jayrayner
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Posts posted by jayrayner
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Such suspicious folk. To take the various points raised here in no particular order, her soup really was spankingly good: intense, rich but without being overwhelming or simply too salty. It was a strong piece of cooking.
Yes, they cooked in real time, and no we had no way of knowing who was who. And indeed my two colleagues didn't have any idea there was a faking it element to the show (though, for various reasons too complicated to explain, I did. Nevertheless I didn't have a clue who was who and, not knowing, voted on execution alone.)
The two other chefs do each have five year's experience, but not perhaps in the most illustrious of places: both, as I recall, out of town or grand airport hotels. Nevertheless one of them prepared a very good gezpacho. But it was not as good as the winner's fish soup.
None of the meat dishes were as impressive as any of the soups but again, hers did the job (though the description was a little confusing. Both Paul Merret and I wondered why you would bother putting any flavouiring in a salt crust, as salt crusts seal meat and any traffic would, osmotically be out rather than in; the salt pastry nature of it made more sense.) And yes, all of us like venison.
A final point. In the after match interview I did say it was very good cooking but were those the only two dishes she could do? The answer I now see is yes.
Still and all, I think it made for fun food television. As for the outcome of each show it ain't predictable. I suggest you carry on watching.
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" saw an article recently (I forget where) that briefly specualted on his financial situation, apparently actually trying to find out how many restuarants he owns is not easy
I think that was mine: I spent the best part of a day with him trying to find out what he owns. Came up with a blank. Eventually we published this (and forgive the longish quite; I think it's illuminating to the discussion):
Trying to get to the bottom of Marco's business empire is like trying to follow one of his recipes: a job only for the professional. As long ago as 2001 it was announced that he was stepping down from the company that owned the Mirabelle, Quo Vadis and all the others, but that he would remain as a shareholder and consultant. His long time business partner, the restaurateur Jimmy Lahoud, is certainly still involved and the accounts of the various companies that Lahoud and Marco have been a part of regularly refer to personal loans made by the men to those companies, and consultancy fees going back the other way, but those only give a snapshot of what has been.It is certainly the case that a very complex network of companies is involved, so complex indeed that many experts have given up trying to ascertain his value. Marco was estimated to be worth £50m in the Sunday Times rich list for 1999. In 2000 that was down to £35m, and he disappeared altogether the following year.
'I've been unable to see evidence of the profits to justify his inclusion in the list,' said Philip Beresford, who compiles the list, at the time, and Beresford kept him out again this year. In the past Marco has happily allowed the media to describe him as the proprietor of the restaurants in his group. What's changed is that he no longer does so, preferring instead to refer elliptically to his 'interests in restaurants'.
The only thing I could ascertain from his furious scribbling in my notebook is that a share of the companies with which he is involved goes to an offshore trust. He does not own that trust but he does control how that block of shares votes on important issues. As he says, absolutely correctly, he does not own the restaurants. But he has a bloody big say in what happens to them.
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If I was you I would replace the section headings with those old stalwarts starters, main courses, puddings before some smart arse restaurant critic comes in and whips yours arse for it. Entirely unreasonably of course.
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glass champagne 9
jambon 9
oeuf cocotte 9
ravioli 15
pied de cochon 11
calamar 10
agneau+ extra pommes (gratis) 14
caille 16
chocolate sensation 9
pinot noir crittenden 33 (£20 cheaper than my original choice out of stock santenay, well done to the somellier for that one!)
calvados 9
water 3.50
service 18.88
£169.88
i was stuffed, i thought i'd get through some cheese as well and i even turned down the offer of some crinkle cut chips
It's easy to run up a bill for one like that - if you have five starters, two main courses, a £33 bottle fine, aperitif and digestif.
My price estimate is based on a (reasonably sized) meal for two, plus a bottle from the lower reaches of the list and a bottle of water. Take off Gary's champagne and calvados, drop the price of the wine and you are well within my £150 top out.
All of which means I think Matthew's six to ten plates each is completely excessive. And I don't think I coudl ever be accused of having a bird like appetitie.
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I read Jay's review of Simpson's and think it's a fair assessment, but if you don't get to visit top class restaurants on a very regular basis then I don't think you'd get the sense of ennui that he had. That of course is the problem with critics, however good, in any field, they are looking for new, original, stimulating, because that allows their writing skills full rein, but most of us are just looking for a good product at a fair price. And you will get that at Simpson's.
I do recognise and accept the point and have indeed written about it; a little like members of the royal family, we assume all restaurants smell of wet paint because the pones we visit do.
That said, I hold to my feelings about Simpsons and, more generally, if I were going to Birmingham or knew anyone who was I would tip Jessica's over Simpsons any day.
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think those are your only two choices at that level now ....
Have only been to Jessica's, and only once, but it was a pretty good meal. Think the chef is ex-hibiscus and Simpsons so there's certainly good pedigree there.
Have you checked the relevant websites?
Don't think you'll be eating badly at either place!
Jessica's every time. but don't take my word for it. Read
Oh, hang on. Those are my words... Oh well.
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I agree with the ever correct poppyseedbagel. Hay Fever is set around a country house party. Therefore you can be a rather less intricate: think kedgeree, devilled kidneys and boiled ham with parsley sauce and you won't go far wrong.
If you want to be a little exotic go for peach melba, invented by escoffier for dame nellie well before the 20s but still very popular then.
And to the contributors in the US, no, British food in the 20s was not the same as that in North America.
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You know this is almost enough to get me to return to the burb of my birth. But, er, not quite.
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Ramsay has been talking about opening in NYC for at least 4 years. This from the September 2002 edition of Condé Nast Traveler:Now, after the opening of The Connaught, [Ramsay] is setting his sights on Manhattan. Next year Blackstone, the company that owns The Connaught and Claridge's, plans to open a hotel on Columbus Circle. Ramsay will run the restaurant. But as his friend Alain Ducasse learned when his restaurant got off to a bad start a couple of years ago, New York can be tricky.
'I won't have sixteen pens for signing the check. I won't have twenty-seven rums. And I'll spend more time in the kitchen than Rocco (DiSpirito, the celebrity chef at the acclaimed Union Pacific in Manhattan, who is frequently seen in the society pages and at clubs).'
'You get only one shot at New York,' Ramsay says. 'That will be the biggest test of my entire life. And until I have a crack at it, I'm sleeping with one eye open. But one thing I'm not afraid of is intimidation.'
Hmm. Not much arguing with that is there. As I am my own researcher I will just have to punish myself.
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Ramsay had plans to open in America long before he signed TV deals. If I'm not mistaken, the first season of Hell's Kitchen was the middle of 2005 in America? Ramsay has certainly spoken of opening up in New York long before that. The earliest example I can find online is an article from the Scotsman in March 2005, 2 months before Hell's Kitchen aired. But I'm sure I remember him talking about opening in New York a long time before this.
Not as I understand it. The first Hell's Kitchen was shot in Los Angeles in October of 2004 (lucky me: I got to eat there on its second night). The deal with Fox to do it predated the shoot by a good few months. Indeed I believe it was only a few weeks after broadcast of the first british one, in May of that year, that the Network contracted him..
And at that point, according to the Ramsay organisation, they had no plans to do anything in the US. And I would challenge you to find anything in the cuts that proves otherwise.
I'd hazard a guess that if they announced a deal in March 2005 they were probably looking a good long time before that, as I say I remember Ramsay talking about the states a long time ago (I'm from London inceidentally), my only surprise is the amount of time it took him.
Just telling you what I know from the research I did for the gastronomy goes global piece in OFM which involved talking to all the people involved. But you're welcome to contradict me. I don't honestly care that much.
And Matthew, I do know you're from London.
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Ramsay had plans to open in America long before he signed TV deals. If I'm not mistaken, the first season of Hell's Kitchen was the middle of 2005 in America? Ramsay has certainly spoken of opening up in New York long before that. The earliest example I can find online is an article from the Scotsman in March 2005, 2 months before Hell's Kitchen aired. But I'm sure I remember him talking about opening in New York a long time before this.
Not as I understand it. The first Hell's Kitchen was shot in Los Angeles in October of 2004 (lucky me: I got to eat there on its second night). The deal with Fox to do it predated the shoot by a good few months. Indeed I believe it was only a few weeks after broadcast of the first british one, in May of that year, that the Network contracted him..
And at that point, according to the Ramsay organisation, they had no plans to do anything in the US. And I would challenge you to find anything in the cuts that proves otherwise.
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Bit closer in to london is the Charles Napier at Chinnor. Truly fantastic setting, and v good food the last time I ate there.
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Hey if someone picked up the tab for me travelling 4hrs in a first class carriage to have lunch I'd go just about anywhere.
First class? I should be so bloody lucky. I have to go with the bikes.
I should point out, for the benefit of the pedant of a reader who wrote to tell em that trains do not run to wells (and that therefore my review was incorrect), it did also require £52 in round trip cab fares from castle carey. I'm intrepid me.
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Bills were itemised when they first opened but then they had a problem with their tills. They now have new tills so itemisation has been resolved.
All the best,
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Ian
Glad to hear it. they were still unitemised when I went for dim sum two weeks ago
yours
Gerald
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Sorry about the weight comment but I had to squeeze past you on the stairs at the reopening party at pied a terre. For a minute I thought I was goner, it all went dark.
Aw, come on. those stairs are so narrow they'd be a challenge for a nurse trying to fit a catheter up them.
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YYeh well fatty rayner (doesn't he look more and more like his mum!) lives in south london, which is unusual for a journalist so he's well-placed to find a gem.
Elephant & Castle though, what a teribble, terrible **** hole and I say that as a sarf lundoner born and bred.
S
Dear boy, I can always lose weight, but you will forever be cursed with that filthy mouth of yours.
You're right about Elephant and Castle, though. And I was wrong about nobody writing to defend the place. Couldn't move for emails from embittered E&Cers. Love, as they say, is blind.
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Very little unfortunately.
But you are mentioning the unmentionable so consider yourself reprimanded.
won't do it again.
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Question: what is there, in real terms, to separate us from those men in their anoraks at the end of Platform 3 at Crewe?
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A recent office re-org has seen my collection of menus filed into alphabetical order (sad isn't the word I know but I do refer to them for my work, honest). While I've been able to identify the vast majority, I do have three that have no indication of which restaurant they are from. Just for fun, I wondered if anyone can fill in the gaps from these sample dishes (they are all UK restaurants as far as I know) -
Menu 1 (I think this may be Jason Atherton at L'anis, which was where Zaika now is, but I never actually ate there so I'm not sure)
Salad of marinated sea bream, citrus fruit and olive oil dressing, milk garlic puree
Braised beef skirt with roasted vegetables, snail and garlic mash
Chocolate delice flavoured with anise and cocnut sorbet
Menu 2
Foie Gras ballottine on a Madeira jelly, salad of green beans, Granny Smith apple and truffle
Seabass pan fried on fennel hearts, tomato concasse and chives, civet sauce marbled with fennel veloute
Strawberry fool with layers of fresh meringue, pistachio nuts, jelly of red berries
Menu 3
Salad of Cornish lobster with Parmesan Panis a la Nicoise with lobster vinaigrette
grilled turbot with cannelloni of scallops and sevruga caviar with a parmesan cream sauce
raviolo of rice pudding with marinated strawberries and white chocolate ice sorbet
Number one does indeed sound like atherton, though mostly because of the snails and garlic mash reference which, in another form, is on the menu at Maze.
No idea on menu two but I'd want to punch any chef who marbled any sauce with a veloute of anything else.
Menu 3 sounds like Burton-Race in Landmark incarnation. But that really is just a guess.
No help at all am I.
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yeah went on satruday for hotpot with 13 others.
quite scary walking into the restuarant
as i could feel my eyes tingling from the amount of chilli that was in the air!!!
we had the double hotpot and loads of wine.
Food was ok can't really complain as there no other place in london that does sichuan hot pot and the soup base was hot and numbing and thermonuclear red although surprisingly not as hot as i'm used to.
The bill came to about £30/head.
Not bad actually but there was a few niggles.
First when we said we wanted the hotpot they said that we had to preorder it??
then he said something about it taking a few hours to get the soup base ready??
but when we pressed him he went off and got us the hotpot ordering sheets.
not sure what that was about might have been trying to force us to order ala carte??? as sichuan hotpot doesn't take hours to prep the stock??
Service was typically chinatown abrupt and coldly efficient.
also we were on the third floor and their wireless pdq machine couldn't work on the top floor the bluetooth was out of range
so 4 of us had to walkdown stairs and wait for the only pdq handset they had to pay our share of the bill.
but the place is quite nice they spent a pretty penny on the decor and the rest of the menu did look promising should be going back this week to order off teh ala carte.
braised abalone £68/person ouch!!!
My understanding is that they ask you pre-order it because they only have ten of them. Seems pretty reasonable to me - and I think the reviewing fraternity have done a pretty good job of publicising the fact.
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Today, Craig Claiborne's notorious $4,000 Paris banquet would barely rate a mention at the bottom of a society column.
Oh, I think it might make a little more in the press than that. Let's not forget the headline on his piece: 31 dishes, nine wines, a $4000 cheque.
And what those wines were: the 1918 Chateau Latour, the 1969 Montrachet Baron Thenard, the 1928 Chateau Mouton Rothschild, the 1947 Chateau Lafite, the 1961 Petrus, the 1929 Romanee Conti, and the 1928 d'Yquem. Oh, and the 1835 Madeira.
Would I want to write up a meal like that? Er, yes, I think I might. But then I'm just a grubby hack.
(You happen to have mentioned one of my favourite restaurant write-ups of all time; it took me a while but I now have a copy on pdf so that, every now and then, I can pull it up and marvel.)
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Jay, would it be illegal/unethical for you to post your article on eGullet as it existed before it was hacked to bits? (That’s a genuinely innocent question.)
I wouldn't say it was hacked to bits. I lost 400 words out of a piece that was orginally 3500, and I was the one who did the cutting. The reference to Matsuhisa aside, I lost nothing important. A modest tightening can only improve a piece like that; I'm a big believer in editing, something old media (when it's doing the job correctly) still has over the new. So no. I'll stick by the one that's online on the Observer site.
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Here's the Guardian Unlimited article (28 May 2006) citation:
How the world's top chefs went global. By Jay Rayner, critic of the year
jayratner, good on you!
Mind you, I must bring to your attention that before there was a Nobu restaurant in New York in 1994, there was the original Matsuhisa restaurant in Beverly Hills. Los Angeles does have a few good restaurants.
Also, are you optimistic or pessimistic that all these chefs can maintain culinary standards and not become "corporate", mediocre, formulaic, etc.?
Thanks for that. At the last minute I had to lose 400 words. The reference to Matsuhisa was a few of those words.
Do I think they can maintain standards? Yes I do, but it's whether they are standards we - any of us - would find appealing. Multiple operations demandmassive concistency and eventually that can lead to something faultless but bland. I also loved l'atelier de Joel Robuchon in Paris. But I think it takes something away from the experience that it will soon be available in eight other cities, even though it will be exactly the same.
Then again, I do find it hard to begrudge the big names their success. Being a chef is a tough business. I couldn't work the hours, and I'm sure most people couldn't either. Rare (read stupid) is the guy or gal who goes into it thinking they'll become rich. Investment banking it ain't. That some of them eventually manage to make big money seems fine to me. (Have you noticed how it's often the people with enough money to eat in their restaurants, the big earners, who most begrudge the star chefs their riches?)
Personally I found Mark Edwards' comment, that these jumbo high end restaurants might kill off the smaller ones, most intriguing, though I doubt its the case. I suspect the big players only arrive in town when a restaurant sector has recahed a certain maturity.
J
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It isn't just the food that's sous-vide-- it's the restaurants themselves.
Nice line. Wish I'd put it in the piece. In case anybody notices and wonders, some curious coding problems have turned up in the on-line version. I have no idea why Robuchon's first name has the apostrophe in it but it's not there on the old-fashioned printed page.
MPW comes out of retirement
in United Kingdom & Ireland: Dining
Posted
Yes. I'm 23 now.