Recently, from a solo perch at a clamorous new restaurant in Notting Hill, I looked up and saw a familiar, enabling glint in my server’s eye. 'Sure we can’t tempt you to get the pizza as well?' she asked, pen hovering expectantly above her notepad. Now, in my previous life as a critic writing a regular, weekly newspaper column, this question wouldn’t have really been a question at all. Never mind that I had already ordered a starter, a pasta and two rounds of focaccia just for myself; never mind that I also had definite designs on pudding. One of the underreported realities of covering restaurants for a living is that it is very much a game of frantic over-ordering and maximum menu coverage at all costs. To be a professional glutton is to develop a clown-car stomach with no occupancy limit; it is to stagger out of lunch with either a familiar sense of distended biliousness, a laden doggy bag, or both.
But then, after some deliberation, I eventually remembered that I didn’t necessarily have to do that any more. Where once restaurant visits were all about making my analytical work easier through trying as much as humanly possible, now, this was mostly eating on my own terms; just a meal with no fixed obligation to gather enough to fill out 800 words. And so, even with the old gannet impulses twitching away like a phantom limb, I held firm, shook my head, and displayed that most alien and novel of professional qualities: restraint.
I say none of this to even slightly complain about the monetised over-eating and Creosotian tendencies of my (sort of) old life. This is not an addition to the recent rash of inadvertent calls to strike up the tiny violin orchestra in the name of restaurant columnists. It is, instead, a usefully illustrative window into the altered way that I now interact with restaurants. Through more than six years of columns I have surfed the frothing, breakless wave of the London food scene; there have been multiple restaurant writing awards, one axis-shifting pandemic, hundreds of unforgettable meals, and countless politely declined offers of a tour of the private dining room. I have loved every bit of it and do not feel I am anything like done with the manic rhythms of the hospitality scene.
But now, it is like that wave has finally broken, and I am suddenly splashing around in the shallows. Not exactly a civilian without some skin in the hospitality game. Not someone for whom restaurant visits have inevitably become a little transactional and work-oriented. But an occupant of some fascinating, liberated middle-ground in between. To say that I am now free to be as candid about restaurant culture as I’ve always wanted to be would be to imply that this hasn’t always been the case (something I think past reviews of Nusr-et and the execrable Kebhouze prove). But to step off the juggernaut gives you a better view of it, a sharper sense of its scale and confounding contradictions. And it is that clarity, the distanced closeness of someone experiencing the British gastrosphere in an entirely new way, that I hope will give this new Good Food Guide column its animating spirit of curiosity and, well, unreservedness.
So how else has this new relationship to restaurants been felt? Well, beyond the lost impetus to gorge myself to bursting, the fact that I don’t necessarily have to critically engage with every significant opening has been… strangely freeing. This is not to say that I have suddenly become any less of a restaurant obsessive/bore (delete as applicable). I am still one of those people who reflexively 'keep up' with openings, offer unsolicited dining advice (recently, I practically begged a friend to swap an upcoming booking at a bang average Borough Market stalwart for one at supremely va va voom newcomer Cafe François), and talk about, say, the forthcoming Carbone London in the hushed tones people usually reserve for the new Christopher Nolan.
But there has been something refreshing about scanning the landscape – robot-cooked yakitori, 'wine pubs', whatever grand, ruinously expensive absentee chef concept has been shoved into Harrods this week – and realising how much I can swerve. To be forced out of your comfort zone as a restaurantgoer is, I think, critically important. Yet the newfound ability to make dining decisions primarily based on, well, whether I actually really want to eat there has been quite wild. Relatedly, this has meant going to places that slipped through the cracks of the news cycle, visiting restaurants that aren’t really restaurants (as a British-Nigerian, I was especially taken with the flavours at a terrific Deptford food stand called TT’s Breakfast), feeding my burgeoning interest in spots outside London (one of my favourite meals of 2024 was at Bench in Sheffield), or returning to restaurants I only visited when, in relative terms, they were gurgling newborns (Luke Farrell’s Speedboat Bar remains a terrifically fun hang). To use another aquatic analogy, weekly restaurant critics can be shark-like in both temperament and their need for constant forward motion. To pause, drift, and occasionally reverse has been simultaneously scary and exhilarating.
I look forward to exploring this strange new phase together, be it through wider gastronomic trends, longstanding frustrations, or just my kink for those not-quite cafe-restaurants where the cooking is ambitious but you can open a laptop with impunity (Ozone in east London; Oru Space in East Dulwich and Sutton). But, of course, we are all works in progress. Change takes time. So if you see me in a restaurant, looking uncomfortably full and regretful after having ordered too much, please try not to judge, pass the Gaviscon, and remember that I am very much taking it all one day at a time.
