Latest guilty pleasure - or maybe not even a guilty one - is reading hypercritical reviews of movies and restaurants. Sometimes, if the writer is on his or her game, there will be a sentence that's so damning yet so well-composed that I just can't help but smile.
That was true of a New York Times movie review I read a few weeks ago (I'll have to poke around and see if I can find it - will post link later if I do) that panned the movie so mercilessly I almost wanted to see it just to take in the monumental awfulness.
So this morning when I went to the L.A. Times web site, a link on the home page caught my eye. Tagged "Restaurants," it read: "What's lower than no stars? Oh well, at least there's a nice view."
Intrigued, I jumped to this review - more like a slaughter than a review, actually - of Gladstone's, an oceanside seafood restaurant in Pacific Palisades. Credit to the reviewer for this one pretty clever thought: "It's terrible to gaze out to the ocean and imagine the volume of precious seafood being pulled out and ruined every day by this restaurant."
Now, that's tasty.
Seen any well-written hatchet jobs lately that you'd like to share?
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5 comments:
wow. that's really nasty but funny. i didn't read the rest of it, but because i'll never go there, i didn't think worth it.
you, too, would be a most excellent food critic, since you like to eat out a lot & you like to be critical. think about it! you could get paid to do 2 things you love.
I've thought about that, too. I think the problem would be that I don't like wine, and that seems like a prerequisite -- discussing food pairings and all that stuff. But if I could do it, I could probably write off Lactaid as a business expense.
that's great thinking. why not try to find all the restaurants who cater to lactoids?! that's geniius.
That's the quality I loved the most about Larry Dobrow's magazine reviews. Whatever happened to him? Is he still around? Or I am just not getting those emails anymore? Hmm....
i have always wanted to be a food critic for the same reasons as you sean - i like to eat out, and im very critical. :) but, while i love wine, i dont eat meat, so that is limiting. id be a very biased reviewer. you should do a freelance piece on restaurants that cater to lactose-intolerant people. the times just did a piece on restaurants that cater to people with celiac disease/gluten allergies.
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