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Mari Vanna, a wildly over-the-top take on Russian cooking, is a delicious carb-fest not to be taken lightly
116 Knightsbridge, London SW1 (020 7225 3122). Meal for two, including vodka and service £150
Spare a thought for the poor soul tasked with dusting the tchotchkes that cram the shelves of Mari Vanna in Knightsbridge. It's a Forth Road Bridge painting job, that. The place is crammed with knick-knacks and crockery, with white-painted farmhouse dressers and chandeliers. There are vintage photographs of the Russian family you never knew you had and partitions of artfully distressed wood in the loos, as if you're going for a slash in the outhouse of a tumbledown dacha you never knew you owned. It is over the top, shameless and curiously effective. Mari Vanna, the branch of a small chain with outposts in Moscow, St Petersburg and New York, bellows "I'm charming" at you until you surrender. Which, assuming you can swallow the prices, is what you do.
By the time I went it had been running for more than seven weeks, but still claimed to be on a soft opening, possibly the longest in London restaurant history. And if these are the soft opening prices, God help us if they crank it up. Humble starters are near a tenner or more, mains double that. On the menu it said: "We appreciate your understanding and patience as we work towards perfecting our menu, service and atmosphere," which feels like getting an apology in first. Not that there's much to apologise for. Mari Vanna, named after a fictional hostess, is what it is: a kitsch and loving take on the culinary traditions of Russia.
These, it should be said, are an acquired taste. It is, depending on your point of view, either the very essence of homely, cupboard-love cooking, or a combination of death-by-carbs and leftovers. The cult of the Russian salad has always baffled me. How cold cooked vegetables, here with the addition of cubes of sausage, all bound in mayo has managed to attain the status of classic is beyond me. Russian salad is what happens when it's late, the fridge is almost empty and you are very, very drunk. Here, it's done about as well as it can be done, the ingredients still having bite rather than disintegrating unto slurry.
Far better is a layered salad of salted herring, beetroot and potatoes. We order a bowl of pickles, which are big chunks of vinegar-cured crunchy things, and a couple of their pirogi, the classic bronze-burnished filled pastries. The minced beef and pork is the sort of thing that will see you through a snowed-in month. The more delicate sea-bass version will merely get you through a weekend.
For the main courses we stick to the classics. We have a dish of pelmeni. The silky little meat-stuffed dumplings come with a cooling bowl of soured cream and are completely compelling. We have golubtzi, the cabbage leaves stuffed with a big, butch mix of pork, veal and rice. At Mari Vanna everything is stuffed, including the diners. There may be friendly young Russian waiters who look like they work out a lot, but really you're being fed by a grandmother who doesn't understand the words "enough already". At Mari Vanna it doesn't matter what month it is. Winter is coming. Winter is always coming. So eat.
And drink, of course. There are many vodkas, sold by the 5cl shot at outrageous prices. So we slug Russian Standard vodka and chilli vodka and feel gravity take hold.
It says much for the food that it is the fabulous pastries, made of cream, sponge, cream, pastry and cream which bring lightness to the meal. The Napoleon is layers of puff pastry with heavily whipped cream, crusted with toasted almonds. The honey cake is a dozen thin layers of dark sponge with more cream and a slick of honeycomb. At which point your pancreas nails an "I quit" note to your small intestine, and curls up to die. Mari Vanna is completely bonkers, but in a sweet way. It really is charming. Now please do excuse me. I need to go for a lie down.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
When is a soft opening not a soft opening? When the restaurant in question is charging full whack. It's just as well, then, that this new Russian in Knightsbridge is already well up to speed
Our starter today is a minor ethical dilemma. On arriving at Mari Vanna, a new Russian restaurant in Knightsbridge, the waiter handed us a menu and said, "This is a soft opening, so please excuse us if there is a wait for dishes or things go wrong." The menu repeats the words "soft opening". The convention is that you don't review restaurants during a soft opening, the launch period during which friends, family and random passers-by try out the kitchen and service to check things are working.
So why am I reviewing it anyway? Because the convention is also that, during a soft opening, restaurants don't charge full price. But Mari Vanna seemed fully open for business: the website says nothing about soft openings, it wasn't mentioned when I booked and the prices seem to be full whack – at least, I hope they are: the mains lurk around £20, and your bill for dinner is certain to be some distance north of £100 for two. With respect, therefore, I don't think this is a soft opening, so I'm reviewing it as if it's fully open.
I'd say that Mari Vanna is up and running to very good effect. The service, often the weak point in new ventures, is super-friendly and super-efficient. This isn't really a surprise, because Mari Vanna is part of a small chain of theme restaurants, focusing on the idea of Russian nostalgia, and on this evidence they are wonderful. The room is like no other restaurant I've been in. That's because of the decor – there's just so much of it. No surface is undecorated. There are tchotchkes, trinkets, pictures, candles, jars, lights, and decoupages of old magazines literally everywhere. It is the busiest, cosiest, homeliest, least restaurant-like restaurant imaginable. The very obvious idea is to target well-off nostalgic former citizens of the old country.
The food is wonderful, too, in its way – its very, very Russian way. There's a full page of chopped salads, made with great care and considerable visual impact: mine featured beetroot, egg, salted herring and mayonnaise, and it was a superbly balanced dish of textures and flavours. I'm not sure I've got the point of Russian salad before. Courgette pancakes were light and soft – not crisp – and came with unsmoked salted salmon and soured cream – simple but well-executed. The pierogi (dumplings) were a surprise: they were more like tiny brioche loaves with a filling inside (a choice of three, sea bass, beef and pork, cabbage and egg). A bit heavy, I thought, but a table of Russians was tucking into them with enthusiasm, so maybe this is how they rock their pierogi back in the old country.
The mains look less interesting than the starters – if I went back, I think I might stick to the earlier pages of the menu. I had calf's liver, as recommended by the waitress. It was a sort of liver stroganoff, cooked quickly and finished in a cream sauce, that came with herby mashed potatoes. The liver looked overcooked, but wasn't; a satisfying and hearty dish, but by this point I was starting to reflect on the fact that of all the adjectives applied to Russian cooking, the word "light" isn't one that tends to crop up. Borscht was great, much less beetrooty than expected, with a generous dollop of beef to cut the vegetable's sweetness, and paprika to enliven it – a grown-up soup well on the way to being a stew.
My pudding was superb, red berries with a "Russian cream" that was whipped and enriched with egg yolk. I didn't, indeed couldn't, finish it. I can't remember the last time I ate a meal that featured cream in all three courses. I'm writing this at lunchtime the next day, and it's unclear at this moment whether I'm ever going to feel hungry again.
Be warned, though, that Mari Vanna seems to appeal to the fashion-forward, who are always keen to adopt ideas that reject current notions of restrained good taste. I think that's why the German woman at the next table was talking about "bio-cleansing" and loudly claiming that her very silly beaded cap was "channelling a little Stalin".
The festival has been set up to celebrate the authors and independent businesses that are thriving
An innovative literary festival is taking place in north Manchester that aims to challenge the skewing of cultural events south of the city.
The inaugural Prestwich Book Festival began this week and continues into next month. It celebrates the authors who live in or have connections with the area – novelists Alexandra Singer, Emma Jane Unsworth, Sherry Ashworth and Gill James, writers Kate Feld, Benjamin Judge, Claire Massey, Sarah Clare Conlon and Aaron Gow are also taking part.
Performance poet Longfella, also known as Tony Walsh, will perform Vocabaret with poet Jo Bell at the Church Inn on 14 June. Both poets have been poets-in-residence at the Glastonbury festival.
Alexandra Singer's debut novel, Tea at the Grand Tazi, was published to critical acclaim earlier this year. On 31 May, she will host a literary evening at Time for Tea with homemade cakes and hot drinks.
Emma Jane Unsworth will take part in two sold-out readings at the celebrated restaurant Aumbry, which will re-create the dishes from her first novel, Hungry, The Stars And Everything, published last year.
On the evening of Wednesday 23 May, Sherry Ashworth and Gill James read from their latest work for young adults and answer questions at a free event at Prestwich Library.
The festival's organiser, Ebba Brooks, tells me that Prestwich, like other areas, has suffered in recent years and has been very much overshadowed by south Manchester.
"Recently there's been a new feeling in Prestwich that a lot is happening," she says. A lot of enthusiastic small businesses have got involved with the festival.
"We wanted to do readings in other places, not just draughty community halls. The idea of the festival came to me last summer when I started realising that there were a lot of local authors."
On 7 June, a creative writing workshop led by Brooks takes place at Ellie Magpie – a craft, haberdashery and home decoration shop. Tickets must be booked in advance, with further details on the festival site.
For more on the genesis of the Prestwich literary festival, read this excellent blog post here.
Brooks speaks of the pride in the neighbourhood "in the face of a dilapidated high street and dog poo strewn pavements." As a book lover, she always wanted a literary festival on her doorstep "so I thought I'd better make it happen."
Brooks is hopeful it will become an annual event. It is anticipated that next year's festival will include a story writing competition for young people and performance poetry.
She wants the 2013 event to also celebrate the Jewish community in Prestwich and to be a celebration of Jewish authors.
Using data published here at the Datablog, designers at thetrainline.com have produced a pastel shade visualisation of lunch prices at Michelin starred restaurants across the British Isles. Click the image below to view the full size version.
• Who made this graphic? Designers from thetrainline.com
• Where can I find it? here
Establishments are ranked in order of the cost of a set lunch, grouped according to the number of courses included and colour-coded by region. The most affordable venue is the Hand and Flowers in Marlow, where two courses will set you back £15.
If you scroll down to the bottom of the larger image you will find the Fat Duck - Heston Blumenthal's flagship - where the set lunch consists of a whopping 14 courses and comes at an appropriately pricey £180!
20 restaurants are not included in the graphic since they either do not serve lunch or offer only an a la carte lunch menu. These establishments are listed at the very bottom of the full size image.
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He's London's hottest ticket, but until a few months ago no one had heard of him. Ollie Dabbous explains to OFM how it feels to be booked out until December and what it was like meeting Dave at Downing Street
• Ollie Dabbous' English asparagus, virgin rapeseed oil mayonnaise, toasted hazelnuts and meadowsweet recipe
Ollie Dabbous can remember the exact moment when he went from being the chef of a new, potentially promising restaurant to being the hottest new thing in the world of British food. It was Thursday 2 February, around 10.30am. He sits at one of the refectory-style tables in the downstairs bar of his London restaurant, scrolling through the messages on his phone. "Here it is," he says, passing the phone over. The text, from his friend Will, reads, "Standard LOVES you!!!" The first review of the restaurant, from Fay Maschler, the veteran critic of the London Evening Standard, had just gone online and to describe it as positive is to wallow in understatement. Maschler awards stars out of five, but hands out the maximum very rarely, perhaps once every two or three years. She had given Dabbous, which had been open for just two weeks, the maximum five stars.
"I was massively surprised," the 31-year-old chef says. "She came in on our third day. I didn't know her. I assumed she'd prefer something more refined. We're deliberately a bit rough around the edges."
Indeed. Whatever may have been said about the food served at this newcomer, Dabbous is no gilded gastro-palace. The decor is pure industrial chic: the original concrete floors given a polish. There are heavy metal-work screens and cages for bags and coats, hard-edged wooden, cloth-free tables. In my review I described it as looking like a gussied-up NCP car park, though that doesn't quite communicate the charm of the restaurant. And yet it is certainly hard-edged and functional. If there is any warmth it comes from the frosted window that hides the kitchen.
Maschler didn't care. She described the braised halibut with coastal herbs as "the best thing I have eaten in a long time". She called the entire restaurant a "game changer". Dabbous admits he was "blown away, but at the same time I had a lot of other things on my mind". He had a restaurant to run. In any case the review was about to become the front desk's problem. "It started happening about 3.30pm when the printed edition of the paper hit the streets," says the general manager, Graham Burton. "There was a phone call. And then another. And then another. You'd put the phone down and it would immediately be ringing. We went from two or three emails for bookings to 300 in about an hour." In the short term the review actually cost them money. They had to hire another member of staff just to answer the phones.
And that's how it's been ever since. There have been other wow reviews – from Giles Coren in the Times, from bloggers, from, well, me – and so the noise has continued, with Dabbous even attending last month's gathering of chefs at 10 Downing Street, in aid of VisitBritain, alongside, among others, the Ledbury's Brett Graham, French Laundry's Thomas Keller and El Bulli's Ferran Adrià. Later that week Dabbous won "best kitchen" at the Tatler restaurant awards.
On the day I meet him, in the last week of April, weekend dinners are booked up until the end of December. Even lunches are booked up into July. Dabbous is so hot you could fry an egg on its reputation, to be served on a hunk of their own black pudding, spun through with apple and caramelised onions, and smeared with a butch mango chutney.
And that's the thing. The noise has been generated by food that is the opposite of prissy and overworked. It's big on flavour. Or as Dabbous himself puts it, "I believe in restrained simplicity and cleanliness. I want a dish that has the wow factor but looks effortless. I don't want my food to look cheffy." And it doesn't. Perfect asparagus are accompanied by a dollop of mayonnaise made from rapeseed oil alongside the crunch of hazelnuts and you wonder why no one has done it like this before. A hunk of Ibérico pork, from the shoulder, and cooked over the barbecue, comes with a toffee mess of honey, roasted acorns, almonds, salt and a deep-flavoured smoked red pepper. Best of all is an egg shell refilled with a scramble of egg, long-sautéed mushrooms and smoked butter. There are versions of this dish in many high-end restaurants around the world. Not only is this one of the simplest and most accessible, it's also, at £7, one of the cheapest. Dabbous has broken through not simply because of the quality of the food, but because of the – albeit self-conscious – lack of flummery around it, and the price point. In a city that is subsumed under waves of concept and high-gloss, overworked crockery and 5,000 denier linen, it's a huge relief.
The curious thing is that the chef behind all this is a complete unknown. Usually when a hot restaurant appears, a few people know about the person behind the stove. They've already been marked out as the next big thing in newspaper features, been talked up by their mentors. They've done pop-ups. With Ollie Dabbous all was silence. And yet this gently spoken, lissom, slightly intense chef has the kind of CV most cooks would kill for. Not that he has the life story to match. "There's no story of me podding peas with my mum when I was a kid," he says.
Ollie Dabbous was born in Kuwait, where his French-Italian father was an architect. Later he, his brother and mother moved to live in Guildford for schooling, while his dad stayed in the Middle East and they commuted during the holidays. "I suppose I'm a bit of a mixed grill," he says.
"There was nothing particularly foodie in my childhood. In our house food was fuel." He describes his interest as self-propelled. He started baking at home, became intrigued by the business of cooking and when it came to finding a summer job he gravitated towards restaurants. When he was 15 he spent a month in Florence working in the kitchens of a trattoria where his father's cousin was a waiter. "I loved it," Dabbous says. "It was the produce, the accessibility of it."
It was that which made him decide to be a cook. And so he started writing letters. He wrote to Rowley Leigh at Kensington Place, who gave him a month's unpaid work experience when he was 16. Around the same time, through his father's connections, he landed another placement with the revered three-star chef Guy Savoy in Paris. They put him in the basement where he prepped girolles and artichokes for 12 hours a day. "It was shit but you just move on."
But it was the job in the kitchens of Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons in Oxfordshire, after finishing A-levels, that gave him the real start. "It was the best place to go. Everything was done from scratch. They can afford to do things properly. It's the hardest place I've worked." What, I ask, did he get from Le Manoir? "I learned to taste everything. I learned the importance of freshness, the importance of seasonality."
Raymond Blanc, who would later become a backer of his protege's restaurant, returns the compliment. "Some people take a long time to find their confidence," Blanc says. "Some find it immediately and Ollie was one of those. You could see he had a connection with the food and the people. And he was always asking questions." Blanc credits him with a cool head beyond his years, and a monstrous work ethic. "He was always a hugely hard worker." Ollie acknowledges this. "A lot of cooks would come and go at Le Manoir, but I stayed."
He rose to be senior chef de partie, before leaving to go on a journey through some of Europe's great kitchens. He did brief one-week stages at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck, at the highly regarded L'Astrance in Paris and at Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that has become the figurehead for the localism movement. There were longer stints with Claude Bosi at Hibiscus in Ludlow and at Mugaritz in Spain, one of the leading names in the new cookery of the country.
Finally he returned to Britain to work as head chef at Texture, the newly opened restaurant of another Manoir graduate, the Icelandic born Aggi Sverrisson. "His own restaurant was always the plan. He came here to learn," says Sverrisson. Does he see much of his style in what Dabbous is doing? "No, his food is his own but we have similar tastes. It's all the things we learned from Raymond. The lightness of sauces, the strength of flavours."
After two years at Texture, Dabbous went to work at a nightspot called the Cuckoo Club, where he met the Swedish-born bar man and mixologist Oskar Kinberg, who would become his business partner. Kinberg had always wanted to do a bar and restaurant, and in Dabbous, he says, he found the perfect collaborator. What was it about Dabbous' cooking that he found attractive? He frowns. "You've tasted his food, haven't you?" It's a fair point.
I ask whether the staggeringly positive response to the venture had any downsides. "Well, because the restaurant is so busy a lot of people assume the bar is full too, and until recently it wasn't." There is a bar menu served down here: chicken wings, steak sandwiches, black pudding. But in classic Dabbous style the simplicity of the names belie the work that's gone into them. All the chicken wings are boned out, the relishes on the steak sandwich are their own, the black pudding is the one they make themselves. "To be honest, I just wanted this restaurant to survive," Kinberg says. "I thought it would take six months to get established. Not two weeks." It's good news for the relatively large group of backers, including family and friends, all of whom threw money into the pot.
For a while I stand in the small corridor of a kitchen during the lunch service. There is a coal barbecue they had built for them, and a couple of sous-vide water baths. Dabbous has his tiny pass by the door. Though there are knives and tongs, the implements of choice are tweezers for the placing of blooms and green herbs, and pipettes for dripping in just the right amount of oil or vinegar to a dressing. It is, like the food, quiet, controlled.
There is no shouting and clattering. Ollie Dabbous is clearly exactly where he wants to be: assembling the dishes he first started thinking about four years ago. I ask him where the idea of putting his name above the door came from. "We just wanted a word that didn't shout restaurant or bar. It's an odd word. It sounded right. If I'd known what was going to happen, though, I wouldn't have done it." Why not? "It just looks ludicrously egotistical."
Out by the front desk they are, as ever, fielding phone calls, making apologetic noises about the length of wait for tables. Suddenly they get a cancellation for lunch at the same moment as someone walks in off the street innocently wondering if they have a table for two. "You're in luck," the receptionist says. I tell the two new arrivals they may be the luckiest diners in London and they grin. "Weirdly," the general manager says, "it may be the one way of actually getting a table here at short notice. But please don't tell everyone or we'll have queues out the door."
At any other restaurant of this calibre, the idea of queues down the street would be ludicrous; the way things have been going for Dabbous recently, it really doesn't seem so far-fetched.
• Dabbous, 39 Whitfield Street, London W1T 2SF; dabbous.co.uk; 020 7323 1544
From mango monomania to the meatball menu, restaurants offering Hobson's choice are appearing everywhere
It's often said that less is more, and the restaurant industry has taken this literally with a flurry of single and dual dish restaurants opening lately. Like the trend for shorter wine lists, menus are becoming pared down with just a handful of options. But are simple menus here to stay? Or are these restaurants just one, or two, hit wonders?
Dual dish restaurants are having a bit of a moment right now. The folk behind Goodman opened Burger & Lobster in December last year to rapturous reviews from London's bloggers. The restaurant keeps it simple with just three options - a burger served bloody, a whole lobster and a lobster roll.
Former Ledbury chef James Knappett will launch Bubbledogs, an unorthodox marriage of hotdogs and champagne, in July. The menu is slightly longer, with 10 dishes on it, but still restrained by most standards. Head west to Bristol and you'll find a more traditional combination of craft beer and pizza at Beerd, where the beer list is considerably longer than the pizza menu. And back in London, Mark Hix is soon to open The Tramshed, a Shoreditch hangout with a no-fuss menu of chicken and steak.
Some restaurants go one step further and specialise in a single dish or ingredient. There Soho's aptly named Madd, which serves only mango based dishes, and the slightly less eccentric Meatballs in Clerkenwell, which sells, yes, you've guessed it, meatballs. Leeds has Primo's Gourmet Hotdogs, which dishes up nine variations on the sausage theme. Taking it to the extreme is Le Relais de Venise in Manchester or London, which has a grand total of one dish on the menu. Well I suppose you can't go wrong with steak and chips.
The trend for single dish joints originated in New York (don't they all?). From macaroni cheese to fries to rice pudding, if you can think of a comfort food, there's a New York restaurant for it. And if the queues are anything to go by, niche restaurants are doing very well on these shores too.
Putting all your eggs in one basket isn't without its pitfalls though. As Jay Rayner pointed out in his review of risotto bar Ooze, if you do only one thing you need to do it well. With a lone dish on the menu there's no hiding if it's not up to scratch. If you're not a jack of all trades then you need to be master of one.
Assuming a restaurant does excel at the dishes it sells, a simple menu should make life easy for the diner. Research by Columbia & Stanford universities suggests giving a consumer too many options means they fail to make a decision at all. Simple menus with few choices make dining straightforward. That's as long as you can decide which of the many niche restaurants to go to in the first place.
Simpler menus bring benefits for the restaurants too, with potential for less waste. This is something Gordon Ramsay was always banging on about in Kitchen Nightmares. It can only be a good thing for both the environment. And of course the restaurateur's pocket.
I can't help thinking that churning out the same old dishes must get boring for the chefs though. And these no-fuss menus bore me too. I like to turn up at a restaurant and choose what to eat as the mood takes me. In fact, I love specials, even though I know half the time it's just the chef using up leftovers. There won't be too many surprises if I have dinner at Meatballs. And what happens if I fancy a hotdog but my friend wants a burger?
Ultimately the buzz around niche restaurants tells us that plenty of people love these one trick ponies. But once the dust settles, will we still be standing in line for a lobster roll?
What do you think? Are specialised restaurants just a gimmick? Or does a narrow focus mean a better executed dish? Do you prefer a stripped down menu, or is more more?
Neighbourhood restaurant Market Café serves the residents of Hackney from early morning right through to supper
2 Broadway Market, London E8 (020 7249 9070). Meal for two, including wine and service, £80
Every restaurant in Hackney serves breakfast. It's the law. They just have to, because without it the vanguard of our creative industries would have nowhere to go to eat off their negroni-induced hangovers. The fonts on our magazine spreads would be gauche. The copywriting on our adverts would be shamefully free of achingly clever neologisms. Our chairs would be overly functional, our websites eye-rollingly banal. And all for the sake of some joint serving a reasonable eggs Benedict or a really bad version of huevos rancheros made by someone who's never been to LA but read about it once in an old copy of Arena in a dentist's waiting room.
That's just what Hackney is like. Normally I don't have to go there, because I live in Brixton. If you live in one you don't ever have to visit the other. That's also the law. Then again I do like to serve.
Getting into a black cab from King's Cross I asked for Broadway Market and the driver said: "Yeah, that figures." I asked him what he meant. "Well, you're trendy, aren't you?" This was thrilling. I haven't been called trendy since my ill-advised Flock of Seagulls haircut in 1982, when I slightly overdid it with the home peroxide kit. Then again, I don't think the driver meant it as a compliment. Actually, come to think of it, trendy wasn't meant as a compliment in 1982 either. Though the whole pointing and laughing thing was uncalled for.
Happily nobody pointed and laughed at the Market Café, possibly because the staff is all trendier than I am. It was set up by Hugo Warner, formerly the "ugo" bit of the sandwich chain Benugo, which he left a few years ago. It's a big, echoey, re-engineered pubby space with wooden floorboards, Formica-topped tables and a daytime clientele of new mothers with startled expressions on their faces clinging to each other for safety. They serve breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. And a few things in between. They serve everything, in a vaguely Italian-meets-Britain sort of way. So devilled kidneys on toast sit very happily alongside pecorino salads or a plate of coppa.
There is nothing radical about any of this. A restaurant that looks like Market Café, staffed by people who are trendier than you serving food off a menu which reads like this one could have been launched at any time in the past decade and a half. There is one major difference, though. Ten years ago it would have been rubbish, every dish a clumsy approximation of what they had promised. It would have been the kind of place you would only ever have visited for breakfast when your hangover cried out for hot fat and carbs.
Most of what we ate was far better than OK. Those devilled kidneys were pert and soft and proper pink at the centre and came with a spiky sauce and a thick piece of sourdough toast. A truffled rarebit may have been light on the truffle bit, but the rarebit bit was all cheese and mustard and punch. A squid salad with fat garden peas and rocket was sprightly and, like me, fresh and well dressed. There were thick slices of chargrilled lamb with salsa verde and roasted carrots, and a plate of their own tagliatelle with a sauce of sausagemeat and Parma ham that spoke of long, slow cooking. The menu makes much of the hand cutting of the tagliatelle. To be honest they may want to go back to getting a machine to do it. It was not the most glorious moment in the history of pasta, but the sauce made up for it. £12 brought a portion so big you could camp in it.
Desserts were less successful. An Amalfi lemon sorbet had none of the fragrance I associate with the promise of that word. It was also served inside a hollowed-out lemon, which is retro in a bad way. A rhubarb trifle was a bit of a churned-up mess. Still, they have cakes on the counter which may be a better bet. There are good wines by the glass, and a gentle buzz of people being well fed. It is, as ever, the quality of a place like this, set up less as a destination than a neighbourhood joint, which gives cause for optimism. Things are looking up. Hell, I might even go back for breakfast.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
While the cooking at this country pub may not match that at The Sportsman, its big brother up on the north Kent coast, there's still a lot to recommend it
Some things get clearer as you look back on them. It's more than a year since I ate at the Sportsman near Whitstable, and my opinion of the place has only gone up since. Looking back, and looking at the competition, it's evident that it's one of the very best restaurants in the UK. The Sportsman also does exactly my kind of cooking, emphasising flavour and oomph without unnecessary floofiness in presentation, service or set-up.
The Terry brothers, who own the Sportsman, also own another pub in Kent, the Granville, in the village of Lower Hardres near Canterbury. It's more pubby than the Sportsman, which is a restaurant in pub form rather than somewhere you go for a pint; I'd say the Granville is what's sometimes called "a dining pub". That's an inelegant term, but then the vocabulary on this subject is generally awkward and insufficiently clear. I suppose the sequence, in ascending order of food-centricness, goes something like this: pub, pub with food, dining pub, restaurant in pub form. Order at the table? Order at the counter? Get your own drinks at the counter? Unless it's wine, in which case they bring it. Also: tip or don't tip? I've heard foreign visitors complain that, while pubs are wonderful, they're also hard to understand, with lots of unwritten rules – the upsurge in pub food has made them more complicated still.
At the Granville, you order at the counter from menus written on chalkboards. You order the wine at the counter, but they bring it over. (See? Different rules.) There's a daily menu and a set lunch menu, the latter noticeably good value at £12.95 for two courses or £15.95 for three. The food isn't quite as ambitious as at the Sportsman: here there's bresaola or mussels in white wine as starters, and roast pork belly with crackling as a main, whereas the big brother pub has slip soles grilled in seaweed butter as a starter and turbot braised in vin jaune with smoked pork belly as a main. On the other hand, the prices here are lower.
The cooking is good – not amazing in the way that the Sportsman is, but well above average even for a well-regarded pub restaurant. It makes a serious attempt to fill the customer up, too, which is important in the pub business: it's quite a while since I've seen main courses that are such full-on platefuls. The best dishes were both starters: an oriental crispy pork salad with a sticky but not oversweet sesame dressing, and lots of leaves to add greenery and texture and extend the impact of the sauce. My son said it was the best salad he'd ever eaten – it's close to being the first he's ever eaten, too, which perhaps makes it even higher praise. The other standout was herring roes on a crisp, white bread crouton and dressed with lots of lemon and parsley butter. The key thing here was the absolutely accurate cooking of the roes: they go wrong if even a little under or over, but these had the perfect, creamy, rich softness.
The rest was not quite at that level. Coq au vin was a hearty, tasty version of the classic, the sticky, red-wine sauce, liberally spiked with bacon, setting off a good-quality bird. Mussels in white wine was a competent, comforting staple, as was roast pork belly with crackling and apple sauce. Pouting, one of those sustainable fish we're encouraged to eat, was fried and came with red wine sauce and a superb horseradish cream that did dominate, but that's not a problem for those of us who love it. The veg served with the main courses were excellent, with particularly good, super-light, super-crunchy roast potatoes.
When it came to puds, flourless chocolate cake might have been a bit dry, but then it sometimes is; there's a reason people use flour. Blackcurrant and white chocolate cheesecake, on the other hand, was the perfect texture, and had a great balance of acidity from the fruit and sweetness from the chocolate. Service, like everything else about the place, works well, too. We were on our way back from the Channel Tunnel, and it exactly fit the Michelin definition of a place that was vaut le détour.
• The Granville, Faussett Hill, Street End, Lower Hardres, Canterbury, Kent, 01227 700402. Open lunch Tues-Sun, noon-2pm (2.30pm Sun), dinner Tues-Sat, 6.45-9pm. Set lunch, from £12.95 for two courses.
The head chef at Claridge's explains to a tribunal how a lack of seasoning led to the dismissal of a trainee chef
Gourmets will no longer recount with quite the same pleasure the epicurean delights of Claridge's famous dish – ratatouille. For the hors d'oeuvres recipe was revealed yesterday in a not so exclusive industrial tribunal in London by Mrs Gertrude Hobday, head chef at Claridge's.
The offending dish, now widely publicised, led to the dismissal of trainee chef Richard Elvidge, who according to Claridge's was responsible for a wide variety of "culinary disasters."
The tribunal was told that Mr Elvidge, aged 19 and fresh out of Grimsby Technical College, had made the dish. But a customer complained that there was no pepper or salt. After Mr Elvidge's ratatouille had been returned to the head chef, Mrs Hobday took the rest of the dish from the fridge and added her own seasoning. She then asked Mr Elvidge to try it.
He said: "Yes that's better," but did not seem concerned about the incident. The next day she said to him: "You are not interested in the job." He replied: "No, I am not."
She became upset and started to cry. Mrs Hobday told the head chef to take Mr Elvidge out of her kitchen as she had had enough. "It is either him or me," she told the head chef, and yesterday emphasised: "I meant it."
Mr Elvidge had told Mrs Hobday he was member of a trade union and had asked her to join, the tribunal heard. She said that she was not interested, but if everyone joined, "I suppose I would have to." Cross-examined by Mr Andrew Collender, instructed by the Municipal and General Workers' Union, Mrs Hobday said she knew Mr Elvidge was actively recruiting for the union, but did not know he had the nicknames Jack Jones or Joe Gormley. "I don't even know who Jack Jones is, I am not politically interested," she said. "If I have any problems I solve them myself and if I am not satisfied l leave. If anyone wants to join in a union let them do as they like." Mr Elvidge, she said, had never said he was interested in the catering trade, and he told her he was going to go bricklaying in the summer. The hearing was adjourned until today.
For those who wish to make ratatouille a la Claridge's at home, Mrs Hobday's recipe for nine people is:
Assemble all the ingredients on the kitchen table: 6 sliced onions; 8 green sliced peppers; 8 sliced courgettes; 8 sliced aubergines; 2 tins of pimentoe red; 2 16oz tins of plum tomatoes; tomato paste; salt; pepper; chopped garlic and 2 bay leaves. Then fry the vegetables separately in oil. Drain off the oil. Make puree of plum tomatoes and also the tins of red pimentoes and tomato paste. Add salt, pepper and chopped garlic and add the puree to the fried vegetables. Place in a casserole with the bay leaves on top. Cover with greaseproof paper. Then place the lid on top and cook in a hot oven for 20 minutes.
Ferran Adrià accused of paying a former investor an excessively low price for his stake in the world-famous restaurant
One of the world's most celebrated chefs, Spaniard Ferran Adrià, is to appear in court over allegations that he cheated a former partner out of his proper share in the legendary El Bulli restaurant.
The heirs of Miquel Horta, a former financial backer and shareholder in El Bulli, claim that the chef took advantage of their father's frail mental health to con him into selling his share in the business for a knockdown rate, according to Spain's Cadena SER radio station.
Horta's children, who have taken control of his interests becuse of his mental health, say that his financing of a new, bigger kitchen at the beachside restaurant outside the north-eastern town of Roses was key to El Bulli's later success.
Horta received 20% of the business in return for putting in the money to rebuild and expand the kitchens in the early 1990s.
In 2005, Adrià and his business partner Juli Soler bought out Horta – who had originally made his money from making eau de cologne. They reportedly paid Horta €1m for the 20% share.
Now Horta's sons, Jofre and Sergi, claim that Adrià and Soler deliberately set an excessively low valuation for a restaurant that had become a brand name with global recognition.
They have produced an independent valuation, which reportedly priced El Bulli as nine times higher than the rate paid to their father – or some €45m altogether.
A civil court judge in Barcelona has set a trial date for November, although experts say the two sides could reach an out-of-court settlement before that.
Adrià did not respond publicly to the announcement of the trial and there was no response to messages left by the Guardian.
The Catalan chef closed El Bulli last July, ending a period of 17 years in which he and Soler turned it into the world's most famous restaurant.
He said at the time that he had wanted to close the restaurant while it was still at its best.
El Bulli was voted Restaurant magazine's best restaurant for five years running from 2006.
Cadena SER reported that both Adrià and Soler had decided not to comment on the Horta affair in public – though Soler was reportedly "hurt" by the allegations.
"The truth is I am not interested in polemics," Adrià told a television interviewer last year after news of a dispute with the Horta family first became public.
"I haven't got involved because one has to be aware that one cannot be liked by everyone, that is impossible."
Last year, Adrià said that the restaurant barely made money. "This is like a research and development department. You shouldn't expect it to make money," he said.
Professor Julia Prats, an economist who carried out a case study on El Bulli for the University of Navarre's IESE business school, told the Guardian that it worked more as a marketing tool for Adrià. "Even if it breaks even, that's an accomplishment," she said.
The Horta family believe that their father was "cheated by the accused, who hid from him both profits and parallel activities carried out through third companies during the time he was a partner".
In the meantime, the Adrià family has now branched out into tapas bars in nearby Barcelona.
El Bulli is being turned into a research foundation, with architects plans already available for a new cinema-brainstorming house inside what looks like a large rock, and other buildings including an archive.
The new buildings will have to win planning approval, as El Bulli is inside the Cap de Creus natural park.
Adrià has teamed up with Spanish telecoms company Telefonica, which is the foundation's main sponsor.
• This article was amended on 10 May 2012. The original said incorrectly that Miquel Horta had died.
Oliver Dabbous is being hailed as the next big thing. There's only one problem: you'll never taste his cooking
39 Whitfield Street, London W1 (020 7323 1544). Meal for two, including wine and service, £140
This review is of no use to you. Oh sure, it might gift you vicarious pleasure. But if you're here looking for tips on where to eat well, give it up. Go clean the fish tank. Turn the page and have a look at what Dan thinks you should be doing in the garden this week. The fact is that, unless you are stupidly stubborn or absurdly flexible, getting a table at Dabbous will prove tougher than getting through to a real human being on the TalkTalk helpline. I tried four times to book, (under pseudonyms, natch), only to be told they had nothing at a time I could manage for months. I only got in eventually because a friend who is a journalist for the New York Times begged and pleaded (without revealing the identity of his companion). Once he'd got the table it would have been churlish not to go.
So there you have it: Dabbous is so damn hot you could blister your palms on it. Other so-called critics have already dribbled into their keyboards over the place and proclaimed it a very heaven on earth. The young chef, Oliver Dabbous, who worked with Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir and then at Texture in London, is being hailed as the new culinary messiah. All praise him and so on. The problem, of course, is that nowhere can live up to this level of hype. There is a temptation to roll your eyes and sigh, "It's really not all that." This isn't the restaurant's fault; they are doing now what they did at the start a couple of months ago. It's the opinions swirling around them which have done the damage.
So, how good is it? In places, very. If you like your restaurants to look like they were carved out of the workshop in a decommissioned car plant, Dabbous is the place for you. It's all hard surfaces and gloom and glower. Downstairs is a bar where they mix a good negroni. Upstairs is the dining room, where music throbs and people who are better dressed than you patrol the tables.
Dabbous's food is, for the most part, exceptionally balanced and thought out. The menu is short – just five small plates and six larger ones – and ingredient led. So tiny Jersey royals, the first of the season, come warm in a dairy fat-rich buttermilk sauce which is both savoury and sour. Asparagus turns up with a mayonnaise made with rapeseed oil and a crush of hazelnuts.
Best of all is the egg, described on the menu, redundantly, as a hen's egg – well, the cock's not going to bloody lay the thing, is it? The egg is lightly scrambled and mixed with a dice of mushrooms and smoked butter before being returned to the shell. Oh my. There are lots of versions of this dish. L'Arpège in Paris does one. Jean Georges in New York does one. Neither of those costs £7. But some starters miss the mark. A beef tartar is so finely minced, for example, as to be denatured; the advertised cigar oil, whisky and rye make no impact.
Of the bigger dishes we tried, the star was a hunk of barbecued Iberico pork with a sticky-toffee mess described as a savoury acorn praline. It was sweet and umami and, being less technical, lick-the-plate-clean good. By contrast, barbecued lamb belly, a big fatty cut which can take a spanking, was a little "so what?" A soupy dish of squid in a dark broth of seaweed, radishes and toasted buckwheat again hit 11 out of 10 on the Spinal Tap umami scale, but was not much at all for £12.
And so, with the advice to order four dishes each from the seemingly reasonably priced menu ringing in our ears, we saw the bill for our meal accumulate. To be eaten in a gussied-up NCP car park. Desserts – there are but four – feel like an afterthought. Iced lovage is a grass-clipping granita, in a good (ish) way. A light pastry shell filled with custard cream, and a whimsical affair in which a chocolate ganache is partnered with basil made to look like moss give you something to do while you try to work out just how good Dabbous really is. Or at least that's what it gave us. You? You'll give up trying to get a table. Perhaps wait a while then go. It's worth a look. And that, friends, is what we call an outrageous understatement.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
The director and columnist on David Cameron, being a grump, bad restaurants and refusing an OBE
You dated your wife, Geraldine, on and off for 55 years before finally tying the knot last September. Has being married made a difference?
It's much the same as it was before. I say: "Darling, you're absolutely right" a lot more than I used to.
Do you argue?
The atomic bomb at Hiroshima has nothing on Geraldine. You can't row with her, you just sit back and pray you're not going to be killed. I don't mind a row. I've had screaming rows with people and we've all made up and we're friends.
Do you regret never having children?
I'm not good with children. When they're young, they make a noise. You go to someone's house for dinner and suddenly they bring on these children and say: "Aren't they wonderful?" Well, no, they're not.
You had a tricky relationship with your parents...
Well, not many people have had £10m stolen from them by their mother [Winner's mother, Helen, gambled much of the family fortune away]. It was a very strange relationship but she was a wonderful woman. She was demented, the only person I've ever been frightened of in my life – I saw her reduce QCs to oil slicks – but I admired that, God bless her. When she was on form, she lit up a room and when not on form, she was utterly deadly. So what? Burt Lancaster tried to kill me three times and he was one of my best friends.
You had your first newspaper column at 14 and went to Cambridge at 17. Were you terribly precocious?
I was extremely shy and I still am...You had to put on an act, to become somebody else when you met the stars, and then you went back to being a confused, shy person. Michael Caine said to me the other day: "I was so shy when I was young that when people came to the house, I hid in a cupboard." I totally understood what he meant. I'm a recluse, basically.
Most people would perhaps be surprised to hear that…
Yes, but people don't know what they're talking about. Few celebrities are anything like their public persona. I've built up this ludicrous comedy character.
Do you have a thin skin?
Well, I'm not like Barbra Streisand. If she had a bad review, she'd go to bed for a week. If you're going to put yourself in the public eye, you're going to get flak for it.
You've just given an in-depth interview for the Sky Arts In Confidence series. Were you nervous?
Darling, I've been doing in-depth interviews for 60 years!
What did you think when David Cameron used your catchphrase "Calm down, dear" at prime minister's questions?
He took a phrase used endlessly on Twitter and elsewhere – God bless him – and the socialists start going berserk! At a time of financial meltdown, not enough hospitals… I mean, get a life. In showbiz, in the 50s, we all called each other "darling" or "dear". It was absolutely normal. Now the politically correct brigade has decided, foolishly, that certain things are not right.
Do you like David Cameron?
I've met him quite a few times. I do like him. Whether he's a genius politician, I don't know.
What is the worst restaurant in the UK?
The worst meal I've had in ages was at the Chicago Rib Shack. It was beyond human belief.
It's surprising that you get such bad service in restaurants. Surely people recognise you?
Every restaurant now has receptionists from Outer Silesia. Michael Caine told me that he rang up Scott's for a table. The voice came back: "Michael Caine. How do you spell it?"
Do you hang out with other restaurant critics?
Darling, I'm not a restaurant critic and I've got 986 columns to prove it. I write a funny piece each week about my life in restaurants. I know nothing about food. Mind you, none of the others does either.
In 2007, you got a bacterial infection from eating an oyster in Barbados and almost had your leg amputated. Do you still eat oysters?
No. I'm crippled as a result of eating oysters and then I got E. coli from steak tartare. It was food getting its own back.
Is it true you turned down an OBE?
I turned down two. They wrote to me, saying that Tony Blair would like to honour me with an OBE for my work with the Police Memorial Trust [the charity Winner founded in 1984]. I replied: "Thank you so much, I will continue my good work unrewarded." Then they wrote again, asking me to reconsider. I sent that one back too. My friend Don Black, the lyricist, rang me afterwards and said: "Why have you turned down the OBE? I've got one and so has Joan Collins." I said: "My case rests."
Are you proud of your reputation for grumpiness?
As you get older, restraints fall away, social graces vanish and you become more outspoken, which is good. The British are pathetic at complaining. If five people go to a restaurant, the food is terrible and takes for ever to arrive, the maitre d' will come at the end and say: "Everything all right?" and they'll say: "Oh yes, lovely." What's that about? They're afraid of drawing attention to themselves. They're afraid of retribution.
Maybe they just want to be liked?
That is a big problem. If you want to be liked, you're dead.
If you could come back in the next life as a plate of food, what would it be?
I'd like to be an English fry-up because it's very difficult to do right, to get the toast done at the same time as the tomato and the egg.
Would there be black pudding on the plate as well?
I'm a poor boy from Willesden, darling. Black pudding is beyond our ken.
There's a whole lot more to Peruvian cuisine than roasted guinea pig
The Tintin books have a running gag in which Captain Haddock picks up a glass of the local firewater, overconfidently chugs it and then almost chokes to death from the strength of the hooch. He does it with aguardiente, with spadj (a Balkan loony juice, which, I think, Hergé made up) and with the national drink of Peru, pisco. That happens in Prisoners Of The Sun, and as a result I've been mildly curious about pisco since before I was old enough to drink. I stress "mildly" – after all, the stuff does make Haddock gag.
It eventually came time to scratch that particular itch. My opportunity came at Ceviche in Soho. Pisco is a specialty of the place, which is somewhere you can go for a drink and a bite to eat as much as it is a restaurant – a fact that contributes to the nicely casual, relaxed atmosphere. There's a large list of macerados, or pisco infusions, as well as a list of pisco cocktails. I tried a chilli macerado; my friend had one infused with sour cherry; they were delicious and tasted of chilli and sour cherry, respectively. So it turns out Captain Haddock was a wimp.
Peruvians claim the dish ceviche as their own. I subscribe to the rival theory that it comes from Polynesia, but I can see why Peruvians would want it, since it's such an interesting thing to eat: fish "cooked" with citrus, which makes the proteins coagulate in the same way that heat does. (The Polynesians, who travelled huge distances by canoe, would have had strong reasons for inventing a dish that allowed them to cook fish without using firewood. I'll shut up about this now.) Ceviche is simple in conception, has great possibilities for subtlety and complexity in execution, gives a strong kick of flavour, and depends on fresh ingredients – so it's very modern. I can see why you'd name a restaurant after it, rather than the other great Peruvian specialty, cuy. That's guinea pig to you. Peruvians get through 65 million of them a year. It's perfectly legal to cook them in the UK, but I've never heard of anybody doing it.
I really like ceviche, and I really liked Ceviche. They have a ceviche bar at the restaurant, and do a good job of stressing the variety of which the dish is capable. All feature tiger's milk (leche de tigre), the marinading emulsion of lime, chilli and salt that is the star ingredient in the Peruvian way of ceviche (it's sometimes served in a shot glass on the side, too, I'm told). Some tiger's milks are sharper and more acidic, some hotter and some milder; the balance of fish and tiger's milk is part of the drama and interest of the dish. I particularly liked the Don Ceviche, small chunks of sea bass with ají amarillo chilli in the milk and ají limo chilli on the fish, and it was interestingly different from another sea bass dish, "Barranco I Love You". That's a silly name but it was a serious starter in which the bass was sliced thin and served with an ají amarillo tiger's milk and pieces of intriguingly tasty giant Peruvian corn.
There's lots to be interested in after the ceviche. Grills are big in Peru, as elsewhere in Latin America; here, they feature in proteiny skewers of meat. I've only eaten beef heart in slow-cooked versions, but at Ceviche it comes in a thin slice on a skewer, and very good it is, too, roughly like calf's liver in flavour, but with a chewier, denser texture. Other dishes included a duck confit with lots of coriander and rice cooked in beer with more of that super-authentic corn. Wok-cooked strips of beef came with a soy-oriented "saltado" sauce – the dish showed the Chinese influence that is one of the things that makes Peruvian cooking so interesting. It was also the dish we liked best. The only odd or bland note was a side of beetroot purée with a coriander-oriented cake of mashed potato; this was the only spud in the meal, which is odd given that they come from Peru.
Pisco returned as a theme at pudding, in a spirit-soaked cinnamon sponge, served with a lovely dulce de leche ice-cream – the sort of dessert that vanishes as soon as it hits the table. I left Ceviche happy, and wanting either to go back or to visit Peru. I know which is likelier.
• Ceviche 17 Frith Street, London W1, 020-7292 2040. Open Mon-Thurs, noon-3pm, 5-11.45pm, Fri-Sun noon-11.45pm (10.15pm Sun). From around £30 a head.
Politicians rarely choose restaurants for the menu, but George Galloway's love of a good grill makes him a notable exception
On Monday, shortly after being dragged to the Commons to explain himself over the Jeremy Hunt affair, David Cameron was back at Downing Street brooding over the serious stuff. "Where," he asked a group of food writers, at No 10 to celebrate British food, "should I go to eat?" Well, I told him, it depends what you like. "Oh, you know, we do rather enjoy wandering up to Chinatown for a Chinese." While the image of Sam and Dave trotting up Whitehall for a bit of crispy duck is charming, it does confirm suspicions – politicians have no taste. If you want good Chinese food, Chinatown is the least likely place to find it.
Then again, politicians rarely choose restaurants for the food. They go to be seen or, more often, not to be seen, to reinforce an image, or because the food is so unchallenging it won't distract from the business of plotting. Last week we learned that in 2009, when Cameron met James Murdoch to be told the Sun would be endorsing the Conservatives at the next election, they did so at the George Club, a members-only joint in Mayfair where the menu is pure urban Cosmopolitan male, with just a hint of nursery. Yes, there is tuna and salmon tartare with white miso on the menu, but there is also roast chicken with mash, and Dover sole.
Intriguingly, it is exactly the same gastronomically bisexual proposition once served at the now long-gone Granita in Islington, where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown made their disputed leadership pact in 1994. There it was mussels with lemon grass and coconut milk on the exotic side; plain old grilled sea bass on the other. Proof, if needed, of how much the personnel of New Labour and the coalition have in common.
Old Labour's tastes were a little more solid. The likes of Jim Callaghan, Michael Foot and Denis Healey used to congregate at the Gay Hussar, the Hungarian old-stager in Soho, where the menu was all cherry soup, roast duck, dumplings and cakes that could harden an artery at 100 paces. The late Victor Sassie, who oversaw the dining room, was a classic man of the old left. He adored his restaurant's status as the Labour party canteen; his kitchen staff, less so. "Old Labour used to love eating there," says Shaun Hill, now the chef at the Walnut Tree near Abergavenny, who cooked at the Gay Hussar in the early 70s. "But many of the kitchen staff were rightwing Hungarians who had done a runner from the country in 1956 and Austrians who fought with the Nazis in the second world war."
Today's politicians clearly have simpler tastes. Inside the building on Millbank, where the media have their Westminster operations, is a restaurant called The Atrium, used as a see-and-be-seen lunch venue by MPs. Last December it announced breathlessly that it was bringing in a dashing new chef with a menu of modernist fancies such as pork with white chocolate and tonka bean. Within a few weeks it was announcing - rather less breathlessly - that the menu was going back to Cumberland sausages with mustard mash, and battered hake with chips and mushy peas. It seemed nobody had ever been going there for the food.
Some politicians though, like to go their own way when it comes to eating out, none more so than George Galloway, newly elected MP for Bradford West. He has been tweeting almost daily from the Lahore Cafe Bar in his constituency. "When he's in Bradford he comes twice a day," says the owner, Ishfaq Farooq. At lunchtime, he says, Galloway has the £3.49 lasagne. "But if it's dinner, he'll have the mixed grill." That's a whacking plate of tandoori lamb chops, grilled fish, seekh kebabs and chicken wings, all for £9.99. I may not like Galloway's policies, but as a big fan of Pakistani grill houses I do like his restaurant tips.
As for the prime minister, I said he should take Samantha to a terrific new bistro in Soho called 10 Greek Street; whether the restaurant will be thrilled to have the business is another matter.
The sedate spa town of Harrogate is one of the jewels in Yorkshire's crown, but do you need to be minted to eat well there? Tony Naylor goes beyond Bettys Tea Rooms in search of the best places to eat for under £10 a head
• As featured in our holiday guide to North Yorkshire
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Within this posh Yorkshire food store, there is also a cafe which knocks out locally sourced breakfasts, sandwiches and appetising lunch dishes, such as smoked duck potato cakes. It is popular if lacking in atmosphere: you sit serenaded by the background hum of refrigeration units. You are very much eating in a shop. A sample plate of eggs Florentine was a generous portion, the smoked salmon decent, the eggs sunny. However, at £6.25, elements of it (somewhat tired, dry spinach; one egg's yolk already popped; the Hollandaise lacking a pointed sharpness) were a little sloppy. It was adequate but no classic and, if you're really watching the pennies, my advice would be to skip the cafe and buy a few takeaway bits to eat in the park opposite. The store sells Voakes's excellent pork pies, warm homemade pasties and savoury lattices, handsome salads and sandwiches. Its Weeton's wedgie (£1.50), a peppery open cheese-and-potato pie, is sensational.
• Takeaway snack items 60p-£4.50, cafe meals £4.95-£10.95. 23-24 West Park, 01423 507100, weetons.com
While primarily a coffee shop – one whose conscientious craftsmanship is clear in a sample flat white (£2.40) – Bean & Bud also sells a limited selection of first-rate food. Its remarkably fresh, packed-that-morning sandwiches use ingredients from a neighbouring butcher and Harrogate's renowned dairy dazzler, the Cheeseboard. A sample Coverdale cheese (like a creamier, cleaner Wensleydale) and red onion marmalade sandwich was impeccable. Cakes, meanwhile, come from Brighton-based, Sticky Fingers. That might seem a bit ridiculous, geographically, but SF – a small, family operation with a growing following among independent retailers – makes superb cakes. Its Tunisian orange cake is highly recommended. By Harrogate standards, Bean & Bud is quite the bohemian hangout, too. I certainly didn't hear Belle & Sebastian anywhere else on this visit.
• Coffee from £1.50, sandwiches £3.20, cakes £1.90-£2.60. 14 Commercial Street, 01423 508200, beanandbud.co.uk
Above Farrah's chocolatier and gift store – which itself sells sandwiches, from £1.99, and Voakes's award-winning pies – this is a rather old-fashioned cafe in both good ways (home-cooked food prepared with decent local ingredients) and bad (rather drab, grannyish decor). A dish of rich Lyonnaise potatoes, proper sausages and sweet beetroot and carrot salad was every bit as tasty as it sounds. Yes, admittedly, after being reheated, those sausages had taken on a distinctive ever-so-slightly mushy texture, but, at this price-point, in a limited kitchen, that goes with the territory. Flavour is more important than finicky detail, and Palm Court is making the best of itself, across a menu that teems with things you would gladly eat: Yorkshire ale rarebit; homemade chilli; curried sweet potato soup; ploughman platters. Moreover, it is doing so at prices which, by local standards, are a pound or so cheaper than the norm. There's a 20% takeaway discount, too.
• Meals £3.45-£6.25. 29 Montpellier Parade, 01423 566220, palmcourtcafeharrogate.co.uk
In Harrogate, there are numerous traditional venues offering afternoon tea. If you are looking for something more modern, minus the doilies, this Montpellier Quarter cafe, complete with its shocking pink furniture, Burt Bacharach soundtrack and fantastical cupcakes, should suffice. To metropolitan baking hipsters, the cupcake may be very much last year's thing, but, even at this unfashionably late hour, the eponymous Charlotte Mitchell's creations are a reminder of just how good the cupcake can be. Not only do her pretend lemon meringue pies and sham vanilla sundaes (complete with chocolate flake) look fantastic, but they taste remarkably of what they should, with none of the sickliness or artificiality that often dogs cupcakes. Her sticky toffee pudding creation, particularly, is in a light, beautifully crafted class apart.
• Cupcakes £1.95. 5a Royal Parade, 01423 524330, cupcakesbycharley.co.uk
It is an illustration of how Britain is tightening its collective belt that, even in well-to-do Harrogate, a restaurant of Sasso's reputation needs to discount. The upside, for the budget traveller, is that you can eat two courses for £8.95 (at lunch and before 7pm Mon-Fri) at this Good Food Guide and Michelin-listed Italian. Good complimentary tapenade and somewhat pappy bread, was followed by a discus-sized Milanese fish cake, served with an interesting, zippily dressed mixed salad and a creamy, nicely calibrated horseradish sauce. The cake was well-seasoned and accurately cooked, the filling fairly generous. All in all, it was a very pleasant plate of food. The only sour note was having to listen to a bloke at the next table, one of several middle-aged, lunchtime bargain hunters, explain how public sector waste is strangling the UK economy.
• Before 7pm, two courses, £8.95. 8-10 Princes Square, 01423 508838, sassorestaurant.co.uk
Midweek lunchtime and this slightly dated modern restaurant – clean lines, abstract art, curious plum 'n' pale green colour scheme – was packed. Its very competitively priced lunchtime menu clearly has a loyal local following. It's not hard to see why. Service is efficient and super-friendly, little touches (water comes with ice 'n' lemon in an attractive blue pottery jug) set it apart, and the kitchen is sending out reasonably sharp versions of crowd-pleasing international classics such as stroganoff, salmon pasta in dill and watercress sauce, Caesar salad, and stir-fried chicken noodles with hoi sin vegetables. A chunky fish broth was a big bowlful which, while not making any pretence to bouillabaisse levels of sophistication – the broth's predominant flavour was tomato and garlic, not fish – was hearty, flavourful and packed with lightly fried gnocchi and sizable hunks of salmon, white fish and, slightly dry, tuna. Likewise, the rouille was a rather route-one blended paste, but tasty. For £6, who's complaining?
• Lunchtime set menu, two courses, £8, three, £10. Light lunch meals £6-£8. 3 Royal Parade, 01423 503034, quantro.co.uk
Another lunchtime bargain and, arguably, the pick of the bunch. Good in their different ways as Sasso and Quantro were, the experience at chef-owner Lionel Strub's French restaurant is, in all respects, a step up. With its understated pale blue and off-white colour scheme and its decorative ironwork sculptures, the space itself is classy. The service is also easygoing, chatty and on the ball, in a way that is all too rare. The food was of a piece with this. An accurately cooked sea bass fillet arrived on a generous portion of vibrant, saline samphire with a beurre blanc that had a pleasing vinegary twang. This came with a good side of vegetables (carrots slightly overcooked, the only misstep), as well as free filtered water and a little complimentary appetiser of good beetroot and walnut bread. If one of the aims of a discounted lunch menu is to tempt you back to pay full price at night, Mirabelle's was certainly the most persuasive.
• Lunch, one course £8.95, two £11.95. 28a Swan Road, 01423 565551, mirabellerestaurant.co.uk
Attached to the slick White Hart Hotel, the Badger has been given a rather OTT makeover. With its taxidermy, oil paintings, Chesterfield sofas, faux-flickering gas lamps and handsome dark wood fixtures, it looks how big old Victorian pubs might had Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen been alive at the time. The food, however – and the Fat Badger is particularly useful in that you can eat here all day – will quiet any misgivings about the decor. There are sharing platters, upmarket sandwiches and pasta dishes, plus a handful of mains, such as fish and chips, Niçoise salad and Asian baby back ribs with fries, priced at just under a tenner. The lunch deal (two courses for two, £18.95), where you can choose between the likes of haddock in a butter and caper sauce with bubble and squeak, or Cumberland sausage and mash with onion marmalade, looks good value. Judging by a sample bowl of mushroom soup – big-hitting flavours, a nice sour cream edge, dressed with a seriously pungent truffle oil – the kitchen is cooking with enough rigour and skill to pull off the above with aplomb. A pint of Blonde Witch (£3.30), one of six real ales, was in okay if not sparkling form.
• Snacks, sandwiches and sharing platters, £4.95-£10.95, mains £7.95-£11.95. Coldbath Road, 01423 505681, thefatbadger.co.uk
Chatting as my meal is cooked, the guy behind the counter tells me he has spent so long in fish 'n' chip shops, he can now tell what brand of oil a chippy is using, just by sniffing the air. That is the kind of knowledge you want in a chip shop. This being Yorkshire of course, Graveley's uses beef dripping. A good quality one too, I'd guess, given that my haddock and chips was perhaps most notable for the savoury unctuousness, that ineffable lip-smacking background beefiness, which echoed through both the chips and fish. The former had a decent crunch, if not a shattering glassiness, while the batter was thin enough, if not quite of the tempura-like lightness it can be. The mushy peas (90p) were bright and fresh and a reminder of what a warming, soul-stirring treat they can be when made properly. Graveley's chip shop is attached to a more elaborate restaurant, and so it also offers relatively exotic items, such as smoked mackerel paté, prawn cocktail and Whitby wholetail scampi, to take away.
• Lunch, haddock and chips, from £3.25, evenings from £4.70. 8-12 Cheltenham Parade, 01423 507093, graveleysofharrogate.com
Tucked away upstairs at the Blues Bar, Hani Zayed's one-man operation serves homely Egyptian food at very keen prices. Don't expect anything flash. Zayed's done what he can with the room – rich scents, a few rugs and trinkets, and ambient north African music help set the mood – but it's all pretty make do and mend. There are Carlsberg beer mats and paper napkins on the tables, the chairs don't match and old blues icons are still immortalised in murals on the walls. The food, likewise, is all about flavour rather than fussy presentation. From a menu that includes familiar eastern Mediterranean staples, such as baba ganoush, ful medames and shish kebabs, I enjoyed an intriguing stew of (slightly gristly) lamb in a heady gravy, full of fragrant diverging herb and spice flavours, the sauce at times almost sour, at others almost perfumed. It was served plainly, with rice, like a curry. Not the place to take a fussy eater, then, but a find if you fancy a bit of unexpected adventure in Harrogate.
• Starters £4-£5.75, mains £6-£8. Upstairs at the Blues Bar, 4 Montpellier Parade, 0779 122 8256, bluesbar.co.uk
Tony travelled from Manchester to Harrogate with Northern Rail (northernrail.org). For more information on Harrogate, visit yorkshire.com
• Britain's best budget restaurants - read more of Tony's reviews
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