My Rubric

Before I begin to review there are a few things that I believe need to be addressed:

When one evaluates food, how is it to be done? What criteria does one use when evaluating, what is more important, what is less important? Does ambience matter when you’re having the best meal of your life out of a cart, or a shed? If it doesn’t matter in those cases, why should it matter in other restaurants where the food will undoubtably cost more, and probably have flavors that are about as authentic as possible when they’re brought to you by the good people at Sanyo? Why review at all in fact, people still go to Mcdonalds for some reason which seems to elude me (except at 2:30 on a friday night after a few rounds) they obviously care little for any sort of review at all. The question, in short, is how do we write and make it consistant, worthwhile to our readers, and avoid pseudo-culinary grandstanding (or barking at the moon made of cheese as I like to call it)

In considering these questions in many more, I came up with several criteria that I thought about using in my reviews:

In reviewing there must be a gold standard, something to compare other meals by something so ethereal, provoking, comforting and unnerving that this is what food could be that when it passes by your tongue that you think about it for years to come, so I considered thinking about each meal as if it were directly after an experience like that (for me it was a small brasserie in Brussels). How did it stack up, was it even comparable? But I doubted if this would lead to anything more than a sub-par review full of angry prose, being that I am from Michigan.

Next I thought about considering each meal in terms of its authenticity and dedication to what it was trying to do. I would do this in terms of ingrediants, local sources, do they seem like they’re trying to have a successful restaurant, or do they seem primarily concerned with serving successful food, does it hold true to the original if I’ve had it, etc…

And finally I considered a postmodern approach, evaluating each meal in the the time that it was had, using the rubric of the moment. But what good would this be to someone reading my review? How could they ever recreate my experience, and furthermore why would they want to (especially if it was a poor one). It seems like it would turn the whole process into something a bit masturbatory, at least in terms of my writing.

In the end I decided to choose a piecemeal version of all of these approaches. I decided that it is important and necessary to have something to stack my meals up to, so I will always try and keep that Venus of supper in the back of my head, but at the same time I will not discount the moment, because sometimes it can be as important as the food itself (which may have been the case in Brussels, who knows?), and I will also keep an eye out for what people are trying to do with each meal I have, are the flavors honest, are the ingredients fresh, or, bless my stars if this ever happens in lansing, local? And most importantly is the meal true to the identity that the restaurant is pushing on it?

I look forward to being a part of this venture, and I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t looking forward to kvetching about certain places. But in the end I suppose that I’m most looking forward to the quest to find a meal that will stay in my tastebuds and memories for years to come.

Good luck to you all, may your forks never rust, and your knives never dull, and spoons, well spoons can just go fuck themselves.

C

p.s. I didn’t really proof this well, so it may be edited in the future.