Trevor White is your classic bourgeois loser who happened to be in the right place at the right time. Forrest Gump meets Chocolate Factory Charlie, he parlayed a slight connection with food into a successful career as a restaurant critic in the great cities of the world, before returning to Dublin, where he now publishes the best-selling restaurant guide in Ireland.
Trevor White was born in Dublin in 1972. His parents owned a successful French restaurant in the 1980s. Trading on their success, White secured a job writing restaurant reviews for a small local weekly newspaper at the age of 18.
On graduating from Trinity College with a Diploma in Theatre Studies (“the perfect entrée,” he notes, “to the food world”) he spent five years living and working – periodically – as a freelance journalist in Cape Town, Prague, Bermuda and New York.
White returned to Ireland in 1997, where he was appointed as the Features Editor of Food & Wine magazine. The following year he went first to London, and then New York, where he was appointed as the Senior Editor of America’s Elite 1000. This extraordinarily pompous guidebook for billionaires afforded White a cushion in some of the grandest dining rooms in the world.
Returning to Dublin in the spring of 2000, White launched The Dubliner, an intelligent, eclectic city magazine which has been described as “a welcome glimmer of hope” by the Sunday Times. The magazine struggled to get off the ground, until, “in the ultimate act of kitchen-sink publishing,” the publisher launched a compilation of his restaurant reviews. Now in its fifth edition, it is the bestselling restaurant guide in Ireland.
In his remarkable new book, White charts a journey from the dining room to the kitchen; from proud ignorance to a tentative determination. He also reveals the forces at work in the restaurant world, from the criminal antics of chefs to the real identity of the food fascists. Guidebooks, waiters and Frank McCourt are also exposed in this candid, absorbing account of life at the heart of the restaurant racket.
