Marina O'Loughlin, "We all know that readers enjoy a good savaging, but even they have been feeling kinder about the critical role."

When I had the first spark of an idea to launch a Substack newsletter its working title was Critical Condition. I thought it a witty take on what I spend a portion of my time doing, but thankfully I had a rare moment of openness with a nascent idea and threw it out to a broad catchment of writers and creative thinkers. Brilliant, came the first response. Then a steady trickle of naysayers who thought it a little too close to the bone mid-Covid. Thankfully I rethought and settled on Between Meals.

But now it lives another day and Critical Condition is a series of interviews with current and former restaurant critics. You may have read my recent piece for A+ Insights, which gives a glimpse of some of the names you’ll see here weekly or maybe fortnightly (I’m still working out the patterns of how you as an audience read, so bear with me.) The regular newsletter will continue and intersperse between these Critical Condition letters.

Image: The Sunday Times

So, who to interview? There were a few critics who were a must, or at least top of my wish list. Marina O’Loughlin, currently at The Sunday Times in London, edges to the front of the pack. If I think of who I’ve been reading most consistently and the longest, it’s O’Loughlin. From Metro to The Guardian and then The Sunday Times where she followed the late, great AA Gill. A near impossible task you would think.

Reading over the last review she published with The Guardian, on The Quality Chop House, she wrote, “I walk the back streets of Clerkenwell with the distinct mulchy tang of autumn in the air. A favourite part of a great city, my favourite season, en route to a favourite restaurant where I’ll be eating with a favourite person: that’s my cookie-cig-butt-orgasm right there. I could not be happier.”

That small excerpt encapsulates so much for me personally. Clerkenwell, and especially its backstreet pubs and architecture are the epicenter of the first year of my London experience, and a very special event in the last weeks of my time there. The Quality Chop House is a restaurant I love and have returned to over many years. I think it sums up much that is great about British food and the London restaurant scene. I’ve never met O’Loughlin, but I know immediately that we can agree on a few things.

Image: The Quality Chop House

While the other Critical Condition interviews are by phone or in person O’Loughlin, fresh from Sicily, told me she’s “violently allergic to phone or Zoom or Skype or any of those things” and as we can't do it in person, might we revert to email. Bouncing emails back and forth with Marina O’Loughlin I can say is no chore.  

As often happens when you read someone’s work without seeing them there’s a thought that forms of what they look like, what their mannerisms might be. On meeting a local fixer in Tucson, Arizona he thought we may have met but when he realised we hadn’t he was tight lipped, protecting her anonymity, even as I engaged in a strange real-life game of that childhood classic Guess Who? “Has she got red hair? Does she wear glasses?” I’ll just say, never play poker with Dan from Tucson. His poker face is impenetrable.

While an image search throws up a shot of Lisa Markwell (for a time O’Loughlin’s editor) and Dr Margo Maine (following this bizarre NYC moment) I ask whether she envisages a day when her identity is revealed and whether she’s thought about what that looks like for her life as a critic?

“I do think about it, mostly when I’m feeling a bit skint and realise that the lucrative opportunities don’t really present themselves to people lurking in the shadows,” she says. “But, despite what the famous faces say, I know that a restaurant can put on a show, a love-bombing, when a well-known critic walks into the room. (And people complain about service far more than they do cooking.) Sure, they can’t change the actual food offering, but they can change the quantity, the presentation, the all-round vibe. This way, I continue to get the kind of experience everybody else gets.”

It is, she says, increasingly difficult to remain anonymous, “but I’d like to hang onto it as long as I can. I am recognised a bit more these days than I used to be – mostly in London, nobody has much of a clue outside the capital – and I can immediately sense when I’ve been ‘made’. I’ll drop it when the gig drops me. By then, who’ll give a monkey’s?”

As mentioned, O’Loughlin has written for audiences from Metro, a free paper that you’d find littering London transport, to The Guardian, and The Sunday Times. A broad church socially and politically. I ask if her style has changed as she’s navigated those demographics, and whether she writes for a particular reader, or an actual person.

“I think it has,” she says. “I occasionally come across something I wrote for Metro and think, who the hell was that carefree, energetic young thang? There were no comments back then, no social media, so I wrote whatever the hell I wanted, it was published and tra la la. End of (mostly).”