June 2010 Archives

Gordon Ramsay Holdings (GRH) has closed one of its pubs, the Devonshire in Chiswick, west London.

The Devonshire, which opened in 2007, is one of three pubs the company owns in London which also include the Narrow in Limehouse and the Warrington in Maida Vale.

A spokeswoman for GRH confirmed that the Devonshire has closed. "The Devonshire pub has not been meeting our expectations for awhile and we have taken the decision to close it while we consider future plans," she said. 

"There are a number of options and a final decision will be made in due course."

Last year, GRH was forced to deny that the Devonshire was up for sale after it appeared in the "for sale" section on the website of property agent Restaurant Property. 

The closure of the pub comes six months after the departure of Mark Sargeant, who left GRH last November and was instrumental in the group's roll out of its three London pubs.

GRH's most recent accounts revealed that the company made a loss of more than £4m in the year to August 2008.

Good news for exotic food lovers. Events caterer the London Kitchen is launching a pop-up canapé bar that will serve crunchy creepy crawlies to intrepid punters next month.

The Canapé Kitchen, which will pop up for one hour every Thursday in July, will serve Thai green crickets with coriander and coconut cream, and chocolate dipped scorpions with a white chocolate and chilli fondue.

It will pop up on Carnaby Street in Soho from 5.30pm to 6.30pm next Thursday 1 July, before appearing somewhere in the City on Thursday 8 July and then heading to Covent Garden on 15 and Chelsea on 22 July.

And if eating insects isn't your bag, there'll also be a more conservative menu available for the less daring diners. This will include mini Yorkshire puddings with roast beef and horseradish alongside ham hock on a toasted croute with piccalilli.

The London Kitchen was launched last year by Damian Clarkson after his previous business Red Snapper Events entered into voluntary liquidation.

Caterer was given a plug in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday where food critic Zoe Williams agreed with our assertion that The Walnut Tree near Abergavenny has put Wales on the culinary map.

Williams is impressed by the Michelin-starred restaurant where chef-patron Shaun Hill has been leading its revival for the past few years and is serving a "confident" menu. 

Meanwhile French chef Joel Antunes, who has returned to London after a decade in the USA, gets a lukewarm welcome from John Walsh in The Independent. While he rates the service at Brasserie Joel at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge hotel, he says he "strove, without success, to find something that we hadn't eaten a thousand times before".

Writing in The Observer Jay Rayner gives Tom Aikens' new venture, Tom's Terrace at Somerset House, a basting, saying that he has rarely been to a more tawdry catering venture. His gripe centres on what appears to be a lack of input from Aikens and the steep mark-up on dishes such as £6.50 for a bowl of truffle chips.

Lucas Hollweg of The Sunday Times enjoys eating in a circular, open-sided thatched hut outside at The Black Rat in Winchester. He particularly likes the pared down Sunday lunch menu offering just three starters, three mains and three puds. "It's the sort of menu I generally like, too much choice sending me into a spin of indecision," he says.

In the Independent on Sunday, Simon Usborne says that Angels & Gypsies, a new tapas in London's Camberwell feels sent from above in a neighbourhood not known for destination dining.

Last night saw the launch of Taste of London, the annual food festival celebrating the capitals' restaurant scene.

The great and good of the hospitality industry (and twice as many pretty PR girls) gathered in Regent's Park to sip free Champagne and taste the flavours of 40 of London's top restaurants.

A panel of critics and food writers including Tom Parker Bowles, Charles Campion, Bill Knott, Joe Warwick and Kate Spicer spent more than six hours tasting the restaurants' signature dishes before announcing their top three.

Adam Byatt, chef proprietor of Trinity in Clapham, was the big winner, picking up the top prize for his dish of pig's trotter on toasted pain polaine with fried quail eggs, sauce gribiche and crackling.

 "Adam's dish was an inspired combination of ingredients; crispy crackling, a perfect quails egg to dip into and trotter on toast. A real treat," said Campion.

In second place was Sam and Eddie Hart's tapas restaurant Fino with its braised suckling pig, caramelised apples, roast baby onion and spiced jus. 

In third place was Anna Hansen of the Modern Pantry with her Chermoula baked river trout, quinoa, tomatillo and preserved lemon salad, spiced seeds and tahini cream.

Taste of London runs until 20 June.

Alexis Gauthier's new opening, Gauthier Soho, is criticised by The Independent's Tracey MacLeod for the "sterility and awkwardness" of her experience there.

MacLeod's guest David Baddiel went further and compared the downstairs dining room to a "Harley Street doctor's waiting room", while MacLeod dislikes being "solicitously interrupted" by over-attentive staff. However, the pair at least enjoyed some of the dainty food on offer from the French chef, who previously won a Michelin star at Roussillon, in Pimlico.

The Times' Giles Coren has a better time at Daniel Boulud's much-reviewed, much-feted first European restaurant Bar Boulud. Coren celebrates the charcuterie which he describes as "really, truly, awesome", and is similarly impressed that entire meal for four with copious amounts of wine ends up costing £150.

Meanwhile The Observer's Jay Rayner enjoys a trip down to Devon to see Riverford Farm in Buckfastleigh and sample its produce at its Field Kitchen restaurant. Rayner, who seems ideologically opposed to the idea of organic vegetable boxes, is nonetheless impressed by the food on offer in a "bloody good" restaurant where "the classic European model - animal protein at the centre, vegetables as side dishes - is reversed".

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Jasper Geard is impressed with FishWorks founder and seafood aficionado Mitch Tonk's flagship restaurant the Seahorse in Devon, where the fish do the talking and do so with supreme eloquence.

And although his World Cup opener may not have been the desired result, the Guardian's Matthew Norman has a meal to remember at England captain Steven Gerrard's new brasserie the Warehouse Kitchen and Bar.

Veteran food critic Egon Ronay has died aged 94 after a short illness.

He passed away this morning at his Berkshire home with his wife and two daughters by his side.

A Catey Lifetime Achievement award winner, Ronay was a legendary name in the hospitality industry, a man who consistently demanded quality and never compromised on his values who earned the respect of consumers and industry heavyweights alike.

Born in Hungary in 1915, Ronay was the son of a Budapest restaurateur whose businesses were destroyed during and after World War II. He emigrated to Britain with little money in 1946 to escape the Russian occupation.

Ronay did not immediately embark on the career that was to make him famous, but worked in London restaurants before opening his own, the Marquee in Knightsbridge in 1952.

His first foray into food criticism was as a critic for the Daily Telegraph, and he launched his eponymous famous guides in 1957. The guides' reputation grew swiftly and they were eventually sold to the AA in 1985, although Ronay's name and services were retained. However, he regained the rights to the books in court in the late 1990s after arguing that the company's actions were in danger of tarnishing his name.

In the late 1990s Ronay launched a guide to eating at seven British airports run by the British Airports Authority. Although the publication was small, Ronay described its launch as "an emotional moment to go into print again". He was also instrumental in raising the quality of motorway food, by teaming up with motorway service area operator Welcome Break to award stars to cafés and restaurants trying to improve standards.
 
Ronay was a highly respected figure whose forthright views asked difficult questions when necessary and who never tired in the quest for quality. He will be sorely missed by the industry.

Heston Blumenthal has unveiled the name of his highly anticipated London restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental hotel which will be called Dinner by Heston Blumenthal.

The restaurant, which is set to open at the luxury Knightsbridge hotel in November, will serve a menu centred on contemporary British food based on historical concepts.

The kitchen will be headed up by the Fat Duck group executive chef Ashley Palmer-Watts, who will showcase some of the dishes at Italian chef congress Identità London next week.

Blumenthal said the name Dinner reflects the concept the restaurant is based on. "I wanted to find a name that encapsulated the concept, which has a strong focus on dishes inspired by historic British gastronomy, but was also a bit of fun," he said.

"There has always been confusion in the UK over the names of our midday and evening meals and their origins, so researching this, I discovered the word dinner comes from the old 13th century French word disner, which initially stood for breakfast, and developed to the main meal of the day."

Blumenthal's restaurant will be housed in the space currently occupied by the Mandarin Oriental's Park and Foliage restaurants with expansive windows offering views over Hyde Park.

Interiors will be developed by US-based designer Adam D. Tihany, who said the restaurant will reflect the chef's modern take on tradition. "It will be relatively classic - wooden floors and coffered ceilings - but it'll have some quirkiness to it, too, to give a sense of Blumenthal's creative way of thinking," he said.

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal will be the second high profile opening at the Mandarin Oriental, which last month opened renowned US-based French chef Daniel Boulud's Bar Boulud.

Michel Roux Jnr's new restaurant, Roux at Parliament Square, this week plays host to a rare collection of historical mirrors, worth nearly £1m.

The collection is being displayed at the restaurant to mark the launch of the Mirrors exhibition at the Ronald Phillips Gallery, which runs from 9 to 29 June and showcases 90 English mirrors dating from 1660 to 1820 including a pair of Chippendale ovals and a mirror once owned by former Prime Minister Sir William Gladstone.

Each of the mirrors displayed at Roux at Parliament Square in Westminster will be for sale with price tags ranging from £12,000 to £850,000 and part of the proceeds going to VICTA, a charity supporting blind and partially sighted children.

Simon Phillips, chairman and owner of Ronald Phillips, said: "We wanted to put the mirrors somewhere unexpected in the run up to the exhibition launch - in a place where people could enjoy them as they go about their day to day business."

Michel Roux Jnr added: "These beautiful pieces are hundreds of years old, so it's amazing to think of all the things they may have seen over the years and it's great to see them on show here."    

Roux at Parliament Square is a joint venture between Roux and Compass Group's Restaurant Associates.

An upmarket New York restaurant was forced to close this week as thousands of bees blanketed its front door.

About 15,000 busy bees buzzed around Cipriani Wall Street in Manhattan, following their queen, who was trying to make her way into the restaurant.

"We had 15,000 girls who wanted to get in and have a nice, fresh Bellini on a hot, sunny day," the restaurant's general manager Eric Bonnetain said.

"They could sting, but they were pretty quiet because they were following the queen bee, which was trying to get in."

Bonnetain called police, whose bee handler used a vacuum to suck up the bees into a container and moved them to a bee farm in nearby Connecticut.

Bee swarms are a common occurrence in New York during the spring and usually pop up in search of new homes after a new queen emerges and an existing hive becomes overcrowded.

French-born US chef Daniel Boulud's first European venture, Bar Boulud at London's Mandarin Oriental hotel, is the focus of the weekend's restaurant reviews. And luckily for the chef, the restaurant does not disappoint the critics.

Writing for The Sunday Times, AA Gill finds the best burgers at Bar Boulud, which he otherwise considers a mediocre restaurant albeit with excellent service.

"Burgers, for all their mythology, are monoglot food," he says. "These ones manage to retain their oafish, redneck muscle, but have an added French je ne sais quoi. A bit of wit. A good pick-up line."

Meanwhile John Walsh of The Independent experiences faultless flavoursome cooking at Bar Boulud and says both the chef and his bar are "hugely welcome in the metropolis".

And although The Observer's Jay Rayner gets annoyed during the booking process at Bar Boulud, once he dines there he is impressed with the menu and value for money it offers.

Meanwhile in The Independent on Sunday Toby Young is impressed with Michel Roux Junior's co-venture with Compass' Restaurant Aossociates, Roux at Parliament Square. He declares the restaurant, where former Roux Scholar Daniel Cox is head chef, more of a classy coalition than culinary compromise.

Matthew Norman, writing in The Guardian, discovers a menu of inconsistent quality at Viajante, where Portuguese chef Nuno Mendes is fighting an "internal battle between technical excellence and plain foolishness".

Jasper Gerard of The Daily Telegraph says Paramount atop London's Centre Point building, which last month opened to the public, is tough on prices and tight on portions but the view is worth stomaching the food.

In The Times Giles Coren is experiencing the post-honeymoon-blues but says former Roussillon chef Alexis Gauthier's new restaurant at Lindsay House in Soho offers unarguably great cooking worth two Michelin stars.