“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 Those dishes from the outdated website were no longer available to Rayner because the chef behind them had already departed.

…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.