Giles Coren, British columnist and restaurant critic for the Times, is the star of a new show called Million Dollar Critic, which debuts Oct. 7 on the W Network.Fernando Morales/The Globe and Mail
'I have been engaged two or three times," Giles Coren confesses to me in a midtown diner in Toronto, where he was filming a segment earlier this year for his new television series, Million Dollar Critic. Did he buy expensive rings each time? "Oh yes," the British restaurant critic for The Times carries on. "I was in the engagement ring rental business for a while," he deadpans, leaning in to deliver the joke. "One of them threw the ring right at me." He allows a pause for laughter and then leans in again. "Sometimes, you have to say you're going to marry them," he offers, raising his eyebrows suggestively at me. "I used to have anger problems." He waves a hand in the air to dismiss them. "But then I had therapy. So my wife got lucky."
I am the target of a charm offensive, a media strategy his type of British journalist is fond of employing. The chatter is all yuck-yuck this, witty-me that. And all I can think, as I sit across from him, taking in his mile-a-minute prattle, is that it's a good thing he has has chosen not to eat anything. He wouldn't have time to fit food in his mouth.
Besides, he seems less interested in talking about food than he is in describing the ingredients that go into creating his delectable self. He briefly mentions Million Dollar Critic, which airs Oct. 7 on W Network in Canada and on BBC America in the U.S. The series documents his dining experience in five restaurants in six cities, including Toronto, Quebec City, St. John's, Philadelphia, Providence and Charleston. The premise is that a positive review from him will garner international exposure, bringing in a purported $1-million in extra business.
But the show is just a medium for him to showcase himself. He who expertly stirs up controversies like a French chef preparing béchamel sauce, which he can then dine out on.
There's the widely-publicized incident in 2008 when he lambasted his copy editors at the newspaper for changing one word in his column. He will trash highly-anticipated new restaurants such as London's Balthazar. "I just wrote a bad review and people couldn't hack it," he says. "I had a bad, bad meal and that made me angry … Keith McNally was so used to having his ass kissed in New York. I tell it like it is."
He loves to criticize fat people. "Look, it's not a question of not liking fat people. But we have an obesity crisis. People make such a big issue about the wrong body image for young girls with models who are too thin and anorexic. But the other end is worse." Then there's the inappropriate tweet he sent out, saying a neighbour's 12-year-old son should be sexually assaulted and killed because he made too much noise playing his new drums. "That was just an angry tweet," he says. "I apologized a lot."
Bad behaviour in professional kitchens is part of the cultural expectation. We love the idea that the pan-fried trout, peas and chorizo fricassee comes with a side of chaotic kitchen dysfunction. And Coren appears to want to extend the bad-boy Anthony Bourdain charm thing to the critic. At the end of last year, he wrote about giving up alcohol in Esquire, but fell off the wagon a few months later – which he also wrote about. "I like a drink," he tells me, shrugging in his tailored, shiny suit. "But I don't have booze until the end of the day. I don't do moderation. One drink is a gateway drug. And on film you have to be clear-eyed and alive and your brain has to be working. My brain is all I have and if I'm drunk, it's just like everybody else's brain. And that's why I drink, to just get myself down to a bit of normal." Besides, the 45-year-old says after all that, "I'm a father now so I'm responsible." He and his wife of four years, journalist Esther Walker, have two children, aged three and one.
Forget the tradition of the anonymous restaurant critic. Coren wants – needs, might be the better word – to be the main meal. He wants to be what you can't get enough of, regardless of whether you hate or love him. It's part of the celebrity game, which he knows how to play. He admits that he decided to do Million Dollar Critic after the pay wall at The Times restricted his audience. "My work is what I care about the most, which now most of the world can't read. Before the pay wall, I was read all over America," he says.
"I grew up associating love with success," he explains at one point. "And I associate success with being funny and being funny with being clever." His late father, humorist Alan Coren, was editor of Punch magazine and the host of the popular TV show, Call My Bluff. "In my family, it was about getting attention. At the table, you had to be funny. You had to be quick. You had to talk fast to get it in – and then I'm the eldest," he says, offering me a plaintive look.
More than once, Coren tells me that he got a first-class degree in English literature from University of Oxford. His only sibling, Victoria Mitchell, who also went to Oxford, is famous for her professional poker playing, which she wrote about in For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker. He, too, has written books. First came his novel, Winkler, in 2005. (One section of it won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.) Then, he produced Anger Management (For Beginners), a compilation of his columns. His latest, How To Eat Out: Lessons From a Life Lived Mostly in Restaurants, describes the experience of that private act – eating – in the most public of spaces, the restaurant. That's the focus of his new TV show, too. Amid the overheated obsession with food and celebrity cooking, Coren shrewdly broadens the attention beyond the kitchen to the restaurant itself as he searches for the perfect combination of people, neighbourhood, service staff, food and ambience.
"I wanted to be a novelist. I feel inside like Ernest Hemingway. And I know that I'm not," he divulges suddenly as the conversation turns into a therapy session. "I wanted to be bigger and better than my dad … People always say: 'Your father was such a nice, funny guy.' But he was also dark and angry. My father's writing was funny, but you didn't have to be at home with him. He kept his darkness private."
Coren understands the game of crafting celebrity for the media maw, for the pay wall-paying subscribers of newspapers, for fickle readers everywhere, for his 156K tweeps. You have to entertain. You have to make people talk. You have to pimp yourself, reveal yourself, steel yourself and sacrifice your dignity with a smile and a joke and a quip. "Go ahead, be brutal with me," he says as he kisses me goodbye. I air-kiss him back, and promise that I will.