Joanna Blythman

Joanna Blythman is Britain's leading investigative food journalist and commentator on food issues.

Here she reveals the inside track on how she reviews a restaurant.

The other day I calculated that I had been reviewing restaurants for almost 18 years, something that I still consider to be a privilege. After all, who wouldn't want to eat their way around the country at someone else's expense? Sometimes having trekked to some promising-sounding bistro in the back-of beyond on a bleak, windswept winter's night, only to eat poorly cooked, badly thought out, low-grade food, you will hear me complain, on occasion, loudly. But looking on the bright side, bad experiences like these provide me with a limp rebuttal to the unarguable observation that being a restaurant critic isn't the hardest way to make a living. I still grumble, but weakly, because I realise that I am lucky.

For someone like me who was always fascinated by food, restaurant reviewing is a dream job. For as long as I can remember, everything to do with cooking and kitchens has exerted a magnetic draw. I am the sort of person – and there are quite a few of us – who pours over recipe books in bed, and who finds foreign markets more seductive than a tour of the medieval cathedral. When visiting Galleries Lafayette in Paris, I'll head for the kitchenware, not the shoes or clothing. In Venice, the Rialto market is as essential a stop as the Doge's Palace. I have always cooked from scratch more or less every day of the week.

I got into restaurant reviewing by a circuitous route. I managed to move myself into a food-based job that brought me into contact with Scottish chefs like Andrew Fairlie and Andrew Radford who went on to be stars in the gastronomic firmament. Having more of an insight into how restaurants worked behind the scenes, I took to poring over restaurant reviews with even keener interest, and was nearly always disappointed. In the Eighties and Nineties there was one brilliantly incisive restaurant critic – the Times's Jonathan Meades. But he was in a league of his own. The others trailed well behind.

Like most people who work hard to pay the mortgage, I saw eating out as a great treat. I paid with my own cash, not the company credit card, and I couldn't get over how reviewers would blithely recommend a series of grandiose restaurants where you might expect a bill equivalent to the weekly food spend for a family of four. To add to this Marie Antoinettestyle obliviousness, they seemed to work on the assumption that good food equalled posh (expensive, formal) food, generally French or Italian, but certainly white. It was rare to read a review which treated restaurants from other ethnic traditions with any real knowledge, respect or rigour.

Which, I soon concluded, was just as well. Most of these critics were ill-equipped to write about European food, let alone cuisines from further afield. I had assumed, wrongly, that they must be food experts. I subsequently learned that in the newspaper world, restaurant reviews were regarded as a tax-free salary bonus, a desirable perk to be shared around the office by staffers, usually a self-styled gourmet whose knowledge of food could be fitted on to the back of a postage stamp, the objective being to eat your way around as many expensive restaurants as possible before the editor passed on the jolly to some other scribe.

I became increasingly frustrated too with the prevailing view among newspaper editors that readers aren't interested in food per se and that a restaurant review is just a vehicle for star writers to snipe and quip, with the food relegated to a few sentences at the end of the Clever Dick text because I was interested in what was on the plate, in almost forensic detail. I was exasperated by reviewers who wrote endlessly about themselves, their paramours, their irritating children. It confirmed my suspicion that the general unwillingness of many restaurant critics to talk in any detail about the food wasn't just chance, but a way of covering up their limited terms of reference for discussing food. There are still too many restaurant critics who can't tell a wild chanterelle from a cultivated shitake mushroom, critics who drool over tropical tiger prawns, convinced they came from a fishing boat off the coast of Mallaig.

I heard the chefs' side of the story, too. Many reviewers, I heard, booked under their own, or even the newspaper's name, and expected to be received like visiting royals. They told me about critics who got legless inthe course of the meal or who had a heated row with their spouse/ partner who then went on to slam the food. I learnt how even the most mature and philosophical chefs smarted at criticism, especially when illfounded. Critics who complained that the chocolate mousse, for example, didn't taste of chocolate when in fact it was a coffee mousse, that sort of thing. I got a taste of many serious chefs' smouldering resentment about being judged by people who knew pitifully little about the principles of food and cooking, critics who were just as likely to praise an establishment routinely serving bought-in, pre-prepared, microwaved meals as another making everything from scratch, because they couldn't tell the difference.

Nowadays I set out to write the sort of review I myself would want to read, keeping two constituencies in mind.

The first is the thinking restaurant consumers. I envisage you as people who are generally prosperous, but who don't have money to burn, people who may very well be good home cooks in your own right and who, when eating out, have a right to a meal that is at least as good as you could make at home, if not better. Paying lots of money for a bad meal is a double insult to which I take great offence. I'm sure that many readers share this feeling. My second constituency is the conscientious chef or proprietor who deserves to be treated as a true professional and judged by someone competent to do so.

As far as I'm concerned, a restaurant critic has to be ruthlessly honest.

Many reviewers pull their punches, either because they have been compromised by accepting 'free' meals and hospitality, or for fear of antagonising advertisers. Let's face it, if you've been lounging around with your beloved in some grandiose establishment, luxuriating in the Egyptian cotton bathrobes and drinking your way through the mini-bar free of charge, you aren't at liberty to point out that the food in the dining room is over-priced and under par.

My policy – not one that you can assume is shared elsewhere – is never to accept any invitations to write a review on the basis of 'free' meals. The same applies to less direct bribes which come in various guises: press dinners for new restaurants, relaunch parties for new menus and the like. The more restaurant PRs bombard me, the more I am inclined to think that the restaurant is spending money on marketing that would be better spent in the kitchen.

Toothless reviews are useless for the eating-out public, as are reviews that week after week savage a series of hapless establishments just to show how acerbic and outrageous the writer can be. I never set out to write an excoriating review and amuse my readers at a restaurant's expense, although even trying to visit only restaurants that sound promising, I can be sure of coming up with duffers. In such cases, if you didn't laugh then you would cry, so an injection of humour is appropriate.

Ibelieve in strong criticism where merited and do not apologise for pricking the Emperor's New Clothes bubble that protects many smug, high-profile establishments. I know because many chefs tell me that a bad review never sees off an establishment unless it is on its last legs anyway, while a positive one can put a hidden gem on the map. I am particularly keen to give a leg up to chefs who aren't great self-publicists, or whose restaurant is a bit out of the way, and hopefully, encourage them to stay in business. Basically, I just try to give readers an honest, insightful, evocative report of what I find, without fear or favour. I hope that over a period of time you will come to trust my judgement because I can steer you in the direction of restaurants you might never have of heard of and will want to revisit.

Every restaurant I visit is booked under a false name because I want to experience it just as the ordinary punter would. For the same reason, I do not have a picture byline. Be suspicious of critics whose familiar features shine out from their reviews. This smacks of ego, of the need to be recognised and feted. They must enjoy being fawned over by the Maitre d' and plied with drinks and extras. I imagine that they get a thrill from knowing that the front-of-house manager has rushed through to the kitchen to shout "Guess who's just walked in!" A reliable restaurant critic should be like a cat burglar, in and out before anyone notices.

It's too easy to write about the well-quoted, special occasion establishments. I'm more interested in finding good value, everyday eateries that you can afford to visit regularly. Priority goes to places recommended by someone whose judgement I rate. New restaurants go to the top of the list too because they are dark horses. I know how annoyed readers get when critics never venture outside the central belt, so I try hard to give a broad geographical spread, which means venturing into eating-out deserts where restaurants that are the best in the area are often pretty grim by other standards. I refuse to dumb down standards in order to talk up humdrum restaurants and slap backs along 'Scottish food the best in the world' lines. I don't see myself as a wing of the tourist industry. I'm there to get Scottish chefs to step out of the steak 'n' salmon comfort zone and aspire to higher things.

When I'm looking at a menu, I ask myself three questions. Is this a well-thought out menu? Is the kitchen buying discerningly? Is the chef on the ball? Establishments serving defrosted green-lip mussels from New Zealand or faddy speciality meats like ostrich are clearly missing the point. I want to see evidence that a chef knows how to buy great seasonal produce and treat it with respect. I am deeply sceptical about any kind of fusion cooking and rate chefs who have the confidence to keep their menus clean-cut and simple, with some overall logic or culinary tradition underpinning them, not just a series of random showy stunts designed to dazzle naïve diners. Familiarising myself with the catalogues of companies supplying ready meals to the catering trade has proved very instructive. In really hopeless places I can spot these bought-in reheats because, like lazy plagiarists, they haven't even bothered to change the name of the dish from its catalogue title.

Judging what's on your plate is a very personal thing. I bring to bear on it every bit of experience that I have gained from almost two decades as a food journalist. All that time cooking and flicking through recipes, eating out abroad or in good restaurants in Britain, every contact with a farmer or grower that I have ever had, every market or specialist food shop that I have ever visited, every fact that I have ever learned in the course of writing about the provenance, savoury or otherwise, of what we eat – all this stacks up to make a food encyclopedia that I dip into when assessing what's on my plate.

I hope that it informs your eating out, too.

© Sunday Herald