Comments on: Am I A Food Critic? This Guy Says No.

By: zoe p.

zoe p. — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:23:31 +0000

I found your link from Yelp! Oh, the irony . . .

I read this CJR essay with interest too. The author seems to be considering only a small piece of the food-writing pie . . . That said, I get “offers” all the time that I think would compromise my reviews and I always turn them down. And I suspect anonymity in food reviewing is a good thing . . .

By: Leeanne Griffin

Leeanne Griffin — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 02:18:52 +0000

I hope you’ve at least been to Roseland.

By: Eugene

Eugene — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 01:30:45 +0000

crap — second to last line should read “be,” not me. Damn Internet.

By: Eugene

Eugene — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 01:29:40 +0000

You’re a food critic, dammit!
Although maybe that’s not good thing, coming from me.
I eat hamburgers and Elio’s.
I live near a renowned CT pizzeria, yet I order Domino’s.
Send me to Manhattan, I’ll stop for dinner at Applebee’s.
But I find your posts and reviews accessible. Some of your posts make me think — “Maybe there’s more to food then French fries and Classic Coke?”
That being said — Mr. Fancy Pants from the Village Voice should me writing about film critics. That’s what the Internet killed.

By: ericmsteen

ericmsteen — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:24:52 +0000

If a paper or a magazine is sending a professional photographer it doesn’t sound unbiased. I think the internet does a great job of eliminating jobs that don’t need to be there. If someone wants to be a food critic they now can, and they can have an audience, and an audience has a better ability to choose who they will listen to. That’s a wonderful system!

Besides there are plenty of ways a food critic can make money and get free meals besides being paid by a magazine. They just need to be a little more innovative.

By: Jeanne

Jeanne — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 03:44:58 +0000

I see the same thing in travel writing. Newspaper travel writers and guidebook publishers can be uber-defensive about bloggers and sites that aggregate amateur reviews of hotels and the like. They seem to believe that there is room for only one thing or the other, that somehow a Fodor’s guide and TripAdvisor can’t coexist, that the consumer will consult one or the other and won’t know how to evaluate the differences between the two.

These experts often fail to recognize that even in the days when every newspaper had a travel writer or two, they still couldn’t review all the hotels, restaurants and destinations on the planet. All the professional reviewers and guidebooks in the world won’t do me a bit of good if I’m going to stay in a remote village in Costa Rica that they have never visited. But some people have been there, and their online reviews and blog entries can help guide me.

Likewise, restaurant reviewers have often ignored the places where ordinary people go to eat — chain restaurants, hamburger joints and little local diners. Their reviews of five-star restaurants where the entrees cost $45 are of little use to those of us who can’t afford to eat in that style. If these elite professionals want their opinions to be recognized as more informed and worthy than the Web musings of us ordinary mortals, they ought to start by writing reviews that are relevant to us.

In other words, to hell with them and the horses they rode in on. Whether Five Guys serves a good burger is more pertinent to my life than the quality of the olive oil at a pricey French restaurant in New York. You keep blogging, Leeanne, for the rest of us.

By: uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:36:33 +0000

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