June 2009 Archives

This week's Restaurant of the Week is the Michelin-starred Latymer at country manor hotel Pennyhill Park in Bagshot, Surrey.

Pennyhill Park is one of Surrey's most remarkable hotels. Set in more than 120 acres of park lands, the Exclusive Hotels-owned property features its own golf course and impressive spa as well as 123 beautifully decorated rooms.

Two restaurants provide sustenance to visitors: an informal brasserie serving comforting classics and the more formal Michelin-starred Latymer Restaurant, which bears the name of head chef Michael Wignall.

Best known for his five-year stint as executive chef at the Devonshire Arms Hotel in Yorkshire, where he held a Michelin star for four years, Wignall joined Pennyhill Park at the end of 2007, stepping into the shoes of former executive chef Andrew Turner, who left to set up the Landau restaurant at London's Langham hotel.

The Latymer is a 50-seat dining with interiors featuring dark wooden wall panels alongside green banquettes and steamed glass screens separating tables.

Wignall serves a set menu of three-courses at £58 as well as a ten-course tasting menu at £78. He describes his cooking style as "complex and carefully crafted". "While the style is technical and the presentations elaborate, the food itself is not intimidating, having its roots in familiar classical themes," he says.

This week's Restaurant of the Week is Corrigan's Mayfair, run by the Michelin-starred Irish chef Richard Corrigan.

The restaurant, which is located adjacent to the Grosvenor House hotel, opened last November in the site that once housed the iconic three-Michelin-starred Chez Nico at Ninety. Interiors are loosely based on a hunting lodge, a theme carried through by the menu which has a focus on wild foods and game at its core.

Crustacean and seafood play a central role at Corrigan's and the menu kicks off with native oysters and dishes including Cornish crab jelly with melba toast, octopus carpaccio and Corrigan's take on a bouillabaisse, a South Coast fish soup served with garlic mayonnaise.

Main courses are divided into meat and game, and fish sections, with the latter featuring dishes including butter poached smoked haddock with lobster and creamed parsnip; and steamed sole filet with ceps served in cooking juices.

Speculation is mounting that Michelin-starred chef Daniel Boulud is looking to open his first restaurant in the UK.

Guide Girl understands that Boulud is looking at several opportunities in London for his next venture, including the former Grill restaurant's location in Hyde Park's luxury hotel the Mandarin Oriental.

Lyon-born Boulud shot to fame not in his French homeland, but in New York City where he soon became the toast of the town after opening his eponymous first restaurant in 1993. His management company, The Dinex Group, currently includes five other restaurants and Feast & Fêtes Catering including Café Boulud, DB Bistro Moderne and Bar Boulud in New York City. He has also created Café Boulud in Palm Beach and the Michelin-star award-winning Daniel Boulud Brasserie in Las Vegas.

If Boulud does choose the Mandarin Oriental, he'll be in illustrious company, as Heston Blumenthal is set to take over its other restaurant Foliage this year.

All this exciting news! It's almost too much for this lady-what-lunches to handle...

Paris restaurateur Omar Guerida, owner of über-cool couscous house Chez Omar, is on the hunt for a site in London.

Guerida launched Moroccan restaurant Chez Omar in the French capital's Le Marais district back in 1979 and it has developed into somewhat of a Paris institution.

It was recently included in the Observer Food Monthly's 50 Coolest Places to Eat, where it was described as a hangout for fashion-week darlings desperate for some comfort food: "Tables are tightly packed and the couscous dishes are inevitably sloppy, so don't turn up in your finery."

Guerida now plans to make the jump across the Channel and is looking for a Victorian style pub in London that has high ceilings and a capacity of around 80 covers.

According to property agent Davis Coffer Lyons, who has been instructed to find an appropriate leasehold, Guerida is interested in vibrant areas of the capital "associated with artists, students and the media and fashion industries".

Oh how Parisian!

Image of Chez Omar supplied by roboppy.net.  

You might recognise head chef Tristan Welch from this year's Great British Menu series where he impressed judges with his rhubarb and custard crumble ice cream (pictured below).

He joined Launceston Place in autumn 2007 from the former Pétrus where he worked under Marcus Wareing. The move saw the young chef not only front his own restaurant but also switch from modern French to modern British cooking.

Launceston Place is perched among rows of quaint multimillion-pound housing - all stucco frontages and cherry blossom gardens - and there's certainly no lack of loaded local custom here for Welch to woo. Interiors include chocolaty walls, white tablecloths and a convivial, chic feel that maintains a formality to suit the moneyed Kensington crowd.

Welch's menu is littered with seasonal British produce - nettle, peas, asparagus, rhubarb - a springtime Top of the Crops.

 Gordon Ramsay has said he is "deeply mortified" by the highly public row over the insulting remarks he made about an Australian TV presenter, who had interviewed him.

The famously foul-mouthed chef got into trouble over the weekend after he suggested Tracy Grimshaw needed "to see Simon Cowell's botox doctor" in front of a large crowd at a Melbourne cooking expo.

He also showed a picture of a woman apparently naked on all fours with the face of a pig and said "that's Tracy Grimshaw". Reports further suggested he called her a lesbian, although he strenuously denied this.

It seems that the folks down under aren't as accepting of Ramsay's rants and his comments angered Australia's PM Kevin Rudd, who said the chef's remarks marked "a new form of low life".

Meanwhile, Grimshaw hit back at him, describing him as an "arrogant narcissist" and "a bully". She said: "Obviously Gordon thinks that any woman who doesn't find him attractive must be gay. For the record, I don't. And I'm not."

Coincidentally after featuring Aubergine at the Compleat Angler as my Restaurant of the Week last week, I have just learnt that head chef William Drabble has left.

Drabble, who took over the reins at Aubergine from Gordon Ramsay, has spent more than a decade behind the stove at the Chelsea restaurant. During this time he retained its Michelin star and successfully launched a sister restaurant in Marlow last autumn.

But all good things must come to an end and Drabble has decided that the time has come for him to pursue other opportunities.

His departure coincides with that of the London Fine Dining Group's marketing and operations director David Herbert.
 
Look out for further details on Caterersearch.

UPDATE

Just got a statement from the London Fine Dining Group confirming both Drabble and Herbert's departure. Both are under a confidentiality agreement so unable to share their reasons for leaving.

"David left the group to pursue other business opportunities pursuant to the terms of a confidential settlement agreement," it said.

If one was cynical one could deduce a bust-up... 

 

This week's Restaurant of the Week is Aubergine at the Compleat Angler in Marlow, Buckinghamshire.

After a decade behind the stove at the Michelin-starred Aubergine in Chelsea, which was once home to a young Gordon Ramsay, head chef William Drabble exported his culinary skills to a sister restaurant in Buckinghamshire last autumn.

The launch of the restaurant at the Macdonald Hotels-owned property in Marlow marks the London Fine Dining Group's first venture outside of London.

Headed up by Drabble's former sous chef, Miles Nixon, the simple French cuisine applied to high-end produce that marks his cooking is replicated in Marlow but with £10 shaved off the menus.

However, the different price point doesn't dilute the preference for luxury, and Aubergine's seven-course tasting menu is a masterclass in bringing the best out of well sourced top-end produce. Typical dishes may include lobster tortellini with cauliflower purée and truffle butter sauce; or seared foie gras with marinated figs.

For everyone who watched the Channel 4 documentary Big Chef Takes On Little Chef, during which Heston Blumenthal transformed Little Chef's menu, it was pretty clear that there wasn't much love lost between our favourite culinary wizard and the roadside restaurant chain's CEO Ian Pegler.

The Fat Duck's three-Michelin-starred chef patron's efforts weren't ever quite "blue-sky-thinking" enough for the Little Chef boss, who in the end was proved wrong when Heston's menu took the restaurant it was launched at by storm.

The menu, which includes dishes such as braised ox cheeks, coq au vin and Hereford steak and Abbot Ale pie, proved a big hit not just with food critics, but also with Little Chef's target market of truck drivers and travelling salesmen.

And so last week, Pegler announced that following the success of Heston's trial-menu at the restaurant in Popham, Hampshire, Little Chef had taken the decision roll it out at its 175 restaurants across the UK.

Good news all round then, right? Apparently not.

Despite the great success of the menu, Pegler clearly hasn't quite forgotten his differences with Heston, who has said that he was not consulted by Little Chef about the planned rollout.

At last night's Craft Guild of Chefs Awards, where he was honoured with the Special Award, Heston revealed he was "surprised" that Little Chef had announced plans to launch his menu nationwide without further discussions with him first.

Not quite what I'd call blue-sky-thinking...

Heston Blumenthal not consulted about Little Chef menu rollout 

Ramsay admitted what has been known in the industry for some time - that Gordon Ramsay Holdings was on the verge of administration just after Christmas after breaching covenants on its £10m loan with Royal Bank of Scotland.

The interview, which was of course peppered with swear words and attacks on rival chefs, followed a series of denials from Ramsay's people that the business was in trouble.

"Completely inaccurate," we were told repeatedly.

It is a welcome change - every business goes through troublesome times and half the battle is admitting it.

The Hardens appear to take a little credit for the confession, albeit tongue-in-cheek.

UPDATE:

Phil Hall has just got in touch saying that as much as he'd like to, he can't take credit for Gordon's interview with the Sunday Times. "The interview was set up by his PR agency before I was appointed," he said. Fair play to the PR agency, maybe they're learning that complete denials aren't a long-term strategy after all.