The Times, 29 December
Giles Coren visits Le Café Anglais, London W2

This last restaurant review of the year is one in which the jaded critic traditionally looks backwards and reflects on the highs and lows of the gastronomic twelvemonth. Or, rather, looks back and block-copies text from previous reviews, pastes them into a new document, dashes off a weary intro and files the whole botched patchwork to his editor under the heading, “My Restaurants of the Year”. It’s the sort of journalism that makes you want to kill yourself. Readers go to the quite unnecessary trouble and expense of purchasing a weekend paper during the Christmas break and then are expected to make do with a pompous rehashing of leftovers, whose only novelty is that it contains words for which the contributor has now been paid twice.

The Daily Telegraph, 29 December
Jasper Gerard visits Gravetye Manor, near East Grinstead, West Sussex

You know you are in the Home Counties hedge-fund belt when even the wine list takes to haranguing you about "EU bureaucrats". Here I am, sinking into a comfy wingback, fire crackling in the giant inglenook of this regal Sussex manor house, deciding languorously between the game and the fish, when I'm slapped around the chops by the sommelier equivalent of Norman Tebbit. The only reason one has not heard of the Pinot Gris, spits the list, is because it was called Tokay Alsace before beastly Brussels pen pushers, "in their wisdom", forced the vineyard to change the name. All seemed so perfect about Gravetye Manor: a grand entrance, deep-fragranced gardens, a drive so long it almost needs a service station and leading to a ravishing stone-built Elizabethan mansion that has been a restaurant-cum-country hotel for half a century.
Gravetye Manor – The Daily Telegraph review in full >>

The Sunday Times, 30 December
Christopher Hart visits Texture, London W1

Texture. Texture. And the texture of Texture is, primarily... foam. Foam doesn’t do much for the human palate. It doesn’t have the appealing crunchiness that reminds us of squatting by a wood fire, clad in rabbit fur, gnawing on an elk bone, nor the creamy smoothness we start enjoying about a minute after we’re born. Foam is just foam, with less fortunate associations. It’s what slugs emit when you sprinkle salt on them. It’s what’s left in the sink after you’ve done the washing up. It’s the stuff you get along the shoreline of a sea used as a transnational lavatory. We must be hard-wired by evolutionary biology to regard it with some suspicion. So why does it keep appearing on food in this heavily hyped new restaurant? Expectations have been running high because the chef-director, Agnar Sverrisson, previously worked at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. Can he have learnt to love foam from Raymond Blanc?
Texture – The Sunday Times review in full >>

The Observer, 30 December
Jay Rayner visits Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester, London W1

The festive lights are still twinkling down the lobby of the Dorchester Hotel right now, and if what you want is a rush of seasonal cheer, stay there and order a cocktail. For God's sake, do not open the door on the left, for through there is the nightmare of Christmas present, and probably of past and future, too. Through there, dressed in funereal shades of grey, is a restaurant called Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester, and it is enough to make even the happiest of souls run screaming for the Prozac. Jolly it is not. Expensive and disappointing it most certainly is.
Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester – The Observer review in full >>