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Egon Ronay is one of the world's most famous restaurant reviewers, and publisher of a series of restaurants guides that has spanned 40 years.

Many of the guides have sponsors, though the sponsors are all unrelated to the hotel and food industry, and Ronay won't accept advertisements from hotels or restaurants. He and his people never accept free meals or rooms. His inspectors do unannounced visits.

Ronay holds that the food revolution in the UK actually got its start in the 1960s, when ordinary people started to have money. Before then, wealthy people thought it was not done to talk about food. Ronay accepts the new word "gastropub", though he's not particularly keen on it as a word, but he does like what the gastropubs are turning out.

Ronay disappeared from the scene around 1996, and didn't return until 2004. When he returned, he faced a crowded market, and many of the celebrity chefs politely dismissed him as an old man and a spent force. Others think that his tongue is still one to reckon with.

As of 2003, he lives in the Berkshires with his second wife, Barbara, and works out of an office in Knightsbridge, behind Harrods. By many reports, he is still an elegantly dressed man, with high standards in personal appearance. His daughter, Edina, a former girlfriend of the actor Michael Caine, became a fashion designer.

Despite all the fine dining he has done, Ronay professes to prefers above all his wife's Irish stew, and partridge, pheasant and venison.


Egon Ronay was born circa 1916 (he was 89 in 2005.) His grandfather owned a 120 room hotel in Pöstyén, Hungary. His father was a successful restaurateur in Budapest, Hungary, having five restaurants. He brought Egon into meetings about the restaurants when Egon was 17.

Egon studied law at University, but the family lost everything during the Second World War.

Egon arrived in England on his own on 10 October 1946, around 30 years of age. He did not return to Hungary again for a visit until around 1983. He got a job at the Princes restaurant in Piccadilly owned by a friend of his father, then worked for a while at the Carousel Club in St James's.

In 1952, on the strength of a borrowed £4,000, he opened a small tea room called the "Marquee" in the Knightsbridge area of London. Fanny Cradock was writing a column at the time for the Daily Telegraph. She came to review the restaurant with her husband Johnny, they loved it, and she gushed about it. Egon was then persuaded by Cradock's editor at the Daily Telegraph to start his own column, which he wrote weekly for six years.

In 1957, he published his first restaurant guide, selling 30,000 copies. He sold four pages of ads in it to the Ford Motor Company. He started the guide because he was infuriated at the low standards of public food in Britain.

In 1979, in his "Lucas" guide, he also rated -- and trashed -- the food and the service on 14 airlines travelling between the UK and North America.

In 1983, he founded "The British Academy of Gastronomes." He also in the same year ran a cosponsored promotion with J. Lyons & Company. A competition was held offering five all-expense paid, plus spending money, weekends for two in Europe. Entrants had to be able to say in four languages "Thank you for a wonderful meal" and say what for them was a good meal. They also got a meal at a restaurant in the same city they chose from the "Egon Ronay TWA Guide to Good Restaurants in Europe." The contest was linked to J. Lyons & Co. "Continental Desserts" product; the packaging also gave consumers a coupon for 50p off "Just a bite : Egon Ronay's Lucas guide for gourmets on a family budget" (published 1979.)

In 1985, he was tired of his eating guides empire, and sold all rights to the Automobile Association, including using his name attached to a food guide. Three years later, the Automobile Association had sold the rights on to the Richbell Group. The deal continued to prohibit Ronay from publishing under his own name -- the enforced silence frustrated him. In 1992, after the Richbell Group had gone bankrupt, he began legal action to regain the right to his name in print, which was finally awarded back to him by the courts in 1997.

During the 1990s, he worked for the British Airports Authority (BAA) and for J.D. Wetherspoon, a big pub chain in the UK.

In 2005, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Carlton London Restaurant Awards. He also raised a minor stir in the same year by praising the quality of restaurants in Scotland that now existed.

Books

• 1959. Egon Ronay recommends 175 Eating Places in and around London, etc.
• 1960. Egon Ronay recommends 190 Eating Places in and around London, etc.
• 1966. Egon Ronay’s guide to hotels & restaurants in Ireland, incorporating Dublin pubs.
• 1966. Egon Ronay - BMC 1966 [1967] Guide to hotels, restaurants, pubs and inns in Great Britain and Ireland, with motoring maps.
• 1966. Egon Ronay’s AA Ski Europe, etc.
• 1966. Egon Ronay’s banqueting directory: receptions, conferences, exhibitions, private functions, ban
• 1966. Egon Ronay’s Guide to Scandinavia’s best hotels & restaurants. With motoring maps.
• 1967. Budget holidays in France, Italy, Spain. An AA guide produced for the AA by the Egon Ronay Organisation
• 1967. Egon Ronay’s Coffee guide. Where to get a good cup of coffee in Central London.
• 1969. Egon Ronay’s 1969 pub guide to England, Scotland and Wales. In association with the Gas Council
• 1971. Egon Ronay’s Dunlop Guide to hotels, restaurants, inns in Great Britain and Ireland
• 1972. Egon Ronay’s Pubs & tourist sights in Britain, 1972.
• 1973. Egon Ronay's pubs and tourist sights in Britain. 1973 [etc.].
• 1974. Cunard/Egon Ronay Guide to QE2 1974 Cruises: Ports of Call: Details of Shore Adventures Included
• 1975. Egon Ronay's Guide to the Best in Freezing : Egon Ronay
• 1975. Crane Fruehauf's Egon Ronay guide to intercontinental transport cafés
• 1976. Egon Ronay's Pub guide: a selection of 600 pubs including some on the continent.
• 1977. Egon Ronay's Lucas guide to transport cafes and accommodation. 1977.
• 1979. Just a bite : Egon Ronay's Lucas guide for gourmets on a family budget. London: Penguin.
• 1980. Egon Ronay's Raleigh pub guide: 1980.
• 1981. Egon Ronay's Raleigh pub guide 1981
• 1982. Egon Ronay's TWA guide ... to good restaurants in Europe's business cities.
• 1983. Egon Ronay's Bulmer pub guide.
• 1985. 1985 Guinness Pub Guide Food and Accommodation [Egon Ronay Organisation]
• 1987. Egon Ronay's Bird's Eye guide to healthy eating out.
• 1988. Master chefs of Europe.
• 1988. A Taste of Europe.
• 1991. The unforgettable dishes of my life.
• 1994. Egon Ronay's Britvic Guide 1994: Just a Bite : Eating Out on a Budget in the UK and Ireland
• 1994. Egon Ronay's Ford Guide 1994: And Baby Comes Too : 900 Family-Friendly Hotels and Eating
• 1994. Egon Ronay's Champagne Mumm guide to Paris :
• 1995. Egon Ronay's Jameson Guide 1995 Ireland : Egon Ronay's Guide (Egon Ronay Guides);
• 1996. Egon Ronay's Tabasco guide 1996 : bars, bistros & cafes
• 1996. Egon Ronay's Guide to Paris. New York: Saint Martin's, 1995.
• 1996. Egon Ronay's Kingfisher Lager guide to oriental restaurants.
• 2005. Egon Ronay's Royal Automobile Club Guide: To the Top 200 Restaurants in the UK, The Good Food Guide 2005
• 2006. Egon Ronay's Guide to Restaurants & Gastropubs

Literature & Lore
"A man full of bile is not fit to pronounce on food."

-- Egon Ronay on French President Jacques Chirac, July 2005 (after French President Jacques Chirac said only Finnish food was worse than British)


"It is of no greater use than someone venturing an opinion as you wait in the queue at the supermarket."

-- Egon Ronay on ordinary people posting restaurant reviews on the web


"It sometimes looks more like hubris when the result arrives on your plate and you rush back to the menu in order to discover precisely what it was that you ordered."

-- Egon Ronay on "testosterone-driven cooking" by celebrity chefs.


"It won't be many years before food in this country [the UK] is better than it is in France. But there is an annoying new trend for over-complicated menus that are anything but customer friendly. They read like recipes, with the result that you choose halibut and then fail to find it on your plate. It's even hard to get a decent dessert: instead, you get a sculpture. It's ridiculous."

-- Egon Ronay as quoted by Rachel Cooke in "He's had more hot dinners". Manchester: The Observer. 7 December 2003.


"I'm not particularly bothered about being in his guide. I mean, who is Egon Ronay? Doesn't he normally write about pubs, inns and service stations?"

-- Gordon Ramsay in Rachel Cooke. "He's had more hot dinners". Manchester: The Observer. 7 December 2003.

Acknowlegements

Other entries for: Biographies

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