Which restaurants will survive in 2009?

Slightly off-topic but as a long-standing food and drink writer I thought you might be interested to read my thoughts on the type of restaurants that I believe will survive the current recession

Looking back on my predictions a year ago, most have come to fruition but who would have guessed just how deeply the recession would bite in such a short time? Certainly not the people who were behind the spectacular new shopping and eating complexes like the Westfield Centre in West London or Cabot Circus in my home town of Bristol which increasingly look like extravagant follies.

Still, I'm not as convinced as the rest of the media that we'll all be eating at home. People still haven't got the time and in some cases the skills to cook every night. Here are the eight types of restaurants I reckon will survive:

Celebrity restaurants
I don't so much mean restaurants frequented by celebs - though that too - as the new generation of mid-priced restaurants run by celebrity chefs - Jamie's Italian, (Raymond) Blanc's Brasseries and Maze Grill (Gordon Ramsay and Jason Atherton) among them. A Big Name is reassurance, in many people's view, that they're spending their money wisely. (Not that I think they're always right)

Neighbourhood restaurants
There are all sorts of reasons why neighbourhood restaurants should flourish - they tend to be cheaper, there's no need to take the car (so no drink-driving problems) but above all the level of personal service you get if you're a regular. If you're feeling credit-crunched it's good to be cossetted.

Well-established restaurants
They've seen it all - hard times as well as good ones and know how to deal with the downturns by making a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Examples of two long-distance runners: Le Gavroche in London and Le Champignon Sauvage in Cheltenham

Restaurants which offer small plates
A trend for the past few years but one that will really come into its own in 2009. Forget the 3 course meal (unless it's a thrifty fixed price lunch) What you need is a place where you can go and have a couple of plates and a good glass of wine. Like the excellent new Bocca di Lupo in Soho.

Wine bars
For the reason given above plus the fact that as supermarket selections get more and more restricted we all need somewhere to go and enjoy an interesting glass of wine. For me one of the best openings of 2008 was Terroirs, the brilliant new West End wine bar set up by the enterprising Caves de Pyrène

Traditional curry houses
Not the flashy new top-end ones but yer local Indian. Eat in or takeaway.

(Some) top-end hotel restaurants
The super-rich are always with us and they have to have somewhere to go so I don't see an end to luxury dining. But where? The premier league such as the Dorchester and the Grosvenor House should survive but I wouldn't put my money on less illustrious names with similar prices.

Seaside B & B's
Especially those offering half board. (Which I suppose makes them D, B & Bs) With the euro at parity with the pound why travel further afield? Despite the weather last summer expect a revival of the English seaside guesthouse (noughties-style)

The likely casualties

Upmarket sandwich bars
Taking your own lunch to work will be so 2009

Mid-priced chain restaurants
If we eat out we'll save it for a special occasion. Chain restaurants which have survived on the basis that people were eating out three or four times a week will struggle. Particularly if they offer mediocre food.

Large country house hotels
Unless they're very hip and cater for the super-rich (see above). Too far to go, too expensive.

The good news
In a frantic bid to keep our custom, restaurants will be falling over themselves to offer us deals we can't refuse so expect brilliant cut-price lunch offers, 2 for the price of one dinners and free glasses - or even bottles - of wine. Every cloud, as they say, has a silver lining . . .

China's glitzy new gastronomy

In the second of his features on his recent trip to China, food writer and restaurant guide inspector Stuart Walton examines the burgeoning restaurant scene in Beijing and Shanghai

While I was in China last month (October 2008) it was announced by finance ministers that forecasts for the country’s economic growth rate has been revised downwards from 10% to 7% per annum, as a result of the global slowdown. Despite the gloomy tones in which the news was relayed, 7% growth is a figure that most of the western world would give up their budget deficits for.

The evidence of China’s boomtime is all around. A mandatory trip to the Olympic sports area of Beijing offers the most obviously tangible witness, but the glitz and glam of the city centre tells its own dynamic story. Heading east from the Forbidden City, along Donghuamen and Jinbao Streets is a voyage through modern plutocracy, with the massive spotlit edifice of the Legendale Hotel the out-and-shouting, high-camp star turn. In the narrower, intersecting streets, people still squat on their haunches outside tiny scruffy shops to wolf down bowls of steaming-hot noodles in the blear early morning.

Further south, the Pudong skyline of Shanghai rises, Hong Kong-like, on the east bank of the Huangpu river, its central feature the heaven-piercing Oriental Pearl TV tower. Facing it in dumb defiance on the opposite bank is the old commercial waterfront strip of the Bund, western capitalism’s Asian Great White Way, where banks and insurance companies once rubbed shoulders in well-fed Palladian complacency. The cosmopolitan atmosphere of Shanghai dates back to these Victorian days, when the western powers set up their own semi-autonomous exclaves within the city, erecting signs to warn the indigenous population away from their own parks
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The giddy pace of all this development has been matched by the emergence of an innovative gastronomic scene that draws on western technique and applies it to many of the traditional ingredients and dishes of China’s regions. European chefs have set up camp in some of the big hotels, and boutique restaurant operations have sprung up in some of the most unlikely quarters. Italian food has made a big impact, and indeed the transition from noodles to spaghetti has to be one of the easier transits from east to west. Prominent among the clientele are those western business types and tourists who haven’t yet started feeling the pinch, but there are well-to-do locals in evidence too. And, contrary to reports, I didn’t see anybody adding Pepsi to the red wine.

Maison Boulud is situated amid the marbled magnificence of the former US embassy in the old Legation Quarter in Beijing (above) just off the southeast corner of Tiananmen Square. It represents an extension of operations for Daniel Boulud, a French chef with a network of eateries in New York, Palm Beach and Las Vegas. Boulud’s menu is high-gloss Franco-Asian, offering caramelised sea scallops with stir-fried bok choi or shrimp salad with carrot coulis, coriander and lime to start, followed perhaps by roast chicken in a lemon and Sichuan pepper glaze with snow peas and braised romaine. Mango compote with green tea daquoise, coconut pannacotta and ginger ice-cream ends things on a light but vivid note.

If Maison Boulud is dramatically enough located, the CourtYard goes one better, sitting next to the moat near the east gate of the Forbidden City. Chef Rey Lim also had a grounding in New York, and brings the best kind of fusion-inspired creativity to menus that might go from sublime soft-shell crab tempura with eel teriyaki and sweet pea gele to ginger-lemongrass-soy crme brle, via an outstanding main course of duck done three ways – braised with lotus root and red bean paste, roasted breast in a tamarind glaze, and a more classical leg of lacquered duck with red peppers.

The surroundings of the China World Hotel offer a more obviously corporate setting for Aria, (above) where Bernhard Lermann cooks a Eurocentric menu, taking in citrus-cured salmon with caviar and sour cream, and braised lamb knuckle with aubergine caviar and a ragout of white beans and bacon. The wine list is a grand-hotel tome, embodied in the bottles that line the spiral staircase by which you ascend to the dining-room.

Three on the Bund, a seven-storey Shanghai plaza that hosts an Armani store on the ground floor, is home to the rooftop restaurant and bar, New Heights. Executive chef Xavier Mauerhofer has conceived a brasserie-style menu that deals in the likes of Malaysian laksa and beef rendang, as well as gravad lax, duck Vietnamese style, and fish and chips. Or just linger on the terrace with a cocktail, and drink in some of the most thrilling views China has to set before the traveller.

The smart Xintiandi development, just off South Huangpi Road, is a pedestrianised development built around old shikumen (stone tenement buildings), which has become a magnet for Chinese tourists from other regions. Just around the corner is the house, now a museum, where the inaugural meeting of the Communist Party of China was held in 1921 (admission free). Xintiandi boasts an array of eating options, from Balinese prawn satay and crab balls in Cajun rmoulade, not to mention great brunch dishes and smoothies, at Luna, to coffee and mango cheesecake at Visage from a chef, Eric Perez, who has been patissier to the French Embassy in Washington DC.

Then there is Moon’s, a sepulchrally lit, upscale steakhouse where, halfway through eating my half-pound of prime Australian striploin, I was sent an enormous slab of Black Forest gateau from the Chinese birthday party going on at a nearby table. We raised our respective drinks – Chilean Cabernet and can of Sprite – to each other through the enveloping dusk. ‘Ganbei!’ East meets West indeed.

Maison Boulud, 23 Qianmen Dong Dajie, Beijing. Tel: +86 10 6522 4848.
The CourtYard 95 Donghuamen Dajie, Beijing. Tel: +86 10 6526 8883.
Aria, China World Hotel, 1 Jianguomenwai Dajie, Beijing. Tel: +86 10 6505 2266
New Heights, Three on the Bund, 3 Zhongshan Dongyi Lu, Shanghai. Tel: +86 21 6321 0909.
Luna, Unit 1, House 15, North Block, Xintiandi, Taicang Lu, Shanghai. Tel: +86 21 6336 1717.
Visage, Unit 3, Bldg 1, North Block, Xintiandi, Taicang Lu, Shanghai. Tel: +86 21 6382 4878.
Moon’s, Unit 2, Block 6, Xingye Lu, Xintiandi, Shanghai. Tel: +86 21 6336 5683.

Stuart Walton is a long-serving food and wine writer, a contributor to the Good Food Guide, and author of The Right Food with the Right Wine.

A perfect romantic hideaway in an unlikely location

The more you travel, the more you eat out, the harder it becomes finding a place that is really special. It’s not just about how much money you spend though these places rarely come cheap. A great location helps, as does good service but the single most important factor, I’ve come to the conclusion, is that the people who are running the place are hands on.

The Old Convent ticks pretty well all the boxes - except one, of which more later. Its proprietors Dermot and Christine Gannon live in the building and run the place virtually single-handed. It occupies a strikingly beautiful building in an unspoilt location at the foothills of the Knockmealdown mountains in Co Tipperary which I could see as I lay in my bath.

The public rooms are furnished in great style. The dining room is lit by candlelight. And the food is fabulous - some of the boldest, most creative, most exciting cooking I’ve come across this year.

The dinner menu is a six course affair which may irk some. You go into the dining room at the same time and are served at the same time which results in a few lengthy waits and hungry moments when you wish you had a bit of bread to nibble (strangely not forthcoming) But the food when it arrives is so stimulating these minor quibbles seem irrelevant.

Highlights were a bold warm starter salad of 20 hour cooked Dullahollow pork belly with Cashel Blue cheese, sliced pear, pistachio praline and lightly pickled mangetout (left), a terrific combination of contrasting flavours and textures, a silkily smooth butternut squash velout given an unconventional twist with a trickle of nutty argan oil and a more than generous main course dish of rare organic beef fillet served with slow-cooked beef ribs seasoned (we reckoned) with star anise and orange and served with a sweet potato and parsnip gratin and some wicked little sauted potatoes, a dish that on its own was worth at least half the 60€ cost of the meal.

There was also an incredibly umami-rich dish of hake wrapped in prosciutto served with ‘lobster cream mac’n’cheese’ and parmesan toast, two desserts (a Kahlua and cream ice-cream ‘martini’ and a decadent chocolate fondue that arrived with a plateful of goodies including home-made cheesecake, coconut macaroons, strawberries, raspberries, cherries and various other kinds of fruit. Just pure child-like pleasure. And a couple of ‘OC’ mini cupcakes to finish.

I even like the passionfruit and lemon and ginger sorbets we got mid-meal and I really don’t like sweet sorbets in between savoury courses, not least because they destroy whatever wine you’re drinking.

Ah, the wine. The only weak point of the meal. Its not that the list was bad it was just ultra-cautious, in no way matching the boldness of serving a no choice meal of vigorous flavours. There were two very dull Australian wines by the glass, some uninspiring half bottles and not many full bottles that would have seen you right through the meal.

As it was a special occasion we splashed out on one that would - a Billecart-Salmon brut rserve champagne that loved the starter, the lobster mac’n’cheese and, surprisingly, the beef and a lovely half bottle of Domaine Cauhaup Jurancon Symphonie de Novembre (one of the highlights of the list) that was fantastic with the cupcakes and managed to cope with the Kahlua martini and the chocolate fondue but it would have been great to have had some more options by the glass or interesting half bottles to play with. (I gather the Gannons are currently overhauling the list and planning to introduce wine pairings.)

Breakfast the next morning was equally stunning with an inventive range of hot dishes (my baked eggs with smoked salmon and mascarpone was gorgeous) and some delicious fruit martinis of locally produced yoghurt piled up with fresh fruits, a clever and easy idea to copy for a brunch.

One other clever thing. There was a mini kitchen where you could make yourself tea, coffee or hot chocolate, help yourself to fruit or a snack or raid the fridge for fresh fruit juices. Having fed you so royally they must be confident that no-one would feel remotely inclined to abuse their hospitality.

All in all the OC, as it calls itself, is a great place to go for a special weekend away. Start saving now.The Old Convent is open for dinner bed and breakfast from Thursdays to Sunday nights inclusive.

I have written an article about Christmas entertaining ideas from The Old Convent which will appear in the December 2008 issue of Decanter.

Where to eat in and around Agde

There was a time when the best place to eat in Agde or its seaside satellite Grau d'Agde which lie between Montpellier and Ste on the Languedoc coast was the Michelin-starred La Tamarissire. After that closed two to three years ago it left a bit of a gastronomic black hole but a couple of new places have sprung up which have serious gastronomic ambitions.

La Table de Stephane
2 rue des Moulins Huile
Z1 des 7 Fonts
34300 Agde
04 67 26 45 22
www.latabledestephane.com

It has to be said that Le Table de Stephane, which was originally located in Cap d'Agde, has the most umpromising location of practically any restaurant I’ve been to. You reach it through a particularly down-at-heel industrial estate. It’s opposite a large cash and carry. While you’re sitting on the terrace outside gravel lorries and fork lift trucks trundle past. So why am I writing about it? Because the food is first rate, verging on Michelin one star standard.

Inside the restaurant is far smarter than you’d think from the outside. The service is slick and well regimented by what looks very much like Mme Stephane. When you sit down you get a selection of four Michelin-style amuse-bouches - a gorgeous, ice cold whipped mushroom mousse, a little disk of warm ‘cake’, a feuillet of duck (I think) and a caramelised tomato served like a toffee apple.

There were plenty of suitably seasonal choices on a sweltering hot day in July. I had a tuna tartare, roughly rather than finely diced with courgettes and beans and one of those normally superfluous drizzles that had a touch of sweetness that offset the dish nicely. My husband had baby courgettes and stuffed courgette flowers with a robust pistou sauce.

My main course (actually more like a starter) was a brik (Tunisian-style filo pastry triangle) stuffed with lightly spiced chopped cuttlefish and served with a glass of ice cold courgette cream, a delicious variation on the local squid-stuffed pastries, tieilles. Dunking forkfuls of the spicy pastry in the cool cream was just lovely.

Our other main course was a much more classic ballotine of rabbit with mushroom and truffle mash which went perfectly with the half bottle of classy Domaine de Clovallon Pinot Noir we’d ordered.

Being in a bit of a rush we didn’t have dessert but they looked imaginative and when we go back we’ll give them a try.

Three minor quibbles (apart from the view and the traffic). There was a slight repetition of ingredients you wouldn’t expect on such a short menu from a restaurant operating at this level. Courgettes and tuna appeared in both my courses. Secondly, and I admit this is a personal bugbear, with a menu this stylish and inventive why on earth have an old-fashioned cheese trolley? And I would have expected loose leaf verveine rather than a teabag.

But for the quality of food we had it was brilliant value at 52€ (£41) for two and we’ll certainly go back.

Le K’Lamar
33, quai Thophile Cornu
34300 Agde
04 67 94 05 06
www.restaurant-klamar.com

Two things immediately strike you about the K’Lamar. The bizarre name, presumably a tortured twist on calamar (squid). And the drop-dead gorgeous view across the Herault to the seaside resort of Grau d’Agde. The former says more about the place than the latter.

You’d love a restaurant like this, where you can sit right on the quay, to serve simply prepared seafood but it huffs and puffs and froths and squirts ingredients until its blue in the face. It’s not that the chef doesn’t have talent. He simply tries way too hard.

Perhaps we should have tried the menu of the day which during the week is a very reasonable 12.50€ for two courses including a salad and grilled seabass but we were intrigued after our experience at Le Table de Stephane to test the place out.

Black marks first off for not having any oysters. There have apparently been problems with the local oyster beds in the nearby Etang de Thau but they aren't affecting fully grown ones. However my husband was mollified by an impeccable plate of moules gratines (grilled mussels with garlic and breadcrumbs) which despite the inevitable drizzle of . . . we weren’t quite sure what . . . were perfectly cooked. I was also quite happy with my gazpacho although the speared deep-fried mussels that were laid on top of the odd asymmetric glass which lurched over the accompanying rocket like the leaning tower of Pisa didn’t really add a great deal.

Main courses were also slightly off-key. My husband had a veal shank topped with a bizarre disc of fried celeriac that made it look as if it was sprouting a mushroom. It wasn’t cooked quite long enough yet managed to be a bit too heavy for a fine day by the Med. I went for what I assumed to be their signature dish a plate of what turned out to be slightly chewy grilled squid with bouillabaisse froth, confit fennel and basil mash. Plus the inevitable squirts of balsamicky goo. Not bad - in fact the basil mash was great - but again just too complicated for its own good.

The bill for two of us with a 50cl bottle of ros, a half bottle of mineral water, an ‘amuse’ (salmon mousse topped with fennel chantilly) and a little shot of strawberry flavoured cream with our coffees was 72€ (£56). Not unreasonable, if not such good value as the Table de Stephane. But it’s worth going for the view alone and maybe the bouillabaisse which has to be be ordered 2-3 days in advance. Surely the chef can't add drizzles to that . . .

Where else to eat in the area:

Le Bistrot d’Alex, 5 avenue des Vendanges, 34510 Florensac. Tel: 04 67 77 03 05
Excellent simple bistro cooking in a well-designed restaurant attached to the the Florensac co-op. Ultra cheap wine, all available by the glass. Gets packed out, even out of season so be sure to book. See my review here.

Le Chateau du Port, 9, Quai de la Resistance Marseillan. Tel: 04 67 77 31 67 www.chateauduport.com
One of the many outposts of the Pourcel brothers’ empire (the Pourcels are the Gordon Ramsays of the Languedoc . . . ) Haven’t been for a while but the situation is charming overlooking the port and the food well above average for the area. Summer opening only.

Casa Pp, 29 rue Jean-Roger, 34300 Agde. Tel: 04 67 21 17 67
Housed in a rather gloomy cave-like room, down an alley off the main shopping street in Agde this doesn’t look promising but actually serves well-cooked, super-fresh seafood at a very reasonable price. .

Le Glacier, 6 av Victor Hugo, Marseillan 04 67 77 22 04
Not quite the restaurant it was in its heyday 10-15 years ago but under new owners who are obviously trying hard. Stick to the shellfish and simply grilled fish. Very good value set lunch at around 23€. - a good bet for a Sunday.