Rural pleasures
Is London dining losing it?
The newly-released Waitrose Good Food Guide 2017 has raised a few eyebrows among food-loving folk, not least for naming the three best restaurants in the UK as L’Enclume, in Cumbria, Restaurant Nathan Outlaw, in Cornwall and Restaurant Sat Bains, in Nottingham.
Much was made of the fact that not one of this trio is in London, otherwise known (by breathless food writers, at least) as the Culinary Capital of the World. Can London’s restaurant stock have fallen so far?
To borrow a culinary metaphor, let’s try to clarify that stock. The Good Food Guide has a long and honourable tradition – 65 years and counting – of championing the best places to eat in Britain. A “long-list” of potential entries is based on readers’ reports, then a team of inspectors whittles it down to the final selection. (Although, as Rick Stein once asked me: “When you and your partner have had a bloody good meal in a restaurant, do you go upstairs to your room and – well, you know – or do you sit down and write a letter to the Good Food Guide?”)
It has always promoted nonLondon restaurants. And, now that chefs like Simon Rogan and Nathan Outlaw are standing up for homegrown produce, rather than relying – as country-house hotel restaurants traditionally did – on a fitful supply chain from Paris’s Rungis Market via London, countryside restaurants have an advantage over their metropolitan rivals.
L’Enclume chef Rogan has a 12-acre farm on which to grow his vegetables; Outlaw has the bounty of the Celtic Sea on his doorstep; even Sat Bains, nestled by the River Trent and the A52 flyover, has more space to grow herbs and micro-salads than some London restaurants enjoy.
Urban chefs, meanwhile, are desperately keen to get hold of the same produce that their country cousins have.
Nevertheless, London bags 16 spots in the Good Food Guide’s top 50. Edinburgh has three, and no other city has more than one.
It is a list peppered with a few newcomers, but heavily laden with Michelin-starred “fine dining” establishments. Indeed, the top 10 restaurants boast 19 Michelin stars between them.
The National Restaurant Awards, by contrast, are chosen by a panel of industry professionals (in the interests of full and frank disclosure, I’m one of them), and produces a much more volatile list that tends to venerate the new and casual alongside the tried and trusted.
By its reckoning, Pollen Street Social, one of Jason Atherton’s London restaurants and No 4 in the Good Food Guide, just scrapes into the top 50 at No. 46. In contrast, top spot goes to Stephen Harris’s much-lauded The Sportsman on the Kent coast, a restaurant that doesn’t even make the Good Food Guide’s top 50 – perhaps because Harris himself describes it as a “grotty rundown pub by the sea”.
The happy truth, I think, is not that London’s restaurants have got worse, but that restaurants outside London are a darn sight better than they were. Cities like Bristol, Belfast, Liverpool and Newcastle are now hotbeds of culinary creativity.
The starchiness has been ironed out of country-house hotels, too: each of the Good Food Guide’s top three restaurants also offers rooms, but guests (often from London, by the way) now go there primarily for the food, not the napery and the snobbery.
You pays your money – often quite a lot of it, especially in London – and you takes your choice. Just as we choose which film to go to see, or which holiday to book, we all have our prejudices and preferences (personally, I dislike queuing, loud music, lighting so low I can’t read the wine list and 17-course tasting menus, but that’s just me. I think I must be getting old.)
Find a guide or a critic with whom you regularly agree (or, for that matter, consistently disagree) and you have a useful tool when making a choice, although I would counsel against relying too heavily on TripAdvisor, some of whose ratings are frankly barmy. What, for example, is London’s best restaurant? The Ledbury? Le Gavroche? Gordon Ramsay?
No, according to the self-styled “largest travel site in the world”, that honour goes to Andy’s Greek Taverna, in Camden. I’ve been to Andy’s, and they serve a mean moussaka, but it would not be top of my list.
Although, even after a lifetime of eating out around Britain, I’m not sure I have a list. Lists are like a plate of fish and chips: best taken with a large pinch of salt. Bill Knott is a food writer and former chef