This Charmless Man - Giles Coren was right about the food but wrong about everything else at Dakota Grill

We can learn a few things about Times restaurant critic Giles Coren from his recent review of the Dakota Grill at the Dakota Manchester hotel.

Giles, knapsack on his back, bravely ventured north last week, eating at the restaurant with Countdown presenter Anne Robinson, who had summoned him to appear in Dictionary Corner, and who stays at the Dakota while filming in MediaCity.

But let’s just say Giles got a bit distracted by some other stuff along the way.

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Now then. We’re already abundantly aware of his feelings towards Manchester. It’s a place he once remarked was ‘truly one of the worst cities to eat in Europe’.

In his review, Giles gleefully parrots Ms. Robinson’s notion that ‘dinner in Manchester, by the way, requires a girl to have a spray tan, stick-on tattoos and stilettos’.

Sure, she said it. But the best thing is, he gets to repeat it while also thinking it too, all while hiding behind Ms. Robinson’s skirt. It’s a win-win.

“‘Where’s your dress from?’ Anne asks one of the girls who isn’t wearing one,” he writes, describing Robinson’s interaction with two women at the restaurant, because of course what women decide to wear when they go out is his business.

“Although the shadow of her immense eyelashes at least covers some of her chest,” he then oozes, while feeling the compulsion to note that once seated at his table he’s ‘looked after beautifully by Caitlin from Donegal'.

You know what? Maybe we haven’t learned all that much about him from this review after all. It’s nothing if not a lazy, drearily predictable picture painted of women in the north that we’ve all heard a thousand times before. Try harder.

However, we did learn that Manchester