One text that I really liked that we read in class was the “Consider the Lobster” piece by David Foster Wallace. I like the way that he incorporated humor and entertainment as he sought to illuminate his perspective of an event. This article as well as Pete Wells’s reviews, like “Slurping Solo”, taught me that food writing can be very creative. The author can take a lot of liberties that are surprising, unsettling and refreshing all at once. Before this class I didn’t know much about the rhetoric of food, but I definitely didn’t consider humor being a possible element at all, but fortunately I have been proved wrong. We have read many humorous food writing texts in the class and I read many on my own.

The rhetoric of food is all about sharing experiences. It is about connecting with each other, connecting with other cultures and sharing experiences with one another. Writers express their experiences in a myriad of ways (recipes, annotated bibliographies, reviews, essays, poems, articles, blog posts, videos, podcasts). Another important element to consider in the expansive definition of sharing experiences is that each text has a specific audience it is targeted to. I learned the importance of knowing who your audience is through this class, and making sure that what you are producing is appropriate for your audience.

What makes a restaurant good?

What makes a restaurant good is so much more than the quality of the food. Don’t get me wrong, the food should cause a party in your tummy, but the atmosphere of the restaurant is also very important. The articles that I chose to analyze all look at the atmosphere as a key factor to the enjoyability of a restaurant experience. Through creative writing, the authors are able to convey their experience of the restaurant (complete with their feelings and concerns) to you through their diction.

Formal elements:

• description of atmosphere
• what type of food the restaurant serves
• price range
• recommended dishes
• location of restaurant
• rating
• provides pictures of restaurant and food

Who is reading these reviews? People who like good food and want to try new things, people who want to recommend tasty places when their friends ask them where they want to eat, people who don’t want to waste time or money, people who want to pick the right restaurant the first time.

Functional Purposes:

• help the reader decide if it is a place they would enjoy
• tells a story, provides a snapshot of their experience through the imagery they use in their writing (not all reviews tell a story, but the articles that I chose to emulate provide clear pictures or analogies to help you understand the environment)

Texts:

As Not Seen on TV Restaurant Review: Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square by Pete Wells (New York Times)

REVIEW:Hillside Farmacy by Chelsea Bucklew (The Infatuation – Austin)

Slurping Solo, in Sweet Isolation, at Ichiran in Brooklyn by Pete Wells (New York Times)

Review: Hart’s by Bryan Kim (The Infatuation – New York)

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.