Word of Mouth blog + Food & drink

It has become commonplace for big name chefs looking for a costly central location to turn to the relative security of high profile hotels. This year we've had Dinner by Heston Blumenthal at the Mandarin Oriental (also home to Bar Boulud, launched late last year) with its clever fruity take on chicken liver parfait. Also in 2010 Michael Caines opened his ABode in Chester, a brand new hotel and restaurant delivering decent tuck in the evening and B&B, and Pierre Koffmann returned to The Berkeley with the successor to La Tante Claire, Koffmann's. Most recently of all Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver opened their own place, St John Hotel in April of this year, with minimalist décor and very late servings of doubtless excellent food, and Silvena Rowe is due to launch her new place Quince at the Mayfair Hotel in a matter of weeks.

Then there are the "restaurants with rooms", where the food is the main draw but you can extend your stay past pudding - I'm thinking of places like the Horn of Plenty in Gulworthy, Devon, where Peter Gorton creates such splendours as breast of wood pigeon with caramelised chicory, orange and candied hazelnuts. Sat Bains has a great place near the River Trent serving the likes of roast scallop with Indian spices, fennel, cauliflower and garlic cream and much is made of Skye's Three Chimneys restaurant with its 'house over by'. Along with some notable exceptions, such as Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons, whose primary function is a restaurant, these smaller places manage to get the balance right, offering good food and wine in comfortable surroundings that will leave you feeling grateful you can slope off to slip under the sheets.

But there is something rotten, I have come to realise, about most hotel restaurant experiences, however opulent and sophisticated the surroundings and acclaimed the chef.
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Forget weddings or, even, dare I say it, the workers of the world: the first green shoots of spring are what gets my heart leaping at this time of year. Unlike, say, hot cross buns, asparagus is so beautifully easy to prepare that I can happily gorge on it morning noon and night during its brief season – initially just drenched in butter, and then, once the first frenzy has worn off and I can bear to wait more than five minutes for my fix, in more adventurous ways: baked with ham, steamed and served with anchovies and lemon zest, topped with a poached egg, or, of course, dipped into a big, greedy bowl of rich yellow hollandaise. And there, of course, is the lone fly in this mouthwatering ointment. Hollandaise is, I think, the single greatest thing a spear of asparagus can aspire to, yet the path to perfection is fraught with danger for the cook. British asparagus deserves better than curdled eggs.
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The latest combination of religious and royal festivities, public holidays and sunshine have lured Brits into the country's green spaces for picnics. But while seizing an opportunity to bask in the British heat in the company of a cold drink is as easy as pie, the question of picnic food often provides more of a challenge.

Reading Elizabeth David's Of Pageants and Picnics, I became aware of an old school sense of ceremony around picnics. For her, a picnic is as much (if not more) of a treat as fine dining: "As you drink wine from a tumbler, sprinkle your bread with olive oil and salt and eat it with ripe tomatoes or rough country sausage you feel better off than in even the most perfect restaurant."
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The diner is a gleaming nugget of Americana. When US culture became so dominant and enticing around the middle of the last century, a fair portion of its appeal lay in the chrome and Grease of those egalitarian restaurants. The milkshake was the most important and evocative drink of the diner, if not necessarily the most popular. (That was soda, to be discussed anon.) Milkshakes were there to greet the newly invented, cotching teenagers, who wanted kids' drinks in a semi-grown-up environment.

Sweet and cool and sexy, a milkshake represents the best of being young in summer. The original was a thick whiskey-based affair, a kind of savoury eggnog served to invalids. It turned up on the American east coast in the 1880s and was probably made in a cocktail shaker, hence "shake". By 1900 the booze had gone and milkshakes were made with flavoured syrup, and around 20 years later someone thought of adding Horlicks powder to it to make the first "malted milk", one of the gastronomic epiphanies of modern times.