Wouldn’t it be lovely if a look back at a year’s restaurant-going could get stuck into the good stuff straight away? If I could, say, just perv elegantly over the clever, vaguely indecent things that were done to hispi cabbage? But a consideration of the hospitality business in 2022 has to begin by acknowledging that restaurants were trading into brutal, wing-stripping economic headwinds. As restaurants serve as a replacement for the domestic, it makes sense that everything that affects us at home also affects them. Energy and ingredient cost rises have simply been punishing. Restaurateurs have also had to deal with wage inflation. Even if they could pay those increased salaries, staff weren’t always available for employment. The result has been a profound shortening of opening hours. Many ambitious places have dumped à la carte menus that they don’t have the bodies to execute, for tasting menus, yours for big bucks.
Consider Richoux on London’s Piccadilly. I loved their classic brasserie menu of prawn cocktails and steak frites and tarte tatins when I reviewed it in March. I especially liked the prices. Oh, the difference six months makes. Onion soup was £6.95; now it’s £10.50. Salmon à la plancha was £15.95; now it’s £22.95. Tarte tatin was £7.95; now it’s £12.95. Given its prime location, it’s still not appallingly expensive, but it’s certainly not the great value it originally was. Many of you have been there and told me how great it is, so there’s that, too. But it’s tough out there. If you can still afford to eat out, you really will be helping the hospitality sector get through one of the roughest patches in history.
Enough, already. Let’s get on to the good things. In 2022 I travelled from Aberdeen in the north to Worthing in the south, from Swansea in the west to Norwich in the east. I was privileged to eat stupidly well throughout. Sometimes it was just elements of dishes that stuck with me: the eye-widening emerald-green basil sorbet at Moonfish Café on that trip to Aberdeen, the hilarious use of Frazzles and Scampi Fries for the umami crumb on the hispi cabbage at XO Kitchen in Norwich. At Gigi Gao’s Favourite Authentic Chinese in Swansea, it wasn’t just the cheek-slapping Sichuan cookery, but the sequined creation that is Gigi Gao herself. A restaurant is never just a table, a chair and a plate of food. It is so much more besides. In this case it includes major interior design that puts the Cor! into decor.
There was a reassuringly robust showing for classical cooking this past year, designed to feed rather than make you gasp at the inventiveness. The 11-year-old Augustus in Taunton served me deep, porky faggots in gravy and a beautifully made chocolate éclair. At L’Hexagone in Norwich it was an impeccable steak tartare and crème brûlée. (Sympathies to L’Hexagone’s Thomas Aubrit, who incurred a nasty kitchen injury shortly after the review appeared, forcing a few weeks’ closure.) At Les 2 Garçons in London’s Crouch End, a late-career passion project by industry veterans Robert Reid and Jean-Christophe Slowik, it was perfect garlicky snails, crisp-skinned duck confit and the kind of impeccable rum baba that makes me stupidly emotional.
While London produced more teeth-grinding duds than elsewhere – Il Borro, with your catheter-shaped wine carafes and your clumsy peasant food at plutocrat prices, I’m looking at you – it also produced joys. Manteca in Shoreditch, the brave nose-to-tail take on the Italian repertoire, was one to which I returned repeatedly, for their brown crab-meat cacio e pepe, and for the wonderfully big-flavoured pig skin ragù with a puffy scratching the size of a dinner plate, served still warm from the deep fat fryer.
And so to a few awards. Best service really does have to go to Gigi Gao’s. I demand that every waiter I encounter from now on wears a silvery tasselled veil and comfortable trainers. The best starter award belongs to the whipped cod’s roe on toast, topped with fresh herbs and a soft-boiled egg at Sargasso in Margate. It was an awful lot of thought and care for £8. The best large dish award goes to the roasted cod’s head with sriracha butter sauce at Fallow. It was bold and clever and showed what can be done with the bits others discard. In a year when creamy things chucked in a bowl too often marked the meal’s end, the best dessert gong has to go to the beautiful chocolate work enclosing the gorgeous riff on rhubarb served to me at Fletchers at Grantley Hall, near Rippon. In an otherwise less than inspiring experience, that dessert menu shone.
Without doubt the passion project award goes to Yikouchi, the tiny café in Stirchley, Birmingham, where James Kirk-Gould served me the dishes he loved most on his travels in China. Another bowl of that chilli oil-drenched fried chicken, please. And my restaurant of the year? I’ll stay true to what I said in October and give it to Kushi-Ya in Nottingham, where intense young chaps with beards serve brilliant Japanese-inspired food at a brilliant price. I loved the reverse prawn toast, and the wild mushrooms with brown butter ponzu sauce, and the duck heart skewers, and the prawn sando. Oh, I just loved everything. Lucky Nottingham.
What about the worst? It was one I didn’t review. In May I found myself near Mirazur, a Michelin three-star in Menton in the south of France. Grand gastronomes talk breathlessly about it on account of the way chef Mauro Colagreco cooks by the moon’s phases. If only the darling moon helped him make nicer things to eat, but it doesn’t. In an interminable dinner, there were a couple of great dishes and too many that really weren’t. I can’t quite take speeches about caring deeply for the planet’s bounty when they still serve foie gras.
It concluded with a brackish fresh olive ice-cream, which was honestly the least pleasant thing I tasted in 2022. And all of this with a puckered atmosphere as if a cross between Jesus and Picasso himself had deigned to cook for us. With a €340 a head menu and a few glasses of wine, the bill came to more than €1,000 for two. In 2017, I wrote a controversial and less than positive review of the Michelin-three star Le Cinq in Paris. I couldn’t again be the guy who wrote disobliging things about a grand French sacred cow. So I chose to write nothing. Apart from this.
Hence my New Year’s resolution for 2023: avoid stupid mistakes like that.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
