A hick in critic's clothing

People in the city complain about their Bruni, while we in the other city moan about our Bauer. And Ced, dear Ced just goes on sans cesse about his darling Meredith.

But you know what? It's the Londoners who one up us all.

They are trumping us with this bloke Gareth McLean, the latest in the parade of oddly amateurish restaurant critics in the UK Guardian -some of whom have questionable knowledge of food and even less so of dining in general. In his current review in said paper, Mr.McLean had this to say:

Since I don't believe in foie gras, the ham hock and foie gras terrine was out of bounds. And since it's way too old lady to order soup in a restaurant, the leek and potato soup was also a no-no. That left crab ravioli and red mullet or honey-roasted duck confit salad. Here, my unshakeable belief that crabs are reinforced swimming spiders and so shouldn't be put near one's mouth was, well, shaken. Mainly because it's wrong to eat ducks. Not for the same reason it's wrong to eat pigeons (they're dirty birdies, even if the ones you get in restaurants are not plucked off grimy streets), but because ducks seem like nice birds and, despite often living in stagnant water, mostly look clean. So the ravioli it had to be, and it was very tasty.

With his peculiar -if not downright insane- sensitivities, one wonders what he was doing play-acting a reviewer in the first place. And I'm not even mentioning the part about picking bacon bits out of his teeth and contemplating mending the fly on his PJ. I Kid You Not.

We should all count our blessings, starting right about now.

Comments

[Monica]

Wow, that is pretty hilarious...
I mean who am I to judge, as I'm trying my best at being a restaurant critic with NO credentials, but at least I now know what NOT to write ...

[radish]

how do these people get into these coveted food writing positions while the rest of us are left to pontificate whether it's greek or italian olive oil that we should use in our cooking? thanks for bringing this to our attention - this is pretty amusing.

[Derrick Schneider]

"Since I don't believe in foie gras"

Curious phrasing. I'm pretty sure it exists. :)

[Robert Daeley]

I don't know, I think that was pretty funny. And it will almost certainly get a lot of foodies reading and commenting on the series, so the 'marketing' aspect seems to be working. ;)

[Gail]

I'm actually not quite sure where to start with this one. Perhaps I am in the minority but I'm not sure what purpose this person serves as a restaurant critic - is he supposed to represent a modern, hip diner who is politically correct, terrified of seafood and fears appearing passe if they order soup? Bizarre. Maybe it's that quirky British humor and it's supposed to be satirical.

[Fatemeh]

Oh for god's sake, that's just absurd.

If someone has THAT MUCH disdain for and mistrust of food, what the HELL is he doing making food writing his life's work?

[NS]

This is highly amusing. So, it sounds like if an animal is too clean, too dirty, too nice, too unattractive, or too likely to be ordered by "old ladies," he will not order it. What exactly does that leave?

[Becks & Posh]

You lot - isn't it obvious he was chosen for his ironic comedic style?
It's bally hilarious.
This beats bland any day.
Excuse me a second while I head back to London to live with the people that actually *do* have a sense of humour ...

hey - stop taking yourselves all so seriously - this is meant to be fun, isn't it? Go do something silly and childish like pretend you're Rachael Ray for the day or something xx ;)

[Yishay Mor]

At last! A food critic for the true Brits! But why does he bother going to resturants at all? Why doesn't he pick up a Prets sandwich and a pack of crisps like everybody else?

[Kudzu]

I am fond of reading Giles Coren in the Times (of London). Thought for a while that he was getting too big for his britches but now he is bravely demanding to know the sources of the foods restaurants put on their menus -- and, by the way, he doesn't use "source" as a verb, thank God.

I agree with Sam: we need humor as well as smarts. Once in a blue moon we get them both in the work of a critic.

Our locals are so caught up in trying to sound like one another,
with their "napped with" and "redolent of", it's often hard to tell them apart. Give me a bit of (even tasteless) humor now and then to keep me from gagging between yawns.

[Brett]

Maybe because I grew up worshiping Monty Python, I think this guy sounds absurdly hilarious. It's clearly tongue n'cheek (no reference to Thomas Keller's dish intended). You know those Brits, always so self-depricating. I'll take that kind of review any day over the blandness of Bauer or Bruni (oh, how I miss William Grimes), unless of course I'm the poor sap being reviewed. But then again, he did say the ravioli was "very tasty."

[cedichou]

Pim, dear Pim,

en toute modesté, my darling don't belong in the same list as Frank Bruni and Michael Bauer. And little me can't compare with the hilarious Bruni digest. I wished Bruni would move to SF, as he seems to have a sense of humor. At least, he is not as dreadful as Meredith. Thanks for the shout-out.

[Pim]

Monica, radish, Derrick, NS: I know, I couldn't quite figure out why either. And Derrick, good catch on that one. I was on the floor laughing reading your comment.

Robert: The Guardian -London's other premier paper- hardly needs marketing to get people to read them. What they need is competence, at least in the food department. Perhaps they should look over at the sister paper, the Observer, to help tie them over until they found a permanent critic, perhaps.

Robert, Gail, Sam, Kudzu, Brett: I am all for funny. But I hardly think being funny and being knowledgeble are necessarily mutually exclusive. At the end of the day, a restaurant critic has to say at least a few things intelligent about food -well beyond tasty for sure. If all this Mr.McLean wanted to be was funny, he might as well just write a satire piece. Why bother with the pretext of going out to eat at all? Niether the process nor the result seem satisfying, not for him, and certainly not for his audience.

Ced: ça marche pas avec toi, cette modestie. ;-) You are plenty funny too, admit it.

[steve]

good point, but you missed the king of all things off the point in uk restaurant reviews... Mr. A A Gill.

in this weekend's Sunday Times, he comments:

"I've never been to Portugal, so my prejudices about the salty Iberian appendix are unsullied and uncorrupted by acquaintance. It is with a disinterested authority, therefore, that I can say Portugal is Belgium for golfers, a place so forgettable that the rest of us haven't even bothered to think up a rude nickname for it."

OK... bring on the irony, controversy, the debate … yeah, but it’s not the same as being an ethnocentric bore.

[Matthew]

I am lucky. Not because I think AA Gill is a waste of column inches in my paper and would never bother reading the Gardian for a restaurant review. But because I found Giles Coren in the Times. He well worth a read (availabile on line thankfully because I cannot be bothered to get out of bed to go buy the paper on saturday or sunday) and interested in the provenance of the food he eats as well as its quality.

[shuna fish lydon]

I read an article in the NY Times a few months ago about the very fact that London and the UK are so new to good food that restaurant reviewers are on an interesting curve of critique. So I like that you have taken him a bit seriously here.

MB in SF is a totally different thing. We complain because he IS supposed to be a learned rest. critic and he's biased and other things i can't say here. And Bruni? I think he's doing a better and better job, at least one US city can be proud.

[Becks & Posh]

Pim - if you specify that a restaurant critic has to have 'some knowlege of food' then by the same reckoning any critic of Mr McClean should at least have some knowledge of British culture and British humour.

[Pim]

Sam has gone off her rocker since I gave her a hard time on her Marmite.

Um, honey, go make a toast and eat your marmite, and go brush your teeth so Fred can kiss you again. :-P

You cannot be serious and defend this guy. As I said before, being funny and has some knowledge about the subject at hand are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

He's imcompetent, period. And not even all that funny besides.

Heh.

[Becks & Posh]

Hey I am not the only one - five or more of your other readers thought he was funny too.

I don't know how any of us are supposed to judge since we only get a small quote from one of his reviews and your link doesn't go to the article in question.

Clearly though - you just don't get the British humour thing - and that's ok cos you aren't British. I don't know what 'authentic' Thai food is 'meant' to taste like and that's ok cos I am not Thai.

How do you 'know' he has no knowledge of food? where is your proof?
He certainly 'knows' how to be funny, he made quite a few of us laugh.

How much knowledge of food does one 'have to have' in order to be 'allowed' to write and have an opinion about it? I guess, like the rest of us, he's been eating 3 times a day for all of his life which amounts to experience.

He didn't just simply say something was tasty. He said it was tasty in a context which made it almost more tasty than you could imagine. Against all extreme odds it was tasty. That in itself paints a vivid picture.

[Becks & Posh]

"Yet the well-trained, friendly staff seemed to take it in stride, letting the threesome dictate the pace. They acted just as relaxed as they did tending to a group of soccer moms dining a few tables away, or in dealing with a happy foursome celebrating a birthday. In between courses, the man opened a gift, which turned out to be a pair of standard-issue gray pants." -MB The Chron

---------

PS you can keep your Micahel Bauer. I'd enjoy seeing Mr McClean rip his humourless 'grey pants' to shreds. (We won't even dare to think about what he might do with a bunch of soccer moms as well.)

[Pim]

Well, heh, that technical difficulty was entirely my own silliness. But a click over to the Guardian and a quick search with the guy's name would have revealed the entire thing easy enough, no? I fixed the link by the way.

I'm actually not entirely sure if you're just chiding me to be funny, or if you are really trying to be inflamatory. Must have been the not having been born Brit thing again, my country wasn't even colonized, that didn't help I'm sure....

Seriously, if it required being born British to understand British humour, where oh where would Monty Python be?

You are taking patriotic solidarilty a little too far defending this guy. Fatemeh had it right, if this guy had so many issues with food what was he doing writing a review to begin with? I wonder that too.

And as NS pointed out "if an animal is too clean, too dirty, too nice, too unattractive, or too likely to be ordered by "old ladies," he will not order it. What exactly does that leave?"

Heh.
Pim

[faustianbargain]

One of the things you learn very quickly when you are raised by Monty Python(and The Goons who practically babysat me) is to cultivate a healthy suspicion towards anyone who takes themselves a little too seriously. including food reviewers.

I thought it was funny too and especially chuckled at the Enid Blyton references(clearly referring to 'george' of the famous five). Maybe it is a Brit/Brit colony thing.

but then again, coming from the other side of the pass, i prefer entertaining food reviews rather than 'informative' because no professional food reviewer can understand all the variety of taste buds/preferences out there. i'd rather hear from a regular diner type who walks into a restaurant and gives *his/her* personal take on the meal.

[Lil]

how can someone so unadventurous be a food critic??

[Jay Rayner]

Pim, my love, you have spent more than enough time in London to know not to get so worked up about these things. We are, of course, all desperate heathens who would rather raise a laugh than say anything half way useful.

More seriously... the Guardian is circulating the reviewer's slot at the moment. This has resulted in two terrific appearances by Shaun Hill but mostly it has fallen to inhouse staff writers who cost... precisely nothing. So editor says to Gareth McClean 'Would you like to review a restaurant' and he says 'yeah, alright then'. And then he does. Just not in the way you might have liked. In response to the correspondent above, he isn't pretending to be a food writer or restaurant reviewer. He's a feature writer who happens to have the gig this week.

Being honest, I don't think he's trying to be ironic or indulging in satire. He thinks he's being funny. Though he isn't really, not very. That would be my main complaint.

Still, no worries. There will be somebody else along to fill the spot shortly.

[emi]

That was really funny! He must be either trying to get a rise out of people or just playing around. It reminds me of the "reviews" or spoof reviews they have in the Orange County Weekly here.

[Kudzu]

Thanks to Jay Rayner for telling it like it is, revealing the truth about the way many restaurant critics land their jobs. (Some of the temps get to keep them, alas.)

Now can we all please settle down and get back to food?

[haddock]

Perhaps Jeff Cox can get the gig at the Guardian and get him the hell out of Northern California where he has absolutely no business.

[Stephanie]

Although the Guardian and the Observer are sister papers, Guardian readers in the UK have a certain reputation for being worthy. Before everyone jumps on this, I don't, of course, mean ALL Guardian readers are worthy, but the paper has that reputation.
In some circes, the term 'Guardian reader' is one of mild abuse. The stereotypical Guardian reader distrusts all the fun things in life -- eating, fashion, cooking, shopping for fun/pretty/useless items etc. These areas are covered by the paper, but only to point out the error in living such a fun life. I mean, how could you be so shallow as to seriously read a good food review when there are children starving, rainforests without a future and donkeys leading unfulfilled lives? :)
Oh - and he does mean a girl called Bill -- in the 'Malory Towers' books by Enid Blighton. This is not George from the Famous Five with a different name!!!!

[faustianbargain]

i have no recollection of bill from Malory Towers. Very forgettable series. i only remember darrel, sally hope and gwen

[faustianbargain]

ahh..yes. malory towers. i cant spell. nope. i cant.

[stephanie]

faustianbargain, Bill was short for Willhelmena(sp?) -- she had a horse she brought to school with her. That was probably the most interesting thing in the books for me -- you're spot on that they were very forgettable.

[faustianbargain]

bingo! third year at malory towers! whilelmina and thunder, the horse..zerelada, the american actress wannbe and mavis, the opera singer wannabe.

[stephanie]

yes! there was clarissa too -- mousy/shy girl everyone thought was boring until she heroically saved someone (zerelda?) with bill on horseback. she was then bill's best friend and allowed in the golden cricle of daryl, sally etc.
and a miss peters, one of the teachers, stayed up all night with thunder when he got colic. everyone thought she was too brusque, but loved her when she saved thunder...

[Pim]

Jay, Sam, everyone,

Yeah, yeah, I guess I took things a little too seriously. I still don't think he's all that funny. :-P

Faustian and Steph, my sweets, um, you two might want to get a room. No?

cheerio,
Pim

[dermot]

Pim and everyone

Thank you all for your comments on this one. I'm quite glad that I am not the only one who found this review a bit bizarre, to say the least, although I should probably reveal my vested interest now - I work in the Marketing department for Mallory Court, and after waiting for years for our restaurant to be reviewed in the nationals (not being in London means we might as well be on Mars, as far as some critics are concerned) it was a bit disappointing to see this rambling nonsense masquerading as a review.

I for one didn't find it very funny, especially as the largely complimentary things he said about the food (well, he did say it was 'tasty' at one point) were obscured by his pointless warbling about fireproof nighties and unclean birds, with nary a mention of Michelin stars or AA Rosettes.

As my Dad would say, if you can't say anything nice (or that makes some kind of sense), then don't say anything. If Jay would like to provide a proper review of the restaurant sometime, he is welcome to drop me an email.

Phew, rant fininshed. Toodle pip

Dermot

[Owen]

OK - lets weigh in here as yet another transatlantic transplant (for the record I was born in the US, moved to England at age 3, lived there another 25 or so years and returned to the US 16 years ago). I also believe the Guardian to be the best newspaper in the world bar none and certainly find the quality of the writing and the intellect expected from the audience to be higher than most other newspapers except perhaps the Spectator (not really a newspaper). That means that even somethign like a restaurant review is not necessarily intended to be obvious. A better example of this might be in their sports pages which are better written than every single thing that is ever written in the Chronicle or the New York Times or the Post. And those are just the sports pages - the pages of least interest to the wishy-washy liberal (American sense of liberal here) readership that the Guardian supposedly enjoys. If you REALLY want to know what I mean hunt out the minute-by-minute commentary for the Ashes series in the sports section that is coming up soon. Even under minute-by-minute pressure they reamin witty. I digress - back to the food.

A glance through Gareth's other restaurant reviews (he appears to mostly sound off about personal care products, movies and other 'lifestyle' things) reveals that his method is to prattle on about the surroundings in a surreal and modestly amusing and very British humor way and embed a few nuggets about the food within the review. These nuggets seem to be all very well once you have extracted them from the humorous muck. For many readers (and the Guardian knows this) it will be that humorous muck that was the point - not the review of the food.

Final point - nobody in their right mind would read the Guardian for food/restaurant reviews in England. And they know that too. For that you read the Evening Standard, the Observer and The Times and Time Out.

The biggest surprise to me in all of this is that the Guardian is actually doing restaurant reviews - they never used to...

OK - I threw my bit of bread into the fray.

[Jay Rayner]

You've been away a long while my friend. The Guardian has been running restaurant reviews since the late 80s and, in Matthew Fort for 12 years, had the very best of us.

Though of course you're right. Any one with any real taste would read the Observer. I mean, why wouldn't you?

[Owen]

Yes - it has been 16 years that I've been gone. Had a lovely meal last time I was back at the Hope and Anchor in The Cut. Highly recommended to fans of St John's.

[jitahs]

Same Gareth?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/gareth/index.shtml