Blood, Sweat and Asparagus Spears

Reviewed positively in the Financial Times, this is a wonderful account of how the London, and hence rest of the UK, dining scene changed rapidly during the 1990s. It seeks to explain what I had always sensed instinctively, namely that prior to the last 30 or so years, eating in restaurants was fundamentally unexciting. British chefs were historically both too beholden to French culinary tradition and too reluctant to take risks. Turvil is less strong on the distinction between causation and correlation, but irrespective of the catalyst, things did distinctly begin to change, fortuitously for me, at about the time I began to start eating out properly. Blood, Sweat and Asparagus Spears is a wonderful time capsule of 1990s possibility, a period when Britain generally began to rediscover its confidence as a nation, per Blair and Cool Britannia. Restaurants such as The Sugar Club and MASH really did feel cool and different. They also paved the way for making London into one of the coolest culinary destinations in the world today. Turvil's account provides an excellent way for interested readers to join the dots and understand the connections between leading British chefs, from Marco Pierre White to Gordon Ramsay via Paul Heathcote and Paul Gayler. Beyond restaurants, the work also characterises changing palates, the embrace of foods from around the world, and the slow realisation that vegetarianism does not need to be an afterthought. Not rated.

By Andrew Turvil