In the matter of restaurants, it is always better to travel hopefully, and in 2024 my optimism was richly rewarded. The very first review of the year found me in Guildford at Gordo’s, a comfortable canteen of a place hung with gashes of colour. There chef Rafael Onate and his family were showing the locals an exceedingly good time courtesy of fabulous tacos, chimichangas, quesadillas and slowly turning skewers of pork al pastor, kept in place by roasting pineapple. The instinct to cheerlead may be strong, but there is no point pretending. This year has been a difficult one for the restaurant business. Reports of closures piled up in the “news bites” that appear online below this column, like so much hurricane debris. And yet what’s striking is the way superb small restaurants, like Gordo’s, offering something specific, will be supported by the locals if the quality is there.
In Aberystwyth in May it was at Arabic Flavour where I got to tell the story of Ghofran Hamza, a gifted cook still in her 20s, who grew up in Syria, but who was forced to flee with her family by the chaos of war, eventually landing on the west coast of Wales. Dishes like tabbouleh and hummus, falafel and baba ghanoush, might have sounded familiar, but each carried the fat thumb print of a personal and distinctive story. I just hope she managed to find a few extra hands to help her out in the kitchen. In Stoke in September, it was at Little Dumpling King, where chef Rob McIntrye channelled his love of huge, banging flavours into a menu of raucous, mostly Japanese-inspired small plates. His pearly skinned haggis dumplings, swamped in crispy chilli oil, weren’t subtle. But by god, they were delicious. His salt sprinkled deep-fried Mars bar wasn’t bad either.
Journalists always want to identify trends, to turn the chaos of life into ordered lines, usually based around the rule of three. Happily, Little Dumpling King obliged by being part of an identifiable movement, which is to say European cooks displaying their profound, ardent love for Asian flavours. And there were indeed three of them, so it’s clearly a thing. In Nottingham at Everyday People, I thrilled to an expertly executed bowl of vegan tan tan ramen and a slab of fried turnip cake, loaded with pickled shiitake, a cured egg yolk and a fist-full of grated parmesan. Meanwhile, at the Vietnamese-inspired Omni Café in Monkseaton just outside Whitley Bay it was 12-hour beef shin and peanut curry, and crispy pork belly with Thai basil, garlic, oyster sauce and fresh chilli, laid with a frilly edged fried egg.
Today, when everything is online, people who are cross with something they’ve read will tell you about it, forcefully. A couple of weeks ago, I was rightly taken to task for wrongly attributing the rag pudding’s name to its looks, rather than the fact that traditionally it was cooked bound up in cotton rags. Mea culpa, etc. So, before anyone questions furiously whether it’s all been about excitable European cooks leaping upon culinary traditions from places in which they didn’t grow up, no it hasn’t. At the magnificent Tharavadu in Leeds, I swooned over fabulous coconut-boosted curries, and spiced potato-filled dosas from Kerala. At Panda’s Kitchen in Harrow, northwest London, on one of the hottest days of the year, it was Sichuan Mao roast duck in a broth heavy with chillies which only added to the sweat on my brow. And at Maida Grill House in Salford, there was my journey into the culture of rice and three: a heaving trio of cheap and extremely cheerful curries with lots of rice for just £8.50.
Because price is always an issue. Indeed, while it’s better not to dwell on it, any suppurating negativity from me was saved for those places like Gaia, Hot Dogs by Three Darlings and Maroto – all of them in London, all of them hyper glossy and over-engineered, which charged too much for too little. It should be noted that these angry, splenetic reviews were also among the very most read. This is down to all of you. You’re all horrid people who enjoy the taste of blood. But let’s not accentuate the negative.
Expensive doesn’t always have to mean bad. The Greek-inspired Fenix in Manchester is a hilariously over-designed joint, from the waiters’ high-priestess outfits to the field of Gladiator-style wheat hanging from the bar’s ceiling. And it’s not cheap. But the food was terrific, especially the orzo in lobster bisque with langoustines. It delivered on the £34 price tag.
Elsewhere in Manchester, I found an awful lot to love about the rather more democratic Medlock Canteen, and especially its candy-pink-dusted, deep-fried rhubarb pie in a lake of custard. A lake of custard makes most things better.
One recurring theme throughout the year, if only in my inbox, was emails from restaurants encouraging me to try their seven, nine or 37-course tasting menus. I understand why such menus work for kitchens: a limited number of dishes, meaning a limited number of cooks in the kitchen and serious control over ingredient purchasing. But is an often costly experience, even if it buys you a lot, quite as appealing when you just have to take what you’re given? I’m not convinced. Yet, alongside the food at Claro recently, the two standout experiences of the year do actually involve tasting menus. They are just incredibly well thought-out, brilliantly executed ones.
At Cuubo in Birmingham, chef Dan Sweet, whom I then described as an intense sliver of a man, a phrase upon which I cannot improve, served me an astonishing six courses for £75. It included an utterly beautiful white onion soup under a crust of pine nuts, herbs and breadcrumbs, and a superb asparagus risotto.
And then there were the six courses for £55 that I was served at Stage in Exeter, the latest venture from a group of friends who made their name selling handheld food from a horsebox on a Devon beach. Here were fermented discs of kohlrabi bathed in a sauce with all the flavours and richness of chicken liver parfait. Here was steak in a miso butter and caper sauce, and grey mullet with salsa verde. Here was a perfect apple tarte tatin. In a year of many highs, Stage is my restaurant of 2024 and I can’t wait to see what they all do next.
The economics of the restaurant business in the UK really are challenging right now. But there is no doubting the deep wells of culinary talent out there. It gladdens this well-fed man’s heart.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
