How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love TripAdvisor

"The world is changed, I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost; for none now live who remember it."

Every now and then I see a rather snippy tweet or comment from the catering industry on the commentary provenance of TripAdvisor. As a regular contributor to and satisfied user of TripAdvisor I find this attitude perplexing and somewhat disturbing. The world is changed.

I'm a Great Fan of TripAdvisor

Not long ago there was a really comfortable, and self contained, relationship between restaurants and critics. Probably too close. Sometimes you'd go to a restaurant on the strength of a review and then wonder if you were in the right restaurant. The critics were known and in small numbers. Comfortable relationships existed. Apart from the odd scathing review (an old review of the Wykeham Arms in Winchester remains an all time favourite!) mostly it was pretty tame stuff that worked a lot like the marketing arm of the catering industry.

Then the Internet happened, and the industry was and remains completely unprepared. The industry frequently rails against it.

I like TripAdvisor and I take it quite seriously. I have written over 50 reviews and, looking at it, nearly all have been positive. I try to be honest in my reviews and I never write a gratuitously bad review. My one properly "negative" review of a highly rated restaurant (here: http://bit.ly/Wf7sCN) was, sadly, an honest and true reflection of our experience. The restaurant challenged the review. I reconfirmed it. They weren't happy. Neither was I.

I have used TripAdvisor very successfully to find some wonderful restaurants. I find that it is simple to filter the trolls from the people being honest. We've found some fabulous restaurants that we could not have otherwise found. Often we spend a lot of time researching a new location and rarely do we simply plump for the top few restaurants, being more interested in those that rate multiple stars and have interesting sounding reviews. I also think that most people reviewing on TripAdvisor do things honestly and truly reflect their experience.

I also love reading the really damning reviews, especially the 1* ones. Mostly they're hilarious rants from trolls. I know this and totally discount them. Most people do. Every now and then though you see a genuinely bad experience and that matters.

The catering industry though, in some arenas, appears to struggle with this. It doesn't recognise that the internet has happened and that customers, and not just critics, have a forum now. The customers are your real critics. Assume for a moment that a bad review on TripAdvisor is a true reflection of a customer's experience. They're not coming back, and they're going to tell their friends. Those friends are probably not coming now either, TripAdvisor or no TripAdvisor. It's not just TripAdvisor. It's Twitter, Facebook and the guy down the pub having a good old moan about the terrible service last night. The "social" part of social media is really important.

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love TripAdvisor

My advice to restaurants. Embrace TripAdvisor. Engage with your customers online. Most of all, stop hating it.

Sometimes people are going to hate your restaurant for all the wrong reasons. It doesn't matter. They hate it and they're going to tell their friends. They do it on TripAdvisor it's really public and obvious. They do it elsewhere you'll never see or hear it but it is just as damaging. Possibly more so, because they're probably telling locals who are probably your core customer base.

If you're a restaurant, participate on TripAdvisor and engage with your customers. Challenge bad reviews and acknowledge good ones. People on TripAdvisor love feedback from the restaurants they write about and it doesn't happen nearly often enough. If someone writes a truly unreasonable review - like the guy that gave a restaurant a 1* because they were booked out and he didn't have a booking - challenge it and ask to get it taken down.

If you think you don't have enough time to engage with customers on TripAdvisor then your priorities are messed up. Unless you're getting dozens of reviews a day, then you're really looking at a few minutes a day to engage with customers using a different channel. Think of it like the equivalent of having the chef come out at the end of service to chat to the customers. Just do it.

TripAdvisor is not a force for evil and engaged properly can be a great channel to engage with current and future customers. Accept that sometimes people are just going to say completely unfair and unreasonable things about your restaurant. Also accept that sometimes people are going to come to your restaurant and, despite your best efforts, are going to have a truly awful experience whether it's your fault or their expectation. It's been happening forever and it's not going to stop. You'll be a lot more successful though if you engage than if you ignore.

Fabulous fast and easy pasta with tomato sauce

Recipe (for 1):

1 400g can of the best whole tomatoes you can find
1 garlic clove crushed
1/2 ts dried basil
1/2 ts dried parsley
25 ml the best olive oil you can get (it matters...)
salt, pepper to taste
a grind or two of chillies if you fancy

120g of your favourite pasta (I typically use shell style...)

• Get a big pot of salted water boiling for the pasta
• Add pasta and cook for its allotted time (I use pasta that takes 16 minutes)

Whilst all that is happening:

• Put all the sauce ingredients in a (nonstick) pot cold and put onto a high heat until boiling
• Lower heat to a brisk simmer and stir occasionally whilst the pasta is cooking
• Cook the sauce to reduce it down. You're looking for the sauce to have lost the bulk of its moisture and take on a slightly oily texture.

Finally:

• Drain the pasta and add it to the sauce pot and stir through
• Add your favourite pasta cheese if desired
• Eat

Saffron, punkin, pea and spinach risotto. Yum!

Recipe (for 2):

Take the bottom half of a butternut and cut into small cubes, toss in oil and dry roast at 180 degrees for about 30-35 minutes until caramelised nicely (we typically cook this after a roast and only have the bottom bit of a punkin left over...)

1 litre of strong chook stock (I use cubes)
1 whole onion
a big pinch of saffron strands - 20-30 of them or something

• Boil all that lot until the onion is cooked and you have a strong, yellow and strongly saffron flavoured stock. keep the lid on as you'll need most of the liquid.

1/2 - 2/3 of a cup of risotto rice
30g of butter
1/2 cup white wine
2/3 cup frozen peas
loose handful of fresh spinach
1/2 cup freshly grated parmesan or other steenky hard cheese

• melt butter in heavy bottomed pot at a quite low temp
• add rice and cook in the butter for a minute or two
• add the wine and cook down - it should go really starchy at this point
• start adding the stock and cooking down adding stock and stirring as you go
• this stage usually takes 15 minutes for me

Once the rice is nice and fat and cooked you can do the last bit. I like my risotto to be reasonably wet, I don't like really gluggy risottos and look for there to be some liquid visible when eating.

• add the peas and cook for a couple of minutes
• add punkin bits
• add parmesan to taste and stir all this lot through
• finally add spinach and stir through until it is cooked but not mushy

Serve adding more cheese on top if you're lee :)

Hitch Hiking Food Part 2: A man on a mission...

After the relative success of finally (after perhaps nearly 30 years, I'm a procrastinator, what can I say...) of getting around to attempting to make Hagro Biscuits I have a mission.

I bought a Kindle version of the Hitch Hiker's Guide for £2.19 on the weekend and thought why not catalogue every instance of food or drink mentioned in the Guide and create a cookbook of sorts.

Pretty sure there'll be loads of source material, from fairy cake to hagro biscuits to thinks like supplying an entire floating party.

The one I'm really confident on though is being able to write a recipe for "Three Pints at Lunchtime".

Hagro Biscuits for People Who Don't Hate Vogons

Okay, I am a big fan of Douglas Adams, even choosing to live my life according to his example as an arch procrastinator. He would have turned 60 this weekend and so decided to have a bit of a birthday party.

My initial contact with his work was the BBC television adaptation of the Hitch Hikers Guide and it remains one of the funniest things I have ever seen and one of my clearest recollections from my first viewing was Ford eating Hagro Biscuits on the Vogon ship. Apparently the most wonderful frood food in the galaxy, they were awful because the Dentrassi really hate the Vogons. Honestly it didn't look so good either...

Could I make something similar, especially with the colours, but make it taste somewhat nicer and do it without resorting to food colouring and without resorting to simply putting mushy peas on top of the blue biscuit, because I really don't like mushy peas!

The "Biscuit"

Starting with the biscuit I thought I could make this instead a potato pancake or large blini. I already had some Vitelotte Potatoes which I had bought from Natoora in the fridge and they have a really amazing bright purple colour which is retained once you cook them.

The other really quite odd thing about these potatoes is that when you cook them the cooking water turns an amazingly dark - almost "nightmare" - green. So this gives me something to form the natural colouring for the thing that is to go onto my biscuit.

Biscuit Recipe:

• 400g Vitelotte Potatoes, peeled
• 75ml milk
• 1 egg
• scant 1/4 cup plain flour
• 25g butter
• Salt and pepper to taste

Method: (reminder: you have to save the potato cooking water!!!)

1. Cook and mash the potatoes with the milk, butter and salt and pepper. Retain the cooking water.
2. Set the potatoes aside and allow them to cool.
3. Once cooled mix the egg and flour into the potatoes until it is a smooth and incorporated paste about the same consistency as a thick pancake mix.

You did remember to retain the potato cooking water, right? It should look something like this. The water should be a dark, almost nightmare, green:

The Topping

From the original show I'd imagined that the topping could have also been scrambled eggs and that would go very nicely with the potato "biscuit" but I can't think of a good way of incorporating the green water with the eggs without making the eggs incredibly runny and again I'm trying to avoid food colouring.

So I decided to try poaching a couple of eggs in the green water to see how much of the colour they'd take up and then chop the eggs into small pieces on top of the pancake.

Cooking the Dish

Cook the pancake as you would normally in a nice amount of butter. I was looking for a relatively large pancake that would take 2 eggs on top. I ended up with a really nice pancake that was bright purple in the middle and really nicely light and fluffy.

Poach 2 eggs in the retained potato water until you're happy with their doneness but make sure they're still very runny in the middle if you can. For me they didn't come out bright green but they did take on a little of the green colour from the water and in fact looked ever so slightly creepy! (even though it doesn't come out so well in the picture below).

From there put the eggs on top of the pancake, add salt and pepper and chop the eggs finely making as big a mess as possible.

It turned out to be a delicious, if ever so slightly naughty, delight! I can see this as a really nice breakfast dish. And not a Vogon in sight...

I'm going to have another go at this and I am keen to know if anyone out there has any ideas on how you could make the eggs greener but without resorting to colours.

I'm not going to eat in Celebrity Chef chain restaurants

So Jamie Oliver PLC is going to open a chain restaurant in Winchester. My immediate reaction was to be annoyed at the idea. I still am to a certain extent but less than I was. My key objection remains that I am sick of "celebrity" chefs trying to build restaurant empires based on their ability to cook a decent meal and get their heads on TV.

I'm not against chains at all. I take great pleasure in going to Zizzis and varying their hottest pizza to significantly hotter and it is delicious! Zizzis though is unrepentantly a chain and doesn't pretend to be anything else. They, like Loch Fyne, operate to a standard and do it quite well.

The problem with chains operated by celebrity chefs is that there is an implied level of quality beyond your normal chain. Almost "come to my restaurant and you'll be getting food as if it was cooked by me". Unfortunately this is impossible.

The "celebrity chain" has to be the antithesis of what got these guys into cooking in the first place. Instead of innovation, imagination and fine cooking skills we're now being subjected to cookie cutter menus with the emphasis on strict copies of the centrally developed and managed menus. Of course Gordon Ramsay took this to its logical conclusion by centrally preparing meals and simply heating them on site.

Consistent Quality is always an interesting challenge here and I am sure that Jamie Oliver will appear at the opening to wheel out another "trusted lieutenant" (do they all have batallions of these guys constantly in training?) and assure everyone that Jamie himself will periodically be checking in to ensure things are always up to standard.

This argument is specious though and I'm pleased to see that the people in Cape Town and Melbourne voted with their stomachs and money with Gordon Ramsay's "Maze" chain. A colleague who lives in Cape Town said that once people they realised that Ramsay wasn't cooking in the restaurant on a regular basis people simply stopped going. In our case this is simply going to be a Jamie Oliver PLC restaurant and any contact with Oliver's cooking will be through a lens of rote learning and standardisation by the local staff.

Finally the chain restaurant is not local and, in the Winchester case, I assume is there to gain access to the tourist money and an increasingly healthy food scene in town. Certainly a lot of the money that would stay locally with a non chain is going out of the local economy now.

So I'm probably not going to bother with Union Jacks when it opens. There are simply too many other excellent restaurants in Winchester - and beyond - for me to care. I'll go for food that is imagined, developed, prepared and served on site every time. There are some fantastic chefs and restauranteurs out there and I will be supporting them massively in comparison to the cookie cutter "celebrity" chains.

Choice. Dammit...

Annoyingly I find myself in a situation where my old role at IBM is no longer viable and so I am back in the (internal) job market. Unfortunately this has happened at the precisely wrong time of the year - January - when the music has stopped and everyone has sat down. However I have three decent leads and at least one definite offer. That's the good news.

My job preferences are to do some of the following (in no order):

1. Technical pre-sales, or at least customer contact.
2. BPM (which frankly, I love!)
3. Technically challenging and at the forefront of the technology wave.
4. No long term projects requiring constant time away from home.

So I end up with the following situation.

Job #1: 3 and 4 with 3 being on the 'extreme' end.

Job #2: 2 and 3

Job #3: 1, 2, 3 and 4

#3 is the obvious one but I am not sure that I am either going to be offered it in the short term or at all due to issues beyond my control.

#2 is the most definite and has some good aspects to it but is returning to something I decided I didn't want to do several years ago.

#1 is actually a very interesting, challenging and would take me way out of the very comfortable zone I am in professionally but is in a technical area that I'm not so interested in.

Bugger.

So in the next week I am going to have to come to a decision. I get the feeling that the one I want won't become available in the time I have and so would have to choose between two suboptimal choices outside of that, even though both have their unique - and completely different - attractions.

Choice is not always a good thing...

Why I'll Never Order From Dominos Again

I'd have said "...or Pizza Hut" as well, but they've just shut the Winchester branch so that's that obviated then.

I love pizza and since coming to the UK from Melbourne I have been constantly irked by the fact that pizzas in the UK are either quite decent and not delivered like the astonishing Zizzi Rustica Piccante or US delivery style and mostly unappetising.

However pizza is a very convenient thing at times and so we occasionally ordered a pizza from Dominos. Trouble was it was getting worse over time as we kept getting pizzas that were undercooked - even after specifically asking for it to be "well done" - and with an unpleasant sea of soggy sauce all around the outside of the pizza.

Also Lee and I don't 100% agree on toppings even though we can always agree on a shared pizza if needed.

About the time that we were given a pizza oven by my MiL and so we decided to give it a go. It was a revelation. We now get the "perfect" pizza every single time by making the pizzas fresh each time. Hard work? Not really.

We have a breadmaker which has a "pizza" programme which in 45 minutes creates a really nice stretchy dough which I divide and roll into two pizza bases. They're left to rise for 30 minutes.

Whilst the dough is on the go I skin, seed and chop a few tomatoes, mix with garlic and dried basil, parsley and oregano and cook down into a nice fresh tomato sauce. Or if I'm not that keen on tomatoes I just use some passata from a jar and cook it down with the herbs... :-)

Finally top one of the bases and get it into the pizza oven and top the other whilst cooking. When the first one is finished just put it in the (normal) oven until the other is cooked.

Result: two really nice pizzas topped with exactly the toppings we want and in the proportions we want. They're as close to the "perfect" pizza as you can get.

Start to finish is about 90 minutes with about 25 minutes of actual effort, and about 15 if you use passata for the sauce and less again if I got organised and made a lot of pizza sauce in one go and froze it.

So, we're not going to be buying delivery pizza ever again!

I'm Sick to Death of Real Ale

I drink quite a lot of beer. I like it, and in a lot of forms. Coming from Australia 10 years ago I unsurprisingly mostly drunk mass produced "IndustroLager". Little by little I started onto "real ales" in my local pub and over the next year I was exclusively drinking ales and exploring what at the time appeared to be a dizzying range of beers. In my local though were the seeds of my eventual dissatisfaction with a lot of "real ale" and why I am now a lot more choosy about both the beers I drink and the pubs I frequent.

Those seeds were Greene King IPA and Ruddles County. I first started drinking Abbot Ale and really liked it, but thought I'd better give the others a try, especially as a lot of the locals appeared to like the IPA particularly, not to mention Greene King's advertising of it. I was immediately struck by how uninteresting both were, but especially the IPA which was bland, thin and lacking in any distinctive flavour. Since then I have become aware that actually the bulk of the UK "real ale" market is made up of a very narrow group of beer styles and they're largely pretty hard to differentiate. A large percentage of them are of the Greene King IPA mould.

I'm now officially sick to death of (a lot of) real ale. My non exhaustive list of issues include...

Lack of differentiation. There are too many breweries in the UK brewing bland, taste-alike, look-alike "session beers" of limited strength and they're all competing for the same market space. Line up ten random 3.7% "best bitters" and see if you can pick them. See if any of them challenge your mind or your palette. Every beer should have to justify its existence. I'm not going to drink you just because you exist no matter what "tradition" you represent. Modern production, transportation and storage mean we don't need a brewery turning out identical beers every 20-30 miles any more. I'm now attracted to unusual and innovative beers in addition to a stable of reliable regulars but won't do more than sample another "me too" session bitter.

A rush toward lower alcohol beers. This appears to be happening both in smaller beer festivals and a lot of pubs. The Southampton Beer Festival last year had an incredibly limited range and mainly on the weaker side apparently due to "complaints of too many strong beers" the previous year (don't drink them then...). My favourite local pub has also started down this route and I have not seen a beer over 4.1% for several months and I now find myself drinking more often at a different pub where at least I can get a decent HSB! I will though commend the 2011 GBBF for having a really excellent variety on show, but easy when you're that size I suppose. My other paranoid thought on this is simply that low alcohol beers are a lot cheaper to make.

Survival of the feeblest. CAMRA appears to embrace virtually every real ale in much the same way that only a mother can love an uncomely child. I'm perfectly happy that they might discuss and critique behind closed doors but apparently unequivocal support for all beers and brewers as long as they brew, package and serve according to the strict CAMRA guidelines means that there is a lot of very poor beer out there but which CAMRA argues should be embraced and even protected. It has to be damaging their stated aim of promoting consumption of "real ale". Does CAMRA really think that long term lager drinkers are going to drink a pint of Greene King IPA and immediately become a convert? It is probably a good thing it is not where I started years ago as I'd probably still be drinking lager and eying real ale somewhat distastefully.

Lager is not a bad beer style and nor (necessarily) are the companies that produce them. In fact even CAMRA agrees on this one - as long as it is not UK based - and as long as it is not made by one of the brewcos that they disapprove of. Their enthusiasm for Budvar Budweiser is almost embarrassingly hypocritical because the, admittedly quality, beer is mass produced by a very large brewco. It is not a Stella, Grolsch or Carling but still a mass produced lager. Even the big guys can make great beers alongside their mass market IndustroLagers. Fosters and Tooheys make some fantastic premium beers in Australia in addition to the mass stuff.

The packaging is part of the problem. I love a fresh cask. Wonderful. The next day, not so good. The day after, well... I love Fuller's London Porter and it used to be on tap at a pub my workmates used to drink in. Eventually I started buying it in bottles though, to the annoyance of the landlord, because the quality from the pump was so utterly variable and always downward away from "perfect" whereas the bottled version was borderline perfect and consistent. There has to be a realisation that a lot of casks are not going to sell in a short amount of time and techniques for prolonging beer life should be embraced instead of "forbidden" under CAMRA's rules on real ale, for example.

Meantime IPA. The final straw some time back. I randomly bought a bottle of Meantime IPA from my local supermarket, put it in the fridge, got it "far too cold" and then was staggered at the explosion of flavour and texture I got when I drank it. I then proceeded to drink Meantime beers almost exclusively for a couple of months. You mean people are making beer this good in the UK? Why can't I buy it in my local pubs? Suddenly beers and breweries like this are popping up everywhere producing some outstanding beers and causing my consumption of "real ale" to diminish.

The Elephant in the Room: CAMRA. I used to be a member because I thought they protected traditional, quality and non industrial style brewing. I grew quickly disenchanted when I realised CAMRA actually didn't care about quality at all, it cares about a set of rules that it has invented. These rules are so specific that they essentially demonise all beer apart from "real ale" but are lax enough to allow some truly awful beers to proliferate. I'll keep going to their beer festivals - why not - but I'll not support an organisation that can't seem to differentiate quality from mediocrity and promotes that self same mediocrity.

So whilst I still like a lot of real ales, I am sick to death of the sameness, the lack of distinctiveness and a blandness especially when put up against some of the more modern brewers, techniques and packaging. Over time I will inevitably shift to more distinctive, daring and flavoursome beers keeping a small number of real ales that exhibit those characteristics as favourites. The rest of them... I'm done!

That's it, I'm buying an induction stove

Having faffed around for a long while considering the relative merits of induction cooking vs. non-induction vs. doing nothing at all about replacing my ever deteriorating cooktop I finally took the plunge and bought myself a (surprisingly) cheap standalone induction hob to test the waters:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0069KUR6C

The good news is that most of what is promised by induction cooking appears to be true.

A test boiling 2 litres of water on induction vs. ceramic was about half the time and 7 minutes quicker.

Heating a pan to "fried" egg temperature is achieved in "several" seconds.

Powering off the hob stopped the cooking pretty much instantly apart from residual heat in the pan.

There is a surprisingly fine level of temperature control and the "keep warm" appears to work on a feedback loop from the pot.

So overall I am really very impressed... apart of course from the small problem that only two of my current pots are ferrous and so will need to replace others. I sense a new cooker and a kitchen renovation on the way!