This is amazing. My brain is melting. I’m doing this from now on. Why doesn’t everyone do this?!
LOL Golden Pouch?? That place is ass-nasty. Must be more of Eater’s boosterism at work, because that place doesn’t belong on any Top X list in any capacity.
FYI, that place is now on its 7th or 8th menu incarnation and has never really caught-on in the neighborhood. Its busiest time were in the first 4 weeks when friends and family of the owner were going there and posting on instagram and leaving fake yelp reviews. Real people found out pretty quickly that it’s all smoke and mirrors, and the “premium meats” they use contain an ungodly amount of gristle and bone fragments. The backing group, though, is the same group behind Quarters and a host of other Koreatown nightlife venues, and they keep trying to reinvent the menu to get it to catch-on; I doubt it’s made any money in the year and a half it’s been open, and considering they’ve reinvented themselves more frequently than Madonna in the 1980s, I see this publicity attempt as their last-ditch effort to bring in customers.
Truth: this place is D-E-A-D even when everything else around it is packed.
Truth: I’ve literally been walking down Wilshire Blvd and have overheard people complaining about how gross this place is.
LA eater seemingly aims for a readership that seldom strays east of DTLA. it is what it is.
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I’ll take your word for it lol. Thanks for the heads up.
@secretasianman Yeah that’s definitely true. Eater LA is kinda just a hipster mirror of food reviews and what often comes across as paid articles.
i wouldn’t go quite that far, but i would observe that whenever one writes anything, they need to have a target audience in mind, especially if they’re hoping to get paid for it. if these considerations don’t influence one’s choice of topic and vocabulary, they wouldn’t be very good writers. or they have editors from hell as their bosses. the flip side of it is as an astute reader, you should have an idea of whether the author’s sensibilities match yours for any given article.
i’ll use jonathan gold as an example. only guy to win a pulitzer writing about food. his agenda as i’ve perceived it is to make ethnic cuisines accessible to white bread america. and he’s got a gift for describing the appeal of ethnic dishes and allowing the reader to infer that the description applies to the dishes being served at a particular restaurant when he says no such thing. he might suggest the best dishes to try at a certain place knowing that the use of the word best in that context is equivocal. if you read him knowing this, you will find that the headlines seldom match the content of a review. if you are relatively ignorant about a particular ethnic cuisine, you will likely learn something. i don’t think that’s a bad thing.
as for posts here, my expected audience is other food enthusiasts, and i expect them to either know or have the ability to infer or look up on their own the meaning of certain phrases. i consider it a waste of time to include pages of disclaimers to make any given post accessible for the types who post things like “what’s the best chinese restaurant in LA?” without specifying regional cuisine, the distance they’re willing to travel, price range, etc. when i render an opinion, i try but don’t always list objective considerations that influence said opinion. i suspect that i’ve got enough history here that people familiar with my posts have a pretty good idea of what my criterion are. do i expect everyone else to share those criterion? no.
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Or Eater LA, much like LA Weekly before it, includes places on the Westside, if for nothing more than to not endure the stream of comments like: “There has to be someplace on the Westside, that writer didn’t do their homework.” or “All of those places are in the San Gabriel Valley, that’s not Los Angeles, surely there must be someplace closer.”
Those are near exact quotes BTW.
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i’ve seen those kinds of quotes. in all fairness, the size of metropolitan LA makes travel times a factor when evaluating meal options.
my take on it is that when it comes to any individual pursuing an interest in food, the reasons are overdetermined, that is to say, there’s more than one underlying reason for the interest and the overall set of reasons is unique to each individual. some folks, palate never enters the equation - they want to collect good restaurants like badges. some have an interest in food driven by palate but are limited by finances. a food author i respect based in NYC made an observation that for some who had an interest in food but could not afford fine dining, there was a certain cachet in knowing that a hole in the wall in flushing was the best place to get chinese dumplings. if something similar is going on here, then the cachet is lost if you know, but are unwilling to travel there.
i think it might be best to suggest that eater caters to a certain common denominator, while sites like this exist as they cater to another specific segment of food enthusiasts. but i note that even at CH, there was a struggle over trying to define what a true chowhound was. some here might insist distance should be no object. i can agree and acknowledge that other factors limit my ability to do so. if that means i don’t get to wear a FTC badge and learn the secret handshake, fine. but then i’m not collecting restaurants like badges - and i think that most of the active participants share the same sensibility.
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Yeah, just because a new pizza place or coffee shop in Highland Park is deemed “the best” doesn’t mean I’m going to drive there. Many times I suspect it simply means “best for that neighborhood”.
Perfectly said
And regarding budget, there are people (me!) who COULD pay any price but simply won’t. But I’ll go on international travel, buy art, etc. My priorities are just different. As we used to tell a little, old lady for whom Bob was her financial trustee “you can have anything you want but not everything you want.”
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I get that part, but I used those specific quotes because they’re flawed. The first shows a naivete and ignorance, yet still unfairly blames the writer for their own lack of knowledge, while the latter actually is similar for those who stringently believe “L.A.” means only the city limits and not metropolitan Los Angeles. Strangely, they could probably travel farther to spots wholly within the city limits 
The rest of it, yeah. Man, barry, that’s awfully deep. Especially when I was trying to get through my morning cup of coffee 
I truly cringe when I see some of the superlative headlines, especially because those writing the articles aren’t writing the headlines. Just take them with a large grain of salt and pay attention to the body of the article.
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i was trying to dance around the idea that eater knows this but can’t risk trying to educate their readership for fear of losing them by printing disclaimers…
Yes, it was irritating on CH how a certain segment insisted a true hound would pass on an inferior version of a dish closer to them and instead drive across town for the best version. That’s just not realistic.
The other pet peeve of mine is the trophy hunt aspect as another example of “true” hounddom. That’s bs. Eat someplace because you want to try it and when it can fit into your schedule. Going to a place as soon as they open and stating that is a sign of a true hound is off putting.
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everyone has their own limits, but i personally wouldn’t currently recommend a XLB outside the SGV (DTF notwithstanding). a reality for asian ethnic cuisine in LA, chinese in particular, is that the farther away you get from a critical mass of ethnic asians (and i’ll let others argue on what constitutes a critical mass) demanding excellence and authenticity, the less likely you will be to find certain dishes of a certain quality.
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The older I get, the more I just care about “excellence” and less about “authenticity.” B/c, ya know, some things authentically taste like sh*t.
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some do. and then you have pf chang’s
those lettuce cups tho
i know. the point was how far do you want to go in which direction? i can’t stand anhui regional cuisine. the fact anhui restaurants don’t seem to last would tend to imply something but that’s not the point.
We live in the Reno/Tahoe area. Out of curiosity I looked at yelp’s ‘best’ Chinese places. IIRC, PF Changs was in the top 10. I stopped reading.