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.