I truly understand, respect and acknowledge the importance of the critic and their ability to elucidate some of the more minute and overlooked details of the dinner experience, but I’ve also realized that there are a few topics that I just generally have no interest in hearing about any longer. At some point, certain topics can be left to be addressed by the diner and does not warrant a discussion so frequently. There are also a few topics that every critic seems to pick at despite how it sensibly has no technical use or application for their actual job. The writing is fantastic and eloquently argued at times, but increasingly, the topics are becoming self serving. Here are a couple of lists of things that I would like to see the critics and writers to move on from…
The “Let It Die” topics of yesteryear:
-Restaurant noise
-Charging for or not serving bread and water
-Pizza and Burgers
-Anonymity
-Urban Spoon, Yelp, etc.
-Top Chef
-Bacon (soon to be the “Tuna Tartare” of this decade)
-Bourdain comments on Alice Waters and Food Network (it was fun… a year ago)
-NY vs. SF
The “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” self-serving topics of restaurant critics:
-The importance/relevance of critics
-The unimportance/importance of bloggers or blogging
-Being a critic today versus critics of the past
-Creating new diner etiquette based on personal opinion/value/digression
-Defending ratings systems
