GrammarBlog

Sunday 25 November 2007

No manners but what a critic

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I do enjoy broadsheet restaurant criticism.


The best writers use a delightful combination of pretension, rudeness and malevolence. The unspoken concord between writer and reader - i.e. that this is just food and hence reviewing it is faintly ridiculous - provides the opportunity for gleeful childishness and linguistic showboating. GrammarBlog paragon AA Gill excels in food writing; he often spends most of his Sunday Times column digressing in relatively straightforward English, before delivering a savage, unusually concocted onslaught in the last 200 words.


The Blonde’s jellied ham was wet, cold, bacon-flavoured string with green bits. The main course, the faggots, was under-seasoned liverish balls that sat in a thin dew; they should have been raucous, gay offal bollocks wrapped in fatty caul and doused in a gravy made out of mink thong.

I also enjoy Michael Winner's food column. Winner has a different style: short, sharp, bilious sentences that bubble and snap with his slightly old-fashioned vocabulary.


Great Queen Street is awful, ghastly, ill-run, absurd. For a start this dump is so pretentious it doesn't put its name or its street number anywhere. Not on the window, not on the awning. Nothing.

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4 Comments:
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Those raucous, gay offal bollocks were fucking delicious. Hang on I'm on the wrong blog.

26 November 2007 at 10:22  
Blogger Troy McClure said...

Wear it, anonymous. Wear The Unitard.

26 November 2007 at 12:20  
Blogger Gez said...

OK, we have some overspill from PAN blog, and very welcome it is. Nice post Tom – Mr. Gill is always good value. I like the way he uses phrases that, although unfamiliar, are intuitively clear in meaning. I tried to look up "mink thong" and am now fearful for my job.

26 November 2007 at 19:33  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

re: your twitter request...

timeliness? relevance?

-Sarah (orchid8 on twitter)

27 November 2007 at 17:31  

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