The most beautiful restaurant in London?
The 2010 Restaurant & Bar Design Awards were announced this week and London restaurants picked up five gongs - pretty good considering there were nearly 400 entries from over 38 countries.
The overall winner in the Best Restaurant category was Galvin La Chapelle. The restaurant's designers were Design LSM who converted the Grade II 19th Century Foundation School for Girls into one of London's most beautiful restaurants. Canteen picked up the award for Best Multiple restaurant and The Draft House scooped up Best Identity and Web Design.
There were more awards in the form of the Guild of Food Writers Awards which were held this week at the Design Museum. The Restaurant Reviewer of the Year award went to The Independent's Tracey MacLeod whose work was described as; 'fair, honest, up to date, readable, and knowledgeable'.
Paltrow's River Cafe stage
When you think of Gwyneth Paltrow, you probably don't picture her slaving away over a deep-fat fryer, however if you'd been at The River Cafe last month that's where you'd have found the Oscar-winning actress who spent a day working in the kitchens there.
'A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of spending the day working in London's famous River Cafe, and it was incredible!' Paltrow writes on her website, Goop. 'The kitchen runs with a precision you would expect but a calm you perhaps would not. I tried to document as best I could, taking photos along the way.
'Once service started, I was stationed at the deep fat fryer (Delight! Fried zucchini! Fried anchovies!), and also helped Danny on pasta with his very busy day. It was an experience I won't soon forget.'
You are what you photograph
To snap or not to snap, that's the question bouncing around the foodie blogosphere since Giles Coren let loose his first volley of abuse on the practice of photographing one's food in restaurants in his review of Roux Parliament Square a few weeks ago. Never one to mince words, Coren said of the practice; 'I think photographing one’s food in a restaurant is easily as rude, disrespectful and brutish as making a phone call, scrolling a BlackBerry or dropping one’s trousers in the middle of the room and taking a massive dump.'
In this week's review, Coren takes stock of the response to his piece. 'A couple of weeks ago I mentioned here, en passant, how upsetting I find it when people (whom I assume to be mostly food bloggers) take photographs of their food in restaurants. And the internet caved in on me.'
Interestingly, Coren's piece would, before the Times paywall came in, probably have been deluged with comments from bloggers having their say on the subject - but this being the recession and all, and the fact that not many people have picked up on the fact that the Times is still free to read at the moment if you log in, it only has three terse comments. So all that blather that Coren is talking about ended up happening on the Guardian website's piece on the issue which must be pretty irritating for Coren.
As for Hot Dinners - although we're not bloggers - we have to admit that we started out taking pictures of our food, but pretty quickly stopped, mainly when it became clear we weren't very good at it..
