Grace Dent has long established herself as one of the UK’s funniest restaurant critics, and first penned her weekly ES Magazine Grace and Flavour column in 2011. She wrote for the Standard till 2017, her sharp tongue as loved by readers as it was feared by chefs.
Today, it’s been announced that Dent is to replace Gregg Wallace — whose middle name is Allan — as a judge on MasterChef. Wallace stepped down from the role after facing accusations of impropriety on set.
What better way to celebrate her new appointment than to remember her funniest and fiercest reviews? Here are some which will go down in Grace and Flavour history.
On Roofnic: ‘I would rather fall off this roof to my death than go here again’
“At the scrag end of Oxford Street there is a small, dirty, pigeon poo-splattered doorway that looks like it might lead into a forgotten recruitment agency, or somewhere a photographer might ask you to take your top off at the start of your career. Inside this doorway was a man slumped on a chair. I couldn’t decide if he was homeless or a doorman.
“‘Yes, Roofnic,’ he said and pointed to a stairwell, similar to one in a 1980s NCP car park that you might be chased through by a young offender. It was six flights up to the garden. During the ascent, presumably one is supposed to notice the graffiti left by Roofnic party-goers telling of the crazy night they spent here. In fact, one will notice how dirty everything is. Filthy. Great clouds of dust and muck and old fags litter the stairwell.”
On Gilly’s Fry Bar: ‘Having skirted dangerously close to valid nutrition, we shared a side of fat chips with gloopy curry sauce’
‘Jesus loves you!’ she shouted. ‘Go home to your husband and children and read your Bible!’ To which I wanted to reply, ‘It’s 7pm on a Tuesday and I’m in Finsbury Park en route to a chips and curry sauce restaurant to meet a waspish gay and scroll through topless photos of Frank Ocean. Sweetie, do I look like I have a husband or children?’ However, this seemed churlish. And also ungrateful for my lot. Because I very, very much like chips and curry sauce. And battered fish and sausages or, if I’m honest, almost all beige-coloured, carb-heavy comfort food. Anything you can log sheepishly into MyFitnessPal and have a judgy microchip suggest you sprint 11 miles. So Gilly’s Fry Bar — and did I mention they do a Salt & Vinegar Martini? — is my sort of venue.
On Flavour B******: ‘I keep a photo of one dish on my phone as an appetite suppressant’
“Personally, I never want to go back as there are approximately 198 other restaurants that don’t dispatch myriad eensy-weensy bowls of confusing, underwhelming nonsense ‘for sharing’. ‘Flavour B******’ will be eye-rolling shorthand for you and the fact you’ve always thought you were ‘it’.”
On Barbecoa: ‘Jamie, I adore you, but you wouldn’t eat this food’
“Restaurant folk use the term ‘in the s***’ for bad service, but this fails to nail the subtle genres of gone-wrong hospitality. I eat out so often I should herald in my own Dent stool chart of service-breakdown. Barbecoa wasn’t Platoon (everyone running about screaming, some bloodshed). It wasn’t Fawlty Towers (amusing chaos; light inter-staff violence). It wasn’t ’Allo ’Allo! (terrible but local, and the manager’s distracted by shagging the waitress). This was Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World: we’re invisible; the advertised restaurant a mirage.”