In Such Good Taste

I continue to be fascinated with the online discourse recently about criticism and the role of critics. Especially as I find myself becoming much less (publically) judgmental than I used to was: at the risk of being repetitive I will mention that during my younger days I worked as a critic for newspapers and radio in a very broad variety of fields.

Including that of restaurant reviewing. It's not something I make much of, because my career didn't last very long: my doctor told me I had better stop dining out professionally if I wanted to reach the age of 40. But for a short period of time I revelled in the serious challenge of finding interesting ways to write about food and flavour.*

Which brings up today's discovery: a piece in the Guardian by Jay Rayner contrasting restaurant-reviewing styles between the UK and the US. This follows on something by Theodore Gioia† about what Gioia calls a "midlife crisis" in US restaurant reviewing. If I had to make a choice these days I think it would be for the UK style of criticism, as exemplified by Rayner. But really, food writing is a form of criticism that seems to me to have really suffered under the onslaught of the vox populi. Everybody eats, after all. And a surprising number of people seem to think their opinion of a restaurant will matter to anyone else.‡ For myself, ever since Chris Nuttall-Smith stopped writing for The Mope and Wail I have pretty much stopped paying attention to food writing, pro or otherwise.

Though I still enjoy listening when Lorna reads aloud some of the better examples of Rayner's epistolary eviscerations.

*And it is a challenge. Writing about food and eating is almost exactly as difficult as writing about sex and fucking. There's a reason some critics hold an annual celebration of bad writing about sex: the vocabulary available (when writing about sex or food) is extremely limited. Think about it: how many novels have you read, Gentle Reader, that contain actual descriptions of food or eating? (A list of dishes does not count.)

†Not, apparently, to be confused with the music critic Ted Gioia.

‡Lorna and I still dine out fairly frequently. And I wish restaurants would impose a special surcharge on any and every person who insists on taking a (flash) mobile-phone photo of every dish set down before them. If you need a visual reminder of everything you eat, You're Doing It Wrong.