https://www.theguardian.com/lifeand style/2017/apr/09/le-cin

>>8790764
I was neutral until the end. The contrast between the press photos and the actual photos says a lot. I would be pissed.

>>8790764
Did you look at the photos at the bottom? It sounds like a restaurant that's coasting on prior success. Those pictures looked absolutely awful. The milk skin seriously made me literally wrinkle my nose.

it's fashionable for critics to pan 3-starred restaurants, especially french ones.

rayner is a great writer though. the only food critics I bother reading.

>>8790764
>Every single thing I ate at the restaurant Skosh for a sixth of the price was better than this. It’s bizarre. Not that the older gentlemen with their nieces on the few other occupied tables seem to care

Kek

His language is a bit flamboyant but considering the nature of the place it seems justified.

Judging from those photos I would agree with the review.

>>8790793
>the review was bad because it was French
t. guy who didn't read the review but wants to feel smart and "above it all"

>>8790797

I read it twice this morning. I read Jay's column every Sunday. He is very funny.

You must never read restaurant reviews not to be aware of that tendency. Stick it to the Frenchie. You sound too young to be able to afford to eat out in nice restaurants anyway.

>>8790818
No you didn't, and no you're not special because you have a job and can eat French food without flying off the handle about surrender frogs. Get over yourself first, and then read the review.

This is also a fun rewiew

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/dining/reviews/restaurant-review-guys-american-kitchen-bar-in-times-square.html

The press photos only thing says a lot. It's obvious that he had a shitty experience for the cost and they didn't want to be exposed.

>>8790829

That image has Tourist Trap written all over ffs

>>8790764
Small portions will always be retarded. A glob of silicone and suffering should not cost over £30.

>>8791053
>Small portions will always be retarded.
how fat

>>8791053
ill take nicer tasting high quality food in small portions over shitty food in large portions any day of the week

>>8790775

Yeah I really thought milk skin died as a trend. You cannot make yuba with actual milk, you just make disgusting boiled milk tasting aggregate.

>>8790771

The pictures looked bad but desu they weren't very high quality, they were warm indoor lighting, and the colours seemed very flattened. I'd imagine the best food looks bad taken under those conditions.

File: 3678.jpg (509KB, 1920x1920px) Image search: [Google]

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>>8792967

File: 2933.jpg (193KB, 1920x1152px) Image search: [Google]

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>>8792991
>>8792967
This is not a camera issue, it's a bait and switch. If I paid over $600 and it turned out like this I would be livid

>>8793000

Yeah, that one did stand out as particularly bad. But the top one is obviously very edited, and the second one is taken with a piece of shit phone camera. I don't know if you can bait and switch if they haven't seen the food yet.

>>8790764
> Iron Chef America
>90s

Did he mean the original Japanese Iron Chef?

Savage, but doesn't seem unwarranted tbqh

>>8791053
>I can't pay for it.! it's RETARDED I DESERVE LUXURY

>>8790764
idk man, he trash talks bitter and sour flavors and doesn't mention umami so it's kind of tempting to just assume he has a child's palate. that's 3/5ths of what we have to work with so if you're uninterested in those flavors then i don't know what to tell you.

he also seems to equate novelty with quality which is another red flag. good food is good no matter how many times someone else has made it.

>>8794935
Umami
He doesn't mention umami because he's an expert an knows that it's made up bullshit to try and boost the ailing jap food scene.
Also you're a weeb and therefore stupid so you're opinion is worthless

>>8794935
anime isn't real, faggot

food reviews are a genre of entertainment more than anything. successful food reviewers will give a sick thrill to their readers in exposing charlatans and undermining elites, using an extensive vocabulary of extremes. the marking scheme grades you according to how much you make the reader wince, how many different idiomatic words and phrases you can clash with each other and how great the difference you can show between a restaurant's reputation and its merit.

food is subjective on a level most people don't even realise. a food critic can call something 'inedibly astringent' while another calls it 'shiveringly addictive'. food critics will make a song and dance about food being undersmoked or oversmoked, too lemony or not lemony enough, 'a sad pile of brown' or 'a generous, succulent rubble'. it's all bullshit depending on how the food critic feels, and even then you can't trust them to represent their feelings accurately.

however, the question of whether they 'know about cooking' is different. jay rayner does know about cooking. they eat in a lot of different restaurants and they learn how things are done, and they often cook themselves to a very good level. it just means fuck all when they're reviewing it. it's not their job to use their knowledge to fairly represent the restaurant

>>8794958
I really enjoyed your post, insightful and eloquent
pls give blog so I can subscribe

>>8794958
To a certain extent I agree that there is a broad margin for variation from critic to critic, and that food is indeed highly subjective. However, as the work of the critic exists in the public domain, and is a genre of writing which caters to those who do indeed go out to eat in restaurants, critics who distort or misrepresent in the interest of entertainment will get found out pretty quickly and be labeled by the discerning as unreliable, so within the public sphere in which this debate takes place you have a certain contingently "objective" consensus, albeit one which cannot be epistemologically generalised.

However, in this case I cannot imagine Jay is pulling a hatchet job for the sake of a token sacred cow slaughter: if you actually follow his (very good, knowledgeable, and humorous) column, you'll find he is reluctant to mete out unequivocal scorn. Indeed, what Jay Rayner was served by the looks of things was extraordinarily out of order; and whilst he did acknowledge the presence of some good points, notably the bread and pastries, the price and the snootishness merely compounds insult to the injury.

>>8794958
To say that "it's not their job to use their knowledge to fairly represent the restaurant" is entirely disingenuous, because that is the essence of the restaurant critic, and no restaurant critic in the buyer's market of restaurant criticism and gastronomy survives without being some combination of fair, representative and entertaining; furthermore, the extent to which critics distort/exaggerate so as to achieve the last of these three points is debatable, and given the well documented travails of the restaurant business, it is no surprise to find that extremes on either end of the spectrum exist. I've experienced both extremes enough times, occasionally even within the same restaurant, to know that the exceptional does occur with reasonable frequency in the restaurant industry, as do the most discerning consumers of restaurant criticism: the most discerning consumers of restaurants.

In fact, I'd be tempted to say that your post suffers from the very prejudice you accuse restaurant critics of: in the hastiness to expose your critical "charlatans" and undermine the gastro-intellectual "elites", you perform the very same rhetorical trick you accuse restaurant critics of, in order to tug at the inherited preference for the "underdog" and the "unpretentious" in lieu of actually substantiating your allegations.

In short, I know scepticism of popular media is healthy, but here I'm afraid it tends to keel over into internet anon edginess for the sake of appearing "woke".

>>8795547
>>8795557

What leads you to say that the buyers market favours fairness? I clearly don't think that if I say that restaurant reviews are a genre of entertainment. If what I say is true, the market will punish the less entertaining but fairer criticism.

I do think most people in that world would say that the ideal is a scrupulously fair and informative but entertaining review. I just don't think the market for food critics actually favours that and I don't see what other checks and balances there are to keep things in line. I'm sure someone who actually does that job would have interesting things to say about editorial standards and policy though.