Restaurants

At the age of sixteen, chef and restaurateur Forough Vakili, now forty, left Iran to meet a brother she barely knew, eventually settling in America. She didn’t return for eleven years. As a member of the minority Baháʼí faith, which teaches the value of all people, regardless of gender or religion, Vakili had hit a wall in her homeland. “I came here so I could continue my education,” she says, when we speak over Zoom. “We didn’t have many rights back in Iran — there wasn’t a lot offered for us after finishing high school.” It was in Vienna, waiting for her American visa, that Vakili reconnected with her brother for the first time since she was a toddler. Six months later she moved in with him, his wife and three daughters in Atlanta.

The human desire to turn life's mundanities into something altogether more agreeable never ceases to amaze and amuse. Take our homes, for instance. Once we were content to live in caves as long as they kept us dry and were reasonably warm. Then we decided it would be more appealing to build our own caves but with the added benefit of shag-pile carpets, front doors and locks to keep the jungle at bay. This ability to cocoon ourselves from an outside world that had once housed us became something of a status symbol and so we built bigger, more elaborate caves loaded with ostentatious accoutrements such as silk wall linings and sweeping marble staircases leading to bedrooms nobody used.

In the deliciously darkened corners of the Vesper cocktail bar, in the central quartier of the Siamese capital known as Silom, the patrons are guzzling some of the finest cocktails east of Suez: from the exquisite complexities of the 'Silver Aviation' (Roku gin, prosecco, maraschino, coffee-walnut bitters, almond and lavender cordial), all the way to the heady simplicity of the 'Mango Manhattan' (bourbon, vermouth, white port, absinthe). What’s more, everyone seems to be having a good time. Which is maybe not surprising – this place was recently ranked the 14th best bar in all Asia (by the same people that bring you the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, Hotels etc), and the top-of-the-class cocktails are quite considerately priced at around £12 a pop.

I have written before in these pages about declining standards in the restaurant world, which has less to do with the food than with the whole “experience” of dining out: the lack of tablecloths, the napkin-wrapped silverware, the to-go boxes, the slovenly informality of staff and customers alike. I stand by every word of it, which is why discovery, or rediscovery, of rare holdout occasions, in this diner-out, is sheer joy. One such exception, long known to me, Jimmy Kelly’s Steakhouse in Nashville, is exceptional in another sense, too. It has been in operation without interruption and under the same family ownership for eighty-nine years.

The most recent additions to London's restaurant scene have plenty to offer – from Palestinian culinary history on a plate and a slice of the American East Coast to a tasting menu with a twist and ramen worth writing home about. Here's Spectator Life's guide to the best new openings to try now – and three more to look out for later in the year. Four to book now Akub, Notting Hill It's funny how comfort food doesn’t need to be familiar to be instantly recognisable. You may not have grown up eating Palestinian chicken musakhan, but when you taste Chef Fadi Kattan’s version there’s sense of home that’s unmistakable. The chicken is stripped from the bone, seasoned liberally with citrussy sumac and pressed into a dome of shatteringly thin bread.

Does it seem these days that everyone you know suffers from a food allergy, sensitivity or intolerance (don’t ask me to explain the difference)? It seems inevitable that eating out in a group entails someone in the party requesting a menu item be made vegan, keto, gluten-free, dairy-free, tree nut-free, sulfite-free, etc. (I usually just hope the meal itself is free). Blame it on seed oils, soil depletion, genius marketing, the Liver King — whatever. The fact is that our toxic world makes party-planning a royal pain. How do you accommodate a bunch of people whose dietary restrictions turn menu-making into a culinary Sudoku puzzle? Fortunately for you, The Spectator associates with a lot of cool, accomplished, clever people — one of whom is Chef Andrew Gruel.

Thousands of people have fled London for buzzy, creative Bristol in recent years. Among them: top chefs, bakers, brewers and baristas. ‘There’s a thriving community of young food entrepreneurs, many refugees from the viciously profit-driven London restaurant scene,’ says Xanthe Clay, chef, food writer and Bristolian. ‘They are taking advantage of lower rents and rates to cook what they want to cook – not what some venture capital backer demands.’ Those to watch include Jamie Randall and Olivia Barry – the chef team behind Adelina Yard, near Queen Square in the city centre – who bring experience working with the likes of Angela Hartnett.

Last week saw the publication of the 14th annual Estrella Damm Top 50 Gastropubs of Great Britain, a list consumed by middle-class foodies as eagerly as a £27 fish finger sandwich served on a piece of slate, washed down by a non-alcoholic cocktail in a jam jar. Couples scroll through former drinking holes transformed into Michelin-starred restaurants with ‘wacky’ names such as the Unruly Pig and the Scran and Scallie, noting the ones they have been to and others to put on a gastronomic bucket list – the bucket probably being what their sweet potato fries are served in. It’s a far cry from George Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘The Moon Under Water’.

The Menu is a horror film about fine dining that revolves around a psychotic head chef (Ralph Fiennes) who runs a destination restaurant on an American island. The island is uninhabited apart from the chef and his staff, who pluck it for the most refined marine treats to serve the obnoxious clientele on a nightly surprise menu. As I sat in the cinema watching it recently, I felt delighted, then sick, then scared – and then enlightened. Enlightened because I finally understood that fine dining – once the summit of high living and my own former obsession as a greedy twenty-something working in lifestyle journalism – is over. It is not just that in this era of obsessive authenticity and sentimentality fine dining feels passé.

Back in 2000, not one Indian chef in the UK held a Michelin star. For many people, dinner at a curry house meant a formica table, plastic cutlery and warm salad garnishes on Brick Lane.  Two decades later, all that has changed. There are seven Michelin-starred Indian restaurants across London and haute cuisine curry houses are taking over swathes of Mayfair and other upmarket areas that were previously the domain of chic French bistros and Italian osterias.   So what’s behind the rise of the high-end Indian restaurant? And which are the dishes not to miss? We spoke to four top chefs at our favourite upmarket Indian eateries in the capital to find out.

Last time I visited Toronto, Canada, I stayed in Greektown, home to one of the largest Greek communities in North America. Several scenes from My Big Fat Greek Wedding were filmed here, and street signs are in Greek as well as English. On the day I arrived, jetlagged and disorientated, I happened upon a restaurant that was so authentically Greek I imagined I could smell the pine trees and hear the soft chirp of crickets. A couple of elderly men sat drinking ouzo at the bar, and rather than being led to a table I was taken into the kitchen where Maria (reader, that was her name, what can I do?) was stirring various pots, including a green bean and tomato dish (fasolakia giaxni) and meatballs (soutzoukakia).

After twenty-three years in Japan, I have concluded that the much-lauded, worshipped even, cuisine is overrated. And I am getting a little tired of being told how awe-inspiringly wonderful Japanese food is, often by people whose only experience is high-end sushi or designer tempura in a showpiece Tribeca eatery, a world away from the standard fare available on the backstreets of Shibuya. Part of the problem is that much of what delights the Japanese about their food is unrelated to its actual taste.

When jazz music arrived on our shores in 1919, with the first British tour of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, it received a frosty welcome from many. Other performers tried to get the group kicked off theatre bills, and the tour ended abruptly – with the Original Dixielanders being chased to Southampton docks by a lord who had just found out the lead singer had been trying to seduce his daughter. Happily, in the subsequent 100 years or so, jazz has gone on to earn a firm place in our hearts and record collections. With the return of London Jazz Festival, which runs from today until 20 November, we hunted down the capital’s best jazz bars where you can dine and dance the night away.

Horizontal, deep into a book and ever deeper into a mojito, is how I’ve spent most of my week. A private beach under the Caribbean sun should have been relaxing. And it would have been, if it wasn’t for the vibe squad. What is a "vibe squad," you ask? Well, picture it: you’re nearing the end of a Patti Smith novel, and naturally you’re crying. It’s mid-afternoon, you’re contemplating a nap after the next drink. When all of a sudden you and Patti Smith are covered in booze, startled by a young girl in a bright top screaming, "are you ready to part-aaaaaay?" I was not, in fact, ready to part-aaaaaay, and the girl quickly moved along to the next unwitting tourist too polite to tell her to sling her hook.

The gastropub, an invention of the early 1990s, is a terrible idea. They burst on to the scene when breweries were made to sell off many of their pubs for a song to make way for competition, encouraging Marco Pierre White wannabes to snap them up and replace cheese sandwiches and pork scratchings with kidneys on toast and anything that could be put together in a kitchen the size of a shoebox. Many of them have food prepared off-premises but charge restaurant prices. There are no proper tablecloths, the glasses are made to survive if dropped on concrete floors and it all feels a bit like going round to your friend’s house for a substandard dinner party.