Mon, Nov 10, 2003 page16

• London food critics dig in with a vengeance

  A batch of restaurant reviewers have turned their practice into a vicious blood sport that has chefs shaking in their boots

  • By Warren St. John / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  For one of the most feared men in London these days, the writer A. A. Gill looks incongruously relaxed. Perched at the dining table of his Fulham apartment -- easily found thanks to a Mountain Dew-colored Bentley parked out front -- Gill, who looks a decade younger than his 50 years, is answering the charge that he is, hands down, London's most vicious restaurant critic.

  "I take issue with `poison pen,'" said Gill, known as Adrian to friends and enemies alike, a devious smile flickering across his face. "I care an enormous amount about restaurants and food, and I get very angry when they're bad. But I don't close down restaurants. Bad food closes down restaurants. Rude service closes down restaurants. All I do is notice it."

  Gill, whose weekly column, Table Talk, runs in The Sunday Times here, is the unofficial ringleader of a pack of sometimes hilarious, astonishingly brutal restaurant critics who in the last few years have turned English food writing into a blood sport. As the British foodie revolution has taken hold and the local menu has been transformed from gray clumps of meat and potatoes into wildly inventive, sometimes harrowingly expensive internationalist cuisine, Britain's schadenfreude-seeking newspapers have unleashed these reviewers to hack down any tall poppies -- chefs, restaurants, architects, waiters -- who might emerge from the crop. Their M.O. is to review restaurant openings not as culinary events, but as social ones, where chefs and owners put their aspirations on display at least as much as their vichyssoise.

  "If the food is the star of your meal," Gill is fond of saying, "then you're eating with the wrong people."

  No incognito reviews

  In their rush to be the first on the case, British restaurant critics forgo niceties common in France and the US. They don't give chefs a few months to hit their stride, but instead show up on opening night, as on Broadway. They don't go incognito, but rather appear under their own names, often with a pack of friends, sometimes expecting star treatment. And if things don't go well, they relate the experience -- or at least a very rough approximation of it -- in prose that can only be described as a chef's worst nightmare: "`Would you like any dessert?'" Matthew Norman of The Sunday Telegraph wrote in a 2001 review, quoting the waitress at a London restaurant. "Ah, you're very kind," was his reported reply. "I'll have the Listermint and a large spittoon."

  "When they walk in, it's terrifying," said Will Ricker, who owns four restaurants in London, including the trendy E&O in Notting Hill. "If they have a bad meal or they don't like you or they're not properly recognized, they will absolutely rip you to shreds. They can be so vitriolic. And if they really have a go at you, you think to yourself `What have I done?'"

  "Like a movie director," he added, "you've got to take the rough with the smooth."

  With a chorus of critics slamming and praising restaurants, no London reviewer can close a restaurant overnight. But Fay Maschler, who has been reviewing for The Evening Standard for more than 30 years and is considered to be the doyenne of London restaurant reviewers, said Gill is the only restaurant critic in London who can make a restaurant with a positive review, besides, of course, herself. Ricker, whose restaurant E&O got a rare rave recently from Gill, said the review resulted in an additional 2,000 calls a week in the period after the review ran.

  Americans got a glimpse of Gill's rougher treatment this summer, in the August issue of Vanity Fair, when Gill eviscerated 66, Jean-Georges Vongerichten's TriBeCa restaurant. In his review, Gill likened the shrimp and foie gras dumplings at 66 to "fishy, liver-filled condoms" and called them "properly vile, with a savor that lingered like a lovelorn drunk and tasted as if your mouth had been used as the swab bin in an animal hospital." While many American readers were stunned by Gill's dyspeptic prose, to the English, the writing was as ordinary as pot roast for Sunday dinner.

  "That's the kind of thing we write here all the time," said Giles Coren, a restaurant critic here for The Times, who in a recent column likened eating grits to consuming "the sick of an infant child."

  It wasn't always so. Maschler said that when she started out there was only one other regular restaurant reviewer in town. "Now, every newspaper has several," she said. Reviewing was once a polite, objective affair, she added, though for her part, Maschler once described a dish of chicken laksa in a review as "looking like debris caught in a drain."

  Rhetorical arms race

  Matthew Fort, a reviewer for The Guardian and widely considered one of London's "nice guy" reviewers, said that the sheer number of restaurant critics has contributed to a kind of rhetorical arms race, with reviewers escalating their vitriol in an effort to outdo each other.

  "There is a competitive element to be the funniest or most vituperative or to find the most disgusting comparison," he said. "The amount of space dedicated to describing the eating is sacrificed on the whole to the desire to entertain."

  Indeed, what made Gill's review of 66 unusual, for him anyway, was that he discussed the food at all. Many of his columns focus more on his dining companions -- Jamie Rubin, a former spokesman for the US State Department, often comes along, as does Gill's girlfriend of nine years, a writer for The Tatler named Nicola Formby who is known to Gill's readers simply as "the Blonde." As often as not, Gill's columns begin as stream-of-consciousness ramblings that have little to do with dining. A third of Gill's recent review of an Indian restaurant was about his need for a good walking stick.

  Many London chefs find Gill's style -- and especially the way he wantonly ignores their artful creations -- deeply frustrating, though few are willing to say so on the record out of fear of Gill and his peers. Steven Black, the chef at the Berkeley Square Cafe, which opened last April to enthusiastic reviews, said he was dismayed that in Gill's review, the restaurant itself barely warranted a mention. (After a few hundred words on the subject of tradition, Gill pronounced the place, "a critic's nightmare -- nothing much of anything.")

  "We took it on the chin, but we had expected it from A. A. Gill," Black said. "It's heartbreaking really. I think critics should be more informative. They should realize it's our livelihood. It's our business and our money."

  Gill's stock response to chefs' complaints is, more or less, boo-hoo. "My job is to sell newspapers," he said. "I'm not a consultant to the restaurant industry. If they want a consultant they can go out and hire one. Besides, you're dealing with real people's real money. You owe it to readers to be straight and tough."

  Opening salvo

  The dawn of the age of the blistering restaurant review in London was most likely 1993, when Michael Winner, a wealthy Londoner who directed the Death Wish films in the 1970s and 80s, was invited to write a piece about his dining experiences for The Sunday Times. Winner, who had recently been displeased with his dinner at Terrance Conran's restaurant Pont de la Tour, decided to let loose. He described the meal as "the least enjoyable, worst restaurant evening of my life," and the review became the talk of London.

  "I started solely to get revenge on him," Winner said of Conran. Winner's column, Winner's Dinners, now runs every Sunday (he writes it from his 47-room Victorian home in the upscale London neighborhood of Holland Park) and the fierceness of his prose is matched only by the reader mail written in response. Winner admits he's no chef, but says that only helps his reviews. "I don't know about food," he said. "But I know what I like."

  Winner had little company throwing grenades at local chefs until Gill came along in 1996. Gill first aspired to be an artist, but says that at that and every other pursuit he tried, he failed. While he battled a drug habit (Gill, who has been clean for 20 years, described himself as "an everything addict"), he made do with odd jobs, once teaching a 10-day cooking class aimed at helping men impress women. (Lesson No. 1 was called "What Is a Kitchen?")

  "I turned to journalism because it was the only thing left for me to do," he said.

  Gill wrote celebrity profiles for The Tatler magazine before signing on with The Times to write about food, which he took as a broad mandate to write about, as he put it, "everything from potato crisps to the blood and the body of Christ."

  He quickly made a name for himself. He was thrown out of a Gordon Ramsay restaurant while having lunch with Joan Collins because Ramsay was angry at a review. In a review of a north Wales restaurant in 1998, Gill derided the Welsh, resulting in a complaint being filed against him with Britain's Commission for Racial Equality. Lately, Gill has been encouraging his readers to eat more whale. Because he has dyslexia, Gill files his columns by reading them aloud to his editors over the phone. All the while, Gill has made a point not to get too bogged down writing too much about what he's eaten.

  "The least interesting thing about food is the recipes," he said.

  The critics speak for all

  William Sitwell, the editor of Waitrose Food Illustrated, a magazine about British food culture that started in 1998, said that in some ways, critics like Gill and Winner are compensating for what he called a kind of national aversion to speaking one's mind.

  "The British are people who moan afterward, but never complain during," he said. "You hate your meal, but when the waiter comes by and says how was it, we say `Oh, it was fine.' Then we let the critics complain for us."

  The fear of London foodies is that the no-holds-barred style of restaurant reviewing practiced by Gill and Winner and their imitators is displacing serious discussion of cuisine. They point to The Evening Standard's recent hiring of Toby Young, who has written more about velvet ropes than finger bowls, as evidence that the discourse has turned away from food and toward the models in the booths. Young said his editors instructed him specifically not to write more than a paragraph about food in his restaurant reviews, but instead to focus on the scene.

  "I was relieved because I know next to nothing about food," he said.

  With more such critics making reservations around town, Sitwell suggested that the best course for chefs and restaurateurs in London these days is to take a British approach, by keeping a stiff upper lip.

  "If the failing of a restaurant becomes entertainment to someone, so be it," he said. "If they can't take it, they shouldn't open. It's not fair perhaps, but that's how it is, especially in London."
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