What's the point of most newspaper restaurant reviews?

A delightful and thought provoking piece in The Guardian this week on restaurant critics and what we readers should make of them. Media writer Peter Preston looks at how two of London's leading food writers, AA Gill and Giles Coren, disagree over a swanky Indian restaurant. While it is, as Preston writes, good entertainment, it does raise a serious question – where’s the solid advice on where to go for dinner?

Is the poshest new restaurant in town “a dismal experience” or a glowing “testament to a lifetime of forensic appetite and experience”? Do you think it has “far and away the nicest dining room in St James’s” or a “terrible” one, “too big, too modern, no soul … properly catastrophic?” In short, what happens when the critics you hire, the experts who ride high on your menu advising readers, can’t agree? About anything.

After giving some examples of such recent differences of opinion, Preston turns to the serious question of what’s the point of most newspaper reviews?

To tell you, the reader, where’s good to go. Reviewing is, in part, a consumer service. Of course different critics have different favourites, and you learn to follow those among them who fit your own. That’s an essential of film- or theatre-going. But food, with big bills attached, isn’t a smörgåsbord of opportunities: the reader needs solid advice (often distilled from a whole sheaf of reviews).

See what happens when one gastro guru disappoints another. The whole feeding chain becomes TripAdvisor with added adjectives. Coren made the point himself last week when, in true introvert fashion, he reported what a “senior restaurant critic” of his acquaintance had told a restaurateur he knows. She wasn’t going to review his new place because “it isn’t interesting enough”. And Coren only disagrees mildly: “I do not expect restaurants to be interesting. It’s a restaurant’s job to serve food and wine. It is my job to be interesting.”

Which is where “the Blonde” and “Esther” and sundry minor characters make their review bit-part appearances, along with witty essays on the future of the world, kiwi fruit and the northern powerhouse.

Of course there’s a load of experience and expertise on show here. Of course you can follow your favourite writer from Durham to Dover if you’ve the time and inclination. But restaurant reviewing has also become a series of elegant essays too frail to chomp.