Food Critique Quotes

If you really taste a doughnut, it's pretty disgusting. They taste of grease.

Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we've got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that's why you ought to be glad you're an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they're doing.

These $40 burgers with foie gras and truffles and all of that flies in the face of one of the most proletarian foods around. It's overpriced, overdone and just not worth it.

You can show me some stick ice cream and I can tell you if it's good or not just looking at it.

I am well aware that a chef is only as good as his last meal.

When we run out of them upstairs, I've been known to appropriate some from our greenroom, pocketing a few with one hand as I smile and greet our guests with the other. One time, Dave Zinczenko of 'Eat this, Not That!' fame, busted me in the act. The cookies apparently fall in the 'not that' category. I made a note of it.

I took a bite of cookie and chewed. “Hmmm,” I said, trying not to spit crumbs. “Clear vanilla notes, too-sweet chocolate chips, distinct flavor of brown sugar. A decent cookie, not spectacular. Still, a good-hearted cookie, not pretentious.” I turned to Fang. “What say you?” “It’s fine.” Some people just don’t have what it takes to appreciate a cookie.

Kale is a superfood and it’s special power is tasting bad.

The guest will judge better of a feast than the cook

The critic has to do more of what the book critics and art critics have done in the past. Which is give you a context for understanding the restaurant, give you a better way to appreciate it, give you the tools to go in there and be a more informed diner who can get more pleasure out of the experience.

Prosciutto should be thin and let light through like stained glass. Even I know that.

Gus: "It tastes like..." Me: "Food." Gus: "Yes, precisely. It tastes like food, excellently prepared. But it does not taste, how do I put this delicately...?" Me: "It does not taste like God Himself cooked heaven into a series of five dishes which were then served to you accompanied by several luminous balls of fermented, bubbly plasma while actual and literal flower petals floated down around your canal-side dinner table." Gus: "Nicely phrased." Gus's father: "Our children are weird." My dad: "Nicely phrased."

Criticism of a dish is not a criticism of the cook.

What does happen in 'Gourmet,' we had eight test kitchens, and at any given time, there were, like, ten or twelve test cooks. And whenever anybody finished something, they would yell, 'Taste!' and everyone would go running towards it, and then taste, and then brutally deconstruct the dish.

There is no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to be able to tell you what mutton tastes like. It is enough if he eats a cutlet. But he should do that.

Raw toast," Lucas said grimly, shaking his head. "It goes against the very nature of man.

I never fancied broiling fowls; - though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will.

A lot of food criticism has a similar flavor to it, and I'm probably going to write about it in a different way.

I go on 'Sunday Brunch' and Simon Rimmer's mashed potato is like heaven.

If you can't taste an ingredient, you have to ask yourself why it is there.

Part of my job as a food writer is to describe food. So my work on 'Top Chef,' I feel, is an extension of that. When we give a criticism to the contestant, we want to make sure we tell them why it's not working and why it would work if they did it a different way.

Gooseberries should be mainstream berries! Why are chemically fattened strawberries a thing? Why not the delicious gooseberry?

The Guardian's 'Word of Mouth' blog bridges the gap between blogging and serious food journalism.