Table Talk

Sunday Times food critic A.A. Gill is of the mind that restaurants, like food, are best roasted slowly.

And his tongue drips with acid – so much so, I laughed till I cried.

Comments such as these:”What is the point of a menu if you need the Rosetta Stone to translate it?”; or "The amuse-gueule came, as I knew it would: a crab cake the size of a shirt button that collapsed into vapours at the sight of a fork. A man can feel right foolish chasing a crab's toenail round a plate. It tasted fine, in a homeopathic sort of way."; or "The baby back ribs were like eating the evidence in a war-crimes trial. Apparently they'd been buried in a peat bog for a month"; or "The only way to describe this food is 'gay'. Gayissiums. Gayomorphic. show more Spumingly, frothingly queer. It was proudly, poncily, deliciously, lispingly effete." Goodness only knows how he gets away with it. He wouldn’t here – our libel laws would send him (and his paper) broke. Remember Leo Schofield, doyen of food critics in Australia, who lost a $100,000 libel case in 1984 over a restaurant review in which he compared the lobster to an "albino walrus".

Table Talk is Gill at his best. He has naturally chucked out the over-cooked and underwritten bits that appear when you wirte a column (or two) every single week. And these often excoriating reviews do not seem particularly mean, because he has left out the names of the restaurants. I’d love to join him, the Blonde, and his star-studded friends list for just one meal.

More power to his fork. show less

I opened this book in a shop and read the entry about cabbage. It made me giggle, so I bought it. Quite a lot of the book is snigger inducing, however, I'm not sure I'd recommend reading it in one go - it is a book to dip in and out of. A A Gill can be witty and even laugh-out-loud funny; he can also be rather offensive. In small doses, the former seems more prominent, when I read large chunks of the book at once, I was struck more by the latter.

Gill's patronising, middle class arrogance and his faux belligerence I can forgive. His over-use of similes I cannot.

It's a real shame, as Gill knows his stuff and there are some genuinely interesting and witty articles here. A pity then that his writing becomes increasingly annoying: dishes are as salty as "a fat bloke's cycling shorts" and sauces are "the colour of a stripper's knickers and the consistency of a politician's promise". Describing kedgeree as the colour of "Chinese cowardice" is a cheap shot for the sake of cheap laugh. Worse, it does not tell us what the dish actually looked like (I'm guessing some shade of yellow). Lazy writing.

The kedgeree dish is from a lunch that he shared with Jeremy Clarkson, the only man to outdo show more Gill in his use of contrived and convoluted similes. The appendix references Clarkson on no less than 12 pages throughout the book. Enough said. show less