Egon Ronay Food Critic

This week a great man died Egon Ronay, aged 94. He was born in Hungary, his family owned 5 restaurants in pre-war Budapest, the business was seized by the Soviets in 1944. He fled communist domination in 1946 by being freed by a Russian Soldier to whom he had sold coffee just before he was to be shipped off to Siberia. Egon fled to Britain where a family friend gave him a job as a waiter. He would later open his own restaurant in London The Marquee near Harrod's, introducing French food when it was largely unknown after the war in a London of food rations and austerity. Then he went into publishing with his famous Ronay Food guides, who in many ways surpassed the Michelin Guides. Egon had a staff of 30 inspectors and he himself would visit restaurants always under an assumed name, eating 4 meals a day.

I remember well a BBC World program about traveling and Heathrow airport in 1994 when he was inspecting food outlets and restaurants at Heathrow in London. One of the driving forces behind the remarkable change in Heathrow's catering standards at the time was food critic Egon Ronay who was recruited by BAA's chief executive, Sir John Egan, in 1991 to help overhaul the whole experience of eating at the airport. Ronay was an elegant man, always well dressed, very professional in his approach, witty, courteous and polite.

Ronay’s policy of accepting no advertising or hospitality from hotels or restaurants boosted his credibility with the public at large. He later began publishing annual pub and budget-restaurant guides.
The Ronay guide, published for nearly 30 years, could make or break a restaurant. Mr. Ronay bolstered the careers of chefs like Raymond Blanc, Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay, although he could turn on a dime. In 2008, he complained to The Daily Mail that Mr. Ramsay and the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver “are not chefs anymore, they are businesspeople.They're not as good as they used to be."

I completely agree with him, in my travel I noticed to often in one city or another a celebrity chef opening a restaurant and letting others do the cooking, only his name is suppose to guarantee excellence, but that is all a scam really, celebrity does not equal merit.

I also travelled countless times through Heathrow airport and always found at the time the restaurants cleaner with better food than other airports in the world. Air travel nowadays is a chore, security, rude staff, overcrowded and poor dirty facilities, that is what most airports are all about, push people through. Imagine having a good coffee or a sandwich that is fresh with good ingredients, as if you made it yourself. Pleasant staff and clean facilities, all this to me enhances traveling pleasure.

I think I liked Egon Ronay because he cared about food and quality and loved simple food well prepared. He use to say:
“I really wanted to see better food. That really was my purpose.” Going to a restaurant, you want to be able to understand the menu and know exactly what it is you chose, I simply hate it when you read the menu, you look at an item and wonder what is that or how is this prepared, the waiter does not know, has to go and ask, comes back with a vague answer. No that is not what restaurant dining should be, I am not interested in the fact that it is fancy, food should never be fancy, just good and well prepared. At least that is the way I learned it in Switzerland at the hotel school. How to cook green vegetables, so that they are crisp and with a beautiful color, or prepare a steak so that it is cooked the way the customer wants it or offer a dessert that is simple and yet pleasant without being heavy and difficult to digest. It seems that those qualities are difficult to achieve these days in most restaurants because they are more focused on the decor and the atmosphere than on the food.

When I think of all the pre-prepared, processed frozen and factory shipped food being served nowadays in countless restaurants, with countless additive, too much salt or sugar, this is when I remember Egon Ronay and his efforts in raising the standards. As the old saying goes: '' Eating well is the best revenge''. The world needs more people like Egon Ronay.

In 1989 he published a memoir, with recipes, “The Unforgettable Dishes of My Life.”