A.A. Gill passed away in London on Saturday, by far the best known and revered restaurant critic in the world. His passing leaves a huge gap, in that Gill was not only a critical critic, but he was a wordsmith of note. I am sad that I did not read him more regularly,but am trying to catch up.

Adrian Anthony Gill wrote ten books, including ‘Pour Me: A Life‘ and ‘Table Talk‘, the two books I have used as a foundation for this Blogpost. My goal in writing this post is to pay tribute to the great writer, but also to learn more about restaurant reviewing from him. 

‘Pour Me: A Life‘ is a Biography Gill wrote last year, a very honest story about his addiction to drugs and alcohol. The book traces his childhood, schooling, his two failed marriages, and reflects his views on art, religion, friendship, and fatherhood. He writes about his chef brother Nick who disappeared, and has never returned. He shares his dyslexia problem. More than twenty years ago he turned his back on his addictions. 

‘Table Talk‘ is closer to home, and is the name of a column he wrote for the Sunday Times. The 2007 book is a collection of twelve restaurant reviews, as well as musings on restaurant-related topics such as Appetite, Ingredients, eating in the UK, and eating in a host of international countries, including South Africa. The book is an edited collection of his Sunday Times and some Tatler columns.

In his Foreword to ‘Table Talk‘ Gill writes that ‘there is something odd, something obsessive, something a touch neurotic about wanting to be a critic, wanting to pull the legs off delicate bits of fun’. Critics have no greater enjoyment in eating a sausage compared to other diners. ‘But being able to organize, distill, articulate and parse a sausage in the context of aesthetics, taste, morality, history, anthropology and fashion, whilst remembering that it is still a sausage, does give me a separate, academic, rather drily smug satisfaction‘. He adds: ‘Critics criticize so that everybody else can get on with enjoying themselves. We are civilization’s traffic wardens’. 

He admits to having booked restaurant tables under false names but he has never worn a wig or any other disguise, or changed his voice, as may be the case in the USA. He acknowledges that he does get recognised in restaurants, with the result that ‘everything gets worse. Particularly the service’.

He always paid for his restaurant meals. He never ate with restaurant PR consultants. He never ate at restaurants based on media releases. The choice of restaurants he ate at was made by himself, his editor, or his wife, whom he refers to as ‘The Blonde‘. He didn’t have a favourite restaurant, nor did he have secret restaurants which he didn’t write about. His experience in reviewing he based on his ability to cook, and knowledge of food, garnered through having been a cook, a dishwasher, a waiter, and a Maitre’d. But he admits to not being knowledgeable about cheese. He shares that it is difficult to describe food, adjectives relating to it ‘can be as nauseating to read as watching someone eat with their mouth open‘. He admits that it is about the food first and foremost, and that the winelist and decor are of secondary importance. He abhors fast food. 

His contribution to the restaurant industry is that he is a professional, having made it his career, he wrote. He got excited entering a new restaurant. He never ordered a difficult-to-make dish, or a dish that he could dis to enhance his review. He explains that there is no difference in ease of writing a good or a bad review, but that his readers prefer reading the bad ones, something we have experienced as well. 

From the Foreword I skipped to the chapter on South Africa. He writes about an ‘amazing dinner‘ he had at Londolozi game reserve, to which he had to be accompanied by a guide with a rifle. The campsite had an aura of romance, reminding him of ‘King Solomon’s Mines‘, with the animal noises one hears. They ate Mielie soup with wild spinach Marog pesto. This was followed by warthog with fig sauce. Dessert was a whisky and almond gâteau, with apricot ice cream and chocolate sauce. He is condescending about ostrich from our country, describing it as ‘ho hum‘, and criticizes smoked ostrich in particular. The problem with ostrich is that there is no comparable meat, he writes. About Johannesburg he writes that it is not ‘architecturally memorable’, and is a ‘strange and dysfunctional place, a bitter gruel of pain, guilt, misery, raging unfairness, intransigent greed and sullen self-interest’. Compared to a visit six years prior, Gill describes the Joburg he discovers a second time round as ‘a new city’, implying far less crime, a place that ‘has turned a corner’.  

On two trips to our country, Gill had predicted that South African food ‘would be the next big thing‘, given the diversity of ingredients, including its variety of meat and vegetables, and its range of indigenous cuisine. A hotel dinner in Johannesburg gives him the reason why his prediction will not become true: ‘It was a menu of unfounded self-importance, frenchified in snobbery, though not in taste, decorated with amuse-bouches, palate cleansers and sweetmeats, and made with gastric juxtapositions that were pointlessly daring. The service was overheated and cloying….It’s a long time since I’ve wanted to go into the kitchen and drag out the chef, shouting : ‘Here he is, I’ve got him’. 

He concludes the chapter about our country with the following paragraph: ‘This was dinner pretending to be somewhere else. I saw a truth that I should have known all along: it’s not cooks or ingredients that make great food, it’s hungry people. National cuisines must be egalitarian. I don’t mean that everyone eats together, or that they can afford the same, but that the national recipe book is held by all in common, that everyone will have experienced the same cooking. And that’s not yet true of South Africa. There is still plate apartheid‘. Ouch!

Gill’s critical and honest writing got him into hot water regularly, and Wikipedia records that Gill was the subject of 62 Press Complaints Commission complaints in five years. Three weeks ago Gill wrote about his ‘full English‘ cancer for the first time, in a review. RIP.

A.A. Gill, ‘Table Talk’. Phoenix. 2007. 

A.A. Gill, ‘Pour Me: A Life‘. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 2015.

Chris von Ulmenstein, WhaleTales Blog: www.chrisvonulmenstein.com/blog Tel +27 082 55 11 323 Twitter:@Ulmenstein Facebook: click here  Instagram: @Chris_Ulmenstein