I do enjoy broadsheet restaurant criticism.
The best writers use a delightful combination of pretension, rudeness and malevolence. The unspoken concord between writer and reader – i.e. that this is just food and hence reviewing it is faintly ridiculous – provides the opportunity for gleeful childishness and linguistic showboating. GrammarBlog paragon AA Gill excels in food writing; he often spends most of his Sunday Times column digressing in relatively straightforward English, before delivering a savage, unusually concocted onslaught in the last 200 words.
The Blonde’s jellied ham was wet, cold, bacon-flavoured string with green bits. The main course, the faggots, was under-seasoned liverish balls that sat in a thin dew; they should have been raucous, gay offal bollocks wrapped in fatty caul and doused in a gravy made out of mink thong.
I also enjoy Michael Winner’s food column. Winner has a different style: short, sharp, bilious sentences that bubble and snap with his slightly old-fashioned vocabulary.
Great Queen Street is awful, ghastly, ill-run, absurd. For a start this dump is so pretentious it doesn’t put its name or its street number anywhere. Not on the window, not on the awning. Nothing.
