When dining out, one well known restaurant critic makes a point of asking how the tips are distributed, always leaving cash, and encourages readers to do the same. So I dutifully asked the MO of one waiter at the Cornerhouse Grill and was stunned by his response.
If Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, named this his favourite restaurant, and Adrian Gill, erstwhile restaurant critic of the Sunday Times, also raves about the place (albeit that he is presumably on a retainer for writing about the history of most of the major restos in Caprice Holdings Ltd), then any self respecting wino has to visit. Sunday lunch is just the perfect time to eat oysters, and my rocks were from Malden. I am embarrassed, though, to admit I had to ask the waiter to explain that Essex is where these crustacea were reared. I am such a northern oik!
The service at Scott’s is obviously superb, highly professional and (unusually) English. However, our waiter was having an off day. I had to ask three times for my wine to be topped up. You may be thinking “lazy so and so” but I would have had to walk about 300 yards to get to my bottle of Pouilly Fumé from where they parked it. Talking of which can you spot our car in the photo below?
No I can’t see it either.
The somewhat entertaining, but supercilious and frequently AWOL Sunday Times restaurant critic, AA Gill, rarely extends his gastronomic tentacles beyond central London. So I was surprised to see that he had, according to a poster at Piccadilly rail station, nominated San Carlo in MANCHESTER as the best Italian restaurant outside the capital. Surprised not only because he had ventured so far north as to get the apocryphal nosebleed, but also because San Carlo is far from the best resto of any type anywhere.
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