Hungry

by Grace Dent

  And I loved the theatre of eating out. I loved the secret language of stupid fancy restaurants: I knew the question ‘How do you want that cooked?’ is actually rhetorical and you should let the chef please himself. And ‘We want to make the space accessible’ means we even let normals in here at lunchtime and make them vaguely welcome with a drab prix-fixe menu. And ‘Can we perhaps offer you an after-dinner cocktail in the bar?’ means ‘Finish your pudding, we want the table back.’ Surely knowing all this type of thing meant I could wing it for a few weeks in the Evening Standard?

  So, yes, maybe I didn’t know every finickity fact about Cordon Bleu cooking and there were several parts of the world I’d never visited and whose cuisine I’d never eaten, but surely that was a good thing? I could work hard and learn. I thought about the last fifteen years; all the different restaurants, all their cliques and their sets, from the backroom at Vrisaki full of Greek Cypriot grandmas bitching about the standard of the souvlaki, to the budget pasta crowd at Pollo in Old Compton Street, to the off-duty Primrose Hill thespian wife-swapper set at The Engineer. I loved, in a twisted way, the fact that there was really no correlation at all between the actual standard of food being served and how popular a restaurant became. For years I’d eaten at MASH in London where the food bordered on inedible, but what wild pomposity it was served with! The starriness. The egos. So many actual monsters of every variety at every table across town, and worse ones behind the maître d’ desk. Tired of London restaurants, tired of life, I thought.

  I was quite tired of life, to be honest.

  This new opportunity pretty much saved me from doing something stupid.

  Soon after this conversation with the Evening Standard magazine, I headed off to a very hot, very upscale, no-reservations tapas joint in Fitzrovia. I took a date called Joe: another divorced fortysomething. Finding dates is easy when you’re a critic; men were literally falling over themselves to let me pay for dinner. It would turn out to be one of those wretched recently divorced dates that are just an opportunity to swap horror stories about alimony settlements, while coming to the unsaid conclusion that neither of you are ready to date, before going home mutually depressed and resentful. This would all have been a lot easier to stomach if there had been food.

  ‘Not tonight,’ said the tapas bouncer. The hot, upscale tapas place demanded you turn up early to join the waiting list, so we were there by 5.30, trying to charm the aloof misery on the door.

  She did not even bother to look at her clipboard – these places all seemed to have ego-typhoons on the door.

  ‘Do you, um, y’know, want to take a phone number, in case anyone drops out?’ I said.

  ‘No one will drop out,’ she said.

  The no-reservations trend had recently swept into London, almost overnight, from Manhattan. Soho and Shoreditch restaurateurs loved it, as it allowed them to fill tables more efficiently, increase margins and manufacture a genre of weak buzz with little regard to how it suited customers. I already had a dim view of it, even if I knew that customers had created this situation by continuously failing to show up for tables. This led to places going bankrupt in tiny incremental stages. Still, no reservations made planning a night out with any certitude impossible. Maybe you ate, maybe you didn’t. Maybe you booked a less cool back-up restaurant somewhere else and let the other poor suckers down at the last minute when you got into the buzzy place. Or maybe you didn’t double-book, but instead grimly acquiesced to the fact that you and your date might spend the evening wandering forlornly around busy restaurants hoping to get seated anywhere, before retreating to a pub to drink grumpily on an empty stomach, which is what we did.

  At midnight that night I opened a fresh Word document and wrote about the quiet tyranny of no reservations. I was hungry. I’d been burned by this stupid rigmarole multiple times that year – it was due a good kicking. The Standard may have still been working out which proper restaurant critic to give this column to, but I was not, as far as I was concerned, giving it back. Writing about restaurants felt strongly like writing about the things that were actually important in life. They would have to prise this column out of my cold, dead hands.

  I looked at my heartfelt words sitting gloriously on the page and pressed ‘Send’.

  May 2012

  ‘Come for dinner,’ I beg Matt one Tuesday night.

  ‘I can’t,’ he groans. ‘Ask Tom. Ask Courtney!’

  ‘They can’t either,’ I sigh.

  ‘We won’t stay late,’ I plead. ‘You’re really good at this.’

  ‘I can’t. I need to do a presentation at 8 a.m. I can’t turn up vomiting again,’ he says.

  Last month Matt and I went to a five-hour experimental Taiwanese tasting menu. The final course was a sugar-spun replica of a used condom on a pile of sherbet, which represented sand. The chef said the pudding was a political comment on AIDS in Asia. He had intricately piped sugar syrup into the curled-up condom to represent sperm. The restaurant charged us £520 for two people.

  ‘I won’t make you eat a condom again,’ I promise.

  ‘No. Stick me down for Saturday instead. Where is it?’ he says.

  ‘Um, it’s a brasserie in a new hotel, part of a New York chain,’ I say, checking my notes. ‘They don’t believe in plates. They serve a lot of the courses on washing lines.’

  ‘Washing lines?’ he says.

  ‘Well, yes, the Serrano ham course definitely. They serve the lobster in a tool box.’

  ‘OK, I’ll do that one,’ he says.

  ‘I’ll need to write it up on Sunday morning and brief a photographer, so it won’t be a late one!’ I shout as I hang up.

  Everybody you meet, when you’re a restaurant critic, tells you they’d love to be your dinner companion. I found this out right away when I officially accepted the role. Strangers tell you it in shops, at parties and in the street – and they really, really think they mean it. But the truth is, this comes with many caveats. What they actually mean is that they’d like to eat dinner somewhere good, preferably on a weekend and with at least some notice. These are all quite reasonable requests, but columns don’t always work like that; they’re always hungry for words. My friends cannot keep up with how much company I need at such short notice. The Evening Standard Magazine column needs to be fed at least fifty-two times a year, plus Christmas specials and end-of-year best-of lists and special commemorative themed issues. Suddenly I need to be standing up, wearing pants and out of the house a lot. Not just on weekends: on Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays. And not always for lovely dinners, but sometimes for wild goose chases to new openings where one sets off on the promise of a fancy Parisian-style brasserie to find it exists only in the imagination of the manager and you’re actually eating stewed spaghetti in a stairwell. Or the chef has had a breakdown at the fancy concept restaurant and closed without any warning. Or, the worst of all situations, it’s a tiny independently owned place that is not interesting enough to write about and far too fragile to criticise in print, so halfway through the main course, I’m making a reservation somewhere else.

  ‘Grace and Flavour’ – the rather ingenious title that ES Magazine conjured up for my column, which I love – is gaining momentum. I’ve begun to hone my restaurant critic voice and work out my audience. ‘Grace and Flavour’ is for Londoners who are interested in eating out but don’t feel remotely like part of the food scene in-crowd. They might be too scared to call up or go to a fancy place, like I was with Moro. I’m writing it for them: I go in first to do a recce. I’m writing for people like Courtney, my friend who has two babies and, in the middle of the night, sometimes feels like she’ll never get dressed up and go out again. I’m writing for anyone who’s saved up all month for dinner and does not want to end up in a stairwell eating pasta bow-ties in ketchup, or a political sugar condom with syrup jizz and sherbet sand. I’m writing for people who cannot afford any of these silly places but
want to read something that makes them laugh while standing with their face in a stranger’s armpit on the Northern Line. And I’m hoping to attract a regular audience of those who don’t quibble at flowery prose about the clientele, the hand-soap and my love life on the occasions when I’ve blatantly run out of steam about the rigatoni. Thankfully, there must be thousands of people like this out there because, within about a year, I’m one of the most read online columns at the newspaper.

  ‘Well, we had our teas at Hungry Horse,’ says Mam when I phone her. ‘Yer’ dad had gammon with a grilled pineapple ring. It was quite adventurous for him.’

  ‘What is a Hungry Horse?’ I say.

  ‘It’s a family pub. They do mixed grills. When are you going to write about that?’

  ‘I’m thinking probably never,’ I laugh.

  ‘Are people still liking your food column?’ she asks. She’s definitely pleased I’m leaving the house more.

  ‘Well,’ I hesitate, ‘the readership grows every week. They tell me the online figures. I’m probably their most read columnist right now, so I think so’

  Actually, several people are really quite furious – chefs, chef’s wives, other restaurant critics, investors, public relations teams, strangers on Twitter, and so on. Some tell me I have no business writing about food; I’m no match for the greats, like A.A. Gill, Charles Campion, Matthew Fort or Michael Winner. Why am I being taken seriously? Surely, I’m only there due to a fluke?

  But, I think, my life has been a fluke since I was a little girl watching the Motherwell train whip past on its way to Euston, as I ate pickled eggs by the track.

  What do people imagine I will do if they don’t approve of me? Take the hint and stop?

  March 2013

  ‘He was in your room, unpacking your bras? I don’t think I’d like it,’ says Mam.

  I’m telling her about a stay at the Connaught hotel the night before where the suite came with its own personal butler. I was writing for the Evening Standard about one of the fanciest ways to spend a Staycation in the capital and how it feels to have a butler running your bath, choosing your bath oils, arranging your tights and shoes into charming piles. This suite made the place I stayed in Vienna back in the Nineties feel like the Novotel in Ipswich town centre. However, I really wasn’t terribly good at having a butler. After rejecting all of Kaspar’s kind offers to help me arrange holistic beauty treatments and private viewings at art galleries, I opted for a quiet dinner in the room. This placated him a little; he appeared at 7 p.m. on the dot, pushing a trolley with a silver cloche on it, which he then transferred to the grand oval table, where he arranged Sole Meunière, pommes mousseline and a side of cavolo nero into a fabulous dinner for one. This world would be lovely, I found myself thinking, if I had someone special to share it with; even if I did give my divorce lawyers permission to shoot me with a harpoon gun if I ever again mentioned getting wed.

  ‘I wish you could have been there,’ I say to Mam. ‘If you come down, we could come here for afternoon tea.’

  Mam takes some convincing to come to London these days. She says all the walking around tires her out, not like when we came sightseeing when I was small. She’d walk us from Big Ben to Hamleys and back via Buckingham Palace without a thought. Now she’s not as mobile. I also know that taking Dad anywhere far from his front door these days is a battle, as he complains too much.

  ‘Well, me, Dad, Dave, Tam and Lola went to the Wetherspoon’s in Keswick,’ she says. ‘Five of us had dinner. The bill with drinks was thirty-two quid! I had the buttermilk chicken burger.’

  ‘It sounds delicious,’ I say, deadpan.

  ‘Oh, you’re a snob, you are,’ she laughs.

  The truth is that when I squeeze in time to come to Cumbria, taking Dad to the local Wetherspoon’s near my brother’s house in Keswick is one of the unlikely high points. I always have the same specific items on the menu: the Mexican veggie burger with onion rings, plus an enormous glass of Echo Falls Chardonnay. If you buy two, they give you the bottle. This doesn’t happen in the Connaught Bar. And Wetherspoon’s is the only time Dad really relaxes. If we get him a bottle of Doom Bar, the clouds in his brain seem to dissipate for a little while. He forgets whatever thing is currently making him anxious, like the Carlisle Council recycling schedule, which he is currently fixated on. Which item goes in which box? What day will it go? How about on a bank holiday? It’s also a pleasure to see him eating. Dad has been losing weight recently. He will rarely agree to a full plate of food. Everything offered to him needs to be taken back to the kitchen in their flat in Carlisle and halved. Mam says that, on the upside, his sugar intake is more under control. The hospital says his blood tests are much improved – but if his blood is better, that doesn’t explain his odd behaviour.

  ‘I actually don’t mind Wetherspoon’s,’ I tell Mam on the phone. ‘It’s that Brewers Fayre with the ball pond where I draw the line.’

  ‘Oh, Lola loved that ball pond as a toddler,’ Mam laughs. ‘And the chicken poppers.’

  ‘Yes, but I have a very refined palate,’ I say starrily to make her laugh.

  The truth is my palate has altered a bit. I can now tell the difference by sniffing between champagne, Cava Brut, a Chablis Premier Cru and a Pouilly-Fuissé.

  Or tell a beurre noir from a beurre blanc or a beurre noisette. I’m by no means infallible: I messed up in a column recently, confusing black cod and blackened cod – black cod being a specific type of cod (the blackness does not refer to the miso glaze), while blackened cod is cod with cayenne pepper seasoning. But after a week of online unpleasantness and questions about why my job isn’t taken off me, I’ll not make that error again. A few nights before the Connaught I’d reviewed a place in Chelsea where I was handed a tasting menu, mainly in French, filled with the obscure glands and valves of animals, rare fruits that are only in season for three weeks and micro herbs grown specially in polytunnels only for that kitchen. I sat at the chef’s table with the sort of elegant people who refuse the chives and vinaigrette with oysters, preferring to sip the sea water straight from the shell and then claim to know the difference between the minerals in the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. One course involved large chunks of bone marrow in raw egg.

  ‘Was your dinner nice?’ says Mam. She is so proud of me.

  ‘To be honest, not really, no,’ I say.

  CHAPTER 9

  Monsters

  October 2013

  When the offer arrives via email, I examine it carefully to check it isn’t Matt playing a prank. It looks bona fide, but it seems almost ludicrous. Terrifying and ludicrous – but also too amazing to refuse.

  Four weeks later, a Mercedes-Benz picks me up from my house to take me to the set of BBC One’s MasterChef: The Professionals, where I’ve been invited to be one of the critics. In the car, I feel so absolutely bilious with nerves I doubt I can swallow. Let alone swallow with TV cameras in my face and then discuss the intricate juxtaposition of jus and gel in erudite terms with Jay Rayner and William Sitwell either side. My thoughts turn to Dad. MasterChef has been on TV for thirty years, ever since a rather funny man with a sing-song voice called Loyd Grossman presented it. Loyd would invite serious French chefs to deliberate, cogitate and digest haute cuisine cooked by earnest amateurs. Me and Dad would laugh when Loyd called a custard slice by its posh name, millefeuille, pronounced ‘mieeeefieeeeeu’, sounding like a drunken dairy cow. Or when we learned that hen-of-the-woods is actually a fancy mushroom, not a big hen, or that tarte Tatin aux pommes is pronounced ta-ta-tah-oh-pom and is just apple pie.

  ‘Look at these silly sods,’ Dad would say as he sat in his chair eating an ASDA choc-ice. ‘Look at this one in the tweed. He looks like Rupert Bear!’

  The car arrives on set, a TV producer in a headset rushes towards the outdoor smoking area and chivvies the contestants along, herding them away from my sight. Secrecy is paramount. The
less information I have about who is cooking today, the better. The fewer things we know, the more natural our reactions will be when the chefs bowl through the doors carrying seared duck breast with enoki and pickled mooli.

  ‘Grace Dent is on set, door three, walking now,’ says the producer as I step out of the car.

  ‘This way,’ she says, leading me through a maze of kitchens, past shelves of pans and plates and cutlery, past racks of chef’s whites and buckets of dirty dishes. Gregg Wallace shoves his head around part of the set as I walk, takes one look at me and shouts, ‘Oh, it’s you! I like you! Welcome to MasterChef, Miss Dent!’

  I’m left in a dressing room with a full-length mirror, a bowl of grapes and a large framed picture of John Torode. I breathe in and breathe out.

  I’ve decided to wear my hair down rather than in a beehive so that I don’t look too severe and antagonise the audience – or more accurately Twitter, which I can’t really look at anymore as the strangers’ comments are too upsetting. Later, at the critics’ table, as each dish arrives, I find myself being resolutely positive about each element. I cut all the chefs some slack. After all, they’re probably nervous too, like me. They could be having an off day. That’s why their emulsion split and their béchemel tastes of flour. That’s why their rainbow chard is gritty and their chocolate crémeaux is a brown puddle. I don’t want to look like a ball breaker in the edit – I can’t face the blowback online. Jay Rayner from the Observer and William Sitwell, editor of Waitrose Magazine, are much more certain in their views. They’re much more offended by the droopy soufflé and the overdone halibut. Not just offended. Slightly outraged. They know how to deliver great telly. Worse still, when the second chef unveiled his rather delicious plate of monkfish, I suddenly found my appetite and gobbled down the lot.