Lynette Pinchess

Lynette Pinchess blends food writing with practical “what’s on” service, concentrating on how local restaurants, pubs, cafés and food-led days out land with ordinary diners. She works as a food and drink content editor and life writer for Nottingham Post and Nottinghamshire Live, shaping coverage of eating out and leisure across their features and “What’s On” desks. Her pieces mix first-hand reviews, opening and closure news, event reports and reader-driven guides, with price, value and atmosphere treated as core details rather than decoration.

Restaurant, Pub and Café Reviews

Much of Pinchess’s work is built around visits to individual venues, with a strong focus on independent restaurants and pubs. She reviews Indian fine-dining restaurants, noting how they “cement” reputations through awards and how menus balance traditional flavours with modern ideas. She writes in the first person about pub dining rooms, such as a Queen of Hockley visit where she details dishes like rolled leg of lamb and beef shin chilli and reports exactly how a discount scheme halves the food bill.

Café pieces, including a feature on the Biscuit & Brew tea room, linger on specifics like loose-leaf tea, the breadth of the drinks list and how a return visit compares with the opening day.

Across these reviews she consistently reports what customers actually receive: portion sizes, menu breadth, quality of ingredients and how staff and surroundings contribute to the experience.

Reader value is explicit; she highlights affordable burgers at a new Hockley restaurant, the appeal of vegetarian and vegan menus at places like Vegalante, and the reasons regulars consider it a “massive shame” when a pub stops serving food. Her tone is direct and descriptive, with praise or criticism tied to concrete observations rather than general lifestyle language.

Openings, Closures and Recognition

Pinchess tracks the local food landscape as it changes, covering openings, closures and industry recognition with equal attention. She reports on new vegetarian and vegan restaurants and takeaways, spelling out menus that feature falafel, hummus, aubergine and halloumi, and explaining where they sit in the city’s wider dining scene. Closure stories, such as the account from Nottingham’s only fully vegan pub, focus on the business realities behind decisions, including how profits rely more on drinks than food and why a shift in trade makes the model unsustainable.

Awards and external validation are another strand of her beat.

She writes about a Nottingham Indian restaurant’s “big win,” linking fine-dining credentials to ongoing local reputation. She covers a MasterChef winner’s pub that earns praise from a Michelin inspector, relaying details of dishes like ham hock with piccalilli and toast to show what impressed the reviewer.

Competition pieces, including coverage of the Notts Bites takeaway finalists, use quotes from owners on consistency and quality and show how reader nominations shape recognition for places like Ruddington Fish Bar. In each case, the venue’s status is grounded in specific menus, prices and customer loyalty rather than in abstract acclaim.

Food-Led Events and Days Out

Alongside static venues, Pinchess covers events and outings where food is central to the experience. Her Goose Fair reporting emphasises the breadth of cuisines available, listing stalls offering Nigerian, Thai and classic fairground options such as mushy peas with mint sauce, burgers, cock-on-a-stick, doughnuts and candy floss.

She treats these pieces as both scene-setters and practical guides, showing what visitors can eat as well as what rides and attractions are on offer.

Her feature on the School of Artisan Food looks at barbecuing and bread-making courses, documenting the school’s growth over fifteen years and the fact that tens of thousands of students have trained there from across the world.

She includes details such as course length and fees and the setting in Sherwood Forest to position the school as a destination for serious food learning rather than a casual day out. Lists of school holiday activities and her coverage of the Flying Scotsman’s arrival in Nottinghamshire similarly frame routes, attractions and timetables as ways families can build days around food, heritage and local travel.

Value, Guides and Reader Engagement

Service journalism runs through Pinchess’s work, often anchored in value and reader participation. The half-price pub meal article turns her own booking experience into a how-to for readers, explaining that quoting two specific words through a platform like First Table can cut the food bill by 50 percent and spelling out how this works in practice.

Map-led pieces on Michelin-recognised restaurants show how diners can “follow” a route to find high-quality food, while list features on school holiday activities organise options into accessible guides for families.

Reader input shapes several strands: takeaway competitions built on nominations, coverage of celebrity-frequented venues that invites readers to share sightings and photos, and reaction-driven stories when pubs stop serving food. Throughout, she keeps the emphasis on what readers can do next - where to eat, when to visit, how to claim an offer - and supports this with specific names, prices and practical instructions. The result is coverage that combines the authority of an editor with the perspective of someone who eats and attends events in the same way her audience does.