When Restaurant Reviews Aren't About Food
It's an aesthetic.
There are limits, even for #content as a cultural product, for how off-course a TikTok restaurant review can get while still remaining a restaurant review. At some point, there is just free jazz of the most undisciplined sort, a bunch of subliterate micro-influencers tootling away in blithe parallel on their Mouth Horns while the thread tying those improvisations together becomes less and less distinct. The animating tension of these restaurant reviews is delightfully unhinged in a way that the voiceover is always monotone with no emphasis or inflection, and they’re all filmed with this freewheeling cadence and shitty flash. The creator will utter a sequence of words that simulate a narration, but they are in no way accurately describing what is happening in front of them.
Some of this is just the result of watching inveterate tootlers on my iPhone, but I’ll see videos with the headline, “The 12 Places I Ate At This Weekend,” and they’ll rate a restaurant a 6-out-of-10 for its aesthetic. I know I sound like an old man yelling at the sky, but there is no way stomach-wise that this person ate at all these spots in such a condensed timeline, and more saliently, the word “aesthetic” as a standalone adjective drives me insane. What do these people mean? Did the restaurant have Art Deco decor, or did it have an air of jazzy ambiance, or were you vaguely reminded of feudal Japan when you looked at the wall and saw the Mandarin character for food? Some other videos will rate a double cheese smashburger a 9-out-of-10 and then describe the bathroom as “vibey.” The sprawl of burger shots and verbal non-sequiturs didn’t leave a lot of room to elaborate on the vibe of said bathroom, though I could assume the person heard Kenny G faintly playing in the background while they stared at a urinal cake with a picture of Vladimir Putin with his mouth open. This sounds like it’s all very VERY.
For a genre of TikToks that spend most of their running time pushing against the very concept of following a story arc and adhering to a story arc, a particular video of note was called “The Top 5 Restaurants in Toronto with the Most Rizz.” In a daring and cheeky narrative twist, it was never revealed how a restaurant can have rizz. I highly doubt the content creator who posted this video could plausibly assume that these establishments have a higher-than-normal chance of taking me home, because there is no way I would ever sleep with an overpriced chain called the Cactus Club.
There are a lot of aspiring influencers, and many of them can be dismissed or described in just a sentence or two, but we are witnessing a collective cognitive deficiency as they grapple to sound intelligent without having the necessary vocabulary to speak precisely, clearly, and with nuance. This is a clear reflection of the troubling intellectual laziness that pervades influencer culture, where anybody can claim to be a critic or an expert on anything without any backing credentials while the rest of us decline our standards of what is worthy of our attention and finite time on this planet. Nothing of value is communicated, especially when the restaurants they insist we have to try will deliver an experience that’s something like:
“Welcome to ampers&nd. I am Cobblestone, your kitchen liaison. Should you need me at any point, please use the small lead glass mirror we’ve provided to reflect candlelight onto the crystal prism hanging from the neck of Mrs. Juniper, the taxidermied head of a white-tailed elk that provided the milk for our Havarti cheese this evening. Also, we are out of the following menu items: water, Havarti cheese, and napkins. Are there any imagined food allergies we need to be aware of?”
This remind me of "The Ice Cream Museum". A "Museum" displays just to take pictures for the gram in the installations.
Those restaurants are judged on their instagramabilities. In the end they are a new iteration of "the place to be seen" but the audience is virtual and not the place’s patrons.
I have to disagree with you on the "those people have no stand in speaking." For the simple fact that we are on substack and that could be said about a lot of us here.
It's hard to be a foodie in a place like Vancouver where there is just so much variety. Our son used to refuse to eat anything other than the basics whenever his friends asked him if he wanted to join them at Cactus Club. He said it's hard paying for the same food he can get at home that his mother makes, without charging him a ridiculous price. It's like eating Sushi in Vegas, you can do it if you've never had it before, but why would you?