My Dining Hell by Jay Rayner

Author:Jay Rayner [Rayner, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241963203
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

4

I must get out less: Dispatches from Britain

June 2007

Carpe Diem, Millennium Parade, Explorer Lane, Harbourside, Bristol. Telephone: 01173 169173. Meal for two, including wine and service, £90.

It seems the road to Bristol is paved with good intentions. The last time I came here it was also to review a restaurant with a loudly proclaimed ethical policy. Bordeaux Quay made much of its non-existent carbon footprint, its recycling systems and the way it sourced its ingredients locally. When I pointed out that it then used those locally sourced ingredients to make lousy dishes that had nothing to do with the locality from which they were sourced, I received endless emailed complaints which said the chef-proprietor, Barney Haughton, deserved to be canonized for what he had done for the environment. A bunch of these emails came from people with the surname Haughton. Well, if your family won’t support you, who will?

I just hope the owners of Carpe Diem in Bristol do not have a multitude of family members with email accounts because it is, if anything, worse. The food is that nightmarish coincidence of really stupid ideas and grossly incompetent execution. In a year with some quite spectacular lows this is, by far, the lowest. Forget the road to Bristol. The food here is a journey down the road to culinary hell.

Like Bordeaux Quay, Carpe Diem is located in a shiny new development down by the waterside. It is a big, rectangular echoey space which, when empty, as it was on our visit, looks like a modern furniture shop. Like Bordeaux Quay it declares itself carbon and nitrates neutral. Everything that can be recycled is; all coffees and teas are Fairtrade; the bogs use a water-conservation system; and all meat comes from animals that are free range and – their words – ‘live their life with dignity’.

Then they take that meat and treat it with so little respect, so little dignity, they might as well cut out the middleman – the poor, benighted diner – and shove it straight into the wormery. Take, for example, a starter of smoked duck, served sliced, fridge-cold, and with some of the clingfilm still attached. To go with this was a chunk of hard, crumbly chocolate torte. Is it a witty, interesting and modern food combination? No. It is horrible, pointless and idiotic one. There was also a gingerbread crisp that didn’t taste of ginger and a quenelle of quince raisin compote which was merely a poor man’s Branston. These ingredients occupied four separate corners of a plate like guests at a party who didn’t want to be introduced, and rightly so.

There was a similar plating for a grossly over-seasoned crab cake which tasted not at all of crab, with pickled fennel that had no aniseed kick, and some gluey caramelized kumquat that reminded me of orange squash syrup. Amazingly the mains were, if anything, worse. Fillets of sea bass, at a shameful £17.50, had been fried for so long they had soaked up all the fat, managing to be both dry and greasy at the same time.

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