Occasionally I am asked “what’s next?” by friends. At times it is well-meaning, at others withering. “What about another paper?” they ask. “Or something more serious? Surely you can’t eke out another 400 words on martinis?”
And well, look — this paper may have driven me mad over the years, but I’ve become enormously fond of it. I like its history. I like that Quentin Crewe — at one point our helicopter correspondent (journalism: never what it used to be) — is credited with inventing the modern restaurant review, preferring style and social commentary over perceptively identifying chicken from beef.
I like that Fay Maschler, here for 48 years, refined the style, while with her zero and fleeting five stars shaped this city’s openings and closings. I like that she was joined in the Nineties by Charles Campion, padding the outskirts of town for lesser-known cooking and championing unsung finds — a tradition that Jimi Famurewa avidly adopted with detail and insight. Delia Smith wrote for us for more than a decade. The Evening Standard, in one way or another, has changed how London eats.
It is, then, both humbling and gratifying to now be taking on the weekly restaurant review. Reports of its death are greatly exaggerated. I’ve done a number of these columns over the years — covering while Fay holidayed, and then when Jimi did — but keeping it up week-in, week-out as critic proper feels like something different. Perhaps not to you, but certainly to me.
Growing up, ours was not an AA Gill household; we had Michael Winner. But restaurants and dinner parties seemed to shape my childhood. My earliest memories centre on the thrill of being allowed to stay up well past bedtime as my parents’ lunches with family ran into the twinkling dark of a summer’s night (a card recently recovered, penned by my godfather for mum and dad: “I thought responsible parents didn’t drink that much?!”). I also remember when these lunches stopped, and wondering why. Early on, food at home was not inventive but ordered: roasts on a Sunday, sausage and mash on a Monday, bolognese on Tuesdays. If you were raised in the Nineties, this sort of routine may be familiar. Not, perhaps, an auspicious start for a life in food.
But there is a critical point to mention: my parents did not believe in takeaways. We never — ever — ordered food to the house. It was a life-shaping lesson; I didn’t order my first takeaway until lockdown (sushi — for someone else’s birthday. I know, I know). When the cupboards were bare, or just on a Friday, we would go out. An Italian called Quattro in Caversham was a regular — I still eat there, limoncello on the house — and where I first formed the idea that smokers had a much better time of things than those abstaining. Or we would head into the Chilterns to ancient pubs (the Packhorse and the Pack Saddle remain). I remember dad driving home very slowly sometimes, intently looking into the pitch black.
He would drive us around the country, too, for his work. There were grand hotels, rarely but sometimes, places of pianos and puddings with sugar-cages, of porters and bartenders who remembered my father from the life he’d had before the one with us. The sense of occasion — and the thrill it provided — has never left me. Other times we would drive, not in an ageing Volvo but our boat, through the upper reaches of the Thames. I remember a scoop of amaretto ice cream at the Maybush in Witney became the first dish I longed for. I was an adult before I found somewhere else serving it. At the Plough Inn in Kelmscott, the landlord gave us his shove ha’penny board because we used it so often. These early impressions of hospitality — that fundamentally it is based in generosity, in facilitating a good time — sharpened the lens through which I still look.
There is one more instructive memory. My cousin has been on stage in My Fair Lady and afterwards my mother turns to me and says: “We’re going to Joe Allen’s.” Who? A family friend I haven’t met? “You’ll see,” she says. Inside, my cousin seems to knows everyone else here. There are hellos and lots of dahling-dahlings, and Champagne. Joe Allen is a family friend, I discover, just not one of flesh and blood. Familiarity is comforting. Another lesson I never forget.
I come to writing perhaps 10 years after this, a run which includes a mostly-futile stint at law school and a lot of dancing on bars. This proves helpful as the bartender takes a shine to my friends and me — I can’t imagine it is the Elvis impressions that do it — and teaches us to make drinks. In the mornings, not every instruction is remembered, but the gist sticks. It is also a time of cooking; I graduate from toasties to an oddly Tudor approach in the kitchen (fruit and meat are often mournfully combined). Some meals are a riotous success, plenty of others not. But I cook enough that a friend fashions me an apron as a present.
When I move to London, I take a job editing a student website and then, owing to unjustified confidence (the primary qualification for any journalist), land a column at two national newspapers. Money, minuscule amounts of it, starts to come in and the then-girlfriend and I begin to explore. There is the Wolseley for her birthday and soon after the Delaunay. We host parties. Once, a barbecue billowing black smoke stops all the buses on Camden High Road and everyone scuttles inside to hide.
Later, after drinking in the Coach and Horses, I try Cafe Boheme. Soon my friend and I go often enough that we are granted black cards — half price everything, including all the drink. Manhattans (plural) and steak frites become routine.
I join the Standard around the time my father dies, close on a decade ago, and throw myself too keenly into bar reviewing. One day, the head of the website threatens to fire me for wandering about the office without shoes. My first editor leaves after nine days. Her replacement, Ben Norum, is enormous fun. He suggests we both write about restaurants. I take a methodical approach: I go to all the big names first to glean a little about the history of this city, about what lasts and why. Friends are delighted, as is my mother, to find stray evenings taken up with J Sheekey and Scott’s.
I graduate from toasties to an oddly Tudor approach in the kitchen; fruit and meat are often mournfully combined
I begin to take things a little more seriously, interview chefs, learn to cook properly. It works and I become the Going Out editor, and soon look after print pages as well as those online.
One day, I take Fay Maschler out for lunch because it is the thing to do, and because her early missives on my headlines have been scornful. We become friends and I listen closely. I understand that reviews are not a simple declaration of love or hate; that they require context and nuance, a sense of perspective; that they might be taken by some as advice and that loyalty is always to the reader, never the restaurant. There are others who show me much the same. Bob Granleese of the Guardian is particularly helpful. He also delights in pointing out my typos.
That lunch was six years ago, when I already thought I knew a bit. I must have known nothing; I sometimes sit in awe of other’s complete and utter understanding of everything food and drink. But I suppose the deal is this: when we launch next week, as the London Standard, there will be my first review, and every week another will follow. Informing each, there will be a lifetime of eating — and now you know, more or less, what that lifetime’s been.
