Incest and Morris Dancing

by Jonathan Meades

This book is the work of 15 years of weekly restaurant columns in The Times and over 100 weeks spent in provincial British hotels. Jonathan Meades has tried everything and everywhere once and this book is the record of that gravy-stained odyssey. It isn't always pretty but it is the authoritative record of the alleged British gastronomic revolution of the past 20 years. But much more than that, this is a treasure trove of Meades's singular and audacious prose, a heady mix of acute social observation, architectural and topographical commentary, deep satirical humour, and an unshakeable commitment to telling the truth, whatever the consequences.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2002

About the author

Jonathan Turner Meades (born 21 January 1947) is a writer, food journalist, essayist and film-maker. Meades has written and performed in more than 50 television shows on predominantly topographical subjects. His books include three works of fiction and several anthologies.
Meades is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Patron of the British Humanist Association.
Meades was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and educated at King's College, Taunton, which he described as "a dim, muscular Christian boot camp". He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in 1968.
Meades wrote reviews and articles for The Times for many years, and was specifically its restaurant critic from 1986 to 2001. He was voted Best Food Journalist in the 1999 Glenfiddich Awards. Having given up writing about English cuisine in 2001 after being The Times' restaurant critic for fifteen years, Meades estimated, in an interview with Restaurant magazine, that he had put on 5 lb a year during his reviewing period, which works out around an ounce per restaurant. By his own statement in the series Meades Eats, after being pronounced 'morbidly obese' he subsequently managed to lose a third of his body weight over the course of a year.
His first collection of stories Filthy English was followed by Pompey (1993), which was widely praised and compared to Sterne, Scarfe, Steadman, Dickens and Joyce amongst other great stylists.
Meades' An Encyclopaedia of Myself was published in May 2014 by Fourth Estate. It was long-listed for that year's Samuel Johnson Prize and won Best Memoir in the Spear's Book Awards 2014. Roger Lewis of the Financial Times said of the work that "If this book is thought of less as a memoir than as a symphonic poem about post-war England and Englishness – well, then it is a masterpiece."
Meades's book Museum Without Walls was published on the Unbound crowd-funding site, in both print and e-book editions.

Reviews

[Justin Cormack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jonathan Meades is a genius of course, and although this is "merely" a collection of restaurant reviews, well its something more too, a rant about food and architecture and the victorians, and culture.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Far too verbose for me to read all of the 342 pages but great to pick up, read a few pages and put down again. The topic is not of much interest to me (feeding at restaurants and other eating establishments, mainly in Britain), but I enjoyed the author's ramblings and musings. Pointing out that a restaurant capital is vastly different to a gastronomic capital or that "...there exists a situation where huge dosh is spent on design-led pretension and gimmickry, on being seen, on eating novelty cooking wrought by bumfluff antipodeans and where, domestically, food means something shoved into a microwave. So what are all those tossers in telly kitchens dong if they're not teaching us to cook? Ainsley, Brian the Bluff, the whole stable run by by the wretched Bazelgette, chirpy Jamie, the cheery gnome Wozza-they, and all their bathetic peers, are a) filling airtime as cheaply as it is possible to fill it, b) adhering to the British standard tradition of refusing to take food seriously, c0 turning themselves into full-fledged celebrities.
He is a critic but does also applaud many of the establishments within the book

[Eugene · Rating 4 out of 5]

so many many words and so packed together but such wordy goodness