food
The Great British Bake Off, Channel 4 review – a cake with adverts is still a cakeWednesday, 30 August 2017
By the outrage it prompted, you’d be forgiven for thinking that The Great British Bake Off’s move to Channel 4 was a national disaster. If only the public felt so indignant about the sale of the Post Office, or the creeping privatisation of a... Read more... |
Blu-ray: TampopoTuesday, 09 May 2017
This is a very welcome 4K digital restoration of Juzo Itami's extremely tasty Japanese comedy from 1985. Nobuko Miyamoto plays Tampopo ("dandelion" in Japanese), a widowed café owner with a small son. She dishes up bowls of ramen noodles to... Read more... |
Sweet BeanWednesday, 03 August 2016
Sweet Bean is one of those slow, gentle Japanese fables that one either loves or finds infuriatingly sentimental. Directed by documentarian Naomi Kawase, a film festival favourite whose features rarely make it to the UK, it played in Cannes’ Un... Read more... |
Simply Nigella, BBC TwoTuesday, 03 November 2015
TV chefs are like the characters in a favourite band, each one with their newsworthy quirk. There’s the matey one, the posh one, the sweary one, the mumsy one, and the light-fingered one. Then there’s Nigella, the kittenish one, best known for... Read more... |
We Made It: Cheesemaker James MontgomerySunday, 11 October 2015
James Montgomery is a difficult man to pin down. When I first call to arrange an interview he’s too busy to talk. I call back only to find he’s in the middle of fixing a broken bailing machine, and when the interview finally takes place it’s to a... Read more... |
Mouthful, Trafalgar StudiosMonday, 14 September 2015
Metta Theatre’s didactic "short plays" evening takes a rigorously Poppins approach: a spoonful of drama to help the medicine go down. The sobering facts – “We need to produce more food globally by 2050 than we have done in the whole of human... Read more... |
The Great British Bake Off 2014 Final, BBC OneThursday, 09 October 2014
It feels as though 2014 was the year in which the Twitter generation finally woke up and realised what it had done. For five years a quiet, unassuming baking competition had risen through the ranks to become the most polite BBC One ratings... Read more... |
ChefFriday, 27 June 2014
It’s not unusual for Jon Favreau to go small, despite his reputation for the big hits such as Iron Man, Iron Man 2 and Elf. There was the much-touted squib Cowboys & Aliens alongside the nifty minnows of Made and Very Bad Things. Favreau loves... Read more... |
The LunchboxThursday, 10 April 2014
A mouth-watering mixture of romance, drama and comedy is delivered in this fresh and impressive debut from Indian writer-director Ritesh Batra. A poignant and bittersweet relationship between a lonely housewife and a man on the brink of retirement... Read more... |
The Taste, Channel 4Wednesday, 08 January 2014
Take two television formats and blend in mixer, then serve on one platter. The Taste is essentially Mastervoice, fusing Masterchef’s wannabe kitchen creatives and The Voice’s blind auditions. An early tasting suggests that the stand-out ingredient... Read more... |
Heston's Great British Food, Channel 4Wednesday, 11 December 2013
There’s a queue to get into Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant to order things like blowtorched fetlock of kudu with jus de cat-gut noodle on a bed of iron filings strained through a muslin jockstrap. A state of emergency was declared in the gated... Read more... |
Gastronauts, Royal Court Theatre UpstairsSaturday, 30 November 2013
For increasing numbers of people, food is theatre, so what better time to combine the two into the slight, sweet, determinedly socially conscious evening that is Gastronauts? The Royal Court "happening" of sorts is catering to audiences of 60 per... Read more... |
