Tim Hayward (FT Magazine), "I'm sort of a columnist and paid opinionator, and actually anything that happens in a newspaper I can't believe my luck."

Over the past 15 or so years I’ve read Tim Hayward’s work from The Guardian to the FT, followed and interacted on social, read his books, listened to him on the radio, and watched with interest as he became proprietor of Cambridge institution Fitzbillies. But, we’d never actually spoken. It’s funny. Sometimes conversations take the exact tone you imagine they will, and this was one of them. Hayward is a self-confessed “greedy git and food nerd,” and despite his mugshot he talks with the excitement and wonder of someone who has landed a pretty cushy gig.

I recalled to Hayward early on that I was commissioned over 10 years ago for Fire and Knives and Gin & It, two quarterly publications he founded (the latter edited by Kate Hawkings). Moments that are marked in my progression as a writer; a piece about the Six O’ Clock Swill, that particularly feral period in Australian drinking history, for Gin & It, put me amongst writers and industry professionals who I admired greatly. It said to me that I could hold my own professionally. Every young or aspiring writer needs those moments. It was also the first but not last time that I’d get an email to say they would be shutting up shop and some of my commissioned pieces wouldn’t run. A valuable lesson also.

It felt at the time, I say to Hayward, that they were a little bit ahead of an independent trend in that corner of food publishing. “I still talk to quite a lot of people running those things now because they often, when starting up, come to see me and talk about what happened on Fire and Knives,” says Hayward. “I still don't think any of them are making a great living, but for any of us that do it, it's good for us at the time we do, and it's good for the people we work with.” At award ceremonies there’s an almost guarantee he says, “that there's going to be somebody up for food writing or for restaurant writing who got their first break in Fire and Knives. We did do good for a generation, and that feels quite fulfilling.”

Hayward’s own start came with the birth of his daughter, now nineteen. “I was actually doing a lot of the childcare and trying to turn the hobby writing into something. I started pitching work and it took off from there.” He got into food writing on the simple principle of “write what you like.” He’d given comedy writing a go but wasn't making any money at it. He dabbled in screenwriting. “Thank God I didn't follow that one,” he says. “Food just seemed to be something that worked well for me. So, I stuck with it.”

It was on bulletin boards and online communities, pre the boom of blogs, that Hayward was starting to get positive feedback. “There was a board called Opinionated About Food. A lot of the food editors were lurking on those, and so I started putting stuff on and made the jump across to getting paid for it.”

“This is quite a weird thing,” says Hayward. “But I think with the possible exception of Marina [O’Loughlin], I'm the only restaurant critic in the UK that came into it backwards. I started writing for the bulletin boards and I came in through The Guardian online, then went to The Guardian [proper], then went to the FT, and only started restaurant criticism about four years ago.”

Hayward points out that he’s never had a desk at a newspaper and doesn’t really call himself a journalist. “I don't have journalism training. I'm sort of a columnist and paid opinionator, and actually anything that happens in a newspaper I can't believe my luck: they gave me a press card and it's like, I can run around flashing it. It's great.”

Reflecting on his regular gig at the Financial Times he says ,“it's doing for me now what Guardian online did for me at the beginning. The first time I wrote for The Guardian was specifically for online. And I think nobody really knew what they were doing out in the back room with their computers. The brief was very often, write something you think is amusing and interesting, there's not much money in it but put it out here, don't patronise anybody, don't insult their intelligence, just write good stuff, and we got away with amazing things.”

It was Bob Granleese at The Guardian says Hayward who pointed out that “whenever you write anything for The Guardian you'll get upward of 100 comments underneath, 99 of which will say, you know, you're a filthy metropolitan oaf or how can you possibly say that about cheese? What about the vegetarians? Or, some people are allergic to this, you know, not me, but just saying.”

“And you don't get any of that at the FT. I used to get letters in fountain pen saying [affects a clipped Home Counties tone] my wife and I find your review extremely agreeable, and perhaps we'll go there one day. Thank you very much. Yours sincerely. And it was lovely.”

Bob said, you know, the thing about The Guardian is everybody who reads it got a liberal arts degree at a reasonable university. It would be the height of their ambition to write for The Guardian section that specialises in their area. And they all think they could do a better job than you, and truth is probably most of them can.”

At the FT, “they don't want to do your job,” says Hayward. “It's a lovely, rewarding space in which to then go out and do whatever you like. We've just had a new editor join us from the US who's giving me even more space now, and it's literally part of the brief to choose your own restaurants, not just upmarket places, anything.”

There is he says no imperative to review, and what we’re now seeing is a “more columny and less critical” output. A trend that’s come out of lockdowns. Speaking in the second half of last year Hayward says, “we're still slightly in a phase over here of I can't really be nasty about restaurants because I don't want to hurt anybody's business. Everybody knows that we're not being nasty about restaurants, and I don't write very many negative reviews because it's my job to know when places are good or worth talking about. I don't even bother going unless I'm going to get a good story.”

On the often-raised question of influence, Hayward says “I don't think many people take our recommendations for restaurants and certainly to the extent of killing or giving birth to a restaurant. I think sometimes you can be in the narrative about a restaurant at an influential point. There's a couple of places where I'll never be able to pay for a meal because I called them early, I wrote them up, and they happen to be the sort that particularly appealed to my audience. All those people started going not just because of me, but because of all the other stuff they'd seen, and in fact I'd seen that made me want to go to the restaurant in the first place. I don't think I could make a restaurants future by something I wrote. I can help, in both directions.”