Restaurant critic: STFU up about food already!

I don't get taking a photo of every meal. There's probably someone out there taking a photo of every poo too.

 

Milennials are obsessed with food and restaurants, much like prior generations were obsessed with their cars. There's been a lot of ink spilled about this. They don't eat ramen any more. And nobody eats at McDonald's.

They'll skimp on everything else - they don't buy music, cars, or spend much on clothes, for example. They often don't have cable TV. But you can pry their restaurant experiences from their cold dead hands. It's a true generational phenomenon.

(New mommies are also food-obsessed, in a different way, even the non-crunchy ones now.)

 

So in a couple of weeks my wife and I (definitely not millennials) will have our annual turn at playing host to our church's dinner-party club. Your humble correspondent will be preparing:

Confit byaldi (the ratatouille you see Remy prepare in that Disney movie)
Shiitake-mushroom meatloaf
Buttermilk mashed-potatoes

And for dessert, we'll have chocolate pots de creme.

Along the way we'll be having three of my homebrews -- a nut brown ale, a pumpkin-pie spiced ale and a golden ale.

I'm going to go start a blog so I can come back here and post links to it for DW's benefit!

 

Never heard of ratemypoo.com?

 

I'd order pizza. And sausage pizzas. Because everyone lies and says they want pomegranates, Vermont-farmed portobello mushrooms, and non-GMO arugula on their pizza.

And then they all eat the sausage.

 

LOL. There's a story, likely apocryphal, regarding an art museum's board of directors meeting. They were struggling to interpret data from their latest survey of museum visitors, who kept saying they wanted lots of X and Y, but when X and Y had been booked in the past attendance hadn't been all that noteworthy.

During a break, one of the BOD members chatted up an after-hours janitor, telling him they were trying to figure out what museum visitors really want to see. The janitor quietly led the BOD member to a particular exhibit at which the carpet was, far-and-away, more heavily worn than elsewhere. That exhibit, you might have guessed, was a very attractive nude.

 

It really is such a millennial thing to be doing- obsessing over what will be excreted the next morning.
The same generation that thinks you have to earn ITS respect before being gifted its manifest talents.

 

Barry Zito is a foodie and a sexie.



http://twitpic.com/43bff

 

You know how I know it's gotten out of hand?? Out here in the sticks, I work with people who have honest to God 10-minute conversations about the subtle nuances of smothered chicken at Applebee's.

 

I cook but I am not a chef. I eat well but am not a gourmand. we are not obsessed with food but enjoy it, its a hobby almost. We review menus before we go out to eat. We watch Food TV more than ESPN. Wednesday is the second best NYTimes (Sunday #1) Because of the food section (and Dowd's and Friedman's columns).
The New Yorker has been doing more prominent Restaurant Reviews and Bar Reviews for at least a year or two.

Sorry if my 4 decade interest in food has diminished your enjoyment. But STFU

 

This is a beautifully written, heartfelt piece. It's also full of passages that could be rightly described as food porn:

So yeah. It's like a dealer complaining that everyone he knows is a junkie.