Giles Coren

Writing

Giles Coren has been reviewing restaurants for The Times since 2002, a gig he landed after similar stints at Tatler and The Independent on Sunday. In 2005, he was named Food and Drink Writer of the Year at the British Press Awards, and in 2016, he picked up Restaurant Writer of the Year at the Fortnum and Mason Awards. Beyond critiquing menus, he writes a regular Times column that covers everything from his personal life to politics. He once moonlighted as Professor Gideon Garter, penning The Intellectual's Guide to Fashion for The Sunday Times.

Academics have called him a sharp, witty columnist with a tongue-in-cheek style. Studies show his average restaurant rating in The Times is 6.86 out of 10, though Coren insists it's actually 6.3 and should be 5, claiming he only writes half a dozen truly bad reviews each year. He has also written for GQ and, from November 2014, a weekly city-life column for Time Out. James Dyson credits Coren with collaborating on his 1997 autobiography.

Coren's first novel, Winkler, came out in 2005 and earned a section of it the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award. His non-fiction includes Anger Management (For Beginners), a 2010 collection of his Times columns, and 2012's How To Eat Out. He also edited the dining guide Truth, Love & Clean Cutlery: A Guide to the Truly Good Restaurants and Food Experiences of the UK.

Television

In 2005, Coren appeared as a regular correspondent on Gordon Ramsay's The F Word. In June 2006, he presented a programme on More4, entitled Tax the Fat, about clinical obesity and the cost that it presents to the NHS. In 2010, he co-starred with comedian Sue Perkins in a programme called Giles and Sue Live The Good Life, based on the 1970s comedy The Good Life. Coren co-presented the Channel 4 series Animal Farm with Dr Olivia Judson in March 2007.

Around the same time, he appeared in a series of television commercials advertising Birds Eye frozen foods. Also in 2006, Coren presented the film and DVD review programme Movie Lounge. With comedian Sue Perkins, Coren co-starred in a series of documentaries known as The Supersizers.... In the first, Edwardian Supersize Me (BBC Four, 2007), the two spent a week on the diet of a wealthy Edwardian couple.

The second series (The Supersizers Go...) broadcast in May 2008 on BBC Two. The 2009 series, The Supersizers Eat..., covered the cuisine of the 1980s, the 1950s, 1920s, the French Revolution, Medieval culture, and ancient Rome. In 2012, Coren presented Our Food on the BBC, travelling the country talking about various local foods. In 2013, he presented Passover - Why is this night different? for BBC1 and co-presented (alongside Alexander Armstrong) 12 Drinks of Christmas for the same channel.

In 2014, Coren ventured to North America. First, he filmed Pressure Cooker, a cooking competition show co-hosted by Anne-Marie Withenshaw and Chuck Hughes, produced by Jamie Oliver's Fresh One Productions and Bristow Global Media, and broadcast on Canada's W Network and the US FYI Network. Coren followed that up with Million Dollar Critic for BBC America, which premiered on 22 January 2015 directly after Gordon Ramsay's New Kitchen Nightmares. In 2015, Coren began a new BBC series, co-presented with social historian Polly Russell.

Back in Time for Dinner, six-hour-long programmes broadcast from March 2015, achieved a BAFTA nomination in the 'Features' category. Back in Time for Christmas and Back in Time for the Weekend followed. In 2016, Coren filmed Back in Time for Brixton and Further Back in Time for Dinner and the two were released in 2016 and 2017 respectively. Eat to Live Forever was shown in March 2015.

In 2016, Coren fronted the one-off documentary My Failed Novel for Sky Arts. For the same channel, he co-hosted eight-part series Fake! The Great Masterpiece Challenge alongside art historian Rose Balston. In 2016, he presented 500 Questions, a four-part primetime game show on ITV.

In 2017, he presented Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond the Lobby alongside Monica Galetti. A second series aired in 2018, a third in 2020 and a fourth in 2021–22. Coren's departure from Amazing Hotels was announced in 2022.

Controversies

On 23 July 2008, The Guardian media blog published an email from Coren to sub-editors at The Times. Coren's internal Times email used profanity, the use of which he defends, to take issue with a colleague's removal of an indefinite article from his piece, which he believed ruined a joke in his last line. Coren said a joke was lost in the change from "a nosh" (meaning fellatio) to "nosh"—a word derived from Yiddish meaning "food", which he doubted his editors knew better than he.

The Daily Telegraph said the incident was "not the first time the critic has been caught out writing abusive emails to colleagues". The exchange was reprinted in the American magazine Harper's in October 2008. In his next article, dated 26 July 2008, Coren said his Jewish ancestors had been persecuted by Poles. He stated that Poles used to burn Jews in synagogues for entertainment at Easter and that Poland is in denial about its role in the Holocaust.

He referred to immigrant Poles as "Polacks", arguing that "if England is not the land of milk and honey it appeared to them three or four years ago, then, frankly, they can clear off out of it". Coren's comments led to a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission, an early day motion in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, and a critical editorial in The Economist. Coren responded: "I wrote in passing that the Poles remain in denial about their responsibility for the Holocaust.

How gratifying, then, to see so many letters in The Times in the subsequent days from Poles denying their responsibility for the Holocaust." He also told The Jewish Chronicle: "Fuck the Poles". After the Press Complaints Commission rejected their complaint because the criticism had been of a group rather than an individual, the Federation of Poles in Great Britain lodged a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights. Professor Gábor Halmai of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency said "I completely share the criticisms" of the piece made by The Economist.

He said that amid an internal debate about an FRA response, a colleague had said "it is not even certain that what Coren stated with regard to his past had taken place at all". Halmai responded that while the generalisation used by Coren was unacceptable, it was protected under freedom of expression, conceding the existence of the Jedwabne, Krakow and Kielce pogroms.