Writing review is hard.

Food The New Yorker has a piece about good review of bad restaurants which includes a useful paragraph from Jay Rayner about why writing about good restaurants is so difficult which also, somehow manages to exemplify why it's also so difficult to write about anything else. So here it is rewritten for something else:

"He likes writing about terrible restaurants Doctor Who, he explained, because “when you start to write about good restaurants Doctor Who, the lexicon begins to close down. You end up in the language of the motivational poster. But when you’re talking about a bad restaurant Doctor Who, basically you are rubbernecking at a car crash. And the language opens up before you. There are more tools in the toolbox.” Citing the famous Tolstoy line about happy versus unhappy families, Rayner argued that it could be applied to restaurants. “All good restaurants Doctor Who stories are good in the same way: they have tables good plots; they have chairs good characters; they have nice food good direction, and it’s served written by people who aren’t psychopaths. The number of ways by which restaurants Doctot Whos have to fuck things up, the bad ones, leaves me speechless—for a little while, until I sit down to write.”"

Welcome to my life each Saturday night during the on-season.