Review of the reviews
The Observer - 22 June
JAY RAYNER, after news that an Italian restaurant critic is being sued for £15m by McDONALD'S for slating the food, reviews the Big Mac, Chicken Selects and a pasta and feta-cheese salad
Was there anything passable? Yes, I quite liked the berry and yogurt crunch. The yogurt was sharp and there was real fruit in the berry mixture. So, what have we learnt? Not much. McDonald's food is a culinary disaster, but then we knew this. It's also cheap and fun for kids in (extreme) moderation. But for the company to be furious when a restaurant critic tells the truth is like a hooker reacting with outrage at being called loose. It's fair comment. McDonald's may fume. It may even consider reaching for its lawyers, to which I say only this: come and have a go if you think you're hard enough. I stand by every word.
The Sunday Telegraph - 22 June
LUCY BANNELL at the HIELY-LUCULLUS, Avignon, France
The whole meal cost g118 (about £85) and we were seated for three-and-a-half hours, a near impossibility in most British restaurants, where the booking system can seem reminiscent of a pedalo hire station ("Come in, Number 9…"). And none of the dishes had undergone that vertiginous architectural construction that, one suspects, is meant to boggle diners so they are blinded to the accompanying swingeing mark-ups. I haven't felt this relaxed after a meal out in London for years.
The Daily Telegraph - 21 June
JAN MOIR on the GREEN LANTERN, Cornwall
My advice to any amateurs who want to open a restaurant is always this: don't do it. Please. You have no idea what a backbreaking, heartbreaking, difficult, complex, financially and emotionally draining business it is, and no amount of dining out could ever prepare you for it. Every day, you have to deal with the bitter caprices of the weather, the public, the staff, the suppliers. Every week, there are a thousand new problems to overcome. And just when you think you've got it all right, someone like me comes down and bitches about your chairs and your carrot sauce and says you've got a Fawlty-esque manner. Gah! It's enough to make you drill a corkscrew between your eyes and run screaming into the sea.
(Dinner for two, excluding drinks and service, £56.)
The Times - 21 June
GILES COREN at TOM AITKENS, London SW3
Next, I had one of those rectangular plate meals that seem to have been laid out by a proud biology student to get maximum illustration points in his A-level. There was a pig's head braised with ginger, a roundel of stuffed trotter, tongue, and then a crackly sliver of belly. Atop them scampered frizzles of crispy ear. Each item was marvellously tasty, the whole thing both robustly piggy and faintly anachronistic, as if the brilliant Mr Aitkens had this rectangular crockery knocking about and had finally come up with a way of getting most of a pig in it.
(Rating: 7.67 out of 10. Dinner for two, sans grog, £100.)
The Scotsman - 21 June
GILLIAN GLOVER gets nostalgic at LA BRUSCHETTA, Edinburgh
Forget teamed chicken and alfalfa sprouts. This was pan-fried prime Scotch fillet with shallots and wild mushrooms, topped with dolcelatte cheese in a cream and brandy sauce. Gulp. And, rather surprisingly, gulp it I did. The sauce was masterly, perfectly reduced, not too unctuous, with the dolcelatte only a whisper of blue-veined rancour amid these mellow oboe notes for the palate; like a whispering chorus behind a diva's aria.
(Two courses for two, without drinks, £50.)
