Esther Walker is a British lifestyle journalist, author, and podcast host. She writes for The Times and the Daily Mail, runs the Substack newsletter The Spike, wrote the cult blog Recipe Rifle, and co-hosted Giles Coren Has No Idea with her husband, restaurant critic Giles Coren.
Some writers stick to one lane. This one cooks, parents, jokes and argues about the news, usually all in the same week.
- Born around 1980, so she’s in her mid-forties now.
- Bylines in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, i, and Grazia.
- Wrote two non-fiction books, The Bad Cook and The Bad Mother, plus her first novel in 2025.
- Married Giles Coren in 2010 and has two kids, Kitty and Sam.
- Home is Kentish Town, with a second place in Gloucestershire.
Who Is Esther Walker?
Esther Walker’s the elder daughter of Angus Walker, who chairs the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust. North London through and through, basically.
Her schooling took a sharp turn in 1996. She left Henrietta Barnett, an all-girls grammar school, and landed at Westminster School for Sixth Form. At that point Westminster only took girls in the top two years, 60 of them, in a school of 750 boys.
Esther Walker wrote about all this for The Daily Telegraph. On day one she felt so sick with nerves she got off the Tube at Euston and sat with her head between her knees. Her housemaster’s line stuck with her: “The boys talk a good game. But they’re more scared of you than you are of them.”
Turned out he was right. The boys were mostly nervous maths nerds. The girls were the terrifying ones — they smoked Marlboros, lived in Chelsea and knew how to ski.
Twice a week the whole school filed into Westminster Abbey for hymns. She still pictures it when she’s stressed. The school goes fully co-ed by 2030, and she’s a bit envious.
Before blogging, she was a features writer, including a stint at the Evening Standard under Sebastian Shakespeare. He’s the most inspiring person she’s met. Her words: in a tight spot, she still asks herself what Seb would do.
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How Old Is Esther Walker?
Esther Walker was born around 1980, so she’s in her mid-forties. A 2013 Ham&High interview put her at 33, ahead of her Ham&High Literary Festival talk about The Bad Cook. Ten years later she described herself in print as a 42-year-old mother to a son. Same birth year both times.
Recipe Rifle, The Bad Cook, And The Bad Mother
Recipe Rifle started because she left her features job and suddenly had time. “I began to learn to cook, and sharing recipes on a blog gave me a sense of purpose for it,” she explains. It became a cult read for recipes, moaning, motherhood, and more.
Out of it came two autobiographical books, The Bad Cook and The Bad Mother, both about keeping a home running while a career is happening.
She’s not precious about any of it. Who taught her to cook? “NO-ONE! I am entirely self-taught.” Speaking to the blog Life of Yablon, she compared notes with her husband: “He’s a generous, imaginative and brave cook, whereas I am timid, bitter and lazy.”
Esther Walker picks recipes with no odd ingredients and not too many carbs. Giles criticises her cooking, but he only does so very politely. Best TV dinner? Baked potato, cheese, sour cream, butter, salt and pepper, Tabasco and beer. Worst moments? Badly undercooked chicken and a dinner-party stew where she never browned the onions.
She’s Team Jamie, not Heston. Loves ceviche in Soho. Her first properly smart dinner was at The Glasshouse in Kew. Best advice she’s had: “When in doubt, do nothing.”
In a cookery feature with writer Fiona Hicks, she laid out her actual method. Do it ahead. Copy restaurants and take shortcuts. Heat all your pans from the start. Salt it more.
As she put it, cooking is basically chopping things up. Her 20s freezer held vodka; now it’s organic butter. She had help from friends like Leon, founder of Henry Dimbleby, but the rest is trial and error. Her best-ever dinner party was spag bol made with heaps of ketchup, because the host was relaxed.
Flowers, candles, plenty of wine — that’s the real trick. Hicks nervously cooked Giles a chicken pie that day. He said it was better than anything in any restaurant in the world.
Journalism And The Spike
Her work has run across The Times, The Sunday Times, the Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, the i and Grazia. These days her main patch is The Spike, a lifestyle Substack with a subscriber list in the thousands.
Her Instagram Wake-Up Call
One piece really travelled. Esther Walker’d fallen hard into Instagram Reels — 45 minutes at a time, shooing the kids away, snapping at her husband. Then came the awful sleep, the panic attacks in the kitchen, and what she calls life paralysis, where nothing you do feels worth anything.
She pulled the receipts too. A 2019 Federation University Australia study linking screen time to anxiety and depression. A 32.5% jump in women aged 35 to 44 joining the app was used from 2020 to 2021. Leaked Facebook research showed a third of teenage girls felt worse about their bodies. Bottega Veneta deleted its profile.
Michaela Coel quit and found her thumb still hunting for the app. Novelist Emma Jane Unsworth now dips in once every few weeks. Her fix was simple: a 15-minute daily limit. “With my exposure now reduced, I am so much happier.”
Well, This Is Awkward: The Debut Novel
Her first novel, “Well, This Is Awkward” was published on 11 September 2025 by Bedford Square Publishers. Mairéad is mid-forties, single, and child-free and runs an influencer talent agency. Her Gen Z staff are mean to her, and she hasn’t seen her sister in nine years. Then her niece, Sunshine, turns up to stay.
It’s about what it means to have children in your life, yours or not. Georgia Toffolo read it in a day and laughed out loud. Alexander Armstrong called it a fabulous debut. Handy, that — his wife, Hannah Bronwen Snow, is Esther’s sister.
Giles Coren Has No Idea
The podcast is weekly, topical, made for The Times, and award-nominated. Husband and wife discuss the week’s news together.
They’ve mined the marriage before. In lockdown, they made a Times series called Staying In With The Corens, and Esther Walker wrote up her tips for working under one roof without filing for divorce.
Marriage, Children, And Kentish Town
They met around 2007 and married in April 2010, three years into courting. The Sun has followed the pair for years. Giles has been The Times’ restaurant critic since 2002 and won Food and Drink Writer of the Year in 2005.
Her reason for marrying him is gloriously unromantic: he owned a house in north London. Anyone north of Euston would have done, she joked. The couple lives in Kentish Town with Kitty and Sam, plus a place in Gloucestershire.
A free day means a coffee and sandwich from the Bull and Last, then getting lost on Hampstead Heath. She’d like Iceland replaced with a Waitrose. Her chosen epitaph: “She was alright once you got to know her.”
Is Esther Walker Jewish?
There’s no public record of Esther Walker being Jewish. That side of the family is her husband’s. Wikipedia notes that Giles Coren’s parents, Alan Coren and Anne Kasriel, were both raised in Orthodox Jewish households, though his own upbringing was more liberal.
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FAQs
Q1. What Is Esther Walker Famous For?
Esther Walker journalism, the Recipe Rifle blog, and the books The Bad Cook and The Bad Mother. She also co-hosts a weekly Times podcast with Giles Coren.
Q2. Who Is Esther Walker’s Husband?
Giles Coren, born in 1969, a restaurant critic at The Times. They married in April 2010.
Q3. How Many Children Do They Have?
They have two, a daughter, Kitty, and a son, Sam. The family is based in Kentish Town.
Q4. What Is The Spike?
Her Substack newsletter on daily life, parenting, and lifestyle has thousands of subscribers, many of whom are paying.
Q5. Has She Written Fiction?
Yes. Well, This Is Awkward, published 11 September 2025 by Bedford Square Publishers, is her debut novel.
Q6. Is She Related To Alexander Armstrong?
By marriage. The Pointless host is married to her sister, Hannah Bronwen Snow.
Sources & References
- The Telegraph. (2023, March 29). Adored by one of the girls: Westminster going co-ed will mean even harder…
- Ham & High. (n.d.). Kentish Town journalist Esther Walker: “I married Giles Coren and we bought a house in north London.”
- The Sun. (n.d.). Giles Coren’s wife Esther Walker.
- Lifeofyablon. (n.d.). You know Giles Coren, now meet the wife.
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