Every critic must find their voice. I found mine on a warm summer's evening in the early Seventies, the day I decided to picket the family home. I may have been only six, but I'd watched enough television news to know that this was how you registered dissent in Seventies Britain, and my handwriting was more than up to the job. On a piece of cardboard, nicked from one of my dad's freshly laundered shirts, I wrote: 'I want proper dinner.' I taped the card to a ruler and began marching up and down the pavement, the placard held aloft, determined that by direct action I would embarrass my parents into surrender.
It didn't work. They laughed when they found me. As I recall, they also congratulated me on my initiative. But they still insisted that I come back inside to the kitchen table from which I'd fled, and eat both the salad and the accompanying slab of mahogany-brown smoked mackerel, with its brutal cure and slimy skin, which they had decided was a reasonable meal to place before a six-year-old. It was horrible, but I did as I was told.
I cherish the story because I like to imagine it bestows upon me the credentials one needs to be a restaurant critic, the role I have performed selflessly for this newspaper for five years now. Look! I really am the right guy for the gig. I was this way even when I was a kid. All I've done is swap the cardboard placard for the pages of The Observer. But of course, I am protesting too much. There are no credentials for being a restaurant critic save an ability to eat widely - tick - and often - tick - and keep writing about it. If you want to be an astronaut or prime minister there is a career path to be followed. There is none for the professional eater.
Of the dozen or so people who now perform the job for large-circulation newspapers, one - Fay Maschler of the London Evening Standard - won hers in a competition. Three are ex-advertising men. The rest, like me, are jobbing journalists who happened to get their collars felt by the editor when a vacancy arose. Apart from Michael Winner. He got his for being Michael Winner, which is a rare talent indeed. And yet, despite the ludicrously ephemeral nature of the job, now performed by a ludicrously random selection of people, what we do appears to be taken very seriously indeed.
To be a restaurant critic in Britain today is to be at the heart of a feverish debate about how we eat now. When one of my colleagues was threatened recently with legal action over a cutting review he had written, it was headline news. This month ITV will be screening a new prime-time reality TV show in which celebrities, whipped into line by Gordon Ramsay, will staff a temporary restaurant. Naturally, a clutch of restaurant critics has already been invited to take part.
It's all very peculiar. Over the years as a journalist I have covered war-crimes trials and pursued terrorists, written about the dark stains of racism and child abuse. Occasionally I have received a letter from a reader discussing the issues. Sometimes people have told me they had read what I had written. Mostly those people were my wife.
When I started going out to eat for a living, however, everything changed. Now I was doing something that people really gave a damn about. My email inbox fills up daily with a rich and uneven diet of queries, recommendations and abuse. Readers have proposed duffing me up down a dark alley. Local radio phone-in programmes have been dedicated to me, and not in a good way. Before becoming a restaurant critic I had never appeared on BBC Television breakfast news or been invited to opine on the Today programme. I have now. Where before the House of Commons appeared oblivious to my efforts, now I have been publicly slagged off by no fewer than three MPs.
Though I find myself both puzzled and dismayed by much of this, I also know the job has gifted me a lot, not least material for a novel which, unlike my previous efforts, appears to be something people actually want to read. It has given me a voice in that debate on the nation's eating habits. It has allowed me to consume some stunning food that I could not otherwise have afforded. Oh, and it has handed me about a stone and a half in extra weight that I really didn't need.
I was born at 5pm, just in time for tea, and I carried on the way I began. A year before the placard incident, for example, I was asked what I would like to do for a fifth-birthday treat. I announced I wanted frogs' legs, lots of them. So my parents took me to a smart place near Piccadilly Circus called Stone's Chophouse, and I ate so many I was sick on the way home. When I was seven I incurred my only serious injury of childhood, a burn to the hand caused when I poured boiling fat over myself while frying my own breakfast. At 10, during a school skiing trip, I sneaked out of the hotel alone, not to swig kirsch behind the ski sheds, but to eat snails at a nearby restaurant where, thrillingly, they arrived fizzing in their butter-filled shells atop a flickering burner. This was not just my obsession; food was a core part of my family's shared language. My parents were both children of the Depression, knew what it was to go without, and were not about to revisit the experience, either on themselves or their kids, so we were a house of plenty. I once joked that I was a Jew only by food, that I worshipped at my mother's fridge, and it's true that there was no room at the Rayner house for ritual or faith. The Jewish god was far too picky an eater to be given space at our table. Forgo sausages and bacon? Reject shellfish and cheeseburgers, all in the name of mumbo jumbo? Don't be ridiculous.
And yet there was something fundamentally Jewish about our way with food: the noisiness of the dinner table, the stomach-aching generosity, the deep comfort we sought from it. Food was what we did. There was, of course, a price to be paid for all of this. I was a poster boy for childhood obesity long before it became the stuff of headlines, forced early to purchase billowing trousers that other children could camp in but which fitted me snugly. I went on my first diet when I was eight. Then again at 12. And at 16. And last week. And quite a few times between 16 and last week.
There is no doubt that this is a thrilling time in which to be a restaurant critic. Both Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal have achieved their third Michelin stars on my watch, and each represents an encouraging trend for Britain. In Ramsay we have the mastery of pure classical technique, carried forth by the battalions of young chefs now fanning out across the country. In Blumenthal's modernist fancies - his snail porridges and mustard ice creams - we have the confidence not to be hidebound by tradition, a willingness to experiment which again is being picked up by brave and talented chefs from Ludlow to Leeds. There are more and better restaurants now than there were even when I started and, if the emails I receive are anything to go by, they are serving an increasingly sophisticated clientele.
But the food revolution is far from complete. There are still huge swathes of Britain where the search for a good meal would most likely end in starvation. For example, part of my wife's family lives in the Black Country, and for 15 years I have been visiting the area. Not once have I enjoyed a good meal out, and not for want of trying. Eventually, searching for something good to write about, I went to a pub in Netherton famous for its Desperate Dan pies. A steak pie is a thing of beauty, if done well, but these were not: cold, sweaty pastry, gristly meat, soggy vegetables and a foul, industrial gravy. I accept the review I wrote was more a howl of anguish than a considered critique. Perhaps I should not have said that any colour in the locals' cheeks was provided by tattoos. But I did mean what I said about the food.
The day after publication my phone rang. It was BBC West Midlands radio. They were in the middle of a phone-in and the topic was me. They put me straight on the air so I could be roundly slagged off by the good people of Halesowen for half an hour. I made page three of the Dudley News in a report which announced that the pub had torn up a copy of my review and hung it in the toilets so it could be used as bog paper. The local MP, Tom Watson, described me as 'a flatulent oaf'. He and his colleague Ian Pearson MP later invited me to join them to eat the best that the Black Country has to offer. I didn't take up the challenge.
Naturally, I can understand wounded local pride. I live in Brixton, in south London, and it drives me nuts when the ignorant slag it off. What I had actually expected from the job, though, was abuse by chefs. For the most part they have kept their wounded pride to themselves. Until, that is, the Pétrus affair. Pétrus is a high-end gastronomic London restaurant part-owned and run by chef Marcus Wareing, who has made no secret of the fact that he wants more than the one Michelin star he already has. I too thought it was a reward he deserved - until late last year, when the restaurant moved to new premises.
Where once the food had been luscious but controlled, now it became simply odd. On the night I booked in, they were offering turbot with a Welsh rarebit crust, aubergine caviar, cods' roe and a lemon-grass veloute. It read like a car crash and it ate like one too, a cacophony of overseasoned flavours which seemed to cancel one another out. I hadn't wanted to eat it. There were better-sounding things on the menu. But I had felt it my job to do so. (See how I suffer!) My review registered my serious disappointment.
A few weeks later I was contacted by a food enthusiast called Andy Lynes, who helps run www.egullet.com, an impressive website where thousands of consenting adults (including this one) meet to discuss spending bizarre amounts of money on food. Wareing, he said, had told him indignantly at a party that the dish I had dissed was not the one I had eaten. What did I have to say?
At first I thought I was being accused of misreporting the menu description, which was a serious charge. What had actually happened was far odder. By the night I reviewed Pétrus, Wareing later told me, he had been so stung by criticism of the turbot dish by other critics that, having recognised me when I arrived, he decided to change it and not tell me. The Welsh rarebit had been replaced with a herb crust, the lemon-grass veloute with a cep sauce. And I hadn't noticed.
In my defence I should say that, had it been a kicking cep sauce, I think I would have barked: 'Who put all the mushrooms in the lemon-grass veloute?' I still found the dish cacophonous and overseasoned. What intrigued me more than my own failings, however, was the incident itself: that the presence of a restaurant critic in the dining room should have moved a Michelin-starred chef, charging an easy £100 a head, to change a dish without saying a word. Just to see what would happen. What else might a restaurant critic drive a top chef to do? How influential were we, exactly? But then we already knew the answer to that question, courtesy of the legendary French chef Bernard Loiseau and the single gunshot he fired into his mouth in February 2003; a suicide that I appeared to have predicted a full 18 months before the event.
My novel The Apologist did not start life as a book about a restaurant critic. It started as a story about a man who decides to apologise for everything he's ever done wrong, not so much out of guilt, but because he enjoys the emotional roller coaster. Eventually he becomes so good at it he's appointed Chief Apologist to the United Nations, employed to travel the world apologising for everything from slavery to the opium wars. He gets his own jet, his own security detail, his own staff. Following Bill Clinton's apology to Rwanda, for ignoring the genocide, and Tony Blair's for the Irish Potato Famine, acts of penitence seemed so very now. (Recently I set up a website - www.the-apologist.co.uk - where people could issue personal apologies, and the sorries have quickly piled up.)
My only problem was working out who my apologist might be. I thought he could work as a banker or a lawyer, jobs which, by their very nature, come with their own ballast of apologisable crimes. Finally, I concluded that the only reason for not making him a restaurant critic was that I am one, which is no reason at all. Now it became a ripe narrative of food and restaurant reviews, but totally vicious ones. For if there is one thing my job has taught me, it is this: while people like reading about good restaurants, what they really like reading about is bad ones. At first this startled me. I never go out looking for bad experiences, but when the bad ones come along, people love it.
I suppose I shouldn't have been so surprised. The fact is that, while eating in a bad restaurant is horrible, writing about them (and therefore reading about them) is fun. Now, on behalf of my fictional restaurant critic, Marc Basset, I could write some real stinkers. Slowly, as I wrote, a little bit of Mr Basset crept into the real world. As is the custom, I book restaurant tables under an assumed name. For a while it was my mother's maiden name. Then my wife's name. Finally I became my own fictional character. Marc Basset booked into some of the best and worst restaurants that Britain has to offer, and, on occasion, I began to write like him, too. It was, I think, no accident that it was Mr Basset who booked into Pétrus.
As well as offering me a new booking name, making my apologist a restaurant critic also offered me a way into the story. Basset's first apology - the catalyst for his orgy of penitence - would be to the widow of a chef who kills himself after being slated in one of his reviews. I was on a roll. And then, many months later, apparently in response to his downgrading in the famed Gault-Millau guide, the three-star French chef Bernard Loiseau killed himself. My gag didn't look so funny any more.
I am often asked how much power restaurant critics have. I have always said not much; we can encourage customers into good places, but bad places fail all by themselves. The Loiseau case indicated otherwise. Or as the great French chef Paul Bocuse put it: 'Bravo Gault-Millau, you have won.' Quite quickly, though, his widow was suggesting that her husband had been troubled for a while; that it was the overall stress of the business of being a three-star chef, a brand name, which had caused his problems, not one year's restaurant guide.
And yet I could not help but wonder whether, in the novel I had written, there was not some element of self-loathing. I can't deny that at times I have questioned what I do for a living. Is eating out a proper job? Does writing about it add much to the sum of human knowledge? There are certainly evenings, after a meal out, when I find the idea of another restaurant, and another overwritten menu, and another foaming truffled veloute, absolutely exhausting. And then a wonderful thing happens. I go home. I go to bed. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am hungry again. What can I tell you? I am, and always have been, a man of appetites. And for that there is no point apologising.
· Jay Rayner's The Apologist is published by Atlantic Books at £10. To order a copy for £8 plus p&p, call the Observer book service on 0870 836 0885
