Food news, restaurant news, offers and promotions and general musings
Tony Singh: could he be a contender?
OK, this is completely and utterly unofficial but rumour has it that the Scottish chefs competing to represent Scotland in the next series of Great British Menu will be Alan Murchison of Paris House in Woburn; Michael Smith of The Three Chimneys in Skye and Tony Singh of both Oloroso and the 5pm listed Tony's Table in Edinburgh.
The government is launching a campaign to encourage customers to ask where their tips go
Tips make great stories. In 2007, A waitress at a Pizza Hut restaurant in Indiana received a $10,000 tip, rumoured to be the largest tip ever. It may well be the largest tip given in a restaurant but, according to this interview on the Big Hospitality site, it pales compared to the £136,000 tipped by the Sultan of Brunei following a three week hotel stay.
While tipping makes brilliant headlines, it is a controversial subject in the restaurant trade. Customers like to think that any money they leave behind goes to the staff but that isn't always the case. Until recently, some but by no means all restaurants used the money left behind for tips to make up staff pay to the national minimum wage.
Effectively, customers were subsidising the restaurants' wage bill. It is a practice that most customers would object to but, for the restaurateurs who did it, it was seen as a means of competing in an industry where profit margins can be very low.
Since October of last year, using tips to top up wages to the national minimum has become illegal. However, this doesn't mean that all tips have to go to the staff. The actual business or its owner can still take a cut of tips.
The Department of Business Innovation and Skill (BIS) is launching a national campaign today calling on consumers to ask, ‘Who gets the Tip?’ Their research shows that two out of three customers are more likely to return to a business that clearly displays their tipping policy than one that doesn't. The moral being that if restaurateurs want repeat custom then they should be upfront about where your tip goes.
Among the other factoids thrown up by the survey were the following:
Scots are the most likely to tip all the time (45% compared to 30% overall figure), but are the least likely to see any information displayed about tipping.
The English fall behind the Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish as the least likely to leave a tip.
Scots are the most likely to feel uncomfortable asking the question about tipping policies (54% compared to 39%).
Only one in seven Scots ask what happens to their tip (14%), with over half (54%) not feeling comfortable in doing so.
The majority of Scots are more likely to go back to a business that does provide tipping information (67%); and that allows staff to keep the majority of their tips (72%).
Men are more regular tippers than women (80% compared to 77%) but women are more likely to tip in hairdressers / beauty establishments (50% compared to 26% of men).
Marketing cheese 101: the French method
Following on from our earlier cheesy post, I was tickled by this story in The Telegraph about the French cheese industry and its attempts to revive their flagging fromage sales. In Britain, if we want to boost the sales of a food stuff then we have national food days; we run competitions to find the country's best chippies and we get Keith Chegwin to pose as a celebrity chip connoisseur.
In France, they do things differently. If your Livarot sales are looking liverish or your Bleu d'Auvergne market share chart has peaked then the obvious answer is to have your cheese snapped next to a scantily-clad woman and turned into a calendar.
The Fromagiere contemplates a blue
Can you tell your gorgonzola from a Roquefort? Ever wondered what makes a Stinky bishop smell or why Emmenthal has got holes in it? The Roving Fromagiere has the answers. The Fromagiere is Phoebe Weller. A one woman fount of cheesy knowledge, Phoebe used to run the Iain Mellis cheese shop on Glasgow's Great Western Road before looking after Delizique. These days she is a wandering cheese guru who is launching a series of cheese tutorials in Glasgow.
Starting on Thursday11 March and running for eight weeks in the Big Mouth Coffee Company on Dumbarton Road, the tutorials last an hour and each one covers six cheeses.
The curriculum looks like this:
11.03.10 Ewes' milk cheese: a gentle introduction to the delicate sheeps' cheeses.
18.03.10 Goats' milk cheese: only rubbish goats' cheeses taste bad. We'll be examining the good ones.
25.03.10 English cheese: exploring traditional and not so traditional English cheeses.
01.04.10 French cheeses: the best of the best.
08.04.10 Scottish cheese: deep, rich, earthy and from the homeland.
15.04.10 Irish cheeses: turning the traditionals on their heads
22.04.10 Wash-rinded cheese: intense and stinky.
29.04.10 Blue cheeses: from gorgonzola dolce to roquefort.
It costs £6 a class or £45 for the full course of 8 tutorials and, one suspects, that by the end of the eighth tutorial you will never again find yourself at the supermarket check-out with a block of day-glo plastic cheddar lurking in your basket. If you want to know more about cheese than you ever thought possible then book in here: therovingfromagiere@gmail.com
Anton Ego: the food critic from Ratatouille
The Independent's restaurant reviewer John Walsh has written a revealing piece about what he is looking for when he reviews a restaurant. Sunlight, a good steak, decent bottles at the lower price end of the wine list and informed staff were in. Pretentious menus, foam and a meet 'n' greet or shake 'n' fake with the chef were out.
Any review is just a checklist of the reviewer's personal preferences and tastes so it's no surprise that I don't agree with quite a few of Walsh's criteria. His moaning about 'hand-dived' scallops, for instance, seems short-sighted. If it doesn't say they are hand-dived then they have probably been dredged which, in these eco-conscious days, is akin to saying that you only ever buy furniture from wood that has been illegally logged in the rain forests of the Amazon.
It's interesting which facets of a restaurant yank some people's chain but mean nothing to others. Last week, I spoke to one of Edinburgh's Michelin starred chefs who had been sent a blistering letter of complaint by a customer who, at least during his meal, had seemed perfectly happy. Top of the complaints list was the fact that the waiting staff had addressed the customers as Sir rather than calling them by name. Secondly, the bread had been served after the amuse-bouches rather than before.
I'm not sure I would have noticed either of these things far less write about them. That was a snippy letter of complaint rather than a review but it goes some way towards showing how subjective these things are. When you are reading a restaurant review, what really matters to you? Is it purely the food or are you also interested in things like the service, the decor and the cleanliness or otherwise of the loos?
(finalists here http://www.scottishrestaurantawards.co.uk/ ) #
Osteria Piero! #
was anyone else there last night? #
Michael Winner: nearly as tanned as David Dickinson
It's no surprise that when you read those who-would-come-to-your-perfect-dinner-party pieces in the Sunday supplements that Michael Winner's name rarely crops up. Rude, pompous and the star of the world's most annoying TV commercial, most people would rather commit hari kari with the dessert spoon then listen to Winner windbag on and on.
However, as those clever people at ITV1 know, there is a lot of money to be made from being annoying. His 'Calm down dear' ads for Esure may be intensely irritating but, according to research, they are the most effective ads that the company has ever run in terms of prompting recall of the Esure name.
ITV will be hoping for a similar reaction tonight when it broadcasts the first epsiode in a new series called Michael Winner's Dining Stars. In it, the Sunday Times restaurant critic goes to the houses of everyday people who, it seems, will stop at nothing to get on the telly. These people cook for Winner who is then extremely rude about them and their food.
In tonight's episode, Winner goes to Lancashire. Obviously, he is suspsicious of anywhere north of the Watford Gap.
According to Winner: “The north is not a place I frequently go to, it is an alien country, it is another land, but it is beautiful. The people are nice, the people are very nice, but they provide food that is absolutely pathetic and they are incapable of cooking, so, I must say, where I am going does not totally thrill me.”
After lambasting the cooking skills of several households, Winner then picks one to come and cook a meal for him and his celebrity friends. One imagines that there might be a run on ground glass and cyanide.
STV has opted out of showing the programme but Scottish viewers should be able to get it on the ITVplayer. Just try not to kick your computer screen in.
Gravy wrestling: popular in Lancashire; yet to catch on elsewhere
Earlier this week, a press release about the Enjoy England Awards for Excellence 2010 drooped into my inbox. Alongside the usual categories for best small tourist attraction, best B&B and so on was a new award called 'Where else but England?' This category is designed to showcase some of the more eccentric English attractions. Among the entrants are Lancastrian gravy wrestling and asparagus fortune telling in Evesham.
It got me thinking what Scottish food events might be thought of as eccentric. We don't seem to go in for cheese-rolling, oyster-eating competitions or indeed gravy wrestling. The rest of the world might think that the annual Golden Spurtle Porridge World Championship is bizarre but it doesn't seem that weird if you live here.
Of course, if you believe writers such as Ross Anderson writing in the UAE's The National newspaper then many uniquely Scottish dishes are already strange enough and incoporating them into events won't make things any weirder. I have stumbled across sporadic sightings of haggis hurling competitions but it is a sport that seems to be more enthusiastically pursued by Scots Americans than people living here.
If there was an Only in Scotland award that covered strange food-themed events, what would you nominate?
Following on from yesterday's post aboout the Scottish government's proposed measures to tackle obesity, here is a splendidly furious response to the initiative in The Publican. It is written by the Glasgow writer Roy Beers and can be summed up as 'Quotes from the restaurant trade in Scotland suggest licensees consider McGovernment to be stark, staring mad. I agree with them.'
While that is it in a nutshell, the whole thing is worth a read.
I particularly liked the way he has linked the smoking ban with rising obesity levels. Who hasn't packed on the pounds after knocking the snouts on the head? Is Scotland's increasing weight problem down to the government's earlier fag ban?
Some political commentators are worried about the rise of the BNP. Australia may have the answer. Their Vindaloo Against Violence campaign has gone viral. Launched in response to a rise in violent attacks against Australia's Indian community, the campaign encourages Australians to head out en masse and eat a curry to show solidarity with the Australian Indians.
