Egon Ronay: An appreciation by broadcaster and friend Nick Ross

Going to a restaurant with Egon Ronay felt like visiting a church with the Pope.

Egon Ronay tastes Champagne Photo: PA

He was the high priest of eating out and for decades the great chefs would revere him and most of the epicures in Britain were his disciples.

He could be blunt in his assessments but, like a gastronomic Simon Cowell, even his most acerbic judgements were simply honest, and usually right.

His passion was not to criticise but to improve, and with his old world charm he delighted in nothing more than discovering a new eatery with a budding genius in the kitchen.

I first got to know Egon on a rain-lashed water taxi one Friday night in Venice.

I had heard that he and a few friends would nip abroad for a gourmet lunch, which seemed absurdly extravagant, but a weekend of fine dining in the city of canals was irresistible, and I quickly discovered why the trips were so unmissable.

Egon was a serious star. As our boat approached the restaurant the maitre'd and chef came out to greet us with umbrellas, and the dinner turned out to be a feast.

My squid ink risotto was memorable. Back at our hotel, the Cipriani, the manager invited us to taste his Armagnacs, from recent vintages back to the mid nineteenth century.

Yet none of this was fawning on a food writer who had enormous influence. It was friendship and admiration for a man with prodigious talent and exquisite taste who shared their passion for food and wine.

From his escape to Britain from communism in 1946 Egon had fought to raise what were often dire standards of cooking. His first restaurant was a gem, but his Egon Ronay Guide was the holy grail.

More accessible, less stuffy, much more detailed and, in Britain, much more widely read, than the Michelin, it set high standards for itself as well as for the institutions it appraised.

The inspectors were anonymous and wholly independent, and no establishment could be included without at least one annual visit and sometimes several. It was a costly business in food bills alone.

Egon's whole life was an adventure, and at first I suspected his anecdotes were so extraordinary that they must have been embellished, but they weren't.

When we were in Budapest together he relived wartime escapades – he showed us where he hid from the Nazis, salvaged grains of coffee and boiled water on a bonfire to reopen a smashed restaurant, served Soviet soldiers and was later saved from execution as a bourgeois restaurateur when a Russian identified him as a waiter.

The Ronay name has faded in recent years but even so when a few weeks ago he came round to supper my young nephew was struck by his unusual name.

"Egon," he said, "you mean like Egon Ronay."

When he discovered the diminutive white-haired guest was Egon Ronay he was "dead impressed".

One of Egon's many initiatives to improve restaurant standards was to found the British Academy of Gastronomes, a dining club dedicated to good food similar to one in France.

The measure of his influence was that with his death the Academy may die too. But maybe that's not so bad. He has done his work. London now has at least as many fine restaurants as Paris.

We British, whose food was once a joke, are now as knowledgeable and keen on gastronomy as anyone. It is a splendid legacy.