Overpriced, tasteless and pretentious

Man about town: Gill with his partner, Nicola Formby, aka The Blonde, with whom he's recently had twins

10 April 2012

Does AA Gill make you sick? He does me. The day after I meet him for lunch at a restaurant I'd better not name, I spend a good three hours sprawled on the bathroom floor, and then a further 48 feeling properly, shiveringly ill. At least it makes a good story to dine out on, if I'm ever brave enough to dine out again. Have lunch with top restaurant critic at fancy London restaurant and get only to partially digest the posh French food (£93 for two, since you ask).

Unless you read the Sunday paper for which he writes, there's no real reason to know who A A Gill is - but of course everyone does. He's one of those rare hacks who've achieved a celebrity beyond the pages they appear in; a writer who features not only as a byline in glossy magazines, but in their society gossip columns, too - mostly on the arm of his partner Nicola Formby, aka The Blonde, but occasionally with his more famous mates, Nigella or Jeremy Clarkson or Schiffer or Macpherson.

There's something about him, too, which does make people sick, or at least arouses an instinctive dislike. But he's actually rather charming, not very effete, and, of course, entertainingly opinionated on all manner of subjects.

Gill arrives by bike, though it's a bike, natch, he had imported from New York. He's wearing faded jeans, brown suede Chelsea boots and a cardigan, and is easily the most under-dressed, and stylishly dressed, man in this restaurant. Formby once said that he read her copy of Vogue before she did, and that he was an expert flower arranger, both of which I find slightly spooky.

He's fascinated in an equally obsessive way by the significance of dinner. Good food makes him cry, he says (he last sobbed over a sea bass in Rome) - though London these days barely raises a sniff.

Reading a lot of his reviews in one go - he has a new collection out, Table Talk - you realise that he rarely actually likes what, or where, he's eating.

Jellied eels are "a plate of condoms dredged out of a storm drain"; foie gras sushi: "like eating a vet's biopsy tray"; and, my personal favourite: "It was full of Hampstead folk, who really are as extraordinary as tables on the ceiling. They all have that intense look of people trying to explain Primo Levi to an Eskimo." You'd expect Gill to be scathing about pub food, and he is. But unlike the editor of the Good Pub Guide who yesterday rapped pub owners for over-pricing basic meals, in this context he'd much rather pay more than less.

"Pubs don't get into food because they're really keen on cooking and really want to feed people; they do it because they're desperate and not making enough money. In general, they have terrible kitchens made for just heating something up or making sandwiches, and quite often the cooks can't cook, so do strange things they've seen on Ready Steady Cook or got from a Gary Rhodes book. What you want a pub to do is what it always did, but to do it really well - bangers and mash with a really good sausage or a ploughman's with a really sensational piece of cheese and home-made bread. It's not rocket science.

"But I don't want pub food to be any cheaper either. I had Sunday lunch in a pub in Northumberland recently, a big old place that specialised in feeding 40 or 50 people a piece of roast meat. It cost about a tenner for three courses, and as a consequence was simply vile, just really bad and cheap and nasty."

Though he makes a rule of not naming his favourite restaurants ("It depends on the occasion, who you're with; what you want to do. Do you want breakfast, lunch? To get laid?"), his top gastropub in London is the Anchor & Hope on The Cut in Southwark. Gill also likens the outer bar bit of St John in Smithfield to "the best kind of pub" - and he loves St John, its satellites and its revolutionary chef Fergus Henderson.

There's an awful lot to hate about modern dining in London. "Unquestionably, I think food in London is too pretentious," he says, warming up. "Everything is far too much about novelty, which is a sign of insecurity. There's this terrible helter-skeltering of ingredients. One year you can't move for, say, barley risotto and then the next you can't find it anywhere; then everything's got foie gras in it, or every menu has sticky toffee pudding, which also disappears just as quickly. You get this great making and discarding of dishes, which is a really bad thing. And it's just too bloody expensive. It is really really horrendously expensive ...

"Restaurants here are all about chasing this imaginary market of City bankers and bonus boys. They're behaving as though all that matters is that four or five per cent, and so they're over-decorated, they're over-conceptualised, they spend far too much money on the soft furnishings and the hard-wood walls and the pretty waitresses, and they have door policies - and then the food is usually pretty lousy. But what's most important is that they make no concession to the people who live and work around them.

"One of the things I love about Italy is that you know that the waiters could afford to eat the incredible food they serve. I feel very uncomfortable in restaurants that are just too expensive for the staff ever to eat in."

He tells me about a recent lunch with a friend and the friend's two-year-old, and a plate of whipped-up, child-friendly, pasta 'n' tomato sauce for which they were charged a jaw-dropping £17. "Which just sort of says 'f**k you', doesn't it?"

He and Formby have just had children themselves: seven-month-old twins Edith and Isaac. I ask him whether he's getting enough sleep and he goes off into an enormously long riff about men and babies and life and love, and then, amusingly, admits to never having changed a nappy. "Seven months without changing one! And there are two of them. I'd better go home and do one now." But at least we have discovered common ground between him and his once-arch-nemesis Gordon Ramsay, the man who also confessed to never changing a nappy. It was Ramsay who chucked Gill and his guest Joan Collins out of Aubergine a few years ago, to the general hilarity of London at large. Are they on speaking terms now? "If he was here, I'd certainly say hello to him, and I think he'd say hello back. He wrote me a sweet letter after I reviewed something else he'd done. I think he's a really clever chef." He pauses a beat. "But I wouldn't want to work for him."

Gill is 53, and has two older children (Flora, 16, and Alistair, 14) by his second wife Amber Rudd, a venture capitalist. His first was the writer Cressida Connolly, whom he married in his twenties. I ask him how old Formby is - his third long-term partner - and he says, completely unbelievably, that he doesn't know. "I honestly don't." That sounds coy. You've been living with her for years: have you never looked in her passport? "I'm so dyslexic with numbers, even if I did, I couldn't work it out." He is profoundly dyslexic - he has to file copy over the phone since editors can't read his written version - but, come on, enough of the faux-gallantry. I think she's 41, anyway.

Though he lives in Chelsea, loves clothes and writes about food, he is not a Sloane, nor actually a snob in the classic sense, but he does despise people in great generalised swathes because of where they live (Wales, Chester, the countryside). His great grandfather Gill was an unskilled factory worker from Yorkshire, whose clever son was put into a bank at the age of 14, and rose to manage it. His father, Michael Gill, was the TV director who made Civilisation.

"The story of my family on both sides is the story of the middle class in the 20th century, that arc of growing achievement." His dad died a few years ago, after suffering Alzheimer's. "There's nothing good to be said about Alzheimer's but there are things you can tease out of it as consolation. Nothing was left unsaid before my dad died. Because of the nature of the illness and how long it took, I heard all of the things from him that I needed to, and said all the things I needed to say." For more than 10 years, Gill was an alcoholic and pretty much drunk the whole time - "I was a topper-upper, I drank all day, every day" - with morning shakes so bad, he tied a scarf around his neck and arm to stop himself blacking his eye on the first drink of the day.

He quit on the first attempt at rehab at the age of 30, but I wonder whether he apologised to his father for that horribly lost bit of youth? "No," he says immediately, "because I was ill as well. I mean, that doesn't excuse me from responsibility. I'm still culpable for stupid behaviour. When I look at my children now I think of the fear and the worry that I must have caused ..." He stops, momentarily silenced. "But, no. Most of all, it was about wanting him to see that I'd done all right and that I'd be able to look after his grandchildren."

As well as Flora and Alistair, there are a further two grandchildren by Gill's brother Nick, who - sadly for everyone - disappeared nine years ago after the failure of his marriage and business. Gill doesn't talk about this very much "because it's horrible and I miss him terribly and it upsets me too much".

"It's also mixed up with me being quite angry. With him. I'm furious." But he is also quietly philosophical about it; perhaps more so as the years pass. "I do actually think that everybody has the right to disappear. If you believe in those sorts of freedoms, and I think I'm quite an extreme libertarian, then, if you really, really don't like the hand you've been dealt, it must be your right to ask for another one. Of course it's selfish, but part of your freedom must be the freedom to be selfish."

We leave the restaurant and the head waiter asks me whether I enjoyed my meal. Yeah, lovely thanks, I reply innocently. A little less than 24 hours later, I get a second chance to assess it. Later still, and I'm feeling as bilious as an A A Gill review. Naturally, he puts it so much better: "Silt, sump, brack and bilge," he once wrote of an inedible Portobello mushroom. "Talk among yourselves for a moment: I can feel the damnable thing slithering upstream." Gill might make you sick, but you can't help loving the way he does it.

Table Talk (Orion) is a selection of AA Gill's writing about food, £16.99.

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