Is it time to pity restaurant critics?

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.’

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.