Taking a seat at the table: Sit down with our new critic

The Standard's new restaurant reviewer, David Ellis, shares the meals that shaped him, and what the next course holds

- 

OCCASIONALLY I am asked “what’s next?” by friends. At times it is well-meaning, at others withering. “ What about another paper?” they ask. “Or something more serious? Surely you can’t eke out another 400 words on martinis?”

And well, look — this paper may have driven me mad over the years, but I’ve become enormously fond of it. I like its history. I like that Quentin Crewe — at one point our helicopter correspondent (journalism: never what it used to be) — is credited with inventing the modern restaurant review, preferring style and social commentary over perceptively identifying chicken from beef. I like that Fay Maschler, here for 48 years, refined the style, while with her zero and fleeting five stars shaped this city’s openings and closings. I like that she was joined in the Nineties by Charles Campion, padding the outskirts of town for lesser-known cooking and championing unsung finds — a tradition that Jimi Famurewa avidly adopted with detail and insight. Delia Smith wrote for us for more than a decade. The Evening Standard, in one way or another, has changed how London eats.

It is, then, both humbling and gratifying to now be taking on the weekly restaurant review. Reports of its death are greatly exaggerated. I’ve done a number of these columns over the years — covering while Fay holidayed, and then when Jimi did — but keeping it up week-in, week-out as critic proper feels like something different. Perhaps not to you, but certainly to me.