Fuchsia Dunlop

Some time ago I wrote a piece for the Financial Times about the Michelin Guide’s awarding of its maximum accolade, three stars, to a Chinese restaurant, for the first time.  While researching the article, I interviewed the director of the Michelin Guides, Jean-Luc Naret, on the controversy over whether one could judge Chinese and Western restaurants by the same criteria. Since I spoke to him, I’ve had one more niggling question, which is: with most Chinese restaurants, you really need to go with a large group to see what they can do, so aren’t they at a disadvantage when the judging is done by lone Michelin inspectors on repeated visits? Perhaps the inspectors don’t go alone, but it’s hard to imagine that their expenses budget would cover repeated visits with a party of people. If you visit a typical high-end Chinese restaurant alone, or with one dining companion, you are likely to be able to try only a few dishes, and to miss the excitement that comes from a really well-planned and diverse dinner for a group, which can be a kind of showcase for different cooking methods. In general, it is international hotels with Chinese restaurants that offer something equivalent to a Western tasting menu: could this explain the much-criticised focus on hotel restaurants in the inaugural Michelin Guide to Hong Kong and Macau? Hmm…

A couple more reviews of Ba Shan, the new London restaurant in the Bar Shu Group for which I work as consultant. Giles Coren, writing in the Times on Saturday, called it ‘A wonderful addition to my eating life… and a fresh new way to enjoy the most exciting food in the world’. Terry Durack, in the Independent on Sunday, found it ‘immediately charming’, and enjoyed ‘a meal of such distinct and interesting textures and flavours… a gastronomic tour of the provinces of China that Chinatown forgot’. 

by Danny Elwes

On Monday night I went to the awards ceremony for Restaurant magazine’s annual survey of the ‘World’s Fifty Best Restaurants’. Predictably, and I think deservedly, El Bulli took the top spot for the fourth year running, and Ferran Adria and his brother Albert were there to receive the award. But once again the only Chinese restaurant on the list was Hakkasan – in London! I’m a great fan of the dim sum at Hakkasan, and I love the design, but the best Chinese restaurant in the world?! Come on…

The new restaurant, Ba Shan, was the subject of Fay Maschler’s main review in the Evening Standard on Wednesday. And there’s already a review up on Time Out’s website, which mentions ‘the exquisite food and impossibly cheery service‘ – we understand that it will appear in the magazine itself the week after next. It was a blogger, however, who had the first word on the new restaurant, visiting it even before the sign had been put up outside!

A rubbery sea cucumber

I promised to write a little more on this story, and ended up doing a piece for the Financial Times, which you can read here. It was an interesting subject to research – and I had a very robust discussion on the phone with the director of Michelin guides, Jean-Luc Naret. I pushed him quite hard on the subject of rubbery things, which I honestly don’t believe most Europeans can appreciate (it took me years). His argument was that Michelin inspectors, as professionals, are duty-bound to understand the cuisines they assess – including alien aspects such as texture foods. Which conjures up a rather amusing picture of Michelin inspectors munching their way through piles of fish maw, sea cucumber and bird’s nest, trying to grasp the finer points of slitheriness…

My piece about a restaurant in Hangzhou appears in this weeks New Yorker Food Issue. It’s the first time I’ve written for the magazine.

Below are some of the photographs I took while researching the piece;

This is one of the private rooms at the Dragon Well Manor restaurant

  Continue reading…

A piece I wrote after my last visit to New York appeared in the Financial Times this weekend.

Here’s a brief excerpt:

Something as pure and scintillating as a raw oyster demands your full attention. You must sniff it for the whiff of sea breeze, the almost-sound of seagulls and waves breaking. Ease it from its shell, add a squeeze of lemon, a dash of sauce mignonette or even (here) a dollop of ketchup laced with horseradish. And then hold it up, the rough shell against your lip, and let it slide into your mouth, giving yourself over to its icy voluptuousness and the silvery taste of the ocean.

There is something sweetly decadent about being a woman in a restaurant alone, well-dressed and content, enjoying a platter of rugged oysters on their bed of ice. I don’t do it often, but when I do, it makes me feel like a “fast” woman of the 1920s, wearing trousers and smoking cigarettes; or a swashbuckling English missionary of the 1930s, crossing the Gobi Desert on a cart drawn by mules; even, at times, Mata Hari. Eating oysters alone, and enjoying them as much as I do, makes me feel that I am capable of anything…