verging_on_random

The WTF?

It used to be standard practice to take the mickey out of the turgid prose of wine writers. Any media humourist who was short of an idea for Sunday’s column could always resort to a bit of satire about wine back labels or wine reviews. Indeed it was often hard to tell which was which. But I guess it all got too predictable after a while, and like political satire these days, it got harder and harder to distinguish the piss-take from the real thing.

There is, however, still a lot of mileage to be made from the feverish scribblings of the food critics, engaged in writing what somebody perceptively labelled ‘gastroporn‘. For someone like me who eats out at a proper restaurant about once every three months, and usually gets pissed off at paying ridiculous prices for crap that’s not as good as I cook for myself most nights, the restaurant reviews are hilarious. They have a language all their own and one shudders at the idea of sharing a meal with them as they bloviate about the quality of the jus and spend 10 minutes debating whether the scallops come from Coffin Bay or China.

The latest gem I’ve noticed occurs in reviews of Asian restaurants, when critics go into raptures about the unique character imparted to food by ‘the smoke of the wok’. I can’t quite pin down what they mean but I think they’re saying food tastes better if the wok has a crust of cooked on food that slowly builds up over years of not being washed properly.

Shit, young blokes living by themselves have known that since forever.