On my phone, that page is every bit as quick as a native app. The presentation doesn't suffer. It's actually quite a bit better than many native apps I've had the misfortune of installing.
More importantly, the content is actually discoverable from web search. The alternative is forcing the user to choose a recipes app from an opaque app store search, wait to download/install it, then search in that single silo of content and hope it has the content they want. Then, rinse/repeat if they don't find a recipe they like. Even if they happen to find a nice native app on the first try that does have a good UI, good content, and the specific content they want, that is a vastly inferior experience.
Can you create a poor mobile web experience? Sure. The situation isn't very much different than janky, slow desktop sites that are laden with too many third-party scripts for ads, tracking, social, etc. Mobile does exacerbate the effect of that kind of sloppiness, but I think that stems from sites where content is secondary to advertising/social, not the feasibility or difficulty of creating a good mobile web experience.
I was going to add a disclaimer to the link above asking folks to be gentle if they peeked under the hood, because I developed that site in an insanely short amount of time for how much content and functionality is there, but maybe that's an important data point in and of itself. If it were so difficult to develop a decent mobile web experience, there's no way I could have shipped that full site in about two weeks of billable hours. Not to mention, we focused a lot more on the desktop layout than mobile, based on analytics. I wouldn't say mobile was an afterthought, but the phone layout was a fairly small fraction of the overall effort.
