food
Michael Rakowitz: The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, Fourth Plinth review - London's new guardian
Katherine Waters
Fifteen years ago on a cold grey Saturday in mid-February, Trafalgar Square was filled with people marching to Hyde Park in opposition to the proposed invasion of Iraq. A million people gathered in London. Three times that number turned out in Rome. That day, across Europe and the rest of the world, between six to eleven million people participated in the largest coordinated anti-war rally in history. The scale of the movement was unprecedented. Protest globalised. Just over a month later air strikes took out Iraqi observation posts and troops crossed over the borders. The invasion of Iraq Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Word wizard. Grammar bully. Sentence shark. AA Gill didn’t play fair by syntax: he pounced on it, surprising it into splendid shapes. And who cared when he wooed readers with anarchy and aplomb? Hardly uncontroversial, let alone inoffensive (he suggested Mary Beard should be kept away from TV cameras on account of her looks, and shot a baboon), he was consistently brilliant. Wherever he went, he brought his readers with him. His journalist’s eye and performer’s hunger made him a natural raconteur, one who could induce synaesthesia so you could taste words.People dear to me loved his writing Read more ...
Barney Harsent
By the outrage it prompted, you’d be forgiven for thinking that The Great British Bake Off’s move to Channel 4 was a national disaster. If only the public felt so indignant about the sale of the Post Office, or the creeping privatisation of a beleaguered NHS… but hey-ho, cakes it is, then. The news that co-host Mary Berry and presenters Mel and Sue wouldn’t be joining Paul Hollywood in the move led to further disquiet and an unprecedented amount of criticism levelled at the Liverpudlian master-baker, including a series of frankly stunning tweets from former contestant Ruby Tandoh. They Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is a very welcome 4K digital restoration of Juzo Itami's extremely tasty Japanese comedy from 1985. Nobuko Miyamoto plays Tampopo ("dandelion" in Japanese), a widowed café owner with a small son. She dishes up bowls of ramen noodles to local trade but business is not good. A passing trucker (Ken Watanabe in Clint Eastwood mode) takes pity on her and rounds up a gang of misfits to help her perfect the recipe. Interspersed with their slapstick adventures – breaking into kitchens, rummaging through rival establishments’ bins, tracking down gourmets living in a hobo jungle – there are Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Sweet Bean is one of those slow, gentle Japanese fables that one either loves or finds infuriatingly sentimental. Directed by documentarian Naomi Kawase, a film festival favourite whose features rarely make it to the UK, it played in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section and divided the critics. The French and Americans loved it, while hard-nosed British critics scoffed. Adapted from a novel, it’s the story of Sentaro, who makes dorayaki (little pancake purses stuffed with sweet red bean paste) and sells them from a corner shop in a Tokyo back street. Masatoshi Nagase plays Sentaro as a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
TV chefs are like the characters in a favourite band, each one with their newsworthy quirk. There’s the matey one, the posh one, the sweary one, the mumsy one, and the light-fingered one. Then there’s Nigella, the kittenish one, best known for licking her fingers with a lingering thoroughness rarely seen on family television. (She was once the Oxford graduate best known as deputy literary editor of The Sunday Times. Gotta love the patriarchal, objectifying media circus...) This series features the sort of quick but wholesome recipes that can be rustled together after a tiring day Read more ...
Thomas Rees
James Montgomery is a difficult man to pin down. When I first call to arrange an interview he’s too busy to talk. I call back only to find he’s in the middle of fixing a broken bailing machine, and when the interview finally takes place it’s to a backdrop of exasperated lowing: “I’ve moved six calves in the time I’ve been talking to you,” he says.Running Manor Farm, near North Cadbury in Somerset, sounds like a full time job in itself, yet somehow Montgomery manages it and still finds time to produce two of Britain’s finest cheeses. The farm has been making Ogleshield, a washed-rind cheese Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Metta Theatre’s didactic "short plays" evening takes a rigorously Poppins approach: a spoonful of drama to help the medicine go down. The sobering facts – “We need to produce more food globally by 2050 than we have done in the whole of human history” – come thick and fast, emblazoned on a screen and spouted by four versatile performers. Some pieces, written in collaboration with scientists, are fuelled by those stats, others crumble under their weight.The opening pair are somewhat self-defeating in making their mouthpieces so unappealing: a pious, wilfully naïve organic farmer and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It feels as though 2014 was the year in which the Twitter generation finally woke up and realised what it had done. For five years a quiet, unassuming baking competition had risen through the ranks to become the most polite BBC One ratings juggernaut in the corporation’s history. Frankly, the world was ready for a bearded ginger Irishman to throw his baked Alaska in the bin and storm off into the great British countryside.In the end (and let’s not pretend that there won’t be spoilers from the off), it was slow and steady that won the race. Retiree Nancy Birtwhistle’s creations rarely brought Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It’s not unusual for Jon Favreau to go small, despite his reputation for the big hits such as Iron Man, Iron Man 2 and Elf. There was the much-touted squib Cowboys & Aliens alongside the nifty minnows of Made and Very Bad Things. Favreau loves acting and making movies so much that he’s a realist when things go wrong. Or right, in the case of his latest Chef, which one reviewer strangely called "shallow", a word that would only apply if you expected something Bergmanesque from a juicy romp through the world of a professional chef trying to get back his magic meal-making mojo.Favreau stars Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
A mouth-watering mixture of romance, drama and comedy is delivered in this fresh and impressive debut from Indian writer-director Ritesh Batra. A poignant and bittersweet relationship between a lonely housewife and a man on the brink of retirement is set in motion via a mistake by the legendary dabbawalla lunchbox delivery service of Mumbai who mix up an order.Housewife Ila (Nimrat Kaur) is stuck in a desperately unhappy marriage and as a final attempt to make things better she prepares a delicious surprise meal for her husband to grab his attention. Unfortunately it's mistakenly delivered to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Take two television formats and blend in mixer, then serve on one platter. The Taste is essentially Mastervoice, fusing Masterchef’s wannabe kitchen creatives and The Voice’s blind auditions. An early tasting suggests that the stand-out ingredient is Nigella Lawson in the court of public opinion.The Taste has come along at exactly the right time for Channel 4’s PR department. There’s seemingly always room in the television schedules for yet another show about cooking, but how to stand out in the heat of the kitchen? This latest concoction has enjoyed a massive boost in pre-publicity thanks to Read more ...