Tonyfinch

We're not talking about some lost tribe of the deepest Amazon here. We're talking about France for God's sake. What "cultural divides"? It's been clearly implied on this thread by those with experience of trying to book restaurants in France that there may well be some discrimination in the way you're treated depending on whether you are French or not. Lizzie says that "the French prefer to serve someone who is French because a Frenchman dines in the French way" Take out the word "French" and substitute the word "White" there for a minute. It is prejuduce and discrimination pure and simple and it runs like a stain through French cultural and social life and it needs challenging not appeasing. There may be good reasons WHY it is the case but so what? As was said on the infamous Nazi thread,there were good reasons for the rise of Hitler. I do not believe for a second that Americans are any more responsible for no shows in restaurants than any other nationality. No shows are a major problem in all restaurants in all parts of the world. As has been pointed out,there are measures to tackle it. To attribute it to any particular group is just another way of reinforcing prejudice.

Sacre Bleu! Zoot Alors! What SAVAGES you Americans are. Coffee with dessert! The truth is that the French en masse are a nation of xenophobic, paranoid snobs,filled with resentment that English has become the world's lingua franca because Americans speak English. They elect Fascist councils and Mayors all over the South,refuse to recognize the concept of multi culturalism and inorder to compensate for their linguistic and cultural irrelevance they like nothing better than to muck foriegners around over restaurant reservations and peer down their noses at people who might now and again deviate from the so called French way. Fuck L'Astrance.Write to every American guidebook and publication urging your countyrmen to boycott it and every other stuck up restaurant that gives you a hard time. Then,if they love having French customers so much,theyll presumably be happy to get buy on French punters alone.

Nearly all pheasants these days are reared in captivity and then released into the wild for shooting. As a result they have little or no survival skills and stand around in fields waiting to be shot or on roads waiting to be mown down.

But if the restaurant charges say £25 per bottle corkage,then it makes that money for free as it were. It hasn't had to buy or store the wine or absorb the cost of corked bottles and other wastage. The alternative may not be that expensive wine is bought but that cheap wine or even no wine is bought.

That's another area where the cuisines are virtually incompatible. I have French cookbooks at home, especially those describing top restaurant and top chef cooking,where it is hard to spot a recipe which doesn't use dairy or alcohol in some form. I don't know of ANY Indian dishes which use alcohol, and although yogurt and ghee and milky desserts are used in some areas of Indian cooking I think it's fair to say that dairy plays a very minor role if you take the sub continent as a whole.

Just rang La Tante Claire and asked them-£50 per bottle corkage!

Looks like you're the advanced guard,Matthew. Maybe you can report back and tell us if Koffman is demob happy and doesn't care anymore or whether he's going out in a blaze of glory.

Some friends who are Thai food fiends wanted to try somewhere new and avoid the Saturday night mayhem in Soho. We chose Nipa in the Royal Lancaster Hotel purely on the basis of a glowing red starred review in the new Time Out Guide. What the hell does Time Out think it's doing? I should have known from the start what with all that faux teak and those little red chillies on the menu to indicate degrees of "hotness" and no wine on the list at less than £23 quid. The service was courteous enough but that's the only positive thing to say. The food had obviously been piped in from that great Thai kitchen in the bowels of the earth which pre cooks everything and then sends it down a network of tubes to every bog standard Thai food outlet across the UK. It was crap. Because it was Thai crap most of it was,in fact,edible. But crap it was nontheless.And expensive crap to boot. This restaurant is not in the same league as my local Thai in Wapping-Wharf-but TO doesn't even see fit to include that,let alone give it a star. Avoid at all costs. Definitely a candidate with The Cinnamon Club for my worst meal of the year.

Simon,I thought that since you were organizing the egullet dinner at The Sutton Arms on 12th December that you would want to be there,no? Or have I got the date wrong?

Thought after my spouting on Koffman I should go for a last farewell. Booked for Thursday 28th Nov at 8pm no problem.

Stephen, I defer to your experience at Les Portes Des Indes and as you say they may be serving a naturally evolved cuisine, but my general point remains. The fact is that Indian food in the UK has been targeted at a downmarket restaurant clientele for decades now. These restaurants do not receive the stars,the rosettes the ten out of tens etc.,or if they do it is within the confines of an "ethnic" category. I can see why some ambitious restaurateurs may wish to take the cuisine upmarket because no matter what anyone says at its best Indian food is as brilliant as any cuisine in the world. In fact if I had to choose to eat one cuisine only for the rest of my life it would be Indian cuisine. But what I fear is that these people,in their lust for Michelin recognition,see the way forward as Frenchifying. As if somehow authenticity and a deep exploration of the cuisine's myriad possibilities are to be sacrificed on the alter of pweety pictures on a plate,food served in towering stacks,puddles of reduced sauce, the dumbing down of assertive spicing ,the matching of food to wine and all the rest of the clutter that surrounds French food and mostly suits it well but which is alien to the world of Indian food and which in my opinion hinders rather than extends its possibilities and potential. I would like to see much more regionalisation of Indian cuisine,where restaurants specialise in a particular area in depth. There are few in London already but they are a tiny minority compared to the number of generic "Indian " restaurants that exist,and are there any outside of London?

Doesn't Les Portes Des Indes claim that its cuisine derives from Pondicherry? Was that an old French colonial enclave in India? No matter, I honestly believe that French and Indian cuisines have far,far less than more in common and that any hybrid will end up as at best totally pointless and at worst an abomination. For example the French have no idea whatsoever about the role of spices in cooking (with the exception of black pepper). Since spice is the basis for all Indian cooking it is hard to see where any meeting of the two could take place without one grabbing the larger share of identity over the other.And since the French inherently assume superiority in all matters culinary what will emerge is French food "indianized " by the injuducious use of a few spices. This is exactly what is served up at The Cinnamon Club in London and I suspect at other very expensive modern Indian restaurants in London. A genuinely authentic classical Indian or Pakistani restaurant would never get a Michelin star in a month of Tuesdays so to attain this status they have to Frenchify. Believe you me,you won't ever find a French restaurant Indiafying (a touch of curry powder in the scallops doesn't count) so all we'll end up with is a new form of culinary imperialism and the gradual loss of South Asia's marvellous culinary identity. To some opening a FRench? Indian restaurant may be a dream-to me,I'm afraid,it sounds like a nightmare.

I hope Koffman continues cooking in London. I had two lovely meals at the old Tante Claire,though I've not been since it moved. Koffman is a classically trained "old school" chef who has determinedly avoided media glare throughout his career and concentrated on his restaurant. The article doesn't say why the Savoy is not renewing his contract but it would be a shame if it was because they felt he wasn't media savvy or high profile enough. On the other hand I suppose if people are not going to his restaurant while they're queuing up to get into GR it must say something about how a restaurant and a chef need to market themselves these days.

Much more so than "Carbs=Death" at any rate.

For £125 a head you can join in at our place.

I have to disagree that it's worse than most. Which ones are so much better?

OK,phoned the apparently faultless GR at RHR last night to make a booking for two for Jan 7th at 8pm. The phone was answered right away but I was told I would have to wait until Dec 9th to book -I'd forgotten about their one calendar month ahead booking policy. I asked if I would be allowed to book a table for 8pm. The lady asked how many we would be. I said two. She said in that case no, I could "probably" have a table at 7.30 or 9.30. She didn't say that I would have to give the 7.30 table back so I asked and she said yes they would need it back by 9.30. I asked how many one needed to be to get a table between 7.45 and 9. She said she didn't know and would I please ring back on the 9th. The line then went dead but not before I thought I heard GR come racing out of the kitchen screaming like a banshee at her to get off the f.....g phone and get her arse in to the kitchen and do some real f.....g work for once.

OK we'll see. I'm going to try and book a table there for 8pm on January 7th for my 20th wedding anniversary. I might even ask my wife to join me. I'll report back on how I get along.

The giving and receiving of food,even though in a restaurant it's buying and selling, is so bound up with our intimate and personal needs that we relate to it almost on an instinctive basis.Our relationship with the person who feeds us in a restaurant is only a few shades away from our relationship with our primary feeder-our Mother. I remember on another thread someone saying that they couldn't bear eating the food of someone they didn't like-no matter how good a cook they were. This chimes totally with me. One of the reasons I won't go to Ramsey's is that I don't want to eat the food of someone who thives on and cultivates his persona as a bully. So to continue with the psychobabble,people take it badly because criticizing a restaurant they like is not too far from criticizing their mums.And you know full well that the only people allowed to criticise our mums is us.

I think the answer to Simon's question has to be "yes". A country's cuisine is identified by a set of conventions which mark it out from that of others. These conventions include ingredients,preparation methods,utensils,seasonings, cooking techniques etc. etc. An Indian chef,or indeed any chef, in London can create a dish using these conventions which may never have been prepared in India but is recognized by one and all as being "Indian." Where I have a problem is when restaurants subvert the conventions so that you are left with no culinary reference points. I believe this is what The Cinnamon Club and other "nouvelle" Indian restaurants do-apply French conventions to Indian food and leave me at any rate stranded somewhere in no-man's land.

Yes. I'm not so sure if the food actually tastes so much different as it is the difference in context and atmosphere. As I've said before,my glass of pastis TASTES the same in Wapping as it does in Provence. But in Provence I love it and in Wapping I can hardly bear to smell it.

At the risk of harping on I'm amazed that the two sitting policy and the refusal to allow diners to commence between 6.30 and 9 pm is not considered a fault, or at least a possible "significant disappointment". How on earth could the GFG have overlooked this? It appears to be saying that the restaurant has no faults when a huge problem is staring you in the face if you wish to have dinner at 8pm. A mistake of this magnitude calls into question the guide's credibility as far as I'm concerned.

Are you sure you're right there Simon? Tikka Masala is only one step removed from Tandoori Chicken which is definitely "Indian " in origin. I thought I read somewhere that Chicken Tikka Masala was served up at The Moti Mahal restaurant in N. Delhi which was the first place to popularise this cuisine. The lurid version served up in a thousand Light Of Bengals may have originated here but the original was always served up in India.

Jane Maquitty,who I usually rate,reviewed a Madeira in The Times a while back,describing it as "ideal with a piece of cake for elevenses". I wrote to her (no,I very rarely write to critics) and asked her if she actually lived in a world where people drank Madeira and ate cake at eleven o'clock in the morning and that maybe she could offer a few more useful ideas for wines like Madeira, apart from slugging it into the cooking that is. To her credit,she replied with a Mea Culpa letter saying that she would do so next time she wrote about the Old World Fortifieds. I don't know whether she has but it showed how the old stereotype images of these wines still prevails and how they need to break out of them if they're going to become anything other than minority curiosities outside of their home patch.

Difficulty attracting staff,perhaps?