Times critic describes Reethi Rah as ‘James Bond lair’

The infamously brutal Times restaurant critic AA Gill has visited the Maldives, describing it in the major UK newspaper as a “Disneyland of extinction”.

Staying at the Reethi Rah resort, Gill questioned the “holiday-island tropical assumption that people who do lots and lots of nervy, shouty business in the First World need to go to the Third World and listen to birdsong and panpipes to stop.”

He described the resort as having a “spookily ethereal quality, as if it’s hiding something.”

“Perhaps, underneath it, a James Bond villain is building a space rocket. Maybe it’s the set for a huge, elaborate reality porno movie,” Gill wrote in the Times.

He also marvelled at the economy of the Maldives: “Before the international hotels came, the Maldives’ main industries were dried tuna, exported to Sri Lanka, and the RAF base on the island of Gan.”

“Sushi and bombs isn’t exactly the green option, and there is nothing else for the Maldives to do except make coconut matting, so it has to be tourism,” he wrote.