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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
At lunch on Thursday, Peter Harden, the co-publisher (with his brother Richard) of Harden's London and UK restaurant guides, named a 7th (or is it now 8th) reason why diners seek out restaurant reviews: cover from blame should a restaurant suggestion of theirs...
In this 24 September post I listed 6 things readers might expect to get from a restaurant review.  I may need to add a 7th consideration, "The Permission Factor". I first heard this applied to theatre reviews in this article from Monday's New York Times analysing the...
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