‘I want it to go on to someone else while it’s still bouncing.’ Visit. ‘It will be sad to go,’ he told Kent Online. Buss took over the pub when he was just 27 and made a name for himself locally for his seafood cookery, the ingredients for which were sourced from trips to Folkestone. James Buss of the Dering Arms in Pluckley near Ashford, Kent, is selling up after 40 years. There’s been a lot in News bites recently about chefs closing their restaurants because of the current economic challenges. The winner will go through to the worlds to be held in Galway in late September. Saturday’s highlight is an oyster shucking contest for the Scottish title. Apart from the opportunity to eat an awful lot of oysters there are demonstrations and events involving a range of cooks including Tony Singh, Michael Caines and the Guardian’s Felicity Cloake. Tickets are on sale for the Stranraer Oyster Festival, which takes place across the weekend of 15-17 September. Please don’t make me jab at a tablet to prove my devotion. It’s a shimmering gift to central London. This new Masala Zone already does exactly that. It’s the restaurant’s job to show the diner a good time. It’s not the diner’s job to make the restaurant feel good about itself. But please don’t go begging for electronic affirmation before we’re out the door. Send a needy, enquiring email if you must. But even if I wasn’t writing about the place, I still wouldn’t want to finish a meal by having to mark the restaurant’s homework. I know this column gives me an opportunity to say what I think. And right at the end, our waiter proffers a computer tablet so I can provide feedback. What would life be without that? They could save money, energy and the planet by turning down the air conditioning. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The ObserverĪnything to gripe about? Oh sure. ‘Just enough acidity to cut through the sweetness’: carrot halwa. I peeked in one day and felt like I’d just witnessed an old friend being punched in the face repeatedly.
It completely obscured the gold-tiled ceiling, which has been the whole point of the Criterion since first it opened in 1874. This meant constructing a fake arbour down the length of the room, strung with greenery. They turned it into an outpost of their Italian mid-market restaurant group Granaio. Next up, the Savini group of Milan opened a lousy fancy Italian and when that didn’t work, architectural violence was committed on the place. For some reason a man in elbow-length rubber gloves kept wandering around the dining room with a bucket. It was taken over by a Georgian business and became a truly dismal joint flogging a red pepper soup that tasted mostly of sugar and a gummy crab risotto. That’s a terrible sentence to have to write.
All I recall is a mediocre chicken kiev which was a terrible waste of both chicken and garlic butter. He served an underwhelming “will this do?” menu of old stagers which were meant to recall his glory days at the top of the trade, only at a knockdown price. Perhaps we should start with: “Previously, at the Criterion…” For a while in the 1990s Marco Pierre White had it. Now, with its shimmering gold and marble walls, the Criterion gets to cosplay as a grand maharajah’s palace
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