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...]
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...]
