Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a restaurant critic. She eats out six nights a week and sometimes fits in lunch as well.

Fashionable, expensive or simply obvious. She's eaten it and of course written about it in her regular newspaper columns in cookery books and in

restaurant guides too. She took up her profession 27 years ago after she'd

married and had three children. It was something she could do when they were safely in bed. Five times

since she's been Britain's restaurant writer of the year and recently she won the food world's

equivalent of an Oscar, the Glenfiddick trophy.

Food doesn't frighten people anymore, she says.

If I've been part of bringing that about,

then I'm happy.

She is Faye Mashler.

Six dinners a week, Faye, and the odd lunch squeezing, all too much of a good thing, I would have thought. How do you cope? How do you manage? Do you have rules?

Well, I try to eat a different kind of meal each time, so if it's French one night might be Indian the next it's not always six

nights but I'm eating to find some that are either good enough or dreadful enough to

make good copy so you must have rules are you very careful not to drink with every

meal? I wish I would but no the drink helps it all go down I'm afraid I tend to

try and make the other person eat dessert that's one not so much a rule is a preference.

What do you have a spoon for? Yes. It's very important that other person I take. You can't just take anybody

because you might take somebody who just orders a steak and a green salad which is no good

to you at all. Well I'm quite a bully I say to them you can't have grapefruit or

something you know you've got to eat something in which the chef has had a hand but it is

...