Category Archives: General Food Topics

First Night

By Mikael | Published: July 2, 2011
First night done! Nobody, except me thought we would be able to serve anyone yesterday. At least not at 3pm. The site still looked like a building site with dust and all furniture still wrapped. At 6 pm, the builders were still painting. Then, at 6.30, the chairs and the tables were put into place [...]
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Going natural or not?

By Mikael | Published: May 27, 2011
We have hired the sommelier. He is French, like most people we have hired so far. He likes and knows natural wines, which is good because those wines are really fashionable these days. I like the idea of biodynamic wines that have been made with as little man made additives as possible. My philosophy on [...]
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Waking up

By Mikael | Published: May 19, 2011
I have had nightmares about opening/running a restaurant. About AA Gill coming to the restaurant and everything goes wrong. The food is shit because we are short on staff and because the suppliers have refused to send us produce. If it is because we have not paid our bills or because I have shouted at [...]
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Is all this really needed?

By Mikael | Published: May 17, 2011
Did someone say it is easy to do business in England? Well, when you take over a restaurant premises you have to do the following: If you need to change the layout of the place, you need to send an application to the council to vary the premises license. This is on paper a two-week [...]
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The first day

By Mikael | Published: May 16, 2011
Finding a restaurant location was not easy. Maybe I had set up too many constraints. The most limiting constraint – it turned out – was that I wanted to have the kitchen on the ground floor. I have visited what feels like, but surely is not, 1000 premises in London only to find out that [...]
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Updating Gastroville

By Mikael | Published: October 22, 2010
I will pick up blogging again. I have started with updated my favorite restaurants. They are now l’Ami Jean in Paris, the Sportsman in Whitstable, Manresa in Los Gatos, Pappacarbone in Cava de’Tirreni, Mirazur in Menton,  Extebarri in Axpe, Koju, Kawamurra, Mizutani and Sawada in Tokyo. You have them  here.
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Food rating standards

By Mikael | Published: January 28, 2005
An important mission of this site is to attempt to develop reliable and rigorous criteria when evaluating restaurants. The standards as published on this page are by no means final and should be seen as a living document. Whenever we feel it to be required, what is written below will be amended, edited or commented [...]
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