Tim Hayward

A wise colleague once told me that the equation for a restaurant lifespan (L) was something like M - S x D = L Where M is equal to the amount of money available, D is the depth of the hole and S is the speed at which you are prepared to shovel M into D But seriously, how fantastic to follow your passion. The very best of luck

I've just finished reading 'The Soul of a Chef' by Michael Ruhlman. This is a series of pieces following chefs through the Certified Master Chef programme exam at the Culinary Institute of America. For those who haven't read the book the CMC course is the most rigorous test of the best chefs but one which provokes controversy - apparently most of America's most famous or highly regarded chefs have never taken the exam and many of them see it as irrelevant. The book made me think... We don't have anything like the CMC programme in the UK. I'm not sure we ever would. Why is that? Is it something to do with the fact that, until Sleb chefs appeared, cookery schools were either for debs in search of husbands or terrifyingly underfunded branches of provincial technical colleges? Do we lack an institution with the credibility to run or judge such a programme? Is there a fundamental difference in the was the UK and the US approach cuisine? (Judging by these boards, there's certainly a difference in the way we talk about it). Ruhlman writes about the course in the kind of breathless, almost motivational style of a sports writer and more than once makes the comparison between the chefs and professional athletes? That's not a metaphor that makes any sense from my experience of UK kitchens. On the other hand, it does gel with experience of working in the US. Is this the difference? We don't have a CMC for the same reasons we get beaten in sport ? Has anyone else read the book? Can anyone else have a stab at articulating what this cultural difference is?

A thing of beauty. What I really love about this style is that it enables shooting under all kinds of conditions with light, inexpensive kit. When a photographer uses that advantage to shoot authentic things in places where dragging the food to a studio would be impossible it just reeks of integrity. When magazines print page after page of identically styled, lit and defocussed dishes it looks like a catalogue and adds nothing. It's fundamentally lazy. Perhaps the next stage in food photography is to go further in search of more authentic stuff. More like extreme sports shooting "Yeah, it might look like another shot of an impossibly fit Californian hanging from El Capitaine by his fingernails but have you any idea how tough it was getting up there to shoot it?"

Agreed, I think ultimately there is a decreasing need for specialist food photographers in the book and magazine sector but that, in advertising, where the client wants reassurance that they've done everything to make their product look it's best, there will still be a demand, irrespective of prevailing style.

I'm not sure it's about 'schools'. Fashion in the 60s was revolutionised by light, mobile 35mm cameras with fast lenses, fast film and a magazine industry and audience hungry for a new informality. The idea of a Bailey/Duffy/Donovan 'golden age' is hindsight. Today we're seeing cameras that can get a great shot without a great deal of technical wrangling and an audience who want to see food looking a bit more accessible. It's not like anyone sat down and planned it. My concern is what it leads to next.

Love it! Fantastically old style.

Even I'm not enough of an unreconstructed Trot to be able to make a class issue out of pictures of dinner Given the site's restrictions on copyright images it's impossible put valid examples up but if you were, for example, to compare pictures of made dishes in any of the following, you'd get the idea... Old: Larousse Gastronomique Any Delia Smith Raymond Blanc Cooking for Friends The Prawn Cocktail Years The Silver Spoon New: Any Jamie, Nigel, Nigella, Hugh Any copy of Olive, Waitrose FI, Sainsbury mag, OFM etc. In the old style the food has been styled, any props or background look like they've been chosen and crucially, even if the light looks natural, it's artificial. The reason you can tell this is that the whole dish, front to back, is in focus (without wishing to teach my granny to suck eggs, this only happens is on small apertures hence more light is essential). There's usually a slightly out of focus AGA or garden furniture in the background In the new style it's almost compulsory that the whole dish can't be in focus ('shallow depth of field'). The light is always big, hazy and from the back and any props or background look totally 'found'. The background is too defocussed to read but is intended to look like a busy gastropub on a Sunny afternoon. Don't get me wrong. I love the new style. It's less up itself, less artificial. When it's good it's like looking at those fashion shoots of the 60's where suddenly, the models were actually allowed to move, smile and look like real people. A total change and unarguably for the better. My question was simply that, being so easy to do and so completely and unthinkingly ubiquitous, we're surely going to get bored of it - then what?

I'm not sure if it is. Is it not possible that the biggest change in food media has been presenting it like fashion, not as a specialist interest? High levels of PR, breathless puffery of evanescent trends, weekly volte-faces on styles or ingredients, celebrity culture, trivialisation, a post-modern discovery of its own pointlessness, decreasing relevance to real people, self-referential cliques and a inevitable disappearance up it's own fundament. Sounds just like fashion to me. On the other hand, glad to see Guy Bourdin making a comeback in the Times this weekend.

I'll come clean here, I trained as a photographer. This was at least twenty years ago and it was a very good craft training at one of the art colleges that specialised in that sort of thing. We spent months learning real old-fashioned stuff like how to light things, how to develop film, how to print and, at various points took on areas of speciality. Food was the toughest. It involved incredibly high levels of planning, control and intervention. The craft skills were arcane and immensely complex. Your studio practice had to be second to none and the levels of concentration meant that hangovers were out of the question. The lecturers who specialised in the area were gods and work placement with an established food photographer was regarded as little short of a lottery win. By year two I had decided to specialise in fashion. Natural light, out of the studio, shallow depth of field, good looking model and a roll of film. It wasn't exactly rocket science and, at that age, I preferred girls to food. So twenty years later, I start writing about food and I find that food photography has changed beyond recognition. Some of the old skills help and I love the new informal look. But mainly I love the fact that everything.... and I mean EVERYTHING... in UK food magazines now appears to be shot natural light, on location, with shallow depth of field and a good looking subject. I could shoot this stuff blindfold - and so, sadly, can anyone else with a £100 digital camera. At the moment it's fun because editors have started to realise that 'writer/photographer' costs about 75% of 'writer + photographer'. What I'm really interested to know is... a) Has anyone else noticed how samey food photography has become and... b) What on earth can be next? Does anyone see a trend swinging back to artifice and control (momentarily discount the Wallpaper shoots). Can it get any more loose and editorial before, like fashion photography, it fails to represent the subject matter and attempts to convey the 'spirit'. What's the food photography equivalent of 'heroin chic'?

Those were frozen peas. An abomination. Immature peas, ripped untimely from the pod and frozen within seconds. Foodies bang on for hours about what a marvellous vindication of the freezing process they are. Crap! They taste like little condoms full of chlorophyll. A PROPER PEA has been allowed to wax fat upon the vine. All that boring liquid protein turns into healthy starch and the plump, delicious pulse has become a little storehouse of goodness. At this point they are either... a) Picked, dried, packed, bought by your Nan, soaked overnight with bicarb, boiled to death and served with love or... b) Picked, dried, boiled to death, dyed green, stuck in tins and labelled 'Marrowfat Peas'. Either option is food for the Gods. Turn from the frozen pea, O my Brothers. Cast it down. It is Satan's work and has no place on a decent man's plate. Addendum: If, by chance, you were alluding to canned Petits Pois; they are French and thus, simply wrong.

Tinned cod roes, deep fried in batter, brown sauce, mushy peas. I fear I may be losing credibility here before I've actually gained it, but what the hell it's my mouth. ← "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is". Noël Coward Seems the same could be said of food. Ah! Nostalgia - the new MSG.

Aaah yes. I too live my life in a ceaseless and uneasy conflict between gluttony and idleness. Right now I'm trying to decide between slouching toward the refrigerator to construct an enormous sandwich of leftover lamb or just lying here trying to detect a heartbeat in my furred arteries.

My old Nan, a wiley poshrat of abiding low cunning, reckoned she could tell when someone was 'not long for this world'. She said it was something like a smell but not (which made absolutely no sense to me, then or now). But it did make me think about restaurants. Why is it that some places open and you can just tell, right from the get-go that they're going to last just the blink of an eye before going under? A consultant friend refers to it as CTP (circling the plughole). With some things (Fashion Cafe and Dans le Noir spring to mind) you're just staggered that the idea ever got out of the first meeting. (Note to marketeers: Yes, there is such a thing as a bad idea in a brainstorm). But what else? History, location, food, price? What method of divination do you use to you tell that a place has had it?

Opposite side to Moro. A few doors to the East of Cafe Kick. That should be accurate enough - what are you planning? An air strike? I think its last two incarnations were a sub Pizza Express, 'white emulsion and posters' pizzeria followed closely by a 'we've run a kebab empire for a decade, surely it's time to take Middle Eastern street food up-market' mezze joint. If there's a restaurant equivalent of 'Dead Man Walking' they were it.

Sunday Tea.... now you're talking. Fray Bentos corned beef. Either in a white bread sandwich with Anchor or with hand cut chips and tinned peas. Can I also watch a Carry On film while eating. Big old sofa and a Nan that smells of rosewater and dust.

If you want a sandwich that really tastes of sandwich: scraping of marmite, peanut butter, thinly sliced banana and bitter orange marmalade. Trust me. ← Trust You???? That's got to rank right up there with incest and folk dancing as 'things I should really try out some time'.

2 x free range eggs @ £1.50 per half doz = 50p 1 slice off a sourdough loaf @ £1.60 = Let's say 10p 25g Echire butter @ £2.00 250g = 20p 1 Tbsp double cream @ 25p per 100ml = 2.75... let's say 3p Allow 5p for peppercorns, salt (Malden, natch). Borrow rather than buy Bill Grainger's book... 88p for the best scrambled eggs in your life. Thinking about it, though, my Mum used to do something called 'Dead man's eyes' that involved white Sunblest fried in bacon drippings topped with a dollop of last night's mash and a squeeze of ketchup (nicked from a Wimpy). We're talking old money here, back in the days of white dog poo and Spangles, but that's got to be less than a penny a serving. (PS. Welcome aboard)

I thought the stab at Reichl raised some interesting questions. I haven't read Garlic and Sapphires yet. I found the first two in the trilogy entertaining but, towards the end I was starting to question if life wasn't too short to read about the custody battle and the endless trivia of her love life. In short, it seemed a little starry for a restaurant critic to assume we were interested in those minutiae of her life which weren't relevant to her writing. (As it happens I feel the opposite way about Nigel Slater's 'Toast'. He writes beautifuly about his life as it relates to his work yet the coy avoidance of any mention of his lovelife makes the whole thing a little false). OTOH, she was one of the most important critics in the States at the time of a restaurant renaissance which dwarfs our own. Her opinion, syndicated to vast audiences, could really have an effect in a way that even our most important critics could only dream of. Is it any wonder she got a bit up herself? (BTW. Can anyone fill me in on who the 'London acolytes' were?)

... which (immaculately expressed) observation begs the question "Then why doesn't he F off and leave the job to someone else". Does he hate being a journalist because his Dad and his sister are actually good at it? Did they force him to do it at gunpoint? Does he secretly harbour ambitions to be an estate agent or a freelance car clamper - callings to which he would be infinitely better suited?

You're not alone. It's got some of the worst acoustics I've ever come across in a restaurant. Add to this the fact that, if you're sitting on the backless banquettes you find yourself leaning in to hear anything, which knackers your back. What is it with back problems and Exmouth Market? Every time I go to the Quality Chop House I have to take out a simultaneous block booking with my osteopath.

Did anyone else catch Giles Coren's column in the Times supp on Saturday? It was a bizarre piece in which he pretty much confessed he was desperately trying to fill space and then ranted in the weirdest way about reviewers who try to remain anonymous. What the hell was that all about? It read as such a rant it seemed there must be some history to it. Any ideas?

Or, indeed, by a couple of huge men with bats.

I remember that episode too

Dammit! Bunch of bloody amateurs. You'd better come over to mine for a dripping sandwich.

Oh dear. That's going to be rather a tall order. Most of us spend Saturdays bemoaning the plumbing through our awful teeth or indulging in random soccer violence. Pretty much all the restaurants in our little town will shut for the whole week-end while the staff return to their thatched homes to indulge in pagan rituals. Give me a couple of hours and I'll see if I can remember the name of an inkeeper who might let you in for a bit of cheese and some boiled mutton. (PS. Don't trust the cab drivers. They'll drive you to their hovels in the East End, slaughter you and have their toothless wives bake you into pies)