delicious100: Inside the secret world of a food critic

Bad food, “armpit burgers”, three restaurants in a day and hours on a treadmill running off the calories — welcome to the life of a food critic. HOW TO ORDER

With Queensland’s delicious100 launching for another year, we take you behind the scenes with our food critics to reveal their top dining tips — and why the gig isn’t as glamorous as it might seem.

BIG smiles greet us at the door as warm and cheery staff welcome us into the intimate, high-end eatery, regarded as one of the best in town.

As we slide into a cosy private booth and begin to study the menu, my friend pauses, then stares deeply into my eyes across the table.

“This is actually (*horrible),” he says (*the real adjective was more of an expletive, but let’s keep things PG).

“I don’t know how you do this!”

We’re at our third restaurant of the day about to review our third multi-course meal in only six hours.

My mate’s face is flushed in a concerning shade of green – as if he’s just endured 10 rounds on a rollercoaster — and beads of sweat begin to bubble on his brow.

Courier Mail food editor Anooska Tucker-Evans at Montrachet restaurant, Bowen Hills. Picture: Annette Dew.

Having been renovating his house and living without a kitchen for eight weeks, he was initially more excited than a teenage girl at a Taylor Swift concert at the prospect of helping me with back-to-back restaurant reviews.

But the keen foodie is now filled with not only a week’s worth of calories but deep, deep regret.

You see, he was clearly ill-prepared for the assault on your insides that comes with being a professional restaurant reviewer.

For the unseasoned, eating that much food laden with the flavour-boasting properties of oil, butter, sugar and salt, can also have you running faster than Usain Bolt to a toilet as your guts feel like Mike Tyson is trying to punch his way out.

My friend had also peaked too early, eating everything on his plate at each restaurant, despite my cautioning.

I knew the marathon ahead and paced myself and made sure I sampled the food rather than licking the plate clean.

After previous similar outings with friends, many now beg me not to take them on reviews, as having their intestines feel greasier than a can of WD40 is no longer worth the free feed.

I’ve also had to stop taking dates on restaurant reviews as they only want to order the steak and when I inform them that reviewing is not about what you’d like to eat, but ordering what is the most interesting, unusual and/or technically challenging dish on the menu, which could be anything from pork tartare with kombu and sesame to venison with smoked celeriac and cacao nibs, their enthusiasm wanes considerably.

While restaurant reviewing is an incredible privilege that usually requires an existing critic to choke on a chicken bone and cark it to inherit the role, it’s not all “champagne and caviar”, says my fellow delicious. reviewer Anthony Huckstep.

delicious. reviewer Anthony Huckstep

“You have to remember that critics are taking a hit for the team, therefore we eat a lot of bad food so you don’t have to,” Huckstep says.

“I’ve eaten my fair share of armpit burgers, and if you get too many in a row it can really dent your faith in the industry. Sure, it’s a tough gig to complain about, but three hours of inedible food and Fawlty Towers service can put a real dampener on your week.”

Then there’s the moments so nonsensical they’re actually amusing like a young waitress serving me a quartet of croquettes only to put the plate down so awkwardly that the breaded, deep-fried snacks roll off and across the dirty table … and she still expects me to eat them. Or when a waiter bringing over fresh cutlery drops it on the ground in front of me and then hands it to me like nothing happened. Or perhaps accidentally being served up the casing from a pen on top of a pizza like a 1980s sprig of parsley garnish.

There’s also the odd joy of food poisoning that can take the shine off this seemingly glittery gig.

For Huck it was only recently at a once revered Sydney restaurant that had previously made the delicious. 100 in NSW, costing him $350 for the pleasure.

While my last date with a toilet bowl and bucket was brought on by a dodgy pizza at a Brisbane restaurant from an experienced hospitality family, followed by a rather awkward call to the manager the next day to inform them of their failure to comply with food safety.

“It’s is always a hazard of the professional eater – it certainly doesn’t bear thinking about how many people have touched the food I eat – but the recent proliferation of tartare on every menu made from all manner of exotic meats, whether wallaby or emu, alpaca and roo, has made the morning after the night before an increasingly nerve-racking affair,” says Taste Victoria and delicious. reviewer Dan Stock.

Dan Stock

For delicious. magazine editor and food critic Samantha Jones it’s when kitchens get the basics wrong that leaves her deflated.

“(It’s) the disappointment of under-seasoned sauces and overcooked meats, especially when you’ve hoped for something great,” she says. “Oh and the amount of work it takes to write a review that’s not been written 100 times – there are only so many words for ‘delicious’!”

And on that, another great delight of restaurant reviewing is that everyone thinks they can do it better than you – as witnessed by the 652 million (rough guesstimate) poorly worded, misspelled rants on sites like TripAdvisor and Zomato.

Professional reviews are not blow-by-blow accounts of how your breakfast was too cold, coffee too hot or waiter too annoying. They are thoughtful, measured summaries of what to expect at a restaurant guided by years of experience, knowledge and expertise that help to inform a reader whether or not a venue is worth spending their hard-earned pay cheques at. But hey, you eat on the daily and finished Year 10 English so you must be able to do my job, right?

Rangers Valley wagyu at Joy, Fortitude Valley

My entry into reviewing began when a former editor recognised my passion for food and agreed to take a chance on me.

I had grown up a gourmet kid. While my family was by no means rich, I had the tastebuds of an aristocrat and would eat the likes of pate or brie on toast for breakfast and was lucky enough to be taken to the occasional nice restaurants by my parents where the children’s menu was never an option. My mother is also a terrific cook, and I would help her in the kitchen whipping up everything from cakes to her applauded spring rolls. She taught me how to make all the basics from scratch like béchamel, hollandaise and gravy, and we would do professional cooking classes together learning to create anything from croissants and French pastries to Thai curry pastes and soups. I continued this as I travelled the world, learning from everyone from chefs in Morocco to home cooks in Ecuador.

In my early 20s I bought Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion and studied it like it was a text book, and would regularly cut out recipes from magazines to test my skills. I also bought oodles of books on wine and spirits to try to expand my knowledge, while watching hours of cooking shows.

And for me, it’s this love of learning new things, knowing that there will always be a fresh ingredient or food I’ve never tried or even heard of to experience; a brilliant dish to devour in the most unexpected of places that makes your toes tap and your heart full – that’s what makes being a restaurant reviewer so joyful.

That and seeing the culinary world around you grow up and begin to realise its true potential.

In the past few years — particularly the past 12 months — Queensland’s dining scene has transformed from a pimply, grunty teenage boy still trying to find his own identity and far too easily swayed by peer pressure, to a confident, self-assured, sophisticated young man who knows just who he wants to be — consequences be damned. This is thanks to the likes of restaurants such as Fortitude Valley’s Joy — a brave (some may say insane) 10-seater where husband and wife cheffing team Tim and Sarah Scott take care of everything from the bookings and service to the cooking and washing up, while turning out dishes with a level of skill, sophistication and interest that rival those of 50-strong kitchen teams.

Tim and Sarah Scott at Joy

Or tavernas such as Hellenika at the Calile and on the Gold Coast, where owner Simon Gloftis has shown the rest of Australia how elegant and refined Greek fare can be by using only the finest of ingredients.

For Jones it’s the little things about restaurant reviewing that make her hours on the treadmill running off the excessive calories worth it.

“It could be the joy of perfectly fluffy bread with fresh house-churned butter, to something you have never seen before on the plate and makes you feel like a kid opening the gift they never thought they’d get for Christmas,” she says. “I also love seeing a chef start rising through the ranks and emerging to inject new flavour onto our dining scene.”

Huckstep echoes that and says it’s experiencing definitive moments.

“It could be a dish that forces you to put the cutlery down and revel in its deliciousness, the anticipation of what’s to come, the energy of the room when the floor staff are on fire, or, of course something much more formative like garnering inspiration and faith in chefs and restaurateurs leading Australia down a new culinary path,” he says. “It’s a mix of the excitement of the new and the heartwarming reliability of the tried and trusted.”

While for Stock, it’s all about the people.

“The best part of being a food critic isn’t actually the food, though, of course, I have eaten incredibly, greedily, astonishingly and increasingly well over the 15-plus years I’ve been writing about eating and drinking around Melbourne and Victoria.

Food plated up at Hellenika.

“It’s the people who make the food. And by that, I don’t mean the chefs who cook it – as creative and interesting and clever and bonkers many of them are – but the producers and brewers and fishermen and apiarists and cheesemakers who, in their small but vital way, are changing what and how we eat for the better.

“It’s a real privilege speaking to people who are, often single-mindedly, following a passion, often pigheadedly. Doing something they believe in, doing something for others that brings happiness.

“Much is made of the great produce we have in Australia, but that is as much to do with the great people behind getting it to our plate and telling their stories is the best thing about my job. Oh, and marron. I get to eat a lot of it. That’s also very nice.”

So while eating three multi-course meals back-to-back on a Saturday might send my cholesterol soaring higher than the town folk of Nimbin at a festival, it’s one of the best jobs in the world and you’ll have to choke me with a chicken bone to take it from me.

How to order like a food critic

1. No steak — unless it’s a steak restaurant

2. Always choose the most interesting, innovative and technically challenging dish on the menu so you can assess the skills of the kitchen and their ability to transform a concept into something delicious.

3. Also always order the restaurant’s signature dish or their specialty. If they hang their hat on it, it needs to be good.

4. Order a glass of wine to see if they pour it at the table or bring it pre-poured. A pre-poured glass may mean you’re not getting what you ordered.

5. Always assess the toilets of a venue. Dirty toilets are often synonymous with a dirty kitchen.