A look at what it's really like to be a restaurant reviewer

Wow. I read Giles Coren's reviews all the time online and I love his stuff. I agree that his last line WAS tampered with for no good reason and it DID rob it of its wit and cadence, but the rant was a wee bit nuts.

Also, he would have made a better case had he spell-checked himself and capitalized his lower-case "i's" before he hit the send button. That sloppy, typo-ridden e-mail style rather undercut his claim of surgical care with the language.

And if all the Times has done to him in 15 years is change three or four words he should consider himself lucky. I wrote weekly (freelance) restaurant reviews for three and a half years for the Portland Press Herald and they chopped to fit all the time, and slapped cringe-making headlines above reviews I'd spent hours thoughtfully honing.

I suspect it may have been a typo rather than a sub's correction. Even the Times can make a mistake. The joke, such as it was, was lost, but worse things happen at sea. Writers vs. subs is an eternal struggle, but I don't think any writer would get away with this level of abuse of colleagues were he not sack-free owing to the nepotism that is a feature of British broadsheets.

The question is, who leaked it? An irate sub, or, as I suspect, Coren himself? He's not much of a writer imho, but he is a clever 'playa.'

Giles is absolutely, 100% right to object as far as I'm concerned. I'm a journalist and suffer regularly at the hands of butcher subs who take total liberties with my copy. Show a sub a joke and they'll show you an axe! Most are frustrated writers who never made the grade so spend the rest of their lives trying to ruin others' work in revenge! You rock for this rant, Giles!

His line wasn't that clever - this guy needs to get over himself.

I fully agree with the above! It's really irritating when you write a piece of work you're really pleased with and the subs cut it and never bother telling you. At best it's annoying, at worst you have to take &*$#@ from people who gave you the stories in the first place. I bet Giles ignored hundreds of times his copy was cut and this was the last straw. Good on you, Giles!

There isn't a journalist alive who hasn't suffered a similar situation, so I feel for him.

On the other hand, he should stop hanging around with Gordon Ramsay; they're beginning to sound alike.

LOL, for obvious reasons I considered that "a look at what it's really like to be a copy editor." I don't have a lot of sympathy to spare for him, even though there IS no such expression as "go for nosh."

I wondered when someone would speak up for the copy editors! Having been on both sides of this situation, I understand it's frustrating when something you've written gets changed wrongly or not pleasingly (but you kind of have to be an adult about it). But I also wouldn't be surprised if the copy editor (or sub) corrected seven factual/grammatical errors in that review that went unremarked upon.