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Slideshow
The week in pictures
Well, we couldn’t do this week’s round-up without mentioning the World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards. It was a poor showing from the UK with just four restaurants included in the top 50 this year, with none in the top 10, but kudos go to The Ledbury, Dinner by Heston, Lyle’s and The Clove Club — all in London — for making the grade.
Netflix famous Osteria Francescana was this year’s winner, while Geranium from Copenhagen was recognised the third edition of the Ferrari Trento Art of Hospitality Award by excelling at turning a meal into an unforgettable experience through its service, setting, and hospitality.
Ferrari Trentodoc was the official toast at the awards ceremony in Bilbao.
While chefs partied in Bilbao, Gauthier Soho ruffled feathers in London and announced it’s transitioning its menu to be completely vegan within two years, having already scrapped foie gras from its menu and launching a vegan tasting menu.
The restaurant, owned by chef Alexis Gauthier, used to serve its customers 20kg of foie gras every week, but that all changed after an animal rights protest in October 2015, which not only prompted him to scrap it from the menu, but go full vegan himself.
More big news this week came from the craft beer world, specifically Beavertown in north London.
Beavertown has sold a minority stake in its business to Heineken for £40 million, with plans to build a brand new brewing facility in Tottenham. Heineken has been busy following a pattern of buying 49% stakes in breweries like Lagunitas (in California) and Brixton (in, er, Brixton), and in 2017 the drinks giant bought the remaining shares of Lagunitas, completing its buyout.
Beavertown declined to tell us how large Heineken’s stake in their company is, but did say: “whether its 1% or 49% the impact remains the same.”
Beer Twitter, of course, is raging. Several brewers have taken to the website to vent about the deal, while some retailers have even decided to boycott Beavertown’s products all together in protest.
This week in Contentious Publicity Stunts, bookmaker Paddy Power brought a mobile ‘drunk tank’ to Royal Ascot this week in a bid to “curtail the spate of booze-fuelled brawls at race meetings in the UK”.
The gimmick comes after a series of announcements from racecourses and folks in the industry calling for a crackdown on fighting at the races.
Earlier this year, officials at Goodwood racecourse said that they would be putting a cap on alcohol sales after a major fight broke out at the first fixture of the season. In addition, Sussex Police and sniffer dogs will now be present at all race meets to prevent future altercations and drugs being smuggled into the venue.
To be fair, the video is quite funny.
Feast your eyes on these genuinely impressive sculptures of cities made entirely out of food.
Food artist Carl Warner created the pieces include scenes from Paris, Tokyo and Rome, all made from ingredients you might find in your kitchen.
This was organised by Hotels.com, which found that more than two thirds of young people are planning their next holiday based solely on food.
This one is the author’s favourite. Look at those cheese houses!
Over in, in Wineries with Lucrative London Venue Partnerships land, Andrew Nugent, founder of Adelaide brand Bird in Hand, headed to the Serpentine Galleries for its annual summer party on Tuesday evening.
Guests including Alexa Chung, Ellie Goulding, Natalie Dormer and actual Princess Beatrice mingled in the grounds, with glasses of Nest Egg Chardonnay in-tow.
‘Oop north, Mentzendorff joined Ciacci Piccolomini d’Aragona over the weekend as the official wine partner of the fifth Eroica Britannia event held in the Peak District.
Paolo Blanchini
Paolo Bianchini – the man behind the renowned Ciacci Piccolomini d’Aragana wine of Montalcino and a former pro cyclist, joined them for the ride.
Wine and music go hand in hand, so it comes as no surprise that last Saturday Carlos Moro, the president of Bodegas Familiares Matarromera, awarded Spanish orchestral conductor, Inma Shara, with Matarromera’s Gold Insignia “for her dedication and commitment to Spanish classical music, her international renown and her management and leadership skills”. The award ceremony took place at Bodega Renacimiento, Matarromera’s winery, naturally.
Proving not all heroes wear capes, on Wednesday we heard that a pub landlord spent £5,000 on building a 150-seat grandstand in his beer garden to give punters the best view of the action during the World Cup.
Paul Sandford, who runs the Railway Tavern in Dereham, Norfolk, has also brought in four big screens, a DJ booth, and a separate marquee serving food and drink for the duration of the tournament, which will be up and running regardless of how long England stay in the competition.
While we’re on the World Cup, Australian football fans didn’t let the ‘Socceroos’’ terrible first match performance get them down, and set about building a post-game ‘beer snake’.
It doesn’t really look like a snake, obviously, but that’s not the point.
Normally, a beer snake is put together by spectators in the stands, ‘snaking’ its way through the hands of participants who add their empty cups on the way to add to the body.
This particular snake, however, remained freestanding “and thus is perhaps more accurately described as a ‘tower’ rather than a true snake,” writes our poetically-gifted fine wine editor Rupert Millar.
Members of the wine trade and press were invited to attend the planting of the UK’s first Pinotage vineyard yesterday at Leonardslee Gardens in West Sussex. Here Penny Streeter OBE, the owner of the estate and the Benguela Collection, plants her own vine, watched on by Alex Streeter, cellar master Johann Fourie and Gerhard Perold, the great grandson of the creator of Pinotage, Prof Abraham Izak Perold.
The grade I listed gardens include woodland, parkland, seven man-made ponds with a colony of carp, a rock garden, two alpine glasshouses and a doll’s house exhibition as well as colonies of wallabies, wildfowl and deer. Pigs and chickens will also be joining the menagerie.
db‘s Phoebe French attended the planting yesterday and learnt about the plans for the Pinotage and the Benguela Collection’s other West Sussex estate, Mannings Heath. Those wishing to try the wines will have to wait until 2023, the expected release date for the first English Sparkling, while the Pinotage (if successful) will either be made into a still red, or will be added to the base wine for the sparkling.
db needed some cooling down from the heat this week, which was provided by chilled flutes of Cristal 2008, which was launched amid much fanfare at Carousel in Marylebone by Louis Roederer cellar master Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon, who described the wine as his “best ever on the market”.
“For me, 2008 is a classic, cool-climate year; it was dry, but with a cool summer, which brought a lot of freshness, making it on line with 1996 and ‘88 in terms of climate, except there is a bit more density in the 2008,” Lecaillon said of the new release, which was enjoyed by a who’s who of the trade.
The author took a trip to Stationer’s Hall on Tuesday night for a masterclass on Chilean wines from label Dos Almas, one of the newest brands in wine giant Zonin 1821’s portfolio.
The event took place at Zonin’s first tasting event in the UK, with wines ranging from zingy spumantes to spicy Carmeneres.
Wine expert extraordinaire Jancis Robinson has designed her very own glassware range, which she launched at her London home on Thursday night.
Called the 1 Collection, the latest addition to the world of wine accessories comprises a water glass and two decanters, as well as a single glass that has been designed to offer “the best tasting experience for every wine”, whatever its style or strength.