It’s a mistake when visiting the UK not to enjoy the country’s media while munching on Melton Mowbray Pork Pie, potted shrimps on toast and home made blackberry and (scrumped) apple pies – especially its critics and attack dog journalists.
At the top of the tree are Jeremy Paxman, AA Gill, the god Jeremy Clarkson and that rude cunt of a restaurant reviewer Giles Coren.
Many Australians won’t be familiar with Paxman, the presenter of Newsnight who makes an interrogation at Guantanamo seem like being attacked by a dead sheep. As soon as he appears on screen he sneers before verbally assaulting his subjects. He is a man who doesn’t care what anybody thinks and is prepared to show on screen his disdain for anything he doesn’t like – for instance, user generated content as in the above clip. He is famous for asking the former Tory leader Michael Howard the same question 14 times.
Of course, there is also the blood sport of restaurant criticism.
But the mistake people make about AA Gill is that he is a restaurant reviewer. He really is an entertainer and takes no prisoners in doing so. I wouldn’t be surprised if restaurants savaged by him do rather well and that their PRs court him just for the notoriety of being a victim.
Just as the words shark and jump and AA Gill look like they’ll appear in the same sentence I spatter my potted shrimps all over the pages of the Sunday times Style section. Clearly in this review he has the same disdain for user generated content as Paxman:
“The randomly solicited offerings from people whose qualifications are the ability to chew and the profligate use of exclamation marks are based on the false premise that everyone has an opinion, and all opinions are equally valuable. “Just a matter of opinion” doesn’t make an argument an equitable draw. Some people’s are worth more than other’s. Mine’s worth more than Harden’s. Some people are right, and everyone else isn’t. If that’s not the truth, then the whole western canon of civilisation is a fraud and a lottery. Would you pick five random people from a bus queue and let them decorate your bedroom, dress you or choose your next holiday?”
And the professional guides get their serve too:
“If the amateur compilations are useless, then the professionally compiled ones are worse. The life of a secret guide eater is one of unspeakably Beckettesque misery, a meagrely remunerated peripatetic life of tables for one, fingered mantles and sniffed toilets, half bottles and discreet notebooks. It is as far from being a normal and enjoyable night out as is possible. Life is a series of condemned-man last meals.”
This week he reviews Ferran Adria’s El Bulli, you would think an easy target serving a mix of food and industrial chemistry. But he doesn’t fall in to that trap and it is perhaps credit to what Adria has created is that he actually seems to enjoy the experience where there “is none of the faux ponce or haute civility, not the merest whiff of provincial grandeur that always comes with three-star gourmandising”:
“We were given 38 courses that came without fuss or fanfare, at intervals dictated by how fast we ate, not how slowly the kitchen could cook. Most of it was eaten with fingers in a mouthful or two. The combinations of flavours and textures and methods are challenging, but never overpowering, and often astonishing. I’m loath to describe the ingredients: they sound comical or disgusting. Food on paper is only ever an approximation of food in the mouth, and it relies on a shared experience, and if you haven’t eaten here, you haven’t had the experience.”
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