Tonyfinch

I think a sommelier is definitely NOT essential. There is no reason why you couldn't recommend on the menu which wines to drink with certain dishes. There is a fund of info. on food and wine matching out there that you could avail yourself of. Many restaurants now offer "flights" of wines to accompany set menus.

I don't think they are allowed by law to charge for tap water. If they were they surely would.

Well I've said this before as well,but I think its purely because the British customer is prepared to pay these prices. Everybody realises that a restaurant has to make a profit, but most people have an in built sense of the difference between that and profiteering. Yet people seem quite happy tp pay rippoff priced for wine in restaurants. Maybe in the UK its because wine is still seen by many as a "luxury" product. Chatting to a restaurant owner and avid wine collector in Catalonia last year I remarked on how reasonable his wine prices seemed . He remarked frankly that Spanish consumers would never ever pay the kind of mark ups seen on wine lists in the UK and if he charged too much he just wouldn't sell the wine.

Sure,but only on the assumption that customers will spend the £100. They may choose a much cheaper wine,or even no wine at all rather than subscribe to those kind of prices.

The new Chez Max, run by Max Renzland in what was the Parisienne Chophouse in Knightsbridge charges £15 per bottle corkage. I'm going on Saturday and will report back.

I think there's a kind of defensive/aggressiveness that some people display about wine more than about food and indeed other subjects. Its due to a variation on the "I don't know much about Art but I know what I like" line It goes "I don't know much about wine and I DON'T know what I like" If you're confident in your own tastes in music, films etc. do you really care whether others share your tastes or not? You may be disappointed that they don't regard Mary Had A Little Lamb as being up there with Satisfaction, but do you give a damn,really? YOU like it and so what? With wine, people are far less confident about their own tastes? I sometimes drink wine and genuinely don't know whether I like it or not. Or know what qualities I'm supposed to be looking for. Under those circumstances some people get nervous and unwilling to take advice. My father maintains that he cannot tell the difference between a £5 bottle of wine and a £50 bottle. I say "of course you can. Anybody can" but he will not have it. The point is he is generally an opinionated old bugger and I can't think of another subject he would say that about. In the UK and I suspect in large parts of the US, quality wine is still a new subject that some don't feel confident about and some of those are likely to be resistant towards being advised and guided out of a kind of defensiveness. That's when allegations of "winesnob" start getting chucked around.

The moral of that post is: "Never imply to people that you think they may have wasted their money".

Its a themed chain of pubs in the UK. The sell cheap beer and some of them are pretty downmarket.

Doux=sweet

This might have a lot to do with it. There's not much point in a magazine listing wines of the year or some such if no-one can get hold of any. I remember a British newspaper wine critic writing that he wasn't allowed to recommend a wine unless there were so many hundreds of cases available to the supermarket and High St. wine shops in the UK. Having said that 3 Brunellos in a list of 10 seems a bit odd.

I'm not sure what "power" has to do with it. Surely part of going to a restaurant is the sheer pleasure of dithering over and choosing what to eat. You may or may not get better food by forgoing that pleasure but a pleasure foregone it surely is.

You can take the boy out of the North.................etc.etc.

I'd add to that Coldstream Hills from Oz (forget where) made by the wine writer and critic James Halliday. The reserve is delicious but distinctly un-Burgundy like with far more emphsis on upfront strawberry fruit. I drank oceans of Oregon PN when I stayed there in the late 80s and found it all to be v. mediocre and well overpriced compared to good Burgundy. Maybe things have improved since then.

I don't know enough about it to answer that. Maybe if the restaurant is also their home the capital gains tax laws are different. Maybe they need the capital that the sale brings as a down payment on their retirement home so they can't afford to wait until their heirs pay them back. Anybody?

Steve, in France or Italy they would not have to sell. They could hand the restaurant on to the new generation. This is much harder in the UK because, as Macrosan said, the retirement nest egg resides in the value of the property rather than what the owners have managed to save. The cost of hiring more staff is also disproportionately higher because those staff will often also have high mortgages and demand high wages in order to meet them. Very few people rent property in the UK compared to Italy and France and it is much harder for sons and daughters to afford to live in the same areas as their parents-they have to move away to buy start up homes thus making it harder for establishments to keep costs down by employing family members.

Well that's the point. Its the lack of clarity between the two which is unaccepatable. No-one with a tenth of a brain thinks that Paul Newman really stands in the dressing factory making those dressings. But its much more likely that people will think that Trotter and Gagnaire are cooking in those kitchens,at least for a large part of the time, unless it is clearly spelt out otherwise.

One of the reasons for restaurant closures is be the incredibly high property prices in Britain compared to our European neighbours. We are a property owning society and although interest rates are comparatively low many people have extremely large mortgages. This,coupled with the fact that eating out at expensive restaurants is a class driven occupation here and that the eating out classes have to find school fees for Josh and Alice plus money for at least one car and one people carrier on top of the mortgage, means that a lot of disposable income is sucked in on other priorities which come before eating out. Provincial property prices in France and Italy have been almost static for years and restaurants can pass from generation to generation and more easily survive blips in the market.

But it doesn't count for the same. All the above quotes on this thread make it clear that this is Charlie Trotter's restaurant, Charlie Trotter's venture, not that of his right hand man. I know we've touched on this issue before but I think we need to be constantly vigilant against being misled- some might say conned. I've never argued that a named chef has to be in the kitchen all of the time. However it is one thing having a break or making the odd TV programme and another altogether to be spending the bulk of your time in another country, cooking in another restaurant while at the same time using your reputation as the main selling point of the restaurant in London. I don't see how a chef who spends 5 days a month in a restaurant can meaningfully claim to the public that it is "his" restaurant except in the sense that he might part own it. You could argue that Trotter and Gagnaire have never claimed to be the main chefs in these ventures but at the same time Gagnaire must realise that the success of his venture depends on the association with him. Clearly this is a case of CAVEAT EMPTOR- all of you BEWARE!

Bad news for who Andy? Certainly not for me. I am relishing a bout of schaudenfraude at the collapse of this ghastly sounding venture. HOPIT+L indeed. What sort of a stupid name was that? And as for CT being here "five or six days a month"-what sort of involvement is that. The whole thing stank of rip off, as does Gagnaire's Sketch. How gullible can we Londoners be? It seems that there are people prepared to pay fortunes to eat in restaurants where the unique selling point is a chef who is never there! Great! Hopit+l wouldn't have seen a penny of mine and neither will Sketch unless Gagnaire is in that kitchen more often than he is not OR I am proved wriong and the general consensus is that the place is as good as his Paris gaffe.

I didn't realise his wife had died. It is crystal clear from his book "La Tante Claire" how vital she was to the success of the restaurant and how much it pleased him to be able to focus on the cooking knowing that she was taking care of all the other aspects of the operation. Maybe he's despondent and things don't taste the same to him anymore. All the more reason to hope he bounces back.

Wilfred. Be sure to write up Le Gavroche. I'm thinking of going for my 20th anniversary in January and I'd really appreciate an assessment of current form. I was there for lunch last year and the service was so balletic I felt like I was at a performance. It was all I could do not to grab a silver domed tray and pirouette around the restaurant myself. Let us know if ts still like that and what M. Roux is serving up these days.

When Nico Ladenis and Marco Pierre White "handed back" their Michelin stars on the grounds that they were "no longer relevant to the needs of the modern diner", they expounded on what they meant. They felt that in the UK people did not want the seriousness and formality that that level of dining entailed.They did not want to wear a jacket and tie or an expensive frock, they did not want a heavy and formal atmosphere, they did not want a wine list as long as the Bible and as expensive as jewellery, they did not want to slog through the kind of menus that we read all about on the France thread. They didn't care about heavy napiery and lush carpeting. The French are much happier than the British in such an atmosphere. They invented it after all and they feel at home with the formality and the ritual of 3 star dining.They are also far more willing to pay astronomical prices in restaurants than are the Brits. There IS a market in the UK for two and three star Michelin type dining but it is very limited and it is mostly centered in London.The Brits are far happier in places like The Merchant House, which cultivate a relaxed, intimate atmosphere. They also care far less about Michelin stars than the French. I think PK's type of restaurant has fallen victim to the MPW/NL scenario. People don't want it any more. The want less formality and more warmth and intimacy. I predict PK will be back with a new venture which more accurately reflects the market's new requirements. And I reckopn it could be as successfull in its own way as LTC was for all those years.

The business of Chinese restaurants in the West End failing to make their specials menu available to non-Chinese punters is one of the many reasons why I try to avoid restaurants in Chinatown. I find the assumption that lies behind this practice(that Western diners will not want to eat these dishes) to be patronising and outdated. I understand that the majority of customers probably want won tun soup and sweet and sour pork, and one can only assume that the restaurants are happy with this and have no interest in developing Western tastes in Chinese food because they're coining it in already. In don't know whether they can be required to translate their menus but if customers nag enough and the food press moans enough.......

Also the press, the TV media etc. are incredibly London focused in the UK. Far more so than,say,the French and Paris. Food critics on national newspapers regularly make jokes about venturing into wild unknown territory when they go anywhere out of London, especially anywhere North, to write a review. Given that, you could argue that being where it is it's a tribute to the ownwers that WF was able to charge such high prices and remain so successful for so long.