The Power of Nunn

How this British-Indian writer and critic is upending the clubby world of food reviewing in London.

- VIVEK MENEZES

THE VERY FIRST time Jonathan Nunn came to my attention was in February 2019, in the James Beard Award-winning online magazine Taste Cooking, under a headline guaranteed to catch my eye: “Sorpotel Runs in the Blood of Every Goan”. Here was bold, swashbuckling prose that was both entertaining and soulful, and I immediately recognized it was the best thing ever written about the deeply emblematic Goan dish born from 16th-century links to Africa and Brazil, which the young British Indian writer (he was not yet 30) accurately described as “nose to tail long before Fergus Henderson got to it”, and summarized with this lovely insight: “To this day I have never tasted a home-cooked sorpotel made by a man’s hand. It is a dish built on the blood and toil of women.”

I quickly followed Nunn’s biographical note to Eater London, the wonderful—but now sadly defunct—culinary city guide from Vox Media, where he had debuted just a few months earlier, and also reached out to connect with him via Twitter (now X) where @demarionunn was a constant, cheeky and irreverent thorn in the side of the mainstream UK culinary media. His free-flowing online commentary was consistently hilarious, but also hit hard in significant ways, as when he pointed out “more pasta restaurants were reviewed in the UK this year than Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Japanese, East and West African and Caribbean restaurants combined”.

This was Nunn’s first significantly influential breakthrough, as he described to