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Marking 10 years of the Observer Food Monthly Awards, Jay Rayner picks the best restaurants of the past decade
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NB: This list, compiled because it's the 10th Observer Food Monthly Awards this year, is not ranked. These 20 are all equal. They're here because they serve up great, interesting food.
10: The Fat Duck, Bray
Some of his more recent projects may have been flimsy. Which TV executive thought there would be genuine jeopardy in watching a top-flight chef supersize a bloody bag of Hula Hoops, as Blumenthal did for Heston's Fantastical Food? But none of that should detract from the reason he became TV fodder in the first place: The Fat Duck in Bray. Other big name chefs may have abandoned the restaurants where they made their name for the glitter of media whoredom. Blumenthal, however, has kept the faith. The Fat Duck remains the most influential restaurant of ambition in Britain of the last 10 years.
The problem is that all the ancillary trading can obscure the point of what he does. In the restaurant itself, where an absurd 70 or so chefs minister to just 40 diners, it's all very serious indeed, in the best way. Yes, there's lots of whizz-bangery. Yes, you listen to sounds of the seashore while eating edible sand. Yes, there's a gold watch that dissolves in hot water to make a consommé for his take on the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. But what matters is that the food is truly delicious, the experience of eating there joyful, funny, diverting. (Just as it is at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, which he opened in 2011.) I hate being asked to name my favourite restaurant experience, but if forced to it will always be the tasting menu here. Sure, it seriously bloody costs. There will be some who will question the morality of such a price. But the Fat Duck has to be understood in global terms. It isn't just the most important restaurant in Britain; it's one of the most important in the world. So save up. Remortgage the house. Send the kids out to work. It is, quite simply, a unique and class act.
The Fat Duck, Bray, Berkshire. 01628 580 333; thefatduck.co.uk. Meal for two £500
9: The Kitchin, Leith
In a city with new-found culinary heft – there's a lot in Edinburgh for greedy people to love – The Kitchin manages to stand out. This has little to do with the space. The restaurant, while very comfortably fitted out, sits in a hard-surfaced retail development down by the water in Leith, which could quite as easily be a sports shop or pizza joint. Instead, it has everything to do with the sensibility of the man whose name is above the door.
Thirtysomething Tom Kitchin is one of a crew of young cooks who learned their craft in London under the uncompromising stare of the great Gascon chef Pierre Koffmann; a man who was always less interested in prissy towers of ingredients and garnishes placed just so, than in the imperatives of flavour and of avoiding waste.
Ditto Kitchin, who throws immense reserves of French technique – he also trained under Guy Savoy and Alain Ducasse – into the service of glorious regional produce. A lot of Edinburgh restaurants bang on about the joys of Scotland's larder. At many of these it can feel like a put on job, a shallow piece of marketing. Kitchin means it.
Each 12 August, for example, he is up early enough to get the first grouse from a shoot out in the hills south of Edinburgh, and be back in his kitchen in time to have it on the menu that night, alongside bread sauce and duck-fat fried game chips.
Equally, he secures the very finest local seafood. Come here for boned, rolled and stickily caramelised pig's head with roasted langoustine the size of your fattest finger; for razor clams from Arisaig, Invernesshire with chorizo and lemon confit, or a tartare of roe deer with celeriac, orange and redcurrant jelly. A restaurant of ambition it may be, but Kitchin does not run scared of the cheaper cuts; offal features as regularly as its more high-born cousins.
Kitchin's food is both literally and figuratively gutsy. It has a Michelin star. It has other awards, including one for best restaurant, from the Observer's readers, who know a thing or two about good food. But it wears it lightly. This is the restaurant of a man with an instinct to feed.
The Kitchin, 78 Commercial Quay, Leith, Edinburgh. 0131 555 1755; thekitchin.com. Meal for two £140
8: Barshu, London
For decades we made a category error. We called Cantonese food Chinese food as if we had somehow defined the appetites of a land mass that is home to more than 20%of the world. A throng of humanity that huge could never have such limited tastes. The last 10 years has been the decade of Chinese ascendancy. It makes absolute sense that this has also been when we in Britain should finally see the fracturing of our notions of Chinese food.
Today, there are places serving the dishes of Shanghai, Hunan, Xiandong, Beijing and more. But the most popular after Cantonese is Sichuan, a style that makes a virtue of the fiery red chilli, the lip-numbing peppercorn and the inner bits of animals that others throw away. There were a few obscure places serving a version of it before, but it was the arrival of the glossy Barshu in London's Soho that really gave these fabulous dishes the prominence they needed. Its picture-led menu, full of saturated colours, including the most dazzling reds, is a place of mellifluous offerings: of fragrant and hot pig's trotters, of dry braised ox tendons, of Gong Bao chicken with peanuts, dry wok pig's intestines and so on.
Some people find all this terrifying. And yes, it can be a full-on experience. The chillies don't always deliver a whack of heat. Often they are just there for flavour and to be picked aside. However this food can still have curious physiological effects. It can bring on an unexpected sweat; the peppercorns really do numb the lips and tongue. But it can also be thrilling, and working with the great food writer Fuchsia Dunlop, who trained in Sichuan cookery in Chengdu, Barshu finally made it accessible to a novice market. Sichuan food is widely available now across Britain. But Barshu can reasonably claim to be the one that put it on the map.
Barshu, 28 Frith Street, London W1. 020 7287 8822; bar-shu.co.uk. Meal for two £80
7: Le Champignon Sauvage, Cheltenham
Chefs are restless souls, especially at the start of their careers. They don't tend to hang around anywhere very long. They pick up skills. They learn recipes. They move on again, trading what they've already acquired for what else they can get. It is out of this muddle of short-lived stints that a cook's individual style is formed. Not so with David Everitt-Matthias of Le Champignon Sauvage in Cheltenham. He has made a career out of going nowhere; from staying exactly where he is. He opened the restaurant in 1987 while still in his 20s, and he is still there. He runs the kitchen with a small brigade; his wife Helen runs the softly appointed dining room. And that's that. In 1996 they won their first Michelin star. In 2000 they won their second, when the number of such restaurants in the UK was barely in double figures. He doesn't want to be well known in your house. He just wants to be in his kitchen. If he can't be there he closes.
What's most impressive about Everitt-Matthias is that, while physically staying in one place his food has always had forward motion. I first experienced his cooking in my early 20s, completely by accident. I just happened to be staying nearby on holiday. Back then it was heads down classicism: sea food lasagnes, roast loins of pork, chocolate mint soufflés. But a recession which pushed him back towards cheaper ingredients, alongside a discovery of the possibilities of foraging, shaped his cooking. It turned his food into something deeper, more sensual, much more robust.
Le Champignon Sauvage is indeed the place for wild mushrooms; Everitt-Matthias has rarely met a fungus he didn't like. But there's so much more. There are seared scallops with a carpaccio of pig's head, butter-poached dabs with ground elder and new season peas, a salted chicory root iced mousse with vanilla rice pudding. He has braised cockscombs until gelatinous and wobbly to go with pigeon, paired zander fillets with dense duck hearts – "fish with offal is a big thing with me", he once told me – and made panna cottas from acorns. He is a big fan of the mustier, denser flavours, of lovage and jack by the hedge, of bay leaves and wild garlic and shaggy parasol mushrooms. A lot of his technique is grand and French; a lot of his ingredients are deep West Country. It's unique. And boy, does it work.
Le Champignon Sauvage, 24–28 Suffolk Road, Cheltenham. 01242 573 449; lechampignonsauvage.co.uk.Meal for two £150
6: The Yorke Arms, Nidderdale
Ferran Adrià of the late El Bulli once said that a great meal should begin with a great journey, though he may just have been excusing the terrifying hairpins that had to be navigated to get to his gaff.
Either way, there's no denying the beauty of the trip to the Yorke Arms in Ramsgill, through the glorious Yorkshire hills. At the end you find a handsome old building, with the smell of wood smoke as you push through the door, and the promise of somewhere soft to lay your head.
Some of this is pure misdirection, not least the dining room which has much of the pub classic about it. It is dominated by a lot of heavy, brooding furniture.
The surroundings may have a hefty traditionalism; chef Frances Atkins's food doesn't. It is light and bright and modern, considered and thoughtful. Atkins has been tucked away here for years, doing her own thing, in a way which for the past decade has earned her a Michelin star. So expect a bit of the dibs and dabs of sauces which tend to come with the tyre company's approval.
At the heart of this food, though, will lie big flavours, which recognise location. Witness it in the titles of dishes listed as Yorke Arms "classics": Yorkshire potted beef and ham hock terrine with pickled vegetables; Whitby crab with a potage of shellfish; slow-cooked shoulder of lamb, loin and sweetbread with wild herb stuffing. After all that, what you really need is a proper fire to fall asleep in front of. On that score, as on all others, the Yorke Arms does not disappoint.
The Yorke Arms, Ramsgill-in-Nidderdale, North Yorkshire. 01423 755243; yorke-arms.co.uk. Meal for two £90-£130