A fortnight ago the mildest of spats between a food writer and a local restauranteur simmered on these pages for a few days. The exchange was fairly formulaic. The writer had penned a review of her meal at a popular local restaurant. The owner sought to defend his establishment. This scenario plays out with some frequency in many publications worldwide. In fact, by some standards, the review was a model of restraint.
One of the most feared restaurant critics in circulation, A A Gill, has written ferocious reviews in The Sunday Times for about twenty years. He is the kind of character who would have to be invented if he did not already exist: a teetotal, former alcoholic who trained as an artist but became a food critic, he is also profoundly dyslexic and dictates all of his columns. He tends not to confine his observations to food and, in a typical aside, described the Isle of Man as having “fallen off the back of the history lorry to lie amnesiac in the road to progress …its main industry is money (laundering, pressing, altering and mending)… The weather’s foul, the food’s medieval, it’s covered in suicidal motorists and folk who believe in fairies.”
A year or so ago Gill reviewed a Parisian bistro, much favoured by tourists, for the magazine Vanity Fair. He was not enamoured of the venue: “L’Ami Louis is singularly unprepossessing. It’s a long, dark corridor with luggage racks stretching the length of the room. It gives you the feeling of being in a second-class railway carriage in the Balkans. It’s painted a shiny, distressed dung brown. The cramped tables are set with labially pink cloths, which give it a colonic appeal and the awkward sense that you might be a suppository…” His verdict on the food was even less flattering: “we order foie gras and snails to start. Foie gras is a L’Ami Louis specialty. After 30 minutes what come are a pair of intimidatingly gross flabs of chilly pâté, with a slight coating of pustular yellow fat. They are dense and stringy, with a web of veins. I doubt they were made on the premises. The liver crumbles under the knife like plumber’s putty and tastes faintly of gut-scented butter or pressed liposuction. The fat clings to the roof of my mouth with the oleaginous insistence of dentist’s wax.”
If, like A A Gill, we treat food as ‘the great metaphor for all life’, a restaurant review (and the reception it receives) becomes a commentary on much more than food. Gill’s particular crusade is to expose mediocrity and pretentiousness, both of which abound in restaurants in the UK. In order to do this, he adopts an approach of zero tolerance. He can indulge in this style partly because he has thousands of restaurants to select for review and is unlikely to encounter many of their owners and chefs on a daily basis. In a smaller face-to-face society, criticism, whether of a personal or professional slant, is harder to make. It is also harder to receive. Yet any business (including this newspaper) should be prepared to acknowledge that there might be lapses in performance, occasions when something might be done better. It can be argued that local businesses face greater constraints and challenges than those elsewhere but, even so, we should aspire to the same standards.
The exchange of views between the food writer and the restaurant owner generated many comments. Significantly, most bloggers felt the need to take sides, to preface their comments with an expression of support for one party or the other. Why? Is it partly because, in our society, we are still relatively under-exposed to nuanced criticism, particularly in public? Any criticism is therefore seen as a hostile act. We tend to adopt a binary approach to life where you are either ‘in favour of’ a person, idea or initiative or ‘against’ it. This kind of reductionism creates an environment where one can either eulogise or vilify a public figure or event; there is no space for anything in between. It can be seen in all sorts of public arenas where middling achievers are feted as titans of industry or accomplished practitioners because it is easier to do this than to try to assess exactly what they have contributed in their field. The same attitude plays out in public debates where excessive deference to a proposal or a blanket rejection of it are the only idioms available; there is no middle ground, no recognition that issues characterized in overly simplistic terms of black and white are in fact several shades of grey. The binary view does us no favours as a nation. It is an immature response, a childish refusal to embrace complexity.
In the last generation, we have travelled quite some distance in Guyana in terms of debate and dialogue in the public sphere. But there is still, often, in our public discourse, a conspicuous lack of nuance, a lack of subtlety and a lack of space for lone voices or opinions that depart from the orthodox. We need to make space, in our public discourse, for those who are neither critics nor acolytes.
We need to understand that dialogue is not just a battle between opposing camps but a discussion involving many voices, a pulsing and flowing of several shades of opinion. Perhaps, then, we will cease to confuse conflicting opinions with conflict and dissenting views with dissonance. They are, in fact, a necessary part of the national conversation, not an interruption but part of the journey to equilibrium.
