Around here hardly anyone has ever seen her, but plenty of people read her reviews (on the Guardian, on Olive Magazine) and in drones follow her on Twitter (her handle is @MarinaOLoughlin). Marina O’Loughlin is one of the most respected food critics of the United Kingdom, despite her physical aspect being a total mystery. She doesn’t appear on TV and doesn’t attend events and openings.
This of course allows her to be able to appreciate a restaurant under the cover of anonymity. The difference between her and other equally respected but visible critics such as Tom Parker Bowles is that she never gets preferential treatment, not by the chefs nor by the staff; in her own words, the fact that she has no friends in the industry also allows her to be pretty objective and experience a restaurant exactly as her readers would. Obviously, the downside of it is that she’s not able to get tables at the hottest restaurants any faster than the rest of us.
The avatar chosen by Marina O’Loughlin on twitter
When one of her reviews comes out, chefs and restaurateurs alike fear the worst: what has
Marina written? And indeed sometimes her words are sharp as a chef’s knife. Memorable is her review on the newspaper
Metro for the now closed
Gregg’s Table (owned by one of the British Master Chef’s judges): “This really is one of the worst meals I’ve eaten since I was regularly forced to eat leathery custard by a variety of particularly sadistic nuns”. However when a restaurant does please her (and thankfully it does happen often), her reviews really make you want to try it out yourself. We usually agree with her, and she hits the nail on the head in capturing a restaurant’s essence.
Such is the case of
Restaurant Story reviewed on the
Guardian: “I can't remember a meal that prompted so many actual, physical reactions”. Indeed. Despite her status, she’s firmly grounded in the real world and via Twitter she seems really lovely. She fully interacts with her readership, she takes the time to reply and comment on even pretty trivial and not necessarily food related themes. She loves Italy where she often goes on holiday (especially Sicily). Her writing style is lively, cheeky and a pleasure to read, always lined with a veil of typically British dry humour.
We ask her, obviously via email, how long she’s been working incognito. Basically forever, she answers. “I had about six months when I first started - 14 years ago! - when I wasn't incognito. But back then everyone laughed at the idea of a free paper (
Metro) employing good writers so nobody paid me the slightest bit of attention”. Her job sees her stuffing her face up and down the country but also travel abroad a lot. What have been the highlights of her career so far? A few, she tells us.
Meeting other writers whom she’s admired for years; two visits to
El Bulli. And, with her typical tongue in cheek attitude, when she found out she had been named as one of the UK's 500 most influential people by the
Sunday Times, especially because when she read it she was wearing a 12 quid frock. After all, she points out, another difference with her recognisable colleagues, is that since she can never do TV work, she’s always skint.
