When I began reviewing restaurants, in the summer of 1986 I weighed 89kg (14 stone, or 196lb). It’s equally probable that they’d have made no effort to party with me. But had I been a greyhound-racing correspondent I doubt that I’d have made a special effort to party with the dogs. That may say something about my incapacity for friendship (which I am capable of distinguishing from amiable acquaintanceship). This branch of journalism may be styled a form of consumer journalism but it is the very opposite; it is producer journalism, a kind of covert advertorial, a cosy conspiracy that finds writers abandoning all pretence of independence to ghost chefs’ books or to drool over supermarkets’ products in magazines owned by those supermarkets.When I began writing about restaurants I had two friends in the trade Now I have three or four more. He was shocked by my presumption and explained that the point of the awards was to celebrate “writers” who celebrate food/wine/restauration And of course he was right to be shocked.
I suggested to David Grant, of the firm that sponsored this pygmy Olympiad with such rash generosity, that there were at least three or four categories in which no award should be made on the grounds of illiteracy, incompetence, witlessness, etc. This was a uniquely dispiriting experience: the vast majority of entrants could barely parse a sentence. I forget how many categories there are – too many certainly; I mean, “Whisky Writer of the Year”? I checked into a hotel to work my way through the submissions. Some years ago I was invited to judge the Glenfiddich Awards for food writing. When I say “at an even baser level” I know what I’m talking about. The text is an integral part of the work, which is bereft and mute without it, and the critic is complicit in the work, a sort of secondary creator – and not, then, a critic at all, but a propagandist, a proselytiser, an image engineer.At an even baser level there is a similar compact between, on the one hand, the majority of the people who write and broadcast about food in this country and, on the other, the producers, the restaurant industry, the brewers, the wine trade.
That text may be the work of the artist if he or she possesses the gift of arranging words as well as the gift of arranging rubber gloves or tampons, or it may be the work of a critic who interprets the work in a catalogue essay, a newspaper, a magazine. He replied with signal tact: “C’est, hein, different.”In his critique of American art, The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe took a long time to illustrate a truism; that conceptual art is only granted meaning (and comprehensibility) by a text accompanying the work. I once asked the great Burgundian chef Marc Meneau what he thought of British produce. And I have a friend who lives near Bristol who believes that one ate as well, if not better, in that city in the 1970s Two and a half, then. For years Dr Digby Anderson banged on in newspapers about the paucity of quality produce available in Britain So that makes two of us. We never ate it so good.Really? Am I alone in wondering whether this country’s appetite for and susceptibility to the soothing nostrums of PR “presentation”, spin and lies has not quashed whatever gastronomic discernment it may once have had? No, I’m not quite alone.
