April 11, 2016, - 6:12 pm
Major Restaurant Critic: “My Job is to Promote Social Justice, Labor Rights” – The Bernie Sanders Food Critic
The new restaurant critic for a major newspaper has announced that he will praise restaurants that match his utopian left-wing, Al-Jazeera-styled political demands. Who cares about the actual quality of the food and service, right?
With a heavily-inflated claimed average daily circulation figure of 639,350, the Detroit Free Press is the largest daily newspaper in Detroit. The 639,350 figure reflects the more popular Sunday Edition and counts anyone who clicks on its website, even if they spend less than a second on the site. The real circulation figure–including those who subscribe to or purchase the hard copy of the newspaper and those who read several articles on the site–is now actually between 100,000 and 150,000 . . . or less. Back in 2014, the paper counted fewer than 100,000 online and hard copy subscribers, and that number has decreased since. In 2014, fewer than 64,000 people actually subscribed to or bought the hard copy of the paper. And the newspaper has lost tremendous influence, with “reporters” such as Tresa Baldas actually plagiarizing stories broken by others (she admittedly did it to me, with Editor Stephen Henderson acknowledging and covering up the theft).
Still, as the major newspaper in a top eleven market, the paper remains influential in some minor respects in lighter “news” fare, such as restaurant reviews and sports coverage. And that’s where the newspaper’s newly-inducted restaurant critic, Mark Kurlyandchik–a hipster who previously worked for Al-Jazeera America–comes in.
On Sunday, in a half-page column, Kurlyandchik introduced himself as the new critic, “replacing” the paper’s fabulous, retired former critic Sylvia Rector (who made my mouth water with her descriptions of food at restaurants, despite the fact that they were not kosher and I couldn’t eat there).
In his introduction, Kurlyandchik, an attendee of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and tattooed self-styled filmmaker (the ultimate experience for being a food critic!), slipped in what his real agenda will be when he reviews restaurants: Bernie-Sanders-esque, Al-Jazeerafied politics. Kurlyandchick declared that he will review restaurants
through my own lens, using Detroit’s food scene as a window into all the issues it touches: environmental sustainability, social justice, labor rights, economic development and equality.
HUH?!
Um, whatever happened to reviewing restaurants based on the quality of the food, the level of service, and the ambience of the dining experience and location?
Now, this Al-Jazeera hipster will apparently rate restaurants based on whether they donate a portion of profits to “Syrian refugees” or pay their employees $15 per hour and give them six weeks paid family leave a la his previous home of San Francisco. He already noted in a review of one of the restaurants he picked among Detroit’s top ten for the year, that he liked the fact that the wait staff were pierced and tattooed. Really? Does that make your food more delectable–that the person serving it has more outlets from which to ooze germs and disease? Idiocy.
Restaurants are small businesses, probably the riskiest kind of small businesses in which one can invest. The odds are against them. Most new restaurants fail in their first year of business. And they rely heavily on word of mouth–probably more so than any other new small business. So, Mark Kurlyandchik will, sadly, have tremendous influence on new restaurants opening up in the Detroit area. And restaurants will have to advertise their weekly LGBTQ Muslim Vegan Biracial Knitting Club Discount For Locally Farmed Compost-Soil-Grown Food in order to get a positive nod from him. That’s depressing.
Fortunately, as I noted, the Freep has decreasing influence and a rapidly declining readership. Also fortunate: a whole host of independent restaurant and food critics have emerged online to counter greasy-haired, bearded orthodox ideologues like Kurlyandchik. And those sites usually rate food establishments for the only things that count: food and service. Even Yelp critics are probably more believable than this guy.
Kurlyandchik might be the last restaurant critic at the Freep. Most newspapers are getting rid of them, as they are considered an unnecessary expense.
Let’s hope his tenure is short.
In the meantime, Mark Kurlyandchick would be best advised to . . .
STFU and eat.
Your politics are as welcome in our food as cockroaches are.
Tags: Detroit Free Press, food, food critics, left-wing food critics, left-wing restaurant critics, Mark Kurlyandchick Detroit Free Press, Mark Kurlyandchik, restaurant critics, restaurants
He is obviously not a serious restaurant critic.
The best critics conceal their faces & appearances, so restaurants will not know who they are or recognize them when they dine.
Obviously, if a critic is recognized, the restaurant will go out of their way to make the dining experience as good as possible, and the critic’s experience will not be comparable to that of the average customer.
So this is additional nullification of any value to this person’s reviews.
Little Al on April 11, 2016 at 6:32 pm