Wasted Calories and Ruined Nights

by Jay Rayner

  ‘Paola’s market veggies’ arrive in a bowl, with a grainy, deathly ‘carrot hummus’ thickly smeared up the side, like someone had an intimate accident and decided to close the loo door and run away. At the bottom is a ‘cashew aioli’, which is the kind of discharge you get when you torture nuts. It tastes of raw garlic and nothing else. There are sticks of celery and hunks of cauliflower to dredge through this, alongside ‘seeded crisp bread’ which is neither of the last two words. It is dense and hard and tasteless, as you imagine cork floor tiling might be, if it had somehow been repurposed as food.

  Finally, from the small plates, comes tostadas piled with jackfruit, the latest hip, unconvincing replacement for meat. It is a fibrous tangle that gets stuck in your teeth on top of a violent, acidic sludge of guacamole. The jackfruit is described as being barbecued. This means it has been smeared with a blunt barbecue sauce of the kind they serve at pubs with a flat roof. Each of these dishes costs about £8. After this vegan calamity, this extraordinary display of dismal cooking, I find myself eyeing the Yorkshire terrier, greedily. Just hand him over, give me access to the grill, and five minutes.

  Perhaps the kitchen can do better with something that once had a pulse. Or perhaps not. The crispy turkey schnitzel sounds nice. Apparently, it is encased in ‘lemon and thyme-infused breadcrumbs’, but tastes of neither of those things. It barely tastes of anything at all. The meat is overcooked and has the texture of something Timpson’s might one day think about using to re-sole my brogues. A heap of pickled cucumber and radish is piled on top helpfully, to ensure the breadcrumbs go soggy. A side dish of roasted cauliflower is so undercooked that the knife barely manages to go through it. The one edible dish is a glutinous, cloyingly sweet vegetable ‘curry’. It would be regarded as an utter, shameful travesty by many in south-east Asia, but it’s not actively unpleasant.

  We do not stay for dessert. They are mostly a list of ice creams and sorbets including a ‘spinach, kiwi and coconut oil gelato’, which sounds terrifying. What we’ve ordered so far, plus the second-cheapest bottle of wine, has already run up a bill of just under £100. It’s not just the dismal cooking that pains me here. It’s the squandering of ingredients and of people’s time and the tiresome narrative of ‘wellness’ with which it’s been flogged. I feel especially bad about our waiter. Tom is a good man. He is charming, on point and utterly wasted here; he should do something more socially useful, like fly tipping or nicking cars. I whip out my phone and discover there is a branch of Honest Burgers nearby. One of their finest, served medium rare, a big heap of rosemary and salt chips and a hefty tumbler of cheap and cheerful sauvignon blanc is exactly what we need to make all those BTGA (Bad Thoughts Go Away).

  What happened next: The review received a lot of media attention, especially across Australia. Likewise, Australian commenters below the review online expressed dismay that this should be considered representative of Australian culture. On Facebook the restaurant was asked what they thought of the review. They replied, ‘We think it’s a very entertaining piece and enjoyed reading it.’ The menu has not changed, the Farm Girl Café Chelsea continues to trade and has many positive reviews online.

  3

  Unlucky Dip

  Blue Boar Smokehouse

  London, 11 August 2013

  *

  Not far from the Blue Boar Smokehouse, which is a smokehouse much as I am a prima ballerina, is New Scotland Yard. And so it was that I spent much of lunch – less eating, more pushing platefuls to one side – wondering whether there were any statutes under which it would be possible to prosecute the place. Sadly, I concluded that shameless bandwagon jumping, grievous bodily harm to an entire culinary tradition and atrocious cooking are not yet criminal offences. Oh, that they were. This country would be so much the better for it. Make me prime minister. I’ll sort it.

  The Blue Boar Smokehouse is a grotesque marketing conceit, realised in acres of dark wood veneer, hefty linen and glassware. It occupies the back room of a corporate hotel for businessmen, dreaming only of an in-house movie and a handful of tissues, and feels like two hours of death by PowerPoint, presented by a lifestyle trends consultant who once went to Hoxton. You can imagine the pitch: ‘dirty food’ is cool; people like pulling their pork, whatever that means; fried chicken isn’t just for sink estates in Peckham; making this kind of crap is easy and cheap. Fill yer boots.

  Or don’t. Their ribs arrive dangling out of a mini bucket. Ah yes. I’ve seen things like this before; it’s like experiencing a vicious flashback before you’ve taken the drugs. The sauce is at first as sharp and acidic as a cheap packet of salt and vinegar crisps and then as sweet as a six-year-old’s confection stash. If the meat has spent any time in a smoker, I’m afraid it will take a more acute palate than mine to detect it. My mouth had been brutalised by the sauce. On issues of smoke it had nothing to say.

  The least offensive of the main courses is the crab, baked in the shell under a Cajun mayonnaise gunk. It looks like a hefty sneeze into a shell, after a long swim in the sea to clear a cold. To be fair, the first forkful is just about OK. After that it goes from cloying to ‘please stop’ in easy steps. The accompanying chips would have proved a moment of nostalgia for anybody who has ever worked in a fast food joint emptying the freezer bag into the deep fat fryer.

  From the list of pulled meats we order the suckling kid: a heap of something tired and drained, violated and one-note sweet arrives on a wooden board next to glazed onion rolls made from a dough so overworked that tearing them open offers the chance to burn all the calories involved in eating them. The dish is completed by a motorway service station coleslaw.

  Worse than this is the ‘southern fried chicken’, which must never be granted freedom from within those quotation marks: a tube of breast and a reformed leg, clumsily coated in bright orange crumbs the colour of the cast of TOWIE, fried off so limply that those on the bottom come off on the plate. Underneath lies a banana ketchup which has the honour of being the worst thing I have put in my mouth since the incident with the washing-up liquid when I was seven. It tastes like those sweetshop bananas, blitzed with the remains of someone’s forgotten 1970s spice cabinet. It looks like something you would treat with antibiotics.

  The dessert menu includes an Eton Tidy for £7, which is not merely a violation of ingredients but also of the English language: splodges of strawberry purée, hard, dusty meringue, flaps of crumbly gel, artfully draped. It’s the sort of thing that would get a Professional MasterChef contestant sent home in the quarter finals.

  As to wines, a waiter had to be called back to deliver a full measure of the glass I had ordered. Shortly, I expect to receive a press release announcing the relaunch of the restaurant at the Intercontinental Hotel, Westminster. I’ll regard that as a very good day for London.

  What happened next: It took just over a year for the prediction made in the penultimate sentence to be realised. In October 2014 the hotel announced that the restaurant would now be known just as the Blue Boar and that the American BBQ menu was being scrapped to make way for something closer to an English grill menu: lots of smoked salmon, Yorkshire lamb, various steaks, and a pistachio and rhubarb tart to finish. The hotel also changed its name and is now the Conrad London St James, part of the Hilton group.

  Star Inn The City

  York, 5 October 2014

  *

  We all of us have stupid ideas from time to time. We all of us get it wrong. What matters is whether we spot the mistake and make amends. Which is what I told the judge, not that he seemed convinced. Where’s mercy when you need it, eh? Happily, I am less ruthless. I’m quick to give credit where it’s due. I note, for example, that a restaurant I once reviewed (I say reviewed – I mean butchered, skewered and turned slowly on a spit over guttering flames) has stopped putting peanut butter in with the chicken livers and Marmite in with the potatoes. They have seen the error of their ways. Or at least some of them. Good for them.

  Not so, I’m afraid, the Star Inn Th
e City, the £60-a-head York spin-off of chef Andrew Pern’s muchlauded Star Inn at Harome in North Yorkshire. When it opened a year ago, so-called rivals in the restaurant-reviewing lark mentioned things about the place that made me flinch and rock to and fro with my eyes closed while calling for Nursie. Knowing I already had negative thoughts without having even been there, I concluded it was better not to review. But then a year passed and I found myself in York with an evening to spare. I feel I should apologise to the restaurant for their bad luck in this regard.

  For here it comes, the selection of breads – served in a flat cap, ’cos it’s a Yorkshire restaurant, right? And in Yorkshire everything with a pulse wears a flat cap. Always and forever. Yorkshire people slip out of the womb wearing them. Did they buy new flat caps for the purpose? Or were they second-hand? I search the rim for a greasy tide mark. And once you’ve had the thought you can’t help but wonder whose head might have been in your bread basket. It was an absurd and rather unpleasant idea when the restaurant opened – as a number of people said – and it remains so now.

  As is a side dish listed as the ‘salad o’t day’. Look, I enjoy a joke as much as the next anxiety-ridden, sweaty, varicose, misanthropic bastard, but dialect gags like that aren’t funny. They’re a replacement for things that are funny, made by people who couldn’t think of something genuinely funny, and so strained at it like a chap who’s been on a low-fibre, high-animal-protein diet for a month.

  These two small details – along with the aching wordplay of the establishment’s name – go towards making the greater case: that the Star Inn The City is, unfortunately, a really annoying restaurant. It’s a crying shame, because God knows York needs reasonable choices. Since the admirable J. Baker’s closed, it has been perilously short of them. The conversion of the site, a wide and airy glass vault added to the side of one of York’s fine, hulking, ancient buildings, is attractive. And the notion of a good-food pub, coming in out of the countryside like this to the town, is admirable. There’s a repertoire of big-knuckled, earthy British-rustic dishes they could have called upon and sometimes they do – but only in name. Then they work them and overwork them, again and again.

  Alarm bells start ringing with the menu. It’s one of those furiously busy wipe-clean affairs of the sort you’d find in a Brewers Fayre. It has punning section headings complete with exclamation marks, because otherwise you wouldn’t know they were being funny. Geddit? So there’s ‘Good Game, Good Game!’ for the game section, because Bruce Forsyth was … em, er – no, not a clue. And there’s ‘On the sauce!’ for the list of sauces. I think it’s a joke about being drunk. I wish I had been. Plus, it lists every single ingredient, who produced them, where, which direction the wind was blowing from on the day they were harvested. So you get ‘cassoulet of Hodgson’s of Hartlepool natural smoked haddock’, or ‘risotto of local estate shot redlegged partridge’. From now on I want to know how every animal on my plate died: ‘belly of electrically stunned, throat-slit pork …’

  The dishes themselves reach for greatness and trip over while doing so. That partridge risotto also contains Wensleydale cheese, chestnuts and kale, but the overwhelming flavour is of truffle oil and demiglace, that mixture of thickly reduced veal stock with espagnole sauce which makes your lips stick together. If someone had knocked it up from a bit of leftover partridge and a few chestnuts at the back of the fridge you’d be impressed; less so for £10.

  Another starter of corned beef is equally disappointing. In recent years corned beef has been saved from the ignominy thrust upon it by Fray Bentos; the modern version can be a beautifully thick, fibrous thing which still resembles a bit of an animal. Here, it arrives in a jelly-topped rectangle with artfully placed pickled silver skin onions scattered hither and yon. None of this can disguise its dull, mushy texture.

  A main course of otherwise good roast duck breast is let down by a citrus sausage roll. The filling is too dense, the hit of citrus overwhelming, the pastry undercooked at its heart. But the biggest let-down is the fried fillet of Scarborough woof (Atlantic wolffish), with chip-shop chips and a duck-egg sauce gribiche. If you’re going to gussy up what is essentially fish and chips you have to make it better than the original. You have to be playful. This is dense and heavy. I won’t call the woof a bit of a dog, even though it is. The fish is dry and fibrous. The chips are the size of my clunking thumbs, and though they taste pleasingly of dripping, are too much claggy potato. Serve these in a chip shop and there would be a riot. At least the sauce gribiche, here essentially a tartar, is a beautiful thing.

  Only dessert truly saves honour: a slightly loose but sprightly lemon posset topped with a berry compôte, and a steamed ale cake with a killer butterscotch sauce. Service is fine, if brought to a halt by an attempt to send two other starters we didn’t order, compliments of the kitchen, which slowed down the main courses. They were declined. (Note to kitchens: don’t do it. Yeah, I know. That we should all have such problems.) Star Inn the City wants to be a culinary guiding light; right now, I’m afraid it’s slipping towards being a bit of a black hole.

  What happened next: Many York regulars wrote in support of the restaurant, both directly to me and in the online comments section. It rates highly on Open Table and, in 2015, received a very positive review from the Daily Telegraph which described the food as by turns ‘genius’ and ‘extraordinary’, though a review in the Independent accused it of playing the Yorkshire card ‘with a heavy hand’. I am told they no longer serve bread in flat caps.

  Léon de Bruxelles

  London, 22 September 2013

  *

  A Friday night and I am sitting in what feels like a dying restaurant. It’s not in intensive care yet. Think more high-dependency unit, its owners furiously studying the weekly figures for a settled pulse.

  I am in Léon de Bruxelles, the only British outpost of the 120-year-old Belgian mussels-and-chips chain, which has dozens of branches across its home country and France. It’s more than three-quarters empty. This is remarkable. Nothing around London’s Cambridge Circus is empty, not on a Friday night. Garfunkel’s is full. Café Rouge is full. Despite my very best efforts, the Angus Steakhouse, where they torture steaks nightly, is full.

  But not Léon de Bruxelles. You can almost hear the wind blowing between the tables. The transparent laminate covering on the wipe-down mussel-shaped menus is curling off. Then again, why replace them if no one is coming? It can’t claim a location problem. It occupies a huge site opposite London’s Palace Theatre, is gilded in green bloody neon. Not finding it would require talent. And yet it’s all shiny tables and empty seats.

  I do find this odd. Mussels in the shell are one of the most gloriously compelling eating experiences there is. They turn the modern eater into ancient hunter-gatherer, roaming the tundra of shiny black shell in search of dinner. Plus, they are a brilliant leveller. However uptight you are, however much of a clean freak, it’s impossible to eat them with cutlery. It’s a sleeves-up, elbows-on-the-table, get-stuck-in job. Like the flick and pick of the pistachio nut from its shell, the very process of mussel eating is meditative. You zone out and stare deep into the steamy bowl until your eyeballs fog.

  Or at least I do. That’s why I wanted to go. Long ago I was quite the fan of Belgo, the London-based mussels-and-chips chain where the waiters were all forced to dress like Belgian monks, poor sods. It was serious man-on-mussel action. In 1996 Belgo Centraal, a cavernous and gloomy industrial basement space in Covent Garden which finally brought the aesthetic of a BDSM bar to eating out, was named London restaurant of the year. We were young then. They attempted a brand roll-out, but it didn’t take. There are just four left.

  And now there’s this place which opened last year and which on a Friday night has many staff and few customers. The staff isn’t the problem. They are friendly and engaged and have clearly read every page of the training manual, probably a few times. Our waiter almost sounds convincing when he declares their beer cocktails to be ‘very specia
l’. The thing is, special ain’t the same as good. I knew a chap who could do something ‘special’ with a lighter and his bodily methane. I wasn’t paying for that either. I stick with a good wheat beer.

  Part of the problem is the room, which is huge and sterile, with zany things scribbled on brightly coloured boards, the design equivalent of Timmy Mallett’s glasses. On closer examination these turn out to be dish names. The room looks like the canteen of a direct marketing company which has tried to inspire the workforce by giving itself a half-arsed makeover. My wife looks around and declares the narcoleptic strawberry blush of the Angus Steakhouse down the road more welcoming. I know how to show a woman a good time.

  On one wall there is a photograph of the Manneken Pis; on the other, the silhouette of Tintin. Of course these are not the only famous Belgians. There’s a whole board listing ‘Les Belges Du Monde’ – about a hundred names in total, of which we recognise Jacques Brel, René Magritte, Brueghel and Johnny Hallyday. There’s someone listed as Cockrent, which sounds like the name a male porn star would abandon for destroying all the mystique. On closer examination we identify a full stop between the C and O. We look forward to acquainting ourselves with the work of journalist Christina Ockrent.

  We have time to brood on all this because of the aching gaps between courses. There’s nothing better guaranteed to make service run slow than a lack of people to serve. If you want to eat quickly, go to a busy restaurant. We watch those who arrived after us being served before us. The food, when it deigns to appear, has OKs and kill-me-now lows. A starter of warm smoked eel, with mustard-smeared toast, is all rich fish oils and kick. It’s an expression of the Lowlands, the sort of thing you would eat to ward off chilly fogs. A plate of their charcuterie is a reasonable selection served, predictably, too cold. We let them flog us some slices of dead horse. It is smoked, a little sweet, and rather cloying.