LONG LIVE THE KING

Being a restaurant critic must be quite good fun. Negative reviews are enjoyable to read, so I only presume they are even better to write. Personally, I have never had a column but my internal monologue can formulate the most brutal takedowns using all manner of cooking-based puns. The target of my unpublished ire is most commonly a group of restaurants and clubs that will remain nameless but exude the sort of elegance you’d traditionally find in a Moscow brothel and have infected the London scene with an enormously successful takeover of what used to be stylish establishments. At times like this, I think back on an excoriating review of a restaurant by the master hack the late Adrian Gill, who on skewering a new Chinese restaurant in Soho concluded in his infuriated state that he needed something good to happen that evening — so “I’m off to The Wolseley for a croque monsieur,” he wrote.

The quip may have seemed like the final nail in the coffin of the restaurant in question, but actually it was a perfect encapsulation of how important