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 this revelation to [...]

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, a [...]

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 we [...]

My first objection to Norman’s review of The Crown Inn in the London commuter county of Buckinghamshire may sound like a quibble, but it does illustrate his propensity to base his pronouncements on thin evidence. He samples but two of the mains on offer (6 on the menu + daily specials), yet claims to have backed “the main course [...]

Dear Andy Hayler,
I stumbled upon your review of Moro (34-36 Exmouth Market, London EC1), which was reprinted at myvillage.com, and had great difficulty digesting your description of its bread as “poor, too airy, floury and lacking salt”. The hardest part for me to chew was the too-airy bit. My recurring complaint about the breads at London bakeries [...]

In his review of Corrigan’s Mayfair in London, Matthew Norman devotes the first 285 words to a single hypothesis: The best professional cooks are, like Norman himself, portly:
Just as you can’t put too much faith in a bald barber or in a psychiatrist whose jacket does up from the back, so you cannot fully trust a [...]