Time Out was founded in 1968 by the late Tony Elliot with the aim of giving Londoners “reliable information about what was going on”. It has come a long way in the decades since, growing from a rough idea plotted on Elliot’s kitchen table to a global media and hospitality brand.
Today, it spans a network of websites and social media accounts, airs videos, hosts events and curates experiences that iterate the best facets of a destination with its “Time Out Markets”. It promotes the best chefs, restaurateurs and cultural experiences in cities across the world, including Cape Town, Bahrain, Osaka and Abu Dhabi.
If you’re a quality part of the dining scene, Time Out has your back, and can help your bottom line.
Except, it appears, when it doesn’t quite feel that the affiliations, the story, the history, the mooted politics and the associations of the culture of your restaurant fit with the current mood of the Time Out office.
And I’m not talking about, say, Time Out Russia. Its page summarising the “11 best things to do in Moscow” for the eager worldwide traveller contains no warnings against visiting a country governed by a man currently conducting an illegal and murderous invasion of a sovereign nation.
But recently Time Out published a new guide celebrating what they called “The best Middle Eastern restaurants in London”. Yet there were, it turns out, no Israeli-inspired or owned places named on the list at all.
Now, as a restaurant critic for this paper, the former editor of a national food magazine and a hungry and greedy traveller, if you’d asked me to compile such a list, I could have happily chucked some ideas into the mix.
The capital offers what I think is some of the best Middle Eastern food outside of the region itself. I would have given the names of Honey & Co or Palomar, Palmyra’s Kitchen, Maramia Café or Al Waha, to name just a few restaurants offering particularly exceptional fare.
And then, because he is the god of Middle Eastern cuisine, having introduced the decorative salad and the pomegranate seed into every middle-class home in the country, I would highlight at least one of Yotam Ottolenghi’s places.
The exquisite Nopi, perhaps, off Regent Street, an eatery bubbling with whipped feta and pickled kohlrabi.
But he’s nowhere to be found on Time Out’s offering. Indeed, while some of my favourites make the cut, there was initially also no Palomar, no Rovi or Bubala when they first published the list.
I called up some of the owners of these places. One told me they felt it was a “deliberate omission”. Well, that was the case until the media outlet Jewish News covered the story, which I also mentioned in Saturday’s print edition of The Daily Telegraph.
Time Out was then forced to issue a grovelling apology and said, “The initial omission was a very unfortunate oversight and the result of human error.”
Guess which restaurants now make the new cut? The very same I mentioned above, Palomar, Bubala and Rovi. Still no Nopi, however.
Last week, as I commented on in these pages, the soap retailer Lush appeared to pander to the woke crowd by shutting up shop for a day to demonstrate solidarity with Gaza.
This week, I posit that Time Out has similarly executed an anti-Israel bias, deliberately excluding some of the best Middle Eastern restaurants from its top 20 guide. In doing so, it abandoned its founding mantra and miserably failed its readers – and it’s all the more humiliating for them that they’ve now been forced to climb down.
Time Out was founded in 1968 by the late Tony Elliot with the aim of giving Londoners “reliable information about what was going on”. It has come a long way in the decades since, growing from a rough idea plotted on Elliot’s kitchen table to a global media and hospitality brand.
Today, it spans a network of websites and social media accounts, airs videos, hosts events and curates experiences that iterate the best facets of a destination with its “Time Out Markets”. It promotes the best chefs, restaurateurs and cultural experiences in cities across the world, including Cape Town, Bahrain, Osaka and Abu Dhabi.
If you’re a quality part of the dining scene, Time Out has your back, and can help your bottom line.
Except, it appears, when it doesn’t quite feel that the affiliations, the story, the history, the mooted politics and the associations of the culture of your restaurant fit with the current mood of the Time Out office.
And I’m not talking about, say, Time Out Russia. Its page summarising the “11 best things to do in Moscow” for the eager worldwide traveller contains no warnings against visiting a country governed by a man currently conducting an illegal and murderous invasion of a sovereign nation.
But recently Time Out published a new guide celebrating what they called “The best Middle Eastern restaurants in London”. Yet there were, it turns out, no Israeli-inspired or owned places named on the list at all.
Now, as a restaurant critic for this paper, the former editor of a national food magazine and a hungry and greedy traveller, if you’d asked me to compile such a list, I could have happily chucked some ideas into the mix.
The capital offers what I think is some of the best Middle Eastern food outside of the region itself. I would have given the names of Honey & Co or Palomar, Palmyra’s Kitchen, Maramia Café or Al Waha, to name just a few restaurants offering particularly exceptional fare.
And then, because he is the god of Middle Eastern cuisine, having introduced the decorative salad and the pomegranate seed into every middle-class home in the country, I would highlight at least one of Yotam Ottolenghi’s places.
The exquisite Nopi, perhaps, off Regent Street, an eatery bubbling with whipped feta and pickled kohlrabi.
But he’s nowhere to be found on Time Out’s offering. Indeed, while some of my favourites make the cut, there was initially also no Palomar, no Rovi or Bubala when they first published the list.
I called up some of the owners of these places. One told me they felt it was a “deliberate omission”. Well, that was the case until the media outlet Jewish News covered the story, which I also mentioned in Saturday’s print edition of The Daily Telegraph.
Time Out was then forced to issue a grovelling apology and said, “The initial omission was a very unfortunate oversight and the result of human error.”
Guess which restaurants now make the new cut? The very same I mentioned above, Palomar, Bubala and Rovi. Still no Nopi, however.
Last week, as I commented on in these pages, the soap retailer Lush appeared to pander to the woke crowd by shutting up shop for a day to demonstrate solidarity with Gaza.
This week, I posit that Time Out has similarly executed an anti-Israel bias, deliberately excluding some of the best Middle Eastern restaurants from its top 20 guide. In doing so, it abandoned its founding mantra and miserably failed its readers – and it’s all the more humiliating for them that they’ve now been forced to climb down.