Whenever a new Michelin guide is due, there always seems to be a flurry of interest among "foodies", restaurateurs and chefs, and it's easy to assume that this is a reflection of the modern obsession with all things food. But that fascination and speculation has been around for years.
Recently Michelin UK added to their website a couple of articles reproduced from the Telegraph Magazine of 15th March 1974.
Someone at
Michelin must have been rummaging through their archives and found a
copy of The Telegraph colour supplement from 1974 introducing its
readers to the idea of Michelin's red guide and making some predictions
as to which restaurants might get stars.
I find them really
rather fascinating, as a historical document in themselves, as a testament
to how much things have changed, and yet also how so little has changed.
In the first article, I was particularly amused by Prue Leith quoted as saying "You have to be pretty awful not to get into The Good Food Guide" and rather perplexed as to why it refers to Albert Roux throughout as André Roux.
I
remember the Stevensons' (no relation) Horn Of Plenty at Gulworthy, and Patrick Stevenson one night intoning that anyone who
didn't like opera and model railways should have been put down at birth.
The
interview with Michelin in the second article almost reads just like
any interview with Michelin you ever read, save, maybe, for the
occasional condescending dig at English cooking.
I thought it might be interesting to look at the Telegraph's predictions and see how accurate they were. Very, as it turns out.
"Our experts consider it unlikely that any British establishment will be found deserving of two stars, let alone three." Well, their experts were certainly right about that.
"As to numbers of one-star restaurants, our experts think it unlikely that they will number fewer than a dozen or more than 20." Ah well, close: there were 22 stars awarded to UK restaurants in the 1974 Red Guide.
These are the restaurants they predicted would get one Michelin star when the 1974 red guide came out:
The Connaught Hotel ("the restaurant, not the grill room") - one star from 1974-1976, 2 from 1977-1981, then back down to 1 again.
Thornbury Castle - one star from 1974-1982
Le Gavroche - one star 1974-1976, 2 stars 1977-1981, 3 stars 1982-1991, then 2 stars again
La Toque Blanche - one star from 1974-76
Waterside Inn - 1 star from 1974-76, 2 from 1975-84, 3 stars from 1985.
Le Poulbot - one star 1974-79
Bell Inn, Aston Clinton - one star in 1974 which it lost in 1975 before regaining for 1976-79.
The Box Tree - 1 star from 1974-77, 2 stars 1978-1987
Horn of Plenty - 1 star from 1974-1983
Hintlesham Hall - 1 star from 1974-1982
Le Bressan - 1 star 1974-79
Wilton's - Had to wait till 1975 for a star, presumably when they deigned to return Michelin's questionnaire
The only two of those I'd not heard of were La Toque Blanche and Le Bressan, both in London.
These are the one-stars in 1974 that the Telegraph's experts didn't predict:
Hole in the Wall, Bath
Randalls, Brixham
Duck Inn, Canterbury
The French Restaurant, Midland Hotel, Manchester
Hotel de la Poste, Swavesey
Malmaison, Glasgow (the old BTH one, not the newer Michael Caines one!)
Carrier's, Islington
Le Coq Hardi, Kensington
Lee Ho Fook, Soho
Simpsons in the Strand
I had no idea there was a Chinese restaurant with a Michelin star in 1974!
You can see the full history of Michelin stars 1974-2015 for London here and for the rest of the United Kingdom here.
Here's something a little different, that I came across in an email archive earlier today: two old reviews of Manchester's Yang Sing.
These come from the times when nobody had heard (or even thought) of blogs, and even Google didn't exist. Incredible to think that there are people out there, who can't remember the world before Google! Actually, by the time of the second review below, Google existed, but was still waddling around in its nappies, being just 8 months old.
Nobody then, apart from publishers of cookery books and magazines, had thought of taking photographs of the food that came to your table. So, unsurprisingly, there are no pictures to illustrate this post. Here, then, are the reports I submitted to the Good Food Guide on Manchester's Yang Sing in 1997 and 1999.
From: Stevenson A
Sent: 13 February 1997 16:55
To: 'Good Food Guide'
Subject: New Year's Eve at the Yang Sing, Manchester
Chinese New Year's Eve that is.
Last Saturday a sudden craving for dim sum came over me and there was nothing for it but to get in the car and head for Manchester, pausing only to collect my father on the way for a dim sum lunch at the Yang Sing.
It was busy, though not as busy as one might expect for the eve of Chinese New Year - perhaps the Chinese community were saving themselves for the next day's festivities. Having said that, we got the last table available. Shortly after we sat down queues started to form, with at one point around 20 people waiting for tables.
The dim sum are a mixture of trolleys (stationary, unlike some of the London establishments) and kitchen prepared. The menu advises you to order from a waiter as "you may have difficulty in making yourself understood in Cantonese to our trolley girls"!
Service is more civil and good humoured than many Chinese restaurants, though on Saturday's showing male waiters wearing glasses are the best bet if you want something.
Prawn and crab parcels come deep fried with a succulent prawn, but rather tasteless and sparse crab meat. Deep-frying was clean and crisp.
Cheung fun filled unusually with carp were a good specimen.
Deep fried cuttlefish balls with coriander were startlingly good. A fresh flavour and great combination of flavours and textures.
Beef rolls with yam Shanghai style had a mixed reception. They were shreds of beef wrapped in bean curd, steamed with a pureed yam sauce. The rolls themselves weren't bad, just a bit unexciting, but I found the bright yellow yam sauce really quite unpleasant. My father on the other hand liked it, and went so far as to say that if he'd come up with something like that in the kitchen he would have been very pleased.
We were sat at a window into the kitchen, behind which were hung all the roast ducks, suckling pigs, char-siu pork, chickens etc, of which there was quite a rapid turnover. We could resist no longer and ordered a portion of duck. Unlike most other Chinese restaurants I've been in (mainly London) this arrived boned, rather than hacked into slices through the bone with a cleaver, leaving shards of bone to attack the inside of your mouth. This was - to clarify - boneless. It was also succulent, beautifully flavoured, with a nice crisp skin. Served with the usual sort of soy sauce broth over it with the addition of some good crisp peanuts, which did absolutely nothing for the duck. I suppose it just made it in marketing-speak a value-added duck.
Fried dumplings with wind-dried meats and chinese greens were nicely done and an explosion of flavour. The (shallow) frying adds a nice degree of crunch to the outside of the dumpling, but without going the whole hog of deep frying.
We had other dim sum as well, but they have disappeared into the haze of my memory.
We finished with deep-fried custard filled bun things. Wai Kong Bau they may have been called. On the menu they're down as steamed, but vastly improve when deep fried. The flavour and texture are not unlike hot fairground doughnuts, but with a delicious thick eggy custard in the middle.
Chinese tea (the pot refilled once) and a brandy for my father who's still not entirely sure about the effects ethnic food might have on him brought the final bill to £32.
A Chinese horoscope came free!
From: Stevenson, Andrew
Sent: 11 May 1999 20:43
To: Good Food Guide (E-mail)
Subject: Yang Sing, Manchester
A new dim-sum menu. Gone are some of the old favourites and in come things like steamed seafood and yam tarts with coconut sauce. The tart base was made of the same dough the little white steamed buns are made of, and the coconut sauce was delicate and fragrant. The seafood comprised queenies and king prawn. And the whole thing worked marvellously - even for someone who doesn't like coconut and doesn't like steamed dim sum. There were some little wind-dried oyster and char siu pasties with feather light ultra-short pastry, deep fried sesame chicken cakes - the chicken minced, reformed and coated in sesame seeds and poppy seeds before being fried. Crispy fried stuffed chillis, plus a few more.
And to "pander" to (or rather tease) one of the party who generally much prefers a roast dinner, we worked our way through the major part of the roast section of the main menu. Some excellent suckling pig, similarly good roast duck and some soy roast chicken. The latter, like most of the roasts, appears twice on the menu: once in the roast meat section and once in the rice section, the difference being that the latter are about £2 cheaper than the former. We took the soy chicken with rice, and it would be difficult to imagine that there could possibly have been more chicken in the version without rice!! This was the first time we'd tried the soy chicken, and we were surprised at just how succulent and chickeny it was.
I do hope that the Yang Sing will be able to make it back into the GFG next year (although they are still supposed to be re-opening in the old premises), and with the rating it deserves - which is a good 5 or 6. It has the benefit of consummate reliability and high standards, which many other Manchester restaurants only seem to be able to dream about.
Andrew Stevenson
Interestingly, in response to the 1999
email, I got a response thanking me for my report. The response came
from no less than Jim Ainsworth, the editor, and indeed in my view
probably the last really good editor that the Good Food Guide had.
The Yang Sing has had its ups and downs over the years, but in my experience more often due to the vicissitudes of fashion, something which is particularly fickle in Manchester. It had been dropped in 1998/99 because of the fire and the relocation to temporary premises. Once again, the Yang Sing has been inexplicably dropped from the Good Food Guide's 2014 edition. A quite bizarre decision, from an increasingly bizarre and partisan guide that has lost its way. If anything the Yang Sing is better today than it was last year, or even 16 or so years ago, when the Good Food Guide described it as probably the best Cantonese restaurant in western Europe (I may be paraphrasing, but they certainly said something very much like that).
