That tells me that “everyone wants to be a critic” and that’s what food bloggers do. They get to be a critic whether they know anyting about food, the industry or writing. Plus, it is a power trip (one that I don’t always relish; I am dealing with someone’s livelihood). These people love to be mean and many food bloggers are.
Most of them know nothing about any of the above topics and it’s a damn shame that anyone takes what they say as the “truth”.

As for professional restaurant reviewers, our local daily paper, like many other papers, uses whatever reporter is available to review restaurants. New to reviewing restaurants, they don’t have any more of a food backround than the rest of us. It’s only if they have a knack for it that they stick with it for awhile and learn about food along the way. (I’ve been interviewed by them, believe me.) Plus, their food news/trends usually come from a recent article they’ve read in the current issue of Bon Appetit – not because they’re really in touch with the food industry.

i love the passion in these comments!

I guess my whole mindspace is, I don’t see why a professional reviewer has any more a refined palate than anyone else. Maybe they can’t taste for shit, maybe they taste way better. But I’d hazard to guess that if you asked their Editor, their taste level is neither here nor there — they’re simply the person who was the best writer.

Maybe that’s where my point of view differs with a lot of you guys — I see reviewing as a question of writing, not a question of tasting. The ability to convey what you tasted to readers in a manner both vivid and fair is a skill learned by writing, not by eating. Maybe it would help chefs to reconcile the growing world of food blogging if they started to view people as writers, and writers only (excepting those who cook, blog, and blog about their own cooking only), who are working in their area as opposed to “foodies” or “aspiring chefs.” Maybe they’d be less teritorial. I’m not sure many movie directors care about the hundreds of small movie blogs on the internet; chefs might benefit from adopting the same ambivilance?

The bad rising to the top on occasion is what we call the “Perez Hilton Anomaly”.

I will, however, blog about what I like. And I will blog about recipes I’ve made. Sure, there are probably some celebrity chefs that need to be taken down a notch or two because they’re asshats, but I will bitch about their asshattery not their culinary skills. There’s a reason they got to be celebrities.

Aside from Batali’s disgust at anonymous food bloggers, he is a semi-regular celebrity blogger himself, with regular posts on other forums. Mario is probably the most passionate chef I’ve ever seen, and has been known to go into the kitchen and cook at parties where he is simply a guest. It’s my suspicion that the reason he detests food bloggers is that a great many of them simply slam chefs for no good reason, and do it anonymously. For someone who is so passionate about cooking, it’s a not-so-trivial insult to give such a chef unwarranted criticism, especially from behind a facade of anonymity.

I think chefs are mostly complaining about a creature that doesn’t exist. The annonymous blogger who writes a fictitious slam, has no track record yet somehow has a zillion readers? That’s a contradiction in terms, like the opening night of an old favorite restaurant. Yes, the anonymous slammer on a site like Yelp may get the readers– but nobody looks at Yelp and gives total credence to a single review, especially from someone who never posted before. If someone has readers on their blog, then by definition they have a track record which means their new review is built on the credibility of many other reviews. And it seems safe to say they’re not going to piddle away a good rep to grind one axe.

I help moderate LTHForum in Chicago and I can tell you that people are very attuned to the track record of posters. If someone comes on and registers today and slams a place, then everyone knows to assume a high probability of it being a hit job. Where if someone with thousands of posts and a record of what their likes, dislikes, level of intelligence and discernment, etc. all are, slams it, people tend to take it seriously because they know that person to have demonstrated their level of quality and credibility. And that’s nothing like the straw blogger Batali or others rail against.

I too suspect, like folks above, that one of the things chefs don’t like is that they do, in fact, know who many of the “anonymous” reviewers are, and in smaller markets many of the reviewers are probably in the tank for local restaurateurs, serving as community boosters, so bloggers/posters on food boards upset the cozy little world by representing the actual undercover voice of the customer. If that scares you, you deserve to be scared.

Public figures — and Trotter certainly is one — are not like us ordinary Joes and Janes. If you’re a TV chef, you’re fair game for intelligent critique on everything from your style to your opinions about food. (I wouldn’t presume to critique the food itself until TVs come with the ability to actually taste the results.)

Of course, the key word up there is “intelligent.” As many well-spoken commenters have already noted, there are good bloggers and bad bloggers on just about every subject, and the good ones tend to rise to the top and the bad ones are best ignored. Why more professionals don’t get this is beyond me, particularly since they themselves can and often do blog as well.

Poor SYMON, however, looked like he was about to cry. I think, though, their friendship and mutual respect for each other will survive TNIC – to cook another day.

I’m not aware of many chefs who feel that anyone besides another chef of commensurate ability has the right to say anything negative about their work. You know it’s true Ruhlman.

BTW, I finally got to see you on TNIC last night. You speak great sound bites and no, you don’t need a haircut (that guy on the other end did. Yikes!) But I’m not so sure that you are emotionally equipped to negatively criticize chefs in public. You looked so uncomfortable when you had to say something bad about a dish and I thought you were going to heave when you had to dismiss Traci des Jardins. You are too human my friend.

And that fellow who was eliminated because he admitted to using an idea from his pastry chef -what kind of BS is that? Did the judges dig into the sources of the dishes of all the other chefs and determine that he was the only one who borrowed?

Think of it this way — film critics often have no credentials when they start. It’s not typical to find someone who went to film school for four years exclaiming to his friends in Starbucks “I’m totally going to be a film reviewer!” on the eve of their graduation. No, that person is going to go to Hollywood, try to write or act or direct, and maybe end up reviewing films on the side. More often (and I speak with some authority on this, as an editor of a college newspaper for 2 1/2 years), your film reviewers start as college kids who want to see movies for free, and before they come out. So they take the passes, they write two months worth of totally shitty reviews, and then they get better, and their criticsm gets more technical, and they become more familiar with film as a medium because of all the free screenings they go to.

Food writing works the same way. I minored in Journalism in college (my major, and my main academic path, is classical cultural studies), and was told over and over again that all I had to do to be a journalist — any kind of journalist — was to be a good writer. So when we read Jeffrey Steingarten’s book for a Feature Writing class, I realized that I could blend my love of eating with my love of writing. Now, a year and a half out of college, I’m finally working on a blog that will let me get regular practice at writing and editing food journalism without the problems of desperately searching for a job and finding an internship that won’t pay, or worse finding nothing at all.

In the meantime, I’m slowly expanding my palate. So while I might be generally uninformed about technique and history (though I try to do some research if I think it is warranted), I don’t think my tongue is any different than the New York Times food critic. I think my opinions are just as valid, and my mind is almost as open to strange, new things. But because I blog, because it’s on the internet and I don’t have 20 (or even 5) years experience, I’m somehow a problem, an insulter, an interloper? That doesn’t seem fair at all. Blogs are a wonderful way for aspiring writers to practice their craft and get feedback on their work before diving into a very difficult profession. If I couldn’t blog on my downtime as a receptionist, I don’t know what I’d do.