No opening paragraph of a restaurant review has ever delivered as much shock and sudden sadness as that with which AA Gill began his Table Talk on 20 November last year. His account of a trip to Whitby, to the Magpie Café, “the best chippy in the world”, was also a heartfelt, clear-eyed farewell. He had cancer, “the full English” of the disease, the fact of which, of course, didn’t for a moment stop him from enjoying the Magpie’s proper “round-vowelled tea” and delighting in the fact that Whitby’s older residents appeared to be dressed as the home guard.
In the fortnight that followed, which ended with news of Gill’s death – news which coincided, ever the pro, with his final showstopping byline in a tribute to the better and worse of his experience with the NHS – it was hard to reconcile the life of his writing with the full stop and pending silence he described. Gill always said that he never wanted to be famous, only to be read. Bill Deedes, the Telegraph legend who wrote his own last column the week before he died at 94, was a hero. “I want to go on doing this for ever,” Gill used to say. That final unforgettable bit of Table Talk, and that last column, at the very least made good on that ambition.
It’s fair to say writers are not, by first instinct, always as generous as they might be to other writers – particularly when a feted rival is not in the room. And newspapers tend to collectivise that curmudgeonliness. The fact of this special award celebrating the life and achievement of Adrian Gill, for 23 years the unabashed star of the Observer’s stubbornly successful competitor, is probably therefore as telling a statement of his lasting gift as anything else.
Lynn Barber, writing in this paper, set that ball rolling 17 years ago, confessing a secret passion for Gill’s writing, the love that, at Observer HQ, sometimes dared not speak its name: “You’d think he would go off, writing the sheer quantity he does,” Barber noted, despairingly. “Two weekly reviews (restaurants and TV) for the Sunday Times, plus longer articles for its magazine and GQ – but it’s been seven years now and still no sign. And he writes novels too …”
The remarkable thing was that in all the Sundays in all the weeks and months and years after that profile Gill not only continued with his apparently effortless output, but added other unlikely hats. He became a compassionate and unflinching chronicler of refugee crises and emergency relief zones (as well as being author of a compulsively unhinged agony column as Esquire’s Uncle Dysfunctional). He developed a voice, when the spirit moved him, as the most human of political commentators, latterly in his indelible dismantling of the spirit that moved Brexit, and that clear-eyed valediction to the humanity and privations of the NHS.
Of all his many writing performances, though, it was as a restaurant reviewer that Gill’s timing was most impeccable. He arrived from Tatler at the Sunday Times in 1993 at the precise moment when restaurant culture and food politics and shouty chefs were the new new thing. He installed himself in this world like a renaissance jester, the cleverest voice in the room, delighting in pricking pretension and speaking truth to po-faced power. His column did for food criticism what Kenneth Tynan’s had once done for theatre reviewing and Clive James’s had done for TV – he made it a spectator sport.
This ability was not born of a trencherman’s appetite, rather of an omnivorous curiosity – and for people as much as food. The special magic of his columns, Barber suggests now, lay in the fact that “Adrian was a brilliant talker as well as a brilliant writer – but I wouldn’t say he was a brilliant luncher. He didn’t drink so he didn’t linger like the great three-bottle lunchers of old. And, actually, he didn’t eat all that much either. Unusually for a restaurant critic, he never seemed greedy – or maybe he was saving himself for dinner. He was quite autocratic about ordering. I once ordered the duck confit at the Wolseley (which I often had and loved) and he said I couldn’t have that because they used the wrong sort of ducks…”
Gill was never shy with an opinion. Jonathan Meades was for a long while his polymathic peer on the Times. In later years, after Meades moved to the south of France, the pair of them would meet in London at Daquise, the silver service Polish restaurant opposite the Natural History Museum. Meades counts the ways in which his friend was tough to compete with.
First: “He could write – knowledge of a subject is important, and he had a notable breadth of knowledge, but the ability to write comes first and he wrote supple, rich, nuanced prose of real originality.” Second: “He was generally unimpressed by bullshit and did not take people at their own estimate. PR bumf went in the bin as it always should.” Third, and most critical of all: “He was funny, often laugh-out-loud funny. He described me in a review of a film I made about the Third Reich’s architecture as ‘wearing Herman Goering’s demob suit’. I remember ringing him to congratulate him one Sunday after he had written an elaborate description of a Thames Valley waiter who, he proposed, could, between kitchen and dining room, pop into the loo, unbutton his flies with one hand and have a pee all the while balancing several plates with the other.” And then, finally, of course: “He gave offence gleefully.”
Rereading the collection of Gill’s Sunday Times writing, Table Talk, now – if you haven’t, stop here and go and buy it now – is to relive that glee, which sometimes ran away with itself, in cackles of metaphor, but always lasered in on some oddity or delight. The book removed the names of the restaurants Gill skewered, partly, I guess, from a sense of common humanity: nowhere ever needed kicking twice. But also, because the writing – those streams of natter about yaks, or Eminem, or vegetarians or the English (or, unforgivably, the Welsh) generally refused to be located in a particular dining room or tethered to a particular meal. The collected columns were prefaced with a series of favourite amuses bouches:
“The frogs’ legs had been boned,” he wrote of one unfortunate tasting menu. “How much sublimated commis loathing must go into boning frogs’ legs? They tasted like something sour and slimy that had been fished out of a heron’s throat.”
Or: “The mushrooms wouldn’t have tasted wild if you’d soaked them in ecstasy and given them guns.”
Or: “I had a jelly that involved Campari and fennel. It was a pretty colour, but tasted exactly as I’ve always imagined suicide capsules would: fatalistically bitter and fraudulently medicinal.”
He brought to his vocation not only experience as a cook and a pot washer and a waiter and a maître d’ , but also, of course, as he detailed unsparingly in his memoir, Pour Me, about 15 years of being a failing artist and suicidally successful alcoholic. One result of this, he believed, was that everything he wrote had “very little to do with grammar” and everything to do with knowing what might matter in life.
Marina O’Loughlin, the Guardian restaurant reviewer who has the honour and terror of taking over Gill’s space in the Sunday Times, speaks of “pretty much hyperventilating” at the prospect of trying to fill the pages “tragically vacated by someone who has been a writing hero of mine since the first moment I opened a menu”. Like everyone, O’Loughlin loved his wicked way with a metaphor, “but more than this,” she suggests, was that “Adrian was utterly fearless, not only in the face of sweary chefs and furious restaurateurs – let alone whole irate countries – but also when confronted by the challenge of eating anything, anywhere.”
O’Loughlin is not alone in never forgetting the impression Gill made “by his tale of drinking fresh-flowing blood from a live bull in the Serengeti … And that he did it all with the air of someone who never got so much as a wrinkle in his bespoke suits.”
As well as that omnivorous curiosity there was his particular way of telling. All great writing, and certainly all great Sunday magazine journalism, aspires to the condition of conversation. It wants to be the best gossipy, confessional, erudite chat. Gill made a triumphant “advantage” of dyslexia, which meant that from the beginning he couldn’t write his column down in any intelligible way, but habitually dictated it, from notes, on the phone. Few writers have ever been more outrageous flirts on the page than Gill was. Perhaps partly because he was dictating to keep the mysterious late-night copytakers entertained, and not just the word-counter satisfied, his voice never seemed to miss a beat. His writing never sounded like writing.
It is partly for that reason, I guess, that when he dropped the news of his cancer so insouciantly into that first line, not just his many friends and colleagues, and the family he so clearly adored, but also everyone who read him, felt they were losing someone close. The irrepressible confidant, whose call you always answer. Martin Ivens, the Sunday Times editor, noted, “He was the heart and soul of the paper … a giant among journalists. He was also our friend.”
That friendship was generously given. Alex Bilmes was a young editor at GQ when he first met Gill – who followed him to Esquire – and recalls that, above all. “We’d have lunch – The Wolseley, mostly, and a few times I was his date for a restaurant review, on which occasions it was difficult not to wince at the terror in the eyes of the front of house staff (one can only speculate at the panic in the kitchen) – and then perhaps we’d wander through Mayfair, maybe stopping so he could buy a stupidly expensive hat for his collection of stupid and expensive hats. But, for the most part, ours was a relationship conducted by phone. We spoke often and at length. And over the years he became more than a colleague. He was a mentor. He advised me, he admonished me, he educated me, and he made me laugh like a naughty schoolboy.”
That laugh, and that heart, still rings true, and survives AA Gill. “Do I ever get bored, blasé, bilious?” he once asked himself of his restaurant habit, before supplying the ready answer. “No,” he said, “hand on heart, I’m always excited about dinner.” In his company, his legion of readers felt exactly the same.
