Tim Hayward

If you guys are fully geared-up butchers, surely you'd be better off doing a range of value-added products alongside the prime stuff and then marketing them all together. If I had carte blanche I'd be making a range of goat based products and then setting up as 'The Goat Guy' at Borough. That way you sell your prime cuts but all the spare goes into things which continue to add to the message that 'Goat is Good'. There's an Ostrich stall at Borough which has done this very well, you could even argue that this is how Farmer Sharpe had his incredible success with mutton. In principle this is a great time to do it. I think people are ready to try something new - particularly things like mutton and goat which are 'naturally free range'. If anything the Carribean connection is a disadvantage in that it give people preconceptions about needing to be curried (or should that be 'curry') whereas the way it's used in Southern Spanish or Maghrebi cuisine - stunningly fashionable, dahling - is forgotten. It's a great story. People just need to be told. It's a fantastically exciting marketing brief. If you get it right the possibilities are huge - get it wrong and the Tribal elders will never stop laughing.

Twat.

← So we misinterpreted Molecular Gastronomy and these guys, the Spaniard, the American, the Brit are all about cooking in their individual traditions. They have nothing in common but excellence, openness and integrity? Well nothing except a profound interest in the work of the fourth signatory, Harold McGee. There's something surreal about three cooks...cooks for chrissake, not artists or philosophers, making a joint public statement that they are not in the same gang. It's like some sort of Python sketch. Actually, they are all in the same gang - recovering Molecular Gastronauts and MG deniers.

And how much more so when, rather than being part of a broad movement, an individual wraps himself entirely in his own brand of it. When people like for example Dali or Kerouac became locked so tightly (and remuneratively) into a personal style they were easier for history to marginalise. There was little development over the body of their work because they were victims of the popular success of their personal schtick. What if Adria and Blumenthal are the Dali and Kerouac of culinary history? Idolised by adolescent rebels but largely dismissed as genre cults by those with longer memories?

And Herve This (2002) Molecular Gastronomy : Exploring the Science of Flavour, p.149 In a chapter entitled 'Foams', This tips his hat to his old chum Ferran. Foams - low in fat because they are essentially composed of air - first came to prominence with the rise of Nouvelle Cuisine in France in teh 1960s and then gained broader popularity as a consequence of growing interest in lighter foods on both sides of the Atlantic. Today, with the advent of molecular gastronomy and, in particular, the fame of the Spanish chef Ferran Adria, they are very fashionable amongst gourmets". Aaaaaah, Bless! Ferran and Herve, Sitting in a tree....

If a steak cooked like that tasted markedly better than a regular one, people would come and eat it. If it's debateable, foodies will come and try it. If it's not, but people are trying it because of the weird way you've cooked it they you are a Molecular Gastronaut, trading on evanescent fashion.

Point taken. And one could argue that Heston wasn't quite as quick to reinvent himself. But my original point stands. Both men have risen to fame in a world outside of the tiny circle of their own customers. They have done so by either creating, contributing to, fomenting or even just going along for the ride with the convenient tag of 'Molecular Gastronomy'. Neither of them now agrees with the public interpretation of MG but, as far as the public are concerned it's set in stone and neither of them have the power to change it. There have been very few grand 'movements' in the history of food and anything which grows fast as a result of fashion or hype is certain to crash with greater force. There may be long lasting benefits - nouvelle cuisine left us with a better understanding of vegetables, plating and big crockery, the gastropub boom has left us with decent food in pubs, MG will leave us with a better understanding of science in the kitchen. But each of the fashionable movements which brought these advantages are now an embarrassment. If Heston really wants to cook amazing food, that will bring back memories and evoke feelings, if he really wants to use science in the kitchen to please diners, if he really wants to put the final nail in the coffin of MG, why the hell doesn't he open a steak-house for a couple of years? If, on the other hand, he's happy catering to that band of foodies who've seen the pictures but have yet to make the pilgrimage, then he needs to keep the theme park open as long as he can wring cash out of it and quit winging about being seen as a comedy MG wizard.

Rather than get into a whelter of Jesuitical debate about whether or not Adria (a Spanish speaker) ever uttered the words 'Molecular Gastronomy' in public hearing, can we cut straight to the chase? Is there anyone here who's seriously asserting that Adria had nothing to do with Molecular Gastronomy? I mean I can see the business sense in Blumenthal trying to rewrite history I'm surprised to see sensible foodies getting caught up in PR revisionism.

It used to be that it was only weird and significant specialities - Tour d'Argent's scrunched duck for example - that were distinctive enough to be discussed in absentia. The interesting thing about Heston, Adria and the molecular brigade is the way that their dishes are regularly spoken about or opined on by those who've never tasted them. Stop a passer by in the street and, if they're awake enough to know who Ramsey and Blumenthal are, they'll be able to mention a Fat Duck dish. They won't be able to name a single distinctive idea of Gordon's. This has been the marketing genius of molecular gastronomy - breaking the inconvenient link between experiencing the food and talking about it. I would argue that the irritating twats with cameras are more than a little responsible for some of Heston's success. No! I will go on using the term 'molecular gastronomy' for the same reason I use the term '"Dr" Gillian McKeith'. People in the public eye who use a particular means to attract attention to themselves can't be allowed to drop it conveniently or deny it when it suits them. It is undeniably silly and inaccurate but it wasn't 'created by the media'. It was co-opted by Adria, Blumenthal and others and used to market themselves. Through their own self-promotion, the Molecular crew have made MG a public phenomenon. No matter how much they want to bury it or redefine it, MG now means 'expensive food with stupid science tricks' to the masses. If Heston wants to shed MG he can't wish it away or attempt to airbrush it out of existence. If he wants the public to accept him as the future of food the last thing he should be doing is pratting around with audio cues, half-baked NLP parlour tricks and yet another highly publicised comedy signature dish. The term Gastro-Pub, is used today by any customer referring to a pub with decent food. It's become common usage. The only people trying to deny that are those running gastro-pubs with pretentions to something better. The only way to lose the tag you've created is to do something different. Heston has the same problem. He can deny it all he likes but in the public eye he's not just tainted with MG he's been positively hosed with it. Heston will be the face of the "New Cookery' when he does something the public can perceive as new cookery.

No doubt this is true, but they have an awful lot to work with... A dish that looks like the sea shore and you get an I Pod with it? When can you send over a picture? Can we schedule a phone interview? Yes, 500 words in tomorrow's edition no problem." ← Eerie, isn't it? It almost as though HB were conceiving the stuff in order to fulfill this very purpose. ← Now he's inked the deal with Haagen Dazs he won't have to worry about PR ever again.

Heston's PR has always been super efficient. As he was likely to be placed either 1st or second this year and as, by his own admission, last year's award gained him more business than his M. stars, they would have arranged a whole raft of interviews and appearances to leverage the publicity. Then some poor bloody production assistant wakes up and finds that El Bulli is no 1. but that Adria has no time to appear in the UK. Heston's people, OTOH, are still kicking the door down offering his comments everywhere (and I mean everywhere - It's a good thing the poor bloke understands science because I can't comprehend how anyone could appear in so many media without stretching the boundaries of space/time). Full marks to his team. Heston is runner-up to the crown but consolidates his position as a British culinary hero through fantastic PR management, being nice and making himself available. Brings a tear to my cynical old eye.

After much research online and off I bought one of these... from www.cabelas.com in the US. I got the chrome version which was $219 plus around $80 shipping. With the dollar the way it is at the moment, that's still less than anything decent you can buy here. Mine has survived a winter outside unscathed, smokes whole chunks of pork beautifully and grills a treat on the rare occasions I deign to wreck good food by 'barbecuing' it (see here). It's a stunning piece of kit that can even - God help us - boil crabs and fry turkeys. It's built the way only Americans can do it - thoroughly overspecced and dripping with chrome - and I sincerely intend to hand it on to my daughter when I've died of congestive heart failure brought on by eating smoked pork butt.

I don't know the precise funding structure of Restaurant magazine but I can make a point based on experience with other trade publications. The income streams for a trade magazine are as follows 1. Subscriptions Trade publications rarely admit it but in many cases more issues are distributed free than are actually sold. It's the nature of a trade audience... press, PRs, major players all expect their copies gratis yet this ever increasing group of freeloaders are the very audience that is needed to attract... 2. Paid advertising Which, in the current climate, is commanding ever lower rates, leaving... 3. Recruitment advertising The old standby of trade publications which has been effectively gutted by online recruitment. An ugly picture if you're trying to keep a magazine afloat. Then, the trade magazine industry discovered a new stream in the form of awards ceremonies and dinners. These serve to provide good PR for the publication, attract income from the tables bought by nominees, winners and their supporters and, create an event which increases the feeling of industry coherence. As Andy has noticed, they can also be largely funded through sponsorship making them effectively self liquidating. Organisation of these events is now routinely outsourced by the publication to a small army of specialist suppliers who deal with everything from the depressing rubber chicken repast to the 'entertainment', the DJ, the goody bags and, in some cases, the running of the awards list itself. (Though I'm sure this is not the case where a magazine as prestigious as this is concerned). It is more common for the magazine to hire a PR agency to compile the list and, though I'm sure the magazines would be furious if they found out, the tedious but unchallenging job of actually dealing with the list of entrants is invariably given to the lowest graduate trainee or a freelancer hired for the occasion. I have actually seen two appeals on private food boards for assistance in running an awards ceremony recently. Neither offered much more than 'experience'. I'm, of course, positive these had nothing to do with this particular event. In the sectors I'm involved in - advertising, marketing, PR and new media - awards ceremonies are now the only thing keeping the valuable trade titles afloat. They are, as Bear pointed out, utterly, utterly useless as an objective ranking of talent. They are, however funding the trade magazines that we would miss if they expired, they serve to cohere the industry and get the civilian press to talk about it. Every year there are several awards run by the ad industry. Everybody goes, gets pissed, hangs out, catches up and generally has a great time. Everybody gets a nice gong to go on their desk and the magazine can run for another year even though nobody pays for it. Every year there's nice a little PR blip about 'the most popular ad' which gets into the dailies and then it's all forgotten. The difference is that the ad industry doesn't have large, well organised boards of ad consumers, who sit in judgment on the rest of the cosy, incestuous, little carve-up. Restaurant is the trade organ of the restaurant industry not of restaurant goers, power eaters or resto-collectors. They may be attempting to reposition themselves to appeal to a larger audience which encompasses more informed consumers, but let's face it, a restaurant goer reading 'Restaurant' is like a plane spotter reading 'Pilot' - actually, scratch that, 'Airline Management Gazette'. If you're a deep resto geek it's fun to peek behind the veil but, basically you're not the audience. The audience for the Restaurant awards is the restaurant industry. To succeed it should honour those who impress that section of the industry that read the magazine. The reason it needs to have a little bit of extra profile in the national press is to make that audience feel a little better about themselves when their friends and family read it. The 'best' restaurant in the world might well be the third noodle bar on the left outside the railway station in Osaka - run by a wizened old monk who makes a single batch of stock, once a year, from the sweat of Kobe cows scented with the perfume of passing geishas. Unfortunately it has no relevance to the food and bev manager of a country house hotel outside Dudley, an aspiring sous in a one star in Edinburgh or the head of sales for a table linen company in Dublin. Furthermore, he's not going to pay £5K for a table for twelve where he can bring his top five clients and their wives. Hell I'm not sure anyone in Japan has heard of the magazine. The news of a 'prestigious award' would probably have the same relevance to them as a similar offer from the Reader's Digest. If you want to honour the noodle sensei of old Osaka you need a global forum of informed restaurant goers with no ties to the industry - then they can vote on their favourites. For the industry, awards like this do nothing but unalloyed good. Ordinary punters aren't going to be remotely affected by this and we should be too wise to care.

Or take him to the Japanese Knife Centre, get Jay to fix him up with some kind of gorgeous, handmade Samurai number and give him a lesson on how to use it. If he doesn't think that's the sexiest thing ever - divorce him and call me

Damn. Beaten to the post

Just seen this article. ← Thank God! They're going to replace that arrogant, superannuated, scrotum-faced, bullying popinjay with ..... ...Oh dear!

...And there, on the half shell, is an object lesson in the importance of context in writing (or 'foodwriting' if such a thing can be said to exist - discuss. ) I yield to no man in my admiration for the Big Guy in all his throbbing manly glory. In the context of a Hemingway reminiscence this might be a surgical little knot of condensed, expressive prose. In the context of even the most debased, slack, weakminded food hack, phoning in copy, past deadline with a hangover, this would never wash. I'm struggling to find a single image, simile or adjective in that piece that's fresh. In fact every single one is beyond tired. Pray God there's someone in the literature department of a Texas university with the time, funds, computer power and inclination to go through the entire canon of Western literature and prove that Ernest Hemingway was the first writer ever to use the taste of the sea, faint metallic taste and the succulent texture in a a piece about oysters .... because everybody since certainly has. Christ, he could write scripts for Gary Rhodes.

In the company of a crime writer would it be churlish to nominate Chandler's '...as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake'. I know it's de trop but it certainly sticks in the mind. I'll also nominate Len Deighton for use of food in the Harry Palmer series. Sometimes there doesn't seem to be too much space in crime fiction for anything more than broad stroke, cartoon character development but, though Palmer himself seems to use food solely as a seduction tool, Deighton uses his interest in food to counterbalance his anomie and brutality. For me, this was a stroke of brilliance. Deighton was a cook though, and grew up in restaurants. His bonkers series of cartoon strip cookbooks are still some of my favourites today.

Sunbeam, I don't know if you're a Londoner or not but it's worth noting that our fair city has been pretty much laid low in the last couple of months with a very unpleasant gastrointestinal virus. In the UK this is usually diagnosed as nonbacterial gastroenteritis (though the US prefers norovirus) and at this time of the year it is the second most diagnosed illness after the common cold. The symptoms are exactly as you describe after your meal. Around two out of three people I know have been knocked out by it in the last few months and anyone who has eaten out within 56 hrs of the onset of symptoms has naturally tended to blame the restaurant. Noroviruses are transmitted by the faecal/oral route and show symptoms within 24 hrs in those who aren't immune (as far as I remember, about one in three). Most of my close friends have kids at school so we'd expect a high level of infection. I would reckon that anyone eating in any kind of mass catering operation during such an outbreak is gunning for trouble if only through the increased exposure to a range of individuals in the same environment as food. The chances of the fresh scallops on two different plates being bad enough to knock out the diners simultaneously are fairly low. A good prep cook cleaning the scallops from a decent supplier will spot maybe one bad one in two hundred fresh ones. If two get past him and the chef, at once, onto two consecutive plates, he's the unluckiest man alive. On the other hand, the chances of two people eating anything handled by the same people, in the same restaurant, during an outbreak of NBG going down with it are considerably higher. In short, you may well have got it in the restaurant, and possibly from the scallops. But the balance of probabilities is that it had nothing to do with the ingredients and everything to do with the hand hygiene of a single individual amongst the 20 who touched your food or got close to it in the restaurant. Without a really comprehensive test - for which, I take it, there are no surviving samples - a lawyer's going to have trouble proving you didn't get it from the bloke sitting next to you on the tube. The chances of there being a case against the shellfish supplier are tiny. If your negotiation skills are good and you're either very polite or connected to the mob, you might get a meal comped. Other than that, I hope you guys feel better now

Fantastic stuff. Hardboiled crime and kitchen war-stories... I'm hooked. Particularly gratifying to see it set in '83, the last day's of quality violent crime in London. Oily guns, leather jackets and balaclavas. Not a bloody forensic scientist or half-baked profiler in sight just a vinyl roof on the Granada, a shooter in the boot and a lock-up near Heathrow. No CSI, no CPS just Bodie, Doyle and Regan. Raymond Chandler, Derek Raymond, Jay Rayner .... I rather like the internal rhyme. My copy is on advance order.

I refer m'learned colleagues to the following article in today's Guardian. (Full version here)

I love this proposal.... it's so modest.

I notice that few restaurant seem to be trying the obvious 'market forces' solution of putting up prices to cover losses made by unused covers or no-shows. If what people are saying about two tops being less profitable is true, I'd rather the RC charged an honest £10 surcharge for a two top rather than sticking us at either end of service and making us fill out a sodding questionnaire. Hell, in a just world, a decent restaurant could even fill up the no-shows and dead tables with walk-ins. I don't think there's an answer to this. I'm just pissed off that restaurants up here seem to have lost track of the fact that they're here to offer hospitality to guests for a reasonable consideration. They are not here to allow us in if we fit their spreadsheet and process us like a commodity. And even if you argue that large businesses need to treat us that way - I can't see that we should go down without a fight

Granted. And when I turn up a restaurant and say 'I'm sorry, it was me pretending to be my PA and we're not six we're two' I haven't been lying, I've been protecting myself from being treated like a second class customer because I'm not perceived to be as profitable as another. Each side is as morally wrong. I just think it's time restaurants and customers began to treat each other like grown ups. This situation is a ridiculous impasse. Restaurants treat us like cattle because it's financially rewarding, we don't complain enough and they've had their fingers burned by other customers. Customers behave shabbily towards restaurants - sometimes because they are rude or know no better but, and I'd say increasingly, because -their booking policies are increasingly out of line with the needs of normal humans*. If I want to go out for a simple dinner I now routinely have to take out reservations with three restaurants (the first that will give me a 7.00, then another that later offers me something better finally cancelling both because I'm on the waiting list of a third). That can't help anyone trying to run a bookings desk but most people I know now do it. At least I religiously call in the cancellations. Like any unmediated standoff, there is nothing you can do will change the behaviour of the other - you just end up protecting yourself - and that means escalation. I'm sure you treat your customers well. Probably better than some of them deserve. And I don't propose to stoop to lying to get tables. That means both of us can occupy the moral high ground. I think more people - restaurants and customers - should step back from this. It's the only grown up thing to do. On the other hand, I don't think that opening a debate about precisely how shitty the behaviour of successful London restaurants is can do any harm *This is an extract from the booking confirmation email I received from the River Cafe.... Note that they already have all my contact details from the email on which I requested the booking. In what world is that a reasonable way to communicate with a customer?