Chapter 5: L’Autre dimensions to Pied à Terre

The Pied à Terre team had literally come through a baptism of fire. Moore, as always, was looking to the future. An indication of the maturing of Moore in the second decade of the business was in his attitude to serious food critics and their new-found cousins the ‘food bloggers’. These days, he was generally too busy to worry about the critics (a polite euphemism for over it). It was different once.

“In the early days, Richard and I would rush to the newsagent to read Fay Maschler’s latest restaurant review in the Evening Standard, asking each other: ‘who is she going to close down this week?’ It was life and death stuff then.” However, one critic’s assessment of his meal at Pied à Terre from this period still rankles a little. Giles Coren of the Sunday Times gave everything from the food to the service top marks but rated the wine as zero. The result was a middling overall score of five.