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jayrayner

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Everything posted by jayrayner

  1. Does sound dreary and terribly mediocre. Now I'm not excusing anything that happened. I am genuinely curious: why would you want someone to top up the wine and water for you? People know this is a standard bugbear of mine but that doesn't stop me asking the question. in what way does it improve a meal to have someone pouring your drinks for you (when it is done so bloody badly and, almost all of the time, comes across as little more than upselling.) You are a chef at a starred restaurant - I would be curious to know which though I imagine you won't tell us - and it must be something your front of house team do. Please explain the attraction - to you, rather than to your customers.
  2. Bollocks! I missed it. Now I'll have to go and beg at the corner shop in the hope they haven't returned them yet. Arse. ← Sadly, Tim, you are banned from reading OFM. All retailers have been sent your image with warnings that you are not, on any account, to be allowed access to the mag.
  3. but.. but.. you were the one who called the questions an 'absolute joke'. I thought you meant it. BTW - any one who scored 40 or more, spent way too much time on this quiz.
  4. That, and the fact we could run some fab pics with the features. Also - and it was so low-key you could easily have missed it - we had teamed up with Audi who wanted to do a larger scale sponsorship job (ie bigger than spot advertising) around the notion of science and food (playing to their own perceived strengths as technological innovators). They had no say on the editorial, but it got us thinking and we decided to go well beyond the 16 pages which were part of the deal and dedicate the whole issue to the subject. Re everything else you said, Pipp dear boy, the cheque's in the post.
  5. If anybody here finds anything of interest in any edition of OFM I will, naturally enough, be thoroughly dissapointed. And I can guarantee that Polly does not visit this site.
  6. Er yes, most of these are indeed a joke (though not one that anybody in Lincoln, a town with very little to laugh about, would ever find funny.) Re question 12, something dropped off the page as it went to the printers. The full thing should read: 12) To model on the catwalks of the Milan fashion week these days, you must: eat enough to have a Body Mass Index of 18.5 or above be really, really pretty. be a direct descendent of .... Donatella Versace, Dolce and Gabbana or Karl Lagerfeld'. It is corrected in our print edition though not yet on-line. Which is odd. Will investigate.
  7. Jesus! Really! I didn't know. I thought it was serious... ← It may lose something in the translation? SB ← Now I look at it again its obvious to me that question two really was too ambiguous. Next time I write one of these I'll try to make it more obvious. God knows how.
  8. Jesus! Really! I didn't know. I thought it was serious...
  9. Ah yes, West Didsbury: Didsbury's Latin quarter.
  10. I have absolutely no idea but I would say this: the laws of libel apply equally on line as to print. I would therefore not publish a question like that in a newspaper unless I was secure in the answer before doing so.
  11. I know I said I'd stick out of this but... ever pitched a piece to OFM?
  12. It's not your fault her arms are too short and weedy. But then what can you expect from those blue stockings on the FT.
  13. edited by eGullet's Tim Hayward. There is no reason why this could not be done and succed. If a magazines like Decanter can survive then surely there are enough people to buy something along these lines.....more intelligent, in depth, less mass appeal recipies & contributors etc,.... a more specialist publication that discusses things that are seen on this forum not Olive or Waitrose. Think of Wallpaper or Wunderlust but for food. I get bored of OFM because what appears in it is similar to other weekend supplements and the biggest gripe I have is the comparrisons it does on supermarket food. Why not just forget the supermarkets and promote non-supermarket produce. ← A tiny point on Tim's dream magazine (one I would obviously love to read) - putting aside the dead people you would like to commission - could you possibly budget it please. Any idea how much Bourdain costs for example..? As to the produce we do a mixture of both supermarket and non, varying in proportion from month to month. We are a mass market publication. Most people shop in superrmarkets. Our job is to tell them if any of it is any good - while also running long pieces on the pineapple business, factory farming of fish, or the industrialisation of Fairtrade which point out where the supermarkets are screwing up. And now, only because I'm bloody busy working on a mag you all hate, I am going to withdraw from the discussion, not because I don't like arguing. Clearly I do. But because I have a family to support doing satan's work.
  14. Perceptive and direct as always Jon. Plus ca change eh? So, Jay.... ...does this still pertain? ← Up to a point. The editors all know my views. I am after all a regular on this site which means I am more obsessed than most with the subject which, given my job is exactly as it should be. But... five years on, circulation boyant and with a mantlepiece full of awards for the mag (it is no longer early days) I am more than willing to accept that the team knows exactly what it's doing and has got the mix generally right. That is a very different thing from whether you guys approve. And I stick with my very first comment in this thread: that the kind of mag you would like would not be the sort of thing that would prosper in the market place.
  15. Undeniably true. So I suppose what I'm saying is that it's a rotten shame the UK doesn't deserve a publication that's the foodie equivalent of the New Statesman - small circulation special interest Maybe there aren't enough of us to make it worthwhile. But, in the meantime, the Spectator and Private Eye seem to have dropped their food columns altogether and increasingly, I can't find anything to read. ← yes you can. It's here. Seriously. Certain elements of niche high end old media are being replaced by the online opportunities. I suspect you now read far more about food here than you ever did in any of the mags that were ever available.
  16. I direct you to the Food Media and News forum where people are happily slagging off Gourmet.
  17. It's not about individual pieces. It's about the whole package. A piece from the New Statesman would be (and has been) fine. The New Statesman itself sells just 30,000 copies. We sell over half a million.
  18. For obvious reasons I won't get into a long one on this save for two points. I do believe that a food magazine that appealed hugely to the people on this site would be death in the market place, love it as I do here. And Tim, I have absolutely no idea what you mean by: Both were commissioned solely for our magazine by two of the Observer's key writers. They can only look like they've been published elsewhere if they carry a copyright mark from elsewhere. We also don't commission anything for syndication purposes, because it's imporsisble to do so. What I think you're really saying is 'There were two pieces in the mag that appealed to me but if I say that it would undermine my whinge about the rest of the mag.' I think the fact someone like you found two features - about 12 pages of OFM - they approved of means we're doing the right thing.
  19. And I have indeed just posted. What a piece of old bollocks.
  20. Ahh, there's nothing so pleasing on these boards as the gentle sound of fellatio.
  21. I have to ask Marlena, were you there announced or unannounced?
  22. yes. I did it so others would not have to.
  23. At what point did I say we were not given a reason? Young chefs; cook off; we need judges. But hey... sorry your searing foresight is going to waste.
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