When Jay Rayner arrived for lunch at Obsidian on a damp Manchester Monday he found a restaurant unprepared to serve any punter, much less the restaurant critic of The Observer. “A restaurant trading outside of its most appropriate hours”, mused Rayner in his 4th of July review, “is like a transvestite who hasn’t shaved”.  

Few clichés in food criticism are as vacuous as this observation commonly applied to exotic cuisines: Not all dishes will be to all tastes… The last to use it was Matthew Norman of The Guardian in his Weekend magazine review of the London Szechuan restaurant My Old Place. I challenge him or anyone else who’s ever shared [...]

While many attack the Chinese for repressing human rights or restraining the value of their currency, The Guardian Weekend magazine‘s Matthew Norman may be the first opinion writer for a major national newspaper to call them out en masse for undervaluing their vegetables. In his slapdash review on Saturday, 16th January of My Old Place (not [...]

The typical tasks of a restaurant reviewer may not be sufficiently challenging for Marina O’Loughlin, food critic of the London free paper Metro. To keep her mind agile during disastrously dull dinners, O’Loughlin imagines herself a quick-witted panellist on a BBC Radio 4 comedy programme, responding with aplomb to any verbal knot the host tosses her [...]

If Times reviewer AA Gill knew he would be basing his judgment of the kitchen at Lutyens on a handful of dishes, it probably wasn’t a good idea to make one of those choices a plate of Sally Barnes wild smoked salmon. He could have guessed that award-winning smoked salmon from Woodcock Smokery was “unimpeachably [...]

In his review of The Wine Theatre on London’s South Bank, the Guardian’s Matthew Norman quotes the expert opinion of his dining companion, who says the squid salad “was like eating a well lubricated Durex.” Is Norman overestimating his readers? The analogy is of limited value to those lacking the worldly knowledge of his companion, [...]

In her Telegraph review of Min Jiang in London’s Royal Garden Hotel, Zoe Williams does not telegraph the identity of the “star dish” with a “wow factor” that “blew us [she and her mother] away.”  She doesn’t even name it, instead employing 237 words to describe the pièce de résistance but not a full 4 to [...]

Subsequent to the naming of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, awards judge and Guardian food critic Jay Rayner makes a courageous case for haute cuisine in down times: …just as with the very highest of high fashion, the highest of haute gastronomy eventually filters down to what we all eat on a regular basis and [...]