what he has shopped for that morning. Everyone talks about using the freshest produce prepared simply; here you are guaranteed it. The Merchant House style is based on prime ingredients and Shaun is content to run with food costs that most other restaurateurs would find unacceptable in order to use and serve them (around 50% compared to an industry average of 25-30%). Take for example a starter dish of steamed lobster with coriander, chick pea and olive oil sauce, a variation of his stone-cold classic scallops with lentils and coriander. With the menu at £35.00, it would only be natural to expect to pay a supplement for the whole tail you will receive. In fact, unless you want cheese as an extra course, you won't pay extra for anything. The meal began with a single large canape of gravadlax with a boiled quail's egg served on melba toast - stylish and delicious. My starter of calf's sweetbreads with potato and olive cake was as good if not better than the version I ate the first time I visited the restaurant back in 1996. Then it included some kidney, now it is simply one large fist -shaped sweetbread (the thymus heartbread rather than the inferior throatbread), the fried cake of mashed potato and green olives and a piquant caper sauce. It strikes me as a stroke of instinctive culinary genius to accompany sweetbreads with green olives (although if anyone is aware of a precedent I'd be interested to know). Hill's own take is that the sauce made of a thick mayonnaise whisked into warm veal stock finished with shallots, parsley, chives and capers is the unifying factor between the two main elements and that he took a "why not" approach to the marriage of the olives and offal. A main course of turbot with porcini mushrooms with beurre blanc reminded me of how deeply satisfying and joyful eating in restaurants can be when there is a true generosity of spirit about the food. The fish must have been a good 8oz, a thick enough tranche to have roasted beautifully. The porcini were fine, earthy specimens. Sliced and simply pan fried, they echoed the meatiness of the turbot. Accurately cooked asparagus, peas and runner beans were arranged around the fish and a delicate butter sauce, a few blobs of mushroom duxelle and a single boiled Jersey Royal completed the picture. I'm struggling to remember a better plate food. Desserts, along with the warm buttermilk rolls and whole meal bread, continue to be a highpoint of any visit to the restaurant. Having consumed around three-quarters of a bottle of excellent Willi Opitz pinot gris 2000, I abandoned usual etiquette and asked for a half portion each of local strawberries and mascarpone ice cream and apricot tart. If I had polished off the whole bottle, I might easily have added Somloi (a Hungarian trifle Shaun first encountered when cooking at the Gay Hussar in the 70's) and coconut crème brulee to my order. With a full house, including a table of 6, service ran with its usual warmth and efficiency, indeed the restaurant seems to have somewhat of a spring in its step right now. If you can be flexible with your arrangements, it's always worth adding your name to the cancellation list, or booking now for 4 months ahead. Ludlow has many reasonably priced B&Bs (I stayed at The Mount this time around. A large comfortable room with a superb view and a decent breakfast for £30.00. Best breakfast I have had however is at the Hen and Chickens) which helps to make the trip a very affordable one.

It should appear in the 19 June issue (number 67), but I'll let you know if there is any change to that. This will now appear in issue 68 (30 June).

Ramsay was interviewed on Jonathan Ross last week and claimed to be returning to his own kitchen for the next 6 months, so it looks like I was wrong about his forthcoming media assualt (possibly fronting a game show etc). That said, he was on the front cover the Observer Food Monthly on Sunday, and I did spot him in a "Give Blood" advert yesterday and there is the rumoured Walkers Crisps campaign... So has Ramsay changed anything with this series? The only chefs of his equivilent standing to do telly in the UK were the Roux Brothers, and then it was a rather gentle cookery show. Ramsay has rocketed into the consciousness of 7 million primetime ITV viewers. As a result of watching, will they be more understanding of what goes behind the scenes at a restaurant, will they be better customers for that knowledge? Will their curiosity be sparked as Matthew suggests or has it been just another reality show with the food and cooking as side issue, no more important than a plexiglass cage full of spiders?

For which the URL is...

That is an excellent idea. I've mentioned it to Henry Harris a number of times in the past and then for one reason or another it hasn't happened, so lets try and make it happen this time around. I will be free from mid July onwards.

How about some Lebanese at Fakhreldine? Or The White Swan which is a pub and dining room. I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole if it was a gastropub, but from the website this looks to be a rather smart restaurant that happens to be above a bar in Fetter lane. The chef is Jason Scrimshaw, which is a truely marvelous name and reason enough by itself to make this place an essential visit. Add the fact that he worked at Bibendum and Chez Bruce, that the first lady of London grub Fay Maschler gave it a 2 star review and that a three course dinner is £22.00 and you'd have to think of a pretty good excuse not to go.

A little more info here. According to the Caterer, Gueller is keeping quiet about his exact plans for the restaurant, so whether it will mark his return to the stoves and an attempt to reclaim a Michelin star for himself we will have to wait and see. He currently runs what I assume to be a successful catering company so he may want to concentrate on that and install an up and coming chef at the restaurant. But who knows, this could be his last hurrah.

Somewhere along the way however, Jim Cowan was pointed in a different direction. "It surely didn’t happen overnight", he says "and as near as I can determine, it came in several, very gradual steps . . ." +++ Be sure to check The Daily Gullet home page for new articles (most every weekday), hot topics, site announcements, and more.

One of course does not detract from the other and I would not question the accomplishments or the abilities of the chefs. If I elaborate any further on this I will simply begin repeating myself so I will bow out for now and report back with the view from London's Indian chefs when and if I am able to do so.

If you are going to make defining statements about the development and direction of a cuisine, then the semantics of significance and perspective are of enourmous interest. It wasn't the lack of a UK chef at the event that troubled me, it was their absense from your arguement. I simply cannot see Tabla as the Indian equivilent of el Bulli, which is one way of interpreting what you are saying. I'll be very interested to learn if UK chefs view it as such.

Its fine to speak as an American if you only comment about what is happening in that area of the globe. I can't wait to haunt you with this ridiculous statement for the rest of your life! My point was that being an American does not give you the automatic right to assume that everything that happens within your shores is of global significance. (Although thinking about it, its probably written in your constitution.)

Its fine to speak as an American if you only comment about what is happening in that area of the globe. However, your comments appeared to indicate that you believed Tabla to be leading the world in the modernisation of Indian cuisine. If you are going to make that sort of grand pronouncement, then you need to be cognisant of what is actually happening in the rest of the world. It seems to me that you are completely unaware of what has been going on in London for the last decade, and that if you were, you would realise that you are on seriously shaky ground.

That's a good question and one that I will try and get the answer to. My guess is that there is bound to be shared goals amongst Indian chefs cooking at the highest levels in London, but whether or not they refer to themselves as "New Indian" cooks or feel they are part of a movement, I don't know.

How will Tabla "reach beyond its walls" outside of this media friendly 5th birthday party designed to re-awaken interest in a restaurant that may have dropped off New Yorker's radar for whatever reason. I wouldn't question for a moment that the food wasn't as good as you say, that a great time wasn't had by all or that Danny Meyer didn't deliver a truely rousing speech, but chefs of all stripes are more than happy to travel the world to cook at each other's restaurants. How is this any different from what in the restaurant world is pretty much a daily occurance?

Whilst I hold Steven's opinions about nearly everything in very high regard, I think he is way off beam with some of his comments in his first post on this thread. I am in no doubt that he is entirely accurate when it comes to North America, but to say that Tabla "one of the world's most important restaurants" is simply grandstanding. If Steven is attempting to place the restaurant at the "nexus" of New Indian on a worldwide basis, which is how the piece reads to me, I think he is over reaching himself. Nevertheless, I'm pleased to see that New York is catching up on the ground breaking work of Indian chefs working in London. I'm attempting to get a comment on this from the aforementioned Atul Kochhar which I will post here if I am successful.

This may be new in America, but in the UK, Indian chefs have been fusing their traditional cuisine with Western techniques for around 10 years. Atul Kochhar was head chef of Tamarind when it opened in 1995 and won a Michelin star there 3 years ago before going on to open his own restaurant Benares. In my hometown of Brighton, British chef Steven Funnell has run a tiny restaurant called The Black Chapati for over 15 years that began by serving modernised Indian food and now serves a pan-Asian menu. More recently, Iqbal Wahhab employed 2 Michelin star chef Eric Chavot as consultant for his Cinnamon Club restaurant to bring some French flair to the restaurant's Indian menu.

From a British perspective, I'd be delighted to see our restaurant critics taking their cue from Mr. Bruni. If I could open my paper on a Saturday or Sunday and read something like that, I'd be very happy. Informed, opinionated, enlightening, well written and, most importantly, actually about the restaurant, food and service. And all this whilst deftly avoiding formula and cliche. How can that be a bad start?

Its all over tonight, thank goodness. I really couldn't care who wins the bloody thing, but as overlong, convoluted and badly thought out as the show has been, I have been hooked for the whole run. Ramsay is an odd fellow, but has a great screen presence and something of the maverick about him. He has been on just about every cleb/gossip magazine cover this week and if he doesn't cash in on that level of exposure I'll be amazed.