Smashed #16: How, and how not to write a restaurant review.

The UK's restaurant and food scene digested

How, and how not to write a restaurant review.

I’ve been obsessed with restaurant reviews since the early 90s when Nigella Lawson’s column in The Spectator was the highlight of my week. It was a world before Coren and Rayner when Jonathan Meades still wore the critic’s crown and Fay Maschler had only been writing her Evening Standard column for about 20 years.

Since then I have read thousands of restaurant reviews and written a fair few myself. For several years, I taught a food writing class at Leith’s School of Food and Wine in London; the restaurant review session was always my favourite part of the course. As a result, I have developed very strong views about what makes a good and bad restaurant review (you may have noticed if you’re a regular reader). This week, in a change to the usual programming, I’m not going to critique each review individually, but instead explain how I approach the task of writing a restaurant review and use this week’s crop of columns to illustrate the process.

I haven’t done it in a while, but when I review a restaurant, I usually book under an assumed name. I’m not on the TV every five minutes like many of the national critics but having spent the last 20 years writing about chefs and restaurants (and another 8 years doing the same as an amateur) I am well-known in the industry so it’s worth taking the precaution.

From the moment I arrive to the moment I leave, I try to be aware of everything that is happening. It’s a habit that dates back to my stint as a mystery diner. The company I worked for required extremely detailed reports, above and beyond anything you’d see in a restaurant review. It made me aware, for example of how clean the area around the entrance to a restaurant is; has it been recently swept or are there butts from when staff have nipped out for a crafty fag? Am I instantly acknowledged by reception staff or am I greeted by the top of someone’s head as they stare down at their iPad on the reception desk?

If at all possible, I don’t sit with my back to the room. What’s happening at other people’s tables is as important as what’s going on at mine. I might be getting great service but is everyone else? Is the entire room sitting without food for extended periods (it happens), is anyone complaining and if so, how is it being dealt with? Are staff congregating to chat rather than serving? What sort of people are my fellow diners; who comes to a place like this? What’s the general atmosphere in the room? Quiet and hushed or exuberant and buzzy? What’s the decor like? Is the place looking shabby and in need of some TLC? That alone will tell you a lot about how the place is run.

I never test the service. Don’t they have enough to do without me ‘accidentally’ knocking over a glass of wine just to see how they deal with it? I need to have as normal an experience as possible so that readers will get an accurate picture of what they can expect if they decide to follow in my footsteps. I’ll ask a question if I genuinely don’t know the answer, but I’m not going to detain staff with endless quizzes to test their knowledge. It’s not what most people do on a night out and unless it’s a ‘serious’ fine dining place, I wouldn’t expect staff to be a walking Larousse Gastronomique.

I never take notes. I had to as a mystery diner, popping into the loo at least once to record times between ordering and dishes arriving, any deviations from the expected order of service (was I upsold side dishes or not) and jotting down rough descriptions of the staff so that actions could be attributed to the correct person. It was like being a member of the Stasi, but with worse pay. As a critic, all I need are the pictures on my camera and a copy of the menu to jog my memory. If I need more details about a dish, I can call the chef or the PR the next day. As long as the review is written within a few days of the meal, I am happy to rely on my memory rather than affect the experience by trying to take notes secretly at the table or in the loo.

A wide experience of dining and a good knowledge of cooking is extremely helpful to a restaurant critic. You need to understand both what you are eating and the context in which you are eating it. Has it been prepared correctly and how does it compare to similar dishes elsewhere? Is it best in class or just OK?

I’m gathering all that information, not to put it all in my review but as grist to the critical mill. It’s the foundation of what will eventually make it onto the page. If I’m confident I’ve paid attention to as much detail as possible (that’s why it’s a good idea not to get too pissed while reviewing a restaurant. Wine and its service often form an important part of dining out, it’s how restaurants make their money after all, so it should be part of the review process, just don’t go overboard) then I know the really important stuff will make itself known as I write and edit.

So let’s have a look at how the real professionals do it.

Opening lines

The first line or two of a review are the most important, and the most difficult to write. You need to grab the reader and give them a reason to keep going right to the end. You can’t do that if you begin your review by describing arriving at the restaurant, or even worse, leaving your home full of anticipation for the night ahead.

Generally speaking, national restaurant critics don’t do that sort of thing, but you will find it in provisional newspapers, magazines with titles like ‘Scarfolk Life’ (name changed to protect the guilty) and some badly written blogs. ‘After safely ensconcing the little ones with their doting babysitter, we duly set off for a date night at what we hoped would be our new favourite restaurant. Upon arrival, we were greeted like old friends and immediately shown to our table where menus quickly arrived’. Everyone knows how a night out at a restaurant goes, reporting events chronologically as they happened is the quickest way to kill a reader’s interest.

So, where should you start? In media res, that’s where; right in the middle of the action. You are Indiana Jones and there’s a fucking enormous rock just about to roll right over you. What will happen next? OK, so a restaurant is never going to be that exciting, but getting stuck into the meat of the thing right away is never a bad idea. Let’s look at some of our overpaid and over-privileged chums’ openings shall we and see if Spielberg would option them (by the way, don’t ever Google ‘Spielberg my opening’).

Jay Rayner gets it spot on with his review of country pub the Suffield Arms in Norfolk; ‘Hanging on the wall in the deep-varnished, oak-panelled stairwell at the Suffield Arms is a red neon sign which reads “Beer Girls Porn” with a blue neon arrow pointing to the ground floor’. Who isn’t going to want to know what on earth a sign like that is doing in an Observer restaurant review column, so we read on. It’s a clever and efficient piece of sentence construction too, as we already know a little bit about how the place looks and we are only 35 words in.

William Sitwell ramps up the jeopardy with this capsule drama set in Greyhound Inn, Pettistree, another country pub, but this time in Suffolk: ‘There was no escape. It was a perfect and honourable entrapment. The main-course meat choices were Suffolk red, fallow or roe.’ I’m not saying it’s going to launch a long-running movie franchise with merchandising opportunities, but for a restaurant review, it’s a punchy start.

Less successful is the offering from Tim Hayward in his review of Scotti’s Snack Bar in London; ‘Clerkenwell Green is an interesting patch’ is a less-than-interesting sentence. Don’t just say something is interesting, say something interesting about it, otherwise, you just feel like you’re being set up for a long and tedious lecture on a subject you probably won’t care about. ‘The Spitfire Mk.XII is a particularly interesting aircraft, it was actually the first Griffon-engined version to go into service’. It’s not that bad, but Hayward does go off on one about a water boiler that ‘looks like something sticking out of the back of a 1952 “Dennis” fire engine’. Yes, very interesting.

Ambience, food, service

There’s no way around it, you have to hit the holy trinity of restaurant criticism in your review. They are the mirepoix of the genre, the onion carrot and celery that, without which you have a thin gruel of words that lack foundation and body. Do ‘mirepoix’ and ‘gruel’ belong in the same metaphor? That’s not important right now, what is important is how well our critics have incorporated comments on food, service and ambience into their reviews.

In a well-written review, the three topics should be woven seamlessly into the text so that the reader can’t see the joins, or hear the crunching change of gears as the critic ticks each one off in turn. In her review of chef-of-the-moment Whyte Rushen’s Hackney joint Whyte’s, London, Charlotte Ivers covers ambience and food style in one deft sentence: ‘As I watch Rushen and his team potter round the open (obviously) kitchen, mourning my fading youth as I wonder if they might turn down the music if I asked nicely, I fillet the menu and establish that Whyte’s is a hipster twist on the classic French bistro’. Although there’s plenty more detail about the food, Ivers never mentions her surroundings again; there’s no need to, you already know exactly the sort of place Whyte’s is from those few telling words.

What you never want to do is simply list the interior design features. That’s fine if you have very limited space in something like a short guidebook entry or a round-up feature where you need to say something about the look and feel of the place but have less than 100 words for everything; not so much in a 600-word column. ‘The Greyhound is a cosy place. Low ceilings, thick and dark wooden beams, fireplaces, bare brick walls, wooden tables and candles,’ writes Sitwell in a perfunctory sort of way. I mean, it does the job, but where’s the poetry, the finesse?

Rayner gets a bit listy about Suffield Arms, but does so with some style and humour and is able to draw a conclusion about the place in the process. ‘there are long, reconditioned communal tables which are less distressed than mildly disconcerted. . . . Upstairs is what they call the saloon bar, a downlit snug with banquettes upholstered in blood-red corduroy, and swags of damask curtain, placing it somewhere between steampunk fantasy and Victorian brothel. In the most tasteful way possible, the whole place is mannered and contrived’.

Descriptions of food shouldn’t just be a list either. Telling readers what the food tasted like in an inventive way, how it made you feel or in some way summing the menu style up is much more engaging than simply noting every ingredient and cooking technique involved. Grace Dent’s review of the aforementioned Whyte’s (I told you he was chef of the moment) does a bit of all of that and includes this highly effective paragraph: ‘Rushen’s food errs towards comfort-food classics – burgers, spag bol, fish and chips – but quickly pivots into postmodernism. Familiar recipes are broken down, reimagined and paired with popular 20th-century food icons. Why is there a slice of grilled Dairylea on top of my black cherry gateau? Why is this delicious cheese plate served with Hobnobs? Does the steak tartare really need the addition of Rice Krispies?’.

Giles Coren’s description of Jerusalem artichoke with roast chicken sauce and icewine at the highly rated, and soon-to-relocate Joro in Sheffield is quite lovely; ‘the sweet cubes of choke almost fruity in the salty, foaming chicken and fish bone broth, with chewy caramel shards of roasted artichoke and tiny leaves offering up the smoky ghost of roast dinners past.’ It’s not just the menu description with a few adjectives thrown in, the most common methodology of the jaded critic, it’s an invocation of the sensation of eating the dish. As a reader, you almost feel like you’ve eaten it too.

When it comes to service, it’s no good just saying ‘the waiters glided elegantly around the room like a ballet’. Good writing requires specific examples, otherwise you’re just dealing in cliches which are huge turn-offs. With a couple of exceptions, the lack of column inches given over to front of house matters was notable this week. Not a single word from Sitwell or TPB and just a single line from Dent which is not worth quoting here. You could argue that’s a good thing. Great service is often unintrusive, it’s only when things go wrong that it comes into sharp focus. However, it’s the critic’s job to be aware of everything and reflect that in their reviews.

That doesn’t mean the subject needs reams of words. Famurewa probably says enough in his write-up of Camille in London, the latest opening from Clare Lattin and Tom Hill of Duck Soup, Soho fame: ‘Off in the bar area that abuts the semi-open kitchen, members of the young, sparky team could be seen discreetly clinking end-of-service beers’. ‘Young, sparky’ gives you a good idea of the sort of experience you can expect and that will do.

Coren namechecks both Charlie (‘tall, eager, Harry Potter specs, Yorkshire posh, known by the others as “Charlesworth”. . . .Charlesworth knows everything, it’s amazing’) and Oliver ‘the drinks guy (he doesn’t like “sommelier”)’ and returns to each several times, demonstrating how central they were to Coren’s enjoyment of his lunch at Joro.

Similarly, Hayward makes Al, Scotti’s owner, a central figure in his piece that reads eerily like a chapter in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David. Al is ‘a big bloke with the sort of resonant, authoritative voice they used to issue to coppers’ and tells Hayward that the schnitzel he’s considering ordering comes with ‘Onionslettucetomatoesmayonnaise’. ‘I am absolutely not going to argue,’ says Hayward, who also notes that Al politely answers every detailed question from an American tourist in a ‘masterclass of professional forbearance that is a privilege to watch’. The specifics bring the piece to life and put the reader in the room right there with Hayward. Lovely stuff.

Final paragraphs

Everything has to come to an end somewhere, even this apparently never-ending bloody newsletter (I’m sorry if I’m banging on but I am literally on my hobbyhorse. I’m figuratively on it. You know what I mean). Finding an appropriate way to finish a review is possibly even more difficult than writing that attention-grabbing opening line. People complain about working in the NHS. Boo-bloody-hoo. You want to try honing a final paragraph that will leave the reader feeling satisfied rather than short-changed mate, then you’ll really know what stress is like (I don’t need to say that’s a joke do I? I’m going to say ‘that’s a joke’, just in case. Just to reiterate, it’s a joke).

One trick of the trade which works every time is to echo your first line or paragraph in your last line or paragraph; a call back as they say in the stand-up trade. Famurewa provided a textbook example this week, opening with ‘Camille is a restaurant built for revelry, excess and an appreciably French disregard for hyper-productivity or abstemiousness’ and closing with ‘crucially, it is the skilfully rendered romance of the cooking that seals it as one of the fledgling year’s most intoxicating openings’. You see what he did there? The circularity brings a sense of closure; you are back to where you started, time to get off the ride.

Back in ‘Scarfolk Life’ land, a review might end with something like ‘Replete, we dragged our full and weary bodies back to the car, feeling sad to leave the place but content, knowing that we would be back soon to enjoy the experience all over again’. Dent wheeled out a more sophisticated rendition of this ‘sad to leave’ trope in her summing up of Whyte’s: ‘The best way to enjoy the place is to take a friend, arrive hungry and not remotely “on a diet”, wear something spongeable, sit up at the counter, and prepare to eat, laugh and at times be slightly startled. I’m not sure what Michelin would make of it all, but Whyte’s is already in my little black book under “weird but still pretty wonderful”. She’s going to go back, see?

TPB demonstrates how tricky endings can be by simply petering out with ‘This is joyous, big-hearted cooking, a tropical blast of warm Sri Lankan bliss on a bitterly cold South London afternoon’. That reads like the second to last sentence to me, I feel like I’ve been left hanging. TPB has such a low word count for his reviews that it is possible that a sub editor has simply cut off the last line in order to fit the review into the available space, but I might be being overly charitable.

Hayward gives his review a Hollywood voiceover-worthy ending. Referring to the lack of a printed menu at Scotti’s he closes with ‘This is reactionary hospitality conservatism and it should probably make me twitch, but instead the warmth fills me with, well, love.’ You can almost hear Morgan Freeman’s voice can’t you?

In conclusion
All of the above is just my opinion of course, but hopefully that’s what you signed up for. If, after reading this you think, ‘Being a restaurant critic must be the best job in the world, I want to do it’ then I’m afraid you are bang out of luck. Critics generally cling on to their positions like grim death and if there is a changing of the guard, the replacement will be a jobbing journalist who, in all likelihood already works for the paper. But you could write a blog or a newsletter. It won’t get you any closer to the job but you will have a lot fun doing it.