It comes screaming back...

Just when you think you've forgotten how your toes and teeth curled at restaurant reviews in Vietnamese newspapers and magazines, it all comes screaming back at you and turned up to 11. The Hanoi-based PittStop blog highlights what has to be the most incredible restaurant review I have ever come across. Here are his snippets,

the interior is "Cozy contempo-minimalist", the concierge desk is a "slanted grey marshmallow", the total effect is "short of opulent but thoroughly Oriental in a temporarily satisfying way. It’s like King Herod’s breakfast nook – no leopards, belly dancers or sandalwood smoke, yet its intentions seemingly pay lip service to "decadence", "the street’s audio-spatial cacophony of tchotchkes for sale is suddenly gone, like putting on a pair of velvet earplugs... ", "In its own way (that is, removing fun and Truman Capote from the equation), going to Green Mango is an experience akin to having gone to Studio 54 in New York preternaturally cursed with the foreknowledge of all that would come after: here is a Disneyland ride where one can feel wealthy and with-it while consuming the raw distillate of a certain moment in a city and a nation’s history. Like Studio 54, the last greatest disco, one is on hand as a trend is perfected, transcended, and rendered obsolete in the very same instant. Green Mango merits consideration, as do the processes of history that brought it to an ageless mercantile avenue of Thang Long." link

You can read the whole thing at Vietnam News. You can, but I wouldn't advise it. Seriously, is this guy having a laugh?

Comments

[ourman]

Ouch. That is bad. On one level you can't stop reading it but you reach a point where you have to break off before you scream.

Honestly don't know what to make of it. It's written as if the writer thought that this was his one big break and he was trying to hard to impress.

[Graham]

That was my first thought - I'M A PROFESSIONAL WRITER, DONCHA KNOW etc. etc :)

Easy to impress a Vietnamese newspaper editor, just send the copy in. PR companies do it all the time and they have no difficulty getting printspace.

[Teddy]

I read a food review in the Guide once where the reviewer started waffling on about how he just read Seamus Heaney's Beowulf or a bit of Ovid over breakfast... though that was nothing compared to this.

Sadly as the local editors are happy just to have a foreign writer and grammatically correct copy, they just give these guys a carte blanche... there's no other foreign writer or editor in there to say, 'stop the press, WTF is this?'

[ourman]

As I understand it the place is full of English subs who should have more sense than to let this crap go by.

[Graham]

That was my understanding with the Vietnam News at least. $1000 a month or something they got back in the late 90's I believe. Doubt any of them were trained though. The only ones I ever met were always pissed, or on their way to getting pissed, at a little beer stall opposite the office. I can't really blame them for letting this crap in though, it's hilarious and I think I'd have let it through if I didn't like my Editor, or care about my job :)

I was thinking about this as I walked through town this morning... I just couldn't get rid of this vision I have of the author sitting in some grubby, humid, backpacker infested bar in the old town, pulling on a Vinataba intoducing himself to newcomers, "Yeah, I'm such and such. I'm a writer"

[ourman]

Expats can reinvent themselves as anything. Writers, painters, restauranteurs, photographers, film makers, pop bands - I've seen it all.

No average snapper is going to get his or her work show publicaly back home but in Hanoi you could get yourself an exhibition with a couple of phone calls.

I know of one VSO volunteer who quit his post to become a writer. I followed his work for various local expat rags. Always absolutely awful. I kept it for the giggles.

It can be a very liberating experience being an expat. So much less competition.

[Graham]

Yup, seen it myself ourman, but that's not to say all reinventors are total losers. I googled a wee bit. Is this the reviewer?

http://revver.com/video/65172/stand-up-comedy-at-princeton-jacob-gold/

and this?

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2004/12/09/arts/11690.shtml

And this one, I like this one

"If record stores could get up and walk to a record store, Princeton Record Exchange is the record store they would go to."

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2004/04/08/arts/10178.shtml

CAn this guy cook? fish? make things with wood? 'Cos his writing is bloody killing me.

[ourman]

Love the record shop piece. Sheer O Gold.

I will follow his career with interest.

[stickyfingers]

Verbal diarrhoea.

Theory: In certain expats - who have spent months speaking a form of pidgin on a daily basis - the vocabulary and literary references that may customarily litter a conversation will build up, causing cognitive congestion. At this point only a cathartic venting of pretentiousness can save the individual from willingly swallowing their own tongue.

[ourman]

Not losers at all Noodlepie. We've all done it to a certain extent. Like I said, it can be very liberating.

It's not just the competition too. Everything is so cheap that you can be s struggling artiste on so very little.

Write a piece for a local expat rag for $30 and you can eat for a week.

[Graham]

Last night, we were talking about going back :) Ha. Only problem is I have to be near London these days for a few things and don't really fancy the commute :)

[ourman]

Similar conversations here. Maybe not 'nam but somewhere hotter, cheaper and more interesting.

I think a spell is broken when you realise (as not many people do) that you don't have to live in one place or one country.

Suffering another English winter would just seem foolish.

Once you realise you can leave it makes it all the harder to stay and learn to deal with the negatives.

[Graham]

Not so much the winter and stuff here, more the opportunities available. France is so totally not geared up for independent workers. Things would be so much easier in the UK, but then I'd have to live there - errcchhh... However, the future for France, at least in the short doesn't look great, hence the openness to moving on. One other thing ourman, freedom to move around and all that and thoughts thereof aren't quite sos free and easy when you spawn a human.

[Jacob O Gold]

Hey all-

This is the author of the restaurant review under discussion. Just letting you know to keep your eyes peeled for my upcoming article, "Banh Bao: Scenes from a Sidewalk Romance," appearing in the upcoming February issue of the Viet Nam News' Outlook Magazine.

Happy Lunar New Year,
Jacob O Gold

[Graham]

Shame that one's not online, or is it? Can the interweb take the strain?

[Jeffrey]

1)The folks over at "Noodlepie" have taste up their noodle. This kid's got real talent, unlike the rest of the restaurant reviewers in the world who write like they were doing a third grade book report. I loved the article and so did my colleagues.

2) The term "verbal diarrhoea" (which, by the way, is not how it is spelled) seems to me the work of a high school kid....real journalists don't use that term

[Princeton Alum and Professor]

I am a currently a professor at Princeton University and found this page during an afternoon Google session.

Jacob, congratulations on your fine work. Your articles are some of the most well-crafted, wonderfully written pieces I've ever encountered in my entire career as a reader and educator.

I sometimes have students like Graham in my classes, putting down the most brilliant work to make themselves sound intelligent. Don't worry, my dissertation got some silly comments from jokers...that was before it was published.