food
Jasper Rees
There’s a queue to get into Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant to order things like blowtorched fetlock of kudu with jus de cat-gut noodle on a bed of iron filings strained through a muslin jockstrap. A state of emergency was declared in the gated communities of the south-east a couple of years back when some punters succumbed to metal fatigue or carbon monoxide poisoning or some such specialist alimentary ailment. Thus it is with anxiety that one learns of Heston’s latest mission: to think laterally about fish and chips.Yes, assume the brace position. In his new series, the zany lab technician Read more ...
Matt Wolf
For increasing numbers of people, food is theatre, so what better time to combine the two into the slight, sweet, determinedly socially conscious evening that is Gastronauts? The Royal Court "happening" of sorts is catering to audiences of 60 per show during its sellout run. A devised piece that turns playgoers into diners while also asking them to question the ethics and ethos of food, the show in its questioning impulse seems the perfect antidote to festive-season excess. That said, some may be too busy pigging out on the crispy kale - please sir, may I have some more? - to give the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Amongst my friends, I am known as an admirer of the baked good in just about all of its forms: the loaf, the sponge, the ubiquitous cupcake. And yet something about The Great British Bake Off has always put me off. The relentless commercialisation of certain stereotypes of post-war frugality, typically practised by female heads of house, over the past few years has left a progressively nastier taste in my mouth as national austerity has hit harder. I’m not sure whether the final straw was the Sewing Bee spin-off, or judge Mary Berry’s charming remarks in relation to feminism.What makes 'Bake Read more ...
terry.friel
There was a memorable, very French moment in a television series hosted by the great British wine writer, presenter and Master of Wine Jancis Robinson. A French winemaker, asked to taste an Australian wine, swills in disdain and pointedly walks outside, on camera, to spit it out. It’s not good enough even to slosh the floor of his traditional wineshed.That was just a few years ago. Chateau Chunder showed how Australian wine went in two generations from a joke and "plonk" fit only for the poor, the alcoholic and the desperate to some of the best wine in the world. It opened with the famous Read more ...
josh.spero
There are two reasons I can often be found slumped on my sofa watching the 8.30pm cookery-show slot on BBC Two on a Monday evening: first, it has the perfect lead-in, University Challenge, after which nothing involving mental exercise is required; and second, I'm a greedy cook. Tonight saw the return to this slot of erotic gastronome Nigella Lawson with Nigellissima, whose cod-Italian title suggested exactly the food she would be cooking.But it's not so much the food I want to write about. Yes, it looked more desirable than Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Speedos - tagliata, chocolate cheesecake (not Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What do you do after nine series celebrating the cooking and eating of food? You make another, charting the effort to lose some of the weight gained. This time out, the bike-riding Si King and David Myers are still eating and travelling, but trying to adjust what they put in their mouths, to make it less calorie-tastic. Some exercise was on the menu too. As was selling copies of the tie-in book.King and Myers are agreeable enough in small doses – and ought to know how to be after their careers in TV and film production which preceded their transformation into the Hairy Bikers. Their banter is Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
If your evening regime involves lying on the sofa with a KFC boneless banquet wedged between your knees and a bucket of Fanta, complete with multi-angled drinking straw to prevent unnecessary movement, under your armpit, then you would have been forgiven for avoiding The Men Who Made Us Fat. Who, after all, wants to spend their downtime being made to feel like a self-harming, NHS-crushing lard-arse? If, however, you subsist on twig tea and a diet of dandelions washed in spring water by tiny winged seraphs, you might have felt compelled to watch, if only to reaffirm your disdain for the junk Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There are all sorts of reality shows, but the best ones really do strip people bare. It’s the reason why The X Factor is more interesting than Strictly Come Dancing, why Don’t Tell the Bride is more revealing of the gamble of love than Snog, Marry, Avoid? It’s the reason why Masterchef: The Professionals is more gripping than the estimable Great British Bake-Off.While it’s cheering to see talented amateurs like you and me win the original Masterchef, the most popular in the franchise, it’s far more exciting to see the culinary genius that so many college-trained chefs, beavering away in the Read more ...
judith.flanders
Well, the stars were out near Leicester Square, and it was neither the premiere of a Hollywood blockbuster, nor even a clear night. Instead, the stars were in conjunction at Gaby’s Deli, now the hotbed of a revolt against the plastification of London, a valiant push-back against the heart of theatre- and cinema-land being turned into a clone of every high street in the country.Gaby’s Deli has fed hundreds of thousands of audiences before and after shows, with its mix of Jewish deli and Middle Eastern favourites. It has also, crucially, fed thousands of actors, singers, dancers and musicians. Read more ...
judith.flanders
Even in London’s variegated show-world, something called Cabaret Falafel stands out as an exotic title. To discover that it will take place in a delicatessen, performed by the wonderful Henry Goodman, makes it both more piquant and more explicable, for Gaby’s Deli, a stalwart part of Charing Cross Road and of every London theatre-goer's map of the West End, is under threat.Charing Cross Road has already lost most of its independent bookshops; Chinatown has been trampled on by developers who want to root out the Chinese markets; now the Marquess of Salisbury, ground landlord to Gaby’s, has in Read more ...
josh.spero
Baking and competition are two of my favourite things, thus when BBC Two unveiled The Great British Bake Off last year, it seemed my gluttonous, pugnacious prayers had been fulfilled. Amateurs had every possible skill challenged by the good-cop-bad-cop combination of master bakers Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood, leavened (or leadened) by ever-quirky presenters Mel and Sue. (I will avoid all recipe-related puns henceforth, I promise.)But if you were expecting a cross between The X-Factor and Masterchef - or indeed Masterchef and Masterchef - as failing contestants are weekly expelled Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It may not serve up all that much to get your teeth into, but Bijan Sheibani’s production of this 1959 play by Arnold Wesker looks fantastic on the plate. Giles Cadle’s saucepan-shaped set is framed by a giant chalkboard, scrawled over and over with daily specials in faded lettering; beyond it, the globular lamps and plate-glass window of the Tivoli restaurant can be glimpsed. But the action is all in the kitchen. Steel utensils clatter and gleam, and ovens roar into life, blue gas flames dancing. Here, as the staff toil in an atmosphere of sweaty industry, we are treated to a kind of Read more ...