One might assume that the best person to ask for advice on where to eat before the theatre would be a theatre critic. One would be wrong. “Press nights mostly start at 7pm, so it’s often not realistic to fit in a full meal either before or after a play,” Nick Curtis, the Standard’s chief theatre critic, says. “There’s a phone box by the Swiss Cottage gyratory where I and the Financial Times critic Sarah Hemming once found ourselves eating egg mayonnaise sandwiches before a show at the Hampstead Theatre. That’s the reality of eating out for most critics.”
