Circa 2008. A seasoned food critic waltzes into a 5-star hotel in tony Central Delhi and orders the most expensive bottle of champagne (read Dom Perignon) there is. His friends, who act as if they are just as entitled, proceed to guzzle the bottle down while snapping their fingers at the wait staff to order their food. Classy much?
Eight years on, in 2016, pretty much everyone with a camera and access to a 4G connection acts just as self-entitled. But at the bottom of the pit lies the food blogger brigade. Or at least the self-proclaimed “foodies” (what that word possibly means, I have no idea) turned blogger who think the sun shines from their rear ends.
It’s as if they are reading off a textbook – order the most expensive thing off the menu, drink till you can’t taste a single thing, take a few pictures of the food, ensuring that the food will never be an optimum temperature when it’s forked into your mouths and finally gush a bit about the experience with thesaurus adjectives that never make any sense.
And that brings us to the subject of grammar, pray tell me, how can you possibly “slurp a croquette”? I mean, you can bite into one, but slurping is left mostly for liquids, my friend. Or calling it “shushi”, without even knowing how to spell? Grammar nazi apart, it’s important to know what you write and how you describe, an art which seems to have been long gone.
How about those who actually have no tastebuds and are actually describing their meal as “good”. Or perhaps, the other way around – “the meal sucked”? This bit, honestly, gets my goat the most. Why is it so hard to tell people what went wrong in the meal rather than the fact that it went wrong? But hey, that’s the way we roll.
The debate in my head is always simple — are food bloggers people who don’t know their food and are in for a free ride? Or they their because of their love for food? Do they deserve all that extra treatment that restaurants can’t wait to shower on them? So while I think a free review should be celebrated, it definitely should be followed up by a paid meal, just so that you know how things pan out. Or better still, for restaurants, instead of fearing what the bloggers might say, isn’t it time that the restaurants start rating these bloggers?
Most of the times you run into the ones who can’t tell a mashroom from a mushroom, or let’s just make it simple, an orange from an apple. What they can do though is eat till they are ready to burst and snap their fingers at the wait staff. Classy much?
‘Pandora’s Box: Unlocked by DSSC’ is an anonymous series of 5 F&B industry superstars who disclose what it is about the industry that irks, nay, annoys the #&*$ out of them. You can read the other articles here, here, here and here.
