Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes is Australia’s longest-serving restaurant critic. A freelance journalist and writer, he is the restaurant reviewer for Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Australia’s biggest-selling daily newspaper. Over almost three decades he has contributed regular reviews and columns to many of Australia’s most prestigious newspapers and magazines, including The Age, The Sunday Age, The Sunday Herald, The Australian Financial Review, and Gourmet Traveller. Advanced Australian Fare, his history of Australian restaurants and the development of Australian cooking, was named Oustanding Food Book of the Year at the 2003 Australian Food Media Awards. It was one of two runners-up in the 2003 World Gourmand Cookbook Awards culinary-history category. Blackie, his book about the life, illness, treatment and ultimate demise of a family cat, has been translated into Italian, Dutch and Greek, and Adagio for a simple clarinet blends biography, autobiography, history, travel, musicology, Mozart and fiction into a story that writer and critic Michael McGirr described as being ‘as humanly rich, thought-provoking and deftly structured as anything I have read in a long time’. To Die For, 100 food experiences you should have before you die, won the Rest of the World in English 2005 World Gourmand Cookbook Awards food-literature category. His latest book, Paris on a plate, recounts 12 days of eating and many fond memories of the French capital. His views expressed on this website are his alone.