We owe our readers an explanation for the empty space where a review should be this week, and it is this: Topaz Toepads is in Grove Hospital.

There is no gentle way for a food desk to write the sentence “our food critic has food poisoning,” so we will not try to dress it. Late last week Topaz sat down to a meal he intended to review, as he has sat down to a thousand others, and by the small hours he was unwell in a way that a man who eats for a living learns to tell apart from a merely unlucky evening. He made the walk to the townline himself, which the ward tells us he should not have done, and was admitted to Grove Hospital below the wooded slope, where he has been since. We are permitted to tell you that he is stable, that he was never in danger of the serious kind, and that the danger now is chiefly to the composure of the staff, whom he has been reviewing. He has, characteristically, declined to tell us where he ate. We pressed. His answer, which we print in full because it is the most reassuring thing about his condition, was this:

“I do not name a kitchen until I have decided what I mean about it, and I have not decided, and being poisoned by a place is not a licence to be unfair to it. Give me a few days and my stomach back and I may tell you exactly where I went and precisely what I think.”

We take that as proof that the important part of the man is entirely intact.

So there is no review this week, and we would rather tell you why than pretend the desk simply ran quiet. Topaz Toepads will be back at your tables the moment the ward will release him, which by his account cannot come soon enough, and by theirs cannot come soon enough either. Until then Topaz asks for all of your recommendations except for places that gave you food poisoning.

The Vaelthir Desk keeps Topaz Toepads’s chair warm and his standards higher. Cards, but not covered dishes, may be sent to the desk by owl and will be carried to the ward.