‘It’s the best job! But it will kill you’: four restaurant critics on the battle to stay healthy

After 12 years as the New York Times’ restaurant critic, Pete Wells announced last week that he was leaving the role due to ill health – largely a side-effect of dining out decadently on a regular basis. “My cholesterol, blood sugar and hypertension were worse than I’d expected even in my doomiest moments,” he wrote after a medical checkup. “The terms pre-diabetes, fatty liver disease and metabolic syndrome were thrown around.” He had become obese, he says, and knew something needed to change.

With this in mind, we asked four leading restaurant critics how they mitigate the health risks posed by working in what is often deemed “the best job in the world”.

Grace Dent, restaurant critic for the Guardian

In a bid to stay alive in the face of much pommes dauphinoise and clotted cream, I battle every day. It’s me v crème caramel; me v limitless opportunity. Me v my sleepy, ageing, lady metabolism.

It is the best job in the world. I can’t complain. But the thing is, it will kill you. We all know it – the food writer crowd, that is – even if we don’t discuss it, as it’s a little taboo. But I have seen my colleagues get bigger and, increasingly, sicker. Eventually, they can’t do the job as they’re not well enough to walk from the car park to the dining table, or from a regional railway station up a very small incline. Then they die and everyone mutters, “How sad, such a nice bloke,” while flinging CVs at their editor.

My weight is never steady. I’ve been much bigger and smaller. Nowadays, to stay at a UK size 10, at 6am every morning an app on my phone called HappyScale tells me: “TIME FOR YOUR WEIGH IN”. I comply, standing on electronic scales, while shouting expletives. There is nothing Happy about this experience.

Take last Saturday, when I ate a Middle Eastern meze breakfast (date loaf, shakshuka), a Somali feast at lunch (with pasta and rice) and Uzbekistan dumplings for dinner, then arrived home to a gift box of bespoke bakewell tart brownies. That’s 4,000 calories in under 12 hours. So I walk a minimum of six miles a day, I lift weights and I am now three years teetotal because, previously, every time I went to a restaurant, the maître d’ would send me a free martini.

My biggest tip is learn how to say no to – or at least regift – little presents pushed in your hands by strangers, and to extra courses at dinner, and to free hampers left on your doorstep. I use the Olio app to redistribute extra goodies after I’ve tasted a fraction.

These days, I only review with regular dinner dates who have massive appetites. Thank you Charles, Hugh and Tom – all men whom I require no social battery to dine with, who will let me try a taste of 11 dishes, then polish off what’s left. They are the reason I still have both feet.

And, after a day or two of feasting, there is the compulsory fast. On down days, I roam the house like a giant guinea pig, surviving on water, oats and seeds, trying to claw back calories – but sometimes still snacking on cooking chocolate while standing at the cupboard. It’s still the greatest job in the entire world. I plan to carry on for ever – and inevitably die trying.

Chitra Ramaswamy, restaurant critic for the Times (Scotland edition)

I had been in the role four gloriously gluttonous years when it happened. The tummy ache to end all tummy aches, so extra it ran all the way from front to lower back. Acute diverticulitis, the consultant explained after looking at my CT scan. Apparently I’d been living my entire life with a bunch of tiny pouches hanging off my colon, and, 45 years in, something had finally got stuck in one. The pouch became infected, swollen, then burst, flooding my body with terrifying amounts of infection. In a bed on the colorectal ward where I would spend the next five nights, the first question I asked was whether I’d have to give up my job. “I’m a restaurant critic,” I whispered, with a soupçon of shame. “I know,” the consultant replied brightly. “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.” I was advised to take a fortnight or so off. Be more careful when I returned: eat more fibre, avoid poorly digestible foods, consume less alcohol, red meat and coffee. Basically, do the things many of us in anxious middle age are trying and failing to do.

The fortnight leading up to this episode had been … excessive. In Edinburgh, I had reviewed not one but two tasting menus: 30 courses in two meals. There was lamb doused in a melted tallow candle made with the rendered-down fat from the saddle. Gougères pocked with mutton cured in juniper. Dry-aged turbot and caviar, chawanmushi (savoury egg custard) and laminated brioche studded with caper berries and … I’ll stop. There are many cardinal rules of restaurant reviewing and one is: don’t bang on about all the delicious things you get to eat. Another is: don’t describe red meat as “melt-in-the-mouth” because the ghost of AA Gill will come for you. And the biggest one of all? Never, ever moan about the hardships of being a restaurant critic because you’ll be exposed for the massively privileged, greedy arse that you are. Oh dear.

The good news? I’m a female greedy arse. (Not only that, but the esteemed Jonathan Nunn, founding editor of Vittles magazine, tells me I’m the first restaurant critic of colour for a UK national newspaper in history. Chew on that, diverticulitis!) Anecdotally, or at least according to stereotype, my sex means I won’t get obese, get a fatty liver, become an alcoholic or die young due to being a restaurant critic. I’ll just get thinner, sassier, wear better specs and develop ever more withering ways to take down terrible service. This is welcome.

Look, I love my job. If, like me, you’re buoyed up by the fact that there are (at least!) three opportunities for happiness every single day – at breakfast, lunch and dinner – then it really is the best job in the world. That doesn’t mean I want it to kill me.

So what do I do? I offset my once-a-week excess – and it isn’t always excess; we do sometimes review poke bowls – by eating a simple, high fibre, mainly vegetarian diet at home. I often review at lunchtime, ostensibly because I have young kids, but it also means I drink no (or at least less) alcohol. I walk everywhere. I no longer clear the plates when reviewing. And I make sure I never review when ravenous, which is hard because, like all foodies, I’m hungry whenever I’m not eating. Boiled down to the deepest jus, my restaurant critic’s maxim appears to be the same as my golden rule of mothering: take a banana.

Fay Maschler, restaurant critic for Tatler

I started reviewing restaurants for London’s Evening Standard in 1972 after winning a competition to replace Quentin Crewe, a witty and wise gamechanger in that role. The “prize” was a three-month contract. I left 48 years later. Now, I review restaurants for Tatler. It is good to keep skin in the game, which remains such an intriguing one, especially as restaurants continue to diversify, proliferate, pontificate, baffle, horrify, astonish and impress.

Recently, it was suggested by my gastroenterologist that I have an ultrasound of my stomach. Making desultory conversation, as you do when someone is gliding a sensor over your tummy slicked with gel, I said to the doctor doing it, “I seem to have lost my appetite recently.” Rather too crisply she replied, “Well, maybe you have had enough to eat.” Maybe I have, but we must all eat something pretty much every day in order to stay alive – a fact that encourages everyone to think they could or should be a restaurant reviewer.

Appetite does tend to dwindle as you get older – I am 79 – and I try to ensure that what I eat is reasonably nutritious. Many restaurants these days are helpful in this endeavour as they become more conscious of healthy eating and careful sourcing. At home, I am consoled by toast – toast with almost anything on it, but did you realise how much vitamin B there is in Marmite? In terms of snacks, raw nuts (walnuts especially) and medjool dates fill the cracks. Fortunately, I don’t have a sweet tooth – except for the sugars in wine – and in a restaurant I will usually ask my companion to order dessert and just nibble a bit.

Something I have embraced over recent years is fasting. This is undeniably no longer the province of hermits or cranks – anyone who skipped breakfast now tells you they are doing intermittent fasting – but, as the late, lamented Dr Michael Mosley pointed out, is a viable, realisable way of keeping weight in check.

At a wellness clinic I visited in Spain some time ago, the chief doctor/guru said, rather mournfully, “You seem to have a strong constitution.” I think I am fortunate in this being true. My attempts at exercise are lamentable, especially recently since I fractured a vertebra falling on stairs in a restaurant – and I wasn’t even pissed. That has been a setback. My dear pal and fellow restaurant critic Marina O’Loughlin, late of this parish, said, “Just say you are careful about carbs and so live on martinis and reblochon.” It is not far from the truth.

Leonie Cooper, food and drink editor for Time Out London

I’ve been a full-time restaurant critic for just under two years, which makes me small fry in the grand scheme of eating for a living. Still, in my first 12 months, I dined out almost every single night and my first major project was an overhaul of Time Out’s annual list of the 50 best restaurants in London. For this, there was a stint of eating out twice a day, lunch and dinner, and not one meal was at a salad bar. This was rich, creamy and salt-addled cuisine and, because it would be rude not to, mostly washed down with wine.

It was thrilling to explore the city I love by literally gobbling it up. Then, at the beginning of this year, I noticed my jeans were tighter, my tummy rounder. I didn’t feel sluggish or spent, but a year of high-intensity eating had definitely had an effect on my body.

Running seemed to be the easiest route to something resembling health. I tried to do it at least four times a week, jogging around my local graveyard in a vain attempt to make myself more aware of my mortality. I don’t think I ever enjoyed a run and actively hated many. Still, I persisted.

However, a couple of weeks ago while jogging, I slipped and landed on my cheekbone and hip, resulting in a black eye and bum bruise similar in shape and size to Halley’s Comet. It was the perfect excuse to never run again. Handily, I had just taken up reformer pilates, enticed by the promise of a workout you can do lying down, and three sessions a week is my current fast-track route to fitness.

In another attempt to defuse the incendiary device I have placed inside my arteries, I have started trying not to eat everything on the plate. This is hard because 1) It’s likely delicious or, at the very least, expensive and 2) I feel deeply for a chef who sees a critic leaving a half-eaten mound of food. I don’t hate it – I’m just trying not to die!

Despite all of this, I’m doing far better health-wise than I was a decade ago when working full-time as a music journalist at NME. Five gigs a week with dinner replaced by pints, and, if I was being kind to myself, cheesy chips at 11.30pm seems a much more damaging lifestyle. Now, drinking on an empty stomach is nigh-on impossible, and I’m convinced that a glass of pét-nat (sparkling wine) is better for you than a tray full of Guinness. I may have higher cholesterol these days (though I am too scared to actually check), but I certainly have fewer hangovers.