Who is Clerkenwell Boy, London’s foodie superhero?

Ed Cumming meets the faceless food critic whose mouth-watering pictures guide the great and the good

You might have seen him, but you probably wouldn’t have noticed him. Snapping away in the corner of a new restaurant, making sure there’s enough natural light falling on his starter. He’s the anonymous, faceless young man who communicates almost entirely in photographs and hashtags, and he has quickly become one of the capital’s most trusted critics. Few know his name; for tens of thousands of us he is simply: Clerkenwell Boy. He might not be the superhero London’s overblown foodie scene needs, but he’s the one it deserves right now.

@clerkenwellboyec1, as he’s known to his 110,000 Instagram followers, @Clerkenwell_Boy to the 10,000 on Twitter, is the epitome of the 21st-century social media star. He is hip, shiny and to the huge majority of people who don’t fall in the Venn diagram intersection of self-defining “foodies” and “Instagram addicts”, completely baffling.

Jamie Oliver has said, ‘I watch his pictures with total jealousy every week’