You might have missed it, but there's been an ongoing case in the Northern Irish courts that's being watched very carefully both by newspapers and by their reviewers.

The case concerns a restaurant review written by Caroline Workman in August 2000, in which she described an unhappy meal at Goodfellas' pizzeria in Belfast.

Ciaran Convery, who runs Goodfellas, thought the review was 'a hatchet job' and took the publishers, the Irish News, to court. His lawyers argued that the review was damaging, defamatory and hurtful and the Belfast jury agreed, awarding £25,000 and costs to Goodfellas in February 2006.

Back then the judgement caused quite a stir, since the established principle that reviews were 'fair comment' was now in question. It wasn't only restaurant reviewers who felt twitchy. Any review, whether it was of a car, a play, a film, a book or even of a technological gadget, could now possibly be the subject of a court case if it was unfavourable.

I found myself on several radio shows as the ramifications of this case were extrapolated. People got very hot under the collar; this was a blow directly to the solar plexus of press freedom.

The Northern Irish Court of Appeal has overturned that original judgement. The Lord Chief Justice, Sir Brian Kerr, accepted the argument of the Irish News' counsel that that the judge misdirected the jury. The case has now been sent for re-trial. So it looks like we're back to where we were before the case started.

The case does bring up all kinds of questions as to the validity and usefulness of reviews. Who are these reviewers? And what right do they have to pass judgement?

For my part I'd answer that by saying reviewers don't pass judgement, they express a personal opinion. It's up to the readers to assess what weight they'd give to that opinion. We start from the assumption that the reviewer ought to have some level of expertise in their subject and assuming they do, we take their opinion as a guide. Not as a gospel truth set in stone, but as a guide.

I can't speak for reviewers of things other than restaurants, but on that subject I do have some opinions. Unusually, I think, for restaurant reviewers, I used to have a restaurant and I know exactly what it's like to get reviewed. I got reviewed in my restaurant, I've been reviewed when acting on stage and my books have been reviewed. I've had two excoriating reviews in my life, one for my restaurant and one for my book on Italy.

Let me be clear here: both the book and the restaurant only ever got one bad review each, but curiously they're the ones I remember best. Helen Lucy Burke gave my restaurant a real going over -- naturally I thought unfairly -- but here's the odd thing: my business improved the following week as regular customers came specially to lend their support. And the book? It's still selling 10 years on.

This raises the question of what effect reviews have. A few years ago I went through a load of my past restaurant reviews. I discovered that five restaurants that I'd praised to the skies were closed, and three restaurants that I hadn't been too kind to were still in business. The old adage that a bad review can close a restaurant doesn't seem to have any evidence to back it up. The truth is, bad restaurants close themselves. The flip side of this coin may have more validity. A good review of a new restaurant will certainly bring it customers faster than no review at all. People are always happy to hear about a new place where the food is good.

The other purpose of a review is to entertain. The master of the art is A. A. Gill in the Sunday Times. He once famously remarked 'there's nothing so boring as reading about what someone else had to eat'. His reviews are master classes in how to write entertainingly about everything except the food, which he often leaves to the last paragraph.

There's no getting away from it: the easiest way to entertain your readers is to be really nasty. There's an atavistic bloodlust in us that likes seeing someone else get a good kicking. For reviewers there's a temptation to be cruel when it gets a laugh.

Dorothy Parker once wrote of an Italian tenor called Guido Nazzo 'Guido Nazzo is nazzo guido.' You can't help feeling that even if Guido's singing had been sublime, the review would have been the same. The joke was too good not to use it. Exactly the same can be said of her review of Christopher Isherwood's I am a Camera, which read 'No Leica'.

For my part I'm very rarely unkind, and some might argue therefore rarely amusing, but years of being in restaurant kitchens has taught me to respect the people who take on that daunting job. It's perfectly possible to write about what you didn't like without being insulting, although you won't get the cheap laughs that come from savagery.

As jobs go, being a restaurant reviewer isn't among the physically demanding ones, except perhaps on the digestion. It does need a skill set, although those skills are not so apparent until you actually come to do it. Trust me, it's harder than it looks. And yet amongst many people there's a feeling that it's something they could master easily.

Perhaps that's because we all eat -- several times a day, every day of our lives. We're all experts in ingestion. But where people like me part company with others is that we don't eat to refuel -- we eat for pleasure. Good restaurants don't offer sustenance, they offer pleasure on a plate. That's what we pay for and that's what upsets us when it isn't there.

- Paolo Tullio