So... volume 5: Making sure People Know Your Yelp Review is a Fucking Useless Waste of Time
- Having never had banh mi before my wife and I went here for lunch. I had the banh mi Tom special (garlic shrimp) while she had the barbequed pork banh mi. We shared an egg roll appetizer and also had a cream puff for dessert. Food was great. Having never had banh mi neither of us have anything to compare it too but it had a lot of flavor. My only complaint is quite a bit of salt in the shrimp. The pork was good though (I had a bite of hers).
- When it comes to dim sum, I can be a little bit picky since I grew up in Hong Kong... To me, all dim sum item's gotta have the right taste, right texture, and served at the right temperature. (The rest of us, on the other hand, like it slimy, rancid, and ice cold. Fucktard.)
- If you want to know if a dim sum restaurant is really good, you ask anyone with Cantonese parents if they'd bring their parents here for dim sum, then you'd know... =) And from what I experienced, I would have no problems bringing my parents here when they visit. (I'm calling bullshit on this constant assertion that being a member of a certain ethnic group guarantees a supremacy of palate, a culinary genius, a genetic mutant grand mastery of aesthetics and execution. Do they not have the equivalent of Applebee's in any other country on Earth? Do hordes of mindless fools not hunker down in the Cantonese equivalent of a TGI Friday's? Knock it off. Be logical: bad taste is not a strictly Anglo trait.)
- It's a Cantonese restaurant. But we ordered Mapo tofu which is Sichuan food. So it's not authentic at all. (Yeah, inauthentic Cantonese restaurant- stay on your turf! By the way, Mexican places with breakfast tacos? Fuck you, too! And then she says...) I ordered seafood hotpot which doesn't have much flavors. My other friends like it because they don't want any flavors. (Oh, snap! Table for one, please. Forever.)
Posts
Have you read 'Everyone Eats' by Robert Sietsema? It's over at the Columbia Journalism Review.
ReplyDeleteMmmmboy, that was spectacular. Thank you, Dan. Do you suppose he's related to Tom Sietsema?
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm finding this to be true in this age of immediate satisfaction:
"This behavior is creating a boom-and-bust cycle for restaurants, in which novelty and buzz is valued above excellence."
AND
“Criticism—and its humble cousin, reviewing—is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions . . . . It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.”