"I’m not a mad, crazy foodie. But I have strong opinions and I know a lot about food,” Giles Coren tells me as we sit at his kitchen table to talk about Truth, Love & Clean Cutlery, a new guide to ethical restaurants. “The publishers wanted me because they thought I was an outspoken, fun figure who’s not wearing a hair shirt…I’m not a vegan whoopsie.”
He certainly isn’t. A prolific food writer and critic as well as a TV presenter, Coren is known for being opinionated and occasionally causing a furore on social media. One of his earlier books is called Anger Management for Beginners.
By contrast, this book, on which he has an editor credit, bills itself as ‘A guide to the truly good restaurants and food experiences of the United Kingdom’. Good here is used in every sense of the word — so the selected restaurants promise to serve you not just delicious food but also a substantial side-order of ethics: organic produce, responsible sourcing, and care for the environment in their handling of energy, waste, and water.
In his introduction, Coren describes going to a restaurant in 2004 and asking “Do you know where the salmon comes from?” The waiter toddles off to ask the chef and comes back with the memorable response: “The chef says, ‘Who gives a f***?’”
Coren pinpoints this as the defining moment that made him decide that being a restaurant critic wasn’t just about rating the quality of the cooking —“It was to hold these places to account for the way they treat not just their customers, but their meat and fish and the animals who provide them, their fruit and vegetables and the soil and water that grows them, the staff who work for them, and the community in which they ply their trade.” After this, having given that particular restaurant a first-ever zero out of ten, he started scoring places for their meat and fish provenance as well as for food, service, and atmosphere. “By that stage, at home I was always buying free-range, organic chicken — then you go out and have a chicken korma with any old chicken…and you think, What is this? Why am I not holding them to the same high standards I have at home?”
“Where I haven’t been, it’s more report-based…I had the fascinating experience of writing reviews of places and thinking, mmm, that sounds delicious, I must go! I subsequently went to restaurants on the basis of my own reviews….”
He draws an interesting parallel between Jewish attitudes to food and those of the food critic.
“For me, this [ethical] approach is a new kind of kosher. The whole thing is talking about meals —What does this mean? What does that food mean? Why are we eating this? That’s just like being a restaurant critic. It’s a very forensic attitude to food. And Passover is the absolute meal of restaurant criticism. Why tonight do we choose to eat this? The Jews are the food race. Because food is so central.
“This guide is like Leviticus. It’s this big book where I’m telling you all the rules that really matter. It’s not just the produce, it’s about how you treat your staff, everything…”
He doesn’t belong to a synagogue and we discuss the idea that what really matters is which deli you shop at. His own affiliation is Panzer’s (in London’s St Johns Wood), where he regularly loads up with smoked salmon, bagels, and pickled new greens for when they have friends over for brunch.
“Gentile smoked salmon is all…muscular and smells of smoke. It’s not very fatty. They don’t understand — smoked salmon should be almost spreadable! So you give them the real stuff and they can’t believe how delicious it is.’
We agree that bagels must be warmed in the oven, not toasted, so that they stay soft in the middle. Also, that you absolutely cannot eat ham on a bagel (like Coren, I’m not kosher, but I fear that the fabric of the universe would unravel if I went too far against the natural order of things).
“I remember going to Arsenal and they had ham bagels. You couldn’t have that at Spurs…”
His favourite Jewish dish is cholent: “I love it. I could eat it cold. I could eat it all day, every day…My grandmother’s cholent was a big deal to me and so was her chicken soup with kneidlach — which you can’t get of any good quality in a restaurant.”
His mother’s family hailed from Slovakia and her cooking was broadly eastern European. His favourite was a dish of stuffed pimentos that he thinks was “sort of Hungarian.
“My mother would do these 1970s shortcuts — so she’d stuff the peppers with meat and rice, but then cook them in Libby’s tomato juice.”
Just before I interviewed Coren, I read a review of his in The Times of a branch of The Ivy Cafe in St John’s Wood. He wrote of fellow food writers referring to it nudgingly as “The Oy Veh Café”. Of course, as he’s highly entertaining, he turns this rather depressing piece of thinly veiled antisemitism into a very funny spiel, culminating in the great line: “Really, we should just stay home drinking soup and kvetching, shouldn’t we?”
Growing up in Cricklewood, north London, Coren’s family didn’t keep kosher but his mother’s family were “so frum, they were one of those Orthodox families that people could go and live with if they were converting.”
He believes this was partly what made his father, Alan Coren (writer and editor of Punch) become “…sort of not Jewish. My dad never admitted he was Jewish in public. He probably never even used the word “Jew’ in 50 years of writing.
“He would occasionally talk about his grandfather’s ‘Polish accent’ — but it was really a very strong Yiddish accent.”
Coren has clearly relaxed into his Jewishness more as he’s got older. “I always feel quite Jewish but I used to deny it until I was in my twenties.
“At school (Westminster), I pretended not to be. You got done with the whole ‘stingy yiddo’ thing. It was the 1980s. There was quite a lot of mild antisemitism, some less mild, and I saw it and didn’t like it — so I pretended not to be Jewish really.
“At Oxford, it was still uncool. At a bar, you’d say, ‘I just got a round in’ but if you didn’t get another one in almost immediately, it’d be ‘Oh, yiddo…’ No-one likes Jews really. It was just better to not be one…”
Nowadays, he’s not afraid to stand up and be counted, something that has given him a reputation for occasional vituperative outbursts.
“I’ve been banned twice by Twitter — but for responding to goading. I could ignore it. Rise above it! That didn’t work so well for us in the past…” His voice drops. “Twitter wanted me to take my response (to an antisemitic tweet) down. Why don’t they go after the antisemite? You’re coming after the Jew when you could have gone after the Nazi!”
As our time is running out, he starts making a snack to take his kids (Kitty, 7, and Sam, 5) when he picks them up from school – “one jam, one ham”— he says, cutting off the crusts and eating them.
He and his wife Esther eat out two or three times a week but are rather abstemious the rest of the time. “At home, we have fish and greens, fish and greens — maybe salmon steak with curried lentils. No poncy cooking goes on, we don’t have dinner parties, we don’t entertain.”
And he’scareful about his weight: “I skip meals quite often. Like today, I’ll play fives at Highgate (school) but I won’t eat. I’ll just have a mouthful of the kids’ tea or eat their cut-off crusts. Tomorrow I’ll have lost four pounds from whatever I was this morning. So I can eat anything at the weekend. They don’t want fat people on the telly.”
‘Truth, Love & Clean Cutlery’ is published by Blackwell & Ruth in association with Thames & Hudson, £19.99).
