Saturday, February 10, 2007

Better wear something washable

From a restaurant review in tomorrow's New York Times:
An intermezzo of fromage blanc sorbet with macerated strawberries practically jumped off the table...

Um, I'll have the rice pudding, if it promises to stay where it belongs.
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3 comments:

punkinsmom said...

Could that be more pretentious? Does this guy (I'm assuming guy, maybe that's sexist of me) even know what intermezzo means?

Although I will admit to some curiousity at the idea of a fromage blanc sorbet. As long as it didn't actually jump...

9:22 AM
ChefNick said...

Gotta say Mark Bittman is a bit of a chump (hmm, I'm not sure if that's bad. I'm a chump too.)

But he was the author of that "No-knead Bread" frenzy a while back.

He sure has an annoying writing style; semicolons and colons everywhere: interspersed with brackets (that's what I grew up calling them though they're called parentheses elsewhere) and dashes--that was a cheap em dash but I'm too lazy to make a real one--but his most glaring fault is the "I" word. "I" thought this . . . "I" did that . . .

Perhaps he's going against the grain of traditional food reviewing (or movie or anything else reviewing) by injecting himself into every sentence, but we don't want to know about him, we want to know about the food.

Kind of like if Dan Rather reported the day's news: "I heard about the stuff in Iraq and I was appalled . . ."

If I want literary devices, I'll go. To. Steven. King.

11:10 PM
Jim Donahue said...

There was a NY Times restaurant review by Ruth Reichl (or possibly Gail Greene?) a number of years back that stuck in my head because it was so dopey. I'm slightly paraphrasing, but basically: "The food jumped off the plate and exploded in the mouth."

It was a good review, but I certainly wouldn't want to eat there.

11:01 AM

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