Chief Restaurant Critic
Website: London Evening Standard

Total years spent working within the industry?
Journalism specifically 15 years, coming up to 16.

What do you most enjoy about this industry?
I love all of it, I really love the excitement feeling, having been somewhere that is unique or interesting. I write about restaurants and I write about food, and I take that side of the job very seriously, but the main job of a restaurant critic is, as I see it, to give you a musing, a snapshot of life and I really enjoy trying to capture the mood, the feel, what the people look like, what music is on.  Being able to share what the pleasure of eating a particular dish feels like, and finding fresh new ways to do that is both the most difficult thing about the job and the best thing about the job.

I will be filling away in my mind at any moment, a fun descriptive comparison, for what something looks like or how a piece of food tastes, and it’s the thing I really enjoy most. I love London as a city. 

The single most important piece of advice given to you?
It is really important to whenever possible maintain a cordial relationship with people, and be reasonable, fair and not have a scorched earth attitude if something does go wrong. Very often there is a small pool of people, and you end up to running into people that you may have met when they were climbing the career ladder. Wherever possible, be professional, and courteous to the people that you are dealing with.

Three dinner guests - who would they be?
Jay-Z, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Charlton Athletic striker Lyle Taylor.

Finish the sentence, the future in hospitality is…...
Short term future is probably around a lot of hospitality in the home. Hopefully, the future in hospitality is fairer, I hope that what will come out of this is, will be a kind of defining moment in the sense that it shows that things need to be made a bit fairer, in the division of who can survive something like this and who cant.