With all my pretensions, and they are legion, I never pretended to be a gourmet or a restaurant critic, or a definer of food. Because far too many people would know that my judgement of a wine list has always been based on the quantity of wine drunk rather than vintage, I wouldn't really let myself loose into heavy wordage about the excellence or failings of the various restaurants in my own or any other city. Occasionally I roar out to about half a dozen places abroad and mention them so that you have somewhere to go when you get there. But to give me credit I would always say they were recommended in terms of the atmosphere rather than because of the excitement of discovering crushed juniper in the gravy and the delirium brought on by a bruised cardamom pod in the cream.
Anyway, all this fuss about Patrick Guilbaud's restaurant not being included in a guide is utterly idiotic. If it wasn't, in fact, bringing him such bad publicity I would assume Mr Guilbaud and his friends were just causing all this fuss to draw attention to him.
What on earth does it matter that his restaurant is left out of a book? It can't matter to him, since his place is full all the time and the kind of people who go there will go on going there - nobody is going to say "Aha, it's no longer the `in' place to be" just because it has been left out of a personal selection. It's so unlikely anyone is going to cancel a dinner for 10, a business lunch or a banquet just because of this omission.
What he should have done was raise his shoulders elegantly - and his nationality has a particular skill in doing this - and say buf or phoo, or zut alors or whatever it is they say, and forget it.
Then the thing is over, the story is dead in the water and those who always ate in Guilbaud's will go on eating there: if they like it, they tell their friends and so on into the next millennium.
But no, he didn't quite do that and so it has now developed into a major Row Story. There have been newspaper articles, radio programmes, people divided over whether it was an unpardonable professional insult or just one person's viewpoint.
I take the second view. It's not as if he got a very bad review which he felt to be inaccurate and damaging. Nobody said the food was raw or overpriced or snottily served or anything. It just wasn't mentioned at all, and I think it idiotic to let people make this song and dance over it all, particularly since the only end-result is that everyone's going to know it was not included in something.
Honestly, if I were Patrick Guilbauld's best friend I would have told him to let it pass. When the press contacted him and asked what it felt like to be omitted, he should have smiled a charming, Gallic smile and said we are all entitled to our own views. And that would have been that.
John McKenna has been gracious about it and said it is truly a very fine restaurant but not particularly Irish, which is what he was looking for. He comes out much better, to my mind, than the restaurateur does, because even mentioning and reminding us what Michelin thinks and Michelin says sounds a teeny bit petty. Like saying "Look here, really famous people liked my restaurant enough to give it an award, boo hoo why don't you?"
All kinds of criticism and choice are personal. And none of us can be expected to be saintly and mad enough to nod sagely when we are at the receiving end of it. There's a savage pleasure in proving the critic wrong somehow. We've all known that. Ask anyone who has ever written a book or a play! But we don't bleat, no matter how unjust it seems.
Authors will tell you of reviewers who totally misunderstood the work, gave away the ending and demolished it for not being something it never set out to be. But still they don't march into an office demanding a critic's head on a plate.
I had a friend whose book was dismissed as hopefully the last in a tedious trilogy - which was unfair since it wasn't part of any trilogy, tedious or otherwise. Only a few weeks ago I did what I thought was a nice and helpful interview and chat with a very young reporter in London, and she used no other verb to describe me and the way I spoke except the word "gush". Of course I wanted to give her a good, hard smack, write a note to her boss and tell how much help I had been: I wanted to bad-mouth her all over the place until no-one would hire her ever again. But I didn't. It's forgotten already, I imagine, by everyone except myself.
I have the odd, bad-tempered, broody thought about her and Mr Guilbaud should do the same as he rejoices in his full dining room and the lavish praise of his customers. My own criterion for going to restaurants is usually word of mouth, people telling you that this place or that has a warm, nice buzz about it and where the people are welcoming and serve things that you'd like rather than painting a plate with a design of snow peas and toasted pine nuts. I thought this might be a bit vulgar and pathetic, so I telephoned John McKenna to know what he thought people looked for when they went into a place. Interestingly and pleasingly, he said food usually came third in a list of priorities. First, they liked the atmosphere; then, the service; then the food; and then whether or not it was value for money.
He said the waiter or waitress is often as important to the customer and to the image created as the chef, which I also agree with. I have many other, deep-seated views too, which, if there was a different kind of restaurant criticism, I'd be very happy to expand on. I don't like people coming to ask you after every single course if it's all right. I love them putting a jug of water on the table without it being ordered. I don't like being asked would I like freshly ground pepper when I'm in the middle of my story or someone else's. I love them leaving a basket of mixed bread on the table. I like the tables being near enough so you can hear what they're saying at the next one if you want to, but they can't necessarily hear you. I love the Mine Host-figure to come out and talk to everyone in the restaurant for two minutes to each table - then we all feel great but we don't feel hijacked. From four years of lameness, I hate places where the cloakrooms are on a different floor. I like them explaining on the menu what a darne of salmon or a paupiette of something else might be.
Running a restaurant needs all kind of skills and artistry and an endless amount of patience. Not everyone in the world is going to love the book you write, the restaurant you run, or the song you sing. The worst thing you can have in any of these trades is a thin skin, the best thing is to realise that in the end nothing matters all that very much.