Death threats and angry chefs – when restaurant reviews go wrong

Eating nice food for a living sounds great, but there are downsides: from being unmasked to finding out, after you’ve published a glowing review, that there were rodents in the kitchen. The UK’s top critics spill the beans

Being paid to eat is a pretty good gig, but it isn’t without problems. There are restaurants that try to hoodwink you, angry chefs to contend with and, as the Observer’s Jay Rayner found out recently, always the possibility that a place you have raved about may have kitchens that are not entirely rodent-free. (A south London Korean restaurant he loved was temporarily closed after rat droppings were found among the ingredients.) We spoke to some of Britain’s top restaurant critics to find out about the trickier parts of the trade.