While I was eating smoke-infused Indian small plates at Khai Khai on the Quayside in Newcastle, a curious thought occurred to me: 2023 seemed set to be the year that London’s restaurant scene lost its edge. Outside the M25, I was eating far better. I was midway through a plate of broccoli so charred I wrote that it looked as if it had been “chipped from Pompeii’s pavement”. The florets were festooned with pistachio, micro-greens and chilli. It was a Thursday night and the place was heaving, with queues out of the door. Gordon Ramsay had been in that month to sing Khai Khai’s praises. Oh, and Harrison Ford, too.
Things used to be more straightforward: even if Michelin fixated on Cumbria, London’s restaurant landscape was always a touch slicker and more innovative. You would eat better in Soho than in Solihull, or in Mayfair than in Macclesfield. But costs, Covid and other calamities have made London a less easy place to experiment. Meanwhile, in south-west Scotland, say, at both Mr Pook’s in Castle Douglas and Home in Dumfries, I found delightfully odd, fiercely unique places where chefs can let their freak flag fly. At Mr Pook’s, that meant panko-wrapped Dullarg duck eggs and marmalade bread-and-butter pudding with rum-and-raisin ice-cream, while at Home they served Angus steak with a side of fried lasagne.
For the rest of the year, anywhere but London continued to deliver. At Beckford Canteen in Bath, one of my openings of 2023, I ate a chocolate and jerusalem artichoke pudding, after a dinner of welsh rarebit with pickled red onions draped over it like a pretty, stained-glass window. At the Woolpack Inn in Gloucestershire, a pub that Laurie Lee used to love, we ate fresh beetroot with whole almonds and fiery horseradish.
Brighton offered up the unmissable, tiny, but fabulous Palmito, and in nearby Lewes the compact but perfect Fork serves a fabulous Sunday lunch with rare beef that lives on in my heart, as do its starter of cauliflower velouté with blue cheese beignets and hazelnuts and the mont blanc with spiced sponge dessert. One evening at the end of summer, we went to Clay’s near Reading, a restaurant that rose from the ashes of lockdown, and ate crab minapa garelu (spiced doughnuts) and chepala pulusu (Andhra-style fish curry) with blush-coloured beetroot rotis off a menu that is a cacophony of family recipes: “Food,” I wrote, “doesn’t get any more personal than this.”
Before I am banished from London completely for restaurant treason, there have been some wonderful openings in the capital this year: the recently relocated Chishuru, Akara and 64 Goodge Street are all places to put on your list, if you have one, while Tomos Parry’s Mountain is a buzzing, experimental rollercoaster of flavour, and as much evidence as you can have that London still wants to lead the way, even if Le Gavroche has called it a day. If you can nab a table at Homies on Donkeys in E11 for its heavenly Mexicana, go for the chicken thigh barbacoa tacos with smoked guajillo salsa and stay for the large plates of braised chuck pico de gallo and 90s hip-hop.
But, alas, across London, this seemed to be the year that capacious luxury hotels offered star-name chefs and chic dining experiences at ridiculously fierce prices. As I stared forlornly at my £28 plate of drab green beans at House of Ming in the Taj Hotel, sitting at the table where they shove single diners, overlooking the loos and the place they scrape the plates, I felt somewhat shortchanged. In many London restaurants, portions have become hysterically small, with the term “prawns” often meaning “one prawn, sliced multiple ways”, pasta served by the tablespoon and £50 lobster dishes that turn out to be a taste of the tail on a lacklustre waffle. It costs a lot to keep the lights on, let alone buy ingredients, and in times such as these I find myself longing for the rugged cheerfulness of Casa Romana in Carlisle, with its plentiful plates of salmon cooked in sambuca, or the cosy, rural splendour of the Kirkstyle Inn at Slaggyford, Northumberland, where three courses of sheep’s cheese mousse, beef cheek and dark chocolate cremeux come in at £30, which in this day and age, I wrote at the time, “felt like a misprint”.
So, London 0, the rest of the UK 1. But 2024 is all to play for …
