Yes exactly. It saves wasted money when some of these “hyped” restaurants (cough Here’s looking at you) get seen as these magnificent restaurants when they are anything but and the only thing left happy is the restaurant for taking my money.
I like pointed critiques “unprofessional” or not because it’s real not driven necessarily by restaurant politics or connections.
Max Shapiro does a great job of picking apart the kind of long, complicated, expensive, cheffy gastronomic events that he produced in his hobby pop-up. In that narrow context he’s a delightful reviewer and probably more useful than any professional on the LA beat to those who are interested in that kind of thing but not rich enough to try them all.
On the other hand, he knows shit about journalism, commercial publishing, or what professional restaurant reviewers do.
His criticism of Bill Addison being irresponsible and having poor taste is consequently about as fact-based and well-informed as Joe Rogan’s Covid advice.
He also reviews/talks about restaurants that FTC frequents like Chi Spacca, Saffy’s, Bavel, Musso and Frank, Needle, Park’s BBQ, Mother Wolf, Sonratown, Mes Amis, Konbi, Angler, etc.
I can’t find most of those reviews on Instagram.
I don’t see that his perspective on relatively affordable places such as Saffy’s (which sets a new price point for that cuisine) adds enough to the discussion to make it worth dealing with the awfulness of reading long reviews on IG.
if you go to his IG profile, he has all his reviews saved on the “Stories” feature.
There mere fact that he’s willing to tell his audience why he thinks a dish doesn’t work is valuable enough data point to me. If I just wanna hear how amazing a restaurant is with no negative feedback on dish, I can just scroll through Yelp and be done with it.
In regards to professional critics unwilling to criticize or offer constructive criticism, I do understand their perspective in trying not hurting businesses they write about. But that’s not useful to me as a consumer. Every article becomes a puff piece for the business…
For some of the places I listed, he either didn’t save em or he talked about em on Air Jordan podcast.
Keep scrolling to the left on the saved stories and you’ll see the back catalogue
yes, those round icons, you can scroll through them and most of them are there i believe.
Picking apart why a dish didn’t work is of little or no interest to people who want to know where to get a good restaurant meal, which is why professional critics working for commercial publications don’t spend much time on it. Consumers want to know what’s good and where to get it.
I clicked the arrow on the right to scroll through to the end before saying that most of the reviews that moonboy403 mentioned are not there.
Lmao looks like we need a new Max Shapiro thread. (Maybe then he’ll get verified on IG)
For me at least, I like his reviews since they veer more towards the calculation of “is this place worth the hype?”. Many restaurant he talks about are indeed hyped up and known amongst this board and “foodies” of LA, and at least on social media, everyone and their mother wax’s poetic on these places with not even a single criticism. It does seem like I can trust his opinion and that he knows what “good” food is, so I enjoy seeing his reviews pop up once a week on IG. His “in conclusion” stories share a solid and realistic view/expectation of each spot.
Yeah now that I think, most of those discussions were on Air Jordan
