Suzi Edwards

Sketch certainly wins on the front of house front. Never before have I been shown to my table by a fabulously beautiful girl almost wearing a tennis outfit but teamed with four in high vinyl white pumps. My French also meant that I was unable to chat with the Maitre’d of Gagnaire about Bengal cat castration, as was possible here. And, flash-back inducing carpet aside, Sketch is head and shoulders above Gagnaire in terms of interior design. But, please, for a second, Imagine ABBA. Now strip them of their inspiration, imagination and whimsical lyrics about naval battles. It’s Bjorn Again, right? Well from a food point of view, Sketch is the culinary equivalent of a tribute band. So much of the food looked instantly recognizable as Gagnaire. The canapés came standing perkily upright in oval dish filled with tuilles of parmesan and tomato. This was closely following by multi plate amuse of such beauty that the kitchen forgot to add any flavour. Without my camera I could not tell you of any of the food we were offered. And sadly, despite originally giving me permission to photograph, they decided to withdraw that permission soon after. I remember staggering out of Gagnaire, stunned that a restaurant had served me one thing so disgusting (a veloute of raw sheep’s milk) that I had involuntarily “yeucked” loudly at the table and yet also had served a “soup” of foie gras and oysters, studded with lentils that, with each mouthful, made me reevaluate the meaning of the word “amazing”. Like Moby I realized that there was no way I could ever cook like this. I had no idea how he had conjured the food. And my French had deserted me, so I wouldn’t have understood if he’d told me. I staggered from Sketch wondering if I’d had my taste bubs surgically removed earlier that day without realizing it. I’m lucky, I don’t have any qualms at all about spending sometimes frightening amounts of money for great food. I don’t mind spending large amounts of money on not so great food if the ambiance and service are good. But I really, really resent spending 500 GBP on mediocre food served by waiters who, even when I have ordered the wine, ask my partner to taste it and then mix up every single dish they bring out. I remember being surprised that Sketch didn’t get a star. Having eaten there I’m surprised it’s still open. Here’s what we ate (all capitals, restaurant’s own) Langoustines Addressed in Four Ways: Tartar, Green Apple and Grapefruit Granite. Mousseline; Sweet Butter and Passionfruit. Grilled; Red Currant and baby Salad Roasted; Little Bay Peach Juice, Lentils and Shanghai Cabbage Duck and Red Tuna “Aiguilettes” of Duck and Girolles Mushrooms, Red Tuna Sushi Roasted Foie Gras with Amantillado Flavoured Duck Jelly Toasted Brioche with Mango Chutney And then a little sneaky fish course to share Scottish Blue Lobster Nage of Lobster cooked with Lemon Gras, Lime and Lavender A ‘Roudoudou” of ‘Muscat Beaumes-de-Venise’ Jersey Royal mash and Mac Wine Sabayon Ricotta and Edible Flower Cannelloni And then Veal Sweetbreads Roasted Cinnamon Infused Veal Sweatbreads Sarawak Pepper Strawberry Syrup Veal Kidneys and Onion Macaroni Parmesan and Baby Leaves Salad Filet of Beef Heart of Fillet of Beef with a Bitter Orange Sauce Cuttlefish Carpaccio, Sorrel Braised Black Radish, Aubergine and Girolles And we could face spending almost 70GBP on dessert so we each had one from the list Vanilla and Saffron Ice Cream with Crystallised Olives Pierre Gagnaire’s Chocolate Summer 2004

i'd had high hopes for the mini bar. having read how excited everyone on here has been and having a bit of a penchant for innovative food, i gave it a go during my trip to DC last month. and i was bitterly disappointed. i'm not going to dissect the menu. but i really wanted to share my thoughts. i understand what they are trying to do and i love the concept. i especially love the sushi bar style; it could make for a really interactive and thrilling experience. i love my time in kitchens chatting with chefs after eating their food, so of course i'm going to jump at the chance to interact while the food's being prepared. and if the chefs are preparing food of a style that i love...then hell yes. but i didn't expect my questions to be met with crossed arms and defensiveness. i didn't expect to ask "why do you think this place doesn't get the same press as trio" twice and each time be told that jose is a great guy to work for. i didn't expect my attempts to chat about el bulli,gagnaire and fat duck to be knocked right back at me. i didn't expect our wine waitress to repeatedly mix up our wine flight. and it would have been nice if there had been some attempt to match the wine flight with the courses that we were on. it would have been nice if instead of thinking what they're doing is at the forefront of gastronomy, they'd realise that they are, in fact, terribly derivative. i was told they're starting to do "great stuff" with liquid nitrogen. i said "like at the fat duck" and was a shot a look of hatred. i don't expect everyone to be endlessly inventive. culinary movements have to start somewhere and it's great that we're leaping free of the starter, main, pudding movement (or the canape, amuse, starter, main, pre desert, pudding, petite fours that i prefer :-) ) but i don't expect people to pretend they don't owe a debt of innovation to other people. in fact, where i come from we call it copying. and perhaps i wouldn't mind people copying if, just once or twice, i hadn't seen a glimpse of skill and invention that proves they do have thrilling ideas of their own.

or at the leela palace in bangalore :-) we call it fat cat ferengi lunch there. i saw no other westerners in bangalore apart from my two colleagues for a week. i went to the leela and discovered where they were all hiding out. now if they ventured to the real mtr they'd have a real treat, rather than eating attmpted facimiles of western foods of a sunday.

That's a good question and one that I will try and get the answer to. My guess is that there is bound to be shared goals amongst Indian chefs cooking at the highest levels in London, but whether or not they refer to themselves as "New Indian" cooks or feel they are part of a movement, I don't know. I would suggest that if you, as a vigorous observer of your national food scene, don't know the answer, then the question is in part already answered. actually, that's not the case steve. the high end indian restaurants in the uk are fighting two things; the generally inauthentic product sold as indian food in 99% of restaurants and the michelin grading system which isn't really geared to ethinic cuisines. i think people who don't read the UK press or live in the UK also don't realise that we don't have a culture of eating out 3 or 4 times a week or so much of the intellectual thought about culinary movements that the US seems to have. i can't think of a single uk restaurant "movement" that would badge itself in any way, so please don't suggest that it doesn't exist just because andy doesn't have the answer.

i think madhur jaffrey might be more in the uk/indian food continuum than the us one click that said, tabla's definitly on my list next time i am in ny (edit cos i can't spell)

i spent some time in bangalore earlier this year. it's certainly not the first stop you'd make on a culinary tour of india, but i ate some good food. the overriding theme to me was that indian food in india is very different to the india food in the UK. but indian food from the takeaway in the UK is very different to the restaurants that andy mentions. i've only eaten in zaika so i can't comment more on this. this is hearsay slightly, but my indian md went to zaika and had never had food like that anywhere in india....this might just be that she she's not really a seasoned reataurant goer, so i won't make too much of that. back to my bangalorean experiences. i would strongly disagree with jinmyo's contention that "...India has yet to develop a restaurant culture as all of its greatest cooking occurs in households, both aristocratic and otherwise." While there are many dishes that you would only eat at a wedding, there's a hugely strong culture of chaat in bangalore specifically which as far as foodstuffs go, would be mainly eaten in restaurants. while a pani puri eaten streetside isn't in anyway as evolved as the sort of stuff steve ate at tabla, as a taste and restaurant experience, it's still valid.

wow. fantastic information clerkwellian. this would explain why the supermarkets can do what they do....

i'll second the ramsey thing. for the longest time it was the most delish thing i had ever eaten beated only by grant achatz's shrimp tempura earlier this year. so it's still the most delish dessert i have ever eaten. i was sure i detected some truffle at RHR but moby reckons i'm having an olefactory hallucination...

i think the main uk attempt at anything like that is the market concept from the supermaket chain beginning with s who i shall not name. they've tried to make it look they are selling artisinal products, but in fact they're just the same thing but in wicker baskets. i am now insanely jealous of you jonathan. i didn't realise you had a place in france.

i was using utterly butterly as an example. the ones in "shopped" are name free. from memory no mention is made of IP. i don't know if that's because it's not used in food manufacturing, if the author chose to ignore this or if the manufacturers she mentions forgot to lodge them. but then i think about it and every "new" product soon has an own brand equivalent. i can't think of a single "innovative" product that doesn't. and actually, which came first, "i can't believe it's not butter" or "utterly butterly"? i mean, it's not the human genome project. food manufacturers are constantly looking for new product. i would guess there's lots of overlap. i'd be interested to know how the patents work and how much use is made of them. does anyone know? (btw, i admit my use of the word leech was slightly overdramatic. i do appear to be turning into kitten from big brother at the moment. "power to the people")

Could you go into this further? What business practices determine thhe choice of generic brand products? cost. it's as simple as that. many supermarkets used to claim that their own brand stuff was exactly the same as branded products, hence kelloggs "we don't make cornflakes for anyone else" strapline. let's take utterly butterly as an off the top of my head example. that was a product with a unique selling point; it tastes like butter but spreads straight from the fridge. years will have gone into producing that product. as soon as the supermarkets see how it sells they produce their own version, but at a significantly reduced price using inferior ingredients because cost is the only thing they can compete on. utterly butterly is not a great example because the supermarket version hasn't made the makers of utterly butterly go bust. "shopped" gives an example of a producer that ended up having their innovative product delisted by a major chain and going out of business. supermarkets basically leech off manufactuers and gain competitive advantage by taking the scientific research they've done and tracking how well a product sells before they make their own. when it comes to pitching for the business the supermarkets will engage potential suppliers of own brand stuff in e-auctions...the only criteria for selection is cost. cheaper the better. the e-auction means that there's no opportunity for suppliers to sell the benefits of going with them. my biggest bugbear at the moment are the "finest" and "taste the difference" ranges where the supermarkets have recognised the "foodie" upswell and have responded with "better than the other stuff" lines. i was suckered in at first. oooh, a tomato that's grown for flavour i used to think. but what's a tomato grown for if it's not flavour? cost and transportability is the answer. we've all ended up paying premium prices for produce that's allegedly better but is in fact food as it should be.

at risk of sounding like an advert for farmaround they also deliver water organic cereal ecover cleaning products some breads paper products i am very pleased about the water thing because i can't drive and it's a mare to carry back from the shops. i get my tuna (ortiz) from brindisa and nearly faint at the price every time. but it's soooooo good. i used to feed supermarket tuna to my cats and they eye me plaintively every time they smell the ortiz stuff. am sure it makes me a bad person, but i will not share with them. brindisa have a stall at borough, you can probably get it there. they also do nice salted tinned anchovies. i also recently purchased some nunez de prado flor olive oil from there... and then saw nunez de prado standard olive oil in satanburies. i think i would be happy to buy artisan products from a supermarket. it's the own label stuff that's really damaging the suppliers. in fact, i guess that it's a big thing for a small oil producer to be stocked my a chain (and actually quite unusual from what i have read) so as long as the chains don't threated to delist them if they can't produce enough oil, maybe this is a good thing. problem is, the supermarkets have systematically taken producers like nunez de prado off their shelves in the past few years...so there's even less choice of the really good stuff.

i'll bet a few people on here would eat one though. i am so excited about this. however i see my dream of being a uk size twelve slipping still further away... i'm back in the UK 2nd week of july but am more than happy to do a tatin tasting in chicago in the interim :-) it's just give, give, give with me you know.

the important thing to remember is that you don't have to boycott completely! every single time we decide "hell, i am not going to the supermarket to buy this" we are doing a good thing. the supermarkets are currently after our "small basket shops" (those trips where you just need some tomatoes but end up getting a few other things) and the proliferation of smaller, highstreet supermarkets is their way of grabbing the rest of our spend on groceries. the sad fact is that it's impossible for many people to avoid the supermarket, but really, every little helps. to use a well know supermarket jingle :-)

Not sure if anyone else here has read this book, but it's an expose of the UK supermarket system by sometimes Guardian writer Joanna Blythman. The opening section on food was enough to make me cut up my loyalty card, but the following sections about the systematic decemation of the UK farming industry and the overview of how suppliers are treated have lead me to take a stand. I'm not shopping in supermarkets anymore. With my weekly delivery from Farmaround and trip to the Islington farmers market, coupled with an excellent local butcher and fishmonger, I think I might do OK. I'm worried about cat litter as I use a (very good) supermarket brand, but I am guessing that there's a brand name out there that I could support instead. I'll get my cat food from Charlies, my local newsagent/grocers. I'll report on here on how it's going. I've managed 7 days so far...

keep talking, keep talking i *love* tarte tatin

thanks for that mobes. it said lamb on the menu, but i was thinking which organ, not which animal....

what's a smorrebrod lunch? is this a terrible gap in my knowledge?

this is the year of the sweetbread for me. i'd never had them until my trip to the fat duck in january...and now i'm having them whenever i can. that said, i think the chef at sketch could do well to follow your instructions che, the ones i had on friday night (scented with cinnamon) left a lot to be desired. it was one long piece...about maybe five inches long, perhaps larger. which sweetbread would that be?

lovely report and well done on your sucess at the races...makes me sad i have to put my trip to leeds back... do you think hell's kitchen will make lots of people start demanding fried eggs in posh restaurants?

well, finally am going to sketch tonight and as i never "wrote up" my gagnaire experiece, i'll do a compare and contrast over the weekend.

jack had the coconut prawn thing when we went a couple of months ago and he loved it. still talks about it now in fact. i wonder if there was someone different in the kitchen? the fact that EVERYTHING was overcooked suggests a different hand at the tiller to me...

isn't that the beauty of opinions though? glad you enjoyed your meal robyn, it sounds like you had a good trip.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Edinburgh food is a great place to start. edinburgh is known as a food town and you won't struggle to eat well there. i don't remember threads about the other places you mention, but you can try searching and seeing if i have missed anything. there's also a recent thread about edinburgh purveyors of fine food which was pretty interesting. hope this helps.

fantastic idea basildog. these charters are a two way thing :-)