Month in Review - September 2012

Celebrating Spring

 

Donald Rumsfeld managed to get himself into trouble over the question of what we know, what we know we don't know and and what we don't know we don't know. The things we know we don't know much or anything about are those which, in my case at least, I have studiously avoided attempting to learn - quantum physics, rocket science, brain surgery all come to mind. The things I don't know I don't know are legion. So much of what goes on around us we just take for granted until someone asks a question or you come across a snippet of information which challenges your previous assumptions. All of a sudden you realise there a vast holes in your knowledge of the world that, now you've identified the void, you must work to fill. And then of course there is the gaping chasm where lie all the things you once knew but now struggle to remember.
 

As a child I had a passing acquaintance with Pontefract cakes. My parents I think considered these hard discs of liquorice an important part of my English heritage. If you had asked me a few weeks ago why these sweets were called Pontefract cakes I would have told you that they were named after the town where they were manufactured and, if I had thought long enough and hard enough I might even have remembered they were made by Bassetts and that they had a castle image stamped on them. What I didn't know then, and would never have guessed, was that the liquorice used in their manufacture was actually grown in Pontefract. Who would ever have imagined that something as exotic as liquorice would, or indeed could, grow in Yorkshire?

Another question which arose this month was why are hazelnuts called filberts? I still don't feel confident about the answer to this one. According to the Oxford Companion to Food 'filbert' is the name of a type of cultivated hazelnut, as distinct from a cob hazelnut. All wild hazelnuts are just hazelnuts in Britain but in America both wild and cultivated hazelnuts are called filberts. The name filbert is thought to come from St. Philibert, whose saint's day, 22 August, falls at around the time hazelnuts ripen. So hazel nuts are one of those things that I can no longer claim to know nothing about but I still feel they have only moved from the unknown unknowns to the known unknowns.

A while ago I drew your attention to  this post on Edible Geography about lunch.
Lunch is a very serious business for some as this piece 'A day in the life of a Mumbai sandwichwallah' makes clear. Armed with this knowledge a sandwich will never be the same again.

Monthly Catch Up

 

The Restaurant Reviewer at Work?

 



You may well be wondering what happened to July and August - let's just say they came and then they went. So before the end of September rolls around I thought to follow up on the last post about restaurant reviews.
Before there were Internet sites like Yelp and UrbanSpoon there were restaurant guide books and of course there still are - the Sydney Morning Herald Guide, Michelin and Zagat for example. One of the criticisms of these guides is that they tend to grade restaurants by arbitrary and mysterious criteria and concentrate too much on high end dining so that they don't really reflect where real people do actually eat. Two articles from the Guardian (here and here) discuss the latest Zagat Guide to London which rates places like the Ledbury, Dinner by Heston and two of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants in their top ten. Do restaurant guides promote intelligent appreciation of food and informed criticism of eating establishments? Do they help to set standards on which that criticism can be based? What criteria do they use to judge the cooking? How do they choose which restaurants will be included? The Michelin guide in particular is notoriously secretive about their methods yet three stars is still regarded as the mark of excellence never mind what it may really represent.
There can be no doubt that the anonymous voices who rate restaurants on the Internet are both more opinionated and more egalitarian than the majority of 'official' guides. So whilst sites like Yelp may give you a better idea of what to expect from your local Italian or Thai they would appear to contribute little to an intellectual gastronomic dialogue. Research has however led to the conclusion that social media sites do have an influence on 'how consumers judge the quality of goods and services' and they do influence a restaurant's takings. It's also worth remembering that not all social media sites are created equal, so, just as in the case of the more established printed restaurant guides, it is worth knowing what you are dealing with before you make any sort of decision based on their recommendations. Oliver Thring discusses Trip Advisor here and it is instructive to read some of the comments on his post eg.'I would much rather read a restaurant critic's review of a fine dining restaurant, but when it's a local chinese, indian or italian, and I care just as much about the service, cleanliness and atmosphere as I do about the food and price, tripadvisor works for me'.
And for the final word, this piece from Bruce Palling who calls homself 'Gastroenophile'. Mr. Palling has a foot in both camps - he is a journalist (he writes for The Wall Street Journal) and a blogger. He believes that 'we should all be grateful that there has never been such a profusion of fascinating accounts of fine dining so available - and provided free of charge'. Does he mean that we should be grateful that there is now so much information freely available or should we be grateful that there was a time when we were free of other people's gratuitous opinions no matter how fascinating?

More Blogs and Blogging

Le déjeuner des canotiers, Renoir.

 The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

How many of these diners are going to write a review of their lunch on their blog when they get home?
At dinner a few weeks ago the conversation ran to restaurant reviews and to blogs, blogging and bloggers. And given my interest in the latter (that is blogs, blogging and bloggers and the hows and whys of the dissemination of information about restaurants and fine dining) it was suggested that I might furnish a list of blogs that were worth following.
Well I'm not going to do that per se but I am going to point any one who is interested in the direction of some further reading in this area.
Who you might like to 'follow' depends very much on what you want to know, what information you are hoping to gain from reading someone else's thoughts/ideas/opinions. I don't 'follow' blogs so much as watch them. In the interests of my research I track a group of individuals who post fairly regular and very detailed restaurant reviews. I'm not reading these reviews because I want to eat at the restaurants myself but I am interested in the what, when, where, how and why of these dining experiences. None of the bloggers I watch ( and yes it is all a bit voyeuristic) have any credentials as such - they are  not professional writers and they don't have any qualifications as chefs or restaurateurs - they are in the main young people with healthy appetites and plenty of disposable income.
One of the criticisms of the 'amateur' critic is that they have no knowledge of how to cook and because they only know how to eat aren't really in a position to judge whether what they are eating is any good or not and certainly have no way of telling good from better or best. Now that is a criticism that could be laid at the door of many a restaurant reviwer (see below for example) and might be true for those who write  the short reviews on sites such as 'Eatability' and 'Urbanspoon' but certainly isn't true of all bloggers. It probably is true that few food bloggers are professional journalists, although of course there are exceptions to that rule too. Nor is it fair to tar all food blogs with the same brush. For one thing not every food blog concentrates on restaurant reviews (yours truly for one) and not every blog is all about self-promotion.
So let's start with some local food people and their ideas on the restaurant reviewer.
Claire, who calls herself Melbourne Gastronome, recently posted this piece entitled 'Online reviews and the race to be first' which among other concerns raises the question of reviewing etiquette, an issue which is also considered here and here.
Phil Lees, whose blog is called The Last Appetite, has some interesting observations to make about the influence of bloggers. The audience for a particular blog is hard to determine but certainly Phil's statistics and my own analysis of  the blogs I have been studying suggest that the reach may be fairly limited. However the influence of on-line reviews on sites such as Urbanspoon for example is another matter altogether, as Phil discusses here and here.
What do we expect from a restaurant review? Does it really need to be a literary masterpiece? In a recent post of her blog Will Write for Food, Dianne Jacob discusses the James Beard Award nominees including Alan Richman. Richman is perhaps not well known in Australia but he is very much the master of  the long form, the review that tells a story, and his work is usually very funny. His book Fork it Over is a great read. So Richman is a good writer who happens to review restaurants and like many well regarded restaurant critics he is a journalist first. As he says of himself

I am a restaurant critic. I eat for a living.

Chefs complain about people like me. They argue that we are not qualified to do our jobs because we do not know how to cook. I tell them I'm not entirely pleased with the way they do their jobs either, because they do not know how to eat. I have visited most of the best restaurants of the world, and they have not. I believe I know how to eat as well as any man alive.

 

Not every reviewer can be as eloquent and entertaining as Alan Richman, nor do they need to be. The success of Yelp for example rests on the simple fact that most people, deciding where to go to a particular restaurant on Friday for dinner, simply want to know whether or not the people who ate there enjoyed themselves. The fact that you don't know any of these people is immaterial - you don't know Alan Richman or Terry Durack either - and whilst there might be some common ground when it comes to over priced or undercooked and what constitutes unacceptable service no one can tell you whether you will enjoy the taste of the food, that much you have to find out for yourself.

 

One of the things, to my mind one of the good things, that an on-line review can do that a newspaper piece can't is give you a proper look at the food and in some cases at the interior of the restaurant and of people actually eating the food. There are any number of videos on YouTube of people eating at El Bulli or The Fat Duck or Alinea for example which help to make sense of some of the more esoteric offerings which don't sound all that flash when reviewers try to put them into words. Of course it is also true that many on-line reviewers fall back on photographs rather than even attempt to describe what they are eating although in fairness some modernist cuisine creations do transcend the normal culinary vocabulary. The downside of course is that not all bloggers know the first thing about taking photographs and there has to be some limit to the number of pictures any one person can take while they are eating dinner. Would you trust the opinions of anyone who could post more than 200 photographs of any one meal?

 

Like it or not on-line reviews are here to stay and this may not be altogether a bad thing. We might hope for example that the demise of print media in general will mean that those magazines and newspapers which survive will offer a higher standard of journalism and perhaps a return to the long form assuming that there is still a readership for the likes of Alan Richman. Time will also, one hopes, weed out those who have something to say from those who only want to say something on-line. To cite Alan Richman again, his reviews read just as well on the computer screen as they do in GQ magazine.

 

And finally just to go back to what we want from restaurant review here's a comparison between three reviews of l'Enclume, Cumbria. Chris Pople calls his blog 'Cheese and Biscuits' and has earned quite a reputation for his reviews (you can read more about him here). His review of l'Enclume is here. John Lanchester, in his final column for the Guardian reviews l'Enclume here, and Jay Rayner's review is here. The latter may be more 'professional' but there is a lot to be said for Chris's pictures. Perhaps what we should really hope for is less emphasis on restaurants and reviews and more time and thought given to food writing which goes beyond talking about eating.