Chat Over Lunch: Tim Hayward
FT critic, polymath, and recovering ad man steers us towards better experiences and greater pleasure in the name of living life to the fullest.
Chat Over Lunch was conceived from a desire to learn from someone that I admire. Following on from conversations with Nick Lander and Charlotte Ivers, I was thrilled to discover a connection with FT restaurant critic, food writer, and restauranteur Tim Hayward.
We met for lunch at Café Francois, the buzzy new spot in Borough Market. You can find all of the usual restaurant details at the bottom of the article.
I was not a very good student of Ernst Hemingway. My formative teacher on literature, Mr. Wood, from whom I endured lectures and serial criticism of my own writing in both my freshman and senior years of high school, was a Hemingway scholar and admirer, so my teenage self was naturally repelled from the great writer’s work.
But Hemingway is a fascinating character, with his hedonistic lifestyle, a deep love for Paris, and an urge to explore, often beyond the bounds of conventional appropriateness, both geographically and experientially. I re-read his On Paris collection recently — a series of essays written in the early 1920s, mostly in Paris cafés, about life in the City of Light, when Europeans who had faced death in the First World War explored every facet of the joy of living.
The essays offer no great sophistication. They are verbal sketches of observations and experiences. Of wine at 10:00 a.m. Of writer’s block. Of the café scene. And of a Latin Quarter roaring with life.
The new Café Francois in Borough Market is more modern and polished, but it roars in the same way. It would fit into Hemingway’s Paris with minimal modification.
So would Tim Hayward. Into the café scene of the roaring ‘20s. Into the levees and parties. Into a world that celebrates the enjoyment of life and living it.
On paper, Tim is — at a minimum — a brilliant writer, a perceptive observer, and a true polymath with the evident ability to take to almost anything. (In a recent podcast interview, the conversation turned smoothly from Thomas Aquinas to the science behind semaglutide drugs.)
He studied art in the form of photography, and his early professional experiences were sometimes through a lens but more often on a bike, delivering someone else’s work.
He escaped to the U.S. to explore his craft and experience the world beyond the UK. He spent much of his time in the American south, topping up his cash by working as a short order cook in a series of small-town diners. He wound up in San Francisco, but sensibly fled for the UK’s sturdier ground after a major earthquake.
These wanderings and a timely stint at a techie sounding company brought him circuitously to advertising, and during the height of the dot-com boom, Tim was an early advocate for digital, serving as the head of digital and senior planner for several major agencies including HHCL and TBWA.
Two decades later, I found Tim waiting for me at a small table in Café Francois, so close to our neighbours that it initially felt uncomfortable. But Tim was warm and welcoming, eager to dive in.
And so we did, starting with frog’s legs and beef tartare.
Both were delicious. Neither were dainty. The frog’s legs were served in a natural pair. If not for the breading, you could imagine them swimming away from the table. The beef in the tartare was wonderfully prepared, cut to just the right bite-sized morsels, flavoured with pickles and a few capers, and seasoned perfectly. It’s certainly among the best I’ve ever tasted.
The tartare got us talking about table-side preparations, and Tim, who had researched such things for one of his books, told me about the hierarchy of restaurants in the old days, when the chef was of little note and the maitre’d was the star of the show. Waiters were granted shifts by his whim — and it was always “him” in those days — and paid nothing but their tips, so they invented all manner of showy ways to impress guests, make themselves indispensable, and ensure future employment. Baked Alaska, Crepes Suzette, and Beef Tartare all trace their roots to the working rhythms of those grand cafes.
Tim’s own route into food writing was similarly involved. As he grew a bit jaded about advertising, he started exploring a growing interest in food — fuelled by years of client lunches and dinners across London and beyond.
But then he created an opportunity to go further: In the period after the dot-com crash, one of the survivors was an old-fashioned online discussion forum for foodies called eGullet. It was through the forum that early friendships with future critics Jay Rayner, Marina O’Loughlin, and others blossomed. And because he had an ounce of technical know-how and a mild interest, he eventually became the site’s admin.
Now that he could peer behind the curtain, he realised that a notable cluster of newspaper editors were regular visitors to the forum, tapping it for early intelligence on emerging places and trends. He also had access to their contact details. Beyond the forum, UK interest in food and restaurants was growing thanks to TV chefs like Gordon, Jamie, and Nigella who were at the height of their popularity.
A few timely, well-informed pitches later, and Tim’s work had appeared in the Guardian, the FT, and others. Following the financial crash, Tim’s relationship with the FT grew, and, although he was at pains to stress that he never set out to be a critic, he was the natural successor when Nick Lander retired after 30 years.
Around the time that he was starting to write more seriously, his wife saw a Tweet from Stephen Fry that Cambridge institution Fitzbillies bakery was soon to become a victim of the financial crash. As a Cambridge native who was similarly jaded about her own career in advertising, she proposed that she and Tim buy the bakery and preserve it. They did, and Tim returned to the stoves, often pulling dinner shifts for the first few years before they sensibly decided to focus on mornings and lunchtime, where things were both easier and more profitable.
They own the bakery still, and have expanded it to three locations, cementing its status as an indispensable feature of the Cambridge scene. Keeping his hands in the trade undoubtedly gives Tim an even more well-attuned perspective — on food and wine, of course, but also the whole manner of operational trials and tribulations of owning and running a successful restaurant.
Our mains arrived, and with them, Francois O’Neill, namesake and mastermind behind Café Francois, who stopped by for a chat.
Francois talked us through the inspiration behind the café, revealing that much of it came from his experiences on a trip to Montreal. “Yes, it’s like a Paris café, but dirtier,” he said. “A bit more profane. More fun. Not so serious.”
Our mains showed how his vision was coming to life.
The first was a grilled cheese sandwich served with a side of French onion soup for dipping. Any American or Canadian school kid would recognise a “French dip” sandwich. The gag was stupendous. But so were the flavours. Fresh bread sliced thin and then toasted just so. Soft enough to chew without breaking a tooth and dripping with butter. Zingy cheese. All softened further by a long dunk in the soup. Dangerously good. Dirty? Yes.
We also had a bowl of mussels, which were excellent if, perhaps, minutely overcooked. But served with a white wine, cream, and garlic sauce that I would happily drink by the pint.
The most interesting dish was arguably the “Tomato salad, fennel, horseradish, and crouton” that we ordered as an afterthought. Heritage tomatoes paired with perfectly balanced sweet, savoury, and umami. I couldn’t stop eating it. Like French, but better.
With Francois, we talked about Anthony Bourdain. Francois is an admirer. So is Tim: he wrote Bourdain’s obituary for the Guardian and another, later piece reflecting on Bourdain’s legacy.
Francois recalled with fondness an episode of one of Bourdain’s shows set in Montreal, and how that window into Montreal’s dirtier, more hedonistic take on French cuisine influences him even now.
Tim and I both recounted how Bourdain’s world view, urging us all to get out and enjoy life, remained a driving force behind our own choices as well.
Like Bourdain, Tim in unapologetic about his appetites. He’s written an essay defending gluttony. And he is known for seeking out and spotlighting lesser-known places with something excellent to offer.
Indeed, after Francois left, we talked about Tim’s dislike of “fine dining” — both the term and the concept. He repeated a principle first suggested by Marina O’Loughlin, that any restaurant that needed to claim to be “fine dining” in its promotional materials almost certainly was not.
“Critics have to doubt everything,” Tim explained. Too many fine dining experiences have become too geared towards technical mastery, putting flavour and enjoyment to one side in favour of something else, and sacrificing pleasure in the process.
In a recent column, he went further:
Critics are a strange bunch. A few years ago, most of us flounced out of an entire class of restaurants. One after the other, we wrote a piece in which we gave up on “fine dining”.
It made sense. The British Food Renaissance was two decades old and finely matured. Those who’d defended “molecular gastronomy” had by this point rejected its absurdities or distanced themselves from the movement. The celebrity chefs had shot their collective bolts and “fain daining” had entered what felt like a decadent terminal phase. Tasting menus were arrogant and increasingly repetitive; oafish MasterChef and hagiographic Chef’s Table relentlessly drove the idiom outwards to a point just short of self-parody. It seemed an unsustainably colossal cliché and the default shape of provincial mediocrity.
I agree in part. I’ve certainly experienced high-end meals where the vision, the approach, or the experience has been over engineered to the point of distraction. Ironically, one such place was the Ritz, where I had a miserable experience and would never, ever return, but which Tim used just last week to suggest that there might be some pleasure in fine dining after all.
But mostly, I disagree with Tim on this. I’ve been lucky to have many fine dining experiences, and virtually all have brought great pleasure. Great food, great wine, and great company, improved by the restaurant’s atmosphere, approach, and refinement. The best chefs help steer us towards new discoveries that unlock previously unknown pleasures.
And maybe Tim is softening. This week, he quoted Marina O’Loughlin saying, “Despite the critics’ carping — and we are famously jaded — there’s nothing that delivers a restaurant sense of occasion, celebration, opulence quite like fine dining.” In the final calculus, it is all about pleasure and place, and Tim concludes his review of the Ritz with a ray of hope: “We seemed to love it. The quality of the cooking is so high it confounds my distaste for the idiom.”
As we moved onto dessert and coffee, our conversation drifted to less serious topics. We laughed about the old days of the advertising industry, great creative work done in the pub, and swapped stories about our most enjoyable lunches and dinners.
Through it all, I recognised in Tim an irreverence and appetite for enjoyment that seemed to find a wonderful expression in Café Francois. That Hemingway himself would recognise and admire.
From his perch at the FT, through his books, and with his other work, Tim points the way for many us towards the experiences and pleasure that we crave.
Hemingway was fond of reminding us that “In order to write about life, first you must live it.”
Tim Hayward is living it to the fullest and helping all of us do the same. Who could ask for more?
Restaurant Details: Café Francois
Quick hit: Dirty French with a Montreal accent. Decadent but not fancy. The kind of place you’d drink wine at 10:00 a.m. and write your novel — longhand — at the counter.
Details: Booking advised. Borough Market.
Restaurant website. More on Instagram.
Find it on Google Maps. 14-16 Stoney St, London SE1 9AD.
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