RESTAURANTS: How to Eat Out By Giles Coren Hodder Stoughton, 304pp. £12.99
IT MUST BE FRUSTRATING to be Giles Coren. For despite a distinguished career as a restaurant critic (for the London Times), TV presenter and novelist, he is perhaps best known for a series of tawdry scrapes he has got himself into over the years, each of which has reinforced a public perception of him as an odious, bitchy little twerp, a poor man’s AA Gill. Indeed, one of Coren’s many foes, René Redzepi, head chef of Copenhagen’s celebrated restaurant Noma, has dismissed him as a “really, really nasty bastard” whose biggest aim in life is to make himself famous.
So it was with no small trepidation that his latest book, How to Eat Out, was approached. Neither the smug public-schoolboy pout that Coren has adopted on the cover nor the rather patronising title helped assuage a strong urge to dislike this book intensely. This proves harder than first imagined. For his tales of a life lived in restaurants – all the rip-offs, run-ins, ritual humiliations at the hands of petty waiters, and occasional moments of food-induced transcendence – turn out to be a pretty rollicking read.
A great believer in the effectiveness of a bit of profanity, the irascible Coren swears like a docker from cover to cover. His handy tips offer such vital knowledge as how to complain properly, where to sit in a dim-sum trolley restaurant, why you should always tip staff, why mineral water is a scam, how to order wine without coming across as either an ignorant prole or a moneyed oik and why you should never be ashamed to demand a doggy bag.
His pet hates include steak snobs and corn-fed beef, which he decries as mouth mulch for toothless octogenarian Floridians. He also opines at length about why only oikish peasants stuff themselves with bread rolls, which he says should be reserved for Victorian orphans and circus elephants. Never one to hide his light under a bushel, he also proudly recounts how he single-handedly caused the demise of the Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty’s curry-house empire through one of his bitterer reviews. In fairness, she did buy his favourite tandoori parlour and turn it into a soul-withering dump with exclamation marks on the menu. Which makes her fair game in anyone’s book.
Anyway, the question you all want answered: which is the worst country to eat in? Coren (below) plumps for plucky Croatia, where all food that isn’t bear is made of pig and breadcrumbs and emits the vomitous whiff of something that has been deep-fried in truffle oil and Fairy Liquid. And the best? That would be Japan. The home of tiny shops selling knives sharp enough to debone a hippo, poisonous puffer fish and cod-sperm sushi, it and its people have a reverential attitude to food that exposes us westerners for the fat, slovenly, milk-drinking, burger-munching, tracksuit-wearing, foul-mouthed troglodytes that we are.
Smattered with self-deprecation, some of which appears to be genuine, How to Eat Out is incisive, informed and witty. Giles Coren, then, is the Jeremy Clarkson of catering: loud, obnoxious, opinionated and merciless, but – try as you might – difficult to hate.
Kilian Doyle is an Irish Times journalist
