Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A restaurant critic, five times Britain's Restaurant Writer of the Year and winner of the Glen Fiddick Trophy.
On the island
Eight records
I came across Bob Dylan, I suppose, more or less when he sang that song, which was in nineteen sixty three. That was the kind of coming of age I was having. And I think he's a wonderful poet, and the words are still relevant.
Que reste-t-il de nos amours ?
I chose it because it I'm very close to my sister and it reminds me of the period of time she spent in Paris, and that was when she was in her early twenties. And it was when we really became friends.
One of the sweet things I remember about my father is he used to sing sing to me quite a lot, and he was a great fan of Gilbert and Sullivan. And I remember him singing um Tit Willow, and this is Eric Idle singing Tit Willow in a rather more camp way than my father did.
She was a great friend of the family, and she stayed with us for a while, so she's almost like a sister to me and she's a wonderfully amusing, talented lady, which I think comes across in this um song where she is the banjo.
Goldberg Variations, BWV 988Favourite
When I met Reg Gadney, who to whom I'm now married, he was writing a film of um Glengold's life, so this music was very much kind of uh around at the time and he enabled me to discover it really.
Sally sang it at the funeral of my mother, who came from Dumfries, so it it's very moving to me.
I've chosen this because I love her voice, I love Grease. And this is set in Greece, and it's about conjugal love.
It expresses the way I feel each time Reg and I go to our house in Greece. And I just think Mel Torme's got the most wonderful musical voice and it's a song that makes me feel happy.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:54How do you manage [eating out six nights a week]? Do you have rules?
I try to eat a different kind of meal each time, so if it's French one night, it might be Indian the next. It's not always six nights, but um I'm eating to find some that are either good enough or dreadful enough to make good copy.
Presenter asks
2:51The greatest problem, surely, for a well-established restaurant critic is that the restaurant knows when you're in and you get special treatment, so therefore you're not really representing us, the consumer, at all. [Do you ever go in disguise?]
I tried it once. Um I wore a wig and looked, I thought, just like Shirley Bassey. But I was immediately recognised by Marco Pierre White, whose restaurant it was I was trying to sneak into. And he said, Meo fair, you've um cut your hair, so have I. So it was so uncomfortable, this wig, I gave it up.
Presenter asks
4:48The story of how you got the job in the first place, Faye Maschler, is verging on the ridiculous, really. You won it in a competition, didn't you?
The keepsakes
The book
Stella Gibbons
it's one of the few books that makes me laugh out loud and It also exhorts one to be sensible and practical.
The luxury
it would [stock] my bar and it would also provide consolation for me.
Yes, I did. Quentin Crewe was leaving or was fired. I'm not sure which. And clearly they had no successor, and they were competition mad in those days. This was the Evening Standard. And so they ran a competition, and the prize was that you could do the column for three months. There was a many, many entries, I understand, and a lot of argy bargie about who's to be the winner. Anyway, I won the job, and after three months, they said, Would you do another six months? And twenty-seven years later I'm still doing it.
Presenter asks
11:42What did you teach yourself to cook [when you were twelve to fourteen in the States]?
I just took down my mother's cookery books and they one was Mrs Beaton and another one was the Radiation Cookery Book… And I just cooked really thinking back, extremely difficult things like puff pastry and meringues. I was just so pleased that they worked and um it is magical, the alteration of of the ingredient to the finished article.
Presenter asks
16:14How did the partnership with Tom [Mashler] change your life?
Um, it changed it hugely. When I married him, it was just when he became chairman of Jonathan Cape. So I was immediately plunged into a kind of rather, well, a fascinating life actually, meeting lots of authors, doing a lot of entertaining. Tom was quite a bit older than me, and uh I seemed to get involved in a very middle-aged marriage very quickly, and then I had my first child, my daughter Hannah, uh quite soon. So it was a big there was a a lot of change, perhaps too precipitous.
Presenter asks
25:12What aspects of a restaurant set your teeth on edge?
I don't like um pretentiousness and fussiness and uh over elaboration. I like there to be the emphasis really on on on the food and the wine. And on a good time. There's not too much hush. Not too much hush, and also not too much noise, not too much racket. I mean, there's so many restaurants now where you can't hear yourself speak, and I think, you know, part of the enjoyment of eating out for me is the conversation.
“I taught myself to cook. We moved to the States when I was about twelve and I was very lonely. I had a very lonely summer when we arrived. And my mother, as a sort of hangover from her days in India, used to sleep in the afternoons, and to amuse myself I started to cook, using her very complex books. And I found I could do it and enjoyed it, and rather enjoyed forcing my parents to eat what I'd made.”
“I think it's so unfair on the chefs who work very hard and on the restaurateurs who invest so much money when someone goes along and writes about, you know, how they've got a hangover or their friend's skirt has split or something. You know, I just find that little me branch of journalism horrible not only for restaurant criticism but but for other things too.”
“I think women cooks are out there ready to cook them. I think there should be far more female chefs because they're they're more content with making simple food. I think I mean this sounds a bit sexist, but it's meant to be a compliment. They don't need to show off, they don't need to do dramatic looking dishes that have been endlessly fiddled and touched and messed around with.”