Turning Japanese… Chinese…. Thai…. Malaysian; Asian food is set to dominate the restaurant scene in the near future. Keep your tastebuds peeled for specialist ramen houses, UAE’s Noodle house making its UK debut, the expansion of the Vietnamese Pho chain, Brazil-Japanese fusion (hmmmm… the jury’s out on that one), and ‘stick specialists’ such as yakitori places.
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Does anyone else think the restaurant industry is, well, a bit last century? It seems we spent some time inventing the out-to-eat concept, some more time getting it right (or not – some places still struggle with the concept of food and service in the same sentence) and then we let it quietly moulder away as if there was simply nothing more to be done about it. And so the industry has become something of a lumbering behemoth: no-one seems quite able to innovate and maintain before being buried under a pile of press cuttings and selling out to a chain. Read full post
And so it came to pass that the gastropub, that once-mighty bringer of semi-decent pub grub throughout the land, was no more. Or so The Good Food Guide says. It claims that the term is no longer relevant; once used to distinguish pubs serving food from pubs serving crisps and pork scratchings, now the gastropub label is actually deriding that which it once elevated.
The concept of the gastropub arrived on the foodie scene with the launch of The Eagle in East London in the mid-1990s. Suddenly their casual, Med-inspired dishes served alongside elevated pub booze became, quite literally, the talk of the town and the pub was reinvented. Boozers, to differentiate, were for old men; everyone, darling, was eating out in gastropubs – they were cheaper, more ‘real’ and often offered more eclectic choice and quality than many restaurants. Read full post
Is there anything more ridiculous than the concept restaurant? It seems no-one, nowhere and no cuisine is immune. Cherry-picking from the headlining new openings in the next few months, we see that St Jamie of O is not content with dominion over Italian and whatever the heck Barbacoa is supposed to be; his next new thing is a chain called Union Jack’s, but – wait for it – the concept is ‘undecided.’ Well, we’d hazard a guess it’s not going to be Korean. Also down South, Mark Sargeant is expanding The Smokehouse, his newest venture with a ‘fish and chip concept.’ Erm, that’s just fish and chips to you and me. While we’re at it, look out for the latest in confusion dining – Orchid’s ‘Pizza Pub’ concept, which is, and you would never guess it, a pub serving pizza ‘in a casual environment.’ Clearly necessity is the Godfather of invention – who knew? Read full post
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