Friday, December 26, 2003
You know, even the New York Times' fucking food section pisses me off.
Clay Shirky has an excellent piece on how the new Zagat's survey caused the Times to have to backtrack on their previous review. In case you don't know, Zagats uses internet polling to get customer feedback for their annual evaluations. In a first piece, Times restaurant critic Florence Fabricant dismisses the entire idea of Zagat as not reflecting a large enough sample. In a second piece, critic William Grimes rereviews a small Brooklyn restaurant that the Zagat placed as among the best in the City. The Times had previously given the place only one star out of four.
I'll leave you to read Shirkey to evaluate how the Times essentially got faced by the findings. What I want to address is the following quote from Grimes:
First of all, this moron is completely ignoring the fact that haute cuisine is merely a style of cooking. Like any other style it should by judged in comparison to other elements of its category. There are plenty of places throughout the City that serve up haute rubber chicken. Guess what, at the end of the day rubber chicken is rubber chicken is rubber chicken. Haute cuisine is no more the standard by which to judge any other form of cooking than is the price tag at the end of the meal. I, for one, absolutely love, gourmet food. But, I don't all the time. Sometimes, I find other styles of cooking prefferable to gourmet. When I want a burger or a pizza or some Kosher, its not because, well, I just can't go to Daniel or Le Bernadin. I want to go to Skinflints or Grimaldi's or Katz's. Grimes says "For what it is, the Grocery is about as good as it can be". Well, dipshit, that's what you, as a restaurant critic, are supposed to be judging it on - not on whatever the fuck it is that you want it to be. What Grimes, as a restaurant critic, is doing here is the equivalent of a movie critic saying, "Oh...well...for a comedy Dr. Strangelove was great...but, we all know that comedy just isn't as good as drama...". The only difference is that the movie critic would be more likely to receive mockery.
Second of all, Grimes' comments belie a certain snobbish superficiality on the Times' food pages. At the end of the day, restaurants exist by selling food. Things like an elegant environment, being catered to, socializing with interesting people, etc. are all wonderful backdrops and accutrements, but they don't get to the essence of what the business exists for in the first place: selling prepared food. Take a look at your average NY Times restaurant review. They spend more time talking about the damned interior design and clientele than they do talking about the food you're actually paying for. Hell, I've seen the Times give frigging rave reviews to the clone restaurants on Market Street in Philadelphia where I've seen a special advertised of veal covered in crab, prosciutto, and a cheese sause. Its pretty obvious what's going on here. The morons who own the restaurant knew enough that veal, crab, and prosciutto are gourmet ingredients and figured "Oh, gee, well if we put them together, we'll have a really gourmet dish". Nevermind the fact that, if you know anything about food, you know that you're wasting the veal and crab (very delicate tastes) by overwhelming them with the much more pungent cheese and prosciutto. But thats okay on 43rd Street, because the restaurant in question has a hip design (we'll ignore the fact that its the same fricking thing as the rest of Clone Row) and tends to get the local glitterati. If the Times' critics took the minunte and a half that it takes to pull their heads out of their ass they'd have realized that this empreror was a might short in the clothes department. But, nope, they're to busy self-fellating about how cutting edge they are to realize they're being sold a glib line of bullshit.
Clay Shirky has an excellent piece on how the new Zagat's survey caused the Times to have to backtrack on their previous review. In case you don't know, Zagats uses internet polling to get customer feedback for their annual evaluations. In a first piece, Times restaurant critic Florence Fabricant dismisses the entire idea of Zagat as not reflecting a large enough sample. In a second piece, critic William Grimes rereviews a small Brooklyn restaurant that the Zagat placed as among the best in the City. The Times had previously given the place only one star out of four.
I'll leave you to read Shirkey to evaluate how the Times essentially got faced by the findings. What I want to address is the following quote from Grimes:
For what it is, the Grocery is about as good as it can be. So in one sense, the Zagat voters are correct. The Grocery deserves a nearly perfect score. But perfection at one culinary level does not compare with perfection at a higher level. Olympic diving might offer the best analogy. A perfect reverse somersault with one turn cannot earn as high a score as a perfect reverse somersault with two and a half turns. By the same token, the perfect three-minute pop song cannot grip the imagination and hold it the way a three-minute polonaise by Chopin can. Subtlety, finesse and refinement deserve a higher score. Art trumps craft. The best bistro in New York should not be considered the equal of a Daniel or a Le Bernardin.
In this sense, either the Zagat voters are wrong or the scoring system incorporates an absurdity. Mr. Kiely and Ms. Pachter would probably be the first to point it out. The Brooklyn Cyclones could win all 76 of their games, but they would still be a minor league team. A great one, but still minor league.
First of all, this moron is completely ignoring the fact that haute cuisine is merely a style of cooking. Like any other style it should by judged in comparison to other elements of its category. There are plenty of places throughout the City that serve up haute rubber chicken. Guess what, at the end of the day rubber chicken is rubber chicken is rubber chicken. Haute cuisine is no more the standard by which to judge any other form of cooking than is the price tag at the end of the meal. I, for one, absolutely love, gourmet food. But, I don't all the time. Sometimes, I find other styles of cooking prefferable to gourmet. When I want a burger or a pizza or some Kosher, its not because, well, I just can't go to Daniel or Le Bernadin. I want to go to Skinflints or Grimaldi's or Katz's. Grimes says "For what it is, the Grocery is about as good as it can be". Well, dipshit, that's what you, as a restaurant critic, are supposed to be judging it on - not on whatever the fuck it is that you want it to be. What Grimes, as a restaurant critic, is doing here is the equivalent of a movie critic saying, "Oh...well...for a comedy Dr. Strangelove was great...but, we all know that comedy just isn't as good as drama...". The only difference is that the movie critic would be more likely to receive mockery.
Second of all, Grimes' comments belie a certain snobbish superficiality on the Times' food pages. At the end of the day, restaurants exist by selling food. Things like an elegant environment, being catered to, socializing with interesting people, etc. are all wonderful backdrops and accutrements, but they don't get to the essence of what the business exists for in the first place: selling prepared food. Take a look at your average NY Times restaurant review. They spend more time talking about the damned interior design and clientele than they do talking about the food you're actually paying for. Hell, I've seen the Times give frigging rave reviews to the clone restaurants on Market Street in Philadelphia where I've seen a special advertised of veal covered in crab, prosciutto, and a cheese sause. Its pretty obvious what's going on here. The morons who own the restaurant knew enough that veal, crab, and prosciutto are gourmet ingredients and figured "Oh, gee, well if we put them together, we'll have a really gourmet dish". Nevermind the fact that, if you know anything about food, you know that you're wasting the veal and crab (very delicate tastes) by overwhelming them with the much more pungent cheese and prosciutto. But thats okay on 43rd Street, because the restaurant in question has a hip design (we'll ignore the fact that its the same fricking thing as the rest of Clone Row) and tends to get the local glitterati. If the Times' critics took the minunte and a half that it takes to pull their heads out of their ass they'd have realized that this empreror was a might short in the clothes department. But, nope, they're to busy self-fellating about how cutting edge they are to realize they're being sold a glib line of bullshit.
