I
did not imagine that being a food critic would be even close to what
we commonly call work. I was wrong. I thought the task of reviewing a
restaurant would consist of eating and saying whether or not it is
good. It is actually way more complex than that. The work of a food
critic requires a perpetual attention to details with a fast and
lively mind (and hands !) The waiter dropped a plate on a customer ?
Note taking. The restaurant setting is unusual ? Note taking. The
seats are uncomfortable ? Note taking. The biggest difficulty is to
get a global understanding of the place and its customers within the
less time possible, which means being careful about the menu while
not eating all of it, looking at the others' plates while tasting
your own, tasting the alcohol while staying sober enough to write
about it and so on. I found out that being a food critic is not as
easy as one might think.
About
the place, I had very low expectations (barflies, dirty restrooms)
and could not but be positively surprised, which is exactly what
happened when I entered this popular restaurant.
Since
I did not see any coherence in the Rock City Eatery -regarding either
the menu or the decor- I would hardly consider the restaurant
unauthentic: since the place does not claim any belonging (of origin
or of quality), it cannot be but authentic for its uniqueness. When
there is no norm to rely on, there is no risk of overstepping them.
As for the question of tourism (is dining in a restaurant a kind of
tourism?), I would say that it depends on the restaurant. As long as
the restaurant allows the customer to experience otherness -foreign
food restaurants in particular-, it can be seem as tourism. However,
if tourism is, as Long's suggested, getting out of your daily routine
to see the other's daily routine as very exotic, dining in a
restaurant could be seen as tourism only insofar eating out is an
unusual practice. Eating out, when it is part of your daily routine,
is not properly tourism for me.
As
an international student in Kalamazoo, all my experiences here have
first felt foreign to me. The ice in the water, the A/C or the tips
have been some of the most exotic things I encountered when I arrived
in America. But people change and so I did. I can say that I start
now, after 9 months of immersion in this culture, to feel a belonging
and a familiarity regarding American food. I am crazy about peanut
butter/jelly sandwiches and bacon-based brunch on a Sunday morning.
Tourism (or the lack of) has to do with time. It also has to do with
home. What is home cannot be tourism. The home I found here prevents
me today to consider myself as a tourist in America. However, I do
not feel fully integrated yet. I guess, it is the perks and the
drawbacks of biculturalism.
Nice reflection on your experience Marie - I too was surprised at how much work it is to review a restaurant. It's overwhelming when you're there for the purpose of gathering as much relevant information and sensory detail as possible. It took me ten minutes to even glance at the menu and I was, of course, the last to order. You mention many of the challenges you experienced in writing your review, but I have to say, I think you did an really fantastic job capturing the 'culture' of the Rock City Eatery.
ReplyDeleteI like your idea that once a place starts to feel like home, one is no longer a tourist. This seems like a good feeling-based, flexible way to identify when one moves beyond being a tourist in a place.