Over the past few years, food media has become a fractious place. A new generation of writers, and their social media outriders, see the establishment newspaper critics as a cabal of lazy, racist, PR-led hacks, and haven’t been afraid to say so. The traditional newspaper critics disagree with them.
At the heart of the rage is Eater London, the British offshoot of an American digital platform owned by Vox Media. To its supporters, Eater is a vital new space where a diverse group of young contributors, almost all of whom are Corbynite Labour supporters, are given the room to report on news overlooked by traditional outlets. To its detractors, it is a humourless site where writers seek offence, provoke anger and encourage social media pile-ons. In the words of Oisin Rogers, the manager of the Guinea Grill in Mayfair, it’s ‘a clickbaity opinion blog whose business plan is to create generally unpleasant discourse by divisive means.’
Whatever your view, 2018 was a signal year. In June, Ruby Tandoh, the writer and former finalist on The Great British Bake Off, quit her column in the Guardian, citing the ‘toxic’ nature of food writing. She tweeted ‘i’ve quit my guardian recipe column! the circles of food hell are heinous: g*les c*ren [Times restaurant critic, Giles Coren] in the stinking depths, rich people slagging off convenience foods all around, professional fatphobes at every level and not a scruple in sight. i really tried, but i’m out.’ Traditionally, a column in the Guardian would have been a golden sinecure, so Tandoh’s decision was a sign that the ground was shifting.
The following month, a row erupted over Som Saa, a feted Thai restaurant in Shoreditch, which had already attracted attention for being run by a white chef, Andy Oliver. One of his chefs, Shaun Beagley, was sacked after videos and comments he made under the ‘Boring Thai’ alias came to light, in which he spoke in a mock-Asian voice and compared market traders to monkeys living in the jungle, among other unpleasant jokes. Writers who had been following the account fell over themselves to apologise. The row divided observers into two camps: you either saw the videos as yet more proof of the appalling racism in British restaurant culture, or you couldn’t understand what the fuss was about.
The videos were spotted by Soleil Ho, an American writer who is now the restaurant critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. She alerted Anna Sulan Masing, a writer and academic, and Eater covered the story.
‘When white people run restaurants that dive into the cuisines of people of colour, there’s ample opportunity for the relationship to feel exploitative or extractive,’ Ho says. ‘Som Saa felt like the same old same old.’
‘It’s pretty basic, this idea that people of colour deserve to have a say about their place in food and the world,’ she adds. ‘From my perspective, as an American and the daughter of refugees, all this insane food inequity stems from colonialism, which is y’all’s department in Europe!’
The Som Saa incident was a catalyst: in this country, among the broadsheets, there is a single black reviewer, Jimi Famurewa at the Evening Standard, and only three women, Marina O’Loughlin, Fay Maschler and Grace Dent, who are all white. Of the men, Giles Coren and Jay Rayner are the sons of famous journalists, William Sitwell is minor aristocracy, and Tom Parker Bowles is King Charles’ stepson.
