Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

You can get first-rate Canadian maple syrup for about £4.75 out of any big Sainsbury’s (and quite a few of the “Local” ones as well). Not cheap but it lasts and pays for itself a dozen times over.

Didn’t know about that “Canada Store” in Covent Garden – I ought to go and investigate but the problem with me is that even after 26 years in the capital I can’t go into Covent Garden without getting lost.

Lay a trail of string behind you (and hi Marcello! btw)

i've been to this place many times due to my uncle's proximity to it -

http://www.sugarshackvt.com

and actually in the scheme of things $35 for a half gallon of 100% pure maple syrup is a pretty good deal! (though you'd have to pay for shipping, erk)

haha and before anyone says i'm off topic i think you'll agree this is possibly the most "guardian" conversation ever

yeah i just buy my maple syrup from the supermarket, it's not that expensive imo

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/05/north-road-london-ec1-review

On my five-degree scale – in descending order, Awesome, Cool, OK, Meh, Pants – several dishes were between OK and Meh

is this seriously the best they can do for a food writer?

I semi-lolled.

John Lanchester is a fantastic writer (I loved his novels Mr Phillips and The Debt to Pleasure, and liked his 'Whoops' book about the financial crisis), but this article is gratuitously slick - with that 'know it all' style of positing a number of propositions as facts, that don't bear up to examination, e.g

-In cooking as in crime writing, the global trend is Scandinavian.

- Broadly speaking, we look south for posh food, east for ethnic food, west for junk food and north for deep-fried Mars bars.

John has great gifts as a writer - his turn of phrase, his use of metaphor. Hope he doesn't squander them in becoming a Craig Brown.

it's not just slick, it's bone lazy.

plus somebody dissects it in the comments in forensic detail and his actual points/logic are all over the place.

I missed the comments - oh dear.

The review actually reminded me a bit of Momus - that kind of inventing a 'new global/cultural trend' or new 'insights' on the differences between Japan and the West out of a few anecdotal and zeitgeist comments.

At least he's not Jay Raynor.

Or Giles Coren.

Giles Coren wrote one of the worst novels ever written and will have to live with it for the rest of his life.

Jay Rayner's okay (we have a v. good mutual friend) but is one of the most competitive people I've ever met in my life. If friend and I hadn't gone to high school with 100 guys just like him we would probably find him really irritating, but I did zing him by saying my mom's matzoh ball soup would give any he's had a run for its money (true BTW, craving it now).

at least coren and rayner would never use a sentence like the above one...

Yeah, can't see Jay generalizing wildly about "ethnic" food.

i really like jay rayner's stuff

When Facebook gets involved, relationships can quickly fall apart – as Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi have discovered. But dictatorships are not the only ties being dissolved by social networking sites: now Facebook is increasingly being blamed for undermining American marriages.

i just saw this but -

-In cooking as in crime writing, the global trend is Scandinavian.

this seems true?

apart from that yeah the review is pretty awful but he's waaaaaaay better than matthew norman who used to do the guardian saturday review.

jay rayners good!

-In cooking as in crime writing, the global trend is Scandinavian.

this seems true?

I think that 'global' is probably a bad choice of words.

i'm guessing he just means that all over the world there have been many many articles written abt noma + how scandinavian food is doing new things, which seems like a trend? like how spanish food was a trend when el bulli was 'the best restaurant in the world'

xp
Arghh, Norman! He's now in the Telegraph, ruined the Weekend section for me.

I just get tired of them all after a while. Mostly read food blogs these days.

Yeah, can't see Jay generalizing wildly about "ethnic" food.

No, but he does generalise wildly about vegetarians, vegans, anywahere outside London.

A recent tweet - "Dinner. Birmingham. Feel my pain." just about sums him up for me.

"Dinner. Birmingham. Feel my pain." pretty reprehensible for a writer on a nat'l paper. If he can't find somewhere decent to eat in any UK city then he's a moron.

xxps

yeah, I think it's 'there is a international world of food ppl; in that world, everyone is banging on about Scandinavia', which seems true.

I really can't see why the Lanchester is so bad; it oversteps on its generalisations, makes a couple of lazy jokes (Mars Bars, Meh), feels gappy and rushed at the end, but really it's a restaurant review - it's not too bad compared to many (restaurant reviewing is a shady political game + a magnet for arseholes). The commenters seem to be wilfully misreading it to create contradictions. (& fwiw it seems fair about North Road, which is an odd restaurant)

Scando food is a massive trend - friend who is half posh, half Norwegian, 100 per cent chef (River Café, Rose Bakery, editor of food site) has just signed a very respectable deal with Bloomsbury to write about the flora, fauna and cuisine inspired by her family's fjord island in Norway.

plus somebody dissects it in the comments in forensic detail

You say this like it's a good thing and not just what every nutter on the internet does.

xp

oh, i think she was work experience round one of my offices a couple of years ago, heard about the book last time I was in. tilly c-s, right?

xps
What everybody forgets is deep-fried mars bars are fucking delicious.

Yeah but you wouldn't go to a restaurant for one.

No, but he does generalise wildly about vegetarians, vegans, anywahere outside London.

Argh, there is a restaurant in Oxford with a big sign on the window saying "the best Chinese food outside London - Giles Coren", which piqued my curiosity so I read the review online. The first two screenfuls (was going to count the paragraphs but can't look at it any more because of the paywall) were about the old friends he met in Oxford to play cricket with, and then about 5 paragraphs of him almost refusing to eat a meal in Oxford because it isn't London and Mr Coren cannot even imagine anyone not in London being able to cook, and then finally a couple of paragraphs about the food.

Do yr job. Eat a meal. Write about it. Thanks.

Think there might be some good Chinese food in China that Mr Coren might be aware of.

Chinatown

Ah but Giles Coren’s readers don’t really read his restaurant columns for his opinion on restaurants but for his rants/moans, which as they are all wind-up/projection don’t particularly bother me.

Not defending the indefensible Coren here, but Oxford is pretty poor for restaurants. It was a big deal when Jamie Oliver opened his pasta house thing there.

You can't even get decent chelsea buns there anymore.

Oh wait, that's Cambridge. Although probably you can't get decent chelsea buns in Oxford either, way the worlds going, etc.

The single worst restaurant experience I've ever had was the Oxford branch of Freud in, say, 1992. It went like this:

Me, Nick Momus and two of my friends from Brizzle decide to check out Freud.
Wait 20 minutes to be noticed by waiter.
Order. Sandwiches.
20 minutes later, waiter returns with sadface - 'we're out of that, choose something else'
OK, re-order. Nachos.
20 minutes later, waiter returns with sadface - 'we're out of that, choose something else'
Trying not to explode - How the fuck can they be out of something so basic? - hypoglycemia kicking in, BTW where are our coffees? Water, even? Re-order. "Why don't you tell us what's actually NOT OFF, or would that be... difficult?"

It is weird how places full of middle-class/posh people are dead zones for decent food. Exhibit B: Hampstead.

Woof - that's a big fat YES to t c-s - lovely, lovely person and my sub on Saturdays when I can't do veg stall at farmer's market.

posh people like to go to expensive places that are not necessarily good.

or maybe it was because he's a pirate the services wasn't so great? that's why the waiter was late? it was an hour til you ate?

can someone tell the guardian subs or whatever to never ever use "what *name of famous person* did next" as a headline. i've seen it about 10,000 times and it's cringe inducing.

not the grau but why does david mitchell STILL have an observer column? h8 having to see his smug, sententious face every week.

i accidentally read it this week too, cuz on the mobile guardian site it just gives the headline of the piece, not the author. s0 unfunny and uninsightful. we should be burning comedians at the stake, not giving them public platforms for their inability to be funny.

can't stand mitchell.

Picked up the Mitchell and Webb book for a quid last month cos I can't help reading bad comedy books, they interest me as historical artefacts as much as anything. They really aren't very funny at all.

would it be frowned upon to c&p an entire thread to 'first world problems'?

Never read the Observer, don't read newspapers at weekends

This is Mitchell's serious column though: he's not trying for the lols, this week anyway. I thought it was ok - picking up on some of Cameron's messages. It could have ben a bit more insightful e.g. how much Cameron continually borrows from Tony Blair.

I've probably avoided Mitchell fatigue though by not watching 10 o'clock live.

conservative slams into Conservative. great.

"The International Atomic Energy Authority website appears to have suffered a meltdown amid a surge in traffic..."

great work chaps

some kind of web 3 Mile Island presumably?