Now a wing of Waitrose, the Good Food Guide seems inevitably to have lost some of the character it possessed 65 years ago when it was edited single-handedly by its founder, Raymond Postgate, and thereafter by his successor, Christopher Driver of The Guardian.
Today, though printed on much better paper, it looks too like a the product of a committee, comprehensive but impersonal. In the old days, it is true, Postgate and Driver relied on the suggestions of readers for the restaurants it reviewed, but you felt that it was always finally dependent on one man’s opinion of each place.
Each entry was a small enthralling essay, so that if you wished, you could read the book from cover to cover, as I did, as if it were a single fascinating narrative. That special idiosyncratic flavour has long since gone - the decline began when Driver was deposed - and sadly it continues today.
Yet the 2016 edition, out this week at £17.50, is a handsome enough book. It is just not interesting enough to read rather than consult. Times, of course, have changed. The old pioneering spirit, when every mentioned restaurant seemed like a discovery, belongs to the past. All the expected places are in the latest guide and the taste of the 1950s and 1960s, not such a bad time for eating out as it is made out to be, so long as you picked your destination carefully, has certainly vanished.
But what you have to pay in many places nowadays is too often shocking and there is little sense of discovery. So I am disinclined to name the Edinburgh restaurants which are listed in the latest issue or to enumerate which cities outside London win the most entries, which used to be a little game I played with myself whenever I used to review it.
It’s not just a sense of deja vu that prompts this response. It is a sense of boredom and of preferring other ways to spend my money. Also that many of my own personal favourites do not win a mention, which seems more a matter of bad luck than anything else.
31 August 2015
Today, though printed on much better paper, it looks too like a the product of a committee, comprehensive but impersonal. In the old days, it is true, Postgate and Driver relied on the suggestions of readers for the restaurants it reviewed, but you felt that it was always finally dependent on one man’s opinion of each place.
Each entry was a small enthralling essay, so that if you wished, you could read the book from cover to cover, as I did, as if it were a single fascinating narrative. That special idiosyncratic flavour has long since gone - the decline began when Driver was deposed - and sadly it continues today.
Yet the 2016 edition, out this week at £17.50, is a handsome enough book. It is just not interesting enough to read rather than consult. Times, of course, have changed. The old pioneering spirit, when every mentioned restaurant seemed like a discovery, belongs to the past. All the expected places are in the latest guide and the taste of the 1950s and 1960s, not such a bad time for eating out as it is made out to be, so long as you picked your destination carefully, has certainly vanished.
But what you have to pay in many places nowadays is too often shocking and there is little sense of discovery. So I am disinclined to name the Edinburgh restaurants which are listed in the latest issue or to enumerate which cities outside London win the most entries, which used to be a little game I played with myself whenever I used to review it.
It’s not just a sense of deja vu that prompts this response. It is a sense of boredom and of preferring other ways to spend my money. Also that many of my own personal favourites do not win a mention, which seems more a matter of bad luck than anything else.
31 August 2015
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