The Big Green House

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

 

If I were Britannia, I�d waive the rules

When I saw this article in this Sunday�s NY Times on �restaurant critic� (and I use that term very loosely) A.A. Gill and his cohorts, I just about came unglued. It would appear that another aspect of British journalism is going the way of their music press. How can one possibly think that a restaurant review that barely mentions the food is in any way useful to anyone? That�s not criticism; it�s wanking.

Hmm. Apparently it�s �Berate the British� week here at The Big Green House.

I tried to find some example�s of Gill�s �reviews� online, but The Sunday Times wants money from me in order to view their online archive. As an Irish friend of mine used to say, �Sod that for a game of soldiers�, which I�m pretty sure means something like �not in this lifetime�. So, all I have to go by is the NYT article. If it is in any way accurate, I have to wonder why readers put up with his antics. From the article:

Mr. Gill wrote celebrity profiles for The Tatler magazine before signing on with The Times to write about food, which he took as a broad mandate to write about, as he put it, "everything from potato crisps to the blood and the body of Christ."

He quickly made a name for himself. He was thrown out of a Gordon Ramsay restaurant while having lunch with Joan Collins because Mr. Ramsay was angry at a review. In a review of a north Wales restaurant in 1998, Mr. Gill derided the Welsh, resulting in a complaint being filed against him with Britain's Commission for Racial Equality. Lately, Mr. Gill has been encouraging his readers to eat more whale. Because he has dyslexia, Mr. Gill files his columns by reading them aloud to his editors over the phone. All the while, Mr. Gill has made a point not to get too bogged down writing too much about what he's eaten.

"The least interesting thing about food is the recipes," he said.

Also:

�If the food is the star of your meal," Mr. Gill is fond of saying, "then you're eating with the wrong people."

And let�s not forget:

Many of his columns focus more on his dining companions� As often as not, Mr. Gill's columns begin as stream-of-consciousness ramblings that have little to do with dining. A third of Mr. Gill's recent review of an Indian restaurant was about his need for a good walking stick.

Where do I start? If, as a restaurant reviewer, the food isn�t the star of your meal, perhaps you�re in the wrong line of work. I don�t know how these things work in the UK, but when I read a restaurant review I don�t give a husky fuck who the reviewer dined with. I want to know about the food; anything else is just the writer stroking his/her ego. So much for Gill�s claim to �care an enormous amount about restaurants and food�.

Why do the British put up with such shoddy criticism? Mind you, I�m certainly not claiming any cultural superiority for the US. Not by a long shot. I truly am curious, though, about the delight the British press, and by extension I suppose the British public, take in tearing apart the work of others with horrible, mean-spirited �reviews� which are in fact little more than excuses for the writer to have a little fun at some else�s expense. It finally forced me to give up reading the NME and Melody Maker back in the early Eighties. Can anyone enlighten me on this point?

bmarkey 11/11/2003 08:16:00 PM