“If you want my job, your photo will be in London kitchens with a Hitler moustache” The joy of eating out is, of course, about the food, but it’s about everything else, too. It’s about front of house, the cliques and crowds, the ‘concept’ and plainly, whether during the first course, you’re already planning to go back. A general rule of thumb is, if, during your starter, you’ve already spotted a more charmingly situated table and found yourself plotting the gang you’d love to bring back here and sit in it, then it’s already heading for four stars. The modern restaurant critic needs to be a fast, punchy, reliable writer firstly, and a glutton or food expert somewhere after that. I say ‘reliable’. My spelling has sent many sub-editors to early retirement. Many words I use in Grace & Flavour were only recently invented that morning. Still, if you want my job, you’ll be out three or four times per week, rictus grinning at mâitre d’s who hate you. Your face will be on a photo in many London kitchens with a Hitler moustache drawn on it by the commis chef. You’ll write —
22 es magazine 02.06.17
WTR shirt, £210; trousers, £290 (wtrlondon.com). MIU MIU earrings, £300, at matches fashion.com. Jacket, Grace’s own
Above, Grace Dent with LFM co-creative director Tom Parker Bowles and Angela Hartnett, and right, with David Hepworth, Danny Baker and Boy George
alongside your other jobs — around 52 times a year and at least 20 of them will be columns on the act of eating pasta in a tiled room. If you can fill a blank white Word document at 6am, during a bout of mild food poisoning, in the knowledge that the restaurateur spent £25,000 importing a chandelier for his bistro you’re just about to push to liquidation, you’re in with a chance.
O
h and don’t ever moan about it. No one cares. Quibbling about your food-critic lifestyle — the weight fluctuation, the paranoia, the deadlines, the mad chefs shouting on Twitter at 2am — is a bit like Candice Swaenpoel complaining that her G-string chafes while walking for Victoria’s Secret. You have hit the jackpot in life and that includes endless tours of restaurants, including the wine cellar, that you didn’t ask for. Or staff resolutely ignoring everyone else at your table until one of your guests takes a passive-aggressive huff. Or other diners taking photos of you gob-open eating and then putting them on Instagram, tagging you then getting upset if you’re not happy. Or no-reservation restaurants that are actually all reserved. Or being told every day by strangers online that I am their guiding light for recreational activities — in fact they love me, will possibly get a tattoo of
me — then two minutes later, by someone else, that I am an atrocious, dim-witted fishwife who mistook parsley for wild garlic and should be fed to pigs. See, I’m moaning. ‘Oh, cry me a river,’ is the genre of expression I’m met with constantly when I try to quibble about a forthcoming T uesday-n ight n i ne - cou rse m icro gastronomical tasting menu. ‘I just want to eat toast in my underwear,’ is something I mutter a lot as I plaster on Giorgio Armani Liquid Silk over eye-bags and head out to another freshly painted room where I’m literally the last person the staff want to see. I sneaked into a place in Hackney last week with flat hair, glasses and trainers, and ate without being noticed until the last course when the owner saw me en route to the loo, lost control of his knees and exclaimed loudly, ‘Oh s***, it’s you’. As I sat on the loo, face in hands, I could hear him through the freshly hammered-up MDF board shouting at the commis: ‘What did she order? What did she send back? How did no one see her?’ Grace & Flavour has meant that leaving my house is never relaxing, but at the same time, it’s a lifestyle that’s utterly addictive. There is a magic in sweeping into a room and hearing a bustle of ‘thatsthatbloodygracedent youknowher’. No one retires or gives up being a restaurant critic through choice. We merely waddle on, menu after menu, hoping to get away with it until a skinnier thing with better writing, who looks nicer in pictures, takes our place. George Reynolds, Frankie McCoy — I see you. And I’m not liking how young, clever and brilliant you are one bit. It was a long way from Wimpy to The Wolseley, but now that I’m here, I’ll enjoy it while it lasts.
Eyevine
throughout the Nineties in London, without many practical skills other than being able to scrape a thousand words out of my head, often at a moment’s notice, on almost anything. During the Noughties, when I worked for The Guardian and The Mirror, I suspected I should harangue editors harder for a restaurant gig as I was always the one in a crowd who could nail exactly why that £100 we gave to a culinary hotspot in Chelsea, Tower Bridge or Soho was a rip off. Or alternatively, why that particular pub was the perfect place to propose. My ire at Momo, on Heddon Street, for kicking me off my table midtagine as someone from popgroup Another Level needed seating, lasted more than a decade. I could talk for an hour without pause or deviation on the phone manner of restaurant receptionists along Exmouth Market. Along the way I learned to tackle rows of knives, forks and obscure cutlery and how to sound completely trustworthy with a wine list. I still loathe consommé, offal and negronis but can do a passable fake-appreciation. I loved analysing exactly who was eating afternoon tea at The Ritz or was in the back room at Vrisaki in Wood Green.