What a trip to the loo can tell you about a restaurant

The Good Food Guide is back and our hard-working team of reviewers (yes, it actually is hard work) is out and about reviewing restaurants for months on end. One of the many pieces of advice I give to new reviewers is to always go to the loo. They look at me as if I’m slightly dotty which, after 30 years of reviewing restaurants, I probably am. But there is methodology in my madness.

Credit: Simon Letch

By taking the long way around to get to the toilets, weaving in and out of as many tables as you can, you get to see what everybody is eating. It’s like looking at a picture menu. You might see the same plate of food on every table and deduce that it is the venue’s signature dish.

You might see a spaghetti swimming in too much sauce, or someone trying, and failing, to cut through their steak. The tables may be empty, but uncleared of dirty plates and glasses, or filled with people waiting anxiously for food that hasn’t yet appeared.

All those clues, all that information – and you get to go to the loo. But there’s still no respite. While you’re there, you soon discover if the management is as good at keeping the back-of-house as shipshape as the front. On the way back (especially if you engineer to get slightly “lost”), you may get to see the kitchen, or check out the courtyard, or take a peek into the storeroom.

You get more of a feel for the atmosphere, the working conditions of staff, even the quality of the brands of cooking oil and tomato sugo – and 15-litre casks of cooking wine. Nosy, yes, but I see forensics as part of the job. You don’t use that information in the review, but you do take it into account when considering your own experience.

To that end, I’d give any diner the same sort of advice about going to the loo (but perhaps stop short of forensically investigating the storeroom). If nothing else, you’ll have a much better idea of what to order.

Mind you, once this gets out, everyone who gets up and goes to the loo will be treated as if they were a restaurant critic. Which, of course, is exactly how they should be treated in the first place.

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