Miso spaghetti and chorizo sausage rolls, Colombian brunch and a little restaurant in Venice, oysters from Somerset and filo pastries on Instagram: presenting Observer Food Monthly’s food favourites for 2022
Continue reading...Category Archives: Restaurants
How L’Enclume’s Michelin win is taking Cumbria to the top of the foodie table
With more stars than any other county, the land of gravy and chips is now held up as a rival to Paris and San Sebastián
When Simon Rogan and his family moved to Cumbria in 2002, the Lake District was famed for many reasons but food was not top of the menu. Visitors came in droves for the hills, rather than the haute cuisine.
Twenty years later their feted village restaurant, L’Enclume, is at the centre of a “mind-blowing” culinary renaissance that has led some diners to compare Cumbria to international foodie havens such as Paris, San Sebastián and Copenhagen.
Continue reading...Eating out is an indulgence – so is putting calorie counts on menus doomed to fail?
Yes, we need to do something about obesity. But this new legislation seems unlikely to help
Everything I am, I owe to calories, as Sophia Loren never quite said. I have built myself, one edible unit of energy at a time. In truth I have more than built myself. I am over-engineered, in the way Mussolini’s Milan railway station is over-engineered, or Jason Momoa is over-engineered. See how deftly I compare myself to Momoa? We are exactly the same, him and me. Save that every calorie he consumes turns into a plank of rippling muscle, while mine turn into the greatest muffin top this side of the Greggs cake counter. But it’s all flesh, right?
Ah, calories. Mostly I try to ignore them; to regard them as I do the isobars on a meteorologist’s map which in no way describe the experience of standing outside in a howling gale. I know that not all calories are equal; that calories from carbs impact the body differently to those obtained from protein, for example. I also know that we all process foods differently. I have a metabolism that suggests I may at some point have been gene-spliced with a sloth, and hence spend hours in the gym brutalising myself. I also like my dinner very much. I regard the diet book industry as a massive scam. If a single diet book worked there would be no need to publish another one ever again. But still they come.
Continue reading...Opening nightmare: launching a restaurant into a world stricken by Covid and Brexit
The past two years have been the hardest ever for restaurants. Amid critical shortages of staff, food supplies and even customers, can a new venture from the man behind Polpo survive?
Every morning last autumn, as he took the short walk from Farringdon station in central London to his new restaurant, Russell Norman came face to face with a ghost. The pandemic had hit the hospitality sector hard, and this stretch of takeaway outfits and dine-in burger chains was no exception. A Byron, a Coco di Mama, an Itsu – all long gone, doors locked, interiors dark. And then, just before the final right turn, the one that really hurt, the words on its signage removed but the outline unmistakable: Polpo.
The Venetian-inspired restaurant, which took its name from the Italian for “octopus”, had been a breakout success for Norman in the early 2010s. With its small plates, no-reservations policy and stripped-down interiors, the original Soho site had been credited with reinventing casual dining after the Great Recession. But then, like so many brands that emerged during the same period, it started to expand: taking on investors, extending tentacles across the UK, and then collapsing in instalments from 2016 onwards. Most of its sites were forced to close in the context of a broader casual dining crunch, as the cost of running a restaurant rose and the number of customers fell. These days, just two Polpos survive, in Soho and in Chelsea, west London, under the management of Norman’s former business partner Richard Beatty. Norman’s own departure from the project was finalised in June 2020.
Continue reading...Living in a woman’s body: hospitality workers have always suffered abuse. In the pandemic, it got worse
Many women working in restaurants and bars say men routinely asked them to remove their masks in return for tips, putting their lives at risk
After working as a bartender in Washington DC for many years, Ifeoma Ezumaki’s body reached its limit during the pandemic. For Ezumaki and millions of other restaurant employees, working during the pandemic – often, in the US, for a “sub-minimum” wage – became a source of immeasurable suffering. Tips went down because sales went down, while customer harassment and hostility went up. Ezumaki and her colleagues had to become public health marshals, in addition to cocktail servers; she was asked to enforce social distancing, mask wearing and even vaccination requirements.
One evening, a customer at the bar asked her to pull down her mask so that he could see her face – a request that became so common from male customers during the pandemic that hospitality workers started referring to it as “maskual harassment”. When Ezumaki refused, he said: “Well, I guess you’re not going to eat tonight.”
Continue reading...Spice up your life! 22 sensational seasonings that aren’t salt or pepper
Why stick to the same condiments when you can zhoosh dishes up with za’atar or add some yummy yaji? Some of Britain’s best chefs suggest their favourite additions
Historically, Britain has been timid about table condiments. Salt and pepper are the standard duo in the UK, while an exhilarating array of flavourings is deployed globally to tweak cooked foods: traditional spices, evolving spice mixes, clever powders created by imaginative chefs. In deep midwinter, what could be better than sprinkling a dash of vibrant colour across your meals? Here are 22 ways to spice up your food in 2022.
Continue reading...‘I’m following a dream – giving people my soul food’: the global restaurants bringing life to British streets
These 15 small venues – all run or founded by immigrants to Britain – are part of the fabric of the nation’s high streets. But after two hellish years, can they survive?
Plus 15 great recipes – from Scandinavia to Tibet, via the Caribbean and Cambodia
• Yotam Ottolenghi on his favourite ingredient
Continue reading...There’s nothing worse than a restaurant that makes you feel like an old git | Jay Rayner
Give us over-50s a menu we can read, grownup waiters and the chance to hold a conversation. It’s not too much to ask – and it makes business sense too
There is only one thing worse than having to thumb your smartphone torch into life so that you can read a restaurant menu: the youthful twentysomething waiter noticing you do so, and bringing you one of those LED clip-on lamps. Short of wheeling the house Zimmer frame to the table for you to use while popping to the loo, there’s nothing better calculated to make you feel like an old git. It’s profoundly irritating, partly because it’s so unnecessary; it’s entirely possible to have moody lighting while also dropping enough on to a table so that those of us whose sight is not quite what it once was can read the damn small print without recourse to Wembley Stadium’s floods.
But mostly it’s irritating because it’s a huge own goal. It makes any restaurant seem exclusive; as in it was designed to exclude those of us not in the very first flush of youth. All too often this is literally the case, albeit usually by happenstance. The restaurant business is generally a younger person’s game. Setting them up and running them requires the sort of long hours that those of us with a few years on the clock may no longer find appealing. And people in their 20s and 30s may well have no idea what older customers want or need, simply because they haven’t got there yet. If a restaurateur only wants punters their own age, then fine. Turn down the lights. Turn up the music. Print the menu in six point Comic Sans.
Continue reading...Out with the meat, in with the plants as world’s top chefs offer vegan menus
From London to San Francisco, haute cuisine is joining the food revolution. Michelin-starred chefs explain they’re going meat-free
Alexis Gauthier used to sell 20kg of foie gras a week. Now the chef, whose London-based restaurant became entirely vegan in 2021, only sells a plant-based version. Since becoming vegan, he admits, Gauthier Soho has “lost a lot of customers, sadly”. But he says he has gained even more new diners, all looking for something different and sustainable and prepared to pay the price.
Gauthier is not the only chef to abandon the animal produce traditionally associated with fine dining. While the number of meat-free menus has been burgeoning for some time in lower- and mid-priced restaurants, now a growing number of the world’s top chefs are starting to put plants centre stage.
Continue reading...Want to see the world’s worst pizzas? Step this way | Jay Rayner
The Random Restaurant Twitter feed shows that mini chip fryer baskets and terrible food photos are a planet-wide phenomenon
It’s a familiar image. There’s a well-stacked burger: domed bun, a couple of patties, the crimson flash of fresh tomato. It’s not unappetising. Next to it, however, is an emblem for all that is naff, irritating and deathly in the restaurant world: a mini chip fryer basket full of chips. Because what could be more fun than a miniaturised version of a piece of kitchen equipment? It’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect to find in a dreary low-rent British gastropub; one that has decided crass serving items are a substitute for a commitment to good food.
Except this image is not from a clumsy gastro pub. It’s certainly not from Britain. It’s from Fast Food Le Jasmin, a restaurant in Guelma, in north-eastern Algeria. I can show you other examples from Costa Rica and French Polynesia. For the joyous revelation that restaurant stupidity is not restricted to the UK, we must thank a Twitter account called Random Restaurant or @_restaurant_bot, created by one Joe Schoech. As its name suggests, it uses a bot to search Google randomly for information on restaurants all over the world. Around 20 times a day it posts a map link, plus the first four photographs it finds. Certain countries, including China, are excluded because Google isn’t available there. Otherwise, it provides an extraordinary window on how we eat out globally.
Continue reading...‘I don’t blame customers for getting annoyed’: a coffee house owner on life without EU workers
Anas Zein Al-Abdeen owns a chain of four Middle Eastern coffee houses around Birmingham. But, the 40-year-old says, while customers are plentiful, staff are another matter
Anas Zein Al-Abdeen doesn’t want to close his business for three days a week – but, increasingly, it looks like his only option. He simply can’t get the staff. “It’s horrific,” he says. “We can’t plan for anything.”
The 40-year-old British-Syrian businessman runs Damascena, an independent chain of four Middle Eastern coffee houses in and around Birmingham. All of his cafes are affected, but the one in central Birmingham is the most short-staffed, with 25 workers instead of the usual 30. “It’s very stressful,” he says. “Most businesses worry about getting customers. But I’m just worried if we can serve them or not.”
Continue reading...3D-printed steak, anyone? I taste test this ‘gamechanging’ meat mimic | Zoe Williams
Marco Pierre White is championing Redefine Meat’s products, but do they live up to the hype?
Across four capitals – London, Amsterdam, Berlin and Tel Aviv – a new meat was born, containing precisely no animal. The London champion of the company, Redefine Meat, is the celebrity chef Marco Pierre White. At Mr White’s in Leicester Square, chefs, investors and barbecue and burger connoisseurs – as well as former winners of MasterChef – gathered to taste it.
The tone of the event was set by the offering of a pipette of “blood” – “Doesn’t it taste like blood, though?” asked an excited waiter. Well, yes. But memo from the world of carnivore: blood is more something we put up with than something we actively want to drink.
Continue reading...Claridge’s to part ways with chef after rejecting plan for all-vegan menu
Mayfair hotel says it respects Daniel Humm’s plant-based vision but it ‘is not the path we wish to follow’
The five-star Claridge’s hotel in Mayfair has lost its chef after it rejected his vision for an all-vegan menu at his restaurant.
Daniel Humm, 45, will leave Davies and Brook at the end of the year after talks with management about transforming the kitchen in his London restaurant at Claridge’s hotel to serve only plant-based dishes.
Continue reading...One restaurant has been a part of our family. Now we mourn its passing | Jay Rayner
We measured out the landmarks of our lives at London’s Y Ming. So long, and thanks
My family has suffered a great loss. We will still have our memories, of course, each one suffused with a warm glow. But the source of those memories? After 35 years, that has gone. We have lost our family’s restaurant: the one that was so much more than somewhere to eat out. It was where my wife and I went before the kids arrived, and when those kids were young, and when a treat was needed, and when a treat wasn’t needed, and in the last days before every Christmas, when gifts would be exchanged with the lovely staff. It was our restaurant. Farewell then to Y Ming, the brilliant, eclectic Chinese on Greek Street in London’s Soho which, after 35 years, finally closed its doors at the end of last month.
Lots of families have somewhere like this, a place where generations of customers and generations of staff accompany each other down the years. Each navigates the vagaries of fashion. Because a restaurant where families grow up together is never really about what’s new. They are about what’s reliable and what’s familiar and what makes you feel cared for. They are an extra room in the extended family home.
Continue reading...End of the avocado: why chefs are ditching the unsustainable fruit
Give peas a chance – as well as pistachios, fava beans and pumpkin seed paste. These are just some of the ingredients being used to replace one of the world’s most popular fruits
On the one hand, they are deliciously creamy, versatile and gloriously Instagrammable. On the other, they have an enormous carbon footprint, require 320 litres of water each to grow and “are in such global demand they are becoming unaffordable for people indigenous to the areas they are grown in”, according to Thomasina Miers, the co-founder of the Mexican restaurant chain Wahaca.
For some time, the chef has struggled to balance the devastating environmental impact of avocado production with her customers’ appetite for guacamole. Now, she thinks she has found the answer: a vibrant, green guacamole-inspired dip, made from fava beans, green chilli, lime and coriander.
Continue reading...Under the table: Australia’s dazzlingly diverse home cooking underground
Social media and online marketplaces have facilitated a boom in Australian home cooking businesses – but many operate without regulation
During the Sydney lockdown I ordered from a different home cook every Friday night, for me and my neighbours. I discovered each cook from community groups or social media pages for migrant communities in Sydney – east African, Thai, English.
Sometimes the home cooks had a professional social media presence, a delivery provider, or even a website to order from; but often my lead was just a person’s name – I’d then have to find and befriend them on Facebook before asking about a food delivery for the following Friday. Some had menus, others just asked “what do you want?” and let me pick from the full range of their specialty cuisine.
Continue reading...Noma wins world’s best restaurant as Denmark claims top two awards
Chef René Redzepi, famed for foraging techniques, claims first place for Copenhagen eatery
Copenhagen has confirmed its reputation as the global dining destination of the moment after its top eateries finished first and second in the 2021 World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards, widely considered the Oscars of gastronomy.
The new Noma from the chef René Redzepi, famed for his foraging and fermenting techniques, was named best restaurant at a ceremony in Antwerp, Belgium, on Tuesday night. The old one topped the list in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014 and came second in 2019.
Continue reading...Texas couple denied service at restaurant for breaking ‘no mask’ rule
Hang Time owner says rule is part of the restaurant dress code and he reserves the right to refuse business
A Texas couple were denied service at a restaurant because they were wearing masks.
Related: Texas women in New York restaurant vaccine brawl say race a factor
Continue reading...Texas women in New York restaurant vaccine brawl say race a factor
Activist says there will be protest over treatment of Black patrons after confrontation outside Carmine’s
A lawyer for three women from Texas arrested after a brawl outside a popular New York City restaurant over the requirement that guests show proof of vaccination has said race was a factor in the case.
In video shot by an onlooker last Thursday and shared widely on social media, a restaurant hostess, who is white, is seen being attacked.
Continue reading...US restaurant workers are getting stiffed. It’s time for employers to pay up | Gene Marks
The tipped wage scale allows restaurants to pay workers less than the legal minimum wage. Some unscrupulous owners nevertheless try to get away with paying even less
This may come as a shock to some but there’s a different minimum wage for restaurant employees than for workers in most other industries. In Pennsylvania, for example, that minimum wage is just $2.83 an hour.
Every statein the US has these “tipped wages”. According to minimumwage.org, the tipped wage is as little as $2.13 an hour in 19 states and as high as $10 in New York.
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