Now I didn’t grow up eating coal in a coal mine but I feel I can also say with some certainty that every Giles is a posh twat. In fairness I have only ever known two people called Giles. One went to Eton and the other went to Oxford, and the latter is Mr. Coren himself – yes, we have met. This is conclusive as far as I’m concerned.
I’ll be honest. Mr. Coren was top of my hit list of reviewers. Number one. The thought had me cracking my knuckles and stretching out my wrists. But the powers that be chose Mr Rayner which, in retrospect, was a very good thing. Now my teeth are not only cut, but they are also sharp – and ready for Giles.
My first thought was to go for the jugular straight away. There’s simply so much to go at. Every week there’s another ‘Giles-ism’: he’s either sending another of ‘those emails’ or breaking an injunction on Twitter or being homophobic to prominent journalists. But it felt too easy, too obvious, because everyone knows Giles Coren is a prick.
The other annoyingly obvious thing, which everyone wilfully forgets, is that he is a brilliant writer who, while he can be totally insensitive and a howling Tory, for the most part is very funny. It’s confusing to be confronted with someone whose talents are matched only by their unlikability. But then, if you think about it, the world is full of men who are very talented but no one likes: Novak Djokovic, Robbie Savage, Lewis Hamilton, Richard Dawkins, Eminem.
And this is the thing. You can win an argument, but it doesn’t mean you’re not a prick. Of course you’ve been there: slashing away with your tongue, like Jon Snow putting his sword through White Walkers, reducing the room to a pile of body parts. Then at the end of your rant you realise that you stand triumphant – but everyone thinks you’re a prick.
We are all pricks, to a greater or lesser extent, and prickishness cannot be limited to just one type of person: it is something we can all be accused of, a state which we can drift in and out of. To some people, such as our family, we are pricks on occasion; to others, like our ex’s friends, we will be pricks forever.
So I put aside my preconceived ideas and mild hatred and began my research as usual, going about the forensic process of reading every review Coren has ever written. It’s quite hard to find the early ones. Well it’s not that hard, you just click through lots of pages until you find the first review.
Giles’ first restaurant review for the Times was in 1993. The world was a different place then: before the internet changed our lives, before 9/11, before iPhones, and Instagram, or even iPod and mp3s, before Tony and Gordon had grey hair, before the financial crash, before austerity, before Brexit, before we realised that global warming heralded the extinction of the human race. Yes, the world was a very different place, and so, my dear readers, were its restaurants.
