If you really want to ensure a packed restaurant night after night, the solution is clear, get your owner onto a reality TV show, pronto. Hot Dinners spoke today to Alex, restaurant manager at The Apprentice winner Yasmina Siadatan’s restaurant Mya Lacarte (The world’s worst restaurant name? Discuss it on our forums...), hoping to find out whether Yasmina’s success at winning a job with Sir Alan had translated into actual bookings.
‘Yesterday the phone was going pretty much all day long,’ he told us. ‘It’s certainly increased the bookings further in advance and helped keep our momentum going.’ However there are limits to what the restaurant can use from its TV publicity. When Hot Dinners asked whether there were any plans to put some of Yasmina’s memorably-bad chocolates on the menu we were told, ‘It’s not something we’d associate ourselves with.’ So the residents of Caversham won’t be forced after all to endure sweets memorably described by Jonathan Ross as ‘like sucking on the soap in a cheap hotel’.
Other things we learned this week:
- It’s not a good idea to get onto to Greenpeace’s bad books. Celebrity restaurant Nobu got nobbled by Greenpeace over their stance on bluefin tuna, putting barbed adverts in the press and handing out mock menus to the stars arriving at the A-list restaurant including Jack Black and Matt Lucas. (Is it bad, that the pictures of Nobu's sushi made us want to eat there even more?)
- If you need a stay in hospital try and hold off for Heston Blumenthal’s work with the NHS to make it on to a menu in a ward near you. He told the Telegraph he’s a year into a government-funded project to get old people, particularly those in hospital, excited in food again.
- The best work canteen in London has to be at the headquarters of the Compass group, whose head chef Ben Ford won the London Chef of the Year award this week, beating off chefs from The Providores, Automat and the House of Commons among others.
