Sneakeater

And also, you have to know yourself. Sometimes there's something in a restaurant or a composer that just simply appeals to you. (Like Schubert: I just like the way he sounds.) But that very personal response doesn't make that favorite the "best". I think you have to be self-aware enough to realize that. As I said, if your favorite is also what you would consider "the best", it seems to me that it would be almost a total coincidence.

Putting our apparent disagreement about "modern" composers aside, I think the best way to put what I'm trying to say is the following: If your answers to the questions "what is the best restaurant in New York?" and "what is your favorite restaurant in New York?" aren't different, you probably are being too purely subjective to be good critic. ← I disagree. You can easily believe that your favorite restaurant is in fact the best. Would it bother you if a critic's favorite restaurant in New York were, say, Alain Ducasse or Per Se, and that critic also believed that was the best restaurant in New York? And why are you presuming we disagree on modern composers? Does that mean you uncritically accept the current "received wisdom," rather than having your own opinion? Part of the problem here is that a good critic should mold rather than receive opinions, don't you think? ← First paragraph: I think that confluence would be total happenstance. Indeed, because of the nature of experience, I think it would be unlikely that the criteria for "best" and "favorite" restaurants would be the same. I mean, how many people are going to list as their "favorite" spot someplace that only serves multi-course multi-hour meals that you have to concentrate on to appreciate? (Same with music. My "favorite" composer is probably Schubert or maybe -- you're never going to take me seriously again -- Poulenc. But the very things that make them my "favorites" mean, to me, that they aren't as "great" as others whose work is more demanding or even just [i'm thinking mainly about Schubert here] better-put-together. Don't get me wrong. I'm not being a puritan. I'm not arguing that the "best" work has to be painful. I'm just saying that the criteria for "favorite" and "best" are often different, and that the kind of comfort level that often makes something your "favorite" can rule out its being the "best.") Second paragraph -- Of course I agree. But on the other hand, if someone just doesn't like, say, atonal music -- and I'm not saying you don't; I'm sure your beef is more with stuff like minimalism and post-modernism -- that dislike alone wouldn't, to me, justify his dismissing, say, Boulez out of hand as a "bad" composer.

Would any of you like to argue that Spicy & Tasty is not "very good," taking into consideration food, ambience, service, and price? Because if you agree, what are we arguing about? ← BTW, FWIW, I'd like to state my total agreement with this.

Putting our apparent disagreement about, let's say, Ligeti aside, I think the best way to put what I'm trying to say is the following: If your answers to the questions "what is the best restaurant in New York?" and "what is your favorite restaurant in New York?" aren't different, you probably are being too purely subjective to be good critic.

Re: "Objective" reviews. There's subjectivity, and then there's subjectivity. To be a responsible critic, I think you have to take to into account existing expectations, standards, etc. That doesn't mean your criticism is "objective" -- just that it isn't purely (and self-indulgently) subjective. Gaf once quoted someone he knew as saying, "You can like Salieri more than Mozart, but you can't claim that Salieri is better than Mozart." I think that captures it exactly.

I think he DID mean it. I just think he didn't think it through. I mean, it's not like he said all those factors determine his "hephalump" or something. He used words that normally mean something not entirely irrelevant to this subject matter.

But again, what I'm saying is that the fact that he made THAT PARTICULAR ERROR has its own significance.

No it's not. The fact that it's inaccurate is, like, THE WHOLE POINT.

Maybe I haven't been clear enough in what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that, even if you're right, it's very telling that he'd have used the phrase "excited to return" AT ALL, however he might tortuously define it (not that I'm convinced that he means to be redefining it as you claim). Because in the normal sense, ALL that phrase relates to is your subjective response to a place, which is but one element in reaching a review conclusion. So the fact that he chooses to privilege it, even if he does so by redefining it, is, as I said, very telling.

I can't speak for Fat Guy, but I'm reading both sentences.

Ya see, actually, I think we're reading that passage as a whole, and you're the one who's taking a few words semi-out of context, and reading them for more than they're worth.

So you're saying that, as determined by his metric, he'd be more "excited" to "return" to a place he sounds like he didn't enjoy much than to a place he clearly loved, and we're supposed to think he's (a) making sense, (b) thinking through what he said, and © meaning something different from what his words clearly seem to convey. This isn't corporate drafting. It's not like you can take any term and define it as meaning something, however fanciful or unusual, and then that's what it'll mean for purposes of this one particular document. He's writing a general-audience piece in English. He couldn't possibly have meant, '"excited to return' is a defined term, and it doesn't really mean how excited I would actually be to return to a place, but rather where the place falls under my metric." Nor could he really mean, "I determine how excited I am to return to a place by means of a metric, rather than according to my actual subjective feeling about how excited I am to return there." Nor could he mean, "that metric actually accurately describes how I determine how excited I am to return to a place" -- you know that last one because his reviews, as written, belie it.

Eater's really gonna like this part of the thread.

Bruni is a writer. "Excited to return" means something. He can pretend to be defining it otherwise. But anyone who reads that phrase is going to understand it in a different way than you say he's defining it. I think even HE understands that phrase the way we usually do, but just wasn't thinking hard when he used it. The reason this is even worth talking about is that this is more than just a matter of semantics. The point is, using a term like "excited to return" makes it seem like you think reviews are completely subjective, with no obligation to take account of existing standards or possible differences in taste. And that's just irresponsible.

So what you mean is that "excitement" was the wrong word for him to use in that context, because its usual meaning suggests something other than what he was trying to convey.

The problem is that he can't mean it the way he says it. It just doesn't make sense. I mean, don't you get the feeling, from reading his respective reviews, that he's more "excited" about Spicy & Tasty than about ADNY?

As always with Frank Bruni, you have to wonder if he really thought this through, or if he's just writing imprecisely. In reviews of places like Alain Ducasse, Gilt, The Modern, and V Steakhouse, the text suggested a distinct lack of excitement. ← One thing -- and this applies just as much to the Mimi Sheraton quote that was discussed above as to this one from Frank Bruni -- is that, when these Times reviewers discuss the meaning of stars, they always seem to focussing on the cases where a restaurant gets what it's going for, as opposed to smackdowns of failed places with pretences toward more.

Yakitori Totto. I get really excited about going there.

It's just silly. I get excited about going to Franny's. I get excited about going to DiFara's, for God's sake.

Some of us may have problems with his basic culinary knowledge, but it's clear that Bruni likes food too much to let a metric determine how excited he gets.

I agree with FG completely. As often as I've been there, I'm still really excited every time I return to Blaue Gans. But in a star system that has any meaning I can discern, it's a one-star restaurant, no matter how excited it gets me.

"We firmly believe that the world is made up of three types of people: people who used to work in restaurants, people who used to work in retail, and born-rich assholes. And when it comes time to go out to eat, the latter two types are at a huge disadvantage in the not acting twatty department, because they don't know what it's like to be on the receiving end of their own bullshit. Herewith, then, a handy guide to the behaviors that put you at risk for inadvertently consuming an amuse-bouche of busboycum-tainted soup, and how to avoid them." http://www.gawker.com/news/gawker-explains...rant-218359.php

I'd like to note that, notwithstanding Fat Guy's remark that bumping one star up from "fair" to "good" constituted grade inflation, what it in fact does (or would do, if critics took the criteria seriously) is fine-tune the system by adding a category. Although it's nominally a four-star system, this way it becomes at least a five-category system, with "no stars" replacing one star as the bottom category. (When "one star" meant "fair", then no stars meant poor. Now, if "one star" means "good", no stars means either "satisfactory" or "poor", depending on how it's designated.) Of course, that's not to say that's how the stars are actually used.

That's from the article. I didn't make it up. ← HEY HEY SEE THAT SALTSHAKER?! (Thinks for the tilda, rj.)

(Again, not to argue that foreign opinion is correct, but just to show you Portenos [can't do a tilda on my keyboard] what advice we foreigners are being fed.)