More Dolphin Anyone?

If you want proof of how much time some celebrity chefs spend at their restaurants, then look no further than everyone’s favourite squashed Bee Gee Antony Worrall-Thompson.

I cycled past his upmarket restaurant near Kew Bridge during a fitness binge before Christmas, and stopped off for a fag and a peruse of his menu.

Now I’m all for experimenting in the kitchen, and trying different ingredients...but DOLPHIN Antony? It’s not exactly PC. You’ll have Greenpeace special forces after you with a speargun. Either that or your staff – the sort every celebrity chef claims they have painstakingly trained up so well to cover in their absence – have absolutely no idea what dauphinois is.


I’m not one of those tedious grammarians who come out in a nasty rash when they see a spelling mistake, or get a hard-on when they spy a split infinitive, or who scrawl pipe-tappingly lengthy letters to the Telegraph about education today, and English as a second language, but three spelling mistakes in three dishes!

Even restaurants in back-street Beijing do better than that with their tourist menus. Baby cappers! And you’ve got two spellings of Béarnaise, by Jeremy!

Now I know AWT has a pretty good knowledge of classic dishes, and he knows there’s only one p in baby capers, and I hope no dolphin in dauphinois potatoes, but you’d think he’d at least keep an eye on what’s going out on his specials menus, especially considering his recent restaurant failures.

And as for the idiots who waffle on whenever I turn to the thorny issue of celebrity chef absenteeism about how you wouldn’t expect Enzo Ferrari to make your F40 himself, or Giorgio Armani to rip little distressed looks in your jeans, so why do you expect Gordon Ramsay to personally slave over your omelette if you eat at one of his restaurants?

Well, at least they’d spell Ferrari correctly on the badge.