Latest news with #TownRestaurant
The Guardian
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Town, London WC2: ‘This place is a feeder' – restaurant review
Off to Town this week, on Drury Lane. Yes, a restaurant called Town, one word, so a bit of a challenge to find online. Then again, perhaps by the time you're as experienced and beloved a restaurateur as Stevie Parle, formerly of Dock Kitchen, Craft, Sardine, Palatino and Joy, your regular clientele will make the effort to find you. Parle's shtick, roughly speaking, is thoughtful, high-end Mediterranean cooking and warm, professional hospitality, so the longer I thought about him opening a new place in London's theatre heartland and calling it just Town, the more it made sense. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. Yes, Town may be up at the less pretty end of this famous road, next door to a Travelodge and in the shadow of the lesser-known Gillian Lynne theatre, but whenever I hear the words 'Drury Lane', I'm whisked back to the impossible glamour of the start of the Royal Variety Performance on the BBC and people in tiaras exiting Rolls-Royces. Drury Lane, the commentator used to say, was the glitzy epicentre of London town, and Parle's new restaurant certainly captures some of the essence of that yesteryear ritz. It's a big, beautiful, ballsy, expensive-looking beast; a sleek, capacious, ever-so-slightly Austin Powers-esque, shiny-floored, caramel-coloured pleasure palace. It has a vivid, neon-green brightly lit open kitchen and thick 3D burgundy wall tiles that speak of expensive ceramic deliveries from the genre of Italian supplier that makes Kevin McCloud clutch his face and sigh, 'Well, this spells problems for the budget.' Thankfully, the budget for Town's decor – and how many portions of deep-fried sage leaves they need to sell to recoup it – is not my problem. All I know is that I was having a jolly old time from the second I sat down to sip on a naked flame non-alcoholic cocktail while feeling like Princess Michael of Kent circa 1988 hiding from a Royal Command Performance. And that was before I'd even glanced at the menu to choose between Town's cod and clam curry with mussels, rhubarb and ghee flatbread and the Welsh lobster with lardo and house XO sauce, or indeed found room for the morello cherry clafoutis with thick cream. Town's menu, I should warn you, is not for anyone with a meek appetite, or those hoping for a Slimming World Body Magic award by the summer. Example: the fresh, warm potato sourdough from the 'snacks' section of the menu comes with a bowl of bone marrow dipping gravy. Order Parle's signature fried sage leaves, and they'll arrive drizzled with heather honey. If you attempt to hide away with the 100-Acre radishes, they come in a thick puddle of miso hummus. This restaurant is a feeder. Other snacks are the likes of gildas, caviar with homemade beef fat crisps and Coombeshead's cured mangalitsa shoulder. Initially, I suspected that Town might be a pre-theatre restaurant designed to scoop up tourists in search of a deal, but it turns out that the food is far too good to rush through in an hour. And anyway, does anyone really want to sit through two and a half hours of Much Ado About Nothing after devouring a whopping great portion of sublime Kashmiri saffron risotto with yet more bone marrow, or a huge pork chop with seasonal onions, a rich, burnt apple sauce and hot mustard? Both of those dishes were finely executed, eminently devourable and teetering on the edge of a bit bloody much. We shared a side of beef fat pink fir potatoes that held good on their promise, because each one came enrobed in thick, bottom-of-the-tin, Sunday lunch-style beef fat. Right now, Town is manageably quiet, but it won't be for long, and nor should it be. Service is bright, crisp, clever and unobtrusive, and the prices are, dare I say, reasonable by London standards these days. There are a hundred places where the hopeful theatreland diner can be ripped off in this postcode, but Town to me is already a trusted friend. The dessert menu offers no let-up on the excess, extra thought and ecstasy, either. We shared a single scoop of pale green Uji matcha ice-cream festooned in crunchy brittle and perched in a pool of sweet miso caramel. Then, the star of the show, a hot-from-the-oven, damp, sticky cherry clafoutis served with much, much too much clotted cream. Parle has taken to theatreland with another sterling performance: a great first act, a strong middle section and a thoroughly satisfying denouement. Unmissable. Five stars. Town 26-29 Drury Lane, London WC2, 020-3500 7515. Open lunch Mon-Sun, noon-3pm; dinner Mon-Sat, 5-10pm. From about £60 a head à la carte, plus drinks and service
Times
15-05-2025
- Health
- Times
Half puds? Tiny plates? How Ozempic has changed restaurant menus
The other week, I suffered a minor bout of food poisoning — nothing too serious, but certainly enough to dent my usual enthusiasm for eating. It was unfortunate timing because, that evening, I was due to sit down to a ten-course tasting menu cooked by a celebrated chef and it was not something I felt I could duck out of. So I put on a brave face, took a tiny forkful of each dish and sent the rest back to the kitchen largely uneaten. This is going to be awkward, I thought, expecting the chef, or waiter at least, to ask if everything had been all right. But no. Silence. They took away the plates without a murmur, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to spend £250 on dinner and barely touch a morsel. 'It's obvious, isn't it?' my wife said as we left. 'They just assumed you are on Ozempic.' Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro — however we know the new class of GLP-1 appetite-suppressing drugs, they are already changing our relationship with food, and with ministers exploring how they can be accessed more widely, their influence is only going to grow. First to feel the pinch? Restaurants, which have already noticed the subtle effects on their bottom line. Chefs are having to reconsider their menus and diners are trying to establish the new codes of etiquette that their reduced appetites require. • Ozempic seems like a miracle drug. But what's it doing to our brains? The restaurateur Jonathan Downey, who has just opened Town restaurant on Drury Lane in central London with the chef Stevie Parle, says that they 'absolutely design dishes specifically for the Mounjaro generation'. The common complaint among restaurateurs is that no one orders pudding any more, so they have their 'skinny slice puddings' such as half-sized portions of chocolate tart, single scoop servings of sorbet and individual spiced doughnuts. More tellingly, they have made main courses available in smaller portions. 'When you are taking Mounjaro it's important to maintain muscle mass, so the focus is on getting enough protein even when your appetite is reduced,' Downey says. 'It used just to be gym bunnies who were obsessed with that, but now it's middle-aged mums and dad-bod men too.' At Town they serve a butterflied sea bass just with lemon, oil and salt, available as a whole or half fish, and 200g steaks as opposed to a more regular-sized 350g one. Cynics might say it's a way of reducing portion size to keep prices down, but Downey says not. 'It sits with the times. We thought we were just giving people more options, but it turns out to be part of the zeitgeist. You have to give people what they want.' What the Ozempic diner really, really wants, though, is the chance to eat less without signposting it to one and all. Hence the return of the small sharing plate. These were popular before, of course, but after the pandemic they were disappearing in favour of longer, no-choice set menus as restaurateurs tried to push up the average spend. Now it's a brave restaurant that forces so much food on a customer. Even the smaller steaks and pork chops at Town arrive at the table already sliced to make sharing easier, and a dish of five asparagus spears draped with slices of lardo was quickly reconfigured, Downey says, to have each spear individually wrapped 'so people could divide it up more easily'. • Ozempic jabs could soon be eclipsed by first weight-loss pill The Times critic Giles Coren has quickly seen the effects. 'It used just to be rich women who never ate anything in restaurants, but now it's all the men too,' he says. 'I met a friend the other day and he was looking a bit gaunt, and I asked if he was on Ozempic and he just laughed and said, 'Of course I bloody am.' Absolutely everyone I know is. 'I love a sharing plate, because it means you can spread yourself across more of the menu,' he adds, 'but the whole point is that you get lots of them. And as soon as you start ordering, your Ozempic mates go, 'Stop, stop, I can't possibly eat all that.' And I'm thinking, but I've only ordered some ham and half a dozen clams. That's going to make for a hell of a boring review.' At least he knows where he stands when his companion is upfront about it. Much more irritating are those people who try to hide their Ozempic habit in plain sight. 'I've got friends who, for whatever reason, don't want to admit they are taking the jab,' says another regular restaurant-goer. 'So they order loads of sharing plates to make a big show of how hungry they are and then push a salad around their plate and hope that someone else will do the heavy lifting. The trouble is, half the table are probably secretly in the same position and you just end up ordering way too much food, and it all goes to waste.' Gareth Birchley, buying director at Burns & German Vintners, who took Ozempic for six months last year, takes the view that honesty is the best way. 'People can be very cagey about it, but I think it's best to be open with your friends and the restaurant,' he says. He spends much of his time eating out with clients and hates the idea of spoiling his relationship with some of the country's best chefs. He recalls a low point in the private dining room of the three-Michelin-star restaurant Hélène Darroze at the Connaught. 'It was kind of embarrassing only being able to eat one mouthful of each course, but at least because I had been honest about the reason it made it less awkward.' In the end he came off the drug when his weight plateaued. 'I wasn't losing more weight, I wasn't having much fun and I was shelling out £400 a month. It wasn't a hard decision to make.' Luckily for his line of work, he didn't feel sick drinking alcohol, which is a side-effect for many, but it did curb his intake. 'The obvious factor is that if you are not consuming so much food, you can't drink as much.' This is another headache that badly hits restaurants' margins. • How to control your appetite without Ozempic 'Last year the typical restaurant revenue split between food and drink was 55:45, but now it's more like 60:40,' Downey says. 'We know people aren't drinking so much.' He has countered this by offering more wines by the glass and carafe and introducing a range of smaller-serve cocktails, such as half-measure martinis. He has also introduced a new category called 'chargers', served in small glasses as aperitifs. The restaurateur Jeremy King has introduced something similar at the Park, in Queensway, with his small-serve 'sharpeners'. For the time being, GLP-1s are a rich person's drug, so it is only the more upmarket restaurants that are noticing the changes. However, as the drug becomes more widely used, as it inevitably will, it's going to be the mid-market chains and fast food shops that will be next in the firing line. Anyone fancy going halves on a Chicken McNugget?
