There are pursed lips as Bake Off returns. The great British judges know who makes a good madeira cake – and who instantly becomes the bookies’ favourite. After all, they have standards. But here – in a swirl of sloppy chocolate mousse – is an abiding problem for all who seek to judge anything from gastro-ambition to literary acceptance: where do acknowledged rules of excellence chip in? It’s a problem for critics, and for the editors who employ them. Is achievement in fiction, drama, poetry, indeed all (including culinary) art, a matter of criteria, of overarching standards that can be defined and asserted? Or are we talking mere matters of taste? Settle down and pass the poppadoms.
Here’s one absolute matter of taste. Is the poshest new restaurant in town “a dismal experience” or a glowing “testament to a lifetime of forensic appetite and experience”? Do you think it has “far and away the nicest dining room in St James’s” or a “terrible” one, “too big, too modern, no soul … properly catastrophic?” In short, what happens when the critics you hire, the experts who ride high on your menu advising readers, can’t agree? About anything.
Food writing would seem, at first template, to have a common core. Think MasterChef as well as Bake Off: this pastry is either cooked, or it isn’t. Think science; think history; think academic research; think billions in cash and ambition ploughed into restaurant life. And there do seem to be industry standards of a sort: Michelin standards in the spirit of Escoffier among other guidebook benchmarks. But then see what happens when different reviewers – competing titans of national taste – dine at the same table.
You may have noticed the Observer’s own Jay Rayner hymning the launch of a new Soho place called Duck and Rice a few weeks ago. “The prawn sesame toast is the best I have ever tried, the butch minced prawn parcels heaped so pillow-like onto the toast you don’t know whether to eat it or have a nap on it.The take on crispy shredded beef makes every other version feel like a tragic failure.” And so, most succulently, on. You also get “a beautiful room, nice staff and a sense that it’s worth dressing up for”.
But here, dropping on the same doormat that summer morning, came AA Gill in the Sunday Times. “The house duck was grey and soggy with fat. The egg foo young with crab was a kitchen accident … I took Clare, a co-worker on the ST magazine, and she said the char sui bun was like eating a diabetic’s nappy… The whole place was alternatively disappointing, sad and mildly infuriating. It’s not as if there are anything like enough really good Chinese restaurants left in Soho for us to start making bad ones on purpose.”
And then the caravan of critical coincidence moved on to Chutney Mary – our protagonists this time both from the same Murdoch stable, both queuing to collect their expenses at the same cashier’s window. Giles Coren from the Times gets a “terrible” table in this terrible room. The “ghastly” place is “perishingly dark and in no way glamorous”. Its acoustics remind him of “the inside of a tin can”. Begin with a “much too sweet” gimlet and mojito. Order a tiny serving of “ordinary white burgundy” at £18 a glass. The venison samosa is like “a shepherd’s-pie-flavoured Cornetto”. His wife’s butter chicken masala shows “no evidence of butter at all, no richness, no comfort, no breadth or depth”. Giles’s own Rajasthani laal maas is “equally thin and pitiful”, with a cold shank bone protruding from it: and sauce of “rank acidity… a mouthful was all I could bear”. Tandoori prawns? OK at £9.33 per prawn. Don’t mention the “cataclysmic” pudding.
But turn briskly to AA Gill again to enjoy this “comfortable, modern and elegant dining room blissfully free of the tired and threadbare cliches of Anglo-Indian restaurants”. To savour the “subtle and assured spicing” in the butter chicken. To relish that “lustrous” lamb shank Giles pushed away. To salute the Panjabi sisters, owners AA seems to know well, because one of them took him on a 90-minute trek through the streets of Mumbai to see where gulab jamun was made. They are responsible for bringing “the very best subcontinental food to London … If there is a better pan-Indian restaurant in the capital, I haven’t eaten in it.”
You can discern no meeting of minds or stomachs here. One critic couple hated the new Chutney Mary, another loved it. The couple who loved it spent £84.40 of Rupert’s available funds; the couple who didn’t managed to get through a stonking £266.63. (Grace Dent in the Evening Standard contrived to spend more than £150 in 90 minutes). But the basic question remains fatally unresolved.
What’s the point of most newspaper reviews? To tell you, the reader, where’s good to go. Reviewing is, in part, a consumer service. Of course different critics have different favourites, and you learn to follow those among them who fit your own. That’s an essential of film- or theatre-going. But food, with big bills attached, isn’t a smörgåsbord of opportunities: the reader needs solid advice (often distilled from a whole sheaf of reviews). I’m with the admirable Rayner most of the time. He’s great on south London (where my favourite Turkish is one he thinks too good to recommend). I don’t do west London (Gill territory) or the frozen Coren north beyond Regent’s Park.
But, apart from a lot of exhilarating verbal excursions, there’s also a question that ought to engage all of them, not to mention Dent, Marina O’Loughlin et al. Do you have to spend £266.63 (or whatever) to find out who’s right and who’s off the dining room wall? O’Loughlin was making the exact point in the Guardian the other day when she followed the advice of Gill, “the uncrowned king of our breed, the baboon-murdering genius wordsmith” and went to a refurbished Chelsea spot the uncrowned one had lauded for “a menu as smart and appetising as I can remember in a pub”. Alas, she felt she’d been “led up the ancestral driveway” when they served her hot vitello tonnato, “the veal collapsed into greyish mush, its mayo split into vomity curds”.
See what happens when one gastro guru disappoints another. The whole feeding chain becomes TripAdvisor with added adjectives. Coren made the point himself last week when, in true introvert fashion, he reported what a “senior restaurant critic” of his acquaintance had told a restaurateur he knows. She wasn’t going to review his new place because “it isn’t interesting enough”. And Coren only disagrees mildly: “I do not expect restaurants to be interesting. It’s a restaurant’s job to serve food and wine. It is my job to be interesting.”
Which is where “the Blonde” and “Esther” and sundry minor characters make their review bit-part appearances, along with witty essays on the future of the world, kiwi fruit and the northern powerhouse.
Of course there’s a load of experience and expertise on show here. Of course you can follow your favourite writer from Durham to Dover if you’ve the time and inclination. But restaurant reviewing has also become a series of elegant essays too frail to chomp. It’s a style, a prevalent entertainment: but also not much of an answer to the most basic question of the lot. No, not could Corbyn hack it in Downing Street? Just: was the blinking mousse set, or not?
The Edward Heath moment
Exaro, the tough investigative unit, might have won prizes last year for its relentless, brave work on political paedophilia past. It will be in with a great shout again this year: much hard work well-researched and well-grounded. But there’s always a moment where one thing may not follow another. Perhaps an Edward Heath moment – and the trouble with five separate police “operations”, not to forget Wiltshire police touting openly for tips, is that tough journalists also know (from Elveden and Weeting) how fallible and flatulent such ops can be. Juries have learned that lesson well. Journalists take note.