Two Oscar-winning actors on the cover, a World Cup winner’s guide to eating and drinking in Madrid, and a tribute to the late Michael Winner. We seem to have taken the theme of this issue rather literally, then made it worse by launching the first Noble Rot Restaurant Awards. We’ve been known to say that awards are bollocks – unless we win one, in which case they’re a long-overdue recognition of talent. After years of picking holes in Michelin and The 50 Best, we sent Marina O’Loughlin to find out how they work, then decided it was only fair to let everyone pick holes in ours. You’ve more chance of finding Lord Lucan than of discovering who judges most awards. So we collected votes from 117 people whose taste we trust – contributors, chefs, restaurateurs, the odd Oscar winner – printed the results and the names of everyone who’d let us, hung a medal of James Gillray’s gout-ridden foot round the neck of a bottle of Pol Roger ‘Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill’ and called it a trophy. The results are on page 4. Please don’t write in. Also in this issue… … Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley have dinner at Noble Rot Mayfair. Colman recalls a Greek rooftop, a shitload of mai tais and singing till four in the morning when Buckley was due on set at six. Buckley tells us oysters and chips with a dirty martini would be her death-row meal. … Dan Keeling spends two days eating and drinking his way round David Silva’s favourite restaurants and bars in Madrid, as the World Cup winner explains how a bottle of Tenerife red led him to buy vines in Gran Canaria and why seven years in wine have brought him more friends than 20 in football. … In ‘My Most Extraordinary Meal’, Jancis Robinson recalls a 66-wine marathon at Château d’Yquem co-hosted by the wine fraudster Hardy Rodenstock. … Giles Coren remembers Michael Winner as the patron saint of restaurant critics: the man who took on the taxman and won, so that he and others could claim restaurant meals against tax, and who terrified British restaurateurs into raising their standards. Plus: Henry Harris reflects on his love of Lyonnais food; Marina O’Loughlin reviews Paris’s Bistrot Paul Bert; Jeremy King explains the art of being a good guest; Levi Dalton follows the Burgundians making wine everywhere from Oregon to Japan; and Robert Walters looks at Michelin Grapes classifying Burgundy. There are also stories on Mallorcan and Azorean wines, Sweetings, the making of Keller‘s G-Max and the Georgian-era legend of the ‘Three-Bottle Man‘, among much more.
