#28 | Infernal Pint Crèche
The best of the week's food media and some news
Welcome back to the free edition of In Digestion — a weekly digest of the best food media on the web, and why you should care about it. This week’s main focus is a new series on London restaurants; the good links are at the end.
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In my end of year food essay for Art Review, I focussed on the way that new formats and genres of restaurant media — particularly on TikTok and Instagram — have homogenised into “aspirational deliciousness,” a quote from the Evening Standard review of Straker’s in Notting Hill. They do this largely by eliminating context, not just in the obvious, literal flatness of their medium, but by propelling and reproducing their chosen aesthetics on the jet fuel of appeals to authority, rather than establishing a point of view.
This is the model of because-I-said-so-criticism decried by Navneet Alang in his seminal essay, which uses The Chicken Conoisseur as a counter-example thanks to his subjective, highly defended if not defensible criteria and clearly communicated methodologies for reviewing.
The preponderance of flatness doesn’t mean that every account has to do this, and Jimmy McIntosh’s Dead Pubs (found on both platforms) is a new and loud rejoinder. Set against an Adam Curtis-esque soundtrack and cutting in and out of its host’s implicating gaze, it’s already an aesthetic departure from current fashion. But the terms of its critique, and the reasoning behind them, are also clear and particular, built on a fondness of continental lager and a dislike of twee glassware, along with an elusive “Dead Pub Factor.”
In dispensing with any ideas about bestness, and devotedly contextualising the pubs featured, it takes criticism seriously without being too serious. London needs this, much more than any aspirational deliciousness.
The Links
As promised, Jimmy McIntosh, noted pints correspondent for The Fence, delivers an unerringly accurate, wry, and wonderfully soundtracked analysis of Brewdog Waterloo on TikTok.
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R.A. Schuetz reports on what happens when a jury rejects a trial against food justice for The Houston Chronicle.
Jonathan Nunn takes us into the life of Nicholas Saunders, countercultural London, cheese, coffee, and MDMA, for The Guardian Longread.
Korsha Wilson talks with Crystal Wilkinson about her book, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, for the New York Times.
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food = fuel