Category Archives: Restaurants

The rice of the sea: how a tiny grain could change the way humanity eats

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Ángel León made his name serving innovative seafood. But then he discovered something in the seagrass that could transform our understanding of the sea itself – as a vast garden

Growing up in southern Spain, Ángel León paid little attention to the meadows of seagrass that fringed the turquoise waters near his home, their slender blades grazing him as he swam in the Bay of Cádiz.

It was only decades later – as he was fast becoming known as one of the country’s most innovative chefs – that he noticed something he had missed in previous encounters with Zostera marina: a clutch of tiny green grains clinging to the base of the eelgrass.

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Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cookery was a guide to another world

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The actor-turned-cookery writer saved us from terrible British versions of curry and taught us how to roast and grind spices

In 1982 the food writer and novelist Sue Lawrence was in the depths of early motherhood. “But on Monday nights at 7pm the baby could cry all it wanted,” she says. “I had an appointment with the TV. Everybody stopped for it.” The programme which brought a slab of Britain to the sofa was Indian Cookery, presented by the actor turned food writer Madhur Jaffrey. “The show was a revelation,” Lawrence says. “She just demystified everything. We all rushed out to buy the accompanying book.”

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Hidden joys of the UK’s holiday spots: seafood in Yorkshire and Scotland | Jay Rayner

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We’ll soon be able to venture beyond our local park … and to help us, the Observer has launched a guide to Britain’s hidden treasures, starting with Jay Rayner’s hunt for tasty morsels in unlikely places

The Oban docks on Scotland’s west coast are a functional place. Veteran CalMac ferries to the islands heave on their moorings and, from time to time, there’s a waft of diesel in the air. It’s not the first place you might think of visiting for lunch. But there, alongside the blocky, modern ferry terminal building, is the glory that is the Oban Seafood Hut. It’s in the kind of prefabricated shed only its designer could love, and emblazoned with a garish bright green signage that can doubtless be seen from a mile off shore. But oh, the food. One afternoon, beneath gunmetal skies, I feasted on scallops the size of a baby’s fist in ponds of hot garlic butter, shiny black mussels and crab sandwiches thicker than an airport bonkbuster novel.

I cannot claim that the Oban Seafood Hut is a secret, newly whispered. I’ve written about it in my column and, in any case, part of my job reviewing restaurants in normal times involves giving exposure to the relatively obscure. I have no secrets. But it is proof, if we needed it, that a very good time out is not necessarily found in all the most obvious places; those destinations weighed down by labels like “beauty spot” and “national park” and the crowds of visitors that flock to them.

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My new lockdown survival tip? Food, food and more food

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Whether it’s fish fingers or a fancy restaurant chicken salad, what we eat can help us through hard times

Lockdown 3.0. My plan, before this exciting new iteration was announced, was to write about Francis Bacon’s cooking: I’ve been reading a new biography of the artist, and on every other page is a description of the wondrous meals he would produce for friends, seemingly out of nowhere (oysters, fish, cheese, grapes). But all that will have to wait. We must be practical. I’ve had a good look around the place in which we find ourselves, and I’m pretty sure that this is it: the Slough of Despond. It is, I think we can all agree, a grim spot: not quite the bog of Bunyan’s imagining, but nevertheless somewhat dark and dank – and strangely depopulated, too, when you consider how many of us now loiter here, quietly catastrophising. On the plus side, though, it comes with a small kitchen. Will this help to see us through? Perhaps. We can only try.

It’s absolutely fine to eat a slice of toast for supper – we all of us have our picky bread-and-cheese nights

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‘Not that good’: Montreal restaurant’s brutally honest menu pulls in the customers

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Feigang Fei, who runs the Aunt Dai Chinese restaurant, says patrons appreciate his bracingly frank descriptions of the food

In the cut-throat restaurant industry, most business owners boast that their dishes are the best in town.

Feigang Fei, who runs Aunt Dai Chinese restaurant in Montreal, has taken a different approach, with a menu offering bracingly honest descriptions of the dishes on offer.

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Albert Roux’s legacy goes far beyond his food

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Impact of culinary expertise Roux bestowed upon his adopted country cannot be overestimated

Albert Roux, who has died aged 85, did more to encourage and foster Britain’s restaurant sector than any other chef working in the UK. The roll-call of names that passed through the kitchens of his Mayfair restaurant, Le Gavroche, which he opened with his late brother Michel in 1967, is the classic who’s who of the culinary cheffing firmament. It includes Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay, Pierre Koffmann, Phil Howard, Marcus Wareing and Rowley Leigh, each of whom in turn passed on what they had learned from Albert to so many others.

He was firmly in the business of unapologetic luxury. “We knew nothing of the British indifference to food,” he once told me, of his early years in Britain, “because we had only ever cooked for the rich.” Both brothers had arrived in the country from Paris, as private chefs for the aristocracy, Michel for the Rothschilds, Albert for the Cazalets. It was their employers’ money and contacts that enabled them to launch Le Gavroche.

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Chef and Le Gavroche restaurateur Albert Roux dies aged 85

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Member of Roux culinary dynasty died on Monday after a long illness, his family has said

The chef and restaurateur Albert Roux has died at the age of 85.

The founder of the Michelin-starred Le Gavroche and member of the Roux culinary dynasty died on Monday after a long illness.

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Rats besiege New York Chipotle, eating avocados and attacking staff

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Rodents were so brazen that the Upper West Side location closed after the wiring systems were chewed through

As columnist Mary Schmich once said, in life, there are certain inalienable truths: prices will rise, politicians will philander, and – I’m going to add one – you can always count on New York for a good old rat story.

Today that story is of the Upper Manhattan Chipotle food chain rats, who have been feasting on avocados and burritos – and, by the sounds of it – disturbed staff.

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The only thing most of us will be wearing this party season is slightly smarter pyjamas | Grace Dent

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‘I’ve given up trying to control anything now,’ I announced last Tuesday while breakfasting on a packet of jelly babies

Food has lost much of its meaning for me. Well, its meanings, to be more accurate. A typical late autumn of eating has its rhythms: shortly after decorative gourd season and past toffee apple weekend (both cancelled due to lurgy), many of us move seamlessly into pre-Christmas hoarding and restraint mode. The hoarding begins with a casually snaffled box of stollen slices or a little bag of Lindt chocolate Christmas tree decorations, chucked into the shopping basket “just to get things started”. Then a shufti around Marks & Spencer’s food hall, where the displays of shortbread in commemorative tin boxes (those nice ones your mother used for her sewing kit) always bring a sense of minor panic that holidays are comin’ and I am unprepared. Begin the lists, open the iCal, commence the slightly terse intra-family emails. Panic!

I do not have a yuletide shopping delivery slot. That dodgy shelf in my chiller will not survive a fortnight of festive season fridge Jenga, and a better woman than me would have made her own figgy pudding by now. But, as I say, the hoarding won’t happen this year. The big Dent jamboree is cancelled. And the restraint – which runs in parallel from about now to late December – is off, too. About now, I generally have in the diary at least two festive gatherings where I envision myself slinking in wearing some frock that will require me to be a bit hungry for at least 22 days and say things like, “No, I love running five miles pre-dawn dodging flashers – it centres me”, and, “Toast is too filling and carby. I’m so happy with this bircher muesli.” The only thing most of us will be wearing this party season is slightly smarter pyjamas.

Life is quite bizarre now that the usual run-up to New Year has been steam-rollered. How empty does late November feel without a low, bubbling, passive-aggressive email chain between siblings about how much room a nut roast takes up in an oven? I feel oddly bereft without any invites to a mock-Bavarian Christmas market where I can drink £8 glasses of glühwein and eat a reheated wurst on the waltzer while listening to David Guetta. This week I noticed the first of the “What to do with Christmas day leftovers” tips and tricks in the papers. The notion of having so many visitors that you might be caught with a glut of food already seems oddly archaic.

Buying, planning and hoping for things to run like clockwork is a mug’s game. The rules are that there are no rules. “I’ve given up trying to control anything now,” I announced last Tuesday while breakfasting on a packet of jelly babies. I think it was Tuesday. It may have been Thursday. The Gregorian calendar feels so meaningless these days. Anyway, each baby was so chunkily delicious, and their pudgy little lightly frosted bellies slid so soothingly down my throat, that they felt momentarily like love and order. This one lemon, yum yum. This one raspberry, schlurp. I rarely ate sweets before the pandemic, but now, in the blur of news about possible vaccines, permanent restaurant closures and the millions of wonderful hospitality workers who will no doubt need to retrain in cyber, they’re the only thing that piques my attention some days.

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Hold the 18-course dinners: Noma’s chef opens up a burger joint

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The team behind the feted restaurant found Danes queued around the block for their pandemic pop-up

It is one of the best restaurants in the world, known for its 18-course tasting menus costing north of £300 per person and for spawning a culinary movement based on foraging for ingredients.

Now the two Michelin-starred Copenhagen restaurant Noma, run by feted chef René Redzepi, is preparing to open the doors of a new venture: a burger-and-chips joint.

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New furlough scheme may not be enough, say north of England firms

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Covid measures are designed to help businesses forced to close their doors over the winter

Hospitality businesses in the north of England have said they will struggle to survive on the new support package unveiled by the chancellor if they are forced into weeks of local lockdowns.

Carol Ross, the landlady of the Roscoe Head pub in Liverpool, said the new jobs support package- which includes the government paying 67% of employee salaries if businesses are forced to shut down and a further £3,000 a month in cash grants towards other costs – was not enough.

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From cool beans to has-beens? The Covid threat to Britain’s coffee shops

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Why the chains and independents at the heart of Britain’s high streets are in deep trouble

It’s the multibillion-pound industry that kept on growing, based on a bean that Britons couldn’t seem to get enough of: coffee.

Until, that is, the pandemic struck. As is the case with many businesses hit hard by coronavirus, the ubiquitous coffee chains that have powered city centres and high streets across the UK are in deep trouble.

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Cooking eased my exile and became my homage to the lives of immigrants

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Preparing food helped me reconcile my old and new world. Now my restaurant produces a beautiful mongrel cuisine

‘Now you better behave and don’t cry!” was the warning from my mother, shot with a stern look to show she was deadly serious. We disembarked from the aircraft at Heathrow. It was a dark and dank day. Cold rain spat at us as we walked across the tarmac into the immigration hall. In the terminal, the world seemed full of strangers and I swallowed back my tears.

The sunless flat above a shop that my father had found for us was full of draughts and damp. At the makeshift kitchen table, I stared at the exposed electrical wires knotted together on the wall and pined for the warmth of the neat, beloved grandmother we had left behind in our haste to leave Kenya. England welcomed immigrants, but its housing did not. Back home, when you opened the door, every room was fragrant with the scent of ripening guavas. Here, there was just a solitary freckled apple in the fruit bowl that, like us, had seen better days.

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England yet to embrace reopened restaurants and pubs, data suggests

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Tracker finds sales about 40% down on same period last year among venues that reopened

People have not embraced an easing of lockdown restrictions in England’s pubs, bars and restaurants, according to figures that showed a drop in sales of about 40% among venues that opened their doors at the beginning of the month.

Pubs that were open in the week beginning 6 July posted a 39% decline in sales compared with the same period last year, while bars were down 43% and restaurants down 40%.

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How will we ever make people feel at home again, ask Italy’s fearful trattorias

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Owners say plexiglass panels and social distancing mean they will struggle to survive in a post-lockdown age

Armando al Pantheon, a lively, family-run trattoria in the heart of Rome, counts the architect Renzo Piano among its illustrious customers. And there is no way that owner and chef Claudio Gargioli, is going to offend his sensibilities – and those of other regulars – with plexiglass.

His father, who opened the restaurant a stone’s throw away from the majestic Pantheon in 1961, would turn in his grave at such a notion, he said. “It could work as a barrier at the till, but on the table it’s not only ugly, but an insult,” Gargioli told the Observer.

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Michel Roux Sr, chef who reshaped British cooking, dies aged 78

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Tributes paid to ‘humble genius’ whose restaurant was first in UK to win three Michelin stars

Michel Roux Sr, the French chef and restaurateur whose work profoundly reshaped British cooking, has died aged 78.

His family, who were at his side when he passed away at home in Bray, Berkshire, on Wednesday evening, described him as a “humble genius” who had an “insatiable appetite” for life. He died from a longstanding lung condition, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

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Most of George Calombaris’s restaurant empire goes into voluntary administration

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Move follows underpayment scandal that resulted in staff being back-paid almost $8m in wages and superannuation

Celebrity chef George Calombaris has put much of his restaurant empire into voluntary administration.

Advisory and investment firm KordaMentha has been appointed as administrators of 22 companies in the Made Establishment Group, which KordaMentha says operates 12 restaurants and food venues in Melbourne.

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Twitter users mock ‘ladies fillet’ steak on Liverpool menu

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Smaller steak advertised as ‘one for the ladies!’ at Manhattan Bar and Grill

A restaurant in Liverpool has attracted online ridicule for selling an 8oz “ladies fillet” steak, which is smaller than the other cuts on its menu.

The entry for the £18.95 dish on the Manhattan Bar and Grill menu reads: “One for the ladies! A beautiful 8oz cut, because we can!”

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