An atom is made of protons, electrons and neutrons, and protons are made of quarks, and a quark is the size of the violin you’d play for a restaurant critic who complains about their job. It’s the best job in the world: go out for dinner on expenses with a friend or a lover, then bash out a thousand words.
Why, then, might we feel some pity for our restaurant critics? One reason could be that the Grim Reaper is hovering. Last week, the Evening Standard’s restaurant critic Jimi Famurewa announced that his column was being scrapped, as the paper moves to a weekly edition. Another reason, perhaps, is the lifestyle of a restaurant critic. Earlier this year, the New York Times’s Pete Wells left his column for health reasons: ‘I can’t hack the week-to-week reviewing life any more.’
The one thing they all moan about is that it’s easy to put on weight
So is that life harder than it looks? ‘It can be a bit gruelling if you do it like Pete Wells,’ says the Times’s Giles Coren. Wells typically visited a restaurant several times before reviewing it. He wrote in his goodbye column that he was trying to outdo the LA Times’s Jonathan Gold, who died in 2018, aged 58: ‘There didn’t seem to be a dish served anywhere in Los Angeles that he hadn’t eaten at least once, and usually several times… his knowledge inspired me. It also tormented me.’
Such an approach was previously seen as uniquely American, but then along came Jonathan Nunn, who runs the hip newsletter Vittles, which doubles up as an encyclopaedia of London’s food fringes and a leftish magazine. Vittles recently compiled a ‘50 Best Sandwiches in London’ list. Nunn said that halfway through the eating process he walked through Borough Market and felt like he was going to have a heart attack.
Diddums, say Britain’s veteran critics. Going four or five times is ‘not what the ordinary punter does’, says Jay Rayner, who’s been the Observer’s critic for 25 years. ‘It’s always struck me as slightly performative. And Jonathan Nunn…’ – go on, Jay! – ‘well I have views on his claims he’s doing something that’s never been done before. I’ve been reviewing smaller places long before he’d probably passed through puberty.’
Multiple visits are ‘madness and unnecessary’, says Marina O’Loughlin, formerly of the Sunday Times. A good critic can tell if a restaurant is having an off night.
Coren is even more insistent: ‘It comes from another time, it’s the Michelin Guide attitude. That’s what killed restaurant criticism, that’s what made it boring. Thank God I don’t work in American journalism with the cant and the bollocks and the self-regard.’ Nunn says it’s a waste of someone’s time to send them somewhere on a half-baked recommendation. We’re here to sell papers, mate, the broadsheet reviewers reply.
The one thing they do all moan about is that it’s easy to put on weight. Apart from Coren, that is, who happens to be slim. Don’t trust a fat restaurant critic, he says, because they’ll ‘eat anything’. Jonathan Meades was the Times’s critic from 1986 to 2001, and ‘got too fat’, he tells me, although that might be because restaurant food was heavier back then. He eventually reached 19 stone and after resigning went ‘from 19 stone down to 11 stone in ten months’.
Rayner goes to the gym a lot, but says much of his build is genetics and appetite: ‘I’ve always been big. I genuinely don’t think I’d have been much skinnier if I didn’t do this job.’ But ‘if you’re not one of those people who wakes up thinking what they’re going to have for dinner, there’s no way you’re going to find this job comfortable’. A restaurant is the best subject matter a critic can have, says Coren. ‘At least I’m going for a meal and not to see Hedda Gabler.’
Although employing a restaurant critic might ‘look like an indulgence, restaurant reviewing is a cheap way to get readers’, says Rayner. ‘A news operation is really expensive; a lot of people are doing it and they’re covering it in very similar ways. I can tell you hundreds of thousands of people read my reviews on a Sunday – there is engagement, and that’s good for advertisers. I’m well paid but I work out as good value.’ In his opinion, the Standard is shortsighted to get rid of its restaurant column.
The real challenge for critics is oversaturation, along with the fact that people have decided it’s important to ‘be nice’. The review account TopJaw (half a million Instagram followers) is run by a good-looking posho called Jesse Burgess. He asks chefs for their favourite restaurants, and everyone goes home happy. Another review account, Eating with Tod, has two million followers and features multiple videos of a chubby bald chap who chuckles away while eating brown, greasy meats. Most Instagram accounts shy away from criticising the food.
‘There’s been a great de-fanging since the pandemic,’ says O’Loughlin, with the cost-of-living crisis as the cause (Rayner briefly said he would write only positive reviews in 2021). No critic builds a reputation off the sharpness of their tongue any more, as A.A. Gill did. ‘It makes for a far less interesting read,’ reckons O’Loughlin. ‘I’ve been astonished at some of the adulation dished out to very ordinary places.’
Nunn says that British critics lack the ‘teeth and nerve to critique its darlings, or anything that is part of “the scene”’. It’s not as simple as that, thinks Coren, who points out that most restaurants he goes to now are quite good, the standard having risen significantly in recent years. You could, he says, go out looking for a restaurant to hammer, but what psycho does that?
They should, though. In 2021, Coren had this to say about Ave Mario, a self-proclaimed ‘cool’ Italian restaurant in Covent Garden: ‘The ravioli carbonara was unspeakably grim – I only managed one of the warty skin grafts that passed for a pasta parcel, despite the alluring vomitty smell of the thin yellow plasma it swam in – and the cuttlefish were breaded not battered, chewy as old foreskins and smelt of bins.’
Yes, we should all ‘be nice’, but there’s nothing quite as delicious as watching a critic stick the knife in.
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