“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”.  

Rayner wondered aloud if it was fair to be there at all, ultimately reasoning that “if the restaurant has decided to be open then it is OK for me [him] to eat there”.

His puzzled disappointment at not finding any of the dinner dishes he had spotted on the restaurant website menu did not dissuade the intrepid critic from mixing and matching from the extremely limited prix-fixe lunch and bar menus and then writing a scathing review based on a small and not entirely unpleasant sampling of two mains and two desserts.

On twitter I questioned the fairness of his writing such a review without making a return visit, setting off this [uncorrected] exchange between Rayner (his tweets are in blue-bordered box) and myself:

Based on my experience as restaurant critic for The New York Daily News that sounded to me like a justification for lazy if not unprofessional behaviour. I decided to do what Rayner did not: call the restaurant to learn if there were extenuating circumstances to partly explain why Obsidian was so unprepared.

The fact that Monday lunches are notoriously slow, as they are at many Manchester restaurants, is no excuse. Rayner is right: if you’re open for business you’re open for criticism. But there were other conditions not communicated to The Observer readers that made this an inopportune day to be visiting Obsidian and passing judgement on it for a national newspaper.

Obsidian in June was a restaurant in transition. The new chef, Steve Waters, worked his first service on the 11th of June – four days AFTER Rayner’s visit. The new manager, Neil Woodward, began work on the 5th of July, one day AFTER Rayner’s review was published. Trust me, Wayne Rooney is no longer the most miserable man in Manchester.

Put the unfortunate timing of Rayner’s lunch down to bad luck. What’s regrettable is that he did not bother to do a little reporting and thereby explain to his readers, as I am doing here to mine, that Obsidian had hired a new chef who was in the process of implementing an entirely new menu. Those dishes from the outdated website were no longer available to Rayner because the chef behind them had already departed.

Not all dishes will be to all tastes…

The last to use it was Matthew Norman of The Guardian in his Weekend magazine review of the London Szechuan restaurant My Old Place.

I challenge him or anyone else who’s ever shared this revelation to name 20 restaurants – no, make it 1 restaurant – where all dishes will in fact be to all tastes.

Oh, really? Who first got us either excited about – or blissfully reacquainted with – snow peas, watercress, mustard greens, Chinese broccoli, pak choi and oyster mushrooms? Who first showed us how not to overcook vegetables? Who first dazzled us with glistening greens in colours so vivid they seemed to have presaged Photoshop? Who first handmade for us translucent dumplings filled with 8, 10 and or even 12 different veg finely minced to the measure of Alistair Campbell’s humility?

If only the Guardian’s copyeditors would treat their critic’s copy with the same lack of respect that only Norman thinks Chinese chefs show their veg. Lots of precision cutting. More colour, snap, flavour.

Three storeys of gorgeousness from United Designers: Torode’s trademark chunky, butch aesthetic (see Smiths of Smithfield) married to fluid lines, ravishing furniture – wing-shaped Cherner chairs, stork-legged tables and lamps that look like Méret Oppenheim…

You can practically hear the members of the live BBC audience falling over themselves with nods of recognition. It hardly matters that most haven’t a clue who the artist and muse Meret Oppenheim was. We’ve all seen women who look like lamps and lamps which look like women. I happen to have one in my bedroom.

Which brings us to tonight’s quiz for all those listening at home: At left is Erotique Voilée (“Veiled Erotic”), a classic surrealist image taken by American photographer Man Ray in 1933. Rather than ask you if the subject of the portrait is a lighting fixture or an Oppenheim, the more pertinent question is: How do you work the oddly placed knob?

Meret Oppenheim is one of the featured artists in Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism, an exhibition on view through the 10th of January at the Manchester Art Gallery.

Is Norman overestimating his readers? The analogy is of limited value to those lacking the worldly knowledge of his companion, a music critic with 30 years of experience under his belt. I, for one, have never tasted a Durex, lubricated or otherwise, nor has my tongue ever met latex. Come to think of it there was that one night in Madrid….

Perhaps Williams believes the type of duck will become apparent to readers and thus she needn’t bother to state the obvious. That may explain why she doesn’t even bother to tell us Min Jiang is a Chinese restaurant.

…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.

My second objection is the greater neglect. The restaurant critic for the magazine of a major national newspaper does not assess a single dessert. His pretext for not doing his job? The portions “are too geared towards the needs of the famished wayfarer to leave room for even so tempting a pud as treacle tart with clotted cream.”

Sorry, Matthew, but if part of your enviable job is to critique the components of a meal and you fear you may be getting too stuffed from your main course to contemplate dessert there is an easy solution: push away your plate, unfinished. Only after sampling the puds may you conclude they are worth skipping.