While they’re screaming pikers compared to idiotic wine reviewers, when it comes to writing pretentious nonsense, I’ve noticed a recent years trend for restaurant reviewers to go the same way.
The Week, a delightful English news-magazine has a section covering (usually) London restaurant reviews drawn from various publications.
A recent one reads as follows.
I visited this small restaurant in Soho after “spending an hour at the Royal Academy in the presence of Francis Bacon’s brutal beauty” said (“wrote” surely) Tom Parker Bowles in the Daily Mail. Then followed about 100 plus words of fluff and nonsense, concluding with, “On the sound system, soothing classics play while outside the rain falls down”.
Funny that, rain falling down, presumably Parker Bowles having experienced it falling upwards, although what relevance the weather has, let alone his prior-dinner visit to the absurdly over-rated Bacon exhibition to a restaurant review is indeed a mystery.
The other activity subject to pretentious gibberish are art reviews, but note this.
I’ve yet to read a wine or restaurant review by a woman. Seems such pretentious writing is the sole domain of men. There have been the occasional art gallery female reviewer but they don’t write nonsense.
Our best political commentator by a country mile is Jane Clifton in The Listener. I first met her nearly half a century back when she came to Wellington and was employed as an art gallery reviewer. She told it as it was without flowery gibberish, leading to her quick promotion by the late Frank Haden to the Press Gallery at a young age.
Mind you, when it came to direct non-flowery speech and blunt speaking, Frank was the world champion.
As Jane later wrote, Frank called her in, told her of her promotion and said, “I want you to tail Muldoon night and day. If he’s having a shit I want you underneath looking up”.
After that no wonder Jane, brilliant political observer though she is, wrote plain English and never the waffle, which as I’ve alluded to, appears to be the sole domain of males.
6 Comments
Query, does the aforementioned Parker Bowles become a Prince when his mother becomes Queen; uncharted waters
There is an intersection close to my home, with a sign that says ‘give way’. Common usage.
Obtuse waffle pervades everywhere nowadays, particualrly from non traditonal studies students, and especially if pertaining to matters maori. All students should be made to read Churchill. Apart from developing directness, “My Early Life” is likely to capture males of all ages and backgrounds to become regular readers..
Unlike almost all commentary relating to climate emergencies and other unproven matters. Women – and especially vitally teenagers- excel at that gibberish!
Lisa Hilton in The Critic offers a pretty good exception SB. A little flowery maybe, but great writing. And since I’m reading about restaurants I’ll never visit, the sustenance is in the prose.
“I want you to tail Muldoon night and day. If he’s having a shit I want you underneath looking up”.
That’s one of the funniest things I’ve read in months.
Gold, Bob.