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A little while ago I wrote a short piece for lovefood.com about the best meal of my life. In it, I rather clumsily attempted to make the distinction between great meals, which can happen more or less randomly and independently of whether a restaurant is regularly enjoyed by anyone else, and great restaurants which have consistency on their side as well as the ability to knock out a decent dish or ten.
In 2012, I had many, many great meals. L'Enclume in July was an obvious highlight, a tour-de-force of modern British cooking that marked Simon Rogan out as a supremely talented chef with a unique style seemingly plucked from thin air. And thank God, too, for Medlar, finally a Chelsea restaurant worth the money they're asking and one that has, by all accounts, only improved since my visit.
But these are, after all, just meals. I don't live close enough to be a regular at l'Enclume, or work close enough to take advantage of Medlar's cut-price lunch menus, and even if I wanted to go back to another one of 2012's high points, a tasting menu at Ben Spalding's John Salt, Ben and his team up and left Islington just before Christmas, leaving in their wake a rather bemusing press release blaming "different directions" and a good few months worth of cancelled reservations. Look out for Ben opening his own place very soon, but in the meantime his residency at John Salt is being handed to Neil Rankin of Pitt Cue, who if the meals I've had in his Soho BBQ joint are anything to go by, is one of very few chefs who could follow that act.
A great restaurant, then, isn't just where you happen to have a great meal, it's a place you look forward to going to more than anywhere else because you always enjoy the time you spend there. It's a home from home, a comfort blanket of great food and great service, reliable but never predictable, where everything on the menu looks like something you want to eat, and everything you do eat you would happily order again. There aren't many truly great restaurants in London, at least not yet, but there's one spot in Soho that I've spent far too much time and money in over the last year and which still, despite the explosion of quality all around it, has the capacity to surprise and delight every time.
Bob Bob Ricard is my Restaurant of the Year because I've just had too many brilliant times there in the last year for it not to be. I've taken friends, family and colleagues for lunch, dinner, aperitifs and digestifs, and it has not once put a foot wrong. If you were to attempt to describe the look of the place you might begin with something like "Russian-American bistro crossed with Orient Express dining car" but in truth, the singular design vision of owner/managers Leonid Shutov and Richard Howarth (aided and abetted by interior designer David Collins) is like nothing that has appeared in London before or since - it's a marble-clad, velvet-lined palace of pleasure, a surrealist wonderland where - brilliantly - there are no bad tables (everyone has a booth) and illuminated "Push for Champagne" buttons attract the attention of waiters clad in pastel pink and waitresses in sky blue.
The menu makes equally attractive viewing. The Russian influence is reflected in items like the Zakuski Taster Plate, a bijou arrangement of jellied ox tongue, truffled Russian salad and the like, accompanied by frozen vodka in a crystal shot glass. Pelmeni are a silver bowl of beef & pork dumplings served with sour cream, and if you've ever wondered what caviar tastes like and didn't have the hundreds of pounds to throw at places like Caviar House, £25 gets you a taster portion of 12g of genuine Sturgeon roe served in a pearl-like glass pot. The attention to detail - and whatever you think about spending £25 on 12g of anything, the value - is admirable.
BBR's inexhaustible drive for invention and re-invention has created some truly memorable signature dishes that you can't get anywhere else in London. The lobster burger, for example, is a whole breaded, fried tail of lobster in a brioche bun, presented hilariously with the shelled end of tail poking out of the side to let you know which end to eat from. Venison steak tartare is in danger of sounding like something you might be able to find elsewhere until you notice it comes with the option of 10g of sturgeon caviar dumped on top for an extra £15 (either version is superb). And Chateaubriand for one is another dish unique to BBR - the single-portion version of this usually two-person cut down to the sourcing of beef from special miniature cows. You couldn't make it up.
Of course, none of this style and spectacle comes cheap, but BBR is not a place where you ever feel like you're being taken advantage of. The extra rhubarb gin and tonic, the extra dollop of caviar, the irresistible second push of the Champagne Button, they're all good ideas at the time, and it's why a quick pit-stop on the way back from Oxford Circus can so easily leave you staggering out onto Beak Street at midnight, £70 lighter with your pockets stuffed full of complimentary chocolate truffles. It's a place in which to lose yourself, to eat and drink and ignore the problems of the world for a few precious moments. And that, in a sugar-coated nutshell, is why it's my favourite restaurant of 2012.
Honourable mentions
In no particular order, these ten other places have shown me joy and fun times in the last year:
Duck and Waffle on Bishopsgate, and not just for the stunning views - the food is always worth the journey.
José, Bermondsey. There's still no finer Spanish tapas joint in London, and there is plenty of competition.
Tonkotsu, Soho. The signature dish is unmatched in town, a thing of pure and balanced beauty.
Burger & Lobster, Soho, Mayfair and Farringdon. Lobster and chips, £20. Lobster and chips, £20. No matter how many times you say it, it doesn't get boring. Lobster and chips, £20.
MeatLiquor, MeatMarket and MeatMission, Fitzrovia, Covent Garden and Shoreditch. Still the best at this kind of thing.
Tramontana, Shoreditch. The fourth restaurant by the Spanish food specialists manages to be as impressive as ever.
Rita's Bar and Dining, Dalston. Good value, delicious and inventive American comfort food. The hipsters never had it so good.
Lima, Fitzrovia. Finally fulfilling the promise made by other lesser joints that Peruvian fine dining was worth getting excited about.
Patty and Bun, Marylebone. Doing almost everything right when it comes to burgers.
Tayyabs, Whitechapel. Well it had to be in here somewhere didn't it.
Dishonourable mentions
Of course it wasn't all good news.
Chooks, Muswell Hill. A concept and franchise opportunity in search of food worth eating.
Jamie's Italian, Union Jacks, Barbecoa, Fifteen, various places. Will people please stop giving this man money to open restaurants. He's rubbish at it.
BRGR.co, Soho. The exception that proves the rule - the one new burger joint in Soho not worth bothering with.
Skylon, Southbank. The kind of thing we desperately need a lot less of.
Pret a Manger, EAT!, pod, etc. etc., fucking everywhere. For making London worse.
There we are then, and whether or not you agree with all, any or none of the above, I hope you had a good 2012 and you'll find enough of interest to keep reading. Feel free to nominate your own best and worst in the comments - as ever, this blog would be nothing without discussion, disagreement, argument, and finely-tuned lunacy. And you can be sure there'll be plenty more of all that to come in 2013. Happy New Year.
Bob Bob Ricard photos courtesy of the extraordinarily talented Paul Winch-Furness, via the BBR website. Photos of Medlar and l'Enclume are mine. As you can probably tell.
Having been asked by Toptable a couple of weeks ago to come up with a Top 5 restaurants of 2011 (and somehow managing to pick not a single one bookable on Toptable...oops), I thought the job of picking an overall winner for the blog would be easier. In fact, it's been a bloody nightmare. For some reason, my favourite restaurants of previous years have, in their own ways, been shoo-ins - obviously Tayyabs had to win at least once, Rules another, and there will always be a special place in my heart for the astonishing Ledbury. But this year it sometimes felt like all my food wishes had been granted at once - each month brought yet another exciting new opening or dangerously obsession-forming discovery and keeping up with it all was as exhausting as it was thrilling.
It's a strange phenomenon that in an economic climate that you'd expect to limit the scale and ambition of London's restaurants, the opposite seems to have been the case. Russell Norman's restaurants (including my personal favourite Spuntino, above) are often spoken about as "recession-busting", thanks to their focus on informality and tasty comfort food served at reasonable prices, but actually the top end - "fine dining" for want of a better phrase, and believe me I do want - has seen just as much activity. People don't mind splashing out occasionally if - and only if - they feel they are getting their money's worth; this is why it's near impossible to get a table at Goodman of an evening but fusty old temples of silver service like the Rib Room are suddenly feeling rather anachronistic. Customers are fussier when times are hard, but the best places realise that and not only meet their expectations but regularly exceed them.
So, yes, settling on an overall winner has been nearly impossible. The temptation to cop-out and declare a joint or shared 'best' is huge, but in the end that would be a cop-out, so I've had to be brutal and pick just one. It would have been satisfyingly topical to choose a restaurant formed in the fires of London's street food scene but MeatLiquor, dive bar, burger joint and den of iniquity, only missed out by a whisker. Deservedly rammed from the moment it opened, this is the kind of restaurant I'd open if I ever could - fast food as recreated by people who understand everything that's good about it and are obsessive about every detail. Despite some fierce new competition, there still is no greater burger in London than MeatLiquor's (I'd go for the bacon cheese pictured below if it's your first, but they're all great), and the buffalo wings and chilli cheese fries are as addictive as they are messy - which is very. Special mention too should go to the guys at Soulshakers who match the food with inventive and very reasonably priced drinks. Once inside - and at busy times, that takes a while - you simply will enjoy yourself. It is always worth the wait.
It tells you everything you need to know about the drive, ambition and sheer talent of Roganic head chef Ben Spalding that I have been to his restaurant three times in the space of six months and the menu has changed completely on every visit - not a single course of a 12+ stage tasting menu has been repeated, not even once. In addition, everything I have eaten has been not only remarkably well executed, presented immaculately and using unusual and exciting ingredients, but served with the kind of practiced ease that hardly any restaurants anywhere have, never mind one opened so recently. The food at Roganic may be amongst the best in London - it probably is the best in London - but it's the pacing and charm of the front of house that makes it sing, and it's a credit to everyone there that it all comes together so beautifully. I love a dirty burger as much as anyone, but the fact that in 2011 of all years some people are prepared to put their necks on the line and make unapologetically high-end cuisine that is somehow still fresh and relevant and recognisably British makes me very happy indeed. Now if they could only sort out that décor...
I've rambled on long enough even without mentioning gems like José (below), Zucca, Silk Road, Bob Bob Ricard, Dinner, Soif, The Heron, Amici Miei, Magdalen and God knows how many other fantastic restaurants in this extraordinarily diverse city so I had better stop while I still hopefully have your attention. Thanks, as ever, for reading yet another year's worth of rants, misinformed opinion and hyperbole; I'm sure there'll be plenty more where that came from in 2012. Meantime, have a very happy Christmas and New Year, and I only hope you're looking forward to the next twelve months as much as I am. And if you're not yet, then how about this - Pitt Cue are opening in Soho in the first week of January. You're welcome.
Thanks to Lizzie for the Goodman and José pics
When people find out I'm a food blogger, their response is invariably "So which is your favourite restaurant, then?". Actually that's not quite true - their first question is usually "What's a food blog?" but once that has been explained, that's their second question. And without trying to be difficult, my response to that is "I don't really have one." Because I don't - I have many favourite restaurants depending on mood and location and cuisine, and picking just one is pretty much impossible. How on earth do you compare the spice and fire and belly-aching fun of Chilli Cool with the sophisticated French style of Racine or the gutsy, comforting British fare at the Harwood Arms? They're all brilliant places in their own way, equally enjoyable, equally rewarding.
And yet here we are, and I imagine you've already noticed the title of this post, so obviously I do think one particular restaurant has something to mark it apart from the rest. Before I get on to explaining my reasons, though, and in the spirit of various other far more experienced and respected critics, here's a brief summary of the best and worst of 2010.
Best bar is a difficult one, because although I enjoy knocking back a rhubarb gin and tonic as much as anyone in the glittering downstairs space at Bob Bob Ricard, and believe me I have done on far too many occasions this year, we still can't escape the fact that Brian Silva's bar at Rules is still the pinnacle of achievement in this field, and so, for the 2nd year running, it's still my favourite place to pop in for a drink. If you can, try and go while the Christmas decorations are up - with the log fire going and the smell of pine, it's the most wonderfully festive place to guzzle a Negroni.
Best PR campaign special mentions go to Twitter kings @Polposoho and @DishoomLondon, who by simply engaging with all feedback, good and bad, in a friendly and professional way have shown, by example, the very best way to use social media to spread the word about your restaurant. It surely helps that they are both great restaurants, but their energy and commitment are still impressive. The overall winners, however, are the guys behind the Owl and Pussycat in Shoreditch, who left such a thoughtful, reasoned and detailed response to my rather grumpy review that it even made me want to go back and give them another go, which I guess is exactly the reaction they were hoping for. So well done them.
There have, sadly, been plenty of contenders for worst PR campaign, not least of which Cantina Laredo who began by booking in various groups of bloggers to try their new "gourmet" Mexican restaurant, then promptly cancelled them in a fit of pique when we all started writing up our awful meals. Then they tried a different, equally worrisome tactic - inviting rival restaurateurs in for a free meal, taking a photo then posting it on Twitter as if it was some kind of official endorsement. That Cantina Laredo is a hugely overpriced, mediocre Covent Garden tourist trap isn't really the issue here - their cackhanded response to criticism should serve as an example of how not to go about managing the image of your business. But the defensive attitude of Cantina Laredon't pales into comparison to that of Dego, who as the only restaurant ever on this blog to have their PR "guru" openly leave belligerent comments on a bad review of their client, as well as presumably cajoling friends and staff to do the same on this and other restaurant review sites, take the crown for worst PR campaign overall. I am, however, eternally thankful to "jp", "Liza C", "SP" and the rest of the Dego shill gang for being so entertainingly useless.
On a similar note, I'm sure I would be justified in making Dego my Worst overall restaurant, as my meal there was truly appalling, but let's not forget, back in August, a restaurant so diabolical, not just inept but actually pro-actively evil, that in comparison makes Dego look like the Fat Duck. Please, please Aberdeen Angus, I beg of you, please go out of business as soon as you possibly can. London and the world will be immeasurably better off with your demise.
Now, on to best overall restaurant. I had many, many fantastic meals this year, more than I could ever hope for and certainly far more than I can safely mention here without either boring you all senseless or leaving some very worthy contenders out. But honourable mentions should go to Polpetto, a charming and shabbily glamorous room tucked away up an anonymous staircase in Soho that serves some of the very finest and most interesting Italian food in London; Hawksmoor and Goodman, which manage to outdo each other on every visit and are the finest ambassadors to British beef - and British steak restaurants - you could wish for; Brawn, a brave and brilliant new restaurant in Hackney which is an instant classic; and I could hardly go without mentioning my two favourite Vietnamese places, Mien Tay in Battersea and the Viet Grill in Shoreditch, each always great fun.
Why then, overall, the Ledbury? A few reasons, not least of which the food, which is as close to perfection as you could ever want and never fails to satisfy on every single level. The dishes that Brett Graham is turning out are not just wonderfully presented, technically brilliant and bursting with fresh, seasonal flavours, they always have that extra touch of mystery, a surprise ingredient or an unusual texture that speak of a true craftsman at the very top of his game. I can still remember the first time I ate his scallop ceviche with horseradish snow - the sweet plump scallops topped with spicy ice, surrounded by a slick of bright green pesto, a perfect dish if ever one was made - and I'm sure I will for the rest of my days. But add to that the service, professional and friendly without being too stiff or too casual, a bright and comfortable room, and a good value lunch menu, and you have yourselves the best restaurant in London. Much as I was tempted to award less high-falutin' (and let's face it, cheaper) establishments the top gong, I find myself looking forward to my meals at the Ledbury with childlike glee and giddy excitement that is matched by nowhere else.
Looking forward to 2011, trips to Japan, New York and Italy are on the cards if the snow ever melts, but closer to home the first big red mark on the diary is Heston Blumenthal's Dinner, where I'm booked into with a combination of optimism (for a new direction for this obviously talented chef and the team behind him) and fear (for my bank balance). But aside from such big-name arrivals, and mindful of the howls of protest I will surely receive from fans of Madrid or New York or Tokyo, I am fiercely of the opinion that there is no greater place in the world right now to eat out than London. Maddeningly wallet-draining it may occasionally be, but for sheer variety, exuberance and idiosyncratic charm, there is nowhere like it, and nowhere else I'd rather be. So many thanks, as ever, to everyone who has read this blog at any time over the last 12 months, in numbers that bewilder as much as they delight, and all the best for Christmas and the New Year.
Pictures from the Ledbury (1st and last) kindly supplied by Hollow Legs
I had hoped, in the spirit of other far more prolific gastronomes, to do a roundup of all my dining highlights of 2009 in the form of a categorised list, instead of choosing just one "Restaurant of the Year". It was partly because I didn't want to bore people with yet another gushing exaltation to Rules, but I was also curious as to whether even I could reliably recall meals and dishes from the first few months of 2009 - even El Bulli seems like a lifetime ago, never mind my first trip to the wonderful Harwood Arms in February.
But all my good intentions came to naught almost as soon as I began. Here's my draft of the first few categories:
Best restaurant overall - Rules
Best individual dish - Roast Grouse at Rules
Best bar - Brian Silva's Rules Bar
...at which point I thought "this is silly" and gave up. However although Rules does remain my favourite drinking and dining spot overall, there was some pretty fierce competition. Here, then, in no particular order, are some other things I enjoyed in 2009:
- A day trip to Whitstable and a four-hour "blind" tasting menu at the Sportsman was certainly one of the highlights of the year, and is most definitely on my "to do again" list for 2010. We were the first to arrive and the last to leave, and at no point did we get the impression they wouldn't have been happy to see us spend the night...
- Tayyabs remains as addictive and reliably enchanting as it is infuriatingly popular, but then it's when you don't see them queuing round the block in Whitechapel you have to start getting worried. The lamb chops and dry meat remain works of near-genius.
- It's still hard to resist hugging myself with self-satisfied glee at the existence of the Lavender Hill branch of Mien Tay. The friendly but slightly shambolic service and functional décor hide a skilled and generous kitchen. I've been about twenty times since October.
- Exhilarating and challenging Sichuan food in Chilli Cool, Snazz Sichuan (not reviewed) and Gourmet San, where I discovered that there is no dish that can't be improved by the addition of pig.
- A handful of equally satisfying (and stunningly good value) dim sum meals at such varied sites as New Cross, Elephant & Castle and Greenwich. Dim sum chefs train for years, the food is intricate and precise and delicately and uniquely flavoured, and it is a complete mystery why it's all so incredibly cheap. But you won't hear me complaining.
- A hugely enjoyable (and wallet-burstingly expensive) evening at the Pierre Koffman popup, in a room seemingly populated exclusively by food bloggers and journalists.
- And of course, there's that little trip to Spain in September. I didn't enjoy all of it, and in fact hated some of it, but I can't say I still don't feel privileged to have been.
So that was 2009. Many thanks once again for everyone reading the blog and following me on Twitter, and with any luck 2010 should bring even more potential delights, disasters and Ibérico ham tastings (that last wish is mainly for selfish reasons). Here's to next year - it's been a blast.
It is perhaps a sign of these credit-crunchy times that, for me at least, 2008 was not quite as chock-full of Michelin starred, multi-course blowouts as 2007. And when I did occasionally push the boat out, results were mixed to say the least. Under the "disappointing and expensive" category are Texture, Quo Vadis, St John, Le Bouchon Breton and Andaman, all of which managed to present a bill of at least £70 a head and serve food which although not exactly bad came far short of being value for money. Only one fine dining restaurant - The Square, in Mayfair - do I consider worthy of the stratospheric prices they charge, and I hope to goodness that they steer a course through the tricky economic waters of 2009 as I intend to visit again as soon as my bank balance allows it. As for the others, well, we may be about to see a kind of culinary Darwinism at work. I would keep a close eye on some of those names above and see how many are here in twelve months time.
But I am not going to make The Square my Restaurant of the Year. Yes, it's served three of the best meals I've ever eaten, with dishes so perfectly judged in terms of presentation and taste that they can scarcely be bettered in the country, but at £100 a head that's exactly what you'd expect. Likewise Hawksmoor, which dishes out beautifully cooked steaks and wonderful cocktails and has become almost a second home for me in the last few months, but again you would damn well hope so too at £30 a plate, plus extra for chips. The Square and Hawksmoor have hit just the right point on the value for money graph and I'm quite happy for them, but perhaps a truly great restaurant needs something more - not just an ability to meet expectations but smash them into a billion pieces, and not just once or occasionally but again and again and again. And with that in mind, there could only ever really be one winner.
I have in the past moaned about the queues at Tayyab's, even going so far as to suggest an alternative to the daily scrum on Fieldgate Street. The crowds start congregating around 6pm, and by 7:30 or so they snake around the inside of the restaurant, past the sweet counter and back again and sometimes even out into the street, hundreds strong, day after day. And if you have to ask what restaurant in the world can possibly deserve this kind of fanatical devotion, then you haven't eaten there. Juicy, spicy seekh kebabs; sizzling hot platters of bright red lamb chops coated in addictive tandoori spicing that stain your hands for hours afterwards; masala fish which manages to be crispy on the outside and fluffy and moist inside, the robust spicing never overpowering the tilapia meat itself; and dry meat - oh, the dry meat. A heavenly concoction of spices and stock, reduced for so long it's become almost a concentrated meat purée, and yet containing chunks of miraculously tender lamb, the Tayyab's dry meat is a monumental achievement. It is also, as far as I am aware, unique to this restaurant.
One of Tayyabs' biggest fans, and this is saying something for a restaurant whose Facebook 'Appreciation Group' has over 1,000 members, is Gavin Baxter, who has been a regular since far before it became trendy amongst bandwagon-jumping foodies such as myself. Along with other members of the Opinionated About Forums he was an early advocate of the then still relatively unknown Pakistani grill house and was there for the ride as it expanded from a tiny canteen in an old newsagents to the former pub next door and subsequent fame and glory. Gavin signs off his OA forum posts with a quote from Benjamin Franklin on beer; it also struck me as an appropriate final word on my 2008 Restaurant of the Year, with one small alteration:
"Tayyab's is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy"
Looking forward to 2009, there are no prizes of any kind for guessing what I'm expecting this year's highlight to be. I'm afraid there are no available spaces for the trip to El Bulli in September, but rest assured I will write it all up in as much detail as circumstances allow, and I'll be thinking of everyone who didn't win the email lottery as I tuck into my spherical olives. I also promise to not be too smug and keep going on about it.
So, final "thank you"s to Simon Majumdar for mentioning me in the Times Online, to Niamh of Eat Like A Girl and Trusted Places, Helen of FoodStories, Lizzie of Hollow Legs, Charles and Joel of Tipped, Andy Hayler, Silverbrow and of course to everyone else following Cheese and Biscuits in such frankly baffling numbers. I hope you find enough here to entertain you in the year ahead. Cheers, and have a Melón con jamón on me:
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