Letters from Our Readers

"When reviewing Guy Fieri's American Kitchen & Bar, he described one of its beverages as glowing "like nuclear waste" and tasting of "radiator fluid and formaldehyde." After visiting Daniel Humm's Eleven Madison Park, he wrote that a beet he ate there tasted "like Lemon Pledge" and smelled "like a burning joint." It was delightful prose like this that kept me coming back to him."

"Not even Lester Bangs at his most witheringly corrosive was as tough a critic as some of the old guard of entertainers-Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason among them-were when, in the mid-nineteen-fifties, Elvis Presley arrived on the scene. "He can't last. I tell you flatly, he can't last," Gleason opined. Sinatra's fangs were particularly sharp. Rock and roll, he said, is "sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons . . . this rancid-smelling aphrodisiac, I deplore.""

Music critics increasingly adopt gentle tones, reducing the appeal of criticism for some readers. Snarky, entertaining criticism can attract readers through vivid, memorable language. Pete Wells's negative restaurant descriptions—comparing a drink to "nuclear waste" and a beet to "Lemon Pledge"—provide provocative imagery that readers recall more than positive reviews. Mid-twentieth-century entertainers such as Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason sometimes offered harsher public critiques of early rock and roll than prominent critics. Anecdotes about the origins of fact-checking departments suggest editorial responses to publishing errors, including a reported misprint of a Chinese royal name.

Read at The New Yorker