Content area
Full Text
After eight years and 385 reviews for the IoS, Terry Durack signs off with a restaurant built to last
Of the 385 restaurants I have reviewed over the past eight years for these pages, one in four no longer exists. They burst upon the scene with high hopes, big dreams and enormous overheads, get a blaze of publicity, a fistful of reviews, and then... disappear. So I'm not falling for that one again. This being my final column, I want to review something that will be here today and here tomorrow too.
The best way of doing that is to find one that was here yesterday, so here I am at The Glasshouse in Kew, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. The chef is not a household name, nor does he have a TV show. I have no idea if celebrities eat here. Yet there is something special about this quietly glamorous glass-walled corner site.
When Chez Bruce's co-owners Nigel Platts-Martin and Bruce Poole first opened The Glasshouse in 1999, the head chef was 27-year-old Cardiff-born Anthony Boyd, who had trained first with Poole, then with Philip Howard at The Square. Not one of these people is remotely fashionable. Poole is all about flavour, Howard is technique, Platts-Martin is business and wine. It is one of the best schools...