Paper Monitor
11:13 UK time, Thursday, 3 February 2011
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Feeling peckish? A new restaurant has opened and the morning papers have reasoned that you might like to know what's on the menu.
That eatery is not, of course, some humble provincial bistro but Dinner, owned by that proud bearer of three Michelin stars and purveyor of snail porridge Heston Blumenthal.
True, a minority of Fleet Street's readership will find its location at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in London's Hyde Park especially convenient, and ever fewer will be prepared to fork out £12.50 for a starter.
But Blumenthal is a celebrity chef, and the celebrity part of that formulation means Britain's top-ranked gastronome is guaranteed coverage.
For the most part, the food critics are impressed.
Mark Hix of the Independent says he was served up reserving particular praise for the "genuinely astonishing" starter - a "meat fruit", which looks like a mandarin but is, in fact, filled with chicken liver mousse.
Matthew Fort of the Guardian is keen that readers appreciate his dedication to the craft of restaurant-reviewing.
"Over two sittings, I tasted virtually all the 25 dishes on the menu," he declares. "I turned to puddings with trepidation after eight courses."
It's a tough job, but someone has to do it. Thankfully, Mr Fort was Blumenthal's menu, which celebrate the UK's culinary past, "reclaims and reinvents our own cooking heritage, reinvigorating the tired and ordinary orthodoxies of traditional British cooking," he says.
Jan Moir of the Daily Mail, however, finds less to love about
"Heston Blumenthal's interpretation of the dishes of merrie old England is a brilliant and original concept," she says. "Yet eating at his new restaurant remains an interesting experience, rather than a delicious one."
Paper Monitor is sure Mr Blumenthal will not be too offended. In his column for the Times, he says he took inspiration for Dinner from historical recipes which included such instructions as the addition of
With such elliptical guidance to follow, he is unlikely to be too troubled by the more prosaic siren calls of the daily press.
The 
