Liking wine doesn’t make you a wine connoisseur. This is not disparaging Gold, but his knowledge of wine was casual but he enjoyed it. Bill also enjoys wine.
you can have a first rate wine list and have a terrible wine pairing program. They don’t go hand in hand.
Also one man’s excellent is another man’s ehhhh when it comes to wine preference
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I happen to have known Jonathan and had dinner several times with him. Your statement is misguided.
I have also had dinner with him several times and shared/talked wine with him. But everyone’s baseline of what comprises as deep wine knowledge is different. This is mostly in context of max’s complaint and his own baseline (which skews higher than most enthusiasts).
This just further pushes my point that you can be a great food critic without having to be a big time wine connoisseur like was originally suggested in the critique of bill addison
Impossible to say without actually asking Max what level of wine knowledge he’s expecting Bill Addison to have. But not sure you really need a deep knowledge of wine to know the pairings provided by Phenakite were lower-end wines and perhaps not fitting with what they were charging (which was what, for the wine pairing?). Max’s also seems to take issue with the lack of European wines…though my palate leans that way as well, there are plenty of USA wines that appeal to that type of palate that are wonderful in their own right, if not perfect substitutes.
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Max’s complaint that the wines all cost under $20 wholesale is of a piece with his “no luxury ingredients.”
Though going in with a chip on his shoulder could be irrelevant if the food was bad.
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Max talks about his dinner at Phenakite. It starts at around 25 mins.
“Everyone was either okay or bad or really bad.”
“Bill is irresponsible. He has poor taste.”
As a critic, Max is unprofessional, which is fine, since he’s an amateur. Addison surely got better food. As for taste, Max is effete, spoiled, prone to overrating status signifiers. I presume he’s nouveau-riche.
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He gets to be “unprofessional” (not even sure what you mean by that) because he is not… professional. And I appreciate that he is actually critiquing restaurants.
What are examples of him preferring “status signifiers”? I have listened to him a lot on the pod and read his IG reviews and don’t think this is the case. He seems to like upscale, composed dinners—but not “status signifiers”. One example from a current story of his about Addison (the SD restaurant): he says that he is over A5 wagyu.
Also, as far as I know, he is daddy-riche—not nouveau-riche.
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I very much appreciate that he explains why he thinks a dish work or doesn’t work for him. To me, that’s much more informative than professional critics waxing poetics about every restaurant they write about.
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His father founded the real estate agency where he works, so I guess he’s second-generation nouveau-riche. Not that there’s anything wrong with that so long as you’re not smug about it or clueless about how it affects your perspective.
Wasn’t the criticism of the wines being cheap because they were part of an expensive wine pairing at a restaurant that was billed as fine dining and at the top of some “best” list?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Keep scrolling to the left on the saved stories and you’ll see the back catalogue