Fay Maschler MBE, winner of CODE’s Women of the Year 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award, has covered the London restaurant scene for more than 50 years, as restaurant critic at the Evening Standard from 1972 to 2020 and now at Tatler. ‘It’s a hell of a long time,’ she says. ‘It’s a long time to stay in any job.’
CODE founder Adam Hyman and I meet Maschler over lunch at Lilibet’s, a glamorous and Maschler-approved new arrival in Mayfair. Even before she has the menu and a glass of Champagne in her hand, she is surveying the fully booked dining room, noting who’s there, what they’re eating, how much they’re spending, oblivious to diners stealing a glance back at her. In a London dining room, Maschler is a celebrity. Not that she’s too grand for the set lunch, which we all agree is a steal at £34.
So, how does the reigning queen of restaurants feel about winning CODE’s Lifetime Achievement Award? ‘It’s a great honour to win an award but it feels a bit like an obituary,’ she says with a smile. ‘It feels like, OK, you’ve done your job. You can go now. I don’t want to go yet.’
Maschler’s longevity is all the more striking given that her tenure at the Standard was only meant to be temporary. A mother of a new baby and toddler at the time, she entered a competition to win a column for three months and won it. In a neat coincidence, one of the restaurants she wrote about for the judges was Simpson’s in the Strand, reopened just last month and where CODE held its Women of the Year lunch in honour of its three award-winners: Maschler, Nieves Barragán Mohacho and Dara Klein. Maschler recently dug out her original Simpson’s review. ‘Dinner for two with a carafe of wine was £5.78.’
Conversation turns to her early days at the Evening Standard, a time before the nationals even had permanent restaurant critics. ‘Restaurants were burgeoning. It was so different when I started in the early 1970s. It was a different scene altogether. People went to hotels or men to their clubs or fancy places and then at the other end of the scale there were some Bangladeshi restaurants that people thought were Indian.’ It’s hard to believe that her features editor at the time was concerned she might ‘run out of restaurants’.
1987, fifteen years into her tenure, was a turning point. That was the year Rowley Leigh opened Kensington Place; Marco Pierre White was cooking at Harvey’s; Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers opened The River Cafe; Simon Hopkinson moved to Bibendum; and Alastair Little was making waves in Soho. ‘Everything seemed more democratic, more open to everybody,’ she says. ‘It was a really interesting time of change.’
The week we meet, once at Lilibet’s and again at her home in Fitzrovia, she has a full diary that includes checking out the new Orrery in Marylebone, a Giorgio Locatelli dinner at Due Veneti, and lunch at Pied à Terre. She relishes the restaurant scene as it is today. ‘I enjoy very much its diversity. I’ve tried cuisines I’ve never encountered before, which is lovely. And although it’s a schlep, I like what’s happening in the East End. Uber comes into its own for me. Obviously it’s a difficult time, we know that, but looking at it more objectively I think it’s a really interesting time.’
What she does miss at Tatler is the pace of a daily paper. ‘You could go to a restaurant on Monday and have the review in the paper by Wednesday.’ Even at 80, she’s clearly not over the thrill of breaking a story. Everybody is a critic now, she notes. ‘In the days of Adrian Gill and Jonathan Meades and, I would include myself, I think those opinions mattered because they were well informed and well expressed but now everybody’s a restaurant critic on Instagram.’ A good critic, for Maschler, enjoys the celebratory aspect of restaurants and can contextualise them. ‘But just to write about a meal, it can be quite dull.’
‘When I met Reg [Gadney], my second husband, sadly no longer with us, I was at that time thinking maybe I should do something different. Then he came into my life, and he loved restaurants. He was a writer and a painter and he was in all day writing and painting so he loved going out in the evening, so I got a new lease of life about the job. It’s a lovely job.’
She has, over the years, cultivated an enviable circle of friends of all ages and backgrounds, a roster of good eaters, including her elder sister Beth Coventry, and fellow critics Marina O’Loughlin and Tracey MacLeod. One of her favourite dining companions is, she divulges, currently ‘looksmaxxing’; another is her former gastroenterologist. She also has a regular appointment with a personal trainer. He won’t be making the transition to ‘plus one’, she insists; she needs to keep him for weight-training sessions which she enjoys enormously.
Her latest project is her most personal yet: a memoir. ‘When I entered the competition, there was a shortlist of three. According to Simon Jenkins, there was a huge amount of argy-bargy and the editor Charles Wintour got bored with it and said, “Oh fuck it, give it to the girl.” So I’m writing Give It to the Girl.’
With that, we leave Maschler to head home for a rest before her next engagement, proof that a Lifetime Achievement Award is no cue to slow down.
