What value a Michelin star?

There are currently six Indian restaurants in London with Michelin stars: 

Amaya, Benares, Quilon, Rasoi Vineet Bhatia and Tamarind. 

At Tamarind, in Queen Street, Mayfair, typical current prices are: murgh mahni £17.50 (chicken tikka in creamed fresh tomatoes flavoured with ginger, green chillies and crushed fenugreek leaves - a 'signature dish' of chef Alfred Prasad or is it of Executive of Operations, Rajesh Suri?), tarkahir handi £8.95 (broccoli, shiitake mushroom, asparagus, red pepper and baby corn tossed wih cumin, red onions and crushed pepper), pulao rice £3.95 (braised rice wih browned onions, cumin and saffron). That's one of the cheapest options and adds up to £30.40 for a main dish, served Western-style (ie in portions barely sufficient for sharing). If you add in an appetiser (£6.95 to £11.50), poppadom (£3.95), raita (£3.95), plain naan (£3.95) and a dessert (£6.95-£7.95) you're heading for a very, very tasty bill.

However, if you're pushing the boat out in a big way, say with jhinga ajwaini (four giant, kebabed tiger prawns marinated with ginger, yoghurt, paprika, ground spices and ajwain @ £22.50), tender lamb cutlets marinated wih garlic, raw papaya, fennel, sta-anise, paprika and cream @ £24.75), methi paneer (batons of paneer cheese tossed with fresh fenugreek leaves, garlic, red chilli and tomato @ £9.50 or gajjar halwa (carrot fudge with melon seeds and rasins toppend with silver leaf and pistachio @ £7.50) - then you'll pay an astronomic sum for your gastronomic indulgence (not forgetting the 12.5% service added to your bill and a limit of 2 hours for your table). 

So - you pays your money and makes your choice. Service is slickish, the atmosphere is basement Mayfair with fresh flowers, the wine list is expensive, the loos are 5-star and the food is priced at Michelin-star heights. Is it worth it? That's for you to decide. The food's undoubtedly good, but does it justify such high prices? You can't blame all the high prices on sky-high Mayfair rents. It's the way that we traditionally eat Indian food that will push the bill sky-high. Isn't the fun of indulging in shared, familiar dishes with rice, naan and side dishes (not forgetting the lovley gulab jamun for pudding) at a reasonable price the point of Indian food? Scallops, monkfish, shiitake mushrooms, Elwy valley Welsh lamb cutlets are not the normal fare of your local Indian ... but this is hardly in that league - after all, it has a Michelin star.

By the way, you could also nip over the road beforehand to the Curzon Cinema and pay twelve squid to see the latest movie in more Mayfair cinema comfort. Try telling the residents of Mayfair that there's a credit crunch on....

Up The Workers!

'Manchester United have defied the credit crunch to secure the biggest shirt sponsorship deal in football history', writes James Ducker in The Times. 

* The Barclays Premier League champions announced a four-year contract - from the end of next season - worth £80 million with Aon Corporation, the world's leading risk advisor/insurance broker. Guess who's going to pay the best part of that fee? The workers, of course. Aon announced in April that they would be cutting company contributions to the staff pension fund of most of its 5,400 UK workforce; it halved the maximum amount contributed by the employer to 6% of an employee's salary. The move was described by them as 'necessary to cut costs and remain profitable', and now widely seen by the market as 'heralding a clampdown on retirement schemes'. Nice timing, Aon, your employees will be seeing red in more ways than one.

* So, in order not to fuel the flame of Aon's hoped-for publicity, above is a pic of Wayne Rooney doin' a little dance in the current sponsor AIG's shirt. AIG, of course, is another discredited American insurance company (but they only paid £56.5m). 

Pedants and Cavaliers

Richard Morrison, chief music critic and columnist, always writes wittily and thought-provokingly in The Thunderer: 

'I am pedantic to the point of nerdishness about written English, but cavalier verging on insouciant about how people talk the lingo. Similarly, some people (let's call them men) can be mind-numbingly pedantic about, say, sports statistics, yet catastrophically cavalier about doing small but necessary procedures around the home, such as closing the shower door before turning on the water, or inserting one's front-door keys in a pocket before leaving the house.' 

Now that rings a bell...

'In Britain the power struggle between pedants and cavaliers is eternal. It is basically what the English Civil War was all about. But in recent years the cavalier tendency has been very much in the ascendant. In public or private, most of us bend the rules as much as we can get away with — and then feel aggrieved if some nitpicker chastises or punishes us for so doing. Of course, individuality is important and the slimy tentacles of the Nanny State must constantly be checked. “The better the state is organised,” wrote Nietzsche in one of his wiser aphorisms, “the duller will be mankind.” But I sense that the pendulum is swinging the other way. Faced with the spectacle of obscene greed at the top of the country, most of us would welcome a period of puritanical pedantry and ruthless scrutiny.'

View partial source: Times Online & BBC

* The Daily Universal Register's last word:

"The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it." 

Francois de La Rochefoucauld. More from the wise FdLR here.

Google new widgets

Google's new Web Elements (click here) allow you to add everything from news video player feeds to online presentations, spreadsheets, maps, search and web conversation to your website as a widget. Easy peasy, using simple code copy and paste. Will the Google geeks ever run out of steam? By the way, dudes, when are you gonna take a new Street View pic of my house, now that I've spent so much on getting it repainted?