May 2011 Archives

Celebrity chef Gary Rhodes is to host a special dinner at his Michelin-starred restaurant Rhodes 24 in aid of charity Help for Heroes.

Located atop Tower 42 in the City of London, the restaurant will play host to the event on 22 June and offer up to 80 diners the chance to sample Rhodes's award-winning cooking.

Rhodes hopes to raise £15,000 for Help for Heroes, which supports troops who have been wounded in Britain's current conflicts.

The five-course menu, which will be paired with wine, will include dishes such as pan fried halibut with seared English asparagus, casserole of peas, broad beans and white asparagus cream; fillet of beef with oxtail cottage pie and buttered baby leeks; and a Rhodes Twenty Four signature pudding plate.

There will also be a silent charity auction, with prizes including lunch for six prepared by the Rhodes 24 team on the roof of the 600ft Tower 42 overlooking London.

Tickets to the one off event are £185 and bookings can be made at reservations@rhodes24.co.uk or by calling 020 7877 7703.

Michelin has brought forward the publication of its 2012 guide to Great Britain and Ireland, which will be released on 6 October this year, it has been confirmed.

Traditionally the guide is published towards the end of January, which means this year the guide has to go press three months earlier than usual, which will no doubt affect the rating of some of the more recent, high profile restaurant openings. 

A spokesman for the company said it was a decision made by Michelin's head office in France to bring the UK edition inline with the other European guides.

"All the other country guides, except for France, are published before Christmas so Michelin has made the decision to bring forward the publication of the Great Britain and Ireland guide for business reasons," he said.

Meanwhile, the publication of Michelin's Eating Out in Pubs guide has been pushed back from September to 4 November.  

Matthew Norman finds brutally minimalist decor but a superbly rich menu at St John Hotel, the latest venture from Trevor Gulliver and Fergus Henderson.

The Daily Telegraph's food critic praises head chef Tom Harris, who presents his menu with rustic simplicity and without a shred of fuss. "Every dish was in perfect balance, every ingredient tasted purely and vibrantly of itself, only more so," Norman enthuses.

Meanwhile, writing in The Sunday Times, AA Gill says that although its heart is most certainly in the right place, the food at the St John Hotel does not offer precise flavours.

"It's well intentioned, its heart and all its other organs are in the right places, but its seasoning isn't. The flavours are smudged and imprecise. The dishes aren't clear, or doctrinal enough. And a lot of it is decent, but righteously boring," he says.

Writing for The Guardian, John Lanchester says Jason Atherton's Pollen Street Social is fun, informal and customer-friendly. "It's the polar opposite of what we've come to expect of 'fine dining'. And it's also properly brilliant," he says.

The Times' Giles Coren enjoys immaculate service and skilful cooking at Phil Howard's two-Michelin-starred Square but adds he finds it hard to get real joy from this sort of procession.

According to Jay Rayner, writing in The Observer, Spuntino, the third venture from the team behind Polpo and Polpetto, is the capital's best Brooklyn diner, while The Independent on Sunday's Lisa Markwell says if you're caught in the maelstrom of Oxford Street's shopping hell, the Riding House Café offers respite.

In London, the Evening Standard's Fay Maschler says the Gilbert Scott, the new restaurant venture by Marcus Wareing at the St Pancras Renaissance hotel, is a dream ticket in need of direction, while Time Out's Guy Dimond finds it's the building that has the wow factor, not the meal.

The Metro's Marina O'Loughlin finds Yotam Ottolenghi's new Soho restaurant, Nopi is an undeniably glamorous restaurant offering wonderfully creative food which is interesting, affable and very delicious.

Spanish chef Jose Andres, known for his avant-garde cooking and bringing tapas to America, has been named the most outstanding chef in the USA in the country's coveted James Beard Awards.

Andres, whose company the Think Food Group runs a string of popular restaurants in Washington, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, beat fellow chefs Gary Danko, Suzanne Goin, Paul Kahan and Charles Phan to win the prestigious accolade.

The chef, who grew up in the Asturias area in northern Spain, started his career under the tutelage of Ferran Adria at El Bulli, before moving to the USA in 1990.

"Here's an immigrant celebrating the melting pot," he said. "I feel like I'm an ambassador bringing Spain to America and also to the world."

Meanwhile, Daniel Humm's Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park in New York picked up the James Beard Foundation's award for restaurant of the year, with its pastry chef Angela Pinkerton being named outstanding pastry chef.

Celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten's ABC Kitchen in New York won the best new restaurant award, while the rising star award for chefs under the age of 30 went to Gabriel Rucker, executive chef at Le Pigeon in Portland, Oregon.

AA Gill says that while Jason Atherton is an inspired and sophisticated chef, the food at Pollen Street Social is not what you want to eat with friends for dinner.

Scoring the restaurant just two out of five stars, the Sunday Times food critic says former Gordon Ramsay Holdings chef Atherton offers plates suffering "from the most common defect of trendy kitchens: nobody eats them before they get to the customer".

However, he admits: "The skill and the commitment and the sophistication are all there. There needs to be a lot less cogitation and a great deal more gurgitation."

Meanwhile John Walsh, writing in The Independent, says there's a great deal to enjoy at Pollen Street Social, adding that Atherton has clearly put his heart and soul into the restaurant.

On one of his main courses he enthuses: "These were vivid and extravagant flavours I'd travel miles to experience."

The Observer's restaurant critic Jay Rayner argues Barbecoa, the meat-driven restaurant by Jamie Oliver and US barbecue enthusiast Adam Perry Lang in the City of London, is an opportunity missed.

He says: "The bizarre thing is that Barbecoa clearly could get it right because the two bits of proper ribbery on the menu are very good indeed. [...] But that was it. Just those two dishes."

The Independent on Sunday's Amol Rajan finds the food at the Curlew in Bodiam, East Sussex, is a triumph and totally deserving of its Michelin star, while the Sunday Telegraph's Zoe Williams says nothing could be more perfect that the Star Inn, Harome, Yorkshire.

Finally writing for the Sunday Herald, Joanna Blythman finds Mark Greenaway's food at the Hawke & Hunter in Edinburgh is a knock-out - scoring it a perfect 10.

A celebrity chef has won a gagging order preventing the press to report on a legal dispute with two former employees.

According to reports the "internationally renowned" chef is being taken to an employment tribunal in London but the media cannot identify the chef or the claimants. The order requires the chef to be known only as L and his business as K Ltd.

In the Daily Telegraph it is reported that one of those suing is a female accountant claiming unfair dismissal and sexual discrimination, while the other is a former chief executive suing for unfair dismissal, age discrimination and non-payment of wages.

Who could this mysterious L possibly be...