how to do a restaurant review... he is missed.

[Ken Gargett]

john, speaking of not saying anything if you can't say something nice, i think aa gill might have the same attitude as myself. an oldie but worth a rerun. 

 

AA Gill: Table Talk

 

Chicago Rib Shack, 145 Knightsbridge, SW1; 020 7591 4664

Mon-Sat, noon-12.30pm, Sun, noon-11.30pm

5 stars:Hog heaven 4 stars:Piggy bank 3 stars:Pearls before swine 2 stars:Pig’s ear 1 star:Pigswill

<image001.png>

I knew a woman who lived in a discreet mansion block in Maida Vale, north London, one of those red-brick variegated-laurel affairs that give you the impression the planners were unsure whether they needed a crematorium, an umbrella factory or serviced flats for middle-European Jews. Next door was an opera singer, a famous baritone. Don’t you mind living next to a man who can make a noise as loud as a jumbo jet with a stubbed toe? No, no, she said. It wasn’t the singing, the scales, the repeated phrases, even the lieder that bothered her. It was the sex. Oh, yes, I see.

I can imagine the bellowing, the shrieking, the high Cs and tintabulated headboard. Oh, no, she said; it wasn’t the noise, it was the constant demands. He wanted sex all the time. In the hall, on the kitchen floor, when she was cleaning the linoleum. It was exhausting and cost a fortune in tights. And the neighbours were beginning to whisper, and, as you know, Jewish whispering is far louder than Aida.

I never weary of reminding our provincial neighbours that cities are where things happen, where culture is made, noisily, messily conceived; where it gets its tights ripped. Cities are the future: the engines that drag us all forward. If there is salvation for humanity out there, if there are going to be rainbows and new dawns and bluebirds and honey for tea, then they will be imagined, designed, manufactured, marketed and made elegant in the city. My friend from Maida Vale had a profound thought about city living: it’s not for everyone. Some people prefer nostalgia to innovation, predictabilities over fortune, soothing in place of shock, small harmonies above vast clamour. People who are easily intimidated or disappointed shouldn’t live in cities. To live in a city is a thankless gift and a surprising burden, offered to those who wish to live and fight in the front ranks, to sweat and swear and push and suck up the strain of being in humanity’s shield war. If you’re happier knitting socks, rolling bandages, making lavender sachets, then live in the country. Be a spectator. Embroider a memorial scatter cushion.

Recently, there has been a spate of provincial complaints about restaurants made by neighbours in the middle of the city. Scott's was obsessively hamstrung by a carping neighbour; an Indian restaurant I know got bumped with reams of vexatious complaint; and now Tom’s Place, Tom Aikens’s fish restaurant, is being threatened with closure by neighbours using bullying planners in the middle of Chelsea. More and more restaurants, pubs, clubs, bars and cafes are having their business challenged, truncated and strangled on the grounds of noise, inconvenience and bad taste. Small numbers of residents use planning rules to blackmail both the businesses and local councillors. And we’re just going to have to kill them. Because this has precious little to do with life aesthetics and the commonweal, and everything to do with property prices. We are getting a city made of estate agents’ particulars. Urban is noisy. It smells. It’s full of people who want to drink your claret, enter your wallet and stuff your daughter. Restaurants are more important to cities than you are, any of you. Having Tom’s Place down the road is an amenity that improves the neighbourhood. Next door, it makes the curtains smell, and takes £10K off the asking. Well, tough.

I know where this leads. The creeping countrification of the city; an infection of niceness. Areas of villages manqués, with five shades of rubbish bag and security lights that illuminate the speed humps like star shells on the Somme. Far worse than the doughnutting of urban blight, worse than poverty and crime and Harry Potter with a knife, is property-price countrification. I’ve seen it in Manhattan; now, the city that doesn’t sleep pops a Xanax at 10pm and leaves at the weekend. You wake up to find that everything that was exciting, entertaining and important and had a life, rather than a lifestyle, has been poisoned and pulled up, and London has become the Bisto Cotswolds. Restaurants are born in cities. They are the defining characteristic of our habitat. Tom’s Place is a good restaurant, Tom Aikens a great chef. Any city in the world would be proud to have him. If they force him to change his business because of the smell of money, then I will take it very badly. I will take it personally. I will take a punitive interest in local elections.

Nothing shows you quite how far you and the city have gone than an old menu, so it was with giggling nostalgia that I skipped to the reincarnation of Chicago Rib Shack. I was rather worried that you couldn’t book; I needn’t have been. It’s been remade in a large, benighted site on Brompton Road, opposite London’s most infuriating and ugly building site. This was once Oliver Peyton’s bravely beautiful Isola, and then an expensive Brazilian restaurant that reminded us why the rest of the world would do anything with a Brazilian — dance, play football, drink, shag, party, change sex — just not dinner.

We could have sat anywhere on two floors, the first big difference from the original. It used to be packed; a squealing, sticky, heaving jam. If you don’t remember the original, then it’ll be difficult to explain quite why it was so peculiarly and embarrassingly fab. Started by Bob Payton, a sharp advertising man, it was, as it said on the label, based on the pork barbecues of Illinois. This was a moment when all restaurants were suddenly themed with waiters in hats, where the pictures, the music and the napkins were matched like Abba costumes. It was childish and attractive. I suppose we all spent so long thinking that restaurants were either French, Italian, Chinese or railway, that brash, bright, jolly American ones looked fun, and everything had to be fun. Fun and fab. Fab and fun. The racks of pork ribs in sweet, tomatoey sauce seemed contemporary.

I sat down, touched the stickiness of a table that had been wiped with a dirty cloth, and knew instantly that you should never eat the same thing twice. Like history, food repeats itself — once is comedy, twice is vomit. It was just as I remembered it, but instead of filling us with Proustian reverie, it reminded us of how far our tongues have travelled. All those lunches, dinners and teas of the past 20 years, a motorway of food stretching round the world, speeding our expectations away from scooped out baked potatoes stuffed with sour cream and chives, away from the combo platter with 2in of boiled sweetcorn that taste like bog-wiped loofah and the coleslaw that was slimy tile grout, and the potato salad that was coleslaw but without the sophistication, and an onion loaf that was a breeze block of watery oleum, held together by oil that they’re now turning into tractor fuel.

The ribs and that barbecue flavour — such a cosmopolitan, grown-up Hollywood version of home-grown brown sauce — tasted as if they’d been boiled in an ashtray. The flavour of smoke has been so comprehensively removed from our lives that it now seems hideously like sticky, toffee-coloured emphysema. The mud pie and the chocolate milk shakes are made from that preparatory chocolate syrup that is so glossily, authentically American and appears in so many porn movies, but is potty-mouth if you’ve ever eaten real chocolate made with chocolate.

A manager man came up to the table. “Oooh, not such a good review last week, hope we’re gonna get a better one. Everything all right?” he asked cheerily over a mountain of congealing and collapsing incinerated animal bits. I smiled the smile of the apocalypse. No, it won’t be that bad, sonny. It’ll be on a whole new level of bad. This is bad from a bad place where the bad people live. This is a glutinously awful pig-swamp bad, out all on its own in the badlands. This is, to put it simply, just so you don’t forget, terribly bad food. And it’s terribly bad food from the bad past. It’s like having your mum come out with photographs of your 1980s girlfriend, and you have a look and you think, “Oh, my God, how could I ever have put that in my mouth?”

 

 

[JohnS]

Indeed, he had a sharp mind, that's for sure. I can't believe it's been ten years (since he has passed)!

[Ken Gargett]

14 hours ago, JohnS said:

Indeed, he had a sharp mind, that's for sure. I can't believe it's been ten years (since he has passed)!

he did well for a recovering alcoholic and a person who suffered from severe dyslexia his entire life. so bad, he could not actually write. had to dictate everything.