Sunday 25 November 2007
No manners but what a critic
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.
Labels: AA Gill, Food Criticism, Michael Winner, top ten
posted by Tom at 1:22 pm
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4 Comments:
Those raucous, gay offal bollocks were fucking delicious. Hang on I'm on the wrong blog.
Wear it, anonymous. Wear The Unitard.
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.
re: your twitter request...
timeliness? relevance?
-Sarah (orchid8 on twitter)
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