conrad

While Jay Rayner's amour-propre may be well served by seeing himself appear as a blurb on YMing's menu, the danger in this tendency lies in this: that kitchen brigades change and chefs move on, and even though a particular dish may remain a stalwart of the menu, the reviewer's encomium may now be appended to what turns out to be a sodden mulch. What is the shelf-life of such endorsements? At least with the stickers in the window from the annual guides, one can see which was the most recent edition the restaurant appeared in.

How about JSP and Michael Winner doing a Pizza Hut all-you-can-eat blowout together? Mmmm. You read it here first.

If Janet Street-Porter is now being invited to pontificate on the restaurant scene, then the lunatics really have taken over the asylum. It almost outclasses the debacle a few years ago when the Mirror hired Dirty Den from EastEnders to write a wine column.

To return to the original query: in my opinion, the Seafood Restaurant is not what it once was. Neither the scallops nor the monkfish I had on my last visit were up to snuff, the atmosphere is leaden, and the sight of Stein schmoozing up to a bunch of American tourists on the terrace instead of getting out back and getting on with it was depressing. The standard of cooking does not justify the menu prices, imho.

It would indeed be an odd critic who wasn't prepared to criticise. In the matter of restaurant criticism, the humble hack tends to be bold in doing so because the expenses are being paid the newspaper, and also because the newspaper now feels that its readers want to see blood on the carpet. Whoever said it reinforces the prejudices of people who wouldn't spend their money in the restaurants concerned anyway is about right. By contrast, wine writers (of which I am also one) are stuck up the opposing creek. Their editors won't let them write adverse copy because all that's wanted is lists of recommended bottles. So they are muzzled from the outset, but also disinclined to rock any boats because the feeding and guzzling they do is paid for the trade fronts and PR companies in the form of free lunches and press trips. Very few are prepared to snap at the hand that so generously feeds them. Hence all the rampant corruption.

I suppose what we're saying in that case is that we don't expect restaurant critics to be particularly knowledgeable about food. They are not, in that sense, food writers. We just expect them to give a roughly accurate of what they ate and how much it cost, but that the bulk of the column will be composed of strenuously jocose observations about how alienating it all is. Coren again, or rather his dear old dad, last Saturday, contemplating the roast trolley at the Connaught: 'It looks like the glimpse of road-death you get over the heads of the paramedics from the top deck of a passing bus.' Do we believe this was actually said at the time? Did he say it to the waiters, or just to little Giles? Is it an enlightening metaphor, or just a cheap shot? And do we really believe that le vieux Coren is actually familiar with the term 'paramedics'? None of it matters. It's all in the name of knockabout comedy.

I suppose what I'm getting at is the degree to which restaurant reviewing in the UK has become an extension of the writer's personality. Nobody wants to read bland journalism of course, but what we are being treated to now is a kind of digest of the critic's personal life. The type of the British restaurant writer now is a male 40-something of more or less obnoxious rightwing political proclivities, and with an unshakable belief in the readers' bottomless fascination with not just him but his nearest and dearest as well. Guess who this was yesterday: 'I can still recall the names of literally dozens of exotic dancers my father has been moved to recall by desserts of the blancmange family'. Added to this is a spurious literary veneer, with references to the likes of Rabelais and (perennially) Proust larded on to invite the impression that the writer could be doing something with more intellectual prowess, such as composing a critical essay perhaps, than just stuffing himself on expenses and then telling us about it week after week. It was in the early 1990s that reviewing started getting contracted out to media 'characters' (if that's the right word for Michael Winner), novelists, diarists and so forth on the questionable basis that, since anybody could eat in a restaurant, anybody could therefore write about it. One poor old soul who'd recently been ditched from writing a very refined column in a consumer magazine protested to the commissioning editor that he lived in a house, so perhaps he could be the architecture correspondent, but the point was lost on her.

Many thanks Macrosan. (Only just joined today.)

Hi everyone. Just wondered, for a piece I'm writing, whether anybody out there has ever acted on the strength of a restaurant review in the press, and gone and made a booking. I strongly suspect that most restaurant reviews are just read and forgotten about, largely because not everybody lives in London. If you want advice, surely you'd use one of the annual restaurant guides. What is the point of press reviews?