Restaurant Review - Pitchfork: The Restaurant

Pitchfork:
Pitchfork: The Restaurant
[Pitchfork Media; 2009]
Rating: 6.3

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Online music magazine publisher Pitchfork Media has branched out into the world of fine dining, opening Pitchfork: the Restaurant. Located in Boston, Pitchfork Media’s home city, the restaurant marks a departure for the company, who had previously branched out into television channels as well as concert and festival promotion. This is their first time doing anything not directly related to music.

It’s a risky move to be sure, and on first glance it’s a silly one. The gastro-hipster scene is filled with similar restaurants, from Fried Bear - the eatery seen as starting the movement – to the newly opened Shut Your Mouth and Eat Restaurant, which is, as everyone knows, the side project of Bruno Mincemeat. Next month the long-awaited electro-gastro café, [lightning bolt], will open, and many gastro-hipsters seem to be rallying against what they see as the selling out of their favourite culinary haunts. Now would not seem to be a good time to be opening a new eating place.

As expected, the restaurant wears its influences firmly on its sleeve, and yes, these influences aren’t surprising, much to its detriment. Take Pitchfork’s Chutney Sandwich, for example: the lettuce arrangement seems to have been taken wholesale from DeKlassay’s Tangerine Salad. And while the casual eater will marvel at Pitchfork’s Ham en Croute, seasoned scenesters will recognise elements of meals from little-known restaurants like Dipthong Tragedy, Exclamation Point! Misuse, and Café of Montreal.

But at the same time the chefs at Pitchfork know what they’re good at, and when they stick to this formula, they do it well. There’s the occasional foray into avant garde food, echoing the 60s food dub experiments of Colonel Insane’s Ohm Beat Restaurant, but this is thankfully brief. The ponderous, meandering Beetroot-infused Scallops is one such victim of the urge to think too much about a meal, and suffers accordingly.

A quick trawl through the dessert menu shows some definite gems. Blancmange is a wonderful example of good food done well, while Chocolate Sorbet echoes Dizzy Holness at his most fragile. Even Lemon Cheesecake holds a certain poignancy not seen since Gustark Malfinch opened his much-missed limited edition café in 2001.

But in a world of great eateries, the question remains: If Pitchfork: The Restaurant didn’t exist, would it be necessary to invent it? The answer, sadly, is no. Two years ago, this would have been a hugely successful hit restaurant, but blame the food criticism media for building the gastro-hipster scene up too much, because the genre is saturated. Not even an excellent cheesecake can save Pitchfork Media from this fact.

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/pitchforkrestaurant

- Imaginary Reviewer, February 10, 2009

Restaurant Review: Appetite for Mozzarella

Axl Rose has many reasons to be happy right now. Next week, the long-awaited Guns N Roses album, Chinese Democracy, will be released after 14 years of writing, recording, false starts and band member changes. Even more surprisingly, Rose has just recently opened a new pizza restaurant in downtown Los Angeles called ‘Appetite for Mozzarella’, and it’s garnering a lot of attention from gourmands and rock fans alike. I decided to take a look.

The décor of AfM is how one would expect a restaurant owned by the frontman of Guns N Roses to look. Guitars and photos of the past adorn the walls of the eatery, though his public spats with other members of G’n’R mean that only pictures of Axl himself are to be found. There are framed gold and platinum discs around the place, and in one corner there is a display of some of Rose’s famous kilts. As one might expect, the music being played is a constant stream of Guns N Roses’ most popular songs, including that one from Terminator 2.

Looking at the menu, there’s a great selection of delicious-looking pizza meals, and I opted for the ‘Sweet Chili of Mine’, a pepper-based pizza with caramelised onions and olives. My partner went for the ‘Meat-Train’, a carnivore’s dream with more different sausages than you can shake a Slash guitar solo at. Really, we were spoiled for choice; from the fromage-tastic ‘It’s so Cheesy’ (with seven different kinds of cheese) to the vegetarian ‘Welcome to the Fungal’, a mostly mushroom-based pizza, there was so much on offer here. I was quite tempted by the ‘Paradise VoraCity’, a pizza that certainly lives up to its name by being 36 inches in diameter and earning a leather jacket for anyone who can eat an entire one alone.

With all these mouthwatering choices, then, it’s a shame that the service in Appetite for Mozzarella is so poor. It was over an hour after we ordered that we saw our waiter again, and when asked what had happened to our food he apologised but said that Axl had fired all his kitchen staff shortly after we ordered. He assured us that our meal would be ready once the new recruits had got up to speed with the kitchen layout and the menu.

I took this time to read a leaflet about the restaurant. Apparently it’s possible to rent out Appetite for Mozzarella for a special ‘November Rain’ wedding reception, complete with unexpected downpours, someone diving headfirst through the cake and a general feeling of foreboding until the third act when the bride dies and the groom wakes up, sobbing, as the whole thing has been a dream.

After another hour had passed our pizzas were brought out to our table, but before the waiter could set them before us, the chef ran out and told him to bring them back because he wasn’t happy with them.

It was at this point when I realised that nobody else in the restaurant was eating.

And this, then, is my main gripe with Appetite for Mozzarella. The food looks and smells wonderful. The smells coming out of the kitchen were to die for. We couldn’t wait for our food. But we had to wait. And wait. And wait. And despite being offered free Dr. Pepper for having to wait so long, it is simply unacceptable to have people wait for as long as we were before being served. When we discovered that our food wouldn’t be ready until April 2015, my partner and I decided to leave and find a more prompt meal elsewhere.

So I’m sorry that I can’t comment on the quality of the food in question, but with service this bad, I don’t recommend that anyone else try to find out for themselves.

No chefs’ hats out of a possible five.

Welcome to the fungal/we’ve got chanterelle/we’ve got every mushroom you want/even False Morel/and you’re a very hungry man/very hard to please/if you don’t like mushrooms well/we’ve got a pizza full of cheese/in the fungal/welcome to the fungal/gonna bring you your shi-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ke/shiitake/shiitake

Restaurant Review: The Best of All Possible Meals

The Best of All Possible Meals is the latest themed restaurant to hit the World dining scene, garnering huge swathes of column inches in the weekend broadsheets. With an interior designed by up and coming architectural collective ‘Pörn’ and a menu full of creations by top chef GastroKeith, The Best of All Possible Meals has the gimmick of being the first philosophically-themed restaurant in the world. I went along to see if I could find the meaning of life lurking somewhere in my soup.

The décor of the establishment is superb, with busts and portraits of popular philosophers lining the walls. Whether you’re into Stoicism or Contemporary Post-Structuralism, you’re sure to find all of your favourites somewhere in the dining room. My waiter for the day, who introduced himself as Immanuel, showed my partner and I to our seats at a Wittgensteinian Truth Table, and asked if we would like our menus in rational or empirical form. I chose the former option while my partner opted for the latter, and for anyone thinking of eating at the restaurant I can only recommend that you also go for the empirical menu. My choice of a rationalist menu meant that it was assumed that I had an innate knowledge of its contents, meaning that I didn’t receive one. Luckily I was able to share my partner’s.

Our Waiter for the day, Immanuel

Incidentally, for those who don’t wish to be sat at one of the Truth Tables, there are private rooms available on request. These ‘Sartre Rooms’ are especially for those who think that “Hell is other people”.

While there are several set menus to choose from, there are also many things of interest on the A la Descartes menu, and it was from here where the two of us ate. For our appetizers, I decided to have the Leibnizian monad salad, while my partner went for Nietzsche’s Uberminestrone Soup. The salad was good, though there definitely wasn’t enough of it. Conversely, while plentiful, the Nietzschian soup was a little hard to swallow.

I had heard good things about the Platonic Chicken, and so ordered that as my entrée. It was absolutely superb: moist, tasty, done to perfection and with an exquisite selection of vegetables. I can say without fear of exaggeration that this is the best chicken I have had in my life. It was, as far as I can see, the ideal form of chicken, the chicken to which all other chickens must aspire. I now know that I will never eat another chicken so long as I live, as nothing will ever live up to Platonic Chicken here at The Best of All Possible Meals.

My partner, on the other hand, was not so lucky in her choice of entrée. She went for a Hume-inspired dish consisting of duck with mashed potatoes and green beans. She enjoyed the side dishes, but wasn’t overly keen on the meat itself. She called it ‘Hume’s Problem of In-duck-tive Seasoning’. I tasted some for myself and she was right; it was far too salty.

For dessert, I treated myself to an Ontological Banana Split. I don’t see how I couldn’t; its very existence on the menu meant that I had no other option but to conclude it delicious. My partner decided to go for the Gödel Cheese Plate, but we couldn’t get our heads around it. For some reason it contained every single cheese in existence, but by doing so, proved that no cheese plate would ever contain a set of all cheeses. It felt wrong to eat any of it, and so it was returned to the kitchens untouched.

We finished our meals with a couple of cocktails, and while I enjoyed my Locke on the Rocks, here I must again make a warning to the potential BoAPM customer. The Socrates Sling, a drink that contains a mysterious ‘secret ingredient’, prompted my partner to feel quite ill, and a while after our meal had ended, she succumbed to her sickness. The inquest suggested she had suffered from hemlock poisoning. Therefore, I wouldn’t recommend anyone try that particular drink themselves.

All in all, The Best of All Possible Meals is a fairly decent establishment, with some poor dishes made up for by the wonderful Platonic Chicken. I would have liked to have finished this review with a conclusion, but this is philosophy, and it would only be proved wrong in a matter of months.

For more Philosophically-inspired cuisine, please look out for the forthcoming restaurant by John Searle, The Chinese Food Argument.

Restaurant Review: Waiter! Waiter!

The Waiter! Waiter! restaurant in Battersea has been open for six months, and is steadily earning itself a reputation for serving top class food at fairly decent prices. The main talking point of the establishment, however, is that it is owned and run by Jacques LeBeouf, the famous pastry chef and former Miss Paraguay.

The décor in the dining room is particularly stunning, with beautiful crystal chandeliers and very thought-provoking tables. These physics-defying furniture items somehow manage to hold up one’s plates and elbows despite their legs not actually reaching the floor. Extraordinary.

Once my wife and I had stopped admiring the chandeliers, tables and the cleanliness of our hands, we were forced to choose our dishes, which, given the extent of the menu and the quality of the meals on offer, was no easy feat. Luckily the waiting staff are equipped with cattle prods, meaning that the terminally indecisive have some added incentive to choose quickly. I opted for the soup of the day (although not, I was informed, that particular day), and my wife – after a bit of encouragement from Nigel, our waiter – chose the chicken Caesar salad.

Once it arrived, my wife was highly complimentary towards her entrée, though Nigel said that that was a side-effect of the high-voltage shock, and after a little while she stopped talking to it and started to eat. Waiter! Waiter! prides itself on its restaurant-joke-applicability, and as a result my soup came complete with fly in it. This is a very nice touch that my wife and I enjoyed greatly, though I must say I was a little disappointed that our waiter, when asked what the fly was doing in my soup said ‘The backstroke, sir’, when it was quite obviously doing a front crawl.

For my main course I had the ‘Gammon Surprise’, which was indeed a big surprise, as I had ordered the halibut. With a side compote of plum and damson, and topped with lemon margarine, it had a slightly awkward air of perspicacity to it, although my wife put that down to the gentleman on the next table whose cottage pie was repeating on him. My wife, on the other hand, thoroughly enjoyed her duck a l’orange, despite the fact that the kitchen had run out of oranges and so had to make it with banana.

I had the rhubarb crumble for dessert, and my wife had the chocolate fudge cookie. We didn’t like what we had so we swapped.

In summary, then:

Waiter! Waiter! Restaurant, Battersea:

Décor: Four bangers (out of five); Very nice, but a little disorienting
Food: Three bangers (out of four); I burped up a little bit of sick afterwards
Service: Eight bangers (out of eleven); Nigel gave me his number
Price: Ten bangers (out of ten); For some reason I wasn’t billed