Stop all the clocks ... The Good Food Guide has ceased publication. Waitrose, which bought the Guide from Which? in 2013, has decided ‘to focus on our other publications, Waitrose Food and Waitrose Weekend’.
The truth is that, in common with Michelin and Time Out, they were giving all their hard-earned information away free on their website – and still are.
Most people Google ‘restaurants near me’ and choose the one with the highest score out of five. That army of volunteer inspectors must now stand down.
I was brought up with the Guides; at home there used to be an entire bookshelf of them in chronological order. The font of the title anxiously evolved from the conservative fifties, through the hip sixties and the Day-Glo seventies, only to retreat in the conservative eighties.
My mother, always in pursuit of a bargain, used them to track down which restaurants would offer children half- portions at half-price – a brilliant concept, introducing children to adult food, which has been replaced by the infantilising tyranny of the kiddies’ menu and sweetened chicken nuggets.
The brainchild of Raymond Postgate (1896-1971), the first Guide appeared in 1951. Not minding about food was our national condition and so we got the food we deserved. Restaurateurs had become complacent, certain in the knowledge that two wars had taught us not to complain.
Derek Cooper, author of The Bad Food Guide, believed this was a result of British reserve: ‘An Englishman would rather submit to voluntary euthanasia than expose himself to the possibility of Raised Voices in Public.’
In Postgate, we got the gastronomic champion we deserved, a militant campaigner rather than a worldly gastronome – Egon Ronay, the Hungarian restaurateur, was to take up that position from 1959 with his
Guide to British Eateries. Although he dubbed himself ‘the self-elected Chairman of British Gastronomy’, Postgate’s gastronomic credentials lay firmly in the English tradition. He dreamed not of the Provençal dishes beloved by Elizabeth David, but of ‘lobsters in whisky, roast cygnet, salmon in cider and ormers’.
His reputation as a connoisseur was due to wine expertise and, even then, his The Plain Man’s Guide to Wine was for the no-nonsense man on the street. He was the absolute opposite of the French elitist André Simon, who called him ‘a good judge of cheap wine’.
Postgate had always been the outsider. A conscientious objector in the First World War, he was on the far left of the Labour party in the twenties and thirties. A classics scholar, he wrote effusively about John Wilkes, but a high-profile campaign had until then eluded him.
In 1949, Stephen Potter, author of the Gamesmanship books, commissioned him to write an article on British catering for his Leader Magazine. Postgate suggested a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Food to expose the rank offerings of English eateries. He wouldn’t accept this was down to rationing – then at its peak – given that our island of game is surrounded by fish and seafood.
He wanted to encourage us Britons to learn to fight against established practices, and food was his battleground. And so he formed an army, unsusceptible to bribes, which would root out the profiteers. By 1966, he had 13,000 members submitting reports, and was selling more than 100,000 copies a year.
Every Good Food Guide’s introduction exhorted readers to complain about poor food and poor service, and to check the bill assiduously (‘If you can’t add, do at least scowl at it and look as if you are adding it up’).
He all but treated the trade as the enemy – eager to rip off its customers and willing to sue for libel if the truth was exposed. The last mention of libel threats against the Guides was as late as 1979, and the two camps weren’t to work together until 1982, when Albert Roux was invited to put the view of ‘the other side’.
Despite his self-congratulatory claims of having revived the restaurant trade, if anything Postgate succeeded in entrenching the mutual suspicion and animosity between staff and customer. In 1963, a hotelkeeper forced his guests to finish their dinner by 7.45pm because he wanted to watch something on telly.
The Guides are a brilliant record of our attitudes to food. Well into the 1960s, portion size was deemed paramount. Members rejoiced when ‘helpings were generous’ or there was ‘more than I could eat’. The chief inspector of the Guides complained in 1966, ‘A vast mass of our population, as far as I can make out, eat nothing but chips with absolutely everything.’
There were flourishes of self- congratulation. The 1968 Good Food Guide to London boasted, ‘No other city in the world, not even New York or Paris, today has such a variety of restaurants as London. Inside every English Puritan, there has always been a hedonist struggling to get out, and in the past decade he has got out.’
Yet, in his 1970 Guide, Postgate complained, ‘There is still a decayed Puritan atmosphere in parts of Britain.’
The 1990 Guide was full of woe: ‘There is an apparent lack of a restaurant culture in large parts of Britain.’
And yet would London now be the capital of European gastronomy without that army of watchdogs?
