Top ten tastes of Scotland
As St George’s Day looms on the horizon, The Times has come up with one writer’s top ten quintessentially English foods. It’s a neat but tricky idea. Here is my Scottish equivalent. 1) It...
Author archives for Jonathan
Menu snafu
Mistakes in menus tend to fall into two categories: there are the typos, spelling mistakes and translation errors that happen when the menu is written by someone whose grasp of English isn’t perfect and then there are the...
What's cooking?
New ventures in Glasgow and Edinburgh often seem to come in flurries and when one city is quiet then the other is buzzing. On the new openings front, Glasgow seems to be relatively calm at the moment while Edinburgh is...
Clandesdine
According to reports in the national press, the latest craze to sweep the London eating out scene is the underground restaurant. A cross between a dinner party and dining in a restaurant, these semi-secret events take place...
Eating food is like making love
Or at least it is if you are Hell’s Kitchen chef Jean Christophe Novelli. The Frenchman is opening a new restaurant in Puerto Banus, Spain this month and yesterday I did an interview with the man to talk about his new...
Taste the irony
Edinburgh’s tram works are a controversial issue and I have no intention of fully opening that can of worms here. However, it was hard not to have a wry smile at this tale in The Scotsman. The first in a small chain of tram-themed...
Bacon butties beat the booze blues
In this piece in The Telegraph, Elin Roberts of Newcastle University for Life claims to have proved what many of us have known all along: a bacon butty helps cure a hangover. According to Ms Roberts, the carbs in...
The new number one nosh?
At last week’s G20 meeting there was a desperate scramble as nineteen of the world’s leaders jostled to make friends with China’s President Hu Jintao, the representative of one of the few countries in the world whose bank...
Food fest frenzy
Spring is showing vague signs of arriving: the daffs are in bloom, the clocks have gone forward and the central heating only needs to be switched on for 23 hours a day. All of this means that the food festival season will...
The name’s Bond
It is never wise to big a place up without eating there first but I’m intrigued by the menu plans at Bond No 9, a new bar and restaurant in Leith. The bar opened in one of the port’s old bonded warehouses back in December but it has taken...
Spam, Spam, Spam
As you are all aware, entries for the 2009 SPAM Cook of the Year have to be submitted by the end of April. The best three SPAM recipes from each of seven UK regions are then put to public vote with the seven winners going forward to the...
New Roux
April Fool’s Day is perhaps not the most auspicious date on which to launch a new restaurant but super chef Albert Roux is nobody’s fool and Chez Roux, his new venture at the Rocpool Reserve Hotel in Inverness, is certain to make a...
Everybody needs good neighbours
Thanks to the smoking ban, cheap supermarket booze and increasing legislation, the idea of the local bar for local people seems to be dying on its backside. Fortunately, the neighbourhood bar looks like it could run for some time. So,...
Tasty Telly
Chefs on the fourth series of The Great British Menu will start sharpening their knives on BBC2 tonight. Having previously cooked banquets for Her Maj; the British Ambassador to France and for Heston Blumenthal, the winners of this series’...
Reasons to be cheerful
At the moment, there can’t be many people in the catering trade who are rubbing their hands with glee and planning to buy a holiday home on Mustique. However, it’s not all doom and gloom out there by any means. ...
Them's the jokes, volks
Crude national stereotyping would have it that the German sense of humour is, at best, under developed. If you were to believe the stereotype then a Germanic boozer would not be the first place to look for laughs. This...