Who is the best member of your family? Not your favourite relative, which may be an easy question to answer. No, the best – the person who in every measure wins out over all the others. It’s a stupid question, isn’t it; one you literally cannot answer. Let’s try something seemingly easier: what’s the best restaurant you’ve ever visited? After 25 years of restaurant reviewing, I am asked this question often. After all, I’ve eaten out a lot. I have acquired a significant number of data points. I should therefore be qualified to come up with a helpful, definitive answer.
Except, the deeper into this job I get, the more exasperating I find it. Which is why for years I declined every approach by the team behind a ludicrously successful social media outfit called TopJaw, which has nearly 700,000 followers on Instagram. TopJaw is the work of two extremely amiable, puppyish chaps called Jesse Burgess and Will Warr. Their main schtick: asking celebs and food people to produce quickfire answers to questions about the best of everything, including the best restaurant in London. Their reels get millions of views, which in turn brings commercial opportunities. There’s money to be made from definitive answers.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, people stay in their lanes with their answers. Michel Roux, deeply glazed in French neo-classicism, chose the equally neo-classical Chez Bruce. The multi-Michelin star French chef Anne-Sophie Pic chose the multi-Michelin star Core by Clare Smyth. The extremely wealthy Ed Sheeran chose the £310-a-head sushi restaurant Araki. Fair play to the River Café’s Ruthie Rogers, who chose the River Café and refused to do otherwise when told she couldn’t. A ludicrous question deserves a ludicrous answer.
Because how do we define best? You could use some infuriating aesthetic involving chefs with tweezers, and 19-course tasting menus priced for oligarchs, which is pretty much what the annual World’s 50 Best Restaurants list does. You’d have an answer. You’d also probably have a depressing night out. The best restaurant depends on your mood and the company you’re in; whether the night will end in bed with a lover, or with the world put to rights with a friend. It depends upon how hungry you are, how sad or happy, how tight money is or isn’t. It depends on a lot of things. On the right day the best restaurant in the world for you could be a caff serving hot apple crumble and custard. On another day it really might be Ruthie Rogers’s place and a bowl of white truffle pasta.
Hence for years I thumbed my way through TopJaw reels, rolled my eyes with each stab at the definitive and refused the invitations. Until the lovely PR on my latest book told me, in the loveliest way possible, that I was an idiot, because this was coverage you could not buy. So I went and stood before the camera in a Soho street for a reel that has since had over a million views.
To be fair, if only to me, I started my answer with “It’s a stupid question,” before continuing, “but then I realised the actual answer was Bouchon Racine.” Go on. Shout “sellout” at me. It’s all I deserve. Except standing there, hearing the words come out of my mouth, I realised it wasn’t the worst answer to a stupid question; that I really do love Henry Harris’s take on French bistro classics. Bring on the tete de veau and the cote de boeuf. Bring on the mont blanc. That said, I reserve the right, on a different day, to come up with a completely different answer. Because that’s how life works. Isn’t it?
What would your answer to the question be? Tell us in the comments