eat great food. meet great people.
When Jay Rayner arrived for lunch at Obsidian on a damp Manchester Monday he found a restaurant unprepared to serve any punter, much less the restaurant critic of The Observer.
“A restaurant trading outside of its most appropriate hours”, mused Rayner in his 4th of July review, “is like a transvestite who hasn’t shaved”. [Read more...]
Subsequent to the naming of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, awards judge and Guardian food critic Jay Rayner makes a courageous case for haute cuisine in down times:
…just as with the very highest of high fashion, the highest of haute gastronomy eventually filters down to what we all eat on a regular basis and we all benefit from it.
My concern with trickle-down gastronomics (my term, not his) is that the great influence of innovative masters like Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal, the chefs at the restaurants named best (elBulli) and second best (The Fat Duck) in the world, often results in overly ambitious homages with disastrous consequences in all the wrong places. Architecture provides a parallel. From the modern masterpieces of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe came the nightmarish tower blocks of Glasgow and the hellish projects of Baltimore.
Fortunately, a badly conceived meal does not last as long as a badly conceived building.
I’m not sure if the “when-in-Rome” rule of choosing Chinese restaurants originated in the Analects of Confucius or in a 1926 fortune cookie dispensed at a San Francisco chow mein house. Regardless, this principle of choosing among not just Chinese but other exotic ethnic restaurants endures. The low-tech method was to press your nose to restaurant windows and choose the one with the most (and preferably the happiest) native diners. The new method is to google for guidance from critics, bloggers and reader reviewers who themselves are wont to base their judgements on ethnic profiling. Like The Observer’s Jay Rayner I am reluctant to assume a restaurant is promising merely because it is filled with diners who share its nationality. Yet I, like Rayner, am heartened to find myself the lone outsider in a popular, insider’s refuge. [Read more...]
