Dilly Diner of the week

If you're one of those people who are impressed by numbers then this week's Dilly Diner is right up your street. The Varsity drive in in Atlanta Georgia is the World's Largest Drive-in situated on more than two acres and accommodating 600 cars and over eight hundred people inside.The original Varsity was opened in 1928 on a 70' X 120' lot with a white picket fence by a man named Frank Gordy; a man with a $2000 nest egg and "million dollar taste buds." Through Frank Gordy's determination, the original Varsity has grown into a two-story "Lunching Pad" and there are now 6 sister locations. The Varsity has become an Atlanta institution known and loved by all.
On days of Georgia Tech football games up to 30,000 people visit The Varsity. It sells more than two miles of hotdogs daily, a ton of onion rings, 2500 pounds of fresh cut potatoes, 5000 homemade fried pies, and 300 gallons of chili, all of which are made from scratch daily. The downtown Varsity is also the world's largest single outlet for Coca-Cola. But what about the food ? Who cares ? Never mind the quality, feel the width.

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That was the week that was

It's been another tough week for poor old Gordo baby. According to accounts filed this week, his main company, Gordon Ramsay Holdings, has breached its banking covenants - that's polite talk concerning the smooth talk that His Gordoness and father in law Chris Hutcheson used to secure loans to bring the the word of the Ramsay to the masses. Promises made to lenders to secure a loan. Now Ramsay and his chief executive who is also his father-in-law, have had to promise to help the company pay its debts if necessary. And how's this for a bit of Greek accounting ? - "The holding company has also granted loans to Ramsay and his father-in-law, of £80,000 and £530,000 respectively. In a complex arrangement, the two men have also given personal guarantees of £1.6m and £500,000 to secure bank loans."


Meanwhile over at the Fat Duck in Bray, Heston Blumenthal has his worries also. It seems the restaurant should be renamed The Sick Duck. Blumenthal closed the restaurant for tests last week following about 40 complaints of food poisoning over a three week period. This figure has now soared to over 400 and hopes of reopening this week may be dashed or even if he does reopen what brave souls will pop along for the snail porridge, bacon and egg ice cream and the prospect of a few days off work ? The Fat Duck, which has held three Michelin stars since 2004, was named the world’s best restaurant in the World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards in 2005 and has been in the top two for the past five years. El Bulli, north of Barcelona, holds first place. It is not normal for any quality establishment to mass poison it's guests, for a restaurant of this calibre it can only be the work of aliens.




Speaking of spending time in the loo one restaurant that is not going down the tube is the Modern Toilet, a popular Taiwanese restaurant chain that's actually on an expansion phase into China and other parts of Asia. Food is served in toilet shaped plates and whilst it may be off putting to some diners it seems that deep down they are adhering to the same principles that attracted so many to The Sick Duck. Diarrhea for dinner? That's the point. "It's supposed to shock and confuse the senses," says Modern Toilet manager Chen Min-kuang. But as one guest who was dining there, described it, "They do it tastefully. It's all very clean." Every customer sits on a stylish acrylic toilet (lid down) designed with images of roses, seashells or Renaissance paintings. Everyone dines at a glass table with a sink underneath. The servers bring your meal atop a mini toilet bowl (quite convenient, as it brings the food closer to your mouth), you sip drinks from your own plastic urinal (a souvenir), and soft-swirl ice cream arrives for dessert atop a dish shaped like a squat toilet. There is no truth in the rumour that Heston was seen lurking there earlier in the week looking for ideas to clean up his act.

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TV cooking is an exact science

They make it look simple don't they? You too can produce this perfect dish at home if you just pay attention for the next 30 minutes but strangely enough when you do try it out on your friends at the weekend it's not quite the same is it? What's the reason for your culinary failure, I mean you did follow the recipe to the letter didn't you?
Well there's lots of reasons ranging from equipment and ingredients through to expertise. Let's look at the equipment first. There's no way the TV chef is cooking in the same old battered pots and pans that you have had for the last 20 years. He has the benefit of state of the art professional cookware, designed to give an even heat distribution with none of those hot spots so often found in cheap pots - you can see them easily after you've finished your dish, they've got brown food particles stuck to them. The same is true of the professional oven or stove top which he is using. Possibly the only exception to this is Floyd who chooses to cook in cheap pots on gas burners usually in gale force winds but then he seems to cook exactly the same dish no matter which part of the world he is in and no-one ever gets to taste it so I suppose we can discount him.
Next there's the ingredients. Not only are they the absolute best that they can source from reputable suppliers but they are also processed by many hands off camera, there are more home economists and food stylists hanging around the set than you could possibly believe.That of course takes us to the question of expertise and experience. This dish has been pumped out 10 or 12 times in quick succession by this very experienced team of helpers, they're not working their way through a recipe hastily jotted down on the back of an envelope.
Finally, never forget that your TV hero has the benefit of the editing room. He makes plenty of mistakes but just as doctors bury theirs, the TV chef's end up on the cutting room floor and the little army jumps back into action. So don't feel too disheartened if they don't all turn out just right, remember that when it's " lights....camera....action...." is also time to suspend belief for just a little while.

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Foaming at the mouth

So what actually puzzles me is exactly how many average restaurant goers get a chance to eat with Ferran Adria at El Bulli ?
I mean people who would normally eat out at an expensive restaurant and pay their own bill, how many of them do you think could possibly eat at El Bulli ? Because surely that's the whole point of running a restaurant, to service the needs of the restaurant goer, otherwise just open a private dining club and invite every food writer in the world to taste your outlandish creations and ooh and aah at the appropriate time or when prompted by the waiter.
You see my curiosity was aroused when I started to breakdown the numbers that Ferran gives out in his press interviews. He is only open from the 1 st April to the 30 th September each year. Bookings open on the 20 th January in the morning and close on the 20 th January in the evening with a full book for the entire season. They have on average 400,000 requests for bookings of which, since they only cater for 50 covers per evening, they can only satisfy 8000 covers per year. Now that's one of the statistics that really interests me, 8000 covers per year because it seems to me that 7,000 of that figure is roughly divided between food writers, restaurant critics and chefs making the pilgrimage to the feet of the master to duplicate his latest creations in the trendy dining rooms of the world. Read any magazine or newspaper with a food section and you'll find an article on the Spanish Toreador, check out any chef's chat rooms or forums on the net and the buzz is about whether or not they have been successful in obtaining a booking for the new season - what hope has the average restaurant patron to slip in amongst these disciples ?
There's one further question which vexes me almost as much as how do they get the teflon to stick to non stick pans, how the hell do the " anonymous Michelin inspectors " manage to secure unsolicited, paid for, secret inspections in this consistently overrated circus ? If clowns had a cuisine this would no doubt be it.

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Restaurant rants

A dinner out the other evening at a restaurant which shall remain nameless but which was previously on my list of favourites got me to thinking about those little things that really piss me off and probably you as well. So here’s my Top Ten in no particular order.
1) Misnaming of menu items – carpaccio is a beef dish, it never involves fish, mushrooms or God forbid, beetroot.
2) Stop this stupid trend of amuse bouche – if I wanted to taste a silly little portion yesterday’s leftovers then I would have come yesterday.
3) Why do waiters leave you with the menu for 10 minutes and then when you’ve made your mind up they announce the Chef’s specials.
4) What are those little dishes of crushed black pepper and salt all about? I would prefer a mill rather than everyone sticking their grubby fingers into the dish.
5) If another waiter refers to myself and my significant other as “ You guys ” he’ll get a smack.
6) Talking about waiters, why don’t they get a pen and paper. It’s a restaurant, I’d like to get my meal as ordered first time around, I’m not interested in your potential mental dexterity and I’ve already had my shot at the lottery this week.
7) And just to finish on the staff issues, you can thank me for my custom by all means but don’t try to flatter me that it was a pleasure to serve me and that you’re really looking forward to my return.
8) Don’t try the verbal selling technique on me either. I can see that you are struggling with remembering the 23 specials and you’ve already recited them with a certain lack of passion to 9 other tables – how the hell do you expect me to remember number 5? My theory is that there only ever is a first and last special and everything in between is made up to try and impress you that the chef is really clever.
9) Hard butter – it gouges holes in the bread rolls except in the case of ciabatta when it fills in holes. Surely someone could invent a small fridge that would hold butter at a suitable temperature for spreading.
10) Crumbing down – you know that point in the meal, after the main course, when the waiter decides to stop the flow of conversation for 6 or 7 minutes while he pretends to move around the table flicking crumbs and miscellaneous food debris onto a plate held in his left hand. In actual fact he manages to overshoot the plate most of the time so be careful when you get up to go to the loo.

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The bigger they come......

There are two words that stike fear into the heart of any self respecting chef no matter how macho an image he presents to the public - food poisioning. It's the ultimate put down. You can send a dish back to the kitchen as undercooked or even dare not to finish everything on your plate and the worst reaction you will get is a few carefuuly chosen expletives casting doubt on your parentage or lack of education but complain about puking up or being affixed to the toilet seat for a day or two and you can be guaranteed that in any serious restaurant there'll be uncomfortable inquests and often death by firing squad whilst all the time the management will be trying to downplay the event and divert attention somewhere else. It's a direct assault on the integrity of the chef, after all no-one with perhaps the exception of doctors, wants to kill off their customers.
Fortunately for most experienced, trained chefs, it's a relatively rare occurrance. It's more likely to happen in those places run by ponytails who "just love food and so we decided to cash everything in and open up this little bijou" - they're the ones to watch. If it happens to one table it's a calamity, if it happens more than once in a short period then someone should be looking for another job, if it happens continuously it's a case of " what the f#ck's going on here ? A Kitchen Nightmare of biblical proportions.
That's exactly what is going on at the restaurant voted No 1 in the world. A restaurant that you can't get a booking at because it's so popular. A restaurant where the chef, although self trained, has a reputation for seeking out perfection. Over the last few weeks at least 40, that's FORTY, different customers have called in to complain of feeling ill after eating there and that's just the one's who have taken the trouble to call, some may not have been able to crawl to the telephone. Jeez that's bloody incredible - not even the local Greasy Spoon cafe could claim that sort of hit rate! Now it's easy to blame the mad scientist cooking style of Chef Heston Blumenthal or even people passing out when presented with the bill at an average of over R3,000 per head but it's got to be more than that. To his credit, apart from getting the local health authorities involved early on, Heston took a big balls decision to temporarily close his restaurant, The Fat Duck, until the results of further tests are revealed. It's a decision that is going to cost him close on Two Million Rand in the short term in lost bookings and who knows what in the long term in terms of lost confidence in his product. It's a no win situation for anyone and scary when it can happen in a kitchen that is run like a science lab but then maybe that could be part of the problem.

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Heston Potter and the Spanish Toreador

We're going to skip the "Sunday afternoon at the bioscope" clip this week in order to celebrate the fact that Ferran Adria is gracing our shores with his distinguished presence. One of my readers (or should that be in the singular?)requested a Heston Potter cartoon to record the event so we dragged him out of semi retirement for the day.

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