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. 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.