Latest news with #Pompadour
Scotsman
29-07-2025
- Business
- Scotsman
Is the tasting menu over? The rise of 'accessible' dining out in Scotland
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The past few years have seen the multiple course tasting menu reign supreme across all kinds of restaurants. The type of menu once usually reserved for high end restaurants, often in luxury hotels, started to trickle down into neighbourhood eateries and has been widely popularised by the Six by Nico concept, growing and expanding into cities across the UK and globe. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad But now, with the cost of living continuing to bite, not to mention VAT and rates for restaurants, is the tasting menu over? I write this just a few days after chef Dean Banks announced he was scrapping the tasting menu within the Pompadour in Edinburgh's Caledonian Hotel on Princes Street. This stunning dining room, with its views of Edinburgh Castle, is a historic one and has been the site of Mr Banks's restaurant after the Galvin Brothers left in 2019. Mr Banks said he had chosen to move away from a tasting menu , which he has served since opening, due to a change in consumer demand. With starters from £15 and mains starting at £26, and a three-course lunch for just £39.50, the new menu is a far cry from the previous eight-course tasting menu for £105 per person. Commenting on the launch of the new a la carte menu, Mr Banks said: 'Consumers are moving away from multi-course tasting menus, instead preferring restaurants where they can enjoy premium dishes at an accessible price point. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'When considering the future of Dean Banks at the Pompadour, it was important to reflect these changing consumer demands while ensuring the high-quality offering we pride ourselves on remains.' Some of the new dishes at the Pompadour restaurant | Grant Anderson Edinburgh is home to many fine dining restaurants, and a host of Michelin Stars. But some of the most recent, and celebrated, launches are offering a more 'basic' a la carte menu rather than the popular tasting menu. One of these, Moss , which has gained rave reviews, was launched as a kind of antithesis to these fine dining establishments, with Mr Moss calling it 'rehab for fine dining chefs'. He also spoke, ahead of Moss launching, about how it was going to be a tasting menu restaurant, but the fact that changed due to market saturation. Mr Dobson said: 'We're now going for more of a neighbourhood price point. We want people to visit once or twice a month.' This isn't something that tends to happen with an expensive, multiple course only option. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Last year chef patron of The Gannet in Glasgow, Peter McKenna, ditched the eatery's tasting menu, saying: 'What I want is a comprehensive, a la carte menu individually priced, so somebody can come in and they can have a bowl of wild garlic soup with Maryhill cultivated mushrooms or a rack of hogget or a whole lobster. The Gannet has always been a neighbourhood restaurant and I want to reassert that.' This neighbourhood dining seems to be what's in demand - somewhere to get delicious, seasonal and comforting bites to eat, in relaxed surroundings without breaking the bank. While the tasting menu lives on, it does so as part of a larger experience. Inver, for example, is an exploration of its surroundings - both outside the window and what's on the plate.
Spectator
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Grayson Perry has pulled off another coup at the Wallace Collection
This show was largely panned in the papers when it opened in April, with critics calling it 'awkward and snarky', applying that sturdy English put-down 'arch', and generally carping at 'rich insider' Sir Grayson Perry for posing as an outsider artist. Word-of-mouth reviews were completely different, however, almost as if gallery-goers, free from the necessity of taking an art-historical position, had just really enjoyed the whole bonkers experience. To get to the exhibition, which is down in the former cellars of Hertford House, you first walk through the Wallace Collection, past its gleaming ormolu and onyx treasures. The place is a portal into the ancien régime, yet still carries a feeling – imprinted into the small-scale neoclassical architecture – that this is a home. A fantasy home. A home for a fantasist. 'A poor person's idea of how a rich person's home should look,' as Perry puts it. The sort of place one might think one lived in, if one were having a mental-health crisis. Which brings us to Perry's invented persona Shirley Smith, formerly in the care of Claybury Mental Hospital, Essex, now living in a council flat in Islington, and suffering – or enjoying – delusions of grandeur. The audio guide begins with her voicing a letter to the 9th Marquess announcing she has recently discovered she is his heir and asking when she can move into her rightful home. A tragicomic conceit, and a rich vein for Perry, who makes many of the works in the exhibition in her persona – intense, repetitive line drawings of herself in fine clothes, and a truly hideous handcrafted version of Boucher's 'Madame de Pompadour' made by Shirley Smith out of wool and bobbins during art-therapy sessions. Because this is the Wallace Collection, the original 'Pompadour' by Boucher is hanging here, too, completely upstaged by Shirley Smith's garish stitching; when I finally noticed the familiar masterpiece, I burst out laughing, and saw it afresh – an achievement of the show. Perry has created Shirley Smith in the image of Madge Gill (1882-1961), the outsider artist, scribbler, weaver and mystic. Several of her drawings and textiles are displayed, illuminating but tangential. In fact, the whole show is a constellation of clever tangents and compelling ideas, volleying from AI to the rococo, from 'craftivism' to – in a virtue-signalling tapestry by Perry that is unappealing to look at, but makes another synaptic spark – the problems of patronage. Delusions of Grandeur digs into the feelings that the Wallace Collection evokes; Perry himself has a kinky engagement with the armour, hates the shiny Sèvres and can't keep a straight face when he looks at the miniatures, which he arranges into a family tree of psychiatric disorders. He has a lot of fun with it all, believing an artist's job is to 'bite the hand that feeds him, but not too hard'. The mood is mildly subversive, the social-warrior sting removed by the fact that Hertford House is bequeathed to the nation, and you can stroll in at any time, for free. 'I Know Who I Am', 2024, by Grayson Perry. © GRAYSON PERRY. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND VICTORIA MIRO Perry puts his spin on the weaponry here, creating 'A Gun For Shooting the Past', a gaudy neon fake blunderbuss that sits beside a real silver-enamelled flintlock. 'This gun is a talisman of power over our history,' he riffs. 'It has no power in the here-and-now, it cannot kill anyone. It is for settling scores with the past, it kills memories… For those of us who are still controlled by painful experiences at the hands of people in the past, perhaps several generations ago, this gun can deliver cleansing fire.' The woman next to me beamed at it, in on the psychotherapeutic language, or simply enjoying the conceit. This work will live on, I think, but there is no new masterpiece here, nothing you want to buy a postcard of. In fact, as noted, many of the works are ugly, failures of one sort or another. But it's a very stimulating show, the most cerebral fun I've had in a gallery for a long time. I was hoping for a more complete engagement with Shirley Smith's style, but the glimpse of the numinous power of outsider art dwindles like a candle next to Perry's electric light. The promise that we will see the interior of Shirley Smith's home does not come off, and instead we get more and more Grayson Perry showing through the patina of Smith. But Perry is, I suppose, what people have come for, and he has pulled off another coup here.
