From her Northern childhood to her career as an award-winning restaurant critic, food has shaped Grace Dent’s life, and now she’s spilling the beans in a memoir. By Emma Higginbotham
“Supermarkets have got a special place in my heart,” says Grace Dent who, appropriately for a restaurant critic, is telling Weekend how almost all of her childhood memories revolve around food.
“Parents slave so hard to give their kids these magical moments, with Christmas and weekends away, but the things that actually stick in your mind are trying to put something that you’ve seen on television into your mum’s trolley – and getting it!
“That moment when you get the Variety pack of cereals, or the BirdsEye Supermousse, or the tub of banana Nesquik,” she says, with a wistful sigh. “And then my mum says ‘But do you remember when I took you to the air show?’ and I’m like ‘What? No’.”
It’s little surprise, then, that food takes centre stage in her very funny new memoir, Hungry. Tracing Grace’s culinary journey from her working class roots in Carlisle to gourmet London, it’s also a love letter to her dad, George, as he slips into dementia. But don’t be fooled by the sombre subject.
“The book isn’t a misery memoir, it’s a comedy about my family and what we ate,” says the 47-year-old. “It’s about me going from being a little girl surviving on Findus crispy pancakes, salad cream and butterscotch Angel Delight to how I became the restaurant critic for The Guardian, and this go-to voice in the food world. How the hell did I do that?!”
It’s a good question, given that the Dent family diet was essentially beige. The daughter of a van driver and a cleaner, Grace was born in 1973 and grew up with her younger brother David in a house where ‘foreign’ food was treated with suspicion (she doesn’t recall seeing a bulb of garlic until the mid-80s, “and that was round the neck of someone in ’Allo ’Allo”).
Hungry is also a story about Grace’s quest for fame. Aged three, she would deliberately lose herself in shops just to hear her name read out over the tannoy, and by her teens she’d realised that her ticket out of Carlisle was through writing.
“I knew that I was good with words,” she says. “I was always good at telling stories and making people laugh. But I still don’t see myself as a journalist. I am literally the worst person at writing up facts. Very early on in my career, my editor started to look at my copy and go ‘But Grace, did any of this actually happen?’
After Stirling University, Grace headed to London where she combined newspaper and magazine writing with fun (there’s a great anecdote in the book about her sliding down John Leslie’s staircase on the back of a framed poster of Cannon & Ball before being sick in a hedge).
Yet it wasn’t the capital’s party scene that she fell in love with, it was the beigels, the bibimbap, the ackee and saltfish. Eating out, she discovered, was far better than pubbing and clubbing. And even better than that was writing about it.
In 2011 Grace was offered a restaurant column on the Evening Standard, within two years was a MasterChef regular, and in 2017 became The Guardian’s restaurant critic. It is, she says, her dream job. “My joy is an empty Word document, and being able to sit in bed in my pyjamas, surrounded by cats, and write a piece about a restaurant I’ve been to the night before.”
But while some critics have announced that they won’t write negative reviews during the pandemic, Grace has no such qualms. “Nobody wants to read a column by the sunny, positive woman who finds all terrible food lovely because haven’t we had a horrible year?” she says, laughing. “Possibly the first six or seven columns I wrote after the start of lockdown were quite positive, but there’s definitely a bite creeping back in.”
Yet she insists she doesn’t enjoy sticking the boot in. “The great myth is that restaurant critics love a horrible meal because it’s so easy to be horrible. It isn’t! It’s really difficult, knowing the ramifications. People will be fired, people will quit, people’s wives will go on the warpath and start tweeting at you at two o’clock in the morning.
“The easiest one to write is when you had an absolutely incredible evening and found another special place for your little black book. Then I can say ‘Woah, you need to go here!’ and everybody involved in that restaurant has the weekend of their life.”
At the heart of the memoir is the message that food is love, and for all those fancy restaurants and exquisite menus, Grace is never happier than having pub grub with her family, especially as her father slips further away.
“I really love my dad, and with dementia you lose people in tiny, tiny steps,” she says. “Dementia is something that we’re all aware of, but we don’t really talk about the millions of people across Britain that are in the same position as my family – that my father is still alive, but he isn’t alive.”
George no longer recognises Grace, “and I don’t really know what to do now,” she says. “It’s hard to go, and it’s hard not to go.
“So with the book, I wanted to pay tribute to the idea of ambiguous grief that never really has any resolution, and do that hopefully in a funny, touching way. I’ve been incredibly honest, and right now I feel like I’ve done the best thing. I feel like maybe I’ve helped people.”
Grace admits to being nervous about putting such personal emotions out there, but there’s always her love of processed, childhood comfort food to console her.
“I’m completely unashamed of it, and I do think that a box of BirdsEye potato waffles in your freezer brings joy,” she says. “Nobody gets to the end of a very long, crap day and thinks ‘Oh god, I just want to go home and have a superfood salad’.”
:: Hungry: a memoir of wanting more by Grace Dent, £16.99.
Food for thought
Grace believes she won her work experience placement – and then her first staff job – at upmarket magazine Marie Claire by calling herself Grace Georgina Dent. “This lengthened the short Northern fishwife grunt of ‘Grace Dent’ and made it sound posher,” she writes. “I’d fooled them, and now I was in.”
Aside from her press work, Grace, who is divorced and currently in a relationship, has written 11 novels for teenagers. Unusually for a restaurant critic, she eats a mostly vegan diet when she’s not reviewing.
Grace doesn’t hold back when it comes to her foodie dislikes, describing the flavour of truffle as “unwashed feet”, foie gras as “meaty snot” and turkey as “dry, third-rate chicken that tastes oddly like fish”.
An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend in October 2020 (c) Waitrose