Writing about food – or, more specifically, writing about restaurants – is an enormous privilege. It costs money, and you need money to do it. It is absolutely no coincidence that most of the national broadsheet restaurant critics, nearly all men of course, are either descended from the aristocracy or other journalists. To the point where there isn’t much difference, to be honest: I heard Giles Coren described once as a “hereditary columnist” and, like my vague feelings of revulsion towards Coren, it has always stayed with me.

So how do people afford it? The most frequent route, for Instagrammers at least, is to accept free food in return for content. I’ve talked about that recently, so I won’t do it to death, but what surprises me is how little people on Instagram follow the ASA guidelines and declare things as #ADs or #gifted. Sometimes it’s down to ignorance, others down to wilful ignorance. Often it’s hard to tell. “I thought that was just a courtesy thing” said a content creator I swapped messages with recently. Err, well, how about giving your audience the courtesy of knowing that you didn’t pay for the food you just raved about?

“What if I went intending to pay and they wouldn’t let me?” he followed up, an oblique take on the eternal if a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody around to hear it question. It doesn’t matter what you intended, it matters whether you put your hand in your pocket. I’m afraid it really is that simple.

But restaurant bloggers do this too, usually while criticising influencers and content creators, seemingly for the crime of being less subtle. They take free stuff all the time, and often don’t declare it either. They certainly wouldn’t break out the hashtags of shame, because that would let the cat out of the bag, so instead they resort to weasel words like “I didn’t see a bill”. Some restaurant bloggers are positively myopic where bills are concerned, but they still have good enough eyesight to say the food looks phenomenal. What are the chances?

But this is the problem: writing about food is an expensive business, so unless you are fantastically independently wealthy you need to find a way to keep doing it – whether that’s wealthy friends, or a patron, or in-laws you can stiff, or some other route. It’s why many restaurant bloggers drift into doing PR for restaurants they like on the side, so the line between the writer and the subject gets hopelessly blurred.

Again, I do kind of understand: I have made a few friends in the business since I started writing this blog (although, and this probably says something about my winning personality, not many) but I don’t review their restaurants. Stay in this game long enough though, and of course you risk compromising yourself. But what I don’t understand, given all the privilege entailed in being able to do this, is how little restaurant bloggers seem prepared to check or acknowledge their privilege.

Instead, you just get tin-eared humblebragging from people who aren’t even pretending to be relatable. “I eat out more often than you, so I know what I’m talking about” says one restaurant blogger who routinely promotes businesses he has worked for. “My lunch is better than yours” repeatedly boasts a second, who rarely sees a bill and appears to be about six months from a cirrhosis diagnosis. Classic car crash.

“I’m especially interested in submissions from writers who identify as working class” says a third, a double barrelled type who is currently in the twelfth week of a jaunt round Asia. Nice work, gang: keep on keeping it real!

So at this point, I should acknowledge my own privilege: I am extremely lucky that I can afford to do this, and very glad that I’ve never gone down the route of accepting free food from restaurants and reviewing it. At the start of this year, I asked if readers wanted to support the costs of what I do, and I was very fortunate that the response was positive. I said at the time that it would hopefully enable me to cover some of the costs of running this blog, and that it might allow me to write more, or different content. It has definitely done the former, and enabled me to get rid of ads on the blog, but what about the latter?

The reason I’m talking about this, today of all days, is because this week’s review is of Orwells, the widely acclaimed Shiplake restaurant that features in the Michelin guide, has received multiple accolades from the Good Food Guide and has been pursuing excellence for something like fifteen years. Its chef owners, married couple Ryan and Liam Simpson-Trotman, are regulars on James Martin’s ITV show Saturday Morning. It is probably the best, nearest restaurant I have never reviewed in nearly twelve years of doing this, and in honesty I would probably not have reviewed it if it wasn’t for the support this blog receives from subscribers.

That’s not to say that I couldn’t have afforded to, but I publish a review every week and in the old days, I could have reviewed two or three places, easily, with the money it would cost me to eat at Orwells. I try to cover a variety of places, at a variety of price points, and eating at Orwells would have scuppered that. So it has never made it to the top of my list – because I’m not one of those reviewers who “didn’t see a bill” – and it’s only now that I felt, on a Thursday night during a well-earned week off, that Zoë and I could hop in a taxi and head out to Binfield Heath to see what the fuss was about.

Incidentally, that’s also why this review is behind a paywall. It was made possible by people who subscribe to the blog, so being able to read it is the least they should get in return for their generous support. But also, be honest: if you’re thinking of going to Orwells and you want an opinion you can trust on whether it’s any good, you can afford to subscribe to this blog, for a month at least. If you can afford to eat at Orwells, you can afford that.