Reviewers, smaller cornettos, opium poppies as a food additive and other news and views

Trend that strikes at the heart of the restaurant business - Chefs who drop à la carte rebrand themselves as artist-performers whose work we pay to experience

A Conversation With Pete Wells - The New York Times’ restaurant critic on puncturing pretension in fine dining, the rise of foodie-ism, and why nothing tastes better than Oreos.

Q. Do you think you write too often about restaurants that are out of reach?

A. You know, I think about it. On the one hand, yes, a lot of these places we’re talking about are very small and not many people can get in, and some of them only do one seating a night or two seatings a night, or they’re open three or four days a week, and I do wonder about how many people they’re actually serving. On the other hand, the very places where the food is extremely creative and thought-out and a lot of care is taken, they do represent the higher end of refinement. There’s a little bit of tension there about wanting to write about places that regular people can actually go to and feel like I’m covering, for lack of a better word, advances in the field.

US fine wine sales to rise in 2016 as overall market shrinks – forecast

China finds restaurants using opium poppies in food - Thirty-five restaurants across China have been found illegally using opium poppies as a seasoning, officials have revealed. ... Poppy powder, which contains low amounts of opiates, is banned as a food additive in China. However, restaurants have previously been caught using it.

A Cooking Class Where New Immigrants Learn The Recipe For English - On a recent Wednesday afternoon, 20 recent immigrants and refugees to the United States streamed into a shiny commercial-size kitchen on the fourth floor of the Free Library of Philadelphia's central branch. They were here to partake in the library's take on teaching English as a second language. The program, dubbed Edible Alphabet, is run through the library and Nationalities Service Center, an organization that helps settle refugees when they arrive in Philadelphia. By offering English instruction in the form of a cooking lesson, organizers hope to provide a familiar setting for the students — who hail from over 10 different countries — to connect to each other.

Magnum and Cornetto ice creams to shrink - Unilever said the move was to help consumers "make healthier choices." From the spring, "single serving" portions will contain no more than 250 calories.

Eating for life: Live Well challenges restaurants, helps patrons - People say they want to eat better and live heathier, but how can they when restaurants are high-calorie dens of temptation? Fatty entrees, huge portions, endless drink refills — you know the gut-bulging feeling. The Live Well Restaurant program of the Allegheny County Health Department has an alternative — places where consumers are offered good-for-you meals, nutrition information and options that make for healthy choices. On Thursday the department rolled out the first five restaurants that will be able to display the Live Well sticker.

Investors toast Treasury Wine's earnings

Momofuku Seiobo - two hits and a miss in the restaurant reviews this week

I don't think I'm being cynical to suggest that when the same restaurant turns up on the dining review pages of a city's two major newspapers that the restaurant's public relations department has had a success. And so it has been this week with both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph opting on Tuesday to feature the Star Casino's Momofuku Seiōbo. The critics for both papers had complimentary things to say and the timing of their visit was sensible enough given that Monofuku changed chefs, and with that introduced a menu with a different emphasis, earlier this year.

But with my cynical journalist's hat on I could not fail to noticed that Tuesday's praise followed the exclusion of Monofuku from John Lethlean's Top 50 Hot Restaurants in the Weekend Australian magazine on the Saturday preceding. The blow of being dropped from this influential national listing was certainly softened by flattering home town reviews. I just wonder if that PR department had an inkling that Monofuku was on the way out and acted skilfully because of it.

Whatever. It is differences of opinion that add interest to restaurant reviews.

On this little blog we try and feature a variety of serious appraisals. You buy your paper and take your choice and to help we give a little summary of who is writing about what in our newspaper restaurant reviews section.

Follow the link and you'll find the list of the major writers.

And their recent offerings.

Click on the "Our summary HERE" to go to our summary of the restaurant that has been reviewed.

Recent postings on the blog are:

Momofuku Seiobo - Sydney Daily Telegraph
Momofuku Seiobo - Sydney Morning Herald
Rosie Campbell's - Sydney Morning Herald
Lester & Earl - Gold Coast Bulletin
Coast - Brisbane Courier Mail
Abbondante - Melbourne Herald Sun
Hattori Hanzo - Melbourne Age
Das Kaffeehaus - Melbourne Age

What's the point of most newspaper restaurant reviews?

A delightful and thought provoking piece in The Guardian this week on restaurant critics and what we readers should make of them. Media writer Peter Preston looks at how two of London's leading food writers, AA Gill and Giles Coren, disagree over a swanky Indian restaurant. While it is, as Preston writes, good entertainment, it does raise a serious question – where’s the solid advice on where to go for dinner?

Is the poshest new restaurant in town “a dismal experience” or a glowing “testament to a lifetime of forensic appetite and experience”? Do you think it has “far and away the nicest dining room in St James’s” or a “terrible” one, “too big, too modern, no soul … properly catastrophic?” In short, what happens when the critics you hire, the experts who ride high on your menu advising readers, can’t agree? About anything.

After giving some examples of such recent differences of opinion, Preston turns to the serious question of what’s the point of most newspaper reviews?

To tell you, the reader, where’s good to go. Reviewing is, in part, a consumer service. Of course different critics have different favourites, and you learn to follow those among them who fit your own. That’s an essential of film- or theatre-going. But food, with big bills attached, isn’t a smörgåsbord of opportunities: the reader needs solid advice (often distilled from a whole sheaf of reviews).

See what happens when one gastro guru disappoints another. The whole feeding chain becomes TripAdvisor with added adjectives. Coren made the point himself last week when, in true introvert fashion, he reported what a “senior restaurant critic” of his acquaintance had told a restaurateur he knows. She wasn’t going to review his new place because “it isn’t interesting enough”. And Coren only disagrees mildly: “I do not expect restaurants to be interesting. It’s a restaurant’s job to serve food and wine. It is my job to be interesting.”

Which is where “the Blonde” and “Esther” and sundry minor characters make their review bit-part appearances, along with witty essays on the future of the world, kiwi fruit and the northern powerhouse.

Of course there’s a load of experience and expertise on show here. Of course you can follow your favourite writer from Durham to Dover if you’ve the time and inclination. But restaurant reviewing has also become a series of elegant essays too frail to chomp.

Read the critics and take your choice - Temporada Canberra's restaurant of the year or a tragic example of the downstream effects of too little training?

There's a reason for this little

restaurant reviews button at the top of our pages. We are starting to index reviews and in time we hope to provide enough material for people to find a critic's review of places they have already been to. That should help our readers make up their own mind about whether the new place being raved about by an "expert" is going to appeal to them or not.
Consider these two conflicting comments below that have appeared in major newspapers this month. Now I have not been to Temporada myself but I am mightily confused about whether I should. Who to take notice of? The Australian's John Lethlean or Natasha Rudra of the Canberra Times?

Perhaps the table showing how all the critics rank Canberra restaurants will help you if you have a similar problem