June 2011 Archives

The producers of MasterChef USA have found themselves with egg on their faces after it emerged that they used computer trickery to double the crowd at the show's auditions.

In the opening sequence of the cookery show, which is presented by Gordon Ramsay, shots of large crowds were shown with a voiceover saying "thousands upon thousands" of hopefuls had lined up.

But an eagle-eyed viewer has spotted a massive blunder as in the scene several groups of people in the crowd can be seen twice in the line-up. Oops.

Producers have now been forced to apologise for doctoring the shots of crowds. Reveille Productions, who produces the series along with Shine TV, told Entertainment Weekly: "We have reviewed the footage and it's clear that the scene was enhanced in post-production. We sincerely apologise to our viewers and hope that they still enjoyed the show."

Meanwhile, Gordon Ramsay's film debut has been rather poorly received by the critics. The film, Love's Kitchen, which sees the celebrity chef star as himself, has been widely panned by the critics, with the Metro describing it as "deliciously bad"; the Independent calling it "amateurish"; the Guardian labelling it "a grisly, unfunny mess"; and the Daily Mail saying it's a "Kitchen Nightmare".

Probably best if Ramsay sticks to barking orders in the kitchen than making appearances in lame films.

The Good Food Guide has named Orwells, in Shiplake, Oxfordshire, the winner of its Readers' Restaurant of the Year Award.

The restaurant, which is run by Ryan Simpson and Liam Trotman, former chefs of the Michelin-starred Goose, beat nine other finalists voted for by more than 27,500 Good Food Guide readers.

Opened in May 2010, Orwells is a pub-cum-restaurant with a 62-seat pub, 30-seat garden and a 15-seat fine dining area known as the Room. The set-up means that head chef Simpson can split his menu offering a fine dining experience as well as a more accessible, and more affordable, pub menu.
 
Elizabeth Carter, consultant editor of the Good Food Guide, commented: "It was Orwells' bags of energy and that something-for-everyone appeal that made it stand out - and they had some very strong competition.

"Ryan Simpson clearly understands the way we want to eat now and has judged his market exactly.'

Orwells owners Simpson and Trotman were delighte, adding: "We're really thrilled and delighted to win the Good Food Guide Readers' Restaurant of the Year in such a short period of time since opening. It shows how hard work, determination and listening to your customers really can pay off."

The Good Food Guide Readers' Restaurant of the Year Award is run annually to find the UK's favourite restaurant as nominated by the general public. To qualify for the awards restaurants needed to be independently-run, offering regional or local produce where possible and deliver consistently great food and excellent service. 

The ten regional winners of the Good Food Guide Readers' Restaurant of the Year Awards were shortlisted to be overall winner. The regional winners were:

-      Wales - Cwtch, Pembrokeshire
-      East of England - Roger Hickman's, Norwich
-      London - Retro Bistrot, Teddington
-      Midlands - Edmunds, Birmingham
-      Northern Ireland - Molly's Yard, Belfast
-      North West - Spire, Liverpool
-      North East - Salvo's, Leeds
-      Scotland - Ondine, Edinburgh
-      South East - Orwells, Shiplake (winner)
-      South West - The Mill Tea & Dining Room, Lyme Regis

All regional winners will appear in the Good Food Guide 2012 which will be published on 8 September 2011.

 

Russell Norman's third London restaurant, Spuntino, impressed the critics this weekend, with both Giles Coren and Zoe Williams giving it positive reviews.

Writing in The Times, Coren finds great hangover food at Spuntino but adds that while über cool and trendy, Norman's restaurants' kitchens aren't great on consistency. "But," he adds, "consistency is what you go to boring Michelin restaurants for, not fun places."

The Sunday Telegraph's Williams very much enjoys the food at Spuntino which she says is a don't-stand-on-ceremony 'finger food' restaurant that is all very Depression-era, but in a good way.

Meanwhile London's Riding House Café, the latest venture from the team behind the Garrison and Village East on Bermondsey Street, divides the restaurant critics.

While the Guardian's John Lanchester enjoys small plates of great food at the restaurant, the Metro's Marina O'Loughlin says the food doesn't reach the same standard as its glamorous interiors.

The London Evening Standard's David Sexton says Madison, the latest restaurant from the Inc Group located atop the One New Change development in the City is astonishingly bad. Giving it just one star, he suggests the bravest plan for it might be to close quickly and start again.

According to Tracey Macleod, writing in the Independent, the food at Quince, Silvena Rowe's new restaurant at the May Fair Hotel, isn't quite the draw she hoped it would be.

The Sunday Times' AA Gill finds good quality ingredients and cooking at the River Café in Glasbury-on-Wye, Hereford, while according to the Observer's Jay Rayner the Bishop's Dining Room & Wine Bar in Norwich, is the perfect middle-class fantasy of a restaurant. 

Time Out's Guy Dimond is impressed by the excellent French cooking at Medlar, where the entire menu sounds delectable, and every dish exceeded his expectations.

Ferran Adrià may be closing his legendary restaurant El Bulli this month but this doesn't mean he's taking time off.

It was announced this week that the world-renowned chef has teamed up with PepsiCo - owner of brands like Frito-Lay, Quaker, Tropicana and Gatorade - lending his creative, culinary genius to all of the company's brands worldwide.

Adrià has been linked to PepsiCo for a while through other partnerships including the Lay's Craft 100% olive oil or cream Alvalle. This time round the Catalan chef is to create a line of new "snack products", breakfast options and convenience items with a special focus on healthier choices.

Located on the Costa Brava, 100 miles north of Barcelona, El Bulli will close this month for two years and reopen in 2014 as a private, not-for-profit organisation.

The elBullifoundation will allow up to 30 scholars to work alongside the restaurant's creative team. El Bulli will retain its dining, where a certain number of customers will be able to taste the Foundation's creations.

Adrià recently opened two new restaurants in Barcelona together with his brother, Albert. The duo launched tapas bar 41 Degrees in the Catalan capital as well as tapas restaurant Tickets.   

Taste of London played host to a very special guest last night, multi-Michelin-starred super chef-restaurateur Alain Ducasse. I caught up with the iconic French chef

What do you think of the idea behind Taste of London?
I think it's an excellent idea. It's great for all the restaurants and exhibitors. There is nothing like it in France at this time. It would be great to have a Taste of Paris.

What do you think of the London dining scene?
It's fantastic and so cosmopolitan. It compares to New York. London is a very dynamic city and so is the restaurant scene and there's so much variety. It's also very competitive because there's so much on offer.

How important is it for you to have a restaurant presence in London?
It's very important. London is the biggest capital in Europe.

How much of a milestone was it for you to win the three stars at the Dorchester?
It's always difficult. It's difficult to get them and to retain them. But it's very important for my ego to get the three stars. We changed our proposal in London. Spoon was very contemporary restaurant. Now we are at the best address in London and I prefer that.

What are your plans for the future?
Last week we opened our first restaurant in Russia at the W Hotel in St Petersburg and in a few months we will open a restaurant in Doha at the Museum of Islamic Art. We have also just opened our second training school in Brazil. We opened a school in Rio about five years ago and now have about 1,000 trainees learning the art of French cuisine. Last week, we opened a school in Sao Paolo. In Brazil they don't have the know-how and the basic techniques of cooking.

You teamed with France's top chefs to launch the Collège Culinaire de France lobbying group. Where did the idea for this come from?
We all decided to gather to promote French gastronomy around the world. I don't think there was a specific need for it, it was more an idea that we had. Between me, Joël Robuchon and Pierre Gagnaire, we have restaurants all around the world. My main competitors are the French chefs - and Gordon Ramsay.

Who - other than Gordon Ramsay - do you think is a big talent in the UK?
Tom Kitchin. He is a great chef, who has developed a local cuisine with real passion.

Taste of London runs in Regent's Park until Sunday 19 June.  

Last night saw the launch of Taste of London, the annual food festival celebrating the capital's restaurant scene, which opens to the public today.

The great and good of the hospitality industry gathered in Regent's Park to sip Champagne and sample a special hog roast prepared by two-Michelin-starred chef Claude Bosi.

At Taste of London, 40 of the capital's top restaurants are represented and 36 of them put their top dish forward for the Best Taste Award.

A panel of judges including Danish chef Rene Redzepi of Noma in Copenhagen, Observer food critic Jay Rayner, Guardian food editor Matthew Fort, Sunday Telegraph restaurant critic Zoe Williams and food writer Joe Warwick spent more six hours tasting the restaurants' signature dishes.

Pascal Aussignac, chef proprietor of the Michelin-starred Club Gascon group of restaurants, was the big winner picking up the top prize for his dish of foie gras burger and summer truffle.

"I am amazed and surprised," Aussignac said after the award ceremony. "It's super cool, especially considering that I have been given the award by Rene Redzepi who is such a great chef."

Rayner added: "Club Gascon's foie gras burger is shamelessly outrageous and an absolute joy. Is it good for you? No. Does it make you feel good? Yes!"

A close runner up was taste of London newcomer Skylon executive chef Helena Puolakka's dish of warm smoked Loch Var salmon, lemon verbena jelly and pickled cucumber and sweet rye. In third place was Tristan Welch, head chef at Launceston Place, with a rice pudding soufflé with raspberry sauce for two. A special mention also went to Paramount's Colin Layfield for his rump of lamb, goat's cheese and white onion tart with sweet pea puree.

Next to the Best in Taste Award were the Best in Taste Wine Awards:
Taste of Summer Award - Prosecco Riccardo NV, Italy
Foodies Wine Award - Gran Feudo Chardonnay 2008, Bodegas Chivite, Spain
Indulgence Award - Felsina Vin Santo 2001, Italy

Taste of London runs in Regent's Park until Sunday 19 June.

Laverstoke Park, former Formula One world champion Jody Scheckter's organic farm in Hampshire, is to open a cookery school this summer.

Headed up by Paul Blake, who previously ran the Fine Food School in Dorset, the school will open next month offering a variety of courses which in addition to recipes and cooking methods will also highlight the importance of food provenance.

The school will be located at the heart of the 2,500 acre Laverstoke Park and will offer customers the chance to meet the farmers and understand the practices and philosophies of biodynamic farming.

Courses on offer will include subjects such as Cheap Cuts and Offal; Field to Fork with Pork, Lamb, Beef or Buffalo; BBQing; Curing, Smoking and Sausage Making; and a seasonal course on Game.

Scheckter founded Laverstoke Park in 1996, which today has the only licensed Soil Foodweb laboratory in Europe.

Despite interiors reminiscent of "Weirdsville Arizona", Lord Sugar's Essex gastropub Sheesh, Ye Olde King's Head in Chigwell, serves great food, says John Walsh.

Writing in the Independent, Walsh is taken aback by the oddness of the design of the restaurant owned by the star of the BBC's Apprentice, where the main dining hall features 'the biggest mirror in Essex' and a black-tile floor buffed to such a shine, you can glimpse ladies' undergarments it.

However, he adds that the food is surprisingly good: "At the end of this most peculiar banquet, everyone confessed, a little sheepishly, that the food had been far better than they'd expected on walking in. And also, that they wouldn't have missed this flamboyant display of Essex style for all the slingbacks in Basildon."

Giles Coren, writing in The Times, finds great albeit expensive food in a great location at D&D London's Coq d'Argent but adds that the service is a bit too fussy for him.

"I had 12 of the best snails I've ever had, in garlic and tomato butter. So fat and sweet and salty and moreish, I could have eaten a thousand. I could have totally cleared your garden," he enthuses.

The Guardian's John Lanchester enjoys "very good cooking all round" at the Pheasant in Harome, former Michelin-starred Star Inn owner Andrew Pern's other restaurant in the Yorkshire town, where Peter Neville is head chef.

Sunday Times food critic AA Gill enjoys the food at the Sir Charles Napier in Oxfordshire, where the menu is perfectly matched to the customers: a mixture of summer-holiday European and stalwart English rural cliché.

The Observer's Jay Rayner says Soseki is a restaurant that is as concerned with sustainability as it is with offering authentic Japanese flavours.

In London, the Metro's Marina O'Loughlin says Marcus Wareing's new restaurant the Gilbert Scott at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel is average and cramped without the flair or drama of similar establishments, while writing for the Evening Standard, David Sexton finds himself queueing for top tapas at former Brindisa chef Jose Pizarro's first solo venture Jose.

Michelin is expanding its Japanese coverage by extending its Tokyo guide to include the Shonan area, southwest of the Japanese capital.

The group's guide to Tokyo, which will be released in December, will also list hotels and restaurants in the cities of Yokohama and Kamakura.

Commenting on the release Bernard Delmas, president of Nihon Michelin Tire, said: "The Michelin guide is updated each year by offering a new selection of restaurants and hotels and by gradually expanding the covering area.

"In the fifth anniversary of the Michelin guide in Japan, I am pleased to offer a wider selection by expanding from Kamakura city to the Shonan area."

Published at the beginning of December, the new edition will be available in Japanese and English.

The current Michelin guide to Tokyo, Yokohama and Kamakura lists a total of 266 Michelin-starred establishments including 14 three-star, 54 two-star (52 in Tokyo) and a record 198 one-star restaurants (174 in Tokyo).

The Japanese capital has more starred restaurants than any other city including Paris. The size and scale of the restaurant industry in Tokyo helps to partly explain its success when it comes to Michelin stars as there are around 160,000 restaurants compared with about 40,000 in Paris.

Michelin now publishes 26 guides covering 23 countries in Europe, the USA and Asia, where it also has guides to Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe; and Hong Kong and Macau.

It's been a busy week for Gordon Ramsay.

After getting annoyed at an L.A. restaurant for refusing to serve Victoria Beckham a plain salad, posting a return profit for his restaurants, extending his contract at Claridge's for another year and making his film debut, he's now also finally sold off the Devonshire pub.

His company, Gordon Ramsay Holdings (GRH), has sold the Chiswick pub to the team behind the Drapers Arms in Islington. The west London pub, which has been shut for a year, will reopen next month under the ownership of Nick Gibson.

Gibson aims to run a local community pub with a commitment to providing good food and drink in a relaxed and informal setting. The kitchen will be managed by David Philpot, who previously worked with Caprice Holdings and the Soho House Group, while restaurant manager will be Ryan Hayward.

GRH put the lease for the Devonshire up for sale last June after shutting the pub as it failed to meet trading expectations. The site was sold through Restaurant Property, which is currently also marketing GRH's Warrington pub in Maida Vale. The group still runs the Narrow in Lime House.

Gordon Ramsay Holdings (GRH) is to continue to operate its restaurant at Claridge's but the hotel's owner, the Maybourne Hotel Group, has extended the contract by only 12 months.

The celebrity chef, who has run the former Michelin-starred restaurant at the five-star Mayfair hotel since 2001, was widely tipped not to have the 10-year lease renewed after Maybourne closed his previous restaurants at the Connaught and the Berkeley.

"While the GRH contract was due for renewal this year, it has been agreed to extend it into 2012," said a spokeswoman for Maybourne.

GRH's latest accounts revealed that Gordon Ramsay at Claridge's saw a 6.3% decline in footfall in the year to 31 August 2010. The restaurant, which was previously run by Mark Sargeant, lost its Michelin star in 2009 after seven years.

GRH previously operated four restaurants at Maybourne's London hotels including Angela Hartnett at Connaught; and Pétrus and Boxwood Café at the Berkeley. None of the restaurants' contracts were renewed upon expiry and are now occupied by Hélène Darroze; Marcus Wareing and Pierre Koffmann respectively.

Paul Foster, head chef at Tuddenham Mill in Suffolk, is one of the country's best young chefs who is right on the gastronomic cutting edge, according to Jay Rayner.

The Observer's food critic says Foster, one of this year's Acorn award winners, is cooking modern, well balanced food that is very much worth travelling for.

"His ideas are controlled. His flavour combinations make sense. The smartest bits of kitchen kit are used not simply because he's got a new toy but to add something," he says. "If you want a plate of food that shouts 2011, which is the word "now" fashioned from calories, go to Tuddenham Mill."

Meanwhile the Sunday Times' AA Gill finds the Gilbert Scott, the new restaurant from Marcus Wareing, is "depressing and like eating a home-economics history project".

He says: "This restoration or reconstruction of both building and menu is a mule born gelded, a sterile exercise that bears nothing, fires blanks, leads to nothing but more of the past. It's an exercise in sentimental hindsight."

Writing for the Sunday Telegraph, Zoe Williams says Nando's bears the hallmarks of a kitchen "that does nothing but chicken, that knows the bird inside out, that hasn't dried out a bit of poultry since a freak lapse of concentration in 1995".

The Guardian's John Lanchester likes the food at Martin Blunos's Crown Social in Cardiff but adds that the location doesn't match the chef's cooking, while the Independent's Tracey MacLeod is impressed with Kateh, a new Persian restaurant on one of the loveliest canal-side streets in leafy Little Venice.

In The Times, Giles Coren says that while small and pokey and located in loathsome Leicester Square, the St John Hotel is precise and gorgeous a manifestation of Fergus Henderson's beautiful philosophy.

In London, the Metro's Marina O'Loughlin says the first outpost of Bill's Produce in the capital is a big, fat fake operation that's dictated by the spreadsheet, while the Evening Standard's David Sexton says Pizza East in Notting Hill, the second site of the trendy Soho House Group-owned pizza restaurant, is worth the trek.

Some restaurants refuse to bend the rules, no matter who their customers - even when Gordon Ramsay and Victoria Beckham are in the house.

The chummy pair dined at Mediterranean restaurant Gjelina in Los Angeles earlier this week, when pregnant Posh asked to have her order amended.

She'd chosen the smoked trout salad, which is normally served with grapefruit, avocado, red onion and lemon. However, this flavour combination was too much for pregnant Posh, who demanded to have it plain and with the dressing on the side.

But Gjelina has a very strict no substitutions policy, you see, and its menu clearly states that "changes & modifications [are] politely declined".

And they quite obviously make no exceptions. So Posh's demand was refused and Ramsay got annoyed.

"I couldn't believe it," he said. "The lady's pregnant! No one is asking to be fussy.... I still think that's the customer's prerogative....

"It was a sour note. I don't think customers should be treated that way. That might not be the way I choose to eat it, but that's what the customer wants."

Oh well, at least they weren't kicked out of the restaurant.