:fireemoji:
If anything has an exquisite blankness, it is an empty comments section on the internet. A hopeful horizon line. But from the depths they will come with their own desperate hope, felt in quaking hands over the keyboard, wringing and writhing to punish the slow.
“First.” No time to take in the moment lest someone get there… First. Enter. Refresh. Hard refresh for the veterans. Comments: (1). “First.” A perfect signifier. A comment left by an idiot, signifying nothing.
This is the most #basic form of first, the most lukewarm of any 🔥 take. Firstness takes many forms, and the form at hand is inspired by a conversation between Sunday Times restaurant critic Marina O’Loughlin and seasoned Food Recapper George Reynolds. It’s a conversation on Twitter, the fastest and most furious platform, and it’s a conversation about restaurant reviews, one of the fastest and most furious written forms that there is. A pithy one-liner on #Shitadvisor, a Yelping treatise, an analysis of heft and wit; a borderline racist diatribe. These are all restaurant reviews. What should be clear immediately is that not all takes are created equal; what’s less clear is the standards by which they are judged at large.
Reynolds’ column that reviews reviews, which is as noble a meta-deconstruction as it is thankless a task, has increasingly noted the competition to be #first to a new opening. It reached a zenith this week when Giles Coren of The Times called attention to his tardiness compared to Grace Dent of The Guardian. Coren was reviewing Sorella, Robin Gill’s reinvented and thoroughly excellent Clapham Italian, which Dent filed two weeks prior.
Coren’s admission that “The thought of featuring as an angry blob alongside the Guardian review of Sorella felt like fair consolation for their having got here before me” created a failure out of nothing; he invented a stick to beat himself with that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. While it’s perhaps futile to overstate this set-up from a critic whose entire MO is built on perambulation, preamble and waffle before devoting precisely seventeen words to the food, treating primacy as a yardstick for his work is an interesting move. The need for speed is clearly something of concern; getting there first is of value; the hottest take is the deepest.
Except… it isn’t. Reynolds contends that the first take is often “the most interesting” for readers of his column, which is hard to argue in such a webby environment. O’Loughlin’s contention is that print consumers of restaurant criticism don’t think on this level, which is also hard to argue. Being first matters more to some than to others, but when it comes to restaurant criticism, “first” is subject to a series of qualifiers. The first, expert opinion. The first opinion from the newspaper or column that I choose to read. The first opinion from a critic I find funny, or who speaks to what I value in the world. If simple primacy were the only bellwether, we’d all be reading columns on Instafluencers, glued to phones for the first shot of THAT dish in THAT place. Hypothetical. I swear.
In recent-ish months, conversations around reviewing restaurants first, and early, have centred on the ethics of soft openings, sad space ships, and Neil Rankin going postal. “First” and “early” are too easy to conflate — one is far more subjective than the other, but they surely intersect: reviewing a new restaurant based on the fact that it is new flies in the face of evolution of longevity, both of which are highly desirable in restaurants other than pop-ups for which London ought to curb its enthusiasm, and both of which are necessary counterpoints to the concept of earliness. Reviewing teething problems does no-one any favours; reviewing deeper issues at length — Magpie’s ill-fated trolley an example—can be helpful.
What’s more interesting is how being first to a certain kind of restaurant protects critics and their publications from an even slower death: sameness. The neophile immanence that Instagram, Twitter and London restaurant culture engender does more than blur lines between first and early. It leads reviews towards a cookie-cutter model that treats that first take as the deepest, and leaves no room for others: the irony being that an assemblage of broadly positive reviews, each with their own inflections, should surely be the most reliable indication that a restaurant is worth your time and money, or at least your attention. The limitation, of course, is in what gets reviewed and why, which is a whole other question already deeply explored with eloquence and serious thought.
Instead, second place is the refuge of the chastened latecomer, with the hot review leading to one hot visit to taste one or two hot dishes, immediately to be forgotten on receipt of the bill and picking up of the phone to find the next place to plunder for social currency. Multi-faceted consensus and nuanced disagreement are left behind. It’s true that excellence is likely to be broadly celebrated and ineptitude, cynicism and wrongheadedness are likely to be broadly panned, and this is mostly a happy thing. A culture of criticism that leaves no room for the fact that restaurants exist longer than the length of a meal, though, is an utterly defunct one, and a boring one too. Assessing restaurants as swiftly as possible from this insular perspective shapes another element of restaurant culture: the focus on a place, and a plate of food, that is nice for one night, or one lunch, rather than on how a restaurant’s existence can shape its community and its context, for better or for worse. It allows infancy to command more significance than it deserves.
As the extreme example at the start of this piece makes clear, firstness has no currency in isolation. Neither should newness.
