Author Archives: Oliver Thring

How we fork out millions for MPs’ food and drink

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A feature for G2

It is just after prime minister’s questions, and it’s all rather lively in the Strangers’ Dining Room in the House of Commons. Sir Peter Tapsell, father of the house, is at a corner table, burbling contentedly. Tory and Labour MPs are rigidly segregated. A doddery staff member with Charles Darwin’s beard spoons out crumble and custard. Down the corridor in the empty bar they are serving “Top Totty Blonde Beer”, with its bunny-eared model. By the following day this will be withdrawn, after a complaint from the shadow equalities minister, Kate Green.

I am here as a guest of MP Kerry McCarthy, having read recently of theappalling hardships our Honourable Members endure in their dining rooms and refectories. “Literally uneatable” was Tory MP Laurence Robertson’s verdict on the food served in the Commons last year. Another member bewailed their “bucket” of chips, adding that while such presentation is “no doubt trendy”, it makes the chips “soggy”. (“The tower arrangement is better,” this gourmet claimed.) Packets of crisps from Commons vending machines are 10g too light. The beetroot is “tasteless”, the eggs are “watery” and the salads are “cold”. In all, despairs one MP from the wood-panelled dining room with its sweeping views of the Thames, eating in the mother of parliaments is “a dismal experience”.

There are, remarkably, 28 different food outlets in the Westminster complex. The grandest and most traditional are the adjacent Members’ and Strangers’ Dining Rooms. These share a menu, the former’s being heavily subsidised. Only MPs and officers of the Commons are allowed in the Members’, the Tea Room and various other places. “I don’t like the food and can’t eat most of it,” says McCarthy, who is a vegan. “I think it’s generally pretty OK – though some of the combinations are a bit bizarre.” Starters at the Strangers’ include rabbit and apricot terrine or roast partridge breast, both £6.75. I have chicken with cabbage and black pudding potato cake: tepid but tasty and, at £13.55, cheap compared with many central London restaurants.

Continue reading at the Guardian

The Cube, Milan

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I was in Milan for fashion week. I say ‘for’, but ‘during’ is probably more accurate, or ‘despite’. It was a one-night job to visit a pop-up restaurant called The Cube, a postmodernist construction designed or commissioned by Electrolux, perched like a pigeon atop various European landmarks. They started in Brussels; Stockholm and London are coming up, and this time they stuck it on the building next to the Duomo.

Milan hardly feels like Italy: in most meaningful senses, it’s northern European. People stomp around looking grim and serious, swooshing silk and designer clobber. Boulevarded and boutiqued, the whole place struts. If Italy is a default, 19th-century compromise, then Milan is the resentful party. Most of the Milanese I spoke to griped about the south without prompting.

My cousin is at university there and I arranged to come out the day before so I could crash on his sofa. I joined him and his gilded friends for dinner at a film-themed place called Papermoon, supposedly frequented by Hollywood types when they’re in town. It was pizza and pasta, and the place is overlit, but we ate and drank well for a little under €50 a head, which I’m told is a miracle in Milan. At the next-door table gabbled perhaps 18 models, there for fashion week, scarfing pizza and pasta as if they’d never heard of lettuce. Henry – my cousin – says that the Milanese eat carbs like famished Stakhanovites, but you rarely see a fat one. They’re just less neurotic about food than we are.

The day I went, the chef at The Cube was a chap called Andrea Sarri, whom I should have heard of but hadn’t. He runs a place called Agrodolce, and though sweet and sour is characteristically Sicilian he’s based near Sanremo by the French border. Sarri is a slim and gregarious chap, and his food matches beautifully abstracted presentation with winning, ingredient-led Italianate simplicity. It worked well in a place that seats just 18, all sitting round one table.

We ate almost no meat. Scallops in English-trannied “acidolous salade” were wibbly bivalves with crisp frisée in a trickle of broth. I loved a pre-dessert of yoghurt cream with persimmon sauce and popping candy coated in chocolate, but the best dish by far was a langoustine risotto, gunged with rich, sweet tomato pulp and a dollop of mozzarella cream. Italian cooks tend to work within specific constructions: not for them – or more particularly their customers – the extraneous pairings and gallant nonsense of other Europeans. Predictably, Sarri worked best with seafood, simply treated.

The Cube is coming to London in time for the Olympics. They won’t tell me where it’s going to be but I heard it might be plonked on Tower Bridge, which would be a hell of a venue. It rotates high-end (read: Michelin-starred) chefs from the countries that host it, but again I have no details on who the English chefs will be. I hope they avoid the obvious London ones.

The Cube by Electrolux, 1 Via Ugo Foscolo, Milan
Bookings at: electrolux.co.uk/Cube/Milan
Much better photos than mine here

Secrets of the menu

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A piece for The Guardian on how restaurateurs design menus so that people pay more

Restaurateurs and those who advise them have long argued that people read menus in predictable ways. The received wisdom holds that a diner will start on the right-hand side of a menu, a little way above the middle, before zooming up to the top right-hand corner. Then he’ll jump backwards to the top left and down the left-hand page, then finally fill in the gaps in the bottom-right and the middle.

Not so, apparently. New research from San Francisco State universityclaims to overturn this notion. Once they had hooked people’s heads up to computers, presented them with menus and studied their eye movements, the researchers found that participants read menus sequentially from left to right, like books. (In part, this confirms Gallup research (pdf) from 1987.)

The findings could have important implications for menu design and the way we order in restaurants. Restaurateurs might need to rethink placing their showcase items at the top-right of their menu or just below it. The menu from Keith McNally’s majestic New York brasserieBalthazar, deconstructed in this paper a couple of years ago, proudly places “Le Bar à Huîtres” at the top-right of the page, with its high-margin plateaux de fruits de mer at $70 and $115 and half a lobster at $23. (It also sticks a prawn cocktail there for $15: this might look expensive in isolation but seems almost cheap beside such expensive dishes.)

Continue reading at The Guardian

Gourmet crisps – a half-baked idea?

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Kettle Chips: the only acceptable fancy crisp

Something for The Guardian on supposedly ‘posh’ crisps

Following their horribly named “Do us a flavour” marketing campaign of a couple of years ago, Walkers have just announced a new gimmick - what’s that flavour? - introducing three “mystery” crisp flavours for the public to identify. I’ve just tried them. Packet A tastes of salt and stale milk, and a glance at the ingredients reveals it contains “mystery dairy seasoning”. Packet B smells of concentrated tomato syrup and tastes of dried blood (that’ll be the suitable-for-vegetarians “mystery meaty seasoning”); while packet C is vaguely curried and yoghurty and may turn out to be chicken tikka masala (it has pictures of chicken breast, chillies and coriander on the packet “for inspiration”).

I pine – don’t you? – for a time when crisps were just crisps. Why this need to take nice shards of fried potato and dust them in weird chemicals that never resemble what they’re supposed to? Walkers have decked their latest packets in pictures of fresh sage, chives, ripe tomatoes, crumbly parmesan and – good God – yellow peppers. This is presumably supposed to make the crisps look more upmarket, but it just seems grasping and odd.

“Posh crisps are the biggest scam of our time,” said Jay Rayner a while back. Four quid is too much for a small sachet of fried potatoes, even if the spuds have been “fried in extra virgin olive oil” (a stupid idea) or “dusted with pink Himalayan rock salt” (posh salt being an even worse scam than posh crisps). India Knight is another journalist who can’t abide expensive chips. They’re “annoyingly crispy,” she says, “so there’s no meltiness at any point, only these spiky shards – and to me they taste overwhelmingly of stale oil … Crisps are fried potatoes. They are not a thing that needs to be faffed about with.”

Continue reading at The Guardian

Is Red Tractor pork really ‘high welfare’?

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Pigs at West End Farm, Wiltshire. Photo: Oliver Thring

A piece for the Guardian on the welfare of British pigs

Red Tractor pork is high welfare pork – or so the adverts say. The UK’s pig industry is in the midst of a £2m marketing campaign encouraging people to consider the welfare of British pigs. Around 80% of British pork farms unite under the Red Tractor scheme, which has specific welfare standards. These turn out to be more or less the legal minimums, but at least guarantee that the pork is British.

Supermarkets, which sell most of the pork in this country, care about profits first and are thus happy to sell lower welfare Spanish, Danish or Polish pork to British consumers who often want the cheapest product. This is helping to put many UK pork farmers out of business. The total UK pig herd shrank by 40% in the last decade, while UK pig farmers lost over £100m last year owing to the rising costs of pig feed and because higher welfare standards than many EU countries mean our pork is more expensive to produce.

It’s broadly true that British pigs enjoy better living conditions than most of their European counterparts; the British pig industry claims that most of the pork we import from the EU could not be produced legally in this country. In 1999 sow stalls became illegal in the UK, as they are in Sweden: they remain commonplace in much of the continent and some US states. These monstrous cages, which maximise the number of pigs which can be housed in a space, restrict a sow’s movement during almost all of her four-month pregnancy to an area little bigger than her own body. (Sows have litters every four months or so, usually with just a few days between pregnancies.) Unable to turn around or even lie down comfortably, she is utterly unable to engage in the natural activities of a pig: rootling, exploring, or building a nest for her piglets.

Sow stalls are to be phased out across the EU by 2013, though farmers will still be permitted to use them during the first four weeks of a sow’s pregnancy. British pork farmers echo concerns about enforcement of the EU ban on caged hens which came in to force on 1 January, worrying privately that many European farmers will simply ignore the legislation. As one said to me: “We know jolly well they’re not going to implement it.”

Continue reading at the Guardian

Vegetarian haggis recipe

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This one isn't vegetarian. The veggie one does not photograph well. Photo: Tim Hayward

A piece for the Guardian on an alternative way to celebrate Burns’ Night

I confess I had few hopes for vegetarian haggis, a term that seems to border on the oxymoronic and which carries a strong whiff of substitution. (Like all right-thinking people, I’m opposed to any vegetarian food that seeks to simulate meat.) There are few more boldly carnivorous dishes than haggis, which is correctly made with the lungs, heart and liver of a sheep, as well as oats, spices and lots of nicely softened onions if I’m making it, then stuffed into a cow’s caecum and boiled for ages.

The veggie version is really a firmish bean and lentil stew, lightly spiced and thickened with oats. And it’s delicious. I’d say it carries something of the 1970s Brown Mush school of vegetarian cookery, and it scarcely photographs well, but the flavours are excellent in a homely sort of way.

I made proper haggis a couple of years ago, a laboriously icky procedure that involved clamping windpipes to the side of the saucepan using clothes pegs to allow snot to drain from the lungs, and seemingly endless skimming of the broth to remove scum. That experience took a couple of days: you can make the vegetarian version in half an hour.

Macsween, which manufactures 1,000 tonnes of haggis every year, tells me that one in four of the haggises it sells is vegetarian, which seems impressively high to me. I’m sure they’d want you to know their vegetarian haggis has won gold stars in the Great Taste Awards for the last four years running, but they’re predictably cagey about which spices they use, and in what proportion.

Continue reading at the Guardian

Food fight!

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A man has tomatoes thrown over him at La Tomatina festival in Bunol, Spain

Something for the Guardian on food fights

Food is normally a civilising influence, eating an activity people love to share in the world over. Food fights invert this idea, turning a peaceful and cultivated undertaking into something thrillingly anarchic. President Reagan’s chief of staff told the New York Times the other day that the Republican debates had disintegrated into a “food fight” – that is, become chaotic and coarse. (And also, presumably, funny, given theignorance, gaffes and oopses of the various campaigns.)

Like all mock battles, food fights derive much of their excitement from simulating danger. The best foods for a food fight enhance this by splattering and staining the combatants in a deeply satisfying way. All organised food fights around the world make use of this. The largest in Italy is the Battle of the Oranges in Ivrea near Turin. (The more perceptive reader will have spotted that oranges don’t grow near Turin – the town imports hundreds of thousands of Sicilian oranges for the skirmish every year.) It takes place every February; one American journalist described the event as a “lesson in physics” given “the impact of the thrown fruit as it hits the flesh”. In all, it is somewhat more brutal than a typical food fight: some competitors actually wear armour.

Spanish food fights are rather less serious. The most famous food fight in the world, “La Tomatina” of Buñol, Valencia, sees 40,000 people scrapping with the squishy, explosive excess of the tomato harvest. Participants are obliged to crush the fruits before throwing them so as not to injure each other. (A very good idea: just before Christmas I witnessed a Brussels sprout fight of some ferocity in Trafalgar Square. A sprout is unlikely to collapse on impact, of course, and some participants took things rather too far by freezing their missiles first.) Following the hour-long Tomatina, and once the detritus has been cleared, the town’s streets are pristine, cleaned by the acid in the tomatoes. The Rioja town of Haro a few hours away has hosted the batallo del vino every year for more than a century. Wine-throwing begins at 7am; rules concerning white clothes are enforced with the rigour of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, and by the end of the fight, everyone is the colour of the bouncing blackcurrants in the Ribena ads.

Continue reading at the Guardian

Better than your usual table, sir?

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Bar stools. Tottery high chairs. Photo: Juice Images/Alamy

A brief piece for the Guardian on a clever new website that lets you book specific seats in restaurants

There’s a new website called Table Guru which I rather like. I appreciate that its target market probably careens towards the geek end of the restaurant spectrum (guilty), but the idea behind it should suit almost anyone who likes to eat out. In the way that many theatres show you the auditorium seating plan when you book your seat, this site maps restaurant interiors, displaying the spacing and placing of covers, so you can ask for a decent table when you ring up to book. Users can upload their own photos and reviews, and share opinions on the best spots in a given room. It’s only available for 55 Michelin-starred restaurants in London at the moment, but the site is expanding rapidly.

Many people probably don’t care where they sit in a restaurant. I do. It may be a first world problem of almost parodic stature, but I believe that the placing of a table, its proximity to other diners, to the kitchen, corridors, the bogs – has a palpable impact on the enjoyment of a meal. You might be eating the most exquisite food in the world, but if a waiter’s buttocks are brushing the back of your head every 30 seconds, or a wintry gust extinguishes your tea light every time the door opens, it could just as well be ashes and alum on your tongue.

The problem is partly in legs. Ours and tables’. They get in the way. Fay Maschler has never recognised the appeal of eating on tottery chairs so high your feet can’t touch the ground, and nor have I. A friend and I share a hatred of wine bars or tapas-style places that put chairs round wine barrels so you can’t fit your legs underneath. Bar counters are frightfully modish, and normally I don’t mind them, but these too can be ruined when your knees are rubbing against those of the person next to you, unless you fancy them.

Some restaurants simply have no good tables – McDonald’s, Ducksoup– and in those one can normally muddle along quite happily. A few restaurants have no bad ones; I think AA Gill once said that was the genius of the Ivy. But most places have a mixture of good and bad spaces, and it’s one of the most irritating mistakes a manager or waiter can make to plonk you in the latter when a restaurant is half-empty.

Continue reading at the Guardian

Chef d’oeuvre: Pierre Gagnaire

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Pierre Gagnaire. Photo: Mark Read

A profile of the bonkers superstar chef Pierre Gagnaire for Spear’s magazine

With Pierre Gagnaire, one senses, food is merely a conduit to higher things. ‘Jazz is a world music and is like cuisine in its multiform appearance reflecting the rhythms of life itself,’ he muses on his sprawling, largely impenetrable website. ‘The painter takes his own personal language,’ declaims the chef, ‘and uses that to express things which seemed inexpressible… The presentation of a dish teaches me new rules of harmony and through this exercise, I find a form of peace.’

He seems to prefer to see himself not as cook but as creator, an artist rather than a mere artisan. People with extensive experience of high-end restaurants often claim that the best — certainly the boldest — way to experience Gagnaire’s is to spurn the menu altogether, allowing the chef to ‘create’ according to his whims and fancy. This ‘can make the difference between an extraordinary experience and a disappointing one’, claims one well-known blogger.

The Observer restaurant critic Jay Rayner has written that Gagnaire off-menu is ‘a puff of nothing, bland and unmoving, a set of paintings with ingredients used only for their colour rather than their flavour’. But Gagnaire takes himself so seriously he even offers a protracted reading list, with publishers, the better for us to understand the man and his work.

Such self-importance can be rather off-putting, especially when the ‘creations’ don’t justify it — though in my experience of Gagnaire’s cooking they happily do. If the world of the superstar chef is at times an unpleasant one — endless plane journeys, meetings, interviews, handshakes, posing in kitchens, gurning for cameras — then Gagnaire suffers more than most. He has about a dozen restaurants around the world: in Courchevel, Paris, Moscow, Seoul, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and those famed gastronomic paradises, Dubai and Las Vegas. The fawning customers and, latterly, commercial success have provided Gagnaire with levels of self-belief remarkable even for a celebrity chef.

Continue reading at Spear’s WMS