By Richard Vines

When Gordon Ramsay opened his restaurant in Versailles in 2008, I found myself sitting next to Pierre Koffmann and his wife Claire at the inaugural dinner.

Pierre tends to be reticent and can come across as brooding. Claire can be chatty, so the two of us nattered all evening and Pierre was free to focus on the food.

Out of that chance encounter came a friendship and a mini-dining-club that has seen us eat out together as often as three times a week, in London and overseas, for more than a decade. We’ve settled into a pattern where Claire and I do most of the gossiping and drinking. But I do have ears as well as a mouth, and I quickly became awed by Pierre’s knowledge of food.

Of course, one shouldn’t be surprised that a three-Michelin-star chef knows his onions, but the breadth and depth of Pierre’s insight still impresses me every time we go out. He can discourse on the menu and the various dishes before any food appears. And when a plate is served, he will immediately dive in and start tasting it, even while the server is labouring to tell us about it.

Pierre’s palate is extraordinary and I realized many years ago that each meal with him is like a masterclass. I used to think that people would pay just to hear him. I shan’t say his words were wasted on me, but I always felt they deserved a wider audience.

When I retired from Bloomberg (where I was Chief Food Critic) after 25 years in May 2021, it occurred to me (and Claire) that this was an opportunity to share Pierre’s views. I could put a tape recorder in front of him, catch his thoughts and attempt to package them into a review, which I’d then work on with Pierre. I’ve previously written the introduction to two of Pierre’s own books, Memories of Gascony and Classic Koffmann, and over the years, I have become familiar with the way he expresses himself.

So that’s the inspiration for this website. I shall take the lead some of the reviews. (The clue will be in the byline.) Our initial focus will be on London restaurants, but we aim also to review outside the capital and to go overseas.

It’s a humble endeavour: We are not going to compete with the big-beast professional reviewers, and neither is this a consumer-focused website, where we’ll swoop in to give a verdict on all the latest openings.

Our aim is to be supportive of the hospitality industry in a critical way, promoting good cooking and good restaurants, whether they be simple or luxurious. While we shan’t beat the drum for mediocre chefs, neither will we waste time and space bashing them. (Salt Bae is unlikely to make an appearance.) We’ll tell you about restaurants that we like.

We shall rate each with one-to- four Disques. One will be for a good restaurant; two will be a very good restaurant; three is excellent and four is outstanding.

We shall try to avoid bigging up our mates, but we have a lot of friends in the industry. And we shall book anonymously, but we don’t pretendto go unrecognized.

While we aim to be unbiased, we’ve almost 100 years of professional experience between us and it is inevitable we may have some baggage.

I just hope it is Louis Vuitton.