A.A. Gill, British food critic with an acid wit, dies at 62

By Harrison Smith

The Washington Post

A.A. Gill, a food critic and travel writer whose acid wit and stylish turns of phrase in stories for the Sunday Times made him one of Britain’s most revered – and feared – newspaper columnists, died Dec. 10 in London. He was 62.

Martin Ivens, the editor of the Sunday Times, announced his death in a statement on Saturday, saying that Gill “was the heart and soul of the paper.”

“I’ve got an embarrassment of cancer, the full English,” Gill wrote three weeks ago, beginning a rare five-star review with a description of his metastatic lung cancer. “There is barely a morsel of offal not included. I have a trucker’s gut-buster, gimpy, malevolent, meaty malignancy.”

Gill’s writing was a staple of the Sunday Times since 1993, when he suggested a piece about the “tweed and feathers,” cocktail-party-like scene of Scotland’s Inverness airport. A prolific writer who also contributed to GQ, Esquire and Vanity Fair magazines, he filed weekly restaurant and television columns, monthly travel pieces, and features on the travails of fatherhood and the effectiveness of Britain’s National Health Service.

Although his subject matter often strayed from food, Gill – a dyslexic former artist and alcoholic whose spelling was so bad he dictated each of his stories over the phone – was best known for the dyspeptic prose in his restaurant reviews, which made him among the most powerful figures in the British restaurant scene.

In 2003, fellow London critic Fay Maschler told the New York Times that beside herself, Gill was the only person “who can make a restaurant with a positive review.” Following one such review, chef Will Ricker said that his restaurant E&O received an additional 2,000 calls a week.

His bad reviews often were withering.

The shrimp-and-foie-gras dumplings at the Manhattan restaurant 66, Gill wrote for Vanity Fair, were “fishy liver-filled condoms” that “tasted as if your mouth had been used as the swab bin in an animal hospital.”

Perhaps just as critical was his review of the memoir “Autobiography” by the singer Morrissey, whom Gill called “plainly the most ornery, cantankerous, entitled, whingeing, self-martyred human being who ever drew breath. And those are just his good qualities.”

The website Omnivore named Gill’s review its Hatchet Job of 2014, awarding him with a year’s supply of potted shrimp for his efforts.

Shy and dandyish, with a fondness for tweed suits, scarves and monocles, Gill’s dislikes were many: gastropubs (“food and pubs go together like frogs and lawn mowers”), nostalgia (“the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug”), public-relations representatives (“the headlice of civilization”), vegetarians (“people who get pleasure from not eating things”) – even entire places and groups of people.

The Isle of Man was not worth a visit – “the weather’s foul, the food’s medieval, it’s covered in suicidal motorists and folks who believe in fairies” – and the Welsh were “loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls.”

His comments about the Welsh resulted in a complaint filed against him in Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality, and critics described subsequent remarks as scurrilous and sexist.

Gill was unrepentant. “Don’t believe what the in-touchy folk with Velcro lives and pitying smiles tell you. Hate is good,” he wrote in a 2003 review. “Hate is a doer, a fixer, a trailblazing reformer. Your collection of hates is the most precious thing you own. You will be remembered by the breadth, strength and tempered edge of your hatreds.”

Adrian Anthony Gill was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on June 28, 1954, and grew up mostly in London. His father, Michael, worked in television; in 1969, he produced the acclaimed Kenneth Clark documentary series “Civilisation.”

Gill’s mother, Yvonne Gilan, was an actress who earned praise for her comic portrayal of a flirtatious Frenchwoman in one episode of the sitcom “Fawlty Towers.”

A self-described “militant teenager” with a pronounced stammer, Gill said that he had a strained relationship with his father, who urged his son toward journalism. Gill instead wanted to be an artist, a field in which he could work unhindered by dyslexia.

He attended a progressive boarding school in Letchworth before studying at several art schools and embarking on a seven-year career as a painter and illustrator. To support himself, he sold pizzas, pornography and hair spray, and at one point taught a cooking class for men who were trying to impress women.

Gill also drank heavily and used drugs including speed, he said. At 30, a doctor told him his alcoholism would kill him, and Gill checked into a treatment center and began to reverse his slide.

He began writing seriously at the suggestion of a friend, setting aside his shyness and self-doubts to interview a painter for a small art magazine.

An editor at Tatler magazine suggested he write about recovering from alcoholism, and Gill had his break, going on to develop his style of humorous, first-person journalism. He began using the name A.A., he said, probably out of “some silly Edwardian snobbery” and at the suggestion of editors who preferred short bylines. “Mind you,” he said, “Adrian Anthony sounds like an aging Florida interior designer who once did Rock Hudson’s pool house out as a tiki-tiki wet bar.”

Gill proposed to his partner of 23 years, food consultant and former model Nicola Formby – “the Blonde,” as he called her in many of his columns – after receiving his cancer diagnosis.

Previous marriages to Cressida Connolly and Amber Rudd, a Conservative politician who is now England’s home secretary, ended in divorce.

Additional survivors include his mother; two children from his relationship with Formby; and two children from his marriage to Rudd. A younger brother, Nick, was a Michelin-starred chef who disappeared in 1998 after what Gill described as a mental breakdown.

Gill’s books included two poorly reviewed novels, “Sap Rising” (1996) and “Starcrossed” (1999), the cookbooks “The Ivy” (1997) and “Le Caprice” (1999), and several collections of his journalism: “Table Talk” (2007), “Paper View” (2008) and “A.A. Gill Is Further Away” (2011). He also published a memoir of his alcoholism and recovery, “Pour Me: A Life” (2015).

Gill did not consider himself “cheated” of a longer life, he said in a recent interview. Because of an alcoholism that nearly killed him, he said, he considered himself “very lucky.”

“At the last minute I found something I could do,” he continued. “Somebody said: why don’t you watch television, eat good food and travel and then write about it? And, as lives go, that’s pretty good.”