Fay Maschler on 48 years at the Standard: Sharing my table with this city has been an honour

The doyenne of dining Fay Maschler shares her extraordinary story of five decades at the heart of London’s remarkable restaurant scene
The doyenne of London dining: Fay Maschler, pictured at home
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd
Fay Maschler10 December 2020

It is 1972.  I am 27. My friend Dusty Wesker, wife of Arnold Wesker who is great mate of my then husband Tom, thrusts an Evening Standard at me announcing a competition they are running whereby the prize is to be the paper’s restaurant critic. With one or maybe even both of my two small daughters – the younger only a few months old – in my arms or round my feet I am thinking I probably shouldn’t be considering a job, but grievously I miss working, having been a copywriter at JWT and a journalist on the new, improved Radio Times. And the prize obtains only for three months…what harm can it do? I enter on the closing date.

The competition attracts a huge response. There is a shortlist of three (I am in) and then another round with each of the finalists having to write a second column linking three restaurants with a theme, the style established by Quentin Crewe, the ground-breaking restaurant reviewer who is leaving. I put together Bumbles, Tethers and Simpson’s in the Strand and in the first sentence wonder in print how taramasalata has become English. Apparently at this stage there is protracted argy-bargy about who gets the job until editor Charles Wintour (father of Anna and Patrick) tiring of the discussion says, “Oh f**k it, give it to the woman.” That’s me.

Simon Jenkins, features editor at the time, says he fears I will run out of places to visit. To generalise wildly: in the early Seventies there are at one end gentlemen’s clubs, hotel dining rooms and posh “Continental” behemoths like L’Ecu de France and Le Coq d’Or (later Langan’s Brasserie), and at the other end greasy spoons, curry houses and fairly bogus Italian trattorie, with in between Anglo-French bistros with risible names like Chompers and Grumbles (est.1964 and still going). Eating out is not the all-embracing democratised pastime, the default meal position it mercifully becomes.

I take to checking out hitherto uncharted territory – a Gujarati restaurant in Willesden, a Thai place in Dollis Hill, a Vietnamese south of the river. I am educating myself and making discoveries, one of which is that I will never run out of places to write about. After three months is up I am asked if I would like to do another six months. Lisping a bit because the bit is between my teeth I say, “Yes, I would”. After that the subject is not mentioned again.

A young Fay Maschler
Fay Maschler

Going to restaurants as “work” becomes part of our life. Tom, world-famous for his meanness, can overcome his stated preference for my cooking when restaurant bills are paid on expenses…but does remain loyal to my abilities when entertaining at home the authors he publishes.

In 1987 a handful of restaurants open that presage the change that will build into a powerful wave eventually crashing on the shores of stodgy familiarity sending expectations and assumptions skittering.

Early in that year Marco Pierre White opens Harvey’s in Wandsworth. His high cheekbone rock star looks occupy me for a while but ultimately it is his ability as a cook that astonishes. Keen on hunting and fishing (and poaching) Marco identifies with wild fish and game in a manner that, penetrating their souls, he knows instinctively how best to prepare and present them. It is positively spooky. Eventually he is rewarded with three Michelin stars, which of course he hands back.

Rowley Leigh, who trained with the Roux brothers, opens Kensington Place, the floor to ceiling glass frontage specified by architect Julyan Wickham announcing the egalitarian, brazen, suit-yourself, suck up the loud noise ethos of the enterprise. The invitation is particularly warmly embraced by Evening Standard staff in those far-off, much-missed days of long boozy lunches that need no camouflage of a business meeting. But we might be getting together to discuss the Evening Standard Gourmet Competition, sponsored by Château Mouton Rothschild that is an annual event or reader’s visits to vineyards.

Marco identifies with wild fish and game in a manner that, penetrating their souls, he knows instinctively how best to prepare and present them. It is positively spooky

Something of a hedonistic scholar, Rowley and his friend from Cambridge University Alastair Little in his eponymous pared-back Soho restaurant exemplify a different kind of chef, not so much self-taught as self-defined, a deliberate path taken, not kicking off with a careers master’s disdainful push of  “Well, you could, I suppose, go to catering college”.

Ruth Rogers and her pal Rose Gray convert premises that are part of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners architectural practise first into a works canteen and then The River Café open to the public. Italian restaurateurs are horrified – Alvaro Maccione loves it when I say in a review of his La Famiglia that he was serving Tuscan cooking when those two women were still extra-virgins – but inspiration from Dada, Richard Rogers’ Italian mother, dedication to exemplary ingredients, stylish simplicity and impeccable connections quickly make Hammersmith a desirable pilgrimage. Alan Yentob is there most evenings.

Fay with her second husband, the writer and painter Reg Gadney
Fay Maschler

Simon Hopkinson, once a chorister at St. John’s College School in Cambridge – it is not only spies that flow from that city – becomes chef at Bibendum in the Michelin building in South Kensington bought by a consortium including Terence Conran. Simon’s fastidious, stubborn, deeply felt approach later also flowers in the many evocative, trustworthy books he writes.

Simon’s move from the restaurant Hilaire to Bibendum is thanks to the machinations of Alan Crompton-Batt, the PR often credited with creating the notion of the celebrity chef – Marco Pierre White and Nico Ladenis being the biggest beasts. Resisting at first Alan’s overtures of friendship, I soon cave in, persuaded by his energy, wit, kindness, intuition, mop of blond hair, red Ford Cortina – which he is willing to drive anywhere to eat anything – and his ability to remember every sip and every mouthful of the meals we share, however much we drink. Tom and I are divorced now and Alan becomes a staunch companion, that mythical figure who in the old days of restaurant reviews often plumped for the pâté maison and washed it down with a decent house red.

‘Oh Reg Gadney, he’s so nice’ say friends to me. And he is. We’ve met in January 1992. We marry in December.

I discover a perk of the job is the job. I can meet someone I take a shine to and invite him or her – in those days usually him – to help me by coming out reviewing. It is considerably less “Will you walk into my parlour said the spider to the fly” than would be an invitation to have supper at home.

Eight years after my divorce I go to dinner at the house of Chinese scholar Yan Kit-So and find myself seated at her big round table next to Reg Gadney. We establish a shared delight in restaurants – I’m not sure that he isn’t walking out with the manageress of Clarke’s at the time – and discover mutual acquaintances from The Royal College of Art where he has been prorector. “Oh Reg Gadney, he’s so nice” say these friends to me. And he is. We’ve met in January 1992. We marry in December.

Reg’s enthusiasm for going out after being in all day writing and painting gives me a second wind after 20 years in my job. He effortlessly endears himself to my friends in the restaurant business, not only chefs and restaurateurs but fellow reviewers such as Jonathan Meades, Adrian Gill, John Lanchester and later Marina O’Loughlin and Tracey McLeod. I have happily landed in a world that is much more than meat and potatoes – though roasted they comprise what is probably Reg’s favourite meal. Those “business associates” and others I meet in the line of duty become ever more important after Reg dies in 2018. They are a circle I call on – and lean on.

Fay pictured in 1994

The introduction to the second Evening Standard restaurant guide I write – for 1994 – starts “London has become an exuberant city for eating out. Defying a recession that has floored other businesses, restaurants are booming.” The list of Newcomers is a significantly disparate round up in terms of style – Wagamama is there as well as Quaglino’s – as is also, with nepotism duly acknowledged, my sister’s eponymous restaurant Beth’s in Downshire Hill, Hampstead.

My job seems, to some extent, to shape the lives of others. I meet Peter Langan when, standing in for my friend Caroline Conran, I compile London a la Carte, a collection of menu facsimiles and recipes sold in Habitat. We lunch at Odin’s, his beguiling restaurant in Marylebone, and I sense that he and my sister will hit it off. They do. She helps him open Langan’s Brasserie and then goes to work as chef at Simon Parker Bowles’s Green’s Restaurant & Oyster Bar (now Maison François). Meanwhile my daughter Hannah works as a waitress in school holidays and ends up at the age of 14 more or less briefly running a Soho venue for Antony Worrall-Thompson. Alice opens a primary school in Tamil Nadu and when I visit I am blown away by the food given to the children. Later my son Ben, the youngest of my three children, goes to work for Nick Jones at Soho House and then with Nick Gibson opens The Draper’s Arms in Islington followed by The Compasses Inn in Wiltshire. I hear from Hannah now living in New Zealand that her youngest son George is expressing interest in being a chef. My beloved stepdaughter Amy Gadney Bevan has recently taken over and revived beautifully The Royal Oak pub in the village of Ramsden…  Impinging this way on family is an odd feeling perhaps once shared by coalminers and doctors, but hospitality is a seductive business.

I am blessed to have lived through the amazing unfolding of restaurants in London since the early Seventies

Criticising established restaurant critics is one of the new sports on Twitter. Part of my defence for being old, white and middle-class is to point to some of the individuals I have helped, sometimes changed their lives, by discovering  – usually thanks to readers and friends - and then publicising their endeavours. Two currently flourishing are Otto Tepassé at Otto’s and Asma Khan who is launching her third iteration of Darjeeling Express in Covent Garden. I mourn the closure of Patio in Shepherd’s Bush – pointed out to me by someone working at the BBC TV Centre when it was in White City - where Ewa and Kaz Michalik dispensed incredible generosity in the shape of Polish food, vodka and music. They were delighted when Michael Winner, Matthew Norman, who described the dining room as resembling the living room of an educated friend in 50s Warsaw, and Matthew Fort follow on in praise of the venture.

Times now, as Charles Dickens might observe, are the best and the worst…the epoch of belief, the epoch of incredulity…the season of light, the season of darkness. I am blessed to have lived through the amazing unfolding of restaurants in London since the early Seventies. Why not make it a neat 50 years someone says. Stay tuned. 

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