Edinburgh’s michelin men
The 2010 Michelin Guide has made hearts swell in Edinburgh, where I live: we now have five Michelin stars, with another just across the water in Fife, at the Peat Inn, near Cupar. Outside London, no other city in these islands has as many: Dublin has four and Birmingham has three, Manchester and Glasgow have none. Don’t think of moving here, though: we’re full up.
Chefs respect Michelin like no other award system because of its rigour and history (the star rating was launched in 1933). A Michelin star is the only bouquet they will die for—in 2003 Bernard Loiseau, chef and owner of Burgundy’s La Côte d’Or, took his own life amid rumours he would lose one of his three stars. But this obsession is not necessarily a boon for the diner. Matthew Norman, the Guardian’s restaurant critic, blames it for the many irritating meals served by chefs imitating the “molecular gastronomy” techniques used by Heston Blumenthal or Ferran Adria.
Many in the food world groan at Michelin’s conservatism—until the guide pins a medal on a spot they have championed. They say the Guide Rouge remains absurdly male; that it is passionless and restricted by the “scientific” judging system, with its presumption of absolute standards in cooking. And, notoriously, its biases towards food that is French, expensive and classical.
They have a point—two years ago, it was discovered that only two of the 12 inspectors working on the first Hong Kong and Macau Michelin Guide were Chinese. This year’s headline award in Britain was—boringly—yet another star for Alain Ducasse (at the Dorchester). This apostle of modern haute cuisine now has 19 for his chain of some 30 restaurants across the world. Certainly four of the five (all male) chefs who now hold stars in Edinburgh are working in the French tradition. Although Tom Kitchin, in Leith, has localised his classical training, celebrating the Scottish seasons and championing our game and fish.
Still, I find Michelin more useful than guides that are composed of punters’ reviews, like toptable.com or Zagat. If we relied on democratic consensus we’d all be eating at Pizza Hut. So I went for lunch at Edinburgh’s newest Michelin entry: 21212.
Paul Kitching’s restaurant opened in May 2009. It occupies a whole house on Edinburgh’s grandest terrace and cost £4.5m to do up, including bedrooms. Inside, amid the satin and the gilt, contemplating lunch at £35 a head for three courses (the same as the three-star Dorchester), you might think 2008 had never happened. Except that only two other tables were occupied.
We thought the food was entertainingly bonkers. The menu features just seven dishes, but each gives its money’s worth, if you’re counting ingredients and man-hours. My starter was: “Slow Cooked Nuggets of Smoked Salmon With All Things Tomato, A Confit, Relish, Dried, Grilled, Aubergine Caviar, Almonds, Smoked Streaky Bacon, ‘Marie Rose,’ Pea Sprouts, Mint Sauce.” A friend once dubbed this sort of thing “cuisine infantile”—as though a toddler had grabbed everything it liked and thrown it all in a bowl. And blown flavoured foam on top.
Did it work? It made us giggle. An espresso-sized soup bowl contained layers of celeriac, carrot puree, root vegetables, a dried fig and a chestnut. It was rather good. With the cheese came a curry-and-coconut flavoured oatcake—that was horrible.
When 21212 opened, London’s most influential restaurant critic AA Gill sneered at Kitching’s “car crash” menu—and the chances of staid, penny-pinching Edinburgh stomaching it. But what should award-winning food be about if not new riffs on tradition, flair and surprise? Michelin has supported this inventive chef since first awarding a star to his restaurant, Juniper, in Manchester 12 years ago. If Kitching survives the cold it will be interesting to see what he does next. And you can’t say that of Alain Ducasse.
No chicken feed
I was told off the other day by a Defra press officer for encouraging the Times’s readers to break the law. I had advised them to feed kitchen scraps to their chickens (if they had obtained these fashionable recession-era gadgets) or their pigs. This was in an article on trying to cut my food waste, a current obsession of the government. Through the agency Wrap, it has been chiding householders for throwing away 30 per cent of the food they buy.
The nagging press officer was right, of course. After the foot and mouth outbreaks of 2001, it became illegal here and in the rest of the EU to feed commercial or domestic catering waste to animals. This rule ends nine millennia of a mutually beneficial relationship between humans and omnivorous domesticated animals, and is ignored across much of the continent. Here, 1.7m tonnes of food, once boiled for pigswill, now goes into landfill.
Laws aren’t bad just because they’re regularly flouted—but this one is a stupid over-reaction. It punishes the smallholder and the amateur, when the root of most animal disease—from BSE to swine flu—is in the corner-cutting practices of industrial farming. Recently Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, has been urging Britons towards greater food self-sufficiency and more sustainable farming. It is daft that the time-honoured method of turning waste into bacon and eggs is illegal.
The 2010 Michelin Guide has made hearts swell in Edinburgh, where I live: we now have five Michelin stars, with another just across the water in Fife, at the Peat Inn, near Cupar. Outside London, no other city in these islands has as many: Dublin has four and Birmingham has three, Manchester and Glasgow have none. Don’t think of moving here, though: we’re full up.
Chefs respect Michelin like no other award system because of its rigour and history (the star rating was launched in 1933). A Michelin star is the only bouquet they will die for—in 2003 Bernard Loiseau, chef and owner of Burgundy’s La Côte d’Or, took his own life amid rumours he would lose one of his three stars. But this obsession is not necessarily a boon for the diner. Matthew Norman, the Guardian’s restaurant critic, blames it for the many irritating meals served by chefs imitating the “molecular gastronomy” techniques used by Heston Blumenthal or Ferran Adria.
Many in the food world groan at Michelin’s conservatism—until the guide pins a medal on a spot they have championed. They say the Guide Rouge remains absurdly male; that it is passionless and restricted by the “scientific” judging system, with its presumption of absolute standards in cooking. And, notoriously, its biases towards food that is French, expensive and classical.
They have a point—two years ago, it was discovered that only two of the 12 inspectors working on the first Hong Kong and Macau Michelin Guide were Chinese. This year’s headline award in Britain was—boringly—yet another star for Alain Ducasse (at the Dorchester). This apostle of modern haute cuisine now has 19 for his chain of some 30 restaurants across the world. Certainly four of the five (all male) chefs who now hold stars in Edinburgh are working in the French tradition. Although Tom Kitchin, in Leith, has localised his classical training, celebrating the Scottish seasons and championing our game and fish.
Still, I find Michelin more useful than guides that are composed of punters’ reviews, like toptable.com or Zagat. If we relied on democratic consensus we’d all be eating at Pizza Hut. So I went for lunch at Edinburgh’s newest Michelin entry: 21212.
Paul Kitching’s restaurant opened in May 2009. It occupies a whole house on Edinburgh’s grandest terrace and cost £4.5m to do up, including bedrooms. Inside, amid the satin and the gilt, contemplating lunch at £35 a head for three courses (the same as the three-star Dorchester), you might think 2008 had never happened. Except that only two other tables were occupied.
We thought the food was entertainingly bonkers. The menu features just seven dishes, but each gives its money’s worth, if you’re counting ingredients and man-hours. My starter was: “Slow Cooked Nuggets of Smoked Salmon With All Things Tomato, A Confit, Relish, Dried, Grilled, Aubergine Caviar, Almonds, Smoked Streaky Bacon, ‘Marie Rose,’ Pea Sprouts, Mint Sauce.” A friend once dubbed this sort of thing “cuisine infantile”—as though a toddler had grabbed everything it liked and thrown it all in a bowl. And blown flavoured foam on top.
Did it work? It made us giggle. An espresso-sized soup bowl contained layers of celeriac, carrot puree, root vegetables, a dried fig and a chestnut. It was rather good. With the cheese came a curry-and-coconut flavoured oatcake—that was horrible.
When 21212 opened, London’s most influential restaurant critic AA Gill sneered at Kitching’s “car crash” menu—and the chances of staid, penny-pinching Edinburgh stomaching it. But what should award-winning food be about if not new riffs on tradition, flair and surprise? Michelin has supported this inventive chef since first awarding a star to his restaurant, Juniper, in Manchester 12 years ago. If Kitching survives the cold it will be interesting to see what he does next. And you can’t say that of Alain Ducasse.
No chicken feed
I was told off the other day by a Defra press officer for encouraging the Times’s readers to break the law. I had advised them to feed kitchen scraps to their chickens (if they had obtained these fashionable recession-era gadgets) or their pigs. This was in an article on trying to cut my food waste, a current obsession of the government. Through the agency Wrap, it has been chiding householders for throwing away 30 per cent of the food they buy.
The nagging press officer was right, of course. After the foot and mouth outbreaks of 2001, it became illegal here and in the rest of the EU to feed commercial or domestic catering waste to animals. This rule ends nine millennia of a mutually beneficial relationship between humans and omnivorous domesticated animals, and is ignored across much of the continent. Here, 1.7m tonnes of food, once boiled for pigswill, now goes into landfill.
Laws aren’t bad just because they’re regularly flouted—but this one is a stupid over-reaction. It punishes the smallholder and the amateur, when the root of most animal disease—from BSE to swine flu—is in the corner-cutting practices of industrial farming. Recently Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, has been urging Britons towards greater food self-sufficiency and more sustainable farming. It is daft that the time-honoured method of turning waste into bacon and eggs is illegal.
