Of course the unspeakable Tripadvisor does give a lot of people the misplaced sense of empowerment which leads them to launch written assaults on defenceless dining establishments which are frequently doing their best to deliver as good a service and food as edible as they can possibly manage, and make a living out of it as much as is feasible and employ people as well. But the vox populi is a fearsome beast and the opportunity to let rip against a restaurant for what is seen as a slight, a mild impertinence, minimal error, a tiny incompetence or whatever is an opportunity which more and more people feel incapable of resisting regardless of the consequences on a business, its owners and employees.
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| The One-Eyes Have It |
But it's the professional critics whom we all really envy. Giles Coren - now there's a name to conjure up in the history of the development of the food scene in Birmingham. He generated much heat in 2015 by writing in The Times, "Honestly, if I'm going out of London to eat, it's more productive to leave the country". The Birmingham Mail reported on 6 February 2015 that Coren said that Birmingham's "posh" eateries were "not my sort of thing at all" and that he had branded Brummies as being "bumpkins, yokels and one-eyes". The final remark had come at the end of a seeming retraction of his comments about "provincial dining" - he had opened a tweet that he "was not qualified to comment on Brum's food scene" and described his comments as "boring fob-offs" but closed with "Although they're all quite true. I would just normally mince my words to avoid offending the bumpkins, yokels and one-eyes".
The problem with the writings of Giles Coren is that are often very enjoyable and it's not difficult to disagree with many of his opinions though he can be viciously cruel. Who can forget his vicious nastiness when he reviewed what was then the 1 Michelin-starred Kingham Plough in Oxfordshire where he very reasonably launched a diatribe on sous vide cooking but savagely attacked the lovely chef Emily Watkins? It's fun to read witty criticism but quite another thing to read savage destructiveness.
That's TripAdvisor - too many people who can't spell correctly, never seemed to have used any punctuation in their life or really have just never learnt any good manners, are given voice and opportunity to destroy a restaurant's reputation at the click of a computer key. And none of them are likely ever to be a Giles Coren.
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| Tripadvisors working out how to concoct a negative review and get a discount out of the restauranteur. "The Bean Feast" by Jan Steen, 1668. |
