Well done for them! They must be superhumans or gargantuans! I honestly admire them…
How some restaurant critics (or taste critics, or taste journalists or whatever you want to call them) manage to taste and comment on all (10 or even 20!) dishes of a restaurant and have an opinion on EVERYTHING, it surpasses me! And usually they find everything great!
Do they serve them on saucers or coffee plates? Or do they invited to special "gastronomic" sessions from morning until late midnight? I do not understand, really…
And my last question: do they pay for the dishes they taste? For all 17 that this food critic tasted and praised the restaurant with so much fervor? Because if they do NOT pay, there is an issue of reliability! Or is it so common formGreek food critics not to pay? Does this… contribute a little to the praises for the food and service?
There are of course some presumably fools or strange people, it seems! These e.g. who try the Michelin candidate restaurants and even their mother does not know what they do for a living, who go like regular customers and eat incognito, and who normally pay for their meal in the end!
In other countries restaurant critics remain unknown. Because they have to judge what the restaurant offers to its customer, not what it offers to a reviewer! There are no photos of them on their sites or in the articles they sign! Here of course, in the small "village" called Athens, everybody knows everyone! Alas! And I laugh when the taste critic feels very "important" when he boasts that this particular restaurant invited him to a special session to taste and write about its dishes!
Seriously; Is this the "restaurant reviewer"? Swallowing (supposedly, OK!) 17 dishes and not having time to raise his head to see where he is, how the restaurant looks like, its style, the customers who frequent there… or the service, or even his company, his own and his friend’s personal comments. It was a long time ago that the great Matthew Fort in the Guardian and Jonathan Meades in the Times of London have both made it clear that food is not just about taste and texture. It has to do with politics and history, love and sex, the environment, architecture and much more.
The same goes for food critics, and of course food reviews….
Cheers!
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