Book description
I have been a restaurant critic for over a decade, written reviews of
well over 700 establishments, and if there is one thing I have learnt
it is that people like reviews of bad restaurants. No, scratch that.
They adore them, feast upon them like starving vultures who have
spotted fly-blown carrion out in the bush.
They claim otherwise, of course. Readers like to present themselves
as private arbiters of taste; as people interested in the good stuff.
I'm sure they are. I'm sure they really do care whether the steak was
served au point as requested or whether the souffl had achieved a
certain ineffable lightness. And yet, when I compare dinner to bodily
fluids, the room to an S & M chamber in Neasden (only without the
glamour or class), and the bill to an act of grand larceny, why, then
the baying crowd is truly happy.
Don't believe me? Then why, presented with the chance to buy this
ebook filled with accounts of twenty restaurants - their chefs, their
owners, their poor benighted front of house staff - getting a complete
stiffing courtesy of the sort of vitriolic bloody-curdling review
which would make the victims call for their mummies, did you seize it
with both hands?
Jay Rayner is an award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster
with a fine collection of floral shirts. He has written on everything
from crime and politics, through cinema and theatre to the visual arts,
but is best known as restaurant critic for the
Observer
. For a while he was a sex columnist for
Cosmopolitan
; he also once got himself completely waxed in the name of journalism.
He only mentions this because it hurt. Jay is a former Young Journalist
of the Year, Critic of the Year and Restaurant Critic of the Year,
though not all in the same year. Somehow he has also found time to write
four novels and two works of non-fiction. He is a regular on British
television, where he is familiar as a judge on Masterchef and the
resident food expert on The One Show. He likes pig.
