‘I love a chef who gets jiggy with the animal fats’ – Restaurant Review | Marina O’Loughlin
‘It was local wisdom, not the chef’s success on Great British Menu, that led me here, and I’m glad it did: it’s a little treasure’. I’m not big on food telly. I’ll watch everything Nigella is in, but that’s nothing to do with the food and everything to do with Nigella. I love the quietly charming, cerebral approach of our own Yotam Ottolenghi. And I’ll try to catch episodes of Masterchef that feature my critic colleagues, or to scream obscenities at Gregg Wallace. That’s because there haven’t been many good programmes about restaurants, my particular food fetish. I liked The Restaurant and Michel Roux’s Service (and I adore First Dates), but that’s about it. Anyway, I’ve never watched Great British Menu, which causes the manager of Benedicts some consternation. He talks us through the menu with a litany of “Richard did this on Great British Menu. Did you see it?” With every shake of our heads, he seems more deflated. Didn’t we know that Richard Bainbridge, Benedicts’ chef-patron, was a TV star? Didn’t we know that he won? We didn’t.