A reviewer's tough life

THE FOOD CLUB

People who meet me for the first time are thrilled when they hear that I review restaurants for a living. "Don't you need a companion when you go out?" they ask, salivating at the thought of limitless free meals.

My stock response is to give them what I fondly imagine is a Mona Lisa smile, before I change the subject. There's many a slip twixt fork and lip, and anyone who accompanies me to a couple of meals ends up being my worst enemy for life. Here's why.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. I'm meticulous about paying my bill when I'm out for a restaurant review. Free meals severely curtail your freedom to write objectively. Many restaurants recognise this, and use it as a (rather pathetic) bargaining tool.

Now that many top-end standalone restaurants are represented by public relations firms, I receive my fair share of calls to "come for lunch and give us your opinion about the food as our guest".

When I make it clear that I can visit the place as their guest and give them my opinion or write about it after an anonymous visit, but not both, most PR people lose interest in wanting to host me.

Going anonymously has a couple of disadvantages. Most places do not have the concept of chef's specials. At least, they do, but they don't know it.

Thus, as an anonymous diner, when you ask the waiter what the best dish on the menu is, he'll usually smirk, "Everything is special." I usually sigh inwardly because I dread having to plow through a random sample of the menu hoping to discover the best things on my own.

At the other end of the scale are restaurants where some items on the menu have been marked with an asterisk and billed as specials, but which, on inspection, have turned out to be unmitigated disasters.

I don't always review restaurants when I go out. Sometimes, I go out with friends. Or at least, I pretend I do. What actually happens is that I'm recognised quite often, and then a troupe of managers, chefs and waiters sidle up to our table, proffering samples of dishes that they're thinking of adding to the new menu.

They usually want my opinion on those dishes, and I'm happy to dole it out: good, bad or ugly. That's when the chef sits down at our table and thrashes out the finer points of the dish with me, while the faces of my friends get progressively more and more glum.

It's the reason why my husband never goes out with me. As he privately confessed to a friend, "Go out with her and you'll feel invisible. Everybody will rush up to our table but they'll only talk to her. And they'll talk for hours and hours."

To my surprise, I'm a hot favourite as a sounding board for new concepts. Restaurant owners who have become friends think nothing of inviting me over to ask my opinion about whether they should do a north Indian restaurant or a coffee bar. Take a break, guys. If I knew so much about the business of making money, wouldn't

I have gone out and made some myself?