The great Tom O'Connell, of O'Connell's in Ballsbridge, is moving on to pastures new, after eight years of running one of the best Dublin destination restaurants.
We wish him and his team well, and only wish we had a hotel dining room that needed a dynamic, hard-working, philosophical proprietor, so that we could hand it over to him and say: “Just do the good thing, Tom”.
An interesting article by Rosie Boycott, which appeared originally in The Guardian and is reprinted in the Guild of Food Writer's Savour magazine, contains this extraordinary statistic regarding food production in the U.K.:
“On average 37 farmers are leaving the land every day in Britain; there are now more people in jail than farmers”.
Shiver me timbers...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/28/food.ethicalliving
“It is a religion of the art of life”
Joerg Muller and Karin Wieland feature this quote from Okakura's classic, “The Book of Tea”, on their handsome Solaris Botanicals brochure, and it's a presumptive but entirely appropriate borrowing, for if you seek the refinement of tea and tea drinking, then Solaris teas should be part of your culinary culture.
If you drank either the red or the white wines from Domaine Le Roc des Anges, could you tell they were made by a woman, and a young woman at that?
Marjorie Gallet comes from the Rhone, trained in oenology at Montpellier, then got herself 54 acres in Montner in the eastern Pyrenees, a currently hot wine-making area.
She started making the red Roc des Anges aged 23, back in 2001. The red wine, Segna De Cor, has grenache, carignan and syrah, and it's accessible and likeable, slightly vegetal and extremely good with food.
A final thought about Restaurant Magazine's 50 Best Restaurants.
In position number 5, is Thomas Keller of The French Laundry in The United States, so the critics say that's the best restaurant in the U.S.A.
In 6th place is Thomas Keller of Per Se, in the United States, so that's the second best restaurant in the U.S.A.
But hang on a second.. isn't The French Laundry in California?
And isn't Per Se in New York?
Can Tom Keller bi-locate?
Through all those time zones?
He isn't a chef. He's superman!
And aren't critic's lists absurd?!
The highest climber in this years 50 best restaurants list is Fergus Henderson's iconic St. John, in London.
We love the man's books, and his food, and here is what our man in the Sunny South-East, Eamon Barret, made of a recent visit:
Star of the trip was dinner in St John, Fergus Henderson's spartan restaurant in the City.
The annual Restaurant Magazine's 50 Best Restaurants in the World is a daft idea, and one in which we have played a part in previous years.
Like all daft ideas, certain truths emerge from the voting process, none more so than this year.
So, who's hot? Well, Andoni Luis Aduriz of Mugaritz, who moves up to 4th place in the list, for one. We make no secret of our admiration for this chef, who is a genuinely poetic, sublime cook.
Well, you are familiar with Bridgestone Tyres, and maybe with Bridgestone Guides. But did you know that there is a Bridgestone Chair, designed by the late, great Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata?
That's it above, originally created as four chairs in 1986 for Bridgestone's Tokyo office, with Kuramata's signature mesh on the exterior and upholstered leather inside.
Behind many interesting books, there is a male with a mid-life crisis, and so it proves with Carl Wilson's fine “Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste”.
LTAL is, ostensibly, about Celine Dion, and specifically her album of the same title, and is an exploration of the nature of taste, as Wilson works his way through schmaltz, parlour music, Pierre Bourdieu and lots of other usual suspects, trying to make up his mind about what he thinks of the mega-successful chanteuse.
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