Charles Campion, who has died aged 69, from complications of heart disease, was a big man in every sense of the word – big in stature, girth and appetite, but bigger in heart and mind. He looked what he was – an authority on food, not simply about the food on the plate, but everything that lay behind it and beyond it, the produce, the way ingredients were produced, the politics and social history. He was omnivorously curious and inquiring.
Charles began writing for the London Evening Standard in 1992, in the era of the colossus restaurant critic. Jonathan Meades, AA Gill and Fay Maschler were the arbiters of public gastronomic taste. Charles spotted that these eminent figures tended to specialise in high-end, and mostly European, establishments, at a time when there was an explosion of minority ethnic restaurants all over the country, and in London in particular. So Charles turned his attention to the lesser known, less fancy Thai, Chinese, Indian, Korean, often small, family-run places.
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