Egon Ronay: The man who taught Britain how to eat

By Michael Winner for the Daily Mail
Updated: 04:11 EST, 14 June 2010

Food critics are the most useless people in the world. None of them knows what they're talking about. They're pompous, arrogant show-offs who write in over-flowing sentences about sauces that no one knows or cares about.

There was only one exception and he died on Saturday, aged 94, at his home in Berkshire. His name was Egon Ronay.

He was a quiet, dignified man, whose father, an Army officer, had five restaurants in Budapest. The business was destroyed when the Russians took over during World War II.

Egon Ronay died on Saturday, aged 94, at his home in Berkshire. He came to London in 1946 and began working as a waiter before going on to open a restaurant

Egon was reduced to selling coffee from a stall. Then he was imprisoned in a basement to be sent to Siberia. But a Russian soldier remembered he'd sold him coffee and set him free.

In 1946, Egon came to London, first as a waiter, then to open restaurants. Through the auspices of an admirer, the wonderfully named Fanny Cradock, cook and food critic of the day, Egon, too, became a food critic.

Now he's gone, there are no critics left that mean anything. He led the way to improve British culinary standards with his restaurant , the Marquee in Knightsbridge. He served classical French dishes that were almost unknown in Great Britain.

But he served simple food. Not elaborate plate decoration that passes for cooking excellence nowadays.

In 1955, he sold his restaurant to concentrate on his food guides. After he became a critic, Egon said: 'There is an annoying new trend for complicated menus that are anything but customer friendly. They read like recipes, with the result that you choose halibut and then fail to find it on your plate.

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Egon samples a sandwich from a selection at Heathrow Airport

'It's even hard to get a decent dessert, instead you get a sculpture. It's ridiculous. Kitchen hands are turned into sculptors, painters, decorators, the essential subject being unrecognisably disguised. Food has no nationality, food is either good or it isn't. Anyone thunderstruck by newness alone is the worst kind of ignorant food snob.'

Egon was not a snob - although he was horrified by the communal teaspoon he once found attached to a string hanging above the sugar bowl at a cafe in a London railway station.

When, 15 years ago, I started writing tales about my life in restaurants - some people aggrandise these vignettes by saying I'm a food critic - I was greeted with contempt and hostility by other food writers.

Not so Egon. He rang to congratulate me and we often spoke and met thereafter. He was a marvellous supporter. It made me very proud.

His views on the unnecessary complication of food, menus and restaurant staff presentation coincided exactly with my own.

Egon had been determined, through example, and through his Egon Ronay Guides, to improve catering standards in England. He said: 'I think my guides have had the effect of telling people in mass catering that they could no longer get away with murder - because I would expose them.'

There's no question Egon improved standards at all levels of catering in Great Britain. He couldn't go so far as to transform the profit in mass-produced food which comes from central depots and flies out of them like garbage on to plates in restaurants all over the country.

What he did was educate people as to what food could be - and thus the British, slow to rise from anonymity, started to complain more often and more vociferously about what they were eating. This was a considerable advance on diners accepting anything they were offered.

But Egon would come to despair over the cult of the so-called celebrity chef. He said: 'Gordon Ramsay and Jamie oliver are not chefs any more, they are business people. They're not as good as they used to be. They don't cook. They're interested in and concerned with money.

'Celebrity chefs are purely a show. The word celebrity doesn't say much about merit.'

How right he was. Egon was an immaculately dressed, sparkling man with wonderful wit and observation. devoid of pomp and arrogance. His Ronay Guides to restaurants and hotels were the best, far more reliable than the snooty Michelin Guides.

They have never been surpassed. Strangely, when they went out of business in the Eighties, I was approached and offered hundreds of thousands of pounds to put my name on a new version of the Ronay Guide.

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Egon tries out the food at a service station on the M1. It may surprise drivers but he awarded some of his coveted stars to motorway service stations

I turned it down because (a) I could never match up to Egon and (b) I can think of little that would be more horrific than people coming up to me in the street and haranguing me because they went to a restaurant recommended in my guide that they didn't like.

Egon had 30 inspectors, but stayed on top of everything. He would travel round the country eating four meals a day. He'd revisit every restaurant each year, always booking under an assumed name.

Like me, Egon never accepted a free meal. He had a sparkle and a great sense of humour. He unquestionably raised the standards of cooking in Great Britain.

Nowadays, people think smoking in a restaurant spoils the enjoyment of others. As a 20- cigar- a- day man, who stopped, I now agree. But Egon and I clashed in friendly fashion on TV when he defended smoking in restaurants and I, poacher turned gamekeeper, was against it.

As with every time I met Egon, it was simply wonderful to hear his news and views, often bordering on severely scandalous, about various chefs. Some he liked. Some he'd gone off. A few he still admired.

The world has moved on a long way from the meat and two veg which sat on your plate in the Forties and Fifties.

Strange though it may seem, I look back with nostalgia to World War II food - it was immensely plain, but at least the ingredients were not overchemicalised and deep frozen to a tasteless death, as so much is today.

The Fifties showed things getting a bit more daring. Then along came Egon and he led the way to continental cooking styles that started to change everything.

By the Sixties, food had become adventurous. Food of different nationalities featured more and more. We'd graduated to the more carefully prepared and adventurous food that Egon both served and later encouraged in others.

This led to ever-increasing standards in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, but this advance was not without drawbacks.

Restaurants saved on space as prices and rents rose. People were jammed closer and closer together, noise levels became horrific and the food quality in many cases took a dive. Profit before pride.

Egon looked with considerable despair at the over-complicated pomposity of menus and dishes served today. He believed that chefs should re- connect with tradition, not go into outer space in a pilotless rocket.

There are people who you may not see every day, who you may not speak to more than a dozen times a year, but whose presence in your life, even if not central, is of immense value.

Thus Egon Ronay figured in my life. His notes of congratulation if he liked something I'd written, his phone calls, his gossip, I will miss them all.

But, above all, the so-called hospitality industry (misnamed if any industry ever was) has lost a beacon, a guiding light.

Egon Ronay was a force for good, civility, humour - and for excellence in the provision of food. Because of Egon Ronay, we all eat better than we would have done had he never f led from Russian dominance of Hungary.

I miss you, Egon. I'll try to carry the Ronay flag onwards and upwards.

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