To my friend mordenti, who had a pre-preview already, I beg patience (or perhaps a response to this new preview in light of the pre-preview).
I got back yesterday from a trip to LA. One of the goals of the trip was to visit a number of restaurants reviewed in Counter Intelligence, the weekly food column in the LA Weekly by Jonathan Gold.
Gold won this year's Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He is the first food reviewer to win this prize. A quick survey of the previous 10 years has 2 winners each in Literature, Music and Film; with the other 4 years' winners writing on Architecture, Fashion, Photography and Automobiles (!). Of those, by the way, Fashion (2006) and Automobiles (2004) were similarly unprecedented subjects for Pulitzer recognition. As you might imagine, writing on Music, Film, Literature and Architecture had won before.
I believe that Gold also is the second person writing for a free weekly paper to win the prize for criticism (the first was Lloyd Schwartz in 1994 writing for the Boston Phoenix).
Anyway, enough recitation of numbers and dates.
After eating at the restaurants that Gold reviewed, my aim was then to write a piece reviewing his reviews of those restaurants.
Now, having eaten at those restaurants, I find myself with a basket of ideas waiting to be turned into some kind of palatable essay.
An upcoming post might address the following topics:
1) What is the value of a food review? Is it in reliability? Is it something to do with the quality of the language?
2) What is the distinction between a food writer and a food reviewer?
3) What is the point of Jonathan Gold's column?
4) Why do some people on the internet feel that they should heap scorn on those who like certain restaurants "just because" a critic said it was good?
5) What is the difference between food reviewers writing in a free weekly, a paid daily, and one of the many peer-review sites (like Yelp or Zagat)? What motivates each of them? How does their tone differ?
6) Is there an evolutionary advantage to having strong aesthetic opinions? Does it have something to do with age? A friend of mine told me about a study in which older monkeys preferred not to eat new foods.
7) If you like eating out, do you have to like reading food reviews? How is the relationship of the diner to food reviews different from (or the same as) the relationship a person who appreciates art has to art criticism?
8) Do reviews serve to ease the anxiety we have at trying new things? If so, to what end?
9) Given the economically marginal existence of most eateries, restaurant criticism is especially fraught with political and moral implications, in addition to the aesthetic considerations in any kind of review.
10) A food reviewer's common practice of visiting the same restaurant multiple times may give a more reliable indicator of the worth of the restaurant, even by one's own subjective tastes, than one's initial visit to a restaurant.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comment:
After reading your amazing list of questions minger it occurred to me that i dont think i have ever read a food review. I have read those reviews of restaurants in lonely planet when i am a tourist, and i have read those 25 word summaries of neighborhood restaurants in the gaurdian sometimes. But I have never read a full article about a restaurant. I think i associate writing about food to writing about meat, which has its own flare of disgust for vegetarians. i imagine that there must be articles written about veg restaurants but i think im so tainted by my general perception that I dont even think to go look them up.
Anyway, this is a great preview and i look forward to all your interpretations about a kind of writing i have intentionally exiled myself from.
Post a Comment