January 2012 Archives

Time is running out to enter the 2012 Roux Scholarship, the prestigious cookery competition organised by the Roux family. 

Now in its 29th year, the Roux Scholarship is open to chefs working in full-time employment in the UK and aged between 22 and 30.

Entrants have until Friday, 3 February, to submit a recipe for four people using two 400g spring chicken, 300g of veal heart sweetbreads and featuring two garnishes, one of which must be cauliflower-based and the other using a green vegetable of their choice. The dish should also be accompanied by a sauce.

The regional finals will be held on Thursday, 8 March in both Birmingham and London. Judges include Michel and Albert Roux and their respective sons Alain and Michel Jnr, Brian Turner, Gary Rhodes, Andrew Fairlie, David Nicholls and James Martin from the BBC show, Saturday Kitchen.

The winner will receive a three-month stage at a three-Michelin-starred restaurant anywhere in the world, all expenses paid, plus a number of unique prizes all related to food and hospitality.

John Lanchester visits Za Za Bazaar in Bristol, Britain's biggest restaurant at nearly 1,000 covers, and finds the all-you-can-eat buffet fares well against its casual dining competitors.

"The choice is numbing, and it would obviously be daft to assess the food as if it were trying to be fayne daining," the Guardian's food critic says. "Instead, Za Za Bazaar is pitched against the high street alternatives at around the same price point, and at that level does a pretty good job."

Writing in the Sunday Times, AA Gill says that the relaunched Restaurant Tom Aikens in London's Chelsea is one deep breath away from being one of the best dining rooms in the country. However, he adds that while Aikens "is still one of our most talented chefs", he needs to "trust his ingredients more and rely on his craft less".

Meanwhile Fay Maschler is less enthused by Tom Aikens in her review in the London Evening Standard, finding the food and interior a bit hit and miss.

The Metro's Marina O'Loughlin says that Mishkin's, a kind of Jewish deli from the Polpo/Spuntino label, may not be kosher but it is better than the real deal.

Although he enjoys the food, the Independent's John Walsh suggests the owners of the Crooked Well in south London, should reconsider the atmosphere, while the Sunday Telegraph's Zoe Williams enjoys the weird and sometimes wonderful world of Hedone.

Finally the Observer's Jay Rayner says although the owners are clearly very nice, 20 St John in Norwich is a place that hasn't worked out how to do the thing it wants to do.

Multi-Michelin-starred chefs Sat Bains, Claude Bosi and Jason Atherton (pictured) are to cook together for a Singaporean-inspired evening held at Pollen Street Social next month.

The chefs, who have five Michelin-stars between them, are coming together for the event on Sunday 26 February, following their four-day tour to Singapore, where Atherton recently opened his restaurant L'esquina.

The dinner is in collaboration with the Singapore Tourism Board as part of the Chef Exchange Programme, which aims to encourage creative ideas between chefs from different cultures.

Atherton says: "I am delighted to be hosting this evening with two extremely talented chefs; Claude Bosi from Hibiscus, London, and Sat Bains from Restaurant Sat Bains with Rooms in Nottingham. It gives me great pleasure to share Singaporean cuisine with UK consumers and I fully support what the Chef Exchange Programme is aiming to achieve."

Pollen Street Social is now accepting bookings for the event, for arrival on the Sunday evening between 6.00-8.30pm, and for parties up to a maximum of eight guests. The special tasting menu will be £85 per person, with optional wine pairing in addition.

Londoners' favourite restaurant in 2011 was Jason Atherton's Pollen Street Social, according to eating out guide Square Meal which awarded its BMW Award for Restaurant of the Year to the Mayfair eatery.

The first solo venture from former Gordon Ramsay Holdings' Maze chef director Atherton, the Michelin-starred restaurant was praised for offering top quality food, good value and impeccable service.

Meanwhile, bad service is the biggest bugbear for restaurant diners in the capital, according to the 2012 Square Meal Complaints Survey.

Grumbles over poor service in restaurants amount to 45% of all complaints and way eclipse the second-largest area of upset, which is ambience and décor (19.5%), reports the survey.

The restaurant guide's annual look at the industry, based on the opinions of about 8,000 London restaurant-goers, found that rude staff, slow service and unknowledgeable staff as well as the practice of automatically adding service charge to the bill, contributed to ruining guests' dining experience.

Complains about atmosphere are up 39% from last year, with disappointing décor, lack of ambience and too much noise topping the list of grievances.

Also on the capital's list of annoyances was disappointing or overpriced food, although this has remained steady at 18.5%, with diners enjoying set menus at high end restaurants and other offers.

Roganic named best new restaurant by Square Meal >> 

34, the latest restaurant from Caprice Holdings, was the focus of the restaurant reviews this weekend and largely impressed the critics.

While dinner at the Mayfair restaurant, which has steak at its heart, certainly isn't cheap, the fabulous grilled meats and devil-may-care luxury make it really rather worth a visit, agree the Sunday Telegraph's Zoe Williams and the Guardian's John Lanchester.

However, writing in the Independent Tracey MacLeod is less enthused by 34, which she says is all about expensive comfort rather than excitement, while in the Times Giles Coren reviews 34 and fellow London newcomer the Delaunay, insisting it's the latter that will no doubt be a massive London institution for years to come.

What the Butley Orford Oysterage in Suffolk lacks in frills it more than makes up for with its flavoursome, no-nonsense cooking, says Jay Rayner writing in the Observer, while according to the Independent on Sunday's Amol Rajan Angela's in Exeter is a wonderful local restaurant.

In London, the Evening Standard's Fay Maschler finds the combination of Jeremy Lee and the Hart brothers at Quo Vadis in Soho is the dream team of which her nights are made, while Time Out's Guy Dimond says the meaty menu and unfailingly friendly and smiling service make the 30-minute queue at Pitt Cue worth the wait.

Finally, Andy Lynes says in the Metro that although the cooking and service at Alyn Williams at the Westbury is faultless, he's unsure he'd ever go back.

Steak restaurant and cocktail haunt Hawksmoor Spitalfields will get a brand new 60-cover bar next month.

Set to open in late February it will feature interiors by regular Hawksmoor collaborators, interior architects Macaulay Sinclair.

The new bar will have a regularly changing list of five exclusive drinks in addition to the full cocktail list. The food menu, currently in 'testing stage' will include Short-Rib French Dip, Fried Oyster Roll, Chilli Cheese and other Hawksmoor hot dogs alongside onion rings, chicken wings and fried oysters.

The AA has announced the latest additions to its restaurant awards, with seven establishments being honoured with three AA rosettes.

The winners include two restaurants in London, four in England and one in Scotland.

The London restaurants being elevated to the three-rosette-status, which rewards outstanding restaurants demanding recognition well beyond their local area, include Simon Rogan's two-year pop-up restaurant Roganic in Marylebone and Michelin-starred Hakkasan's second outpost in Mayfair.

Acorn award winner Paul Foster has won three rosettes for his cooking at Tuddenham Mill in Newmarket in Suffolk, while former Savoy Grill chef Lee Scott won the award at boutique hotel Cotswold 88 in Painswick.

Gravetye Manor in East Grinstead, which recently relaunched its restaurant, and East Lodge Country House in Rowsley also won three AA rosettes, with Restaurant Mark Greenaway at No.12 Picardy Place in Edinburgh completing the list.

AA Hotel Services manager Simon Numphud said he was delighted to welcome 13 further establishments into the three rosette category, which accounts for 10% of restaurants in the UK.

Two-Michelin-starred chef Hélène Darroze has become a chevalier (knight) in the French Legion of Honour.

The French chef, who runs her eponymous restaurant at the Connaught in London as well as a restaurant in Paris, has been awarded the honour by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The award, with its five different levels, was created in 1802 by Napoleon as an order of merit to recognise outstanding services rendered to France or a feat befitting humanity.

She is one of several chefs to have been recognised, with others including Paul Bocuse, Thomas Keller and Alice Waters.

Commenting on the award Darroze said: "I am so proud to have been given this special award. I feel honoured to join such a distinguished group of people and this recognition for chefs shows what an important role food plays in today's world.

"I could not have achieved this without such a dedicated team around me both in London and Paris."

While the food at Meat Liquor, the permanent outpost from the team behind the hugely popular Meat Wagon, is great the queue outside prevents it from ever being a real restaurant, according to Giles Coren.

The Times food critic says although the burgers are fantastic and the staff are friendly, you can never be friends with Meat Liquor.

"You can live upstairs, you can go every night, you can tip big, kiss everybody, recommend it to your friends and have five children with the front of house, but show up at teatime on a wet Thursday in the mood for a burger and you can get to the back of the queue, son, like everybody else."

The Delaunay, the latest restaurant from Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, gets a warm welcome from both John Walsh of the Independent and the Guardian's John Lanchester.

Walsh says the Delaunay is a restaurant he looks forward to visiting again and again: "It's lovely just to hang out there. The waiting staff are friendly and attentive. The prices aren't astronomical. You can't help feel it's your kinda place."

Lanchester adds that although not quite there yet, it will certainly become a huge success. "I'm sure the Delaunay is going to keep improving [...] and it's clearly going to be a massive hit," he says.

The Sunday Times' AA Gill enjoys the food at Novikov, the giant Mayfair venture from Russian restaurateur Arkady Novikov, while the Metro's Marina O'Loughlin says that Stravaigin continues to lead the way among restaurants in Glasgow.

And although Anna Hansen is a real talent, Lisa Markwell, writing in the Independent on Sunday, says her recent visit to the Modern Pantry was ill-fated.

34 , the latest restaurant from the Caprice Holdings stable, was the focus for Jay Rayner this week who found perfect steaks, incredible desserts and a scattering of phone-hackerati...

Writing in the Observer, Rayner said that while early publicity had billed 34 as a meaty version of its sister fish restaurant Scott's, he wasn't sure that that was true. "The menu is broader than that," he says. "But certainly a list of very good steaks is at its core, including Australian Wagyu at fearsome prices and Scottish cuts which are both more affordable and leave less of a whacking carbon footprint, with American steaks in between. My rib eye was simply a great piece of meat, cooked with care and precision."

"Three weeks from signing the contracts, the Punch Bowl was again open with staff in place, menus written and a major refurbishment undertaken. I was tempted to hotfoot it over there the first day, but with respect, I waited for a week and found the place heaving on a Thursday night in November, a bit of a rarity these days."

The Times's Tom Chesshyre, meanwhile, found Jolyon's at No 10, a new 21-bedroom independent hotel in Cardiff as "a breath of fresh air" in a city full of "big, boring, corporate chain" properties.

"The bed was wide and there was a tiny bathroom with a "Japanese bath" -- a deep, square trough. Some of the rooms are quite tight, but with suites such as mine from £80, you can hardly complain."

However, the Daily Telegraph's Matthew Norman wishes to forget his visit to Massimo, London, adding "the first and last thing to be said in Massimo's defence is that it is a prisoner of one of those hotels, The Corinthia off Whitehall, that suck the life out of restaurants like dehumidifiers. Such paeans to marble-sanitised vulgarity may be perfect for lobbyists to entertain their prey, and well suited to very young and blonde Bulgarian women seeking quality time with a new uncle or godfather from Moscow. But it is hard for any restaurant within them to create an atmosphere, and despite its lavish decor Massimo did not come close."