Reading Restaurant Reviews in the New York Times

It has often been said that the best writing in newspapers can be found on the sports pages and in restaurant reviews. I think that is often quite true, because the tasks are so challenging. Sports writers must continually come up with new ways to describe repetitive events; and food writers must figure out how to describe the way food tastes, without resorting to clichés and platitudes. Not everyone succeeds. There are plenty of bad writers on the sports or food beats. But when the writing is great, it is really great, as is the case with Pete Wells, the current New York Times food critic.

Perhaps ironically, Wells shows off his best chops when he is panning a restaurant. One reason for that, I suppose, is that it is hard to find non-hokey metaphors for good food. When it comes to bad or disappointing food, however, Wells is in his element. Below are a few choice passages from his recent review of Bluebird London, which he describes as “the busily programmed 10,500-square-foot restaurant that the mall in the Time Warner Center imported from England.” He gave it no stars.

Maybe the people in charge have been taking management cues from Prime Minister Theresa May’s government, which has approached its Brexit plan like a class of first graders trying to build a working jet airplane out of Lego pieces and a flying-squirrel sock puppet.

But up front, next to the desk where the hosts have mastered the art of checking reservations without making eye contact, is a cafe-slash-wine bar. A glass case there serves as a temporary prison for aging pastries and tragic snacks.

The “crispy shrimp” have the limp, expired quality of tempura that’s been doing laps all night at a conveyor-belt sushi place. Yellowfin tuna poke has been tossed onto a big, damp heap of unseasoned quinoa, which must be there to soak up any seasoning that accidentally attaches itself to the fish.

Because you are in an English restaurant, you will be curious about the English food. Because you are in Bluebird London, you will regret this.

If something comes with a pastry crust, exercise caution. On top of an allegedly Cornish chicken pie, sealing in dry chicken and mushrooms coated in grease that is trying its best to be mistaken for sauce, is a dome of puff pastry. . . . The very, very thick football of crust encasing beef Wellington is cooked only on the surface; deep inside, where it meets the tenderloin, is a mass of wet, gluey dough. This costs $95 and will serve two people, both of whom had better like the taste of raw flour.

It’s like a stray plate of salad that you might pick up at a party before you realized that somebody had dumped the warm dregs of a drink into it.

I have no idea whether this review is accurate, overwrought, or just nasty. Given the $$$ prices – with appetizers as much as $24 and main courses at $58 – it is almost unimaginable that I would have ever dined at Bluebird, no matter what Wells had to say about it.

Either way, I do hope that Wells finds more sub-par eateries. When it comes to restaurants I will never frequent, it is much more fun to read about the bad ones.