‘This isn’t dessert, it’s a diabetic coma on a plate’
“The thing about food writing is that there are only about fifteen adjectives you can use — ‘delicious,’ ‘delectable,’ ‘unctuous’ …”
— Tom Parker Bowles, the food writer at Tatler, the British society magazine and author of The Year of Eating Dangerously
The problem with modifiers — delicious, delectable, unctuous — is that they don’t paint pictures in your readers’ minds. Instead of simply describing your subject, engage your readers’ senses with analogy.
That’s what Jonathan Gold does in his Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant reviews for the LA Weekly. Here’s how he describes:
A well-priced restaurant
“… a place where a fine, intimate dinner costs rather less than a quick meal of cheeseburgers and drinks at Houston’s.”
The craft of making the perfect gelato
“It is a kind of alchemy to capture flavors in their truest, most flattering form, like pinning a butterfly under glass in a way that displays the majestic iridescence while making you forget that you are looking at a bug.”
Décor at a Japanese restaurant
“[The] front dining room [was] not quite wide enough for a stout man to stand in sideways.”
“[T]he table … was fashioned from a long plank that a self-respecting pirate would have found too narrow to walk.”
An over-the-top dessert
“But the emblematic dish at Simon L.A. so far … is the mammoth concoction Simon calls the Junk Food Sampler: a $25 dessert so insidious, so awe-inspiring, that it may as well have been designed by a consortium of work-deprived Beverly Hills dentists. …
“If you are interested in feeling the way you might have after gorging on funnel cake, ice cream and caramel apples at the state fair when you were 13, the Junk Food Sampler may be for you. This isn’t a dessert; it’s a diabetic coma on a plate.”
Two other desserts
“A meal here is unthinkable without at least one dessert order of the Macau egg-custard tarts, sun-yellow things encased in flaky pastry so intricately layered that it makes puff pastry seem crude as Wonder Bread. … ‘Small cookies’ are as close as you may ever come to the Wonka-designed product in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that reproduced all the sensations of a three-course meal in a single stick of chewing gum.”
The Kobe strip steak at Cut
“A whole fillet of Japanese beef, as wrapped in ninja-black cloth and carried around by the beef sommelier at Wolfgang Puck’s steak house Cut, is as ghostly white as an alabaster slab, like steak as seen in a photographic negative, like something Francis Bacon might have carved out of soft stone. …
“If you happen to be at Cut, and you happen to have in front of you what would ordinarily be a perfectly splendid corn-fed Nebraska strip steak, aged 35 days, seared at 1,200 degrees, then finished over oak to a ruddy, juicy medium rare — or even an example of American wagyu rib eye — you would take one bite of your neighbor’s Japanese Kobe steak, cooked the same way, and look around for rocks to throw at your own hunk of meat. …
“If you have $120 million to spend on a painting, you might as well buy yourself a Klimt. If you have $120 to spend on a steak, you might want to consider visiting Cut — and splitting the Kobe strip four or five ways, because unless you happen to play in the NFL, there is no way you can digest even a small example of the plutonium-dense meat by yourself.”
Sure beats “unctuous,” doesn’t it?
Need to describe something? Use analogies, not adjectives, to bring your subject to life.
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Sources: Rebecca Mead, “Royals Posh Spices,” The New Yorker, Aug. 27, 2007
Jonathan Gold, “Hare Today … Ant Eggs Tomorrow,” LA WEEKLY, Jan. 14, 2006
Jonathan Gold, “Cool Hunting,” LA WEEKLY, July 26, 2006
Jonathan Gold, “L.A. Simonized,” LA WEEKLY, Aug. 30, 2006
Jonathan Gold, “Claws and Effect,” LA WEEKLY, Sept. 6, 2006
Jonathan Gold, “Bring the Funk,” LA WEEKLY, Sept. 27, 2006
Jonathan Gold, “Flesh and Bone,” LA WEEKLY, Dec. 6, 2006
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