GORDO normally goes on with himself for a good few paragraphs in his reviews before getting stuck into the food itself. Not as bad as that little snot Giles Coren who masturbates for most of his, in order to showcase his expensive education.
The gnocchi could have been used as ammo in the Anzio landings in WW2. The butternut squash was inconsequential in both quantity and flavour, the pine nuts weren’t toasted.
Coren is very good at grammar. He is also very good at being snotty about the North West and was so patronising in his review of Aumbry last week Gordo wanted to strip the little shit naked at 4am, tie a few mobile phones round his neck and handcuff him to a drain pipe outside the 24 hour Spar on Oxford Road.
I suspect that we are going to have a lot more of this as these southern tossers have to get on the train to BBC’s Media City to do their poncey sofa chats desperately trying to sell their mind numbing books. Coren's is called 'How to Eat'. It should have been called 'How to be Patronising'. Gordo’s pick of the week it ain't, readers.
Where was Gordo? (I was wondering that. Ed)
Oh yes, reviews. Gordo has always been annoyed about the review/perceived hatchet job that AA Gill, the television critic, did on Rosso a year ago or so.
Gordo's memory of the gaff was of an average faux-Italian that was fun when the place is full. So for Gordo a scored review was in order to set the record straight.
Looks smart
Booking in under his collegues name, Ruth Allan, who was Gordo’s pal for the lunch, the fat man arrives at the front desk.
"Hi, d’you have a table for Allan?" asks Gordo.
A pretty lady looks at the booking record.
"A table for three?" she asks after figuring out how the spelling of Allan works.
"Not sure"' answers Gordo, who thinks that Ruth may have added on a pal. "It could be two or three"...
Gordo is then taken to a table for two in such a tight brasserie-style layout that there would simply be no room for a third. Gordo points this out, the girl looks baffled; Gordo groans and chooses his own table on the other side of the room. Ruth arrives on her own.
A couple of glasses of house Prosseco, Le Dolci Colline, Adria Vini, turn out well so a bottle, at £22.95, is ordered. Very reasonable this folks.
The food is chosen, starters being burrata, ‘creamy mozzarella served with a fig and pomegranate salad’ (£8.50), and Zuppa di Pepperoni; ‘roast pepper and cherry tomato soup, topped with crumbled goats cheese and snipped chives’ (£4.95).
Both pretty boring, but the choice should demonstrate the depth of the kitchen brigade skills. The first will show attitudes to ingredients, the second how careful they are with dealing with them, starting from a freshly scrubbed stockpot.
They arrive. They look pretty. So far so good. Gordo cuts into the mozzarella, immediately becoming concerned at the resistance he was experiencing. The first centimetre was very rubbery mozzarella, which gave way to a core that was totally odd. It was a light yellow, the colour of jersey cream. It was hard but fibrous. It tasted like it had gone wrong.
Interior Of Mozzarella Burrata
Definitely not to Gordo’s taste, nor Ms Allan’s. It was...weird. Gordo asked the waiter what it was. He didn't know. The head waiter came over, looking like an East German assassin from a Len Deighton novel. He didn't know either. He did, however, take it to show the chef.
He came back.
"The chef," announces our good looking umbrella poisons expert, "says that is exactly as it should be."
No further explanation. Gordo is baffled. Pardon him for being such an ignorant bugger on the subject of food.
Fatty has since discovered that Burrata can be both a cheese in its own right as well as one made up. One is a cheese made in a very similar way to mozzarella, differing in the stretching technique in production.
The ‘filling’ comes from cream from the whey and is, apparently quite buttery. Another example is a dish of Mozzarella cheese stretched and flattened so that it can line a small pudding basin, then filled with, for example, ricotta cheese that has had cream whipped into it. Wouldn’t it have been nice if the chef had educated front of house as to what it was?
Gordo has no idea if Rosso’s Burrata is a good example of its ilk. He would, however, guess that it had been hanging about in the fridge a tad too long. The common denominator of all the information is that it should be eaten at room temperature and should taste mild and sweet, with the consistency of very soft mozzarella. And be eaten within 24 hours of being made. Rosso’s example was chilled, with the interior having the consistency of wet suet pastry.
The salad turned out to be boring, the dressing vapid whilst the fig plonked on the plate was perfectly alright but sat there saying to Gordo, “Fucking kill me. Right now. Please.” Those sixteen pomegranate seeds were just. Oh God, I give up.
The chef then sent out some more mozzarella in the form of a lazy Caprese salad (mozzarella, ripe tomatoes, de-seeded and sliced, fresh basil leaves, great olive oil, crunchy sea salt). The tomatoes were ordinary and cold; the mozzarella was a problem cheese again, straight out of the fridge and no sea salt.
The soup did not have a tang of tomatoes, certainly any tomatoes with a personality, whilst it didn’t have the smoky sweetness of ‘roasted peppers’. It did have some goats cheese chucked in, which did the soup no favours whatsoever as it just bullied what there was of any flavour right out of the door. No snipped chives, just a lonely basil leaf wondering about the meaning of life.
The soup
Gnocchi con zucca ‘handmade potato gnocchi with butternut squash, toasted pine nuts, fresh sage and a touch of cream’ ( £10.95) was again mind boggling in its ordinariness.
The gnocchi could have been used as ammo in the Anzio landings in WW2. The butternut squash was inconsequential in both quantity and flavour, the pine nuts weren’t toasted. Sage...?
Whilst a touch of cream would be right if it wasn’t changed to a bucket-load of something that makes the dish sickly and doubly inedible.
Gordo had ordered a seafood platter for two. Again, method in his madness, as you can't hide poor ingredients here, nor slapdash cooking, it’s all in the seasoning and the timing, as well as top-drawer ingredients. The explanation of the dish includes 'a whole lobster'. It was a quid short of eighty for the two of us. Again, it arrives looking good.
But, there’s very little shellfish, some monkfish and other assorted anonymous white fish, some mussels and small clams, both rubbery, and two halves of completely ruined lobsters, which were incinerated (see top picture in this story). It was impossible to tell if these were native or the £5 Canadian ones from Aldi (which, as it happens, if dealt with correctly aren’t that bad at all). Dry and ruined. Oh, and stringy. Did I mention that the calamari rings had no seasoning whatsoever in its batter? This was a shocker.
Seafood platter
We couldn't bring ourselves to order puddings.
Franky, Gordo has little or no respect for chefs like this. There are far too many restaurants describing themselves as Italian in the North West filled with people who do not understand that this cuisine relies completely on its ingredients being top drawer, along with the reality that they have to be cooked with skill and love and a lightness of touch.
There is no excuse for serving a dish which, when a punter asks what it is, the chef hasn’t proudly told his front line all about. Just to tell the front of house gaffer to say ‘that is exactly what it should be’ with a full stop is not good enough.
Because, my cheffy pal, that is exactly the kind of patronising attitude that Coren and Gill have for us up here. And the sort of food that would confirm their prejudices.
The three of you deserve each other.
This is all a great shame as the room here is really quite exciting and the front of house staff are on the whole top drawer, unless you want you coat back smart-ish.
The bar is one of Gordo’s favourites as well, being just around the corner from his apartment. It’s an easy ‘call in’ as long as he can find his way past the black £250,000 Rolls Royce parked as ostentatiously as possibly there by the owner. Not Rio Ferdinand by the way, although he is on board with a few shares. The Rolls Royce shows Rosso up for what it is.
All fur coat and no knickers.
Sell the Rolls Royce, spend less on PR people and more on your staff, training and ingredients - it would very much be a move in the right direction.
You can follow Gordo on Twitter here @GordoManchester
ALL SCORED CONFIDENTIAL REVIEWS ARE IMPARTIAL AND PAID FOR BY THE MAGAZINE.
Rosso, 43 Spring Gardens, City. M2 2BG. 0161 832 1400
Rating: 10/20
Food: 3/10
Service: 4/5
Ambience: 3/5
