My name is Henry Kay Kallendrine and I am here to show you all where a proper man should dish. Please check my UK and London guide for more information. I could argue that I was not attracted to the prospect of spending money on lunch, but why should you trust me? However, first of all I thought about something else: I was tired of being a generalist and wanted to get a specialization. I felt perfect for this. I love restaurants, always since my late mother introduced me to the joys of oysters among the velvet plush and polished mahogany of Rules in Covent Garden. Theater and entertainment restaurants. This is a place for gossip, revelations and to satisfy all kinds of appetites.

I’ve already spent a fair chunk of my money on them and read restaurant reviews as if they were the cure for a poorly defined ailment. I loved the effortless writing of Matthew Fort in the Guardian and Jonathan Meads in the Times, making it clear that food isn’t just about taste and texture. It’s about politics and history, love and sex, the environment, architecture and more. I wanted to be able to write about all of this. It took me six months to convince the newspaper that I was the greediest person for this job.

But in Britain, good food is more often allowed to speak for itself. There are still tablecloths, but there are fewer of them. In truth, the move away from crisp linen began with the advent of gastropubs, a movement that predated my arrival – I hosted a wedding reception at London’s original gastropub, Eagle on Farringdon Road, in 1992 – but which has relentlessly spread its aesthetic around the world. country. They have become to Britain what a small country bistro once was to France. Recently, the “Stephen Harris Athlete” in Kent, the self-proclaimed “ugly” old drinker by the sea, was once again named the UK’s best restaurant pub. Quite right.

Few food pubs are as interesting as Sportsman, so I don’t write about them anymore. There are some very good ones, but how do I pick out 1100 words from another menu of goat cheese and beet salad, sea bass fillet and crème brлеlée? An entertaining review, like any useful form of journalism, at its core needs a story. It was never my job to tell you if the fish was raw or the lamb was overcooked. It was always about finding something remarkable. Although “noteworthy” is all relative.