What started out as a post lampooning Huffington Post’s American centric view of the world, has now become an annual event on ChefHermes.com, the Top 10 most followed UK restaurant critics on Twitter.
With the exponential growth of Twitter over the past 3-4years, it now seems to touch the vast majority of people on the planet, boasting some 302 million monthly users. It has become as much of status symbol to pass landmark follower numbers (1k, 5k, etc) as it was getting your first gold card in the 80’s. Such much so that some users want to exaggerate their following. This said for the first time I’ve done a TwitterAudit for each entrant on the table. Whilst we’ll never know exactly how many of these followers are genuine, everybody is measured using the same yard stick. A generally perceived rating of 80% and above is an indication of a following that hasn’t been altered.
As it looks like you’ll need somewhere close to five figures in terms follower numbers, here are a few of the notable omissions that didn’t make the cut:
- Fay Maschler with 8078 followers: Restaurant Critic for The Evening Standard since 1972
- Joanna Blythman with 8813 followers: Journalist and author
- Bruce Palling with 6005 followers: Food columnist
- Tracy MacLeod with 5546 followers: Agent, broadcaster, restaurant critic, model, actress, whatever.
- Mark Taylor with 8976 followers: Freelance food writer and editor, Bristol Post food ed, also writes for Crumbs, Cotswold Life, Metro and others.
Top 10 most followed UK restaurant critics on Twitter 2015
| Name | Number of followers | Twitter bio | Twitter profile |
TwitterAudit rating of genuine followers | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grace Dent | 217,588 | @Gracedent | ↔ | 80% | |
| Giles Coren | 170,713 | Time Out - The London Times - Esquire | @GilesCoren | ↔ | 77% |
| Jay Rayner | 132,736 | Eats, writes about it. Ponces about on telly. Has big hair. | @JayRayner1 | ↔ | 81% |
| Zoe Williams | 52,209 | Writer, bon viveur | @ZoeQWilliams | ↔ | 89% |
| Marina O'Loughlin | 30,727 | Restaurants. Travel. 'Obnoxious scenester consumerist chimpanzee.' Instagram: marinagpoloughlin | @MarinaOLoughlin | ↔ | 85% |
| Richard Vines | 29,447 | Bloomberg's chief food critic. | @RichardVines | ↔ | 89% |
| Amol Rajan | 27,093 | Editor, The Independent; Columnist, Evening Standard; Host, London Live; Food Critic, @indyonsunday; Patron, @ProspexTweets; Reggae nut; Author, Twirlymen | @AmolRajan | ↑ | 90% |
| Tom Parker Bowles | 26,229 | Let's Eat Meat-Recipes For Prime Cuts, Cheap Bits and Glorious Scraps of Meat. Out now (Pavilion) | @TomParkerBowles | ↓ | 84% |
| Andy Lynes | 22,427 | How to be a Chilli Head published by @PavilionBooks 7 May 2015 | @AndyLynes | Re-entry | 54% |
| Andy Hayler | 9,282 | Food Writer, Restaurant critic for Elite Traveler magazine | @Wyahaw | New Entry | 88% |
Follower numbers, bio & TwitterAudit all correct as of midday Friday 8th May 2015