Where should we go for lunch today? There are so many great restaurants in Austin; sometimes it is hard for me to pick where to eat. When this dilemma occurs, restaurant reviews always save the day. The synthesis of opinion and fact given through the writer’s experience helps me delve into their experience and see whether the restaurant is a good fit for me or not.
My mentor text is a review of a restaurant in NYC called Hart’s. The article is written by Bryan Kim and I found it through a website called “The Infatuation”. Kim’s review gives an overall rating to the Hart’s and gives a rundown of the recommended dishes, which consists of a one-sentence description and an intriguing picture of the dish. The text pulls the audience in by starting with a compelling hypothetical situation that creatively helps the reader understand the interworking of the restaurant more clearly. The author, Bryan Kim, is a prolific food reviewer for “The Infatuation” and the audience he is targeting is the trendy, young New Yorker. His intended purpose is to give his targeted audience a new place to try next time they are eating out with friends. This text’s function is to bring to attention a restaurant that might go under the radar otherwise so that people can know what type of food they serve, what the atmosphere is like and when and with whom is it best to go to this place. This text is a great mentor text for me because the intended audience and the purpose are very similar (though I’ll be targeting the Austinite and not the New Yorker). I would also like to emulate aspects of Kim’s format (the length and concision) and many of the tools he used (the overall rating, recommended dishes, description of atmosphere).
This text is a great example of a restaurant review because it helps the reader delve into the environment for a brief moment in order for them to decide whether that is somewhere they would like to eat.
Kim, Bryan. “Hart’s – Bedford-Stuyvesant – New York.” The Infatuation. The Infatuation, 16 Mar. 2017. Web. 22 Mar. 2017.