This review is a bit of a sham, I’m afraid, because it isn’t one where I booked under a false name and shambled quietly into the restaurant hoping to achieve as close a facsimile of a “real” dining experience as possible. It’s quite the opposite, in fact. For I ate at the Greenhouse not just in my name, but in the name of three other frontline restaurant critics as well, which is a significant chunk of the species nationally. Furthermore, we had a private, glassed-off room, the table was booked probably 100 years ago, the chef chose the menu, and the sommelier chose the wine. As a review meal, it was a farrago.

But what could I do? I am off to Spain tonight for five days to write a piece for this magazine. While I am away, my deadline will pass. I haven’t got time to go and eat somewhere now. Yesterday’s lunch at the Greenhouse, where we four critics sat as the judging panel for the London Restaurant Festival Awards, is all I’ve got.

And I don’t think it’s such a bad call, as it happens. The Greenhouse in Mayfair is a perennial top-end favourite. I’ve reviewed it a couple of times, under different chefs, but there is too much going on in the restaurant world to be always going back to places every time the chef changes. However, I had heard great things about their new man, Antonin Bonnet, and had been curious. So when I learnt that we would be discussing the future of London’s restaurants there, over a few courses, I spotted a two-birds-with-one-stone type opportunity.

The part I wasn’t looking forward to so much was the judging. I don’t really go in for these sorts of competitions. Strange though it may sound, I do not have the confidence in my own opinions that such a role requires. I like to write about food, not sit in judgment on it. (The scores given rather churlishly at the end of this column are provided very much under duress.)

Expert View

The side dish of heritage carrots were a bit scary: all multicoloured and leaves-on and covered in grit

Giles Coren

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On the plus side, restaurant critics are a terrific bunch. The jolliest, smartest, funniest, don’t-really-give-a-toss-when-it-comes-down-to-ittest gang of hacks you could hope to meet. And I love their company. Which isn’t to say they don’t make me feel uneasy. They all seem to know so much more than me. They are always crazily in love with restaurants and chefs I’ve never even heard of.

“Jalapeno McSweetbread is on fire just now, down at his new place in Chiswick,” one of them will say. And they’ll all sigh and kiss their fingers. And I’ll go, “Jalapeno Who?” And they’ll all raise their eyebrows, and look at each other, and shrug.

To make up for it, I’ll disclose the name of a place I’ve recently discovered and one of them will say: “You’re still going there?” And another will say, “Juan-Jesus moved on weeks ago!” So I’ll name somewhere else and they’ll squeal, “He microwaves everything!”

You mention your favourite restaurant, and this lot remember how much better it was before, when so-and-so was the chef. And they remember the names of sommeliers, and head waiters, too. And they know what is about to close and what isn’t going to open after all. And where some famous chef you haven’t heard of, who isn’t opening till next year, is currently cooking for friends.

Sitting round a table with this lot, you realise that you have been nowhere and that you know nothing. You also learn that they take notes. I said I was planning to review the meal, and they asked where my pen was. Wasn’t I going to take notes?

Notes about what? Surely not so as to remember every last detail about the food? That’s the last thing I want to do. By the time I’ve finished gooning on about my life, I only have 250 words left for the meal, so it’s a disaster if I recall too much even in my head. If I had endless shorthand pads full of notes on the construction and provenance of each bean, I’d be screwed.

But I don’t need notes to recall walking through the strange, calm little garden in front of the restaurant, off a cobbled Mayfair mews, into a very elegant, unusually masculine (since its refurbishment) restaurant, and being shown to a glass box, inside which, already seated, were my fellow judges: three restaurant critics and, for some reason, three other people.

They were seated around a circular table. I was the last. I felt like I had walked into Blofeld’s lair and they had already decided to kill me.

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