You big softie: Has Giles Coren put down his poison pen?

Giles Coren was once the angriest man in newspapers; on a mission to close down restaurants and destroy reputations. Then he got a therapist, a wife, and a very cute baby, and started being, well, nice. Has the notoriously cutting critic finally lost his edge?

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Giles Coren

28 May 2012

In the beginning, I wasn’t going to write a book at all. I was just going to collect a load of my old restaurant reviews, stick them between two covers and try to persuade people to buy them all over again. It’s what I usually do. It’s what Jeremy Clarkson does. It is an economically efficient form of self-plagiarism that has a long and distinguished history. It is, after all, what Charles Dickens did.

But as soon as I sat down to look over the words I had churned out (one hesitates to say anything as grand as ‘woven’ or even ‘spewed’) over 15 years reviewing restaurants for Tatler, The Independent and The Times, I realised that I couldn’t do that, and would have to start from scratch.

Because I’ve changed. I used to be so angry. I think back to my early days as a critic in the late 1990s, and I blush. I would go swaggering into restaurants in some ridiculous tramp disguise, challenging them to mistreat me, order the things I was least likely to enjoy, then hurl my plate aside in a fury and demand to see the manager.

When I got home, I would sit down and slaughter the place, from the ‘demented holocaust of care-home pelmetry and Argos furniture they call a dining room’ to the ‘wall-eyed gargoyle of a waitress whose breath alone took three years off my life in the short time it took her to say the word “soup” ’ to ‘the chef whose signature pigeon and chocolate dish I can only assume to have been some sort of elaborate suicide note’.

I wasn’t happy unless jobs were lost, reputations were ruined and ‘closed’ notices were up in the window by the end of the week. I remember reading an interview in the Financial Times with the owner of a restaurant I’d just panned, in which he declared that ‘Giles Coren’s review cost me £150,000,’ and thinking, ‘Is that all?’

I suppose my greatest hour was closing down an entire chain of Indian restaurants called The Bombay Bicycle Club, which had lately been bought up by, of all people, Shilpah Shetty. I’d always rather liked the place but things had taken a turn for the worse since she got involved.

‘The food was terrible,’ I wrote. ‘Six or seven bowls of brown cloacal waste, studded with amorphous protein chunks. The sick of an infant who lives on Dairylea Lunchables. Why cubed? The meat here was always slices of chicken, big pieces on the bone, skin, fat, all that. Now it’s rhomboids from giant rectangular chickens reared on Mars and cut by machines undreamt of in Bernard Matthews’s most foetid nightmares…’

Within a week, the branch was gone; in a couple of months, the entire chain. Sorry Shilps.

So there I was, increasingly successful thanks to my raging critical ways. Co-hosting the F Word on Channel 4 with Gordon Ramsay (with whom I was seen as having a kindred sweary spirit), then all sorts of other TV shows, separating myself from the crowd with my furious posturing, writing vile, actionable things on Twitter, breaking injunctions for fun, and forever answering the door to police, tabloid hacks, angry neighbours...

The Guardian got hold of some private professional correspondence of mine and splashed it on their front page, asking: ‘Is this the maddest email ever written?’ I was called ‘the angriest man in Britain’. And I rose to it. I immediately brought out a book called Anger Management For Beginners, an anthology of all my angriest writing, and travelled Britain being furious with people in theatres, clubs, literary festivals, then autographing copies for their mums. People emailed and tweeted me begging to be abused. ‘It’s my birthday,’ they would say, ‘Please, please, call me a ****.’

From nowhere, I became suddenly (slightly) rich and (a teeny bit) famous. But was I happy? Was I, hell.

In my personal life, I limped from one cataclysmic romantic mismatch to the next. On the relationship level I was like some paramedic off Casualty, endlessly staring at car crashes. Often, anger was an issue. Not violence or abuse or anything like that. Just shouting and throwing things and everything falling to bits every couple of years, ending with a bloody change of personnel.

At work, similar things happened. One word out of place from a newspaper editor or TV producer and I resigned on the spot, shouting and belly-aching and demanding satisfaction.

But how did I get that way? I was once such a nice child.

I honestly think it was the job. I had become mean and stupid and deliberately hurtful because that is what is expected of restaurant critics. Of critics in general. The successful ones, the only ones anyone had heard of, were the bastards. So I went totally bastard. So much simpler to write that way. It’s just much easier to be funny when you’re being mean.

But the meanness is like a horrible growing disease that infects everything it touches (I’m not going to say ‘a cancer’, because it’s not that bad). All those dark, angry critics, they’re not happy. And nor was I.

My inbox was always full of emails saying, ‘We went to a really crap restaurant on Sunday, bad food, bad service, terrible music… you simply MUST go and write about it!’

But why would anybody deliberately go to a bad restaurant? What sort of system is that for living a life? Gradually, I began to ask myself if there were not another way.

I got some therapy. Actually, lots of it. And that enabled me to marry a woman who didn’t care that I was an angry bastard because, as she said, ‘at least you’re MY angry bastard’. I dropped the angry pose as much as possible in public (the book didn’t do all that well anyway). And I started going to restaurants, as far as possible, only when I was sure that they would be nice – because other critics, mostly this paper’s sainted Fay Maschler, had already said so.

I let the other reviewers eat the bad meals, so that I didn’t have to, and my wife and I went out only for the good stuff. And I wrote mostly positive reviews. Not only. But mostly. And, ooooh, it felt an awful lot better.

We had a baby. It was 15 months ago but I don’t think I’ve stopped smiling since. I am a grinning, endlessly delighted goon. I get trolled on Twitter now for banging on about my daughter (I still occasionally hit back at the meanest ones). I’m even contemplating puppy ownership, despite having written many times in support of an urban dog slaughter to solve the problem of pavement poo – offering to ‘fork the rigid little carcasses on to the fat-spitting giant poodle pyres myself’.

So when ES suggested that I return for the first time to Roka, a desperately glitzy Asian fusion joint in Fitzrovia, which had been, in 2004, the subject of my worst review ever, I was worried. Never go back to the scene of the crime. It might all kick off again.

This, after all, was a place which I had said was: ‘typical of the small-minded, brutal, ignorant, greedy, snobbish, ugly, filthy quagmire of moral excrement which is, on occasion, the London top-end restaurant scene,’ where I had been ‘subjected to a level of service directly correlated to how much money a staff member thinks you have in your wallet, in your bedroom safe, in your numbered accounts at banks in countries where sex with children and trafficking in Nazi gold are not only accepted, but are conditions of habitation’.

You really wouldn’t go back, would you? But we did. And although the doorman made us wait a bit on the cold pavement despite our having a reservation, as he had done that night eight years ago, I chose this time to see it as the consequence of a too-small reception space at the main door rather than wilful rudeness.

Through newly softened eyes, the place looked glowing and warm. Enthusiastic chefs shouted ‘hai!’ in unison as they turned things on spits over charcoal grills. And the room was a sea of smiley, chubby faces, very few of whom I wanted to kill. We got chatting to a nice old couple from San Francisco and I wrote down the names for them of restaurants in London they should visit. I saw a Russian diner click his fingers for service, and I didn’t stab him in the eye with a fork.

The food was peerless: spritzy fried things, incredibly fresh fish in the ‘new sushi’ style, wondrous meats smoking from the fire, and terribly attentive service. But you know what: my wife and I had a stinking row. It ended with me hurling down my payment and storming from the restaurant, then ripping on the hand-brake at 30mph while she was driving us home and raging off on foot through the midnight Camden streets.

So I guess there’s life in the old dog yet. ES

Giles’ new book, How To Eat Out: Lessons From A Life Lived Mostly In Restaurants (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99), is out now

EAT LIKE A PRO Giles Coren's dos and don'ts when dining out

Lay off the bread. Bread is not a first course, it is a breakfast food which will ruin your whole damn meal. And make you fat.

Insist on tap water. Mineral water is a preposterous vanity, either bottled in glass which is stupidly heavy to freight, or in plastic that ends up in one of the plastic patches the size of Texas occupying our oceans.

Get the best out of your local by tipping above the service amount; asking what the chef had for lunch, and following suit; asking after their children and buying the odd drink. Become their friend.

Never just book a table. Or you will get the shittest one they have. At least ask for a ‘nice table’, maybe make a joke of it: not by the loos or the till. Note the name of the guy/girl who takes the booking.

Avoid restaurants with a waiter posted outside. Thus saving your dignity and wallet.

To order wine, just have a conversation with the waiter. Explain what you like and don’t like, and if he suggests something too expensive ask, ‘The others are undrinkable, are they?’

Start a Chinese meal with greens such as bok choi to stay healthy, then you’ll eat (a bit) less of the fatty, salty, stodgy stuff.

In a sushi restaurant sit at the bar so you can ask, ‘What’s the best fish today?’ Always ask if they have any hamachi (yellowtail). I think, and so do the Japanese, that it’s best to eat sashimi, then sushi.

When in a French restaurant, don’t worry about ordering ‘hamburger à cheval’ – it means it has an egg on it. It doesn’t mean it is made from horsemeat. It could just as easily be dog.

If you are eating Italian, don’t have the truffle pasta. They grate on as much as they feel like giving you at the table – loads for the eyeties, barely any for the Brits – then whack £100 on the bill.

When ordering Indian food, don’t. Try to avoid it altogether.

Complain nicely, politely, apologetically – but firmly at the moment of disappointment. If you do not, you are a mug Englishman and deserve to sit there while the Frenchies get all the best food.

Tip: Yes you, you mean bastard. I think a tenner is fine on top of a service charge. Maybe a twenty if you’ve dressed up.

You big softie: Has Giles Coren put down his poison pen?

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