Food critics can be a pompous lot. I have said before that much restaurant criticism is little more than posturing: ‘Look at me! Don’t I write well and with such culinary wit!’ The truth is, as one interested in food and restaurant culture, I find most reviews unhelpful. Granted, jealousy could be a factor. A prominent…
Category: Restaurants
Colman Andrews on restaurant critics
“Being a restaurant critic is sort of like being put out to stud. There’s no denying that the basic activity is highly pleasurable, but when you have to do it when and with whom somebody else tells you, it loses a lot of its appeal.” Colman Andrews, Everything On the Table: Plain Talk about Food…
Point on skinny chefs
“Whenever I go to a restaurant I don’t know, I always ask to meet the chef before I eat. For I know that if he is thin, I won’t eat well. And if he is thin and sad, there is nothing for it but to run.” Fernand Point (1897 – 1955) was the French chef and…
Gopnik on Cafes and Restaurants
I quoted yesterday from Adam Gopnik’s beautiful book The Table Comes First. As one who tries to write about tables and food, I bow down to writers like this. Gopnik not only writes well and ranges broadly, he sees in food so much more than food. The book is a delight to read. I don’t…
A restaurant shepherd
A few years back I had the pleasure of meeting Esther Lou, a Chinese-American woman who has a ministry to kitchen workers in the Chinese restaurants of Los Angeles. She calls herself a ‘restaurant shepherd’. Industry statistics tell of more than 1 million immigrant labourers working in some 42,000 Chinese restaurants in the US. According…
Bill Buford’s ‘Heat’
Another good kitchen read. Staff writer for the New Yorker, Bill Buford was commissioned to write a profile of celebrated New York chef Mario Batali. To do so, Buford wrangled his way into Batali’s kitchen as his ‘slave’. Eighteen months later, Buford had progressed from lowly kitchen hand to line cook, along the way spending…
EATING HEAVEN 