142. A Spring Afternoon With Giles Coren.

 It’s a fine sunny mid-spring Sunday afternoon. I’ve exhausted the dog with a walk over Cofton Common (look it up) along a human-free public footpath, Upper Bittell Reservoir looking like a grand lake, in the distance, to my left the not-too-far off Cotswolds and straight ahead the close-by Lickeys where Tolkein’s and his fiancée used to meet each other (and if you can see behind them) the two-humped  Malverns.

  The perfectly warm sun made lunch in my rather old-fashioned garden (more neglected than it deserves but with camellias still in gay blossom, the fruit trees in flower and the first of the bluebells making everything as Tory as it should be) the only acceptable option. There’s a robin tweeting harmoniously in one of the damson trees and the dog is dozing comfortably despite a rival barking a few gardens away. 

  Lunch is not what Sunday lunch should be - a finely crafted Tanqueray Seville orange gin with Mediterranean tonic  and microwaveable Sainsbury’s Singapore noodles. This is not an easy dish to prepare - do not trust the instructions, if you microwave the meat and prawns for anywhere near the time the manufacturers tell you to do then nothing but unhappiness results. Prawns of the consistency of bullets may be acceptable to the dog, a labrador who will eat anything whether or not it is unspeakable, but no human could derive pleasure from them, nor for that matter from the desiccated chicken and duck which results from following the instructions.

  So, lounging in the sun, who to sit round your garden table with? Today it was Giles Coren, the Times restaurant critic and television presenter (though he has acknowledged openly as a middle-aged white man he is unlikely to ever be employed by the BBC again). Coren, who annoyed so many people in 2015 (Blog 6) by announcing his dislike of eating in any English restaurant outside London, wrote a splendid book published in 2012 by Hodder and Stoughton titled How to Eat Out Lessons From A Life Lived Mostly In Restaurants which I have enjoyed before and now returned to. Perhaps it was the Seville orange gin which enhanced the pleasure of reading the opening chapters over lunch. It also had something to do with his reminiscences of his earliest love - Chinese restaurants - and the fact that I was consuming a faux Asian dish at the same time but I enjoyed a few guffaws and kept wishing that society had not taken a turn to ensure that Coren’s book, with its hilarious pokes at all sorts of foreigners, would surely not be taken up by a publisher today, almost 10 years on.

  His foody memoirs are a delight this second time around. There’s a sentimentality mixed up with an honest telling of how eating out was then and at earlier times. For those relatively new to dining out this is an education. My own tale goes back a further generation when children rarely ate out with their parents and it made me slow to observe what was going on in restaurants of which Coren twenty years later was all too aware. But our food experience of the 1950s and 60s when British food is said to have dived to the lowest depths it could is worth knowing about if only to appreciate what we have now. I can not however but feel a little envious of Coren and his earliest experiences which were unimaginable to children of one generation before. He was so aware as a child of his visits to restaurants and what was going on in them you know he was destined to be a food critic. Now if only I’d been born 20 years later. But as a dining companion, if only in print, it has been a tasty lunch eaten on a fine spring afternoon enhanced by his tales.

98. London Restaurants Feeling The Heat Of COVID-19.

  As statues of 18th century slave owners which have stood for 200 years across Britain begin to disappear in the swell of the tide of protests against racism, one not necessarily foreseen outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic, so other symbols of privilege - ludicrously overpriced London restaurants are beginning to feel the heat. Much loved by London-centric Michelin, but already dumped by the 2019 The Fifty Best Restaurants in the World List, formerly prestigious London restaurants, previously delighted to squeeze wealthy international travellers and gastrotourists and the wealthy Londoner elite (now hiding away in their second or third or fourth or fifth home somewhere in Scotland or Cornwall or the Cotswolds) for every £50 note they can, are facing the end of their glory days.
  Thus the two Michelin-starred The Ledbury is now closed indefinitely as its Chef patron, Brett Graham, declared that it was impossible to keep the restaurant open because of the government’s social distancing measures and he has fired all his staff but is holding on to the lease for the present. the Ledbury hah held its two Michelin stars longer than any other restaurant in London apart from Le Gavroche and first opened about 15 years ago.
  Quite simply, London now has far, far too many restaurants. With international travel suspended it is clear that there are not enough local inhabitants to keep the thousands of restaurants in the capital alive over the next couple of years. And with the prices in so many of them being exorbitant the numbers of their potential clientele is minuscule. Furthermore those in the know are already ditching London in a big way. The latest Fifty Best Restaurants In The World list gave London the elbow when it placed only two of the city’s restaurants in the legendary Fifty - both in Shoreditch (The Clove Club and Lyle’s) with a taste for ‘Modern British’ cuisine, with Spanish or Nordic or Far Eastern influences rather than being derivative of the sort of stuff the French have long presented to the world as the (dubious) peak of gastronomy. Thus the likes of Dinner by Heston Blumenthal and The Ledbury were pitched from their top fifty places with the latter down to no. 68.

  Here in Birmingham the number of true Fine Dining restaurants, mostly serving exceptional food at realistic prices but undervalued by the London-loving Michelin, can be counted on the fingers of less than two hands. There should be enough local diners around wishing to enjoy the pleasures of Birmingham’s very special restaurants to enable the restaurants not only to reopen but to thrive and flourish. We have some exciting new chefs just waiting for the current crisis to finish to open their new restaurants and of course there are Birmingham’s great already well-established restaurants on the scene which their regular diners are just itching to get back to. Perhaps some of the promising young Midlands chefs who thought their future lay in a career in London will think of coming back to the West Midlands as the London restaurant scene begins to sink.
  It’s been an awful time and bad things aren’t over yet, but the Birmingham food scene could emerge enriched and hopefully better appreciated than it ever has been before. Giles Coren, who claims to have given up being a food critic, may after all find peace among the “One eyes” who enjoy West Midlands gastronomy. And the likely collapse of the London dining food scene gives impetus to the campaign of the quite excellent and pleasingly influential West Midlands mayor, Andy Street, to make the region the place where the hospitality industry kickstarts the economy again.

6. The One Eyes Have It.

 It's true isn't it? Most of us would like to say nasty, deliciously caustic things about someone and have the world as our audience and at the same time do it with a sense of impunity. Fortunately most of us are not psychopaths nor in a position to fulfill such a secret wish. Thank the good Lord.

  Of course the unspeakable Tripadvisor does give a lot of people the misplaced sense of empowerment which leads them to launch written assaults on defenceless dining establishments which are frequently doing their best to deliver as good a service and food as edible as they can possibly manage, and make a living out of it as much as is feasible and employ people as well. But the vox populi is a fearsome beast and the opportunity to let rip against a restaurant for what is seen as a slight, a mild impertinence, minimal error, a tiny incompetence or whatever is an opportunity which more and more people feel incapable of resisting regardless of the consequences on a business, its owners and employees.
  

The One-Eyes Have It 

 

 But it's the professional critics whom we all really envy. Giles Coren - now there's a name to conjure up in the history of the development of the food scene in Birmingham. He generated much heat in 2015 by writing in The Times, "Honestly, if I'm going out of London to eat, it's more productive to leave the country". The Birmingham Mail reported on 6 February 2015 that Coren said that Birmingham's "posh" eateries were "not my sort of thing at all" and that he had branded Brummies as being "bumpkins, yokels and one-eyes". The final remark had come at the end of a seeming retraction of his comments about "provincial dining" - he had opened a tweet that he "was not qualified to comment on Brum's food scene" and described his comments as "boring fob-offs" but closed with "Although they're all quite true. I would just normally mince my words to avoid offending the bumpkins, yokels and one-eyes".

  The problem with the writings of Giles Coren is that are often very enjoyable and it's not difficult to disagree with many of his opinions though he can be viciously cruel. Who can forget his vicious nastiness when he reviewed what was then the 1 Michelin-starred Kingham Plough in Oxfordshire where he very reasonably launched a diatribe on sous vide cooking but savagely attacked the lovely chef Emily Watkins? It's fun to read witty criticism but quite another thing to read savage destructiveness.

  That's TripAdvisor - too many people who can't spell correctly, never seemed to have used any punctuation in their life or really have just never learnt any good manners, are given voice and opportunity to destroy a restaurant's reputation at the click of a computer key. And none of them are likely ever to be a Giles Coren.

Tripadvisors working out how to concoct a negative review and get a discount
out of the restauranteur. "The  Bean Feast" by Jan Steen, 1668.