I alway use another name to book a table – often the name of the person I’m eating with, or a similar name to mine, like Miller. But I once made an effort with a disguise too. To go incognito to Harvey’s, Marco Pierre White’s restaurant, I bought a wig and thought I looked like [50s singer] Alma Cogan. But Marco came into the dining room and said: “Oh, hello Fay – you’ve cut your hair. So have I.” That was very Marco – always bringing things back to himself.

When I got my job in 1972 [at the London Evening Standard where she worked until 2020], by writing “English As She Is Eaten” in a competition, I had a two-year-old child and a baby. We ate together at home and I think they picked up the rudiments of behaviour that way. Then they’d eat out with us and they loved and love restaurants probably as a result – Chinese restaurants in particular. I found their reactions interesting. In a posh place they’d behave more. They picked up on the vibes.

Because I was a female criticising or evaluating them, a lot of male chefs early on found it hard to take my reviews; they couldn’t bear it, really. I had unpleasant letters and death threats. I once took a letter from a waiter – who said he was going to come and knife me – along to Hampstead police station and a policeman studied it for a long time and then said: “I think this constitutes a threat.” I imagine the waiter lost his job. The police did nothing really but that was the end of the death threat. But I don’t think that would happen these days. There became more of an acceptance that restaurants and restaurant critics can co-exist and help each other.

I’ve never hidden food on a plate. Egon Ronay might have done, but he was a skinny little thing. I might have shoved food onto other people’s plates, but never into my handbag. Going to New York, where I felt galvanised – I think it was something to do with the city being built on rock rather than mud – I ate two lunches and three dinners, but I didn’t eat more year-round. Becoming a restaurant critic enabled me to increase my knowledge but I don’t think I ate more in quantity. In fact I think it’s much easier to leave food in the restaurant than somebody’s house – where you’re trying to be polite. Or even in your own home, where you can later heat it up again.

I was born in India but my parents moved us to Surrey in 1947 – when I was about 18 months old. My older brother died back in India and I don’t think my mother could bear to lose another. I don’t have precise memories but my mother, who’d actually loved India, never stopped talking about it. There are lots of conversations and narratives which seem like my own memories but of course they’re not. Yet when I travelled back to India as an adult I felt totally at home. When you’re a baby I think you really pick up on smells, sound, colours…

I was a particularly pernickety, difficult eater, so my mother told me. I only liked peas and blackcurrants. She would have to balance a pea or a blackcurrant on whatever food she was presenting to me, so the story goes. I’m still very fond of eating them. Very.

It was a much skinnier period then. And also my father was advised to become vegetarian – as a health thing – and so my mum, my sister and I all had to. That was a weird time. That was probably 1955 and to be vegetarian in Surrey was no fun at all. You couldn’t buy an aubergine or lentils or anything. You were lucky to find a wild mushroom in East Horsley.

In the summer of 1957 we moved to Connecticut, where my mother was liberated by convenience food. It was at the start of long school summer holidays in America, so I had no one to play with – my sister stayed behind in Surrey – so I started cooking, to occupy myself while my mother napped. I liked the reversal of roles, the power shift of deciding the food, and that’s stayed with me. I’ve always liked being bossy. And then I found cooking very good for seduction. I made a vinaigrette and salad for one man when I was 18 or 19 and he was astonished. Another was amazed when I did a chicken and white wine sauce for him and I ended up living with him.

Publisher Tom Maschler, my first husband, had a mother who was a very good cook and I realised very quickly from her the sort of robust food he loved. That’s how I got him to marry me. It was very purposeful. You know the Dylan lyric, “Can you cook and sew, make flowers grow? Do you understand my pain?” That was my answer for him and it worked. Later, when I met Reg Gadney, my second husband, he said, “I can’t eat garlic”, and I replied: “Well, that’s it then. It’s over.” But Reg began to eat garlic and we bonded over restaurants.

I don’t mind saying, because my husbands are sadly both dead now, that I most enjoyed dining with Reg. He did all his work during the day – writing thrillers and painting – but by evening was ready to let rip. And he was terribly good at laying a table and entertaining people.

Because I never worked at a desk at the Evening Standard, I never really had the office experience, but I think I went through 12 editors. The first was Charles Wintour, who everyone would probably agree was a really superb editor. Some stand out like Charles – John Leese was very good; Stewart Steven had a passion for London and the arts which was very good for me and appropriate. There was a managing editor called Bert Hardy who I became good friends with and who was very keen on restaurant guides, on doing more with the job, like tours of vineyards.

I witnessed the unfolding of restaurants since the early 70s, but the mid-80s was when things really began to game-change and improve – with Rowley Leigh’s Kensington Place, Harvey’s and the River Café.

My sister Beth opened a restaurant in Downshire Hill in Hampstead and now owns The Wells Tavern in Well Walk. She’d had a long relationship with Peter Langan and together they opened Langan’s Brasserie back in 1976. We went to the auction of artworks that had been displayed there – often bought by Peter with the advice of Brian Sewell, or given by artists and then “eaten down” – and it was all terribly sad. My sister and I are very close and cook together. We’re interested in the same things and same people and she moved in with me in Fitzroy Square for the lockdown. That’s jolly nice.

Last night we cooked a Nigel Slater recipe because it looked healthy – and was healthy – based on cavolo nero with quite a lot of spices. For lunch I ate rye sourdough with cranberries from Fabrique and tonight there’s a delivery from Quality Chop House and we’re doing an Italian thing called arrosto, which is a roast chicken.

Fay Maschler is Tatler’s restaurant critic

My favourite things

Food
Wild strawberries

Drink
Ouzo (to soften the edges of life)

Restaurant
Riva in Barnes where Andrea Riva chooses the menu

Dish to make
Omelettes