Occupational hazards

GIVEN the enormous number of meals that restaurant critics and food writers eat, it isinevitable that they sometimes endure a dud meal - whether it be due to the food itself, the service offered by the staff, or the behaviour of fellow diners. Here, leading food writers recall their worst or most embarrassing restaurant visit.

ROY ACKERMAN

Leading Guides

"I remember taking a young lady to dinner who had been talking to me vividly for four or five minutes when the waiter arrived with two plates of food. However, they were not for us. I told him that they were for the couple sitting at the corner table who, I advised him, were also waiting for their wine. It was at this point that my guest suddenly realised that I hadn't been listening to a word she was saying. And that is a problem in accepting an invitation from a restaurateur - we're always so interested in what is going on in the restaurant that we don't pay enough attention to our guests."

ROBERT COCKCROFT, Yorkshire Post

"The most embarrassing occasion was the time when I suffered a particularly severe bout of gout when I was at the Greenhead House restaurant in Sheffield. It was so bad that I had to go into the gents, fill a basin with cold water and soak my foot in it for about 10 minutes. A customer walked in half-way through all this and slowly backed out, not believing what he was seeing. Although rather embarrassed, I was quite happy as they keep a good supply of magazines in the gents, including Viz. After I'd finished I went back to my table and finished my meal! "

EMILY GREEN, Independent

"I spent an evening with Tom Jaine at the Waterside Inn in Bray where he was set on making the waiters lose their temper. He demanded that we should be moved to another table because our table showed his legs and another customer's ice bucket was too close. Then he said to the waiter: "Oh come off it, you're not really French. You're Australian, admit it." My heart went out to the waiter as, of course, he was really French. I just wanted to disappear under the table out of embarrassment. Waiters deserve gold medals for valour for having to deal with such customers."

TOMJAINE, FORMEREDITOROFTHEGOODFOODGUIDE

"My most frequently embarrassing moments relate to my credit card being constantly refused. Some waiters are discreet, some pretend the credit card machine has broken and others just fling it back at me. But the single worst moment happened when I was eating foie gras and my fork hit what I thought was a piece of chicken hidden in the salad. But it turned out to be someone's tissue. When I asked for an explanation, the waiter said he didn't know what it was and no-one else bothered to appear. I was even charged for the dish on my bill, but I crossed it off and didn't pay for it."

JONATHAN MEADES,

The Times

"Unfortunately I have suffered many inept meals prepared by people who shouldn't be cooking for a living. The further you get from London, the worse it gets. Just one example from a meal last year involved a sauce which tasted just like you would imagine a cheap pot-pourri or scented lavatory cleaner would taste. And that was just one of about half a dozen things wrong with the meal. I couldn't believe the restaurant was actually in business, but I find punters outside London are indiscriminate about where they eat. Having travelled constantly up and down the country filming for TV for the past 18 months, rather than pick out one particularly bad incident, the most distressing thing I found was that you have to travel at least 50 miles to find anything decent to eat."

LYNDSEY BAREHAM, LBC

"When I first started writing restaurant reviews for Time Out, I had no budget and had to chat up restaurants, offering to write a review in return for a meal. On one occasion I went along to a French restaurant in Soho where there was a lot of fanfare and fuss when I arrived. Unfortunately, after I had eaten my starter and main course, I was violently sick. It was so embarrassing and ghastly, although the restaurant staff couldn't have been nicer and more helpful. I don't know whether it was due to something I'd eaten at the restaurant or whether it was a bug I already had. As a result, to this day, I can't bear to do a review at a restaurant where I am known."

PERRY EDWARDS, former AA chief

inspector for 22 years

"It takes a lot to turn my stomach, but a visit to the kitchen after eating a meal in a restaurant 20 years ago did just that. It wasabsolutely filthy and full of droppings and live cockroaches. While that was by far the worst single moment, I have endured some pretty awful meals along the way, though, thankfully, standards overall have greatly improved. About 15 years ago, I spent July inspecting hotels along the South Coast. Out of the 31 meals I had, I was not served one single fresh vegetable!"

MICHAEL RAFFAEL, Chef

"In 16 years as a food writer, I've only suffered from salmonella once, and that was after visiting a restaurant in Birmingham when I was writing restaurant reviews for British Rail's InterCity magazine. I was very ill for two to three days. Besides that, the worst restaurant experiences I've had have been in Jersey where I used to go every year for 10 years as a restaurant critic at the Jersey Food Festival. A group of 10 of us reviewed about 60 restaurants in 10 days. On one occasion a flashy waiter prepared a cràpe Suzette for us and used salt instead of sugar. Another time, I was tucking into a plate of Flukes - tiny round new potatoes - when I discovered one of the potatoes was in fact a pebble! A genuinely bad Dover Sole was served to me on another occasion. It was quite obviously bad because the bone was black. When I returned it to the kitchen, the chef sent it back saying it was perfectly all right. And finally, the bottle of wine that was opened away from the table was clearly not the Beaujolais that was printed on the bottle. When I spoke to the waitress she gave me a deadpan look and denied it was anything other than Beaujolais - but I later saw her sniggering with her colleague."

CRAIG BROWN, Sunday Times

"It was collective madness in the basement of the Nosh Brothers restaurant in the Fulham Road. I sat at a small table, with two large tables on either side, each laid up for about 16 people. Soon after we arrived, one of the large tables filled up with a group of timid-looking secretaries and one or two men. The second table was then occupied by Sandhurst officer types; they were noisy and very soon started throwing bread rolls at the secretaries and taking off their shirts. The secretaries joined in the throwing of rolls and began massaging the officers. It was quite bizarre and became so noisy that we couldn't order our puddings. The restaurant owner then appeared with a baseball bat and threatened the two groups. Luckily we were able to move upstairs to eat our dessert, but just before I left, I looked down into the basement, by which time all the men were completely naked, except for napkins covering their bottoms. It was a complete nightmare." o