Giles Coren on Food Writing

The London Times award-winning food columnist takes an irreverent look at the world of food writing, from restaurant critics to celebrity chefs

As one of the UK’s most popular food critics what first got you interested in writing about food?

I was a writer for a long time before I wrote about food. Food is the thing that people want to read about, so it is the thing that newspapers use to dangle in front of the writers they most want to keep and reward. They offered me the chance to write about food and now I am the only person in England who knows anything about food who isn’t 30 stone! It’s better to have me on the TV because I can still fit into my trousers. The people who know about food are giants and they are all fat.

Apart from being fat, what do you think makes a good food critic?

It is someone who understands that your first job as a journalist is to sell newspapers, and to do that you need to entertain people. Your opinion is neither here nor there. Almost all restaurant critics are rubbish. Worldwide, 99% of them are a waste of time. The only ones that are any use at all are here in the UK and there are probably only three or four who are really any good. The ones who show off about each mouthful of food, trying to show how it was cooked and what was done and give you the biography of the chef, are tedious bores. If you were next to them at a dinner party you would just kill yourself.

But Adrian Gill and Jonathan Meades, who was my predecessor at The Times, understand that the first job is to tell a great story that people will look at in the weekend paper. Essentially, being a food critic is nothing – it’s not politics, it’s not war reporting. There is no need to see it as something terribly important and become pompous and self-aggrandising about it. We all know who those people are! It is all a bit of fun.

I started doing it in the mid-90s for a thing called The Condé Nast Restaurant Guide. I was about 25 and it was edited by a friend. I reviewed central London restaurants because I lived there. I wasn’t really interested in it, so I read some restaurant reviews and there was all this bogus terminology because it was relatively new in this country. They thought you needed some sort of special vocabulary for it, like you have with critical theorists in other fields. So you would find lobster bisque described as “accurate”.

What on earth does that mean?

Well, it was all made up for people who know about food but can’t write, and are therefore in hock to pre-O-level descriptions of how to write from teachers who will say things like, “Be precise, write what you know, don’t use words like ‘nice’ and ‘good’ because they don’t mean anything”. So you will have a “finely judged hollandaise”. I will happily tell a thousand-word story about my life and say the food was quite nice – seven out of 10 – and frankly that is all the reader needs or wants.

Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking

By Fergus Henderson

Buy

So what about food books that you do rate? I know you are in your kitchen now looking along your shelves. What are you going for first?

I have chosen Fergus Henderson’s Nose to Tail Eating. I have a treasured first edition of it from 1999. I can’t remember why, but they must have sent it to me at the time and it became the most sought-after cookbook. And then it went out of print and couldn’t be got because there were only a few thousand to start off with. Eventually it was reprinted with grand fanfare and I discovered I had the original one.

You weren’t tempted to sell it?

No.

Why did so many people want to buy it?

First of all, it is a beautiful thing. It is not self-aggrandising. I hate French and Italian food writing, because they are envious, invaded and defeated countries and intellectually bankrupt since the 19th century, so they pour all their energy into this bogus idea of intellectualised cooking. Many English cooks have the confidence to not be like that, and Fergus is the best example of it. It is a black-and-white book which has some colour plates in it, with just the simplest things in the world.

The problem with cookery writing is that the decision to go to catering college comes just after you fail O-level English for the 14th time. Then you get someone who has got a bit of education, like Fergus. His recipes are revelationary because, as the title Nose to Tail Eating suggests, it is all about using the whole pig. People like Gary Rhodes are endlessly wordy but Fergus keeps it simple, with dishes called things like Boiled Ox Tongue or Rolled Pig Spleen. There are no poncy names. He has two phrases that linger most in that book for me. When he talks about chopping parsley he says, “Chop it not too fine, but just enough to discipline it”. And I think chopping parsley to give it discipline is a brilliant concept which simply wouldn’t happen in the brain of someone like Gordon Ramsay. The other time is when he is talking about boiled ham and parsley sauce and he says, “Don’t dress the ham on the plate but put the sauce in a jug on the table and allow your guests to express themselves”.

What a great image.

Yes, I love the idea of expression through parsley sauce. That is where food and writing come together in a bit of poetry.

And do you actually like cooking, considering how many restaurants you must go to?

If I have got time I like to do it. It is like reading or shagging – if you have time to do it properly, then it is great and you don’t have to focus on anything else.