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Weekly round-up of the national critics' restaurant reviews and news on eating out,
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I spend an inordinate amount of time on restaurant websites. It's the occupational hazard of food blogging. People come to you and say, 'I'm off to a nose flute recital in Neasden tonight. What's the best coeliac Mongolian round there?' And because I'm petrified of looking thick I say 'Let me have a quick think,' and scurry to Google or my groaning shelf of restaurant guides and click and flick and say 'Yes, I've got it - it's Wheat Got the Wok'.

And, you know, the worst part of food blogging, the thing I'd change in a furry heartbeat, are these damn sites. On you log, hunting for a phone number or to see if they're open on Sunday, and instead of calm HTML and simple info, they fling hideous graphics at you and pummel you with loathsome music. And when you eventually get past that, you find there's nothing useful there, no hint of a menu or any indication they want your business.

I've just spent an hour trawling the web looking for bad restaurant websites. And now I feel a nameless dread, an ashen, wasted catharsis, like I've entered the seventh circle of hell: washed-out, strung-up, eye-frazzled and tinnital. I'll focus on three.

First, though it saddens me to say it: Tayyabs. I'm fond of the restaurant, but its site is a mess. It begins with awful music - a frantic irregular pulsing, and a background sound like someone scraping a crocodile with a stick. There's a piece of curiously-worded, unrequested advice: 'The best way to get to Tayyabs is on the tube nearest station is whitechapel tube see map for directions'. (Repeated [sic]s...) The 'map' in question is buried elsewhere, while the menu languishes in a strange anti-browser of its own, refusing to list prices until you download the pdf. Useless.

Next, another place I like, Club Gascon. The site kicks off by inexplicably tracing an outline of Britain, then zooming into London (it says 'London', to help you along). Little spots pimple over the river, representing Gascon outposts, but you can't click them, because everything immediately morphs into an ugly 'CG', like a mangled fingernail. When you finally choose a restaurant, there's more infuriating Flash before, out of nowhere, an appalling noise starts up: the wail of a tortured animal, an over-fast jazzified atonal monstrosity that makes you want to rip your ears off, or pour cement into your head, or shove skewers through your eardrums. Needless to say, menus here are pdf only.

Finally, the grand-daddy. The monster. The Big Bertha of awful restaurant websites - Sketch. Visiting the Sketch site is like experiencing madness - the full-on, wild-eyed, gob-foaming, schizo, gibbering, screeching, clawing psycho stuff, not that doped-up Cuckoo's Nest apathy. It begins by showing you a giant china testicle, with 'Enter' written underneath it. Always a worrying sign. If you click it - an odd decision, under the circumstances - there's a pop-up window (hurrah!), and the thing starts clunkily rotating. You have to click it again, naturally, and it opens up and vomits out this hideous mechanical menagerie - elephants and flamingos bouncing around in cages, strange cogs and whirls, and spinning illegible text. The music - of course there's music - is a monotonous thump of discordant bleeps, like a madman one-man-band. It's all so shrivellingly ugly, so divorced from hospitality or welcome or even food, one can only wonder what on earth they were thinking.


Some other execrable websites:

Roberto Passon, New York. Screamingly awful blue and yellow colour scheme and a website largely comprising unreadable bubbles. Music straight from Guantanamo.

Casa Marcial, Spain. (Thanks to Marina O'Loughlin for this one.) It's bonkers: it has to be seen to be believed. It's impossible to navigate, and features plates rolling down hills, a giant disembodied hand and a chef apparently pleasuring himself.

Market Bar, San Francisco. Unappetising photos of sausages burning on a grill, and far too much Flash. But the real attraction here is the noise - a background hubbub meant to evoke contended diners but which sounds instead like the relentless babble of Babel.

And some successes:

St John: clean, clear, robust and English, like the great restaurant itself.

Franco Manca: the best pizzas in London, with all relevant details on a single page.

Gordon Ramsay: the svengali's mothership is easy to navigate and looks elegant in his signature purple, showing that even an empire can be condensed into its essentials. No Flash, Gordon.

Please note that the opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of iStarvin.