‘You get obsessed': Lunch at Chapter One with arguably one of the world's best food writers

Irish Times

03-05-2025

On the back of the kitchen door in a well-known London restaurant – name redacted for reasons of plausible deniability and professional courtesy – there's a wall of shame: mugshots of restaurant critics taped up like a rogue's gallery, each one a warning to the kitchen brigade – if this face appears in the diningroom, start sweating. Among them is a photo of
Tim Hayward
, former restaurant critic at The Financial Times, with a handwritten caption: 'Fat
Jeremy Corbyn
.' To be clear, it isn't so much a political comment as an unflattering comparison in the beard-and-belly department. Jay Rayner is there too, labelled 'Obese d'Artagnan,' which feels marginally more flattering – assuming you want your swashbucklers portly and wielding a quill instead of a rapier.
Hayward, arguably one of the world's best food writers (The Financial Times, The Guardian, seven books), tells it with the relish of a man who enjoys a well-cooked humiliation. A friend tipped him off – not out of concern, but with the glee of someone spotting a mate's face on a toilet wall. Staff had scrawled their own nicknames, some cruel, some cryptic. A makeshift intelligence op – less CIA, more MI5 run by kitchen porters – but it says a lot about how seriously restaurants take these people.
He's also a regular panellist on The Kitchen Cabinet on
BBC
Radio 4 – the food show that cares more about why mayonnaise splits than celebrity chef grandstanding. Forensic, funny, rigorous – exactly Hayward's territory.
When he's not writing or broadcasting, Hayward is baking bread. He co-owns Fitzbillies, the Cambridge institution that's been serving Chelsea buns and hearty breakfasts since 1920 – built, like his writing, on rigour, tradition and a firm disdain for frippery.
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We're having lunch at Chapter One in Dublin, which isn't where Hayward would normally end up. He's a bacon sandwich man at heart – sliced pan, margarine and far too much bad bacon – but he's willing to be persuaded. We'll come back to what he thought of the meal later, because right now, somewhere between the second amuse-bouche and a triumphant Irish coffee, he's explaining how he got into food writing.
Hayward didn't fall into food writing from a kitchen or a reporter's desk. He started out as a planner in advertising (not a copywriter, as many assume), in the age of expense accounts – long lunches, longer bills, minimal email. 'Throwing other people's money at the problem,' he says. He worked at what he calls 'crazy agencies, the ones with the beanbags and an aircraft hangar', where planners were 'quirky people they couldn't think of anywhere else to put'. Left-field and techie, he ended up head of new media, 'digital guru and all that sort of bollocks'.
Advertising drilled into him what food writing often forgets: how to read a room, how to take apart an experience and see what actually matters. Before
TikTok
shrank attention spans to three seconds and X taught everyone to argue in headlines, Hayward had already found eGullet – the ferociously nerdy forum where restaurant openings were dissected like crime scenes and Anthony Bourdain was just another bloke trying to win an argument.
eGullet was the feral frontier of early internet food culture – chefs, obsessives and insomniacs pulling apart new openings with microscopic glee. Mise en place, the 'napkin test' (folded, replaced, ignored) – nothing escaped scrutiny. 'It wasn't content,' he says. 'It was a community. You showed up with an opinion and you bloody well backed it.'
Now that the restaurant critic work is behind him, the discipline hasn't softened – it's sharpened ... Same rigour, same methodical thinking – but aimed now at older, messier, more intricate things. Not the amuse-bouche – but the centuries of cookery, culture and craft behind it
Writing about food came later. What came first – and has never left – was the obsession.
Serious, never solemn. The career stayed stubbornly independent. 'I didn't read food writers,' he says. 'I read essays.' Hunter S Thompson, Pauline Kael, Clive James – stylists with teeth. You can hear it: arguments in every line, more interested in how restaurants work than whether the chicken was 'succulent'.
Hayward didn't hustle his way into restaurant criticism – he slipped in sideways. Back then, food writing was a sealed ecosystem, run by a handful of old hacks who sounded exactly like the papers they worked for – same vowels, same prejudices. 'You didn't get in with a CV,' Hayward says. 'You got in because you were either married to the right person or sleeping with them.' In his case, it was simpler: the editor's wife read something he'd written and suggested he be given a shot.
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That one shot became a second, then a third – not because he played the game, but because he didn't. Hayward wasn't posing as an authority. He was, by his own admission, a 'deep nerd' – a man who'd spent years on eGullet. When food pages still read like smoked salmon canapés, he turned up with essays that felt like real conversation. Not criticism – dissection.
The same streak he learned in advertising still drives his work now, writing about food for the Financial Times. Two months of research for a single piece isn't unusual. No guesswork, no shortcuts. 'You never show up to a pitch without knowing everything,' he says – same rule now. A restaurant isn't just food: it's architecture, economics, sociology, marketing and bad decisions. 'The thing is,' he grins, 'you get obsessed.'
Tim Hayward. Photograph: Alan Betson
Hayward has aphantasia – not a flaw, just a different circuit – which means he can't summon mental images. No mind's eye. No internal slide show. So when he writes about food, he doesn't recall how it looked – he remembers how it behaved, how it felt. Over lunch at Chapter One, it's obvious how that plays out. He picks up on the amuse-bouche – a gel-topped dome concealing truffle – and notes how many visual tricks are at work to sell depth and richness.
That old photographer's muscle memory – constantly scanning, clocking tiny mechanical details – never left him. Wired to a mind that deals only in facts, Hayward didn't guess, embellish or decorate. When he wrote about a meal, the description was brutally precise. It wasn't showing off – just the way his brain worked.
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Restaurant reviewing, for him, was ruthlessly efficient. No notepads, no dictaphones – just a few quick photos to lock in the details. It wasn't nostalgia: it was data collection. Advertising had wired him differently – know how a spreadsheet works, how a whiteboard builds a campaign – and apply the same precision everywhere else.
The discipline extended beyond the meal: write the column before the evening cooled, crash it out on the train, set a fake deadline. This gave him time to F&F – finish and file, time to reread, polish, sharpen. No overthinking. No indulgence. One meal, one mind, one strike.
Of course, Hayward booked himself in for dinner at that London restaurant. The maître d' clocked him before he sat down – someone had clearly memorised the watch list. The staff had been briefed.
At the end of the meal, Hayward offered his compliments. The food was very, very good, he said. Then, smiling just enough to make it sting, added, 'Though I do have one question ... do I really look like fat Jeremy Corbyn?' The staff blanched, braced for impact – then exhaled when the glowing review landed. Chances are, that photo's still on the door.
As for the Chapter One meal? 'Yeah, that was good,' he said, with the calm detachment of a man weighing up a bevelled blade. No fireworks. No ego. Just clever cooking, by people who knew when to stop. The kind of place he might not usually seek out – but one he'd happily return to.
Now that the restaurant critic work is behind him, the discipline hasn't softened – it's sharpened. Food writing is a bigger machine: months of research, towers of books, every piece pinned across an imaginary whiteboard in his head. Same rigour, same methodical thinking – but aimed now at older, messier, more intricate things. Not the amuse-bouche – but the centuries of cookery, culture and craft behind it.
Food writing hasn't just evolved – it's mutated, warped by the image-first logic of social media. 'It's like a virus that escaped from the hospital,' he says. It's no longer about knowledge or writing skill. What matters is what grabs the algorithm's attention. It's about manufacturing the perfect scroll-stopping moment – a hit of clickbait dressed up as content – and hijacking a thumb mid-scroll.
Tim Hayward: 'Why would you want a knife you're afraid to use?'. Photograph: Alan Betson
He's not sneering. He's fascinated – as an early adopter always is. He tells the story of a guy with a serious YouTube following – not a critic, not a chef, just a camera and an audience – who visited a small restaurant, filmed it and filled every seat. No review, no Michelin nod, just raw digital gravity. The camera isn't reporting on the business now – it is the business.
His next appearance – at the Ballymaloe Festival of Food, in conversation with Fingal Ferguson – feels like stepping off the scroll and into the forge. There, he'll be talking about work that lasts, not work that trends.
When Hayward talks about knives, it's not about collection – it's about craft. 'Why would you want a knife you're afraid to use?' he says. The one that anchored his book Knife wasn't rare or precious – just his grandmother's bread knife. Not valuable, not Japanese, not especially sharp. But it worked. It had purpose. The thing that stuck with him was feel. People say 'balance,' but that's not quite it. There's no good English word for it – just something you recognise the second it's in your hand.
While everyone else chased folded steel and carbon content, Hayward went the other way – into sheds and smithies, listening to people who made knives to be used, not admired. During the Knife photo shoot, £25,000 (€29,400) worth of Japanese blades stayed locked in a safe. It was the cheap, battered ones that had stories. That's what he'll be talking about at Ballymaloe – not reverence, not collecting, but purpose. Why the best knife isn't the fanciest – it's the one that feels right.
Where food writing goes next, Hayward thinks, won't be with the TikTok millionaires. 'Those deals last a year,' he says. Influence burns fast and leaves nothing. What's coming back is the serious stuff – the methodical minds, the researchers. The ones who care about the why, not just the what. Not just the ingredients on the plate, but how it got there, and why it matters.
'It'll come back to the geeks,' he says. Not because it's fashionable – but because it's the only thing left when the noise burns out. The ones who still think about food the way a real craftsman thinks about a knife – not something to flash around, but something you trust with your life.
And Hayward is sharpening his.
Tim Hayward will be speaking at the
Ballymaloe Festival of Food
, which runs from May 16th-18th.