Wasted Calories and Ruined Nights Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Ruined Nights I’ll Never Get Back

  Abuse for the Author

  The Legal Small Print

  1 High Concepts

  Lanes of London

  Pret a Manger

  Tapas 37

  Studio 88

  Circus

  2 Lost at Sea

  Lands End

  The Red Duster

  Fancy Crab

  Smith & Wollensky

  Farm Girl Café

  3 Unlucky Dip

  Blue Boar Smokehouse

  Star Inn The City

  Léon de Bruxelles

  City Social

  The Ten Room

  4 All Fur Coat …

  Beast

  Dorchester Grill

  The Rib Room

  Quattro Passi

  Le Cinq

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  All of the reviews collected here appeared first in the Observer Magazine. I am grateful to Guardian News & Media Limited for granting me the rights to republish them in this collection. I would also like to thank John Mulholland, editor of the Observer throughout the period these reviews were published, and Ruaridh Nicoll, who likewise was editor of the Observer Magazine, for allowing me to do this fabulous job. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to the accounts department of Guardian newspapers for reimbursing my expenses so quickly. I literally could not have done it without them. Thanks should also go to my endlessly patient wife, Pat Gordon-Smith, who has to put up with me being out so often, having an awful time.

  Finally, as with My Dining Hell, my first collection of less than positive reviews, I would like to thank the myriad companions who had to sit through these terrible restaurant experiences with me. As ever, they ate them so you wouldn’t have to.

  Ruined Nights I’ll Never Get Back

  Experienced journalists are rarely taken by surprise by the impact of their work. We know exactly what we are doing and why. As I trudged down the marble steps of the Georges Cinq Hotel in Paris, one chilly spring evening in 2017, I knew what I was going to do and I knew what the impact would be. If I claimed otherwise, attempted to feign innocence, I would be lying. OK, I didn’t quite anticipate the global reaction. I didn’t anticipate the international newspaper headlines and the talking points and the outbreaks of glee.

  But if, in the days leading up to the publication of my review of Le Cinq on 9 April 2017, anyone had asked me what I thought the response was going to be, I would have been straight with them. I would have told them it was probably going to be the most read article of my career.

  And it was. The review was the most read thing across the entire Guardian site for the whole of that Sunday. And for the day after that. And for much of the day after that. An average restaurant review of mine is viewed perhaps 75,000 times and shared some 1,000 times via social media platforms. A popular review will break through 100,000-page views. My review of Le Cinq was viewed about 2.2 million times and shared over 114,000 times. Soon newspapers from New York to Mumbai were writing stories. The high point for me came when the American restaurant blog Eater ran a post headed: ‘The Worst Lines of Jay Rayner’s Le Cinq Review, With Cats’. It was just that: a series of photos of cats, with speech bubbles filled with quotes from the review. They had attempted to turn me into a meme. I couldn’t have been prouder.

  Which is what happens when you write an unremittingly negative, ‘wipe-the-blood-off-the-walls’, ‘take-no-prisoners’, ‘inform-the-next-of-kin’ review of a Michelin three-star gastro palace in Paris; one where dinner costs €300 a head. People love it, because people are horrible. You will find it at the end of this collection of pieces about miserable nights I spent in terrible restaurants. If you want to flick straight to it, go right ahead. I won’t stop you. Then come back.

  The assumption is that I wrote such a brutal piece simply to gain that sort of notoriety. Indeed, many of those who criticised me alleged as much, and obviously I do myself no favours by gloating over the statistics. I can’t apologise for that. As I’ve long said, my job is not to sell restaurants but to sell newspapers (or the digital equivalent thereof). I was just doing my job. Because yes, that review did bring the Observer an awful lot of readers and attention. But it had nothing to do with that.

  I wrote that review because I was angry: eye-gougingly, bone-crunchingly, teeth-grindingly angry. How bloody dare they? How dare they charge €70 for a starter and €140 for a main course and serve up such a travesty of modern gastronomy? How dare they make cooking of ambition, something I care about (for good or ill), look like a parody of itself? How dare they do this to me and my companion and everybody else in the room? By the time the frozen minced parsley turned up on the dessert, complete with a big ‘ta-da!’ reveal, my thoughts had turned from what I could do to the restaurant with words, to what I could do to the place with a can of kerosene and a box of matches.

  As I say in the piece itself, I didn’t go there to have a bad time. I never do. I thought it might be a little absurd, in the way of the grandiose and the haute and the gilded. I knew it would be painfully expensive. (So expensive indeed, that the Observer didn’t cover all the costs. My companion paid her own bill and I paid half of my own, leaving a ‘mere’ €150 for the paper to pick up.) But I did at least expect to have a laugh.

  In the end the only laughs were the ones my readers had at the restaurant’s expense. Because of course, people love negative reviews. As I explained in the introduction to My Dining Hell, my first volume of stinkers, originally published as an eBook in 2012, if I had published a collection of my greatest raves, very few people would have bought it. Narratives of positive experiences are cloying and twee and eventually just a little dull and samey. All nice evenings out tend to be nice in similar ways.

  But terrible experiences tend to be uniquely terrible. The reader projects themselves into the awfulness, gives thanks that they weren’t the one who had to put up with it, and then, like villagers gossiping over the five-bar gate, gorge on all the details. They luxuriate in vicarious displeasure. In the years since that first volume was published I’ve been accused of revelling in the negative. As a result, I’ve had cause to count exactly how many of mine really are stinkers. Every year it’s roughly the same: a fifth or slightly fewer. Which is to say, ten. The majority, twenty-five, are positive. About fifteen are middling, neither great nor terrible (and therefore the hardest to write). I never go looking for bad restaurants. There are certain big-ticket openings which, like major West End musicals, have to be reviewed. I might have my suspicions about them but I am required to give them the once over. I go to the rest of them because I think they’ll be great; often that’s because someone else told me so. Alternatively, I’ll have studied their website, read the menu and consulted the writings of others, be they blogs or local newspaper reviews. I do my research, specifically to find good places.

  But it’s the ten negative reviews – the ‘utter shitbaggings’ as I like to call them – which you remember, isn’t it? Of course it is. Because, as I say, you’re horrible.

  For the first forty-eight hours after the review was published, Le Cinq and its chef Christian Le Squer stayed silent. It made sense. What were they supposed to say? That I was wrong? I would have disagreed with them, but I took it as read that this was what they thought. Eventually, however, the French newspaper Libération obtained a quote from that famous spokesperson, ‘a source close to’ the chef. The review was dismissed as mere ‘rich-bashing’.

  It was a charge against which I could easily defend myself. In 2008 I had
published a book, The Man Who Ate the World. It was a journey through seven mega cities, the likes of Moscow, Dubai and New York, in search of the perfect meal. In Paris I decided to do the high-end Super Size Me. In the movie Super Size Me, released in 2004, documentary film-maker Morgan Spurlock ate only McDonald’s for thirty days in a row to see what the impact would be upon his body. The high-end version I embarked on involved eating in a Parisian Michelin three-star every day for a week: the flagship restaurants of chefs like Guy Savoy and Pierre Gagnaire, renowned dining rooms like Le Grand Véfour, Ledoyen and so on. A couple were terrible, delivering platter after platter of over-processed and over-tortured ingredients. A few were great. They gave you the opportunity to wallow in luxury. One – chef Pascal Barbot’s restaurant glorious L’Astrance – was outstanding. I still recall the two fat langoustines in a crystal-clear langoustine broth decorated with single leaves of herbs and purple flowers, like a Monet watercolour; the roasted pigeon with its liver spread on toast; and at the end, a plate of wild strawberries, to which nothing had been done. Because who could improve upon what nature had already perfected?

  I didn’t begrudge a penny of the three-figure bill. I have long argued that spending large amounts of money on dinner is absolutely fine as long as it’s worth it. Some people build their memories from watching their team lose at rugby or from going to the opera. I build mine from meals.

  And yet Le Cinq did have a point about me wanting to smash the rich. This collection of stinkers differs a little from the one that came before in that, aside from Le Cinq and a couple of others, the vast majority are in London. They are also from a particular kind of London. A series of taxation policy decisions, which began with the Labour governments of both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and continued under the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, made the British capital especially attractive to a certain type of ‘non-domiciled’ high net worth individual. They might have been born in Beijing or Moscow or Mumbai, and their money might be in the Cayman Islands, but to all intents and purposes, home is Knightsbridge. They need somewhere to eat. Indeed, they need a whole luxury economy to serve them.

  In the years this book covers, that thick, gilded slice of the market came to maturity, encouraging the growth of a particular type of stupidly spendy restaurant, where all sense of value goes out of the window. Consider the revamped Dorchester Grill or the Rib Room of the Jumeirah Tower, Quattro Passi or City Social or an import like Smith & Wollensky. In these places casual dinners at £100 a head or even more became the norm for a particular type of Londoner who, the next morning, would probably not recall what they had eaten. So yes, I did start rich-bashing, and with serious enthusiasm. Because money like that should buy you the sublime not the stupid. Spending money on the good stuff is fine. Throwing it away on the substandard is a particular kind of obscenity. Note the number of times in this collection that I leave before dessert, on the grounds that there’s only so much suffering a chap can take. And I really love dessert.

  Are they easy targets? Perhaps, but that doesn’t make shooting at them wrong. Restaurateurs and chefs who choose to make their money like this need to know it’s not OK. Plus, frankly, I am well placed to have a go at lousy places in my own city. Other Londoners don’t mind when I lay into the stupidities of the capital. Those of us who live in London know full well there are things wrong with it. For the most part we each of us live in our own particular version of the city. We are quite happy for the failings of the other parts to be pointed out to us and others.

  As I’ve found to my peril, other cities don’t respond in the same way. Write a negative review of a restaurant in Liverpool, Manchester or Birmingham and the proud locals will give you a total kicking as a matter of principle, regardless of what they actually think of the place that’s been criticised. You’ll be dismissed as a metropolitan snob before lunchtime on the day the review was published. Sometimes, frankly, writing a negative review of a place like that is not worth the hassle.

  There’s another good reason for not writing a negative review. At the risk of sounding pious, anyone doing this job has to be aware of the impact they can have. From time to time I will eat in a small family-run restaurant which is failing: the food isn’t anywhere near as good as they think it is or the service is amateurish and, as a result, the tables are empty. The last thing they need is to be taken down by the weight of a national newspaper. In those circumstances I pay the bill myself, chalk it up to experience and move on. The only review in this collection that doesn’t quite fit that model is of the Red Duster in the Isle of Wight. But that one was so bizarre, so bonkers and just so weird, I couldn’t not write about it. So shoot me.

  One element a paperback collection of magazine articles like this will lack is the visual. Each week my reviews are illustrated by terrific full-colour photographs. For the most part I regard that as an added extra. I love great illustrations but it’s my job to paint a picture with words. There’s only one in this collection where some of those pictures might have added to the experience and that, as it happens, is Le Cinq.

  Once I’ve reviewed a restaurant, I send a list of the dishes I ate to the picture editor of the Observer Magazine who then makes contact with the restaurant and arranges to send in a photographer to take pictures of those dishes.

  It’s very rare that the restaurants are unwilling to oblige. Indeed, it’s only happened three times. One was a motorway services (so we ran the piece on the news pages, making even more of their refusal to allow the terrible food to be photographed), one was a brilliant but skanky Sichuan restaurant on the Bethnal Green Road in East London, where the staff’s creaky grasp of English meant they didn’t have a clue what we were going on about and in any case gave the impression they weren’t very interested. The third was Le Cinq. They said their food was far too expensive for them to make it solely for us to photograph. They insisted they would send over their own press shots. The moment I saw a proof of the page ahead of publication I understood why. One of the dishes pictured was an onion gratin which, through a series of different textures including gel balls and purées, was meant to mimic a classic French onion soup. In Le Cinq’s picture it was a riot of gold and ambers; a beautiful shimmering thing, like a city on a hill, drenched in sunlight.

  In my review I had commented specifically on how terrible the dish looked. What’s more I’d taken a photograph of it on my iPhone 7. My picture was of sludgy, sticky, blackness. It was the stuff of depression and gloom. The editors and I agreed that we had to run with the picture Le Cinq had given us. If we did otherwise they might accuse us of actively setting out in some way to sabotage their business. Instead I posted the two photographs (and a few others) side by side on my own website, with a little commentary. We posted a link to that on the online version of review. Then I watched my website crash as hundreds of thousands of people tried to gain access. Personally, I think the words do the job, but if you want to see the compare-and-contrast pictures you’ll find them on the ‘News’ page of my website, jayrayner.co.uk. It’s more robust now; it won’t fall over.

  Otherwise, I hope you enjoy this collection of meals that amounted to just so many wasted calories and ruined nights. At the very least I hope you enjoy reading them a damn sight more than I didn’t enjoy experiencing them.

  Abuse for the Author

  From reviews of the novel Day of Atonement, posted to Amazon:

  ‘Terrible book, terrible story.’

  ‘Can only be described as the incoherent ramblings of a self-obsessed ego.’

  From reviews of the novel The Apologist, posted to Amazon:

  ‘Overthought, self-conscious twaddle. Not worth the money I didn’t pay for it.’

  ‘This book was downloaded by mistake. I didn’t know how to cancel on Kindle.’

  From Twitter:

  ‘Jay Rayner is a good writer but has a face for radio, bless him.’

  ‘Jay Rayner … food critic, TV presenter. A face like monkfish genitalia & so ugly i
t makes you gasp.’

  The Legal Small Print

  All restaurant reviews are a snapshot of a moment in time and should be understood as such. The date at the top of the review indicates when it was published. Any notes about what may or may not have happened to the restaurant since publication are included at the end of the relevant review. Occasionally, small edits have been made to remove repetitions that would become obvious across a collection like this, or to correct minor inaccuracies not spotted at first publication.

  1

  High Concepts

  Lanes of London

  The Marriott Hotel, Park Lane, London, 9 February 2014

  *

  Here is a lesson in impotence. It doesn’t matter how often I bang on self-importantly in this column about how much I hate menu concepts, how they make me want to stab forks into soft body parts. It doesn’t matter if I keep repeating myself. I will still be ignored. They just don’t care, these people. And so it is that within minutes of being seated at Lanes of London in the Marriott Hotel by Marble Arch we are approached by a waitress who makes ‘suited and booted’ look like part of her job description, and she says: ‘Can I explain the concept of our menu, today?’ Oh God. Clearly it’s not: here’s a list of dishes, you choose, we bring.

  Oh well. I suppose you want to know what that concept is. The Marriott has noticed that street food is now a Thing; that the capital’s roads are clogged with reconditioned campervans knocking out stuff that makes sauce dribble down your forearms, some of which is great and a lot of which is stuff in a bap flogged for £6.50. The Marriotts – I want them to sound like an awful dysfunctional couple you once invited round for dinner by mistake – have clearly decided that the only thing wrong with street food is the street bit. Very breezy, streets.