Gary Marshall

Well marco didn't disappoint, he had the whole place in the palm of his hand, no shouty, sweary boll*cks but they certainly got the message Food is all the marco classics, and for the trivia fans, he was cooking in the box tree at ilkley in the earlier interviews. couldn't care who wins but it's going to be entertaining.

thing is you're unlikely to be able to get artisanal type meats from a catering supplier. At the end of the day the sort of farms that supply farmers markets are small scale producers and if your business is supplying restaurants then you need to have the goods, so reliability of supply is key. This means you are forced to look at the larger farms and multiple suppliers and as such you can understand they are looking for a certain minimum level of husbandry hence the branding but can't guarantee exactly where it will come from one week to the next as it's nature after all and you can't quickly grow a dexter, kill and hang it on demand when someone rings wanting 3 aged strip loins tomorrow! When we had our pub our meat was from a local butcher and the butcher had exclusive supply of beef and pork from two farms, and that was just to keep a local butcher in meat, his catering supply didn't extend much past us, indeed rivals approached him for supply but he refused as he just didn't have the meat to spare. And every now and again he couldn't supply the aged meat as it had just sold too quickly so we had to recourse to the catering suppliers

yes i know, he's 37 but only a few months younger than me, you old gits are lucky to remember how to turn your computers on these days i would have thought.

40? i thought he was a youngster like me self

I don't think they need the challenges, given the inexperience of the teams just letting them get on with it will provide enough entertainment. It's not really about the food or fine dining it's about the dream that many capable home cooks have that they could pack it all in, and run a restaurant, at least this show is giving a flavour of the reality. and like any of these shows if the people were too competent it wouldn't make 'good tv'

i don't think that's part of the deal , it sounds like the winner gets a joint venture with raymond blanc in a restaurant rather than the one they were running. Watchable show i thought, brought back a lot of memories

i'm pretty sure he has no financial inolvement now, i seem to remember reading that he'd sold his stake to his uncle and the money would ensure the future of the fat duck (of which the story appears to be was financially struggling until it got it's third star). He's also out of the riverside brasserie too iirc ?

entirely agree, i thought of a fixed mark up, but it does only work in your favour if you buy better wines, but unfortunately as i'm sure baker estates/basildog would confirm my experience that at the end of the day you sell more 'house' wine than anything else so the average punter is actually getting 'ripped off ' in daily mail parlance under such a scheme. I think our house wines were £3.75 a bottle sold for £11.95 less vat £10.17, a Whopping £6.42 cash profit and 63% GP 271% mark up, at £10 mark up plus vat it becomes £15.50 (13.75 ex vat) 68% GP and 350% mark up Also puzzled by glucks comment re avoiding 300% mark-ups, if that persimmon viognier is still as bakerestates says a £4 wine then less the vat on the selling price it's a £15 wine so the gross margin is 73% and the mark up 375%?! There's also more visibility in wine prices, no-one complains about the price of a bowl of soup but the margin/mark -up would be significantly higher than on the wine. At the end of the day it's a very imprecise science, and i suspect there's little more to it than what your particular market will stand, so if you find an altruistic/enthusiastic owner out there who fairly marks up his wine then support him, because there'll be plenty of pressure on him to raise his prices! cheers gary

drum and monkey is an institution, whether that's a recommendation or not i don't know! Was taken over by jan fletcher who made her money in car dealerships and also owns bryans fish and chip shop in headingley. Place has had a sympathetic refurb a while ago but i don't think the menu had changed for years and the prices are suitably idiosyncratic. nice place to get settled into for a lunch, foods not going to set the world on fire but it is suitably convivial. other than betty's my other recent harrogate dining experience is chez la vie above carringtons nightclub, old school bistro actually not that bad, plus when the table starts vibrating you know it's time to head down stairs to the club, which is, an experiece that i wouldn't want to spoil. best food nearby i would think is the yorke arms at pateley bridge.

That's awful, don't you live on site as well? I used to live in a village that flooded, my house was never flooded but we were cut off, and at its worst spent 3 weeks wading through 2-3 feet of water at 7am to go to work. Doesn't do much for morale, especially when you have TV crews parked there wanting quotes, oddly enough i wasn't in the mood for a broadcastable quote at that time of the day. hope the insurance pays up quickly and you can get opened again. cheers gary

didn't realise jan moir was still food writing, thanks.

ah well, never let the truth get in the way of a good story! think i got the last loose bird of flaxton a few years ago. i have a loose bird from harome in the oven as we speak, with some tarragon from the garden and a 1er cru st aubin i think.

the goose at britwell salome is a worthy diversion, matt tompkinson is doing some good stuff there

on a slight tangent, interesting dinner with friends other night who have bought a house in burgundy not far from bresse and say that chickens out there are very expensive £30 for a chicken not uncommon, no cheapies to be had. best ones in my area are from the excellently named 'loose birds of harome' about £10- £13 each, you can tell from the thickness of the thigh bones that they are very different from the usual ones. Make much better stock too. Having not done a taste test back to back i couldn't say whether they taste much better but i'm happy that they are not pumped full of crap and the birds have had chance of a decent life.

available at wh smiths

there's a precedent, McDonalds also have a decent stake in pret a manger too.

only opening monday - friday, a la ramsay & aikens ? shame for us out of towners but good news for the staff!

on previous trips we have ventured out of padstow to the likes of ripley's, black pig etc but it does require a bit of organisation. only places to my mind you get what it says on the tin in padstow are margots, steins F&C's and the bintwo terrace, rest is a bit of a lottery/questionable qual/prix etc thus my last 2 day trip was steins/bintwo/margots, margots /bintwo/ no 6 but don't expect to turn up to margots unnanounced and get a table!

i saw MPW in lucianos the other week, his chosen attire was an immaculate dark blue pin stripe suit, proper yellow braces and a white t - shirt. Only marco could pull that off If i hadn't been with a company i would have been over for an autograph!

when i went to LG (which was oddly enough pretty much exactly 4 years ago to the day- it was the first night of our honeymoon and our anniversary was yesterday, luckily i remembered.) i felt the need not to conform and wore a jacket but no tie. But then I like to live on the edge. And i'm a messy eater and dry cleaning ties is a pain. I don't like formal dress codes but then again oddly i quite like it when people have 'made an effort', for somewhere like LG or Winteringham Fields it's in keeping.

i had a mixed evening there over easter which was a very busy saturday night and there were long delays between courses, dos hermanos seemed to have similar issues on a seperate evening. Looks like a quieter evening is the one to go for.

yes, the yorke arms is a well known 1* and very good it is too, middle of no-where mind which slightly dampens my enthusiasm for repeated visits ie mrs m won't drive me back from there! other than canteen, not heard of the rest. ransoms looks quite interesting but site does look a bit over the top, better send bapi out to investigate it more his neck of the woods....

I doubt it, TR set lunch looks remarkable value compared to the ALC tho.

i think the belvedere that i mentioned got a star this year, and i think clos des sens is now 2 star which doesn't suprise me given the quality of my meal there.

i don't know why, but i agree it's true. Certainly property isn't a lot cheaper in the sticks vs town and ingredients cost the same in westow as they do in london. Staff are probably more expensive as you don't have the pool of cheap labour or students you have in a metropolis and staff housing aint cheap when a small 2 bed cottage in a nice area costs £200k. One thing i do know is that punters with money to spend, tend to drive nice cars and they are far happier parking outside of any of the establishments bertie mentioned than they are a town centre car park. who wants to wade through a crowd of drunks pre and post dinner or have to fight your way to a taxi rank? Just get the mrs to drive the merc home Can't honestly say that explains it in its entirety though!