Sandwich History. Reservation Resales. Critics & More.
Jimi tries Ibai, the new basque steakhouse in the City. Hayler dislikes Chez Roux. Grace tries Uzbek.
I’ll keep it fairly short this week, as I’ve been in Texas this weekend enjoying barbecue and Mexican food. Although, while I’ve been writing this, James Whatley has been teasing me with photos from a lunch at Roe, and I wish I could be in two places at once.
My Kind of Nerdery: A History of Sandwiches in London
The wonderful folks at
offer an valuable addition to our always-on conversation about sandwiches. It’s a history of sandwiches of London dating back to 1762.My favourite entry focuses on the Steak Roll, by pioneering gastropub The Eagle in Farringdon:
When The Eagle opened in Farringdon in the bracingly cold winter of 1991, it offered warmth in the form of space heaters and a steak sandwich. The pub’s first flyer listed the ‘Bifana’ at £4. The combination was simple – rump steak, salsa verde, cos lettuce, and a stone-baked Portuguese roll – but the effect was outsize. The sandwich became the rock steady of the pub’s otherwise changing menu. It’s been there every day since.
Check out the whole article though. It’s great.
Restaurant Booking Re-Sales Inbound. (Argh!)
The Standard reports on a new service that will facilitate diners transferring their restaurant booking to someone else. I wrote about this topic a while back after the The New Yorker dug deep into the reservation resale market in NYC, discovering a series of for-profit schemes that were profitable for the schemers and terrible for foodies. The new London service claims that there’s no way to profit from reselling your booking. That its just a facilitation service. But I’m sceptical. It’s hard to be a successful business when your model is explicitly anti-profit. I stand by what I said in May: Restaurant reservation resales should be banned, and restaurants shouldn’t honour resold reservations.
Conversation Over Lunch, Part II, Upcoming
One Question and Professional Lunch are doing our second Conversation Over Lunch at Thirty7 in Covent Garden next Thursday, 15 August. If you would like to join us either next week or for a future lunch, click here to register. Interest so far has been incredible. We had so many register from our July invitation that we have mostly filled August, but do sign up anyway as we might have a last-minute drop-out. And if we can’t get you for August, we will try to get you along in September or October. Our first Conversation Over Lunch, at LeRoy in Shoreditch, was fantastic. You can read my reflections from it here.
Critics Wrap-Up
✍🏻 indicates a review that you should read for the writing.
🍽️ indicates a place that sounds excellent and is probably worth a try.
🍽️ Jimi Famurewa (Standard) visits Ibai in Farringdon, the new Basque influenced steakhouse. It’s big. “The 80-cover, haute-industrial dining room is big. The prices are big. The flavours — inspired by the French side of the Basque border — are so big they often land with the super-sized abandon of an Olympic opening ceremony.” … “It is a City boy steakhouse with sneakily daring, meticulously sourced food; a bustling, Basque asador in a shiny, sprawled air hangar of a space.”
Catherine Hanly (Hot Dinners) also tries Ibai. “If you're in the market for great steak, interesting wine and a good time, then Ibai is the place for you.”
Charlotte Ivers (Sunday Times) checks out Boisedale’s in Belgravia. “This Scottish restaurant is a parcel of an imagined past.”
✍🏻 Grace Dent (Guardian) heads to Osh Paz, a new Uzbek dumpling place in Regent Street. “What OshPaz [has] is huge heart. It may take me a moment to find Uzbekistan on a map, but Piccadilly Circus? Well, even a fool can get there.”
Andy Hayler (independent critic) is the latest to try Chez Roux and, like those who came before, found it lacking.
Tom Parker Bowles (Mail on Sunday) goes to River Cafe’s new Cafe. “A study in pure simplicity.”
Christina (LOTI) visits Koyn Thai in Mayfair. “The food here is elevated but the dishes haven’t been fiddled with at the expense of flavour, so you still get a true taste of Thailand, just in a high-end setting.”
✍🏻 Marina O’Loughlin (independent critic) is doing a four-week summer residency with the FT, and she opens this week with an interesting piece of the value of being a regular. It’s also a sort-of reflection on the Pete Wells / critics’ life isn’t always fun and joy narrative that’s been around the last few weeks. Well worth a read.
William Sitwell (Telegraph) was in Chester this week. Jay Rayner (Observer) was in Newport. Nick Lander (jancisrobinson.com) was in the Languedoc. Giles Coren (Times) didn’t do a review, writing about his family holiday in Ibiza instead.
✍🏻 Tim Hayward (FT) likewise didn’t write a review, but wondered whether restaurants could be ‘camp’?
Thanks so much for being part of the Professional Lunch community. My review of Mountain will be with you later this week. In the meantime, please subscribe if you haven’t already, and share Professional Lunch with friends and colleagues.