The Criterion, 224 Piccadilly, London W1

The piece you are about to read marks either the end of restaurant reviewing as we know it, or a brave new dawn – and I am genuinely not sure which.

For as I write it up for you in all its imperial 1,500-word majesty on Friday, August 21, 2009, and send it lumbering out into the world through the normal channels to be edited, subbed, illustrated, faffed and fiddled with, printed and bound and thrown in the back of a van to arrive, finally, 15 days later, on the floor of your local newsagent, from where you will pick it up and heave it home to where, you hope, your husband has put the kettle on, so that you can tear off the polythene bag, toss away the Bathstore flyers and droiky CD giveaways, and flick through the real pages with your real fingers, until you get, finally, to this page, to find out – be still, my beating heart – what this restaurant critic thought of the relaunched Criterion restaurant in Piccadilly, the world already knows. And has known for more than a fortnight.

And that’s because I tweeted it.

Suddenly aware that, with the monetisation of online news being only months away, newspapers in solid form are going to reach fewer and fewer people, and that we (journalists) are all going to have to metamorphose into what Nathan Barley calls “self-facilitating media nodes”, I registered on twitter.com, the online soundbite-orientated networking channel made famous by Stephen Fry, Lily Allen and a billion savvy little media consumers (whom I would have once called “sad-arse friendless weirdos”, but now know better), and got tweeting.

I promised, in messages of no more than the maximum 140 characters, to deliver instant verdicts on restaurants I visited, from the table, as opinions came to me. A dry run at Sofra in Mayfair (“full of hedge-fund fools forking down bland, ugly, totally unTurkish chain food. It’s McD’s in curly slippers”) went down well, and soon I had 2,000 followers (Lily Allen has 1.3 million, Fry has 800,000, even my little sister has 5,000), so I told them I’d be going for a full twitrev at the Criterion that evening.

This lot – young (apart from Stephen), digital, unlikely to eat there should they live to 102 – were not going to care about the history of a 135-year-old restaurant, or that it’s been taken over by a 21-year-old Russian, or what that means. They don’t give a crap for context, considered reflection or pellucid prose, they’ll be open to a random three-second cyber-happening, and they’ll take or leave it as they find it.

So I tweeted 19 times from the table, using my clunky old Samsung. With an iPhone or the like I could have seen the responses of my followers, and responded on cue (and that will come), but, scraped off my Twitter page and stuck on to this paper one, the review looks like this:

<heading off to review criterion by phone-tweet from inside, but my crappy samsung makes loud bleebs when texting - don’t know how to stop it>

<Hmmm. My manhattan is a bit sweet. Nice carpet though>

<nice waiter. Ordered grouse risotto and mutton>

<Oh, and a 2001 pessac leognon>

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