Food critic Egon Ronay, who helped rescue British dining from postwar austerity, dies at 94

British food critic Egon Ronay dies at 94

LONDON — Food critic Egon Ronay, whose eponymous restaurant guides helped Britain embrace fine dining after years of postwar austerity, died Saturday. He was 94.

Family friend Nick Ross said Ronay died at his home near the village of Yattendon, 50 miles (80 kms) west of London, after a short illness.

Born in Budapest in 1915, Ronay was the son of a prosperous restaurant-owner whose business was ruined by World War II and the subsequent Soviet occupation. Ronay left communist Hungary for Britain in 1946.

He worked as a manager at London restaurants before opening his own establishment, The Marquee, which sought to bring French culinary flair to a country just emerging from years of food rationing.

“You could eat well in London,” Ronay told The Observer newspaper in 2003 about the 1950s, “but in extremely few places.”

He began writing about food for The Daily Telegraph newspaper, and in 1957 produced the first Egon Ronay Guide to British restaurants, modeled on France’s Michelin guides. The annual guides, researched with the help of a team of anonymous reviewers, became immensely popular, and restaurants displayed the blue Egon Ronay label as a seal of approval.

Ronay later said that in Britain until the 1960s, “food was not a polite topic for conversation.”

“When I came there was only two columns about food, one in the Tatler and one in The Daily Telegraph. Now there is not a single publication in the whole of Britain that does not carry news on food.”

As well as his restaurant guides, Ronay rated eating spots at airports and highway service stations, and acted as a food consultant to a chain of pubs. He said his goal was to raise the quality of dining for everyone, not just the elite.

“It is not for me to say whether I have had any influence. Other people must judge,” he once said. “However, I think the guides certainly have had the effect, particularly in mass catering, of telling people that they could no longer get away with murder — because I would expose them.”

Ronay sold the guides to the Automobile Association in 1985, but went to court and regained the right to the Egon Ronay name years later, after the company that subsequently bought them went bankrupt.

He continued working into his 90s. Ross said he had a “remarkable ability to taste flavors in anything.”

“Right up until his death, even young chefs regarded him as the monarch,” Ross said.

Ronay is survived by his wife Barbara, two daughters and a son.

Funeral details were not immediately available.