You see, he was invited to take part in a discussion of food-writing in a couple of months’ time at The Cheltenham Festival of Literature, sponsored by The Times. And he said yes. And then I was asked to take part in it, too. Not all that surprising, really, what with me being The Times restaurant critic (who did he think he would be talking to, William Rees-Mogg?). But I’m told that when Gary heard I was on the bill, he carked it. Declared that he was not sharing a platform with me. So The Times said: “Fair enough, we’ll find another chef.” It’s not like there’s a shortage.
I’m only guessing, but it’s possible that Gary’s refusal to take part had something to do with my having given him a couple of bad reviews. Which I did only because, in the time since I began reviewing restaurants in The Times, Gary has opened two bad ones. Not execrable, just bad. And the reviews were not especially rude, just honest. I summed up his Rhodes 24, indeed, by saying that it “serves competent new-wave, old-school cooking in a crappy corporate room with a terrific, heart-stopping view”. Ooh, hark at me – the Simon Cowell of restaurants.
And then I flew to Grenada to check out a new restaurant called Gary Rhodes at the Calabash, and found just an old restaurant with a single dish in each course labelled “a touch of Rhodes” – and those dishes happened to be, at suppertime in high Caribbean summer, a starter of eggs Benedict and then a really awful, soupy risotto. It is true I speculated that Gary’s interest in the project was largely about the free flights and hotel rooms – but then I modestly observed that the same could be said of my interest in reviewing it.
Rhodes wrote to complain. At least his people did. They said I’d gone too early, with the menu still in a trial stage, and that I was picking on Gary for no reason. So I went back a year later. All the way to Grenada, 5,000 miles, to have another look at the restaurant they claimed was now entirely Gary Rhodes in every way. And it was exactly the same: two misconceived and badly executed “touch of Rhodes” dishes on an otherwise dreary big hotel menu. Still carpet-chompingly expensive (around twice the price of The Ivy), still a cynical marketing mirage. But I didn’t write about it again, because I have nothing personal against Gary Rhodes, and it might have looked like bullying.
And then the lily-livered swine pulls out of a literary festival because I’m in it. I mean, good Lord, it’s not as if I accepted the invitation out of a desire to talk to Gary Rhodes. I did it to plug my new novel (Winkler, published this week and yours for £15.29 – cheaper than Gary’s risotto – if you buy through The Times bookshop on 0870 1608080). I’d have thought that was the kind of cold, hard marketing nous of which Gary would approve.
But I shall lean on Gary’s reputation to hawk my fiction anyway, by attaching the details of my book to a review of his latest restaurant, at the Cumberland Hotel in London. And if the things that are wrong with it are because it isn’t finished yet and Gary is going back next year to sort them out, then I apologise, and look forward to his letter.
As it happens, I ate OK. Having read a review of his soft-boiled egg in a rival paper the other week, which
pronounced it overcooked and asked what kind of chef it was that could not boil an egg, I ordered it myself, to give him a shot at redemption. This time, no doubt pricked by that critic’s harsh words, the chef under-boiled the eggs. If you are going to cock up a boiled egg that is served with “Serrano ham breadsticks and asparagus spears” then this is a better way to cock them up, because at least you can still dunk. Indeed, some people like a layer of cold, wet, unset albumen on top of their yolk. The problem for me was that neither of these two witty plays on the notion of the soldier had the right texture to pick up any egg and transfer it to the mouth – they just slid right on out unmoistened, like ducks from a slimy urban pond.
A dear old friend of mine, over briefly from Oman, where he is but a humble English teacher and aspiring novelist, said he was enjoying his warm tiger prawns with crab cocktail salad and I did not have the heart to borrow even a mouthful from a man who lives on husks and camel meat for 51 weeks of the year. From the limp way they sat on his fork, though, the prawns looked overdone to me. The scallop risotto had good flavour but was, as in Grenada, the consistency of custard – maybe Rhodes does it deliberately.
My sand-dwelling pedagogic friend ordered the 10oz T-bone steak (there is also a 20oz one because London hotels always cater with Americans in mind), which declared itself to be: “Aged 28-day McDuff Scotch beef”, and when the waitress asked how he wanted it done he said, being an English teacher, “Seeing as it’s McDuff,
I had best have it bloody, as from its mother’s womb untimely ripp’d.” Aren’t teachers just the funniest guys?
The steak’s accompanying little bowl of nine, count them, nine chips, was derisory. As were the two wafer-thin slices of cotechino on my main course “confit duck and cotechino sausage salad”, which sat sadly, with a tasty bit of duck breast, on a mound of rather lame baby gem lettuce. We also tried an aubergine pasta dish that was OK in a wedding banquet veggie option sort of way. And then there were “jars for two” of rillettes or potted salmon, foie gras, haddock rarebit, gammon and pineapple (ho ho ho), a kilo of mussels, braised oxtail, you know the form.
If the food was adequate, the venue has all the charm of a Bolton Novotel conference centre and buffet hall, though it is hardly Gary’s fault that the lobby of the Cumberland is the size of an airport departure lounge, and no place for a restaurant. Indeed, perched on the edge of the uncomfortable cluster of tables in a far corner of the atrium, across vast acres of rolling prairie, dwarfed by giant pillars of laminated wood (or Formica) that reach into the sky like Jack’s beanstalk (or like some horrific dream of Albert Speer), we occasionally found ourselves looking round for the departure board in the hope that our plane was early and we could leave. Maybe go to Grenada and see if Gary’s restaurant there is ready yet.
RHODES W1
Cumberland Hotel,
Great Cumberland Place, W1
(020-7479 3838)
Meat/fish: 4 (the eggs are free-range, but the chicken, alas, was not so lucky)
Cooking: 5
Other: 4
Score: 4.33
Price: £40 per head sans grog
Rhodes 24
Tower 42, Old Broad Street, EC2
(020-7877 7703)
Don’t take my word for it, try it yourself. It’s got a Michelin star.
Winkler by Giles Coren
(Jonathan Cape, £16.99)
A novel by me, published August 25. Highly enjoyable, if you like that sort of thing. Has some rude bits, though, so don’t buy it if that worries you.
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk when you have read Winkler and tell me what you thought. But only if you liked it. Like Gary Rhodes, I don’t take criticism well
