Jay Rayner marks two decades as the Observer’s restaurant critic and explains why food writing is about more than what’s on the plate
I am the accidental restaurant critic. It was never my plan, because what fool would nurture an ambition to have their dinner paid for and then be paid to write smartarse things about it? And yet, exactly 20 years ago this month, that’s what I started doing. Two decades later I am still doing it. I have measured out my life in contrived starters and sublime main courses; in hours spent trying to avoid overstrained adjectives and overthought similes, and not always succeeding. I have spent months in the gym attempting to mitigate the impact, and not always succeeding. My body is no longer quite my own.
Until March of 1999 I was a general news and feature writer. Then one day over lunch, with the Observer magazine’s then editor, I was told Kathryn Flett would be moving on from the restaurant column. The thought only occurred to me in that instant. I said: “That’s a job you can’t apply for … but I’d like to do it.”
No-reservation restaurants struck me as the stupidest of ideas. Obviously, it would go nowhere. I was so wrong
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