A friend sent me this LARB (who knew there was an LA review of books? There's some joke about LA "culture" that could go here. I guess those jokes are outdated now that LA is such a cultural and food hub, but I'm thinking of the movie LA story) long think piece on "The midlife crisis of the American restaurant review"
Maybe only KW and I will take the time to read it, you could also just skip to the writer's recommendations at the end if you don't want to read. I would add to the author's points that the length of restaurant reviews has been cut at many publications due to what I call the blurbification of writing that the internet has led to. So now even print pubs mimic the blurby feel of online pubs. At SNR I argued against word count cuts that kept getting tighter and tighter for the weekly reviews.
I agree that 2018 was a watershed year in food writing, and honestly I do feel pretty irrelevant to the conversation right now and that's ok. The world moves on.
Gioia is spot on about how the reviews that are pans bring out creativity that the raves rarely do. Food writers would do well to try to tap those same creative juices and humor for a positive review.
That said, some of the suggestions are kind of silly. Writing about an area (a few restaurants with some kind of overarching theme) with context and having more roundtable-type reviews are good suggestions. I think everyone likes reading roundtable discussions. I would often write what I called "roundups" for MidMo, but they centered around a certain cuisine or dish, so it might be deeper to write about a geographic area with context. I mean, a lot of food writers do roundups, I didn't invent it, but that was how I wrote the majority of the food coverage in MidMo so that's why I'm mentioning it.
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I love writing roundups but they take a huge amount of time/energy and I frankly do not get paid enough to justify it most of the time these days. I thought that piece on the midlife crisis of the restaurant review was interesting, but also misses some pretty big things. The word count cuts are one factor; the collapse of local journalism more generally, which the piece barely discusses, is another (she said, thinking about the fact that she's a freelance dining critic, not staff, for a midsize city daily). I've done creative-format reviews and enjoyed that (I did a Harper's Index by the numbers style one years and years ago when I had to review Cheesecake Factory for SNR) but I think it can also veer into gimmickry sometimes. Let's discuss more in person, too!
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