Giles Coren

After 24 years as the Times Restaurant critic, Giles Coren continues to get under his readers’ skin. They love him or they hate him, but they can’t ignore him. His success lies not just in the effortless fluency of his writing, the way his original prose gets straight to the heart of his subject, but in his ability to combine humour with a keen understanding of what makes a restaurant tick. This is why readers come back for more – he is a reliable critic who also makes them laugh. This year in an uncharacteristically serious and heartfelt column, he confronted the growing obesity crisis with a rant against the unhealthy options at motorway service stations. To counter that, he wrote a classic takedown of the food by numbers on offer at a clutch of high end new hotels aimed at the super rich, and he was the first to review a good value new restaurant in Sheffield, which he loved despite sitting at a PVC-upholstered table which he described as “like eating off Suzi Quatro’s lap”.