Diners with a decent memory - and sufficient miles on the clock - will recall that for four of five years in the mid 1990’s Joël Antunès cooked at Les Saveurs in Mayfair. Despite the handicap of a windowless basement dining room, this classic restaurant was highly thought of, and spangled by the Michelin men. Then Antunès left these shores and set off on a world tour which ended with him cooking in the U.S.A. Now, in an echo of Bruno Loubet’s triumphal return to London, Antunès is back and plying his trade under the banner of Kitchen Joël Antunès in a smartly refurbished ground floor dining room at the Embassy on Old Burlington Street.
Most pundits concede that it is important for any business to re-invent itself from time to time. When that business is a restaurant, the small band of regulars grizzling that things ain’t what they used to be is usually outnumbered by incomers lured in by the promise of something new. Tom Aikens shut down his flagship on Elystan Street for over 5 months – in itself a bold thing to do – and then opened with a new backer, a new room, a new menu and a new baby. It is hard to assess which of these “news” leads to the most sleepless nights but the baby is probably winning by a short head.
However hard you try to buy fresh, buy local and buy interesting food, the dire economic climate lays its cold hand on your shopping list. You find yourself looking for Jacob’s ladder to stew slowly in a casserole; you experiment with beans and lentils; you opt for boring, wintertime vegetables rather than fancy stuff. And you don’t have to be Chancellor of the Exchequer to pinpoint the reason
As 2011 takes the final curtain, it’s time for one those lists much beloved by Editors everywhere. In the past a helpful list of books for purchase with your treasured Christmas Book Tokens was a regular fixture in the New Year periodicals. Now it seems people who are aware of Book Tokens are an endangered species, and you have to suspect that shortly printed books will be in an equally parlous predicament. Here are a few of my favourites from 2011, the list is in no particular order – each and every one is a good read.
On the one hand we have Paris stalwart “Prunier Restaurant (depuis 1872)” and on the other we have the ”River Restaurant at the Savoy” (a relative newcomer, founded in 1889). Both these venerable restaurants have made a good job of getting under the skin of their customers during more than a century of boom and bust. They are both fighting fit and have recently brought off the difficult trick of relaunching while still retaining the feel and tone of their glory years. For those of us obsessed with food and restaurants they make an interesting case study – what kind of a menu do you write to tempt the 21st Century diner?
This year the mince pies hit the supermarket shelves earlier than ever before. These tasty little pastries seem to have a five month season and mince pie addicts only face Cold Turkey in high summer. So when wandering around Waitrose in early November the mince pies took centre stage especially as a pack of Heston from Waitrose Puff Pastry Mince Pies with Pine Sugar Dusting had been marked down to 99p. Some bargains reach out and grab you by the throat, this packet had been reduced from £3.29 a figure that valued Heston’s mince pies at over 50p each. Time to try the professor’s mince pies and very cheaply.
Given the length of time it takes to open a restaurant it is a spooky coincidence when several new places open in a short space of time with enough similarities to define a discernible trend. When the principals of these new eating places first got together and started looking for the money needed to make their dream a reality how did they all end up with the same combinations of the same key elements? Consider a small plate “tapas” approach to dishes, grungy New York style décor and “no-booking exclusivity” in some form or another. Step into the limelight Bocca di Lupa, Spuntino and now Ducksoup. It is as if there really is a mood of the moment which if understood by budding restaurateurs ensures success.
It is always good fun to eat out with chefs. At the risk of generalisation, when they are on our side of the pass wielding a knife and fork chefs generally concentrate hard and apply themselves vigorously. They also have formidable appetites, pipe cleaner thin men full of nervous bounce will sit down and biff their way through three starters and a couple of mains without flinching. My kind of d
It’s been a fabulous year for plums, like the apples (Discovery was ripe by mid-August) everything has been remarkably early. A fluke combination of perfect weather at blossom time to help the pollinators, wet weather when required and sun during the ripening season has meant that there is plenty of everything. Some years we get to complain that come preserving time there is too little fruit to work with and sometimes we get to complain that there is too much. This state of perennial dis-satisfaction must be what makes farmers seem so grumpy. But the problem remains, the hedges are dripping with sloes; the paths are stained purple by the fallen damsons; and the weight of apples are in danger of breaking the boughs.
There’s a good argument for saying that the sweet potato is not a potato at all but when it comes to names this tuber is frequently taken in vain – in America it is called a yam but strictly speaking it is not one of those either. The Maoris have got things right, they call sweet potatoes “kūmara” which is a bit handier than the biologist’s formal name, Ipomoea batatas. Potatoes, sweet potatoes and tomatoes are all cousins and share the Convolvulacea (the Morning Glories) on their family trees. For most Brits sweet potatoes are seen as a rather American vegetable, a bit too sweet, cloying, fibrous – candidates for the masher or the chip pan. Felice Tocchini, the Tuscan born, head chef at Fusion Brasserie in Worcestershire thinks differently.
