Tim Hayward

Hey folks, welcome back to The Scoop Podcast.

In 2020, Tim Hayward urged people to visit Maymay in Borough Market to experience genius for pocket change.

Queues and queues of eager readers followed, waiting to try Elizabeth Hay's Hananese chicken rice.

Elizabeth founded Maymay as a way of bringing the Singaporean hawker experience to London.

Jancis Robinson reveals the World Atlas of Wine.

Tim Hayward talks about the cocktail hour, and Charlotte Kristensen on her journey from law to wine.

Tinashe Musora has an extraordinary story.

These days, he's a successful sommelier, wine judge, and winner of the 2025 IWSC Emerging Talent Award.

I mean, maybe the next book [laughs] is gonna be all about mindful drinking of wine, but that's not my department.

[laughs]

Tim Hayward on mindful drinking and the cocktail hour.

Best known as the London Wine Girl on Instagram and as a columnist in the Mail on Sunday, Charlotte Kristensen has decided to open her own personal recipe book for her latest work to take on the challenge of food and wine pairing She trained and practiced as a lawyer, but then, as she explained to me, wine came calling

And they generally did what the traditional food media already did, reviewed restaurants, shared recipes, photographed meals, only in a more spirited, anarchic, and amateur way.

In 2009, the restaurant writer Tim Hayward, then a contributor to The Guardian, and the PR firm owner, Sarah Canny, held a summit for bloggers and restaurant PRs at the five-star The Reuben's at the Palace across from Buckingham Palace.

The point, according to attenders, was to come to an understanding.

Many PRs found bloggers amateurish and impudent, too ready to generate notoriety for themselves by slagging off their client restaurants.

However, this system we trialed felt more hassle than it was worth, and so have not continued to do it." This demand for exclusivity, itself a trick taken from newspapers, points towards a new problem, which is that traditional and social media have become virtually indistinguishable from each other.

On one hand, while influencers have broken free of the elitism of traditional food media, they've also recapitulated its chummy relationship with industry.

On the other, restaurant writers have become much more like influencers Several former and current editors of newspaper food sections told me that as budgets shrink, they've become increasingly reliant on industry freebies for their non-review coverage, and even the firewall around critical reviews never being based on free meals has weakened.

Twigg said that without an expense account, The Independent sometimes publishes reviews based on comped meals, a practice that I've heard dates back to at least twenty nineteen.

I'm your host, Christopher Kimball.

Tim Hayward loves steak so much he's inked it onto his body.

So the symbol is a gridiron surrounded by a ring, and in the ring are the words "beef and liberty."

Tim claims the best steak he ever ate came from a cow that was 25 years old.

This is Milk Street Radio.

I'm your host, Christopher Kimball.

Right now it's my conversation with Tim Hayward.

In order to write his book on steak, Tim ate at some of the best steakhouses all around the world.